So the human mind finally gets a part to play in the speculations? That is pretty exciting.

Then we agree that there is a difference between what a sentence is about and what is done with it? — Banno

I might not be understanding what you're asking, but I believe that in order for a sentence to be about something, it has to be used. Meaning is found in use.

o it'd be neat to set up a system where we seperate out the judgement about our expressions from what they are about, so we could work through any inconsistencies in their content apart from their force. — Banno

If you're talking about an artificial environment that's pimped out with a foundation of axioms, then yes, you probably could do that. If we subsequently want to bridge that to ordinary language we'll probably end up with Chomsky and an innate human language which can be identified by analysis of the world's languages (to see what words they all contain.) I figured that wouldn't be your cup of tea.

Folk seem too keen on claiming that one cannot understand what a statement is about without deciding if it is true or false. — Banno

I don't think anyone has made that claim. You probably need to understand the truth conditions, but not whether it's true or false.

But philosophers have been regularly thinking outside the box for millennia. That's not what Wittgenstein was talking about, is it? Wasn't he talking about speculating where nothing can be known?

What's perhaps salient here is that we can understand what a statement is about, and indeed, what it would take to make it true or false, while not knowing if it is true or if it is false, and certainly without having to make a judgement as to it's truth. There have been plenty of examples hereabouts - "the grass is green", "the cat is on the mat". — Banno

If you understand what "the cat is on the mat" is about, it's because you're providing a phantom context for it. The OP alludes to this. There just is no proposition where there is no context of utterance. You can easily invent that context though, and voila: you have a proposition.

There's a famous incident where an English colony in North America disappeared without a trace. They're called the "lost colony." The people who came back looking for them found a tree that was supposed to be used for emergency communication (in case they were attacked by the natives.) But the previously agreed upon code hadn't been used. Instead there was one word carved into it: "Croatan." Ever since then, people have tried to understand what the lost colony meant by it. Croatan was an Algonquin chieftain. Did they mean that Croatan killed them all? Or did the crops fail and they had to go live with Croatan? You see, to sort out any meaning in the communication, you have to imagine the context in which it was uttered, in other words, you have to imagine it being asserted, whether it actually was or not.

But one can utter a sentence without expressing a proposition. And without making a judgement as to the sentence's truth. — Banno

Definitely. :up:

although I think you can remove the assertion in "real life" too. — Leontiskos

Can you give an example of that?

It's fairly clear that assertion is integral to a proposition. The question is: what does it mean to separate them? By what means does Frege do that? If it's by way of a stipulated logical domain, yes you can separate them. In real life? No, you can't.

Sentences or maybe utterances, depending on how you'd like to slice it. It's not obvious to me you can utter a sentence without uttering it in a particular way, which would include something like force.

I would love not to talk about propositions at all, so I'll leave that to you. — Srap Tasmaner

Frege, the godfather of abstract objects, dealt with propositions, so we're going to be mixing quiche and spaghetti if we don't talk about them.

An utterance is just sounds or marks. Literally, nothing else. A sentence is a grammatically correct sequence of words, but a sentence has no specific meaning.

A proposition is expressed by an uttered sentence. A proposition is along the lines of content.

George points to a whiteboard that has the number 2 written on it. He says, "That's a prime number.". He has expressed the proposition that 2 is a prime number. He did that by uttering the aforementioned sentence.

If this doesn't work for you, you've probably got a strong inclination for behaviorism and meaning skepticism. Frege is not your philosopher.

Another way to look at it: if you're not sure whether assertion is something we add on — Srap Tasmaner

Add onto what? Are you thinking of a sentence or a proposition? If it's proposition, just examining what that is will indicate why assertion is integral.

Who are you quoting? Certainly not Frege. Assertoric force does not depend on the hearer. — Leontiskos

Please quote Frege on this issue.

"Berlin" correlates to "2+2" (or "4") and "Berlin is a city" correlates to "2+2=4." — Leontiskos

You need context to make that distinction. If I ask you what the weirdest city in the world is, and you say, "Berlin", you have expressed a proposition. It's all about context.

I was thinking this morning that skunks are assholes. My nostrils were filled with their defensive stink at the time, their last FUCK YOU to a world that left them smeared across the highway. They invade small-time poultry operations and bite the heads off the chickens. They don't eat them, they just bite their heads off. Who does that?

