A challenge to Frege on assertion

This grows out of the thread on “References for discussion of truth as predication”. That thread was inspired by some questions raised by Irad Kimhi in Thinking and Being. I’ve realized that it’s hard to get clear on what those questions are unless you’ve read Kimhi’s book, which is a big ask.

So instead, I thought I’d pick, one by one, some Kimhi-inspired challenges to Frege and describe them in my own words, without using Kimhi’s sometimes confusing terminology, trying as best I can to link them to questions that are already familiar to many philosophers. Thus, I’ll be less concerned with “what Kimhi says” (which can be difficult to make out) and more concerned with the nature of the challenge, which I think can be raised regardless of whether you’ve read Kimhi or agree with him.

This OP offers the first one, which concerns assertion.

Frege wrote that his most important contribution to philosophy was “dissociating the assertoric force from the predicate.” We make statements in predicate logic that are blind or innocent as regards to truth-in-the-world. Frege says, “A proposition may be thought, and again it may be true; let us never confuse the two things.” (Foundations of Arithmetic) We can understand “The grass is green” without knowing whether or not it is true, and whether we should affirm or deny it.

The consequences of this, according to Frege, are probably familiar to most of us, and I won’t repeat them all. I’ll just point out that, in Fregean logic, the predicate does all the work, so to speak. 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 subject position, accordingly, is not a collection of attributes. It is a ‛thing’ only to the extent that the function makes it into one.” (cf. “To be is to be the value of a bound variable”)

So questions of existence, like questions of truth, are at one remove. 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. Frege called this “saturating” or “fulfilling” the function, since a predicate without a subject can’t receive a truth-value. As far as truth goes, Frege introduced the idea of the judgment- or assertion-stroke, which would mark a proposition as “a true thought.” (I can’t resist quoting, parenthetically, another passage from Roberts that I love: “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.”)

But suppose we decide to question the absolute dissociation of force from sense. What grounds might we have to do this?

There seem to be two steps involved in Frege’s conclusion that assertoric force is necessarily dissociated from predication. The first is the claim that logical or functional sense is a feature of repeatable occurrences of p. p retains its identity (and sense) no matter where and how it appears.* If I state ‛p’ and then ‛If p then q’, the only thing that entitles me to conclude ‛q’ is the fact that ‛p’ means the same thing in each of its occurrences. Nothing more is required for me to recognize these repetitions of ‛p’ other than their logical identity. In contrast, an actual occurrence (and I’ll say more about what that means) of ‛p’ can have assertoric force. But regardless of whether ‛p’ is asserted or unasserted, I can recognize ‛p’ as the same proposition in each occurrence.

That’s Step 1. Step 2 is the potentially controversial one: Therefore, a proposition cannot contain assertoric force as part of its logical structure. If it could, then we would no longer be able to recognize repetitions of ‛p’ as “the same”: Some would be asserted, some would not, and that would be internal to the structure. There would be some sort of deep or semantic assertion built into this Uber-proposition. Assertion would be functional in the Fregean sense. And since the self-identity of ‛p’ is critical to the entire logical apparatus, we know this cannot be. Besides, it just stands to reason, doesn’t it? I can use p and q and r and . . . z as much as I want, I can ascribe beliefs about them, or present them as part of hypothetical premises. (They work just fine in compound propositions, in other words.) None of this counts as actually “judging p true”.

Sounds simple. But does it really cover all that we mean by “asserting p”? That question is the basis for this challenge to Frege.

At this point I have to move into “I don’t know” territory. I’m not sure if the argument – which I’m about to spell out – is a successful one, and at the end of this OP I’ll invite opinions pro or con. Right now I’ll just make the best case I can.

Let’s go back to the judgment-stroke. It’s composed of a horizontal and a vertical line. The horizontal line marks assertability, the vertical line marks actual assertion or being true. The horizontal line is part of the functional composition of p, and as we know, the vertical assertion line is not. So this gives us a way of talking about “showing” or “displaying” or “manifesting” assertability without adding the vertical line and claiming that we are dealing with an actual occurrence of assertion. So far this is just another way of revealing the dissociation of sense and force.

But aren’t there two different ways in which “occurrence of an assertion” can be understood? An assertion can be displayed, perhaps as an integral part of a proposition, without being an “actual assertion.” Or better, let’s stipulate that to display force is not the same thing as to assert. Let’s add a nuance to the vocabulary so that we can now claim to be able to discover the force of ‛p’ without actually asserting it.

How do we do this? ‛The grass is green’ displays the assertion, and at the same time, under the right circumstances, makes it. ‛The grass is green’ is not neutral as to force; it is not the making of the assertion that would give it its force. What it displays is a positive predication, which can be affirmed or denied. In contrast, ‛If the grass is green, then I’m happy’ displays the assertion ‛The grass is green’ but doesn’t actually make it.

This is somewhat easier to see with denial. ‛It is not the case that the grass is green’ displays the assertion ‛The grass is green’ while not making it. ‛It is not the case that the grass is green’, just like ‛The grass is green’, is not neutral as to force, and in this instance we know that it can’t be “actual assertion” which gives it its force, because in this case there is no assertion.

Frege wants simple or “actual” occurrences of ‛p’ to be analyzable in the same way as hypothetical occurrences in ‛if p then q’. He has to say this based on his understanding of the centrality of repeatability and the self-identity of ‛p’, discussed above. But what actually warrants this? Surely we can look at a statement like ‛The grass is green’ as occurring in other contexts besides logical arguments, and when we do, we discover that assertoric force is by no means absent. In fact, “assertion as true” is the reasonable default assumption in most everyday examples of stated propositions. I’ll allow myself one quote from Kimhi: He says that Frege goes wrong by assuming “that the repeated occurrence of a proposition . . . lies within the context of valid arguments.” All actual occurrences of ‛p’ are treated the same way as ‛p’ is treated in modus ponens. Again, what is the warrant for this?

A natural response is to say, “The ‛warrant’ is that it enables us to construct a logical system that’s clear and manipulable and can answer the questions we want answered. What’s the alternative way of understanding the language of predication and assertion? Will it give us the same desirable results? Can there really be a ‛logic’ of this that isn’t predicate logic?” And that’s what Kimhi’s book is about.

