Yes, a little more, but first let me be sure I understand you. In 'If p then q', are you saying that 'p' and'q' are mentioned?

The assertoric nature of FG consists entirely and only in the syncategorematic ⊢
⊢
. The assertoric nature of KG is at least centered on the verb 'is', but the entirety of the sentence is required in order to understand its assertoric nature. Like Humpty Dumpty, once KG has been separated into FG and FGH it becomes very difficult to put the pieces back together again and find the wholeness of KG. — Leontiskos

Agreed. Good analysis. I'd only add that whether there is indeed a "wholeness of KG" is a central question, and Kimhi is trying very hard to argue for it, using pre-Fregean concepts of logic.

Some of this is good, I agree. "Kimhi argues that a self-conscious, first-person perspective — an 'I' — is internal to logic" -- that's the most perspicacious bit. It takes us right back to our big question about how 'p' is meant to be understood when it stands alone. Can it be "innocent" of consciousness? The parts about how "thinking is not just a cognitive psychological act, but also one that is governed by logical law" and "In other words, the distinction between psychology and logic collapses" are too imprecise and summative to really express Kimhi.

I'm mainly pointing out the difference between the standard epistemological questions "How are we justified in saying p is true?" or "What makes p true?" vs. the meta-question "What the heck do we mean by truth anyway?"

Good, I'll watch for it too.

I'm going to propose what I hope is an alternative view in a separate post, so as to please no one. — Srap Tasmaner

:lol:

Fantastic, I'll read the Boynton immediately, thanks. It will be good to have an introduction to Rodl as well -- I don't know his work apart from the odd reference.

I liked "Life of p" too but fair warning, it's the only joke in the book.

This is a gracious way of phrasing your criticism! As you can see from the exchange with @Leontiskos just above, he and I are also wondering about the ultimate import of all this. I find Kimhi’s book impressive and original; on almost every page there’s an insight or question I hadn’t thought of; and clearly it’s made something of a splash in academic circles. I wrote the OP because I wanted to start discussing some of Kimhi’s challenges to Frege, which are at least plausible and, if correct, very significant. So yes, to me it adds up to “being interesting,” even fascinating, and yes, I can see why it might not be your cup of tea.

About your “elevation”: For you, the question of truth is important, so if we can phrase the Frege/Kimhi discussion in terms of truth, that will make it of interest. Well, I’m interested in truth too, but I don’t see Frege or the analytic philosophers abandoning that question. Indeed, I can hardly think of a more written-about and argued-about question in my lifetime. I think it’s possible that you have a definition of truth which isn’t shared by, e.g., Frege, and therefore it appears that the topic itself is missing from his writings. But a huge meta-question in anal phil (sorry, couldn’t resist) is not just “How do we know which propositions are true?” but “How do we decide what truth refers to, what we can say about it, what logic might tell us about it?” etc. etc.


So no, I don’t think Kimhi is saying that “analytic philosophy often loses its way when it doesn't focus on the older tradition of discerning TRUE propositions.” Now it may well be that, if we can absorb Kimhi’s ideas, we’ll wind up with some important things to say about how to discern truth. But that is not his focus. He does indeed argue that anal phil was wrong from the start in creating a sort of dualism between what can be thought and what the world contains, but that’s different. He wants us to recognize a unity here. Where this might take us in terms of understanding truth, I’m not yet sure.

the assumption that being true or false originally involves a dissociation of what is true or false from the activity of thinking or saying that such-and-such is or is not the case — Kimhi, Thinking and Being, 8

This is his “psycho / logical monism” put quite plainly.

The obvious question is then, "Isolating the assertoric force in that manner is admittedly strange, but what's the concrete issue here?" I have some ideas but no clear answer at this point — Leontiskos

Looks like we’re at a similar place, then. I phrased it as “Is this just playing with words?” but it’s the same question about what, if anything, important follows from this. I have spent the least amount of time, so far, on final essay/chapter of Thinking and Being, which is called “On the Quietism of the Stranger” (referring to Plato’s Sophist) and takes a decidedly enigmatic, even mystical, turn, in a way that does remind me of Wittgenstein. I need to read that chapter more carefully before weighing in on what the point of it all might be. And, more down to earth, that Rombout thesis looks really good and should be a help.

