I’ve fallen behind, but I like the way that recast the discussion from a birds-eye view. I will try to do something similar in this post. For me the discussion has been an ongoing attempt to frame Kimhi’s critique in ever more precise and interesting ways, yet without ever managing to explain why such a critique is supposed to matter.

I was revisiting Newman’s Grammar of Assent on Anthony Kenny’s recommendation, and it got me to thinking about modus ponens. One point Newman makes is that while inference can be purely formal, with no concrete content (he gives the transitive property of identity as an example), assent requires such content. Assenting to some proposition requires an actual proposition; just ‘p’ will not do. In his review Boynton quotes Rödl, “. . .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. . .” As I noted earlier in the thread, this is a criticism of Kimhi. Kimhi tries to critique Frege from a Fregian point of view, and because of this his critique has no force.

Like p, modus ponens is a very odd abstraction. From the perspective of concrete judgments it seems to say nothing at all, and Wittgenstein is here instructive:

5.132 If p follows from q, I can infer p from q; conclude from q to p.
The method of inference is to be understood from the two sentences alone.
Only they themselves can justify the inference.
Laws of inference, which - as in Frege and Russell - are to justify the conclusions are meaningless and would be superfluous. — Frege, Russell and Wittgenstein on the Judgment Stroke, by Floor Rombout, 57

(Rombout points out that Wittgenstein is interested in the consequence-relation and not inference, and although this is true there is nevertheless a way in which modus ponens seems to lend itself to a consequence-relation framing, which looks to be a problem for Frege.)

To some extent Wittgenstein is right. Put bluntly, modus ponens is not a form of reasoning so much as a form of post hoc reasoning or rationalization. It is an ad hoc response to the problem of the Meno. “How did you get to B from A?” “By holding that B follows from A!”

Rombout argues that Frege, Russell, and Wittgenstein have different conceptions of what logic is, and the problem here may be that Kimhi’s conception of logic is too close to Frege’s to critique it. The deeply Aristotelian response to modus ponens is to reject the form, not to quibble about the assertoric force of different p’s. “Follows from” is the meta-form of all logic, not a rule of inference. For Aristotle, logic is supposed to say why B follows from A, not that B follows from A. This critique of Kimhi’s therefore has more to do with modus ponens than Frege.

Quasi-subjective moves are not at home in logical systems which favor consequence over inference. Frege’s judgment-stroke or Kimhi’s self-consciousness don’t make any sense with respect to ‘p’, because p was not made for such quasi-subjective moves. p is just a true/false abstraction. There’s nothing there to judge.

(What Kimhi is failing to recognize is that his subject-predicate predilection cuts against the things like modus ponens and not just Frege, even though modus ponens was central for Frege. That whole approach deviates from the act of thinking which so interests Kimhi.)

()

On Redrawing the Force Content Distinction, Christian Martin — Pierre-Normand

Good find. This is an important paper for this thread: link to Martin's paper.

-

This analogy seems problematic for the following reason: A mimetic gesture can indeed be performed as a basis for another act, while it can as well be performed without providing the basis for anything further. In contrast, an assertoric gesture is not such that it merely can occur as a basis for a further act. For if it were, it would amount to a forceless while logically contentful act on its own, which is exactly what seemed problematic about the Fregean conception. — On Redrawing the Force Content Distinction, by Christian Martin, 184

This is the point I made to @Srap Tasmaner earlier:

I am pointing to a fourth point, and it requires moving from the equivocity of the indicative mood to the univocity of statements. The idea is that we never handle statements independent of assertions, even when we are not asserting them. In that way a statement is like a tool with only one purpose. — Leontiskos

Before reading Martin I hadn't noticed that Kimhi falls into this himself.

Incidentally, Newman uses 'assent' rather than 'assert', which clears up a lot of the mud that Srap in particular was traversing. I think it also helps address the public/private counterargument.

