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.

This intended reading, I think, preserves the philosophical distinction Frege is drawing in this passage between the mental act of thinking (grasping the thought) and the truth of the thought itself. — Pierre-Normand

Yes. You've just said what I said, above, but you said it better. I should have read this more carefully before posting -- the point has been well made.

That's what a proposition is supposed to be: that thing we can agree or disagree on. — frank

I like the clarity of this, but doesn't it beg the question? The "other side," so to speak, would say, "A proposition is supposed to be a thing with a truth-value, something we don't merely agree or disagree on, but claim objective reasons for doing so."

I agree that this is the best way to understand what's at issue here about "thought". (Though I don't want to take sides on the larger question.). Pretty clearly, the first quote finds Frege using "thought" to refer to an activity, an event that can happen in a mind, one involving a separation of sense or content from truth-value. When such an event happens, Frege wants to call it a thought, even as you and I might. The second quote is quite different. Here we have a much more technical term -- let's call it Gedanke for clarity -- which is meant to represent the content referred to above. In that sense it is propositional.

(And I see that some of your subsequent posts pick up this theme of how technical Gedanke is.)

Both IEP and Roberts refer to this Gedanke sense, but neither give a specific reference in Frege. From the context, I'm guessing it's to be found in On Sense and Reference. I don't have time today to hunt it down but maybe someone else can.

There is still no clear account of what this thread is about. — Banno

Well, it’s certainly wandered off in many directions. I just reread my OP, which included my optimistic belief that we didn’t have to be concerned with “what Kimhi says” in order to understand the question I was raising. Ha! But I’m glad to have stimulated a lot of interest in Kimhi.

I think now that the “challenge to Frege on assertion” is just that, and probably never should have wandered into speculations about different kinds or modes of “force,” even though Kimhi himself often seems to do that. The challenge asks whether we have to understand all actual occurrences of p in the same way that p is understood in modus ponens – that is, as a logical unit that can be handled within a formal system. The trivial answer is, “No, of course not, people say all kinds of stuff.” But I thought, and still think, that a much deeper question is being raised here, a metalogical one about how what we think and can say is related to our existence claims about what is. Maybe another way (not in the OP) to formulate the challenge would be to ask, "Does a strong formalism such as Frege's invalidate whatever can be said or thought about p in ordinary language?" By "invalidate" I mean "render meaningless/useless/incoherent" or, for short, unthinkable, despite what we may believe at the time about our alleged thought?

I'll have to ponder that. Two clarifications: I wish I'd said what you quoted, but I was myself quoting Julian Roberts, from The Logic of Reflection. And, in this context, it's the function (predicate) that is empty or unfulfilled or unattached, not the subject. There's quite a long sub-thread, woven among the various other topics, starting with , about just what the status of an "unattached subject" might be.

In those terms the question is simply whether Kimhi sees something which "displays (assertoric) force [without being a self-identifying display]" as having some kind of force. — Leontiskos

Right.

Regardless of words, Kimhi's point seems to be that Frege's Point excludes the possibility that a sentence displays assertoric force. — Leontiskos

Right.

I don't see Kimhi in any way moving away from assertoric force to some kind of general force. — Leontiskos

Not using that language, but I'm struggling to find a better way of talking about Kimhi's very unusual (to modern logic) commitment to two-way capacity and the primacy of affirmation and denial over the more usual "verb says something about subject" approach. Part of my motivation for wanting to mess with this language and perhaps find a way to bring a more basic concept of "force" into play is that Kimhi is not what you'd call a term-clarifier. He's no Kant! He'll take several shots at a difficult term, but one senses he hasn't really pinned it down. I was trying to kinda help him out, but as I say, I'm no longer sure it would be removing any mud from the water, even if I succeeded.

Thank you. This give me a good launchpad into Soames. I don't yet see anything that rules out a more hermeneutic approach to truth, but of course that is not the subject of this thread.

