talking about language rather than thinking — Banno

I guess you could read my examples that way, but it wasn't my intention.

It's a little harder to show collaborative thought, but I expect most of us have had an experience like this: you're trying to express or even explain something you don't quite have a grasp of, and the person you're talking to puts it in such a way that it clarifies your own thinking for you. (I've already posted elsewhere Fry & Laurie's "That's It!", so only a link this time.)

Well I suspect not just our language use but almost all of our thinking is just as collaborative as in this example, it's just usually harder to see. "I think ..." "I judge ..." Bullshit. Tens of thousands of years have gone into every thought you've ever had, every word you've ever uttered.

The content of a thought ought to specify its truth conditions. Hence, the content of a simple predicative thought must have a referent to its singular term such that its truth or falsity depends on how things are with the referent. — Pierre-Normand

Natural enough. For a lot of cases, we usually say we need two elements for assertion: what we're talking about (to be picked out by a referential expression) and what we're saying about it (the predication).

Two small points about this though.

1. If you think of this in terms of communication, there's a fairly clear sense of "picking out" or "specifying" available: you negotiate until you agree on the subject; enough for your audience to know what you're talking about is enough for you to say what you want to say.

There is no standard as clear that doesn't consider communication. If someone is just expressing their views in language for fun, speaking their beliefs to the universe at large, what standard do they meet to count their referential expressions as successful?

Negotiation can be really one-sided. Suppose you tell me you have to take care of something and then we can go; I wait by the car and when you arrive I ask, "Did you take care of it?" If you say, "Take care of what?" all I have is "Whatever you told me you had to take care of!" I take myself to be talking about something that only you can pick out.

2. Principally for descriptions (with a bound variable) but even for names, we can sometimes choose -- to use the programming language terminology -- between early binding and late binding, between fixing reference at "compile time", when we first speak, and at "run time", which can vary.

Consider a direction like "Don't forget to put your tools away after". The tools that are already where they should be can't be put away, so the intention is to pick out whichever tools are out at the time you're carrying out the directive. That can also be expressed as a conditional --- something like, "For all members of your tools, if it's out then put it away." The variable is singular now, but it's still not going to be bound until run-time, and then a number of times, also not known until run-time. Same thing.

This example is similar to the example in the first point, but one person gives the criterion and the other applies it; together they fix the reference, but not immediately.

---

Both points are intended to cast a bit of doubt on the presumption that our propositions are always referentially determinate, and thus their truth conditions too, at the time of our choosing, or that they need to be. (And I didn't even mention vagueness.)

There are similarly open-ended options for predication.

None of this matters to Frege or Kimhi, I'm sure. I don't know if it helps with @Banno's cat.

rule out talk of abstracta in a less reified way — J

No no, of course not.

We don't have to continue this here, or anywhere. Roughly, I'm just carrying the flag for population thinking versus essentialism. --- The bit earlier in the thread about loose and tight coupling, that's a suggestion that hunting for the essence of assertion, for example, is misguided.

Maybe some other time, though I really hate talking at this level of generality. Everything I say sounds like hand-wavy bullshit.

the role "the laws of thought" in Frege — fdrake

Have a glance at SEP's article on psychologism. Some curious stuff there I haven't really absorbed.

I may come back to some of your other points tonight after work.

For Kimhi, the key concept is affirmation and denial, not positive or negative predication. — J

Which has a weirdly moral ring to it. You're either right with God or you're not. You affirm the truth or you deny it. It's your soul that's at stake.

But I insist it's worth it. — J

Whereas I think it's all horseshit, but it's an opportunity to explore what I find so ridiculous about this way of doing philosophy.

I do find it curious that I reached for hylomorphism right before identifying the magnitude of the platonism at issue. The old war still rages, and an enemy of my enemy is a friend.

This is what drives him crazy -- how can we unify what appears to be a hopeless gap between the psychological and the formal? How can we bring "I judge p rightly" into some kind of entailment relation with what is the case about the world? — J

I find reading Kimhi pretty unpleasant, so a lot of what I say is kind of half-baked because I'm trying to avoid *studying* him, but that's what it takes. That said---

This is the main thing, near as I can tell.

My last few posts are trying to express my shock when it occurred to me there is a non-psychological sense of 'judgment' and this is probably Frege's sense.

I can't quite wrap my head around something like "impersonal judgment". It's not a movement of mind, not inferential. Maybe intuition? (Or revelation!) A mind and a thought just are related correctly or incorrectly.