We can understand “The grass is green” without knowing whether or not it is true, and whether we should affirm or deny it. — J


It is that last part I am trying to focus on.. As clearly Frege believes it and Kimhi agrees.
— schopenhauer1

I think the argument has been that Frege believes this must be so, and Kimhi claims it ain't necessarily so, but sometimes it is. I haven't wrapped my head around what is supposedly the main topic of this thread yet. — Srap Tasmaner

I sympathize! I thought you yourself gave it the best interpretation, in your elucidation of the difference between affirming a statement and making a statement about the world. In the first case, we’re saying something about p, a “bit of language,” as Kimhi calls it. In the second case, we are creating a proposition, p, which states what is the case in the world; the world, of course, is not made of language. And the Kimhi-inspired challenge is trying to tie this back to Fregean notions of what can and can’t serve as the argument of a proposition. This is where the dreaded “categorematic / syncategorematic” distinction comes in, but I’ll fight to the bitter end against using those terms if I can present the idea more simply.

As for the quoted exchange with @schopenhauer 1, I think Frege and Kimhi are in agreement here. What Kimhi believes to be importantly controversial is not the separation of sense from (T/F) assertion, but the crucial difference between how logic treats statements of affirmation/denial vs. propositions. In a manner that I too am still struggling to grasp completely, he thinks that Fregean logic presupposes (or is it imposes?) a dualism that is artificial. One way he puts this is:

It is widely accepted, to the point that it is almost a dogma of contemporary philosophy, that we must acknowledge a radical difference between the occurrence of p in extensional truth-functional complexes (such as “~p”) and its occurrence in intensional non-truth-functional complexes (such as “A thinks [judges, asserts] that p”). — Kimhi, p. 11

I added “judges, asserts” because Kimhi is often unclear whether he wants “thinks” to mean “thinks truly” and/or “thinks that __ is the case” or simply "has the thought in consciousness." In this instance, I believe any of those three senses of "thinks" would be part of the point he's making.

The difference presupposes a certain kind of sentence reification — Leontiskos

Could you say more about this? I’m not sure what sentence reification would be.

My impression is that you have spoken about assertoric force independent of assertions, and not just force, but I could be wrong about that. — Leontiskos

No, you’re right. In part, this thread for me has been a process of clarifying terminology. I now think it’s better just to speak of “force” understood as positive or negative predication rather than using the term “assertoric force.” This (my) sense of "force" might be close to what you’re calling intentional force, but I’m still not sure whether you mean “intentional” or “intensional”. Interestingly, either meaning might apply on this point!

Well, "before we can say whether it exists or not," seems to be simply anti-Fregian, given that we can never say that that an "argument" (in Frege's language) does not exist.. . . I think Frege would go even further and say that there is no reason or sense in "claiming that Fido exists" via predication. — Leontiskos

There’s an important question here. Yes, once an argument is attached to a predicate, we say it exists. But the question is, What was the status of the argument term before something was predicated of it? A rather Zen-like question, but what I’m arguing is that an infinite number of nouns (just to simplify it to nouns) are floating around in our language, their status unknown. To place one into a function grants it existence in the only way that Frege thought made sense. So I do think it’s meaningful and important to speak about entities/nouns that may or may not exist – it will depend on whether they become arguments in a function. Frege, on my reading, never disagrees with this. He is always talking about what we can say, that is, make grammatical propositions about. ‛Grass’ is a word. The moment we try to do something with it, predicate something of it, we are inducting it into the world of things that can be talked about, that can be said to exist. It’s not so much that Frege thinks some magic is at work here that brings objects into existence ; it’s more that his attitude is, “Well, if you don’t think it exists, why are you saying things about it?” That's the sense in which he "assumes" existence, I believe.