This is key, and I'll allow myself one more go at the individual-term question. It's the difference you're drawing between ordinary language and "what Frege would have" that I was focusing on. I absolutely agree that there's no place for "meaning or significance" of singular terms sans propositions in the logical world Frege goes on to create. But in the spirit of Kimhi, I'm trying to understand what Frege might be thinking, literally, when he encounters an isolated term. And of course "Frege" here is a stand-in for "any reasonable person." I'd hoped my suggestion was a modest one -- that there is some recognition (in ordinary language, if you will) of at least a likely potential meaning, on the assumption that Frege has encountered the term before. This observation leaves everything in place, in terms of predicate logic and Fregean existence claims. I have no disagreements with any array of experts on Frege. But it also leaves a problem about what is thinkable. I believe your statement contrasting ordinary language with "predication and quantification" shows the problem very nicely.

I've adopted the concept from Habermas, but either way, yes, it's a question rooted in hermeneutics. Plato too, arguably.

Yes. This shows the important difference between context and truth-value. Kimhi is asking us to rethink some basic assumptions about the "givenness" of some particular context, and the idea of a "contextless" appearance of p. But whether p is T or F is another story; context won't tell you.

My understanding is that in choosing the judgement stroke to range over the whole expression Frege removed the illocutionary force. But the "force" that denotes remained. — Banno

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

Frege may well have thought that proper names relied on quantification. Russell, arguably, did just that with his Definite Descriptions. — Banno

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

@leontiskos The go-to modern work on this is probably Kendall Walton's Mimesis as Make-Believe, if your interested in pursuing it. Excellent study. I can't find it or any excerpts on the Net, sorry.

Sounds good, I'll do that, and then toss any questions I have to you.

Just one follow-up now:

If you give a lecture explaining what truth is, and I'm your audience, I have to already understand what truth is in order to discern what you're doing, that is, telling me the truth about truth. Therefore you can't teach it to me. — frank

I still don't see that this follows. Can't you have a mistaken or in-part inaccurate understanding of what truth is, and discover in the course of my lecture what the "truth about truth" is? You seem to be saying that you wouldn't be able to recognize the "truth about truth" unless you already had the correct understanding of what that is. But couldn't the lecture process itself provide the necessary enlightenment? i.e., in the course of listening to me, couldn't you find yourself agreeing with me and simultaneously realizing "Ah, of course, I now see why I believe this to be true"?

If this is better addressed in Soames, then no need to answer. It's just where I'm currently puzzled.

@banno @frank

For in a definition certain characteristics would have to be stated. And in application to any particular case the question would always arise whether it were true that the characteristics
were present. So one goes round in a circle. Consequently, it is probable that the content of the word " true " is unique and indefinable — The Thought: A Logical Enquiry

Hmm. Does this amount to pointing out that any definition of “truth” would have to be true, thus opening up the regress? Or is it rather that, armed with our definition of “truth,” we need to use that very definition in order to decide whether the word applies in a particular case? The first option does seem circular to me. But why is second impermissible? Couldn’t I just say, “Yes, it is true that the characteristics that I claim define ‛truth’ are present in this case”? Showing that my definition of “truth” is correct is not the same thing as being able to develop and use it. Or is it? Is there something unique about “truth” that limits “definition” to “correct definition”?

The Parmenidean problem doesn't do much for me either, and I'm sorry Kimhi chose to start his book with it. I'm pretty sure that the majority of the important issues in the book, including my "challenge about assertion", can be addressed without worrying about "saying what is not." And having written that, I'm ready to be schooled by our Aristotelian friends on why this is wrong!

But that's the thing about philosophy, isn't it? I don't see the force of Parmenides' questions. But some excellent philosophers do. So I have three options: 1) I can assume I understand the issues involved, and I am right, and they are wrong. 2) I can reflect harder, assuming that Kimhi is smarter and better read than I am, and he wouldn't be wasting his time on this if there weren't something there. 3) Since the questions don't really interest me, and my time on earth is finite, I can choose to philosophize about something else.

Option 3, thus far, has worked for me.

(Do I really have to go back to the Tractatus? Whimper. OK, I'll take your suggestion.)

Unless these philosophers explain WHY thought MUST reflect reality (via "logic"), it doesn't seem to have any force to me, except as, ironically, unsupported assertions. — schopenhauer1

One of the best and most accessible parts of T&B is Kimhi's discussion of the four ways we can think about the relation of logic to thought (and reality). I wish I could refer you to this but I don't think it's online anywhere. He tries to develop an argument that, if successful, would answer your request. Oversimplified, here's the idea: If thought does not, necessarily, reflect reality via logic, that gives us a version of psychologism. Thought is just that -- merely thought. And logic represents the way we think, ideally. Kimhi agrees with Frege that this is a non-starter; he calls it "self-refuting":

It cannot ground the normativity of the logical requirements that underlie the objective purport of every claim about how things are -- including the claims of psycho-logicism itself.

