• A challenge to Frege on assertion
    I will be out for the rest of the day — Leontiskos

    And I'll get back to work.

    More response to your earlier post tonight, and then we'll go from there.
  • A challenge to Frege on assertion
    You seem committed to the position which says that we cannot say anything fundamental about language or reasoning itself. — Leontiskos

    Not at all. I'm contesting whether we should take Frege as having done so.
  • A challenge to Frege on assertion
    is said to express a complete thought, that can be true or false, by fiat, by stipulation
    — Srap Tasmaner

    I don't think Frege holds that such things can be true or false by fiat.     — Leontiskos

    Sorry. That was ambiguous. The assignment of the truth-value is done by judgment, not by stipulation, but that "Fa" is truth-apt, that it expresses a complete thought, is stipulated.
  • A challenge to Frege on assertion
    the logician and the speech act theorist use the word 'assertion' differently. Maybe the most obvious difference is that the logician need not speak or engage in interpersonal communication in order to assert. More generally, what this means is that the forces involved in logical acts are different from the forces involved in speech acts. Martin is an example of someone who is explicitly interested in the former and not the latter, at least in the paper cited in this thread. — Leontiskos

    (I've started the Martin paper, so I expect we can talk more about that soon.)

    I don't want to just rush to deny that this is so, but all we have so far is the typical philosopher's gambit: "And by 'assertion' I don't mean assertion in the usual sense, by 'force' I don't mean force in the usual sense, ..."

    Consider that we are discussing a man who thought it necessary to invent a language, separate from natural languages, that would be suitable for use in logical analysis. In Frege's language, a formula like "Fa" or "(x)Fx" is said to express a complete thought, that can be true or false, by fiat, by stipulation. Is it any wonder that his logic looks more like a branch of mathematics than anything else?

    Which, again, is not to say that it is useless, anymore than mathematics is useless. But what are we to say about its relation to human reasoning conducted in natural languages? Is it, for instance, reasonable to imagine that something like Frege's system *underlies* human language use? I'm skeptical. Even while allowing its usefulness.

    And that means what we say about logic is what we say about a certain approach to reasoning and language, a certain way of taking it, but we need not think we are saying anything fundamental about language or reasoning itself.
  • A challenge to Frege on assertion
    we now seem to be doing speech act theory rather than logic — Leontiskos

    Oh -- there are dots I didn't connect there.

    Part of my concern is, what are these statements, the Ps and Qs, we deal with when doing logical analysis?

    In a sense, I'm trying to flesh out @frank's point about context. There's obviously something to that, we all know there is. Is it just dealing with indexicals? Maybe making explicit common knowledge that's relied on? You might be able to convince yourself that turning a non-truth-apt sentence into a truth-apt proposition is only a little more complicated than substituting names for pronouns, only there's more of that sort of thing to do.

    But what if that's wrong? What if language never comes anywhere close to expressing a complete thought because that's not what it's for? What if language is all hints and clues and suggestions because the audience shares the burden of communication with the speaker?

    Logical analysis, when it deals with "bits of language," seems to set aside the communicative nature of language and pretend that by presenting what one side of a conversation says, or what they might say if they were more prolix, it can present an argument in its entirety.

    If that's false, what are we doing when we engage in logical analysis?

    ...

    Lots more in your post to respond to, but I wanted to get to this first.
  • A challenge to Frege on assertion
    I am not sure that in everyday language the content really stands apart from the force, at least in the sort of examples you have given. Something like, "The next town is like 70 miles," is rather different from what logicians do. Such a thing is implying via content, not truly separating force from content. — Leontiskos

    I just watched a bird land on a broken tree limb. It glided in to a spot less than foot from the tip, immediately trotted up to that furthest point, and then remained there for several moments looking around. The uttermost point on the branch was clearly its destination, but it got there not by aiming at it, which it was surely capable of doing, but by landing first at an easier spot and then making the short, easy trek there.

    There's reason to think conversational language use is always like this, that we always say less than we mean and count on the audience to fill in "the rest," though whether that results in complete, self-contained propositions we both affirm or just another satisficing shortcut, that's hard to say. (Was this bird at the *exact* tip?) How often do we even try to understand each other "completely," whatever that might mean, and if such a thing is even possible, rather than enough to get along in a given situation? (Does a broken tree limb even have a well-defined tip? Did the bird care?)