Maybe better than starting a thread, would you want to log into the Internet Archive and read some pages from Scott Soames' book on truth?

It's a safe website. Once you log in, you can borrow books. The pages relevant to Frege start on page 21. The previous section covers some issues about truth bearers: sentences versus propositions. That's fairly important for understanding Frege.

Does this amount to pointing out that any definition of “truth” would have to be true, thus opening up the regress? — J

No. It's basically that truth is integral to the act of assertion. If you give a lecture explaining what truth is, and I'm your audience, I have to already understand what truth is in order to discern what you're doing, that is, telling me the truth about truth. Therefore you can't teach it to me. It's part of my computer's BIOS. It's in my firmware.

I'll see if I can start a thread to go through it.

Forgive my extemporising. — Banno

:up:
In a way, the OP is asking about the extent to which meaning is use. In what circumstances can we drop use and still have meaning? This is assertoric force:

'assertoric force follows if a proposition expressed by an indicative clause is presented as relevant in a context made up of a subset of the hearer's factual assumptions."

You can already tell from that definition that assertion is generally going to be involved in the meaning of a proposition because you need to know context to discern what proposition is being expressed. Math is is different situation though. It has a semi-stipulated character, in part to avoid a paradox arising from Frege's work. This tells us that when we're talking about Frege, we're talking about a perspective that sees math as a matter of description, specifically of the contours of the human mind: of thinking. In the light of that, it becomes more interesting to consider his thoughts about separating sense and use.

More extemporizing.

This is the sentence in the OP that stood out to me:

An assertion can be displayed, perhaps as an integral part of a proposition, without being an “actual assertion. — J

I believe it follows from Frege's view of truth that assertion is integral to propositions. Think of the scrap of paper that says "Berlin.". Any effort to read it as a proposition will immediately conjure situations in which someone is asserting it. The mind is wired to look for purposeful communication.

When a logician separates assertion from proposition, meaning becomes unstable. The only source of stability is the potential for assertion.

I think that like Davidson, you have reinterpreted Tarski for your own purposes. No shame in that.

Ok. Whatever else you might think about truth, it's pretty hard to disagree with Tarski. Is that what you want to do? — Banno

You don't get Tarski unless you understand that his truth predicate doesn't mean anything. It's not the truth we talk about in ordinary language. Don't equate Tarski and the T-sentence rule. The latter has become a philosophical gadget in a variety of projects.

We disagree about the value of Tarski's work. You don't need Tarski to play around with the T-sentence rule, though. I think that's what you're doing.

I'm happy to be shown otherwise. — Banno

He has a pretty rigorous argument for indefinability. I think J wanted to see it too.

The point of misinformation in Russia is to have people just stop asking. It's like there's no truth anywhere.

Imagine that you're a character in a novel. All of a sudden you start commenting on the nature of the novel you're in, and how wonderful the author is. You're breaking the fourth wall and in a way it makes sense, but mostly it doesn't. You're using language that's relevant to the world you know, but you're talking about a world you can't know. It's like that.

We could explore Frege's argument for the undefinability of truth if you're interested. It shows an infinite regress opening up if we insist that truth is teachable.

An alternate but kindred argument would be:

1. In order to express or discern a proposition, you have to understand what it means.

2. Meaning is found in truth conditions.

Therefore, communication requires understanding truth. So it isn't teachable. You can't define it in the sense of explaining it to someone who doesn't already know what it means.

I think we often frame our interactions with the world as if we're communicating with it. For instance when we're seeking something, we imagine that there is some unexpressed proposition that specifies the location of the lost object: it's located at x.

This would be a way of explaining why we sometimes lift propositions out of the domain of human speech. Sometimes it's the world speaking. There's a sort of connection there between truth and being.

Didn't Frege believe truth is a concept that's too basic to define? It's just impossible to express a proposition without already understanding what truth is. There's no meta-cognition needed.

Unfortunately the crazy ones have convinced young people that there is no future for them. — Agree-to-Disagree

Eh, the world is always ending. We endure.

A claim nobody ever has made. — Benkei

Certainly no one who was particularly well informed.

Even under the worst-case scenarios, human-caused warming will not push the Earth beyond the bounds of habitability. — Agree-to-Disagree

True. It's crazy that anyone ever believed that the earth would cease to be habitable due to anthropogenic climate change.

We still need to switch to fusion though.

