if telling a non-fiction story is a form of assertion, and telling a fiction story is not really assertion, then what is it? — Leontiskos

Yeah that was the idea. Is assertion something added on to the words? If you can add on assertion, are there other things you could add on?

It seems clear that Kimhi accepts a logical subject in the way that (early?) Wittgenstein does not, and can thus introduce consciousness. — Leontiskos

Shaky ground for me, but I don't think that's right. The alternative title for the Tractatus is "The World As I Found It". "The limits of my language are the limits of my world." There's that business with the eye, and the little picture showing how the eye is its own horizon, never included in what it can see. The issue of solipsism is addressed directly. There's a pretty strong sense of "I" at least in parts of the Tractatus, and it would probably be fair to call it "logical". -- Honestly not an aspect of the book I ever gave much thought to though, so I might be off base here.

Fiction is a minefield for discussions like this, and I don't want to derail the thread, if that's even possible, but I'll make one point.

My view is that in a work of fiction the author pretends to be telling a story, as she might tell a story about something that really happened. We pretend to believe she's telling a story. An author pretends to be telling the truth. (I think it's a pretty sophisticated thing, and it's easy to be culture-bound and miss how unusual it is.)

A relevant (for this thread) question might be: what exactly is an author pretending to do that he isn't? Can we say, there's the sentences you speak and the order you speak them in, on the one hand, and something else that makes your speaking "reporting a sequence of events" or "(merely) telling a (fictional) story" on the other?

My memory of the Tractatus is that Wittgenstein also says that a picture is a fact, it's part of the world, and so to say this is a picture of that is to say that between this fact and this other fact there is a special picturing relation. And he wants to figure out what it means to say two facts are so related and how it is possible for them to be. (I'm thinking of this in part because Kimhi ends up talking about consciousness, right? So you might take consciousness as the locus of this relation, or even as constituted by it.)

The more natural move for later Wittgenstein is to say that sometimes we see something as a picture of something else, sometimes we don't, and that it is a far more flexible business than it might seem in the Tractatus. The duck-rabbit shows flexibility in what something is a picture of; the possibilities for what counts, or what someone might count, as a picture of a given thing are too numerous to contemplate. (Think of how often only a parent can understand the first indistinct words of their own child. Now consider the range of possible pictures of a dog, from that toddler's wobbly shapes to a cubist painting or an abstract sculpture, and "everything in between", photos, icons, words, pantomime, on and on. Clouds!)

Is there then something between assertion and non-assertion? — Leontiskos

Almost everything I've posted in this thread.

There are a couple places where I was moved to think, but nothing much came of it.

Most of my posts have been pretty lazy, stuff I can post on auto-pilot. Sometimes I do this just in case I happen to know something someone else would find useful. If you asked me if I believe any of it, I'm not sure what I would say.

I like the stuff about the screwdriver. And I'm right about triangulation. Everything else was chit chat. Philosophical gossip.

I was a bit puzzled by this so I asked ChatGPT o1-preview the following question — Pierre-Normand

Just so you know, I'm not going to read that.

just tell me whether you understand the word on the paper or not — J

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?

Don't worry about it. Frege is not that dumb. I believe Dummett's formula ends up being: "The meaning of a word is the contribution it makes to the truth conditions of the sentences in which it is used."

You can still get some straightforward compositional semantics out of that. But the approach Dummett is championing has to put sentences first: sentences have truth conditions, and words don't, so the sentence is where we start.

As for your "Berlin" example, you don't understand it. It could be a lot of things. Name of a city, name of a band, name of a book, an adjective describing a strain of flu. Without the context of a sentence -- and honestly much more context than that -- you can't know what referent "Berlin" is intended to pick out if any. You might know a lot of options, but even for a single word there are more possibilities than you can imagine.

is it possible to see that something is true before going on to assert it? — Leontiskos

There's a couple ways to read this, but at any rate, a couple obvious options:

1. Under the usual understanding of assertion -- just to get this out of the way -- it's perfectly ordinary for people to make claims the truth of which they do not know. They may indeed be aiming at truth, but when you loose the arrow, while you may feel some confidence of the result, you cannot know whether you've hit the target.

2. From the other side, once you "grasp" the truth of a situation, have you any choice but to affirm it? This would seem to be somewhat closer to the sense of assertion intended. In other words, Moore's paradox is a simple impossibility: to see the truth of a situation or a proposition is to believe it.