But for now, what do you all think? Have I succeeded in raising a genuine challenge to Frege, or does the Fregean have an obvious counter-argument?

*This shouldn’t be read as a seeming contradiction to the Fregean “context principle,” which will come up in a different Kimhi-inspired challenge.

Banno

↪J

Thanks for the excellent OP. I don't have access to Kimhi, but have read a few reviews and other articles. Instead of addressing Kimhi directly, I'll go over my own understanding of the Fregean account and subsequent developments. You are probably already familiar with what follows, so think of it as my rehearsing the arguments that got us to the sort of accounts being critiqued.

First we should be clear about the nature of illocutionary force. Taking your example, "The grass is green", we can imagine various situations in which this utterance does quite different things. Imagine a meeting in which a landscape gardener is presenting their plan for the forecourt of a new build. One of those present is unclear as to which parts of the drawing are cement and which are lawn, and asks "The grass is green?". The designer replies, "Yes. The grass is green." There follows a conversation about how best to represent the lawn after which the manager gives the instruction "The grass is green!". Here we have the same sentence being used in three quite different ways - as a question, as a statement and as an instruction. The same sentence is being used with three differing illocutionary forces.

Notice that the content of the sentence is much the same - in all three cases it is about the colour of the grass. Now truth-value is usually, but not always, associated with statements. So the statement "The grass is green" is the sort of thing that might be true or false, but the instruction "The grass is green!", meaning something like "You will colour the grass green in your diagram!", is neither true nor false. But we might answer the question "The grass is green?" with "Yes", or with "True". This has led to the idea that there is a propositional content that is the same for all three, which sets out the reference and the predicate in each case, and takes differing forces depending on the use to which the sentence is put. So the question, statement and instruction can be seen as all sharing the same propositional content but differing in illocutionary force.

We might right the propositional content in subject-predicate form: Green(grass). This is usually considered not to have an illocutionary force, but just to be setting out what the sentences are about. A big advantage of this is that it can be treated extensionally - as concerning only the things that it denotes. It's generally taken as read that in logic we are dealing not with sentences that include a full illocutionary content, that we set this aside for the purposes of examining in detail the propositional content.

What's salient here is that making an assertion is as much part of the illocutionary force of an utterance as is asking a question or giving an instruction.One might see this as setting aside the "assertoric" aspect of the sentence in order to deal with other aspects of its structure - what it is about.

The rather large advantage of this is the structure of formal logic. This is no small thing, since this provides the foundations of mathematics and computer science. Treating sentences in this way has undeniable advantages.

This is a somewhat seperate issue from the sense-reference distinction. I think it may be helpful for us to acknowledge that illocutionary force differs from sense and reference. I'll prehaps come back to sense and reference in another post.

For now, @J, do we agree roughly on the account I've given above?

Srap Tasmaner

↪J

Oh all right.

First, it's not clear to me what your argument is.

‛The grass is green’ displays the assertion, and at the same time, under the right circumstances, makes it. — J

That doesn't sound like an argument; it sounds like you (ahem) asserting your proposed conclusion. Even so, the natural rejoinder is that the circumstances in question involve someone, you know, asserting it.

Surely we can look at a statement like ‛The grass is green’ as occurring in other contexts besides logical arguments, and when we do, we discover that assertoric force is by no means absent. — J

And again, the natural rejoinder is that the context of which you speak includes someone asserting this. You haven't actually shown why we ought to think force is part of logical form. Have you?

Second, it's a particular kind of argument you want to make: not so much that Frege is wrong or something, but that some other framework might prove more useful, or more perspicacious, might make easier to see something that Frege's framework makes hard to see, that sort of thing.

RussellA

Have I succeeded in raising a genuine challenge to Frege — J

An Indirect Realist's challenge to Frege's disassociation of sense from reference

For Frege, a proposition such as "this grass is green" or "this unicorn is intelligent" have a sense and a reference, such that sense and reference can be disassociated. Kimhi is saying that sense and reference cannot be disassociated because they have a unity.

For the Indirect Realist, the colour red doesn't exist in any world outside the mind, but only exists as a concept within the mind. Similarly, other objects such as apples, unicorns and grass don't exist in any world outside the mind either, but only exist as concepts within the mind.

Consider the Schema "this grass is green" in language is true IFF this grass is green in the world. For the Indirect Realist, the world of apples, grass and unicorns exist in the mind as concepts. Therefore, the schema would become: "this grass is green" in language is true IFF the grass is green exists in the mind as a thought.

For the Indirect Realist, the sense of a proposition exists in language in the mind as a thought, and the reference of a proposition exists in the world, which also exists in the mind as a thought.

For the Indirect Realist, sense and reference are unified as both exist in the mind.

Khimi and Wittgenstein
Wittgenstein proposed that language was thought.
For example: Tractatus 5.6 "The limits of my language means the limits of my world."

The sense of a proposition is in language and the reference of a proposition is in the world.

But we only know language through our thoughts, and we only know the world through our thoughts.

It follows that we only know the sense of a proposition though our thoughts and we only know the reference of a proposition through our thoughts.

If Wittgenstein is correct in that language is thought, the sense and reference of a proposion are unified within thought.

Khimi does support Wittgenstein over Frege. From the Notre Dame review of Thinking and Being:

3. It begins to look as though the contemporary neglect of the old puzzles rehearsed by Wittgenstein is far less revelatory of the nature of these puzzles than of the current state of philosophy. The groundbreaking lesson of Kimhi's reflections is that this diagnosis may well be sound. Our sense that we have put these old puzzles behind us bespeaks a "misplaced confidence", one that "stems from our present conceptions of logic and language" (2). The task of addressing these puzzles must be confronted anew. Given that the Parmenidean account of the unity of thinking and being lands us in an aporia, what is required is a diagnosis of what stands in the way of an alternative account of this unity

If Khimi also supports Wittgenstein's idea that language is thought, then for Khimi, this would be a mechanism by which sense and reference are unified, in being unified within thought.

fdrake

But aren’t there two different ways in which “occurrence of an assertion” can be understood? An assertion can be displayed, perhaps as an integral part of a proposition, without being an “actual assertion.” Or better, let’s stipulate that to display force is not the same thing as to assert. Let’s add a nuance to the vocabulary so that we can now claim to be able to discover the force of ‛p’ without actually asserting it. — J

And again, the natural rejoinder is that the context of which you speak includes someone asserting this. You haven't actually shown why we ought to think force is part of logical form. Have you? — Srap Tasmaner

Fun thread.