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

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

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.

the Original Post tries place Kimhi's thesis in a cage so we can talk about it without talking about Kimhi (and for good reason!), but this can never be fully carried out by those who do not understand Kimhi's thesis as well as he does. — Leontiskos

I’m afraid this is probably true, but I’m still going to avoid as much of Kimhi’s terminology as possible, out of consideration for others following the thread. The “good reason!” you mention isn’t just his odd use of singular terms like “syncategorematic,” but his whole style of writing, which is dense, lacks examples, and asks you to remember his labels for complicated arguments (“Frege’s observation” vs. “Frege’s point,” for example). I agree that the ND review is a help. And everything you’ve cited from Thinking and Being here is absolutely on the mark, and important; I’m just afraid it will be opaque without context and a lot of reflection.

A proposition will be true, given some interpretation, only when that interpretation assigns that individual to that property. That is, "Grass is green" will be true only in interpretations that assign "...is green" to all instances of "grass". Or to put much the same thing slightly differently, when the interpretation is such that "grass" satisfies "...is green".

What counts as being true is being satisfied, under some interpretation. — Banno

I recommend we adopt this, for purposes of this discussion, as a reasonable consensus on “criteria of truth” etc. The huge potential area of disagreement would center on whether "some interpretation" is the best we can do, of course, so it leaves out some meta-philosophical issues, but we can’t get distracted trying to work out a Theory Of Everything.

Or we can just agree to disagree about what makes a statement true, and stay focused on the Kimhi-inspired challenges to Frege.

But what is dropped here is not an illocutionary assertion. What is dropped is the sense, as used to make the identification. It seems that it must be something like this that Frege meant by “dissociating the assertoric force from the predicate”. — Banno

Ahh, the light goes on. Got it, thanks.

This is super helpful, thank you. I want to mull over several points you make before responding. But for now, could you expand a little on this?:

In other words, by identifying the two extensional sets as the same, we're able to "make the assertion" that S is Richard's sister without any appeal to some actual act of assertion
— J

Not quite. — Banno

What's the better way to understand this? Is the problem that I'm still thinking in terms of assertions, which, as the rest of your post shows, are no longer much needed in logic?

This phrase, "just an ontological move", is interesting. — Srap Tasmaner

Very interesting, and what you’re saying about it applies to a lot of issues, not just Roberts here with the separation of function and argument. To stick with that for a minute: I read the passage from Roberts as suggesting that Frege’s “ontological move” is a somewhat ad hoc or tendentious solution to a potential problem about psychologism. It’s not enough, for Frege, to show that subjects and predicates (arguments and functions) are given an asymmetric treatment in the “formal rules of calculation.” He also wants to eliminate psychologism as an option for understanding what logic is fundamentally about. Logic is not about the way we think, it is rather a description of the objective structure of thought. By calling a function a “thought,” Frege wants to rule out the possibility of its appearing in the argument position, as a possible subject of logical discourse. Here’s a bit more from Roberts:

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

I’m not sold on the Wittgensteinian leap at the end, but I include it because a number of people on this thread have also noted this similarity. As for the legitimacy of this “move,” your comments now become pertinent. I agree that Frege is saying, “Here is my method, these are the terms I’ll use, this is how I intend to proceed.” But he seems also to be firm about the ontological difference between arguments and functions. Roberts is asking, “Has Frege explained anything, or is he merely declaring his own ‛way of going on’?” We know we can rule out your 2nd option (that Frege would invoke “all in the head / language / culture” as his explanation), since that would be psychologism on steroids. So what about the 1st? It seems to me this is pretty close to what Frege believed, but again, we want to know why he believed it. I’m not sure it’s enough simply to point out how tidy this makes everything, and how effective a weapon it is against psychologism. Frege was smarter than that. Like you, I’m not sure what to say about it, and I’d defer to those who know Frege better than I do.

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

Nice to meet another Merrill fan!
— J

I didn't consider for a moment anyone would get that reference! — Srap Tasmaner

Oh heck yeah -- the man was a genius.

