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. — J

All these problems have been dealt before by the ancients and then by the Kantians. Parmenides asserts the world is ONE but we falsely perceive it as a multiplicity. A is ~A here. The hard part for Parmenides (and other like him) is getting how A is ~A. Schopenhauer, for example, said that this is because (taking from Kant), the world is Ideal, and thus the mind is structured from manifestations of the ONE (Will). I don't think he quite threads the needle... However, the point being that psychology (aka "psychologism") structures the world such that A is ~A, but we cannot see but the metaphysical reality is thusly obscured. It is the same with Buddhist's Nirvana, etc. Reality and illusion is at the heart of much of early philosophy. Analytics seem to just want to clarify the phenomenal reality and to do so, want to provide basic rules to communicate what our psychology tells us. The minute you don't ascribe it to psychology, you are making a METAPHYSICAL claim and not an epistemological one. Schopenhauer had four volumes on his metaphysical claims. Platonists/Neoplatonists also had such writings. There is generally a lack of such claims in linguistically-based analytic philosophy. The problem I see here is that the metaphysics has been detached from the claims. Perhaps Kimhi is decrying this.

- Rombout's tries to set this out in the section on Kant (2.2.2).

...nor what any alternative might look like. — Banno

This is fairly important. Kimhi does somewhat attempt to provide an alternative, but Martin demonstrates rather quickly that Kimhi's alternative falls into the exact same problems that he attributes to Frege's conception (184...).

Thus:

The preceding discussion of the force-content distinction shows that there is, on the one hand, ample motivation for drawing such a distinction, while at the same time indicating that the way in which it is drawn in the Fregean tradition, namely, such as to make it appear as though force were external to thought, is problematic. Holding these two observations together instead of merely focusing on the diagnosis of confusion suggests that one cannot do away with the problems surrounding the force-content distinction by “abandoning” it. For in light of the profound motivations that have led to its introduction, the distinction seems doomed to re-emerge in some guise or other. Therefore, in order to come to terms with force and content, the distinction needs to be redrawn... — On Redrawing the Force Content Distinction, by Christian Martin, 194-5 (my emphasis)

What we need is a constructive alternative, and this is what Martin claims to provide.

attempting to wrestle with the bigger picture — Leontiskos

Quite the opposite. I'm just forcing myself to try to understand the damn book. Although maybe you're right, in the sense that I'm just picking out the bits that seem to address The Tradition.

Yes, but why are we to think that Kimhi is committed to "atomicity"? That's what puzzled me about your first post. — Leontiskos

That was an hypothesis: if he doesn't attack the "atomic" part of "atomic proposition" (which is what Quine did), maybe he's okay with it.

most parties are agreed that in order to assert ~p there is a "reliance" on an understanding of p — Leontiskos

I believe Kimhi wants to say these are the same thing, in the following sense (although there's some labor over it): extensionally, ~p is a complex proposition dependent certainly for truth-value but perhaps also for sense on p; intensionally, to consider p at all is also to consider ~p, to think or judge or say one is also to take a position on the other.

Another way to get there has been discussed earlier in the thread, but I don't know if it's Kimhi's way or equivalent, and that's to deny that ~p is a component of an intensional complex like "A thinks ~p", and construe this instead as "A thinks-not p" or "A denies p".

That would be a pretty Fregean move, like saying "A is" is not a component of "A is red."

Section 2.2.2 is good overview of the Kantian debt, but it presupposes a certain reading of Frege that I'm trying to get clearer about. Do we all agree that "in the Fregean paradigm a true judgment is a bit pleonastic: only true statements may be asserted, and therefore judgments can only be true"? (ftnt. 38, p. 23) I think Frege indeed says this. But then we have "True judgments aren't just true for a subject, or according to a subject, but objectively true and acknowledged to be so by a subject." (23) The connection for Kant is clear enough, but is Rombout right when he says that "Frege needs a realm of thoughts that may be grasped" by a subject?

Let's go back to my statement (1). To say it, all Frege needs to do is put a judgment stroke in front of it. Does this mean that Frege is the subject, in the sense of "the one who is acknowledging the objective truth"? Is this really what he means? Or is it closer to a Kantian transcendental subject? I'm trying to imagine Frege replying, "Yes, every proposition I've prefixed with a judgment stroke is one I know to be true." Wouldn't he be more likely to say, "These are for purposes of example"? But now we're back to purported or believed or proposed truths.