I bolded "a" in the quote since, if I read it right, you're construing Frege's view that every proposition cannot contain assertoric force as part of its logical structure. There's several degrees of freedom in that sentence.

1 ) What counts as a proposition.
2 ) What counts as a logical structure.
3 ) What counts as an integral part of a proposition.
4 ) I suppose whether you read "logical" as a subset of a "linguistic" or "sentential" structure or a more broad "performative" and "pragmatic" one.

But if the claim is that Frege's view applies to every proposition, all you'd need is one example of a proposition whose logical structure wasn't totally covered by Frege's account of logical structure.

I'd posit that Moore's Paradox's has an assertion as an integral part of a sentence, and highlights a kind of contradiction (underlying logical structure?) which isn't representable in normal flavours of sentential logic.

The sentence "It's raining but I believe that it's not raining" is weird. It can be true, and it will be true (extensionally) whenever it is raining but the utterer believes it is not raining. For example, if their curtains are closed and they just looked at a false weather forecast for their area, that is a plausible belief I could have.

What makes it strange is that writing or saying the sentence counts as an assertion, so the clause "It's raining" doesn't just state that it's raining, it imbues a state of awareness of the fact that it is raining to the speaker, which engenders us to ascribe that state of awareness to the speaker. Whereas the latter clause "but I believe it's not raining" cancels the ascription of the state of awareness to the speaker as well as ascribing opposed content to the clause "It's raining" to the speaker's state of awareness.

That sets up the statement as... weird... since it contains a performative contradiction of some kind, but it isn't a strict one. One would expect that the speaker believes that it is raining if they have indeed asserted it, and will do so on the basis of having inferred that it is raining somehow based on contact with the rain. Nevertheless the statement entails no logical contradiction. Though it could be analysed as entailing a contradiction when the utterance of the statement is treated as a speech act. However the sensible interpretation of the speech act is not what would make it true in virtue of its extension, as demonstrated with the example of not seeing the weather and seeing an inaccurate weather forecast.

With reference to the above list of degrees of freedom:

1 ) I'm counting the conjunct ((It is raining) and (I believe it is not raining)) as the proposition associated with the sentence.
2 ) I'm asserting that an analysis of the "logical structure" of the sentence should include an explanation of why it appears to be self contradictory, even though extensionally it is not self contradictory.
3 ) I'm asserting that whatever the answer is in ( 2 ), it should be seen as an integral part of the sentence, since the sentence strikes every competent interpreter as weird.
4 ) I think this engenders a broader, less formal, sense of logic as expectable behaviour and interpretation which should be considered as part of the analysis of propositions.

I do think it's possible to resolutely deny that the logical structure in 2 has anything to do with the logical structure of propositions, or to say that the contradiction is well explained by the common belief in the proposition that "if X asserts Y then X believes Y" as a default operation of language. But the post is long enough so I'll only offer detailed rejoinders to those things if asked to.

do we agree roughly on the account I've given? — Banno

In a word, yes. Assertion as displaying illocutionary force is part of the "standard" picture. And the challenge here is about the nature of propositional content (intension vs. extension), just as you say.

↪RussellA

Yes, I think the ND review gets it right about Kimhi's debt to Wittgenstein, which he acknowledges. He sees Wittgenstein as a fellow "psycho / logical monist". Is a there a Wittgensteinian response about assertion here that you could offer? (In this context, assertion isn't the same as "reference.")

The Indirect Realist challenge is interesting, but I'll leave it alone as my own metaphysics is much closer to direct realism.

Fun thread. — fdrake

Fun, for sure. Some go clubbing and do X, we worry about 'x'. :razz: (Some do both, no doubt.)

writing or saying the sentence counts as an assertion, — fdrake

But does it? Were you asserting it, just now when you wrote the sentence? I know you clarify this later, but in this OP I’m claiming that much depends on exactly what we mean by “assertion” so I’m being finicky here.

I like your “degrees of freedom” analysis a lot. (2) and (3) get to the heart of the matter – how can a strictly Fregean understanding of propositions give us any insight into what’s wrong with a “logical structure” that is not extensionally self-contradictory? The challenge I’m offering concurs with (3) that an explanation of the self-contradiction must be part of our logical analysis of the sentence. I’m trying to keep Kimhi mostly out of this, but will just note that (3) is absolutely essential to his revisionist philosophy of logic.

I also agree that it’s possible simply to deny (2) – isn’t that what Frege (and probably Donald Davidson) do? I’d be interested, though, to hear more about what a default operation in language is, and how it might answer the problem.

First, it's not clear to me what your argument is. — Srap Tasmaner

it's a particular kind of argument you want to make: not so much that Frege is wrong or something, but that some other framework might prove more useful, or more perspicacious, might make easier to see something that Frege's framework makes hard to see, — Srap Tasmaner

Right, my argument is more that Frege fails to provide a way of dealing with certain features of assertion and its connection with thought or consciousness, not that he’s wrong per se in what he does countenance as part of logic. I guess that’s why I think of it as a “challenge” to Frege rather than a refutation.

