hardly the ideal summertime reading, as it is here. — Wayfarer

Oh stop! We're snowed in where I live.

So isn't Rödl arguing, on this basis, that you can't really show the mind-independent nature of metaphysical primitives in the absence of a mind, which can only be that of the knower of the proposition? — Wayfarer

I’m not sure. Do you mean that, because it would take a mind to demonstrate the mind-independent nature of metaphysical primitives, this represents a sort of contradiction? Or more like, Abstractions can't exist in the phenomenal world, and therefore anything we discover about them is a discovery about our world, the subjective and/or World 3 world? Or neither . . . Everything else you and Burge say about Frege seems correct, and definitely the focus of Rödl's challenge.

You would usually add supporting sentence(s) to clarify what your exact sentence means after a sentence starting with "I think" . Therefore adding "I think" to a statement seems to contribute in making the statement obscure in its exact meaning. — Corvus

I agree. In the context of this thread, the relevant rephrasings are probably:

a) I think: "The Eiffel Tower is 400m tall".
b) I think: "I think the Eiffel Tower is 400m tall".

a) is now clear, if we take it as a report about a mental event, a particular thought the speaker is having. b) remains ambiguous. The first "I think" can also be taken as a report about a thought, but then we don't know whether that thought -- the thought that "I think the Eiffel Tower is 400m tall:" -- is expressing meanings 1, 2, 3, or 4, above.

But is Rodl using the word "judge" in a particular way? — RussellA

No! -- or at least that's how I read him. He's really saying judgment shouldn't be called a propositional attitude, despite what all the traditional sources maintain. The entire separation of force (judgment, attitude) and content is off base, according to him. That's why it's kind of an outrageous viewpoint on the face of it.

It sounds like your mind is already made up that anything Nagel says about views is true. — Harry Hindu

Oh gosh, no. I just think his book does the best job I know of laying out the problem. That's the thing . . . he isn't trying to settle the issue at all, one way or another. He's trying to show why we should worry about it!

My experience is that people say, "read <insert your favorite philosopher here>" as a means of hand-waving another's arguments off, as if because some famous philosopher wrote something, that disqualifies my argument. — Harry Hindu

I know what you mean, but hopefully that's not what I'm doing. (And besides, any number of "famous philosophers" disagree completely with Nagel, so I'd need a better reason to agree with him than because he was famous and wrote something!). It's just really hard to summarize what an excellent book-length piece of philosophy says, or hard for me, at least.

the scribbles, "water is H2O" — Harry Hindu

statements (strings of scribbles and sounds) — Harry Hindu

etc.

I can see that "scribbles" is doing the work of a technical term for you, but I'm honestly not sure what you mean to be contrasting "scribbles" with. Possibly that's why I'm having trouble understanding your argument.

Someone recently told me about Noesis and Noema. I have only started reading it, but I think it's relevant? — Patterner

Circling back to this . . . Yes, I agree this is a way to state some of the problem in a different vocabulary. I know Husserl from the outside, so to speak -- he's never engaged my imagination very much. I'll tap @Joshs and see if he wants to respond; I think he may have a better perspective.

I don't need to read Nagel. — Harry Hindu

Well, this probably won't get anywhere -- you sound like your mind is made up -- but OK.

When I think "Water is H2O," I am imagining myself speaking objectively. Water would be H2O regardless of whether I think it, and regardless of whether anyone else does.

Don't take "view from nowhere" too literally. Any talk of "views" is metaphorical. All I mean, and all Nagel means, is that there appears to be an entire class of statements that remain true regardless of who says them, and in many cases regardless of whether anyone says them. But how can this be? We are, as you point out, individual knowers with limited consciousness. What could entitle us to claim a truth that is apart from point of view?

If your next question is, "Right, tell me how," I'll demur. It's just too big a subject to deal with on this thread, and we'd have to set it up with a lot of reading. Reams and reams have been written about it. For what it's worth, my current opinion is that we lack a good account of how to reach a so-called view from nowhere, but our entire philosophical enterprise rests on the need for one. Living in this tension seems to characterize the very core of doing philosophy as I see it.

