So it is making an assertion. Attaching an illocutionary force. Doing something with the proposition. — Banno

and spoke to this, but the problem with phrasing it that way is that it closes the question that is supposed to remain open. The question is, "Is it possible to detach the assertoric force from an assertion and still be left with an intelligible declarative sentence?" The illocutionary force approach—which I am not overly familiar with—presupposes that you can remove the force and be left with an intelligible sentence. And presumably everyone is in agreement that you can remove the illocutionary force, without being in agreement on whether you can remove the assertoric force, which in itself shows that the two are different. Illocutionary force is apparently meant to be something superadded, whereas critics of Frege think that assertoric force is not superadded in the way that Frege supposed.*

The question is subtle. It asks whether an (unasserted) declarative sentence has some kind of latent or dormant assertoric force which is inseparable from the sentence itself. Presumably no one is wondering if sentences have latent or dormant illocutionary force.


* And I suppose it is crucial to note that Frege's distinction between assertoric force and predicate was not intended to be merely stipulative. He thought he was saying something that was both true and previously unattended to. He thought that his recognition of the clean separability of the two, via the judgment-stroke, was an advance. For example, see his quote <here>.

but the problem with phrasing it that way is that it closes the question that is supposed to remain open. — Leontiskos

Could that be becasue the question is muddled?

And presumably everyone is in agreement that you can remove the illocutionary force, without being in agreement on whether you can remove the assertoric force, which in itself shows that the two are different. — Leontiskos

Not everyone. Very few, I suspect. To remove the "assertoric force" is to remove whatever it is that makes a declaration into an assertion. And that is what the illocutionary force of does.

The question is subtle. — Leontiskos

Indeed. To the point of invisibility.

We can understand what it would take for a statement to be true or false, without assigning a judgement to the statement. — Banno

Let's consider your cat, and the mat he is sometimes on.

How did you learn he was a cat? Or that what lounges upon is a mat?

Perhaps someone pointed at him, or a picture of one of his brethren, and said "cat" or "This is a cat", and did something similar for the mat.

To explain the preposition, a picture (or a reality) of the cat on the mat, accompanied by the sentence "The cat is on the mat" would be typical. (The finest treatise on English prepositions I know is Go Dog. Go!. It sounds like it will be primarily about verbs, but it devotes considerable attention to prepositions. Interestingly, many of the "captions" dispense with the copula, and just say "A blue dog on a red tree," or "A dog out of a car," like so.)

Now it's true that even if no one ever taught you, in so many words, "an apple in the mailbox" or "An apple is in the mailbox", you can still understand what would be going on if that were so.

But you can imagine learning English without anyone ever having resorted to veridical descriptions of the situation shown in a picture or plainly visible to you?

Could you substitute "imagine a cat" for the demonstration with the picture or with the cat?

Could that be becasue the question is muddled? — Banno

Sure. Could be.

Martin racks up a lot of different folks who have claimed that there is something wrong with the way Frege separates out assertoric force, and if I have time I may read his paper more carefully to get a better feel for the nature and gravity of the difficulty. Wittgenstein was obviously one of them.

---

But you can imagine learning English without anyone ever having resorted to veridical descriptions of the situation shown in a picture or plainly visible to you? — Srap Tasmaner

This is close to Newman's distinction between real and notional assent.

Yep, all that. We learn to use a language by using it.

So what is the force in assertoric force? Is what you are claiming that the assertoric force is how "The cat" denotes the cat? Than it's about denotation, and fine. But that's not 's "some kind of latent or dormant assertoric force which is inseparable from the sentence itself." It's picking stuff out.

I don't think the notion of assertoric force is clear enough to be understood, if it is something different from denotation or illocutionary force.

I don't think the notion of assertoric force is clear enough to be understood, if it is something different from denotation or illocutionary force. — Banno

For Frege, isn't it about the "judgement of a statement as true".

"It is true that the sky is blue" would be an example of something with assertoric force.

Assertion does NOT equal denotation.. "The cat" is a reference to something "in the world".

All of this goes back to various things I've asked earlier and no one cared to pick up (i.e. the nature of "truth", how it is related to the judgement of a sentence, metaphysics and epistemology, and all that).