    One thing implicature suggests is that what the audience fills in can be pretty complicated, involving not just disambiguation and shared background knowledge but inference. It also goes with my other recent posts, in trying to suggest that force may not always fall into a neat taxonomy, and that even when some force is employed or conveyed it might still vary in its intensity. (A sentence can be a simple assertion about geography, but not intended to convey that information.) For example, the effect of an attempted cancellation of force by following something you've said with "Just kidding" is widely considered uncertain or partial. (When Moss is chickening out of the robbery he proposed to Aaronow, a whole spectrum of assertive force suddenly blossoms, from committing to considering to talking about it to speaking of it, "as an idea.")

    Now, there was a lot of talk earlier in the thread about whether a sentence could display assertoric force without being asserted, and it occurred to me something a bit like this is going on in teaching language, something that looks a little like use, a little like mention, but doesn't make sense as either. You have to use a word and show your use, but your use of it in the first place is not a normal use -- to inform, say -- but a use chosen just so that it can be shown. Some features of assertion have to be in place, but not in order to make an assertion.

    So I don't think it's helpful to think of utterances as having a content that can be "extracted," nor is it helpful to think they have or lack some stereotypical force.

    Instead, most utterances only contain part of a point, at best, so whatever you count as the content of a statement is an interpretation that depends on how you fill out "what was said," and the force of an utterance is often mixed or uncertain, so what you count as its force is primarily an indication of how you intend to take it.

    My point, again, being that logic makes choices about what to count as the content, what to say was the force, and these choices can be interesting, helpful, and defensible, but they are also underdetermined. Even if you have no expectation that logic can tell you "what's really going on" in language use, you can still get logic wrong by assuming it has to come out as one specific thing.
  • Poets and tyrants in the Republic, Book I
    ↪Jamal


    Maybe part of my good impression of Cephalus is that we know what the wealthy and powerful will do to Socrates, but here's Cephalus who says, "Socrates! So glad you're here. I wish you'd come see me more often." And when he has to go see to the sacrifice (meant to mention that, as @Amity did), he encourages Socrates to carry on the conversation with the young folks, so not evidently concerned they'll be corrupted.
  • Poets and tyrants in the Republic, Book I
    philosophy is only good when you're old and have nothing better to do — Jamal

    I wasn't talking about TPF, exactly.

    Still, as I recall, Socrates says he's interested in talking to him precisely because of his advanced age, and seems to hope it will be a more reflective time of life, when matters of the soul might loom larger than worldly affairs. And he crosses that interest with a question about his wealth, whether he can only spare his attention because of his financial security. (Maybe he doesn't specifically ask that, I don't remember, but he's interested in how much interest he has in money and why.)

    To me, the idea of old age being naturally a philosophical period strikes me as quite reasonable and very Greek, if I may say so. At the other end, Socrates tries to get at the (noble) young before they're too caught up in responsibilities and cares. Also natural and reasonable, in the same way.

    By "Greek" I mean that obsession with stages of growth and development, progression toward embodying your deepest nature, that stuff.
  • Poets and tyrants in the Republic, Book I
    Cephalus believes his money is power. It is used in his old age to protect himself. His only interest in being just is self-serving. He is persuaded by the fear engendered by the poet’s stories of what will happen to him when he dies. — Fooloso4

    Maybe it's just the phrasing, but that seems a little harsh. I had rather a good impression of the old man, and I thought Socrates did too. His age and circumstances allow him to be more interested in less worldly matters, like talking with Socrates, which won't make him or his family any richer.
  • A challenge to Frege on assertion
    Aaronow: Yes. I mean are you actually talking about this, or are we just.
    Moss: No, we're just.
    Aaronow: We're just "talking" about it.
    Moss: We're just speaking about it. (Pause.) As an idea.
    Aaronow: As an idea.
    Moss: Yes.
    Aaronow: We're not actually talking about it.
    Moss: No.
    Aaronow: Talking about it as a.
    Moss: No.
    Aaronow: As a robbery.
    Moss: As a "robbery"?! No.
  • Site Rules Amendment Regarding ChatGPT and Sourcing
    ↪fdrake


    I've been thinking of beginning all my replies with "That's a very interesting point! I would enjoy the opportunity to explore these ideas further with you."

    Is that likely to be a problem?
  • A challenge to Frege on assertion
    we can contemplate it for its meaning alone, think about it, play with it. — J

    Forgot to point out that I agree, and "can" there is the point I've been making, that it's a choice, a strategy. Trump has this indirect sort of Mafia speech style, so the literal meaning of what he says is at odds with the message he is clearly sending. We don't have to be taken in by this, treating the literal content as the more genuine, more fundamental aspect of speech. When we do that for logical analysis, it's a choice.
  • A challenge to Frege on assertion
    ↪J


    One point I think I left out: everything to do with language use has to be learnable, and it has to be usable even with only partial mastery. One of the things in my mind as I wrote that was, how do children learn force in all its variety? (Related to what I did mention, in human history.) There are some well known steps in concept acquisition, for example, but I don't know the research on force (although I think the point I made earlier about pedagogical force fits here).

