- Let's do a bit of hair-splitting.

Are you using 'statement' here the same way I was, or as 'a sentence that is being asserted'? — Srap Tasmaner

Something like that: "A sentence being asserted (as true)." I avoided the indicative mood language because a statement is only one kind of utterance in the indicative mood.

This is the whole point of my screwdriver discussion. — Srap Tasmaner

I read your screwdriver analogy as having three points, characterized here:

So we are right to recognize that a screwdriver is longing to drive screws, and this is the most joy it can find in life, but we still might drive screws without it, or use it for something else. — Srap Tasmaner

First, the screwdriver has a latent orientation towards driving screws; second, it can be used for things other than driving screws; and third, other things can be used to drive screws.

I am pointing to a fourth point, and it requires moving from the equivocity of the indicative mood to the univocity of statements. The idea is that we never handle statements independent of assertions, even when we are not asserting them. In that way a statement is like a tool with only one purpose. Suppose we put the tool in our shed for storage. In doing this have we used it for an alternative purpose? No, because we are preserving the tool in order that it may be used for its singular purpose at a later date. The storing of the tool is related to its singular purpose, even though it is not itself its purpose.

When I was thinking about tools before you posted about them, I was thinking about the first and fourth points, not the second or third, and the fourth point stretches the tool analogy (which is why I didn't present that analogy). If we wanted to try to fit the fourth point to the screwdriver analogy we would probably say that the form of the screwdriver makes it fit for some tasks and unfit for other tasks, and that it therefore has a limited and determinate range of uses. But analogies aside, the point is that statements and assertions really do go hand in hand (and this holds even if we put the statement in the cage of quotation marks). A statement cannot really be used to ask a question or give a command, apart from its inalienable purpose of asserting. If a statement manages to do any of these other things, it only does so in virtue of asserting, and there is no way to handle or wield a statement while separating it from its shadow, its assertoric nature. I think this goes beyond the three points you were making, and at least qualifies your claim that "the [screwdriver] has other uses." The question is whether the "other uses" of a statement are truly independent of its assertoric nature.

- Yes, I agree.

[petri dish or] sandbox — bongo fury

The petri dish or sandbox metaphor is a bit different. I think this is related to @J's idea that quantification and claims of existence are two quite unrelated things, which seems closer to Quine than Frege. Now presumably everyone in this thread is closer to Quine than Frege on that question, which is an important wrinkle in the thread. Because of this we must take pains to ensure that the thesis Kimhi is critiquing is something that is still widely held, and has not been abandoned.* This is why I am inclined to read some of the critiques as critiques of the propositional calculus rather than the predicate calculus specifically, not because the latter has been abandoned but simply because the former is more widely known and held.

* Inversely, I don't think someone like Banno is being sufficiently careful about the differences between Fregian logic and contemporary logical intuitions. There is a sense in which we must sift contemporary intuitions, such as the Open Logic Project, into its Fregian and non-Fregian constituents, lest we run roughshod over key theoretical distinctions in our pragmatic shoes.

the differences between Fregian logic and contemporary logical intuitions — Leontiskos

I'm not much concerned about this, but the single most interesting point, and relevant to this thread, is that the assertion stroke disappeared. Frege thought it was necessary and later logicians universally (?) don't. I'm no historian, so I'm not quite sure how this happened. I always assumed that Frege was just wrong, and that we can do formal logic as if there were an implicit assertion stroke at the start of each line. And if we can do that, it becomes clearer that what we're really doing is manipulating symbols according to rules, as when we do mathematics, and interpretation can wait until later.

(On the other hand, natural deduction systems often use some notation for assumptions and their later discharge, I think, so that's a way of singling out formulae you are not asserting simpliciter.)

Now for the hair-splitting.

Suppose we put the tool in our shed for storage. In doing this have we used it for an alternative purpose? No, because we are preserving the tool in order that it may be used for its singular purpose at a later date. — Leontiskos

In most cases, but also I think obviously false as a rule. You might own a tool that you have no intention of ever using, an antique gun, for instance. Men have workshops with peg-boarded walls where lots of tools are impressively arrayed and the three or four they actually use are laying on the workbench or in a drawer. I could go on.

This hair isn't worth splitting though, because most sentences asserted are not ready-to-hand like a screwdriver, but one-offs. So there's no sense talking about storage and retrieval in the first place. (Words, on the other hand, ...) Where you do see the same sentence bouncing around repeatedly is in argument and discussion, and in quotation. That means we have the option of exploring whether there are different kinds of assertion; maybe assertion in an argument is a slightly different beast from the sort of extemporaneous sharing of information we do all day.

we never handle statements independent of assertions, even when we are not asserting them. — Leontiskos

And I'm just not sure what you're reaching for here with "handle", or "independent of", for that matter. Now and then I think you're making a sort of psychological or cognitive point: Hume noted that to conceive of an object is to conceive of it as existing; you almost seem sometimes to be saying that to conceive of a statement is to conceive of it as being asserted. Which might be true, but I don't believe this is what you're saying, or what the point of saying it would be. So what kind of "handling" of statements are you talking about, and how are possible assertions implicated?