Did Nagel ever address or mention the Observer effect in QM? — Harry Hindu

I don't recall that in Nagel, though I'm not sure.

How does one imagine a view from nowhere using a view from somewhere? — Harry Hindu

Indeed. If you're willing to regard that as an open, rather than rhetorical, question, then the Nagel book is for you. If you're already certain it's impossible, then not.

That's certainly one way to "look" at it. (Pardon the "view" metaphor!) I think the desirability of articulating a "view from nowhere" lies in helping us sort out subjectivity and objectivity. It's possible, of course, to simply declare that objectivity cannot mean what most people take it to mean -- that is, a point of view that is made true not by virtue of who has it but of what is seen -- but I think that's hasty. We can learn a lot more by wrestling with it as a genuine problem, and trying to see what would have to change in some of our basic philosophical outlooks, if traditional "objectivity" is indeed chimerical -- which it may well be. But again, the Nagel book goes into all that -- if you haven't read it, I highly recommend it.

A view is inherently 1st person. — Harry Hindu

This, in a simple sentence, is the bone of contention. Our language, our choice of a metaphor like "view," certainly suggests that someone or ones must be doing the "viewing." But there is a correspondingly robust tradition that says differently. Nagel's The View from Nowhere gives the best account I know of what such a view would entail. Nagel's position is also discussed at some length in Rodl's Self-Consciousness and Objectivity.

I'm going to post the following here and also in the "Question for Aristotelians" thread, because they seem to have intertwined a bit (as threads will).

This quote is from Rödl's response to the Hanks review. It presents an unusually succinct (for Rödl) explication of one of his basic positions:

I reject the idea that judgment is a propositional attitude. More generally, I reject the idea that “I judge a is F” is a predicative judgment, predicating a determination signified by “__ judge a is F” of an object designated by “I”. It is clear that, if “I judge a is F” is of this form, specifically, if it represents someone to adopt an attitude, then what it judges is not the same as what is judged in “a is F”: the latter refers to a and predicates of it being F; the former refers not to a, but to a different object and predicates of it not being F, but a different determination.

— The Force and the Content of Judgment

Now this strikes me as correct. Or, backing up just a little, I think the distinction he is drawing is meaningful, and correct to draw. I wish he had filled out "a different determination" at the end -- what exactly is the structure of "I judge a is F" if it is not understood as predication? But his larger point, I believe, is that the two statements -- "I judge a is F" and "a is F" -- have two different subjects. Rödl uses the term "object" rather than "subject," in the sense that Frege would use "object" or "argument" rather than "subject," but if my reading is correct, he's referring in each case to what we would loosely call the subject of the proposition. In the first instance, if it is a genuine predication (which Rödl denies), "judging that a is F" would be predicated of "I". In the second instance, F would be predicated of a.

This is only the first hill in Rödl's campaign to convince us of where and how Fregean logic fails, but I thought it was worth laying out as a preliminary and interesting thought.

I'm going to post the following here and also in the "p and 'I think p'" thread, because they seem to have intertwined a bit (as threads will).

This quote is from Rödl's response to the Hanks review. It presents an unusually succinct (for Rödl) explication of one of his basic positions:

I reject the idea that judgment is a propositional attitude. More generally, I reject the idea that “I judge a is F” is a predicative judgment, predicating a determination signified by “__ judge a is F” of an object designated by “I”. It is clear that, if “I judge a is F” is of this form, specifically, if it represents someone to adopt an attitude, then what it judges is not the same as what is judged in “a is F”: the latter refers to a and predicates of it being F; the former refers not to a, but to a different object and predicates of it not being F, but a different determination. — The Force and the Content of Judgment

Now this strikes me as correct. Or, backing up just a little, I think the distinction he is drawing is meaningful, and correct to draw. I wish he had filled out "a different determination" at the end -- what exactly is the structure of "I judge a is F" if it is not understood as predication? But his larger point, I believe, is that the two statements -- "I judge a is F" and "a is F" -- have two different subjects. Rödl uses the term "object" rather than "subject," in the sense that Frege would use "object" or "argument" rather than "subject," but if my reading is correct, he's referring in each case to what we would loosely call the subject of the proposition. In the first instance, if it is a genuine predication (which Rödl denies), "judging that a is F" would be predicated of "I". In the second instance, F would be predicated of a.