    I also didn't come right out and say that the way logic handles language and the way we do when teaching children has a sort of family resemblance, and that's the other reason I was thinking about it. Not sure where that leads, if anywhere.
  • A challenge to Frege on assertion
    ↪fdrake


    Some of the issues you raise I'm partial to because I have tried to raise them as well! I'm going to attempt a similar overview with a different emphasis, and try to show the relevance of my recent posts. All at once! (And I'll try to be a little less cagey.)

    1. Can force be separated from content?

    Yes. It's the whole point of logic, and until proven otherwise, it is clearly successful at doing so. If Frege didn't think so, he was confused.

    2. When you separate force from content, have you shown that everyday speech has (at least) two components?

    No. In the sense of "not necessarily."

    I believe it is perfectly coherent to claim that making this distinction is a strategy employed not only by philosophers, sometimes with the intent to do logical analysis, but by ordinary speakers of a language in the course of their day.

    Logic is that strategy deployed wholesale, rather than ad hoc for particular, often exigent, purposes.

    3. What does it take to separate force from content?

    Depending on how you take the question, the answer is many thousands of years, or a few years.

    It is perfectly clear that there's something small children understand before content, if for no other reason than that they are born without a lexicon. There is also a longish period when they understand speech they cannot quite produce, and this includes a babbling period, when children practice making what Frost called "sentence sounds". You can hear young toddlers having entire pretend conversations that just happen to lack distinct words.

    But words do come. There's even some research that purports to show that dogs recognize some individual words and do not just respond to tone of voice.

    Words and then sentences arrive for children in a world that already includes tone of some kind, though it's not perfectly clear this is the same thing as force, and I assume something similar is true of human history.

    And I think the way we teach children words probably bears some resemblance to the initial steps of language for humankind. Simple descriptions, simple reports, little if any grammar. (I think Strawson somewhere speculated that the initial step would be "feature identifying" in this sort of impersonal way that persists in idioms like "It's raining". "It's tiger-ish here," "It's Mom-ing here," that sort of thing.)

    And force? Some kinds of force are clearly, I think, a bit more recherche than others. Toddlers don't understand irony, and it takes a while to be clear on what an imperative is! People aren't born knowing that certain ways of talking to you mean you have to do something, while telling you what. People aren't born knowing they're expected to answer questions, and just staring or repeating your desire (that one comes so early) for juice seems reasonable.

    So what do we start with? There's clearly something that would later count as declarative in how we teach children, and in what I assume is early speech. Is that a force? A proto-force? Does it make sense to call it a particular force if there are no others to distinguish it from? Just as interesting as the question of how we first spoke is how we first asked questions, or tried to give commands, or expressed wishes for the future.

    Sophisticated stuff, which appears to require a pretty robust linguistic foundation to get started. And we have to be careful not to assume that's already in place when considering how that foundation is laid.

    It is not yet clear to me that force, in its many varieties, is foundational, rather than an elaboration.

    Contra my first claim ...

    Martin shows that there are forces in the logic itself, and that logic is not separable from a process of temporal human acts. — Leontiskos

    I guess I'll have to have a look at that.
  • A challenge to Frege on assertion
    And how does this relate to assertoric force? What is assertoric force? It's not the illocutionary force of making an assertion...? It's not what is involved in denoting this rather than that? It's something in between, but what? — Banno

    Well, obviously I don't know. If I knew, I wouldn't still be trying to figure it out.

    Think about the peculiarity of being taught the word "cat". When mom says "This is a cat," would you describe that as her telling the little one it's a cat? Kinda. But don't you have to already know what a cat is, to find out that something is a cat? And for a similar reason, it wouldn't make sense to describe mom as claiming that it's a cat. What could that mean to the little guy?

    Anyway here's these sentences people use, that look kinda illocutionary, kinda assertoric, but aren't quite that. Austin doesn't have a category for these, does he? Maybe "instructives." That's a pity. I can't help but wonder what he would say.

    And it's a curious fact that these peculiar utterances constitute a lot of how we learn language, and how we learn to learn more, and when it's our turn we talk the same way to teach new little ones.

    And the connection to the topic is that these sentences, and sentence substitutes (which I'm disinclined to call elliptical sentences, but maybe they are), don't just have a certain form; they have to be veridical.

