At this point I very much want to know what motivates you to have faith in Kimhi. Or more precisely, "Suppose Kimhi's arguments fail. How would you try to salvage his project, and what would the aim be?" What's the target here, for you? — Leontiskos

This question about having faith in Kimhi perhaps illuminates a significant difference in how we approach philosophy. I said in the OP that I was unsure whether Kimhi was raising a plausible challenge to Frege on assertion. I was pleasantly surprised to find a number of us willing to do some deep diving, in order to explore this and related questions. But l remain unsure about the Kimhi-inspired challenge, and whether Kimhi's entire project is solid, or whether he's someone who can raise excellent questions but not provide arguable answers.

But there it is . . . I wasn't reading Kimhi in the first place in order to find some truth that might settle some important controversy. I don't believe, at this extremely deep level of meta-philosophy, that such truths exist. I read K in order to better understand the questions, and to work on interpretation (in the hermeneutic sense) of why the protracted antinomies here are so persistent. And here, if you like, my "faith" in Kimhi has proved justified: For all the difficulty attendant on reading him, my insight into the underpinnings of predicate logic, and the many other questions that have arisen, has sharpened, and generated a host of other fascinating (to me) issues. That's why it's worth it, despite the screaming. (His inadequacies as a writer come with the philosophical territory, I would say. Most philosophers aren't good stylists.)

Robert Hanna, in that T&B review that I otherwise didn't like, stood up for a similar outlook:

To begin at the end, my overall judgment is that although Thinking and Being is indeed a
first-rate and perhaps even brilliant piece of philosophy, and although it has genuine
historico-philosophical import, in that, in my opinion, it effectively closes out a 100+
year-long tradition in modern philosophy, namely, the classical Analytic tradition,
nevertheless, all its central theses are false. — Robert Hanna,

I'm figuring that such a conclusion might be incoherent to you -- how could Kimhi be brilliant and important if he gets it all wrong? My outlook is even more modest than Hanna's: We're not yet sure whether he gets it right or wrong, and whether the kinds of things that worry him are in fact solvable. It's too soon, the grist hasn't gone through the mill yet. This happens whenever an important work appears, and has nothing to do, in my opinion, with bringing some controversy to a conclusion. I don't believe philosophy settles questions in that way. Nor will K's brilliance be burnished or tarnished if we never do reach consensus.

I guess that's the target you asked about.

the view from anywhere is eccentric, looking to account for what others say they see, while seeking broad consensus . . . It acknowledges that what we are doing here is inherently embedded in a community and extends beyond the self. — Banno

Very good. Would you agree that both the VA and VN are attempts to capture some concept of objectivity? (read "intersubjectivity" in the case of VA)

I am unsure why Evans would be committed to this atomistic thesis or to take it to be an indispensable feature of an extension of Frege's notion of sense as applied to object dependent thoughts. So, I don't quite understand what motivates Kimhi's rejection of Evan's account. — Pierre-Normand

I think the answer to your question lies in the first line Kimhi quotes from Evans, which begins: "The sense of a sentence, which is of course a function of the sense of its parts . . . " (my itals). Kimhi is probably reading this to mean that Evans accepts the building-block account of propositional meaning. I'd need to read more from Evans to decide if I agree that he does, but I'll bet that's what K is objecting to.

K's specific argument about "taking different attitudes to p" is pretty good, don't you think? If you can use your building blocks to build a statement like "p & ~p" without violating any spatio-logical rules, then it does seem to invalidate the previous, psycho / logical criterion for what is thinkable, for what can be a thought. And I especially like footnote 40. (Have you noticed how much important stuff is in the footnotes that might just as well have been promoted into the body of the text? Having been an editor for many years, I can tell you that this is a sure sign of a confusing ms. receiving a heavy edit from someone trying to give it structure.) Kimhi talks about "pragmatic contradiction" as the reason you can't attach a judgment stroke to "p & ~p"; if you use the stroke, you show that you know what it means to understand a logical expression. This is very similar to Habermas's "performative contradiction" -- sounds like material for a good paper.

the magnitude of the platonism at issue. The old war still rages — Srap Tasmaner

I wouldn't try to alter your philosophical convictions -- there's too much of that already on TPF -- but I truly don't think platonism (including Fregean platonism) needs to be anyone's opponent. That is, unless one takes a very rigid view of it as talking about Objects Called Forms that have some kind of otherworldly existence. Perhaps that was Plato's belief, though I doubt it, but it needn't be ours. It doesn't sound as if your thoughts about hylomorphism would rule out talk of abstracta in a less reified way.