We've sort of begun talking about the assertibility of a statement as an affordance, in direct analogy to screwdrivers. But we could instead think of the way simple objects in the Tractatus are said to sort of carry with them the possible states of affairs they could enter into. Just so, a sentence in a given language has what we might think of as chemical properties: there are other sentences it will have an affinity for, and bond with readily to create a narrative or an argument; there are sentences it will repel, sentences that if they bond it will reconfigure both into new configurations with new possibilities, and so on. Philosophers tend to treat statements as having built-in "affirm" and "deny" buttons, but that's surely a somewhat impoverished view, once you consider the wealth of ways sentences relate to each other.

The hairs that remain to be split are no fun: there's
(1) the sentence;
(2) the sentence in a given context;
(3) the elaborated sentence with indexicals resolved by context;
(4) the sentence as uttered;
(5) the sentence as uttered in a specific context;
(6) the actual uttering of the sentence;
(7) all the intentions involved (which Grice admits are infinite, though it's a pretty model and gets something clearly right).

I'm sure I'm leaving some out. I'm not sure which of these we've been talking about, which Frege has, which points made depend on whether you're talking about one or the other and which don't. We may have no choice but to wade into some of this -- though I'll note again that this is the sort of crap you don't have to worry about in mathematics, where Frege's machine is both happy and indispensable.

I'd like to say something useful about this last difficulty but it will have to wait.

I'm not much concerned about this, but the single most interesting point, and relevant to this thread, is that the assertion stroke disappeared. Frege thought it was necessary and later logicians universally (?) don't. I'm no historian, so I'm not quite sure how this happened. — Srap Tasmaner

I have been meaning to look into this same thing. I plan to look through this Master's thesis, "Frege, Russell and Wittgenstein on the Judgment Stroke."

different kinds of assertion — Srap Tasmaner

For example, I'll go ahead and note (not assert) that in a mathematical or logical proof, you will often have occasion to rely on statements, derived or not, that it would be odd to call assertions. When you say "And since 2 is less than 3, ..." you're not asserting that 2 is less than 3, you're not claiming that it is, you're reminding the audience that it is, and pointing out to them that you are relying upon this as fact.

* Don't mind the "since" -- the point stands if the previous line was "Now, 2 is less than 3."

This phrase, "just an ontological move", is interesting. — Srap Tasmaner

Very interesting, and what you’re saying about it applies to a lot of issues, not just Roberts here with the separation of function and argument. To stick with that for a minute: I read the passage from Roberts as suggesting that Frege’s “ontological move” is a somewhat ad hoc or tendentious solution to a potential problem about psychologism. It’s not enough, for Frege, to show that subjects and predicates (arguments and functions) are given an asymmetric treatment in the “formal rules of calculation.” He also wants to eliminate psychologism as an option for understanding what logic is fundamentally about. Logic is not about the way we think, it is rather a description of the objective structure of thought. By calling a function a “thought,” Frege wants to rule out the possibility of its appearing in the argument position, as a possible subject of logical discourse. Here’s a bit more from Roberts:

So if we purport to describe thinking [that is, predicate something about it], or to explain it in terms of empirical categories, then whatever we purport to describe is by that very token not the formalism of pure thought. Ultimately, as Wittgenstein emphasized, thought in this sense can only be shown, or demonstrated in practice; it can never have things said about it. — Roberts

I’m not sold on the Wittgensteinian leap at the end, but I include it because a number of people on this thread have also noted this similarity. As for the legitimacy of this “move,” your comments now become pertinent. I agree that Frege is saying, “Here is my method, these are the terms I’ll use, this is how I intend to proceed.” But he seems also to be firm about the ontological difference between arguments and functions. Roberts is asking, “Has Frege explained anything, or is he merely declaring his own ‛way of going on’?” We know we can rule out your 2nd option (that Frege would invoke “all in the head / language / culture” as his explanation), since that would be psychologism on steroids. So what about the 1st? It seems to me this is pretty close to what Frege believed, but again, we want to know why he believed it. I’m not sure it’s enough simply to point out how tidy this makes everything, and how effective a weapon it is against psychologism. Frege was smarter than that. Like you, I’m not sure what to say about it, and I’d defer to those who know Frege better than I do.

I would also love to return, maybe in a fresh OP, to the wider implications of whether “carving the world at its joints” (Plato and Sider) is more than an ontological “move,” understood as something you just declare as useful methodology. A minor topic in philosophy! :wink:

Nice to meet another Merrill fan!
— J

I didn't consider for a moment anyone would get that reference! — Srap Tasmaner

Oh heck yeah -- the man was a genius.

In other words, by identifying the two extensional sets as the same, we're able to "make the assertion" that S is Richard's sister without any appeal to some actual act of assertion — J

Not quite. On to looking at ⊢. From what I understand, in the Begriffsschrift "⊢" is an explicit judgement; what follows is known, while — would prefix "a mere complex of ideas", un-affirmed (SEP). In the Grundgesetze this has changes significantly; ⊢ now says something like "The following names the true" (SEP). That's much closer to it's modern use, where ⊢ρ is "ρ is a theorem" and ψ⊢ρ says "ρ is derivable from ψ". Notice that in these more recent uses, truth is not mentioned. That's important.

So historically there is a shift from "⊢" being read as "we know that..." to something with much less commitment. It's akin more to "We can write that..".

