Nowt so abstract as "semantic content". — bongo fury

I haven't said semantic content is "abstract'.

I haven't said semantic content is "abstract". — Janus

A concrete example, then?

Even taking "proposition" as a term of art, it's not at all clear that this is what we ascribe truth to. Some concept of force, and in particular assertoric force, send seems to be required.

Janus

Even taking "proposition" as a term of art, it's not at all clear that this is what we ascribe truth to. Some concept of force, and in particular assertoric force, seems to be required. — Srap Tasmaner

Ah, propositions not abstract enough...

So, examples please of sentences (or if you must, propositions) that are truth-apt only when asserted?

There is a distinction between the statement "there is a fire in the next room" and the assertion "there is a fire in the next room.
— Banno

The second is a sentence token having, like a money token, currency and value in a system of interpretation. As such, within that system (of interpretation and production of sentence tokens as assertions), it is licence to produce more tokens, with similar value.

The first, if not an assertion, is outside the system - a dud ticket, a void note, an invalid vote. — bongo fury

Is the first somehow unable to be false?

The bulk of the semantic content of statements consists in references to concrete objects of experience. Of course the content is given in general terms as 'tree' 'stone' 'animal' or whatever, but I don't take that to mean it is "abstract". What did you mean by "Nowt (presumably "not"?) so abstract as semantic content"?

Even taking "proposition" as a term of art, it's not at all clear that this is what we ascribe truth to. Some concept of force, and in particular assertoric force, send to be required. — Srap Tasmaner

I'm not sure what you mean here. When I make a statement about some aspect of how things are, I am proposing that things are as my statement asserts, no? So in that sense a proposition is an assertion (at least it would be insofar as I would be asserting that it is true), or so it seems to me.

I only mean that we might want a more, let's say, "neutral" way of describing the semantic content of a statement, so that we can bring out the relationships between

• The cat is on the mat.
• Is the cat on the mat?
• Would that the cat were on the mat!
• On the mat, cat!

and so on. The content of these is, if not quite identical in every case, closely related. A state of the cat being on the mat is claimed to hold, is asked about, is wished for, is demanded, and so on. We comfortably assign meaning to questions, commands, and so on, but truth and falsity only to assertions, that is, to claims that said state is realized in the world.

(There's clearly some close connection between grammatical mood and force, but it's not absolute, since you can, for instance, quite readily ask a question -- speak with interrogative force -- using a sentence in the indicative mood. Think of a detective going over a witness's statement:
D: 'And at that point you saw the man carrying a small ostrich.'
W: 'That's right.'
D: 'Did he see you?'
W: 'No, I don't think so. He was having some trouble with the ostrich.'
The detective is not asserting that the witness saw a man carrying a small ostrich, but asking the witness to confirm that the detective has understood them correctly.)

OK, I think I see what you are concerned about. So, in relation to the sentence:

'And at that point you saw the man carrying a small ostrich.' — Srap Tasmaner

you are thinking that the term 'proposition' is too strong, given that the detective is not proposing that W saw a man carrying a small ostrich, but rather asking whether he did?

The bare phrase 'A man carrying a small ostrich' then, we should think of as, what? A description of a state of affairs, perhaps?

Sure, something like that, and that would be the semantic content. "Proposition" is probably mostly used to pick up content + assertoric force, but there's no need to assume or to accept the ambiguity if we can just say so in so many words. And the point, again, is the minimal one that truth does seem to have something to do with assertion. Just what exactly, I'm incapable of saying.

Right, so a proposition is the act of proposing or asserting something, and what is being asserted; the semantic content, which is descriptive, is not the proposition itself, because to say that would be kind of redundant; like saying "I hereby propose a proposition"? That makes, sense, I think it is a valid and useful distinction, so thanks for correcting me on that.

(( This ended up very long -- apologies. ))

Having pressed that distinction I'm going to muddy the waters a bit. Quite a bit.

There's a certain way of speaking about sentences I find quite natural but have been agonizing over in my contributions to this thread. (I also find it a little surprising that no one has called me on it -- if tgw were still here, I think he would have.)

