Frege is not giving a simplification or a model — Leontiskos

That may be true, but it's been a serious point of contention in the post-Frege discussion of language.

And here I'll mention, for the nth time on TPF, the comparatively little-known view of Tarski's star student, Richard Montague, that there is no distinction between formal and natural languages, because natural languages are "formal" in the intended sense, and that linguistics is a branch of mathematics. Montague presents his analysis of the logical constants as the semantics of natural language. Certainly a maximalist take on the formal view of language.

And I guess we ought to leave this more general discussion of the underlying issues there.

Who dug this rabbit hole? Lewis Carroll, apparently. — bongo fury

On page 305 of Dummett's book:

In order to understand a sentence which is either assertoric or imperative, then, we have to know two things: under what conditions it is correct and under what conditions incorrect; and whether it is used to make an assertion or to give a command. [...] The conditions for the correctness or incorrectness of a sentence could then be considered as endowing it with a certain descriptive content, which is in general independent of whether it is being used to make an assertion or give a command; this descriptive content corresponds precisely to what Frege calls the sense of a sentence, or the thought it expresses. In order to understand the sentence, to know its use, it will be necessary that it should contain another symbolic element conveying the force with which it is used; something playing the part of an assertion sign or command sign. Here the assertion sign is doing much more than merely marking the beginning and end of the sentence [pace Wittgenstein]. — Michael Dummett: Frege, Philosophy of Language, page 305

I wish 308 was included in the preview.

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- :up:

Well, here we are back to the vexing question of "assertion" a la Kimhi. To push you down the rabbit hole, I'd need to persuade you that your use of "say" and "says" is not innocent, but brings with it an entire apparatus involving what it is for a consciousness to think (and possibly assert) a proposition. I'm still working on the best way to talk about this (and I'm not sure it's true, but Kimhi makes it plausible at least). — J

A lot of this seems to revolve around the question of whether a modus ponens is conceived as tautological. For Rombout I want to say that Frege says no, (early) Wittgenstein says yes, and Russell bridges the two. P must be both the same and different if true knowledge is ever to be gained.

I’m happy to have both Novak and Rombout on tap. As I mentioned yesterday, my time is a bit curtailed this week but I’m sure they are both worth reading, and I’ll do so.

Fregian logic has an especially hard time with individuals since it is built for concepts or classes. Given that the statement is not Fregian in the first place, it raises a whole host of issues. — Leontiskos

This was your response to these questions of mine:

What do you think the status is of the term ‛The grass in my backyard’? Are you able to understand it? And now a second question: What do you think Frege would say? — J

Are you saying that, because “The grass in my backyard” is an individual term, not "Fregean," not part of a proposition, Frege would be reduced to silence about it? Would he say, “Sorry, I don’t understand that term”? This seems unlikely. I’m deliberately asking a question about an individual term because I’m trying to build up an argument about Frege’s views on existence.

Your response goes on to imagine what Frege would say about a different bit of language, “The grass is in my backyard,” but that of course is a proposition and not at issue. So I pose the question again: Given your understanding of Frege’s philosophy of logic, how would he account for the fact (if it is a fact) that we can understand the individual term “The grass in my backyard”? (I’ve only put it in my backyard to avoid the appearance that I’m asking about a universal term, “grass”; there’s no predication involved. If you prefer, change it to a unique non-composite term, such as “The Hope Diamond” -- anything that can be the argument in a function.) And the question remains for you as well: You are not a Fregean, so what account would you give of that term? Do you understand it? If so, how and why?

Do you know Russell?

The thing about "The grass in my backyard" as a denotative phrase is that it has that "the" in it, which Russell gives a famous analysis of, claiming it includes a sort of hidden existential quantification.

Kimhi's book is much shorter but I believe the depth and importance is there, — J

Like Alice on Jabberwocky:

“It seems very pretty,” she said when she had finished it, “but it’s rather hard to understand! Somehow it seems to fill my head with ideas—only I don’t exactly know what they are!”