No no, I'm not accusing [@fdrake] of platonism — Srap Tasmaner

You can go ahead and accuse me of platonism if you like! In this sense, which circles back to what you're saying about the World 3 nature of propositions: Plato's Forms were a somewhat amazing (given the time and place) attempt to find "the view from nowhere." Intelligible objects are shown to any and all of us, requiring only the Good to illuminate them. If Plato had had the word, I believe he would have called them objective. 3,000 years later, we're still on the same hunt. Frege wants his Laws of Thought to reveal a specifically platonic world of numbers, but you're right that it can go much farther than that. And:

The problem is, the reasons for seeing judgment and inference as objective would apparently vouchsafe the objectivity of just about anything. — Srap Tasmaner

I'd offer that as a nutshell description of the canyon that loomed between Analytic and Continental philosophy in the last century. If just about anything can be presented as a World 3 thing, accessible via the view from nowhere, then we have a real problem about subjectivity and interpretation. New OP called for, clearly .
. .

A mind and a thought just are related correctly or incorrectly. — Srap Tasmaner

I think that's close. For Kimhi, the key concept is affirmation and denial, not positive or negative predication.

I find reading Kimhi pretty unpleasant — Srap Tasmaner

I have gotten so frustrated with Kimhi over the past month that I've literally screamed, trying to untangle him. But I insist it's worth it.

The role "the laws of thought" in Frege plays, Kimhi keeps an analogue of it, but they're less ironclad logical laws and more tight constraints on thought sequences/acts of thinking. I don't know what their nature is, or how they work, but Kimhi seems to want to notice expansive regularities in them. — fdrake

Part of what makes their nature hard to grasp is that Kimhi insists on linking them with the laws of being. Or rather, he's trying to get us to think outside that dualism. The psychological PNC and the ontological PNC are not "two different principles. In the end the monist will say neither that they are two, nor one. Or rather: that they are the same and different. " (31). To anticipate your question -- no, I don't know what that means either.

Jack identifies it as G#
Jill identifies it as Ab.
G# and Ab are the same frequency.
Since G# and Ab are the same frequency, they're extensionally equivalent in terms of sound frequencies.
The note will be identified mistakenly when and only when it is not heard as G — fdrake

Right.

The thing that would let you see Jack and Jill's mistake as the same is the final principle there, right - the fact that the note will be identified mistakenly when and only when it is not heard as G. — fdrake

I don't think this would get you to "the same mistake." They're both failing to hear it as G, and they're both identifying the note mistakenly, but the question is, whether the way each describes what they (mis)hear is just a preference for different enharmonic spelling. Which leads to . . .

If Jack always identified every enharmonic equivalent in the sharp form, and Jill always identified every enharmonic equivalent as the flat form, the means by which they make the mistake would be a little different. — fdrake

This may be true, but we'd need to hear more about what "the means" represents. Anyway, the case I had in mind involved more than spelling. I'm imagining a case where Jack has an understanding of a particular musical passage that would entail the G# spelling, not just cos he likes sharps better than flats, but because that would be the correct spelling on his analysis. Same for Jill, in reverse. And sadly, they're both wrong, not at a theoretical level at all, but plain old faulty ears.

I think there's a way of mucking with it. I'm not sure why I'm mucking with it at this point though. — fdrake

Agreed, let's stop! It was just by-the-way.

The thing is, this thread is about what sort of thing the judgment of a proposition is. I mistook it, for some time, to be about "assertion" in a speech-act or language-game sense, because of the phrase "assertoric force", — Srap Tasmaner

Yes, assertion in the sense of judgment, but I wouldn't blame yourself much for any confusion. My OP didn't discriminate, because I hadn't taken on board the point you're now drawing our attention to. And as we've seen, Kimhi himself can be hard to parse. In any case, the various sub-threads concerning other senses of "assertion" have been valuable, at least to me.