‛The grass is green’ displays the assertion, and at the same time, under the right circumstances, makes it.
— J

That doesn't sound like an argument; it sounds like you (ahem) asserting your proposed conclusion. Even so, the natural rejoinder is that the circumstances in question involve someone, you know, asserting it. — Srap Tasmaner

Here, I’m hoping to get the reader’s agreement on a point of observation – namely that there’s nothing incoherent about trying to draw a distinction between force and assertion. The challenging part, perhaps, lies not in the second use of ‛The grass is green’ -- I quite agree that under these “right circumstances” someone is indeed asserting it – but the first. We’re not used to thinking that p can display an assertion without making it. The Fregean picture is more like “p would or could be an assertion under the right illocutionary circumstances (thanks, @Banno), but unless it’s actually being asserted, p has nothing in the way of force.” That’s what I’m challenging. The argument for that is in the OP and I’m sure it can be improved, so please feel free to sharpen it in the process of disagreeing, if you do.

Leontiskos

‛The grass is green’ is not neutral as to force — J

The closest Frege's system can get to modeling something like this is to say, "There exists something which is both grass and green." Fregian logic has an especially hard time with individuals since it is built for concepts or classes. Given that the statement is not Fregian in the first place, it raises a whole host of issues.

But for now, what do you all think? Have I succeeded in raising a genuine challenge to Frege, or does the Fregean have an obvious counter-argument? — J

All the objections to Frege's logic that I have seen are metalogical objections, and yours is no exception.

↪Srap Tasmaner

says that there is no (counter)-argument being offered, and this is true at least insofar as there is no counter-argument which adopts Fregian presuppositions. What is being questioned is the presupposition.

So how does one offer an argument against logical presuppositions? The most obvious way is to argue that the presupposition fails to capture some real aspect of natural logic or natural language, and by claiming that natural propositions possess a variety of assertoric force that Frege's logic lacks, this is what you are doing. Yet this is where a point like Novák's becomes so important, for logicians like Russell, Frege, Quine, et al., presuppose that natural language is flawed and must be corrected by logic. This moots your point. Further, Quine will set the stage for a "pragmaticizing" of logic, which destroys the idea of ontologically superior logics at its root:

In Quine’s hands, however, the principle takes on a purely descriptive meaning, stating merely what kind of entities a given theory presupposes to exist – namely those that can figure as values of bound variables in that theory. In other words, the Principle features in Quine as his famous criterion of “ontological commitment”, which, since language has been purged of all directly referring expressions, lacks any a priori connexion to reality and becomes rather a matter of pragmatic choice. — Lukáš Novák, Can We Speak About That Which Is Not?, 166-7

It is a question of what you're up against.

And that’s what Kimhi’s book is about. — J

Kimhi's approach strikes me as a attempt to kill Frege by a kind of "death by a thousand cuts." Whether or not this works, it will not be convincing to entrenched Fregians, as it requires a willingness to abandon Fregian presuppositions for the sake of argument. Beyond that, with each small cut Fregians will presumably respond, "It's such a minor issue - who really cares?" It seems to me that your Sider paper—which never in fact received a hearing within your earlier thread—was much more "punchy" and effective as directed against Fregians. Kimhi's book seems to be directed towards those who are predisposed to question the sovereignty of Fregianism, rather than committed Fregians themselves.

And finally, this argument about assertoric force is an argument where I can see both sides, and I don't know that the clarity and merits of the OP are sufficient to overcome the weight and presuppositions of the opposing side. For example, on the one hand we have some obscure gesturing towards real problems or at least wrinkles with the Fregian presupposition. What do we have in favor of the Fregian presupposition? Something like this, which is both clear and strong: <The first and second premises of a modus ponens both display p, but with entirely different assertoric force. Therefore assertoric force is not intrinsic to p>. That's a strong argument, and from my skim of Kimhi and the ND review I did not understand Kimhi to be questioning this distinction between sense and assertoric force tout court.* To question the distinction tout court would require a very clear and very strong argument. The ultimate nub here is always going to be, "Well if you aren't questioning the distinction tout court, then in precisely what way are you questioning it?" Does Kimhi have a clear answer?

* In fact all logic seems to require a distinction between sense and assertoric force, and therefore if the conclusion of your argument is that these cannot in any way be separated then logic itself would appear to be doomed. The subtlety of Kimhi's argumentation results in a subtle conclusion. There is the danger here of throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

fdrake

But does it? Were you asserting it, just now when you wrote the sentence? — J

This is a precise question, thank you.

"Does it?" and "were you asserting it?" seem to be a false dichotomy to me. There is another possibility.

Reading the sentence "It is raining but I believe it is not raining", as a competent interpreter of English, produces the uncanny effect. I don't believe I, as the writer of the sentence, was asserting it. Rather I believe the sentence "It is raining but I believe it is not raining" suggests, as part of a normal interpretation of it, that the ambiguous referent "I" in the sentence is ascribing an ambiguous/ambivalent/weird state of being to themselves through the opposition between the clauses. Whether I write the sentence or not is irrelevant, I suppose, what matters is that the proposed speaker conjured into being by "I" in the sentence ascribes the unusual state to themselves.

I know you clarify this later, but in this OP I’m claiming that much depends on exactly what we mean by “assertion” so I’m being finicky here.

So in the context of the sentence, it would count as an assertion on the part of whoever "I" refers to. Even if that reference isn't fixed. The odd part of what makes it count as an assertion seems to be "I" conjures an asserter. Which isn't the person who writes the sentence (me), it's the person in the sentence.

Leontiskos

The Fregean picture is more like “p would or could be an assertion under the right illocutionary circumstances (thanks, Banno), but unless it’s actually being asserted, p has nothing in the way of force.” That’s what I’m challenging. — J

The simple argument from Geach in Kimhi's book is that p has assertoric force in (2) but not in (1):

p → q
p
∴ q

What you seem to be saying is that if we let p = "The grass is green", then it will have assertoric force in (1). Is that really true?

The force of a locution is context-dependent, but doesn't formal logic always need to nail down and simplify this context-dependency? If the argument of the OP is that natural language is a more powerful or complete logical tool than formal logic, then I would agree. But is there any formal logic that will really be able to dodge this bullet and provide the same cornucopia of locutionary flavors that natural language possesses?

Srap Tasmaner

@J

↪Srap Tasmaner says that there is no (counter)-argument being offered, and this is true at least insofar as there is no counter-argument which adopts Fregian presuppositions. What is being questioned is the presupposition. — Leontiskos

It looked to me like the argument form here was something like this:

A: Fs are not Gs.
B: But in a way they are.

