A challenge to Frege on assertion

Srap Tasmaner

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. — schopenhauer1

I think the argument has been that Frege believes this must be so, and Kimhi claims it ain't necessarily so, but sometimes it is. I haven't wrapped my head around what is supposedly the main topic of this thread yet.

what is the criteria for truth, for Frege or otherwise — schopenhauer1

This phrase "criteria for truth" -- what could that possibly mean? How can anyone have one of those?

schopenhauer1

I think the argument has been that Frege believes this must be so, and Kimhi claims it ain't necessarily so, but sometimes it is. I haven't wrapped my head around what is supposedly the main topic of this thread yet. — Srap Tasmaner

Eh, I probably don't have it, but when I look at it, it looks like Kimhi is accusing Frege of treating something like, "Sky is blue!" no differently if it was an actual assertion of something else, that would later be parsed out if we understood the real world context. In other words, we need real world context, and probably why @Banno mentioned the notion of "satisfaction".

This phrase "criteria for truth" -- what could that possibly mean? How can anyone have one of those? — Srap Tasmaner

This is more what I'm interested in, because I think at the end of the day, this is what the questions here circle around. What makes an assertion true... I think it's a lesser question whether the statement itself is being offered up as an assertion or something else.

Srap Tasmaner

↪schopenhauer1

Sorry, I didn't understand a word of that.

schopenhauer1

Sorry, I didn't understand a word of that. — Srap Tasmaner

The real-world context of an argument matters. That's the gist of it.

Leontiskos

This phrase "criteria for truth" -- what could that possibly mean? How can anyone have one of those? — Srap Tasmaner

Right:

The assertion [or judgment-stroke] symbol is a composite. But unlike every other composite sign in the Begriffsschrift, the composition of this symbol is not itself functional. The nature of its composition remains mysterious. Presumably it is unanalyzable in the same sense that “acknowledgment of something as true” is unanalyzable. — Kimhi, Thinking and Being, 40

---

I think I am starting to get a sense for the sub-thesis of Kimhi's that the OP is talking about. He is saying something like this: "Frege sucks all of the assertoric force out of its natural context within a statement and then plops it at the beginning of the declarative sentence in the form of a judgment-stroke." Further:

This distinguishes it, within the Begriffsschrift, as the sole syncategorematic expression. The whole symbol governed by a judgment-stroke, for example, “⊢p,” is itself a syncategorematic unit since it cannot be embedded as a functional or predicative component within a logically complex whole. (In particular, it cannot be either a subject or a predicate term in a proposition.)

...

The categorematic / syncategorematic difference will emerge as the major concern of this work. But at this point it can be described simply as the difference between expressions that can and cannot be functionally embedded as part of a larger significant expression. For example, in the Begriffsschrift “-p” is a categorematic propositional sign because it can occur as a subordinate expression within a compound proposition. And, as I already mentioned, “⊢p” is a syncategorematic propositional sign. — Kimhi, Thinking and Being, 41-2

(See the review and quotes from <this earlier post> for context)

Another summary of the project can be found in the following excerpt, and note that Kimhi is fond of the quote from Wittgenstein in the footnote, which occurs a few times throughout the book:

In order to see how this Fregean attempt to make our puzzlement vanish in fact fails to come to terms with the real difficulty, we shall need to appreciate how it turns on the assumption that being true or false originally involves a dissociation of what is true or false from the activity of thinking or saying that such-and-such is or is not the case; or in other words, on a dissociation of the intrinsic propositional unity of veridical being from its veridical being or non-being.[11] It will be essential to the project of this inquiry to show that this assumption is incoherent.

[11] This dissociation is the target of TLP 4.063, which purports to show that “the verb of a proposition is not ‘is true’ or ‘is false’ as Frege thought: rather that which ‘is true’ must already contain the verb” (Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. Pears and McGuiness [Oxford: Blackwell, 2001], 29). — Kimhi, Thinking and Being, 8

The obvious question is then, "Isolating the assertoric force in that manner is admittedly strange, but what's the concrete issue here?" I have some ideas but no clear answer at this point, but what I want to say is that this critique of Kimhi's applies to post-Fregian logic as much as it does to Frege. These "functionalist/compositionalist assumptions" are alive and well. That is, propositional logic apparently still dissociates assertoric force from sense in this more subtle manner. This then helps to answer the question that many of us have been asking, "Supposing that the judgment-stroke has been dropped in the meanwhile, does Kimhi's critique apply to anything after Frege?"