Not being able to say what your ideas are is death in philosophy. Or rather, it ought be; but folk do go on so.

So . . . which sentence are you referring to as mentioned? (or all three?) — J

I'm not sure which three sentences you are referring to. I was addressing 'if p then q'. Us talking about this sentence is an example of 'mention'. We are not concerned with whether it is true, and are not claiming that it is true, so there is no intentional assertion going on in our referring to the sentence.

I do recall that, thanks for bringing it up: On Denoting.

So we can invite @Leontiskos to compare Russell's view as well -- does he (Leontiskos) think Frege would give the same explanation? Is that his (Leontiskos's) own explanation? Just to refresh us about the point of it all, it has to do with the way in which Frege forbids predicating existence; getting clear on the individual-term question is kind of Step One to making my case that Frege only means, literally, that we can't speak in Logicalese about the existence of entities or the non-existence of entities. I don't take him to mean that we can't understand the difference, or that we can only understand what can be said in Logicalese. But one step at a time.

the way in which Frege forbids predicating existence — J

Consider this: if you can predicate existence, can you also predicate non-existence? (Or, what is the same thing, negate a predication of existence.) And *what* would you predicate non-existence of?

I'm tempted to warn you off this whole thing -- which gets rehashed regularly -- but there is a sense in which Frege's system automatically narrows the the field of true statements to statements about real things, and that does seem relevant to Kimhi's whole invocation of Parmenides. Somehow. Not waters I like to swim in.

Here's a fun read on Carroll and inference --- also handy because it mentions a lot of the best-known work, including a few I've missed. (You could probably get something similar out of SEP, but I'm allergic to SEP.)

OK, it's clear to me now which sentence you meant. I began a reply about the "more to it than that" . . . and found myself in deep waters. To be honest, I'm no longer sure that there is more to it. In other words, your paraphrase ("such sentences have an inherent assertional logical or grammatical structure") may capture the idea just fine. Sorry, I'm a slow thinker . . . thanks for your patience. I'll keep working on it.

I'd have to agree here. I think in this sort of thing, we must work backwards and then go from there. For example, if Kimhi is saying something about logic and its connection to "thinking and being", we first must understand what his main claim is here, and then we can work to his examples in Frege. Right now we are only working with partial ideas which by itself seem more perplexing than enlightening. No one has yet explained the main premise, or in any clear manner I can discern. From what I gather, logic is something that is entailed in human thought and being. But what this means, how this is, why this matters, etc. is not explained. And thus this Frege stuff doesn't seem like its leading anywhere other than he doesn't like the little marker that says "This statement is asserted as true".

I want to highlight a few things in Owen Boynton’s first-rate essay/review on Thinking and Being. This will be a brief discussion and I really hope everyone interested in this thread will read the Boynton piece – he’s a marvelously good explicator. (And thanks again to @Pierre-Normand for finding the piece.)

Boynton wants to compare certain aspects of Kimhi’s thought with Sebastian Rödl’s, and I’m not qualified to say much about that. But a quote from Rödl that Boynton provides sets the stage very well:

Philosophers are in the habit of indicating the object of judgment by the letter p. There is an insouciance with respect to this fateful letter. It stands ready quietly, unobtrusively, to assure us that we know what we are talking about. For example, when we do epistemology, we are interested in what it is for someone to know—know what? oh yes: p. If we inquire into rational requirements on action or intention, we ask what it is to be obliged to—what? oh yes: see to it that p, intend that p, if p then q, and so on. However, if we undertake to reflect on thought, on its self-consciousness and its objectivity, then the letter p signifies the deepest question and the deepest comprehension. If only we understood the letter p, the whole would open up to us. — Sebastian Rodl, Self-Consciousness and Objectivity

You could say that Kimhi’s entire project – and the Kimhi-inspired challenge to Frege with which I began this thread – rests on this sudden realization that p is mysterious, not “innocent”, not something merely to be taken for granted in its philosophical employment. The first chapter of T&B is called, wryly, “The Life of p,” but it’s no joke. We have to ask, “How does p appear before us, on the page, in speech, in thought? Who puts it here?” Philosophy begins in wonder . . . and great philosophy often begins with questions that seem almost idiotic in their obviousness.