This had not occurred to me, though it might be obvious to the rest of you. And I think it's very much in Kimhi's neighborhood. The judgment he wants restored to its rightful place is not some subjective thing, but third-realm just like propositions. — Srap Tasmaner

Yes. This is what drives him crazy -- how can we unify what appears to be a hopeless gap between the psychological and the formal? How can we bring "I judge p rightly" into some kind of entailment relation with what is the case about the world? Kimhi believes that Fregean logic doesn't permit the inference (1) S is F; (2) A thinks that S is F; (3) Thus, A truly thinks that S is F.

I agree, but it doesn't necessarily challenge Srap's point, it only insists on being more precise, which is all to the good.

Can we think of an example where no amount of precision can create a genuine synonymy between, say, two mistakes? If the precision is only about the object of the mistakes, then yes, I think so. Here's one that occurs to me offhand as a candidate: Jack misidentifies a note in music as a G# (it's really a G natural), Jill misidentifies it as an Ab. As you may know, G# and Ab refer to the same note, under different music-theoretic circumstances, rather like Morning Star and Evening Star. So have Jack and Jill made the "same mistake"? Arguably, no amount of precisifying about the note itself is going to resolve this, since Jack and Jill are making their respective mistakes for different reasons. But then again, they're hearing the exact same tone and being wrong about it with the same result. I want to say it's two different mistakes. This is perhaps a cousin of the "carrying the 1" example.

Like @banno and @frank, I believe this is right. The question, "How far can this analogy go?" is a good one. Perhaps we should say: It can go as far as propositional content can go. So, the same mistake? Probably. Taste in music? Maybe. Fear of snakes? No.

Excellent stuff here, thanks.

Not at all sure what "symbolic and actual" is doing here. — Banno

I think what Kimhi means is: A symbolic occurrence would be when p is used as, quite literally, a symbol, such as when we show the modus ponens inference. It is not "spelled out" but is understood to stand for "any well-formed proposition." The actual occurrence would be "p spelled out," an actual sentence in some particular context of assertion/mention/belief etc.

It's worth asking what sort of thing a "Law of thought" might be. Presumably a Law of thought must be such that it hold true in all cases. — Banno

But then there's the other sense of "law" which refers to something that doesn't necessarily hold true in all cases, but ought to. Kimhi says that this normative sense of "law" is characteristic of a dualistic understanding of how thought relates to being. Using the PNC as his example, he argues that if non-contradiction is supposed to be a principle of being, a statement about how things are in the world ("either A or not-A"), then the psychological version is "a normative requirement: that one should not contradict oneself." He doesn't think it has to follow from the ontological version. Which is part of why he rejects the whole dualistic model.

it's not about the view from nowhere, but about the view from anywhere. — Banno

I like this. I think Nagel would point out the following: Even something as abstract as a "view from anywhere" implies that someone, some consciousness, is going to step into that place and attain the view. But built in to the "view from nowhere" is the (very abstract) notion that something remains the case regardless of anyone's viewpoint. But the two views can be made quite similar if we just say that the view from anywhere is strictly hypothetical as regards a viewer. If anyone steps in, then their view will be the same as any other "anywhere-stepper."

I'm firmly with Kuhn here. I think there's close to zero chance that physicalism will turn out to be able to explain consciousness -- unless you just stipulate that anything that's real is physical, therefore consciousness is physical, QED, but that's no explanation at all. Or I suppose you could do a Dennett and "explain" consciousness by trying to show that it isn't real. Carroll's attempt to reduce the issue to a manner of speaking is hopeless. Kuhn's case for the two Seans is pretty good, and he's right to deny that it's a parallel with the Ship of Theseus. But we're waiting on the science here.

I'm way out of my depth on your other speculations. I'll watch the thread and see what I can learn.