I think this does raise the question, "How exactly does post-Fregian logic conceive of assertoric force?," and I am hoping that a clear answer will be found in that Master's thesis, "Frege, Russell and Wittgenstein on the Judgment Stroke." On the face of it it would seem that assertoric force moved into a metalogical position. (Note well that assertoric force (or judgment) and "truth" conceived as the '1' value in the internal 0/1 binary system of propositional logic are two different things, and Frege's recognition of this fact is part of what caused him to include the judgment-stroke in the first place.)

(@J)

Leontiskos

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

Kimhi speaks about motives which he shares:

. . .in the fifth chapter the simple logos apophantikos is characterized as revealing or showing (dêlôn) a single thing (pragma).

These motives [from Aristotle's De Interpretatione] will be familiar to readers of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, with its account of propositions as pictures. There is, I believe, an affinity between these works. . . — Kimhi, Thinking and Being, 73

Kimhi's index contains 50% more references to Wittgenstein than Aristotle, both of whom are surpassed only by Frege.

I don't actually know Wittgenstein very well. Can you say a bit about his picture theory and its abandonment, and how it might relate? Kimhi seems fond of the theory, and I'm not sure he wants to abandon it wholesale. He notes that there are different interpretations of Wittgenstein.

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”. — Banno

Ahh, the light goes on. Got it, thanks.

↪schopenhauer1

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. — Banno

I recommend we adopt this, for purposes of this discussion, as a reasonable consensus on “criteria of truth” etc. The huge potential area of disagreement would center on whether "some interpretation" is the best we can do, of course, so it leaves out some meta-philosophical issues, but we can’t get distracted trying to work out a Theory Of Everything.

Or we can just agree to disagree about what makes a statement true, and stay focused on the Kimhi-inspired challenges to Frege.

The difference presupposes a certain kind of sentence reification — Leontiskos

Could you say more about this? I’m not sure what sentence reification would be.

My impression is that you have spoken about assertoric force independent of assertions, and not just force, but I could be wrong about that. — Leontiskos

No, you’re right. In part, this thread for me has been a process of clarifying terminology. I now think it’s better just to speak of “force” understood as positive or negative predication rather than using the term “assertoric force.” This (my) sense of "force" might be close to what you’re calling intentional force, but I’m still not sure whether you mean “intentional” or “intensional”. Interestingly, either meaning might apply on this point!

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.. . . I think Frege would go even further and say that there is no reason or sense in "claiming that Fido exists" via predication. — Leontiskos

There’s an important question here. Yes, once an argument is attached to a predicate, we say it exists. But the question is, What was the status of the argument term before something was predicated of it? A rather Zen-like question, but what I’m arguing is that an infinite number of nouns (just to simplify it to nouns) are floating around in our language, their status unknown. To place one into a function grants it existence in the only way that Frege thought made sense. So I do think it’s meaningful and important to speak about entities/nouns that may or may not exist – it will depend on whether they become arguments in a function. Frege, on my reading, never disagrees with this. He is always talking about what we can say, that is, make grammatical propositions about. ‛Grass’ is a word. The moment we try to do something with it, predicate something of it, we are inducting it into the world of things that can be talked about, that can be said to exist. It’s not so much that Frege thinks some magic is at work here that brings objects into existence ; it’s more that his attitude is, “Well, if you don’t think it exists, why are you saying things about it?” That's the sense in which he "assumes" existence, I believe.

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." — Leontiskos

Yes, you’ve got it, as your later post with the extensive Kimhi quotes shows. Kimhi agrees with what he calls “Frege’s observation” but not what he calls “Frege’s point.” His line of dialogue should read, “I disagree, if you’re saying that the only thing which gives the predicate its force is assertion. But as I read you, you needn’t be saying that at all. That’s a conclusion that Geach and other Fregeans have imposed on you.” And that’s what I’ve been saying too.

