2). Ones hand is forced - ie the decision is inescapable — Benj96

Just think necessity. Necessity forecloses on (practical) choice, which is the species of choice I think you're referring to. And necessity imposes ultimatums every day for everyone all the time. — tim wood

There is a conflation occurring between a necessary act and a necessary choice. "Forcing one's hand" refers to a movement ad unum (towards one thing or one external act). It does not generally refer to something which must be decided. "You need to do this," is very different from, "You need to make a decision about what to do." An ultimatum forces a decision, not an external act. Here there is the very large difference between choice and coercion.

We might say that Frege thereby secures the essential connection between logic as a formal study of the syntactic rules that govern the manipulation of meaningless symbols in a formal language and the rational principles that govern the activity of whoever grasps the meanings of those symbols. — Pierre-Normand

Where, historically, would you say that essential connection gets dissolved or weakened?

I don't think those two quotes speak against the claim that Frege is equating propositions with thoughts in the specific sense in which he understands the latter. The quote in Foundations of Arithmetic seems meant to distinguish the thinking of the thought from its being true. — Pierre-Normand

Well, I think this avoids the force of my point a bit. Frege said, "A proposition may be thought..." He did not say, "A thought may be thought..." There are apparently good reasons why he didn't use the latter formulation, and they point a difference between a proposition and a thought. Specialized senses can "solve" this, I suppose, at least up to a point. (Nor am I convinced that IEP is using 'proposition' in a non-Fregian way, but I don't want to get bogged down in this.)

However the OP outlined a non-cynical option: option 1. In this case (with no opposition and malice) the frame is quite optimistic. — Benj96

Er, but only as a preliminary. You go on to say:

Now for the high stakes:
1). Those who choose option one catapult me into fame and recognition/acknowledgement - as the word of my proof spreads from person to person.
2). Those who choose option two are none the wiser, and unsure of what is going on ( "?" )
3). Those who choose option three: are inherently my antagonists - and must silence/eradicate the truth by any means necessary to protect their own agenda/self-interest/narrative. Meaning I will likely be assassinated/martyred based on your collective choices.

...

In this way I believe notable historical figures in not just scripture but also politics wielded mass psychology to empower themselves... — Benj96

The whole thing is supposed to be "designed," "wielded," etc., to produce some dramatic effect.

My point is that an ultimatum need not be designed to produce some dramatic effect. It might just be true, and in being true may end up producing a dramatic effect. Ultimatums are impactful by their very nature, yes, but you seem to be saying that an ultimatum is necessarily wielded as an instrument towards something other than truth. I would say an ultimatum can be instrumentalized in that sense, but need not be.

I agree that an ultimatum is impactful, but I don't think it needs to be reduced to a sociological tool. Maybe I am misreading you, but much of your OP goes beyond looking at ultimatums, and goes on to look at the motives of those wielding ultimatums.

- :up:

---

You appear to be agreeing that we can't have unasserted propositions in real life, even if the assertion is only hypothetical or potential. — frank

The answer here is, 'No, that's not what Russell was saying at all, whether we take your "proposition" in Russell's sense or Frege's sense.'

This thread has taken plenty of care in avoiding ambiguous language like "proposition," and this is because the language of the thread is in no way controlled by Frege's usage. It is controlled by Kimhi's usage, the publicly available sources, and common usage.

I don't think those two quotes speak against the claim that Frege is equating propositions with thoughts in the specific sense in which he understands the latter. — Pierre-Normand

If "thought" is understood in a specialized sense then, sure, if you like. Again, my point is that these invisibly specialized senses of "proposition" and "thought" are not getting us anywhere.

Frank is just trying to uphold his idea that in "real life" we don't talk about unasserted declarative sentences, without actually going through the work of defending it.

- Global warming or climate change is on a par with your OP. It is often presented as an ultimatum. Nevertheless, a cynical reading is not the only option, nor does it invalidate the claim. Trying to make it invalidate the claim or the approach is more psychologizing than philosophy.

- Early Frege did not distinguish sense and reference and may have spoken of propositions simply as thoughts, but this is not true for later Frege, which is what my IEP quote reflects. But none of this really helps you with your vague term "proposition," for "thought" is equally vague (as the quote from the OP shows, where Frege literally says that propositions need not be thought).

You seem bound determined to be vague and ambiguous in your claims. I'll leave you to it.

