I've no high aptitude for logic. Just a rough comprehension of the basics. But by all means keep up the flattery.

since Pa does not display an assertion, — Pierre-Normand

(quote from Kimhi)

I would assume it does, until something stops it. Just by recognising it as a sentence in a language, you allow it to assert itself: to replicate, and produce corollaries.

The question is, do you want to allow it to proliferate unchecked into this or that discourse? Or will you, within such a discourse, impose restrictions on the sentence's self-assertion, and ensure that it appears in public only, if at all, suitably contextualised, and qualified.

Perhaps, most harshly, wearing a negation sign - thereby qualified as untrue.

Or neutered. Contextualised as the disjunction of its assertion and denial (Pa v ~Pa).

Or conditionalised, or hypothesised, or probabilised.

Or chaperoned, by speakers: asserters, who would like to assist, and deniers, who oppose proliferation of the naked sentence.

Speakers on opposite sides might resort to all sorts of (more or less democratic) means to exert influence.

If they resort to logic, though, they must allow full rights of self-assertion to the premises, and then withdraw to watch the game. Which is played out by the self-asserting sentences, unassisted.

I agree that this is the best way to understand what's at issue here about "thought". (Though I don't want to take sides on the larger question.). Pretty clearly, the first quote finds Frege using "thought" to refer to an activity, an event that can happen in a mind, one involving a separation of sense or content from truth-value. When such an event happens, Frege wants to call it a thought, even as you and I might. The second quote is quite different. Here we have a much more technical term -- let's call it Gedanke for clarity -- which is meant to represent the content referred to above. In that sense it is propositional.

(And I see that some of your subsequent posts pick up this theme of how technical Gedanke is.)

Both IEP and Roberts refer to this Gedanke sense, but neither give a specific reference in Frege. From the context, I'm guessing it's to be found in On Sense and Reference. I don't have time today to hunt it down but maybe someone else can.

That's what a proposition is supposed to be: that thing we can agree or disagree on. — frank

I like the clarity of this, but doesn't it beg the question? The "other side," so to speak, would say, "A proposition is supposed to be a thing with a truth-value, something we don't merely agree or disagree on, but claim objective reasons for doing so."

This intended reading, I think, preserves the philosophical distinction Frege is drawing in this passage between the mental act of thinking (grasping the thought) and the truth of the thought itself. — Pierre-Normand

Yes. You've just said what I said, above, but you said it better. I should have read this more carefully before posting -- the point has been well made.

He's reliant on ambiguity. But further, he seems not to consider the developments of logic and metalogic since Frege - and they are profound. — Banno

I wouldn't sell him short. "Reliant on ambiguity" implies that he's trying to get away with something, but I think it's rather the case that he's not a very skillful writer and doesn't always realize how murky things are getting.

Your second point seems true, though. Kimhi targets Frege as if he had published the Beg. last year. He doesn't refer to many sources that are contemporary, except concerning Aristotle.

I like the clarity of this, but doesn't it beg the question? The "other side," so to speak, would say, "A proposition is supposed to be a thing with a truth-value, something we don't merely agree or disagree on, but claim objective reasons for doing so." — J

I didn't mean to say that propositions are limited to the things we agree or disagree on. We imagine there are true propositions that no one knows, for instance, the answer to whether there is life on other planets.

I was trying to show what's at stake if we decide that there are no propositions in the Fregean sense of the word. We'll have to give up the notion of agreement as we commonly understand it. I was thinking about this because I was quoting Soames and the first chapter of his book on truth explains why we can't use utterances or sentences as the basis of agreement. It has to be propositions, or the content of an uttered sentence. With regard to whether there's life on other planets, notice how we "smuggle in" an assertion as Kimhe puts it.