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. — Leontiskos

I’m afraid this is probably true, but I’m still going to avoid as much of Kimhi’s terminology as possible, out of consideration for others following the thread. The “good reason!” you mention isn’t just his odd use of singular terms like “syncategorematic,” but his whole style of writing, which is dense, lacks examples, and asks you to remember his labels for complicated arguments (“Frege’s observation” vs. “Frege’s point,” for example). I agree that the ND review is a help. And everything you’ve cited from Thinking and Being here is absolutely on the mark, and important; I’m just afraid it will be opaque without context and a lot of reflection.

schopenhauer1

Or we can just agree to disagree about what makes a statement true, and stay focused on the Kimhi-inspired challenges to Frege. — J

I guess my question then is thus:
I have a thread about uninteresting philosophies.. My criteria for this is pedantic minutia-mongering and/or it takes common sense notions and makes it "write large" (as if it is profound revelation).

Curious, I know you find the topic interesting, but can you see why this might fall under those categories? I guess what I am trying to ask here for what Kimhi is saying about Frege is, can you find the important point that makes this interesting?

I'll make my own attempt at elevating this topic (to my own standards of interest)...

Frege created a system of logical symbolism whereby we can parse out various categories of a statement so that one can understand that we are referring to the same object, but with different senses.

However, his system seems to neglect the important question (one would think!) which is to say, "How do we know which propositions are true propositions?". And this question, the important one, is missing from Frege.. In fact, it's a throughline missing throughout some analytic philosophy, up to and including Wittgenstein's Tractatus (at which point he combines Russell's theory of atomic objects and such). It certainly is felt in later Wittgenstein, for example, in language games, and "context" (use). So, as far as I see Kimhi's critique as being interesting or relevant beyond some picuyunish ones, is that he is saying that analytic philosophy often loses its way when it doesn't focus on the older tradition of discerning TRUE propositions, rather than focusing on purely on language structures and how they are most clearly communicated to understand their sense and identity and things such as this.

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.
— schopenhauer1

I think the argument has been that Frege believes this must be so, and Kimhi claims it ain't necessarily so, but sometimes it is. I haven't wrapped my head around what is supposedly the main topic of this thread yet. — Srap Tasmaner

I sympathize! I thought you yourself gave it the best interpretation, in your elucidation of the difference between affirming a statement and making a statement about the world. In the first case, we’re saying something about p, a “bit of language,” as Kimhi calls it. In the second case, we are creating a proposition, p, which states what is the case in the world; the world, of course, is not made of language. And the Kimhi-inspired challenge is trying to tie this back to Fregean notions of what can and can’t serve as the argument of a proposition. This is where the dreaded “categorematic / syncategorematic” distinction comes in, but I’ll fight to the bitter end against using those terms if I can present the idea more simply.

As for the quoted exchange with @schopenhauer 1, I think Frege and Kimhi are in agreement here. What Kimhi believes to be importantly controversial is not the separation of sense from (T/F) assertion, but the crucial difference between how logic treats statements of affirmation/denial vs. propositions. In a manner that I too am still struggling to grasp completely, he thinks that Fregean logic presupposes (or is it imposes?) a dualism that is artificial. One way he puts this is:

It is widely accepted, to the point that it is almost a dogma of contemporary philosophy, that we must acknowledge a radical difference between the occurrence of p in extensional truth-functional complexes (such as “~p”) and its occurrence in intensional non-truth-functional complexes (such as “A thinks [judges, asserts] that p”). — Kimhi, p. 11

I added “judges, asserts” because Kimhi is often unclear whether he wants “thinks” to mean “thinks truly” and/or “thinks that __ is the case” or simply "has the thought in consciousness." In this instance, I believe any of those three senses of "thinks" would be part of the point he's making.

↪Leontiskos

the assumption that being true or false originally involves a dissociation of what is true or false from the activity of thinking or saying that such-and-such is or is not the case — Kimhi, Thinking and Being, 8

This is his “psycho / logical monism” put quite plainly.

The obvious question is then, "Isolating the assertoric force in that manner is admittedly strange, but what's the concrete issue here?" I have some ideas but no clear answer at this point — Leontiskos

Looks like we’re at a similar place, then. I phrased it as “Is this just playing with words?” but it’s the same question about what, if anything, important follows from this. I have spent the least amount of time, so far, on final essay/chapter of Thinking and Being, which is called “On the Quietism of the Stranger” (referring to Plato’s Sophist) and takes a decidedly enigmatic, even mystical, turn, in a way that does remind me of Wittgenstein. I need to read that chapter more carefully before weighing in on what the point of it all might be. And, more down to earth, that Rombout thesis looks really good and should be a help.