In other words, it can't explain the very link you regard as so important -- that between logic and truth about the world. Kimhi goes on to talk about why the thought/world dualism isn't satisfactory either, but I don't want to paraphrase him to death. I hope this gives you a taste of how he justifies his views.

On this account, both "Berlin" and "2+2=4" are names. Indeed, if a proposition is considered to be a statement with a truth value, then any proposition is just the name of either the true or the false. — Banno

Yes, that’s how I understand it too. And for Frege, names are, in an important sense, outside logic, because logic only deals with things with “judgeable content.” Julian Roberts, to whom I often turn for insights into Frege, puts it this way: “Logic [according to Frege] has nothing to say about anything that is not a statement [i.e.], something that can be true or false. The utterance ‛house’, for example [or ‛Berlin’ in my example], is not a statement and cannot be of concern to logic.”

So far as existence is defined, it is defined in terms of the universal quantifier. — Banno

Good. I’m only vaguely aware of how Frege’s concavity differs from our modern universal quantifier, but I think I can still ask these next questions. The Fregean universal quantifier ranges over objects as well as formulae/functions, right? So maybe my question about “Frege on the Beach” (sounds like a hit song) could be phrased as: "When you comprehend the term ‛Berlin’ (as I’m going to assume you do, Herr Frege), does your comprehension depend on the universal-quantification symbol? And then, should you choose to use the term to fulfill a function, does the existence commitment change to ∃x?” So the idea is that ∀ can range over names or terms that are not (yet) part of functions. Clearly, I’m trying to find a way to make a name (and its sense) a “thinkable thought” without violating Frege’s understanding of what logic can do. Does this sound at all sensible to you?

Are you puzzling over the context principle, is that it? Are you asking if Frege is literally saying a word isolated like this, not part of a sentence, is meaningless? — Srap Tasmaner

No, I'm confident Frege would never say such a thing, and I was trying to get @Leontiskos' agreement on what he would say. I thought about including something specifically about the context principle, just to show I wasn't making that connection, but I decided to keep it simple.

As for your "Berlin" example, you don't understand it. It could be a lot of things. — Srap Tasmaner

An interesting takeaway from this little sub-thread: It's harder than I would have expected to come up with a individual term that will simultaneously be recognizable to (pretty much) everyone and also unambiguous. So sure, "Berlin" can be comprehended different ways. But that isn't really the point. The point is that there would be a finite number of candidate meanings, and while Frege might well say, "I'm not sure which one this piece of paper is referencing," he would not say the equivalent of "Huh? No idea what this could mean. I can't 'comprehend' any of the candidate meanings."

If this still seems not nailed down, maybe we should imagine the beach example as involving an absolutely unambiguous term -- "the Hope Diamond," say -- and just stipulate that Herr Frege has learned this term prior to his walk. Now we pose the question to him about whether he comprehends it.

Lastly, and I've said this repeatedly, this wasn't supposed to be some kind of "gotcha" about how Frege is contradicting himself about the existence of individual terms, or terms outside of functions, or whatever. I was trying to build a case, step by step, to show that we have alternatives about how to understand "existence can't be predicated." This was meant to be an early step in the argument. It goes all the way back to that thread on quantifier variance.

Sorry, I misunderstood the diction of your question to mean that, like me, you weren't quite sure about this. But obviously you know a lot about it. Yes, I'd very much like to hear your exploration of the indefinability of truth for Frege. Should it open a fresh OP? Or here is fine too.

Does "Berlin" have extension? If it does then it is not an object. If it does not then it is an object. All you are doing is trying to have it both ways. You want objects with inherent extension, which is impermissible. — Leontiskos

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

And I'll leave it at that.

I'm hoping @Banno could speak to this. I'm pretty sure Frege thought truth was definable within his predicate logic, but that might not amount to the same thing you're talking about.

