- See also:

Leontiskos - that masters thesis you linked is a good read. — fdrake

Okay, good. I want to have a proper look at it today, but I think it may be helpful to bring the question into sharper relief first.

The idea is that we never handle statements independent of assertions, even when we are not asserting them. — Leontiskos

@Srap Tasmaner - Similar to this, the Original Post tries place Kimhi's thesis in a cage so we can talk about it without talking about Kimhi (and for good reason!), but this can never be fully carried out by those who do not understand Kimhi's thesis as well as he does. I want to bring him in a bit given that we are trying to sort out how Kimhi's critique relates to Frege and the tradition that follows Frege, especially with respect to the dissociation of assertoric force from predicate.

In the other thread a useful review of Kimhi's book came up, which is publicly accessible and gives the very large scope:

It is also not so clear, on a closer look, that a conception of thought and judgment along Fregean lines is able to dispose of the Parmenidean puzzle. Judgeable content is introduced as the highest common factor shared by thought and judgment. One can grasp a judgeable content without yet taking the further step of judging it to be true or false ("advancing to a truth-value"). Judgment is logically more complex than thought: it consists in a content grasped plus the recognition of the truth of what is thus grasped. This means that the logical unity of the content of an assertion, as conveyed by the predicative use of "is", precedes and is independent of the logical unity of the judgment to which this assertion gives expression, as conveyed by the assertoric use of "is" (8, 18). As Kimhi points out, however, it is far from clear that the notion of a judgeable content that is at once forceless and truth-apt is coherent. How can content show how things are if it is true prior to and independently of saying that they do so stand?

...

It is Kimhi's contention that the fundamental obstacle resides in the assumption that "All logical complexity is predicative or functional in nature" (15, 22), i.e., that every dimension of the logical complexity of a proposition can be rendered in function-argument form. Let us call this assumption the Uniformity Assumption (UA). This assumption, in turn, fuels the assumption that a simple proposition enjoys a unitary being, and so is individuated as the proposition that it is, prior to being true or false (39). On this assumption, the veridical being or non-being of what is said by a proposition (i.e., its being the case or not being the case) is extrinsic to its predicative being (i.e., the being expressed by the predicative use of "is") (8, 18). Let us call this assumption the Externality Assumption (EA). Correlatively, the veridical sense of being and non-being (i.e., being as being-true and being as being-false) is held to be at best secondary (69-70). Finally, EA induces a twofold thesis: it is countenanced (1) that every assertion articulates into two components, one of which conveys its semantical content and the other the force with which it is put forward (39); and (2) that the contexts in which a proposition can occur divide into two radically different kinds of contexts, namely, extensional, "transparent", truth-functional complexes, on the one hand, and intensional, "opaque", non-truth-functional complexes, on the other hand (12). Thus, UA is the ultimate source of the "psycho/logical dualism" (as the book calls it) that was systematically advocated by Frege and is nowadays more or less taken for granted (33-34). This dualistic view of judgment as decomposing into a subjective act and a truth-evaluable content drives a wedge between the psychological and ontological versions of the principle of non-contradiction (PPNC and OPNC respectively) (39). It is supposed to be the only way of steering clear of the pitfall of psychologism about logic (33).

This overall diagnosis is at once profound, original, and controversial. . . — Review of Kimhi's Thinking and Being, by Jean-Philippe Narboux

It is hard to quote from Kimhi's book on this topic, as the topic is very complex and interconnected to other issues. For those with access to the book, or who want to use a preview site like Google Books, two places where it seems to come up are page 37 and following, and then especially page 82 and following.

Here is an attempt at some relevant quotes:

This proposition is what Kimhi calls "Frege's observation" (which is in fact enunciated by Peter Geach):

a proposition may occur in discourse now asserted, now unasserted, and yet be recognizably the same proposition.

(Peter Geach, “Assertion,” reprinted in Logic Matters (London: Basil Blackwell, 1972), 254–255.) — Kimhi, Thinking and Being, 37

It is worth noting that Geach is not using the term proposition in the Fregean sense of a thought or content, but rather, as he puts it elsewhere, “in a sense inherited from medieval logic, a bit of language identifiable in a certain recognizable logical employment.”[25] It is a bit of language—but not just a “string of words.” Different occurrences of the same words are recognizable as occurrences of the same proposition only within the larger logical context. (This is also what I mean when I talk of propositions and propositional signs.)[26]

The use of the term occur in Frege’s observation is ambiguous between occurrence understood as the actual concrete occurrence of a propositional sign and a symbolic occurrence of a propositional sign within a larger propositional or logical context. — Kimhi, Thinking and Being, 38

. . .Understood as a point concerning a proposition’s concrete occurrences it is the straightforward insight that having the character of an actual assertion, by contrast to having a semantical or logical identity, is characteristic of particular occurrences of a proposition that cannot be associated with the repeatable symbol. In other words, a propositional sign manifests, through its symbolic composition, the semantical character of each actual occurrence of the proposition, but not the force character of any those occurrences.

However, for Frege and Geach the observation amounts to something different. They want to say that anything within the composition of a propositional sign which is associated with assertoric force must be dissociated from that which carries semantic significance—that is, from everything directly relevant to its truth-value. In particular, they want to dissociate assertoric force from anything in the composition or form of that which is primarily true or false in a propositional sign.[27]

In what follows, I shall call the correct understanding of Frege’s observation Wittgenstein’s point, and I shall call the conclusion Geach and Frege draw from it—that assertoric force must be dissociated from a proposition’s semantical significance— Frege’s point. We shall see that Frege’s point is mistaken. It only seems necessary if we accept certain functionalist (and more generally, compositionalist) assumptions about logical complexity. Correctly understood as Wittgenstein’s point, Frege’s observation concerns actual occurrences of a proposition and amounts to the full context principle; misunderstood as Frege’s point it runs together the symbolic and actual occurrences of a proposition and limits the context principle to atomic propositions. — Kimhi, Thinking and Being, 38-9

(See here for footnote 27)

Minor point, but yeah I should have been saying "declarative" all along! — Srap Tasmaner

Useful. :up:

I think we can say this: a world with declarative sentences in it, or a world in which they can be produced, is a world that also includes assertion. — Srap Tasmaner

Yes, that is a good way to put the point I was trying to make. Note also how philosophical anthropology is implicated, namely the question of whether the human being is capable of truth, where 'truth' means something high or Platonic.

What that gets us, I'm not sure. If you say, for instance, that assertion "aims at truth" (which, perhaps mistakenly, I suppose is the sort of thing Kimhi will want to say), then a declarative sentence must be the sort of thing that can be aimed at truth, whatever that means. One adjustment to this I would probably make... — Srap Tasmaner

And now we are on the edge of the deep waters again, but this is all on point. I am going to try to address some of the points I missed before diving into this headlong.

---

So there's no sense talking about storage and retrieval in the first place. — Srap Tasmaner

No, I agree with this. I was not trying to say that we store and retrieve declarative sentences. The point is that declarative sentences have a unique and inalienable nature. Your later considerations about our capacity for truth also point to their unique importance. The relation between a screwdriver and the act of driving screws is loose. The relation between a declarative sentence and a statement is not loose in that way, and I would go on to say that the relation between these two things and our capacity for truth is also not loose in that way. But again, I don't want to move too fast into this newer and deeper topic.

And I'm just not sure what you're reaching for here with "handle", or "independent of", for that matter. Now and then I think you're making a sort of psychological or cognitive point: Hume noted that to conceive of an object is to conceive of it as existing; you almost seem sometimes to be saying that to conceive of a statement is to conceive of it as being asserted. Which might be true, but I don't believe this is what you're saying, or what the point of saying it would be. So what kind of "handling" of statements are you talking about, and how are possible assertions implicated? — Srap Tasmaner

I don't see any problem agreeing with Hume in that even if I would probably go a bit further. But I worry that this tangential "hair-splitting" may have no force against Frege, and so I don't want to develop it too far. It's more that, "Here's something I hold, which sounds a lot like what Kimhi is saying. Maybe Kimhi could be interpreted this way? But I don't see how it intersects with Frege."

