I must be missing something. I can see no more of a problem with fictional assertions than I can with fictional imaginings, fictional events, fictional places, fictional characters and so on. — Janus

I finished the Scholastic portion of Novak's paper, and I think I agree with you. It gets complicated, but I would essentially say that we can truly speak about fiction so long as the authors of fiction are genuine sub-creators (in Tolkien's sense). That is, we must say that in writing their books the authors of fiction create real truthmakers (or at least the sort of truthmaker that is proper and relevant to fiction).

That seems reasonable. Granted, I am a little bit surprised that Kimhi is so fond of the early Wittgenstein. I don't think a picture is a fact, and so I think the search for a fact-fact relation is a false start. I haven't read much where Kimhi speaks about consciousness and self-consciousness, but it seems plausible to me that he wants to move that relation away from world-facts and into the realm of consciousness. It seems clear that Kimhi accepts a logical subject in the way that (early?) Wittgenstein does not, and can thus introduce consciousness in a way that Wittgenstein could not.

The more natural move for later Wittgenstein is to say that sometimes we see something as a picture of something else, sometimes we don't — Srap Tasmaner

Yes, and if this weren't true then I don't see how we would be able to err. Then: is an inference—the thing between the lines of a syllogism—a kind of picture and also quasi- or sub-assertion? If so, and if a correct inference is a logical truth, then the possibility of inferential error comes into view.

I suppose this is a somewhat new topic, but the thread is now becoming more diffuse. Are logical errors possible without [judgment, or a logical subject, or content to be judged]? Do those who fundamentally disagree with Frege's judgment-approach have any basis with which to account for logical errors?

Fiction is a minefield for discussions like this, and I don't want to derail the thread, if that's even possible, but I'll make one point.

My view is that in a work of fiction the author pretends to be telling a story, as she might tell a story about something that really happened. We pretend to believe she's telling a story. An author pretends to be telling the truth. (I think it's a pretty sophisticated thing, and it's easy to be culture-bound and miss how unusual it is.)

A relevant (for this thread) question might be: what exactly is an author pretending to do that he isn't? Can we say, there's the sentences you speak and the order you speak them in, on the one hand, and something else that makes your speaking "reporting a sequence of events" or "(merely) telling a (fictional) story" on the other?

Sketching connections — Pierre-Normand/ChatGPT o1

Interesting (to me anyway) that this suggests a 'visuo-spatial' element to Chat GPT o1's process.

It seems clear that Kimhi accepts a logical subject in the way that (early?) Wittgenstein does not, and can thus introduce consciousness. — Leontiskos

Shaky ground for me, but I don't think that's right. The alternative title for the Tractatus is "The World As I Found It". "The limits of my language are the limits of my world." There's that business with the eye, and the little picture showing how the eye is its own horizon, never included in what it can see. The issue of solipsism is addressed directly. There's a pretty strong sense of "I" at least in parts of the Tractatus, and it would probably be fair to call it "logical". -- Honestly not an aspect of the book I ever gave much thought to though, so I might be off base here.

My view is that in a work of fiction the author pretends to be telling a story, as she might tell a story about something that really happened. We pretend to believe she's telling a story. — Srap Tasmaner

Hmm, I'm not sure if I like the way you phrased this, but I see what you are saying. Something like, "The author pretends to be telling a non-fiction story." At the end of the day I think it will depend a great deal on what an author is actually doing, which is obviously tricky.

(I think it's a pretty sophisticated thing, and it's easy to be culture-bound and miss how unusual it is.) — Srap Tasmaner

Yes, and it is interesting that in recent history fiction was thought to require a kind of disbelief-suspension-bridge (I forget the real name that is used). Some plausible device was used to connect the fiction to the real world.

Then, to take an extreme example, what did Tolkien take himself to be doing in his writings? He certainly seemed to be self-consciously involved in a less fictional act than, say, J. K. Rowling.