    I don't know if it's any help. But it's curious that this is how we transmit our linguistic knowledge to the next generation.
  • A challenge to Frege on assertion
    We learn to use a language by using it. — Banno

    But at first -- and what I was pointing out -- there's a lot of someone else using it, and using it in, so far as I can tell, in one particular way. It's hard even to imagine an alternative.

    (Interestingly, there's been some work on how this continues as the child gains competence. By 3 or 4 or 5, depending on who you ask, children distinguish between an adult expressing a personal view and an adult speaking pedagogically, speaking for their community.)
  • A challenge to Frege on assertion
    We can understand what it would take for a statement to be true or false, without assigning a judgement to the statement. — Banno

    Let's consider your cat, and the mat he is sometimes on.

    How did you learn he was a cat? Or that what lounges upon is a mat?

    Perhaps someone pointed at him, or a picture of one of his brethren, and said "cat" or "This is a cat", and did something similar for the mat.

    To explain the preposition, a picture (or a reality) of the cat on the mat, accompanied by the sentence "The cat is on the mat" would be typical. (The finest treatise on English prepositions I know is Go Dog. Go!. It sounds like it will be primarily about verbs, but it devotes considerable attention to prepositions. Interestingly, many of the "captions" dispense with the copula, and just say "A blue dog on a red tree," or "A dog out of a car," like so.)

    Now it's true that even if no one ever taught you, in so many words, "an apple in the mailbox" or "An apple is in the mailbox", you can still understand what would be going on if that were so.

    But you can imagine learning English without anyone ever having resorted to veridical descriptions of the situation shown in a picture or plainly visible to you?

    Could you substitute "imagine a cat" for the demonstration with the picture or with the cat?
  • A challenge to Frege on assertion
    ↪J


    I think what he's going for there with the "whatever is true/false, is/isn't" is every kind of theory out there about truth. Philosophers have tried all kinds of formulations, and placed the emphasis in different ways, but it's all about the same thing. Think of the ambiguity of the word "fact". True proposition? Or state of affairs that "obtains"? --- That last word there, that's typical philosophical shop talk, right? (Like "grasping".) No one knows what it means. No one defines it. But we all know what you're getting at. States of affairs (more shop talk) only show up as the counterpart of true propositions. It's all the same stuff.
  • A challenge to Frege on assertion
    I'm not sure this single sentence can bear the scrutiny we are applying to it. — Leontiskos

    Fair. The thing about existence surprised me, so I took it seriously.

    I have been doing some dot-connecting and reading between the lines in these recent posts.

    I think we do have a tendency to treat every word as a term of art, with a specific technical meaning. Hence I have been treating as equivalent 'assertoric force', 'judgment', and 'assertion'.

    Until I'm convinced Kimhi means these consistently differently.

    (The man will put in parentheses "a thought, a sentence, a state-of-affairs", so that's not an invitation to split hairs or take these all in distinct technical senses, at least not for his point.)
  • A challenge to Frege on assertion
    ↪Leontiskos


    I see the edits now.

    Once that is in place "conferral" takes on a different sense, for then the verb and not the speaker is what confers on the proposition its existence and nature or meaning. — Leontiskos

    Then it does turn on what is understood by "use". Is there a real sense in which a word is just there in a sentence -- and thus "used" in it -- without someone "using" it in a sentence? What can a verb do on its own?

    "Display" something seems to be the answer -- and I will look into that -- but there's another way to take that too, that this only means it is by this use of this verb that one indicates or expresses or shows forth or even represents their judgment that ...

    Does a Fregean formula like "Fa" display the independent existence of a thought or a state of affairs? Or is it a judgment?
  • A challenge to Frege on assertion
    ↪Leontiskos


    Huh.

    Well, I'm not about to claim his writing is crystal clear on this point.

    What do you make of his use of the word "existence" in the first quote?

    I suppose "allowed them to construe" is ambiguous. I took it as a rhetorical denial of the claim that truth-bearers have some existence besides what is conferred upon them by judgment. Do you read that differently?
  • A challenge to Frege on assertion
    ↪Leontiskos


    Yeah I did quote that. Thought so.

    I'll take a look at displays.

    But unless you're reading "use" creatively, he does say what I said he did.
  • A challenge to Frege on assertion
    where does Kimhi say that, "the proposition [...] has existence conferred upon it by someone affirming or denying [it]"? — Leontiskos

    Thought I had quoted it somewhere, but no. I'm away from the book, but it's early, coming off the discussion of the veridical sense of 'to be' and into the syllogisms of thinking and being. I take the veridical use of 'to be' to be 'assertoric force'.
  • A challenge to Frege on assertion
    classically speculative knowledge is thought to undergird practical knowledge. On this classical account we never carry out practical activities without also engaging in speculative knowing. For example, if you want to eat an orange you must first be able to recognize it and see that it is edible, nutritious, desirable, etc. If you can't possess that kind of knowledge about it then the question of eating it will never come up. — Leontiskos

    Kimhi says that the proposition "The orange is good to eat" has existence conferred upon it by someone affirming or denying that the orange is good to eat.

