I think my OP explanation was barely "pretty good," but 20 pages later, your summary captures one important point. I could go back and count at least a half-dozen excellent questions that the Kimhi-inspired challenge to Frege on assertion has sparked, some quite technical, as we've seen. But we shouldn't lose sight of this very simple one that you highlight: Propositions are not "in the wild"; they are bits of language, as Kimhi puts it. That may indeed be obvious, but many of the consequences are not. And Kimhi himself is working toward a highly unusual, even mystical, understanding of how the bridge between thought and world should be construed. Well, not unusual to Classical phil, but unusual now.

That could well be true, and fits with your earlier point that Kimhi isn't (here) interested in being precise with terms. And ordinarily I'd just say, OK fine -- except that the subject of the book is precisely the difference, if any, and the unity, if any, between the world ("A or ~A") and the mind ("p or ~p"). Ontology or psychology? Events or statements? Being or thinking? etc. I guess all I'm saying is that I wish Kimhi had sacrificed the big-picture view about "whatever is true/false/is/isn't" and given us more details about how assertion and V2B apply in the various instances.

Ha, our comments overlapped. You picked up on the same question in the footnote.

Specifically, [Kimni] is saying that assertoric force is not limited to assertions. — Leontiskos

One can see here why J came under the impression that a non-assertoric force was in play — Leontiskos

This is starting to get hair-splitty, but yes, I would still say that an "assertoric force not limited to assertions" is either incoherent or, in some sense or manifestation, also non-assertoric. But the nomenclature doesn't matter so much. Better terms could have been chosen, starting with Kimhi himself.

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

The problem is, that’s not all Kimhi says about what the veridical to-be does. Maybe this is only Kimhi's reading of Kahn, but he says in the footnote on p. 9 that the V2B is what "confers existence" on "that which is true/false or is/is-not the case". The Analytics, he says, want to believe that the force/content distinction allows them to regard propositional content independently of the veridical. But the explanatory parentheses about what's covered by the V2B is alarming: "(e.g., a thought, a sentence, a state of affairs)". So it’s not just that, as you say, existence is conferred on propositions by the V2B. Evidently, the V2B makes no distinction between a psychological event (thought), a statement (sentence), and something non-linguistic in the world (a state of affairs). Even if Kimhi (or Kahn) is using "thought" in the Fregean sense of "proposition," this is still hard to swallow. How do you understand the V2B’s connection with states of affairs, which are generally considered to be the subjects of propositions, not the propositions themselves? Is this still a type of judgment or assertion?

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

If we were strictly talking about propositions, then I think this would be right.

The problem I see here is that the metaphysics has been detached from the claims. Perhaps Kimhi is decrying this. — schopenhauer1

Do you mean that we (or some philosophers) are making claims about metaphysics without realizing that they are in fact only claims, from someone's point of view -- thoughts, in other words? I can sort of see how this might connect to Kimhi's insistence on uniting what he calls the ontological and psychological explanations of logic. He doesn't think the "detachment" can happen at all.

Then we can say that knowing words is knowing how to work out the meanings of sentences containing them. — Pierre-Normand

This is fine, as long as we expand what a "sentence" is to include ostensive gestures and other "non-linguistic sentences." Anyone who's watched a toddler learn words, knows that it starts with an adult pointing to the target and then saying the word. But I'm happy to consider the pointing as a sentence of sorts: "That's a ball!" Indeed, such a sentence is often uttered along with the pointing.

All these problems have been dealt [with] before by the ancients and then by the Kantians — schopenhauer1

By "dealt with" do you mean "resolved"? Surely not. If you only mean "recognized and discussed," then Kimhi, for one, would be the first to insist on this.

the point being that psychology (aka "psychologism") structures the world such that A is ~A, but we cannot see but the metaphysical reality is thusly obscured. — schopenhauer1

I want to understand this, but can't quite. Could you elaborate? I would have thought that psychology strutures the world so that A is not ~A.

Both your responses allude to the difficulties I see here.