But I want to make a bit of a different point. On my (admittedly limited) understanding of the Tractatus, one thing a picture is entirely incapable of depicting is that it is true. A picture can show how things might be, and things may indeed be that way, but the picture cannot include itself in its depiction and vouch for its own accuracy.

Just so, my belief that a picture is accurate does not count as evidence that it is.

We have talked some -- whether we should have or not, I'm not sure --- about whether there's some sense in which propositions are self-asserting. In these terms, whether a picture at least inherently claims that things stand as it shows, even if it cannot itself substantiate that claim.

On the one hand, this seems a bit foolish. Pictures can show how things aren't, so why would they have to be claiming that things do so stand, how would they, and why would anyone care if they did: if all pictures claim to be true, you can ignore their claims. If, per impossible, a picture could show that it was the truth, that would be something to pay attention to. They can't, and claims are cheap.

On the other hand, in the wake of the Tractatus and Carnap and the rest, we got possible-world semantics; so you could plausibly say that a picture showing how things could be is a picture showing how things are in some possible world, this one or another.

The feeling of "claiming" is gone, but was probably mistaken anyway. In exchange, we get a version of "truth" attached to every proposition, every picture. Under such a framework, this is just how all propositions work, they say how things are somewhere, if not here. Wittgenstein's point could be adjusted: a picture does need to tell you it's true somewhere -- it is -- but it can't tell you if it's true here or somewhere else.

I don't want to get into this too much, but yes, in trying to keep conscious, attentive decoding out of it, I do make understanding sound too passive. I think the evidence is that understanding is pretty darn active (we predict the ends of sentences before we hear them, guess what the other person is going to say next, back-channel to guide their speech, and so on). It might still make sense to say that we don't choose to understand other people's speech this way, it's just what we do.

I was very impressed by Austin's claim that it normally doesn't make sense to say that I sat in the chair "voluntarily" or that I sat in the chair "involuntarily" -- as doctrinaire views on free will would require -- but each fits special circumstances which call for such an adverb. Just so, I'm resistant to analysis that treats all of our declarative utterances as deserving an "I judge that ..." or "I believe that ..." in front of them. Sometimes we judge, sometimes we go out of our way to mark what we're saying as our personal belief, and sometimes, probably mostly, we just talk.

I still don't know what this thread is about, but I'm pretty sure it starts in a place pretty far from me and goes in the opposite direction.

Here's a fun read on Carroll and inference --- also handy because it mentions a lot of the best-known work, including a few I've missed. (You could probably get something similar out of SEP, but I'm allergic to SEP.)

the way in which Frege forbids predicating existence — J

Consider this: if you can predicate existence, can you also predicate non-existence? (Or, what is the same thing, negate a predication of existence.) And *what* would you predicate non-existence of?

I'm tempted to warn you off this whole thing -- which gets rehashed regularly -- but there is a sense in which Frege's system automatically narrows the the field of true statements to statements about real things, and that does seem relevant to Kimhi's whole invocation of Parmenides. Somehow. Not waters I like to swim in.

Do you know Russell?

The thing about "The grass in my backyard" as a denotative phrase is that it has that "the" in it, which Russell gives a famous analysis of, claiming it includes a sort of hidden existential quantification.

Frege is not giving a simplification or a model — Leontiskos

That may be true, but it's been a serious point of contention in the post-Frege discussion of language.

And here I'll mention, for the nth time on TPF, the comparatively little-known view of Tarski's star student, Richard Montague, that there is no distinction between formal and natural languages, because natural languages are "formal" in the intended sense, and that linguistics is a branch of mathematics. Montague presents his analysis of the logical constants as the semantics of natural language. Certainly a maximalist take on the formal view of language.

And I guess we ought to leave this more general discussion of the underlying issues there.

Broadly -- I think everyone knows this, but here we are -- the two principal strands of thought about language are: language as symbol system (which facilitates thought); language as communications system. Frege is generally treated as part of the former camp, and early Wittgenstein, and the latter camp includes later Wittgenstein, Grice, et al. (David Lewis makes an heroic attempt to marry them in Convention, and admits that he cannot.) For what it's worth, I'm in the latter camp, but see the sort of analysis the former produces as a useful strategy in some cases.

