If "assertoric force" is proposed to be understood as not an illocutionary force ranging over the subsequent expression, then it is up to the proposer to set out what it is that the force does that is different to the illocutionary force of asserting. — Banno

Maybe it's the same as long as we narrow our focus to propositions in the Fregean sense.

Al LLMs make naught but verbal cardboard. — Baden

The next time you're homeless you're going to wish you had some verbal cardboard.

:up:

Consider "Frank posts on PF". Here is a list of folk who post on PF. "Frank posts on PF" will be satisfied if and only if Frank is in that list. — Banno

I think this is trivially true.

I just need to know truth conditions for p. Then I understand p.

I see what you're saying. The way I've been thinking of it is that to understand p, I have to know what it would mean for it to be true. The way I do that is to imagine someone saying that p is true. I look at that setting. I suppose you don't need to do that. I don't really understand how you're doing it.

:lol:

They have to make p true. I see.

I don't see how commands have anything to do with truth.

It will make things up entirely — Hanover

I was thinking of the AI that google uses. I think I only used ChatGPT once.

I get that. In terms of propositions, we could say it works this way:

p is the proposition that the grass is green. The part that follows the word that is the proposition. It is not a sentence nor an utterance. It's a truthbearer. It's an abstract object. This proposition can be expressed by the utterance of a sentence. An utterance is usually marks or sounds. A sentence is a grammatically correct string of words.

The questioner has asked if it is true that the grass is green. She asked if it is true that p.

The answer that came to the questioner was that p is true.

The command doesn't contain a proposition.

We have the propositional content and we have the propositional attitude. Folk here say Kimhi thinks there is a "force" not captured by either of these. I'm asking what that force is. — Banno

I develop propositional attitude by analyzing the context of utterance, specifically in the case of an assertion. It occurred to me all of the sudden that we may not all be the same in this. It may be that habits that I have to use to understand propositions aren't necessary for you. I've been assuming you're doing the same thing I am, but you're just not as conscious of it. Maybe that's bullshit. Ha! :grin:

But you do know what "the sun rises in the east" is about, as much as "the sun rises in the north" or "the sun does not rise". These are not disconnected from the world, isolated from time and space. — Banno

You're providing the sentences involved with that connection, though. You do this by providing context, although in this case I'm guessing it's fictional.

Oh, I didn't realize that.

Michael's recent project of denying that promises exist by denying that one can bind themselves to a future course. — Leontiskos

That's not what he was saying.

I've seen Wikipedia provide misinformation. I've never seen ChatGPT do that, although I guess it could.

:smile:

J explains it pretty well in the OP.

p is the proposition that the sun rises in the east
q is the proposition that I will see the sun above my barn

If p, then q.

Frege was saying that the above propositions haven't ever been asserted. His focus is on how one thought follows another, and thoughts which have never been asserted abound in the processing of the mind.

Kimhe says this way of thinking about propositions disconnects thought from the world as if there's some inner sanctum where they dance around isolated from the world of time and space.

He says that the act of assertion, which pins the meaning of a proposition down to the actual world, is secretly there: "smuggled in.".

To me, this is kind of blatantly obvious. This is part and parcel of what a proposition is.

That's cool, except China is in the process of building about 50 coal burning power plants. :sad:

The SEP says this about Frege's view of assertion:

" It is in the force of an utterance that the step is taken from the content to the actual point of evaluation. This view has been stated by Recanati with respect to the actual world:

"[…] a content is not enough; we need to connect that content with the actual world, via the assertive force of the utterance, in virtue of which the content is presented as characterizing that world. (Recanati 2007:". here

The act of assertion pins down the meaning of a thought so it becomes truth-apt. How do we know which cat is supposed to be in the mat? We need context. The context is revealed in the time and place of the assertion. It's about indexing. That's what I've been assuming anyway.

It seems that Bob paid for the statue rather than the clay, though. Did Bob pay for something that isn't physical?

That was fascinating. The answer was that Quine would say I have a unique connection to the world, but I also mind-meld with my community so that my language isn't private.

If I can mind-meld with my community, why can't I mind-meld with individual people? Or maybe it's that there is an innate primal language from which all languages emerge?

Food for thought. Thanks!

makes sense :up:

@Banno

Imagine someone saying something like this about numbers:

"What numbers never do is just hang out quantifying trees."

How would you respond to that?

Quine believed in semantic holism, right?