Edit: For Frege, for example, it is good to know he is a Platonist about propositions metaphysically. It is good to know how he viewed epistemology in how we can judge a proposition as true, etc. etc. It would be even better if we knew how he connected reference to words (thoughts?).

We learn to use a language by using it. — Banno

But at first -- and what I was pointing out -- there's a lot of someone else using it, and using it in, so far as I can tell, in one particular way. It's hard even to imagine an alternative.

(Interestingly, there's been some work on how this continues as the child gains competence. By 3 or 4 or 5, depending on who you ask, children distinguish between an adult expressing a personal view and an adult speaking pedagogically, speaking for their community.)

And presumably everyone is in agreement that you can remove the illocutionary force, without being in agreement on whether you can remove the assertoric force, which in itself shows that the two are different. Illocutionary force is apparently meant to be something superadded, whereas critics of Frege think that assertoric force is not superadded in the way that Frege supposed.

The question is subtle. It asks whether an (unasserted) declarative sentence has some kind of latent or dormant assertoric force which is inseparable from the sentence itself. Presumably no one is wondering if sentences have latent or dormant illocutionary force. — Leontiskos

For Austin, assertions are one specific kind of illocutionary acts. When one utters the the sentence "p" with assertoric force, they thereby also perform a locutionary act that may be likened to presenting the content of the utterance. So, Austin also has available to him a notion of the content of an utterance with the force removed (or abstracted away) from it. One significant difference between Frege and Austin, though, is that Austin conceives of illocutionary speech acts (such as assertion) primarily within a speaker-hearer framework. Judging that p (e.g. through making up one's mind that p is the case), or asserting it out loud while, unbeknownst to one, nobody is there to hear and understand the claim being made, would need to be understood derivatively from the primary case where a move has been made in a language game. I view this as a virtue of Austin's pragmatic account of language since it secures its connection to the public norms governing the use of a language and to the pragmatic significance of our language games.

Again, yes. And how does this relate to assertoric force? What is assertoric force? It's not the illocutionary force of making an assertion...? It's not what is involved in denoting this rather than that? It's something in between, but what?

This is just an application of the classical analytic "What do you mean by..."; but is there a satisfactory answer?

"It is true that the sky is blue" would be an example of something with assertoric force. — schopenhauer1

And of the illocution of making an assertion. So how does assertoric force differ from the illocution of making an assertion?

And of the illocution of making an assertion. So how does assertoric force differ from the illocution of making an assertion? — Banno

Illocution is the intent behind the statement. "The sky is blue" might be intended as a poem, a riddle, a question, etc. It may be an assertion, but not necessarily.

Assertoric force would be one that is a type of illocution relating to the judgement of a statement being true.

The SEP says this about Frege's view of assertion:

" It is in the force of an utterance that the step is taken from the content to the actual point of evaluation. This view has been stated by Recanati with respect to the actual world:

"[…] a content is not enough; we need to connect that content with the actual world, via the assertive force of the utterance, in virtue of which the content is presented as characterizing that world. (Recanati 2007:". here

The act of assertion pins down the meaning of a thought so it becomes truth-apt. How do we know which cat is supposed to be in the mat? We need context. The context is revealed in the time and place of the assertion. It's about indexing. That's what I've been assuming anyway.

And how does this relate to assertoric force? What is assertoric force? It's not the illocutionary force of making an assertion...? It's not what is involved in denoting this rather than that? It's something in between, but what? — Banno

Well, obviously I don't know. If I knew, I wouldn't still be trying to figure it out.

Think about the peculiarity of being taught the word "cat". When mom says "This is a cat," would you describe that as her telling the little one it's a cat? Kinda. But don't you have to already know what a cat is, to find out that something is a cat? And for a similar reason, it wouldn't make sense to describe mom as claiming that it's a cat. What could that mean to the little guy?

Anyway here's these sentences people use, that look kinda illocutionary, kinda assertoric, but aren't quite that. Austin doesn't have a category for these, does he? Maybe "instructives." That's a pity. I can't help but wonder what he would say.

And it's a curious fact that these peculiar utterances constitute a lot of how we learn language, and how we learn to learn more, and when it's our turn we talk the same way to teach new little ones.

And the connection to the topic is that these sentences, and sentence substitutes (which I'm disinclined to call elliptical sentences, but maybe they are), don't just have a certain form; they have to be veridical.