That's a disagreement, I guess, but I wouldn't call it an argument. And yes maybe it's a disagreement over presuppositions, but what's the argument for dropping the presupposition?

@fdrake brought up Moore's paradox, which did immediately leap to mind, but --

What's the plan here? What do we think we're doing?

What I want to ask specifically is this: are we to proceed as if there is a fact of the matter here? Do we expect to discover that force is or is not part of a sentence's logical form, as we might discover, I don't know, humans reached North America tens of thousands of years earlier than we thought?

If we find that there are multiple frameworks for analyzing the symbol systems of humans and their utterances, and each is useful for particular purposes, we might consider the possibility that the speakers of a language also have at their disposal multiple frameworks for thinking about the utterances of their fellows. The distinction between between force and logical form might not be a fact, so much as a strategy, something people do because for some purposes it's very useful to do so.

The example that leaps to mind for me is indirect discourse. Even if you follow @fdrake in thinking there is a sort of default use of language -- and I very much do (and here we might mention Lewis's truthfulness and trust) -- indirect discourse presents some challenges. The idea of force is helpful here, because you can distinguish between reporting what someone else asserts and asserting it yourself. (That this is a strategy we are not required by the nature of things to follow is clear in the phenomenon of blaming (or killing) the messenger.)

All of this probably aligns me with

a "pragmaticizing" of logic, which destroys the idea of ontologically superior logics at its root — Leontiskos

But I'm making the further suggestion that it's not just a question of our theories of language as philosophers, but that these theories are founded on the practices of language speakers, and that such theories do not stand aside as explanations of how people talk but are deployed strategically by speakers and listeners.

Leontiskos

The odd part of it seems to be "I" conjures an asserter. Which isn't the person who writes the sentence (me), it's the person in the sentence. — fdrake

"I" always refers to the person speaking the sentence, does it not? These are two different claims:

It is raining and I don't believe it is raining.
It is raining outside, and he says, "I don't believe it is raining."

I have seen analytics fall into this trap of thinking that sentences can float in the ether without any speaker, even a logically remote one. In that sense I would agree with the OP that all sentences have a kind of force, but I would call it an intentional force rather than an assertoric force.

Leontiskos

It looked to me like the argument form here was something like this:

A: Fs are not Gs.
B: But in a way they are.

That's a disagreement, I guess, but I wouldn't call it an argument. And yes maybe it's a disagreement over presuppositions, but what's the argument for dropping the presupposition? — Srap Tasmaner

Yes, that's fair. :up:

If we find that there are multiple frameworks for analyzing the symbol systems of humans and their utterances, and each is useful for particular purposes, we might consider the possibility that the speakers of a language also have at their disposal multiple frameworks for thinking about the utterances of their fellows. The distinction between between force and logical form might not be a fact, so much as a strategy, something people do because for some purposes it's very useful to do so. — Srap Tasmaner

I don't think it is a question of whether there are non-logical forms of discourse. That can be granted. The question is whether Frege's system is a flawed logical form of discourse.

Kimhi defines philosophical logic as, "the idea of a study that achieves a mutual illumination of thinking and what is: an illumination through a clarification of human discursive activity in which truth (reality, aletheia) is at stake" (1).

So logic is not indirect discourse, and indirect discourse would not function as a counterexample to Frege's system. It may be otherwise for Quine, but for Frege the ontological question is not moot, and Frege did not consider his system to be a strategic, pragmatic deployment. Specifically, the system was meant to capture logic in its entirety. You are saying that it does not capture all of human symbolic activity. Would you also say that it does not capture all of logic?

Srap Tasmaner

Kimhi defines — Leontiskos

Shrug. He can define as he likes.

Frege did not consider his system to be a strategic, pragmatic deployment. Specifically, the system was meant to capture logic in its entirety. — Leontiskos

I don't think "logic in its entirety" is a thing.

I'll pass on Frege exegesis, but I'll say his system is spectacularly useful for doing mathematics; I believe this is mainly what he was after, but it doesn't much matter to me.

Are there forms of reasoning it is less useful for? Without question. But there are also occasions when presenting a bit of informal reasoning in the language of FOL is clarifying and useful if not dispositive. Again, I see it as a tool; you can use it and you can overuse it, and you can forget you have other tools. Tools aren't true or false.

Leontiskos

↪Srap Tasmaner

- I think it is a useful tool, but Frege thought it was more than that and it seems he was wrong. When one sees that Frege's system is insufficient it at the very least must be demoted to the level of a "tool." Whether @J is arguing for more than this, I do not know.

I don't think "logic in its entirety" is a thing. — Srap Tasmaner

Do you think logic is a thing?

Srap Tasmaner

Frege thought it was more than that and it seems he was wrong. — Leontiskos

Another black eye for modern thought.

Do you think logic is a thing? — Leontiskos

If you like, go for it. Sometimes it's more useful to speak of "logics" in the plural. It's just a word, you know.

When one sees that Frege's system is insufficient it at the very least must be demoted to the level of a "tool." — Leontiskos

Insufficient for what? For the "mutual illumination of thinking and what is"?

I don't know man. I'm not sure how damning it is to describe something as merely useful, but you've got a hobby horse to ride and I'll not stop you.

fdrake

What's the plan here? What do we think we're doing? — Srap Tasmaner

If I'm part of that "we", I see a relatively clear but restrictive theory proposed as Frege's in

↪J

and clarified wonderfully in

↪Banno

. I wanted to put some pressure on the restriction in it. The restriction being that an account of a sentence's "logic" ought to solely concern under what conditions is that sentence true. And moreover, in the final analysis, that logical structure of truth conditions spells out all of what is asserted in an assertion and thus how that assertion works whenever it is asserted.

I don't think this has much grander significance, at least to me. I just enjoy thinking about formal vs informal reasoning and how that interplays with speech acts and extensional semantics.