A relevant (for this thread) question might be: what exactly is an author pretending to do that he isn't? Can we say, there's the sentences you speak and the order you speak them in, on the one hand, and something else that makes your speaking "reporting a sequence of events" or "(merely) telling a (fictional) story" on the other? — Srap Tasmaner

Right: Or: if telling a non-fiction story is a form of assertion, and telling a fiction story is not really assertion, then what is it? Frege talks about a similar thing in terms of the words of an actor on stage, and Kimhi considers this scenario (...in some earlier post I talked a bit about this). But what exactly constitutes the pretense in the author or kindergarten teacher who tells a fictional story? I'm not sure - haha.

if telling a non-fiction story is a form of assertion, and telling a fiction story is not really assertion, then what is it? — Leontiskos

Yeah that was the idea. Is assertion something added on to the words? If you can add on assertion, are there other things you could add on?

Another way to look at it: if you're not sure whether assertion is something we add on (rather than being built in), does showing that we can add something else instead of assertion show that assertion is something we add?

Another way to look at it: if you're not sure whether assertion is something we add on — Srap Tasmaner

Add onto what? Are you thinking of a sentence or a proposition? If it's proposition, just examining what that is will indicate why assertion is integral.

And one last point -- sorry for the multiple posts -- the whole point of my view of fiction is that it is parasitic on candid account giving or reporting. If we did not already have such a practice of reporting on real events that happened to real people in real places, and so on, we could not pretend to report on events we've made up (and maybe people and places as well).

Yeah that was the idea. Is assertion something added on to the words? — Srap Tasmaner

Right...

If you can add on assertion, are there other things you could add on? — Srap Tasmaner

Another way to look at it: if you're not sure whether assertion is something we add on (rather than being built in), does showing that we can add something instead of assertion show that assertion is something we add? — Srap Tasmaner

Maybe Kimhi would agree when I claim that it is strange to talk about non-intentional sentences. Supposing that assertion is one form of intentional 'force' (or simply intention), are there sentences without intention? And are there declarative sentences without assertion?

If "Berlin" makes no sense apart from context, does a sentence make sense apart from intention? If not, then it would seem that in "adding" assertion to a putatively non-intentional sentence, we are in fact either altering the intention that was already present, or else a dead structure of letters and words becomes a living form when intention is infused (an essential change occurs). It may be that in analyzing the materiality of a sentence and prescinding from intention we are doing something like examining a corpse, or at least a comatose patient.

Are you thinking of a sentence or a proposition? — frank

Sentences or maybe utterances, depending on how you'd like to slice it. It's not obvious to me you can utter a sentence without uttering it in a particular way, which would include something like force.

I would love not to talk about propositions at all, so I'll leave that to you.

Sentences or maybe utterances, depending on how you'd like to slice it. It's not obvious to me you can utter a sentence without uttering it in a particular way, which would include something like force.

I would love not to talk about propositions at all, so I'll leave that to you. — Srap Tasmaner

Frege, the godfather of abstract objects, dealt with propositions, so we're going to be mixing quiche and spaghetti if we don't talk about them.

An utterance is just sounds or marks. Literally, nothing else. A sentence is a grammatically correct sequence of words, but a sentence has no specific meaning.

A proposition is expressed by an uttered sentence. A proposition is along the lines of content.

George points to a whiteboard that has the number 2 written on it. He says, "That's a prime number.". He has expressed the proposition that 2 is a prime number. He did that by uttering the aforementioned sentence.

If this doesn't work for you, you've probably got a strong inclination for behaviorism and meaning skepticism. Frege is not your philosopher.

And one last point -- sorry for the multiple posts -- the whole point of my view of fiction is that it is parasitic on candid account giving or reporting. If we did not already have such a practice of reporting on real events that happened to real people in real places, and so on, we could not pretend to report on events we've made up (and maybe people and places as well). — Srap Tasmaner

Yes - that is the Aristotelian realism route and I am comfortable with it. It says that fiction is ultimately a rearranging of sense experiences and memory. But a Platonic account will say that the reality that we experience in sense is a reflection of the Forms, and that we can perhaps experience the Forms directly. This is the view that fiction could be a "higher reality" via its direct participation in the Forms.

