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.

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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

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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.

- Rombout's tries to set this out in the section on Kant (2.2.2).

- Thanks for the posts and attempting to wrestle with the bigger picture. :up:

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

Yes, I think this is right.

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. — Srap Tasmaner

Yes, but why are we to think that Kimhi is committed to "atomicity"? That's what puzzled me about your first post. I am also unconvinced that Kimhi is a "proposition skeptic," although it is an interesting idea.

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. It is worth remembering that every single secondary source we have examined thinks Kimhi is wrong in significant ways, with the exception of Boynton who thinks he is wrong in a smaller way.

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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. — Srap Tasmaner

It is in our power, but I think most parties are agreed that in order to assert ~p there is a "reliance" on an understanding of p. This is the focus of Martin's paper, which seems to be very much on point.

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Most competent speakers would have no trouble explaining it. We would say, “ ‛Assert’ can mean ‛say something that is true,’ or it can mean ‛say something purporting to be true’. It depends on the context, and usually it’s clear which meaning is intended.”

Which meaning does Frege have in mind with the judgment stroke? — J

Rombout points out that Frege is not merely attributing a belief to a subject with his judgment-stroke, and that Wittgenstein fails to recognize this (72). Kimhi seems to follow Wittgenstein in this. Indeed, Kimhi seems to be simply wrong when he says that the argument is inaccessible to Frege that, "She asserts p, therefore p is true" (where 'asserts' refers to Frege's judgment-stroke).

- :up:

Right, or it's that we have a proximate thesis but no remote thesis:

I think that in order for the critique to make sense it must be linked up to some goal of Kimhi's. Kimhi must be made to say, "This point in the OP matters because it can be linked up to my larger concern of X." — Leontiskos

One should apply the context principle to arguments and theses themselves. The meaning of a thesis can only be grasped in relation to the deeper conclusion it is meant to support. So we have Kimhi's proximate thesis: Frege mucked up assertoric force. But what hangs on this? What is the import? What does it matter if Frege did or did not muck up assertoric force? Until we understand this more remote thesis we can't even really understand the proximate thesis.

- Hanna represents something interesting and probably confused when he says that Kimhi's book, "effectively closes out a 100+ year-long tradition in modern philosophy [even though] all its central theses are false." The efficacy of false theses and the arguments that try to support them...?

I find this whole thing opaque in the absence of some clear motivations about where Kimhi wants to take us, what is at stake, etc. And I am not even particularly attached to the tradition that Kimhi is targeting! I think the sub-text needs to be brought to the surface.

- That all strikes me as a rather elaborate avoidance strategy. If someone doesn't care about a thesis then they won't find arguments for or against it interesting, especially when they profess to be unable to understand those arguments in themselves. It seems that you don't know why you find Kimhi's project interesting, and that is a fact more interesting than any polemic against "settled questions." I suggest finding out why you find Kimhi's project so interesting.

The point here is that this thread lacks a concrete thesis or question: we aren't at all sure what we are doing. I thought that if you knew what you were doing as the author of the OP it might provide us with a direction. It's not a trap so much as a question, "What's your motivation for asking the question?" (How to Write an OP).

I guess that's the target you asked about. — J

Hmm? What I got from that post was, "There is no target, so grab another arrow and keep shooting."

- So you found an exception or two to the rule. Congrats. :roll:

On Redrawing the Force Content Distinction, Christian Martin — Pierre-Normand

Good find. This is an important paper for this thread: link to Martin's paper.

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This analogy seems problematic for the following reason: A mimetic gesture can indeed be performed as a basis for another act, while it can as well be performed without providing the basis for anything further. In contrast, an assertoric gesture is not such that it merely can occur as a basis for a further act. For if it were, it would amount to a forceless while logically contentful act on its own, which is exactly what seemed problematic about the Fregean conception. — On Redrawing the Force Content Distinction, by Christian Martin, 184

This is the point I made to @Srap Tasmaner earlier:

I am pointing to a fourth point, and it requires moving from the equivocity of the indicative mood to the univocity of statements. The idea is that we never handle statements independent of assertions, even when we are not asserting them. In that way a statement is like a tool with only one purpose. — Leontiskos

Before reading Martin I hadn't noticed that Kimhi falls into this himself.