Leontiskos

I'm not sure how damning it is to describe something as merely useful, but you've got a hobby horse to ride and I'll not stop you. — Srap Tasmaner

No one said it was damning. Is mine the hobby horse, here? If you are averse to the topic of a thread, why post in it? After all, if you are ultimately just going to say, "None of this matters at all, and 'logic' is nothing more than a word," then it would seem that you are averse to the topic.

Some sharp, interesting comments and questions here. Let me start with a quote from @Srap Tasmaner

Are we to proceed as if there is a fact of the matter here? Do we expect to discover that force is or is not part of a sentence's logical form, as we might discover, I don't know, humans reached North America tens of thousands of years earlier than we thought? — Srap Tasmaner

No, the way the we use terms like “force” doesn’t reveal facts about the world in the way natural history does. Such terms are, as you say, tools. But that is not the same thing as saying there is no fact of the matter as to whether hallowed terms like “being” and “truth” reflect genuine ontological structures. They may or they may not – it depends on what we mean by them, what we want such terms to describe. We can’t go out and discover this, any more than we can discover that the number 2 precedes 3 and follows 1.

The takeaway here is that “ontologically superior languages,” to use @Leontiskos’s phrase, might be precisely those which are the most useful to us, as you seem to suggest. But this does require one to drop the idea of a truth about ontology that is independent of hermeneutics. Which relates to this from Leontiskos:

for Frege the ontological question is not moot, and Frege did not consider his system to be a strategic, pragmatic deployment. — Leontiskos

Yes to the pragmatic part (or at least I don’t know where in Frege to look for that kind of language), but we should be careful about Frege’s ontological commitments. Again, I like Julian Roberts on this:

Existence [for Frege], in other words, is dependent on logical identification, not the other way round. Once you have named something, you can say whether it exists or not. — Julian Roberts, The Logic of Reflection

It’s true that this doesn’t moot the ontological question, but it’s a special and severe restriction on what we can say about existence. It’s also a precise description of the order in which Fregeans have to proceed: quantification first.

I see a relatively clear but restrictive theory proposed as Frege's in ↪J and clarified wonderfully in ↪Banno. I wanted to put some pressure on the restriction in it. The restriction being that an account of a sentence's "logic" ought to solely concern under what conditions is that sentence true. And moreover, in the final analysis, that logical structure of truth conditions spells out all of what is asserted in an assertion and thus how that assertion works whenever it is asserted. — fdrake

Works for me. Good way of putting it.

When one sees that Frege's system is insufficient it at the very least must be demoted to the level of a "tool." Whether J is arguing for more than this, I do not know. — Leontiskos

I’m still an undecided voter on the question of whether Frege’s system is insufficient, though I obviously regard Kimhi’s challenge as serious, otherwise I wouldn’t be devoting so much head- and forum-space to it. But let’s say it is insufficient. Merely a tool, then? Here is another perspective, which comes closest to the spirit of the challenge in my OP: If Frege’s system is insufficient in its basic understanding of how propositions work, how they must be understood within logic, then while it may remain a powerful tool, it’s defective in explanatory power at the metalogical level. That would be very serious, but hardly unprecedented. Newtonian physics is still a powerful tool, despite getting the big picture all wrong.

**

Does this Kimhi-inspired challenge question the dissociation of sense from assertoric force tout court (completely, without qualification)? No. Then:

"Well if you aren't questioning the distinction tout court, then in precisely what way are you questioning it?" Does Kimhi have a clear answer? — Leontiskos

The claim under challenge is that assertoric force must always be dissociated from sense. Kimhi clearly says that this is mistaken. He believes that p may sometimes appear with its force displayed – that is, as positive predication – without being asserted. And he also believes that, sometimes (usually within the context of predicate logic), the separation of force and sense is necessary and unproblematic.

To unpack this, and to stay away from the jargon of “categorematic” and “syncategorematic” (which Kimhi uses in an idiosyncratic way), I’m suggesting we think of force as something that can be displayed without assertion. And having said that, the question is whether this is just playing with words – whether the nuance I’m proposing really clarifies anything, or would change how we think about logic. To that question I would say, “Kimhi thinks it does, but I’m not clear on it yet.”

**

Both@Leontiskos and @Fdrake have concerns about the “I” of assertion. This is very important, in my opinion. For instance:

Have I asserted p when I write ‛p’? How can you tell?

Is there a difference between thinking p and saying it out loud? Does vocalizing p usher it across the assertion barrier?

Here is the first sentence of Camus’ The Stranger: “Mother died today.” Call it ‛p’. Has p been asserted? By whom? The narrator of the novel is named Meursault. Should we say it’s his assertion? But of course there is no Meursault. Is it then Camus’ assertion? But it’s not about his mother. Maybe it's not an assertion after all. Sure looks like one, though . . . etc. etc.

So, much as I wish I could agree with Leontiskos (it would make things so much simpler):

"I" always refers to the person speaking the sentence, does it not? — Leontiskos

I think the answer is no. @Fdrake prefers to think of the asserter as “the person in the sentence,” and this seems closer, but demands a generous ascription of personhood.

There’s a lot more I could respond to, but enough for now. High-quality posts.

Banno

↪J

Ok, thank you.

I see the thread has gotten away, with various posts the relevance of which are uncertain. That makes it difficult to do the step-by-step work needed here.

Let's next take a look at sense and reference. Again, you are probably already familiar with what follows, and think of this as rehearsing the arguments that got us to the sort of accounts being critiqued.

We find it useful to differentiate between what was referred to and how it was referred to. So we use the word "Venus" to refer to Venus, and we can also use "Hesperus" to refer to Venus, but seen in the evening. What differs here is not the individual being talked about. There were attempts to remove individuals all together from the calculus, but there turned out to be cases where they were most useful, especially in modal logic. So now we usually use constants, a,b,c..., sometimes even calling them "names", and usually think of them as simply referring extensionally to individuals.

But that's a more recent development. It seems Frege worked with a more general understanding of the things he was representing. So his

might now be parsed as U(x)f(x), and we might think of "x" as ranging over individuals. For Frege the gothic $\mathfrak a$ was the argument of a function.

What I would draw attention to is that illocutionary force is a different issue to sense and reference. Frege was perhaps unable to accomodate this difference in his nomenclature.

