Good. I’m only vaguely aware of how Frege’s concavity differs from our modern universal quantifier, but I think I can still ask these next questions. The Fregean universal quantifier ranges over objects as well as formulae/functions, right? So maybe my question about “Frege on the Beach” (sounds like a hit song) could be phrased as: "When you comprehend the term ‛Berlin’ (as I’m going to assume you do, Herr Frege), does your comprehension depend on the universal-quantification symbol? And then, should you choose to use the term to fulfill a function, does the existence commitment change to ∃x?” So the idea is that ∀ can range over names or terms that are not (yet) part of functions. Clearly, I’m trying to find a way to make a name (and its sense) a “thinkable thought” without violating Frege’s understanding of what logic can do. Does this sound at all sensible to you? — J

I haven't been able to follow this. But at the beginning of this thread I had an intuition that there was some blurring of the notion of force in Frege that has been set out in subsequent work, which is why I went to the trouble of explicating the nature of illocutionary force. "Force" here is used to talk about intentionality, about what we are doing with the words at hand. So we speak of a difference in force between "Grass is green" used as an assertion, command or question. That's illocutionary force, operating at the level of sentences. There's also a difference in using "Berlin" for a city, a person or a rock band, and this might also be called a difference in "force". My understanding is that in choosing the judgement stroke to range over the whole expression Frege removed the illocutionary force. But the "force" that denotes remained. Hence we are able to use the same letter for the same item in the expression, giving us extensionality.

Frege may well have thought that proper names relied on quantification. Russell, arguable, did just that with his Definite Descriptions. But it's no longer so popular.

- @J seems to want us to say that Frege would have it that 'Berlin' has meaning and significance even apart from any predicate or quantification, as it does in everyday language.

Isn't it a category error to challenge the fiction author regarding warrant? — Leontiskos

CHAPTER I.

YOU don't know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; but that ain't no matter. That book was made by Mr. Mark Twain, and he told the truth, mainly. There was things which he stretched, but mainly he told the truth.

My point is that first and foremost the fiction writer *pretends* to have such warrant. In early prose fiction this is almost universal (in English anyway).

Nowadays, we're used to how fiction works and it's dramatically less common to go through this little dance.

And the point of all this is to clarify how we usually offer and receive declarative utterances, so that we know what's been stripped away when we consider the bare words, as we might when playing at logic.

I *think* this is in the neighborhood of Kimhi. I'm under the impression he wants to restore the thinker to the thought, or maybe it's thinking as what links what is thought to what is. I haven't put a lot of time into figuring out what he's after, obviously.

It's not novel to say that something is stripped away when we engage in logical analysis. It's more or less the point. The question is whether what you have left, that you'll submit to logical analysis, is what you think it is, and whether the pieces fit when you try to reassemble the living use of language.

Parmenides' questions — J

It's just that so many of the reviews take this as central. It seems these folk would scrap modality. We do think things like "what if I hadn't answered your post?". So perhaps they are wrong and there is no mystery here. That would help explain why no one has been able to set out Kimhi's argument coherently.

I've been one who is inclined to think that ChatGPT and such are not at all mirroring how human minds work, since they are in the end only picking one word after another based on preferential probabilities. I'm now entertaining the reverse view, that many human minds are indeed also only picking one word after another based on the reaction they get. :worry: Hence Trump and Trolling. And many of the replies here. And perhaps Parmenides?

In order to judge that the definition is true, one already must have a grasp of what it is to be true and what it isn't. So the definition is superfluous.

That's my understanding, and how I read Frege's comment. To judge that a given definition of truth is true, one already must have a grasp of the nature of truth.

Hence Convention T, the minimum that must be the case. "p" is true if and only if p.

Yep.

although I think you can remove the assertion in "real life" too. — Leontiskos

Can you give an example of that?

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. — frank

Yep. It might be helpful to add "statement" between "sentence" and "proposition". A statement is the concatenation of a noun phrase and a verb phrase. "The cloud is thoughtful". They differ in syntax from questions and commands, although these distinctions blur at the edges. "Is the cloud thoughtful?" "Make the cloud think!".

I find it useful to think of propositions as that subset of statements that take a truth value - so maybe not "The cloud is thoughtful" and maybe not "The present King of France is Bald".

What's perhaps salient here is that we can understand what a statement is about, and indeed, what it would take to make it true or false, while not knowing if it is true or if it is false, and certainly without having to make a judgement as to it's truth. There have been plenty of examples hereabouts - "the grass is green", "the cat is on the mat".