And the discussion in this thread of modus ponens was just plain muddled. — Banno

Could you say more about this? Perhaps the target statement ought to be this, from T&B:

Geach agrees with Frege that we identify an argument as valid by recognizing it to be in accord with a principle of inference which is a norm that pertains to acts. Thus, on Geach's reading, Frege's observation [that p may occur in discourse as asserted or unasserted while still being recognized as the same p] applies both to an actual argument of the form modus ponens and to modus ponens as a principle of inference. Therefore, Geach's understanding of Frege's observation conflates the two senses of propositional occurrence: symbolic and actual. — p. 38

I take this passage to be central to what Kimhi wants to say in the book. If you can lay out problems with it, I'd find that helpful.

It's hard to be sure, but there seems to be a profound misapprehension concerning what logic is, underpinning the Kimhi's work and much of the writing on this thread. I'm not inspired to go down that path. — Banno

It is hard to be sure. The other possibility is that it's a profound contribution to our understanding of what logic is (T&B, that is, not necessarily this thread!). But of course you're right to be skeptical and to demand clear arguments. As someone else posted above, I hope you can stay with us and at least view the path from drone height, even if you don't want to go down it.

we can't use utterances or sentences as the basis of agreement. It has to be propositions, or the content of an uttered sentence. With regard to whether there's life on other planets, notice how we "smuggle in" an assertion as Kimhe puts it. — frank

Yes, very good. That said, I believe there is still a larger issue about the basis of agreement -- broadly pragmatic and communication-oriented, or claiming some version of objectivity? But that's a deep rabbit-hole, and as long as you're not saying that agreement is only consensual, then we're on the same page.

as long as you're not saying that agreement is only consensual, then we're on the same page. — J

I'm happy exploring behaviorism and pondering whether there really is any such thing as agreement, but my home base is to imagine that I agree with billions of people I've never met on a mass of propositions, many of which I've never brought to mind consciously. :smile:

…there seems to be a profound misapprehension concerning what logic is, underpinning the Kimhi's work and much of the writing on this thread. — Banno

I've no high aptitude for logic. Just a rough comprehension of the basics — Banno

I’m not thoroughly convinced your first quote (underlined) is consistent with your second quote. Your first quote, if it be authoritative, suggests a very considerable depth of experience.

Lest you be further embarrassed by what you think flattery, perhaps you can help me understand something for me basic:

The subject (or argument, in Frege’s terminology) is what Julian Roberts in The Logic of Reflection calls “an empty center.” Roberts goes on, “And the ‛object’ which fills that [empty] subject position, accordingly, is not a collection of attributes (featureless). It is a ‛thing’ only to the extent that the function makes it into one.” — J

“There is, ultimately, something rather raffish about a function (predicate); it wanders the world, hoping to connect, but may well never succeed. There is nothing in the function that establishes it as a part of reality (unreal).” — Roberts

If the subject is empty, the object is featureless, and the predicate is unreal, then that’s a triad of zeroes, and I don’t see how a function linking three zeroes can produce a non-zero product. — ucarr

In the J quote and the Roberts quote above, they seem to be establishing an interpretation of predicate logic that boils down to a triad of zeroes. That takes us to the primordial question: How existence? Well, science asks for one gimme: something spontaneously arising from nothing. “After we have something, we’ll figure out the rest,” says science.

Are Frege, Kimhi, Roberts, J, et al really sourcing predicate logic back to the supernatural gimme? I’m not inclined to think so, but that’s how I read them as quoted here.

I’m asking you to give me some tips on understanding how my reading of the quotes is fundamentally wrong.

Good citations.

Language is here in a predicament that justifies the departure from what we normally say. — Frege, On Concept and Object – Posthumous Writings, 97 – footnotes omitted

True, we cannot fail to recognize that we are here confronted by an awkwardness of language, which I admit is unavoidable — Frege, On Concept and Object – Posthumous Writings, 97 – footnotes omitted

But nobody can require that my stipulations shall be in accord with Kerry’s mode of expression, but only that they be consistent in themselves. — Frege, On Concept and Object – Posthumous Writings, 97 – footnotes omitted

Is it my imagination, or is Frege sounding a bit defensive here? He seems to recognize the shortcomings of his approach -- the awkwardness, the departure from ordinary language. His project, as we know, is to improve or even abandon ordinary language in the interest of clarifying logic's objective structure. So here, he's trying to confine himself to saying it's a predicament about language, not thought, and he's also saying that he's entitled to make his own stipulations about how to use terms.