Again, small steps. Does this seem correct to you?

Janus

I would have thought that whether a sentence which could be said to be in the propositional mode is assertoric or not depends on whether the sentence is being or has been used or mentioned.

I don't see a problem with fictional characters asserting stuff—fictional character/ fictional assertion.

Leontiskos

It’s true that this doesn’t moot the ontological question, but it’s a special and severe restriction on what we can say about existence. It’s also a precise description of the order in which Fregeans have to proceed: quantification first. — J

I don't think this is correct at all. Here is Frege:

Here I would retort: If “Sachse exists” should mean “The term ‘Sachse’ is not an empty sound but it stands for something”, then it is correct to say that the condition that “Sachse exists” must be satisfied. This, however, is no new premise, but a self-evident presupposition of all our words. The rules of logic always presuppose that the words used are not empty, that the sentences express judgements, that we are not playing with mere words. Given that “Sachse is a man” is an actual judgement, the word “Sachse” has to stand for something; in which case I do not need any further premise to infer “There are men” from that. The premise “Sachse exists” is superfluous, as long as it means nothing over and above that self-evident presupposition of all our thought. Or 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?[4]

[4] [...] Gottlob Frege, “Dialog mit Pünjer über Existenz” (between 1879 and 1884), in Schriften zur Logik und Sprachphilosophie: Aus dem Nachlass (Meiner Verlag 2001), 99, p. 11–12. [...] — Lukáš Novák, Can We Speak About That Which Is Not?, 157-8

If we attribute any content to the verb “to be”, to the effect that the sentence “A is” is neither superfluous nor self-evident, we shall have to concede that the negation of “A is” is, under certain circumstances, possible, viz. that there are subjects to which being must be denied. Then, however, the notion of “being” generally won’t be suited to be used as an interpretation of the meaning of “there is” any more, according to which “there are B’s” would be equivalent to “some being falls under the concept of B”. For if we applied this interpretation to the sentence “There are subjects to which being must be denied”, we would obtain the sentence “Some being falls under the concept of non-being”, or “Some being is not”. This is unavoidable, as soon as one ascribes any content whatsoever to the concept of being. If the interpretation that “there are B’s” means the same as “some being is B” is to be correct, then it is simply necessary that “being” be understood as conveying something completely self-evident.[5]

[5] [...] ibid., 20-21 — Lukáš Novák, Can We Speak About That Which Is Not?, 159

Given this evidence it would seem that it is incorrect to claim that for Frege quantification is wider than existence. I think the sources from your thread on QV attest to this same fact.

I have been snipping the second sentence of that title, "Can we speak about that which is not? Actualism and Possibilism in Analytic Philosophy and Scholasticism." The general critique of Frege seems closely related to the Actualism and Possibilism debates.

-

Newtonian physics is still a powerful tool, despite getting the big picture all wrong. — J

As I said in the first sentence of that post, "I think it is a useful tool." By "tool" Srap is apparently implying a strong sort of ontological pluralism, as he favored in your earlier thread. You are welcome to press him on it, or on the question of better and worse logical tools.

If Frege’s system is insufficient in its basic understanding of how propositions work, how they must be understood within logic, then while it may remain a powerful tool, it’s defective in explanatory power at the metalogical level. — J

Yes, well put.

I’m suggesting we think of force as something that can be displayed without assertion. And having said that, the question is whether this is just playing with words – whether the nuance I’m proposing really clarifies anything, or would change how we think about logic. To that question I would say, “Kimhi thinks it does, but I’m not clear on it yet.” — J

This is what I suspected, and said, "...But is there any formal logic that will really be able to dodge this bullet and provide the same cornucopia of locutionary flavors that natural language possesses?" (

↪Leontiskos

).

There are systems of logic that set about mapping other forms of force, such as belief, but it doesn't strike me as a great approach to lay the charge at Frege's feet that he hasn't sufficiently accounted for non-assertoric forms of locution. This is where I think Srap's critiques are helpful, for they demand more precision as to the actual conclusion being argued for.

Both@Leontiskos and Fdrake have concerns about the “I” of assertion. This is very important, in my opinion. — J

It strikes me as a simple question of intent. One asserts something if and only if they intend to, and I don't think any material sign contains within itself any variety of illocutionary intent. For example, "The grass is green" can be placed in that modus ponens premise, and thus stripped of its assertoric force. Now it does have a kind of prima facie assertoric force, which must be stripped or prescinded from if we want to avoid it. Is that the same as being intrinsic?

I think the answer is no. — J

I don't think you understand what I am saying. "I" refers to the person speaking the sentence, and this person is not fdrake. The oddity is that @fdrake seems to think that there was no asserter prior to the one who was "conjured" by the "I", but I recognize that he is not trying to give an answer to the paradox.

I have seen analytics fall into this trap of thinking that sentences can float in the ether without any speaker, even a logically remote one. In that sense I would agree with the OP that all sentences have a kind of force, but I would call it an intentional force rather than an assertoric force. — Leontiskos

Does, "It is raining," have assertoric force, and if so, who is the asserter? There is a sense in which it has a kind of meta-assertoric force insofar as we are forced to imagine at least an implicit speaker. But my use of the quotation marks indicates that I am holding it aloof rather than asserting it myself. I don't suppose this is all Kimhi is saying?

Srap Tasmaner

↪J

I've been rereading your OP, and I think I get the argument now. Here's the key point, I believe:

‛The grass is green’ is not neutral as to force; it is not the making of the assertion that would give it its force. What it displays is a positive predication, which can be affirmed or denied. — J

Two alternative definitions of "assertion" contrasted here:

(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.

In (1) the claim is not made until someone asserts it, or asserts that the statement at issue is true, that what it describes is the case. In (2), the statement itself is a claim that things stand thus-and-so, and asserting that statement is affirming, agreeing with, that claim, endorsing its claim to truth.

One thing that's nice about (2) is that the statement underlying the claim is readily picked out. We could try to avoid some of the awkwardness of (1) (and ditch the somewhat Tractarian "possible state of affairs") something like this:

(1A) Assertion is (a person, an agent) claiming that what a statement says, is in fact the case.

