- So the goal is an attitude of indifference. How does one get to that goal? Is it just by practicing indifference? Or is there some better way to get there?

What is your approach to achieving your Stoic goals? Presumably it doesn't occur just automatically.

- A characteristically punchy quote from Hart, but on point. :up:

The analytic school of philosophy is the dominant way of doing philosophy, nowadays. — Shawn

Is it? It holds a large share of English-speaking philosophy, but it is largely ignored outside that limited area.

- Fair enough. I now see you were saying something a bit different than Banno.

Analytic philosophy is a toolkit and not a school of philosophy? Then why do analytic philosophers tend to focus on the same basic set of problems? Or else, why do we call people "analytic philosophers" at all? Is that a misnomer?

When the grid goes down, the crypto-heads will discover the difference between gold and crypto as a store of value. — fishfry

They will. :up:

Even if they are low quality, which I don't think they are, a lot of crap is allowed here. — T Clark

So do you think low quality posts should not be moderated? Every time a low quality post is moderated are you going to come along and try to make an argument in favor of low quality posts? What in the world are you supposed to be arguing here?

Besides, it was moved to the Lounge. It wasn't deleted or closed.

- That's pretty interesting. Plato would surely approve!

Hence, lounge. — fdrake

No offense to the OP, but I am glad to see the bar being raised and the lounge being utilized. I think this will improve the quality of the site in the long run, and will give users an opportunity to write more focused OPs.

Beyond that, the forum is full of opiniated fluff and vague assertions. I don't know why Carlo Roosen is being singled out. — T Clark

"The house is full of dirt, so why are you cleaning!?"

I did. A cyst is not a person. — Banno

That's propaganda, not an argument. It does not help you that the emotional post you dredged up from six years ago contains propaganda, nor is it surprising that it does. Nor does it help the thread.

- Okay, and to be clear, Socrates proposes "recollection" and a form of reincarnation to respond to the dilemma. Aristotle proposes logic: that we can learn things that we did not know before, and that there is a manner in which this is done. I'm obviously thinking about Aristotle's answer rather than Socrates'. :smile:

Generally, there are thousands (at least) of cryptocurrencies, and there will be thousands more created in the future. The barrier to creating them is quite low. Given this, are cryptocurrencies truly scarse? — hypericin

I suppose their scarcity presupposes investment in a single kind. They are not scarce in their genus, for there are many species of cryptocurrency. But they tend to be scarce in their species, e.g. Bitcoin is designed to include scarcity.

Fast-forwarding to the end: cryptocurrency is silly. The means of exchange probably needs to have some kind of inherent value, such as gold has.

Scientific investigations of how we perceive already, to some extent, presuppose the a priori modes by which we intuit and cognize objects, being that we must study the intuited and cognized version of our own representative faculties, and so the Kantian question is still very much alive and puzzling. — Bob Ross

Right. :up:

Let's take the words of Albert Einstein as an example — Michael

Einstein? The more you post the more evangelistic your approach becomes. This is a site for philosophical argument. Evangelism is literally against the rules.

Heh. I taught my phone "Kimhi" but it ignored me this time. — Srap Tasmaner

@J might not object. "It doesn't taste good, but it is healthy!" :grin:

(A) "Dogs are nice"

and on the other

(B) "For all x, if x is a dog, then it is nice."

We just need a neutral word for the relation between (A) and (B), and, if you start with (A) and recast it as (B), we need a neutral word to describe what you're doing there. Maybe you believe you are "revealing (A)'s logical form," and maybe you don't. — Srap Tasmaner

Well, I don't think this Fregian move can plausibly present itself as something other than a schematization, so I agree with you in cases such as this one. But this is probably the weakest point of Frege's system. It's harder to tell if distinguishing force from content is artifice.

Again, for me it begins with the puzzle of the Meno. I want to say that if logic is artifice then knowledge is artificial. And of course some of what we involve ourselves in when we do logic is artifice, but that doesn't mean that there is nothing more than that involved.

Or we could put it this way: "Even if Frege's is not perfectly correct, it correctly points us in the direction of a real rational faculty that humans possess." To what extent can we speak about and explicate that faculty? And form and strengthen it? It's not altogether clear, but that it exists seems obvious.