We've sort of begun talking about the assertibility of a statement as an affordance, in direct analogy to screwdrivers. But we could instead think of the way simple objects in the Tractatus are said to sort of carry with them the possible states of affairs they could enter into. Just so, a sentence in a given language has what we might think of as chemical properties: there are other sentences it will have an affinity for, and bond with readily to create a narrative or an argument; there are sentences it will repel, sentences that if they bond it will reconfigure both into new configurations with new possibilities, and so on. Philosophers tend to treat statements as having built-in "affirm" and "deny" buttons, but that's surely a somewhat impoverished view, once you consider the wealth of ways sentences relate to each other. — Srap Tasmaner

Yes, I like these ideas. I think this relates to what I have referred to as intentional force, and perhaps what @J has referred to as force. But again, I have no clear sense of how this will intersect with Frege, except for the basic point that Frege simplifies what is not simple.

I'm sure I'm leaving some out. I'm not sure which of these we've been talking about, which Frege has, which points made depend on whether you're talking about one or the other and which don't. We may have no choice but to wade into some of this -- though I'll note again that this is the sort of crap you don't have to worry about in mathematics, where Frege's machine is both happy and indispensable. — Srap Tasmaner

Yes and yes. :up:

For example, I'll go ahead and note (not assert) that in a mathematical or logical proof, you will often have occasion to rely on statements, derived or not, that it would be odd to call assertions. When you say "And since 2 is less than 3, ..." you're not asserting that 2 is less than 3, you're not claiming that it is, you're reminding the audience that it is, and pointing out to them that you are relying upon this as fact. — Srap Tasmaner

Yes, this looks like a kind of presupposition or premise in the way it functions logically. Our context and aim will determine whether such distinctions are necessary, but in a way you have already pulled the curtain on the obvious and difficult debate—and that visitor was at the door from page 1. It is something like the realism debate, colored by your pragmatist approach.

There is something faintly Fregean about this, because of B. Frege's arguments for the "third realm" were often intersubjective: there is not "my pythagorean theorem" and "your pythagorean theorem" but "the pythagorean theorem"; — Srap Tasmaner

Yes, but Frege and Kimhi do not seem to be at odds on this point. That's not to say it's not worth talking about. My next post will hopefully be on Frege's judgment stroke, and whether that idea had any lasting effect.

Impossible to address all the interesting points and questions, but I’ll do my best to respond to folks one by one. — J

Yes, I feel this as well.

The difference is that (1) is an assertion, couched of course in language, about something in the world, e.g. the green grass. (2) is an assertion, couched as affirmation or denial (which could be in symbolic language rather than words) of the sentence used in (1) about the grass.

The irony is that Kimhi claims there is no difference – this is his monism. He says there’s no “logical gap” between (1) and (2). But in order to appreciate how he could say such a thing, we first have to get clear on what appears to be the difference. Hope this helps. — J

Well yes, but it is many more than the 'monists' like Kimhi who do not see a difference here. The difference presupposes a certain kind of sentence reification, and this is related to my complaint about thinking about sentences divorced from intentional sense and implicit speakers.

I know, this is really hard to be clear about. When I suggested “adding a nuance to the vocabulary” that would separate force from assertion, I was suggesting a possible way to clarify. My idea was that we could then talk about “displaying force” without “asserting.” So, to respond to your paraphrase: No, not exactly. I‛m suggesting that we should stop thinking of “force” as something that only an assertion can create. The term “assertoric force” kind of twists our arm into thinking that there’s no force without assertion. So instead, “This statement has force [positive or negative predication] even before you pick it up and assert it.” — J

My impression is that you have spoken about assertoric force independent of assertions, and not just force, but I could be wrong about that. For example, if Kimhi questions the distinction between assertoric force and predicate, then the prima facie reading is that there is some kind of assertoric force associated with the predicate. The difficulty about simple force, or illocutionary force, or intentional force, is that it is very vague and seems to take us far beyond the realm of logic. A number of times throughout the thread this idea has been reigned in lest we move into the open sea of super-logical (linguistic) concerns.

Right, but it’s the introduction of the argument into the function that allows us to claim it exists. I see how you could have read my “before we can say whether it exists or not” to mean that there would be a further decision process. But no, all I’m positing is that, for Frege, ontological commitment can only be shown through his predicate logic. — J

Well, "before we can say whether it exists or not," seems to be simply anti-Fregian, given that we can never say that that an "argument" (in Frege's language) does not exist. As Frege said, to say that 'A is B' means that there are B's. We can never say 'A is B' and then go on to decide whether B's exist.

Hmmm. Well, ‛Fido exists’ isn’t a proposition, if I understand Frege. So for that very reason, we don’t have to do anything with Fido other than use him in a function in order to claim he exists. We do have to do that much, though.

Can you say more about this point? It’s possible I’m not following you. — J

That's right - I agree with your claims here entirely, although I think Frege would go even further and say that there is no reason or sense in "claiming that Fido exists" via predication. Existence in that basic sense seems to be superfluous for Frege.

Good questions. If you accept my proposal to disambiguate “force” from “assertion,” then we need to clarify the relations among all these terms, which is a headache, not just for Kimhi -- much less so than for Frege, as you point out. Just to repeat the point from above, though: I think Kimhi believes that something can have force (not assertoric force) without being asserted. — J

Okay, but do you see how this reading of Kimhi fails to contradict Frege?

Frege: "Assertoric force is dissociated from the predicate."
Kimhi: "I disagree, because the predicate has force."
Frege: "Unless you say that the predicate has assertoric force, you have not disagreed with me."

I agree with this, and it seems to support your understanding as well. Notice, though, that Roberts puts “explained” in scare-quotes. Fair enough: Is this really an explanation or just an “ontological move”? — J

I read it as neither, but rather as merely "saying" or stipulating. If Roberts is right then it is an unargued premise. I find this whole line of Psychologism interesting, and Roberts' theories interesting and at least somewhat plausible.

I read the passage from Roberts as suggesting that Frege’s “ontological move” is a somewhat ad hoc or tendentious solution to a potential problem about psychologism. — J

Right.

So if we purport to describe thinking [that is, predicate something about it], or to explain it in terms of empirical categories, then whatever we purport to describe is by that very token not the formalism of pure thought. Ultimately, as Wittgenstein emphasized, thought in this sense can only be shown, or demonstrated in practice; it can never have things said about it. — Roberts

This is where I see a large and sometimes unnoticed gap between analytic philosophy and scholasticism. The scholastics are quite happy to think about thinking, and are apt to switch into that mode at a moment's notice. If Frege really thinks logic is "a description of the objective structure of thought," then he will have to provide arguments for this thesis, and if he cannot argue about the psychological act of thinking, then he cannot do this.

I’m not sure it’s enough simply to point out how tidy this makes everything, and how effective a weapon it is against psychologism. Frege was smarter than that. — J

I tend to agree. I think there is more here.

I would also love to return, maybe in a fresh OP, to the wider implications of whether “carving the world at its joints” (Plato and Sider) is more than an ontological “move,” understood as something you just declare as useful methodology. — J

There are topics at hand that could easily resurrect your thread on Sider, and that might be the easier thing than drawing up a whole new OP. Especially because we don't want too many new OP's on the same constellation of topics.

I'm not much concerned about this, but the single most interesting point, and relevant to this thread, is that the assertion stroke disappeared. Frege thought it was necessary and later logicians universally (?) don't. I'm no historian, so I'm not quite sure how this happened. — Srap Tasmaner

I have been meaning to look into this same thing. I plan to look through this Master's thesis, "Frege, Russell and Wittgenstein on the Judgment Stroke."

Yeah, when everything serves a religious end-goal, that does make debate sort of uninteresting. — schopenhauer1

I don't think so, as that wouldn't fit Aristotle, but I suppose antinatalism could be said to be the most uninteresting philosophy along these sorts of lines. :wink:

stultifying — Joshs

Russell is stultifying. But is he uninteresting?