    That seems to leave knowledge in a somewhat precarious position. "The orange is good to eat" needs to be available as a proposition that can be known, but on the hylomorphic reading I have suggested, it is only available in a judgment that the orange is good to eat (or not), as "what is asserted," the content of the judgment. But then you would have to judge that things stand thus-and-so (or don't) even to be capable of knowing that they do or don't. Sounds like a cart and horse situation.

    All of the propositional attitudes will face this problem if there are, as Kimhi says explicitly, no forceless truth-bearers.

    This problem remains even if we make some obvious improvements to my reading. When Kimhi says "conferred" there is some ambiguity. You could think of a judgment as an event, and "what is thought" as persisting only for the duration of the event.

    But we often use such locutions in the past tense -- "what Frege thought," "what Kimhi said." That suggests that "conferring existence" might have some staying power, so thinking, judging, or saying P brings it into existence --- and leaves it there, for others to think and judge and say. I get to say that what Frege said is right or wrong.

    If that's so, Kimhi might be offering an interesting philosophical just-so story about where propositions come from, assigning priority to judgment over wondering, wishing believing, hoping, guessing, knowing, doubting, and so on.

    Except that he explicitly says that P does not persist as a truth-bearer with no force, and that seems to deny its availability for being governed by the other propositional attitudes that might come along.

    But does it? Or does it only say that propositions *only* appear governed by a propositional attitude? If I wonder whether P, there's P as "what I wonder". If I guess that P, there's P as " what I guess."

    What propositions never do is just hang out bearing truth or not.

    So Kimhi is an anti-realist.
  • A challenge to Frege on assertion
    ↪Leontiskos
    ↪Leontiskos


    Let's leave it.

    There was a point there that was intended to be near the subject of the thread. If it gets close enough, I might bring it up again.
  • A challenge to Frege on assertion
    I don't think the "modeling mindset" is an improvement, and I think the main reason approaches like Frege's turn out to be useful is because they were intended to be more than just models. — Leontiskos

    Nowhere that I've noticed in Frege or Kimhi is there any recognition that ordinary people, who do most the thinking and asserting (and working and paying, and living and dying), also think about what they're doing, not from off to the side as philosophers, except maybe sometimes, but in the midst of doing it, because thinking about how you're speaking, for example, or how someone else is, whether they mean what they say, whether there's something else implied by what they say or the way they say it, whether you might be giving the wrong impression, all of this matters tremendously to understanding each other (or manipulating each other, etc). This kind of theorizing is not optional, but an important part of everyday thinking and talking.

    And the kind of theorizing people do everyday is my kind, not Frege's or Kimhi's, and I would call it modelling because people know that most of what they think is only true "for the most part" or "usually" or "depending", and that you have to be willing to adapt and adjust, and the strategic choices we make in thought and speech and action don't have guaranteed results, just chances. My sort are for this kind of probabilistic modelling because it works.
  • A challenge to Frege on assertion
    he's committed to vouching for their truth — J

    Yes and no.

    You've played with this stuff, right? You write down "P" and that means P is a premise; it's *treated as* true. In essence, all symbolic logic is hypothetical. You just see how things work out *given* certain premise and inference rules. (And natural deduction systems have additional ways of doing this.)

    What I think is unavoidable is vouching for P as a truth-bearer, and for its availability. That is, that it is a proposition.

    we don't yet know — J

    The book has been out what since 2018? I don't know how many articles have been updated since then, but he gets not a single mention on SEP. (I haven't checked his Google scholar or PhilPapers rankings.)
  • A challenge to Frege on assertion
    who cares if it's a bit off? — Leontiskos

    Btw, Timothy Williamson tells a story about explaining the Gettier cases to an economist, who was mystified by the importance philosophers attach to them. "So there are exceptions. So what? All models have exceptions." And Williamson -- who's been doing just fine in the current regime -- thought, maybe we really have been going about this wrong, and has become an advocate for at least incorporating the modeling mindset into philosophy.
  • A challenge to Frege on assertion
    those in the thread who said, "Frege is just giving a model, so who cares if it's a bit off?" — Leontiskos

    Ahem.