You write down "P" and that means P is a premise; it's *treated as* true. — Srap Tasmaner

Right, and why would anyone question that? Except that Kimhi and perhaps Rodl (I don't know much about him, apart from the citations in Boynton) are saying, "Wait a minute, not so fast. Then what is the judgment stroke supposed to be doing? Does it import or ratify actual truth somehow? Who has acted thus upon p? What exactly would it have meant to 'treat something as true' without the judgment stroke?" Such annoying questions, but are we sure how we should answer?

If you read a textbook on anatomy, you aren't supposed to think of it as being asserted by someone in particular. — frank

Indeed, and the use of p in a logic textbook isn't meant to invoke a real human subject doing the writing. But here again: Someone did write the anatomy textbook, and if it ever came to a question of accuracy, who that person was and the status of their ability to assert truthfully would be very much at issue. It's much worse with logic, because of the self-reflection involved. "Someone" is offering us statements and perhaps judgments that purport to be true, and they are about what purporting to be true is, in logic, which includes the vexing question of assertion. We want to say that this is "innocent" at the level of p, but does Frege's own understanding of what a proposition is, allow us to do so?

This may be where the uniqueness of thinking, a la Kimhi, starts to make itself felt. A thought simply cannot be separated from a thinker, on this view.

I'm not sure about any of this, but it's pretty clear that Kimhi wants us to question every assumption about how we're entitled to do logic -- even if we only wind up reinstating the assumptions.

The book has been out what since 2018? I don't know how many articles have been updated since then, but he gets not a single mention on SEP. (I haven't checked his Google scholar or PhilPapers rankings.) — Srap Tasmaner

OK. I assumed from the Martin and Conant cites that T&B is being taken seriously. Maybe not.

the depth and originality of Kimhi's thought
— J

I consider the jury decidedly out on this. — Srap Tasmaner

OK, maybe I'm a bit previous here! Admittedly, we could be spending all the time we're spending on Kimhi because we want to figure out if he's got anything worth contributing, not because we already know he does. And as I was saying to @Leontiskos earlier, of course the jury is still out, we don't yet know what other 1st class philosophers are going to do with him. All I can say is, after a lot of years watching flavor-of-the-month philosophers come and go (ah, remember Paris fashions?), Kimhi feels like the real deal to me. We'll see . . .

Frege wants propositions to be the object of thought, but he also wants them to have independent existence. — Srap Tasmaner

Yes, that's the nub of the question I was raising with my statements (1) and (2).

you cannot just rip it from a thinker's mouth and solve the problem of the independence of propositions. — Srap Tasmaner

And (1) tries to do just that, hence my question -- who here is thinking this? It goes back again to those provocative lines from Rodl about the "life of p":

Philosophers are in the habit of indicating the object of judgment by the letter p. There is an insouciance with respect to this fateful letter. It stands ready quietly, unobtrusively, to assure us that we know what we are talking about. — Sebastian Rodl

Part of our unearned insouciance is this story we tell ourselves about how p can, of course, "stand on its own" in some obvious way.

(This turns out to be the other side of my realization that Frege probably means 'judgment' in some strangely objective sense.) — Srap Tasmaner

If we decide that he's talking about actual rather than purported or exemplary judgments, then yes, the strange objectivity arises because he's committed to vouching for their truth. This connects with what Rombout speaks about when he says, "In order to judge, one really has to do something. Judging is not a capacity but an act."

It's not you. Apparently some version of T&B had circulated for a long time and Kimhi didn't want to publish it but was finally persuaded. As I said someplace earlier, this book has an editor's fingerprints all over it, and not a good one. So much could have been improved, especially the layout of the progression of his ideas. But here we all are, chewing it over, and that, IMHO, is a tribute to the depth and originality of Kimhi's thought, despite his shortcomings as an organized writer.

Section 2.2.2 is good overview of the Kantian debt, but it presupposes a certain reading of Frege that I'm trying to get clearer about. Do we all agree that "in the Fregean paradigm a true judgment is a bit pleonastic: only true statements may be asserted, and therefore judgments can only be true"? (ftnt. 38, p. 23) I think Frege indeed says this. But then we have "True judgments aren't just true for a subject, or according to a subject, but objectively true and acknowledged to be so by a subject." (23) The connection for Kant is clear enough, but is Rombout right when he says that "Frege needs a realm of thoughts that may be grasped" by a subject?