My contention is that he can't confine himself to a "language predicament," because his predicate logic is claiming to do so much more than reform language. The individual-term question is merely an obvious starting-place for such a critique. And while he's entitled to withhold his agreement from Kerry or anyone else, his stipulations are also not in accord with many of our most useful common modes of expression, and in such a case, I don't think consistency is enough. Put another way: This is a high price to pay for formalism, especially when it claims to control something as basic as what can be said to exist.

(And just to pay Frege the respect he deserves, I agree with @Banno's fruit-fly analogy. There is a great deal to be learned about thought from Frege's intricate constructions, regardless of whether some of his metalogical premises might be questionable.)

I take this passage to be central to what Kimhi wants to say — J

For this thread, it is absolutely central, this claim of conflation.

You can consider a physical object as having properties such as mass, velocity relative to a frame of reference, and so on. The mass of an object, for instance, can be treated as an abstract object, but hylomorphism comes naturally here, and almost no one is tempted to say that the mass of the object has some existence separate from it. Nor does its velocity or any other property.

Now consider things people say to each other. You might very well find reason to distinguish what someone says from how they say it, or what someone says from the importance they attach to it, and so on. You might distinguish what someone says from the specific words they used to say it, including which language they used, so that people speaking English and German can say "the same thing".

"What he said" looks a lot like an abstract object, along the lines of mass, but for some reason many people, perhaps including Frege, have been tempted to treat "what he said" as having an existence independent of the words he used or the sounds he made.

For the issue Kimhi wants to raise, the issue would be whether you are conflating two different objects (or kinds of objects) that have independent existence, or whether Geach and Frege have conflated two different 'descriptions', I suppose we could say, two different 'qua ... ' formulations.

Does it matter what's being conflated?

I think it might for Kimhi's argument because one way of buttressing the idea that propositions have independent existence is to align them with the mental, rather than the physical. There's more, of course, but here, I think clearly, the question is in what sense "what he said" is a thought, while the actual words spoken were merely a physical "expression" or even representation of that thought.

If we take a more hylomorphic view, there may still be an argument, but it won't be this one.

The mass of an object, for instance, can be treated as an abstract object, — Srap Tasmaner

Abstract objects are things like numbers, sets, and propositions. Mass is a physical property.

Abstract objects are things like numbers, sets, and propositions. — frank

What role does the observer play in the construction of an abstract object? To clarify what I’m asking, consider this related question: Can/does an abstract object exist without an observer who perceives natural things and then constructs a composite abstraction based upon repeated viewings of similar things?

I'd have to go with Schopenhauer and say that subject and object are two sides of the same coin.

These two objects have the same mass.

These two cartons have the same number of eggs.

These two sentences mean the same thing.

hmm

Both IEP and Roberts refer to this Gedanke sense, but neither give a specific reference in Frege. From the context, I'm guessing it's to be found in On Sense and Reference. I don't have time today to hunt it down but maybe someone else can. — J

You may remember that Frege wrote Thought: A Logical Enquiry, ("Der Gedanke. Eine logische Untersuchung") where he famously argued for a kind of Platonism about thoughts/propositions, and suggested that they inhabit a third realm separate from both material objects and (subjective) mental phenomena. It is worth noting, though, that he published this in 1918, much later than On Sense and Reference (1892), or The Foundations of Arithmetic (1884).

Whatever one may think of Kimhi's (or Rödl's) beef with Frege regarding the propositional unity of "forcefully" entertained propositional content, their ontological thinking is certainly less naïve than Frege's. What still remains an open question to me (even though I lean towards the Wittgensteinian quietism of McDowell) is whether their accounts of this self-conscious propositional unity constitutes an improvement over the charitable accounts, put forth by Evans and McDowell, of what Frege was trying to accomplish when he sought to individuate thought/proposition at the level of sense (Sinn) rather than at the level of extensional reference (Bedeutung) in order to account both for the rationality of the thinking subject and for the objective purport of their thoughts. See McDowell's Evan's Frege (cited and quoted by Kimhi) as well as On Redrawing the Force Content Distinction, by Christian Martin, and Wittgenstein’s Critique of the Additive Conception of Language by James Conant. (Both Martin and Conant have engaged deeply with Kimhi and have credited him for fruitful discussions.)

