If other people can assent to the thought I express in the Pythagorean theorem just as I do, then it does not belong to the content of my consciousness, I am not its owner; yet I can, nevertheless, acknowledge it as true.

If it is the same for anyone who can understand it then it is common to all who think. What I think is interesting, is that it is both true, and also ideal, as are a great many mathematical and geometric ideas. That is, they're common to all who can grasp them, but they can only be grasped by a rational mind. So in that sense their reality is intelligible rather than corporeal - which is rather similar to the outlook of objective idealism. (See for a discussion of 'intelligible objects' this passage on Augustine on Intelligible Objects.)

Compare this passage from Ed Feser:

Consider that when you think about triangularity, as you might when proving a geometrical theorem, it is necessarily perfect triangularity that you are contemplating, not some mere approximation of it. Triangularity as your intellect grasps it is entirely determinate or exact; for example, what you grasp is the notion of a closed plane figure with three perfectly straight sides, rather than that of something which may or may not have straight sides or which may or may not be closed. Of course, your mental image of a triangle might not be exact, but rather indeterminate and fuzzy. But to grasp something with the intellect is not the same as to form a mental image of it. For any mental image of a triangle is necessarily going to be of an isosceles triangle specifically, or of a scalene one, or an equilateral one; but the concept of triangularity that your intellect grasps applies to all triangles alike. Any mental image of a triangle is going to have certain features, such as a particular color, that are no part of the concept of triangularity in general. A mental image is something private and subjective, while the concept of triangularity is objective and grasped by many minds at once.

Some Brief Arguments for Dualism

As for Grice - isn't his argument a form of psychologism? He is attempting to provide an account which rests on so called 'psychological states', whereby such states then underwrite or form the basis of ideas, as such. Which, I suspect, is ultimately in the service of some form on naturalism, although it's hard to say on the basis of the above.

As for Grice - isn't his argument a form of psychologism? — Wayfarer

Maybe? But the main problem with psychologism is just that Frege has such a strong argument against it.

Compare the example of phonemes (or cheremes) which are explicitly defined as equivalence classes of sounds (or gestures). You could think of propositions, for instance, as equivalence classes of utterances, thus utterance-types, and thoughts as equivalence classes of psychological states, e.g. belief-types.

One question is, how do you get these equivalence classes rolling? What is required to be able to take something as a member of a class, or as a token of a type?

But where we want to start is the observation that, in uttering an allophone (within my speech community) for /a/, you are taken to have uttered the phoneme /a/. It might be helpful to put off the question of universals for a little while and look at how that transaction works.

I have loads to say about that one suggestive little change to Frege's account, but I'm curious to see what other people think first. — Srap Tasmaner

I haven't quite grasped the distinction yet. Grice speaks of 'the belief-types' and 'the beliefs of particular peoples'. Isn't that use of 'the' the equivalent in his nomenclature to Frege's 'the sense'?

Grice speaks of 'the belief-types' and 'the beliefs of particular peoples'. Isn't that use of 'the' the equivalent in his nomenclature to Frege's 'the sense'? — mcdoodle

Maybe? But why go through the type business at all? Why not just say, as Frege does, that we each have the belief that such-and-such?

For one can hardly deny that mankind has a common store of thoughts which is transmitted from one generation to another.

Oh, it's not that difficult to deny that.

Oh, it's not that difficult to deny that. — Terrapin Station

I'll bite, against my better judgement...

Whether it's difficult remains to be seen. It's clear enough what Frege gains by not denying it; what do you gain by denying it?

Whether it's difficult remains to be seen. It's clear enough what Frege gains by not denying it; what do you gain by denying it? — Srap Tasmaner

What you gain is that you say something that's true rather than something one would simply like to be true. ;-)

What you gain is that you say something that's true rather than something one would simply like to be true. — Terrapin Station

"What you gain is that you say something that's true to you rather than something one would simply like to be true to one."

Fixed that for you.

That goes without saying. Of course, the reason it's true is that in my judgment, the proposition matches facts.

Your truth is of no consequence for me.

Then why ask me in the first place?

Just stick with inquiries directed at folks whose judgment you're interested in.

You misunderstand. I was not insulting or dismissing you.

On your own view, you cannot tell me the truth, only your truth. No matter what I claim, my truth cannot contradict your truth. (Something happens in my brain; something happens in your brain. Period.) It is in that sense that your truth is and can be of no consequence for me. Even if you wanted to provide an argument for why I should take your truth into account, how would you proceed? We are incapable of both assenting to the same premise.