I have described the Liar as purporting to predicate falsity of itself but failing to. I posted comments along those lines several times, and each time I had to decide whether to bother about the little pedant on my shoulder chastising me: 'Sentences do not attempt, do not purport, and so on; a speaker uttering the sentence with assertoric force would be attempting or purporting, and so on.' This is not a minor quibble: Austin, for instance, claimed that it is the historical stating of a sentence -- the speech act which ordinary usage might pick out with words like "He asserts that ..." or "She is claiming that ..." -- which is true or false, not the sentence itself, and certainly not the meaning of the sentence.

Even if Austin's view strikes you, as I think it does most, as wrong, there is some appeal to the idea that a sentence can only be true or false relative to a particular occasion of (perhaps hypothetical) utterance, since what a sentence means, if it is not a tautology, is in quite obvious ways dependent to some degree or other upon those circumstances (of time, place, environment, and of course language), and for sentences involving indexicals or anaphora, as the Liar does, that degree might be considerable. But situation semantics is not my interest in this little post.

A natural thought is that, while it is the sentence itself that is the truth-bearer, we take asserting that sentence as a sort of prerequisite for the assertibility of judgments of truth and falsity. Thus, in telling a story, or reading aloud, or going over a witness's statement, we are not taken to have made an assertion, to have ourselves made any claim to truth, and so in turn the audience is not asked or expected to endorse what we say or not. Insofar as the speaker makes no claim, the audience is not asked or expected to either. Except when they are: you might repeat another's claim, neither explicitly giving nor withholding your endorsement, but to submit it to your audience's judgment. But then we have the original speaker's claim on the table, if not yours. Inverted commas may remove the assumption that the speaker is making an assertion, but leave intact the assumption that the original speaker was. -- But that's all on the side of assertibility, and it still seems clear that whether invited to or not, the hearer of an indicative sentence is always at liberty to judge it true or false; it's just that their judgment may be inappropriate or inconsequential.

And I'm finally getting to the point I actually want to raise: there is a way of talking about sentences that takes the sentence itself as its own speaker. 'What does this sentence here say?' 'What is question no. 3 asking for?' 'This paragraph claims just the opposite.' 'The sign says you have to wait here.' 'The instructions tell you what to do if it doesn't work.' There's even pleonastic speech:

As I went walking I saw a sign there
And on the sign it said "No Trespassing."
But on the other side it didn't say nothing,
That side was made for you and me. — Woody Guthrie

We can take all of this as just a casual way of talking to be analysed away: that to describe a sentence as "saying" something is just to say that it means what a speaker would mean if they spoke that sentence -- a kind of metonymy, in which we attribute to the sentence an intentionality that properly only belongs to the (perhaps hypothetical) speaker, as if the sentence "borrows" its apparent capacity to mean something from its (perhaps hypothetical) speaker, when in truth it's just a sound or a mark, an inert object.

But if we're also going to distinguish, as it seems we very often need to, between sentence-meaning and speaker-meaning -- between "what the words say" and what the speaker "meant by saying those words" -- we might begin to see the point of imagining the "borrowing" going the other way: when we mean something by saying some words, perhaps it is we as speakers who are borrowing the capacity of words to mean something, a capacity which we lack not being signs or symbols but persons. (We certainly produce signs and symbols, but if they have meaning, is it because we imbue them with what we mean, or do we produce them because they already have meaning? Is what we mean the same kind of thing?) There would be some sense, then, to the widespread persistence of idioms which treat sentences as their own speakers, despite everything else which tells us that this is plainly false.

Which brings us back around to the problem of semantic content and assertion. There is a sense in which we naturally read indicative sentences as asserting themselves. (Frege's original version of the Begriffsschrift, if I recall correctly, had a "judgment-stroke", a symbol to indicate that an expression was being asserted, but later versions of the predicate calculus dropped it as unnecessary -- assertion is taken as built-in.) There is a natural reading of the Liar as saying that it's false, "saying" in some "full blooded" sense, asserting its falsity just as much as we would be if we sentient speakers were to assert, 'The sentence 'This sentence is false' is false.'