I love this topic, but all I'll say here (it really needs its own thread) is that any plausible account of the view from nowhere would have to explain why it's a desideratum of rational thought, while at the same time leaving room for subjectivity, for me being a Kierkegaardian individual rather than merely an item in the Hegelian System or, worse, the victim of "rationalization" in Weber's sense. I agree, the 20th century was a rough time for objectivity -- it doesn't look as attractive as it used to -- but I'm not sure this forum would make sense without some faith in the view from nowhere.

one way of buttressing the idea that propositions have independent existence is to align them with the mental, rather than the physical. — Srap Tasmaner

Yes, and Kimhi wants to do neither. He’s after a unity of thinking and being. And no, I still haven't completely grasped how he gets there.

the question is in what sense "what he said" is a thought, while the actual words spoken were merely a physical "expression" or even representation of that thought. — Srap Tasmaner

To that I would add a third discrimination: “thought” in the Fregean sense of “proposition” or “propositional content.” So we have:
- “Thought” as a mental event. Mine is not yours, etc.
- “Thought” as the content of that mental event – this is the Fregean sense. Here, my thought is the same as yours, or can be.
- The language in which thought-as-content may be expressed. This is important because we need to leave room for synonymy between languages.

I often find it helpful to invoke Karl Popper’s “Three Worlds” idea in this sort of discussion. Popper’s World 1 is the physical world, the world which would exist, in a rough-and-ready way, without any consciousnesses. World 2 is the mental world, understood strictly as mental events, or brain events. Each occurs at a Time T-1, -2, etc. and is unique in the sense that no one can have the exact same event. World 3 is the world of our mental constructions, our ideas, propositions, theories, poems. As I said above, it’s basically the content of thoughts – it’s what the World 2 events are about.

There is a point you can make about content, the proposition, and a different point you can make about actual occurrences, in which that content features, but Frege, I think it is claimed, forgets what he's about and tries to make a single point about both, or tries to make a point about one that can only be made about the other, and somehow tricks himself into thinking he has not mixed up the two. — Srap Tasmaner

I read Kimhi to be saying that both the symbolic and actual occurrences of p are World 3 objects – they are contents of thought, one unasserted, one asserted – but the actual occurrences can’t be understood if we strip away any connection with assertoric force/truth value and try to treat them as if they were synonymous with symbolic occurrences.

I think it is, very much so. The "view from nowhere," on Thomas Nagel's understanding, is precisely the longed-for objective view that, in this case, would grant thoughts some autonomy from being "merely about us," in whatever way you want to take that idea. Everything I understand about Frege says that he would have heartily endorsed the view from nowhere as essential even to the simple self-identity of one instance of 'p' with another.

The passage from Kimhi you cite was key to my OP. I appreciate your analysis. Interestingly, Kimhi seems to equate "Wittgenstein" with the Tractatus. There is very little indication that Kimhi has absorbed later Witt, and he never speaks in terms of language games.

The full context principle assigns meanings (Fregean senses) to subsentential expressions (e.g. names, predicates and logical connectives) not only in the context of whole sentences but also in the context of the other sentences a sentence relates to in a language game. (And this is not exhausted merely by inferential relations). This is the point about actual occurrences of propositions — Pierre-Normand

I think Kimhi would accept this as a paraphrase of his thought. If we want to continue to speak Kimhian, we could replace "in a language game" with "in an actual occurrence of p."

Me too.

Great references again, thank you. I've just gotten onto McDowell and Rodl, and now I can add Martin and Conant. That was the good thing about grad school, you could actually read all day . . .

What still remains an open question to me (even though I lean towards the Wittgensteinian quietism of McDowell) is whether their accounts of this self-conscious propositional unity constitutes an improvement over the charitable accounts, put forth by Evans and McDowell, of what Frege was trying to accomplish when he sought to individuate thought/proposition at the level of sense (Sinn) rather than at the level of extensional reference (Bedeutung) in order to account both for the rationality of the thinking subject and for the objective purport of their thoughts. — Pierre-Normand

Well put. What you're calling the charitable accounts do seem to capture what Frege wanted to do, and why (especially the desire to explain the objectivity of thoughts), but I'll have to read more of McDowell.

Good citations.

