- Sure, but given that Frege understands language differently than the subject-predicate model of ordinary language which he intentionally diverges from, what more is there to say?

Here is Frege on this issue:

Therefore when Kerry says that my criterion does not meet the case, claiming that in the sentence ‘The concept that I am now talking about is an individual concept’ the name composed of the first eight words surely means a concept, the contradiction does not lie in what I have laid down; it obtains between the sense I attach to the word ‘concept’ and that adopted by Kerry. But nobody can require that my stipulations shall be in accord with Kerry’s mode of expression, but only that they be consistent in themselves. True, we cannot fail to recognize that we are here confronted by an awkwardness of language, which I admit is unavoidable, if we assert ‘the concept horse is not a concept’, whereas, e.g. the city of Berlin is a city, and the volcano Vesuvius is a volcano. Language is here in a predicament that justifies the departure from what we normally say. The peculiarity of our case is indicated by Kerry himself by means of the quotation-marks around ‘horse’. (We have used italics here to the same end.) There was no reason to mark out the words ‘Berlin’ and ‘Vesuvius’ in a similar way above. In logical discussions one quite often needs to assert something about a concept, and to express this in the grammatical form usual for such statements, so that what is asserted becomes the content of the grammatical predicate. Consequently, one would expect the concept to be the content of the grammatical subject; but the concept as such cannot play this part, in view of its predicative nature; it must first be converted into an object, or, speaking more precisely: an object that is connected with it in accordance with a rule must be substituted for it, and it is this object we designate by an expression of the form ‘the concept x’. (Cf. p. X of my Grundlagen.)

So the phrase ‘the concept horse’ must be regarded as a proper name, which can no more be used predicatively than can, say, ‘Berlin’ or ‘Vesuvius’. If we say that Bucephalus falls under the concept horse, then the predicate here is clearly ‘falling under the concept horse’, and this has the same meaning as ‘a horse’. But the phrase ‘the concept horse’ is only part of this predicate.

When I wrote my Grundlagen, I had not yet made the distinction between sense and meaning; and so, under the expression ‘content of possible judgement’, I was combining what I now distinguish by the words ‘thought’ and ‘truth-value’. For this reason I no longer hold my choice of expressions in the second footnote to p. 77 to be quite suitable, although in the main my view remains the same: a concept is essentially predicative in nature, whilst the very opposite is true of an object, so that a proper name (sign or name of an object) can never contain the whole predicate. — Frege, On Concept and Object – Posthumous Writings, 97 – footnotes omitted

1. The concept horse is not a concept
2. [The concept horse] is not a concept
3. The city of Berlin is a city
4. [The city of Berlin] is a city

Frege interprets the parts in brackets as, “A proper name in the logical sense,” which, “is a sign for an object.” Ergo: if the last three words of (3) and (4) were absent we would not know that 'Berlin' is a city (because proper names are not predicative). Frege grants that (3) is unintuitive given its redundancy, but he is unperturbed.

Frege makes a very interesting comment in the context of dissociating assertoric force from the predicate, and it relates to Kimhi:

. . .Assertoric force is to be dissociated from negation too. To each thought there corresponds an opposite, so that rejecting one of them is accepting the other. One can say that to make a judgement is to make a choice between opposites. Rejecting the one and accepting the other is one and the same act. Therefore there is no need of a special name, or special sign, for rejecting a thought. We may speak of the negation of a thought before we have made any distinction of parts within it. To argue whether negation belongs to the whole thought or to the predicative part is every bit as unfruitful as to argue whether a coat clothes a man who is already clothed or whether it belongs together with the rest of his clothing. Since a coat covers a man who is already clothed, it automatically becomes part and parcel with the rest of his apparel. We may metaphorically speaking, regard the predicative component of a thought as a covering for the subject-component. If further coverings are added, these automatically become one with those already there. — Frege, Introduction to Logic – Posthumous Writings, 185

Soon after this, Frege expresses frustration that 28 years after he introduced the material conditional mathematician and logicians continue to resist it as something bizarre! Curiously, in speaking of his “conditional stroke,” he claims that the relation designated by the conditional stroke is not strictly speaking something that obtains between thoughts, but rather that the sign for the conditional stroke connects sentences. This seems to indicate that he posits a non-assertoric difference between the two p’s in the premises of a modus ponens.