If I've missed a specific bit in Rombout 2.2.2. that addresses this, I'd be happy to have the reference, but even happier to hear your thoughts about it.

Quite the opposite. I'm just forcing myself to try to understand the damn book. Although maybe you're right, in the sense that I'm just picking out the bits that seem to address The Tradition. — Srap Tasmaner

Well, I am really looking for any kind of "bigger picture." Kimhi's bigger picture, J's bigger picture, or philosophy's bigger picture - in that order. Understanding the book requires the first.

That was an hypothesis — Srap Tasmaner

Okay.

I believe Kimhi wants to say these are the same thing, in the following (although there's some labor over it): extensionally, ~p is a complex proposition dependent certainly for truth-value but perhaps also for sense on p; intensionally, to consider p at all is also to consider ~p, to think or judge or say one is also to take a position on the other. — Srap Tasmaner

Right, and Kimhi gets subtle here in saying that they co-implicate each other even though p has a primacy over ~p.

Another way to get there has been discussed earlier in the thread, but I don't know if it's Kimhi's way or equivalent, and that's to deny that ~p is a component of an intensional complex like "A thinks ~p", and construe this instead as "A thinks-not p" or "A denies p". — Srap Tasmaner

I also forget Kimhi's exact position, but I know he considers such ideas. He is trying to get away from such atomic or compositionalist approaches, and if Boynton is right then Kimhi follows Frege in attributing "syncategorematicity" to the whole of a judgment, such that it becomes a single whole.

he's not using the judgment stroke merely to mark a purported truth. But how shall we characterize what he is doing? — J

I have a thought about this, which almost made it in an earlier post.

Kimhi says that existence is conferred on propositions by the veridical use of 'to be', so that's judgment or assertion.

Frege wants propositions to be the object of thought, but he also wants them to have independent existence. It's almost as if he half accepts Kimhi's position, but then confers existence on his propositions in perpetuity by borrowing the veridical use of 'to be' and tacking it right onto the proposition. There! Fixed!

But this is worse than doing nothing in Kimhi's view because this is a complete sham. Propositions exist only in the judgments of thinkers; the veridical use of 'to be' no more stands *on its own* than propositions do, so you cannot just rip it from a thinker's mouth and solve the problem of the independence of propositions.

(This turns out to be the other side of my realization that Frege probably means 'judgment' in some strangely objective sense.)

syncategorematicity — Leontiskos

Yeah I haven't gotten to that stuff yet.

It's painful reading. I know a lot of that is just me, that I'm out of practice, but I never felt so frustrated reading Dummett or Sellars, writers many people dislike. There's something disorganized about Kimhi's writing, that nothing he says makes sense on its own, without all of his other thoughts. But you can't say everything at once; as a writer you have to impose some structure, if not lemma-theorem-corollary, then at least something pedagogical, building it up. Wittgenstein struggled with this and found not one but two solutions! Kimhi doesn't seem to have.

- Heh, yeah. I added some edits to this post before I realized you were online, and one of them was along these lines:

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. — Leontiskos

It's not you. Apparently some version of T&B had circulated for a long time and Kimhi didn't want to publish it but was finally persuaded. As I said someplace earlier, this book has an editor's fingerprints all over it, and not a good one. So much could have been improved, especially the layout of the progression of his ideas. But here we all are, chewing it over, and that, IMHO, is a tribute to the depth and originality of Kimhi's thought, despite his shortcomings as an organized writer.

It's painful reading. — Srap Tasmaner

On page 17 I argued that Kimhi is too bound up in a Fregian paradigm to overcome Frege. The challenge for the anti-analytics is to make an argument that is both sound and coherent, for in opposing analytic philosophy one wishes to oppose the method and not merely the content, and given that the method of analytic philosophy is exceedingly clear, the anti-analytic is moved in the direction of obscurantism, seen most obviously in a thinker like Heidegger. They do not wish to engage analytic philosophy on its own terms. This is understandable, but it makes it harder for those of us on the ground to separate the wheat from the chaff.

I have only found thinkers who are deeper in history to be capable of overcoming modern antinomies, such as that between analytic and continental philosophy.

the depth and originality of Kimhi's thought — J

I consider the jury decidedly out on this.

