Do you happen to know what group was surveyed?

OK, thanks. It's an interesting take on Rorty's part but I'm not sure it's held by too many others. It makes for some strange groupings -- Husserl is meant to have more in common with Quine, on this view, than e.g. Heidegger or Sartre, which seems wrong. But in fairness, I don't think Rorty cared too much about the history of philosophy, and its divisions. His division, as you quote, was between philosophers who wanted to maintain a transcendental method for philosophy, and those who believed there was no boundary named "Objectivity" or "Truth" of this sort.

Well, I did say "arguably". :smile: Perhaps it would have better to say something like "In the early 20th century a split in methods and interests occurred within philosophy, and Husserl was a bellwether." I was trying to pinpoint the "two-camps" division, before which Hegel et al. were simply philosophy, common property of all philosophers. Only in retrospect were they seen as prefiguring Continental phil. Or that's my version of the history, anyway.

Clarity seems to be the biggest difference between the two 'camps'. — AmadeusD

OK, I'll stand up for the Continentals here! Is it possible that what you're calling "unclarity" could better be called "difficulty"? Case in point, perhaps, is Husserl, arguably the father of Continental thought. At first reading, he's as clear as mud. But you have to persist. In part this is because he's not a gifted writer, at least not in translation. (And if that's what you mean by unclarity, then you're correct.) But something can become clear, given time. His ideas are unusual and difficult, and require slow, patient reflection and discussion. The thing is, it pays off richly in philosophical insight.

This is not to take sides in any alleged Analytic/Continental debate. The same could be said for many Anglophone philosophers too.

To the first point: you'd said "the quality of our lives" so I took you to be referring to something intersubjectivity or semi-universal. But now I see that you mean: "A useful philosophy for me should improve the quality of my life," and yes, that's different.

To the second point: Indeed, I didn't see where morality came into it in the first place; I was only quoting you that it was a "moralizing" question.

I'm not sure we've completely eliminated the normative, though, by putting it in these terms. Presumably you'd say that someone who disagreed with the "philosophy should improve the quality of my life" position was wrong, wouldn't you? Or is that too only meant in the sense of "For me, philosophy is about improving the quality of my life. You may have a completely different conception of what the use of philosophy is, and there's no right or wrong here"?

Signing off for the night . . .

Good. All too often, a philosopher's conception of personhood is asked to do too much, especially in the ethical area.

Philosophy if it is to be of any use should improve the quality of our lives. — Janus

I can't help asking: Isn't the above a definitive answer to the question of how to do "proper" philosophy? So when you discovered the answer, were you engaging with a "tedious moralizing" question? I'm confused.

Have you read Nagel's essay Secular Philosophy and the Religious Temperament? — Wayfarer

Yes, an excellent piece. That's one of the reasons I appreciate Nagel so much -- he refuses to be doctrinaire about the type of philosophy he was trained in.

In any case, I am not worried about outliers. — Kurt Keefner

I understand that the outliers are not the subject of your OP, but I do want to point out that this view of personhood, based as it is on a capacity for conceptual rationality, may result in some unpleasant ethical implications. My query about animals was aiming in that direction. And infants, of course . . . But you may not mean that personhood is a requirement for being included in the ethical community.

OK, I'll posit that there is no non-philosophical way of raising the question of what philosophy is, or should be. Both Analytic and Continental philosophers are surely aware of this, but I would say that on the whole the (best) Continentals are slightly more skilled at performing the necessary self-reflection involved. Analytic philosophers can get very hung up on being right about things -- which (see above) reveals a certain conception of what philosophy ought to be doing.

That said, I agree that there are a lot of interesting "bridge" figures between the two schools, and we shouldn't make a huge deal about some supposedly irremediable divide.

An interesting topic. To be sure I'm understanding you, let me pose this question: Are you saying that the question of "philosophy proper" or "a proper way of doing philosophy" can receive an answer that is non-philosophical or outside philosophy? Or would any answer assume, or reveal, a particular conception of what philosophy is?