On the other hand, what if something important has happened that should be passed on? Is that a possibility or not? I don't see how a strange argument bogged down in cynicism is going to undermine such a possibility.

When he mentions the first chapter, Soames is talking about an examination of the relationship between utterances, sentences, and propositions, with the goal of explaining why the concept of a proposition is indispensable. — frank

Your quote nowhere says that for Frege a proposition is a thought. Do you realize that?

Did you have some source that conflicts with that? — frank

Have you read the OP?

Frege says, “A proposition may be thought, and again it may be true; let us never confuse the two things.” (Foundations of Arithmetic) — J

Here is IEP:

For this and other reasons, Frege concluded that the reference of an entire proposition is its truth-value, either the True or the False. The sense of a complete proposition is what it is we understand when we understand a proposition, which Frege calls “a thought” (Gedanke). Just as the sense of a name of an object determines how that object is presented, the sense of a proposition determines a method of determination for a truth-value. — Frege | IEP

-

Those who find that language distasteful probably shouldn't be discussing Frege at all. — frank

Those who don't know what they are talking about probably shouldn't be giving lectures.

If you find a logical system that says "The sky is blue" and the "snow is white" and all you are doing is writing expressions like, "This is a fact." "this is a true assertion".. what the duckn difference does it make if you cannot show why it's true, or how it's true? — schopenhauer1

Why shouldn't it make a difference? Is justification the only thing that matters? The only thing we can talk about? If you want a thread on justification then you should start it. This thread is not about justification.

When Frege talked about propositions, he was talking about thoughts. — frank

I will simply note that, yet again in misrepresenting Frege, you provide no source for your claims. Cf.

- was right on the money when he said that your desire to keep using that word "proposition" gets us nowhere, as it is used very differently by different authors.

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

Can you give an example of that? — frank

Here is Russell:

In language, we indicate when a proposition is merely considered by “if so-and-so” or “that so-and-so” or merely by inverted comma’s. (PM, p. 92) — Frege, Russell and Wittgenstein on the Judgment Stroke, by Floor Rombout, 45

-

Ordinarily we must take something away from a statement in order to sequester the assertoric force, because the assertoric force is a natural part of a declarative sentence. In Russell and Wittgenstein's misunderstanding Frege's judgment-stroke is something added on to a proposition or "assumption," and hence becomes a symbol in its own right.

For Frege it is more complicated. For Frege it is a stroke, not a symbol. It is "syncategorematic" (Kimhi) and hence is in no way on the same plane as the symbols of the sentence. The difference between a mere horizontal and the horizontal with the judgment-stroke added is a distinction in mente, and exists for the purposes of logic and inference. The judgment-stroke is sui generis, and this reflects Kimhi's emphasis on the fact that thinking is unique. It is a bit of performative language rather than descriptive language.

If there is some problem (qua Kimhi) with Frege's judgment-stroke it is an incredibly minor and subtle problem. Wittgenstein's complaint is more intelligible, but it is a one-way ticket to a destination that Kimhi will have no part of (which is apparently why he snips Wittgenstein's critique out of its context each time he references it in his book).

- Yes and yes. :up:

- I am content with the response I already gave to that tangential topic.

I just reread my OP, which included my optimistic belief that we didn’t have to be concerned with “what Kimhi says” in order to understand the question I was raising. Ha! — J

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."

But I thought, and still think, that a much deeper question is being raised here, a metalogical one about how what we think and can say is related to our existence claims about what is. — J

Does Kimhi ever directly attack Frege on that front? On the existence-predicate?

This is the tangent that most interests me in this thread: How is it that logic becomes separated from thinking, judgment, and consciousness?* Ironically Rombout seems to trace this to Wittgenstein, in which case, pace Kimhi, (early) Wittgenstein does not save us from Frege, he takes Frege to the place that Kimhi finds most problematic. — Leontiskos

The difficulty I have with Kimhi is that we are considering the foundation of his project, and that foundation seems to be based on two misreadings: first, Wittgenstein's misreading of Frege that Kimhi follows unquestioningly, and second, a misreading of early Wittgenstein. If Frege is bad then early Wittgenstein is much worse, and it is muddled for Kimhi to think that early Wittgenstein is his ally against Frege. Kimhi thinks Frege is too thin, whereas early Wittgenstein was saying that he is too fat. I see concentric circles of the "any stick to beat the devil" fallacy, where one affirms a thinker whose conclusion they desire, even if the arguments to get there do not hold up.