And now it feels like we're halfway to (2) already.

---- I want to stop there for a moment, because there's more to say about this business of sentences saying something, but I want to add a brief detour back to Frege and truth values.

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.

So a typical, and trivial, bit of post-Frege argumentation might be this:

1. For all integers x, if x is a prime greater than 2, then x is odd.
2. 5 is a prime greater than 2.
Therefore
3. 5 is odd.

What interests me about this for the sake of this discussion is that it is not some statement that could take a truth value that is repeated: it is the unsaturated function "... is a prime greater than 2." It appears first with a bound variable in 1, and then with a specific named object in 2, and it's the use of the same predicate that allows the conclusion in 3, repeating the other unsaturated function "... is odd" but now applying it to a named object so that it is a complete symbol and can take a truth value.

This seems slightly at odds with the descriptions involving a repeated identical 'p': there are no repeated complete symbols here.

2 and 3 are straightforward, and the sorts of statements that say things. But 1? Does 1 say something? Evidently, but it says a different sort of thing than 2 or 3.

Srap Tasmaner

I don't think this is correct at all. — Leontiskos

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.

Added: This all goes hand-in-hand with Frege's straightforward platonism -- mathematical objects just exist, and they have to exist for us to talk about them as we do.

fdrake

The oddity is that fdrake seems to think that there was no asserter prior to the one who was "conjured" by the "I" — Leontiskos

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.

I'm saying conjured because the sentence is really weird. Firstly it's a philosophy brainrot meme, no one is actually going around saying that sentence. I can't expect it to work like a sentence outside of a philosophy thought experiment in all respects. Which is fine, it's made to illustrate something tacit about our intuitions surrounding statements, assertions, logic and beliefs.

The sentence is free floating. The sentence "Sally said, 'It is raining but I believe it is not raining'", also illustrates the paradox, but now you know "I" refers to the speaker Sally. Rather than some retrojected speaker you conjure into existence, for the sentence, when you get to the words "I believe" and form a coherent interpretation of the sentence in light of that.

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.

↪Banno

Small but crucial. Yes, I'm with you. And I'm especially pleased to see you emphasizing the difference between illocutionary force and (extensional) reference. I read "force," "assertion," and "reference" as three different terms that often overlap but don't have to.

↪Janus

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.

RussellA

I think the ND review gets it right about Kimhi's debt to Wittgenstein, which he acknowledges. He sees Wittgenstein as a fellow "psycho / logical monist". Is a there a Wittgensteinian response about assertion here that you could offer? (In this context, assertion isn't the same as "reference.") The Indirect Realist challenge is interesting, but I'll leave it alone as my own metaphysics is much closer to direct realism. — J

Assertion vs. reference
As you said, Frege wrote that his most important contribution to philosophy was disassociating the assertoric force from the predicate.

It is true that an assertion and a reference are not the same thing, but they are inseparable. In order to make an assertion, in order for there to be the act of asserting, something must be being asserted. In this case, what is being asserted is a reference.

For example, given the proposition "this grass is green", the somerthing that is being asserted is that this grass is green, where the truth value of the proposition "this grass is green" is given by its referent, ie, that this grass is green.

Frege in On Sense and Reference noted the connection between the assertoric and its referent:

We shall now enquire into the Sense and Reference of a whole assertoric sentence. Such a sentence contains a thought. Should this thought be seen as its Sense or as its Reference?

IE, the duality between assertoric force and predicate may well be equally expressed as the duality between sense and reference.

Wittgenstein and assertion

Within the Tractatus there is no reference to either "assertoric force" or "reference", but only to "sense".

As normal with Wittgenstein, he conflates many topics, whether falsehood and negation, the intensional and the extensional, the psychological and the logical as well as "sense" and "reference".

The unity of thinking and being is the cornerstone of Wittgenstein's Tractatus.

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.

TLP 2.221 - What a picture represents is its sense.
TLP 2.222 The agreement or disagreement of its sense with reality constitutes its truth or
falsity

Wittgenstein in the Tractatus is unifying thought and being, and is unifying Frege's "sense" and "reference" into the single term "sense".

Indirect Realism vs Direct Realism

It is in the nature of Indirect Realism that there is a natural unity of thought and being, in that on the one hand we think about the world, and on the other hand, the world we think about exists as a thought. Such a unity is a consequence of logical necessity.

The Direct Realist, on the other hand, has the thought of a red postbox, and the belief that the postbox is red. However, there is no logical necessity that the fact that there is a red postbox in the world will give rise to the thought that there is a red postbox in the world. Any agreement between what exists in the world and any thought about what exists in the world remains contingent.

Indirect Realism has the advantage of thoughts as being necessarily true, whereas Direct Realism has the disadvantage of thoughts as only being contingently true.

Given this evidence it would seem that it is incorrect to claim that for Frege quantification is wider than existence. — Leontiskos

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.

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. He requires, correctly, that “A is B” be “meaningful and true” before the contradiction with “There are no B’s” can be shown. But what does it mean for “A is B” to be meaningful and true? Correct grammar, and the judgment-stroke. Both of these require quantification first. 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. It goes back to Frege’s basic assumption that all p’s occur in the context of logical argument.

it doesn't strike me as a great approach to lay the charge at Frege's feet that he hasn't sufficiently accounted for non-assertoric forms of locution. This is where I think Srap's critiques are helpful, for they demand more precision as to the actual conclusion being argued for. — Leontiskos

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.

I don't think you understand what I am saying. "I" refers to the person speaking the sentence, and this person is not fdrake. — Leontiskos

But in all seriousness, what if the “person” can’t do any speaking at all? Meursault has never said a word – no surprise, since he isn’t real. Pursuing this much further would probably take us away from the main concerns of the thread, so I won’t belabor. What we need is an account of how so-called fictional assertions work, and what requirements we place on personhood in order to have apparently non-existent persons asserting things. I find this all fascinating but, as I say, I don't want us to digress.

A challenge to Frege on assertion

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