By assuming that assertoric gestures can either occur “with” or “without” being assertoric acts Kimhi has subscribed to a view that allows for the occurrence of logical acts – namely, mere assertoric gestures – which, albeit generically tied to assertoric force, are not qua particular acts tied to an overarching logical act whose force they actually partake in. — On Redrawing the Force Content Distinction, by Christian Martin, 186

The same problem came up in a recent pm with Bob Ross, where he was tripping over the difference between a species of intentional act and a particular intentional act. Apparently what Wittgenstein sees as context Aquinas would see as intention, where intention is essential to an act and not truly separable from it. Thus a mimetic act and a non-mimetic act are two different kinds of acts.

At this point I very much want to know what motivates you to have faith in Kimhi. Or more precisely, "Suppose Kimhi's arguments fail. How would you try to salvage his project, and what would the aim be?" What's the target here, for you? — Leontiskos

This question about having faith in Kimhi perhaps illuminates a significant difference in how we approach philosophy. I said in the OP that I was unsure whether Kimhi was raising a plausible challenge to Frege on assertion. I was pleasantly surprised to find a number of us willing to do some deep diving, in order to explore this and related questions. But l remain unsure about the Kimhi-inspired challenge, and whether Kimhi's entire project is solid, or whether he's someone who can raise excellent questions but not provide arguable answers.

But there it is . . . I wasn't reading Kimhi in the first place in order to find some truth that might settle some important controversy. I don't believe, at this extremely deep level of meta-philosophy, that such truths exist. I read K in order to better understand the questions, and to work on interpretation (in the hermeneutic sense) of why the protracted antinomies here are so persistent. And here, if you like, my "faith" in Kimhi has proved justified: For all the difficulty attendant on reading him, my insight into the underpinnings of predicate logic, and the many other questions that have arisen, has sharpened, and generated a host of other fascinating (to me) issues. That's why it's worth it, despite the screaming. (His inadequacies as a writer come with the philosophical territory, I would say. Most philosophers aren't good stylists.)

Robert Hanna, in that T&B review that I otherwise didn't like, stood up for a similar outlook:

To begin at the end, my overall judgment is that although Thinking and Being is indeed a
first-rate and perhaps even brilliant piece of philosophy, and although it has genuine
historico-philosophical import, in that, in my opinion, it effectively closes out a 100+
year-long tradition in modern philosophy, namely, the classical Analytic tradition,
nevertheless, all its central theses are false. — Robert Hanna,

I'm figuring that such a conclusion might be incoherent to you -- how could Kimhi be brilliant and important if he gets it all wrong? My outlook is even more modest than Hanna's: We're not yet sure whether he gets it right or wrong, and whether the kinds of things that worry him are in fact solvable. It's too soon, the grist hasn't gone through the mill yet. This happens whenever an important work appears, and has nothing to do, in my opinion, with bringing some controversy to a conclusion. I don't believe philosophy settles questions in that way. Nor will K's brilliance be burnished or tarnished if we never do reach consensus.

I guess that's the target you asked about.

- That all strikes me as a rather elaborate avoidance strategy. If someone doesn't care about a thesis then they won't find arguments for or against it interesting, especially when they profess to be unable to understand those arguments in themselves. It seems that you don't know why you find Kimhi's project interesting, and that is a fact more interesting than any polemic against "settled questions." I suggest finding out why you find Kimhi's project so interesting.

The point here is that this thread lacks a concrete thesis or question: we aren't at all sure what we are doing. I thought that if you knew what you were doing as the author of the OP it might provide us with a direction. It's not a trap so much as a question, "What's your motivation for asking the question?" (How to Write an OP).

I guess that's the target you asked about. — J

Hmm? What I got from that post was, "There is no target, so grab another arrow and keep shooting."

it effectively closes out a 100+ year-long tradition in modern philosophy, namely, the classical Analytic tradition, — Robert Hanna,

It's not at all clear what "classical" analytic philosophy might be, nor what the argument(s) against it might be, and certainly not that they succeed. Nor is it clear that there is any substantial point here against formal logic as it now stands, nor what any alternative might look like.