Notice also that for Frege there is a structure literally hanging from the ⊢. So we have

read from bottom to top, for what we might now write as
$\forall A\forall B (A \rightarrow (B \rightarrow A))$.
In the modern version all the assertive paraphernalia on the left is removed. Along with it goes much of the implication of commitment. (again, stolen from SEP)

Perhaps it would help at this stage to talk about deduction rules such as Modus Ponens. Historically this is thought of as a rule about deriving true propositions; so if ρ is true and ρ implies ψ, then ψ is also true. But that's not how it must be understood. Alternately, it can be seen as simply a licence to write certain things down in a game of symbols: so if you can write "ρ" and you can write "ρ⊃ψ" then you are, for the purposes of that game, entitled to write "ψ". And on this understanding, the truth of ρ, ψ and ρ⊃ψ are irrelevant.

Notice that the supposed "assertoric" implications of the process are here simply absent.

It might be objected that truth is somehow implicit in all this, after all even the Open Logic Project uses the falsum, ⊥, in setting out propositional logic, and makes use of gothic F and T. But non of these symbols need have the assertic force - they could happily be replaced by any other symbols. Remember the reading of "⊥" as "bottom"; the whole edifice of propositional logic might be built on "top" and "bottom" as much as on "true" and "false". All that is needed is a pair of opposite that can serve to differentiate the various well formed formula into those we are entitles to write - the theorems - and the rest.

It might also be objected that I'm talking only about syntax here, and that all this disappears when we give things a semantics. But in assigning ⊥ or ⊤ in propositional logic, we are giving it a semantics - since Frege, these are what propositions refer to. The issue becomes more complex with the semantics of predicate calculus, were satisfaction is more complicated, but the point I think remains.

All this by way of pointing out that "assertoric force" doesn't much feature in modern logic for very good reasons. We have the habit now of separating out the illocutionary force from our sentences, as well as setting aside any sense it might have in favour of the denotation (reference). We do this in order to display certain aspects of the structure of our sentences, that we can then examine in far greater detail than was previously possible. And we do it quite self-consciously.

So two things follow from this with regard to what Kimhi might have to say. The first is that while "assertoric force" might have featured in Frege, its place in logic is less prominent now than ever. The second is that the result of setting "assertoric force" aside is a quite powerful discussion, with implications for much of modern life. Kimhi had best present a subtle and powerful argument if he is to convince us of the benefits of doing otherwise.

Logic is not about the way we think, it is rather a description of the objective structure of thought. — J

Okay, yeah, I haven't thought about this in a while, but that's Frege all over. It's pure platonism.

I avoided the indicative mood language because a statement is only one kind of utterance in the indicative mood. — Leontiskos

Minor point, but yeah I should have been saying "declarative" all along!

I think we can say this: a world with declarative sentences in it, or a world in which they can be produced, is a world that also includes assertion. A screwdriver is an element in a system of fastening: without screws of the appropriate material and materials to be fastened that screws can be driven into, there's no reason to have screwdrivers. To then take the screwdriver as having, shall we say, significance in itself, would clearly be mistaken.

What that gets us, I'm not sure. If you say, for instance, that assertion "aims at truth" (which, perhaps mistakenly, I suppose is the sort of thing Kimhi will want to say), then a declarative sentence must be the sort of thing that can be aimed at truth, whatever that means. One adjustment to this I would probably make is to say the goal of assertion is to aim someone else at truth -- at what you take for truth, anyway, so that's another adjustment. It's a triangulation: if you imagine yourself at vertex A, observing a truth at vertex B, then you speak to someone else at C to guide their gaze toward the (purported) truth at B.

There is something faintly Fregean about this, because of B. Frege's arguments for the "third realm" were often intersubjective: there is not "my pythagorean theorem" and "your pythagorean theorem" but "the pythagorean theorem"; if I claim that P is true, in order to agree or disagree you must be considering the very same P, else we talk past each other; and, finally, there was the telescope, where we can each in turn view the image on the mirror, rather than viewing the moon directly, but it is the same image we observe -- this to explain the difference between sense and reference, as I recall, and to insist that senses are not subjective.

Impossible to address all the interesting points and questions, but I’ll do my best to respond to folks one by one. — J

Yes, I feel this as well.

The difference is that (1) is an assertion, couched of course in language, about something in the world, e.g. the green grass. (2) is an assertion, couched as affirmation or denial (which could be in symbolic language rather than words) of the sentence used in (1) about the grass.

The irony is that Kimhi claims there is no difference – this is his monism. He says there’s no “logical gap” between (1) and (2). But in order to appreciate how he could say such a thing, we first have to get clear on what appears to be the difference. Hope this helps. — J

Well yes, but it is many more than the 'monists' like Kimhi who do not see a difference here. The difference presupposes a certain kind of sentence reification, and this is related to my complaint about thinking about sentences divorced from intentional sense and implicit speakers.

I know, this is really hard to be clear about. When I suggested “adding a nuance to the vocabulary” that would separate force from assertion, I was suggesting a possible way to clarify. My idea was that we could then talk about “displaying force” without “asserting.” So, to respond to your paraphrase: No, not exactly. I‛m suggesting that we should stop thinking of “force” as something that only an assertion can create. The term “assertoric force” kind of twists our arm into thinking that there’s no force without assertion. So instead, “This statement has force [positive or negative predication] even before you pick it up and assert it.” — J

My impression is that you have spoken about assertoric force independent of assertions, and not just force, but I could be wrong about that. For example, if Kimhi questions the distinction between assertoric force and predicate, then the prima facie reading is that there is some kind of assertoric force associated with the predicate. The difficulty about simple force, or illocutionary force, or intentional force, is that it is very vague and seems to take us far beyond the realm of logic. A number of times throughout the thread this idea has been reigned in lest we move into the open sea of super-logical (linguistic) concerns.

Right, but it’s the introduction of the argument into the function that allows us to claim it exists. I see how you could have read my “before we can say whether it exists or not” to mean that there would be a further decision process. But no, all I’m positing is that, for Frege, ontological commitment can only be shown through his predicate logic. — J

Well, "before we can say whether it exists or not," seems to be simply anti-Fregian, given that we can never say that that an "argument" (in Frege's language) does not exist. As Frege said, to say that 'A is B' means that there are B's. We can never say 'A is B' and then go on to decide whether B's exist.

Hmmm. Well, ‛Fido exists’ isn’t a proposition, if I understand Frege. So for that very reason, we don’t have to do anything with Fido other than use him in a function in order to claim he exists. We do have to do that much, though.

Can you say more about this point? It’s possible I’m not following you. — J

That's right - I agree with your claims here entirely, although I think Frege would go even further and say that there is no reason or sense in "claiming that Fido exists" via predication. Existence in that basic sense seems to be superfluous for Frege.

Good questions. If you accept my proposal to disambiguate “force” from “assertion,” then we need to clarify the relations among all these terms, which is a headache, not just for Kimhi -- much less so than for Frege, as you point out. Just to repeat the point from above, though: I think Kimhi believes that something can have force (not assertoric force) without being asserted. — J

Okay, but do you see how this reading of Kimhi fails to contradict Frege?

Frege: "Assertoric force is dissociated from the predicate."
Kimhi: "I disagree, because the predicate has force."
Frege: "Unless you say that the predicate has assertoric force, you have not disagreed with me."

I agree with this, and it seems to support your understanding as well. Notice, though, that Roberts puts “explained” in scare-quotes. Fair enough: Is this really an explanation or just an “ontological move”? — J

I read it as neither, but rather as merely "saying" or stipulating. If Roberts is right then it is an unargued premise. I find this whole line of Psychologism interesting, and Roberts' theories interesting and at least somewhat plausible.

I read the passage from Roberts as suggesting that Frege’s “ontological move” is a somewhat ad hoc or tendentious solution to a potential problem about psychologism. — J

Right.

So if we purport to describe thinking [that is, predicate something about it], or to explain it in terms of empirical categories, then whatever we purport to describe is by that very token not the formalism of pure thought. Ultimately, as Wittgenstein emphasized, thought in this sense can only be shown, or demonstrated in practice; it can never have things said about it. — Roberts

This is where I see a large and sometimes unnoticed gap between analytic philosophy and scholasticism. The scholastics are quite happy to think about thinking, and are apt to switch into that mode at a moment's notice. If Frege really thinks logic is "a description of the objective structure of thought," then he will have to provide arguments for this thesis, and if he cannot argue about the psychological act of thinking, then he cannot do this.

I’m not sure it’s enough simply to point out how tidy this makes everything, and how effective a weapon it is against psychologism. Frege was smarter than that. — J

I tend to agree. I think there is more here.

I would also love to return, maybe in a fresh OP, to the wider implications of whether “carving the world at its joints” (Plato and Sider) is more than an ontological “move,” understood as something you just declare as useful methodology. — J

There are topics at hand that could easily resurrect your thread on Sider, and that might be the easier thing than drawing up a whole new OP. Especially because we don't want too many new OP's on the same constellation of topics.

Minor point, but yeah I should have been saying "declarative" all along! — Srap Tasmaner

Useful. :up:

I think we can say this: a world with declarative sentences in it, or a world in which they can be produced, is a world that also includes assertion. — Srap Tasmaner

Yes, that is a good way to put the point I was trying to make. Note also how philosophical anthropology is implicated, namely the question of whether the human being is capable of truth, where 'truth' means something high or Platonic.

What that gets us, I'm not sure. If you say, for instance, that assertion "aims at truth" (which, perhaps mistakenly, I suppose is the sort of thing Kimhi will want to say), then a declarative sentence must be the sort of thing that can be aimed at truth, whatever that means. One adjustment to this I would probably make... — Srap Tasmaner

And now we are on the edge of the deep waters again, but this is all on point. I am going to try to address some of the points I missed before diving into this headlong.

---

So there's no sense talking about storage and retrieval in the first place. — Srap Tasmaner

No, I agree with this. I was not trying to say that we store and retrieve declarative sentences. The point is that declarative sentences have a unique and inalienable nature. Your later considerations about our capacity for truth also point to their unique importance. The relation between a screwdriver and the act of driving screws is loose. The relation between a declarative sentence and a statement is not loose in that way, and I would go on to say that the relation between these two things and our capacity for truth is also not loose in that way. But again, I don't want to move too fast into this newer and deeper topic.

And I'm just not sure what you're reaching for here with "handle", or "independent of", for that matter. Now and then I think you're making a sort of psychological or cognitive point: Hume noted that to conceive of an object is to conceive of it as existing; you almost seem sometimes to be saying that to conceive of a statement is to conceive of it as being asserted. Which might be true, but I don't believe this is what you're saying, or what the point of saying it would be. So what kind of "handling" of statements are you talking about, and how are possible assertions implicated? — Srap Tasmaner

I don't see any problem agreeing with Hume in that even if I would probably go a bit further. But I worry that this tangential "hair-splitting" may have no force against Frege, and so I don't want to develop it too far. It's more that, "Here's something I hold, which sounds a lot like what Kimhi is saying. Maybe Kimhi could be interpreted this way? But I don't see how it intersects with Frege."

We've sort of begun talking about the assertibility of a statement as an affordance, in direct analogy to screwdrivers. But we could instead think of the way simple objects in the Tractatus are said to sort of carry with them the possible states of affairs they could enter into. Just so, a sentence in a given language has what we might think of as chemical properties: there are other sentences it will have an affinity for, and bond with readily to create a narrative or an argument; there are sentences it will repel, sentences that if they bond it will reconfigure both into new configurations with new possibilities, and so on. Philosophers tend to treat statements as having built-in "affirm" and "deny" buttons, but that's surely a somewhat impoverished view, once you consider the wealth of ways sentences relate to each other. — Srap Tasmaner

Yes, I like these ideas. I think this relates to what I have referred to as intentional force, and perhaps what @J has referred to as force. But again, I have no clear sense of how this will intersect with Frege, except for the basic point that Frege simplifies what is not simple.

I'm sure I'm leaving some out. I'm not sure which of these we've been talking about, which Frege has, which points made depend on whether you're talking about one or the other and which don't. We may have no choice but to wade into some of this -- though I'll note again that this is the sort of crap you don't have to worry about in mathematics, where Frege's machine is both happy and indispensable. — Srap Tasmaner

Yes and yes. :up:

For example, I'll go ahead and note (not assert) that in a mathematical or logical proof, you will often have occasion to rely on statements, derived or not, that it would be odd to call assertions. When you say "And since 2 is less than 3, ..." you're not asserting that 2 is less than 3, you're not claiming that it is, you're reminding the audience that it is, and pointing out to them that you are relying upon this as fact. — Srap Tasmaner

Yes, this looks like a kind of presupposition or premise in the way it functions logically. Our context and aim will determine whether such distinctions are necessary, but in a way you have already pulled the curtain on the obvious and difficult debate—and that visitor was at the door from page 1. It is something like the realism debate, colored by your pragmatist approach.

There is something faintly Fregean about this, because of B. Frege's arguments for the "third realm" were often intersubjective: there is not "my pythagorean theorem" and "your pythagorean theorem" but "the pythagorean theorem"; — Srap Tasmaner

Yes, but Frege and Kimhi do not seem to be at odds on this point. That's not to say it's not worth talking about. My next post will hopefully be on Frege's judgment stroke, and whether that idea had any lasting effect.

@Leontiskos - that masters thesis you linked is a good read.

I think Kimhi believes that something can have force (not assertoric force) without being asserted. — J

In the mind is the sense that "the sunset is red", and in the world is the referent that the sunset is red.

Frege argues that a proposition can have a sense in the mind even if there is no referent in the world. Khimi argues against this.

This is not a problem for the Indirect Realist, for whom the world exists in the mind, meaning that a referent in the world exists as a sense in the mind. Unity arises in thought, thoughts about sense and thoughts about referents.

However, this is a problem for the Direct Realist, where referents in the world can exist independently of being observed. EG, for the Direct Realist, sunsets were red prior to the existence of any observer thinking that "sunsets are red".

How does a Direct Realist support Khimi and explain a unity between a sense in the mind and a referent in the world when these are independent of each other.

In other words, can there be something in the world having a force, such as a red sunset, prior to it being asserted by an observer that "the sunset is red".

This is super helpful, thank you. I want to mull over several points you make before responding. But for now, could you expand a little on this?:

In other words, by identifying the two extensional sets as the same, we're able to "make the assertion" that S is Richard's sister without any appeal to some actual act of assertion
— J

Not quite. — Banno

What's the better way to understand this? Is the problem that I'm still thinking in terms of assertions, which, as the rest of your post shows, are no longer much needed in logic?

Leontiskos - that masters thesis you linked is a good read. — fdrake

Okay, good. I want to have a proper look at it today, but I think it may be helpful to bring the question into sharper relief first.

The idea is that we never handle statements independent of assertions, even when we are not asserting them. — Leontiskos

@Srap Tasmaner - Similar to this, the Original Post tries place Kimhi's thesis in a cage so we can talk about it without talking about Kimhi (and for good reason!), but this can never be fully carried out by those who do not understand Kimhi's thesis as well as he does. I want to bring him in a bit given that we are trying to sort out how Kimhi's critique relates to Frege and the tradition that follows Frege, especially with respect to the dissociation of assertoric force from predicate.