This is only the first hill in Rödl's campaign to convince us of where and how Fregean logic fails, but I thought it was worth laying out as a preliminary and interesting thought.

And this one replies to the Hanks review I mentioned -- they make a good pair to read:

https://www.academia.edu/110564453/The_force_and_the_content_of_judgment

To my way of thinking these are very different things. — EricH

Another difference, which gets close to the issues that concern Rödl, is that "1) The oak tree is standing there" is asserted from an implied or absent point of view, whereas "2) I think that the oak tree is standing there" is as much about what I think as it is about the oak tree; it is incorrigibly 1st-person. This can be readily seen by constructing denials of the two statements.

https://www.academia.edu/110564586/Self_Consciousness_and_Objectivity_An_Introduction_to_Absolute_Idealism

He's kind of an incarnation of German idealism. — Wayfarer

Except Hegel was never such a heart-throb. Gotta say, though, that for me the toughest sell so far in S-C&O is the connection to something genuinely Hegelian. I haven't finished the book yet and was interested to learn -- if the above-mentioned Peter Hanks is right -- that there's actually very little in it about Idealism, which was my impression so far.

@WayfarerYes, there's a short review of Self-Consciousness & Objectivity there as well that's worth reading, if only because the author, Peter Hanks, gives an unsympathetic account of Rödl's views that highlights how we must not interpret Rödl, if we're to make any sense of him.

Here's an earlier (and briefer) essay Categories of the Temporal: An Inquiry into the Forms of the Finite Understanding — Wayfarer

Thanks for this. By now I almost speak Rodelian -- his diction is surprisingly simple, if his ideas are not -- but this looks helpful.

Maybe I will get Rödl’s book and find out what he makes of these texts. — Paine

I hope you do!

J seems to take issue with something or another in Frege, but he is still working out exactly what that is. — Leontiskos

True enough, and the closest I've gotten so far to "what that is" would be: propositions seem to have to be uttered by someone; they aren't "in Nature"; and yet the Fregean treatment of them wants to point us the other way, to something called "p" which has an independent existence in some intriguing but unspecified way; they can be separated from their assertions. People like Kimhi and Rodl are aware of this too, and give differing accounts of what's going on. The line I'm pursuing at the moment involves trying to get a grip on the difference between "thought" understood as essentially 1st-personal, and the notion that "thought" is best understood as an item in Popper's World 3. Driving me fairly nuts . . .

In order for Pat to say to herself "that oak tree is shedding its leaves", Pat must be aware that she is thinking the thought, rather than someone else, such as Patachon.

The reply to Pat should be response 1, "“I think” must accompany all our thoughts" — RussellA

I think this is right if we interpret the phenomenology generously. The point of response #1 was supposed to be that, strictly speaking, "I think" isn't something we have to experience. Nor need we be aware of it, though sometimes we are. So even if Pat is not aware that she is thinking the thought, the "I think" is nonetheless present. Thus, I would question whether we need to stipulate Pat's awareness of thinking the thought. If we bring the awareness to mind, and question her about it, she will probably answer as you suggest: "Yes, it is I and no one else who thinks my thought." Is this good enough to earn the description "The 'I think' must accompany all our thoughts"? At this point we're really fine-tuning (in a way that can be all too annoying in a lot of phenomenology). I think a case could be made either way -- that "being aware that X [me] is thinking the thought" is an inseparable aspect of thinking, or that this awareness is always available to me but not always experienced.

The problem is not with propositional logic, but with interpretation. — Banno

Fair enough. I could quibble about whether there would be propositional logic without interpretation, but I take your point.

