For such a person—and they are common—I would ask why we must accept the premise that cultural realities cannot be criticized. — Leontiskos

This is essentially my question :D. [...it] is more of an axiological question — schopenhauer1

I tend to blame Rawls for this sort of cultural relativism. When you can't figure out how to ground morality objectively, then you just stop at the level of culture, and that's what Rawls did.

Ok, so how do you know which is attributed to which? Should it be condemned if it is cultural, or is culture sacrosanct? To what extent?

...

Let's say that culture was not at all in the picture, and you disapproved of someone's individual habit.. But then you realized that that habit was actually part of their culture. Does the disapproval change? If so, why? — schopenhauer1

I tend to see culture and habit as parallel. So the first question is, "Suppose you see someone doing something that you disapprove of, but then you realize that they are habituated to this act. Does the disapproval change?" Yes, it changes qua culpability and capability. For example, there is a moral difference between someone who freely engages in a bad act and someone who is addicted to it.

Culture is the same, but at a deeper level. It can perhaps even be conceived as the amalgamation of a people or a people's history, which is then confronted by the amalgamation of a different people. There is a parallel between the moral confrontation between two persons and the moral confrontation between two cultures. And we must remember to distinguish between morality and custom in order to avoid condemning what is contrary to our own customs but not to morality.

But it's also, WHEN can we distill that it is cultural vs. other factors? — schopenhauer1

If I am right in saying that culture is a kind of societal habit, then I would say that a non-cultural cause is anything which does not flow from that kind of societal habit. For example, if gangs are a result of poverty, and if poverty is not a societal habit, then the poverty that produces gangs is not a cultural cause.

The trick is that poverty can become cultural even when it is not at first. Probably everything is like this, which is what makes the question difficult. My guess is that an important distinction must be made between high culture and just culture. The Chinese have a tea culture and an opium culture. The first is "high culture" or intentional culture, whereas the second is just culture, or else undesirable culture.

I mean a classic example here is gang culture in the US. This is tied with so many things- racial oppression, socio-economic oppression, and cultural aspects. One side of the debate regarding gang culture is that it is a cultural problems. A prominent conservative historian, Thomas Sowell, traces it back to Southern white redneck culture, that ultimately gets traced back to England. Nonetheless, he seems to see it as more of a cultural circumstance more than socio-economic. Others would say that it derives from socio-economic circumstances of simply being poor. If you are poor, and discriminated, these are the activities that a subgroup might tend towards.. — schopenhauer1

Okay, good. Gangs might be a consequence of culture going back to "Southern white Redneck culture," or they could be a consequence of the the disenfranchisement, resentment, and desperation resulting from poverty and discrimination. Or both. But the first is "cultural" and the second is "socio-economic."

Maybe part of the question is to ask whether it represents an insuperable obstacle or defense to say, "It's cultural." For example, if gangs are cultural then they cannot be criticized, at least on the premise that cultural realities cannot be criticized. For such a person—and they are common—I would ask why we must accept the premise that cultural realities cannot be criticized.

Not at all. — Srap Tasmaner

No? Look at this sentence:

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. — Srap Tasmaner

Now if we tighten up the logic, then the second clause would read, "...and therefore we must not think we are saying anything fundamental..." I want to say that whereas your second clause is a "X is not necessary" clause, your first clause in fact entails, "~X is necessary." If X is to remain a possibility then the first clause would need to be rewritten.

I take it that this discrepancy represents an important issue underlying the thread.

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

I am focusing mostly on his final section where he tries to set out an alternative to Frege. The other parts are interesting, but I think an alternative is what this thread is most in need of.

At what point (if any) can we distill cultural factors for why groups act a certain way versus socio-economic or political factors? — schopenhauer1

What do you mean by culture? On my view economics and politics are downstream of culture, and so it is difficult to separate such things from culture.

Can one be a "culturist", meaning can one morally be "against" certain cultures, or should people be tolerant of all cultural aspects, whether you agree with them or not? — schopenhauer1

I think one of our most entrenched difficulties is our inability to say that other people are (objectively) wrong, and this is most obvious when it comes to cultural considerations. If you can't objectively oppose a culture then in the end you probably can't objectively oppose anything.

I rather have it an investigation on when one can reasonably blame a "cultural" trait, if at all for a negative aspect of social living. — schopenhauer1

I want to say that culture is something like societal habit, or some subset of societal habit.