Kimhi is too bound up in a Fregian paradigm to overcome Frege — Leontiskos

I don't know the contemporary landscape well, but I think the dominance of something recognizable as analytic philosophy was already slipping in the 70s and 80s. Rorty, Stanley Cavell, Annette Baier (I think also of the Pittsburgh crowd) and others seem distinctly post-analytic.

But Frege and Husserl, this is the last moment before the split. So if you want not to join one side or the other, you might go back to the most recent common ancestor. (Without just taking Kant for another spin.)

But I think it's pretty uncommon to see anyone who isn't doing ancient philosophy or Heidegger talk about "the unity of thinking and being". That's pretty out there, but again I don't know the scene well anymore.

I don't know the contemporary landscape well, but I think the dominance of something recognizable as analytic philosophy was already slipping in the 70s and 80s. Rorty, Stanley Cavell, Annette Baier (I think also of the Pittsburgh crowd) and others seem distinctly post-analytic. — Srap Tasmaner

That's true.

But Frege and Husserl, this is the last moment before the split. So if you want not to join one side or the other, you might go back to the most recent common ancestor. — Srap Tasmaner

Well, yes, but that is one of the things that I find so odd about Kimhi: he reads Frege in a purely analytic direction. I am convinced that (a particular flavor of) Wittgenstein must be the key to understanding Kimhi's approach. When J was initially posting about Kimhi I wasn't recognizing that Wittgenstein is Kimhi's central source.

Wittgenstein — Leontiskos

Yeah there are certainly hints, and that alone makes him an outlier these days.

I will revisit that section when I get a chance, but in this area there is an inherent danger. Kimhi is right to say that thinking is unique. It is also mysterious, and ineliminably so (in large part because it is unique). Frege's judgment-stroke reflects this mysterious nature of thinking. For example, as says, Frege wants to have it both ways. So does Kimhi when he says things such as, "It is both x and not-x." It seems that we are just bumping up against the mysteriousness of thinking.

The danger then is something like "mystery swapping." Kimhi wants to construe the mystery in a different way than Frege does. At such a point we need to be very clear about what constitutes a better construal or account of a mystery. When someone says something about a mystery it is very easy to contradict them, and much harder to say something profitable oneself. The question of a target enters again, because if we have no target about what constitutes a better mystery-account and what constitutes a worse mystery-account, then we are up a creek without a paddle. As Martin's paper bears out, it becomes very difficult to recognize the parameters that a suitable account of, say, the content-force distinction, will adhere to.

...along these same lines, I often opposed those in the thread who said, "Frege is just giving a model, so who cares if it's a bit off?" Of course he is not giving a model, but there is still truth in such an objection. I would phrase it as something like, "Frege did not give a perfect account of the mystery of thinking, but it is not a bad account, and in order to critique it we would need to get much clearer on what should be thought to constitute a better account."

those in the thread who said, "Frege is just giving a model, so who cares if it's a bit off?" — Leontiskos

Ahem.

Of course he is not giving a model — Leontiskos

I absolutely think he is, even though he didn't think so. Newtonian mechanics? Pretty damn good model used appropriately, within certain limits, but its author thought it was Truth. And he was wrong. Doesn't matter what he thought he was doing, the model he left us is useful.

And so it is with Frege.

who cares if it's a bit off? — Leontiskos

Btw, Timothy Williamson tells a story about explaining the Gettier cases to an economist, who was mystified by the importance philosophers attach to them. "So there are exceptions. So what? All models have exceptions." And Williamson -- who's been doing just fine in the current regime -- thought, maybe we really have been going about this wrong, and has become an advocate for at least incorporating the modeling mindset into philosophy.

Frege wants propositions to be the object of thought, but he also wants them to have independent existence. — Srap Tasmaner

Yes, that's the nub of the question I was raising with my statements (1) and (2).

you cannot just rip it from a thinker's mouth and solve the problem of the independence of propositions. — Srap Tasmaner

And (1) tries to do just that, hence my question -- who here is thinking this? It goes back again to those provocative lines from Rodl about the "life of p":

Philosophers are in the habit of indicating the object of judgment by 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. — Sebastian Rodl

Part of our unearned insouciance is this story we tell ourselves about how p can, of course, "stand on its own" in some obvious way.