↪schopenhauer1

This is a gracious way of phrasing your criticism! As you can see from the exchange with @Leontiskos just above, he and I are also wondering about the ultimate import of all this. I find Kimhi’s book impressive and original; on almost every page there’s an insight or question I hadn’t thought of; and clearly it’s made something of a splash in academic circles. I wrote the OP because I wanted to start discussing some of Kimhi’s challenges to Frege, which are at least plausible and, if correct, very significant. So yes, to me it adds up to “being interesting,” even fascinating, and yes, I can see why it might not be your cup of tea.

About your “elevation”: For you, the question of truth is important, so if we can phrase the Frege/Kimhi discussion in terms of truth, that will make it of interest. Well, I’m interested in truth too, but I don’t see Frege or the analytic philosophers abandoning that question. Indeed, I can hardly think of a more written-about and argued-about question in my lifetime. I think it’s possible that you have a definition of truth which isn’t shared by, e.g., Frege, and therefore it appears that the topic itself is missing from his writings. But a huge meta-question in anal phil (sorry, couldn’t resist) is not just “How do we know which propositions are true?” but “How do we decide what truth refers to, what we can say about it, what logic might tell us about it?” etc. etc.

So no, I don’t think Kimhi is saying that “analytic philosophy often loses its way when it doesn't focus on the older tradition of discerning TRUE propositions.” Now it may well be that, if we can absorb Kimhi’s ideas, we’ll wind up with some important things to say about how to discern truth. But that is not his focus. He does indeed argue that anal phil was wrong from the start in creating a sort of dualism between what can be thought and what the world contains, but that’s different. He wants us to recognize a unity here. Where this might take us in terms of understanding truth, I’m not yet sure.

schopenhauer1

He does indeed argue that anal phil was wrong from the start in creating a sort of dualism between what can be thought and what the world contains, but that’s different. He wants us to recognize a unity here. Where this might take us in terms of understanding truth, I’m not yet sure. — J

I mean, I think this actually contradicts your assertion here:

Frege, and therefore it appears that the topic itself is missing from his writings. But a huge meta-question in anal phil (sorry, couldn’t resist) is not just “How do we know which propositions are true?” but “How do we decide what truth refers to, what we can say about it, what logic might tell us about it?” etc. etc. — J

Rather, from what I've read so far, it seems Kimhi is trying to say that philosophy has to go back in a way to WHAT COUNTS. What counts? Things like Parmenides project (how is the one many?), etc. It seems like a sub-category of a kind of viewpoint about philosophy excoriating it for not getting back to the fundamentals of being, metaphysics, ethics, and discerning what is true and what is not. Rather, if one is lost in the world of parsing sentences (Frege, early Witt, Russell, et al) or even simply understanding how a sentence fits into a context (late Witt, postmodernists, etc.), then we are not getting to what matters (what is the world really? What are the fundamentals of reality? etc.). Again, this is just my interpretation.

schopenhauer1

↪J

↪Leontiskos

↪Srap Tasmaner

If this helps, this NYT article seems to summarize pretty nicely Kimhi's main claim:

Kimhi wants to rescue the intuition that it is a logical contradiction to say, “It’s raining, but I don’t believe it’s raining.” But to do this, he has to reject the idea that when you assert a proposition, what you are doing is adding psychological force (“I think … ”) to abstract content (“it’s raining”). Instead, Kimhi argues that a self-conscious, first-person perspective — an “I” — is internal to logic. For him, to judge that “it’s raining” is the same as judging “I believe it’s raining,” which is the same as judging “it’s false that it’s not raining.” All are facets of a single act of mind.

One consequence of Kimhi’s view is that “It’s raining, but I don’t believe it’s raining” becomes a logical contradiction. Another consequence is that a contradiction becomes something that you cannot believe, as opposed to something that you psychologically can but logically ought not to believe (as the traditional cleavage between psychology and logic might suggest). A final consequence is that thinking is not just a cognitive psychological act, but also one that is governed by logical law.

In other words, the distinction between psychology and logic collapses. Logic is not a set of rules for how to think; it is how we think, just not in a way that can be captured in conventional scientific terms. Thinking emerges as a unique and peculiar activity, something that is part of the natural world, but which cannot be understood in the manner of other events in the natural world. Indeed, Kimhi sees his book, in large part, as lamenting “the different ways in which philosophers have failed to acknowledge — or even denied — the uniqueness of thinking.” — https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/26/books/review/irad-kimhi-thinking-and-being.html

Leontiskos

↪schopenhauer1

- I think this is a good general account of Kimhi's book, but not a good account of his critique of Frege (because Frege also thinks judgment is internal to logic). For that reason this line of more general inquiry may be better suited to the more general predecessor thread, "References for discussion of truth as predication."