I will be out for the rest of the day, so I want to try to offer at least a short response:

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, ..." — Srap Tasmaner

We have circled around this problem a number of times in the thread (i.e. the fact that the judgment-stroke is not a speech act). Most recently I claimed that Frege is concerned with assenting, not asserting, but that's also imperfectly stated. The judgment-stroke is something like the act of assent or the recognition of truth. This does not seem to be the same as assertion in interpersonal communication.

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.

Is it any wonder that his logic looks more like a branch of mathematics than anything else? — Srap Tasmaner

I also don't think mathematics holds that mathematical claims can be true or false by fiat. I think this thread has often conflated metamathematics and metalogic with mathematics and logic.

We can represent truth-apt thoughts or truth-apt mathematical claims without providing content, but this is a very limited move, and does not imply that the truth of thoughts or mathematics is in some way stipulated. I don't want to move into a tangent, but the object of metamathematics is different than the object of mathematics, and what is stipulated in that case is not so much truth as a truth-mimicking value that then allows one to study formal characteristics of mathematical systems.

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. — Srap Tasmaner

You seem committed to the position which says that we cannot say anything fundamental about language or reasoning itself. I don't take that as granted.

Sorry for the shorter post!

- A psychological clique that thinks of itself as True Philosophy? They are a dime a dozen.

Oh -- there are dots I didn't connect there. — Srap Tasmaner

When I said that we are doing speech act theory rather than logic what I meant is that the content/force distinction is not the same for each. Speech act theory deals with intentional (illocutionary?) force, whereas logic deals with assertoric force. Martin points out that you can run the same sort of critique from the perspective of speech act theory, but it is a somewhat different critique.

What I am gathering from Martin, @fdrake, and @Pierre-Normand, is that assertoric force is not merely one variety of intentional or illocutionary force, for 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.

Edit: This may go back to your observation about language qua thought vs. language qua communication.

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? — Srap Tasmaner

Without yet opening this can of worms, I think my post accommodates this. I called a sentence "A bit of language," (following the classical understanding of a proposition which underlies the Frege-Geach Point). But I think a phrase or word is also a bit of language, at least insofar as my points about determinate range and literal sense are concerned.

Good post. I agree with almost all of that, and although we may disagree on some of the implications, let me just break off a piece to try to disagree with. You can bring in some of the other pieces as they become relevant. As a caveat, we now seem to be doing speech act theory rather than logic, and this will need to be held in mind.

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. — Srap Tasmaner

I think Kimhi is more or less correct that declarative sentences have (or “display”) assertoric force, and I would also say that utterances have force.

Now part of the problem here is that we can say “utterance” and mean something which contains force or does not contain force, and a lot of this goes back to our conversation about screwdrivers. First of all I would argue that something which does not contain force is not an utterance. Everything which is actually being uttered has actual force. But the interesting question is whether a certain material aspect of an utterance must also contain force, and this is perhaps the parallel to the OP in speech act theory. We could call that material utterance a sentence, just as we called the material assertion a declarative sentence. This is a sentence conceived as “a bit of language.”

In the first place I would say that all sentences have a common baseline of force. What kind? Communicative force. As a sign of communication a sentence has communicative force.

Now maybe you would concede that sentences do have communicative force, at which point the more difficult inquiry begins, namely that of deciding whether a given sentence has inherent force over and above communicative force. I think it will, and like the screwdriver, the availability of multiple uses does not preclude a singular form or force. A screwdriver can be used for many things, but there are many more things that it simply cannot be used for. A sentence is the same way, and its determinate range represents its inherent force.

I would then want to bring in different senses (for example, the theological senses of the literal, allegorical, tropological, and anagogical). I want to say, with Aquinas, that the literal sense is normative and foundational. It is what grounds the natural force of a sentence. If a sentence like, “The old dog is hungry,” had no natural force, then anything at all could be done with it. But not anything at all can be done with it; therefore it has natural force. What limits its range of use and its force? Its literal sense. Even metaphors and analogies play on the literal sense, and are not divorced from it. Irony and humor also depend on the literal sense, if in a different way. Someone who does not understand the literal sense will not understand any of the other senses, for these other senses build on the literal.

(Two quick preemptions. First, we have sayings whose literal sense has been lost to us. In such cases the sense which was previously metaphorical has now become the literal sense in a rather odd way. Second, the normativity of written or spoken language is interpersonally situated. The claim here is not that, say, an English sentence has natural force for the Russians. The concrete sense of an utterance will be a kind of relation between the intent of the speaker and the intent of the recipient, and the sense of a sentence will be an abstraction and reification of this.)