I don't know if it's any help. But it's curious that this is how we transmit our linguistic knowledge to the next generation.

@Srap Tasmaner

This is a related analogy, but is not exactly what is going on in the thread. Kimhi's forces aren't quite illocutionary forces, we're not talking about speech act theory, by my reckoning we're closer to talking about logic - like a natural language Conceptual Notation but written in natural language. A formal kinematics of thought in its relation to the world. Treat this as an invitation to engage with the thread topic on its own terms. I also don't know precisely what the forces are, I'm just opening another door for them.

I think the muddle between force in thread and illocutionary forces comes down to never seeing a free floating proposition out in the wild. The proposition is largely a philosophical construct you get from distilling sentences down to what makes them true or false. You then call this the propositional content of the sentence. You take inspiration from declarative sentences and apply it to non-declarative uses of language.

To do that distillation in the latter case, you first neglect the use case. You find the content first. You then "analyse" the use back in by notionally associating some force to the propositional content. And finally present an IRL speech act as a pair {illocutionary force, propositional content}, and that's the end of the analysis. Finally the couple {illocutionary force, propositional content} is notionally equated to the analysed speech act, and they're treated as equivalent.

If you want to use this style of analysis, and see the thread through its terms entirely, you're going to remain confused. Since traditionally if you write down an argument like "if p then q, p, therefore q", you're definitely not thought of asserting p in the first conditional, and you're almost certainly not thought of asserting p in the quoted argument. You can look at logic as a flow control system for propositional content to other propositional content, and never have to care about force at all when you're just shunting about the symbols.

Except it behaves like a model and a guide for IRL reasoning, argument and thought, and when you write down logical operations (and syllogisms) on propositional symbols, they mimic assertions, rejections, stipulations etc. Even ones you make in your own head. Which is a bit odd when you think about it, since you're supposed to be dealing with things that have no forces... but there they are in the logic.

You could also notice that when you're playing around with propositions in logic, no one needs to actually assert them or reject them for the logic to work. So you end up with a system of symbols that apes and embodies speech acts of assertion and rejection, with formal connection rules that ape conclusion and consequences and inference, that allegedly has nothing to do with the forces associated with conclusion, inference, affirmation, rejection and so on. Which itself suggests that notionally manipulating these things behaves like a real argument, no? Forces and all? Right down to the level of the propositional symbol?

That should really give us some pause about the adequacy of the distillation procedure. Our real life use cases bled through into how we interpret the complexes and single propositions in the logic. They're also designed to guide and reflect how we think.

Consider:
p=>q,
~q
------
~p

vs

Alice) "We're getting cheese at the shop!"
Bob) "We're not going shopping"
Alice)"Then we won't get cheese"

You can maybe imagine the translation exercise between the latter and the former as two way. The assertions in the latter map onto the propositions in the former. Even introducing p=>q or p onto a line plays into that - you introduce a p, you stipulate it somehow, you assert it.

- Thanks, that helps connect some dots. Earlier in the thread I posited that assertoric force was merely one kind of illocutionary force, but I now see that this is at best a simplification.

-

- Really loved that post. Among other things, it puts flesh on my Humpty-Dumpty quip.

---

I don't think the notion of assertoric force is clear enough to be understood, if it is something different from denotation or illocutionary force. — Banno

I think illocutionary force maps fairly closely to the basic definition I gave, but the sentence that followed is important, "Then the question comes: does that definition stand or are Kimhi, Martin, et al. tweaking it as they go?" Or in other words, Frege might see assertoric force as an illocutionary force, but I don't think Kimhi would, because for Kimhi the force comes from the sentence and not just from the speaker.

I think the elephant in the room for @Banno is Kimhi's reliance on Wittgenstein. If Kimhi's critique is vacuous, then was the critique of Wittgenstein upon which it is built also vacuous?