He is proposing what he calls "psycho / logical monism" and claiming Wittgenstein as a fellow monist. Understanding this is, for me, by far the most difficult part of the book, and Kimhi occasionally indulges in an obscurity worthy of, yes, Hegel. But what this tells me is merely that it's hard, and that Kimhi is not the greatest writer -- I'm by no means ready to dismiss his ideas just because I'm still working on them. Sorry not to be able yet to explain the monism part, but I undertstand it better each time I reread. The clue, once more, is that "The difference between 'p' and 'I think p' is syncategorematic," or metaphysical, rather than a matter of logical form. Kimhi wants to go on to show how this distinction will lead to a unity of thinking and being, in a very old tradition he traces back to Plato and Aristotle.

[Kimhi contests] Frege's underlying assumptions of logic.. That logic is not psychological, according to Frege, but rather metaphysically real in some Platonic way... — schopenhauer1

Yes, Kimhi calls this "psycho / logical dualism" and rejects it. According to him, neither the Platonists nor the "it's just how we think" philosophers are correct, because the dualism is all wrong.

It’s hard to tease out a direct answer here to my “What would Frege say about comprehending a singular term?” question, but here are a couple of things you do say:

Are you asking what your incomplete sentence is supposed to mean without any verb? Suppose you begin speaking a sentence very slowly, "The grass in my backyard..." We have a subject ("the grass"), an accidental modifier of place ("in my backyard"), and we are awaiting the verb and predication. — Leontiskos

if you want to talk about some x apart from any function then Frege will not have it. So if you want to conceive of your "term" of "The grass in my backyard" as a proper name, then Frege will ask you to say something about the proper name. — Leontiskos

OK. Evidently my choice of “The grass in my backyard” was unfortunate, because it looks like its grammar may confuse the logical point. Let’s change the term to “Berlin”. If I say “Berlin,” I doubt if anyone would call it an incomplete sentence. Or, if you like, imagine Frege walking along a beach and finding a scrap of paper with the word “Berlin” written on it. In either of these cases, I’m guessing the natural response would be something like “What about Berlin?” or “I wonder why ‛Berlin’ appears here.” But what my question about comprehension is asking to you to affirm, is that in neither case would the response be “What is Berlin? I don’t understand this term” (if you’ll grant that the folks involved have heard of Berlin before).

To the second quote: I do indeed want to talk about (in the sense of "mention") some x apart from any function. I’ve just done so. You say that “Frege will not have it.” That may well be true. But again, what I’m asking is, does “not having it” mean that Frege doesn’t comprehend the term “Berlin”, or doesn’t think that I do? Or is it, rather, that he’s urging me to understand that I can’t say anything about the term without its taking its place to saturate a function?

I’ll drop this if the question still isn’t clear. This was all in aid of trying to build up a picture of how Frege regarded existence, but there are other ways to approach it.

But I guess the bigger picture here is that Kimhi seems to think Frege is lacking something that, say, someone like Aristotle captured in his logic- some sort of active engagement of the thinker and the logic. — schopenhauer1

This is a good discussion among you, @Banno, and @Srap Tasmaner. I'll just step in to say that the quoted passage sounds like it's on the right track to me. Kimhi does think there's something important -- indeed, fundamental -- missing in Frege, and that something has to do with the role of the thinker. Here's a passage from T&B that talks about this, perhaps unfortunately in terms of the syncategorematic:

The difference between "p" and "I think p" (and hence the difference between consciousness and self-consciousness) is syncategorematic -- and so too is the difference between p and not-p. This difference . . . cannot be associated with a difference in predicative content or form. . . . In the end we shall see that the various capacities which philosophical logic finds itself called upon to elucidate -- capacities for judgment, for language, for the deployment of logical words (such as "not" and "and") [Note: These would be syncategorematic in the traditional use of that term - J] , and for self-consciousness (and hence for the use of the word "I") -- are all one and the same capacity. To appreciate this is to appreciate the uniqueness of thinking. — T&B, p. 16

Kimhi is very blithe in his use of "hence" to arrive at the concepts of consciousness and self-consciousness. And many would take issue with the idea that philosophical logic is "called upon to elucidate" anything whatsoever about self-consciousness. But I think we can at least see what Kimhi believes his problem is about -- and the passage from Rodl, via Boynton, quoted earlier is also on point. As to whether this is reflected in Aristotle, I'm not qualified to say.