Like It's not just that I don't like Wittgenstein because I disagree with him. I actually think what is considered profound is actually not that interesting an insight. — schopenhauer1

I agree with that, but I don't find him uninteresting in an absolute sense.

I can't think of philosophers who are uninteresting in an absolute sense, but perhaps Russell comes closest in that his goal seems misguided and naive. Of course, before the demise of Logical Positivism he would not have been so commonly seen to be misguided and naive.

The scholastics can be quite boring and uninteresting at times, given that they were not motivated as much by their own idiosyncratic and subjective interests. Aristotle, too. [Their interest in the totality of all things leaves many complaints for those with idiosyncratic interests.]

Maybe the philosopher is characteristically interested in things that most people find uninteresting or not worth attending to. But are there any who constantly fixed their attention on what is truly uninteresting and not worth attending to?

[petri dish or] sandbox — bongo fury

The petri dish or sandbox metaphor is a bit different. I think this is related to @J's idea that quantification and claims of existence are two quite unrelated things, which seems closer to Quine than Frege. Now presumably everyone in this thread is closer to Quine than Frege on that question, which is an important wrinkle in the thread. Because of this we must take pains to ensure that the thesis Kimhi is critiquing is something that is still widely held, and has not been abandoned.* This is why I am inclined to read some of the critiques as critiques of the propositional calculus rather than the predicate calculus specifically, not because the latter has been abandoned but simply because the former is more widely known and held.

* Inversely, I don't think someone like Banno is being sufficiently careful about the differences between Fregian logic and contemporary logical intuitions. There is a sense in which we must sift contemporary intuitions, such as the Open Logic Project, into its Fregian and non-Fregian constituents, lest we run roughshod over key theoretical distinctions in our pragmatic shoes.

- Let's do a bit of hair-splitting.

Are you using 'statement' here the same way I was, or as 'a sentence that is being asserted'? — Srap Tasmaner

Something like that: "A sentence being asserted (as true)." I avoided the indicative mood language because a statement is only one kind of utterance in the indicative mood.

This is the whole point of my screwdriver discussion. — Srap Tasmaner

I read your screwdriver analogy as having three points, characterized here:

So we are right to recognize that a screwdriver is longing to drive screws, and this is the most joy it can find in life, but we still might drive screws without it, or use it for something else. — Srap Tasmaner

First, the screwdriver has a latent orientation towards driving screws; second, it can be used for things other than driving screws; and third, other things can be used to drive screws.

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. Suppose we put the tool in our shed for storage. In doing this have we used it for an alternative purpose? No, because we are preserving the tool in order that it may be used for its singular purpose at a later date. The storing of the tool is related to its singular purpose, even though it is not itself its purpose.

When I was thinking about tools before you posted about them, I was thinking about the first and fourth points, not the second or third, and the fourth point stretches the tool analogy (which is why I didn't present that analogy). If we wanted to try to fit the fourth point to the screwdriver analogy we would probably say that the form of the screwdriver makes it fit for some tasks and unfit for other tasks, and that it therefore has a limited and determinate range of uses. But analogies aside, the point is that statements and assertions really do go hand in hand (and this holds even if we put the statement in the cage of quotation marks). A statement cannot really be used to ask a question or give a command, apart from its inalienable purpose of asserting. If a statement manages to do any of these other things, it only does so in virtue of asserting, and there is no way to handle or wield a statement while separating it from its shadow, its assertoric nature. I think this goes beyond the three points you were making, and at least qualifies your claim that "the [screwdriver] has other uses." The question is whether the "other uses" of a statement are truly independent of its assertoric nature.

- Yes, I agree.

Oh, and about the Novak paper: Your link didn’t seem to take me there. Mind verifying and posting it again? Thanks. — J

Here is the link that was buried in the original post, which I have verified is working: "Can We Speak About That Which Is Not? Actualism and Possibilism in Analytic Philosophy and Scholasticism," by Lukáš Novák. (Pages 155-188)

As I've previously explained and illustrated via example, it is not contradictory to maintain the three stipulations of the OP - for intending the least of all wrongs when no other alternative is in any way available to you is a good, and not a bad. Maintaining the three stipulations can become contradictory when reinterpreted in the fashion you have. But, as I've previously expressed and exemplified, this is not how I myself interpret the OP's three stipulations. — javra

At this point in the thread you have the burden of proof to show that the three stipulations are consistent with your claim that <it is sometimes permissible to (intentionally) harm others>.

I will not plead for you to give your honest answer to the simple question I've asked. — javra

I've answered your question. Did you not see the answer?

If you think of something people use, you might think of a tool. Tools capture the problem we face pretty well. — Srap Tasmaner

Yes, I was thinking of the same analogy.

All of which, I think, explains both J 's sense that statements display assertoric force without themselves being assertions -- in much the way a screwdriver has a clear and unambiguous purpose... — Srap Tasmaner

Right, good.

--but also why Frege distinguishes them, because the coupling of a statement to the assertion it would naturally be used to make is loose. — Srap Tasmaner

I think it is worth asking this question of why Frege distinguishes the assertoric force from the predicate. Your idea seems to be that it is because different predicates can be used to make the same assertion. Here is Frege, and @J may also be interested:

Dissociating assertoric force from the predicate

We can grasp a thought without recognizing it as true. To think is to grasp a thought. Once we have grasped a thought, we can recognize it as true—make a judgement—and give expression to this recognition—make an assertion. We need to be able to express a thought without putting it forward as true. In the Begriffschrift I use a special sign to convey assertoric force: the judgement-stroke. The languages known to me lack such a sign, and assertoric force is closely bound up with the indicative mood of the sentence that forms the main clause. Of course in fiction even such sentences are uttered without assertoric force; but logic has nothing to do with fiction. Fiction apart, it seems that it is only in subordinate clauses that we can express thoughts without asserting them. One should not allow oneself to be misled by this peculiarity of language and confuse grasping a thought and making a judgement. — Frege, Posthumous Writings, 192

(Of course "assertoric force" is here binary, as on/off or true/false)

This is what I would want to question:

So we have a statement, which, like a screwdriver, carries in its very design its fitness for being asserted; on the other hand, we have the act of assertion which makes use of the appropriate statement. But this coupling is loose: the sentence has other uses as well,... — Srap Tasmaner

Now in that bolded phrase you switch from 'statement' to 'sentence', but regardless, I would question the idea that a statement has other uses than assertion. Appealing again to my idea of intentional senses and implicit speakers, I don't think statements are ever wielded while wholly prescinding from their assertoric nature. I don't know whether Frege would think of a quoted phrase as a "subordinate clause" (or the equivalent German), but suppose I put quotation marks around, "The grass is green." This is sufficient to indicate that I am expressing a thought without asserting it to be true. Is that proposition assertoric? No and yes. No, insofar as I am explicitly indicating that I do not intend to assert it. Yes, insofar as the intentional sense and the implicit speaker associated in my mind with the proposition both have everything to do with assertion; or in other words: it is a statement, albeit quarantined and muted. Similarly, tigers are dangerous. If we put a tiger in a cage does it become non-dangerous? Yes and no, for the cage only exists because it is dangerous, and the cage is what holds the danger at bay.

This is part of what I understand @J to be saying in the OP and elsewhere, but as I said in my first post, I am not yet convinced that it is something Fregian logic must worry about.

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

Are fictional assertions true? Here is Frege:

In myth and fiction thoughts occur that are neither true nor false. Logic has nothing to do with these. In logic it holds good that every thought is either true or false, tertium non datur. — Frege Reader, 300

The very next sentence of the unabridged text begins the section on dissociating the assertoric force from the predicate.

Yes, and it need not even be limited to logical sentences. It applies to any piece of language. I am saying that we do not have any notion of what a piece of language means without a background of intentional sense and implicit speaker. And yes, the default for statements would seem to be assertion. It is something like asking what a speaker of the language would use it for, but pre-critically.