Kimhi is right that Wittgenstein disagrees with Frege's judgment-stroke, but he seems to have overlooked the fact that it is for a completely opposite reason than his own. And Kimhi is right that there are problems with first-order logic, but I don't know that Kimhi's critique itself holds water, at least on this assertoric front. In longer-lasting systems of thought such as Catholicism one comes to be very careful about genealogical arguments, and the OP seems to represent a poor genealogical argument. Kimhi sees a problem with first-order logic, and he wants to trace it to its root. But there is no obvious root, and in tracing it to Frege's judgment-stroke Kimhi seems to have alighted on a false genealogy.

I think Rombout gives a much sturdier genealogy: the cleavage of epistemology from logic comes from Russell and Wittgenstein's misappropriations of Frege. Is some of it Frege's fault? Probably, but Wittgenstein is the central actor here. Wittgenstein's "solution" to the foundational Meno dilemma is to have a radical divorce between epistemology and logic. This is simply a non-starter if logic is supposed to provide an account of how progression in knowledge occurs. As Rombout says, Frege and Wittgenstein have an entirely different understanding of what 'logic' even means.

...and the more Frege I read, the stronger he stands against Kimhi. To take one example, Narboux's Notre Dame review ends by pointing out a problem in Kimhi's Wittgenstenian-colored idea of propositions being understood in large part in light of negation. This is a mistake that Frege, Thomas, Augustine, Parmenides, and probably also Aristotle all avoided. Frege's understanding of 'p' in that metalogical sense seems to in fact be better thought out and more robust than Kimhi's (although if Frege did not understand the difference between denial and negation then part of this was a happy accident for him).

Welcome!

My advice would be simple: be transparent and honest. Don't pretend to know what you don't know, and don't be afraid of saying something that may turn out to be wrong. That way people will know what you are thinking and they will be able to engage with it. A thread I wrote is related: Argument as Transparency.

Belief in a story would be a different flavour of belief than the one in this thread anyway. Telling a story is, at least, a sequence of sentences presented with different forces and roles, and we've been dealing with single sentences with possibly a single illocutionary force. — fdrake

This is part of what I was trying to get at when I said that fiction is much less univocal than logic. :up:

The boring deflationary answer is just to say that understanding a given text as a story means just the following: belief in any presented sentence in that text is equivalent to believing that that sentence is a part of the text. Line of the story as story event. I believe that Gollum lied and cheated if and only if it says so in the book.

Suspension of disbelief works in opposition to the latter boring answer. Like the deus ex machina eagles at the end of Lord of the Rings. A flight of massive eagles coming in and saving the day, really? You only doubt it, "c'mon, really?" because you believe it happened in the story, but it could be felt to collide with the story's narrative. No one would doubt the eagles came, they just would doubt whether in some sense they should've. — fdrake

Yes, good, and we can take this in a Platonist direction contrary to your second deflationary theory. The question of whether logic or fiction is more 'real' can be assessed according to the question of whether logical analysis or narrative is more foundational to human life. If narrative is the meta-category of human life, then any genre of story (including fiction) will be more real than logic. On the other hand, if scientia is the telos of human life, then logic has a primacy over fictional narrative. I think there is a very strong case to be made in favor of the view that narrative, not logic, has the primacy.

My point is that first and foremost the fiction writer *pretends* to have such warrant. In early prose fiction this is almost universal (in English anyway). — Srap Tasmaner

Granted, and I pointed to the same thing early on in the discussion:

Yes, and it is interesting that in recent history fiction was thought to require a kind of disbelief-suspension-bridge (I forget the real name that is used). Some plausible device was used to connect the fiction to the real world. — Leontiskos

-

Nowadays, we're used to how fiction works and it's dramatically less common to go through this little dance. — Srap Tasmaner

Sure, but it's worth recognizing that it was never anything more than a dance.

It's not novel to say that something is stripped away when we engage in logical analysis. It's more or less the point. The question is whether what you have left, that you'll submit to logical analysis, is what you think it is, and whether the pieces fit when you try to reassemble the living use of language. — Srap Tasmaner

Yes, that's a very good way to put it. :up:

So if we take our shears to an asserted sentence we can apparently remove the basic assertoric force. Then if we take our shears a second time we could apparently remove the grammatical aspect and achieve the result of "mere words." Then a third time, and be left with mere tokens or letters. One way to phrase the question is this: Is the "sharpness" of Frege's shears intelligible or arbitrary?