All of which, I think, explains both J 's sense that statements display assertoric force without themselves being assertions -- in much the way a screwdriver has a clear and unambiguous purpose ---but also why Frege distinguishes them, because the coupling of a statement to the assertion it would naturally be used to make is loose. — Srap Tasmaner

I like the screwdriver analogy. ‛The grass is green’ is all set, ready to go -- its "purpose" is what I'm calling its force -- but someone does have to pick it up and use it. A lot of the interest in this thread centers on how best to understand picking it up and using it. The Fregean “loosening” is also good – for him, it is logically necessary that assertion does nothing to sense.

The distinction [between arguments/subjects and predicates in Frege] is total and fundamental. — Srap Tasmaner

This passage from Julian Roberts is worth quoting in full:

Psychologism rests on the assumption that we can coherently say things about thinking itself. To rule this out, something stronger than asymmetry of the function-argument relation is needed. Frege achieves this strengthening by interpreting ‛functions’ as ‛thinking’. This semantic interpretation involves an ontological commitment. The distinction between functions and arguments becomes an ontological one. So the asymmetry of the relation is ‛explained’ by saying that the entities denoted at either side of the relation are themselves, ontologically, distinct. There are function-entities, and there are argument-entities. As a result of this ontological move, the rule ceases to be a formal rule of calculation and becomes a declaration about the necessary properties of certain entities. Thoughts, in a word, are ontologically distinct from their objects; and that is why thoughts may never be arguments. — Julian Roberts, The Logic of Reflection

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

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

Yeah, and it’s this overlap that’s driving us all slightly crazy! So far we lack a rigorous analysis of how the terms relate.

There's a little bit of a puzzle about the "affirming" language, because it makes asserting sound like it has an extra step, so that it strongly resembles indirect discourse. — Srap Tasmaner

That’s a big chunk of Kimhi’s argument as well. I was going to save the whole “believes that” / “thinks that” / “judges that” issue for a different OP, but (sigh) of course it’s relevant here too.

As if a person making an assertion were "channeling" a spirit guide: there's an internalized claim presented, which you speak on Ephraim's behalf, and by so speaking endorse it. — Srap Tasmaner

Nice to meet another Merrill fan!

I'm also not clear on what an "exact connection between assertion and truth values" could be. If I claim something is the case I am either right or wrong depending on whether what I've claimed is the case or not. I can't see what more could be said about that. — Janus

Perhaps nothing more, in that simple case. But as this thread demonstrates, "assertion" gets used in some much more complicated and ambiguous contexts. As @Banno points out, above, Frege didn't think in terms of actual illocutionary acts such as the one you're using as an example. And Russell talks about a "non-psychological sense" of assertion whereby we can say that "If p then q" asserts an implication without asserting either p or q. And I would add, though Russell doesn't, that the implication "If p then q" can be asserted on paper, so to speak, without anyone claiming it's true.

So when Frege 'wrote that his most important contribution to philosophy was “dissociating the assertoric force from the predicate”', he could not have been talking simply or explicitly about illocutionary force . . . — Banno

Right.

. . . but had in mind at least partly something of the sort given here, where the assertive force of "S is Richard's sister" is simplified by treating it extensionally as S={Ruth} — Banno

In other words, by identifying the two extensional sets as the same, we're able to "make the assertion" that S is Richard's sister without any appeal to some actual act of assertion (i.e. illocutionary act). Have I understood you? And if I have, do you see the addition of the judgment stroke as referring to assertion in this sense? This is one place where Frege confuses me. When he says that the judgment stroke marks "a true thought," does he mean a thought asserted to be true, or one that actually is true? So again, different senses of "assertion" might arise here.

@Banno @Leontiskos @Srap Tasmaner @RussellA @fdrake
Whew, we’ve got the makings here of a solid weeklong conference on Frege and Kimhi!

Impossible to address all the interesting points and questions, but I’ll do my best to respond to folks one by one. Leontiskos up first!

