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
...nor what any alternative might look like. — Banno
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)
attempting to wrestle with the bigger picture — Leontiskos
Yes, but why are we to think that Kimhi is committed to "atomicity"? That's what puzzled me about your first post. — Leontiskos
most parties are agreed that in order to assert ~p there is a "reliance" on an understanding of p — 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. — Srap Tasmaner
That was an hypothesis — Srap Tasmaner
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
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
he's not using the judgment stroke merely to mark a purported truth. But how shall we characterize what he is doing? — J
syncategorematicity — Leontiskos
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 painful reading. — Srap Tasmaner
the depth and originality of Kimhi's thought — J
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. — Srap Tasmaner
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
Wittgenstein — Leontiskos
those in the thread who said, "Frege is just giving a model, so who cares if it's a bit off?" — Leontiskos
Of course he is not giving a model — Leontiskos
who cares if it's a bit off? — Leontiskos
Frege wants propositions to be the object of thought, but he also wants them to have independent existence. — Srap Tasmaner
you cannot just rip it from a thinker's mouth and solve the problem of the independence of propositions. — Srap Tasmaner
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
(This turns out to be the other side of my realization that Frege probably means 'judgment' in some strangely objective sense.) — Srap Tasmaner
the depth and originality of Kimhi's thought
— J
I consider the jury decidedly out on this. — Srap Tasmaner
he's committed to vouching for their truth — J
we don't yet know — J
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
You write down "P" and that means P is a premise; it's *treated as* true. — Srap Tasmaner
If you read a textbook on anatomy, you aren't supposed to think of it as being asserted by someone in particular. — frank
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
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
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.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
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....how do we think, falsely, that the world is how it is not; — 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.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
...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.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)...
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
of course the jury is still out — J
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. — Srap Tasmaner
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
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
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