What pisses me off most about the choice debate is the insincerity of the antagonists. — Banno

Make arguments, not emotions. This thread contains lots of real arguments regarding abortion. That seems worth continuing.

Whatever "rational" grounds you might have for believing in naive realism, it is incompatible with physics, biology, neuroscience, and psychology. — Michael

And of course this tired claim has been shown to be unsupportable any number of times in the recent thread, Perception. These blind appeals to "The Science" seem to be just the sort of non-interactive evangelization that the forum rules prohibit.

Besides, the belief that science can adjudicate the Kantian question just belies a misunderstanding of the Kantian question, not to mention the science.

- What is at stake here are natural rights, not civil rights, and natural rights are always just.

Resist. — Baden

I'll drink to that.

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This will not end well. — Banno

Yes. As I argued elsewhere, I think the quick adoption is short-sighted.

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plagiarism — bongo fury

I want to say that the cultural morality of the West and especially the U.S. has shifted towards a consent-based system. We think that if everyone sees what you are doing and no one objects, then you haven't done anything wrong. Therefore lifting from LLMs is not seen as plagiarism because LLMs are not persons, and because the creators do not object to such lifting.

This obviously raises other questions, but of course on a (good!) philosophy forum objections do exist, as this thread demonstrates. The objection that is ready to hand is not plagiarism per se, but rather a concern with the quality of LLMs. I like your question because it raises the issue: If LLMs improve in quality would they then become acceptable on a philosophy forum?

(To be fair, the thread didn't fully shift to the criterion of quality until frank posted.)

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. — Srap Tasmaner

Frege certainly thought so.

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. — Srap Tasmaner

Yes, but 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.

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. — Srap Tasmaner

Walker Percy's writings on Helen Keller (and his own daughter) are interesting in this regard.

With that said, I don't know how much the experience of toddlers will bear on Kimhi's project.

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A symbol such as a word or sentence, in contrast, has sense -- we can contemplate it for its meaning alone, think about it, play with it. It's not telling us to do any one thing in particular. So you might say that the possibility of separating force from content is essential to having a true language of symbols. — J

It seems like you want to talk about symbols as stipulated signs. I'm not at all familiar with that usage, but I would question the idea that natural language is a set of stipulated signs. I think natural language and formal logic are very different in that way. I would say that the "true language of [stipulated signs]" is logic. This is why, for example, logic has no interest in philology (and also why philologists tend to be wiser than logicians).

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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. — Srap Tasmaner

Yep, fair. Teaching someone a language requires such separation, whether it be logic or natural language.

-

Aaronow: We're just "talking" about it. — Srap Tasmaner

Don't get me started on the TPFers who want to talk about things they profess to have no interest/belief in. :grin: "Allow me put forth my thesis without any intellectual responsibility."

Thinking and Being is hard to quote from in a self contained manner — fdrake

When I began reading I was thinking, "Wow, this guy really takes the full context principle to the limit!" But after awhile it starts to feel like a collection of deferred explanations.

It's like someone forked the repository of philosophical knowledge just after the publication of Wittgenstein's Tractatus, then merged in secondary literature in that heritage up to 2019. — fdrake

Yes, haha.

To portray the foreclosed future the abandonment of that problematic left. — fdrake

That is a more nuanced take than what we've been considering. I agree that the problematic of judgment cannot be abandoned. And maybe Frege primed the pump for its abandonment, but of course he himself did not abandon it.

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@Banno - regarding illocutionary force:

What is common to these three views is that their critical engagement with the force-content distinction is undertaken from a broadly Wittgensteinian perspective, while rejecting the speech-act theoretic approach to the topic of force and content. . . [5]

[5] Cf. Rödl 2018: 33, Bronzo 2019: 26–31, Kimhi 2018: 39. – There is another group of contemporary philosophers who, from vantage points rooted in speech-act theory, reject the Fregean conception of force as external to content and seek to replace it by an alternative picture, cf. Barker 2004: 89, Recanati 2013, Hanks 2015: 12–20, Hanks 2016, Recanati 2016. These positions deserve separate treatment, cf. Martin 2020: appendix. — Martin, On Redrawing the Force-Content Distinction, 180-1

Yet, God could have not liked evil for He is an all good being. — Shawn

Does an all good being like evil?

Did you put much time or effort into this OP?