Bare unspoken sentences that implicitly assert themselves are quite handy for doing logic, of course. It's practically the whole point, to divorce what is said from the person who happens to be saying it; except when you can't, because of indexicals and anaphora, for instance, and then you need quite a bit more machinery than you get from Frege to start making sense again. But there is another point to looking at indicative sentences this way: an assertion is a claim to truth. Who is to sit in judgment of that claim? The speaker is supposed, or assumed, to have already judged a sentence true, so if anyone is to judge the claim, it will have to be someone else; as the speaker, you have already cast your vote. What would be the point of you voting again, by endorsing your own claim? If you tried to pass off your vote in favor of the claim as separate from it, as an additional independent vote, you would be doing something illegitimate. Like everyone else, you get one vote, not two. Thus it is when a sentence makes semantic claims about itself. Sentences like 'This sentence is meaningful/meaningless' or 'This sentence is true/false' appear to be doing something which may be impossible -- cf. that a picture is (or isn't) an accurate representation of something cannot be part of that picture -- but I for one have a strong sense that it is at least illegitimate. The Liar has already cast the vote that all indicative sentences cast for their own truth; it does not get an extra vote to declare itself false as well.

How exactly does the liar sentence require mucking about with any other kinds of sentence than the declarative, assertoric kind?

The only kind, after all, that we ordinarily expect to divide up into true and false instances?

And why, when we do happen to be focussed on that kind, the sudden skepticism about them so dividing, and the addiction to complicating the issue by introducing beliefs, assertions, propositions, attitudes etc?

A nominalist suspects that the motivation is a mystical fascination with abstractions (e.g. "the cat's being on the mat") and the possibility of grasping them; where one ought to be content to point the predicate "is on the mat" at a cat. (Or the predicate "is on" at a sequence of two appropriate objects.)

I'm going to muddy the waters a bit. — Srap Tasmaner

I'd be thrilled if anyone in this thread were prepared to dissolve statements, assertions, beliefs, propositions and truths into one colour. But belief in the abstractions and the supposed distinctions is no doubt too dyed into the wool.

Bare unspoken sentences that implicitly assert themselves are quite handy for doing logic, of course. — Srap Tasmaner

Arguably, no statement is ever entirely bereft of any illocutionary force, and [such that it?] might be considered a "dud ticket". But we use them quite routinely when doing logic, so I'm not too concerned about that.
— Banno

Great, and when you do logic, aren't you writing (or uttering) tokens, and excluding or contextualising (e.g. attaching "not" tokens to) contradictory ones, from within a system of proliferation of assertive tokens? — bongo fury

We are token-producing agents, in the material world.

What did you mean by "Nowt (presumably "not"?) so abstract as 'semantic content'"? — Janus

https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/there%27s_nowt_so_queer_as_folk

Thanks, you made some interesting points there and I could find nothing to disagree with.

What did you mean by "Nowt (presumably "not"?) so abstract as 'semantic content'"? — Janus


https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/there%27s_nowt_so_queer_as_folk — bongo fury

Right, I realize now you meant to write 'nowt' and that it means much the same as "nothing" or 'nought'. But my question was really about what point the whole sentence was intended to make.

I could find nothing to disagree with — Janus

I think it likely that around half of what I posted in this thread is dead wrong; I just don't know which half.

:cool:

But my question was really about what point the whole sentence was intended to make. — Janus

This one:

A nominalist suspects that the motivation is a mystical fascination with abstractions (e.g. "the cat's being on the mat") and the possibility of grasping them; — bongo fury

... or of combining them with mysterious forces.

Sure, if it works, why not. My interruptions were just a shout out for the more down to earth option.

The problem isn't truth. Its applying "truth" to something that doesn't make any sense to begin with. — Philosophim

Yes. It is the same with Russell's Paradox. The paradox begins with "The set..." but the thing under discussion is not a set at all (the paradox shows it can't be). Yet, it exists as something that is not a set. In fact, the paradox arises out of the assumption that a non existent set is a set; the paradox is in the way the proposition is stated: "The set..."

:ok: