Are you using 'statement' here the same way I was, or as 'a sentence that is being asserted'? — Srap Tasmaner
This is the whole point of my screwdriver discussion. — Srap Tasmaner
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
[petri dish or] sandbox — bongo fury
the differences between Fregian logic and contemporary logical intuitions — Leontiskos
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
we never handle statements independent of assertions, even when we are not asserting them. — 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. — Srap Tasmaner
different kinds of assertion — Srap Tasmaner
This phrase, "just an ontological move", is interesting. — Srap Tasmaner
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
Nice to meet another Merrill fan!
— J
I didn't consider for a moment anyone would get that reference! — Srap Tasmaner
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
Logic is not about the way we think, it is rather a description of the objective structure of thought. — J
I avoided the indicative mood language because a statement is only one kind of utterance in the indicative mood. — Leontiskos
Impossible to address all the interesting points and questions, but I’ll do my best to respond to folks one by one. — J
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
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
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
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
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
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 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
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 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 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
Minor point, but yeah I should have been saying "declarative" all along! — Srap Tasmaner
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
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
So there's no sense talking about storage and retrieval in the first place. — Srap Tasmaner
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
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
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
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
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
I think Kimhi believes that something can have force (not assertoric force) without being asserted. — J
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
Leontiskos - that masters thesis you linked is a good read. — fdrake
The idea is that we never handle statements independent of assertions, even when we are not asserting them. — Leontiskos
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
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
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
Frege simplifies what is not simple. — Leontiskos
Frege and Kimhi do not seem to be at odds on this point — Leontiskos
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'll go back over it, just to chaeck we are on the same page. I's saidWhat's the better way to understand this? — J
and that FregeThe "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
...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
andIf Richard's sibling is in Sydney then she is in Australia
Richard's sibling is in Sydney
Hence Richard's sibling 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.If Ruth is in Sydney then she is in Australia
Ruth is in Sydney
Hence Ruth is in Australia
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.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
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.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. — 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. — schopenhauer1
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 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
Too far off topic. — Banno
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
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