This is starting to get hair-splitty, but yes, I would still say that an "assertoric force not limited to assertions" is either incoherent or, in some sense or manifestation, also non-assertoric. — J

The key is that a declarative sentence is an assertion secundum quid, a kind of privative reality. In 's language, it is not "in the wild." It is in some sense artificial or contrived. But if you want to see someone who is waist-deep in non-assertoric forces, check out Martin's paper. :grin:

Martin demonstrates by example how difficult this project is, beginning especially with section 4 of his paper. None of us have really been willing to shift into first gear and get into it in the way that he does, and for good reason. It is not at all clear that the river in question is swimmable, and presumably that is why everyone (including Kimhi, but especially Banno) keeps such a distance from the water. Martin does a great service in leading the way by diving in and swimming. Even if he doesn't make it, others will learn by his example.

An example of this is 204 where Martin examines ¬p and argues that, "Deviating from what Frege thought (cf. N: 355–356), negation amounts at the same time to a logical force of its own." He will end up saying that unlike a positive judgment, a negative judgment or negation has a negative logical force that is non-assertoric. Be warned that Martin is using words with more precision than Kimhi, such as the word "thought."

The merit of this sort of inquiry is reflected in what fdrake said:

Which is a bit odd when you think about it, since you're supposed to be dealing with things that have no forces... but there they are in the logic. — fdrake

Martin shows that there are forces in the logic itself, and that logic is not separable from a process of temporal human acts. How we ever managed to lose sight of such an obvious fact is a mystery to me, but clearly the reminder is salutary.

To make this a bit more apprehensible, some of us may remember Michael's recent project of denying that promises exist by denying that one can bind themselves to a future course . Martin shows that logic and assertion have everything to do with binding oneself to a future course, according to true constraints such as the principle of non-contradiction. This makes sense to me, and it makes sense that we live in a world where promises and syllogisms are dying the same death. We have somehow managed to forget that the machinery we have created requires human subjects carrying out human acts, whether that machinery is logic or the banking system.

(Out for a few days)

Great guideline. :up:
I've seen ChatGPT harm other forums that haven't taken such precautions.

- Thanks, that helps connect some dots. Earlier in the thread I posited that assertoric force was merely one kind of illocutionary force, but I now see that this is at best a simplification.

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- Really loved that post. Among other things, it puts flesh on my Humpty-Dumpty quip.

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I don't think the notion of assertoric force is clear enough to be understood, if it is something different from denotation or illocutionary force. — Banno

I think illocutionary force maps fairly closely to the basic definition I gave, but the sentence that followed is important, "Then the question comes: does that definition stand or are Kimhi, Martin, et al. tweaking it as they go?" Or in other words, Frege might see assertoric force as an illocutionary force, but I don't think Kimhi would, because for Kimhi the force comes from the sentence and not just from the speaker.

I think the elephant in the room for @Banno is Kimhi's reliance on Wittgenstein. If Kimhi's critique is vacuous, then was the critique of Wittgenstein upon which it is built also vacuous?

4.063 An illustration to explain the concept of truth. A black spot on white paper; the form of the spot can be described by saying of each point of the plane whether it is white or black. To the fact that a point is black corresponds a positive fact; to the fact that a point is white (not black), a negative fact. If I indicate [andeuten] a point of the plane (a truth-value in Frege’s terminology), this corresponds to the assumption [Annahme] proposed for judgement, etc. etc.
But to be able to say that a point is black or white, I must first know under what conditions a point is called white or black; in order to be able to say ‘p’ is true (or false) I must have determined under what conditions I call ‘p’ true, and thereby I determine the meaning [Sinn_w] of the sentence.
The point at which the simile breaks down is this: we can indicate [zeigen] a point on the paper, without knowing what white and black are; but to a sentence without a meaning corresponds nothing at all, for it signifies [bezeichnet] no thing (truth-value) whose properties are called “false” or “true”; the verb of the sentence is not “is true” or “is false” - as Frege thought - but that which “is true” must already contain the verb.

4.064 Every sentence must already have a meaning [Sinn_w]; the affirmation [Bejahung] cannot give it a meaning, for what it affirms is the meaning itself. And the same holds of denial, etc. — Rombout quoting Wittgenstein, 60

(The bolded quote is what Kimhi comes back to again and again in his book.)

Is early Wittgenstein as confused as Kimhi?

(See also Martin's section on Wittgenstein, beginning on page 190.)

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So what is the force in assertoric force? Is what you are claiming that the assertoric force is how "The cat" denotes the cat? Than it's about denotation, and fine. But that's not ↪Leontiskos's "some kind of latent or dormant assertoric force which is inseparable from the sentence itself." It's picking stuff out. — Banno

Maybe we could say that assertoric force is that in virtue of which an assertion is realized, qua assertion. For Frege this consists only in judgment or the judgment-stroke. For others it also includes the inherent capacity of the declarative sentence to assert, which is bound up in the meaning and shape of the sentence. In presenting a determinate (truth)-option a declarative sentence has already asserted itself into a kind of possibility space, if that makes any sense.