Then to bring this back down a bit, the point is that Tolkien obviously thinks he is doing something Platonic whereas H. G. Wells obviously thinks he is doing something Aristotelian. What this means is that Wells is pretending in a way that Tolkien is not, and therefore it becomes hard to give a single account of fictional intention to all fiction writers.

Interesting (to me anyway) that this suggests a 'visuo-spatial' element to Chat GPT o1's process. — wonderer1

Yes and no ;-) I was tempted to say that ChaGPT's (o1-preview) summary of its thinking process had included this phrase merely metaphorically, but that doesn't quite capture the complexity of the issue regarding its "thinking". Since this is quite off topic, I'll comment on it later on today in my GPT-4 thread.

something like examining a corpse — Leontiskos

Very plausible. Taking down the words someone spoke leaves an awful lot behind. As musical notation is a somewhat limited representation of someone playing an instrument.

Coming back to fiction, it's probably a blind alley to think there's something added to the words in place of assertion; the pretense is that you are removing something and pretending you haven't. And the audience agrees to pretend you haven't -- to a degree, or in some particular way. ("Willing suspension of disbelief" is probably much too strong, if not just wrong, because people watch horror movies.)

A better form for my question would be, what have you removed? What's missing, that everyone kinda pretends isn't, when you tell a (fictional) story? Does it overlap with what's left out when you only have a record of the words spoken, the bare, lifeless sentences?

...one thing a picture is entirely incapable of depicting is that it is true. A picture can show how things might be, and things may indeed be that way, but the picture cannot include itself in its depiction and vouch for its own accuracy. — Srap Tasmaner

I agree that a picture is not capable of depicting that it is true. However, I question the practical import of that to some extent.

In my experience it can be important for me to recognize whether a picture is consistent with my observation of the way things go in the world. (My profile picture can serve as an example of a picture that is 'not consistent' with the way things go in the world.)

the pretense is that you are removing something and pretending you haven't — Srap Tasmaner

I think Frege would say that the fiction author has removed something from their words, whereas the fiction author would say that Frege has removed something from their words. Fiction may be inherently Platonic in that way. It may insist that it is giving more, not less, than what non-fiction gives.

A better form for my question would be, what have you removed? What's missing, that everyone kinda pretends isn't, when you tell a (fictional) story? Does it overlap with what's left out when you only have a record of the words spoken, the bare, lifeless sentences? — Srap Tasmaner

But on the premise that fiction is less, I would suspect that an intention tertium quid is involved in fiction (though I am not sure whether it is a kind of quasi-assertion or else something with a different intentional force altogether). Does the fiction author make use of the assertoric force that the logician removes, as an ingredient in what he adds to the lifeless sentence in order to give it life? I don't know. What are your thoughts?

As an aside, my friend's child always engaged in "pretend" without any notice, as if she paid no mind to the boundaries of pretending and not pretending. My nephew, on the other hand, is very precise about where pretending begins and ends, even at a younger age than the girl. Part of the difficulty of all this is that pretending and playing is very different from the logical thinking that Frege and Russell prefer, perhaps to the point of incommensurability. Perhaps if we "knew" what we were doing when we pretend or play we would cease to pretend or play. I'm not sure if you can reduce logic or pretending to the other, and this may be because logic specifies and marshals intentionality in a way that play refuses to do.

(To ask her whether she was now pretending or not was much like asking someone to explain the punch line of a joke. Asking for illumination causes the sun to set.)

pretending and playing is very different from the logical thinking that Frege and Russell prefer — Leontiskos

Pretending, as your examples demonstrate, is complicated, but I think it's actually very important to logic because of hypothetical reasoning (not to mention counterfactuals). I think it's very difficult to give an account of what happens when we entertain an hypothesis, but it looks a bit like pretending. When doing philosophy or mathematics, we say things like "Suppose I have an urn with 100 marbles in it..." and we could very nearly (?) say "Pretend I have an urn... " "Pretend you've drawn a red marble", and so on.