On your own view, you cannot tell me the truth, only your truth. No matter what I claim, my truth cannot contradict your truth. (Something happens in my brain; something happens in your brain. Period.) It is in that sense that your truth is and can be of no consequence for me. Even if you wanted to provide an argument for why I should take your truth into account, how would you proceed? We are incapable of both assenting to the same premise. — Srap Tasmaner

All that anyone can tell you is propositions that match facts in their judgment. And that's what I did. We can and certainly do have different judgments, and we can't somehow get beyond the fact that we're making judgments about how propositions link up with facts. Propositions can't somehow match up with facts or not independent of us. Meaning is something that we do as individuals. Objectively, the sentences that we count as propositions are just text marks or sounds.

You could only care about your own judgments about the relationship of propositions and facts, but that's probably not the case since you're participating on a message board like this.

I have loads to say about that one suggestive little change to Frege's account, but I'm curious to see what other people think first. — Srap Tasmaner

My mind was blown the first time I came across a person who even considered the notion that an idea might be somehow owned by the stuff in an individual's skull. And Frege was part of the discussion... it was about abstract objects like numbers.

How would Frege's view fit with a platonic account?

My mind was blown the first time I came across a person who even considered the notion that an idea might be somehow owned by the stuff in an individual's skull. And Frege was part of the discussion... it was about abstract objects like numbers.

How would Frege's view fit with a platonic account? — Mongrel

Leaving aside whatever there's room to debate, Frege's a pretty thorough platonist.

The owning ideas thing he explains with a telescope: there's the actual object out there it's pointed at, say the Moon -- this will be the reference -- then there's the image on the mirror, which is not the object but is still objective -- that's the sense or the thought -- and then there's the retinal images of whatever individuals look through the telescope, which are subjective and unshareable, and that's what Frege calls ideas.

I didn't realize he was a thorough platonist. So you are as well? The image on the mirror is the sharable sense?

I was thinking about meaning today. I have a problem with the concept of a sign. It's supposed to be a signifier/signified combo. I don't think an isolated sign has any meaning, though. I think it has to appear in a complete thought (a complete sentence?) in order to be meaningful. Could be off topic?

All that anyone can tell you is propositions that match facts in their judgment. And that's what I did. We can and certainly do have different judgments, and we can't somehow get beyond the fact that we're making judgments about how propositions link up with facts. Propositions can't somehow match up with facts or not independent of us. Meaning is something that we do as individuals. Objectively, the sentences that we count as propositions are just text marks or sounds. — Terrapin Station

Scenario (1): A and B have a box of propositions, and they each have opinions about which ones are true. They take turns sorting them into boxes marked "true," "false," and "not sure." Maybe neither of them have some special status that allows them to know what is true, but they can at least see the different ways they sort the propositions. A might be surprised to see B put something in the "true" box that he wouldn't, but B might convince A that he should, because of some others he put in.

Scenario (2): A has his own box of propositions and B has his own box. They might as well sort at the same time, without paying any attention to each other, and they can even share the boxes they sort into. Doesn't matter. What difference could it make to A what B does with his box of propositions?

I took you, perhaps mistakenly, as going for scenario 2, rather than scenario 1.

A third scenario you may find more congenial is suggested to me by Grice's talk of types.

Scenario (3): It's more like kids each sorting their own collections of baseball cards. They can each have a copy of the same card-- not numerically the same, but same player, year, series-- and they can have cards that they count as the same in different ways. "Do you have a Clayton Kershaw?" can be answered "yes" whichever one of the various Clayton Kershaws that have been issued you have.

Scenario 3 is more appealing than 1 in some obvious ways, so long as we can make the type stuff work.

I didn't realize he was a thorough platonist. So you are as well? The image on the mirror is the sharable sense? — Mongrel

That's the idea. It's not the object referred to but still objective.

I was thinking about meaning today. I have a problem with the concept of a sign. It's supposed to be a signifier/signified combo. I don't think an isolated sign has any meaning, though. I think it has to appear in a complete thought (a complete sentence?) in order to be meaningful. Could be off topic?

That would be a version of Frege's context principle. It can get a little weird.

Oh yeah--am I a platonist? Not by temperament. But I find it hard to talk about language, logic, and mathematics without drifting toward a Fregean sort of platonism. I'm not quite convinced that means you have to be what's usually called a platonist, but there's something there that has to be taken seriously.

It's not the object referred to but still objective. — Srap Tasmaner

Objective? Third-person data as opposed to first-person data?

That would be a version of Frege's context principle. It can get a little weird. — Srap Tasmaner

Weird how?

but there's something there that has to be taken seriously. — Srap Tasmaner

I don't know if you've really taken it seriously unless you've pondered how it fits into the bigger picture.