Frege’s system of logical notation, depending as it does on a distinction between the intensional force and extensional force of predicates, cannot account for the inference: “p”→ “A judges p”→ “A rightly judges p.” Within the context of “A judges,” “p” takes on a different intensional force (its sense) from when it stands alone, even though its extension (its reference) remains the same; it is intension, rather than extension, that permits inference. — Boynton

Frege’s remedy, according to Kimhi, is to introduce the judgment stroke, which has no functional role: “it signifies that something has been asserted, but it remains unrelated to the content of asserted propositions.”

Fine. But this removes assertoric force from any possible unity of thought and being – between what is said and what is the case.

Put another way, whereas . . . Fregean logic can provide an account of the content of thought, such an account of that thought will be divorced from [1] being/reality/the world on the one, and [2] of the thinker/subject on the other; a mode of expression not available in formal logic (because not reducible to the elements within propositions) is required in order to close the gap. Kimhi calls this mode of expression the syncategorematic. — Boynton

This is the best attempt I’ve yet seen to get across Kimhi’s notion of the syncategorematic. There’s more to it – for Kimhi, a fact is itself a syncategorematic unit – but the basic idea is that to think about how thought refers to the world is to think syncategorematically, and thus outside the expressions of formal logic.

Boynton doesn’t like the S word any better than I do – he calls it “cumbersome,” “not easily graspable,” and “specialized” -- and in a brilliant stroke he suggests an “obvious alternative”: metaphysical.

For what “syncategorematic” does is to demarcate a realm of expression and thought that cannot be reduced to categorematic notation or analysis—it is very much, in that sense, similar to “metaphysical” . . . In other words, Kimhi wants to suggest that the “meta” prefix, referring to “beyond”, is in fact properly understood as the “syn” prefix, referring to “with.” — Boynton

These are just a few of the insights I found in Boynton’s piece. I could have picked out and commented on a half-dozen other, equally insightful, passages, but you can read it for yourself. I find the essay especially valuable because, to think about Kimhi’s philosophy and its challenges to Fregean logic, we need a kind of vision shift, a big-picture understanding of why we ought to be dissatisfied. That can often be hard to find in T&B. I think Boynton is keeping our eyes pointed in the right direction, on the difficulties formal logic experiences when it tries to connect thought with being. “The metaphysical already accompanies, is already within, our normal propositions, our everyday speech, and . . . such unity is also the unity of thought and being.” The connection with Wittgenstein is becoming clearer and clearer to me . . .

No one has yet explained the main premise, or in any clear manner I can discern. — schopenhauer1

It's hard to do, no question. Does the post about Boynton, above, help any?

And thus this Frege stuff doesn't seem like its leading anywhere other than he doesn't like the little marker that says "This statement is asserted as true". — schopenhauer1

More than a matter of liking or disliking, I would say. I can't recap all the arguments but I'm sure you can see that the need to undertand assertoric force is critical to the whole question. Kimhi claims that a strategy like the judgment stroke is inadequate to the task.

In other words, your paraphrase ("such sentences have an inherent assertional logical or grammatical structure") may capture the idea just fine. — J

This is what and I were talking about earlier, namely the way that a declarative sentence has an inherent assertoric force even before it is asserted. For example:

The question is whether the "other uses" of a statement are truly independent of its assertoric nature. — Leontiskos

That line of inquiry ended this way:

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." — Leontiskos

After a close read of Kimhi's section 2.5 I see him doing the exact same thing that Srap and I were doing. He says that both a declarative sentence and an asserted declarative sentence "display" force, but whereas the first is "a mere display" the second is "a self-identifying display." This language is odd, but he is apparently trying to make it line up with his consciousness-claims.