Let's go back to my statement (1). To say it, all Frege needs to do is put a judgment stroke in front of it. Does this mean that Frege is the subject, in the sense of "the one who is acknowledging the objective truth"? Is this really what he means? Or is it closer to a Kantian transcendental subject? I'm trying to imagine Frege replying, "Yes, every proposition I've prefixed with a judgment stroke is one I know to be true." Wouldn't he be more likely to say, "These are for purposes of example"? But now we're back to purported or believed or proposed truths.

If I've missed a specific bit in Rombout 2.2.2. that addresses this, I'd be happy to have the reference, but even happier to hear your thoughts about it.

Frege is not merely attributing a belief to a subject with his judgment-stroke, — Leontiskos

That's my reading too -- he's not using the judgment stroke merely to mark a purported truth. But how shall we characterize what he is doing? This is where the problems start to crop up . . .

I just don't think anyone other than a few stray mystics is ever truly illogical. . . . Statements of logic, like the LONC, are indubitable. You don't really have any choice in that. — frank

It’s an interesting point. Would you agree that it’s possible to be illogical without knowing it, or meaning it? If so, then plenty of folk besides mystics are frequently illogical. I think what you’re saying is that, once we become aware of the logic/illogic in a statement, we don’t have a choice about which is which. We can no longer think in the way we formerly did, in our confusion, and still claim to make sense. That may well be true.

Am I missing the point here? — frank

Not at all. And if you regard “Either A or ~A” as a Humean generality, then your view of the connection between logic and the world would fall under Kimhi’s category of “psycho / logicism” -- “Either A or ~A” is how things look to us given that OPNC is only an expectation rooted in logic. There may be some version of reality, beyond our ken, in which "The cat is black" and "The cat is not black" happily coexist. (Not talking fuzzy logic here, of course.) His category of “logo / psychism” flips it the other way round – now it’s the world that is indeed displaying logical structure, and if logic as thought does the same, that is an application of the OPNC, not a new principle; we think logically because the world is logical.

@Banno @Pierre-Normand Great analysis of the Kimhi footnote from @Srap Tasmaner , above. It sets this up:

I think this heterogenous, but still orderly, collection are the forces we're speaking about. They're baked into the expression like the truth condition is alleged to be.

Whereas the illocutionary force concept is not baked into the commonalities between sentences whose factual content is equivalent. It operates on sentences with a given factual content. Forces seem aligned with the conditions that allow us to grasp an expression's content - content as affirmation, content as rejection. Illocutionary forces are means of operating on an expression's content, content as factual, rejection as practical. — fdrake

From the viewpoint provided us by Srap, I think this is right, thanks.

*
Here’s a somewhat related question arising from the many discussions about assertion on this thread, and also from Rombout’s essay/thesis on the judgment stroke as understood by Frege, Russell, and Wittgenstein. (A really helpful work, if you haven't looked at it yet.) How we answer it may shed light on assertion in general.

Consider these two statements:

(1) ‛It is true that p’
(2) ‛Someone asserts that p is true’

In ordinary language, it’s plain to see that they don’t mean the same thing. (1) makes a truth claim, while (2) describes some act of assertion, the subject of which may or may not be true. Compare ‛It’s true that the sky was cloudy today’ and ‛Pat asserted that the sky was cloudy today’. In the first case, the subject is the sky, in the second we’re talking about an assertion of Pat’s. Pat may well be wrong, but I can still truthfully say that she made the assertion.

What’s going on here is a “game,” if you like, about how the word “assert” is used in English. Most competent speakers would have no trouble explaining it. We would say, “ ‛Assert’ can mean ‛say something that is true,’ or it can mean ‛say something purporting to be true’. It depends on the context, and usually it’s clear which meaning is intended.”

Which meaning does Frege have in mind with the judgment stroke? Show your work. :wink:

About Hanna, I agree completely. This sort of bombast is part of why I disliked his review so much. But I quoted him to display an attitude which I think is commendable -- that we can recognize that a piece of philosophy can be very important while also deeply incorrect in the certitude of its conclusions.

I don't know if it helps with Banno's cat. — Srap Tasmaner

Schrodinger's cat: Unclear if it's alive or dead
Banno's cat: Unclear if it's referentially determinate
Kimhi's cat: Must be paired with a non-cat to make sense!