And again we have the important difference between the content of the statement and what is done with the statement.

A proposition is expressed by an uttered sentence. — frank

Sure. But one can utter a sentence without expressing a proposition. And without making a judgement as to the sentence's truth.

I'd just note that the whole apparatus of first-order logic works for fiction. Frodo walked into Mordor, therefor by existential generalisation something walked into Mordor.

Folk seem too keen on claiming that one cannot understand what a statement is about without deciding if it is true or false. That's not right.

What's perhaps salient here is that we can understand what a statement is about, and indeed, what it would take to make it true or false, while not knowing if it is true or if it is false, and certainly without having to make a judgement as to it's truth. There have been plenty of examples hereabouts - "the grass is green", "the cat is on the mat". — Banno

If you understand what "the cat is on the mat" is about, it's because you're providing a phantom context for it. The OP alludes to this. There just is no proposition where there is no context of utterance. You can easily invent that context though, and voila: you have a proposition.

There's a famous incident where an English colony in North America disappeared without a trace. They're called the "lost colony." The people who came back looking for them found a tree that was supposed to be used for emergency communication (in case they were attacked by the natives.) But the previously agreed upon code hadn't been used. Instead there was one word carved into it: "Croatan." Ever since then, people have tried to understand what the lost colony meant by it. Croatan was an Algonquin chieftain. Did they mean that Croatan killed them all? Or did the crops fail and they had to go live with Croatan? You see, to sort out any meaning in the communication, you have to imagine the context in which it was uttered, in other words, you have to imagine it being asserted, whether it actually was or not.

But one can utter a sentence without expressing a proposition. And without making a judgement as to the sentence's truth. — Banno

Definitely. :up:

: Ok, but

Folk seem too keen on claiming that one cannot understand what a statement is about without deciding if it is true or false. — Banno

I don't think anyone has made that claim. You probably need to understand the truth conditions, but not whether it's true or false.

I don't think anyone has made that claim. — frank

Well, perhaps you haven't. Then we agree that there is a difference between what a sentence is about and what is done with it?

So it'd be neat to set up a system where we seperate out the judgement about our expressions from what they are about, so we could work through any inconsistencies in their content apart from their force.

Enter, Frege.

Then we agree that there is a difference between what a sentence is about and what is done with it? — Banno

I might not be understanding what you're asking, but I believe that in order for a sentence to be about something, it has to be used. Meaning is found in use.

o it'd be neat to set up a system where we seperate out the judgement about our expressions from what they are about, so we could work through any inconsistencies in their content apart from their force. — Banno

If you're talking about an artificial environment that's pimped out with a foundation of axioms, then yes, you probably could do that. If we subsequently want to bridge that to ordinary language we'll probably end up with Chomsky and an innate human language which can be identified by analysis of the world's languages (to see what words they all contain.) I figured that wouldn't be your cup of tea.

I believe that in order for a sentence to be about something, it has to be used. — frank

So could you not understand what a sentence is about unless it is clear it was being used to make, say, an assertion rather than ask a question? Isn't it a bit more complex than that?

Seems to me that "The cat is on the mat" is about a cat and a mat. And we at least have some idea of what that piece of paper scribed with "Berlin" might be about.

Isn't being about something just a part of the use?

So can't we understand what a statement is about without asserting it to be true or false?

Perhaps we might agree that one might understand what an utterance is about, but not if it were a question or a command... we might partially understand it... or understand part of it.

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. — wonderer1

Maybe it's only important to philosophers and other such model builders.

On the other hand, I think people often tend to treat memories as a class of "pictures", broadly, that vouch for their own truth by being the kind of picture they are. And of course they're wrong.

It's an interesting question though. What was Wittgenstein trying to block by making this point? I should go back to TLP and look, but one thing that comes to mind is this: if you want to know if a picture presents the truth, you need another picture that says that. You can see where this is headed.

It seems to be a denial that there is any self-evident truth -- which would be handy for capping off the regress -- but that's not quite right; I think the claim would be that there is no substantive, we might say, self-evident truth. It's in the TLP (according to my lazy history of logic) that we get the presentation of tautology as a true statement that says nothing. And if it says nothing, evidently not a picture. So the truths of logic are something else entirely, and it is only there, among these whatever-they-ares, that we get self-evident truth.