This bypasses my question, and doubles down even. It is assumed "virtue building" such as a program that one might enter into as an Aristotlean or Stoic or whatnot, would seem to be a freely chosen philosophy that one is intending to follow. A culture seems to be something one generally falls into, though one can take it on too. — schopenhauer1

Virtue is a kind of habit of or a use of a kind of habit; it is not habit per se. I drew the parallel between culture and habit, not culture and virtue.

What if one is about virtue-building but isn't following any particular program, just their own.. Is that culture? — schopenhauer1

I've said that a culture is a kind of societal habit. On that view nothing an individual does in themselves has any necessary connection with culture (because the action or habit of an individual is not necessarily the action or habit of a culture).

Is the practitioner of a philosophy and an individual acting under the enculturation of a subgroup's culture the same thing? — schopenhauer1

One is intentional and the other is not necessarily intentional, no?

Is there a substantive difference or is it all culture all the way down? — schopenhauer1

Suppose we have a norm, "Do not treat others as you would not like to be treated." Suppose a culture instantiates this norm. Suppose there are two people in the culture that are baptized into the cultural norm, Bob and Joe. Bob is under the influence of the cultural norm, and it influences his actions. Joe, on the other hand, while being under the influence of the cultural norm, also perceives that it is a moral norm, which he then freely assents to in a rational manner. Bob and Joe are different. Bob holds the norm in a merely cultural manner, whereas Joe also holds it in a moral manner. Joe is therefore rationally and intentionally invested in the norm in a way that Bob is not. We could argue whether Bob is virtuous for following the cultural norm, but it is certainly true that Joe is more virtuous than Bob.

(We could go on to consider a third person who intentionally rejects the cultural norm.)

But they haven't paid their dues! We've earned this, by banging our heads against Kimchi. Oh sure, they'll join in *now*, for the fun part, but where were they when we were slogging through the mud, I ask you. — Srap Tasmaner

Those who only agree to come after the kimchi has already been served. :lol:

Here again, this may not contribute to a neutral presentation of (2), but I have to treat language as being first for communication and other uses come after. — Srap Tasmaner

Well if language is essentially for communication then the answer to the question has again been foreclosed.

All I'm arguing for is slowing down the moment of schematization so that we can see frame-by-frame what's happening, regardless what we say about how before and after are related. — Srap Tasmaner

But the classical logician says that it's not a schematization at all, and on that account you have begged the question.

Here's how I would start a thread about logic. I would post the dilemma of Meno 80b. I would basically say that if that dilemma can be overcome then logic exists, and if it can't then logic does not exist. Per Rombout, someone like Wittgenstein doesn't think logic exists. But the thread would not use the word "logic," for that word is an equivocal quagmire.

Worth also pointing out that it is far from clear what "thoughts" are, yet the term is used with gay abandon throughout Martin's paper. — Banno

Have you actually put any effort into Martin's paper? Have you tried to understand any of this on its own terms, as fdrake invited you to do? In section 4 Martin spends a lot of time on thoughts.

The objection here looks like self-fulfilling laziness. "Martin doesn't give an analytic-stipulatively precise definition of 'thought', therefore logical nominalism holds." This is classic Wittgenstenian question-begging. Martin is damned either way. If he gives an analytic-stipulative definition then he is barred from contact with reality (i.e. barred from logical realism). If he instead works his way towards a real definition of thought then the Analytic rejects it as imprecise. For the Analytic, only what is stipulated can be precise, only what is precise is allowed, and therefore logic is the realm of tautology divorced from reality. Three cheers for circular reasoning. The corrective here is to stop being lazy and to start challenging yourself by thinking about things on their own terms, as they are in themselves, rather than as you stipulate them to be. Anyone who makes the simple observation that arguments presuppose thoughts should be willing to wrestle with the "a posteriori" question of what thoughts are. If they are not willing to wrestle with such questions then I'm not sure what they take themselves to be doing.

I didn't follow your reasoning that turned my "not necessarily" into an even bigger "necessarily not". I do hope this was clearer. — Srap Tasmaner

Yes, very helpful.