But language is easy (!) compared to logic. It appears to me that research overwhelmingly supports the communication-first view, but there is no simple path from there to a similarly robust take on logic, not that I've found anyway. That's uncomfortable for me, but oh well.

And Kimhi seems to me mostly to be talking about a pretend world, or at least mistaking the simplifications (that is, fictions) we employ, like "grasping the truth of a proposition", for reality. (And note that mathematics is such a pretend world where logic runs like a champ without any of this psychological baggage.)

The puzzle is explicit in Frege's requirement that only true sentences can be asserted, a requirement that is incomprehensible to, and thus not even understood by Russell and Wittgenstein. If only true sentences can be asserted, then what exactly is the difference between calling a sentence true and asserting it? Frege has an uncommonly objective notion of truth (and also assertion) (at least as far as contemporary logic is concerned). — Leontiskos

Indeed it is so incomprehensible that I didn't even remember this was Frege's view.

Which suggests to me that "assertion" is really not a word we should be using at all here, given its modern meaning.

I may have missed it, but I suppose this applies to "judgment" as well, that you cannot judge as true what is false.

All of which points toward that favorite (never defined) word, "grasping". So it's about grasping the meaning of a proposition, grasping its truth, the difference between those, and so on.

and the class of things which are thus and so is not empty — Leontiskos

Eek. Not only is this part redundant but it requires classes to be objects, which pill, though bitter, even Quine swallowed for the sake of mathematics. But we don't have to go there just for this.

(It's also Quine who pointed out that names for individuals are eliminable. You just make a predicate like "Socratizes" that is satisfied by a single individual. That might not strike you as either intuitive or felicitous, but it's a typical math move, to subsume a particular problem into a more general one.)

a kind of thinking together — Leontiskos

It's ironic you say this.

My deep dissatisfaction with everything I've read of Kimhi was precisely the emphasis on assertion, judgment (a word I've never had any use for because of its libertarian aura), and this "I" of logic.

I've been thinking a lot the last few days about the "we" of logic, but so far it's not in good enough shape for the thread I promised.

Anyway, this "I" stuff is why I'm not bothering about Kimhi anymore.

I don't even want to talk about Kimhi, so new thread it is.

A logic which presupposes judgment is something fundamentally different from a logic that does not. Frege and Kimhi both maintain that logic presupposes judgment. — Leontiskos

Well, that's the thing. You're talking about Frege says about his system. And I'll grant you, the first version of the system we all know now as "classical logic" included some notation that Frege thought important, which it turns out had so little to do with how the system was actually used that it disappeared without a trace, leaving the system essentially unchanged. You're right that Frege might not see it that way, but the facts on the ground tell a different story.

What's ironic about this story, is that it's as if we're talking about Frege's "interpretation" of the predicate calculus, considered as a system of symbol manipulation, which in a sense is precisely what's at issue. That means each side can retreat to their preferred view and consider the other misguided. Not a great result. (And of course a third party might see the dispute as "merely verbal".)

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

Sorry, I didn't understand a word of that.

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.

what is the criteria for truth, for Frege or otherwise — schopenhauer1

This phrase "criteria for truth" -- what could that possibly mean? How can anyone have one of those?

Frege simplifies what is not simple. — Leontiskos

Shrug. That's how simplification works. It's a model; all models are wrong.

Frege and Kimhi do not seem to be at odds on this point — Leontiskos

For instance, my little triangulation model is waaaaaay simplified.

Correctly understood as Wittgenstein’s point, Frege’s observation concerns actual occurrences of a proposition and amounts to the full context principle — Kimhi, Thinking and Being, 38-9

I always read the "language-game" analysis as an expansion of the context principle, so I have some sympathy with this view.

I do want to note the alternative approach, though, which is Grice's, and which I also have considerable sympathy with. Grice distinguishes sentence meaning from speaker's meaning, and defends the usual logical analysis of the meaning of a sentence as essentially correct, even if in a given context a speaker means something else by saying it.

An example I've used before: you're driving somewhere with a friend and ask, "Should we stop here to eat?" Your friend checks his phone and says, "The next town is like 70 miles." What he means by saying this is "yes", but that doesn't change the meaning of the sentence he uttered or of any of the words in it. --- Nor is "yes" logically implied by what he said; it is only implicated, and he might in fact be willing to wait.