--- More to come later, but I really have to work for a few hours.

What's missing, that everyone kinda pretends isn't, when you tell a (fictional) story? — Srap Tasmaner

Can there even be an answer using speech act properties alone for that? The sense of nonreality afforded to fiction is surely something closer to intangibility.

"Frodo touched the ring" - fine
"I touched Frodo" - madness.
"Frodo often doubted his ability" - fine
"I often doubted Frodo's ability" - fine.
"I saw Frodo touch the ring" - a bit off, "saw" would have to be understood figuratively, as a stand in for "read". "I saw that Frodo touched the ring" would ring better.

So in a certain sense, nothing seems to be missing, besides the capacity for personal sensorimotor relations with elements of fiction. You can have beliefs and intuitions about them all you like, you just can't smell, see, taste, touch them (except figuratively).

Looks like that has a physiological/phenomenological answer to me, anyway. Probs off topic.

Kimhi's argument is something like this:

1. In order to assert a (declarative) sentence, I must first judge whether it is true or false
2. In order to judge whether it is true or false, it must have a judgable content
3. In order to have a judgable content, it must display assertoric force
4. In order to display assertoric force, it must contravene "Frege's Point"

The only question for me is whether (4) holds, or in what limited sense it holds.

It's fairly clear that assertion is integral to a proposition. The question is: what does it mean to separate them? By what means does Frege do that? If it's by way of a stipulated logical domain, yes you can separate them. In real life? No, you can't.

You can have beliefs and intuitions about them all you like, you just can't smell, see, taste, touch them (except figuratively). — fdrake

That's close to my answer.

The obvious candidate for what's missing is belief, but I don't think that's quite it.

(I'm only indulging here because I keep seeing echoes of the actual topic...)

The main pretense in story telling, I claim, is about the story teller. They pretend to know a story they're actually making up (or that someone else made up). In early prose fiction, there's often a bit of BS at the beginning about how the writer stumbled on these letters, how he came to have this diary, or (nearby in poetry but right time period) some mad old man stopped me on my way to attend a wedding.

I think more than belief is at stake, because we judge beliefs on how they were arrived at. The challenge of someone who doesn't believe a story you're telling, even a true or at least honest one, is "How do you know that's what happened?" It's not just a question of whether the teller believes the tale, but whether their life history entitles them to it, gives them warrant to tell it. Hence the pretend warrant fiction writers sometimes display.

So yes, somewhere back in the chain of how I come to be telling this story, to be in a position to tell this story, there must be witness or even participation. I was there and I saw it, or I had it from a guy who was there. The storyteller pretends to be such a person.

This is, perhaps, a more colorful version of the Parmenides stuff.

One consequence of such a view might be that it's not really the tale we believe but the teller. We do not adopt a propositional attitude of "belief" toward the story, except perhaps as a consequence of adopting a social attitude of "trust" toward the storyteller.

--- back to work ---

I gave the quote where Frege himself says that the judgement stroke applies to the whole:

...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

In a way, the OP is asking about the extent to which meaning is use. In what circumstances can we drop use and still have meaning? This is assertoric force: — frank

Sure. What I was at pains to set out in the first few posts here is the difference between asserting a statement and understanding its content. Both involve intentionality, with the "t"; but we can understand the content of a sentence separately from it's illocutionary force. And here I am using a language unavailable to Frege, but which owes much to his work. Frege showed us that if we treat the intentionality (with a "t") of the content extensionally (without a "t") we get some very interesting results.