Seems to me that "The cat is on the mat" is about a cat and a mat. — Banno

In a raw sort of way. Maybe that's enough.

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

This is some rambling.

Belief in a story would be a different flavour of belief than the one in this thread anyway. Telling a story is, at least, a sequence of sentences presented with different forces and roles, and we've been dealing with single sentences with possibly a single illocutionary force.

Belief in a proposition vs belief in a story. Minimally belief takes the form "x believes that p", but belief in a story doesn't even seem to have an easy parsing as modal applied to a collection of sentences... it's hard to tell which sentences. The sentences of the story? That wouldn't do, since no one believes "Frodo went to Mordor" is true, they just believe it's true that Frodo went to Mordor in the Lord of the Rings. And it's precisely the ability to stipulate that we must evaluate the story in narrative terms which we're after, the missing mechanism of stipulation, rather than the ability to believe in the story's statements once construed as being part of such a stipulation.

The boring deflationary answer is just to say that understanding a given text as a story means just the following: belief in any presented sentence in that text is equivalent to believing that that sentence is a part of the text. Line of the story as story event. I believe that Gollum lied and cheated if and only if it says so in the book.

Suspension of disbelief works in opposition to the latter boring answer. Like the deus ex machina eagles at the end of Lord of the Rings. A flight of massive eagles coming in and saving the day, really? You only doubt it, "c'mon, really?" because you believe it happened in the story, but it could be felt to collide with the story's narrative. No one would doubt the eagles came, they just would doubt whether in some sense they should've.

Which gives an opportunity for more expansive, and more boring, deflationary answer.

Understanding a given text as a story means just the following: belief in any presented sentence in that text is equivalent to believing that that sentence is a part of the text in its context of evaluation. Line of the story as story event in the context of the story. I believe that Gollum lied and cheated if and only if it says so in the book and that seems reasonable in terms of the rest of the world and the story's narrative.

If the latter is true, it doesn't say anything insightful at all.

Stephen King said that fiction is a way of expressing truths that couldn't be conveyed in any other way.

Sounds good, I'll do that, and then toss any questions I have to you.

Just one follow-up now:

If you give a lecture explaining what truth is, and I'm your audience, I have to already understand what truth is in order to discern what you're doing, that is, telling me the truth about truth. Therefore you can't teach it to me. — frank

I still don't see that this follows. Can't you have a mistaken or in-part inaccurate understanding of what truth is, and discover in the course of my lecture what the "truth about truth" is? You seem to be saying that you wouldn't be able to recognize the "truth about truth" unless you already had the correct understanding of what that is. But couldn't the lecture process itself provide the necessary enlightenment? i.e., in the course of listening to me, couldn't you find yourself agreeing with me and simultaneously realizing "Ah, of course, I now see why I believe this to be true"?

If this is better addressed in Soames, then no need to answer. It's just where I'm currently puzzled.

@leontiskos The go-to modern work on this is probably Kendall Walton's Mimesis as Make-Believe, if your interested in pursuing it. Excellent study. I can't find it or any excerpts on the Net, sorry.

My understanding is that in choosing the judgement stroke to range over the whole expression Frege removed the illocutionary force. But the "force" that denotes remained. — Banno

Yes, which is why I keep trying to find some better, more perspicuous ways to carve up "force." I was leaning toward believing that "force" itself should be strictly separated from both assertion and illocution -- or that, at least, Kimhi would want us to think of it that way. I'm no longer sure, based on the many interesting comments from yourself, @leontiskos, @srap tasmaner, @frank and others.

Frege may well have thought that proper names relied on quantification. Russell, arguably, did just that with his Definite Descriptions. — Banno

This is more or less where I was going with my hard-to-follow speculations about the universal quantifier. Russell's TDD postulates existential quantification for proper names, if I'm remembering rightly. And you had said that "so far as existence is defined, it is defined in terms of the universal quantifier." So my question was, If Frege does not accept the TDD, can we spell out how universal quantification might still give us something to think about when we think about names?

I still don't see that this follows. — J

This is a good response. Heidegger relies on exactly this hermeneutic circle in everything he writes. It's prima facie a reasonable description of learning.

"make-believe" is a lovely phrase. I should have used it.

Yes. This shows the important difference between context and truth-value. Kimhi is asking us to rethink some basic assumptions about the "givenness" of some particular context, and the idea of a "contextless" appearance of p. But whether p is T or F is another story; context won't tell you.

