Oh, I guess I was asking bongo. :grin:

That the score and a performance can't be identical is shown by the fact that we can have many performances of the same score. What's being reified? — frank

Yes, we have many performances of the same song (from copies of the same score). Let's reify tokens vs type.

But no, they aren't later on disqualified (unperformed) when we are distracted by some narrower psychological sense of "perform".

Yes, many utterances and inscriptions of the same assertion (assertions of the same claim, if you like), but no, these not disqualified (as tokens of the same claim or assertion or proposition or declaration or sentence or predication) upon reification of some more specific aspect.

I don't follow. What is it that's being reified?

the act and the performing of it as distinct things. — bongo fury

Whatever narrower psychological sense of "perform" or "assert" makes us disqualify an otherwise appropriate sound event from being a performance, or an assertion string from being an assertion. (Is what I feared was being reified.)

Are you saying that a sentence is actually a type of action?

In the game of language, yes.

In the game of language, yes. — bongo fury

You're being a little too mysterious for me to follow. I have no idea what you're saying.

What type of action did you have in mind? I was thinking predication. The pointing of a predicate at a thing. By means of a conventional agreement that the predicate term gets pointed by the sentence at the object identified by the subject term.

If that's silly (I think Geach pours scorn on it?) maybe it's unnecessary for present purposes anyway.

And 1. is no less a claim (or assertion) for lacking a personal endorsement (or other assertion sign).

And the string "the cat is on the mat" is no less a claim (etc.) even for being embedded in

3. It's false that the cat is on the mat. — bongo fury

I don't understand what you're trying to say here.

Haha, 3 a step too far?

Are you back peddling on 1 also? Its being a claim and an assertion, even while lacking a prefix to that effect?

You seemed to provide confirmation on the point. But there may have been a misunderstanding.

Haha, 3 a step too far?

Are you back peddling on 1 also? Its being a claim and an assertion, even while lacking a prefix to that effect?

You seemed to provide confirmation on the point. But there may have been a misunderstanding. — bongo fury

I just don't understand what you're trying to say.

All I am saying is that "the cat is on the mat" and "I think that the cat is on the mat" mean different things, as shown by the fact that one can be true and the other false.

What type of action did you have in mind? I was thinking predication. The pointing of a predicate at a thing. By means of a conventional agreement that the predicate term gets pointed by the sentence at the object identified by the subject term — bongo fury

Just by way of guessing at what you're saying (I guess I'm intrigued :razz: ), language use is something humans do in space and time. Like music or the weather, there are detectable patterns.

Say we're analyzing the weather, and we notice low pressure zones. We pick that idea out, pull it out of ever evolving movements of air and water, and the next thing you know, we have fluid dynamics where we're talking about low pressure zones as if they're things separate from what's going on in space in time. Suppose we get so used to speaking about fluid dynamics, that we forget that it's all motion, and we start to wonder how a low pressure zone, the abstract object, fits into the weather (the physical thing.)

The problem here is just forgetting that we started by analyzing the weather, which means pulling it apart into objects that we lay out on a table. I don't think the answer is to insist that a low pressure zone is not an abstract object, because it is. The solution is to remember that it's the product of analysis.

No worries.

Do you think that those sentence strings mean those different things as they stand? Or do you only mean that they will end up meaning the different things if and when they are later on asserted?

"I think that the cat is on the mat" — Michael

I might think the cat is on the mat. But I might speak that sentence, even though I don't actually think the cat is on the mat. I only thought of the words to say.

None of which has anything to do with whether or not the cat actually is on the mat, or whether there even is a cat or mat.

My point is, there you almost go... reifying the act and the performing of it as distinct things. — bongo fury

Yes, and this is Kimhi through and through, as well as Rombout's paper on Frege.

The point that Kimhi makes successfully is that it is more unnatural for an assertion to be unasserted-and-reified than for it to be asserted. When we put the assertion into limbo in order to scrutinize it absent any assertion on our part, we are doing something that is weird and which is not usually done. Further, even the reified assertion has a kind of latent assertativeness or at least assertability.

Kimhi may be correct that Frege's assumption that the unasserted proposition and the assertion are "on a par," so to speak, is the source of many problems.* It is certainly occurring in this thread. Taxonomical thinking is occluding linguistic realities.


* More precisely, this is not an assumption so much as a necessity of the sort of logical work to which Frege applied himself, which is why Geach was right to defend it at least on that score.

Do you think that those sentence strings mean those different things as they stand? Or do you only mean that they will end up meaning the different things if and when they are later on asserted? — bongo fury

They mean different things whether asserted or not.

They mean different things whether asserted or not. — Michael

• Teacher: "What do you think, Michael?"
• Michael: "The cat is on the mat."

Is that different than, "I think the cat is on the mat"?

The notion that material strings have strict meanings without taking context and intention into account is not going to get us anywhere.

the act and the performing of it as distinct things. — bongo fury

Whatever narrower psychological sense of "perform" or "assert" makes us disqualify an otherwise appropriate sound event from being a performance or an assertion string from being an assertion. (Is what I feared was being reified.) — bongo fury

To distinguish an act from a performing of [that act] is to attach oneself to a very strange doctrine of human action, where acts are somehow reified and can even be "unperformed." "Performance" is a metaphor, and it will get us into trouble with its unclarity.