I suppose a question that arises is whether the material symbol of a pun or ambiguous reference can itself be pointed to. The answer is probably: Yes, but only as a material symbol and not as a proper linguistic sign. To take an old example: 'bank'. In the river sense or the money sense? More to the point, can we reference the single bearer of both separate senses? Sure, but that bearer is a material token rather than a proper and meaningful word: b-a-n-k.

It is in that context that I am interested in Marcion who wanted to separate the creator of tradition from the gentle lord of the Savior. It can be noted that Maricon was clearly more 'Hellenized' than the followers of the Torah in Jerusalem. One does not have to purge all traces of 'Greekness' from those followers for the difference to be significant.

A similar condition applies to the earliest gnostic materials. Some are drawn from Greek ideas, some from other sources. There still is a tension between traditional life and visions of apocalypse. The desire to change a world of brutal power such as the Romans deployed remained a goal for Gnostics centuries later. — Paine

Ah, so your response to Count Timothy had to do with Marcionism or Gnosticism? I think this could make for an interesting thread.

I have observed more than a few people argue that potency/potential is best left out of natural philosophy because it is, in principle, not empirically observable. Only act can be observable, hence, being good modern empiricists, we have no need for potency. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Who are you thinking of? I have a hard time believing that someone who understands potency/potential could leave it out, at least on the basis of empirical grounds.

So with "appears to say", I meant something like "appears to us", "can be interpreted as", and so on. And I mean those expansively, provisionally and contingently. I think part of what makes Moore's Paradox interesting is because it invites us to bracket a normal functioning of language and thus throws it into relief. — fdrake

Here is my edit in case you didn't see it:

I would say that the context-independent interpretation is clearly contradictory, and that it doesn't make much sense to present it as context-independent and expect the hearer to place it in some idiosyncratic context. The additional context could be as simple as, "Sally, a deeply intelligent woman, said..." — Leontiskos

For me the paradox is too obviously contradictory to be a good candidate for exercises regarding misinterpretation or ambiguity of meaning. It's not a coincidence that you will go through your entire life without ever once hearing someone say, "X is true but I believe it is false."

I would say that the detective who has only Sally's statement in front of him is not a good detective if he multiplies all sorts of theories without any evidential basis for those theories. The exercise feels like being put in the place of a sophist's pupil who receives the task, "Politician Sally said this and nothing more. Find a way to spin it so that she didn't contradict herself. It won't be easy."

And what is the difference between Sally saying, "It is raining but I don't believe it is raining," and Sally saying, "It is raining but it is not raining"? I think the difference is only minor, and the same maneuvers that saved the first could equally well save the second. If this is right then on your approach every statement is unfalsifiably noncontradictory.

And moreover, I'd bet that this conflict of appearances is commonplace and essential out in the wild. — fdrake

When we hear something like this in the wild we either ignore it given our dearth of information, or else we try to gather more information in an attempt to account for the seeming contradiction. But the fact that it is a contradiction at face value will not go away.

Is it a contradiction? Yes. Could there be some extenuating circumstance or idiosyncratic use of language or intent that renders it non-contradictory? Yes.

In the wild I'd be inclined to read "believe" somewhat figuratively, like an exasperation, or an alternatively that Sally is experiencing a disconnect between whatever engenders her to assert statements and whatever engenders her to assert her own belief in statements. Basically I want to trust Sally rather than calling her out. — fdrake

Supposing it never occurs in the wild, does that matter? In that case, "What would an unspoken sentence mean," is a bit like the question about the sound of the tree falling in the unoccupied woods. Perhaps there is a good reason why Moore's sentence is never actually spoken.
Language is flexible, but there are limits to this.

The distinction is total and fundamental. Frege goes so far as to say you cannot talk about functions (i.e., predicates) at all, because to talk about them is to treat them as objects. We do, nevertheless, talk about them, because it's handy, but he considered this a shortcoming of natural languages. In his system, it is simply not possible: functions cannot be values of variables. ((That's first-order, of course, and it's well known that even to define arithmetic you have to pass on to second-order. I don't recall what he says about this, and whether a switch to classes as stand-ins for functions is good enough. Anyway, there's a gap in my account here.))

He goes further, and says that he cannot even tell you what a function is -- that is, what belongs to the type <function> -- for related reasons, but, and this is a key point, though he cannot tell you what the difference is between an object and a function, he can show you. This is the whole point of the Begriffschrift, to show this difference clearly, perspicaciously. Perforce that means logical form is not really something to be defined (though I don't recall him saying this) but shown.

((This distinction -- that there are some things that can only be shown -- I think had a tremendous influence on Wittgenstein, that was still percolating after the Tractatus, or so I believe.)) — Srap Tasmaner

Very interesting. That all makes sense, and fills out my understanding a bit.

Kinda, but I'd be more inclined to say that predicates neither exist nor fail to exist. No more than red is tall or short. It just doesn't apply. Objects are the sorts of things that exist (or fail to), and functions aren't objects.

I don't remember how Frege deals with non-existent objects, or if it even comes up, but in the world he left us, empty classes serve. I can name "the smallest positive rational number" but it will turn out I have defined an empty singleton class. (Extensionally equivalent to any other empty class, but not intensionally, if that matters.) — Srap Tasmaner

Good, and this is more accurate than the way I was stating it.

My idea was basically that it is curious that Frege is comfortable saying that Fido is not a cat, but is unwilling to say that Fido does not exist. As you point out, this makes sense for Frege given that the former statement is just a matter of class exclusion, and given that classes—empty or otherwise—are not said to exist. ...But I think @J's confusion about Frege may stem from a similar place. J may be thinking, "Kimhi criticizes Frege for divorcing the sense of a proposition from its assertoric force; 'Fido exists' is a proposition; therefore Frege divorces this proposition's sense from its assertoric force; therefore Frege thinks we can quantify over Fido before predicating existence of Fido." At the same time, J knows that Frege does not accept the idea that existence is a predicate, and so there is a tension.

I don't remember how Frege deals with non-existent objects, or if it even comes up, but in the world he left us, empty classes serve. — Srap Tasmaner

According to the paper I have been citing:

Frege poses the rhetorical question as to whether it is possible to produce an example of a meaningful true statement of the form “A is B”, where A is a proper name, but there are no B’s. The challenge is not met by Frege’s opponent in the dialogue as preserved, but in case we attempted to suggest e.g. the sentence “Smaug is a dragon” as an obvious counterexample (assuming that, of course, there are no dragons), according to his principles Frege would be bound to saying that this is “not a real (i.e., meaningful) sentence”. This counterintuitive result was to be mitigated in a later phase of the development of Frege’s thought, as the distinction drawn between Sinn and Bedeutung enabled, under certain circumstances, expressions (including sentences) to have a Sinn despite lacking a Bedeutung. Nevertheless, the fundamental principle of Frege’s theory, viz. that objects capable of being judged about are, trivially, exclusively existing objects, was never abandoned by Frege, nor did he ever consider it in the least controversial. Quite the opposite – Frege regarded it as empty and tautological, since the term “existing”, insofar as it is applied to individuals, is devoid of any content and as such it does not impose any extensional narrowing: ... — Lukáš Novák, Can We Speak About That Which Is Not?, 158-9

Peirce had quantifiers too, I hear, but I've never studied his logic. I certainly defer to Kenny -- I just think of the likes of Boole and De Morgan being quite nearly there already. — Srap Tasmaner

Yes - my point is only that a critique of Frege could be a critique of his propositional or predicate calculus. I assume that bit about the repeatability of 'p' pertains to the propositional calculus.