(Note that this isn't the way Kimhi would describe it, but I think it may work as a gloss on Kimhi.)

Of course for Martin the crux is to map the force-content distinction, such that assertoric force is the complement to logical content. For Martin it is about a relation between the two.

Could that be becasue the question is muddled? — Banno

Sure. Could be.

Martin racks up a lot of different folks who have claimed that there is something wrong with the way Frege separates out assertoric force, and if I have time I may read his paper more carefully to get a better feel for the nature and gravity of the difficulty. Wittgenstein was obviously one of them.

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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? — Srap Tasmaner

This is close to Newman's distinction between real and notional assent.

So it is making an assertion. Attaching an illocutionary force. Doing something with the proposition. — Banno

and spoke to this, but the problem with phrasing it that way is that it closes the question that is supposed to remain open. The question is, "Is it possible to detach the assertoric force from an assertion and still be left with an intelligible declarative sentence?" The illocutionary force approach—which I am not overly familiar with—presupposes that you can remove the force and be left with an intelligible sentence. And presumably everyone is in agreement that you can remove the illocutionary force, without being in agreement on whether you can remove the assertoric force, which in itself shows that the two are different. Illocutionary force is apparently meant to be something superadded, whereas critics of Frege think that assertoric force is not superadded in the way that Frege supposed.*

The question is subtle. It asks whether an (unasserted) declarative sentence has some kind of latent or dormant assertoric force which is inseparable from the sentence itself. Presumably no one is wondering if sentences have latent or dormant illocutionary force.


* And I suppose it is crucial to note that Frege's distinction between assertoric force and predicate was not intended to be merely stipulative. He thought he was saying something that was both true and previously unattended to. He thought that his recognition of the clean separability of the two, via the judgment-stroke, was an advance. For example, see his quote <here>.

...Accordingly, the primary problem with Frege’s understanding of force is not that he fails to explain the absence of assertoric force from the use of declarative sentences in certain contexts but, rather, his failure to account for the unity of thought and force in assertions, be they logically simple or propositionally complex. — On Redrawing the Force Content Distinction, by Christian Martin, 180

(Note too that Martin uses the same language of "declarative sentences" vs. "assertions" that Srap and I developed earlier in the thread. This is much better than "displays" vs. "self-identifying displays.")

- Yep, good, and this is why I wasn't finding it useful to try to gain perfect precision on Frege's sense of proposition (even in the unlikely event that he has a clear and consistent sense).

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'. — Srap Tasmaner

I think this is a fine way to read Kimhi. As I recall he will consistently talk about displays of force/judgment/assertion and self-identifying displays of force/judgment/assertion. I find that way of speaking unhelpful. Without digressing, I sympathize with all of the things you're running into!

This is starting to get hair-splitty, but yes, I would still say that an "assertoric force not limited to assertions" is either incoherent or, in some sense or manifestation, also non-assertoric. — J

See:

For Kimhi Frege's Fa displays assertoric force and therefore is not independent of it. It is not a judgment, but "displays" one. As I said earlier in the thread, I am not convinced that Frege would disagree with such claims. There is a possible equivocation on "assertoric force." — Leontiskos

I suppose it would be more technically correct to say that, rather than there being a possible equivocation on "assertoric force," Kimhi's distinction occurs as display vs. self-identifying display (of assertoric force). But it is worth recognizing that Kimhi does not make use of a non-assertoric force.

As to @Banno's question about what assertoric force is, following the "Frege-Geach point" (Martin) or "Frege's observation" (Kimhi), assertoric force is the thing that separates an asserted proposition from an unasserted proposition.* Then the question comes: does that definition stand or are Kimhi, Martin, et al. tweaking it as they go? Again, Martin's paper is very helpful with regard to the OP.

* For example, in a modus tollens the antecedent of the conditional premise does not possess assertoric force, whereas the same 'p' in the second premise does possess assertoric force.

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? — Srap Tasmaner

I was hoping this would help, "In my own words: the integrity of a proposition is bound up with assertoric force and the veridical use/sense of the verb."

My sense is that Kimhi thinks there is a veridical use of the verb and also a non-veridical use of the verb, and here he wants to talk about the veridical use of the verb. That doesn't entirely solve the puzzle, but I'm not sure this single sentence can bear the scrutiny we are applying.