I've adopted the concept from Habermas, but either way, yes, it's a question rooted in hermeneutics. Plato too, arguably.

This is key, and I'll allow myself one more go at the individual-term question. It's the difference you're drawing between ordinary language and "what Frege would have" that I was focusing on. I absolutely agree that there's no place for "meaning or significance" of singular terms sans propositions in the logical world Frege goes on to create. But in the spirit of Kimhi, I'm trying to understand what Frege might be thinking, literally, when he encounters an isolated term. And of course "Frege" here is a stand-in for "any reasonable person." I'd hoped my suggestion was a modest one -- that there is some recognition (in ordinary language, if you will) of at least a likely potential meaning, on the assumption that Frege has encountered the term before. This observation leaves everything in place, in terms of predicate logic and Fregean existence claims. I have no disagreements with any array of experts on Frege. But it also leaves a problem about what is thinkable. I believe your statement contrasting ordinary language with "predication and quantification" shows the problem very nicely.

I still don't see that this follows. Can't you have a mistaken or in-part inaccurate understanding of what truth is, and discover in the course of my lecture what the "truth about truth" is? You seem to be saying that you wouldn't be able to recognize the "truth about truth" unless you already had the correct understanding of what that is. But couldn't the lecture process itself provide the necessary enlightenment? i.e., in the course of listening to me, couldn't you find yourself agreeing with me and simultaneously realizing "Ah, of course, I now see why I believe this to be true"? — J

I'll post Frege's words, and the way Soames formulates it:

"But could we not maintain that there is truth when there is correspondence in a certain respect? But which respect? For in that case what ought we to do so as to decide whether something is true? We should have to inquire whether it is true that an idea and a reality, say, correspond in the specified respect. And then we should be confronted by a question of the same kind, and the game could begin again. So the attempted definition of truth as correspondence breaks down. For in a definition certain characteristics would have to be specified. And in application to any particular case the question would always arise whether it were true that the characteristics were present. So we should be going round in a circle. It therefore seems likely that the content of the word ‘true’ is sui generis and indefinable." — Gottlob Frege, “Der Gedanke. Eine logische Untersuchung,” in Beitrage zur Philosophie des deutschen Idealismus 1 (1918): 58–77, translated into English as “Thoughts” by P. Geach and R. H. Stoothoff in Collected Papers on Mathematics, Logic, and Philosophy ed. B. McGuinness (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984), 351–72, reprinted in Propositions and Attitudes, ed. N. Salmon and S. Soames (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 33–55, at 36.

The argument suggested by this passage can be reconstructed as a reductio ad absurdum:

A. Suppose that truth is definable and that the definition is as follows: For any proposition p, p is true iff p is T.

B. If (A), then to inquire (establish) in any particular case whether a proposition p is true, one must inquire (establish) whether p is T.

C. Therefore, to inquire (establish) whether p is true, one must inquire (establish) whether p is T.

D. To inquire (establish) whether S is to inquire (establish) whether it is true that S, which is to inquire (establish) whether the proposition that S is true.

E. Therefore to inquire (establish) whether a proposition p is true, one must inquire (establish) whether the proposition that p is T is true, which in turn requires one to inquire (establish) whether the proposition that the proposition that p is T is itself T is true, and so on ad infinitum.

The argument can be continued in two different ways, one emphasizing circularity and the other emphasizing regress.

Circularity

F. Since deciding whether a proposition p is true involves deciding whether the proposition that p is T is true, the definition (A) of truth is circular.

G. Since adequate definitions cannot be circular, truth is indefinable.

Regress

F*. So if truth is definable, then deciding whether a proposition p is true requires completing the impossible task of deciding the truth values of infinitely many distinct propositions.

G*. Since we sometimes can decide whether a proposition is true, truth is indefinable. — Understanding Truth, p. 21

There's a fair amount of discussion after this this passage. This source may require a university IP.
I'm not sure: here

I think the upshot of the argument is that the concept of truth has to be innate, or that it's an aspect of communication. We can analyze it out and contemplate it, but the longer we do that, the less sense it will make.

But whether p is T or F is another story; context won't tell you. — J

Right. Context is just part of discerning what proposition is in play.

Thank you. This give me a good launchpad into Soames. I don't yet see anything that rules out a more hermeneutic approach to truth, but of course that is not the subject of this thread.