I've been rereading your OP, and I think I get the argument now. — Srap Tasmaner
This seems slightly at odds with the descriptions involving a repeated identical 'p': there are no repeated complete symbols here. — Srap Tasmaner
I think the general thrust of the whole modern Frege-Tarski-model-theoretic approach is to presuppose the existence of the objects within the universe of discourse — Srap Tasmaner
[In Frege] the duality between assertoric force and predicate may well be equally expressed as the duality between sense and reference. — RussellA
The unity of thinking and being is the cornerstone of Wittgenstein's Tractatus. — RussellA
In the Tractatus, it is not the case that a proposition has a sense prior to anything that is being referred to, in that sense may be disassociated from reference, in that the sense of "this grass is green" may be disassociated from its referent in reality, that this grass is green. But rather, the sense of the proposition is what is being referred to, in that there is a unity between the sense of "this grass is green" and its referent, that this grass is green. — RussellA
When we say A judges that, etc., then we have to mention a whole proposition which A judges. It will not do to mention only its constituents, or its constituents and form but not in the proper order. This shows that a proposition itself must occur in the statement to the effect that it is judged. — LW
(1) Assertion is (a person, an agent) claiming that the possible state of affairs, let's say, described by a statement does in fact hold.
(2) Assertion is (a person, an agent) affirming the claim about the world made by a statement. — Srap Tasmaner
This seems slightly at odds with the descriptions involving a repeated identical 'p': there are no repeated complete symbols here. — Srap Tasmaner
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. — Srap Tasmaner
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. — Srap Tasmaner
Excellent citations from Frege. My claim was twofold: 1) that predicate logic restricts what we can say about existence; and 2) we have to start with a logically grammatical proposition that fills the argument slot with a term, thus creating what Frege called a “name,” before we can say whether it exists or not. I’m not sure what “wider than existence” means exactly, but your citation clearly shows that Frege believed we have to presuppose that “sentences [can?] express judgments” and that there is a world out there, about which we are trying to say things. No disagreements here, and sorry if I seemed to say otherwise. — J
One point about something Frege also says here. He asks: “Can you produce an example where a sentence of the form 'A is B' is meaningful and true, A being a name of an individual, and yet 'There are B’s' is false?” To me, this shows why quantification comes first in his method. — J
He requires, correctly, that “A is B” be “meaningful and true” before... — J
If we changed Frege’s question to read: “Can you produce an example where a sentence of the form 'A is B' is unasserted, A being a name of an individual, and yet 'There are B’s' is false?”, the answer would be, Of course we can. — J
But what I was trying to point out (or what I think Roberts means, anyway) is that “the universe of discourse” isn’t neutral or discoverable or God-given or whatever. We have to determine it, which requires quantification. — J
The charge is more radical than that. The Kimhi-inspired challenge says that the mandatory dissociation of force from sense in logic is wrong. Kimhi: “[Frege and Geach] want to dissociate assertoric force from anything in the composition or form of that which is primarily true or false in a propositional sign.” And yes, I hope Srap keeps pressing his points; we need to interrogate this challenge sharply. — J
I find this all fascinating but, as I say, I don't want us to digress. — J
Just for the specific sentence "It is raining but I believe it is not raining", taken as a stand alone. When you read that, you can understand it. Even though you don't know who "I" refers to. You just know it's the person in the sentence. — fdrake
I'd make the same conjured into existence analysis for "I" or "me" in the sentences:
A) It's an egg, I know it's an egg.
B) Ask not for whom the egg tolls, it tolls for me.
C) I have to block out thoughts of eggs so I don't lose my egg.
when they are presented without further context.