That's what a proposition is supposed to be: that thing we can agree or disagree on.

If you start with a strongly materialistic bias, you're likely to lean toward behaviorism, which says that we never really agree on anything. — frank

I can say we agree, and I can say what we agree on, without attributing to "what we agree on" independent existence, but instead treating it hylomorphically as an abstract object that is immanent within our agreement. "Our agreement" is another such abstraction. Does it exist independently of our agreeing?

Abstract objects are things like numbers, sets, and propositions. Mass is a physical property. — frank

I'd have to go with Schopenhauer and say that subject and object are two sides of the same coin. — frank

Do we see from the above that mass and abstraction, like form and content*, are interwoven?

*The interweave of form and content entails higher-order perception: the perceiver’s perception of the perceiver’s perceptivity.

These two objects have the same mass.

These two cartons have the same number of eggs.

These two sentences mean the same thing. — Srap Tasmaner

I was also thinking of a rejoinder along those lines. Certainly, for some purposes, there is a point in sorting numerical quantity alongside weight as a (predicative) way to express amounts of grocery items one needs to buy and therefore view them both as the same sorts of abstract objects. But there is also a principled and characteristically Fregean way to set them apart. Numbers can be viewed as second-order functors that stand in need of (first-order) predicative expressions rather than singular terms to saturate them and form complete propositional contents. On that view, the thought that there are twelve eggs in the carton can be logically analysed as the thought that, qua eggs, the objects in the carton are 12. You can't ask how many items there are in a room or refrigerator without specifying (or tacitly assuming) what kinds of object it is that you are talking about, and how they are meant to be individuated. If quantity is a "property" of something, it isn't a property of an object (such as a carton of eggs) but rather a "property" of the predicate "_is an egg" as it figures in the proposition "there are 12 x's in the carton that are such that x is an egg", for instance. By contrast, the thought that there is one kilogram worth of eggs in the carton predicates the same weight regardless of the manner in which individual eggs are individuated. This logical feature of the concept of a number (it's being analysable as the referent of a second-order functor in sentences expressing how many objects of a specific kind there are in some domain) makes them "logical" or "abstract" in a way more simple predicates such as weight are not.

On edit: There is an argument to be made, though, that weight being a concept which, like mass, belongs to a quantitative science (or quantitative way of thinking about things and comparing definite chunks of them — one kilogram worth of eggs being such a chunk, for instance) also is inseparable from the (second-order) concept of a number unlike more concretely qualitative concepts such a the concept of a color.

I hope I didn't suggest that there's only one type of abstract object. Quite the contrary. Mathematics alone provides a considerable menagerie.

For purposes of this thread, the ones that would matter would be, at least, content and force.

There is a suggestion, speaking roughly and quite broadly, that a system of logic intended to deal with our utterances only as content, without force, is somehow mistaken. That may be so, but it's no argument to say that our utterances also have force if the whole point of the enterprise is to set force aside without denying it.

It might be closer to the argument given to say that Frege, in particular, does not set aside force (even if other and later logicians do) but that he brings it in in a way that is somehow at odds with the unity of force and content in our utterances. That might be a claim that it is a fool's errand to distinguish force and content (somewhat as Quine argued the impossibility of separating the analytic and synthetic 'components' of a sentence), or it might be a claim that Frege has distinguished them incorrectly, or something else, I don't know.

I've not spent as much time as I might have thinking about Kimhi's argument, but the claim of conflation suggests that there is a point you can make about content, the proposition, and a different point you can make about actual occurrences, in which that content features, but Frege, I think it is claimed, forgets what he's about and tries to make a single point about both, or tries to make a point about one that can only be made about the other, and somehow tricks himself into thinking he has not mixed up the two.