All of this agnosticism about (3) depends on being able to formulate (2) neutrally. — Srap Tasmaner

Right, and that is the difficulty. I’m not sure (2) can be formulated neutrally as a claim. Probably it can only be approached neutrally as a question. The question is something like, “What is logic?” Or, “What are humans rationally capable of?”

We can be more conservative and ask whether Frege’s distinction between assertoric force and thought has a real correlate in human reasoning, and I think it surely does. We are truly able to think things without judging them true. This is why Martin thinks the distinction needs to be redrawn rather than abandoned. If this is right then Frege’s logic represents something true about reasoning itself, even if what he says is skewed or off kilter.

-

second, clarity is obviously negotiated between speaker and audience, and thus our practices of making better, clearer arguments arise from the efforts of ordinary speakers — Srap Tasmaner

This looks like that same conflation between speech act theory and logic. Can we form sound arguments and thereby gain knowledge without engaging in interpersonal speech acts? This is precisely what logic means in the classical understanding.

It's a fantastic invention — Srap Tasmaner

Each time you state the problem in terms of artifice or invention you fail to capture a neutral (2). Do you see this? To call logic an invention of artifice, or a schematization or formalization, is to have begged the question. If that's all logic is then the answer to (3) is foreclosed.

(We are now knee-deep in the topic I was hoping would become a new thread. Is it worth breaking off? The general membership would find this topic more interesting than Kimhi's.)

Short response before I head out for the evening...

So is culture akin to addiction in that it is a mechanism whereby free will is limited to an extent? — schopenhauer1

For Aristotle habit is the basis of both vice and virtue.

But can't certain cultural customs be immoral? — schopenhauer1

Sure, and that's why the caution I spoke of is required. If we condemn based solely on our own customs then at best we are imposing a non-moral norm, and at worst we are imposing an immoral norm.

For such a person—and they are common—I would ask why we must accept the premise that cultural realities cannot be criticized. — Leontiskos

This is essentially my question :D. [...it] is more of an axiological question — schopenhauer1

I tend to blame Rawls for this sort of cultural relativism. When you can't figure out how to ground morality objectively, then you just stop at the level of culture, and that's what Rawls did.

Ok, so how do you know which is attributed to which? Should it be condemned if it is cultural, or is culture sacrosanct? To what extent?

...

Let's say that culture was not at all in the picture, and you disapproved of someone's individual habit.. But then you realized that that habit was actually part of their culture. Does the disapproval change? If so, why? — schopenhauer1

I tend to see culture and habit as parallel. So the first question is, "Suppose you see someone doing something that you disapprove of, but then you realize that they are habituated to this act. Does the disapproval change?" Yes, it changes qua culpability and capability. For example, there is a moral difference between someone who freely engages in a bad act and someone who is addicted to it.

Culture is the same, but at a deeper level. It can perhaps even be conceived as the amalgamation of a people or a people's history, which is then confronted by the amalgamation of a different people. There is a parallel between the moral confrontation between two persons and the moral confrontation between two cultures. And we must remember to distinguish between morality and custom in order to avoid condemning what is contrary to our own customs but not to morality.

But it's also, WHEN can we distill that it is cultural vs. other factors? — schopenhauer1

If I am right in saying that culture is a kind of societal habit, then I would say that a non-cultural cause is anything which does not flow from that kind of societal habit. For example, if gangs are a result of poverty, and if poverty is not a societal habit, then the poverty that produces gangs is not a cultural cause.

The trick is that poverty can become cultural even when it is not at first. Probably everything is like this, which is what makes the question difficult. My guess is that an important distinction must be made between high culture and just culture. The Chinese have a tea culture and an opium culture. The first is "high culture" or intentional culture, whereas the second is just culture, or else undesirable culture.

