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. — schopenhauer1
The difference between "p" and "I think p" (and hence the difference between consciousness and self-consciousness) is syncategorematic -- and so too is the difference between p and not-p. This difference . . . cannot be associated with a difference in predicative content or form. . . . In the end we shall see that the various capacities which philosophical logic finds itself called upon to elucidate -- capacities for judgment, for language, for the deployment of logical words (such as "not" and "and") [Note: These would be syncategorematic in the traditional use of that term - J] , and for self-consciousness (and hence for the use of the word "I") -- are all one and the same capacity. To appreciate this is to appreciate the uniqueness of thinking. — T&B, p. 16
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. — Leontiskos
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. — Leontiskos
[Kimhi contests] Frege's underlying assumptions of logic.. That logic is not psychological, according to Frege, but rather metaphysically real in some Platonic way... — schopenhauer1
Yes, Kimhi calls this "psycho / logical dualism" and rejects it. According to him, neither the Platonists nor the "it's just how we think" philosophers are correct, because the dualism is all wrong. — J
Frege doesn't write
⊢p⊃q
⊢p
⊢q
such that each is within it's own intensional bracket; he writes
⊢(
p⊃q
p
q) — Banno
The first is invalid; the second, brilliant. — Banno
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. — 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? — schopenhauer1
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. — Banno
That's not what logic does. Rather it is about the consistency of what we say. — Banno
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. — schopenhauer1
This might be the sort of thing McDowell and Kimhi are looking for. — Banno
Here's a passage from T&B that talks about this — J
That is to say, the "thinking" part, according to this view, is "behind the scenes". The conclusions are then taken from the "thinking part" and put forth in logical terms so as to be clear and consistent so nothing is misconstrued. — schopenhauer1
I read up more on Frege's meta-logical theory, and it seems that he was a sort of Platonist about logical truths.. So finally, I think I see what the goal of Kimhi here is. It's not the FORM per se, but Frege's underlying assumptions of logic.. That logic is not psychological, according to Frege, but rather metaphysically real in some Platonic way... Ok, so this just goes back to an old debate about the nature of truth. Is "Truth" independent of human thinking, or is it "True" irrespective of the interpreter (or psychology)? — schopenhauer1
OK. Evidently my choice of “The grass in my backyard” was unfortunate, because it looks like its grammar may confuse the logical point. Let’s change the term to “Berlin”. If I say “Berlin,” I doubt if anyone would call it an incomplete sentence. Or, if you like, imagine Frege walking along a beach and finding a scrap of paper with the word “Berlin” written on it. In either of these cases, I’m guessing the natural response would be something like “What about Berlin?” or “I wonder why ‛Berlin’ appears here.” But what my question about comprehension is asking to you to affirm, is that in neither case would the response be “What is Berlin? I don’t understand this term” (if you’ll grant that the folks involved have heard of Berlin before). — J
To the second quote: I do indeed want to talk about (in the sense of "mention") some x apart from any function. I’ve just done so. You say that “Frege will not have it.” That may well be true. But again, what I’m asking is, does “not having it” mean that Frege doesn’t comprehend the term “Berlin”, or doesn’t think that I do? Or is it, rather, that he’s urging me to understand that I can’t say anything about the term without its taking its place to saturate a function? — J
KG: The grass is green
FG: ⊢∃x(Grass(x) ∧ Green(x)) — Leontiskos
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. — Janus
...Just so, I'm resistant to analysis that treats all of our declarative utterances as deserving an "I judge that ..." or "I believe that ..." in front of them. Sometimes we judge, sometimes we go out of our way to mark what we're saying as our personal belief, and sometimes, probably mostly, we just talk. — Srap Tasmaner
I still don't know what this thread is about, but I'm pretty sure it starts in a place pretty far from me and goes in the opposite direction. — Srap Tasmaner
He is proposing what he calls "psycho / logical monism" and claiming Wittgenstein as a fellow monist. Understanding this is, for me, by far the most difficult part of the book, and Kimhi occasionally indulges in an obscurity worthy of, yes, Hegel. But what this tells me is merely that it's hard, and that Kimhi is not the greatest writer -- I'm by no means ready to dismiss his ideas just because I'm still working on them. Sorry not to be able yet to explain the monism part, but I undertstand it better each time I reread. The clue, once more, is that "The difference between 'p' and 'I think p' is syncategorematic," or metaphysical, rather than a matter of logical form. Kimhi wants to go on to show how this distinction will lead to a unity of thinking and being, in a very old tradition he traces back to Plato and Aristotle. — J
I want to highlight a few things in Owen Boynton’s first-rate essay/review on Thinking and Being. — J
For any proposition, Pa, its truth value is associated with the extensional reference to something that exists (the extension is a relation between a and a fact in the world that must obtain). But what is it that creates this “association”? How is it associated with the extensional reference to something that exists, as opposed to something that does not exists?
“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? This question cannot be answered, since
Pa does not display an assertion, and therefore there is nothing that associates it with
the positive rather than the negative judgment.” (Kimhi, 137)
Interestingly, this, coming near the end of Kimhi’s work, is very much where Rödl starts out in Self-Consciousness and Objectivity (p. 43: “But this second-order judgment is not a thought of its own validity. So I am not, in judging that I must judge q, conscious of anything that stands in the way of judging that I may judge ~q. And this is to say that I am not conscious of anything that stands in the way of judging ~ q.”);. . . — Boynton's Review of Thinking and Being
It's tricky to switch paradigms, but in Wittgenstein's paradigm the problem is that Frege has "two phases in the assertion of a sentence." Russell struggles with the same issue from a different paradigm. For Frege it is the difference between "the True" and the judgment-stroke.