Because, as internet brainrot would have it, the who "I" is is ghosted, for real. — fdrake
This is all somewhat interesting, and there are many ways we could go with it, but you may first have to convince me that it is on topic for this thread. — Leontiskos
I think this reflects the confusion in modern thought where it is presupposed that there can be statements without implicit speakers. — Leontiskos
the Fregian presupposition which cleanly distinguishes predicate bearers from predicates, because apparently it associates existence with the former but not the latter. — Leontiskos
That is, apparently we can talk about non-existent predicates but not non-existent predicate bearers. — Leontiskos
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
I am struggling to see the difference here — Leontiskos
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
One way it seems relevant is that understanding the sentence as weird and contradictory on a gut level... pumps the intuition that it must function as an assertion. It would never be uttered in normal circumstances since part of its mechanism asserts something and then undermines the act of assertion. — fdrake
And it would probably be better to look at it in the form "Sally said "It is raining but I believe it is not raining"", since that dodges all the weird crap involving "I", since we know who is saying it. — fdrake
So when Sally says the second clause, "I believe it is not raining", a reading of the phrase in which Sally's assumed to be truthful and sincere associates the "I believe" in the sentence with asserting the claim "It is not raining". So the first clause appears to assert "It is raining", the second clause appears to assert "It is not raining", and those things clash together in our heads. — fdrake
Nevertheless, Sally is not in a state of contradiction. — fdrake
For Sally only appears to assert that it is raining, and only appears to assert that it is not raining. — fdrake
Eg, I've said "I don't believe it's raining!" while wincing up at a sky thick with summer rain. — fdrake
A similar logic lets you provide a model for Sally's odd phrase. I'm sitting here now, I believe it's not raining since it wasn't forecast to rain this evening last time are checked. But my curtains are closed. I just said "It is raining and I believe it's not raining" aloud... and it turned out it wasn't raining after all, when I opened the curtain. — fdrake
What I think makes Moore's paradox a good gateway in this discussion is that there's a whole context of cooperative use and interpretation, which contains a myriad of exploitable oppositions and contradictions, that just don't show up when you analyse the phrase as an instance of asserts(p & believes not-p) & asserts(p)=>believes(p). Particularly how you can make sense of it, and the kind of doubt you might have regarding Sally's faculties and situation. Maybe those are the kind of things J was looking to incorporate into a logic. — fdrake
...there's a whole context of cooperative use and interpretation, which contains a myriad of exploitable oppositions and contradictions, that just don't show up when you analyse the phrase as an instance of asserts(p & believes not-p) & asserts(p)=>believes(p)... — fdrake
Though there remains the question of whether this can be incorporated into normal flavours of logic, whether it's something that can be formalised, whether it should be formalised... and so on. — fdrake
As an aside, when I said the phrase aloud I felt a powerful compulsion to immediately open the curtain to check... Surely something we expect Sally to have done in my shoes! — fdrake
This is a different matter as far as I'm concerned: — Leontiskos
I would say that to assert is to believe. Therefore if Sally asserts that it is raining then she believes that it is raining. This is all that is needed to recognize her contradiction, and this premise seems very secure. What you have done is given some possibilities where she doesn't actually assert, but that strikes me as beside the point. — Leontiskos
I'll ask the reader to note that this is the very first formula in this rather extended treatment of logic. This might give an indication of how foundational extensionality is in logic. It is worth I think lingering on what is being said here. Consider the groupings {a,a,b}, {a,b} and {b,a}. Extensionality says that for the purposes of doing the logic that follows, all of these can be treated as {a,b}. What we have here is a tool for simplifying whole groups of expressions down to a single form.Definition 1.1 (Extensionality). If A and B are sets, then A = B iff every element of A is also an element of B, and vice versa. — Open Logic Project
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.)) — Srap Tasmaner
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.) — Srap Tasmaner
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. — Srap Tasmaner
Frege poses the rhetorical question as to whether it is possible to produce an example of a meaningful true statement of the form “A is B”, where A is a proper name, but there are no B’s. The challenge is not met by Frege’s opponent in the dialogue as preserved, but in case we attempted to suggest e.g. the sentence “Smaug is a dragon” as an obvious counterexample (assuming that, of course, there are no dragons), according to his principles Frege would be bound to saying that this is “not a real (i.e., meaningful) sentence”. This counterintuitive result was to be mitigated in a later phase of the development of Frege’s thought, as the distinction drawn between Sinn and Bedeutung enabled, under certain circumstances, expressions (including sentences) to have a Sinn despite lacking a Bedeutung. Nevertheless, the fundamental principle of Frege’s theory, viz. that objects capable of being judged about are, trivially, exclusively existing objects, was never abandoned by Frege, nor did he ever consider it in the least controversial. Quite the opposite – Frege regarded it as empty and tautological, since the term “existing”, insofar as it is applied to individuals, is devoid of any content and as such it does not impose any extensional narrowing: ... — Lukáš Novák, Can We Speak About That Which Is Not?, 158-9
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. — Srap Tasmaner
I think we're all on the same page, I'm just using the word "claim" instead of "assert", and also drafting the word "say", all three of which have considerable overlap in everyday speech. — Srap Tasmaner
(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). — Srap Tasmaner
But what is a "fictional assertion"? Isn't an assertion supposed to "judge p true"? Kimhi calls this case "assertion by convention" but I don't think that helps either.