I mean a classic example here is gang culture in the US. This is tied with so many things- racial oppression, socio-economic oppression, and cultural aspects. One side of the debate regarding gang culture is that it is a cultural problems. A prominent conservative historian, Thomas Sowell, traces it back to Southern white redneck culture, that ultimately gets traced back to England. Nonetheless, he seems to see it as more of a cultural circumstance more than socio-economic. Others would say that it derives from socio-economic circumstances of simply being poor. If you are poor, and discriminated, these are the activities that a subgroup might tend towards.. — schopenhauer1

Okay, good. Gangs might be a consequence of culture going back to "Southern white Redneck culture," or they could be a consequence of the the disenfranchisement, resentment, and desperation resulting from poverty and discrimination. Or both. But the first is "cultural" and the second is "socio-economic."

Maybe part of the question is to ask whether it represents an insuperable obstacle or defense to say, "It's cultural." For example, if gangs are cultural then they cannot be criticized, at least on the premise that cultural realities cannot be criticized. For such a person—and they are common—I would ask why we must accept the premise that cultural realities cannot be criticized.

Not at all. — Srap Tasmaner

No? Look at this sentence:

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

Now if we tighten up the logic, then the second clause would read, "...and therefore we must not think we are saying anything fundamental..." I want to say that whereas your second clause is a "X is not necessary" clause, your first clause in fact entails, "~X is necessary." If X is to remain a possibility then the first clause would need to be rewritten.

I take it that this discrepancy represents an important issue underlying the thread.

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

I am focusing mostly on his final section where he tries to set out an alternative to Frege. The other parts are interesting, but I think an alternative is what this thread is most in need of.

At what point (if any) can we distill cultural factors for why groups act a certain way versus socio-economic or political factors? — schopenhauer1

What do you mean by culture? On my view economics and politics are downstream of culture, and so it is difficult to separate such things from culture.

Can one be a "culturist", meaning can one morally be "against" certain cultures, or should people be tolerant of all cultural aspects, whether you agree with them or not? — schopenhauer1

I think one of our most entrenched difficulties is our inability to say that other people are (objectively) wrong, and this is most obvious when it comes to cultural considerations. If you can't objectively oppose a culture then in the end you probably can't objectively oppose anything.

I rather have it an investigation on when one can reasonably blame a "cultural" trait, if at all for a negative aspect of social living. — schopenhauer1

I want to say that culture is something like societal habit, or some subset of societal habit.

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!

- A psychological clique that thinks of itself as True Philosophy? They are a dime a dozen.

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.

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.)

What pisses me off most about the choice debate is the insincerity of the antagonists. — Banno

Make arguments, not emotions. This thread contains lots of real arguments regarding abortion. That seems worth continuing.

Whatever "rational" grounds you might have for believing in naive realism, it is incompatible with physics, biology, neuroscience, and psychology. — Michael

And of course this tired claim has been shown to be unsupportable any number of times in the recent thread, Perception. These blind appeals to "The Science" seem to be just the sort of non-interactive evangelization that the forum rules prohibit.

Besides, the belief that science can adjudicate the Kantian question just belies a misunderstanding of the Kantian question, not to mention the science.

- What is at stake here are natural rights, not civil rights, and natural rights are always just.

Resist. — Baden

I'll drink to that.

---

This will not end well. — Banno

Yes. As I argued elsewhere, I think the quick adoption is short-sighted.

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plagiarism — bongo fury

I want to say that the cultural morality of the West and especially the U.S. has shifted towards a consent-based system. We think that if everyone sees what you are doing and no one objects, then you haven't done anything wrong. Therefore lifting from LLMs is not seen as plagiarism because LLMs are not persons, and because the creators do not object to such lifting.

This obviously raises other questions, but of course on a (good!) philosophy forum objections do exist, as this thread demonstrates. The objection that is ready to hand is not plagiarism per se, but rather a concern with the quality of LLMs. I like your question because it raises the issue: If LLMs improve in quality would they then become acceptable on a philosophy forum?

(To be fair, the thread didn't fully shift to the criterion of quality until frank posted.)

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.

-

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."

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

Yet, God could have not liked evil for He is an all good being. — Shawn

Does an all good being like evil?

Did you put much time or effort into this OP?

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)

Great guideline. :up:
I've seen ChatGPT harm other forums that haven't taken such precautions.

- 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.

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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.)

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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.

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.

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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.

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>.