And in trying to make sense of this, it keeps sounding like exactly what Kimhi wants, and that he says is *not* on Frege.

Could you give me some more words on that please, or a link to where you've previously spelled it out? — fdrake

It's from Kimhi's book. I don't know if anyone has posted that quote. If not I can do it tonight.

What have I said which has given you the impression that I like the forms? — fdrake

Oh! Nothing. No no, I'm not accusing you of platonism.

Roughly, I suppose I'm claiming that nothing in this discussion makes sense at all without a pretty robust platonism. It's Frege. We're arguing over which version of platonism is most satisfactory in whatever sense. I'm suggesting we own up to that.

And where's Kimhi? There's something about bringing psychology and logic back together, so he's messing about with the core of Frege's worldview, his platonist anti-psychologism. Does he bring them back together by ditching the platonism? That's not the impression I've gotten but I don't think I've stumbled on him addressing it either way.

I just think we should quit throwing around 'proposition' and 'judgment' and 'inference' in ways that allow people to give those words their preferred reading. Frege is a Laws of Thought guy. I don't think you get to tweak his position by pulling in a little "social context" here and there, for example.

Either Kimhi is underselling the rigidity with which Frege's system excludes psychology, or what he Kimhi means by 'psychology' might not be what people think.

The thing is, this thread is about what sort of thing the judgment of a proposition is. I mistook it, for some time, to be about "assertion" in a speech-act or language-game sense, because of the phrase "assertoric force", and because my memory of Frege is a bit hazy. But it's about judgment. Kimhi wants to show there is no "logical gap" between P and "We who think P are right".

We all know the status Frege assigns to propositions; it seemed to me the same considerations would apply to the judgment of P. For the case when P is true, I think Frege might very well consider judging P true to amount to following a law of thought. (If P is the case, you ought to judge P true.) As the thought P is not your personal property, not just a psychological fact about you, so judging it is also not just a matter of your personal mental behavior, but is already marked down in Plato's great hall as right judgment or wrong judgment. Thoughts aren't psychological facts, and neither is your comportment toward them (in judgment) or handling of them (in inference, for instance).

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

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

You cannot have a tidy little special-purpose platonism just for logic and mathematics, which have kind of an "eternal forms" vibe to them already. You both seemed happy to pick and choose which things get Forms and which don't, but I think you'll be stuck with a Form for "disappointment with the last season of Game of Thrones".

That post reads like I addressed @J as a defender of Frege, but it was meant to be addressed to @J as someone who believes Kimhi is making a point about Frege, but it keeps coming out as just the sort of thing we'd expect Frege to say.

The truth cannot be told in such a way as to be understood and not be believed. — Blake, not Frege or Kimhi

Suppose we go along with Frege and think of thoughts (propositions) as objective, in his sense, not the personal property of anyone.

What about judgment? What about inference?

If I judge P true, and so do you, aren't we making something we'd want to call "the same judgment"?

If I infer Q from P, and so do you, aren't we making something we'd want to call "the same inference"?

We can go further.

Suppose I forget to "carry the 1" in a piece of simple arithmetic, and so do you. Aren't we making "the same mistake"?

How far can this analogy go? Couldn't we have the same taste in music? The same fear of snakes?

Or is there some reason all of these things aren't just as objective as Frege's propositions?

I was rather arguing for something that is very much the polar opposite of that view. — Pierre-Normand

Which is what I had expected! Obviously I must have misread you.

I suppose we can leave it there for now, though I'll certainly go back through your posts.

Several posts back it felt like we were finally dealing with the central issue of this thread, so I would feel bad if we lost sight of that.

Why not say that there is a common purported content (how things are, state of affairs) that is here denied and there asserted? Consider the content of the assertion "this apple is red" or "p". When one asserts that, what one thinks is that the apple is red. When you use the same linguistic form to deny that the apple is red, one says "it is not the case that this apple is red" or "not p", this can not be construed as you standing in the different relations (with the "force" of negation, say) to the same state of affairs consisting in the apple being red since, from your point of view, there is no such state of affairs in the world. — Pierre-Normand

(my bolding)

I can't provide an adequate response to this, with appropriate citations and such, but I can say this: I am deeply, deeply suspicious of the model suggested here. It's the alternating monologues model of conversation, where the speaker simply expresses their thought out loud within earshot of an audience; language exists to mediate the connection of my mind to the world, and my audience more or less eavesdrops on my review of that relation.