Yet my point gets louder and louder, "But I don't see how it intersects with Frege." Kimhi is wed to the idea that Frege's point commits Frege to the claim that a declarative sentence cannot display assertoric force. Is that really right? For example:

...But it is also supposed to corroborate Frege’s point. For if a thought can be conveyed without assertoric force, assertoric form must be external to a proposition’s semantical character. — Kimhi, Thinking and Being, 44

Now Kimhi has introduced another term, "assertoric form." The difficulty with all this hair-splitting is that Frege apparently never considered and rejected Kimhi's idea of "assertoric form," and Frege's judgment-stroke is closer to Kimhi's monism than anything we see on the post-Fregian scene.

Apparently Kimhi wants to trace truth-functional compositionalism back to Frege's dissociation between assertoric force and predicate:

The textbook account of truth-functional propositional complexity begins from Frege’s point. — Kimhi, Thinking and Being, 47

I am open to the idea that the following 70% of Kimhi's book shows why it matters that Frege did not have a precisely correct representation of assertoric force, but set in isolation the point seems uninteresting. It's like Kimhi is pointing to an incredibly dull star in the night sky, and we can't tell whether it is there or not. After straining for so long, the question arises, "So what if it is there? Does it matter?"

I think Kimhi makes interesting and correct observations on many topics (and errs in others), but this point of the OP would seem to require more leverage to function as something of interest.

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There are also places where Kimhi follows Wittgenstein into incorrect interpretations of Frege, such as here:

But this construal of concept expressions rests on an incoherent association of the unity of a contradictory pair of assertions with the duality of truth and falsehood, understood as two objects with contrary properties (see TLP 4.063). — Kimhi, Thinking and Being, footnote 34

Frege simply does not make this error, given his constraint that only true sentences can be asserted. Kimhi appeals in places like this to Wittgenstein, and Rombout explains how Wittgenstein makes this exact same error. Along similar lines, calling Frege's distinction between truth and judgment/assertion "dualistic" seems to obscure the very close coupling between those two things in Frege's thought.

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Edit:

I was addressing 'if p then q'. — Janus

It's also interesting to note that Kimhi's point can invert against himself, for if Frege did not admit that in the assertion, "If p then q," the antecedent and consequent have some sort of latent assertoric force which can be actualized in the context of a modus ponens, then he would not be able to draw a modus ponens. Put differently, in asserting, "If p then q," we are asserting something about p and q. Is the takeaway then that assertoric force is not binary? And yet, is assertion binary?

...my case that Frege only means, literally, that we can't speak in Logicalese about the existence of entities or the non-existence of entities. I don't take him to mean that we can't understand the difference, or that we can only understand what can be said in Logicalese. — J

For Russell and Frege, logic trumps natural language, and is not "logicalese." This is very clear in Novak. Frege does not renege on his opposition to the existence-predicate when it comes to natural language. He does not think, "Oh, well you can't predicate existence in logic, but you certainly can in natural language."

Consider this: if you can predicate existence, can you also predicate non-existence? — Srap Tasmaner

That's right. Frege says the exact same thing in the second quote I gave in <this post> on page 1.

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Are you saying that, because “The grass in my backyard” is an individual term, not "Fregean," not part of a proposition, Frege would be reduced to silence about it? Would he say, “Sorry, I don’t understand that term”? This seems unlikely. I’m deliberately asking a question about an individual term because I’m trying to build up an argument about Frege’s views on existence. — J

As I said, you are presupposing subject-predicate logic, which Frege explicitly rejects. "Terms" are not part of Frege's system (where ‘term’ means a subsistent thing with a nature, that can bear predications).