Language is here in a predicament that justifies the departure from what we normally say. — Frege, On Concept and Object – Posthumous Writings, 97 – footnotes omitted

True, we cannot fail to recognize that we are here confronted by an awkwardness of language, which I admit is unavoidable — Frege, On Concept and Object – Posthumous Writings, 97 – footnotes omitted

But nobody can require that my stipulations shall be in accord with Kerry’s mode of expression, but only that they be consistent in themselves. — Frege, On Concept and Object – Posthumous Writings, 97 – footnotes omitted

Is it my imagination, or is Frege sounding a bit defensive here? He seems to recognize the shortcomings of his approach -- the awkwardness, the departure from ordinary language. His project, as we know, is to improve or even abandon ordinary language in the interest of clarifying logic's objective structure. So here, he's trying to confine himself to saying it's a predicament about language, not thought, and he's also saying that he's entitled to make his own stipulations about how to use terms.

My contention is that he can't confine himself to a "language predicament," because his predicate logic is claiming to do so much more than reform language. The individual-term question is merely an obvious starting-place for such a critique. And while he's entitled to withhold his agreement from Kerry or anyone else, his stipulations are also not in accord with many of our most useful common modes of expression, and in such a case, I don't think consistency is enough. Put another way: This is a high price to pay for formalism, especially when it claims to control something as basic as what can be said to exist.

(And just to pay Frege the respect he deserves, I agree with @Banno's fruit-fly analogy. There is a great deal to be learned about thought from Frege's intricate constructions, regardless of whether some of his metalogical premises might be questionable.)

we can't use utterances or sentences as the basis of agreement. It has to be propositions, or the content of an uttered sentence. With regard to whether there's life on other planets, notice how we "smuggle in" an assertion as Kimhe puts it. — frank

Yes, very good. That said, I believe there is still a larger issue about the basis of agreement -- broadly pragmatic and communication-oriented, or claiming some version of objectivity? But that's a deep rabbit-hole, and as long as you're not saying that agreement is only consensual, then we're on the same page.

And the discussion in this thread of modus ponens was just plain muddled. — Banno

Could you say more about this? Perhaps the target statement ought to be this, from T&B:

Geach agrees with Frege that we identify an argument as valid by recognizing it to be in accord with a principle of inference which is a norm that pertains to acts. Thus, on Geach's reading, Frege's observation [that p may occur in discourse as asserted or unasserted while still being recognized as the same p] applies both to an actual argument of the form modus ponens and to modus ponens as a principle of inference. Therefore, Geach's understanding of Frege's observation conflates the two senses of propositional occurrence: symbolic and actual. — p. 38

I take this passage to be central to what Kimhi wants to say in the book. If you can lay out problems with it, I'd find that helpful.

It's hard to be sure, but there seems to be a profound misapprehension concerning what logic is, underpinning the Kimhi's work and much of the writing on this thread. I'm not inspired to go down that path. — Banno

It is hard to be sure. The other possibility is that it's a profound contribution to our understanding of what logic is (T&B, that is, not necessarily this thread!). But of course you're right to be skeptical and to demand clear arguments. As someone else posted above, I hope you can stay with us and at least view the path from drone height, even if you don't want to go down it.

He's reliant on ambiguity. But further, he seems not to consider the developments of logic and metalogic since Frege - and they are profound. — Banno

I wouldn't sell him short. "Reliant on ambiguity" implies that he's trying to get away with something, but I think it's rather the case that he's not a very skillful writer and doesn't always realize how murky things are getting.

Your second point seems true, though. Kimhi targets Frege as if he had published the Beg. last year. He doesn't refer to many sources that are contemporary, except concerning Aristotle.

This intended reading, I think, preserves the philosophical distinction Frege is drawing in this passage between the mental act of thinking (grasping the thought) and the truth of the thought itself. — Pierre-Normand

Yes. You've just said what I said, above, but you said it better. I should have read this more carefully before posting -- the point has been well made.

That's what a proposition is supposed to be: that thing we can agree or disagree on. — frank

I like the clarity of this, but doesn't it beg the question? The "other side," so to speak, would say, "A proposition is supposed to be a thing with a truth-value, something we don't merely agree or disagree on, but claim objective reasons for doing so."