-

It's in the TLP (according to my lazy history of logic) that we get the presentation of tautology as a true statement that says nothing. And if it says nothing, evidently not a picture. So the truths of logic are something else entirely, and it is only there, among these whatever-they-ares, that we get self-evident truth. — Srap Tasmaner

This is the tangent that most interests me in this thread: How is it that logic becomes separated from thinking, judgment, and consciousness?* Ironically Rombout seems to trace this to Wittgenstein, in which case, pace Kimhi, (early) Wittgenstein does not save us from Frege, he takes Frege to the place that Kimhi finds most problematic.

* But not construed as Banno's full-on logical nominalism, where logic is merely symbol manipulation. That is called metalogic or metamathematics and is not generally seen as logic itself. The result was not logical nominalism, but instead a sort of reification of truth as something that exists independently of subjects and minds. A kind of overcorrection of "psychologism."

Yes, which is why I keep trying to find some better, more perspicuous ways to carve up "force." I was leaning toward believing that "force" itself should be strictly separated from both assertion and illocution -- or that, at least, Kimhi would want us to think of it that way. I'm no longer sure, based on the many interesting comments from yourself, leontiskos, @srap tasmaner, @frank and others. — J

In those terms the question is simply whether Kimhi sees something which "displays (assertoric) force [without being a self-identifying display]" as having some kind of force. Regardless of words, Kimhi's point seems to be that Frege's Point excludes the possibility that a sentence displays assertoric force. I don't see Kimhi in any way moving away from assertoric force to some kind of general force.

This is more or less where I was going with my hard-to-follow speculations about the universal quantifier. Russell's TDD postulates existential quantification for proper names, if I'm remembering rightly. And you had said that "so far as existence is defined, it is defined in terms of the universal quantifier." So my question was, If Frege does not accept the TDD, can we spell out how universal quantification might still give us something to think about when we think about names? — J

In the parts of Frege that I have read he shows no interest in the epistemic aspect of a proper name, which is probably a credit to him. He takes it for granted that a proper name can designate an object.

A lot of what Kimhi (and Rodl) are doing is probing presuppositions of formal logic. There is a lot of magic involved in formal logic, and I suppose the question asks how much presuppositional magic is to be granted. Kimhi's broader thesis is that by adopting a Fregian approach first-order logic has merely side-stepped some of the biggest problems of philosophy, which persist as elephants in the room rather than vanquished foes.

-

Can't you have a mistaken or in-part inaccurate understanding of what truth is, and discover in the course of my lecture what the "truth about truth" is? — J

Frege understands that prefixing "It is true that..." to a sentence both adds something and doesn't add something. It is slippery. But the odd parallel is that his judgment-stroke also adds something and doesn't add something, in just the same way.

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

I don't think anyone has claimed this. The point that Wittgenstein makes has to do with conditions for truth or falsity, not a decision.

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

Yes, exactly. :up:

Frege makes a very interesting comment in the context of dissociating assertoric force from the predicate, and it relates to Kimhi:

. . .Assertoric force is to be dissociated from negation too. To each thought there corresponds an opposite, so that rejecting one of them is accepting the other. One can say that to make a judgement is to make a choice between opposites. Rejecting the one and accepting the other is one and the same act. Therefore there is no need of a special name, or special sign, for rejecting a thought. We may speak of the negation of a thought before we have made any distinction of parts within it. To argue whether negation belongs to the whole thought or to the predicative part is every bit as unfruitful as to argue whether a coat clothes a man who is already clothed or whether it belongs together with the rest of his clothing. Since a coat covers a man who is already clothed, it automatically becomes part and parcel with the rest of his apparel. We may metaphorically speaking, regard the predicative component of a thought as a covering for the subject-component. If further coverings are added, these automatically become one with those already there. — Frege, Introduction to Logic – Posthumous Writings, 185

Soon after this, Frege expresses frustration that 28 years after he introduced the material conditional mathematician and logicians continue to resist it as something bizarre! Curiously, in speaking of his “conditional stroke,” he claims that the relation designated by the conditional stroke is not strictly speaking something that obtains between thoughts, but rather that the sign for the conditional stroke connects sentences. This seems to indicate that he posits a non-assertoric difference between the two p’s in the premises of a modus ponens.