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

I am struggling to see the difference here, but maybe that is just me. — Leontiskos

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

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

I thought J was saying, "This thing has assertoric force even before you pick it up and assert it." — Leontiskos

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

For Frege we don't quantify things and then go on to decide whether they actually exist — Leontiskos

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

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

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

I think @J's confusion about Frege may stem from a similar place. J may be thinking, "Kimhi criticizes Frege for divorcing the sense of a proposition from its assertoric force; 'Fido exists' is a proposition; therefore Frege divorces this proposition's sense from its assertoric force; therefore Frege thinks we can quantify over Fido before predicating existence of Fido." At the same time, J knows that Frege does not accept the idea that existence is a predicate, and so there is a tension. — Leontiskos

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

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


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

Thanks. As I mentioned earlier, at some point I want to quote a few passages from Kimhi interpreting Aristotle and see if you, @Count Timothy von Icarus, and others who know this field agree with him.

Well, as a Relativist, you are "relatively" young then!

Thank you. I know it's ridiculous in 2024 but I'm a child of the previous century and I need paper pages and lead pencils in order to think properly! :smile:

[In Frege] the duality between assertoric force and predicate may well be equally expressed as the duality between sense and reference. — RussellA

Good, that fits the Fregean picture.

The unity of thinking and being is the cornerstone of Wittgenstein's Tractatus. — RussellA

Yes, to the best of my understanding (with help from Kimhi).

In the Tractatus, it is not the case that a proposition has a sense prior to anything that is being referred to, in that sense may be disassociated from reference, in that the sense of "this grass is green" may be disassociated from its referent in reality, that this grass is green. But rather, the sense of the proposition is what is being referred to, in that there is a unity between the sense of "this grass is green" and its referent, that this grass is green. — RussellA

Cf. this from Notes on Logic:

When we say A judges that, etc., then we have to mention a whole proposition which A judges. It will not do to mention only its constituents, or its constituents and form but not in the proper order. This shows that a proposition itself must occur in the statement to the effect that it is judged. — LW

And cf. the elucidation @Srap Tasmaner provided between affirming a claim and making a judgment about the world.

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

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

Thank you. I've been trying to get ahold of a reasonably priced copy of the Armstrong book. Now I'll try harder.

I think the general thrust of the whole modern Frege-Tarski-model-theoretic approach is to presuppose the existence of the objects within the universe of discourse — Srap Tasmaner

Sure. But what I was trying to point out (or what I think Roberts means, anyway) is that “the universe of discourse” isn’t neutral or discoverable or God-given or whatever. We have to determine it, which requires quantification. What we presuppose, I think, is that once we do this, there’s no problem with saying that objects exist.

That said, I know some Frege and Tarski but would flunk a test on "the whole modern Frege-Tarski-model-theoretic approach," so feel free to school me.

I've been rereading your OP, and I think I get the argument now. — Srap Tasmaner

Yes! You’ve got it precisely, and have expressed it better than I did. Many thanks. The key difference is affirming a claim – that is, a statement -- rather than making your own statement about how the world is.

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

I’m puzzled too. Can a more expert logician weigh in and help?

Given this evidence it would seem that it is incorrect to claim that for Frege quantification is wider than existence. — Leontiskos

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

One point about something Frege also says here. He asks: “Can you produce an example where a sentence of the form 'A is B' is meaningful and true, A being a name of an individual, and yet 'There are B’s' is false?” To me, this shows why quantification comes first in his method. He requires, correctly, that “A is B” be “meaningful and true” before the contradiction with “There are no B’s” can be shown. But what does it mean for “A is B” to be meaningful and true? Correct grammar, and the judgment-stroke. Both of these require quantification first. If we changed Frege’s question to read: “Can you produce an example where a sentence of the form 'A is B' is unasserted, A being a name of an individual, and yet 'There are B’s' is false?”, the answer would be, Of course we can. It goes back to Frege’s basic assumption that all p’s occur in the context of logical argument.

it doesn't strike me as a great approach to lay the charge at Frege's feet that he hasn't sufficiently accounted for non-assertoric forms of locution. This is where I think Srap's critiques are helpful, for they demand more precision as to the actual conclusion being argued for. — Leontiskos

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

I don't think you understand what I am saying. "I" refers to the person speaking the sentence, and this person is not fdrake. — Leontiskos

But in all seriousness, what if the “person” can’t do any speaking at all? Meursault has never said a word – no surprise, since he isn’t real. Pursuing this much further would probably take us away from the main concerns of the thread, so I won’t belabor. What we need is an account of how so-called fictional assertions work, and what requirements we place on personhood in order to have apparently non-existent persons asserting things. I find this all fascinating but, as I say, I don't want us to digress.