In the other thread a useful review of Kimhi's book came up, which is publicly accessible and gives the very large scope:

It is also not so clear, on a closer look, that a conception of thought and judgment along Fregean lines is able to dispose of the Parmenidean puzzle. Judgeable content is introduced as the highest common factor shared by thought and judgment. One can grasp a judgeable content without yet taking the further step of judging it to be true or false ("advancing to a truth-value"). Judgment is logically more complex than thought: it consists in a content grasped plus the recognition of the truth of what is thus grasped. This means that the logical unity of the content of an assertion, as conveyed by the predicative use of "is", precedes and is independent of the logical unity of the judgment to which this assertion gives expression, as conveyed by the assertoric use of "is" (8, 18). As Kimhi points out, however, it is far from clear that the notion of a judgeable content that is at once forceless and truth-apt is coherent. How can content show how things are if it is true prior to and independently of saying that they do so stand?

...

It is Kimhi's contention that the fundamental obstacle resides in the assumption that "All logical complexity is predicative or functional in nature" (15, 22), i.e., that every dimension of the logical complexity of a proposition can be rendered in function-argument form. Let us call this assumption the Uniformity Assumption (UA). This assumption, in turn, fuels the assumption that a simple proposition enjoys a unitary being, and so is individuated as the proposition that it is, prior to being true or false (39). On this assumption, the veridical being or non-being of what is said by a proposition (i.e., its being the case or not being the case) is extrinsic to its predicative being (i.e., the being expressed by the predicative use of "is") (8, 18). Let us call this assumption the Externality Assumption (EA). Correlatively, the veridical sense of being and non-being (i.e., being as being-true and being as being-false) is held to be at best secondary (69-70). Finally, EA induces a twofold thesis: it is countenanced (1) that every assertion articulates into two components, one of which conveys its semantical content and the other the force with which it is put forward (39); and (2) that the contexts in which a proposition can occur divide into two radically different kinds of contexts, namely, extensional, "transparent", truth-functional complexes, on the one hand, and intensional, "opaque", non-truth-functional complexes, on the other hand (12). Thus, UA is the ultimate source of the "psycho/logical dualism" (as the book calls it) that was systematically advocated by Frege and is nowadays more or less taken for granted (33-34). This dualistic view of judgment as decomposing into a subjective act and a truth-evaluable content drives a wedge between the psychological and ontological versions of the principle of non-contradiction (PPNC and OPNC respectively) (39). It is supposed to be the only way of steering clear of the pitfall of psychologism about logic (33).

This overall diagnosis is at once profound, original, and controversial. . . — Review of Kimhi's Thinking and Being, by Jean-Philippe Narboux

It is hard to quote from Kimhi's book on this topic, as the topic is very complex and interconnected to other issues. For those with access to the book, or who want to use a preview site like Google Books, two places where it seems to come up are page 37 and following, and then especially page 82 and following.

Here is an attempt at some relevant quotes:

This proposition is what Kimhi calls "Frege's observation" (which is in fact enunciated by Peter Geach):

a proposition may occur in discourse now asserted, now unasserted, and yet be recognizably the same proposition.

(Peter Geach, “Assertion,” reprinted in Logic Matters (London: Basil Blackwell, 1972), 254–255.) — Kimhi, Thinking and Being, 37

It is worth noting that Geach is not using the term proposition in the Fregean sense of a thought or content, but rather, as he puts it elsewhere, “in a sense inherited from medieval logic, a bit of language identifiable in a certain recognizable logical employment.”[25] It is a bit of language—but not just a “string of words.” Different occurrences of the same words are recognizable as occurrences of the same proposition only within the larger logical context. (This is also what I mean when I talk of propositions and propositional signs.)[26]

The use of the term occur in Frege’s observation is ambiguous between occurrence understood as the actual concrete occurrence of a propositional sign and a symbolic occurrence of a propositional sign within a larger propositional or logical context. — Kimhi, Thinking and Being, 38

. . .Understood as a point concerning a proposition’s concrete occurrences it is the straightforward insight that having the character of an actual assertion, by contrast to having a semantical or logical identity, is characteristic of particular occurrences of a proposition that cannot be associated with the repeatable symbol. In other words, a propositional sign manifests, through its symbolic composition, the semantical character of each actual occurrence of the proposition, but not the force character of any those occurrences.

However, for Frege and Geach the observation amounts to something different. They want to say that anything within the composition of a propositional sign which is associated with assertoric force must be dissociated from that which carries semantic significance—that is, from everything directly relevant to its truth-value. In particular, they want to dissociate assertoric force from anything in the composition or form of that which is primarily true or false in a propositional sign.[27]

In what follows, I shall call the correct understanding of Frege’s observation Wittgenstein’s point, and I shall call the conclusion Geach and Frege draw from it—that assertoric force must be dissociated from a proposition’s semantical significance— Frege’s point. We shall see that Frege’s point is mistaken. It only seems necessary if we accept certain functionalist (and more generally, compositionalist) assumptions about logical complexity. Correctly understood as Wittgenstein’s point, Frege’s observation concerns actual occurrences of a proposition and amounts to the full context principle; misunderstood as Frege’s point it runs together the symbolic and actual occurrences of a proposition and limits the context principle to atomic propositions. — Kimhi, Thinking and Being, 38-9

(See here for footnote 27)

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. — Banno

Isn't this just the difference between validity and soundness? In computer science, for example, all that matters is the structure can be parsed using the correct language structure to manipulate the 0s and 1s when it is compiled to machine code/binary. That doesn't convey truth. Something else needs to be added.