So I assume, from your OP (welcome, by the way!) and from the responses of others, that non-human animals are persons too? Or have I missed something that would rule them out?

OK, fair enough.

Just out of curiosity -- why would we want to talk about subjectivity in the first place, on your view? Is the talking meant to provoke in the listener a deeper experience of their own subjectivity, somehow?

The question I see being raised here is, "Are property rights always just?" Most of us would want to reply, No, not always. What counts as property, and as a right to hold property, varies from society to society. Justice, arguably, does not, or should not. That something is a right does not make it just. Murphy & Nagel's The Myth of Ownership is good on this:

Any convention that is sufficiently pervasive can come to seem like a law of nature -- a baseline for evaluation rather than something to be evaluated. Property rights have always had this delusive effect. Slaveowners in the American South before the Civil War were indignant over the violation of their property rights [by actions such as] helping runaway slaves escape to Canada. But property in slaves was a legal creation, protected by the U.S. Constitution, and the justice of such forms of interference with it could not be assessed apart from the justice of the institution itself. — The Myth of Ownership

In other words, you can't usefully ask "Was Harriet Tubman wrong to break the property-rights law?" without also asking "Was the law itself wrong?"

Philosophy is for closers!

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.

Wow, great find. I had marked a few of these too, but most are new. Thank you!

Welcome to my world! :lol: I tried so hard to leave him out of the assertion challenge ("inspired by Kimhi"), for just that reason. But we're trudging along as best we can . . .

Sorry, I should have provided references but, as I said, I wasn’t sure I was even on track with your OP.

For Kierkegaard, I had in mind the Concluding Unscientific Postscript, Part Two, Chapters I, II, and III. I won’t even pretend to give a summary! But his stance, briefly, is that Hegel’s philosophy (which was very much in vogue at the time, and which SK calls “the System”) can give an account of absolutely everything except SK himself. He is left understanding all that can be known (he’s being a little sarcastic here) but the one thing he wants to understand best, his own being, is left out of “the System.” And this must necessarily be so, since there is no room for anyone’s subjectivity in an objective account of what is. The “uniqueness” angle might be that “the System” treat only things which are not unique, because they must be shareable and rationalized. Whereas any given self is, arguably, a one-off, a hapax – so how can it be made an object of knowledge?

The Nagel reference is more specific. In The View from Nowhere, p. 54, Nagel writes of what he calls the “centerless” objective world:

Yet each of us, reflecting on this centerless world, must admit that one very large fact seems to have been omitted from its description: the fact that a particular person in it is himself. What kind of fact is that? What kind of fact is it – if it is a fact – that I am Thomas Nagel? — Nagel

So again, subjectivity is posed as a problem for the objective viewpoint. (The puzzle is only a puzzle when expressed in the 1st person.) I think the “uniqueness” question here is more or less the same as in Kierkegaard – Nagel is uniquely Thomas Nagel, and this is of extraordinary importance to him, not in some egotistical way, but simply as a plain matter of getting around in his life. How do we fit such a vital fact into our “System” of non-unique things?

Hope this helps.

I'm using two contexts to try to understand you: First, the Kierkegaardian questions about how a self can escape from rational objectification. Second, a puzzle voiced by Thomas Nagel as to whether the statement "I am Thomas Nagel" is a fact about the world. They both consider "uniqueness" as possibly irremediably subjective.

I'm not at all sure I've understood you, though. If this is off track, please ignore.

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'.

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.

That could well be true, and fits with your earlier point that Kimhi isn't (here) interested in being precise with terms. And ordinarily I'd just say, OK fine -- except that the subject of the book is precisely the difference, if any, and the unity, if any, between the world ("A or ~A") and the mind ("p or ~p"). Ontology or psychology? Events or statements? Being or thinking? etc. I guess all I'm saying is that I wish Kimhi had sacrificed the big-picture view about "whatever is true/false/is/isn't" and given us more details about how assertion and V2B apply in the various instances.

Ha, our comments overlapped. You picked up on the same question in the footnote.