No, that's a big help. Sort of what I thought. Rödl calls this kind of statement "a thorn in the side" of propositional logic, in part because of the linguistic ambiguities you note. And these in turn lead to conceptual puzzles, such as the one about whether to conceive of thinking as an experience or an action. Also, perhaps even more crucially, whether "a thought" is a World 2 or a World 3 item. Frege would of course not have that terminology to hand, but I think a lot of what he had to say about psychologism is an attempt to sort it out.

Yes, I remember that article, I'll reread, thanks.

I may not have asked what I meant to ask here. I was wanting to affirm that all 4 statements are well-formed propositions -- that is, they are candidates for having all the things done to them that we do with propositions, including asserting, questioning, etc. In that sense, "I see the oak tree" may not be a judgment, but can't it be asserted?

Or, leaving Frege out of it, I'm trying to home in on whether 1st-person statements that quote a proposition internally, as it were (such as C and D), are in any way logically problematic.

Still beavering away at this, not ready for prime-time yet. But you can help with a clarification:

A. "The oak tree is shedding its leaves."
B. "I see the oak tree."
C. "I think* 'The oak tree is shedding its leaves'."
D. "I think** 'The oak tree is shedding its leaves'."

*Popper's World 2 sense of "think" = a mental event
**World 3 sense of "think" = results in Frege's "proposition"

Am I right that all four of these sentences are propositions in good standing, according to Frege? The fact that A is from no particular point of view, whereas B - D are, doesn't matter, correct? Also, the fact that C & D quote another proposition is likewise kosher?

Oh, no worries, these are difficult topics. FWIW, my question about representation was strictly about its Kantian use, since it seems that, if Rödl fudges anywhere, it's there. You say:

representation is absolutely necessary for any and all Kantian speculative metaphysics, — Mww

And that's my understanding too, but until now I would have said that substituting "thought" for "representation" (again, within Kant-world) isn't a major misunderstanding. Could you say more about what hinges on this for him? Many thanks.

Thanks, that's it exactly.

I'm not sure if Kant had that in mind, but I'm pretty sure that's what Rödl means. Sorry to be a broken record, but once again it's the ambiguity of "think" that is critical. Rödl wants to take "think" and "thought" in the sense of "a mental event occurring to an actual thinker or subject." And not only does he not take it in the sense of "propositional content," he's trying to construct an argument to the effect that this sense isn't meaningful.

Kant, on my best reading, is asking for a structural interpretation of the term "accompany". For him, it isn't a matter of the self-consciousness of the thinker, a la Rödl. Rather, I read him as saying that for me to have a thought at all, there must be something he calls the I think that makes the thought possible for me -- the same way space and time structure perceptual experience. Once again, we're talking "thought" as mental event, not propositional content.

I mean, the dude himself said, “Kant said, more precisely…” at the expense of his own statement’s accuracy.

But he’s got letters after his name and I don’t, so….there ya go. — Mww

Heck, I don't care about anybody's letters -- if it's wrong, it's wrong. I think you know Kant very well; would you say that Rödl's qualification here ("more precisely") does affect the accuracy of the statement "The I think accompanies all my thoughts"? And I'm still struggling to understand what's at stake in contrasting "representation" with "thought" in this context. Any help with that?

Kant's failure to draw and maintain the distinction between thought and thinking about thought. — creativesoul

Truly, I wasn't aware there was a problem here. Can you say more about Kant's failure? I know you feel you've said what needs to be said already, but I'd be grateful for a little more explication.

Yes, I read Sartre that way too.

"The oak tree is shedding its leaves" is a valid proposition but not a thought. "Think the oak tree is shedding it leaves" is not a valid proposition, as it doesn't indicate who is having the thought. "I think the oak tree is shedding its leaves", "they think the oak tree is shedding its leaves" and "he thinks the oak tree is shedding its leaves" are valid propositions expressing thoughts.

A thought cannot be had without someone having that thought. — RussellA

Yes, these reflections are in the spirit of the problem Rödl is considering. You're right to connect it with the ambiguity of "thought" as "event of thinking," which requires a thinker, and "thought" as "proposition" (this is how Frege used it), which is supposed to be available to us objectively, without needing to indicate a thinker.