And it remains unclear what sort of thing "assertoric force" might be.

In the end I remain unimpressed.

- Hanna represents something interesting and probably confused when he says that Kimhi's book, "effectively closes out a 100+ year-long tradition in modern philosophy [even though] all its central theses are false." The efficacy of false theses and the arguments that try to support them...?

I find this whole thing opaque in the absence of some clear motivations about where Kimhi wants to take us, what is at stake, etc. And I am not even particularly attached to the tradition that Kimhi is targeting! I think the sub-text needs to be brought to the surface.

The efficacy of false theses — Leontiskos

If the thesis is false, then there is a thesis. But, what is the thesis?

Since "assertoric force" remains obscure, it remains unclear what the problem with "assertoric force" might be.

Right, or it's that we have a proximate thesis but no remote thesis:

I think that in order for the critique to make sense it must be linked up to some goal of Kimhi's. Kimhi must be made to say, "This point in the OP matters because it can be linked up to my larger concern of X." — Leontiskos

One should apply the context principle to arguments and theses themselves. The meaning of a thesis can only be grasped in relation to the deeper conclusion it is meant to support. So we have Kimhi's proximate thesis: Frege mucked up assertoric force. But what hangs on this? What is the import? What does it matter if Frege did or did not muck up assertoric force? Until we understand this more remote thesis we can't even really understand the proximate thesis.

So we have Kimhi's proximate thesis: Frege mucked up assertoric force. — Leontiskos

What is Frege's notion of assertoric force, and how was it mucked up, and did subsequent developments of the notion of "force" not address those problems, and how is any of this so central to "Classical" analytic philosophy that it undermines it?

Frege's notion of assertic force is to do with the judgment stroke, it was further developed in different directions by model theory and Oxbridge linguistic philosophy, both of which became ubiquitous. It remains unclear what any problem with "classical" analytic philosophy might be.

- :up:

I've never thought of logic as normative. Have you? I've always thought of it as if the mind is a landscape that's just there, that we're inside. Logic is part of the boundaries of it. What do you think logic is?

Frege's notion of assertic force is to do with the judgment stroke, it was further developed in different directions by model theory and Oxbridge linguistic philosophy, both of which became ubiquitous. — Banno

I can't quite figure out if you want to claim that the notion of assertoric force is so obscure and muddled that we ought to entirely dispense with it or if you rather want to claim that it is so clear and well understood that you can't fathom what the problem might be with it.

On edit: Myself, I would say that, yes, we have a fairly good idea regarding what it is but our attempts to make the notion explicit and/or formalize it leads to puzzles regarding its relation to content. (And diagnosing the source of a philosophical puzzle, in general, can be instructive).

I can't quite figure out if you want to claim that the notion of assertoric force is so obscure and muddled that we ought to entirely dispense with it or if you rather want to claim that it is so clear and well understood that you can't fathom what the problem might be with it. — Pierre-Normand

Nor can I. If it is just the illocutionary force involved in making an assertion, then it seems reasonably clear, but then what is Kimhi worried about? and if it is something different, then what? A force involved in denoting - what's that, then? Or something else?

You seem to treat it as fairly transparent. So what is it?

(Reminder: Parmenides puzzle number one is, how can we think what is not the case? Number two is, how can we talk about what is not the case, even to say that it is not?)

Here's most of the footnote on pages 9 and 10. This is not an argument per se, but does lay out pretty well what Kimhi takes himself to be up to in relation to early-ish analytic philosophy.

(1) no objection

Over the course of its history, analytic philosophy has associated different modes of non-existence with different components of a simple proposition. One of the early contributions of the tradition was the construal of non-existence claims as concerning the extensions of predicates through the use of quantifiers.

