Frege, Indispensability, and the Compatibilist Heresy

In Grundgesetze, Vol. II, §91, Frege argues that ‘it is applicability alone which elevates arithmetic from a game to the rank of a science’. Many view this as an in nuce statement of the indispensability argument (IA) later championed by Quine. Garavaso has questioned this attribution. I argue that even though Frege’s applicability argument is not a version of IA, it facilitates acceptance of suitable formulations of IA. The prospects for making the empiricist IA compatible with a rationalist Fregean framework appear thus much less dim than expected. Nonetheless, those arguing for such compatibility eventually face an hardly surmountable dilemma.