We want to say that this is "innocent" at the level of p, but does Frege's own understanding of what a proposition is, allow us to do so? — J

Right. That's the first thing that occurred to me about it. Frege's propositions must reflect context of utterance. I was thinking there might be some sort of phantom assertion to it, something generally understood as with the textbook. "One observes...". instead of "she observed.."

When was the force stroke supposed to be used?

Part of our unearned insouciance is this story we tell ourselves about how p can, of course, "stand on its own" in some obvious way. — J

Isn't it because the world is supposed to stand on it's own, and true propositions are states of the world?

If you read a textbook on anatomy, you aren't supposed to think of it as being asserted by someone in particular. It's like das Man, except with the textbook it's the scientific establishment.

Cool. Logo / psychism is basically stoicism.

It's easier to get forgiveness than it is to get permission. Especially if it's the Netherlands.

The idea of logic as normative crops up more in everyday speech, I would say. "You're not being logical!" is a normative reprimand; the idea is that a good arguer ought to use correct logic. More generally, we seem to believe that in most cases, logic represents a template or set of guidelines for good reasoning, and it's all too easy not to use them. We aren't forced to think logically, in the way that, say, we're forced to digest food using [whatever the heck we digest food with]. — J

I see what you're saying. I just don't think anyone other than a few stray mystics is ever truly illogical.
The person who is being admonished to be more logical is being asked to think it through again. Statements of logic, like the LONC, are indubitable. You don't really have any choice in that. If you speak in contradictions (outside of mysticism), you're spouting nonsense, right? You're asserting p's that can't be true. The fault is in failing to take note of what you're bound to think.

As for an ontological LONC, how would we establish that? To nudge Hume, even if it's been true up to now that contradictions don't happen, that doesn't mean it won't start happening tomorrow. The ontological LONC is really an expectation rooted in logic. Double slit experiments cause stress for decades. No one ever makes a credible case for dispensing with the LONC. We're stuck with it.

Am I missing the point here? 

Maybe form and formlessness are dependent on one another for meaning. It's one concept.

St. Gregory of Nyssa takes this up in "On the Making of Man." Apparently, a common argument at the time was to say that matter must be coeternal with God (a view based on the Timaeus) because God, as pure act, would lack the properties of matter (which must come from somewhere). But as St. Gregory points out, having removed all form, all whatness, from matter, one is left with nothing, no attributes at all—so there is nothing to "lack" in a "lack of potency." (This is also how Aristotle's Prime Mover(s) or Plotinus' One cannot be said to suffer from any privation through being pure act). — Count Timothy von Icarus

That's interesting. One of the books I read about Plotinus suggested that he was an eliminative idealist (like a reflection of an eliminative materialist). Though we talk about the privation of the good (or mind), it's not really an independent thing. It's also part of the One, though apparently the part where Plotinus explains this is squirrelly.

Now, if form is rather something created by/imposed by the mind, it almost seems to counterintuitively dislodge the phenomenological side of the understanding of eidos, since now the whatness of things is no longer essential to what they are but is rather something produced in one corner of the world, for some perceiving subject. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I suppose that goes well with panpsychism. I've leaned pretty far into the skepticism about metaphysics these days. Don't have much to say about it, but I could go on and on forever about the dramas that Form and Formlessness play out in the psyche. Cool stuff.

I've never thought of logic as normative. Have you? I've always thought of it as if the mind is a landscape that's just there, that we're inside. Logic is part of the boundaries of it. What do you think logic is?

I love most of Koons' stuff. But yea, investment is like accounting: it's a bizarre other world. S&P500 futures make about as much sense as a giant balloon dog.

Matter ‘comes to matter’ within intra-actively changing agential configurations. — Joshs

What now?

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, — Srap Tasmaner

If you express a proposition you just need to be pointing to some state of affairs. Precision isn't really the issue.

Cosmology shows there are enormous amounts of formless matter scattered throughout the Universe. And that's only the matter that can be seen! — Wayfarer

But we imagine that if we had eyes small enough, we would see particles down there. It's not really formless, is it?

But you just did. — Banno

You misunderstood. I have never said that.

If you are incapable of entertaining a statement without deciding if it is true or if it is false — Banno

You keep saying this in spite of protests from both me and Leontiskos that no one has claimed this.

...given the right circumstances — Banno

Exactly. The only way I can make sense of Frege's idea of a proposition (a thought) that is disconnected from assertion is to imagine that we're looking at humans as if they're robots and we're examining the programming to see where the meaning is coming from. That's wild.

They are not the sort of sentences that ordinarily might be considered true or false. But "The cat is on the mat" is. — Banno

Sentences aren't usually considered to be truth-apt. There's a good SEP article that explains why.