Specifically, [Kimni] is saying that assertoric force is not limited to assertions. — Leontiskos

One can see here why J came under the impression that a non-assertoric force was in play — Leontiskos

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. But the nomenclature doesn't matter so much. Better terms could have been chosen, starting with Kimhi himself.

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

The problem is, that’s not all Kimhi says about what the veridical to-be does. Maybe this is only Kimhi's reading of Kahn, but he says in the footnote on p. 9 that the V2B is what "confers existence" on "that which is true/false or is/is-not the case". The Analytics, he says, want to believe that the force/content distinction allows them to regard propositional content independently of the veridical. But the explanatory parentheses about what's covered by the V2B is alarming: "(e.g., a thought, a sentence, a state of affairs)". So it’s not just that, as you say, existence is conferred on propositions by the V2B. Evidently, the V2B makes no distinction between a psychological event (thought), a statement (sentence), and something non-linguistic in the world (a state of affairs). Even if Kimhi (or Kahn) is using "thought" in the Fregean sense of "proposition," this is still hard to swallow. How do you understand the V2B’s connection with states of affairs, which are generally considered to be the subjects of propositions, not the propositions themselves? Is this still a type of judgment or assertion?

I take the veridical use of 'to be' to be 'assertoric force'. — Srap

If we were strictly talking about propositions, then I think this would be right.

The problem I see here is that the metaphysics has been detached from the claims. Perhaps Kimhi is decrying this. — schopenhauer1

Do you mean that we (or some philosophers) are making claims about metaphysics without realizing that they are in fact only claims, from someone's point of view -- thoughts, in other words? I can sort of see how this might connect to Kimhi's insistence on uniting what he calls the ontological and psychological explanations of logic. He doesn't think the "detachment" can happen at all.

Then we can say that knowing words is knowing how to work out the meanings of sentences containing them. — Pierre-Normand

This is fine, as long as we expand what a "sentence" is to include ostensive gestures and other "non-linguistic sentences." Anyone who's watched a toddler learn words, knows that it starts with an adult pointing to the target and then saying the word. But I'm happy to consider the pointing as a sentence of sorts: "That's a ball!" Indeed, such a sentence is often uttered along with the pointing.

All these problems have been dealt [with] before by the ancients and then by the Kantians — schopenhauer1

By "dealt with" do you mean "resolved"? Surely not. If you only mean "recognized and discussed," then Kimhi, for one, would be the first to insist on this.

the point being that psychology (aka "psychologism") structures the world such that A is ~A, but we cannot see but the metaphysical reality is thusly obscured. — schopenhauer1

I want to understand this, but can't quite. Could you elaborate? I would have thought that psychology strutures the world so that A is not ~A.

Both your responses allude to the difficulties I see here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

the depth and originality of Kimhi's thought
— J

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

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

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

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

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

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

Philosophers are in the habit of indicating the object of judgment by the letter p. There is an insouciance with respect to this fateful letter. It stands ready quietly, unobtrusively, to assure us that we know what we are talking about. — Sebastian Rodl

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Frege is not merely attributing a belief to a subject with his judgment-stroke, — Leontiskos

That's my reading too -- he's not using the judgment stroke merely to mark a purported truth. But how shall we characterize what he is doing? This is where the problems start to crop up . . .

I just don't think anyone other than a few stray mystics is ever truly illogical. . . . Statements of logic, like the LONC, are indubitable. You don't really have any choice in that. — frank

It’s an interesting point. Would you agree that it’s possible to be illogical without knowing it, or meaning it? If so, then plenty of folk besides mystics are frequently illogical. I think what you’re saying is that, once we become aware of the logic/illogic in a statement, we don’t have a choice about which is which. We can no longer think in the way we formerly did, in our confusion, and still claim to make sense. That may well be true.