But what is a "fictional assertion"? Isn't an assertion supposed to "judge p true"? Kimhi calls this case "assertion by convention" but I don't think that helps either.

This would be a fairly minor point were it not that this thread is trying to understand the exact connection between assertion and truth values.

Small but crucial. Yes, I'm with you. And I'm especially pleased to see you emphasizing the difference between illocutionary force and (extensional) reference. I read "force," "assertion," and "reference" as three different terms that often overlap but don't have to.

Some sharp, interesting comments and questions here. Let me start with a quote from @Srap Tasmaner

Are we to proceed as if there is a fact of the matter here? Do we expect to discover that force is or is not part of a sentence's logical form, as we might discover, I don't know, humans reached North America tens of thousands of years earlier than we thought? — Srap Tasmaner

No, the way the we use terms like “force” doesn’t reveal facts about the world in the way natural history does. Such terms are, as you say, tools. But that is not the same thing as saying there is no fact of the matter as to whether hallowed terms like “being” and “truth” reflect genuine ontological structures. They may or they may not – it depends on what we mean by them, what we want such terms to describe. We can’t go out and discover this, any more than we can discover that the number 2 precedes 3 and follows 1.

The takeaway here is that “ontologically superior languages,” to use @Leontiskos’s phrase, might be precisely those which are the most useful to us, as you seem to suggest. But this does require one to drop the idea of a truth about ontology that is independent of hermeneutics. Which relates to this from Leontiskos:

for Frege the ontological question is not moot, and Frege did not consider his system to be a strategic, pragmatic deployment. — Leontiskos

Yes to the pragmatic part (or at least I don’t know where in Frege to look for that kind of language), but we should be careful about Frege’s ontological commitments. Again, I like Julian Roberts on this:

Existence [for Frege], in other words, is dependent on logical identification, not the other way round. Once you have named something, you can say whether it exists or not. — Julian Roberts, The Logic of Reflection

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

I see a relatively clear but restrictive theory proposed as Frege's in ↪J and clarified wonderfully in ↪Banno. I wanted to put some pressure on the restriction in it. The restriction being that an account of a sentence's "logic" ought to solely concern under what conditions is that sentence true. And moreover, in the final analysis, that logical structure of truth conditions spells out all of what is asserted in an assertion and thus how that assertion works whenever it is asserted. — fdrake

Works for me. Good way of putting it.

When one sees that Frege's system is insufficient it at the very least must be demoted to the level of a "tool." Whether J is arguing for more than this, I do not know. — Leontiskos

I’m still an undecided voter on the question of whether Frege’s system is insufficient, though I obviously regard Kimhi’s challenge as serious, otherwise I wouldn’t be devoting so much head- and forum-space to it. But let’s say it is insufficient. Merely a tool, then? Here is another perspective, which comes closest to the spirit of the challenge in my OP: If Frege’s system is insufficient in its basic understanding of how propositions work, how they must be understood within logic, then while it may remain a powerful tool, it’s defective in explanatory power at the metalogical level. That would be very serious, but hardly unprecedented. Newtonian physics is still a powerful tool, despite getting the big picture all wrong.

**

Does this Kimhi-inspired challenge question the dissociation of sense from assertoric force tout court (completely, without qualification)? No. Then:

"Well if you aren't questioning the distinction tout court, then in precisely what way are you questioning it?" Does Kimhi have a clear answer? — Leontiskos

The claim under challenge is that assertoric force must always be dissociated from sense. Kimhi clearly says that this is mistaken. He believes that p may sometimes appear with its force displayed – that is, as positive predication – without being asserted. And he also believes that, sometimes (usually within the context of predicate logic), the separation of force and sense is necessary and unproblematic.

To unpack this, and to stay away from the jargon of “categorematic” and “syncategorematic” (which Kimhi uses in an idiosyncratic way), I’m suggesting we think of force as something that can be displayed without assertion. And having said that, the question is whether this is just playing with words – whether the nuance I’m proposing really clarifies anything, or would change how we think about logic. To that question I would say, “Kimhi thinks it does, but I’m not clear on it yet.”