Your response goes on to imagine what Frege would say about a different bit of language, “The grass is in my backyard,” but that of course is a proposition and not at issue. — J

No, I don't think this is true. For Frege, "The grass in my backyard," would seem to parse as I described it. "The grass in my backyard. . .," parses as, "∃x(Grass(x) ∧ Backyard(x)). . ." Else, if you want to talk about some x apart from any function then Frege will not have it. So if you want to conceive of your "term" of "The grass in my backyard" as a proper name, then Frege will ask you to say something about the proper name. You could say something like, "[The grass in my backyard] is long," where "...is long" is the function and "The grass in my backyard" is the proper name of an object. But in common use the reference, "The grass in my backyard," already involves predication, and is therefore not a proper name. That you were able to predicate without using the word 'is' would seem to be to the point.

(The disjunctive syllogism allows us to avoid Russell's question, for "The grass in my backyard" either involves implicit predication or else it does not.)

And the question remains for you as well: You are not a Fregean, so what account would you give of that term? — J

I don't think Frege's positive analysis is altogether incorrect. When we predicate (apart from predications of existence/non-existence) we commit ourselves to the "existence" of the objects in question (whether vacuously, as in Frege's case, or substantially, as in the common case). I differ from Frege insofar as I have no qualms about predicating existence and non-existence, although Novak's topic is admittedly difficult.

Are you asking what your incomplete sentence is supposed to mean without any verb? Suppose you begin speaking a sentence very slowly, "The grass in my backyard..." We have a subject ("the grass"), an accidental modifier of place ("in my backyard"), and we are awaiting the verb and predication. For Aristotle the subject of a predication is basically never propertyless, and this is because substances have natures, and a reference to a substance includes its nature.

Kimhi actually makes my point for me:

Every syllogistic term must have an extension—must signify a concept in Frege’s sense. And this violates commitment (3). — Kimhi, Thinking and Being, 45

A syllogistic term such as, "The grass in my backyard," must have an extension and therefore signify a concept in Frege's sense, and therefore it violates Frege's commitment, "To keep in mind the distinction between concept and object."

I’m happy to have both Novak and Rombout on tap. As I mentioned yesterday, my time is a bit curtailed this week but I’m sure they are both worth reading, and I’ll do so. — J

That’s fair. It’s just that we’re stuck on this topic and you don’t seem to want to take Frege at his word that he denies the existence-predicate. I’m not sure how you intend to argue otherwise without adverting to primary or secondary Fregian sources, and Novak is the source that is already in play on this issue. Is the goal to show that the denial of a substantial existence-predicate is incoherent, and therefore Frege either did not hold to such a position or else held it and was incoherent? What is the thesis you are aiming at? As for me, I think it is clear that he does hold to such a position; I do not think it is incoherent to do so; but I do think it is silly and mistaken.

This goes back to what I said in my first post:

All the objections to Frege's logic that I have seen are metalogical objections, and yours is no exception. ↪Srap Tasmaner says that there is no (counter)-argument being offered, and this is true at least insofar as there is no counter-argument which adopts Fregian presuppositions. What is being questioned is the presupposition.

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

but there is a sense in which Frege's system automatically narrows the the field of true statements to statements about real things, and that does seem relevant to Kimhi's whole invocation of Parmenides. Somehow. — Srap Tasmaner

This seems right. Kimhi often mentions the problem of referring to non-existents. What he doesn't seem to recognize is that Frege inoculates himself against even Kimhi's more subtle objection by saying that assertion is always tied up with truth. So Frege will say, "It is true that not-x," but he will never say, "It is false that x." Part of Kimhi's project turns on the difference between falsity and negation (or denial and negation), but like Wittgenstein and Russell he fails to understand that Frege will have nothing to do with claims of falsity per se. Now for me this gets at a different problem with Frege's system, but Kimhi is not recognizing how thoroughly the Fregian paradigm sidesteps Parmenides' koan. His argument that Frege is inconsistent is very difficult to maintain. On my view Fregians tend to be wrong but not inconsistent.

...and there is an interesting way in which Frege's decision to speak about truth but not falsity is more monistic than Kimhi's idea that truth/falsity and affirmation/negation are balancing forces (albeit with the first term receiving a primacy). But I digress.