Incidentally, Newman uses 'assent' rather than 'assert', which clears up a lot of the mud that Srap in particular was traversing. I think it also helps address the public/private counterargument.

By assuming that assertoric gestures can either occur “with” or “without” being assertoric acts Kimhi has subscribed to a view that allows for the occurrence of logical acts – namely, mere assertoric gestures – which, albeit generically tied to assertoric force, are not qua particular acts tied to an overarching logical act whose force they actually partake in. — On Redrawing the Force Content Distinction, by Christian Martin, 186

The same problem came up in a recent pm with Bob Ross, where he was tripping over the difference between a species of intentional act and a particular intentional act. Apparently what Wittgenstein sees as context Aquinas would see as intention, where intention is essential to an act and not truly separable from it. Thus a mimetic act and a non-mimetic act are two different kinds of acts.

A subsidiary argument which may not have been mentioned is, "Any species which develops systematic means to kill 70+ million of its own fetuses each year is messed up." A species which so buttresses the killing of its own offspring is not in good shape. For a species to intentionally kill its own fetuses is exceedingly unnatural.

I’ve fallen behind, but I like the way that recast the discussion from a birds-eye view. I will try to do something similar in this post. For me the discussion has been an ongoing attempt to frame Kimhi’s critique in ever more precise and interesting ways, yet without ever managing to explain why such a critique is supposed to matter.

I was revisiting Newman’s Grammar of Assent on Anthony Kenny’s recommendation, and it got me to thinking about modus ponens. One point Newman makes is that while inference can be purely formal, with no concrete content (he gives the transitive property of identity as an example), assent requires such content. Assenting to some proposition requires an actual proposition; just ‘p’ will not do. In his review Boynton quotes Rödl, “. . .the letter p. There is an insouciance with respect to this fateful letter. It stands ready quietly, unobtrusively, to assure us that we know what we are talking about. . .” As I noted earlier in the thread, this is a criticism of Kimhi. Kimhi tries to critique Frege from a Fregian point of view, and because of this his critique has no force.

Like p, modus ponens is a very odd abstraction. From the perspective of concrete judgments it seems to say nothing at all, and Wittgenstein is here instructive:

5.132 If p follows from q, I can infer p from q; conclude from q to p.
The method of inference is to be understood from the two sentences alone.
Only they themselves can justify the inference.
Laws of inference, which - as in Frege and Russell - are to justify the conclusions are meaningless and would be superfluous. — Frege, Russell and Wittgenstein on the Judgment Stroke, by Floor Rombout, 57

(Rombout points out that Wittgenstein is interested in the consequence-relation and not inference, and although this is true there is nevertheless a way in which modus ponens seems to lend itself to a consequence-relation framing, which looks to be a problem for Frege.)

To some extent Wittgenstein is right. Put bluntly, modus ponens is not a form of reasoning so much as a form of post hoc reasoning or rationalization. It is an ad hoc response to the problem of the Meno. “How did you get to B from A?” “By holding that B follows from A!”

Rombout argues that Frege, Russell, and Wittgenstein have different conceptions of what logic is, and the problem here may be that Kimhi’s conception of logic is too close to Frege’s to critique it. The deeply Aristotelian response to modus ponens is to reject the form, not to quibble about the assertoric force of different p’s. “Follows from” is the meta-form of all logic, not a rule of inference. For Aristotle, logic is supposed to say why B follows from A, not that B follows from A. This critique of Kimhi’s therefore has more to do with modus ponens than Frege.

Quasi-subjective moves are not at home in logical systems which favor consequence over inference. Frege’s judgment-stroke or Kimhi’s self-consciousness don’t make any sense with respect to ‘p’, because p was not made for such quasi-subjective moves. p is just a true/false abstraction. There’s nothing there to judge.

(What Kimhi is failing to recognize is that his subject-predicate predilection cuts against the things like modus ponens and not just Frege, even though modus ponens was central for Frege. That whole approach deviates from the act of thinking which so interests Kimhi.)

()

A hodgepodge...

