How did Frege analyze words such as “and” and “not” as logical functions?
Gottlob Frege analyzed sentential connectives such as "and" and "not" by treating them as logical functions that produce new truth-values when applied to other sentences as arguments.1
In this framework, Frege viewed these connectives as analogous to mathematical functions. Just as a mathematical function takes a numerical input to produce a specific output, these logical functions take the truth-values of component sentences to determine the truth-value of the resulting complex sentence. For example, the function corresponding to "not" (negation) takes a true sentence and produces a false one, or vice versa.12
While Frege was aware of the concept of treating these connectives as truth-functions, this approach was later emphasized most strongly by Ludwig Wittgenstein. By isolating these functions, Frege was able to determine the truth-value of an entire sentence based on the outputs of its constituent parts, a method that became foundational to modern propositional calculus.21