:yum:

The idea of logic as normative crops up more in everyday speech, I would say. "You're not being logical!" is a normative reprimand; the idea is that a good arguer ought to use correct logic. More generally, we seem to believe that in most cases, logic represents a template or set of guidelines for good reasoning, and it's all too easy not to use them. We aren't forced to think logically, in the way that, say, we're forced to digest food using [whatever the heck we digest food with].

This is all fairly trivial. Kimhi's idea of the normative applies when a philosopher, noticing the Ontological Law of Non-Contradiction ("both A and ~A cannot be the case"), also notices that it's possible to say contradictory things, inadvertently or on purpose. This philosopher then claims that we shouldn't do this. We ought to fit our thinking to the way the world is. (But again, Kimhi himself is certainly not that philosopher. He won't countenance the dualism.)

You ask what I think logic is. Basically, I agree with you that logic describes one of the "boundaries of the mind." But this boundary is peculiar in two respects, both hinted at above. One, it's a boundary that applies somewhat hypothetically: If we wish to talk sense and not nonsense, we're going to keep within logic's boundary. And two, our reasons for trying to respect it -- to refrain from talking nonsense -- seem all bound up with the OPNC, with our desire to think correctly about the way the world really is.

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

This question about having faith in Kimhi perhaps illuminates a significant difference in how we approach philosophy. I said in the OP that I was unsure whether Kimhi was raising a plausible challenge to Frege on assertion. I was pleasantly surprised to find a number of us willing to do some deep diving, in order to explore this and related questions. But l remain unsure about the Kimhi-inspired challenge, and whether Kimhi's entire project is solid, or whether he's someone who can raise excellent questions but not provide arguable answers.

But there it is . . . I wasn't reading Kimhi in the first place in order to find some truth that might settle some important controversy. I don't believe, at this extremely deep level of meta-philosophy, that such truths exist. I read K in order to better understand the questions, and to work on interpretation (in the hermeneutic sense) of why the protracted antinomies here are so persistent. And here, if you like, my "faith" in Kimhi has proved justified: For all the difficulty attendant on reading him, my insight into the underpinnings of predicate logic, and the many other questions that have arisen, has sharpened, and generated a host of other fascinating (to me) issues. That's why it's worth it, despite the screaming. (His inadequacies as a writer come with the philosophical territory, I would say. Most philosophers aren't good stylists.)

Robert Hanna, in that T&B review that I otherwise didn't like, stood up for a similar outlook:

To begin at the end, my overall judgment is that although Thinking and Being is indeed a
first-rate and perhaps even brilliant piece of philosophy, and although it has genuine
historico-philosophical import, in that, in my opinion, it effectively closes out a 100+
year-long tradition in modern philosophy, namely, the classical Analytic tradition,
nevertheless, all its central theses are false. — Robert Hanna,

I'm figuring that such a conclusion might be incoherent to you -- how could Kimhi be brilliant and important if he gets it all wrong? My outlook is even more modest than Hanna's: We're not yet sure whether he gets it right or wrong, and whether the kinds of things that worry him are in fact solvable. It's too soon, the grist hasn't gone through the mill yet. This happens whenever an important work appears, and has nothing to do, in my opinion, with bringing some controversy to a conclusion. I don't believe philosophy settles questions in that way. Nor will K's brilliance be burnished or tarnished if we never do reach consensus.

I guess that's the target you asked about.

the view from anywhere is eccentric, looking to account for what others say they see, while seeking broad consensus . . . It acknowledges that what we are doing here is inherently embedded in a community and extends beyond the self. — Banno

Very good. Would you agree that both the VA and VN are attempts to capture some concept of objectivity? (read "intersubjectivity" in the case of VA)

I am unsure why Evans would be committed to this atomistic thesis or to take it to be an indispensable feature of an extension of Frege's notion of sense as applied to object dependent thoughts. So, I don't quite understand what motivates Kimhi's rejection of Evan's account. — Pierre-Normand

I think the answer to your question lies in the first line Kimhi quotes from Evans, which begins: "The sense of a sentence, which is of course a function of the sense of its parts . . . " (my itals). Kimhi is probably reading this to mean that Evans accepts the building-block account of propositional meaning. I'd need to read more from Evans to decide if I agree that he does, but I'll bet that's what K is objecting to.