It's not the object referred to but still objective.
— Srap Tasmaner

Objective? Third-person data as opposed to first-person data? — Mongrel

If by "third-person" you mean public, then I think yes.

That would be a version of Frege's context principle. It can get a little weird.
— Srap Tasmaner
Weird how?

There are various ways of formulating contextualism and some of them conflict with compositionality. I can't imagine giving up compositionality. I don't even know what the alternative would be.

but there's something there that has to be taken seriously.
— Srap Tasmaner

I don't know if you've really taken it seriously unless you've pondered how it fits into the bigger picture.

I'm not sure what this means.

If by "third-person" you mean public, then I think yes. — Srap Tasmaner

Or maybe you meant mind-independent. The reflection of the moon in the mirror is there whether anybody's looking or not.

There are various ways of formulating contextualism and some of them conflict with compositionality. I can't imagine giving up compositionality. I don't even know what the alternative would be. — Srap Tasmaner

I think I was arguing against compositionality. The parts, to the extent that they have meaning, gain that meaning from their place in the whole.

I'm not sure what this means. — Srap Tasmaner

I meant how some form of platonism fits with your overall ontology. Dualist? Monist? Both?

But why go through the type business at all? Why not just say, as Frege does, that we each have the belief that such-and-such? — Srap Tasmaner

I'm not a Gricean, but I@m trying to follow the logic of Grice's thought. He goes through the type business because he's trying to find good generalisations. Partly he's trying to solve one problem of Fregean 'sense', which is that it hovers in no-man's-land, an inbetweenie:

The reference of a proper name is the object itself which we designate by its means; the idea, which we have in that case, is wholly subjective; in between lies the sense, which is indeed no longer subjective like the idea, but is yet not the object itself. — Frege

So I think this shows Frege not merely saying that each of us does something unique, but rather saying there's something intermediate: that 'sense' is something some but not all of us will share. Grice's version of that is 'implicature'. Both of them, 'sense' and 'implicature', seem to me interesting but dodgy concepts: they are the work of analytical people trying to pin down something slippery, contextual and often feeling-based or feeling-related. What do you think is the right way to look at it?

Scenario (1): A and B have a box of propositions, and they each have opinions about which ones are true. They take turns sorting them into boxes marked "true," "false," and "not sure." Maybe neither of them have some special status that allows them to know what is true, but they can at least see the different ways they sort the propositions. A might be surprised to see B put something in the "true" box that he wouldn't, but B might convince A that he should, because of some others he put in.

Scenario (2): A has his own box of propositions and B has his own box. They might as well sort at the same time, without paying any attention to each other, and they can even share the boxes they sort into. Doesn't matter. What difference could it make to A what B does with his box of propositions?

I took you, perhaps mistakenly, as going for scenario 2, rather than scenario 1.

A third scenario you may find more congenial is suggested to me by Grice's talk of types.

Scenario (3): It's more like kids each sorting their own collections of baseball cards. They can each have a copy of the same card-- not numerically the same, but same player, year, series-- and they can have cards that they count as the same in different ways. "Do you have a Clayton Kershaw?" can be answered "yes" whichever one of the various Clayton Kershaws that have been issued you have.

Scenario 3 is more appealing than 1 in some obvious ways, so long as we can make the type stuff work. — Srap Tasmaner

First, it seems like you're still thinking about "true" (and "false") as something other than a judgment we make, as individuals, about propositions and their relations. That's because you're saying things like "some special status that allows them to know what is true." If you were using "true" as a synonym for "(a particular sort of) judgment," and then made a substitution, you'd see that you're saying "some special status that allows them to know what judgment they're making."

Aside from that, yes, I'm saying something much more like (1), although of course it depends on the person whether they care what other people are doing or not. But (1) is clearly what we do most of the time when we're interacting with other people philosophically, for example. We wonder why someone is saying that something is true or false when we clearly reach a different conclusion. We wonder if they're not using words in some obviously different way, etc.

And re types, yes, I'm saying something more akin to your Grice example.

In a way, "no man's land" is exactly the right phrase, because nothing here is the sole and unshareable property of any man. I can understand why people think stuff out here "dodgy," but just look at what's here: meaning, information, patterns, mathematical objects, transitions, tendencies, dispositions, institutions, -- I could go on and on and on. We may nurse a view that we are particulars and all we ever really, in whatever sense you think you can make that work, talk about are other particulars, but I think every time you open your mouth you make use of stuff in no man's land. I think it's rather the point of language.

