Frege is not giving a simplification or a model — Leontiskos
Who dug this rabbit hole? Lewis Carroll, apparently. — bongo fury
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
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
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
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
Like Alice on Jabberwocky:Kimhi's book is much shorter but I believe the depth and importance is there, — J
Not being able to say what your ideas are is death in philosophy. Or rather, it ought be; but folk do go on so.“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!”
So . . . which sentence are you referring to as mentioned? (or all three?) — J
the way in which Frege forbids predicating existence — J
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
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
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
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
No one has yet explained the main premise, or in any clear manner I can discern. — schopenhauer1
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
In other words, your paraphrase ("such sentences have an inherent assertional logical or grammatical structure") may capture the idea just fine. — J
The question is whether the "other uses" of a statement are truly independent of its assertoric nature. — Leontiskos
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
...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
The textbook account of truth-functional propositional complexity begins from Frege’s point. — Kimhi, Thinking and Being, 47
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
I was addressing 'if p then q'. — Janus
...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
Consider this: if you can predicate existence, can you also predicate non-existence? — Srap Tasmaner
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
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
And the question remains for you as well: You are not a Fregean, so what account would you give of that term? — J
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
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
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
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
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 writeFrege’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
Indeed, calling it an "inference" is extremely problematic. — Banno
The answer, by example: if P={a,b,c} then Pa is true; if P={b,c,d} then Pa is false.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?
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
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.Do we agree up to here? — Srap Tasmaner
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
More a group sharing a way of life and language. — Banno
Well, no. "General public" might do.That could still be either one. — schopenhauer1
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