I say all this because if you want to identify the meaning of a sentence with its use, as a move in a language-game -- what I think Kimhi might be pointing at with "actual occurrences" and so on -- you can get speaker's meaning right but skip entirely over sentence meaning, which in this case is a verifiable claim about geography.

It does seem like the principal subtext here is the picture theory of the Tractatus and its abandonment.

Russell is stultifying. — Leontiskos

Awww. :(

Sitting in the library reading "On Denoting" changed my life. It felt like coming home.

"There are a great many qualities one could attribute to the First Gentleman of Europe, but an interest in the law of identity is not among them."

Happy times.



Antinatalism is the poster boy for playing with Big Important Ideas not always leading to wisdom or insight. At least the minutia-mongerers among us aren't so foolish as to think there could be such a thing as an argument against life.

I think we can say this: a world with declarative sentences in it, or a world in which they can be produced, is a world that also includes assertion. A screwdriver is an element in a system of fastening: without screws of the appropriate material and materials to be fastened that screws can be driven into, there's no reason to have screwdrivers. To then take the screwdriver as having, shall we say, significance in itself, would clearly be mistaken.

What that gets us, I'm not sure. If you say, for instance, that assertion "aims at truth" (which, perhaps mistakenly, I suppose is the sort of thing Kimhi will want to say), then a declarative sentence must be the sort of thing that can be aimed at truth, whatever that means. One adjustment to this I would probably make is to say the goal of assertion is to aim someone else at truth -- at what you take for truth, anyway, so that's another adjustment. It's a triangulation: if you imagine yourself at vertex A, observing a truth at vertex B, then you speak to someone else at C to guide their gaze toward the (purported) truth at B.

There is something faintly Fregean about this, because of B. Frege's arguments for the "third realm" were often intersubjective: there is not "my pythagorean theorem" and "your pythagorean theorem" but "the pythagorean theorem"; if I claim that P is true, in order to agree or disagree you must be considering the very same P, else we talk past each other; and, finally, there was the telescope, where we can each in turn view the image on the mirror, rather than viewing the moon directly, but it is the same image we observe -- this to explain the difference between sense and reference, as I recall, and to insist that senses are not subjective.

I avoided the indicative mood language because a statement is only one kind of utterance in the indicative mood. — Leontiskos

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

Logic is not about the way we think, it is rather a description of the objective structure of thought. — J

Okay, yeah, I haven't thought about this in a while, but that's Frege all over. It's pure platonism.

different kinds of assertion — Srap Tasmaner

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

* Don't mind the "since" -- the point stands if the previous line was "Now, 2 is less than 3."

the differences between Fregian logic and contemporary logical intuitions — Leontiskos

I'm not much concerned about this, but the single most interesting point, and relevant to this thread, is that the assertion stroke disappeared. Frege thought it was necessary and later logicians universally (?) don't. I'm no historian, so I'm not quite sure how this happened. I always assumed that Frege was just wrong, and that we can do formal logic as if there were an implicit assertion stroke at the start of each line. And if we can do that, it becomes clearer that what we're really doing is manipulating symbols according to rules, as when we do mathematics, and interpretation can wait until later.

(On the other hand, natural deduction systems often use some notation for assumptions and their later discharge, I think, so that's a way of singling out formulae you are not asserting simpliciter.)

Now for the hair-splitting.

Suppose we put the tool in our shed for storage. In doing this have we used it for an alternative purpose? No, because we are preserving the tool in order that it may be used for its singular purpose at a later date. — Leontiskos

In most cases, but also I think obviously false as a rule. You might own a tool that you have no intention of ever using, an antique gun, for instance. Men have workshops with peg-boarded walls where lots of tools are impressively arrayed and the three or four they actually use are laying on the workbench or in a drawer. I could go on.

This hair isn't worth splitting though, because most sentences asserted are not ready-to-hand like a screwdriver, but one-offs. So there's no sense talking about storage and retrieval in the first place. (Words, on the other hand, ...) Where you do see the same sentence bouncing around repeatedly is in argument and discussion, and in quotation. That means we have the option of exploring whether there are different kinds of assertion; maybe assertion in an argument is a slightly different beast from the sort of extemporaneous sharing of information we do all day.