Pretending, as your examples demonstrate, is complicated, but I think it's actually very important to logic because of hypothetical reasoning (not to mention counterfactuals). I think it's very difficult to give an account of what happens when we entertain an hypothesis, but it looks a bit like pretending. — Srap Tasmaner

That's true, but I don't think that sort of hypothesizing is susceptible to formal logical analysis, as it is presupposed that the subject is doing this and I don't think formal logic can circle round itself to account for such a presupposition.

So yes, somewhere back in the chain of how I come to be telling this story, to be in a position to tell this story, there must be witness or even participation. I was there and I saw it, or I had it from a guy who was there. The storyteller pretends to be such a person.

This is, perhaps, a more colorful version of the Parmenides stuff.

One consequence of such a view might be that it's not really the tale we believe but the teller. We do not adopt a propositional attitude of "belief" toward the story, except perhaps as a consequence of adopting a social attitude of "trust" toward the storyteller. — Srap Tasmaner

The historical development of how a fictional story is told is interesting, but are verification and warrant really at the center of fiction, at least in our own day and age? Or related at all? Isn't it a category error to challenge the fiction author regarding warrant?

I suppose if we want to make fiction very logical we can think of it as an experiment in counterfactuals, and of course fiction with a strongly didactic motive is intended in that way. I mostly think that because fiction is a less univocal category than logic, logic won't make sense of it. Logic can work on something which has a clear and stable intentional character, but the raison d'être of fiction (or logic) is not available to logic in this way. Like "Berlin," fiction need not be or mean one thing. I don't think all fiction authors are involved in the same sort of intentional stance towards their work.

(Out until tomorrow - take your time!)

It can only occur once for an expression, but the question is whether a modus ponens is a single expression. — Leontiskos

Yes, that’s how I understand it too. — J

Good. Names are given meaning by being given an interpretation. For propositional logic that interpretation is just "⊤" or "⊥", something that is quite explicit in Frege. But of course there followed Russell's paradox, the controversy about Basic Law Five, the theory of Definite Descriptions, possible world semantics, rigid designation and so on. IT all became quite complicated, and very fruitful.

Yep. "Berlin" names Berlin. "Berlin is the weirdest city" names the true (!). But that's not an end to it, since we can also take "Berlin is the weirdest city" and treat of its parts, concluding that if Berlin is the weirdest city, then something is a city. And here we move from propositions to predicates, from the 0th level to the first level.

Again, it is important to note that the very same sentence may have more than one logical treatment. seems to miss this.

Again, it is important to note that the very same sentence may have more than one logical treatment. ↪Leontiskos seems to miss this. — Banno

One can speak about modus ponens in terms of logical consequence or logical inference. Both make sense in their own context, but Frege actually adopts the latter approach. For Frege a modus ponens requires three judgment-strokes. — Leontiskos

It's fairly clear that assertion is integral to a proposition. The question is: what does it mean to separate them? By what means does Frege do that? If it's by way of a stipulated logical domain, yes you can separate them. In real life? No, you can't. — frank

I think these are the right considerations, although I think you can remove the assertion in "real life" too.

Kimhi's argument is something like this:

1. In order to assert a (declarative) sentence, I must first judge whether it is true or false
2. In order to judge whether it is true or false, it must have a judgable content
3. In order to have a judgable content, it must display assertoric force
4. In order to display assertoric force, it must contravene "Frege's Point"
[5. Therefore, "Frege's Point" prevents one from judging and asserting declarative sentences and engaging in the activity of logic] — Leontiskos

We could look at this from a different angle: What would it mean for someone to hold to "Frege's Point" to the extent that (4) is true? According to Kimhi, it would mean that they cannot do logic, for logic requires the ability to judge and assert declarative sentences (cf. 5).

Is it plausible to attribute such a doctrine to Frege? Does he really want to divorce assertoric force from sentence to such an extent that the sentence cannot be judged true or false? If not, does he have the resources to stop short of that pitfall? Kimhi seems to say, "no."

(I agree with Kimhi that Frege's analysis of assertoric force is not "natural," but beyond that I'm not convinced that it is as detrimental as Kimhi claims.)