(2) also fine

Once issues of non-existence that could be understood in terms of empty extensions of predicates were set aside, the interest of analytic philosophers turned to the mode of non-existence associated with the singular term in a simple proposition, and hence to issues such as the status of vacuous names and fictional entities

(3) an eyebrow is raised

While the problems of intentionality and non-existence, analytic philosophers remained notably untroubled by the problems under discussion here— ones that arise in connection with the proposition as a whole. [ The grammar here evades me, and we may be missing a word. ]

(4) a fateful decision

The adoption of the force / content distinction allowed them to construe that which is true / false or is / is-not the case (e.g., a thought, a sentence, a state of affairs) as having its own existence independent of that conferred upon it through the veridical use of the verb “to be.” [ That is, the use of it to mean "is the case". ] Hence they were assured by the force / content distinction that the existence of the underlying propositional whole is guaranteed.

(5) and this is the result

Analytic philosophy thus became completely unconcerned with the problem of non-existence associated with the propositional whole—hence with the difficulties raised by Parmenidean puzzles.

(6) which we decry

The aim of this work is to show that the very notion of a forceless truth-bearer is an illusion through and through, and hence that the difficulties of non-existence associated with the propositional whole—precisely those which are at issue in those puzzles— are inescapable.

TL;DR Kimhi is a proposition skeptic.

He is not the first. Quine was a proposition skeptic, and his issue was indeed with the "propositional whole"; he concluded that our beliefs face the tribunal of evidence en masse. The atomic proposition, Quine argued, was a myth. (Quine effectively declared the end of early analytic philosophy here, and suggested his new "logical empiricism" was in the tradition of American pragmatism.)

Kimhi's proposition skepticism is different; he objects, so far as he indicates here, not to atomicity, but to forcelessness. It is the force / content distinction, he says, that allows philosophers to attribute to propositions independent existence.

This would be an interesting choice. Who believes in atomicity anymore? It's been on the outs for half a century. What might Kimhi find attractive about it?

If it turns out Kimhi is not committed to atomicity, then the proposition is already dead and does not need killing. Perhaps he is not convinced by the previous reports of its death.

Read and re-read part (4) up there. That's the heart of it (but y'all were talking historical context, so you got it).

(4) says not that there are no atomic propositions, but that their existence is "conferred upon" them by the veridical use of "to be", that is, by what we have been calling 'judgment' or 'assertion'.

This does indeed look like the hylomorphic claim that "what you say is the case" exists only immanently in your saying so, not independently as we all suppose Frege to believe. (As variously Aristotle, @Leontiskos and I have suggested.)

In a sense, this claim alone solves the Parmenides puzzles! Or at least the second one. By speaking, we can bring into existence an atomic proposition; we need only say that something is or is not the case. There is no reliance on anything else here, nothing that would be needed to support the existence of our atomic proposition (no "negative fact" for instance, no missing truthmaker). It is entirely within our power.

(He will say something similar about thinking, not relying on anything external to itself.)

What do we think about Kimhi's in-the-moment atomic propositions?

Is that something worth having?

Is it something we will get to keep, or will the various arguments against atomicity sweep these away too?

You seem to treat it as fairly transparent. So what is it? — Banno

I don't think it's transparent at all (although I might have thought that it was fairly unproblematic prior to getting engaged in this thread). One issue arises when we seek to abstract away the content of a proposition as something that is common to all the acts involving this content regardless of their illocutionary force (or the mental equivalents of such forces when propositions are entertained by individuals). Propositional contents "specify" ways for the world to be such that we can allegedly assert, question, imagine, doubt, etc., that the world is that way. In the case where the language at issue is formal and extensional, the problem is less acute. However, in the case of natural languages, the objects, properties, relations, etc. being talked about, aren't merely being stipulated to exist prior to our engaging with them referentially with our speech and mental acts. Their natures and individuation criteria are caught up in the norms of the language games within which we engage with them. (Think of Sellars's material inferences like <'A is located east of B' iff 'B is located west of A'> as a rule that is partially constitutive of the meanings the relational predicates 'east of' and 'west of'). Those norms govern, among other things, what circumstances warrant producing mental acts (or speech acts) with this or that illocutionary force, but they also contribute to determining what those contents are. Hence, the contents of such acts can't always be neatly separated out from their forces.