No one has yet explained the main premise, or in any clear manner I can discern. — schopenhauer1

It's hard to do, no question. Does the post about Boynton, above, help any?

And thus this Frege stuff doesn't seem like its leading anywhere other than he doesn't like the little marker that says "This statement is asserted as true". — schopenhauer1

More than a matter of liking or disliking, I would say. I can't recap all the arguments but I'm sure you can see that the need to undertand assertoric force is critical to the whole question. Kimhi claims that a strategy like the judgment stroke is inadequate to the task.

I want to highlight a few things in Owen Boynton’s first-rate essay/review on Thinking and Being. This will be a brief discussion and I really hope everyone interested in this thread will read the Boynton piece – he’s a marvelously good explicator. (And thanks again to @Pierre-Normand for finding the piece.)

Boynton wants to compare certain aspects of Kimhi’s thought with Sebastian Rödl’s, and I’m not qualified to say much about that. But a quote from Rödl that Boynton provides sets the stage very well:

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. For example, when we do epistemology, we are interested in what it is for someone to know—know what? oh yes: p. If we inquire into rational requirements on action or intention, we ask what it is to be obliged to—what? oh yes: see to it that p, intend that p, if p then q, and so on. However, if we undertake to reflect on thought, on its self-consciousness and its objectivity, then the letter p signifies the deepest question and the deepest comprehension. If only we understood the letter p, the whole would open up to us. — Sebastian Rodl, Self-Consciousness and Objectivity

You could say that Kimhi’s entire project – and the Kimhi-inspired challenge to Frege with which I began this thread – rests on this sudden realization that p is mysterious, not “innocent”, not something merely to be taken for granted in its philosophical employment. The first chapter of T&B is called, wryly, “The Life of p,” but it’s no joke. We have to ask, “How does p appear before us, on the page, in speech, in thought? Who puts it here?” Philosophy begins in wonder . . . and great philosophy often begins with questions that seem almost idiotic in their obviousness.

Frege’s system of logical notation, depending as it does on a distinction between the intensional force and extensional force of predicates, cannot account for the inference: “p”→ “A judges p”→ “A rightly judges p.” Within the context of “A judges,” “p” takes on a different intensional force (its sense) from when it stands alone, even though its extension (its reference) remains the same; it is intension, rather than extension, that permits inference. — Boynton

Frege’s remedy, according to Kimhi, is to introduce the judgment stroke, which has no functional role: “it signifies that something has been asserted, but it remains unrelated to the content of asserted propositions.”

Fine. But this removes assertoric force from any possible unity of thought and being – between what is said and what is the case.

Put another way, whereas . . . Fregean logic can provide an account of the content of thought, such an account of that thought will be divorced from [1] being/reality/the world on the one, and [2] of the thinker/subject on the other; a mode of expression not available in formal logic (because not reducible to the elements within propositions) is required in order to close the gap. Kimhi calls this mode of expression the syncategorematic. — Boynton

This is the best attempt I’ve yet seen to get across Kimhi’s notion of the syncategorematic. There’s more to it – for Kimhi, a fact is itself a syncategorematic unit – but the basic idea is that to think about how thought refers to the world is to think syncategorematically, and thus outside the expressions of formal logic.

Boynton doesn’t like the S word any better than I do – he calls it “cumbersome,” “not easily graspable,” and “specialized” -- and in a brilliant stroke he suggests an “obvious alternative”: metaphysical.

For what “syncategorematic” does is to demarcate a realm of expression and thought that cannot be reduced to categorematic notation or analysis—it is very much, in that sense, similar to “metaphysical” . . . In other words, Kimhi wants to suggest that the “meta” prefix, referring to “beyond”, is in fact properly understood as the “syn” prefix, referring to “with.” — Boynton

These are just a few of the insights I found in Boynton’s piece. I could have picked out and commented on a half-dozen other, equally insightful, passages, but you can read it for yourself. I find the essay especially valuable because, to think about Kimhi’s philosophy and its challenges to Fregean logic, we need a kind of vision shift, a big-picture understanding of why we ought to be dissatisfied. That can often be hard to find in T&B. I think Boynton is keeping our eyes pointed in the right direction, on the difficulties formal logic experiences when it tries to connect thought with being. “The metaphysical already accompanies, is already within, our normal propositions, our everyday speech, and . . . such unity is also the unity of thought and being.” The connection with Wittgenstein is becoming clearer and clearer to me . . .