K's specific argument about "taking different attitudes to p" is pretty good, don't you think? If you can use your building blocks to build a statement like "p & ~p" without violating any spatio-logical rules, then it does seem to invalidate the previous, psycho / logical criterion for what is thinkable, for what can be a thought. And I especially like footnote 40. (Have you noticed how much important stuff is in the footnotes that might just as well have been promoted into the body of the text? Having been an editor for many years, I can tell you that this is a sure sign of a confusing ms. receiving a heavy edit from someone trying to give it structure.) Kimhi talks about "pragmatic contradiction" as the reason you can't attach a judgment stroke to "p & ~p"; if you use the stroke, you show that you know what it means to understand a logical expression. This is very similar to Habermas's "performative contradiction" -- sounds like material for a good paper.

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

I wouldn't try to alter your philosophical convictions -- there's too much of that already on TPF -- but I truly don't think platonism (including Fregean platonism) needs to be anyone's opponent. That is, unless one takes a very rigid view of it as talking about Objects Called Forms that have some kind of otherworldly existence. Perhaps that was Plato's belief, though I doubt it, but it needn't be ours. It doesn't sound as if your thoughts about hylomorphism would rule out talk of abstracta in a less reified way.

No no, I'm not accusing [@fdrake] of platonism — Srap Tasmaner

You can go ahead and accuse me of platonism if you like! In this sense, which circles back to what you're saying about the World 3 nature of propositions: Plato's Forms were a somewhat amazing (given the time and place) attempt to find "the view from nowhere." Intelligible objects are shown to any and all of us, requiring only the Good to illuminate them. If Plato had had the word, I believe he would have called them objective. 3,000 years later, we're still on the same hunt. Frege wants his Laws of Thought to reveal a specifically platonic world of numbers, but you're right that it can go much farther than that. And:

The problem is, the reasons for seeing judgment and inference as objective would apparently vouchsafe the objectivity of just about anything. — Srap Tasmaner

I'd offer that as a nutshell description of the canyon that loomed between Analytic and Continental philosophy in the last century. If just about anything can be presented as a World 3 thing, accessible via the view from nowhere, then we have a real problem about subjectivity and interpretation. New OP called for, clearly .
. .

A mind and a thought just are related correctly or incorrectly. — Srap Tasmaner

I think that's close. For Kimhi, the key concept is affirmation and denial, not positive or negative predication.

I find reading Kimhi pretty unpleasant — Srap Tasmaner

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

The role "the laws of thought" in Frege plays, Kimhi keeps an analogue of it, but they're less ironclad logical laws and more tight constraints on thought sequences/acts of thinking. I don't know what their nature is, or how they work, but Kimhi seems to want to notice expansive regularities in them. — fdrake

Part of what makes their nature hard to grasp is that Kimhi insists on linking them with the laws of being. Or rather, he's trying to get us to think outside that dualism. The psychological PNC and the ontological PNC are not "two different principles. In the end the monist will say neither that they are two, nor one. Or rather: that they are the same and different. " (31). To anticipate your question -- no, I don't know what that means either.

Jack identifies it as G#
Jill identifies it as Ab.
G# and Ab are the same frequency.
Since G# and Ab are the same frequency, they're extensionally equivalent in terms of sound frequencies.
The note will be identified mistakenly when and only when it is not heard as G — fdrake

Right.

The thing that would let you see Jack and Jill's mistake as the same is the final principle there, right - the fact that the note will be identified mistakenly when and only when it is not heard as G. — fdrake

I don't think this would get you to "the same mistake." They're both failing to hear it as G, and they're both identifying the note mistakenly, but the question is, whether the way each describes what they (mis)hear is just a preference for different enharmonic spelling. Which leads to . . .

If Jack always identified every enharmonic equivalent in the sharp form, and Jill always identified every enharmonic equivalent as the flat form, the means by which they make the mistake would be a little different. — fdrake

This may be true, but we'd need to hear more about what "the means" represents. Anyway, the case I had in mind involved more than spelling. I'm imagining a case where Jack has an understanding of a particular musical passage that would entail the G# spelling, not just cos he likes sharps better than flats, but because that would be the correct spelling on his analysis. Same for Jill, in reverse. And sadly, they're both wrong, not at a theoretical level at all, but plain old faulty ears.