Leontiskos

↪J

- I may not be telling you anything you do not already know, but Frege's distinction between assertoric force and predicate is very different from sense and reference. Like Russell, when that question reared its head Frege tried to adapt his system to account for it, but this had little to do with his judgment-stroke (it has to do with the horizontal stroke, not the vertical stroke). See Rombout, "2.1.4 Sinn and Bedeutung."

There is a temptation in this thread to anachronistically place some variety of current logical practice prior to Fregian logic. @Banno has been exemplifying this in his methodology by making his own conception of logic the norm against which Frege is to be measured. Banno seems to be trying to give a course on logic, saying, “This is how you do logic, and these are the ways that Frege deviates from logic.” One thing Rombout addresses is the differing conceptions of logic between Frege, Russell, and Wittgenstein. Banno's conception of logic includes things like this:

But [Fregian "judgment"] is something added on top of the logic. It's just not at the core, which is about manipulating symbols. — Banno

This is an interesting thesis that Banno is presupposing, but in fact it is a thesis that Frege, Kimhi, Aristotle, and presumably even Kimhi's interpretation of Wittgenstein all disagree with. A thread which argues for that thesis would be interesting and popular, but that debate has nothing to do with Frege and Kimhi. A logic which presupposes judgment is something fundamentally different from a logic that does not. Frege and Kimhi both maintain that logic presupposes judgment. A methodology which simply presupposes that Frege and Kimhi are both fundamentally wrong reflects a desire for a different OP, a different thread.

Of course one will approach Frege and Kimhi through their own lens, but we must avoid pigeonholing them into our paradigm, especially given the way that Frege is a historical antecedent of lenses like Banno's.

(I had already anticipated this problem in <this post> and others within that thread)

Leontiskos

↪J

There are a number of posts I need to respond to, but at this point I am inclined to think that we have been on the wrong scent all along. I am starting to think that the sub-thesis of Kimhi's that the OP reflects can be accessed through a consideration of these two assertions/statements:

KG: The grass is green
FG: $\vdash$ ∃x(Grass(x) ∧ Green(x))

Reveal

[math]\vdash[/math]

And for reference, consider also a declarative sentence (as @Srap Tasmaner has usefully called it):

FGH: —∃x(Grass(x) ∧ Green(x))

...Where " $\vdash$ " is Frege's judgment-stroke combined with the horizontal stroke, and "—" is Frege's horizontal stroke.

Much of this thread has been comparing FG to FGH, and conceiving of KG in terms of either FG or FGH. That's understandable, for we are probably all Fregians.

But KG is not FG, and this is not merely because Fregian predicate logic struggles with individuals. KG is not FG because KG is pre-Fregian (i.e. it is Aristotelian). Again, both KG and FG are assertions or statements, but their assertoric natures differ considerably. The assertoric nature of FG consists entirely and only in the syncategorematic $\vdash$ . The assertoric nature of KG is at least centered on the verb 'is', but the entirety of the sentence is required in order to understand its assertoric nature. Like Humpty Dumpty, once KG has been separated into FG and FGH it becomes very difficult to put the pieces back together again and find the wholeness of KG.

...I have limited time at the moment so I am going to leave it there instead of trying to make the differences between KG and FG more clear and precise.

[Kimhi] is saying something like this: "Frege sucks all of the assertoric force out of its natural context within a statement and then plops it at the beginning of the declarative sentence in the form of a judgment-stroke." — Leontiskos

Or in Frege's own words:

The languages known to me lack such a sign, and assertoric force is closely bound up with the indicative mood of the sentence that forms the main clause. — Frege, Posthumous Writings, 192

Janus

Perhaps nothing more, in that simple case. But as this thread demonstrates, "assertion" gets used in some much more complicated and ambiguous contexts. As Banno points out, above, Frege didn't think in terms of actual illocutionary acts such as the one you're using as an example. And Russell talks about a "non-psychological sense" of assertion whereby we can say that "If p then q" asserts an implication without asserting either p or q. And I would add, though Russell doesn't, that the implication "If p then q" can be asserted on paper, so to speak, without anyone claiming it's true. — J

I missed this until now.