OK, it's clear to me now which sentence you meant. I began a reply about the "more to it than that" . . . and found myself in deep waters. To be honest, I'm no longer sure that there is more to it. In other words, your paraphrase ("such sentences have an inherent assertional logical or grammatical structure") may capture the idea just fine. Sorry, I'm a slow thinker . . . thanks for your patience. I'll keep working on it.

I do recall that, thanks for bringing it up: On Denoting.

So we can invite @Leontiskos to compare Russell's view as well -- does he (Leontiskos) think Frege would give the same explanation? Is that his (Leontiskos's) own explanation? Just to refresh us about the point of it all, it has to do with the way in which Frege forbids predicating existence; getting clear on the individual-term question is kind of Step One to making my case that Frege only means, literally, that we can't speak in Logicalese about the existence of entities or the non-existence of entities. I don't take him to mean that we can't understand the difference, or that we can only understand what can be said in Logicalese. But one step at a time.

I’m happy to have both Novak and Rombout on tap. As I mentioned yesterday, my time is a bit curtailed this week but I’m sure they are both worth reading, and I’ll do so.

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. — Leontiskos

This was your response to these questions of mine:

What do you think the status is of the term ‛The grass in my backyard’? Are you able to understand it? And now a second question: What do you think Frege would say? — J

Are you saying that, because “The grass in my backyard” is an individual term, not "Fregean," not part of a proposition, Frege would be reduced to silence about it? Would he say, “Sorry, I don’t understand that term”? This seems unlikely. I’m deliberately asking a question about an individual term because I’m trying to build up an argument about Frege’s views on existence.

Your response goes on to imagine what Frege would say about a different bit of language, “The grass is in my backyard,” but that of course is a proposition and not at issue. So I pose the question again: Given your understanding of Frege’s philosophy of logic, how would he account for the fact (if it is a fact) that we can understand the individual term “The grass in my backyard”? (I’ve only put it in my backyard to avoid the appearance that I’m asking about a universal term, “grass”; there’s no predication involved. If you prefer, change it to a unique non-composite term, such as “The Hope Diamond” -- anything that can be the argument in a function.) And the question remains for you as well: You are not a Fregean, so what account would you give of that term? Do you understand it? If so, how and why?

yes the quote is direct — bongo fury

Yikes! Thanks for the translation.

Why deny, in the latter case, that each occurrence of the sub-string "P" (considered as such, apart from its context) still says that P? You could perfectly well admit that it does but still say the whole, larger sentence doesn't. — bongo fury

Well, here we are back to the vexing question of "assertion" a la Kimhi. To push you down the rabbit hole, I'd need to persuade you that your use of "say" and "says" is not innocent, but brings with it an entire apparatus involving what it is for a consciousness to think (and possibly assert) a proposition. I'm still working on the best way to talk about this (and I'm not sure it's true, but Kimhi makes it plausible at least).

And if you have a reason, why shouldn't it equally well apply for sense, and disqualify the inner occurrence of the sentence from having the same sense as a free-standing occurrence? — bongo fury

This is a little easier. We can go along with Frege in the separation of sense from assertion as merely meaning that a concrete occurrence of a proposition may actually assert it, whereas this assertive force is not associated with the repeatable symbol 'p'. ("Frege's observation," above). What is necessarily associated is the sense.

That is very kind of you to say, thanks.

Yes, you’ve got it, as your later post with the extensive Kimhi quotes shows. Kimhi agrees with what he calls “Frege’s observation” but not what he calls “Frege’s point.” His line of dialogue should read, “I disagree, if you’re saying that the only thing which gives the predicate its force is assertion. But as I read you, you needn’t be saying that at all. That’s a conclusion that Geach and other Fregeans have imposed on you.” And that’s what I’ve been saying too.
— J

So Kimhi doesn't disagree with Frege after all? He only disagrees with Geach? — Leontiskos

No, you’re right, I was oversimplifying for the sake of brevity. He thinks that both Frege and Geach maintain “Frege’s point.” So a better rewrite of the words addressed to Frege that I put in Kimhi’s mouth: “I disagree, if you’re saying that the only thing which gives the predicate its force is assertion. But as I read you, you needn’t be saying that at all. But you do, and Geach and other Fregeans have emphasized this additional point without seeming to realize that you could have stopped with your ‛observation’ and all would have been well.”