Assertion (and performance) require a necessary condition of intention. Whether something was asserted or performed cannot be decided without consulting the agent's intentions.

There is no such thing as a language, not if a language is anything like what many philosophers and linguists have supposed. There is therefore no such thing to be learned, mastered, or born with
— Davidson, A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs

Behold! The power of analytic philosophy!

There are conventions, to be sure, but those conventions do not determine the meaning of an utterance - this is shown by your example, that any phrase can serve as a password.

What's the reasoning here:

P1: Any phrase could be used as a password.
P2: ????
C: Therefore there are no language to learn and linguistic conventions don't determine what words mean.

Prima facie, that's a ridiculous claim unless one runs back from the motte to the bailey in order to massively caveat it so as to make it an entirely different claim. That the claim can be written down, and anyone can understand it, would suggest there are such things as conventional meanings to words and languages for instance.

Incidentally, I doubt whether using it as an example of a declarative sentence or of a statement or of a proposition or of a claim prevents it being any of those. Indeed, it clouds the issue to take any clear distinction between any of those varieties of hot air for granted.

On the other hand, names seem to stand apart as a different kind of hot air. No? (E.g. they seem to be generally simpler in semantic structure and function.) And I wondered whether considering the situation of using a name as an example of a name, and this not appearing to cause it to cease being a name, might lead you to reconsider your reasoning in the case of assertions.

Perhaps I ought to have chosen a different analogy. Is a table not a table when presented as an example of a table?

If I use it mostly as a chair, perhaps it ceases being a table. But then I'm hardly presenting it as an example of a table.

All fair points. I wasn't using "name" in a very specific or technical sense, just pointing out that in the case of examples or quotations it's often just an assertion of some sort that isn't being asserted that is instead being nested within another assertion. I've always come at this from the way Aristotle uses grammar to help justify his embryonic notion of the Doctrine of Transcendentals. To say: "Theseus is standing" is also to claim that such is the case, to say that it is so, and thus true. And to say "a man," or "a duck," is to say "one man," or "one duck" (the theory of measure).

My thoughts then have generally tended to be that, even if there are some examples where assertoric force isn't implied, this is sort of irrelevant. Indeed, I'm not sure what questions it would be relevant for, because I normally see proposed "counterexamples" brought up in contexts where they need to be non sequiturs or nit picking. I'd say that, even if assertoric force isn't always implied, it usually is, and that this is a basic function of language, and essential to how it works.

What's the reasoning here:

P1: Any phrase could be used as a password.
P2: ????
C: Therefore there are no language to learn and linguistic conventions don't determine what words mean.

Prima facie, that's a ridiculous claim unless one runs back from the motte to the bailey in order to massively caveat it so as to make it an entirely different claim. — Count Timothy von Icarus

:up: :fire:

Kimhi may be correct that Frege's assumption that the unasserted proposition and the assertion are "on a par," so to speak, is the source of many problems.* It is certainly occurring in this thread. Taxonomical thinking is occluding linguistic realities. — Leontiskos

This is related to Srap's observation:

(It is even plausible to claim that the division itself is not a posit of theory, but is itself found in nature -- right up until you hit the exception at quantum scale.) — Srap Tasmaner

These two moves are very similar:

• Scientist: "My observing the electron could not possibly have an effect on the experiment!"
• Philosopher: "My taxonomical dissection of assertions could not possibly have a per se effect on the outcome of these arguments!"

Cheap. Worthy of your friend Leon. Read the article and address that.

The notion that material strings have strict meanings without taking context and intention into account is not going to get us anywhere. — Leontiskos

I wasn't offered any context when bongo fury asked me what they mean. So I think it's both reasonable and correct to say that "the cat is on the mat" and "I think that the cat is on the mat" mean different things and have different truth conditions, with it being possible that one is true and the other false.

But what if we actually spoke about assertions rather than circumlocutions that may or may not indicate assertion? What about:

"The cat is on the mat."
"I assert the cat is on the mat."

More simple questions that you refuse to answer. They just keep piling up:

What's the reasoning here:

P1: Any phrase could be used as a password.
P2: ????
C: Therefore there are no language to learn and linguistic conventions don't determine what words mean. — Count Timothy von Icarus

The quote is the conclusion of an argument presented in the article "A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs", available at https://www.scribd.com/doc/82848058/Davidson-A-Nice-Derangement-of-Epitaphs

There's also a substantive thread here on the article.

You and Tim pretending that the concluding remark is the whole argument is pathetic. — Banno

Why don't you try making an argument for once? Do you realize this is a philosophy forum?

:rofl:

Here's the argument.


It's against Tim's

But words do have a stipulated, conventional meaning that relies on limited context, that is accessible to all speakers. — Count Timothy von Icarus

You might have to do some work to catch up.

Have fun.

- How many philosophy forum rules do you break each time you refuse to do philosophy? Almost 28,000 posts. :roll:

So you are back to talking about me in order not to feel obliged to do any thinking.

Nothing new.