I mentioned earlier that a sentence such as "it is raining" can be mentioned without asserting its truth, while to use the sentence would seem to be to assert its truth. I also see that there is a sense in which such sentences have an inherent assertional logical or grammatical structure. Is there any more to it than that?

Srap Tasmaner

A logic which presupposes judgment is something fundamentally different from a logic that does not. Frege and Kimhi both maintain that logic presupposes judgment. — Leontiskos

Well, that's the thing. You're talking about Frege says about his system. And I'll grant you, the first version of the system we all know now as "classical logic" included some notation that Frege thought important, which it turns out had so little to do with how the system was actually used that it disappeared without a trace, leaving the system essentially unchanged. You're right that Frege might not see it that way, but the facts on the ground tell a different story.

What's ironic about this story, is that it's as if we're talking about Frege's "interpretation" of the predicate calculus, considered as a system of symbol manipulation, which in a sense is precisely what's at issue. That means each side can retreat to their preferred view and consider the other misguided. Not a great result. (And of course a third party might see the dispute as "merely verbal".)

I'm going to propose what I hope is an alternative view in a separate post, so as to please no one.

Leontiskos

I'm going to propose what I hope is an alternative view in a separate post, so as to please no one. — Srap Tasmaner

Would it be better placed in the thread that generated this one? Or else the Quantifier Variance thread?
Many of the broader issues that people want to discuss—with positions which presuppose that both Kimhi and Frege were wrong from the start—would seem to be better placed in one of those earlier threads. These questions of logical nominalism and logical pragmatism are certainly interesting, but I don't see them as relevant to this thread and I don't know that others who would be interested in discussing them will look for them in this thread.

Ultimately I would love to see such presuppositions presented as theses in a new thread, but those older threads would also be an option.

Edit: I get it: Kimhi is opaque and (literally) inaccessible. So then the TPFer reads Frege, inevitably disagrees with Frege, and wants to express how and why they disagree with Frege. Still, given that the topic of the OP is not dead, I think tangential critiques of Frege along the lines of logical nominalism or pragmatism are better placed in the other threads where they are more relevant.

Srap Tasmaner

↪Leontiskos

I don't even want to talk about Kimhi, so new thread it is.

Leontiskos

↪Srap Tasmaner

- Thanks, I will keep an eye out for it. :up:

Leontiskos

Could you say more about this? I’m not sure what sentence reification would be. — J

Behind that distinction is the claim that asserting something and affirming a sentence are two different things. But what else does it mean to affirm a sentence than to assert something? And how do we assert something without sentences?

You seem to want to say that when you say, "The grass is green," and I say, "I affirm the sentence that J has just asserted," we have done two different things. In order to say this we must reify the sentence and say that an affirmation of the sentence is not the same as an assertion of the sentence. I have never been able to make sense of this move. I see how we can speak about a sentence qua sentence, but I don't see how we can affirm a sentence without asserting it, or what that would even mean.

No, you’re right. In part, this thread for me has been a process of clarifying terminology. I now think it’s better just to speak of “force” understood as positive or negative predication rather than using the term “assertoric force.” This (my) sense of "force" might be close to what you’re calling intentional force, but I’m still not sure whether you mean “intentional” or “intensional”. Interestingly, either meaning might apply on this point! — J

Okay, but I think you were right to speak about assertoric force. I think what is at stake is assertoric force specifically, not more general considerations such as force or illocutionary force or intentional force. Continuing:

Yes, you’ve got it, as your later post with the extensive Kimhi quotes shows. Kimhi agrees with what he calls “Frege’s observation” but not what he calls “Frege’s point.” His line of dialogue should read, “I disagree, if you’re saying that the only thing which gives the predicate its force is assertion. But as I read you, you needn’t be saying that at all. That’s a conclusion that Geach and other Fregeans have imposed on you.” And that’s what I’ve been saying too. — J

So Kimhi doesn't disagree with Frege after all? He only disagrees with Geach? Then why does he call it "Frege's point" instead of "Geach's point"? No, Kimhi is explicit that he is critiquing Frege and Geach:

However, for Frege and Geach the observation amounts to something different. — Kimhi, Thinking and Being, 38-9

This is the sort of mistake that occurs when one tries to make Kimhi speak about force rather than assertoric force, namely the mistake of claiming that Kimhi is critiquing Geach but not Frege. I worry that Banno is leading you into a pit.