    Of course he is not giving a model — Leontiskos

    I absolutely think he is, even though he didn't think so. Newtonian mechanics? Pretty damn good model used appropriately, within certain limits, but its author thought it was Truth. And he was wrong. Doesn't matter what he thought he was doing, the model he left us is useful.

    And so it is with Frege.
  • A challenge to Frege on assertion
    Wittgenstein — Leontiskos

    Yeah there are certainly hints, and that alone makes him an outlier these days.
  • A challenge to Frege on assertion
    the depth and originality of Kimhi's thought — J

    I consider the jury decidedly out on this.

    Kimhi is too bound up in a Fregian paradigm to overcome Frege — Leontiskos

    I don't know the contemporary landscape well, but I think the dominance of something recognizable as analytic philosophy was already slipping in the 70s and 80s. Rorty, Stanley Cavell, Annette Baier (I think also of the Pittsburgh crowd) and others seem distinctly post-analytic.

    But Frege and Husserl, this is the last moment before the split. So if you want not to join one side or the other, you might go back to the most recent common ancestor. (Without just taking Kant for another spin.)

    But I think it's pretty uncommon to see anyone who isn't doing ancient philosophy or Heidegger talk about "the unity of thinking and being". That's pretty out there, but again I don't know the scene well anymore.
  • A challenge to Frege on assertion
    syncategorematicity — Leontiskos

    Yeah I haven't gotten to that stuff yet.

    It's painful reading. I know a lot of that is just me, that I'm out of practice, but I never felt so frustrated reading Dummett or Sellars, writers many people dislike. There's something disorganized about Kimhi's writing, that nothing he says makes sense on its own, without all of his other thoughts. But you can't say everything at once; as a writer you have to impose some structure, if not lemma-theorem-corollary, then at least something pedagogical, building it up. Wittgenstein struggled with this and found not one but two solutions! Kimhi doesn't seem to have.
  • A challenge to Frege on assertion
    he's not using the judgment stroke merely to mark a purported truth. But how shall we characterize what he is doing? — J

    I have a thought about this, which almost made it in an earlier post.

    Kimhi says that existence is conferred on propositions by the veridical use of 'to be', so that's judgment or assertion.

    Frege wants propositions to be the object of thought, but he also wants them to have independent existence. It's almost as if he half accepts Kimhi's position, but then confers existence on his propositions in perpetuity by borrowing the veridical use of 'to be' and tacking it right onto the proposition. There! Fixed!

    But this is worse than doing nothing in Kimhi's view because this is a complete sham. Propositions exist only in the judgments of thinkers; the veridical use of 'to be' no more stands *on its own* than propositions do, so you cannot just rip it from a thinker's mouth and solve the problem of the independence of propositions.

    (This turns out to be the other side of my realization that Frege probably means 'judgment' in some strangely objective sense.)
  • A challenge to Frege on assertion
    attempting to wrestle with the bigger picture — Leontiskos

    Quite the opposite. I'm just forcing myself to try to understand the damn book. Although maybe you're right, in the sense that I'm just picking out the bits that seem to address The Tradition.

    Yes, but why are we to think that Kimhi is committed to "atomicity"? That's what puzzled me about your first post. — Leontiskos

    That was an hypothesis: if he doesn't attack the "atomic" part of "atomic proposition" (which is what Quine did), maybe he's okay with it.

    most parties are agreed that in order to assert ~p there is a "reliance" on an understanding of p — Leontiskos

    I believe Kimhi wants to say these are the same thing, in the following sense (although there's some labor over it): extensionally, ~p is a complex proposition dependent certainly for truth-value but perhaps also for sense on p; intensionally, to consider p at all is also to consider ~p, to think or judge or say one is also to take a position on the other.

    Another way to get there has been discussed earlier in the thread, but I don't know if it's Kimhi's way or equivalent, and that's to deny that ~p is a component of an intensional complex like "A thinks ~p", and construe this instead as "A thinks-not p" or "A denies p".

    That would be a pretty Fregean move, like saying "A is" is not a component of "A is red."
  • A challenge to Frege on assertion
    Next bit of deviation from mainstream analytic philosophy:

    For example, it is widely accepted, to the point that it is almost a dogma of contemporary [ analytic ] philosophy, that we must acknowledge a radical difference between the occurrence of p in extensional truth-functional complexes (such as “~p”) and its occurrence in intensional non-truth-functional complexes (such as “A thinks that p”). Given the way this distinction between logical contexts is usually understood, it has the consequence that, if one wants to answer our above question (what is it for p to occur in propositions of both of these sorts?), one must conclude that the p in question possesses the logically prior character of being something which is in and of itself true or false. — p. 11

    There's more, but let's stop here a moment.