I think there's a way of mucking with it. I'm not sure why I'm mucking with it at this point though. — fdrake

Agreed, let's stop! It was just by-the-way.

The thing is, this thread is about what sort of thing the judgment of a proposition is. I mistook it, for some time, to be about "assertion" in a speech-act or language-game sense, because of the phrase "assertoric force", — Srap Tasmaner

Yes, assertion in the sense of judgment, but I wouldn't blame yourself much for any confusion. My OP didn't discriminate, because I hadn't taken on board the point you're now drawing our attention to. And as we've seen, Kimhi himself can be hard to parse. In any case, the various sub-threads concerning other senses of "assertion" have been valuable, at least to me.

This had not occurred to me, though it might be obvious to the rest of you. And I think it's very much in Kimhi's neighborhood. The judgment he wants restored to its rightful place is not some subjective thing, but third-realm just like propositions. — Srap Tasmaner

Yes. This is what drives him crazy -- how can we unify what appears to be a hopeless gap between the psychological and the formal? How can we bring "I judge p rightly" into some kind of entailment relation with what is the case about the world? Kimhi believes that Fregean logic doesn't permit the inference (1) S is F; (2) A thinks that S is F; (3) Thus, A truly thinks that S is F.

I agree, but it doesn't necessarily challenge Srap's point, it only insists on being more precise, which is all to the good.

Can we think of an example where no amount of precision can create a genuine synonymy between, say, two mistakes? If the precision is only about the object of the mistakes, then yes, I think so. Here's one that occurs to me offhand as a candidate: Jack misidentifies a note in music as a G# (it's really a G natural), Jill misidentifies it as an Ab. As you may know, G# and Ab refer to the same note, under different music-theoretic circumstances, rather like Morning Star and Evening Star. So have Jack and Jill made the "same mistake"? Arguably, no amount of precisifying about the note itself is going to resolve this, since Jack and Jill are making their respective mistakes for different reasons. But then again, they're hearing the exact same tone and being wrong about it with the same result. I want to say it's two different mistakes. This is perhaps a cousin of the "carrying the 1" example.

Like @banno and @frank, I believe this is right. The question, "How far can this analogy go?" is a good one. Perhaps we should say: It can go as far as propositional content can go. So, the same mistake? Probably. Taste in music? Maybe. Fear of snakes? No.

Excellent stuff here, thanks.

Not at all sure what "symbolic and actual" is doing here. — Banno

I think what Kimhi means is: A symbolic occurrence would be when p is used as, quite literally, a symbol, such as when we show the modus ponens inference. It is not "spelled out" but is understood to stand for "any well-formed proposition." The actual occurrence would be "p spelled out," an actual sentence in some particular context of assertion/mention/belief etc.

It's worth asking what sort of thing a "Law of thought" might be. Presumably a Law of thought must be such that it hold true in all cases. — Banno

But then there's the other sense of "law" which refers to something that doesn't necessarily hold true in all cases, but ought to. Kimhi says that this normative sense of "law" is characteristic of a dualistic understanding of how thought relates to being. Using the PNC as his example, he argues that if non-contradiction is supposed to be a principle of being, a statement about how things are in the world ("either A or not-A"), then the psychological version is "a normative requirement: that one should not contradict oneself." He doesn't think it has to follow from the ontological version. Which is part of why he rejects the whole dualistic model.

it's not about the view from nowhere, but about the view from anywhere. — Banno

I like this. I think Nagel would point out the following: Even something as abstract as a "view from anywhere" implies that someone, some consciousness, is going to step into that place and attain the view. But built in to the "view from nowhere" is the (very abstract) notion that something remains the case regardless of anyone's viewpoint. But the two views can be made quite similar if we just say that the view from anywhere is strictly hypothetical as regards a viewer. If anyone steps in, then their view will be the same as any other "anywhere-stepper."