I think we're all on the same page, I'm just using the word "claim" instead of "assert", and also drafting the word "say", all three of which have considerable overlap in everyday speech. — Srap Tasmaner

:up:

(4) Leontiskos seems almost to suggest that statements have a sort of hole in them, like Frege's functions, waiting for an agent to be inserted and complete the assertion. But we need more than an agent, we need an actual utterance (even if internal), and then we're faced with the problem of intention as well --- some of that context will take care (I'm acting in a play), but some it won't (I was just saying what he wanted to hear). — Srap Tasmaner

I have often given an impromptu and half-baked account, and this will be no exception. The idea is not so much that they have a hole, but rather that in order to be understood even qua proposition they must have an intentional sense, and they cannot have an intentional sense without an implicit speaker. And there is no neutral intentional sense, or non-intentional sense.

So to take @fdrake's example of Sally asserting Moore's paradox, there is no interpretation of Sally's linguistic utterance which is entirely divorced from an intentional sense and an implicit speaker (in fact fdrake cleared up the implicit speaker problem by making the speaker explicit). According to @J, and as I supposed, Kimhi is after something more substantial and controversial than this. But my point is that there is a kind of default or prima facie intentional sense of every proposition, given the fact that there is no way of interpreting or even apprehending a proposition without assuming some intentional context or another. It's not so much that the proposition has a hole or an intrinsic intentional force by its very nature, but rather that it can never be handled as a proposition, or as a linguistic utterance, without some intentional sense (and implicit speaker) being supplied. There is no possibility of fully prescinding from the intentional sense of a proposition, and the intentional sense would seem to involve a "force" dynamic. In your language we might say that affirming a pre-existing saying will involve one in different intentions and assertoric force, depending on the content of the saying.

One way it seems relevant is that understanding the sentence as weird and contradictory on a gut level... pumps the intuition that it must function as an assertion. It would never be uttered in normal circumstances since part of its mechanism asserts something and then undermines the act of assertion. — fdrake

Good, this is precisely the way that it sheds light on the OP.

And it would probably be better to look at it in the form "Sally said "It is raining but I believe it is not raining"", since that dodges all the weird crap involving "I", since we know who is saying it. — fdrake

Yep, this helps a great deal to clear away the tangential issues.

So when Sally says the second clause, "I believe it is not raining", a reading of the phrase in which Sally's assumed to be truthful and sincere associates the "I believe" in the sentence with asserting the claim "It is not raining". So the first clause appears to assert "It is raining", the second clause appears to assert "It is not raining", and those things clash together in our heads. — fdrake

Right.

Nevertheless, Sally is not in a state of contradiction. — fdrake

Isn't she, though?

For Sally only appears to assert that it is raining, and only appears to assert that it is not raining. — fdrake

This is a different matter as far as I'm concerned:

1. Sally said, "It is raining but I believe it is not raining."
2. Sally appeared to say, "It is raining but I believe it is not raining."

Did she appear to say it or did she say it? First we were dealing with (1), but now we have suddenly switched to talking about (2), which is quite different. If she only appeared to say something, then of course she could not contradict herself. The conclusion would not be, "Sally contradicted herself," but rather, "Sally appeared to contradict herself."

Eg, I've said "I don't believe it's raining!" while wincing up at a sky thick with summer rain. — fdrake

But note that this is no longer an assertion. The assertion would be, drawn out, "It is false that it is the case that it is raining." Or, "It is not the case that it is raining."

A similar logic lets you provide a model for Sally's odd phrase. I'm sitting here now, I believe it's not raining since it wasn't forecast to rain this evening last time are checked. But my curtains are closed. I just said "It is raining and I believe it's not raining" aloud... and it turned out it wasn't raining after all, when I opened the curtain. — fdrake

This doesn't strike me as intelligible. Why did you say it was raining? Were you having a stroke, with random words exiting your mouth? There is no question here that people can say nonsensical things and contradict themselves. The question is whether some utterance is contradictory.

I would say that to assert is to believe. Therefore if Sally asserts that it is raining then she believes that it is raining. This is all that is needed to recognize her contradiction, and this premise seems very secure. What you have done is given some possibilities where she doesn't actually assert, but that strikes me as beside the point.

What I think makes Moore's paradox a good gateway in this discussion is that there's a whole context of cooperative use and interpretation, which contains a myriad of exploitable oppositions and contradictions, that just don't show up when you analyse the phrase as an instance of asserts(p & believes not-p) & asserts(p)=>believes(p). Particularly how you can make sense of it, and the kind of doubt you might have regarding Sally's faculties and situation. Maybe those are the kind of things J was looking to incorporate into a logic. — fdrake

That's fair. You've sufficiently established your thesis about the relevance of Moore's paradox.

Now, in my opinion, the sort of ways that you are defending the coherence of Sally's statement are not going to be plausible ways to critique Frege. But with that said, I have seen folks who are devoted to Fregian logic who have a tendency to oversimplify locutions, so there is that. That's a hard thing to critique.

...there's a whole context of cooperative use and interpretation, which contains a myriad of exploitable oppositions and contradictions, that just don't show up when you analyse the phrase as an instance of asserts(p & believes not-p) & asserts(p)=>believes(p)... — fdrake

I would say that the context-independent interpretation is clearly contradictory, and that it doesn't make much sense to present it as context-independent and expect the hearer to place it in some idiosyncratic context. The additional context could be as simple as, "Sally, a deeply intelligent woman, said..."

Though there remains the question of whether this can be incorporated into normal flavours of logic, whether it's something that can be formalised, whether it should be formalised... and so on. — fdrake

Right.

As an aside, when I said the phrase aloud I felt a powerful compulsion to immediately open the curtain to check... Surely something we expect Sally to have done in my shoes! — fdrake

:grin:

In reply to this edit: Since you're being ultra-formal in reasoning, what pacifist (either directly or indirectly) causes no harm to other life in their persisting to live by consuming nutrients via food? — javra

So then you think pacifism fails for two reasons: both because it is permissible to intentionally harm others, and because pacifism is impracticable. Either way you disagree with conclusion (4) and the stipulations that undergird it.

The question here is whether you contradict yourself in claiming to accept all three stipulations while simultaneously claiming that it is okay to intentionally harm others (or, put differently, whether the stipulations entail pacifism). As I have shown, the three stipulations do logically entail the conclusion <It is always impermissible to harm others>, and therefore you contradict yourself by claiming that you accept the three stipulations while maintaining that it is sometimes permissible to (intentionally) harm others.

Now you want me to enter into a debate about whether one should choose the least of all wrongs. I am not a consequentialist, and because of this I do not think one should do what is wrong. I would counsel others to abstain from acting if the only possible actions are wrong. But I am not going to enter into this debate in full. Showing your contradiction was my aim.

Let me first say that I think the first half of your first post was excellent and deeply relevant. As to the second half, about Moore's paradox, I continue to vacillate on whether it is really relevant. It sheds a bit of light but also raises a lot of issues that seem to be tangential. With that said...

Just for the specific sentence "It is raining but I believe it is not raining", taken as a stand alone. When you read that, you can understand it. Even though you don't know who "I" refers to. You just know it's the person in the sentence. — fdrake

I can't understand it. The received view seems to be that it is absurd. I don't know who "I" refers to. And I don't know who "the person in the sentence" is supposed to refer to. The problem is that, taken at face value, the locution is schizophrenic, and therefore talking about a single speaker is not intuitive.

This is why talking about Moore's paradox seems to require a great deal of explanation and verbiage, in the first place as to how it is being interpreted.

I'd make the same conjured into existence analysis for "I" or "me" in the sentences:
A) It's an egg, I know it's an egg.
B) Ask not for whom the egg tolls, it tolls for me.
C) I have to block out thoughts of eggs so I don't lose my egg.

when they are presented without further context.

Because, as internet brainrot would have it, the who "I" is is ghosted, for real. — fdrake

I worry that we're on a tangent, but the difference is that any statement has a kind of implicit, "I say..." "(I say) It's an egg." Moore's sentence is absurd (and contradictory) because the speaker disagrees with himself (or else has a very idiosyncratic notion of belief).