(This turns out to be the other side of my realization that Frege probably means 'judgment' in some strangely objective sense.) — Srap Tasmaner

If we decide that he's talking about actual rather than purported or exemplary judgments, then yes, the strange objectivity arises because he's committed to vouching for their truth. This connects with what Rombout speaks about when he says, "In order to judge, one really has to do something. Judging is not a capacity but an act."

the depth and originality of Kimhi's thought
— J

I consider the jury decidedly out on this. — Srap Tasmaner

OK, maybe I'm a bit previous here! Admittedly, we could be spending all the time we're spending on Kimhi because we want to figure out if he's got anything worth contributing, not because we already know he does. And as I was saying to @Leontiskos earlier, of course the jury is still out, we don't yet know what other 1st class philosophers are going to do with him. All I can say is, after a lot of years watching flavor-of-the-month philosophers come and go (ah, remember Paris fashions?), Kimhi feels like the real deal to me. We'll see . . .

he's committed to vouching for their truth — J

Yes and no.

You've played with this stuff, right? You write down "P" and that means P is a premise; it's *treated as* true. In essence, all symbolic logic is hypothetical. You just see how things work out *given* certain premise and inference rules. (And natural deduction systems have additional ways of doing this.)

What I think is unavoidable is vouching for P as a truth-bearer, and for its availability. That is, that it is a proposition.

we don't yet know — J

The book has been out what since 2018? I don't know how many articles have been updated since then, but he gets not a single mention on SEP. (I haven't checked his Google scholar or PhilPapers rankings.)

Part of our unearned insouciance is this story we tell ourselves about how p can, of course, "stand on its own" in some obvious way. — J

Isn't it because the world is supposed to stand on it's own, and true propositions are states of the world?

If you read a textbook on anatomy, you aren't supposed to think of it as being asserted by someone in particular. It's like das Man, except with the textbook it's the scientific establishment.

Both your responses allude to the difficulties I see here.

You write down "P" and that means P is a premise; it's *treated as* true. — Srap Tasmaner

Right, and why would anyone question that? Except that Kimhi and perhaps Rodl (I don't know much about him, apart from the citations in Boynton) are saying, "Wait a minute, not so fast. Then what is the judgment stroke supposed to be doing? Does it import or ratify actual truth somehow? Who has acted thus upon p? What exactly would it have meant to 'treat something as true' without the judgment stroke?" Such annoying questions, but are we sure how we should answer?

If you read a textbook on anatomy, you aren't supposed to think of it as being asserted by someone in particular. — frank

Indeed, and the use of p in a logic textbook isn't meant to invoke a real human subject doing the writing. But here again: Someone did write the anatomy textbook, and if it ever came to a question of accuracy, who that person was and the status of their ability to assert truthfully would be very much at issue. It's much worse with logic, because of the self-reflection involved. "Someone" is offering us statements and perhaps judgments that purport to be true, and they are about what purporting to be true is, in logic, which includes the vexing question of assertion. We want to say that this is "innocent" at the level of p, but does Frege's own understanding of what a proposition is, allow us to do so?

This may be where the uniqueness of thinking, a la Kimhi, starts to make itself felt. A thought simply cannot be separated from a thinker, on this view.

I'm not sure about any of this, but it's pretty clear that Kimhi wants us to question every assumption about how we're entitled to do logic -- even if we only wind up reinstating the assumptions.

The book has been out what since 2018? I don't know how many articles have been updated since then, but he gets not a single mention on SEP. (I haven't checked his Google scholar or PhilPapers rankings.) — Srap Tasmaner

OK. I assumed from the Martin and Conant cites that T&B is being taken seriously. Maybe not.

https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/935118

We want to say that this is "innocent" at the level of p, but does Frege's own understanding of what a proposition is, allow us to do so? — J

Right. That's the first thing that occurred to me about it. Frege's propositions must reflect context of utterance. I was thinking there might be some sort of phantom assertion to it, something generally understood as with the textbook. "One observes...". instead of "she observed.."

When was the force stroke supposed to be used?

He defines three sorts of problems related to non-existence: (1) empty predicates; (2) vacuous singular terms; (3) problems that implicate the whole proposition — Srap Tasmaner

Ok, this might be informative. Firstly, there is a large body of literature for these issues, so it is not the case that these are ignored by logicians and others. Secondly, there are ways of dealing with these issues, indeed, many for each. It might be argued that there is no consensus, but why should there be? To think that there is one right way to deal with such things is to adopt logical monism, and there are good grounds not to do this.