I agree that this is the best way to understand what's at issue here about "thought". (Though I don't want to take sides on the larger question.). Pretty clearly, the first quote finds Frege using "thought" to refer to an activity, an event that can happen in a mind, one involving a separation of sense or content from truth-value. When such an event happens, Frege wants to call it a thought, even as you and I might. The second quote is quite different. Here we have a much more technical term -- let's call it Gedanke for clarity -- which is meant to represent the content referred to above. In that sense it is propositional.

(And I see that some of your subsequent posts pick up this theme of how technical Gedanke is.)

Both IEP and Roberts refer to this Gedanke sense, but neither give a specific reference in Frege. From the context, I'm guessing it's to be found in On Sense and Reference. I don't have time today to hunt it down but maybe someone else can.

There is still no clear account of what this thread is about. — Banno

Well, it’s certainly wandered off in many directions. I just reread my OP, which included my optimistic belief that we didn’t have to be concerned with “what Kimhi says” in order to understand the question I was raising. Ha! But I’m glad to have stimulated a lot of interest in Kimhi.

I think now that the “challenge to Frege on assertion” is just that, and probably never should have wandered into speculations about different kinds or modes of “force,” even though Kimhi himself often seems to do that. The challenge asks whether we have to understand all actual occurrences of p in the same way that p is understood in modus ponens – that is, as a logical unit that can be handled within a formal system. The trivial answer is, “No, of course not, people say all kinds of stuff.” But I thought, and still think, that a much deeper question is being raised here, a metalogical one about how what we think and can say is related to our existence claims about what is. Maybe another way (not in the OP) to formulate the challenge would be to ask, "Does a strong formalism such as Frege's invalidate whatever can be said or thought about p in ordinary language?" By "invalidate" I mean "render meaningless/useless/incoherent" or, for short, unthinkable, despite what we may believe at the time about our alleged thought?

I'll have to ponder that. Two clarifications: I wish I'd said what you quoted, but I was myself quoting Julian Roberts, from The Logic of Reflection. And, in this context, it's the function (predicate) that is empty or unfulfilled or unattached, not the subject. There's quite a long sub-thread, woven among the various other topics, starting with , about just what the status of an "unattached subject" might be.

In those terms the question is simply whether Kimhi sees something which "displays (assertoric) force [without being a self-identifying display]" as having some kind of force. — Leontiskos

Right.

Regardless of words, Kimhi's point seems to be that Frege's Point excludes the possibility that a sentence displays assertoric force. — Leontiskos

Right.

I don't see Kimhi in any way moving away from assertoric force to some kind of general force. — Leontiskos

Not using that language, but I'm struggling to find a better way of talking about Kimhi's very unusual (to modern logic) commitment to two-way capacity and the primacy of affirmation and denial over the more usual "verb says something about subject" approach. Part of my motivation for wanting to mess with this language and perhaps find a way to bring a more basic concept of "force" into play is that Kimhi is not what you'd call a term-clarifier. He's no Kant! He'll take several shots at a difficult term, but one senses he hasn't really pinned it down. I was trying to kinda help him out, but as I say, I'm no longer sure it would be removing any mud from the water, even if I succeeded.

Thank you. This give me a good launchpad into Soames. I don't yet see anything that rules out a more hermeneutic approach to truth, but of course that is not the subject of this thread.

This is key, and I'll allow myself one more go at the individual-term question. It's the difference you're drawing between ordinary language and "what Frege would have" that I was focusing on. I absolutely agree that there's no place for "meaning or significance" of singular terms sans propositions in the logical world Frege goes on to create. But in the spirit of Kimhi, I'm trying to understand what Frege might be thinking, literally, when he encounters an isolated term. And of course "Frege" here is a stand-in for "any reasonable person." I'd hoped my suggestion was a modest one -- that there is some recognition (in ordinary language, if you will) of at least a likely potential meaning, on the assumption that Frege has encountered the term before. This observation leaves everything in place, in terms of predicate logic and Fregean existence claims. I have no disagreements with any array of experts on Frege. But it also leaves a problem about what is thinkable. I believe your statement contrasting ordinary language with "predication and quantification" shows the problem very nicely.