It seems that originally Moore was looking at two propositions, both of which are said to be true:

1. It is raining
2. I believe it is not raining

He supposes that any two true things can be conjoined and spoken, hence, "<It is raining> and <I believe it is not raining>". I think this reflects the confusion in modern thought where it is presupposed that there can be statements without implicit speakers. This is all somewhat interesting, and there are many ways we could go with it, but you may first have to convince me that it is on topic for this thread.

Excellent citations from Frege. My claim was twofold: 1) that predicate logic restricts what we can say about existence; and 2) we have to start with a logically grammatical proposition that fills the argument slot with a term, thus creating what Frege called a “name,” before we can say whether it exists or not. I’m not sure what “wider than existence” means exactly, but your citation clearly shows that Frege believed we have to presuppose that “sentences [can?] express judgments” and that there is a world out there, about which we are trying to say things. No disagreements here, and sorry if I seemed to say otherwise. — J

I am disputing your (2). For Frege we don't quantify things and then go on to decide whether they actually exist (and this is very much related to your QV thread).

One point about something Frege also says here. He asks: “Can you produce an example where a sentence of the form 'A is B' is meaningful and true, A being a name of an individual, and yet 'There are B’s' is false?” To me, this shows why quantification comes first in his method. — J

His claim seems to be counterfactual, not temporal. "If there are no B's then 'A is B' is neither meaningful nor true."

He requires, correctly, that “A is B” be “meaningful and true” before... — J

You seem to be reading this word "before" into the text, contrary to the text.

If we changed Frege’s question to read: “Can you produce an example where a sentence of the form 'A is B' is unasserted, A being a name of an individual, and yet 'There are B’s' is false?”, the answer would be, Of course we can. — J

I don't know if what you are saying here makes sense, as Frege's whole point is that if there are no B's then 'A is B' cannot be meaningful or true. Were you able to download Lukáš Novák's paper? I think it would be of great benefit.

The irony here is that Frege would presumably not say, "Of course we can." If there are no B's then 'A is B' is not merely unasserted, it is not meaningful. The second quote I gave has Frege literally denying that we can meaningfully deny that something exists (tout court).

But what I was trying to point out (or what I think Roberts means, anyway) is that “the universe of discourse” isn’t neutral or discoverable or God-given or whatever. We have to determine it, which requires quantification. — J

For Frege there is no non-existent universe of discourse. Existence is not an afterthought to quantification.

The charge is more radical than that. The Kimhi-inspired challenge says that the mandatory dissociation of force from sense in logic is wrong. Kimhi: “[Frege and Geach] want to dissociate assertoric force from anything in the composition or form of that which is primarily true or false in a propositional sign.” And yes, I hope Srap keeps pressing his points; we need to interrogate this challenge sharply. — J

Okay. I can see how Frege mandates a dissociation between sense and assertion. Is that the same as mandating a dissociation between sense and force? Or sense and assertoric force? Kimhi seems to believe that something can have assertoric force without being asserted. It seems like Frege wants to make one big distinction (between propositions and their truth values), and Kimhi wants to make lots of small distinctions (between different kinds of force, or different levels of assertoric force).

I find this all fascinating but, as I say, I don't want us to digress. — J

Agreed. :up:

- Great posts.

(1) Assertion is (a person, an agent) claiming that the possible state of affairs, let's say, described by a statement does in fact hold.
(2) Assertion is (a person, an agent) affirming the claim about the world made by a statement. — Srap Tasmaner

I am struggling to see the difference here, but maybe that is just me. I was understanding @J to be saying that propositions can have assertoric force independent of persons/agents who would speak them. Therefore I would prefer a distinction between a possessor of assertoric force which requires a speaker/asserter and one that does not. I thought J was saying, "This thing has assertoric force even before you pick it up and assert it."

This seems slightly at odds with the descriptions involving a repeated identical 'p': there are no repeated complete symbols here. — Srap Tasmaner

Interesting point. Substitution of individuals/particulars occurs beginning with (2), and substitution is a different kind of logical move.

But I would say the middle term (the recurrence of 'p') is found in the substitutability itself. (1) quantifies over all integers, and because '5' and '2' are integers they are substitutable into the formula of (1). Does the OP's point about the repeatability of p break down in cases of substitution? I shouldn't think so, but perhaps that argument needs to be refined.

I suppose it is worth noting:

Frege isn't remembered for the propositional calculus, which predates him, but for quantifiers and their use in tidying up the predicate calculus, to make it safe for mathematics. — Srap Tasmaner

According to Anthony Kenny's history of philosophy Frege and Peirce simultaneously and independently developed the propositional calculus (which therefore did not predate them, at least in this robust form). But you are right that Frege is remembered for his predicate calculus. The point, though, is that a critique of propositional calculus (and the repeatability of propositions) is a Fregian critique just as much as a critique of predicate calculus would be.

I noticed that too. Absolutely. I think the general thrust of the whole modern Frege-Tarski-model-theoretic approach is to presuppose the existence of the objects within the universe of discourse, and then the questions addressed are which objects satisfy which predicates, and that's all. — Srap Tasmaner

Yes, that's right. Jumping ahead a bit, I am curious about the Fregian presupposition which cleanly distinguishes predicate bearers from predicates, because apparently it associates existence with the former but not the latter. That is, apparently we can talk about non-existent predicates but not non-existent predicate bearers. This seems to reveal an odd lack of parity. For Aristotle a substance and an accident both play by the same general rules, even though an accident has a different kind of being than a substance does.

The ones for Greek scholarship (mostly re Aristotle) that I can find in the text are: Charles Kahn (mainstream, right?); Jennifer Hornsby; Jonathan Beere; Michel Crubellier; Lukasiewicz (also mainstream?); Anscombe (not sure how she's regarded now); C.W.A. Whitaker; Benjamin Morison; Walter Leszl; John McDowell; Edward Lee; and I may have missed some. So I think the scholarship is there (minus the Medievals, as you point out), it's just hard to get an overall picture of what Kimhi is relying on. — J

Right, good points. And Kimhi interacts with some of these scholars a great deal, some hardly at all.

Re Beere, Kimhi does say, "Both my usage and my understanding of the Aristotelian terminology of capacity and activity are informed by Jonathan Beere's illuminating study, Doing and Being (OUP, 2009)." Do you know Beere's work? Is Kimhi wise to rely on it? — J

I have never heard of him, but I haven't kept up with Aristotelian scholarship, and what I read is in large part limited to what I am able to access. OUP is of course a good press.

Kimhi does a fair job of noting the ways that he is interacting with the scholars he cites. I think whether his view agrees with the received view depends on the topic at hand. One reason I mention the Medievals is because Aristotle's works are underdeveloped or underdetermined on many of these later issues, and they can therefore be taken and run with in different directions.

Irrespective of what your anticipated answer will be, I again deem the choosing of the least bad to be a good in an of itself, rather than a bad in and of itself. — javra

Then you are directly denying #3.

Is it a bad to choose - or else to intend the manifestation of - the lease bad from all alternatives that are available to oneself at the juncture of the given choice? — javra

It is impermissible to choose harm on such a basis given the three stipulations. (1) and (2) form an exhaustive division: ends and means. According to (3) harm is bad, according to (1) what is bad cannot be done for its own sake, and according to (2) what is bad cannot be done for the sake of something else. The three stipulations logically entail pacifism. There is no way around this given that every act is either a means or an end. It is contradictory to accept the three stipulations without being committed to pacifism, and therefore you are contradicting yourself.

Edit: Here is a more formal version, which may help you see your contradiction:

1. It is morally impermissible to perform an action that is X.
2. It is morally impermissible to directly intend something that is X—even for the sake of something good.
3. Harming someone is X.
4. Therefore, pacifism is true.

(2 is strictly speaking superfluous, but I think Bob was going for the exhaustive division noted above.)

