I like how you characterize Kimhi's viewpoint in T&B. It's the offbeat, alternate-history quality that, for me, is part of its striking originality. As we've remarked before, Kimhi seems uninterested in Wittgenstein after the Tractatus. And he treats Frege as if the guy was still publishing! I think it's a way of drawing the connections he wants to draw to the source of his problems -- Parmenides, Plato and Aristotle. He's not interested in the history of philosophy as such, but rather in the history of a problem, one that he's inviting others to look at and realize it is a problem.

I hope you say more about your thoughts on T&B as you progress through it.

Aaronow: Yes. I mean are you actually talking about this, or are we just.
Moss: No, we're just.
Aaronow: We're just "talking" about it.
Moss: We're just speaking about it. (Pause.) As an idea.
Aaronow: As an idea.
Moss: Yes.
Aaronow: We're not actually talking about it.
Moss: No.
Aaronow: Talking about it as a.
Moss: No.
Aaronow: As a robbery.
Moss: As a "robbery"?! No.

Philosophy is for closers!

It occurs to me that if for you, understanding people doesn't involve looking for truth conditions for the statements they make, you're kind of talking to yourself. You're not interested in what they really mean, you're just figuring it out for yourself by analyzing the words. Your biases are there, but you don't care. Meaning is your own private universe.

Thinking and Being is hard to quote from in a self contained manner — fdrake

When I began reading I was thinking, "Wow, this guy really takes the full context principle to the limit!" But after awhile it starts to feel like a collection of deferred explanations.

It's like someone forked the repository of philosophical knowledge just after the publication of Wittgenstein's Tractatus, then merged in secondary literature in that heritage up to 2019. — fdrake

Yes, haha.

To portray the foreclosed future the abandonment of that problematic left. — fdrake

That is a more nuanced take than what we've been considering. I agree that the problematic of judgment cannot be abandoned. And maybe Frege primed the pump for its abandonment, but of course he himself did not abandon it.

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@Banno - regarding illocutionary force:

What is common to these three views is that their critical engagement with the force-content distinction is undertaken from a broadly Wittgensteinian perspective, while rejecting the speech-act theoretic approach to the topic of force and content. . . [5]

[5] Cf. Rödl 2018: 33, Bronzo 2019: 26–31, Kimhi 2018: 39. – There is another group of contemporary philosophers who, from vantage points rooted in speech-act theory, reject the Fregean conception of force as external to content and seek to replace it by an alternative picture, cf. Barker 2004: 89, Recanati 2013, Hanks 2015: 12–20, Hanks 2016, Recanati 2016. These positions deserve separate treatment, cf. Martin 2020: appendix. — Martin, On Redrawing the Force-Content Distinction, 180-1

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. — Srap Tasmaner

Frege certainly thought so.

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. — Srap Tasmaner

Yes, but I am not sure that in everyday language the content really stands apart from the force, at least in the sort of examples you have given. Something like, "The next town is like 70 miles," is rather different from what logicians do. Such a thing is implying via content, not truly separating force from content.

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. — Srap Tasmaner

Walker Percy's writings on Helen Keller (and his own daughter) are interesting in this regard.

With that said, I don't know how much the experience of toddlers will bear on Kimhi's project.

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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. — J

It seems like you want to talk about symbols as stipulated signs. I'm not at all familiar with that usage, but I would question the idea that natural language is a set of stipulated signs. I think natural language and formal logic are very different in that way. I would say that the "true language of [stipulated signs]" is logic. This is why, for example, logic has no interest in philology (and also why philologists tend to be wiser than logicians).

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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. — Srap Tasmaner

Yep, fair. Teaching someone a language requires such separation, whether it be logic or natural language.

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Aaronow: We're just "talking" about it. — Srap Tasmaner

Don't get me started on the TPFers who want to talk about things they profess to have no interest/belief in. :grin: "Allow me put forth my thesis without any intellectual responsibility."