- Sure, but given that Frege understands language differently than the subject-predicate model of ordinary language which he intentionally diverges from, what more is there to say?

Here is Frege on this issue:

Therefore when Kerry says that my criterion does not meet the case, claiming that in the sentence ‘The concept that I am now talking about is an individual concept’ the name composed of the first eight words surely means a concept, the contradiction does not lie in what I have laid down; it obtains between the sense I attach to the word ‘concept’ and that adopted by Kerry. But nobody can require that my stipulations shall be in accord with Kerry’s mode of expression, but only that they be consistent in themselves. True, we cannot fail to recognize that we are here confronted by an awkwardness of language, which I admit is unavoidable, if we assert ‘the concept horse is not a concept’, whereas, e.g. the city of Berlin is a city, and the volcano Vesuvius is a volcano. Language is here in a predicament that justifies the departure from what we normally say. The peculiarity of our case is indicated by Kerry himself by means of the quotation-marks around ‘horse’. (We have used italics here to the same end.) There was no reason to mark out the words ‘Berlin’ and ‘Vesuvius’ in a similar way above. In logical discussions one quite often needs to assert something about a concept, and to express this in the grammatical form usual for such statements, so that what is asserted becomes the content of the grammatical predicate. Consequently, one would expect the concept to be the content of the grammatical subject; but the concept as such cannot play this part, in view of its predicative nature; it must first be converted into an object, or, speaking more precisely: an object that is connected with it in accordance with a rule must be substituted for it, and it is this object we designate by an expression of the form ‘the concept x’. (Cf. p. X of my Grundlagen.)

So the phrase ‘the concept horse’ must be regarded as a proper name, which can no more be used predicatively than can, say, ‘Berlin’ or ‘Vesuvius’. If we say that Bucephalus falls under the concept horse, then the predicate here is clearly ‘falling under the concept horse’, and this has the same meaning as ‘a horse’. But the phrase ‘the concept horse’ is only part of this predicate.

When I wrote my Grundlagen, I had not yet made the distinction between sense and meaning; and so, under the expression ‘content of possible judgement’, I was combining what I now distinguish by the words ‘thought’ and ‘truth-value’. For this reason I no longer hold my choice of expressions in the second footnote to p. 77 to be quite suitable, although in the main my view remains the same: a concept is essentially predicative in nature, whilst the very opposite is true of an object, so that a proper name (sign or name of an object) can never contain the whole predicate. — Frege, On Concept and Object – Posthumous Writings, 97 – footnotes omitted

1. The concept horse is not a concept
2. [The concept horse] is not a concept
3. The city of Berlin is a city
4. [The city of Berlin] is a city

Frege interprets the parts in brackets as, “A proper name in the logical sense,” which, “is a sign for an object.” Ergo: if the last three words of (3) and (4) were absent we would not know that 'Berlin' is a city (because proper names are not predicative). Frege grants that (3) is unintuitive given its redundancy, but he is unperturbed.

- @J seems to want us to say that Frege would have it that 'Berlin' has meaning and significance even apart from any predicate or quantification, as it does in everyday language.

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

I think these are the right considerations, although I think you can remove the assertion in "real life" too.

Kimhi's argument is something like this:

1. In order to assert a (declarative) sentence, I must first judge whether it is true or false
2. In order to judge whether it is true or false, it must have a judgable content
3. In order to have a judgable content, it must display assertoric force
4. In order to display assertoric force, it must contravene "Frege's Point"
[5. Therefore, "Frege's Point" prevents one from judging and asserting declarative sentences and engaging in the activity of logic] — Leontiskos

We could look at this from a different angle: What would it mean for someone to hold to "Frege's Point" to the extent that (4) is true? According to Kimhi, it would mean that they cannot do logic, for logic requires the ability to judge and assert declarative sentences (cf. 5).

Is it plausible to attribute such a doctrine to Frege? Does he really want to divorce assertoric force from sentence to such an extent that the sentence cannot be judged true or false? If not, does he have the resources to stop short of that pitfall? Kimhi seems to say, "no."

(I agree with Kimhi that Frege's analysis of assertoric force is not "natural," but beyond that I'm not convinced that it is as detrimental as Kimhi claims.)