4.063 An illustration to explain the concept of truth. A black spot on white paper; the form of the spot can be described by saying of each point of the plane whether it is white or black. To the fact that a point is black corresponds a positive fact; to the fact that a point is white (not black), a negative fact. If I indicate [andeuten] a point of the plane (a truth-value in Frege’s terminology), this corresponds to the assumption [Annahme] proposed for judgement, etc. etc.
But to be able to say that a point is black or white, I must first know under what conditions a point is called white or black; in order to be able to say ‘p’ is true (or false) I must have determined under what conditions I call ‘p’ true, and thereby I determine the meaning [Sinn_w] of the sentence.
The point at which the simile breaks down is this: we can indicate [zeigen] a point on the paper, without knowing what white and black are; but to a sentence without a meaning corresponds nothing at all, for it signifies [bezeichnet] no thing (truth-value) whose properties are called “false” or “true”; the verb of the sentence is not “is true” or “is false” - as Frege thought - but that which “is true” must already contain the verb.

4.064 Every sentence must already have a meaning [Sinn_w]; the affirmation [Bejahung] cannot give it a meaning, for what it affirms is the meaning itself. And the same holds of denial, etc. — Rombout quoting Wittgenstein, 60

(The bolded quote is what Kimhi comes back to again and again in his book.)

Is early Wittgenstein as confused as Kimhi?

(See also Martin's section on Wittgenstein, beginning on page 190.)

---

So what is the force in assertoric force? Is what you are claiming that the assertoric force is how "The cat" denotes the cat? Than it's about denotation, and fine. But that's not ↪Leontiskos's "some kind of latent or dormant assertoric force which is inseparable from the sentence itself." It's picking stuff out. — Banno

Maybe we could say that assertoric force is that in virtue of which an assertion is realized, qua assertion. For Frege this consists only in judgment or the judgment-stroke. For others it also includes the inherent capacity of the declarative sentence to assert, which is bound up in the meaning and shape of the sentence. In presenting a determinate (truth)-option a declarative sentence has already asserted itself into a kind of possibility space, if that makes any sense.

(Note that this isn't the way Kimhi would describe it, but I think it may work as a gloss on Kimhi.)

Of course for Martin the crux is to map the force-content distinction, such that assertoric force is the complement to logical content. For Martin it is about a relation between the two.

Kimhi's forces aren't quite illocutionary forces, we're not talking about speech act theory, by my reckoning we're closer to talking about logic — fdrake

Yeah, agreed, but it covers much the same territory. Instead of talking of illocutionary force we might talk of propositional attitude. What's at issue is the supposed difference between an attitude towards a proposition and an attitude within a proposition; Kimhi, on the accounts given here, thinks there is an force that is somehow a part of the content of the proposition, and not of what is being done with it.

But even that is unclear, and depends on which of the various versions one listens to.

My purpose here has simply been to set out how illocutionary force, propositional content, and propositional attitudes are usually seen, in the hope that it provides some background against which @J or someone might set out the issue.

As for engaging with the thread topic on its own terms, I don't see that those terms have been established to anyone's satisfaction.

J explains it pretty well in the OP.

p is the proposition that the sun rises in the east
q is the proposition that I will see the sun above my barn

If p, then q.

Frege was saying that the above propositions haven't ever been asserted. His focus is on how one thought follows another, and thoughts which have never been asserted abound in the processing of the mind.

Kimhe says this way of thinking about propositions disconnects thought from the world as if there's some inner sanctum where they dance around isolated from the world of time and space.

He says that the act of assertion, which pins the meaning of a proposition down to the actual world, is secretly there: "smuggled in.".

To me, this is kind of blatantly obvious. This is part and parcel of what a proposition is.

I think my OP explanation was barely "pretty good," but 20 pages later, your summary captures one important point. I could go back and count at least a half-dozen excellent questions that the Kimhi-inspired challenge to Frege on assertion has sparked, some quite technical, as we've seen. But we shouldn't lose sight of this very simple one that you highlight: Propositions are not "in the wild"; they are bits of language, as Kimhi puts it. That may indeed be obvious, but many of the consequences are not. And Kimhi himself is working toward a highly unusual, even mystical, understanding of how the bridge between thought and world should be construed. Well, not unusual to Classical phil, but unusual now.

:smile:

Well, not unusual to Classical phil, but unusual now. — J

Queue my point :D.