**

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

Have I asserted p when I write ‛p’? How can you tell?

Is there a difference between thinking p and saying it out loud? Does vocalizing p usher it across the assertion barrier?

Here is the first sentence of Camus’ The Stranger: “Mother died today.” Call it ‛p’. Has p been asserted? By whom? The narrator of the novel is named Meursault. Should we say it’s his assertion? But of course there is no Meursault. Is it then Camus’ assertion? But it’s not about his mother. Maybe it's not an assertion after all. Sure looks like one, though . . . etc. etc.

So, much as I wish I could agree with Leontiskos (it would make things so much simpler):

"I" always refers to the person speaking the sentence, does it not? — Leontiskos

I think the answer is no. @Fdrake prefers to think of the asserter as “the person in the sentence,” and this seems closer, but demands a generous ascription of personhood.

There’s a lot more I could respond to, but enough for now. High-quality posts.

Thanks much. I admit to being daunted by the Thomistic apparatus, but that's my problem. Certainly a revisit with Aristotle's Metaphysics is in order. I might run a few quotes by you (and other Aristotelians) that Kimhi uses to support his position, if that's OK with you. Curious to know if K's interpretation is mainstream or outlier/revisionist.

First, it's not clear to me what your argument is. — Srap Tasmaner

it's a particular kind of argument you want to make: not so much that Frege is wrong or something, but that some other framework might prove more useful, or more perspicacious, might make easier to see something that Frege's framework makes hard to see, — Srap Tasmaner

Right, my argument is more that Frege fails to provide a way of dealing with certain features of assertion and its connection with thought or consciousness, not that he’s wrong per se in what he does countenance as part of logic. I guess that’s why I think of it as a “challenge” to Frege rather than a refutation.

‛The grass is green’ displays the assertion, and at the same time, under the right circumstances, makes it.
— J

That doesn't sound like an argument; it sounds like you (ahem) asserting your proposed conclusion. Even so, the natural rejoinder is that the circumstances in question involve someone, you know, asserting it. — Srap Tasmaner

Here, I’m hoping to get the reader’s agreement on a point of observation – namely that there’s nothing incoherent about trying to draw a distinction between force and assertion. The challenging part, perhaps, lies not in the second use of ‛The grass is green’ -- I quite agree that under these “right circumstances” someone is indeed asserting it – but the first. We’re not used to thinking that p can display an assertion without making it. The Fregean picture is more like “p would or could be an assertion under the right illocutionary circumstances (thanks, @Banno), but unless it’s actually being asserted, p has nothing in the way of force.” That’s what I’m challenging. The argument for that is in the OP and I’m sure it can be improved, so please feel free to sharpen it in the process of disagreeing, if you do.

Fun thread. — fdrake

Fun, for sure. Some go clubbing and do X, we worry about 'x'. :razz: (Some do both, no doubt.)

writing or saying the sentence counts as an assertion, — fdrake

But does it? Were you asserting it, just now when you wrote the sentence? I know you clarify this later, but in this OP I’m claiming that much depends on exactly what we mean by “assertion” so I’m being finicky here.

I like your “degrees of freedom” analysis a lot. (2) and (3) get to the heart of the matter – how can a strictly Fregean understanding of propositions give us any insight into what’s wrong with a “logical structure” that is not extensionally self-contradictory? The challenge I’m offering concurs with (3) that an explanation of the self-contradiction must be part of our logical analysis of the sentence. I’m trying to keep Kimhi mostly out of this, but will just note that (3) is absolutely essential to his revisionist philosophy of logic.

I also agree that it’s possible simply to deny (2) – isn’t that what Frege (and probably Donald Davidson) do? I’d be interested, though, to hear more about what a default operation in language is, and how it might answer the problem.

Yes, I think the ND review gets it right about Kimhi's debt to Wittgenstein, which he acknowledges. He sees Wittgenstein as a fellow "psycho / logical monist". Is a there a Wittgensteinian response about assertion here that you could offer? (In this context, assertion isn't the same as "reference.")