    Extensional complex propositions are truth-functions of their component propositions, but intensional complex propositions are not. That means that p occurs in an extensional complex on the expectation that it can be given a truth-value contributory to the truth-value of the complex; but when p occurs in an intensional complex, its truth-value makes no difference to the truth-value of the complex. So yes, those ways of occurring are different, maybe even "radically" different.

    So how does that lead to "in and of itself true or false"? I think it's just the claim that for p to work in an extensional context it has to be ready to provide a truth value. In particular, that truth value cannot depend on the truth value of any other proposition, so --- atomicity.

    Which we had *some* reason to think Kimhi was into, but he has a specific issue here, something about the "logical unity of p and ~p" and he doesn't want to say you can consider p without considering the complex ~p.

    That matters because what occurs in an intensional complex like "A thinks p" is the very same proposition that's in ~p, which means we get to consider how p works in these intensional complexes. And any A that affirms p denies ~p. (I'll have to check tonight when I can look at the text, but I think this is one of those self-evident, non-inferential things for him.)

    In short, if you take this detour through intensional complexes, you get a specific failure of atomicity, which extensional complexes just require.

    Why is this the fault of the extension / intension distinction? I think it's sort of a revenge pattern: yes, the truth-value of p doesn't matter to the truth of "A thinks p", but there's still an exclusionary relationship between "A thinks p" and "A thinks ~p" that the usual view cannot account for, precisely because it blinds us to the p in "A thinks p."
  • A challenge to Frege on assertion
    So we are talking about illocutionary force — Banno

    Don't think so. At least at first, Kimhi says nothing to suggest that you do anything by saying that things stand thus-and-so.

    So in what way does a proposition "exist"? — Banno

    Only as an abstract object, immanent in an actual use. What I think so far.

    What problem? — Banno

    He defines three sorts of problems related to non-existence: (1) empty predicates; (2) vacuous singular terms; (3) problems that implicate the whole proposition, not just its parts as in (1) and (2). The third set includes the Parmenidean problems: how do we think, falsely, that the world is how it is not; how do we say, truly, that the world is not as it is not. His examples come from Wittgenstein, one from the early Notebooks, one from the Blue & Brown books.
  • A challenge to Frege on assertion
    ↪Banno
    ↪Leontiskos


    (Reminder: Parmenides puzzle number one is, how can we think what is not the case? Number two is, how can we talk about what is not the case, even to say that it is not?)

    Here's most of the footnote on pages 9 and 10. This is not an argument per se, but does lay out pretty well what Kimhi takes himself to be up to in relation to early-ish analytic philosophy.

    (1) no objection
    Over the course of its history, analytic philosophy has associated different modes of non-existence with different components of a simple proposition. One of the early contributions of the tradition was the construal of non-existence claims as concerning the extensions of predicates through the use of quantifiers.
    (2) also fine
    Once issues of non-existence that could be understood in terms of empty extensions of predicates were set aside, the interest of analytic philosophers turned to the mode of non-existence associated with the singular term in a simple proposition, and hence to issues such as the status of vacuous names and fictional entities
    (3) an eyebrow is raised
    While the problems of intentionality and non-existence, analytic philosophers remained notably untroubled by the problems under discussion here— ones that arise in connection with the proposition as a whole. [ The grammar here evades me, and we may be missing a word. ]
    (4) a fateful decision
    The adoption of the force / content distinction allowed them to construe that which is true / false or is / is-not the case (e.g., a thought, a sentence, a state of affairs) as having its own existence independent of that conferred upon it through the veridical use of the verb “to be.” [ That is, the use of it to mean "is the case". ] Hence they were assured by the force / content distinction that the existence of the underlying propositional whole is guaranteed.
    (5) and this is the result
    Analytic philosophy thus became completely unconcerned with the problem of non-existence associated with the propositional whole—hence with the difficulties raised by Parmenidean puzzles.
    (6) which we decry
    The aim of this work is to show that the very notion of a forceless truth-bearer is an illusion through and through, and hence that the difficulties of non-existence associated with the propositional whole—precisely those which are at issue in those puzzles— are inescapable.

    TL;DR Kimhi is a proposition skeptic.

    He is not the first. Quine was a proposition skeptic, and his issue was indeed with the "propositional whole"; he concluded that our beliefs face the tribunal of evidence en masse. The atomic proposition, Quine argued, was a myth. (Quine effectively declared the end of early analytic philosophy here, and suggested his new "logical empiricism" was in the tradition of American pragmatism.)

    Kimhi's proposition skepticism is different; he objects, so far as he indicates here, not to atomicity, but to forcelessness. It is the force / content distinction, he says, that allows philosophers to attribute to propositions independent existence.