Anyway….not that big a deal. — Mww

I'm sure it isn't, but I hate to get anything wrong. Let me fill out what Rödl says. His footnote for the claim "Kant said: The I think accompanies all my thoughts" reads: "CPR, B 131. More precisely, he [Kant] says that the I think must be able to accompany all my representations, for all my representations must be capable of being thought. This presupposes (what is the starting point of Kant's philosophy and not the kind of thing for which he would undertake to give an argument) that the I think accompanies all my thoughts."

Hmm. Does this respond to your point? I'm not completely clear what's at stake with the distinction between "thought" and "representation" here, but Rödl does seem to be interpreting, rather than innocently paraphrasing. Granted, the difference is blurry when it comes to reading Kant.

The semantics of “uncertainty” and “doubt” being an utterly different issue to that of the thread, granted, but I do find interest in it. — javra

Me too, thanks for clarifying. On your interpretation, "uncertainty" is definitely the better term for what I was trying to get across.

Several folks (@banno, @creativesoul, & others, sorry if I've forgotten) have responded to the OP by affirming that Pat is “right” in her report of her experience. I want to look at that more closely, starting with what exactly it is that she is right about (hence the scare-quotes).

Basically, Pat is telling us that she hasn’t had the experience that she believes she would have to have if it were true that the “I think” accompanies all our thoughts. She believes that experience would be something like an additional thought that says, “I think p,” and that occurs simultaneously or in close proximity to her thought of p. She tells us that this does not characterize her usual experience of thinking.

So, is Pat right about her experience of thinking? There’s certainly no reason to doubt it. Full disclosure: It was quite easy to write Pat’s lines for her because I pretty much share that experience. So I think we ought to say that Pat is right about this.

But I don’t think that’s what some people mean when they say that Pat is right. I think they mean that, because Pat has disconfirmed a particular version of what the “I think” would entail, therefore she is right that the “I think” does not accompany all our thoughts. That was response #4, back in the OP. But note that Pat never actually says this. She starts with a particular interpretation of what the “I think” would be, and (rightly, we’re saying) reports that she hasn’t experienced it. But unless she’s unusually dogmatic (or possibly unversed in philosophy), she wouldn’t go on to say that no other understandings of the “I think” are possible.

Here’s where I think this leaves us. We can accept that Pat’s (putatively accurate*) report rules out the possibility that the ubiquity of the “I think” consists in its being some kind of affirmative, conscious thought that accompanies every one of our mental representations – or even our propositions. But that leaves quite a bit still to explore. Response #4 states, “If your report is accurate, then the thesis that ‛the “I think” accompanies all our thoughts’ has been proven wrong.” But we see that isn’t so. What has been proven wrong is the notion that the “I think” is a subject of experience.

Now let’s compare this to the Kantian perspective. Imagine that a different experimental subject I’ve created :wink: tells us, “Kant claims that time and space are constitutive concepts of the understanding, and form the basis of any possible experience. Well, sorry, but when I experience something, I don’t also have an experience of ‛time’ and an experience of ‛space’. I just experience whatever it is that happens.”

We could reply, “Quite right, time and space are not themselves experiences, they are constitutive of experience. They are the without-which-nothing. When Kant says that they are ubiquitous throughout all possibilities of experience, he doesn’t mean you can discover them as some additional ur-experience.”

I hope the parallel with the “I think” question is clear. Referring back to my original four responses, it looks like #3, which argues basically what I just wrote, is the one we should choose if we want to explain to someone who believes that Pat’s experience justifies #4, why that isn't so.

But I don’t see the issue as settled yet. Are there good reasons for claiming that this transcendental “I think” has any reality at all? We’re not there yet. Maybe, if it isn’t an experience, it’s just a hoax. But I think we’ve made some progress by showing the alleged role of experience in all this a little more clearly.


*And response #2 is available as well, if we want to try to make a case that Pat is mistaken, or misguided, about her experience.

the stipulation that “I think” as a proposition always accompanies the proposition “I think (proposition) p” is, for my part, utterly absurd: — javra

Agreed. I resisted including a specifically propositional understanding of the "I think" as one of my suggested retorts to Pat because it seems like a non-starter. I don't believe anyone, from Descartes on, ever meant that.