- See also:

Ugh, are we Wittgensteining Banno now? I'll let Banno reference himself (I'm waiting for him to copy and paste your text :razz: ).

Ok I read @Banno's post. Yes, I think I agree with all he said there as to how emphasis on "truth" has been put aside for emphasis on proper structure and rules. I think it parallels what I was saying pretty much. But my question is rather, the question at hand (or so it would seem), "WHAT" criteria needs to be added to make it truth? Is it just default "judgements made from some amalgamation of verification and/or falsification principle"?

Frege simplifies what is not simple. — Leontiskos

Shrug. That's how simplification works. It's a model; all models are wrong.

Frege and Kimhi do not seem to be at odds on this point — Leontiskos

For instance, my little triangulation model is waaaaaay simplified.

Correctly understood as Wittgenstein’s point, Frege’s observation concerns actual occurrences of a proposition and amounts to the full context principle — Kimhi, Thinking and Being, 38-9

I always read the "language-game" analysis as an expansion of the context principle, so I have some sympathy with this view.

I do want to note the alternative approach, though, which is Grice's, and which I also have considerable sympathy with. Grice distinguishes sentence meaning from speaker's meaning, and defends the usual logical analysis of the meaning of a sentence as essentially correct, even if in a given context a speaker means something else by saying it.

An example I've used before: you're driving somewhere with a friend and ask, "Should we stop here to eat?" Your friend checks his phone and says, "The next town is like 70 miles." What he means by saying this is "yes", but that doesn't change the meaning of the sentence he uttered or of any of the words in it. --- Nor is "yes" logically implied by what he said; it is only implicated, and he might in fact be willing to wait.

I say all this because if you want to identify the meaning of a sentence with its use, as a move in a language-game -- what I think Kimhi might be pointing at with "actual occurrences" and so on -- you can get speaker's meaning right but skip entirely over sentence meaning, which in this case is a verifiable claim about geography.

It does seem like the principal subtext here is the picture theory of the Tractatus and its abandonment.

What's the better way to understand this? — J

I'll go back over it, just to chaeck we are on the same page. I's said

The "assertoric force" being removed here is at least in part the sense of our statements, so that we might set them aside and deal with the reference. — Banno

and that Frege

...had in mind at least partly something of the sort given here, where the assertive force of "S is Richard's sister" is simplified by treating it extensionally as S={Ruth} — Banno

The point is a straight forward one, I hope.

Consider

If Richard's sibling is in Sydney then she is in Australia
Richard's sibling is in Sydney
Hence Richard's sibling is in Australia

and

If Ruth is in Sydney then she is in Australia
Ruth is in Sydney
Hence Ruth is in Australia

Since {Ruth}={Richard's sibling}, extensionally, these arguments are the same. Whatever "force" there is in "Richard's sibling" drops out of consideration.

How Ruth is identified is irrelevant to the syllogism. All that counts is that Ruth satisfies "...is in Sydney".

But what is dropped here is not an illocutionary assertion. What is dropped is the sense, as used to make the identification. It seems that it must be something like this that Frege meant by “dissociating the assertoric force from the predicate”.

So you suggested

In other words, by identifying the two extensional sets as the same, we're able to "make the assertion" that S is Richard's sister without any appeal to some actual act of assertion (i.e. illocutionary act). — J

And that's roughly right, but not quite what I wanted to draw attention to with talk of the extensional aspect fo Frege's logic.

I suspect Frege would not have been able to make the distinction between illocutionary force and what might be called "intensional" force, between the way a sentence is used to make an assertion and the way in which a sense is used to identify an individual. This distinction was made much later.

I've also suggested a seperate point, which I will try to clarify. When one looks at It is clear that what is being asserted is not the first line, but the whole structure. The "|" has the whole within its scope. This is what licences the reduction of this to
$\vdash\forall A\forall B (A \rightarrow (B \rightarrow A))$
with the much reduced use of space. Frege was asserting this, the whole illocution. In Begriffsschrift, it was within the scope of something like "I know..."; in Grundgesetze it was something like "this is true:...". I would suggest that now, the "true" part has faded, and although it is still used, it does not have the force it once had. I suggest it's more akin to "We are entitled to write...".

It might be objected, as I mentioned, that this treats of syntax and not semantics; that to look at soundness and completeness we must assign truth of falsity to the various well formed formulae. But truth and falsity are there defined in terms of satisfaction. We could get the same result by assigning any pair of terms - top and bottom, up and down, flipped and flopped.

The use of "true" and "false" in the development of propositional calculus might seem to imply that some formula are being asserted. But it ain't necessarily so. Further, it's satisfaction, not truth, that decides which formula are to be preferred. And I think that is the case of first order logic as well.

Which is not to say that making assertions is not something we can do with these logics. And indeed, that is the usual use to which all this structure is put. But use is something added on top of the logic. It's just not at the core, which is about manipulating symbols.