This is starting to get hair-splitty, but yes, I would still say that an "assertoric force not limited to assertions" is either incoherent or, in some sense or manifestation, also non-assertoric. — J

The key is that a declarative sentence is an assertion secundum quid, a kind of privative reality. In 's language, it is not "in the wild." It is in some sense artificial or contrived. But if you want to see someone who is waist-deep in non-assertoric forces, check out Martin's paper. :grin:

Martin demonstrates by example how difficult this project is, beginning especially with section 4 of his paper. None of us have really been willing to shift into first gear and get into it in the way that he does, and for good reason. It is not at all clear that the river in question is swimmable, and presumably that is why everyone (including Kimhi, but especially Banno) keeps such a distance from the water. Martin does a great service in leading the way by diving in and swimming. Even if he doesn't make it, others will learn by his example.

An example of this is 204 where Martin examines ¬p and argues that, "Deviating from what Frege thought (cf. N: 355–356), negation amounts at the same time to a logical force of its own." He will end up saying that unlike a positive judgment, a negative judgment or negation has a negative logical force that is non-assertoric. Be warned that Martin is using words with more precision than Kimhi, such as the word "thought."

The merit of this sort of inquiry is reflected in what fdrake said:

Which is a bit odd when you think about it, since you're supposed to be dealing with things that have no forces... but there they are in the logic. — fdrake

Martin shows that there are forces in the logic itself, and that logic is not separable from a process of temporal human acts. How we ever managed to lose sight of such an obvious fact is a mystery to me, but clearly the reminder is salutary.

To make this a bit more apprehensible, some of us may remember Michael's recent project of denying that promises exist by denying that one can bind themselves to a future course . Martin shows that logic and assertion have everything to do with binding oneself to a future course, according to true constraints such as the principle of non-contradiction. This makes sense to me, and it makes sense that we live in a world where promises and syllogisms are dying the same death. We have somehow managed to forget that the machinery we have created requires human subjects carrying out human acts, whether that machinery is logic or the banking system.

(Out for a few days)

Michael's recent project of denying that promises exist by denying that one can bind themselves to a future course. — Leontiskos

That's not what he was saying.

Some of the issues you raise I'm partial to because I have tried to raise them as well! I'm going to attempt a similar overview with a different emphasis, and try to show the relevance of my recent posts. All at once! (And I'll try to be a little less cagey.)

1. Can force be separated from content?

Yes. It's the whole point of logic, and until proven otherwise, it is clearly successful at doing so. If Frege didn't think so, he was confused.

2. When you separate force from content, have you shown that everyday speech has (at least) two components?

No. In the sense of "not necessarily."

I believe it is perfectly coherent to claim that making this distinction is a strategy employed not only by philosophers, sometimes with the intent to do logical analysis, but by ordinary speakers of a language in the course of their day.

Logic is that strategy deployed wholesale, rather than ad hoc for particular, often exigent, purposes.

3. What does it take to separate force from content?

Depending on how you take the question, the answer is many thousands of years, or a few years.

It is perfectly clear that there's something small children understand before content, if for no other reason than that they are born without a lexicon. There is also a longish period when they understand speech they cannot quite produce, and this includes a babbling period, when children practice making what Frost called "sentence sounds". You can hear young toddlers having entire pretend conversations that just happen to lack distinct words.

But words do come. There's even some research that purports to show that dogs recognize some individual words and do not just respond to tone of voice.

Words and then sentences arrive for children in a world that already includes tone of some kind, though it's not perfectly clear this is the same thing as force, and I assume something similar is true of human history.

And I think the way we teach children words probably bears some resemblance to the initial steps of language for humankind. Simple descriptions, simple reports, little if any grammar. (I think Strawson somewhere speculated that the initial step would be "feature identifying" in this sort of impersonal way that persists in idioms like "It's raining". "It's tiger-ish here," "It's Mom-ing here," that sort of thing.)

And force? Some kinds of force are clearly, I think, a bit more recherche than others. Toddlers don't understand irony, and it takes a while to be clear on what an imperative is! People aren't born knowing that certain ways of talking to you mean you have to do something, while telling you what. People aren't born knowing they're expected to answer questions, and just staring or repeating your desire (that one comes so early) for juice seems reasonable.

So what do we start with? There's clearly something that would later count as declarative in how we teach children, and in what I assume is early speech. Is that a force? A proto-force? Does it make sense to call it a particular force if there are no others to distinguish it from? Just as interesting as the question of how we first spoke is how we first asked questions, or tried to give commands, or expressed wishes for the future.

Sophisticated stuff, which appears to require a pretty robust linguistic foundation to get started. And we have to be careful not to assume that's already in place when considering how that foundation is laid.