That's the terrain of the argument I'm unable quite to present, I think.

Do we see from the above that mass and abstraction, like form and content*, are interwoven? — ucarr

Maybe we could pursue this in a different thread. It's sort of along the lines of Plato. I'll start one if you're interested.

I can say we agree, and I can say what we agree on, without attributing to "what we agree on" independent existence, but instead treating it hylomorphically as an abstract object that is immanent within our agreement. "Our agreement" is another such abstraction. Does it exist independently of our agreeing? — Srap Tasmaner

I think abstract objects are products of analysis. We dismantle mind and language use as if we're taking a cuckoo clock apart. We may become so engrossed in the pieces laid out in a table that we forget that.

As long as you're tuned into the fact that in this framework, propositions are content, not sentences, you're good to go.

I think abstract objects are products of analysis. — frank

Yes, but I would suggest that we shouldn't take the word "analysis" there to indicate a practice that stands outside the everyday use of language, as if this is only something done by a linguist examining a corpus or a philosopher examining whatever she does, arguments, intuitions and whatnot.

Instead, this kind of analysis is engaged in every day by ordinary speakers and listeners; making distinctions like what-you-said vs how-you-said-it are strategies we all use, sometimes to understand each other and sometimes for other reasons. Doing this kind of thing is as much part of being a member of a linguistic community as knowing the word for "window" or the polite use of pronouns.

I agree. I think Frege would too.

It might be closer to the argument given to say that Frege, in particular, does not set aside force (even if other and later logicians do) but that he brings it in in a way that is somehow at odds with the unity of force and content in our utterances. That might be a claim that it is a fool's errand to distinguish force and content (somewhat as Quine argued the impossibility of separating the analytic and synthetic 'components' of a sentence), or it might be a claim that Frege has distinguished them incorrectly, or something else, I don't know. — Srap Tasmaner

In his paper On Redrawing the Force Content Distinction, Christian Martin suggests (and purports to illustrate) that the root of the difficulty is that philosophers tend to universalise the ground of the content/force distinction, or to seek a single account that explains this distinction in all cases (e.g. negation, conjunction, the antecedent of a conditional assertion, fiction, etc.) whereas, according to him, the distinctions made in all of those cases, while proper, only have a family resemblance and must each be sensitive to the features of the specific language game in which they are being deployed. So, while it can make sense to single out the special force of assertion with the judgement stroke, it should no be assumed that the judgement stroke exemplifies a univocal concept (force) that is the same in all cases where one wants to separate force from content in the logical analysis of a thought. Consequently (or so Martin seems to argue), it may be the unwarranted attempt to providing a unified account of force that breaks the unity that force and content have in specific cases where the distinction should rather be drawn in a contextually sensitive way. I am only halfway in my reading of his paper, though, and I may paraphrase Martin's argument differently when I will understand it better, as well as the specific analysis of negation that he provides. (He provides the analysis of other logical connectives in a book that is currently untranslated from the German.)

That sounds very promising.

This is definitely a tangent, but I was just thinking of a puzzle that can arise with properties -- it's close to the distinction between in sensu diviso and in sensu composito, or maybe it's just the order of quantifiers, I'm not sure really. Suppose you have a bunch of marbles, some red and some blue, and you are asked to "list the colors of these marbles." There are two good answers: {red, blue} and {red, blue, red, red, blue, red,...} What is wanted? "Of each color, that it is represented"? Or "Of each marble, its color"?

I thought of this because if instead you were told to sort the marbles by color, there's no ambiguity -- well, not this particular ambiguity. Someone might distinguish the reds and blues more finely, but then we'd be back at the first ambiguity, which is really along a different axis, right?

I wouldn't even throw this little puzzle out there if it weren't for what Kimhi says about propositions versus actual occurrences. The options you get dealing with marbles are different from the options you get dealing with the colors of marbles.

What is wanted? — Srap Tasmaner

I don't it's a case of ambiguity. You just don't have enough information to know what's being asked. You'd have to go back and get the request clarified, right?