Page 44 seems to be very good evidence against your view, for Kimhi presents a passage where Frege attempts to show that (assertoric) force is stripped from an assertoric sentence when uttered by an actor in a play, and Kimhi goes on to argue—in a manner very similar to what I have argued in dialogue with Srap—that the assertoric nature of the sentence is still present in a latent sense. I would argue that each time 'force' appears on that page, it is just shorthand for 'assertoric force', and that in his final paragraph Kimhi consummates this by speaking very explicitly about assertability and assertoric force.

There’s an important question here. Yes, once an argument is attached to a predicate, we say it exists. But the question is, What was the status of the argument term before something was predicated of it? A rather Zen-like question, but what I’m arguing is that an infinite number of nouns (just to simplify it to nouns) are floating around in our language, their status unknown. To place one into a function grants it existence in the only way that Frege thought made sense. — J

That's right, and therefore it does not make sense to ask Frege about the status of an argument term before something is predicated of it.

So I do think it’s meaningful and important to speak about entities/nouns that may or may not exist – it will depend on whether they become arguments in a function. — J

I don't think you're grasping the seriousness with which Frege excludes existence as a predicate. My second quote here literally has Frege explaining why it makes no sense to speak about the existence of entities or the non-existence of entities. I don't see how this claim of yours can be saved:

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. — J

If "before" means "before" and "say whether" means "say whether," then Frege will deny this claim.

You apparently want to say, "The grass is green, therefore the grass exists." For Frege, "The grass exists," is always uninformative or empty. It doesn't matter that it is presented as the conclusion of an argument. Therefore the inference is not substantial, and for Frege is no better than, "The grass is green, therefore the grass is green." The redefinition (or eradication) of existence-predication is total. See Novák, who is explicitly focused on this topic.

Now I don't know that Kimhi's sub-thesis that this thread is considering requires us to understand Frege's position on existence as a predicate, but it is possible that I am wrong. The reason I brought some of this up is because I see an Aristotelian argument against Frege, but I am now unconvinced that it is Kimhi's.

I’m afraid this is probably true, but I’m still going to avoid as much of Kimhi’s terminology as possible, out of consideration for others following the thread. The “good reason!” you mention isn’t just his odd use of singular terms like “syncategorematic,” but his whole style of writing, which is dense, lacks examples, and asks you to remember his labels for complicated arguments (“Frege’s observation” vs. “Frege’s point,” for example). I agree that the ND review is a help. And everything you’ve cited from Thinking and Being here is absolutely on the mark, and important; I’m just afraid it will be opaque without context and a lot of reflection. — J

That's fair, but the concept of the syncategorematic may need to be introduced, even if the word is not.

If folks want to circumvent Kimhi it may be possible to do so via Aristotle or Wittgenstein. I tried to provide a handle by pointing to Wittgenstein here.

---

This is his “psycho / logical monism” put quite plainly. — J

Okay. :up:

...but it’s the same question about what, if anything, important follows from this. — J

Yes, it's a good question.

Leontiskos

As Banno points out, above, Frege didn't think in terms of actual illocutionary acts such as the one you're using as an example. — J

Banno is clearly incorrect:

So we have two different things, sense and reference on the one hand, and illocutionary force on the other. The distinction between them is not, I think, explicit in Frege. It seems instead that the idea of illocutionary force was developed in Oxford and Cambridge in the thirties. — Banno

The assertoric force of Frege's judgment-stroke is one kind of illocutionary force. Therefore Frege is clearly thinking "in terms of actual illocutionary acts" such as @Janus' assertion.* Frege need not be thinking in terms of the various illocutionary forces that we now recognize in order to be thinking in terms of the illocutionary force of an assertion. Even Banno recognized that assertion is part of illocutionary force in his first post:

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. — Banno

And the idea that Frege did not distinguish assertoric force from sense and reference is simply wrong.

* See Rombout 2.1.2

Banno

Ahh, the light goes on. Got it, thanks. — J

Ok., good. Before I go on – if it seems worth going on – I might go over what I'm up to. Again, I haven't access to Kimhi, so can't address the book directly. But then it appears that you are after a better understanding of the context anyway, so rehearsing Frege may be useful.

So at issue is something to do with force, but what is contentious.