It is not yet clear to me that force, in its many varieties, is foundational, rather than an elaboration.

Contra my first claim ...

Martin shows that there are forces in the logic itself, and that logic is not separable from a process of temporal human acts. — Leontiskos

I guess I'll have to have a look at that.

Good post. And it helps me see another possible application of the force/content distinction. Compare "symbol" and "sign." This used to be the standard way of separating what humans do with language from what non-human animals do with . . . well, whatever philosophers used to think they had. This has all been rejected, I believe, but the symbol/sign disjunction still comes up for us humans. A mere sign is supposed be a kind of command, pure illocution if you will. It needn't have any semantic content at all, and is certainly not a proposition. A symbol such as a word or sentence, in contrast, has sense -- we can contemplate it for its meaning alone, think about it, play with it. It's not telling us to do any one thing in particular. So you might say that the possibility of separating force from content is essential to having a true language of symbols.

Just speculatin'.

One point I think I left out: everything to do with language use has to be learnable, and it has to be usable even with only partial mastery. One of the things in my mind as I wrote that was, how do children learn force in all its variety? (Related to what I did mention, in human history.) There are some well known steps in concept acquisition, for example, but I don't know the research on force (although I think the point I made earlier about pedagogical force fits here).

I also didn't come right out and say that the way logic handles language and the way we do when teaching children has a sort of family resemblance, and that's the other reason I was thinking about it. Not sure where that leads, if anywhere.

Frege was saying that the above propositions haven't ever been asserted. His focus is on how one thought follows another, and thoughts which have never been asserted abound in the processing of the mind.

Kimhe says this way of thinking about propositions disconnects thought from the world as if there's some inner sanctum where they dance around isolated from the world of time and space. — frank

Yes, understood. But you do know what "the sun rises in the east" is about, as much as "the sun rises in the north" or "the sun does not rise". These are not disconnected from the world, isolated from time and space.

we can contemplate it for its meaning alone, think about it, play with it. — J

Forgot to point out that I agree, and "can" there is the point I've been making, that it's a choice, a strategy. Trump has this indirect sort of Mafia speech style, so the literal meaning of what he says is at odds with the message he is clearly sending. We don't have to be taken in by this, treating the literal content as the more genuine, more fundamental aspect of speech. When we do that for logical analysis, it's a choice.

But you do know what "the sun rises in the east" is about, as much as "the sun rises in the north" or "the sun does not rise". These are not disconnected from the world, isolated from time and space. — Banno

You're providing the sentences involved with that connection, though. You do this by providing context, although in this case I'm guessing it's fictional.

You're providing the sentences involved with that connection, though. — frank

Well, yes. What of it?

We have the propositional content and we have the propositional attitude. Folk here say Kimhi thinks there is a "force" not captured by either of these. I'm asking what that force is.

He says that the act of assertion, which pins the meaning of a proposition down to the actual world, is secretly there: "smuggled in.". — frank

Secretly in the content? But you understand what "the sun rises in the south" is about, without asserting it's truth. If all that he means is that to understand "the sun rises in the south" is to understand what would be the case for it to be true or false, then yes, I agree.

We have the propositional content and we have the propositional attitude. Folk here say Kimhi thinks there is a "force" not captured by either of these. I'm asking what that force is. — Banno

I develop propositional attitude by analyzing the context of utterance, specifically in the case of an assertion. It occurred to me all of the sudden that we may not all be the same in this. It may be that habits that I have to use to understand propositions aren't necessary for you. I've been assuming you're doing the same thing I am, but you're just not as conscious of it. Maybe that's bullshit. Ha! :grin:

I develop propositional attitude by analyzing the context of utterance, — frank

From my first post

First we should be clear about the nature of illocutionary force. Taking your example, "The grass is green", we can imagine various situations in which this utterance does quite different things. Imagine a meeting in which a landscape gardener is presenting their plan for the forecourt of a new build. One of those present is unclear as to which parts of the drawing are cement and which are lawn, and asks "The grass is green?". The designer replies, "Yes. The grass is green." There follows a conversation about how best to represent the lawn after which the manager gives the instruction "The grass is green!". Here we have the same sentence being used in three quite different ways - as a question, as a statement and as an instruction. The same sentence is being used with three differing illocutionary forces. — Banno