:up:

Put differently, in asserting, "If p then q," we are asserting something about p and q. Is the takeaway then that assertoric force is not binary? And yet, is assertion binary? — Leontiskos

An interesting question. "If p then q" seems to be inherently an assertion about the relationship between p and q. It is an inherently asymmetric relation: "if q then p" is not entailed.

"It is raining" has the form "x is y", just as "it is green" does, and yet they are not the same. To state that it is raining, I could just say "raining", which would seem to indicate that assertion is not always binary.

I hope I've understood your question; I'm pretty confident about working out the logic of natural language, but I'm not great with formal logic.

Ok, so we can consider the review in a bit more detail.

The first paragraph makes it clear that the intellectual predecessor here is McDowell. SO the idea is some thing like that declarative sentences are true in that they are identical to a thinkable (an odd nominalisation), securing a connection between mind and truth. Apparently for McDowell, a true thinkable just is identical to a fact. I'm not overly familiar with McDowell, but it seems to me worth noting that what a "true thinkable" is, is far less clear than is the notion of satisfaction that it appears Kimhi wants it to replace.

But again, what is going on here remains unclear. The foremost puzzle is what sort of "identity" might hold between things as divergent as thinkables and facts. So the puzzle that the identity theory of truth wants to solve is the puzzle fo what is going on on the right hand side of a T-sentence: 'p' is true iff p; and it attempts to solve this by an additional identity, between the thinkable'p' and the fact p. Now the identity that holds between 2+3 and 5 is reasonably clear; there are numbers on both sides of the "=". For an identity to hold between a thinkable and a fact, they must be the same sort of thing. I can't see how what McDowell is proposing is an improvement on the T-sentence.

Seems to me that these considerations sit with the Wittgenstein of the Tractatus. And I have noted that the quotes from Wittgenstein used here indicate more dependence on the early rather than later Wittgenstein. My "solution" to the T-sentence issue – so far as there is one – is that on the left, 'p' is being mentioned, and on the right, it is being used (cue and ).
And this might be why I'm not seeing much of worth in what has been said about Frege. It's answering a question already answered, and in a better way.

SO on to the next paragraph, where we find the bit quoted:

Frege’s system of logical notation, depending as it does on a distinction between the intensional force and extensional force of predicates, cannot account for the inference: “p”→ “A judges p”→ “A rightly judges p.” Within the context of “A judges,” “p” takes on a different intensional force (its sense) from when it stands alone, even though its extension (its reference) remains the same; it is intension, rather than extension, that permits inference. — Boynton

This seems pretty much on the money. "⊢p" does not follow from "p". But that's kinda the point Frege makes, and solves with his nomenclature. In setting out Modus Ponens for example, Frege doesn't write
⊢p⊃q
⊢p
⊢q
such that each is within it's own intensional bracket; he writes
⊢(
p⊃q
p
q)
The first is invalid; the second, brilliant. Again, Frege is setting aside the intensional aspect in order to display the extensional. Frege's system 'cannot account for the inference: “p”→ “A judges p”→ “A rightly judges p."' because it is invalid. It simply does not follow from p, that A judges p, nor that A rightly judges p.


Indeed, calling it an "inference" is extremely problematic.

Indeed, calling it an "inference" is extremely problematic. — Banno

This goes back to my original question, what gives the assertion any truth-value in the first place? Whether you say "This person thinks X is true and judges correctly" or just "X is true", besides just a more efficient logical form, what does it matter really? How we say, "The sky is blue" in a logical form, and whether the fact that the sky is actually blue seem two separate things, the it is the latter that is the most important.

From the next paragraph: "...the extension is a relation between a and a fact in the world that must obtain". That's not quite right. Extensionality is a consequence of identity. So sets are extensionaly the same when every element of A is also an element of B, and vice versa. Definitions of extensionality in subsequent logics follow this form. That is, the relation is pretty clear. The text asks:

In virtue of what is the forceless combination Pa associated with the truth-making
relation that a falls under the extension of P, and thus with the claim Pa, rather than
with the truth-making relation that a does not fall under P (or falls under the extension
of ~P), and this with the opposite claim ~Pa?