I'm firmly with Kuhn here. I think there's close to zero chance that physicalism will turn out to be able to explain consciousness -- unless you just stipulate that anything that's real is physical, therefore consciousness is physical, QED, but that's no explanation at all. Or I suppose you could do a Dennett and "explain" consciousness by trying to show that it isn't real. Carroll's attempt to reduce the issue to a manner of speaking is hopeless. Kuhn's case for the two Seans is pretty good, and he's right to deny that it's a parallel with the Ship of Theseus. But we're waiting on the science here.

I'm way out of my depth on your other speculations. I'll watch the thread and see what I can learn.

I love this topic, but all I'll say here (it really needs its own thread) is that any plausible account of the view from nowhere would have to explain why it's a desideratum of rational thought, while at the same time leaving room for subjectivity, for me being a Kierkegaardian individual rather than merely an item in the Hegelian System or, worse, the victim of "rationalization" in Weber's sense. I agree, the 20th century was a rough time for objectivity -- it doesn't look as attractive as it used to -- but I'm not sure this forum would make sense without some faith in the view from nowhere.

one way of buttressing the idea that propositions have independent existence is to align them with the mental, rather than the physical. — Srap Tasmaner

Yes, and Kimhi wants to do neither. He’s after a unity of thinking and being. And no, I still haven't completely grasped how he gets there.

the question is in what sense "what he said" is a thought, while the actual words spoken were merely a physical "expression" or even representation of that thought. — Srap Tasmaner

To that I would add a third discrimination: “thought” in the Fregean sense of “proposition” or “propositional content.” So we have:
- “Thought” as a mental event. Mine is not yours, etc.
- “Thought” as the content of that mental event – this is the Fregean sense. Here, my thought is the same as yours, or can be.
- The language in which thought-as-content may be expressed. This is important because we need to leave room for synonymy between languages.

I often find it helpful to invoke Karl Popper’s “Three Worlds” idea in this sort of discussion. Popper’s World 1 is the physical world, the world which would exist, in a rough-and-ready way, without any consciousnesses. World 2 is the mental world, understood strictly as mental events, or brain events. Each occurs at a Time T-1, -2, etc. and is unique in the sense that no one can have the exact same event. World 3 is the world of our mental constructions, our ideas, propositions, theories, poems. As I said above, it’s basically the content of thoughts – it’s what the World 2 events are about.

There is a point you can make about content, the proposition, and a different point you can make about actual occurrences, in which that content features, but Frege, I think it is claimed, forgets what he's about and tries to make a single point about both, or tries to make a point about one that can only be made about the other, and somehow tricks himself into thinking he has not mixed up the two. — Srap Tasmaner

I read Kimhi to be saying that both the symbolic and actual occurrences of p are World 3 objects – they are contents of thought, one unasserted, one asserted – but the actual occurrences can’t be understood if we strip away any connection with assertoric force/truth value and try to treat them as if they were synonymous with symbolic occurrences.

I think it is, very much so. The "view from nowhere," on Thomas Nagel's understanding, is precisely the longed-for objective view that, in this case, would grant thoughts some autonomy from being "merely about us," in whatever way you want to take that idea. Everything I understand about Frege says that he would have heartily endorsed the view from nowhere as essential even to the simple self-identity of one instance of 'p' with another.

The passage from Kimhi you cite was key to my OP. I appreciate your analysis. Interestingly, Kimhi seems to equate "Wittgenstein" with the Tractatus. There is very little indication that Kimhi has absorbed later Witt, and he never speaks in terms of language games.

The full context principle assigns meanings (Fregean senses) to subsentential expressions (e.g. names, predicates and logical connectives) not only in the context of whole sentences but also in the context of the other sentences a sentence relates to in a language game. (And this is not exhausted merely by inferential relations). This is the point about actual occurrences of propositions — Pierre-Normand

I think Kimhi would accept this as a paraphrase of his thought. If we want to continue to speak Kimhian, we could replace "in a language game" with "in an actual occurrence of p."

Me too.

Great references again, thank you. I've just gotten onto McDowell and Rodl, and now I can add Martin and Conant. That was the good thing about grad school, you could actually read all day . . .