I am not sure that in everyday language the content really stands apart from the force, at least in the sort of examples you have given. Something like, "The next town is like 70 miles," is rather different from what logicians do. Such a thing is implying via content, not truly separating force from content. — Leontiskos

I just watched a bird land on a broken tree limb. It glided in to a spot less than foot from the tip, immediately trotted up to that furthest point, and then remained there for several moments looking around. The uttermost point on the branch was clearly its destination, but it got there not by aiming at it, which it was surely capable of doing, but by landing first at an easier spot and then making the short, easy trek there.

There's reason to think conversational language use is always like this, that we always say less than we mean and count on the audience to fill in "the rest," though whether that results in complete, self-contained propositions we both affirm or just another satisficing shortcut, that's hard to say. (Was this bird at the *exact* tip?) How often do we even try to understand each other "completely," whatever that might mean, and if such a thing is even possible, rather than enough to get along in a given situation? (Does a broken tree limb even have a well-defined tip? Did the bird care?)

One thing implicature suggests is that what the audience fills in can be pretty complicated, involving not just disambiguation and shared background knowledge but inference. It also goes with my other recent posts, in trying to suggest that force may not always fall into a neat taxonomy, and that even when some force is employed or conveyed it might still vary in its intensity. (A sentence can be a simple assertion about geography, but not intended to convey that information.) For example, the effect of an attempted cancellation of force by following something you've said with "Just kidding" is widely considered uncertain or partial. (When Moss is chickening out of the robbery he proposed to Aaronow, a whole spectrum of assertive force suddenly blossoms, from committing to considering to talking about it to speaking of it, "as an idea.")

Now, there was a lot of talk earlier in the thread about whether a sentence could display assertoric force without being asserted, and it occurred to me something a bit like this is going on in teaching language, something that looks a little like use, a little like mention, but doesn't make sense as either. You have to use a word and show your use, but your use of it in the first place is not a normal use -- to inform, say -- but a use chosen just so that it can be shown. Some features of assertion have to be in place, but not in order to make an assertion.

So I don't think it's helpful to think of utterances as having a content that can be "extracted," nor is it helpful to think they have or lack some stereotypical force.

Instead, most utterances only contain part of a point, at best, so whatever you count as the content of a statement is an interpretation that depends on how you fill out "what was said," and the force of an utterance is often mixed or uncertain, so what you count as its force is primarily an indication of how you intend to take it.

My point, again, being that logic makes choices about what to count as the content, what to say was the force, and these choices can be interesting, helpful, and defensible, but they are also underdetermined. Even if you have no expectation that logic can tell you "what's really going on" in language use, you can still get logic wrong by assuming it has to come out as one specific thing.

All that may be so, and yet it remain useful to sometimes separate what a sentence is about from what one is doing with it.

To be sure, it is a mistake to think that there is one correct analysis of any given utterance. But of course that does not mean we can't or shouldn't engage in analysis.

All this by way of again rejecting logical monism.

Good post. I agree with almost all of that, and although we may disagree on some of the implications, let me just break off a piece to try to disagree with. You can bring in some of the other pieces as they become relevant. As a caveat, we now seem to be doing speech act theory rather than logic, and this will need to be held in mind.

So I don't think it's helpful to think of utterances as having a content that can be "extracted," nor is it helpful to think they have or lack some stereotypical force. — Srap Tasmaner

I think Kimhi is more or less correct that declarative sentences have (or “display”) assertoric force, and I would also say that utterances have force.

Now part of the problem here is that we can say “utterance” and mean something which contains force or does not contain force, and a lot of this goes back to our conversation about screwdrivers. First of all I would argue that something which does not contain force is not an utterance. Everything which is actually being uttered has actual force. But the interesting question is whether a certain material aspect of an utterance must also contain force, and this is perhaps the parallel to the OP in speech act theory. We could call that material utterance a sentence, just as we called the material assertion a declarative sentence. This is a sentence conceived as “a bit of language.”