My read is that at this early stage in the book Kimhi is attempting to distance himself from what will eventually become "Frege's Point," but without yet saying anything overly specific.

Does a Fregean formula like "Fa" display the independent existence of a thought or a state of affairs? Or is it a judgment? — Srap Tasmaner

For Frege Fa prefixed by the "horizontal" represents an assertable proposition, a thought. It is not a judgment.

For Kimhi Frege's Fa displays assertoric force and therefore is not independent of it. It is not a judgment, but "displays" one. As I said earlier in the thread, I am not convinced that Frege would disagree with such claims. There is a possible equivocation on "assertoric force."

As to the question of the ontological status of a proposition, I don't find Kimhi taking a stand one way or another, and although I am told that Frege is a Platonist on this issue I haven't read him myself to know the specifics. I don't know that this question of the ontological status of a proposition is central to Kimhi's case, but it may come in later on in the book. And it could be argued to be central in one way or another. I just don't see Kimhi attending to it.

Frege/Geach's adoption of the force / content distinction allowed them to construe a 'proposition' as having its own existence independent of that conferred upon it through the veridical use of the verb “to be," — Leontiskos

- Kimhi refers to TLP 4.063 at least three times in his book, and that is the key to understanding these sorts of claims. Rombout looks at that exact passage in greater context:

His argument is very similar to Wittgenstein's argument that Rombout presents in 4.3.1. In fact it is almost identical except for a mild upgrade. — Leontiskos

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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? — Srap Tasmaner

Yes, I would replace "judgment" with "assertoric force," and this has to do with Kimhi's distinction between an assertion and something which merely displays assertoric force. 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. In my own words: the integrity of a proposition is bound up with assertoric force and the veridical use/sense of the verb.

"Existence" feels clumsy in that sentence, but Kimhi may be trying to speak in more general terms in this introductory part of his book. But I don't want to get bogged down in this one sentence. I am interpreting that footnote in relation to later context, and in particular, "Frege's Point."

(Sorry - I edited these posts about a million times)

But unless you're reading "use" creatively, he does say what I said he did. — Srap Tasmaner

I don't see it.

<Frege/Geach's adoption of the force / content distinction allowed them to construe a 'proposition' as having its own existence independent of that conferred upon it through the veridical use of the verb “to be," therefore Kimhi holds that a proposition has existence conferred upon it by someone affirming or denying it>.

One can oppose Frege/Geach without adopting the consequence. I think there is more than one reason why, but in general it is key to understand that Kimhi is making a distinction, not taking the surface-level contrary position. Specifically, he is saying that assertoric force is not limited to assertions. It is also present in what we have called declarative sentences. It's not that propositions have no existence (apart from assertions). It's that their existence is bound up with assertoric force, and is not separable from it. ...Unless he goes farther than that and actually takes up "proposition skepticism," but I don't think such a thing is in evidence early in the book.

(Like Wittgenstein, Kimhi seems to take care in what he doesn't say, and one wishes he had been bolder and said more.)

(One can see here why @J came under the impression that a non-assertoric force was in play, with the help of Banno; and why @Banno wanted to push assertoric force and illocutionary force together.)

Thought I had quoted it somewhere, but no. — Srap Tasmaner

Here are some places where you got close:

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.” — Kimhi, Thinking and Being, 9

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

-

I take the veridical use of 'to be' to be 'assertoric force'. — Srap Tasmaner

Yes, and this is where it gets tricky. For example:

The second predicative or two-place sense is the veridical or copulative sense. The verb understood in a veridical sense displays a judgment or assertion, namely, an act of a two-way logical capacity or form. The judgments "Helen is beautiful" and "Quasimodo is not beautiful" are positive and negative acts of the syncategorematic (or logical) form "___ is beautiful." — Kimhi, Thinking and Being, 22

Without wading into this too far, the word "displays" is doing a lot of work here. So we can say that this veridical sense of the verb pertains to assertoric force, but at least here Kimhi is not saying anything about assertions ("self-identifying displays") or people making those assertions. (See section 2.5 regarding "displays")

- Yes, "mammal" would probably be the more commonly accepted term.

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.

...

When Kimhi says "conferred" there is some ambiguity.

...

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.

...

So Kimhi is an anti-realist. — Srap Tasmaner

I can't help but wonder if you are reading things into Kimhi with this "proposition skepticism." To take one example, where does Kimhi say that, "the proposition [...] has existence conferred upon it by someone affirming or denying [it]"?