What still remains an open question to me (even though I lean towards the Wittgensteinian quietism of McDowell) is whether their accounts of this self-conscious propositional unity constitutes an improvement over the charitable accounts, put forth by Evans and McDowell, of what Frege was trying to accomplish when he sought to individuate thought/proposition at the level of sense (Sinn) rather than at the level of extensional reference (Bedeutung) in order to account both for the rationality of the thinking subject and for the objective purport of their thoughts. — Pierre-Normand

Well put. What you're calling the charitable accounts do seem to capture what Frege wanted to do, and why (especially the desire to explain the objectivity of thoughts), but I'll have to read more of McDowell.

Good citations.

Language is here in a predicament that justifies the departure from what we normally say. — Frege, On Concept and Object – Posthumous Writings, 97 – footnotes omitted

True, we cannot fail to recognize that we are here confronted by an awkwardness of language, which I admit is unavoidable — Frege, On Concept and Object – Posthumous Writings, 97 – footnotes omitted

But nobody can require that my stipulations shall be in accord with Kerry’s mode of expression, but only that they be consistent in themselves. — Frege, On Concept and Object – Posthumous Writings, 97 – footnotes omitted

Is it my imagination, or is Frege sounding a bit defensive here? He seems to recognize the shortcomings of his approach -- the awkwardness, the departure from ordinary language. His project, as we know, is to improve or even abandon ordinary language in the interest of clarifying logic's objective structure. So here, he's trying to confine himself to saying it's a predicament about language, not thought, and he's also saying that he's entitled to make his own stipulations about how to use terms.

My contention is that he can't confine himself to a "language predicament," because his predicate logic is claiming to do so much more than reform language. The individual-term question is merely an obvious starting-place for such a critique. And while he's entitled to withhold his agreement from Kerry or anyone else, his stipulations are also not in accord with many of our most useful common modes of expression, and in such a case, I don't think consistency is enough. Put another way: This is a high price to pay for formalism, especially when it claims to control something as basic as what can be said to exist.

(And just to pay Frege the respect he deserves, I agree with @Banno's fruit-fly analogy. There is a great deal to be learned about thought from Frege's intricate constructions, regardless of whether some of his metalogical premises might be questionable.)

we can't use utterances or sentences as the basis of agreement. It has to be propositions, or the content of an uttered sentence. With regard to whether there's life on other planets, notice how we "smuggle in" an assertion as Kimhe puts it. — frank

Yes, very good. That said, I believe there is still a larger issue about the basis of agreement -- broadly pragmatic and communication-oriented, or claiming some version of objectivity? But that's a deep rabbit-hole, and as long as you're not saying that agreement is only consensual, then we're on the same page.

And the discussion in this thread of modus ponens was just plain muddled. — Banno

Could you say more about this? Perhaps the target statement ought to be this, from T&B:

Geach agrees with Frege that we identify an argument as valid by recognizing it to be in accord with a principle of inference which is a norm that pertains to acts. Thus, on Geach's reading, Frege's observation [that p may occur in discourse as asserted or unasserted while still being recognized as the same p] applies both to an actual argument of the form modus ponens and to modus ponens as a principle of inference. Therefore, Geach's understanding of Frege's observation conflates the two senses of propositional occurrence: symbolic and actual. — p. 38

I take this passage to be central to what Kimhi wants to say in the book. If you can lay out problems with it, I'd find that helpful.

It's hard to be sure, but there seems to be a profound misapprehension concerning what logic is, underpinning the Kimhi's work and much of the writing on this thread. I'm not inspired to go down that path. — Banno

It is hard to be sure. The other possibility is that it's a profound contribution to our understanding of what logic is (T&B, that is, not necessarily this thread!). But of course you're right to be skeptical and to demand clear arguments. As someone else posted above, I hope you can stay with us and at least view the path from drone height, even if you don't want to go down it.

He's reliant on ambiguity. But further, he seems not to consider the developments of logic and metalogic since Frege - and they are profound. — Banno

I wouldn't sell him short. "Reliant on ambiguity" implies that he's trying to get away with something, but I think it's rather the case that he's not a very skillful writer and doesn't always realize how murky things are getting.

Your second point seems true, though. Kimhi targets Frege as if he had published the Beg. last year. He doesn't refer to many sources that are contemporary, except concerning Aristotle.