The answer, by example: if P={a,b,c} then Pa is true; if P={b,c,d} then Pa is false.

Of course this doesn't tell us if a is an element of P. That's something you will have to do, an act you might choose to perform. And something quite different to logic.

Yep.

Now my response is that we as a community choose to use "the sky is blue" to set out something about the way things are (or are not, when it is overcast). But you don't seem to like this answer. I suspect you want a theory that sets out, for any given sentence, if it is true or no. That's not what logic does. Rather it is about the consistency of what we say.

This put me in mind of the thread on Nice Derangement..., where I found the following:

Understanding an utterance in a language you know is not a voluntary action. You don't get the meaning through a conscious and laborious process something like decoding an encrypted message. If there's good reason to think you are doing something like this, you do it out of habit and a facility developed through countless hours of practice, quickly and without attention. You have to pay attention to the speaker, but not to the process of decoding. Or you're not doing anything like that. I would hope this is an empirical question. Either way, understanding is not something you usually should be described as "doing". It's more like something that happens to you.

There is something similar with speaking. Not just with respect to phonetics, not even just with all the mechanical bits of language production, but even in what you say. Think back over the last few days of verbal exchanges you had at work or in a social setting: in how many of those did you have to, or choose to, consciously and with effort decide what to say? Most of the time we effortlessly select the words to use, assemble them into a sentence and utter that sentence, but more than that, very often we don't even have to think about what to say; it just comes to us, which is to say, it just comes out.

Again, there are questions about how to describe what's going on here, but candid speech is, at least very often, habitual, requiring no more conscious effort than understanding the speech of others. — Srap Tasmaner

At some stage seeking explanations stops, and we act.

And to your unanswered question,

Do we agree up to here? — Srap Tasmaner

I think so. I baulk a bit at 'understanding is not something you usually should be described as "doing"', since we do say that he did or didn't understand... We treat it as something we do.

Now my response is that we as a community choose to use "the sky is blue" to set out something about the way things are (or are not, when it is overcast). But you don't seem to like this answer. I suspect you want a theory that sets out, for any given sentence, if it is true or no. That's not what logic does. Rather it is about the consistency of what we say. — Banno

The way I would reply would depend on whether you meant "community" of philosophers/logicians or the general public.

More a group sharing a way of life and language.

More a group sharing a way of life and language. — Banno

That could still be either one.

But I guess the bigger picture here is that Kimhi seems to think Frege is lacking something that say, someone like Aristotle captured in his logic- some sort of active engagement of the thinker and the logic. I guess I just don't see the difference really in how Aristotle adds the "active" engagement part. As far as I see from their logical forms, they are different ways of saying the same thing. I don't see anything like "Thucydides thinks that Socrates is mortal". Rather Aristotle's example would be "Socrates is mortal". I guess I don't get Kimhi's comparison and how he thinks Aristotle captures the "thinking" part.

Oh I guess.. and this is just basic.. Because
All humans are mortal
Socrates is a human
Socrates is therefore mortal..

I guess the combining of the major and minor premise is considered the "thinking" part.. but is it really that basic? It is still proffered as if everything true and thus the conclusion is true. Still not getting the profound implication here about Aristotle versus Frege.

That could still be either one. — schopenhauer1

Well, no. "General public" might do.

But your confusion in regard to Kimhi's thesis is warranted.

Speaking roughly, there are folk who think logic is about working out what is true and what is not. Perhaps there is some historical justification for that. On this view there is a requirement that logic be the connection between thoughts and words. This might be the sort of thing McDowell and Kimhi are looking for.

But logic is more about which of the various things we can say are consistent with each other, and what that consistency might be. Science, rather than logic, is more about what is the case and what isn't, .