Again, it is important to note that the very same sentence may have more than one logical treatment. ↪Leontiskos seems to miss this. — Banno

One can speak about modus ponens in terms of logical consequence or logical inference. Both make sense in their own context, but Frege actually adopts the latter approach. For Frege a modus ponens requires three judgment-strokes. — Leontiskos

It can only occur once for an expression, but the question is whether a modus ponens is a single expression. — Leontiskos

Pretending, as your examples demonstrate, is complicated, but I think it's actually very important to logic because of hypothetical reasoning (not to mention counterfactuals). I think it's very difficult to give an account of what happens when we entertain an hypothesis, but it looks a bit like pretending. — Srap Tasmaner

That's true, but I don't think that sort of hypothesizing is susceptible to formal logical analysis, as it is presupposed that the subject is doing this and I don't think formal logic can circle round itself to account for such a presupposition.

So yes, somewhere back in the chain of how I come to be telling this story, to be in a position to tell this story, there must be witness or even participation. I was there and I saw it, or I had it from a guy who was there. The storyteller pretends to be such a person.

This is, perhaps, a more colorful version of the Parmenides stuff.

One consequence of such a view might be that it's not really the tale we believe but the teller. We do not adopt a propositional attitude of "belief" toward the story, except perhaps as a consequence of adopting a social attitude of "trust" toward the storyteller. — Srap Tasmaner

The historical development of how a fictional story is told is interesting, but are verification and warrant really at the center of fiction, at least in our own day and age? Or related at all? Isn't it a category error to challenge the fiction author regarding warrant?

I suppose if we want to make fiction very logical we can think of it as an experiment in counterfactuals, and of course fiction with a strongly didactic motive is intended in that way. I mostly think that because fiction is a less univocal category than logic, logic won't make sense of it. Logic can work on something which has a clear and stable intentional character, but the raison d'être of fiction (or logic) is not available to logic in this way. Like "Berlin," fiction need not be or mean one thing. I don't think all fiction authors are involved in the same sort of intentional stance towards their work.

(Out until tomorrow - take your time!)

Kimhi's argument is something like this:

1. In order to assert a (declarative) sentence, I must first judge whether it is true or false
2. In order to judge whether it is true or false, it must have a judgable content
3. In order to have a judgable content, it must display assertoric force
4. In order to display assertoric force, it must contravene "Frege's Point"

The only question for me is whether (4) holds, or in what limited sense it holds.

It appears there are two-brands of "democracy" in conflict, the one that favors the power of the people, the other that favors the institutions that have arisen in representative democracies, for instance elections and parliaments and the credibility of those in power. It's an interesting conflict. — NOS4A2

Interesting, to be sure. :up:

the pretense is that you are removing something and pretending you haven't — Srap Tasmaner

I think Frege would say that the fiction author has removed something from their words, whereas the fiction author would say that Frege has removed something from their words. Fiction may be inherently Platonic in that way. It may insist that it is giving more, not less, than what non-fiction gives.

A better form for my question would be, what have you removed? What's missing, that everyone kinda pretends isn't, when you tell a (fictional) story? Does it overlap with what's left out when you only have a record of the words spoken, the bare, lifeless sentences? — Srap Tasmaner

But on the premise that fiction is less, I would suspect that an intention tertium quid is involved in fiction (though I am not sure whether it is a kind of quasi-assertion or else something with a different intentional force altogether). Does the fiction author make use of the assertoric force that the logician removes, as an ingredient in what he adds to the lifeless sentence in order to give it life? I don't know. What are your thoughts?

As an aside, my friend's child always engaged in "pretend" without any notice, as if she paid no mind to the boundaries of pretending and not pretending. My nephew, on the other hand, is very precise about where pretending begins and ends, even at a younger age than the girl. Part of the difficulty of all this is that pretending and playing is very different from the logical thinking that Frege and Russell prefer, perhaps to the point of incommensurability. Perhaps if we "knew" what we were doing when we pretend or play we would cease to pretend or play. I'm not sure if you can reduce logic or pretending to the other, and this may be because logic specifies and marshals intentionality in a way that play refuses to do.

(To ask her whether she was now pretending or not was much like asking someone to explain the punch line of a joke. Asking for illumination causes the sun to set.)