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

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

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

The hairs that remain to be split are no fun: there's
(1) the sentence;
(2) the sentence in a given context;
(3) the elaborated sentence with indexicals resolved by context;
(4) the sentence as uttered;
(5) the sentence as uttered in a specific context;
(6) the actual uttering of the sentence;
(7) all the intentions involved (which Grice admits are infinite, though it's a pretty model and gets something clearly right).

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

I'd like to say something useful about this last difficulty but it will have to wait.

Is this really an explanation or just an “ontological move”? — J

This phrase, "just an ontological move", is interesting.

My first instinct, as suggested earlier with force and content, is to suggest that what's at work here is not the agent adapting her behavior to the facts of the world, but adopting a strategy to treat this as force and that as content, this as function and that as object. (Frege admits as much when he says talking about functions is treating them as objects.)

The explanation on offer, then, would be an explanation of "how I intend to proceed", how I intend to treat these "things".

Now if you think there is one true ontology out there, you'll naturally ask if functions and objects are really distinct ontological categories; that distinction may be overlooked or abstracted away when it's not of interest, but it lies in wait as an aspect of reality, and this is why we are even able, when we so desire, to distinguish them. The contrary position, I suppose, would be that we "impose" the distinction, it's all in our head, or in our language, or in our culture, whatever. I guess you just deny that any explanation for how we do this is necessary, or you you reach for the magic of consciousness, or something complicated and Peircean.

Obviously I don't know what to say about all that, but I like getting the facts we're trying to explain clear, rather than passing as quickly as possible to the contest of ideologies. To that end, I prefer looking at what people do, and how they think and talk about what they do, to speculating about how things are.

And here I'll add to my previous suggestion: people are very aware of the subtleties of assertion, whether you meant what you said, whether you have committed to a certain claim and can be held to account, etc., and recognize that there are degrees of belief and degrees of conviction in speaking. We put considerable effort into managing these uncertainties. (Think of the conventions surrounding agreement to a contract.)

So I don't really expect an absolute, almost mechanical explanation of what assertion is and how it works, and when faced with a deliberately mechanical system like Frege's I'll tend to see it as a strategy that must be useful for some purposes, with no expectation that it is some total solution to a supposed problem.

Wow, kinda rambled there. Sorry about that.

Nice to meet another Merrill fan! — J

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

We can grasp a thought without recognizing it as true. — Frege, Posthumous Writings, 192

Not to beat a dead horse but this is another exemplar of the pattern I've been talking about. We do generally credit candid speech -- and there's an argument that it must be so for a language to have any consistent semantics -- and it is also true that by and large when we speak we intend and expect others to believe us, but for all that the coupling of understanding and belief is loose: you can understand what someone says without believing it or endorsing it yourself.

Now in that bolded phrase you switch from 'statement' to 'sentence', — Leontiskos

And I'm usually so careful about that. At any rate, I'm just using 'statement' to mean 'indicative mood sentence.'

I would question the idea that a statement has other uses than assertion — Leontiskos

Are you using 'statement' here the same way I was, or as 'a sentence that is being asserted'? (Or something else? Everyday terminology does not lend itself to the distinctions we're discussing.)

Sentences is in the indicative mood are of course used to ask questions, give commands, suggest doubt, make wishes, and so on.

Is that proposition assertoric? No and yes. — Leontiskos

This is the whole point of my screwdriver discussion. Driving screws is an activity, like making assertions. The favored use of screwdrivers is driving screws, as the favored use of indicative mood sentences is making assertions. But, as I argued, this coupling is loose. So we are right to recognize that a screwdriver is longing to drive screws, and this is the most joy it can find in life, but we still might drive screws without it, or use it for something else. What I'm not sure there's grounds for saying is that the screwdriver itself is always kinda driving screws; it's really not, though that is its special purpose and we are right to recognize it.

To take an old example: 'bank'. In the river sense or the money sense? — Leontiskos

To stick with Frege, this is the motivation for the context principle: never ask for the meaning of a word except in the context of (as it is used in) a sentence.

Let's come back to @J 's issue (instead of doing all of philosophy of language).

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

Take a screwdriver. It is a designed artifact, with an intended and, in practice, overwhelmingly common use. That's what it's for. (You might also say that obvious use is what it does, if you're comfortable saying things like that.) When you want to drive a screw, you reach for a screwdriver (of the right sort) because it is the right tool for the job.

But you can use a screwdriver for an unknown number of purposes improvised in the moment. And you can use an unknown number of other objects to drive a screw in a pinch.

The activity of driving screws and screwdrivers are only loosely coupled, though they are indeed coupled and statistics on how screws have been driven and how screwdrivers have been used would certainly show that.

And the analogy to words should be clear, although we're really aiming for sentences, and I think it does no harm to pass the analogy up a rung.

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

For the duration of an act of assertion, there may be a temporary tightening of the coupling --- to produce an utterance you have to commit to a particular sentence. But that grip is immediately slackened: this forum consists almost entirely of people trying to express the same thoughts using different words.

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.

We could also note that Frege's sense/reference distinction is in some ways an acknowledgement of such looseness: "3 + 2" and "5" are different expressions denoting the same object; that means you have some freedom in choosing what expression to use to pick out an object, and both proofs and methods for solving equations rely on this possibility of rewriting a mathematical sentence using expressions that can be substituted salva veritate.

there is a kind of default or prima facie intentional sense of every proposition, given the fact that there is no way of interpreting or even apprehending a proposition without assuming some intentional context or another. — Leontiskos

I'm going to recast what you're saying in this post. (That's just a representative quote.)

I think what you're actually circling around is this: given a sentence (not even necessarily a statement, though that's been the main focus), what would a speaker of this language use it for? You're taking about use, and the default use of statements is assertion.

I'll give my understanding -- and that without going back to the source -- but you are encouraged to check my work.

the Fregian presupposition which cleanly distinguishes predicate bearers from predicates, because apparently it associates existence with the former but not the latter. — Leontiskos

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

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

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

That is, apparently we can talk about non-existent predicates but not non-existent predicate bearers. — Leontiskos

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

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

According to Anthony Kenny's history of philosophy Frege and Peirce simultaneously and independently developed the propositional calculus (which therefore did not predate them, at least in this robust form). — Leontiskos

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

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That's all the housekeeping. I'm tagging the quotes below, because this is the meat of it, of course, but I'm going to hold off posting and think a bit more.

I am struggling to see the difference here — Leontiskos

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.

Therefore I would prefer a distinction between a possessor of assertoric force which requires a speaker/asserter and one that does not. I thought J was saying, "This thing has assertoric force even before you pick it up and assert it." — Leontiskos

The key difference is affirming a claim – that is, a statement -- rather than making your own statement about how the world is. — J

Some points I'm mulling:
(1) We have to decide something about locutions like "This sentence claims ..." or "This sign says ..." and so on. I consider it a live option to take them at face-value. It is more common to treat this as a manner of speaking, perhaps glossing "The sign says we have stop" as "If a person were to speak the word printed on the sign, she would be saying that we have to stop," on the smarty-pants grounds that signs don't talk and to say otherwise is anthropomorphizing them. You can also say that they are said to "speak" by courtesy, or argue directly that either an artifact or an abstract object like a proposition, as it were, "borrows" our ability to mean things, that we, as it were, "lend" them our ability to mean things --- as if to say a stop sign is a sort of ghostly police officer, and he has imbued the sign with his spirit.
(2) 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. 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.
((3) And here I'll note that this pattern is reminiscent of the prosentential theory of truth, as well as other deflationary theories of truth such as Ramsey and Wittgenstein appeared to hold, such that the use of "... is true" is primarily to endorse what someone else has said.)
(4) @Leontiskos seems almost to suggest that statements have a sort of hole in them, like Frege's functions, waiting for an agent to be inserted and complete the assertion. But we need more than an agent, we need an actual utterance (even if internal), and then we're faced with the problem of intention as well --- some of that context will take care (I'm acting in a play), but some it won't (I was just saying what he wanted to hear).
(5) We have to decide --- (4) mentions some of this --- what we want to count as an assertion. Is it fully disambiguated? Are indexicals all resolved? Is the assertion the statement itself, or the claim in the context and at the time it was made? (Is an assertion an event?) ---- Several of these issues do not arise for the language of mathematics, which is entirely tenseless, to start with, requires no speakers or audience, has no sensitivity to context, etc.
(6) And, finally I guess, what about the social aspect of assertion? We generally think of making an assertion as incurring an obligation to stand by it, perhaps to provide justification, to license others to rely upon it, and so forth. There are pragmatic maxims such as "Do not say what you do not have good evidence for" (Grice) or "Do not say what you do not know" (Williamson). It's easy to talk about all this if assertion is entirely external to the "content" of the statement asserted, but goes wobbly if you want to push some of that into the sentence itself.