Edit: Some of the stuff I've read here (not by you) leads me to think that there are folk who suppose that each part of a theorem is being asserted, as if in
1. ρ⊃ψ
2. ρ
3. ψ
each line must be asserted separately, or even that the "ρ" in "1. ρ⊃ψ" is being asserted. But this need say nothing about wether (1) and (2) are true. What's asserted is the tautological whole of ⊢(((ρ⊃ψ) ^ ρ)⊃ψ). That's something Frege's approach makes clear.

Isn't this just the difference between validity and soundness? — schopenhauer1

I don't think so. Asserting that ρ is true is different to asserting that ρ is sound or valid. Not that ρ on its own could be either sound or valid. So I'm not sure what you mean.

I don't think so. Asserting that ρ is true is different to asserting that ρ is sound or valid. Not that ρ on its own could be either sound or valid. So I'm not sure what you mean. — Banno

So this is too much technical parsing.. A "formal argument" having a "valid" conclusion and "sound" premise in many circles would be required for "TRUTH" to be claimed.

In regular conversational parlance, a PROPOSITION can be true or false. So either way, I think the TRUE of a propositional statement (the grass is green), and the TRUE of an argument's soundness (the premise 1 : the grass over there is green if I can see that it is green. Premise 2: I see that it is green. Conclusion: The grass is green.

The question at hand that I am asking, "What counts as it being TRUE", would be valid for the proposition "The grass is green." And the premises of a formal argument about the grass being green.

A proposition will be true, given some interpretation, only when that interpretation assigns that individual to that property. That is, "Grass is green" will be true only in interpretations that assign "...is green" to all instances of "grass". Or to put much the same thing slightly differently, when the interpretation is such that "grass" satisfies "...is green".

What counts as being true is being satisfied, under some interpretation.

So if you are talking about Australian Summer, grass is brown.

Point being we can pretty much drop truth for satisfaction.

Isn't this just the difference between validity and soundness? In computer science, for example, all that matters is the structure can be parsed using the correct language structure to manipulate the 0s and 1s when it is compiled to machine code/binary. That doesn't convey truth. Something else needs to be added. — schopenhauer1

What you say here is too simplistic, but there is something to it. In section 2.1.3 of, "Frege, Russell and Wittgenstein on the Judgment Stroke," Rombout is discussing the difference between an inference and a consequence. Frege's Grundgesetze is quoted:

It is necessary to recognize the truth of the premises. When we infer [schliessen], we recognize a truth on the basis of other previously recognized truths according to a logical law. Suppose we have arbitrarily formed the propositions

‘2 < 1′

‘If something were smaller than 1, then it is greater than 2’ Without knowing whether these propositions are true. We could derive[16]:

‘2 < 2′

from them in a purely formal way; but this would not be an inference because the truth of the premises is lacking. And the truth of the conclusion is no better grounded by means of this pseudo-ineference than without it. And this procedure would be useless for the recognition of any truths.[17]

[16] Note that Frege is using the word ‘schliessen’ (to infer) here, rather than ’ableiten’, which would mean something like: ’to deduce’. — Frege, Russell and Wittgenstein on the Judgment Stroke, by Floor Rombout, p. 14

What's interesting here is that in favoring inference over consequence Frege adheres to an older tradition, and in my opinion thereby avoids some the errors of modern logic-as-mere-symbol-manipulation. Before J's thread on QV I had mistakenly believed that this modern approach could be traced to Frege.

@Banno's posts are indicating that he doesn't like Frege's emphasis on truth given the way it disagrees with modern logical practice, but this seems to have little to do with the OP given that Kimhi is in no way critiquing Frege for his emphasis on truth or inference. Kimhi is not saying that there is a problem with Frege's judgment-stroke because judgment is no longer part of logic. Kimhi seems to agree with Frege that judgment/assertion is essential to logic. Banno's focus on this issue would seem to derive from his own personal interests rather than from the OP.

What counts as being true is being satisfied, under some interpretation.

So if you are talking about Australian Summer, grass is brown.

Point being we can pretty much drop truth for satisfaction. — Banno

To me this just means "context matters". But in almost all instances, it seems when we are saying "true" about a proposition (or by extension a premise in a logical argument, leading to its soundness), then we are saying something about the verification and falsification principle. Thus:

a) Grass is green

If made as a categorical/universal statement about grass can be falsified that indeed under some circumstances it is not, usually via empirical means.

b) THAT grass (right now, right over there) is green

If made about a specific instance/case/existential quantification of grass can be said to be green if it is verified through empirical means.

But in almost any case here, we are almost always using some empirical verification/falsification aspect to these kind of statements for truth (or if you want to say "satisfy", I just see that as a specific context of truth in X circumstance).

Now you may say the truth changes based on how it is satisfied (in various circumstances.. or how it is "used" if you want to say), but in all these cases, it seems to be empirical verification of some sort that counts as what is "true".

So all good stuff here, but my question at hand here is what is the criteria for truth, for Frege or otherwise. We all seem to be circling in agreement that it isn't just symbol manipulation. You mention "judgements" for example. What are these judgements? What shall the be composed of? To Frege. To others...

Too far off topic.

Too far off topic. — Banno

Isn't it about judgements of truth versus simply finding the right logical architecture? And if it is about judgements of truth, I would think that that criteria would be of utmost importance.

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. — J

It is that last part I am trying to focus on.. As clearly Frege believes it and Kimhi agrees.