In my first post I went over illocutionary force, which we can differentiate from the propositional content of an utterance. Frege, and logic, moved from prefixing"I know..." to something more like "I can write..." over time. To be sure, what Frege does is not to set illocutionary force aside so much as to set it as the default in which all his formulations are couched: his judgment-stroke.

Setting illocutionary force aside allowed a focus on other aspects of language within the scope of illocutionary force.

In my second post I reviewed sense and reference, that we can use different and diverse words to talk about the very same thing, but for our purpose in doing the logic at hand what counts is the thing, not how it is differentiated from other things. So 'Venus' and 'Hesperus' are to be teated as picking out the same thing, and 'Ruth' and 'Richard's sibling' similarly pick out the very same person.

This led to the third post, in which I hope I made it explicit that what setting aside sense and keeping reference allowed us to do was to develop an extensional logic, allowing for developments that allowed truth to be set out in terms of satisfaction.

Looking at the process in reverse, we have some structure to which we give an interpretation, a sense and a use. Satisfaction, and so to a great extent truth, enter into the process if at all at the level of interpretation.

So now back to your OP. You talk of a two-step process, the first step is the observation that "...logical or functional sense is a feature of repeatable occurrences of p", the second that "...a proposition cannot contain assertoric force as part of its logical structure"; and the conclusion is that "...assertoric force is necessarily dissociated from predication".

I'm understanding the first to be something like that the "a" in

is the same in both occurrences. Without this, it would be hard to do anything that looked at the structure of our sentences; indeed it'd be difficult to understand how language could function if this were not so.

The second is perhaps what inspired Frege to place the assertic element – the judgement stroke – so that his logical expressions sit within it's scope. It's a clever move, setting the force aside so that we can focus on other structures.

The conclusion I suspect is too strong. I'm not keen in including "necessarily". Seems as what is needed is just to be able to set the force to one side in order to consider the propositional content. So I'd say "...assertoric force may be dissociated from predication".

I think this sort of thing quite central to logic. Earlier I reminded us that "the grass is green" could be an assertion, a question or a command. Which, depends on what is being done with it. Similarly, there are many ways to parse the same sentence in logical terms. So we might, if our purpose is general enough, need do no more than to parse "grass is green" as "p", a single proposition. That's all we would need to include it in a simple argument. But if we need to bring out a different aspect, say that all grass is green, we might present it as U(x)f(x)⊃g(x) – for all x, if it is grass then it is green. Or we might treat "...is green" as a predicate and "grass" as a noun, and just write "g(a)" – grass is green. We might even pars it as "∃x((Grass(x) ∧ Green(x))", roughly "something is both grass and green", safely leaving it open for grass that is not green and green things that are not grass. The point being that "grass is green" can be understood in many, many different ways. It would be odd to think there was one, true parsing. We pars our utterances differently depending on what aspect of them we would focus on, sometimes focusing on illocutionary force, sometimes on truth value, sometimes on differing quantifications, and so on.

Anyway, that will do for now.

↪Srap Tasmaner

Good, I'll watch for it too.

I'm going to propose what I hope is an alternative view in a separate post, so as to please no one. — Srap Tasmaner

:lol:

↪schopenhauer1

I'm mainly pointing out the difference between the standard epistemological questions "How are we justified in saying p is true?" or "What makes p true?" vs. the meta-question "What the heck do we mean by truth anyway?"

↪schopenhauer1

Some of this is good, I agree. "Kimhi argues that a self-conscious, first-person perspective — an 'I' — is internal to logic" -- that's the most perspicacious bit. It takes us right back to our big question about how 'p' is meant to be understood when it stands alone. Can it be "innocent" of consciousness? The parts about how "thinking is not just a cognitive psychological act, but also one that is governed by logical law" and "In other words, the distinction between psychology and logic collapses" are too imprecise and summative to really express Kimhi.

The assertoric nature of FG consists entirely and only in the syncategorematic ⊢
⊢
. The assertoric nature of KG is at least centered on the verb 'is', but the entirety of the sentence is required in order to understand its assertoric nature. Like Humpty Dumpty, once KG has been separated into FG and FGH it becomes very difficult to put the pieces back together again and find the wholeness of KG. — Leontiskos

Agreed. Good analysis. I'd only add that whether there is indeed a "wholeness of KG" is a central question, and Kimhi is trying very hard to argue for it, using pre-Fregean concepts of logic.

A challenge to Frege on assertion

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