...how do we think, falsely, that the world is how it is not; — Srap Tasmaner

Well, we don't. It's a confused notion. One response is also from Wittgenstein, and is close to Frege - that to understand (the content of) a statement is to understand what would be involved in it's being true as well as it's being false; to understand the difference between the cat being on the mat and the cat being on the lounge. There's a fair bit in the Tractatus on this, and it is one of the ideas carried into his later work.

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

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

That's not what I am asking. Sure, propositions are abstract, for some notion of "abstract". But what does it mean to say they exist? Following the usual analytic approach, we might ask the contrary question, "what could it mean for a proposition to not exist?". I hope you see this as problematic. And if this latter question is problematic, so is the former. We might do something analogous to Quine's "to be is to be the value of a bound variable", using a second-order logic ranging over propositions, and here it might be clear what it is for a proposition to exist, but that does not seem to be the question being asked. And hence we might do well to approach the notion of propositions existing with some scepticism until it can be made clear what a non-existent proposition might be.

Last night turned into an early morning, so I am somewhat weary, and havn't been able to follow your point closely. But it seems you are pointing out that in order to say that snow is white, is the same as to say that schnee ist weiß, extensionaly, we would need the entire paraphernalia Tarski brings to his discussion of truth. We can't just take "schnee" and "snow" to meant he same thing; we have to show that they are extensionally equivalent, employing something along the lines of

A name n satisfies an object o if and only if (( n = "Adam" and o = Adam) or ( n = "Bob" and o = Bob) or( n = "Carol" and o = Carol)...

...so that the metalanguage is talking about the same things as the object language. Where one arrives is at some variation of Convention T, that "schnee ist weiß" is true iff Snow is white.

Now it is not clear to me that we have made a judgement here as to whether snow is white, or even schnee ist weiß... Rather all we have succeeded in doing is setting out what would have to be the case for "schnee ist weiß" to be true. The judgement remains something further, something outside this logic.

Real life calls. I'll try to return to this later.

- Well, is Kimhi going to disagree with you that Frege's approach is useful?

I don't think the "modeling mindset" is an improvement, and I think the main reason approaches like Frege's turn out to be useful is because they were intended to be more than just models. I was actually hoping that you were going to write your new thread on this topic.

But my point seems to stand intact:

Of course he is not giving a model, but there is still truth in such an objection. I would phrase it as something like, "Frege did not give a perfect account of the mystery of thinking, but it is not a bad account, and in order to critique it we would need to get much clearer on what should be thought to constitute a better account." — Leontiskos

To say it, all Frege needs to do is put a judgment stroke in front of it. Does this mean that Frege is the subject, in the sense of "the one who is acknowledging the objective truth"? Is this really what he means? — J

It sounds like it, but of course it would require more research into Frege to know for sure. Along the lines of my other response, realists arguing about the nature of knowable objective truths is a lot of inside baseball. Every theory is a bit unwieldy, if only because objective truth is unwieldy, and to adjudicate between them is a difficult task.

of course the jury is still out — J

For me 18 pages with little to show testifies against Kimhi. We have produced very little fruit in the way of understanding his argument, and the prima facie conclusion now says that there is not much to be understood.

It is true that the tangents have been interesting. Working backwards, we have Pierre and fdrake attempting to show Banno why illocutionary force is different from assertoric force; then the point from Pierre about what precisely Frege might mean by the term proposition, etc. There have been a lot of forays into Kimhi where we attempted to strike for gold, but each one seems to have come up short. It will be interesting to see what @Srap Tasmaner makes of the book. I thought the thread was out of gas on page 11, but then @Pierre-Normand came in and breathed new life into it, particularly in providing Martin's paper.

For me the secondary sources were most interesting and informative, including Narboux's book review, Boynton's review, Novak's paper relating to the Parmenidean puzzles, Rombout's paper on the judgment-stroke, and Martin's paper on redrawing the force-content distinction. Threads could be made on any of these related topics, and I hope @Srap Tasmaner finishes the thread he began to write.

Regardless of Kimhi's merits, the thread and topic are interesting. Depending on your target, there may be others who are better archers. Martin gives a slew of folks who have worked on this exact same topic of Frege's force-content distinction, and I'm not sure that Kimhi engages any of them. Indeed, the way that Kimhi fails to engage the existing scholarship on the issues he pursues is part of the reason why my faith in him has flagged. If I had to give someone the ball of the OP to run with, it would certainly be Martin and not Kimhi.