(As variously Aristotle, Leontiskos and I have suggested.) — Srap Tasmaner

This Aristotle bloke is in good company ;-)

Thanks! So we are talking about illocutionary force - a force that

The adoption of the force / content distinction allowed them to construe that which is true / false or is / is-not the case (e.g., a thought, a sentence, a state of affairs) as having its own existence independent of that conferred upon it through the veridical use of the verb “to be.”

"...having its own existence..."? So in what way does a proposition "exist"? I can make sense of it's being treated as the value of a bound variable, "There is a proposition such that it has as it's subject the cat and the mat". Looks like it could be treated extensionally, too.

Analytic philosophy thus became completely unconcerned with the problem of non-existence associated with the propositional whole

What problem? The sort of thing addressed by free logic or possible world semantics? But then it would not be fair to say it was ignored...

Still puzzled.

So we are talking about illocutionary force — Banno

Don't think so. At least at first, Kimhi says nothing to suggest that you do anything by saying that things stand thus-and-so.

So in what way does a proposition "exist"? — Banno

Only as an abstract object, immanent in an actual use. What I think so far.

What problem? — Banno

He defines three sorts of problems related to non-existence: (1) empty predicates; (2) vacuous singular terms; (3) problems that implicate the whole proposition, not just its parts as in (1) and (2). The third set includes the Parmenidean problems: how do we think, falsely, that the world is how it is not; how do we say, truly, that the world is not as it is not. His examples come from Wittgenstein, one from the early Notebooks, one from the Blue & Brown books.

Only as an abstract object, immanent in an actual use. What I think so far. — Srap Tasmaner

@Banno @Pierre-Normand

I was thinking (surprise). This is about how to ground force "in" the territory of a proposition understood as a set of equivalent truth conditions.

It seems generally comfortable, hereabouts, to conceive of propositions as that which is shared between the expressions _snow is white_ and _schnee ist weiß_. One way of fleshing out what is shared is that both expressions have the same truth conditions. Moreover, that both predicates "is white" and "ist weiß" have the same extensions and that "snow" and "schnee" can be used to denote precisely the same entities and type of entity.

What makes the first paragraph an account of what is shared between the expressions? The account finds that every relevant facet of one expression would apply to the other, it does this by grasping a facet and comparing it to some idealised use case. When assaying the two expressions for their content, no one cares that plenty of humans exist now who believe snow is white but not that schnee ist weiß, in virtue of not speaking enough German - this is allegedly ephemeral, and so it is abstracted. I think it makes sense to call this discrepancy ephemeral because what one speaker would do with the expression "snow is white" is (purportedly) exactly what they would do with the expression "schnee ist weiß".

But you can note that they share other things - when someone judges that snow is white, they would also judge that schnee ist weiß. When someone would reject that snow is white, they would also reject that schnee ist weiß.

I need to take a step back into the characterisation I gave of an extensional account.

A) An extensional analysis of rejection regarding a statement p( x ) must rely on the following claim: asserting the statement ¬p( x ) is equivalent to rejecting p( x ).
B) The equivalence in ( A ) requires that an asserter of p( x ) would commit themselves to all and only the same claims that a rejecter of ~p( x ) would.

Asserting and rejection in the above claim are in fact placeholders. A and B can be modified to refer to an arbitrary pair of relations to p(x), R and S. Each of them need a mapping that applies to p( x ) so that being in relation R to s(p( x )) is equivalent to being in relation S to r(p( x )). That criterion takes a predication, and says that being in relation R to it is equivalent to being in some relation S to some mapping of it.

Previously:
R=affirmation
r=identity
S=rejection
s=negation

A) An extensional analysis of R regarding a statement p( x ) must rely on the following claim: being in relation R to statement r(p( x )) is equivalent to being in relation S to s(p( x )).
B) The equivalence in ( A ) requires that being in relation R to s(p( x )) would commit someone to all and only the same claims that being in relation S to r(p( x )) would.