It’s true that this doesn’t moot the ontological question, but it’s a special and severe restriction on what we can say about existence. It’s also a precise description of the order in which Fregeans have to proceed: quantification first. — J

I don't think this is correct at all. Here is Frege:

Here I would retort: If “Sachse exists” should mean “The term ‘Sachse’ is not an empty sound but it stands for something”, then it is correct to say that the condition that “Sachse exists” must be satisfied. This, however, is no new premise, but a self-evident presupposition of all our words. The rules of logic always presuppose that the words used are not empty, that the sentences express judgements, that we are not playing with mere words. Given that “Sachse is a man” is an actual judgement, the word “Sachse” has to stand for something; in which case I do not need any further premise to infer “There are men” from that. The premise “Sachse exists” is superfluous, as long as it means nothing over and above that self-evident presupposition of all our thought. Or can you produce an example where a sentence of the form “A is B” is meaningful and true, A being a name of an individual, and yet “There are B’s” is false?[4]

[4] [...] Gottlob Frege, “Dialog mit Pünjer über Existenz” (between 1879 and 1884), in Schriften zur Logik und Sprachphilosophie: Aus dem Nachlass (Meiner Verlag 2001), 99, p. 11–12. [...] — Lukáš Novák, Can We Speak About That Which Is Not?, 157-8

If we attribute any content to the verb “to be”, to the effect that the sentence “A is” is neither superfluous nor self-evident, we shall have to concede that the negation of “A is” is, under certain circumstances, possible, viz. that there are subjects to which being must be denied. Then, however, the notion of “being” generally won’t be suited to be used as an interpretation of the meaning of “there is” any more, according to which “there are B’s” would be equivalent to “some being falls under the concept of B”. For if we applied this interpretation to the sentence “There are subjects to which being must be denied”, we would obtain the sentence “Some being falls under the concept of non-being”, or “Some being is not”. This is unavoidable, as soon as one ascribes any content whatsoever to the concept of being. If the interpretation that “there are B’s” means the same as “some being is B” is to be correct, then it is simply necessary that “being” be understood as conveying something completely self-evident.[5]

[5] [...] ibid., 20-21 — Lukáš Novák, Can We Speak About That Which Is Not?, 159

Given this evidence it would seem that it is incorrect to claim that for Frege quantification is wider than existence. I think the sources from your thread on QV attest to this same fact.

I have been snipping the second sentence of that title, "Can we speak about that which is not? Actualism and Possibilism in Analytic Philosophy and Scholasticism." The general critique of Frege seems closely related to the Actualism and Possibilism debates.

-

Newtonian physics is still a powerful tool, despite getting the big picture all wrong. — J

As I said in the first sentence of that post, "I think it is a useful tool." By "tool" Srap is apparently implying a strong sort of ontological pluralism, as he favored in your earlier thread. You are welcome to press him on it, or on the question of better and worse logical tools.

If Frege’s system is insufficient in its basic understanding of how propositions work, how they must be understood within logic, then while it may remain a powerful tool, it’s defective in explanatory power at the metalogical level. — J

Yes, well put.

I’m suggesting we think of force as something that can be displayed without assertion. And having said that, the question is whether this is just playing with words – whether the nuance I’m proposing really clarifies anything, or would change how we think about logic. To that question I would say, “Kimhi thinks it does, but I’m not clear on it yet.” — J

This is what I suspected, and said, "...But is there any formal logic that will really be able to dodge this bullet and provide the same cornucopia of locutionary flavors that natural language possesses?" ().

There are systems of logic that set about mapping other forms of force, such as belief, but it doesn't strike me as a great approach to lay the charge at Frege's feet that he hasn't sufficiently accounted for non-assertoric forms of locution. This is where I think Srap's critiques are helpful, for they demand more precision as to the actual conclusion being argued for.

Both@Leontiskos and Fdrake have concerns about the “I” of assertion. This is very important, in my opinion. — J

It strikes me as a simple question of intent. One asserts something if and only if they intend to, and I don't think any material sign contains within itself any variety of illocutionary intent. For example, "The grass is green" can be placed in that modus ponens premise, and thus stripped of its assertoric force. Now it does have a kind of prima facie assertoric force, which must be stripped or prescinded from if we want to avoid it. Is that the same as being intrinsic?

I think the answer is no. — J

I don't think you understand what I am saying. "I" refers to the person speaking the sentence, and this person is not fdrake. The oddity is that @fdrake seems to think that there was no asserter prior to the one who was "conjured" by the "I", but I recognize that he is not trying to give an answer to the paradox.

I have seen analytics fall into this trap of thinking that sentences can float in the ether without any speaker, even a logically remote one. In that sense I would agree with the OP that all sentences have a kind of force, but I would call it an intentional force rather than an assertoric force. — Leontiskos

Does, "It is raining," have assertoric force, and if so, who is the asserter? There is a sense in which it has a kind of meta-assertoric force insofar as we are forced to imagine at least an implicit speaker. But my use of the quotation marks indicates that I am holding it aloof rather than asserting it myself. I don't suppose this is all Kimhi is saying?

For starters, I don't see how you can claim to accept all three stipulations and then argue for harm consequentialism. The stipulations logically entail the conclusion that harm cannot be done. You say you accept all three stipulations but then go on to say that harm can be done. It seems that if you want to hold to harm consequentialism then you will at least need to reject #2, no?

I'm not sure how damning it is to describe something as merely useful, but you've got a hobby horse to ride and I'll not stop you. — Srap Tasmaner

No one said it was damning. Is mine the hobby horse, here? If you are averse to the topic of a thread, why post in it? After all, if you are ultimately just going to say, "None of this matters at all, and 'logic' is nothing more than a word," then it would seem that you are averse to the topic.

- I think it is a useful tool, but Frege thought it was more than that and it seems he was wrong. When one sees that Frege's system is insufficient it at the very least must be demoted to the level of a "tool." Whether @J is arguing for more than this, I do not know.

I don't think "logic in its entirety" is a thing. — Srap Tasmaner

Do you think logic is a thing?

In short, when the only available alternatives to one are all of differing degrees of wrongness, or of badness, then it is virtuous (and hence good) to choose that alternative which is the least wrong, or bad, among the available alternatives. This in contrast to choosing an alternative which is more or else most wrong, hence bad.

Choosing not to choose between the alternatives in this situation would also be, by my reckoning, a non-virtuous act - for, in so choosing not to choose, one then of one's own accord allows for the possibility of the more or else worst wrong to be actualized. — javra

This is pretty stark consequentialism, is it not? Especially your final sentence?

It looked to me like the argument form here was something like this:

A: Fs are not Gs.
B: But in a way they are.

That's a disagreement, I guess, but I wouldn't call it an argument. And yes maybe it's a disagreement over presuppositions, but what's the argument for dropping the presupposition? — Srap Tasmaner

Yes, that's fair. :up:

If we find that there are multiple frameworks for analyzing the symbol systems of humans and their utterances, and each is useful for particular purposes, we might consider the possibility that the speakers of a language also have at their disposal multiple frameworks for thinking about the utterances of their fellows. The distinction between between force and logical form might not be a fact, so much as a strategy, something people do because for some purposes it's very useful to do so. — Srap Tasmaner

I don't think it is a question of whether there are non-logical forms of discourse. That can be granted. The question is whether Frege's system is a flawed logical form of discourse.

Kimhi defines philosophical logic as, "the idea of a study that achieves a mutual illumination of thinking and what is: an illumination through a clarification of human discursive activity in which truth (reality, aletheia) is at stake" (1).

So logic is not indirect discourse, and indirect discourse would not function as a counterexample to Frege's system. It may be otherwise for Quine, but for Frege the ontological question is not moot, and Frege did not consider his system to be a strategic, pragmatic deployment. Specifically, the system was meant to capture logic in its entirety. You are saying that it does not capture all of human symbolic activity. Would you also say that it does not capture all of logic?

The odd part of it seems to be "I" conjures an asserter. Which isn't the person who writes the sentence (me), it's the person in the sentence. — fdrake

"I" always refers to the person speaking the sentence, does it not? These are two different claims:

• It is raining and I don't believe it is raining.
• It is raining outside, and he says, "I don't believe it is raining."

