Abstract

Frege held that logical objects are objective but not wirklich, and that psychologism follows from the mistake of believing whatever is not wirklich to be subjective. It has been suggested that Frege's use of the terms ?objective? and ?wirklich? is in line with that found in Lotze's Logic; from this it has been inferred that Frege's doctrines have been misinterpreted as being ontological in character, but that they really belong to epistemology. In fact, Lotze held that something may be the same for all thinkers, and yet may exist only in thought, not independently of it. For Frege, by contrast, there is nothing intermediate between the content of a single consciousness and what exists independently of being thought at all. This crucial disagreement underlies the divergence between Frege's realism and Lotze's idealism