With that generalisation, ( B ) spells out the equivalence in terms of "commitment to the same claims" under some transformation of the judged statement. However, recall this paragraph in this post:

But you can note that they share other things - when someone judges that snow is white, they would also judge that schnee ist weiß. When someone would reject that snow is white, they would also reject that schnee ist weiß.

The normative machinery in ( B ), "commitment to the same claims", also applies to the judgements regarding snow being white and schnee being weiß - acceptance, affirmation, rejection, rebuking... . Ergo, the same machinery that sets up a criterion for extensional equivalence can also be used to set up a criterion of equivalence that assesses whether two expressions would commit you to the same judgements.

NB, the machinery which allowed us to assay the sentences and refine them into their propositional content with the extensional criterion is also allowing us to assay the sentences and refine them into a flavour of content which includes judgements. I think this heterogenous, but still orderly, collection are the forces we're speaking about. They're baked into the expression like the truth condition is alleged to be.

Whereas the illocutionary force concept is not baked into the commonalities between sentences whose factual content is equivalent. It operates on sentences with a given factual content. Forces seem aligned with the conditions that allow us to grasp an expression's content - content as affirmation, content as rejection. Illocutionary forces are means of operating on an expression's content, content as factual, rejection as practical.

Another aspect of this, which I've thought through far less, is the connection to "being" as Kimhi would have it. But I have an inkling of a way in. If propositional content has a privileged relationship with what is the case - that is, what is - then force would be aligned with what is using the same machinery as above. There is a duality in the illocutionary force concept - content as factual, act as practical - which the force concept avoids. Nowhere near comfortable enough with the thread's material to make that connection well yet though.

I see you already made roughly the same point as I did here with less words.

The idea of logic as normative crops up more in everyday speech, I would say. "You're not being logical!" is a normative reprimand; the idea is that a good arguer ought to use correct logic. More generally, we seem to believe that in most cases, logic represents a template or set of guidelines for good reasoning, and it's all too easy not to use them. We aren't forced to think logically, in the way that, say, we're forced to digest food using [whatever the heck we digest food with].

This is all fairly trivial. Kimhi's idea of the normative applies when a philosopher, noticing the Ontological Law of Non-Contradiction ("both A and ~A cannot be the case"), also notices that it's possible to say contradictory things, inadvertently or on purpose. This philosopher then claims that we shouldn't do this. We ought to fit our thinking to the way the world is. (But again, Kimhi himself is certainly not that philosopher. He won't countenance the dualism.)

You ask what I think logic is. Basically, I agree with you that logic describes one of the "boundaries of the mind." But this boundary is peculiar in two respects, both hinted at above. One, it's a boundary that applies somewhat hypothetically: If we wish to talk sense and not nonsense, we're going to keep within logic's boundary. And two, our reasons for trying to respect it -- to refrain from talking nonsense -- seem all bound up with the OPNC, with our desire to think correctly about the way the world really is.

I don't know if it helps with Banno's cat. — Srap Tasmaner

Schrodinger's cat: Unclear if it's alive or dead
Banno's cat: Unclear if it's referentially determinate
Kimhi's cat: Must be paired with a non-cat to make sense!

:yum:

About Hanna, I agree completely. This sort of bombast is part of why I disliked his review so much. But I quoted him to display an attitude which I think is commendable -- that we can recognize that a piece of philosophy can be very important while also deeply incorrect in the certitude of its conclusions.

Next bit of deviation from mainstream analytic philosophy:

For example, it is widely accepted, to the point that it is almost a dogma of contemporary [ analytic ] philosophy, that we must acknowledge a radical difference between the occurrence of p in extensional truth-functional complexes (such as “~p”) and its occurrence in intensional non-truth-functional complexes (such as “A thinks that p”). Given the way this distinction between logical contexts is usually understood, it has the consequence that, if one wants to answer our above question (what is it for p to occur in propositions of both of these sorts?), one must conclude that the p in question possesses the logically prior character of being something which is in and of itself true or false. — p. 11

There's more, but let's stop here a moment.