Folk seem too keen on claiming that one cannot understand what a statement is about without deciding if it is true or false. — Banno

I don't think anyone has claimed this. The point that Wittgenstein makes has to do with conditions for truth or falsity, not a decision.

I don't think anyone has made that claim. You probably need to understand the truth conditions, but not whether it's true or false. — frank

Yes, exactly. :up:

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

In those terms the question is simply whether Kimhi sees something which "displays (assertoric) force [without being a self-identifying display]" as having some kind of force. Regardless of words, Kimhi's point seems to be that Frege's Point excludes the possibility that a sentence displays assertoric force. I don't see Kimhi in any way moving away from assertoric force to some kind of general force.

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

In the parts of Frege that I have read he shows no interest in the epistemic aspect of a proper name, which is probably a credit to him. He takes it for granted that a proper name can designate an object.

A lot of what Kimhi (and Rodl) are doing is probing presuppositions of formal logic. There is a lot of magic involved in formal logic, and I suppose the question asks how much presuppositional magic is to be granted. Kimhi's broader thesis is that by adopting a Fregian approach first-order logic has merely side-stepped some of the biggest problems of philosophy, which persist as elephants in the room rather than vanquished foes.

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Can't you have a mistaken or in-part inaccurate understanding of what truth is, and discover in the course of my lecture what the "truth about truth" is? — J

Frege understands that prefixing "It is true that..." to a sentence both adds something and doesn't add something. It is slippery. But the odd parallel is that his judgment-stroke also adds something and doesn't add something, in just the same way.

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). — Srap Tasmaner

Granted, and I pointed to the same thing early on in the discussion:

Yes, and it is interesting that in recent history fiction was thought to require a kind of disbelief-suspension-bridge (I forget the real name that is used). Some plausible device was used to connect the fiction to the real world. — Leontiskos

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

Sure, but it's worth recognizing that it was never anything more than a dance.

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. — Srap Tasmaner

Yes, that's a very good way to put it. :up:

So if we take our shears to an asserted sentence we can apparently remove the basic assertoric force. Then if we take our shears a second time we could apparently remove the grammatical aspect and achieve the result of "mere words." Then a third time, and be left with mere tokens or letters. One way to phrase the question is this: Is the "sharpness" of Frege's shears intelligible or arbitrary?

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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. — Srap Tasmaner

This is the tangent that most interests me in this thread: How is it that logic becomes separated from thinking, judgment, and consciousness?* Ironically Rombout seems to trace this to Wittgenstein, in which case, pace Kimhi, (early) Wittgenstein does not save us from Frege, he takes Frege to the place that Kimhi finds most problematic.

* But not construed as Banno's full-on logical nominalism, where logic is merely symbol manipulation. That is called metalogic or metamathematics and is not generally seen as logic itself. The result was not logical nominalism, but instead a sort of reification of truth as something that exists independently of subjects and minds. A kind of overcorrection of "psychologism."

Belief in a story would be a different flavour of belief than the one in this thread anyway. Telling a story is, at least, a sequence of sentences presented with different forces and roles, and we've been dealing with single sentences with possibly a single illocutionary force. — fdrake

This is part of what I was trying to get at when I said that fiction is much less univocal than logic. :up:

The boring deflationary answer is just to say that understanding a given text as a story means just the following: belief in any presented sentence in that text is equivalent to believing that that sentence is a part of the text. Line of the story as story event. I believe that Gollum lied and cheated if and only if it says so in the book.