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

As I read him, Kimhi is saying that if we strip away the assertoric force from a proposition, then it will not be true, false, or even meaningful. His argument is very similar to Wittgenstein's argument that Rombout presents in 4.3.1. In fact it is almost identical except for a mild upgrade.

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. — Srap Tasmaner

I guess the response here is that Frege and Kimhi are interested in speculative knowledge, not practical knowledge, and 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.

I actually thought it was you who was talking about the way that these more complex social-practical assessments presuppose the building blocks of assertion (or really assent), but maybe it was someone else? For example, one cannot lie before they know how to assert.

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. — Srap Tasmaner

There are a number of different issues at play in such a post. I think they are better fit for a new thread because they are topics of general interest. But to take one: must philosophy be accessible to the masses, or address issues that are "not optional"? I don't think so, but I can see why such philosophy is more interesting and appealing. Nevertheless, throughout the thread I have been asking about what larger implications Kimhi's thesis is supposed to have, and I assumed that this matter of 'relevance' was going to come up. "Kimhi's critique is important/relevant because..." I certainly grant you that the thread has remained very abstract and remote from considerations of relevance. That's a fair point.

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. — Srap Tasmaner

So are Kimhi and Frege then opposed to partial truths, or do they think that it is inappropriate to be willing to adapt and adjust, or that all of our strategic choices have guaranteed results? I don't see why one would say that. But I am not yet convinced that the two do not intersect. If Kimhi or Frege are correct then everyday theorizing is bound up in their account.

Curiously, my friend who teaches high school philosophy was complaining about Aristotle's logic in the same sort of way, and I tried to explain that Aristotle's logic is very flexible and broad, and is even meant to include reasoning based on such caveats (e.g. in the Rhetoric Aristotle explicitly speaks about the way logical forms interact with non-"deductive" kinds of argument). ...But that's a tangent of a tangent. :grin:

That syllogism represents the standard sort of case that the objector is appealing to. The essence of 'animal' is operative in both premises (and is the middle term). Dogs, animals, and warm-blooded things all exist, and because of this Aquinas would say that such premises based on an essence are legitimate moves (i.e. Aquinas is not a Possibilist, and this school will not fully emerge until Scotus). And yes, the conclusion has to do with a property or characteristic of dogs, not their existence.

To say it, all Frege needs to do is put a judgment stroke in front of it. Does this mean that Frege is the subject, in the sense of "the one who is acknowledging the objective truth"? Is this really what he means? — J

It sounds like it, but of course it would require more research into Frege to know for sure. Along the lines of my other response, realists arguing about the nature of knowable objective truths is a lot of inside baseball. Every theory is a bit unwieldy, if only because objective truth is unwieldy, and to adjudicate between them is a difficult task.

of course the jury is still out — J

For me 18 pages with little to show testifies against Kimhi. We have produced very little fruit in the way of understanding his argument, and the prima facie conclusion now says that there is not much to be understood.

It is true that the tangents have been interesting. Working backwards, we have Pierre and fdrake attempting to show Banno why illocutionary force is different from assertoric force; then the point from Pierre about what precisely Frege might mean by the term proposition, etc. There have been a lot of forays into Kimhi where we attempted to strike for gold, but each one seems to have come up short. It will be interesting to see what @Srap Tasmaner makes of the book. I thought the thread was out of gas on page 11, but then @Pierre-Normand came in and breathed new life into it, particularly in providing Martin's paper.

For me the secondary sources were most interesting and informative, including Narboux's book review, Boynton's review, Novak's paper relating to the Parmenidean puzzles, Rombout's paper on the judgment-stroke, and Martin's paper on redrawing the force-content distinction. Threads could be made on any of these related topics, and I hope @Srap Tasmaner finishes the thread he began to write.

Regardless of Kimhi's merits, the thread and topic are interesting. Depending on your target, there may be others who are better archers. Martin gives a slew of folks who have worked on this exact same topic of Frege's force-content distinction, and I'm not sure that Kimhi engages any of them. Indeed, the way that Kimhi fails to engage the existing scholarship on the issues he pursues is part of the reason why my faith in him has flagged. If I had to give someone the ball of the OP to run with, it would certainly be Martin and not Kimhi.

- Well, is Kimhi going to disagree with you that Frege's approach is useful?

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. I was actually hoping that you were going to write your new thread on this topic.