Extensional complex propositions are truth-functions of their component propositions, but intensional complex propositions are not. That means that p occurs in an extensional complex on the expectation that it can be given a truth-value contributory to the truth-value of the complex; but when p occurs in an intensional complex, its truth-value makes no difference to the truth-value of the complex. So yes, those ways of occurring are different, maybe even "radically" different.

So how does that lead to "in and of itself true or false"? I think it's just the claim that for p to work in an extensional context it has to be ready to provide a truth value. In particular, that truth value cannot depend on the truth value of any other proposition, so --- atomicity.

Which we had *some* reason to think Kimhi was into, but he has a specific issue here, something about the "logical unity of p and ~p" and he doesn't want to say you can consider p without considering the complex ~p.

That matters because what occurs in an intensional complex like "A thinks p" is the very same proposition that's in ~p, which means we get to consider how p works in these intensional complexes. And any A that affirms p denies ~p. (I'll have to check tonight when I can look at the text, but I think this is one of those self-evident, non-inferential things for him.)

In short, if you take this detour through intensional complexes, you get a specific failure of atomicity, which extensional complexes just require.

Why is this the fault of the extension / intension distinction? I think it's sort of a revenge pattern: yes, the truth-value of p doesn't matter to the truth of "A thinks p", but there's still an exclusionary relationship between "A thinks p" and "A thinks ~p" that the usual view cannot account for, precisely because it blinds us to the p in "A thinks p."

@Banno @Pierre-Normand Great analysis of the Kimhi footnote from @Srap Tasmaner , above. It sets this up:

I think this heterogenous, but still orderly, collection are the forces we're speaking about. They're baked into the expression like the truth condition is alleged to be.

Whereas the illocutionary force concept is not baked into the commonalities between sentences whose factual content is equivalent. It operates on sentences with a given factual content. Forces seem aligned with the conditions that allow us to grasp an expression's content - content as affirmation, content as rejection. Illocutionary forces are means of operating on an expression's content, content as factual, rejection as practical. — fdrake

From the viewpoint provided us by Srap, I think this is right, thanks.

*
Here’s a somewhat related question arising from the many discussions about assertion on this thread, and also from Rombout’s essay/thesis on the judgment stroke as understood by Frege, Russell, and Wittgenstein. (A really helpful work, if you haven't looked at it yet.) How we answer it may shed light on assertion in general.

Consider these two statements:

(1) ‛It is true that p’
(2) ‛Someone asserts that p is true’

In ordinary language, it’s plain to see that they don’t mean the same thing. (1) makes a truth claim, while (2) describes some act of assertion, the subject of which may or may not be true. Compare ‛It’s true that the sky was cloudy today’ and ‛Pat asserted that the sky was cloudy today’. In the first case, the subject is the sky, in the second we’re talking about an assertion of Pat’s. Pat may well be wrong, but I can still truthfully say that she made the assertion.

What’s going on here is a “game,” if you like, about how the word “assert” is used in English. Most competent speakers would have no trouble explaining it. We would say, “ ‛Assert’ can mean ‛say something that is true,’ or it can mean ‛say something purporting to be true’. It depends on the context, and usually it’s clear which meaning is intended.”

Which meaning does Frege have in mind with the judgment stroke? Show your work. :wink:

The idea of logic as normative crops up more in everyday speech, I would say. "You're not being logical!" is a normative reprimand; the idea is that a good arguer ought to use correct logic. More generally, we seem to believe that in most cases, logic represents a template or set of guidelines for good reasoning, and it's all too easy not to use them. We aren't forced to think logically, in the way that, say, we're forced to digest food using [whatever the heck we digest food with]. — J

I see what you're saying. I just don't think anyone other than a few stray mystics is ever truly illogical.
The person who is being admonished to be more logical is being asked to think it through again. Statements of logic, like the LONC, are indubitable. You don't really have any choice in that. If you speak in contradictions (outside of mysticism), you're spouting nonsense, right? You're asserting p's that can't be true. The fault is in failing to take note of what you're bound to think.