Suspension of disbelief works in opposition to the latter boring answer. Like the deus ex machina eagles at the end of Lord of the Rings. A flight of massive eagles coming in and saving the day, really? You only doubt it, "c'mon, really?" because you believe it happened in the story, but it could be felt to collide with the story's narrative. No one would doubt the eagles came, they just would doubt whether in some sense they should've. — fdrake

Yes, good, and we can take this in a Platonist direction contrary to your second deflationary theory. The question of whether logic or fiction is more 'real' can be assessed according to the question of whether logical analysis or narrative is more foundational to human life. If narrative is the meta-category of human life, then any genre of story (including fiction) will be more real than logic. On the other hand, if scientia is the telos of human life, then logic has a primacy over fictional narrative. I think there is a very strong case to be made in favor of the view that narrative, not logic, has the primacy.

https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/933474

“There is, ultimately, something rather raffish about a function; it wanders the world, hoping to connect, but may well never succeed. There is nothing in the function that establishes it as a part of reality.” — J

What if the function, once seized upon by the sentient individual with intent to use it, becomes something essential to what exists? This because under the influence of the sentient controlling it, it acquires the property of “how it’s being used” such that specifically, that “how” is the sentient being’s willful decision to ascribe perceived attributes to the previously empty subject.

A generalization from the above claims that sentient individuals construct reality from possibilities by willfully predicating empty subjects (possibilities) with attributes meaningful and therefore useful to sentients.

The “how” of predication practiced by sentients attaches perceived attributes to otherwise empty subjects. The specifics of this ascribed “how” is determined by the sentient’s natural impulses. This leads us to conclude that the conscious worlds of sentients are extensions of themselves.

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

Right.

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

Right.

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

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

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

Yes, which is why I keep trying to find some better, more perspicuous ways to carve up "force." I was leaning toward believing that "force" itself should be strictly separated from both assertion and illocution... — J

If not assertion or illocution or denotation, then what is force? There is still no clear account of what this thread is about.

The subject (or argument, in Frege’s terminology) is what Julian Roberts in The Logic of Reflection calls “an empty center.” Roberts goes on, “And the ‛object’ which fills that [empty] subject position, accordingly, is not a collection of attributes (featureless). It is a ‛thing’ only to the extent that the function makes it into one.” — J

“There is, ultimately, something rather raffish about a function (predicate); it wanders the world, hoping to connect, but may well never succeed. There is nothing in the function that establishes it as a part of reality (unreal).” — Roberts

If the subject is empty, the object is featureless, and the predicate is unreal, then that’s a triad of zeroes, and I don’t see how a function linking three zeroes can produce a non-zero product.

All that logic can do is show us the grammar of predication, along with rules of inference that will hold when a subject/argument is added to the functional, predicative formula. — J

Formalizations of subject_object_predicate strings of syntax without a goal-oriented observer making public, measurable, and repeatable predications are useless and meaningless permutations of non-referential markings.

The sentient individual as observer with perceptions and intentions has standing in the world, and it goes about making predications. The predications, curved by the force of the observations, acquire usefulness and meaning through their attachment to the observer.

If not assertion or illocution or denotation, then what is force? There is still no clear account of what this thread is about. — Banno

If the figurative use of force (as in “force of personality”) can be linked to physical force (as in: “gale force winds”), then we can start with the physical definition of force: force is a type of energy; energy is the ability to move; energy has two states: sharply bounded energy (as in the animation of a material object); softly bounded energy (as in the animation of an electromagnetic field).

We can parallel the two states of energy with the two states of sub-atomic elementary matter: a) the particle form of elementary matter; b) the waveform of elementary matter. At the scale of human experience it’s the comparison of a block of ice with a room filled with steam.

The binding phenomenon linking figurative force with physical force is consciousness.

The binding gravitational force (physical) linking the firgurative force of supposedly abstract language (also physical) is the consciousness of the sentient individual using language to design a plan of action to fulfill its intentions.

So, the focus of this thread, as implied by references to Julian Roberts, examines verbal and sentential logic through the lens of the gravitational force of consciousness as it links language to physical phenomena via observation. The gravitationality of language herein made explicit is implied in other posts in this thread.

The above paragraph is a compact wealth of complexity, and thus it’s hard to state in simple language what is the focus of this conversation.

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

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

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

I just reread my OP, which included my optimistic belief that we didn’t have to be concerned with “what Kimhi says” in order to understand the question I was raising. Ha! — J

I think that in order for the critique to make sense it must be linked up to some goal of Kimhi's. Kimhi must be made to say, "This point in the OP matters because it can be linked up to my larger concern of X."

But I thought, and still think, that a much deeper question is being raised here, a metalogical one about how what we think and can say is related to our existence claims about what is. — J

Does Kimhi ever directly attack Frege on that front? On the existence-predicate?