I'm not going to deny the sentence I bolded, but I think this is entirely backwards. It's the other person who mediates my connection to the world, and I hers, and language is an important part of how we connect to each other, for that purpose.

Force, in particular, if we can define such a thing adequately, is meaningless absent an audience. I'm not denying that we internalize this dynamic; we very much do. But the origins of assertion, question, command, and so on, clearly --- to me, at least --- lie in our relations with others. We can play at making assertions to ourselves, asking ourselves questions, giving ourselves orders, but nothing could be more plainly derivative of what we do with others, and it is necessarily a make-believe sort of business.

(Oh, you could, if you wanted, cobble together some sense of force appropriate to our dealings with the non-minded world --- putting nature to the question, imposing your will on her, blah blah blah --- but I don't have any idea why anyone would speak a language for that purpose, since nature isn't listening.)

This doesn't directly address the scenario you described, much less provide an alternative analysis, but the starting point strikes me as completely hopeless.

the full context principle assigns meanings (Fregean senses) to subsentential expressions (e.g. names predicates and logical connectives) not only in the context of whole sentences but also in the context the other sentences a sentence relates to in a language game — Pierre-Normand

I have mixed feelings.

Yes, this is the natural way to go, but I think there's a risk that it flattens communication too much. We need different levels to play off against each other, unless you intend words to drag other language-games along with them to provide the necessary contrast. (Which, okay, and I know LW talked that way sometimes, but there are several issues with that.)

The examples I have in mind are irony, sarcasm, exaggeration, implicature (and we could go on) -- none of these are at all intelligible without something that counts, even if temporarily, as the literal meaning to play off of. That could just be some "other" meaning, but it has to be something widely enough available to count as "literal" for the relevant speech community.

So I lean toward what I take to be Grice's approach: logic is all we need for the semantic connections between sentences; pragmatics can't even get started unless that analysis stands as it is. For instance, to trigger the recognition of implicature, a response has to violate the principle of cooperation if taken literally. If you assign as meaning the use being made of the sentence (the speaker's meaning rather than the sentence meaning), you undermine the whole process. What's more, the sentence used to trigger the recognition of implicature (or irony, exaggeration, etc.) has to have a particular literal meaning for it to be suitable for the job in the first place, and thus selected and uttered. (Obligatory chess analogy: being used to block check doesn't change what a piece is, only its role in this position in this game.)

how contents are differently understood or differently individuated within different language games that warrant different ways to mark the content/force distinction — Pierre-Normand

Indeed.

It seems like I'm very nearly giving content to logic and force to pragmatics, and I'm not sure that's a terrible first thought, but I'd be interested in alternatives.

And nothing I've said does much to ground or explain the content/force distinction ...

---- I'll try to catch up so we're not having two conversations, but I'm going to hold off on your post just after this one for a bit.

Yeah there you go.

I don't it's a case of ambiguity. You just don't have enough information to know what's being asked. You'd have to go back and get the request clarified, right? — frank

Because it's ambiguous. I'm struggling here to guess how you understand that word.

But communication failure is not the main point here; it's that you have the option to treat shared abstract properties as singletons, but you do not have that option with the objects instantiating them.

That sounds very promising.

This is definitely a tangent, but I was just thinking of a puzzle that can arise with properties -- it's close to the distinction between in sensu diviso and in sensu composito, or maybe it's just the order of quantifiers, I'm not sure really. Suppose you have a bunch of marbles, some red and some blue, and you are asked to "list the colors of these marbles." There are two good answers: {red, blue} and {red, blue, red, red, blue, red,...} What is wanted? "Of each color, that it is represented"? Or "Of each marble, its color"?

I thought of this because if instead you were told to sort the marbles by color, there's no ambiguity -- well, not this particular ambiguity. Someone might distinguish the reds and blues more finely, but then we'd be back at the first ambiguity, which is really along a different axis, right?

I wouldn't even throw this little puzzle out there if it weren't for what Kimhi says about propositions versus actual occurrences. The options you get dealing with marbles are different from the options you get dealing with the colors of marbles.

I think abstract objects are products of analysis. — frank

Yes, but I would suggest that we shouldn't take the word "analysis" there to indicate a practice that stands outside the everyday use of language, as if this is only something done by a linguist examining a corpus or a philosopher examining whatever she does, arguments, intuitions and whatnot.

Instead, this kind of analysis is engaged in every day by ordinary speakers and listeners; making distinctions like what-you-said vs how-you-said-it are strategies we all use, sometimes to understand each other and sometimes for other reasons. Doing this kind of thing is as much part of being a member of a linguistic community as knowing the word for "window" or the polite use of pronouns.

I hope I didn't suggest that there's only one type of abstract object. Quite the contrary. Mathematics alone provides a considerable menagerie.

For purposes of this thread, the ones that would matter would be, at least, content and force.

There is a suggestion, speaking roughly and quite broadly, that a system of logic intended to deal with our utterances only as content, without force, is somehow mistaken. That may be so, but it's no argument to say that our utterances also have force if the whole point of the enterprise is to set force aside without denying it.

It might be closer to the argument given to say that Frege, in particular, does not set aside force (even if other and later logicians do) but that he brings it in in a way that is somehow at odds with the unity of force and content in our utterances. That might be a claim that it is a fool's errand to distinguish force and content (somewhat as Quine argued the impossibility of separating the analytic and synthetic 'components' of a sentence), or it might be a claim that Frege has distinguished them incorrectly, or something else, I don't know.

I've not spent as much time as I might have thinking about Kimhi's argument, but the claim of conflation suggests that there is a point you can make about content, the proposition, and a different point you can make about actual occurrences, in which that content features, but Frege, I think it is claimed, forgets what he's about and tries to make a single point about both, or tries to make a point about one that can only be made about the other, and somehow tricks himself into thinking he has not mixed up the two.

That's the terrain of the argument I'm unable quite to present, I think.

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

If you start with a strongly materialistic bias, you're likely to lean toward behaviorism, which says that we never really agree on anything. — frank

I can say we agree, and I can say what we agree on, without attributing to "what we agree on" independent existence, but instead treating it hylomorphically as an abstract object that is immanent within our agreement. "Our agreement" is another such abstraction. Does it exist independently of our agreeing?

These two objects have the same mass.

These two cartons have the same number of eggs.

These two sentences mean the same thing.

I take this passage to be central to what Kimhi wants to say — J

For this thread, it is absolutely central, this claim of conflation.

You can consider a physical object as having properties such as mass, velocity relative to a frame of reference, and so on. The mass of an object, for instance, can be treated as an abstract object, but hylomorphism comes naturally here, and almost no one is tempted to say that the mass of the object has some existence separate from it. Nor does its velocity or any other property.

Now consider things people say to each other. You might very well find reason to distinguish what someone says from how they say it, or what someone says from the importance they attach to it, and so on. You might distinguish what someone says from the specific words they used to say it, including which language they used, so that people speaking English and German can say "the same thing".

"What he said" looks a lot like an abstract object, along the lines of mass, but for some reason many people, perhaps including Frege, have been tempted to treat "what he said" as having an existence independent of the words he used or the sounds he made.

For the issue Kimhi wants to raise, the issue would be whether you are conflating two different objects (or kinds of objects) that have independent existence, or whether Geach and Frege have conflated two different 'descriptions', I suppose we could say, two different 'qua ... ' formulations.

Does it matter what's being conflated?

I think it might for Kimhi's argument because one way of buttressing the idea that propositions have independent existence is to align them with the mental, rather than the physical. There's more, of course, but here, I think clearly, the question is in what sense "what he said" is a thought, while the actual words spoken were merely a physical "expression" or even representation of that thought.

If we take a more hylomorphic view, there may still be an argument, but it won't be this one.

I still don't see that this follows. — J

This is a good response. Heidegger relies on exactly this hermeneutic circle in everything he writes. It's prima facie a reasonable description of learning.

"make-believe" is a lovely phrase. I should have used it.

I agree that a picture is not capable of depicting that it is true. However, I question the practical import of that to some extent. — wonderer1

Maybe it's only important to philosophers and other such model builders.

On the other hand, I think people often tend to treat memories as a class of "pictures", broadly, that vouch for their own truth by being the kind of picture they are. And of course they're wrong.

It's an interesting question though. What was Wittgenstein trying to block by making this point? I should go back to TLP and look, but one thing that comes to mind is this: if you want to know if a picture presents the truth, you need another picture that says that. You can see where this is headed.

It seems to be a denial that there is any self-evident truth -- which would be handy for capping off the regress -- but that's not quite right; I think the claim would be that there is no substantive, we might say, self-evident truth. It's in the TLP (according to my lazy history of logic) that we get the presentation of tautology as a true statement that says nothing. And if it says nothing, evidently not a picture. So the truths of logic are something else entirely, and it is only there, among these whatever-they-ares, that we get self-evident truth.