    This would be an interesting choice. Who believes in atomicity anymore? It's been on the outs for half a century. What might Kimhi find attractive about it?

    If it turns out Kimhi is not committed to atomicity, then the proposition is already dead and does not need killing. Perhaps he is not convinced by the previous reports of its death.

    Read and re-read part (4) up there. That's the heart of it (but y'all were talking historical context, so you got it).

    (4) says not that there are no atomic propositions, but that their existence is "conferred upon" them by the veridical use of "to be", that is, by what we have been calling 'judgment' or 'assertion'.

    This does indeed look like the hylomorphic claim that "what you say is the case" exists only immanently in your saying so, not independently as we all suppose Frege to believe. (As variously Aristotle, @Leontiskos and I have suggested.)

    In a sense, this claim alone solves the Parmenides puzzles! Or at least the second one. By speaking, we can bring into existence an atomic proposition; we need only say that something is or is not the case. There is no reliance on anything else here, nothing that would be needed to support the existence of our atomic proposition (no "negative fact" for instance, no missing truthmaker). It is entirely within our power.

    (He will say something similar about thinking, not relying on anything external to itself.)

    What do we think about Kimhi's in-the-moment atomic propositions?

    Is that something worth having?

    Is it something we will get to keep, or will the various arguments against atomicity sweep these away too?
  • A challenge to Frege on assertion
    talking about language rather than thinking — Banno

    I guess you could read my examples that way, but it wasn't my intention.

    It's a little harder to show collaborative thought, but I expect most of us have had an experience like this: you're trying to express or even explain something you don't quite have a grasp of, and the person you're talking to puts it in such a way that it clarifies your own thinking for you. (I've already posted elsewhere Fry & Laurie's "That's It!", so only a link this time.)

    Well I suspect not just our language use but almost all of our thinking is just as collaborative as in this example, it's just usually harder to see. "I think ..." "I judge ..." Bullshit. Tens of thousands of years have gone into every thought you've ever had, every word you've ever uttered.
  • A challenge to Frege on assertion
    The content of a thought ought to specify its truth conditions. Hence, the content of a simple predicative thought must have a referent to its singular term such that its truth or falsity depends on how things are with the referent. — Pierre-Normand

    Natural enough. For a lot of cases, we usually say we need two elements for assertion: what we're talking about (to be picked out by a referential expression) and what we're saying about it (the predication).

    Two small points about this though.

    1. If you think of this in terms of communication, there's a fairly clear sense of "picking out" or "specifying" available: you negotiate until you agree on the subject; enough for your audience to know what you're talking about is enough for you to say what you want to say.

    There is no standard as clear that doesn't consider communication. If someone is just expressing their views in language for fun, speaking their beliefs to the universe at large, what standard do they meet to count their referential expressions as successful?

    Negotiation can be really one-sided. Suppose you tell me you have to take care of something and then we can go; I wait by the car and when you arrive I ask, "Did you take care of it?" If you say, "Take care of what?" all I have is "Whatever you told me you had to take care of!" I take myself to be talking about something that only you can pick out.

    2. Principally for descriptions (with a bound variable) but even for names, we can sometimes choose -- to use the programming language terminology -- between early binding and late binding, between fixing reference at "compile time", when we first speak, and at "run time", which can vary.

    Consider a direction like "Don't forget to put your tools away after". The tools that are already where they should be can't be put away, so the intention is to pick out whichever tools are out at the time you're carrying out the directive. That can also be expressed as a conditional --- something like, "For all members of your tools, if it's out then put it away." The variable is singular now, but it's still not going to be bound until run-time, and then a number of times, also not known until run-time. Same thing.

    This example is similar to the example in the first point, but one person gives the criterion and the other applies it; together they fix the reference, but not immediately.

    ---

    Both points are intended to cast a bit of doubt on the presumption that our propositions are always referentially determinate, and thus their truth conditions too, at the time of our choosing, or that they need to be. (And I didn't even mention vagueness.)

    There are similarly open-ended options for predication.

    None of this matters to Frege or Kimhi, I'm sure. I don't know if it helps with @Banno's cat.
  • A challenge to Frege on assertion
    rule out talk of abstracta in a less reified way — J

    No no, of course not.

    We don't have to continue this here, or anywhere. Roughly, I'm just carrying the flag for population thinking versus essentialism. --- The bit earlier in the thread about loose and tight coupling, that's a suggestion that hunting for the essence of assertion, for example, is misguided.

    Maybe some other time, though I really hate talking at this level of generality. Everything I say sounds like hand-wavy bullshit.
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