This is the tangent that most interests me in this thread: How is it that logic becomes separated from thinking, judgment, and consciousness?* Ironically Rombout seems to trace this to Wittgenstein, in which case, pace Kimhi, (early) Wittgenstein does not save us from Frege, he takes Frege to the place that Kimhi finds most problematic. — Leontiskos

The difficulty I have with Kimhi is that we are considering the foundation of his project, and that foundation seems to be based on two misreadings: first, Wittgenstein's misreading of Frege that Kimhi follows unquestioningly, and second, a misreading of early Wittgenstein. If Frege is bad then early Wittgenstein is much worse, and it is muddled for Kimhi to think that early Wittgenstein is his ally against Frege. Kimhi thinks Frege is too thin, whereas early Wittgenstein was saying that he is too fat. I see concentric circles of the "any stick to beat the devil" fallacy, where one affirms a thinker whose conclusion they desire, even if the arguments to get there do not hold up.

Kimhi is right that Wittgenstein disagrees with Frege's judgment-stroke, but he seems to have overlooked the fact that it is for a completely opposite reason than his own. And Kimhi is right that there are problems with first-order logic, but I don't know that Kimhi's critique itself holds water, at least on this assertoric front. In longer-lasting systems of thought such as Catholicism one comes to be very careful about genealogical arguments, and the OP seems to represent a poor genealogical argument. Kimhi sees a problem with first-order logic, and he wants to trace it to its root. But there is no obvious root, and in tracing it to Frege's judgment-stroke Kimhi seems to have alighted on a false genealogy.

I think Rombout gives a much sturdier genealogy: the cleavage of epistemology from logic comes from Russell and Wittgenstein's misappropriations of Frege. Is some of it Frege's fault? Probably, but Wittgenstein is the central actor here. Wittgenstein's "solution" to the foundational Meno dilemma is to have a radical divorce between epistemology and logic. This is simply a non-starter if logic is supposed to provide an account of how progression in knowledge occurs. As Rombout says, Frege and Wittgenstein have an entirely different understanding of what 'logic' even means.

...and the more Frege I read, the stronger he stands against Kimhi. To take one example, Narboux's Notre Dame review ends by pointing out a problem in Kimhi's Wittgenstenian-colored idea of propositions being understood in large part in light of negation. This is a mistake that Frege, Thomas, Augustine, Parmenides, and probably also Aristotle all avoided. Frege's understanding of 'p' in that metalogical sense seems to in fact be better thought out and more robust than Kimhi's (although if Frege did not understand the difference between denial and negation then part of this was a happy accident for him).

- I am content with the response I already gave to that tangential topic.

although I think you can remove the assertion in "real life" too.
— Leontiskos

Can you give an example of that? — frank

Here is Russell:

In language, we indicate when a proposition is merely considered by “if so-and-so” or “that so-and-so” or merely by inverted comma’s. (PM, p. 92) — Frege, Russell and Wittgenstein on the Judgment Stroke, by Floor Rombout, 45

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Ordinarily we must take something away from a statement in order to sequester the assertoric force, because the assertoric force is a natural part of a declarative sentence. In Russell and Wittgenstein's misunderstanding Frege's judgment-stroke is something added on to a proposition or "assumption," and hence becomes a symbol in its own right.

For Frege it is more complicated. For Frege it is a stroke, not a symbol. It is "syncategorematic" (Kimhi) and hence is in no way on the same plane as the symbols of the sentence. The difference between a mere horizontal and the horizontal with the judgment-stroke added is a distinction in mente, and exists for the purposes of logic and inference. The judgment-stroke is sui generis, and this reflects Kimhi's emphasis on the fact that thinking is unique. It is a bit of performative language rather than descriptive language.

If there is some problem (qua Kimhi) with Frege's judgment-stroke it is an incredibly minor and subtle problem. Wittgenstein's complaint is more intelligible, but it is a one-way ticket to a destination that Kimhi will have no part of (which is apparently why he snips Wittgenstein's critique out of its context each time he references it in his book).