Am I missing the point here? — frank

Not at all. And if you regard “Either A or ~A” as a Humean generality, then your view of the connection between logic and the world would fall under Kimhi’s category of “psycho / logicism” -- “Either A or ~A” is how things look to us given that OPNC is only an expectation rooted in logic. There may be some version of reality, beyond our ken, in which "The cat is black" and "The cat is not black" happily coexist. (Not talking fuzzy logic here, of course.) His category of “logo / psychism” flips it the other way round – now it’s the world that is indeed displaying logical structure, and if logic as thought does the same, that is an application of the OPNC, not a new principle; we think logically because the world is logical.

@Banno @Pierre-Normand Great analysis of the Kimhi footnote from @Srap Tasmaner , above. It sets this up:

I think this heterogenous, but still orderly, collection are the forces we're speaking about. They're baked into the expression like the truth condition is alleged to be.

Whereas the illocutionary force concept is not baked into the commonalities between sentences whose factual content is equivalent. It operates on sentences with a given factual content. Forces seem aligned with the conditions that allow us to grasp an expression's content - content as affirmation, content as rejection. Illocutionary forces are means of operating on an expression's content, content as factual, rejection as practical. — fdrake

From the viewpoint provided us by Srap, I think this is right, thanks.

*
Here’s a somewhat related question arising from the many discussions about assertion on this thread, and also from Rombout’s essay/thesis on the judgment stroke as understood by Frege, Russell, and Wittgenstein. (A really helpful work, if you haven't looked at it yet.) How we answer it may shed light on assertion in general.

Consider these two statements:

(1) ‛It is true that p’
(2) ‛Someone asserts that p is true’

In ordinary language, it’s plain to see that they don’t mean the same thing. (1) makes a truth claim, while (2) describes some act of assertion, the subject of which may or may not be true. Compare ‛It’s true that the sky was cloudy today’ and ‛Pat asserted that the sky was cloudy today’. In the first case, the subject is the sky, in the second we’re talking about an assertion of Pat’s. Pat may well be wrong, but I can still truthfully say that she made the assertion.

What’s going on here is a “game,” if you like, about how the word “assert” is used in English. Most competent speakers would have no trouble explaining it. We would say, “ ‛Assert’ can mean ‛say something that is true,’ or it can mean ‛say something purporting to be true’. It depends on the context, and usually it’s clear which meaning is intended.”

Which meaning does Frege have in mind with the judgment stroke? Show your work. :wink:

About Hanna, I agree completely. This sort of bombast is part of why I disliked his review so much. But I quoted him to display an attitude which I think is commendable -- that we can recognize that a piece of philosophy can be very important while also deeply incorrect in the certitude of its conclusions.

I don't know if it helps with Banno's cat. — Srap Tasmaner

Schrodinger's cat: Unclear if it's alive or dead
Banno's cat: Unclear if it's referentially determinate
Kimhi's cat: Must be paired with a non-cat to make sense!

:yum:

The idea of logic as normative crops up more in everyday speech, I would say. "You're not being logical!" is a normative reprimand; the idea is that a good arguer ought to use correct logic. More generally, we seem to believe that in most cases, logic represents a template or set of guidelines for good reasoning, and it's all too easy not to use them. We aren't forced to think logically, in the way that, say, we're forced to digest food using [whatever the heck we digest food with].

This is all fairly trivial. Kimhi's idea of the normative applies when a philosopher, noticing the Ontological Law of Non-Contradiction ("both A and ~A cannot be the case"), also notices that it's possible to say contradictory things, inadvertently or on purpose. This philosopher then claims that we shouldn't do this. We ought to fit our thinking to the way the world is. (But again, Kimhi himself is certainly not that philosopher. He won't countenance the dualism.)

You ask what I think logic is. Basically, I agree with you that logic describes one of the "boundaries of the mind." But this boundary is peculiar in two respects, both hinted at above. One, it's a boundary that applies somewhat hypothetically: If we wish to talk sense and not nonsense, we're going to keep within logic's boundary. And two, our reasons for trying to respect it -- to refrain from talking nonsense -- seem all bound up with the OPNC, with our desire to think correctly about the way the world really is.