"Mind-independent" is not a phrase I have any use for, I think.

Re: compositionality, I don't see how you recursively generate expressions without it.

Re: my ontology, I don't have one.

I was just discussing the meaning of enlightened with another poster. It's a case where we can go back and forth between a and the sense. There are a lot of different kinds of Buddhism with wildly different doctrines. Among a particular community, we could identify the sense agreed upon. Yet that sense is a sense among many that are out there (and over time.)

"Mind-independent" is not a phrase I have any use for, I think. — Srap Tasmaner

OK. "Mental object" is what math people call the "idea" Frege speaks of. That's as opposed to "abstract object" which I suppose is his "sense."

people think stuff out here "dodgy," but just look at what's here: meaning, information, patterns, mathematical objects, transitions, tendencies, dispositions, institutions, -- I could go on and on and on — Srap Tasmaner

I don't know if you know the paper where David Chalmers argues for a contemporary Fregeanism where 'sense' pretty much becomes 'intension'. Here it is.

But the question is, what are A and B making judgments about?

Frege has a clear answer to that: the proposition, the thought, which is objective. I'll grant that this is basically a posit, but like any posit it serves a purpose. If A and B disagree about whether a proposition is true, they have to assign different truth-values to one and the same thing. That thing cannot be any particular inscription of the proposition, but the proposition itself.

The thought expressed by a sentence is also what Frege says you get when you understand the sentence, and you get it without remainder. It is what is communicated, what is transferred from A to B, what A and B can have different opinions about. This is the idea behind scenario (1) in which there is a single, shared, publicly available box of propositions for A and B. It's what you said it would be easy to deny. (Starting to feel a little icky about talking about propositions as if they're objects.)

So the question is whether scenario (3) can be made to work.

As is, it's just an intuition pump, right? I mean, baseball cards are manufactured; they are by design identical. The analogy is going to fail almost immediately. The questions that replace the built-in identity are a little problematic: what would make two utterances instances of the same utterance-type, two beliefs instances of that same belief-type? What's a type? It feels like you need something from scenario (1) (or nearby) to get this going.

Here's what I'm tempted to do: agree with Grice that this is what happens-- to talk about the tree, we need each to have a belief that the object we're looking at is a tree, not the belief. Don't posit, not yet anyway. (The idea is to avoid using Frege's machinery at all.) Accept that what we have here is all we need to talk about the tree. Then look for an explanation for how two numerically distinct beliefs can count as beliefs of the same type right here, in the transaction between two members of a linguistic community. We honestly don't need them to be instances of the same type, not for this part, although it's pretty obvious why that would be helpful. Right now all we need is for A and B to agree to treat their numerically distinct beliefs as instances of a belief-type.

Grice is almost certainly going to get here with a (probably infinite) chain of intentions, so that can get a little weird.

I'd like to come at it sideways, by the comparison with phonemes. How does someone "decide" that the allophone you actually utter will count as a /d/? This is already a little wrong, because the range of allophones is itself already determined by the speech community. It still looks like we're trying to figure out how conventions work.

One shot at this might be this: when you utter a sound, I have to take it as an allophone of some phoneme we use in our speech community or not. If possible, I'll take it as one of ours, because (a) intentions, and (b) why not? You can provisionally, experimentally take the sound as a phoneme. Which one? Again, you have to decide whether that phoneme with the others around it make a morpheme, and again if possible you will, because (a) intentions, and (b) why not? You do that provisionally and experimentally, all the way up to the complete utterance, and see if it seems to work. I'd say there's a tiny bit of evidence we do this in the way we read over typos, mentally substituting the right letter because we're pushing toward taking the utterance as valid. You could think of this as the principle of charity, but you might also wonder what choice we have but to proceed this way.

Does this actually work? Has any of Frege's machinery been smuggled in here anywhere?

"Mental object" is what math people call the "idea" Frege speaks of. That's as opposed to "abstract object" which I suppose is his "sense." — Mongrel

I think that's right, bearing in mind that he's going to take mathematical objects as, well, objects, just like physical objects. Sometimes he describes the sense of a complete (i.e., referring) expression as the way the object referred to is presented. Example: "2 + ..." is an incomplete expression, a function. Put an object in the blank, and you get a complete expression like "2 + 3". "2 + 3" refers to 5, but not the same way that "5" refers to 5, or "7 - 2" refers to 5. This is supposed to explain why equations can be informative. "2 + 3 = 5" tells you that the references of the two expressions are the same, but it remains that "2 + 3 = 5" expresses a different thought from "5 = 5" or "7 - 2 = 5". The thought expressed is the sense.