Isn't it a category error to challenge the fiction author regarding warrant? — Leontiskos

CHAPTER I.

YOU don't know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; but that ain't no matter. That book was made by Mr. Mark Twain, and he told the truth, mainly. There was things which he stretched, but mainly he told the truth.

My point is that first and foremost the fiction writer *pretends* to have such warrant. In early prose fiction this is almost universal (in English anyway).

Nowadays, we're used to how fiction works and it's dramatically less common to go through this little dance.

And the point of all this is to clarify how we usually offer and receive declarative utterances, so that we know what's been stripped away when we consider the bare words, as we might when playing at logic.

I *think* this is in the neighborhood of Kimhi. I'm under the impression he wants to restore the thinker to the thought, or maybe it's thinking as what links what is thought to what is. I haven't put a lot of time into figuring out what he's after, obviously.

It's not novel to say that something is stripped away when we engage in logical analysis. It's more or less the point. The question is whether what you have left, that you'll submit to logical analysis, is what you think it is, and whether the pieces fit when you try to reassemble the living use of language.

You can have beliefs and intuitions about them all you like, you just can't smell, see, taste, touch them (except figuratively). — fdrake

That's close to my answer.

The obvious candidate for what's missing is belief, but I don't think that's quite it.

(I'm only indulging here because I keep seeing echoes of the actual topic...)

The main pretense in story telling, I claim, is about the story teller. They pretend to know a story they're actually making up (or that someone else made up). In early prose fiction, there's often a bit of BS at the beginning about how the writer stumbled on these letters, how he came to have this diary, or (nearby in poetry but right time period) some mad old man stopped me on my way to attend a wedding.

I think more than belief is at stake, because we judge beliefs on how they were arrived at. The challenge of someone who doesn't believe a story you're telling, even a true or at least honest one, is "How do you know that's what happened?" It's not just a question of whether the teller believes the tale, but whether their life history entitles them to it, gives them warrant to tell it. Hence the pretend warrant fiction writers sometimes display.

So yes, somewhere back in the chain of how I come to be telling this story, to be in a position to tell this story, there must be witness or even participation. I was there and I saw it, or I had it from a guy who was there. The storyteller pretends to be such a person.

This is, perhaps, a more colorful version of the Parmenides stuff.

One consequence of such a view might be that it's not really the tale we believe but the teller. We do not adopt a propositional attitude of "belief" toward the story, except perhaps as a consequence of adopting a social attitude of "trust" toward the storyteller.

--- back to work ---

pretending and playing is very different from the logical thinking that Frege and Russell prefer — Leontiskos

Pretending, as your examples demonstrate, is complicated, but I think it's actually very important to logic because of hypothetical reasoning (not to mention counterfactuals). I think it's very difficult to give an account of what happens when we entertain an hypothesis, but it looks a bit like pretending. When doing philosophy or mathematics, we say things like "Suppose I have an urn with 100 marbles in it..." and we could very nearly (?) say "Pretend I have an urn... " "Pretend you've drawn a red marble", and so on.

--- More to come later, but I really have to work for a few hours.

something like examining a corpse — Leontiskos

Very plausible. Taking down the words someone spoke leaves an awful lot behind. As musical notation is a somewhat limited representation of someone playing an instrument.

Coming back to fiction, it's probably a blind alley to think there's something added to the words in place of assertion; the pretense is that you are removing something and pretending you haven't. And the audience agrees to pretend you haven't -- to a degree, or in some particular way. ("Willing suspension of disbelief" is probably much too strong, if not just wrong, because people watch horror movies.)

A better form for my question would be, what have you removed? What's missing, that everyone kinda pretends isn't, when you tell a (fictional) story? Does it overlap with what's left out when you only have a record of the words spoken, the bare, lifeless sentences?

Are you thinking of a sentence or a proposition? — frank

Sentences or maybe utterances, depending on how you'd like to slice it. It's not obvious to me you can utter a sentence without uttering it in a particular way, which would include something like force.

I would love not to talk about propositions at all, so I'll leave that to you.

And one last point -- sorry for the multiple posts -- the whole point of my view of fiction is that it is parasitic on candid account giving or reporting. If we did not already have such a practice of reporting on real events that happened to real people in real places, and so on, we could not pretend to report on events we've made up (and maybe people and places as well).

Another way to look at it: if you're not sure whether assertion is something we add on (rather than being built in), does showing that we can add something else instead of assertion show that assertion is something we add?

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.)