This would be a fairly minor point were it not that this thread is trying to understand the exact connection between assertion and truth values. — J
So with "appears to say", I meant something like "appears to us", "can be interpreted as", and so on. And I mean those expansively, provisionally and contingently. I think part of what makes Moore's Paradox interesting is because it invites us to bracket a normal functioning of language and thus throws it into relief. — fdrake
I would say that the context-independent interpretation is clearly contradictory, and that it doesn't make much sense to present it as context-independent and expect the hearer to place it in some idiosyncratic context. The additional context could be as simple as, "Sally, a deeply intelligent woman, said..." — Leontiskos
And moreover, I'd bet that this conflict of appearances is commonplace and essential out in the wild. — fdrake
In the wild I'd be inclined to read "believe" somewhat figuratively, like an exasperation, or an alternatively that Sally is experiencing a disconnect between whatever engenders her to assert statements and whatever engenders her to assert her own belief in statements. Basically I want to trust Sally rather than calling her out. — fdrake
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 must be missing something. I can see no more of a problem with fictional assertions than I can with fictional imaginings, fictional events, fictional places, fictional characters and so on. — Janus
In myth and fiction thoughts occur that are neither true nor false. Logic has nothing to do with these. In logic it holds good that every thought is either true or false, tertium non datur. — Frege Reader, 300
To take an old example: 'bank'. In the river sense or the money sense? — Leontiskos
If you think of something people use, you might think of a tool. Tools capture the problem we face pretty well. — Srap Tasmaner
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... — Srap Tasmaner
--but also why Frege distinguishes them, because the coupling of a statement to the assertion it would naturally be used to make is loose. — Srap Tasmaner
Dissociating assertoric force from the predicate
We can grasp a thought without recognizing it as true. To think is to grasp a thought. Once we have grasped a thought, we can recognize it as true—make a judgement—and give expression to this recognition—make an assertion. We need to be able to express a thought without putting it forward as true. In the Begriffschrift I use a special sign to convey assertoric force: the judgement-stroke. The languages known to me lack such a sign, and assertoric force is closely bound up with the indicative mood of the sentence that forms the main clause. Of course in fiction even such sentences are uttered without assertoric force; but logic has nothing to do with fiction. Fiction apart, it seems that it is only in subordinate clauses that we can express thoughts without asserting them. One should not allow oneself to be misled by this peculiarity of language and confuse grasping a thought and making a judgement. — Frege, Posthumous Writings, 192
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,... — Srap Tasmaner
Are fictional assertions true? — Leontiskos
(1) Assertion is (a person, an agent) claiming that the possible state of affairs, let's say, described by a statement does in fact hold.
(2) Assertion is (a person, an agent) affirming the claim about the world made by a statement.