To try to put it plainly: is it possible to see that something is true before going on to assert it? And does (the recognition of?) a sentence's truth require a subject? Is the syncategorematicity (in Boynton's sense) of the judgment-stroke already present in the truth-assessment?
The puzzle is explicit in Frege's requirement that only true sentences can be asserted, a requirement that is incomprehensible to, and thus not even understood by, Russell and Wittgenstein. If only true sentences can be asserted, then what exactly is the difference between calling a sentence true and asserting it? Frege has an uncommonly objective notion of truth (and also assertion) (at least as far as contemporary logic is concerned). — Leontiskos
Unless these philosophers explain WHY thought MUST reflect reality (via "logic"), it doesn't seem to have any force to me, except as, ironically, unsupported assertions. — schopenhauer1
The rules of logic always presuppose that the words used are not empty, that the sentences express judgements, that we are not playing with mere words.
(Gottlob Frege, “Dialog mit Pünjer über Existenz”) — Lukáš Novák, Can We Speak About That Which Is Not?, 157-8
However, I was trying to map his picture of human reality with other metaphysical and epistemological conceptions- namely realism, contingency, and necessity. One can construe Witt's metaphysics of these language-games to be be in purely nominalist or conventionalist terms. However, there may be some inherent, universal aspects to them which can characterize them to be necessary. It is necessary that humans inference, for example. It can be argued that general inferencing (this story/this phenomena/this observation is a specific or general case of X... This general case of X can be applied to specific cases of Y) may be a necessary human capability, dictated by evolutionary forces. In other words, in theory, any mode of survival is possible, in reality, evolution only allows certain modes of survival to actually continue. One such mode of survival, is inferencing. Since humans have no other recourse in terms of built-in instincts beyond very basic reflexes- our general processing minds, must recognize the very patterns of nature (through inferencing, and ratcheted with trial-and-error problem-solving, and cultural accumulated knowledge) which other animals exploit via instinctual models and lower-order learning behaviors/problem-solving skills.
....
This quote here, which I take to be a sort tie-in to my last post, seems to overextend its point. He is moving from primitive inferencing- something that is universal and even tribal cultures utilize, to Logic (capital "L") as conventionalized by Greek/Western contingent historical circumstances. Inferencing + cultural contingencies of the Greek city-states + further contingencies of history led to our current conventions of logic. So it is a mix of taking an already universal trait and then exposing it to the contingencies of civilizations that mined it thoroughly and saw use for it.
However, that's not all. ONCE these contingently ratchted inferencing techniques were applied to natural phenomena, we found not only that the conventions worked internally in its own language-game, but that it did something more than mere usefulness to human survival/language-game-following. It actually mapped out predictions and concepts in the world that worked. New techniques now harnessed natural forces and patterns to technological use, far beyond what came before. Math-based empirical knowledge "found" something "about the world" that was cashed out in technology and accurate predictive models. This is then something else- not just conventionalized language games. This particular language-game did something different than other language games.
My own conclusions from this is that the inferencing pattern-seeking we employ as a species, to survive more-or-less tribally and at the least communally, by way of contingency, hit upon real metaphysical patterns of nature. Thus my statement in another thread that while other animals follow patterns of nature, humans primarily recognize patterns of nature in order to survive. — Philosophical Investigations, reading it together.
Isn't it self-evident that if logic is to be meaningful then there must be some relation between thought and reality? — Leontiskos
An account of what? First you say, "unless these philosophers explain WHY thought MUST reflect reality..." And then you go on to speak about "accounts." They are two very different things.
1 A necessary argument with the conclusion that thought reflects reality is
2 different from an account of thinking. — Leontiskos
You seem to be saying, "Unless Kimhi gives a metaphysical proof for the basis of logic it's not worth a dime." But that's not a reasonable challenge. All inquiry involves presuppositions, and "logic is a thing" is not a tendentious presupposition — Leontiskos
Kimhi is saying, "We both agree that logic is a thing, but Frege's account doesn't account for this fact very well." It's not reasonable to come along and say, "Ah, but I won't grant that logic is a thing until you prove it!" — Leontiskos
Does "Berlin" have extension? If it does then it is not an object. If it does not then it is an object. All you are doing is trying to have it both ways. You want objects with inherent extension, which is impermissible. — Leontiskos
is it possible to see that something is true before going on to assert it? — Leontiskos
just tell me whether you understand the word on the paper or not — J
Notice also that for Frege there is a structure literally hanging from the ⊢. So we have
The judgment stoke occurs once in the expression, at the beginning. It affirms the whole expression, not each individual line separately.read from bottom to top, for what we might now write as
∀A∀B(A→(B→A)).
In the modern version all the assertive paraphernalia on the left is removed. Along with it goes much of the implication of commitment. (again, stolen from SEP) — Banno
My bolding.The horizontal stroke, from which the symbol judgement is formed, binds the symbols that follow it into a whole, and assertion, which is expressed by means of the vertical stroke at the left end of the horizontal, relates to this whole. — Quoted in SEP 1879a: §2
If you say "Raining," is your utterance necessarily either an assertion or a non-assertion? — Leontiskos
Are you puzzling over the context principle, is that it? Are you asking if Frege is literally saying a word isolated like this, not part of a sentence, is meaningless? — Srap Tasmaner
As for your "Berlin" example, you don't understand it. It could be a lot of things. — Srap Tasmaner
Hence he presumes two truth values without giving any account beyond reference. 2+2=4 names the true; 2+2=5 names the false.We do not need a specific sign to declare a truth-value to be the False, provided we have a sign by means of which every truth-value is transformed into its opposite, which in any case is indispensable. — SEP
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