I don't think this is correct at all. — Leontiskos

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

Added: This all goes hand-in-hand with Frege's straightforward platonism -- mathematical objects just exist, and they have to exist for us to talk about them as we do.

I've been rereading your OP, and I think I get the argument now. Here's the key point, I believe:

‛The grass is green’ is not neutral as to force; it is not the making of the assertion that would give it its force. What it displays is a positive predication, which can be affirmed or denied. — J

Two alternative definitions of "assertion" contrasted here:

(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.

In (1) the claim is not made until someone asserts it, or asserts that the statement at issue is true, that what it describes is the case. In (2), the statement itself is a claim that things stand thus-and-so, and asserting that statement is affirming, agreeing with, that claim, endorsing its claim to truth.

One thing that's nice about (2) is that the statement underlying the claim is readily picked out. We could try to avoid some of the awkwardness of (1) (and ditch the somewhat Tractarian "possible state of affairs") something like this:

(1A) Assertion is (a person, an agent) claiming that what a statement says, is in fact the case.

And now it feels like we're halfway to (2) already.

---- I want to stop there for a moment, because there's more to say about this business of sentences saying something, but I want to add a brief detour back to Frege and truth values.

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

So a typical, and trivial, bit of post-Frege argumentation might be this:

1. For all integers x, if x is a prime greater than 2, then x is odd.
2. 5 is a prime greater than 2.
Therefore
3. 5 is odd.

What interests me about this for the sake of this discussion is that it is not some statement that could take a truth value that is repeated: it is the unsaturated function "... is a prime greater than 2." It appears first with a bound variable in 1, and then with a specific named object in 2, and it's the use of the same predicate that allows the conclusion in 3, repeating the other unsaturated function "... is odd" but now applying it to a named object so that it is a complete symbol and can take a truth value.

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

2 and 3 are straightforward, and the sorts of statements that say things. But 1? Does 1 say something? Evidently, but it says a different sort of thing than 2 or 3.

Frege thought it was more than that and it seems he was wrong. — Leontiskos

Another black eye for modern thought.

Do you think logic is a thing? — Leontiskos

If you like, go for it. Sometimes it's more useful to speak of "logics" in the plural. It's just a word, you know.

When one sees that Frege's system is insufficient it at the very least must be demoted to the level of a "tool." — Leontiskos

Insufficient for what? For the "mutual illumination of thinking and what is"?

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

Kimhi defines — Leontiskos

Shrug. He can define as he likes.

Frege did not consider his system to be a strategic, pragmatic deployment. Specifically, the system was meant to capture logic in its entirety. — Leontiskos

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

I'll pass on Frege exegesis, but I'll say his system is spectacularly useful for doing mathematics; I believe this is mainly what he was after, but it doesn't much matter to me.

Are there forms of reasoning it is less useful for? Without question. But there are also occasions when presenting a bit of informal reasoning in the language of FOL is clarifying and useful if not dispositive. Again, I see it as a tool; you can use it and you can overuse it, and you can forget you have other tools. Tools aren't true or false.

@J

↪Srap Tasmaner says that there is no (counter)-argument being offered, and this is true at least insofar as there is no counter-argument which adopts Fregian presuppositions. What is being questioned is the presupposition. — Leontiskos

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

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

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

@fdrake brought up Moore's paradox, which did immediately leap to mind, but --

What's the plan here? What do we think we're doing?

What I want to ask specifically is this: 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?

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

The example that leaps to mind for me is indirect discourse. Even if you follow @fdrake in thinking there is a sort of default use of language -- and I very much do (and here we might mention Lewis's truthfulness and trust) -- indirect discourse presents some challenges. The idea of force is helpful here, because you can distinguish between reporting what someone else asserts and asserting it yourself. (That this is a strategy we are not required by the nature of things to follow is clear in the phenomenon of blaming (or killing) the messenger.)

All of this probably aligns me with

a "pragmaticizing" of logic, which destroys the idea of ontologically superior logics at its root — Leontiskos

But I'm making the further suggestion that it's not just a question of our theories of language as philosophers, but that these theories are founded on the practices of language speakers, and that such theories do not stand aside as explanations of how people talk but are deployed strategically by speakers and listeners.