But my point seems to stand intact:

Of course he is not giving a model, but there is still truth in such an objection. I would phrase it as something like, "Frege did not give a perfect account of the mystery of thinking, but it is not a bad account, and in order to critique it we would need to get much clearer on what should be thought to constitute a better account." — Leontiskos

I will revisit that section when I get a chance, but in this area there is an inherent danger. Kimhi is right to say that thinking is unique. It is also mysterious, and ineliminably so (in large part because it is unique). Frege's judgment-stroke reflects this mysterious nature of thinking. For example, as says, Frege wants to have it both ways. So does Kimhi when he says things such as, "It is both x and not-x." It seems that we are just bumping up against the mysteriousness of thinking.

The danger then is something like "mystery swapping." Kimhi wants to construe the mystery in a different way than Frege does. At such a point we need to be very clear about what constitutes a better construal or account of a mystery. When someone says something about a mystery it is very easy to contradict them, and much harder to say something profitable oneself. The question of a target enters again, because if we have no target about what constitutes a better mystery-account and what constitutes a worse mystery-account, then we are up a creek without a paddle. As Martin's paper bears out, it becomes very difficult to recognize the parameters that a suitable account of, say, the content-force distinction, will adhere to.

...along these same lines, I often opposed those in the thread who said, "Frege is just giving a model, so who cares if it's a bit off?" Of course he is not giving a model, but there is still truth in such an objection. I would phrase it as something like, "Frege did not give a perfect account of the mystery of thinking, but it is not a bad account, and in order to critique it we would need to get much clearer on what should be thought to constitute a better account."

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. — Srap Tasmaner

That's true.

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. — Srap Tasmaner

Well, yes, but that is one of the things that I find so odd about Kimhi: he reads Frege in a purely analytic direction. I am convinced that (a particular flavor of) Wittgenstein must be the key to understanding Kimhi's approach. When J was initially posting about Kimhi I wasn't recognizing that Wittgenstein is Kimhi's central source.

It's painful reading. — Srap Tasmaner

On page 17 I argued that Kimhi is too bound up in a Fregian paradigm to overcome Frege. The challenge for the anti-analytics is to make an argument that is both sound and coherent, for in opposing analytic philosophy one wishes to oppose the method and not merely the content, and given that the method of analytic philosophy is exceedingly clear, the anti-analytic is moved in the direction of obscurantism, seen most obviously in a thinker like Heidegger. They do not wish to engage analytic philosophy on its own terms. This is understandable, but it makes it harder for those of us on the ground to separate the wheat from the chaff.

I have only found thinkers who are deeper in history to be capable of overcoming modern antinomies, such as that between analytic and continental philosophy.

- Heh, yeah. I added some edits to this post before I realized you were online, and one of them was along these lines:

When I started reading Kimhi I received the impression that he knew what he was doing or where he was going. The more I read, the less sure of that I am. I think it was Boynton's review which questioned whether Parmenides was central to Kimhi's argument or more tangential, and that is one example of the difficulty. — 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. — Srap Tasmaner

Well, I am really looking for any kind of "bigger picture." Kimhi's bigger picture, J's bigger picture, or philosophy's bigger picture - in that order. Understanding the book requires the first.

That was an hypothesis — Srap Tasmaner

Okay.

I believe Kimhi wants to say these are the same thing, in the following (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. — Srap Tasmaner

Right, and Kimhi gets subtle here in saying that they co-implicate each other even though p has a primacy over ~p.

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". — Srap Tasmaner

I also forget Kimhi's exact position, but I know he considers such ideas. He is trying to get away from such atomic or compositionalist approaches, and if Boynton is right then Kimhi follows Frege in attributing "syncategorematicity" to the whole of a judgment, such that it becomes a single whole.

...nor what any alternative might look like. — Banno

This is fairly important. Kimhi does somewhat attempt to provide an alternative, but Martin demonstrates rather quickly that Kimhi's alternative falls into the exact same problems that he attributes to Frege's conception (184...).

Thus:

The preceding discussion of the force-content distinction shows that there is, on the one hand, ample motivation for drawing such a distinction, while at the same time indicating that the way in which it is drawn in the Fregean tradition, namely, such as to make it appear as though force were external to thought, is problematic. Holding these two observations together instead of merely focusing on the diagnosis of confusion suggests that one cannot do away with the problems surrounding the force-content distinction by “abandoning” it. For in light of the profound motivations that have led to its introduction, the distinction seems doomed to re-emerge in some guise or other. Therefore, in order to come to terms with force and content, the distinction needs to be redrawn... — On Redrawing the Force Content Distinction, by Christian Martin, 194-5 (my emphasis)

What we need is a constructive alternative, and this is what Martin claims to provide.