I don't think you're grasping the seriousness with which Frege excludes existence as a predicate. My second quote here literally has Frege explaining why it makes no sense to speak about the existence of entities or the non-existence of entities. I don't see how this claim of yours can be saved:

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.
— J

If "before" means "before" and "say whether" means "say whether," then Frege will deny this claim. — Leontiskos

I interpret Frege differently here. To show how, let me start with a question. What do you think the status is of the term ‛The grass in my backyard’? Are you able to understand it? And now a second question: What do you think Frege would say?

The concept of the syncategorematic may need to be introduced, even if the word is not. — Leontiskos

I’m starting to think so too, and see Boynton. He does a far better job than I thought possible at giving the term some intuitive appeal, especially when he likens it to “metaphysical”.

I am so lost in the sample sentences. Is this really how Dummett presents them? Would you mind either punctuating them differently (parentheses, maybe, to set off the sentences-within-sentences?), or else adding a translation into symbols?

Well, I hope you jump in if the mood strikes you.

It bothers me that no one seems able to set out in a few hundred words what is being argued [in Thinking and Being] – I think you might agree with this. — Banno

I sure do, and also about his style. Where were the editors at Harvard UP?! But let's face it, he has this in common with other great philosophers. Kant's style is appalling, but when you work at it, much is revealed. And if someone asked me to explain the 1st Critique in a few hundred words, I'm sure I couldn't. Kimhi's book is much shorter but I believe the depth and importance is there, so paraphrasing isn't easy. I think the Boynton review does the best job, and I'm going to post a few thoughts about it later.

OK, but I'm still trying to break it down a bit more. 'If p then q' is a sentence, but so are 'p' and 'q', presumably. To answer your question about "whether there's more to it" (the Frege / Kimhi issue), I need to start by getting clear on how you're using "mention" as opposed, I presume, to "use." Pardon the persnicketiness, but it makes a difference in what I want to go on to say. So . . . which sentence are you referring to as mentioned? (or all three?)

So your rule might apply within a first-order logic, and so for Frege, but not for higher order logics in which we predicate with other propositions. — Banno

That's all I meant, yes. And of course there are several points of view in this thread, including Kimhi's, that call into question this way of seeing the matter.

@banno @leontiskos @srap tasmaner @janus @fdrake @schopenhauer1 @russellA. and apologies to anyone I missed:

@Pierre-Normand has found a very good short review of Thinking and Being here: unpublished review essay by Owen Boynton. I actually have a lot to say about it but time is tight, which brings me to the other thing I wanted to say:

I don't know if others have this problem, but I always feel like I ought to reply to interlocutors on an interesting thread as quickly as possible, maybe especially when it was my OP. Part of me knows there's no rule about this, and the fact is that I often can't because I have this Other Life where I have to go places and do things. No big deal, of course -- none of us is so terribly important to the others -- but I thought I'd just say it out loud. Right now, there are a number of points I'm eager to address but you won't be hearing from me till tomorrow at the earliest.

The conclusion I suspect is too strong. I'm not keen in including "necessarily". Seems as what is needed is just to be able to set the force to one side in order to consider the propositional content. — Banno

I'll put my original Step 2 here so we can have it in front of us:

Therefore, a proposition cannot contain assertoric force as part of its logical structure. If it could, then we would no longer be able to recognize repetitions of ‛p’ as “the same”: Some would be asserted, some would not, and that would be internal to the structure. There would be some sort of deep or semantic assertion built into this Uber-proposition. Assertion would be functional in the Fregean sense. And since the self-identity of ‛p’ is critical to the entire logical apparatus, we know this cannot be. — J

Does this amount to an argument for the necessity of Frege's separation? I thought it did, on the grounds stated: We've got to have all repetitions of 'p' as identical, but if some of them have assertions "built in," then it wreaks havoc with synonymy, inference, etc., as Step 1 seems to show. But perhaps my conception here is too narrow.