A more plausible option is that the "I think" is in fact a thought of some kind, even if not a proposition. We're seeing some good reasons on this thread to question even that, though.

To answer “I did” and “I think I did” to some question is in no way and at no time equivalent: the first expresses a fact one is confident about regarding what one did, this while the second expresses something along the lines of a best presumption based on one’s best reasoning (i.e., thinking) regarding what one in fact did (presumably about a past deed one does not hold a clear recollection of). The second does not however require doubt of what one thinks is the case, but only allows for certain degrees of uncertainty. — javra

And notice what happens when we ask whether the doubt being expressed is about the thought or what the thought is about. I can be absolutely certain that, right this minute, I am having the thought "I think I did" concerning some previous action I'm not too sure about. Again, the ambiguity of "thought" as mental event (yep, definitely happening) and "thought" as that thought's intensional content (not too sure).

I see what you're getting at but I meant something a little different. It hinges on the ambiguity of the word "thought". We commonly use the word to mean two distinct things: a mental event occurring at a particular place and time, and the content or import of said event ("proposition," in Fregean terms). Traditionally, the latter is common to any particular instantiations of the "thought" in the first sense.

So we could be talking about the mental event "thought that Paris is crowded" or the proposition "Paris is crowded". We can assert things about a mental event that we couldn't assert about a proposition, including something like, "I had Thought X come into my mind but I don't understand the proposition it states." We couldn't say (and mean it), "I'm asserting X (the proposition) but I don't understand it."

Just as a preliminary, I'll lay out Rödl's very stark position:

What is thought cannot be isolated from the act of thinking it; it cannot be understood as the attachment of a force to a content. This may seem hard to accept. — Rödl

Indeed! He goes on to list the benefits that are generally agreed to accrue if we think in terms of force and content:

[The claim is that] We need to distinguish force from content in order to describe disagreement among different subjects. . . . We need to distinguish force from content if we are to represent the progress one makes from asking a question to answering it. . . . Further, the distinction is needed if we are to understand inferences that involve hypothetical judgments. . . . Thus it [would have] great explanatory power. Giving it up is costly. — Rödl

But:

As the force-content distinction makes no sense, it has no explanatory power. There is no cost to abandoning it. — Rödl

So if this is true, Rödl has got to show not merely that the force/content distinction is an incorrect analysis of how propositions work. He also has to make the case that the distinction is literally nonsensical, that there is a deep basic confusion on Frege's part in the way he divides up the conceptual territory involved here.

Why in the world would Rödl think this? He believes that Fregean logic can't make sense of self-conscious thought -- that we need a clearer way to describe what is actually happening when a person thinks.

There can be no Fregean account of first-person thought, no account that provides it with a Fregean thought as its object. — Rödl

And by "Fregean thought," he of course means a proposition. A real cliff-hanger, more to follow . . . I'll let you cool down ! :smile:

I agree that when you say, "Paris is crowded," you're stating your thought (belief, opinion, judgment) that Paris is crowded. We can make up unusual circumstances when that wouldn't be true, but let's grant that this is generally what's going on.

However, when you say "I think Paris is crowded," you can be saying either of two things. You can be saying, "I find myself thinking the thought, 'Paris is crowded'. Hmm, wonder if that's true." (In which case we'd be more likely to punctuate your statement as "I think, 'Paris is crowded'."). Or you can be saying, "I do in fact think (believe) Paris is crowded." The first instance foregrounds the thought, the fact of thinking; the second focuses on the content of the thought. Both are pretty common usages, I would say. We often report a thought qua thought, as an interesting mental event.

And see my attempt at a similar disambiguation, above.

I think you're saying that the use of "I think" here is my sense 1, not sense 2. If I already believed or asserted it, why ask? Right, that would be a good example of why the force/content distinction seems necessary. I'm still working my way toward articulating some of the possible Rodelian responses here, but I definitely appreciate the problem.