The Indirect Realist challenge is interesting, but I'll leave it alone as my own metaphysics is much closer to direct realism.

do we agree roughly on the account I've given? — Banno

In a word, yes. Assertion as displaying illocutionary force is part of the "standard" picture. And the challenge here is about the nature of propositional content (intension vs. extension), just as you say.

Thank you, appreciate the references.

I'm glad to hear you're reading Kimhi -- not for the faint of heart! In fact you may find parts of it easier going than I did, due to your background in Aristotle.

I didn't participate in the thread you refer us to, and I'm not prepared right now to try to take it all in. But your quoted comment about negation versus denial is definitely apropos. It may come down to the difference between 'not-X' (negation as an operation within a proposition) and 'It is not the case that (p)' (denial of a proposition), though I'm not sure about this. What Kimhi adds to this, in a manner I'm still grappling with, is the unity part: the claim that "the assertion 'p is true' is the same as 'I truly think p'." In general, the role of an act of consciousness in Kimhi's philosophy is what allows him to take a thoroughly monist stance on these matters, but as I've said before, I think he could have done a much clearer job explaining it.

I also agree that he's good on the PNC. One of the most appealing and lucid sections of the book.

Yes, I had recourse to it several times in drafting my various posts about Kimhi. Much better than the Hanna piece.

Again, thanks for the response to my concerns. Two things:

1. My question about whether “on” was a logical connective only meant that I wasn’t aware of a “logic of ‛on’” that had been worked out. For all I know, there is one, but if you start playing with it, you can see why it might be ill-suited for formal functions. “If a is on b, and b is on c, then a is on c” – true or false? Beats me. Depends. But once we disambiguate “on”, what are we going to do with it? All sorts of interesting questions hinge on getting clear about “and”, “or”, “if/IFF”, “can”, “must”, et al. -- well, who knows, maybe we need a better understanding of “on” too.

2. I deliberately didn’t say anything about Kimhi’s use of “syncategorematic” in this thread because it’s so non-standard, and even though he has a go at explaining it about three different ways, his usage isn’t transparent to me. You write:

Therefore, within the proposition "p is true", the expression "is true" is a syncategorematic expression, which adds nothing to the sense of "p". — RussellA

That’s right, but it’s right for Frege as well. Frege’s assertion (judgment) stroke, indicating “is true”, is syncategorematic.

Where it gets bizarre with Kimhi is his further claim that p itself is syncategorematic. You’re right that he regards p as a fact rather than a Fregean complex, but how then is p used? What is the context we need to provide in order to state a relation involving p? I don’t think that, e.g., joining it with q in ‛p & q’ helps. The problem lies in how facts are asserted – how they’re affirmed or denied. When the ND reviewer writes, “ ‛p’ itself . . . [does] not add anything whatsoever to the sense of ‛p’,” this can only mean that some assertion of p can add nothing to p’s sense, but that’s still orthodox Fregeanism. I think Kimhi wants to say something more radical – that the context needed to make use of (syncategorematic) ‛p’ has to involve a monistic understanding of what it is to assert. He thinks the necessary separation of sense and assertion is all wrong. “From the monist point of view, a simple propositional sign displays a possible act of consciousness.” -- the possibility of affirmation or negation.

And on this mystical note, I’ll stop.

Thanks, this helps. "Representing" is describing in words, while "mirroring" is more like ostension or making a picture. I'm not satisfied with how this carries over into logical form
(is "on" really a logical connective?), but that can wait till another day.

Within the literature, it seems to me that the words i) assertoric force, asserted, force, extrinsic and assertion seem to be synonyms for Frege's "reference" and the words ii) content, semantic, intrinsic and unasserted seem to be synonyms for Frege's "sense". — RussellA

I would say, not synonyms, but they match up with the distinction that "reference" and "sense" is meant to draw. Semantic content reveals sense, and of course can be unasserted, according to Frege. Assertions and truth-claims about what's actually "out there" depend upon the idea of referring. This thread has mostly focused on how to understand the act of assertion, it seems to me.