— Srap Tasmaner
I am struggling to see the difference here, but maybe that is just me. — Leontiskos
I thought J was saying, "This thing has assertoric force even before you pick it up and assert it." — Leontiskos
For Frege we don't quantify things and then go on to decide whether they actually exist — Leontiskos
Okay. I can see how Frege mandates a dissociation between sense and assertion. Is that the same as mandating a dissociation between sense and force? Or sense and assertoric force? Kimhi seems to believe that something can have assertoric force without being asserted. It seems like Frege wants to make one big distinction (between propositions and their truth values), and Kimhi wants to make lots of small distinctions (between different kinds of force, or different levels of assertoric force). — Leontiskos
I think @J's confusion about Frege may stem from a similar place. J may be thinking, "Kimhi criticizes Frege for divorcing the sense of a proposition from its assertoric force; 'Fido exists' is a proposition; therefore Frege divorces this proposition's sense from its assertoric force; therefore Frege thinks we can quantify over Fido before predicating existence of Fido." At the same time, J knows that Frege does not accept the idea that existence is a predicate, and so there is a tension. — Leontiskos
Now in that bolded phrase you switch from 'statement' to 'sentence', — Leontiskos
I would question the idea that a statement has other uses than assertion — Leontiskos
Is that proposition assertoric? No and yes. — Leontiskos
Oh, and about the Novak paper: Your link didn’t seem to take me there. Mind verifying and posting it again? Thanks. — J
So when Frege 'wrote that his most important contribution to philosophy was “dissociating the assertoric force from the predicate”', he could not have been talking simply or explicitly about illocutionary force . . . — Banno
. . . but had in mind at least partly something of the sort given here, where the assertive force of "S is Richard's sister" is simplified by treating it extensionally as S={Ruth} — Banno
We can grasp a thought without recognizing it as true. — Frege, Posthumous Writings, 192
I'm also not clear on what an "exact connection between assertion and truth values" could be. If I claim something is the case I am either right or wrong depending on whether what I've claimed is the case or not. I can't see what more could be said about that. — Janus
All of which, I think, explains both J 's sense that statements display assertoric force without themselves being assertions -- in much the way a screwdriver has a clear and unambiguous purpose ---but also why Frege distinguishes them, because the coupling of a statement to the assertion it would naturally be used to make is loose. — Srap Tasmaner
The distinction [between arguments/subjects and predicates in Frege] is total and fundamental. — Srap Tasmaner
Psychologism rests on the assumption that we can coherently say things about thinking itself. To rule this out, something stronger than asymmetry of the function-argument relation is needed. Frege achieves this strengthening by interpreting ‛functions’ as ‛thinking’. This semantic interpretation involves an ontological commitment. The distinction between functions and arguments becomes an ontological one. So the asymmetry of the relation is ‛explained’ by saying that the entities denoted at either side of the relation are themselves, ontologically, distinct. There are function-entities, and there are argument-entities. As a result of this ontological move, the rule ceases to be a formal rule of calculation and becomes a declaration about the necessary properties of certain entities. Thoughts, in a word, are ontologically distinct from their objects; and that is why thoughts may never be arguments. — Julian Roberts, The Logic of Reflection
I think we're all on the same page, I'm just using the word "claim" instead of "assert", and also drafting the word "say", all three of which have considerable overlap in everyday speech. — Srap Tasmaner
There's a little bit of a puzzle about the "affirming" language, because it makes asserting sound like it has an extra step, so that it strongly resembles indirect discourse. — Srap Tasmaner
As if a person making an assertion were "channeling" a spirit guide: there's an internalized claim presented, which you speak on Ephraim's behalf, and by so speaking endorse it. — Srap Tasmaner
Nice to meet another Merrill fan! — J
Is this really an explanation or just an “ontological move”? — J
Get involved in philosophical discussions about knowledge, truth, language, consciousness, science, politics, religion, logic and mathematics, art, history, and lots more. No ads, no clutter, and very little agreement — just fascinating conversations.