I don't think the "modeling mindset" is an improvement, and I think the main reason approaches like Frege's turn out to be useful is because they were intended to be more than just models. — Leontiskos

Nowhere that I've noticed in Frege or Kimhi is there any recognition that ordinary people, who do most the thinking and asserting (and working and paying, and living and dying), also think about what they're doing, not from off to the side as philosophers, except maybe sometimes, but in the midst of doing it, because thinking about how you're speaking, for example, or how someone else is, whether they mean what they say, whether there's something else implied by what they say or the way they say it, whether you might be giving the wrong impression, all of this matters tremendously to understanding each other (or manipulating each other, etc). This kind of theorizing is not optional, but an important part of everyday thinking and talking.

And the kind of theorizing people do everyday is my kind, not Frege's or Kimhi's, and I would call it modelling because people know that most of what they think is only true "for the most part" or "usually" or "depending", and that you have to be willing to adapt and adjust, and the strategic choices we make in thought and speech and action don't have guaranteed results, just chances. My sort are for this kind of probabilistic modelling because it works.

Nowhere that I've noticed in Frege or Kimhi is there any recognition that ordinary people, who do most the thinking and asserting (and working and paying, and living and dying), also think about what they're doing, not from off to the side as philosophers, except maybe sometimes, but in the midst of doing it, because thinking about how you're speaking, for example, or how someone else is, whether they mean what they say, whether there's something else implied by what they say or the way they say it, whether you might be giving the wrong impression, all of this matters tremendously to understanding each other (or manipulating each other, etc). This kind of theorizing is not optional, but an important part of everyday thinking and talking. — Srap Tasmaner

There are a number of different issues at play in such a post. I think they are better fit for a new thread because they are topics of general interest. But to take one: must philosophy be accessible to the masses, or address issues that are "not optional"? I don't think so, but I can see why such philosophy is more interesting and appealing. Nevertheless, throughout the thread I have been asking about what larger implications Kimhi's thesis is supposed to have, and I assumed that this matter of 'relevance' was going to come up. "Kimhi's critique is important/relevant because..." I certainly grant you that the thread has remained very abstract and remote from considerations of relevance. That's a fair point.

And the kind of theorizing people do everyday is my kind, not Frege's or Kimhi's, and I would call it modelling because people know that most of what they think is only true "for the most part" or "usually" or "depending", and that you have to be willing to adapt and adjust, and the strategic choices we make in thought and speech and action don't have guaranteed results, just chances. — Srap Tasmaner

So are Kimhi and Frege then opposed to partial truths, or do they think that it is inappropriate to be willing to adapt and adjust, or that all of our strategic choices have guaranteed results? I don't see why one would say that. But I am not yet convinced that the two do not intersect. If Kimhi or Frege are correct then everyday theorizing is bound up in their account.

Curiously, my friend who teaches high school philosophy was complaining about Aristotle's logic in the same sort of way, and I tried to explain that Aristotle's logic is very flexible and broad, and is even meant to include reasoning based on such caveats (e.g. in the Rhetoric Aristotle explicitly speaks about the way logical forms interact with non-"deductive" kinds of argument). ...But that's a tangent of a tangent. :grin:

And the kind of theorizing people do everyday is my kind, not Frege's or Kimhi's, and I would call it modelling because people know that most of what they think is only true "for the most part" or "usually" or "depending", and that you have to be willing to adapt and adjust, and the strategic choices we make in thought and speech and action don't have guaranteed results, just chances. My sort are for this kind of probabilistic modelling because it works. — Srap Tasmaner

I guess the response here is that Frege and Kimhi are interested in speculative knowledge, not practical knowledge, and classically speculative knowledge is thought to undergird practical knowledge. On this classical account we never carry out practical activities without also engaging in speculative knowing. For example, if you want to eat an orange you must first be able to recognize it and see that it is edible, nutritious, desirable, etc. If you can't possess that kind of knowledge about it then the question of eating it will never come up.

I actually thought it was you who was talking about the way that these more complex social-practical assessments presuppose the building blocks of assertion (or really assent), but maybe it was someone else? For example, one cannot lie before they know how to assert.