I have gotten so frustrated with Kimhi over the past month that I've literally screamed, trying to untangle him. But I insist it's worth it. — J

At this point I very much want to know what motivates you to have faith in Kimhi. Or more precisely, "Suppose Kimhi's arguments fail. How would you try to salvage his project, and what would the aim be?" What's the target here, for you?

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- This is informative and helpful, but I am still curious about the question I asked, "Where, historically, would you say that essential connection gets dissolved or weakened?"

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the magnitude of the platonism at issue. The old war still rages — Srap Tasmaner

but I truly don't think platonism (including Fregean platonism) needs to be anyone's opponent. — J

And I would say that Kimhi is not occupying the Platonist position; Frege is. Kimhi is offering the Aristotelian alternative, or at least attempting to.

Note too that the starting point for Aristotle is that we do know things and we do grow in knowledge (i.e. learn things). For Aristotle logic is simultaneously an explanation of how this is possible and a roadmap to learning. By the time we get to Wittgenstein it is not. Frege is somewhere inbetween.

Kimhi talks about "pragmatic contradiction" as the reason you can't attach a judgment stroke to "p & ~p"; if you use the stroke, you show that you know what it means to understand a logical expression. — J

I still maintain that <this thread> is a great testament to Kimhi's point here. It is living proof of the deep problems that arise in a truth-functional context.

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If thoughts as such are tied to some force or other, while embedded thoughts (e. g. p qua part of not-p) do not directly come along with a force of their own, it must be clarified how the indirect connection to force, which embedded thoughts must indeed come along with, is to be understood. That is, it must be clarified how dependent logical acts that have an embedded thought as their content, and the overarching logical act that does indeed bear a force of its own interlock with each other such as to provide for the unity of a propositionally complex thought." — Pierre-Normand

Yes, good. :up:

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I would assume it does, until something stops it. — bongo fury

:up:

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Is it my imagination, or is Frege sounding a bit defensive here? — J

He is, and that makes sense in context, for he is responding to a criticism similar to yours. Still, it's a good question whether one can be more than defensive in such a situation.

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whether their accounts of this self-conscious propositional unity constitutes an improvement over the charitable accounts, put forth by Evans and McDowell, of what Frege was trying to accomplish when he sought to individuate thought/proposition — Pierre-Normand

Right.

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It might be closer to the argument given to say that Frege, in particular, does not set aside force (even if other and later logicians do) but that he brings it in in a way that is somehow at odds with the unity of force and content in our utterances. — Srap Tasmaner

I think so. :up:

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- Good posts, and we spoke about the difference between denial and negation earlier. Kimhi (and Wittgenstein) accuse Frege of flubbing this distinction, but Rombout points out that Frege never did, since he allows negation but not denial (i.e. not judgments of falsity at the level of the judgment-stroke). What's curious is that, if I am right, Frege didn't understand the difference between denial and negation and sort of "got lucky" insofar as he thought denial would be superfluous.

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I just think we should quit throwing around 'proposition' and 'judgment' and 'inference' in ways that allow people to give those words their preferred reading. — Srap Tasmaner

Yep. :up:

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Kimhi believes that Fregean logic doesn't permit the inference (1) S is F; (2) A thinks that S is F; (3) Thus, A truly thinks that S is F. — J

I don't think Kimhi appreciates the objectivity of Frege's judgment-stroke, and therefore this critique seems misplaced. I think that inference holds for Frege, it's just that he may not want to draw out such metalogical implications.

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So the words are a bit wooly because Frege's allegedly made a model of something wooly that has no wool in it, and our fellow travellers are seeking and analysing the wool. — fdrake

:up:

Objection 2 reads, “The essence is the middle term of demonstration,” not, “The essence of a demonstration is the middle term.” For example:

• All dogs are animals
• All animals are warm-blooded
• Therefore, All dogs are warm-blooded

The essence (“what it is”) of ‘animal’ is the middle term of the syllogism.

Aquinas responds to the objection by noting that one never appeals to an essence when proving the existence of a cause from an effect. This is because an essence presupposes existence and therefore when proving existence one cannot make use of essence as the middle term, but must instead use, “the meaning of the word.” This is a rather important aspect of Aquinas’ proofs for God’s existence, often overlooked.

- Ignoring was option (2). The OP already accounts for it.