And one last point -- sorry for the multiple posts -- the whole point of my view of fiction is that it is parasitic on candid account giving or reporting. If we did not already have such a practice of reporting on real events that happened to real people in real places, and so on, we could not pretend to report on events we've made up (and maybe people and places as well). — Srap Tasmaner

Yes - that is the Aristotelian realism route and I am comfortable with it. It says that fiction is ultimately a rearranging of sense experiences and memory. But a Platonic account will say that the reality that we experience in sense is a reflection of the Forms, and that we can perhaps experience the Forms directly. This is the view that fiction could be a "higher reality" via its direct participation in the Forms.

Then to bring this back down a bit, the point is that Tolkien obviously thinks he is doing something Platonic whereas H. G. Wells obviously thinks he is doing something Aristotelian. What this means is that Wells is pretending in a way that Tolkien is not, and therefore it becomes hard to give a single account of fictional intention to all fiction writers.

Yeah that was the idea. Is assertion something added on to the words? — Srap Tasmaner

Right...

If you can add on assertion, are there other things you could add on? — Srap Tasmaner

Another way to look at it: if you're not sure whether assertion is something we add on (rather than being built in), does showing that we can add something instead of assertion show that assertion is something we add? — Srap Tasmaner

Maybe Kimhi would agree when I claim that it is strange to talk about non-intentional sentences. Supposing that assertion is one form of intentional 'force' (or simply intention), are there sentences without intention? And are there declarative sentences without assertion?

If "Berlin" makes no sense apart from context, does a sentence make sense apart from intention? If not, then it would seem that in "adding" assertion to a putatively non-intentional sentence, we are in fact either altering the intention that was already present, or else a dead structure of letters and words becomes a living form when intention is infused (an essential change occurs). It may be that in analyzing the materiality of a sentence and prescinding from intention we are doing something like examining a corpse, or at least a comatose patient.

My view is that in a work of fiction the author pretends to be telling a story, as she might tell a story about something that really happened. We pretend to believe she's telling a story. — Srap Tasmaner

Hmm, I'm not sure if I like the way you phrased this, but I see what you are saying. Something like, "The author pretends to be telling a non-fiction story." At the end of the day I think it will depend a great deal on what an author is actually doing, which is obviously tricky.

(I think it's a pretty sophisticated thing, and it's easy to be culture-bound and miss how unusual it is.) — Srap Tasmaner

Yes, and it is interesting that in recent history fiction was thought to require a kind of disbelief-suspension-bridge (I forget the real name that is used). Some plausible device was used to connect the fiction to the real world.

Then, to take an extreme example, what did Tolkien take himself to be doing in his writings? He certainly seemed to be self-consciously involved in a less fictional act than, say, J. K. Rowling.

A relevant (for this thread) question might be: what exactly is an author pretending to do that he isn't? Can we say, there's the sentences you speak and the order you speak them in, on the one hand, and something else that makes your speaking "reporting a sequence of events" or "(merely) telling a (fictional) story" on the other? — Srap Tasmaner

Right: Or: if telling a non-fiction story is a form of assertion, and telling a fiction story is not really assertion, then what is it? Frege talks about a similar thing in terms of the words of an actor on stage, and Kimhi considers this scenario (...in some earlier post I talked a bit about this). But what exactly constitutes the pretense in the author or kindergarten teacher who tells a fictional story? I'm not sure - haha.

That seems reasonable. Granted, I am a little bit surprised that Kimhi is so fond of the early Wittgenstein. I don't think a picture is a fact, and so I think the search for a fact-fact relation is a false start. I haven't read much where Kimhi speaks about consciousness and self-consciousness, but it seems plausible to me that he wants to move that relation away from world-facts and into the realm of consciousness. It seems clear that Kimhi accepts a logical subject in the way that (early?) Wittgenstein does not, and can thus introduce consciousness in a way that Wittgenstein could not.

The more natural move for later Wittgenstein is to say that sometimes we see something as a picture of something else, sometimes we don't — Srap Tasmaner

Yes, and if this weren't true then I don't see how we would be able to err. Then: is an inference—the thing between the lines of a syllogism—a kind of picture and also quasi- or sub-assertion? If so, and if a correct inference is a logical truth, then the possibility of inferential error comes into view.

I suppose this is a somewhat new topic, but the thread is now becoming more diffuse. Are logical errors possible without [judgment, or a logical subject, or content to be judged]? Do those who fundamentally disagree with Frege's judgment-approach have any basis with which to account for logical errors?