In the first place I would say that all sentences have a common baseline of force. What kind? Communicative force. As a sign of communication a sentence has communicative force.

Now maybe you would concede that sentences do have communicative force, at which point the more difficult inquiry begins, namely that of deciding whether a given sentence has inherent force over and above communicative force. I think it will, and like the screwdriver, the availability of multiple uses does not preclude a singular form or force. A screwdriver can be used for many things, but there are many more things that it simply cannot be used for. A sentence is the same way, and its determinate range represents its inherent force.

I would then want to bring in different senses (for example, the theological senses of the literal, allegorical, tropological, and anagogical). I want to say, with Aquinas, that the literal sense is normative and foundational. It is what grounds the natural force of a sentence. If a sentence like, “The old dog is hungry,” had no natural force, then anything at all could be done with it. But not anything at all can be done with it; therefore it has natural force. What limits its range of use and its force? Its literal sense. Even metaphors and analogies play on the literal sense, and are not divorced from it. Irony and humor also depend on the literal sense, if in a different way. Someone who does not understand the literal sense will not understand any of the other senses, for these other senses build on the literal.

(Two quick preemptions. First, we have sayings whose literal sense has been lost to us. In such cases the sense which was previously metaphorical has now become the literal sense in a rather odd way. Second, the normativity of written or spoken language is interpersonally situated. The claim here is not that, say, an English sentence has natural force for the Russians. The concrete sense of an utterance will be a kind of relation between the intent of the speaker and the intent of the recipient, and the sense of a sentence will be an abstraction and reification of this.)

we now seem to be doing speech act theory rather than logic — Leontiskos

Oh -- there are dots I didn't connect there.

Part of my concern is, what are these statements, the Ps and Qs, we deal with when doing logical analysis?

In a sense, I'm trying to flesh out @frank's point about context. There's obviously something to that, we all know there is. Is it just dealing with indexicals? Maybe making explicit common knowledge that's relied on? You might be able to convince yourself that turning a non-truth-apt sentence into a truth-apt proposition is only a little more complicated than substituting names for pronouns, only there's more of that sort of thing to do.

But what if that's wrong? What if language never comes anywhere close to expressing a complete thought because that's not what it's for? What if language is all hints and clues and suggestions because the audience shares the burden of communication with the speaker?

Logical analysis, when it deals with "bits of language," seems to set aside the communicative nature of language and pretend that by presenting what one side of a conversation says, or what they might say if they were more prolix, it can present an argument in its entirety.

If that's false, what are we doing when we engage in logical analysis?

...

Lots more in your post to respond to, but I wanted to get to this first.

Oh -- there are dots I didn't connect there. — Srap Tasmaner

When I said that we are doing speech act theory rather than logic what I meant is that the content/force distinction is not the same for each. Speech act theory deals with intentional (illocutionary?) force, whereas logic deals with assertoric force. Martin points out that you can run the same sort of critique from the perspective of speech act theory, but it is a somewhat different critique.

What I am gathering from Martin, @fdrake, and @Pierre-Normand, is that assertoric force is not merely one variety of intentional or illocutionary force, for the logician and the speech act theorist use the word 'assertion' differently. Maybe the most obvious difference is that the logician need not speak or engage in interpersonal communication in order to assert. More generally, what this means is that the forces involved in logical acts are different from the forces involved in speech acts. Martin is an example of someone who is explicitly interested in the former and not the latter, at least in the paper cited in this thread.

Edit: This may go back to your observation about language qua thought vs. language qua communication.

But what if that's wrong? What if language never comes anywhere close to expressing a complete thought because that's not what it's for? What if language is all hints and clues and suggestions because the audience shares the burden of communication with the speaker? — Srap Tasmaner

Without yet opening this can of worms, I think my post accommodates this. I called a sentence "A bit of language," (following the classical understanding of a proposition which underlies the Frege-Geach Point). But I think a phrase or word is also a bit of language, at least insofar as my points about determinate range and literal sense are concerned.

the logician and the speech act theorist use the word 'assertion' differently. Maybe the most obvious difference is that the logician need not speak or engage in interpersonal communication in order to assert. More generally, what this means is that the forces involved in logical acts are different from the forces involved in speech acts. Martin is an example of someone who is explicitly interested in the former and not the latter, at least in the paper cited in this thread. — Leontiskos

(I've started the Martin paper, so I expect we can talk more about that soon.)