As for an ontological LONC, how would we establish that? To nudge Hume, even if it's been true up to now that contradictions don't happen, that doesn't mean it won't start happening tomorrow. The ontological LONC is really an expectation rooted in logic. Double slit experiments cause stress for decades. No one ever makes a credible case for dispensing with the LONC. We're stuck with it.

Am I missing the point here? 

I just don't think anyone other than a few stray mystics is ever truly illogical. . . . Statements of logic, like the LONC, are indubitable. You don't really have any choice in that. — frank

It’s an interesting point. Would you agree that it’s possible to be illogical without knowing it, or meaning it? If so, then plenty of folk besides mystics are frequently illogical. I think what you’re saying is that, once we become aware of the logic/illogic in a statement, we don’t have a choice about which is which. We can no longer think in the way we formerly did, in our confusion, and still claim to make sense. That may well be true.

Am I missing the point here? — frank

Not at all. And if you regard “Either A or ~A” as a Humean generality, then your view of the connection between logic and the world would fall under Kimhi’s category of “psycho / logicism” -- “Either A or ~A” is how things look to us given that OPNC is only an expectation rooted in logic. There may be some version of reality, beyond our ken, in which "The cat is black" and "The cat is not black" happily coexist. (Not talking fuzzy logic here, of course.) His category of “logo / psychism” flips it the other way round – now it’s the world that is indeed displaying logical structure, and if logic as thought does the same, that is an application of the OPNC, not a new principle; we think logically because the world is logical.

Cool. Logo / psychism is basically stoicism.

- Thanks for the posts and attempting to wrestle with the bigger picture. :up:

In short, if you take this detour through intensional complexes, you get a specific failure of atomicity, which extensional complexes just require. — Srap Tasmaner

Yes, I think this is right.

So how does that lead to "in and of itself true or false"? I think it's just the claim that for p to work in an extensional context it has to be ready to provide a truth value. In particular, that truth value cannot depend on the truth value of any other proposition, so --- atomicity. — Srap Tasmaner

Yes, but why are we to think that Kimhi is committed to "atomicity"? That's what puzzled me about your first post. I am also unconvinced that Kimhi is a "proposition skeptic," although it is an interesting idea.

When I started reading Kimhi I received the impression that he knew what he was doing or where he was going. The more I read, the less sure of that I am. I think it was Boynton's review which questioned whether Parmenides was central to Kimhi's argument or more tangential, and that is one example of the difficulty. It is worth remembering that every single secondary source we have examined thinks Kimhi is wrong in significant ways, with the exception of Boynton who thinks he is wrong in a smaller way.

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In a sense, this claim alone solves the Parmenides puzzles! Or at least the second one. By speaking, we can bring into existence an atomic proposition; we need only say that something is or is not the case. There is no reliance on anything else here, nothing that would be needed to support the existence of our atomic proposition (no "negative fact" for instance, no missing truthmaker). It is entirely within our power. — Srap Tasmaner

It is in our power, but I think most parties are agreed that in order to assert ~p there is a "reliance" on an understanding of p. This is the focus of Martin's paper, which seems to be very much on point.

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Most competent speakers would have no trouble explaining it. We would say, “ ‛Assert’ can mean ‛say something that is true,’ or it can mean ‛say something purporting to be true’. It depends on the context, and usually it’s clear which meaning is intended.”

Which meaning does Frege have in mind with the judgment stroke? — J

Rombout points out that Frege is not merely attributing a belief to a subject with his judgment-stroke, and that Wittgenstein fails to recognize this (72). Kimhi seems to follow Wittgenstein in this. Indeed, Kimhi seems to be simply wrong when he says that the argument is inaccessible to Frege that, "She asserts p, therefore p is true" (where 'asserts' refers to Frege's judgment-stroke).

Frege is not merely attributing a belief to a subject with his judgment-stroke, — Leontiskos

That's my reading too -- he's not using the judgment stroke merely to mark a purported truth. But how shall we characterize what he is doing? This is where the problems start to crop up . . .