The nickname seems to be contradictory with the real goodness nature of Shiva. — javi2541997

Apparently there is a sect where Shiva is the supreme being, but otherwise, he/she is the destructive side of the Hindu trinity. Destruction isn't necessarily a bad thing. Consider:

Once upon a time, there was a successful slave revolt in St Domingue, which had been a major funding source for the French. A Spanish army, nearby, thought they would drop in take St Domingue, but the slaves fought valiantly, and preserved their freedom. A British army, observing the situation, decided they would drop in a take over St Domingue, but the slaves drove them off, again with great bravery.

Then Napolean sent his soldiers to take back St Domingue. They say the former slaves, watching the approach of the French fleet, thought everyone in France had come. But the slaves fought back, and then summer set in. Yellow fever started to take out the French soldiers and their mood turned sour. They began to entertain themselves by throwing captured prisoners into a ring of bloodthirsty dogs to watch them be torn apart. And then the French caught the leader of the slave revolt. They took the general to the bay and drove stakes into his shoulders as he watched his wife and son drown in the bay in front of him.

But with regard to these French soldiers, who created the air they breathed? Who created the ground they stood on as they lost their humanity? It was the god of creation. In this case, the god of destruction is the good one. He/she takes the French away and reduces them to molecules in the dust. He takes all the pain of the people we now call the Haitians, and lets it crumble away in the breeze. He lets them have a new birth of freedom. Shiva does the same for you everyday.

So theft results in the thief owning what has been stolen.

And folk hereabouts think this a good argument? — Banno

There might be a society where you "keep what you kill" so to speak, proving that it's relative to culture and time period, right?

A destructive God? Interesting, because most deities are basically otherwise. — javi2541997

Shiva!

Such flows generate infinite processes that often produce observable data on each iteration, so there is also empirical meaning with regards to the execution of an infinite process. — sime

But all of that data is finite, isn't it? I guess I'm thinking of finitism. If we set a spaceship (that somehow has an odometer) in one direction and it goes eternally, the reading on the odometer will always be finite. I think this is what Aristotle was thinking. Infinity can only be in potential. When we use the infinity symbol in engineering, we always mean that the variable is infinite for all practical purposes. In reality, it's just really big.

. An obvious follow up question in this respect is where does the "Hero" fall in this arrangement between victim and villain. As most understand a hero to neither be a victim nor a villain. Furthermore most of those faith-inclined idealise God as a Hero. — Benj96

That's a good question. I've only ever thought about the Hero in connection with possibility. Like, when the die is cast, there are six possibilities, but the one that appears at the end is the man (or woman) of destiny: the hero. What do you think of the Hero?

However depending on who you ask, God can also be a villain - an omniscient, omnipotent entity that doesn't answer your begging or rectify your suffering. For others God is the perfect victim - wherever unjust persecution and sacrifice appears in writings on the topic. — Benj96

Yes. In the book of Job, his wife tells him to curse God and die. Boethius was an influential philosopher in the middle ages who taught that we're all bound to the wheel of fortune. If you're doing well, enjoy it, because the wheel can turn down and you can lose it all. If you're at the bottom of the wheel, don't fear, because the wheel keeps turning and there's something amazing in your future.

Interesting. What I gather from this is you would have some sort of duality in your existence. On one side you would be a singular thing (human) and on the other end of the scale you would be everything (secretly). — Benj96

Exactly!

How would you sustain this secrecy, this pseudo-separation? Would it be in the paradoxes, contradictions and delineations between things or selves. — Benj96

Yes!

Is it the free will of others and diversity of opinions, the non-accordnace of individuals that masks your double nature? — Benj96

Yes. Villain-victim, parent-child, husband-wife, rich-poor, etc. But I think the biggest is villain-victim. There's soooo much emotion fueling that relationship.

So you'd be a personified God/in human form? Why did you choose to be human or "human-seeming" in this scenario? — Benj96

It's fun being human. Don't you think so?

Would you have no qualities beyond human ones? And if so, what in your understanding qualifies the title of a God? What would the distinction be from just a regular person? What sets you apart or would your "God" concept be literally "just a person" and thus apply to everyone equally. — Benj96

I would secretly be everything.

Probably sit around reading a book.

Do you think it's more intelligent than any human?

:grimace:

That's nuts.

Consider reading your bible again but this time pretend that you're a Jew. — BitconnectCarlos

I'll say it again. You don't know what you're talking about.