I must be missing something. I can see no more of a problem with fictional assertions than I can with fictional imaginings, fictional events, fictional places, fictional characters and so on. — Janus

I finished the Scholastic portion of Novak's paper, and I think I agree with you. It gets complicated, but I would essentially say that we can truly speak about fiction so long as the authors of fiction are genuine sub-creators (in Tolkien's sense). That is, we must say that in writing their books the authors of fiction create real truthmakers (or at least the sort of truthmaker that is proper and relevant to fiction).

I feel like I'm stuck in an Abbot & Costello routine! If this really represents what Frege would say to me when I ask him whether he comprehends the word printed on that slip of paper he found on the beach, I could only reply, "Well, yeah, but Herr Frege, I'm not asking about extension or objects or what's permissible or impermissible in your philosophy. Have pity on a fellow beachcomber and just tell me whether you understand the word on the paper or not." — J

It is an Abbot & Costello routine. You've been given my testimony, Srap's testimony, Kimhi's testimony, and the testimony of Frege himself, but you still refuse to believe. On what grounds? Frege will not find meaning where there is no extension.

The answer here is that Frege reads the word through his understanding, and his understanding of meaning and truth has to do with the extension of predicates. It makes no sense for you to ask Frege what he would say about a piece of language without appealing to his understanding of language.

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

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

The judgment stoke occurs once in the expression, at the beginning. It affirms the whole expression, not each individual line separately. — Banno

It can only occur once for an expression, but the question is whether a modus ponens is a single expression. What you said earlier simply does not hold:

Frege doesn't write
⊢p⊃q
⊢p
⊢q
such that each is within it's own intensional bracket; he writes
⊢(
p⊃q
p
q) — Banno

My bolding. — Banno

As usual, you are failing to understand the sources you cite. "The judgment-stroke applies to the whole expression, therefore Frege does not use three judgment strokes in a modus ponens." This is a non sequitur.

Here is Rombout, building from my post <here> and Bongo Fury's insight:

Instead of writing the whole inference, consisting of the three assertions “ ⊢ p”, “ ⊢ (p ⊃ q)” and “ ⊢ q” , Russell and Whitehead propose an abbreviation containing the assertions of the two atomic propositions connected by an implication: “ ⊢ p ⊃⊢ q”. Frege would consider this a category mistake; in the Begriffsschrift it is not possible to have a judgment stroke within the scope of a conditional.

...

A reason why Russell and Whitehead consider this abbreviation acceptable can be found in their explanation of syllogisms:

<<It should be observed that syllogisms are traditionally expressed with ‘therefore’, as if they asserted both premises and conclusion. This is, of course, merely a slipshod way of speaking, since what is really asserted is only the connection of premises with conclusion.[36]>>

Where in Frege the premises and the the conclusion, as well as the connection between them need to be asserted in order to constitute an inference, this demand is dropped [by Russell and Whitehead]. What is asserted in [Russell's] syllogism is the connection between premises and the conclusion, not the sentences themselves. This seems to be an explanation for allowing for an abbreviated form, but in order to conclude so, it has to be considered whether a syllogism is an inference. — Rombout, 44-5

One can speak about modus ponens in terms of logical consequence or logical inference. Both make sense in their own context, but Frege actually adopts the latter approach. For Frege a modus ponens requires three judgment-strokes.

You continue unabated in your conflation of Frege and your own approach. You are making the exact same interpretational errors that Russell and then Wittgenstein made regarding Frege.

As I understand it, 0th level terms - a,b,x - name individuals. Included amongst those individuals are propositions, which in turn name a truth value. So (2+2=4)=(5-3=2)= ⊤. These all name the same individual. So "Berlin" might name the city, and "2+2=5" might name the false.

...

On this account, both "Berlin" and "2+2=4" are names. — Banno

This is close, but it obscures the fact that "Berlin" correlates to "2+2" (or "4") and "Berlin is a city" correlates to "2+2=4." The latter two have truth values, and can be called names in reference to "the True." If I recall, in the source that Bongo Fury gave, on the pages following the citation he gave, Anscombe critiques this understanding of number.

Now does Frege think that "4" and "2+2=4" are both 0th level terms, as Banno implies? I actually don't think he does, but I suppose it's possible. He certainly understands that something which saturates a predicate like "...is a city," differs from something which "saturates" the predicate, "...is the True." He distinguishes between objects and sentences, even if sentences are objects vis-a-vis the True in a certain sense.