I don't want to just rush to deny that this is so, but all we have so far is the typical philosopher's gambit: "And by 'assertion' I don't mean assertion in the usual sense, by 'force' I don't mean force in the usual sense, ..."

Consider that we are discussing a man who thought it necessary to invent a language, separate from natural languages, that would be suitable for use in logical analysis. In Frege's language, a formula like "Fa" or "(x)Fx" is said to express a complete thought, that can be true or false, by fiat, by stipulation. Is it any wonder that his logic looks more like a branch of mathematics than anything else?

Which, again, is not to say that it is useless, anymore than mathematics is useless. But what are we to say about its relation to human reasoning conducted in natural languages? Is it, for instance, reasonable to imagine that something like Frege's system *underlies* human language use? I'm skeptical. Even while allowing its usefulness.

And that means what we say about logic is what we say about a certain approach to reasoning and language, a certain way of taking it, but we need not think we are saying anything fundamental about language or reasoning itself.

I will be out for the rest of the day, so I want to try to offer at least a short response:

I don't want to just rush to deny that this is so, but all we have so far is the typical philosopher's gambit: "And by 'assertion' I don't mean assertion in the usual sense, by 'force' I don't mean force in the usual sense, ..." — Srap Tasmaner

We have circled around this problem a number of times in the thread (i.e. the fact that the judgment-stroke is not a speech act). Most recently I claimed that Frege is concerned with assenting, not asserting, but that's also imperfectly stated. The judgment-stroke is something like the act of assent or the recognition of truth. This does not seem to be the same as assertion in interpersonal communication.

is said to express a complete thought, that can be true or false, by fiat, by stipulation — Srap Tasmaner

I don't think Frege holds that such things can be true or false by fiat.

Is it any wonder that his logic looks more like a branch of mathematics than anything else? — Srap Tasmaner

I also don't think mathematics holds that mathematical claims can be true or false by fiat. I think this thread has often conflated metamathematics and metalogic with mathematics and logic.

We can represent truth-apt thoughts or truth-apt mathematical claims without providing content, but this is a very limited move, and does not imply that the truth of thoughts or mathematics is in some way stipulated. I don't want to move into a tangent, but the object of metamathematics is different than the object of mathematics, and what is stipulated in that case is not so much truth as a truth-mimicking value that then allows one to study formal characteristics of mathematical systems.

And that means what we say about logic is what we say about a certain approach to reasoning and language, a certain way of taking it, but we need not think we are saying anything fundamental about language or reasoning itself. — Srap Tasmaner

You seem committed to the position which says that we cannot say anything fundamental about language or reasoning itself. I don't take that as granted.

Sorry for the shorter post!

is said to express a complete thought, that can be true or false, by fiat, by stipulation
— Srap Tasmaner

I don't think Frege holds that such things can be true or false by fiat. — Leontiskos

Sorry. That was ambiguous. The assignment of the truth-value is done by judgment, not by stipulation, but that "Fa" is truth-apt, that it expresses a complete thought, is stipulated.

You seem committed to the position which says that we cannot say anything fundamental about language or reasoning itself. — Leontiskos

Not at all. I'm contesting whether we should take Frege as having done so.

I will be out for the rest of the day — Leontiskos

And I'll get back to work.

More response to your earlier post tonight, and then we'll go from there.

The assignment of the truth-value is done by judgment, — Srap Tasmaner

If you're a realist, you wouldn't say truth is "assigned.". You would just say some propositions are true and some are false. Some have never been expressed and some probably never will be.