"Does a strong formalism such as Frege's invalidate whatever can be said or thought about p in ordinary language?" By "invalidate" I mean "render meaningless/useless/incoherent" or, for short, unthinkable, despite what we may believe at the time about our alleged thought? — J

I think the most fruitful framework for discussing that question would be one that starts without ontological commitments, with something like ontological antirealism.

You appear to be agreeing that we can't have unasserted propositions in real life, even if the assertion is only hypothetical or potential.

- was right on the money when he said that your desire to keep using that word "proposition" gets us nowhere, as it is used very differently by different authors.

When Frege talked about propositions, he was talking about thoughts. Those who find that language distasteful probably shouldn't be discussing Frege at all.

When Frege talked about propositions, he was talking about thoughts. — frank

I will simply note that, yet again in misrepresenting Frege, you provide no source for your claims. Cf.

One represents a functional understanding of logic, the other a "psychological." One inquires into what it means to say that something is true, the other does not. For someone who sees logic as the art of human reasoning and knowledge, the question of truth simply cannot be neglected. — Leontiskos

I don't think this really addressed any of what I wrote by making some arbitrary functional psycho distinction. Frege/Tarski/Aristotle without the metaphysics/epistemology/psychology behind the truth values.. what does it matter? Calling their logical systems functional doesn't MEAN anything. It is just a way of expressing language.

If you find a logical system that says "The sky is blue" and the "snow is white" and all you are doing is writing expressions like, "This is a fact." "this is a true assertion".. what the duckn difference does it make if you cannot show why it's true, or how it's true?

If you find a logical system that says "The sky is blue" and the "snow is white" and all you are doing is writing expressions like, "This is a fact." "this is a true assertion".. what the duckn difference does it make if you cannot show why it's true, or how it's true? — schopenhauer1

Why shouldn't it make a difference? Is justification the only thing that matters? The only thing we can talk about? If you want a thread on justification then you should start it. This thread is not about justification.

I will simply note that, yet again in misrepresenting Frege, you provide no source for your claims. — Leontiskos

"The first point I want to call attention to is that according to Frege, truth is a property of thoughts or propositions in the sense discussed in chapter 1. For Frege, sentences are vehicles for expressing information. The thought expressed by a sentence on a given occasion is the information content carried by the sentence on that occasion. When one assertively utters a sentence, typically one says or asserts the thought expressed by the sentence on that occasion. Thus for Frege, assertion is a relation between an agent and a thought." --Understanding Truth, Scott Soames

When he mentions the first chapter, Soames is talking about an examination of the relationship between utterances, sentences, and propositions, with the goal of explaining why the concept of a proposition is indispensable. Did you have some source that conflicts with that?

Why shouldn't it make a difference? Is justification the only thing that matters? The only thing we can talk about? If you want a thread on justification then you should start it. This thread is not about justification. — Leontiskos

Ok, what do you think it's about? I still don't understand the point.

Thus for Frege, assertion is a relation between an agent and a thought. — frank

As opposed to what?

As opposed to what? — schopenhauer1

Exactly. I think Leontiskos and I are talking about different Freges. :grin:

When he mentions the first chapter, Soames is talking about an examination of the relationship between utterances, sentences, and propositions, with the goal of explaining why the concept of a proposition is indispensable. — frank

Your quote nowhere says that for Frege a proposition is a thought. Do you realize that?

Did you have some source that conflicts with that? — frank

Have you read the OP?

Frege says, “A proposition may be thought, and again it may be true; let us never confuse the two things.” (Foundations of Arithmetic) — J

Here is IEP:

For this and other reasons, Frege concluded that the reference of an entire proposition is its truth-value, either the True or the False. The sense of a complete proposition is what it is we understand when we understand a proposition, which Frege calls “a thought” (Gedanke). Just as the sense of a name of an object determines how that object is presented, the sense of a proposition determines a method of determination for a truth-value. — Frege | IEP

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Those who find that language distasteful probably shouldn't be discussing Frege at all. — frank

Those who don't know what they are talking about probably shouldn't be giving lectures.

Your quote nowhere says that for Frege a proposition is a thought. Do you realize that? — Leontiskos

I think pretty clearly says that. What did you think a proposition is for Frege?