I have seen analytics fall into this trap of thinking that sentences can float in the ether without any speaker, even a logically remote one. In that sense I would agree with the OP that all sentences have a kind of force, but I would call it an intentional force rather than an assertoric force.

The Fregean picture is more like “p would or could be an assertion under the right illocutionary circumstances (thanks, Banno), but unless it’s actually being asserted, p has nothing in the way of force.” That’s what I’m challenging. — J

The simple argument from Geach in Kimhi's book is that p has assertoric force in (2) but not in (1):

1. p → q
2. p
3. ∴ q

What you seem to be saying is that if we let p = "The grass is green", then it will have assertoric force in (1). Is that really true?

The force of a locution is context-dependent, but doesn't formal logic always need to nail down and simplify this context-dependency? If the argument of the OP is that natural language is a more powerful or complete logical tool than formal logic, then I would agree. But is there any formal logic that will really be able to dodge this bullet and provide the same cornucopia of locutionary flavors that natural language possesses?

Curious to know if K's interpretation [of Aristotle] is mainstream or outlier/revisionist. — J

The difficulty, which also strikes me as a red flag, is that Kimhi provides no bibliography. Therefore it probably goes without saying that he has no clear sources to corroborate his interpretations of Aristotle. I don't see much Aristotelian scholarship being appealed to.

And a weakness is that Kimhi completely ignores the Medieval period. One cannot oppose Frege without an alternative, and the most basic Aristotelian alternative to Frege is the Medieval development of Aristotle. Kimhi may be committing the faux pas of providing a critique without any alternative.

‛The grass is green’ is not neutral as to force — J

The closest Frege's system can get to modeling something like this is to say, "There exists something which is both grass and green." Fregian logic has an especially hard time with individuals since it is built for concepts or classes. Given that the statement is not Fregian in the first place, it raises a whole host of issues.

But for now, what do you all think? Have I succeeded in raising a genuine challenge to Frege, or does the Fregean have an obvious counter-argument? — J

All the objections to Frege's logic that I have seen are metalogical objections, and yours is no exception. says that there is no (counter)-argument being offered, and this is true at least insofar as there is no counter-argument which adopts Fregian presuppositions. What is being questioned is the presupposition.

So how does one offer an argument against logical presuppositions? The most obvious way is to argue that the presupposition fails to capture some real aspect of natural logic or natural language, and by claiming that natural propositions possess a variety of assertoric force that Frege's logic lacks, this is what you are doing. Yet this is where a point like Novák's becomes so important, for logicians like Russell, Frege, Quine, et al., presuppose that natural language is flawed and must be corrected by logic. This moots your point. Further, Quine will set the stage for a "pragmaticizing" of logic, which destroys the idea of ontologically superior logics at its root:

In Quine’s hands, however, the principle takes on a purely descriptive meaning, stating merely what kind of entities a given theory presupposes to exist – namely those that can figure as values of bound variables in that theory. In other words, the Principle features in Quine as his famous criterion of “ontological commitment”, which, since language has been purged of all directly referring expressions, lacks any a priori connexion to reality and becomes rather a matter of pragmatic choice. — Lukáš Novák, Can We Speak About That Which Is Not?, 166-7

It is a question of what you're up against.

And that’s what Kimhi’s book is about. — J

Kimhi's approach strikes me as a attempt to kill Frege by a kind of "death by a thousand cuts." Whether or not this works, it will not be convincing to entrenched Fregians, as it requires a willingness to abandon Fregian presuppositions for the sake of argument. Beyond that, with each small cut Fregians will presumably respond, "It's such a minor issue - who really cares?" It seems to me that your Sider paper—which never in fact received a hearing within your earlier thread—was much more "punchy" and effective as directed against Fregians. Kimhi's book seems to be directed towards those who are predisposed to question the sovereignty of Fregianism, rather than committed Fregians themselves.

And finally, this argument about assertoric force is an argument where I can see both sides, and I don't know that the clarity and merits of the OP are sufficient to overcome the weight and presuppositions of the opposing side. For example, on the one hand we have some obscure gesturing towards real problems or at least wrinkles with the Fregian presupposition. What do we have in favor of the Fregian presupposition? Something like this, which is both clear and strong: <The first and second premises of a modus ponens both display p, but with entirely different assertoric force. Therefore assertoric force is not intrinsic to p>. That's a strong argument, and from my skim of Kimhi and the ND review I did not understand Kimhi to be questioning this distinction between sense and assertoric force tout court.* To question the distinction tout court would require a very clear and very strong argument. The ultimate nub here is always going to be, "Well if you aren't questioning the distinction tout court, then in precisely what way are you questioning it?" Does Kimhi have a clear answer?


* In fact all logic seems to require a distinction between sense and assertoric force, and therefore if the conclusion of your argument is that these cannot in any way be separated then logic itself would appear to be doomed. The subtlety of Kimhi's argumentation results in a subtle conclusion. There is the danger here of throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

These are not statements that apply to angles or even Zeus. — Count Timothy von Icarus

:up:

Paul literally has the Son creating the spiritual powers here in Colossians 1, namely the other "divinities" that some in this thread are identifying with Jesus.

Can you provide some examples of that? — Paine

The basis is referred to as the Hellenization Thesis, often traced to Adolf von Harnack, but it also has earlier antecedents in many anti-philosophical approaches to Christianity. You could think of three camps: Christianity was strongly Hellenized, and it was bad; Christianity was strongly Hellenized, and it was good; Christianity was not strongly Hellenized.

I’m looking for some source help. I know that the parallel between ‛X exists/doesn’t exist’ and ‛p is true/false’ is a familiar one, but I can’t find a focused discussion of it in the literature — J

I originally skimmed the works of Gyula Klima when I saw your thread, but I did not see anything related in a precise way. Yesterday I picked through some of the volumes of a journal he co-edits, "Proceedings of the Society for Medieval Logic and Metaphysics." I found an article that is remarkably on-topic in volume 12. It is Lukáš Novák's piece, "Can We Speak About That Which Is Not? Actualism and Possibilism in Analytic Philosophy and Scholasticism." Unfortunately after volume 10 they stopped making the pdfs available online, but it looks like you may be able to get a copy of volume 12 here.

Instead of asking about predications of truth and being, which is a bit general, the article looks at the question of whether we can speak about that which is not. Novák looks at Frege, Russell, Meinong, Quine, Strawson, and then a number of scholastics, particularly Henry of Ghent, Francis of Meyronnes, and John Duns Scotus.

One of the interesting points that Novák makes is that there is a characteristic divide between the scholastics and the analytics with respect to natural language:

In scholasticism the matters are rather more complicated. Generally speaking, the scholastics lacked the Russellian revisionist attitude towards natural language, and therefore they rarely explicitly challenged the obvious capacity of the natural language to refer to non-existents. Their approach was, generally, to explain and analyse, not to correct language – and so the standard scholastic theory of supposition (the mediæval counterpart of reference) naturally allows (via devices like ampliation etc.) for reference to non-existents.[18] — Lukáš Novák, Can We Speak About That Which Is Not?, 168-9

Kimhi's reliance on Wittgenstein is curious insofar as Wittgenstein has one leg in both camps, although both legs seem to be underdeveloped.

-

Volume 5 is also on topic, although less so. It deals with the question of direct and indirect realism as applied to Aristotelian Medievals such as Avicenna, Averroes, and Aquinas. Aquinas ends up with a doctrine where Kimhi's both-and holds, namely reality is present to the intellect in itself and yet representational/propositional moves are not thereby excluded. This volume is available from Klima's faculty page: "Universal representation, and the Ontology of Individuation."

So much for ignoring me. — Fooloso4

I'm sure the referee will award you a point for eliciting a reply to your trolling.

- That was a devious splicing of many different contexts and conversations, which still didn't get you very far. At this point you've lowered yourself to the level of a dishonest troll. Those who thought you were otherwise should take note.