I've adopted the concept from Habermas, but either way, yes, it's a question rooted in hermeneutics. Plato too, arguably.

Yes. This shows the important difference between context and truth-value. Kimhi is asking us to rethink some basic assumptions about the "givenness" of some particular context, and the idea of a "contextless" appearance of p. But whether p is T or F is another story; context won't tell you.

My understanding is that in choosing the judgement stroke to range over the whole expression Frege removed the illocutionary force. But the "force" that denotes remained. — Banno

Yes, which is why I keep trying to find some better, more perspicuous ways to carve up "force." I was leaning toward believing that "force" itself should be strictly separated from both assertion and illocution -- or that, at least, Kimhi would want us to think of it that way. I'm no longer sure, based on the many interesting comments from yourself, @leontiskos, @srap tasmaner, @frank and others.

Frege may well have thought that proper names relied on quantification. Russell, arguably, did just that with his Definite Descriptions. — Banno

This is more or less where I was going with my hard-to-follow speculations about the universal quantifier. Russell's TDD postulates existential quantification for proper names, if I'm remembering rightly. And you had said that "so far as existence is defined, it is defined in terms of the universal quantifier." So my question was, If Frege does not accept the TDD, can we spell out how universal quantification might still give us something to think about when we think about names?

@leontiskos The go-to modern work on this is probably Kendall Walton's Mimesis as Make-Believe, if your interested in pursuing it. Excellent study. I can't find it or any excerpts on the Net, sorry.

Sounds good, I'll do that, and then toss any questions I have to you.

Just one follow-up now:

If you give a lecture explaining what truth is, and I'm your audience, I have to already understand what truth is in order to discern what you're doing, that is, telling me the truth about truth. Therefore you can't teach it to me. — frank

I still don't see that this follows. Can't you have a mistaken or in-part inaccurate understanding of what truth is, and discover in the course of my lecture what the "truth about truth" is? You seem to be saying that you wouldn't be able to recognize the "truth about truth" unless you already had the correct understanding of what that is. But couldn't the lecture process itself provide the necessary enlightenment? i.e., in the course of listening to me, couldn't you find yourself agreeing with me and simultaneously realizing "Ah, of course, I now see why I believe this to be true"?

If this is better addressed in Soames, then no need to answer. It's just where I'm currently puzzled.

@banno @frank

For in a definition certain characteristics would have to be stated. And in application to any particular case the question would always arise whether it were true that the characteristics
were present. So one goes round in a circle. Consequently, it is probable that the content of the word " true " is unique and indefinable — The Thought: A Logical Enquiry

Hmm. Does this amount to pointing out that any definition of “truth” would have to be true, thus opening up the regress? Or is it rather that, armed with our definition of “truth,” we need to use that very definition in order to decide whether the word applies in a particular case? The first option does seem circular to me. But why is second impermissible? Couldn’t I just say, “Yes, it is true that the characteristics that I claim define ‛truth’ are present in this case”? Showing that my definition of “truth” is correct is not the same thing as being able to develop and use it. Or is it? Is there something unique about “truth” that limits “definition” to “correct definition”?

The Parmenidean problem doesn't do much for me either, and I'm sorry Kimhi chose to start his book with it. I'm pretty sure that the majority of the important issues in the book, including my "challenge about assertion", can be addressed without worrying about "saying what is not." And having written that, I'm ready to be schooled by our Aristotelian friends on why this is wrong!

But that's the thing about philosophy, isn't it? I don't see the force of Parmenides' questions. But some excellent philosophers do. So I have three options: 1) I can assume I understand the issues involved, and I am right, and they are wrong. 2) I can reflect harder, assuming that Kimhi is smarter and better read than I am, and he wouldn't be wasting his time on this if there weren't something there. 3) Since the questions don't really interest me, and my time on earth is finite, I can choose to philosophize about something else.

Option 3, thus far, has worked for me.

(Do I really have to go back to the Tractatus? Whimper. OK, I'll take your suggestion.)

Unless these philosophers explain WHY thought MUST reflect reality (via "logic"), it doesn't seem to have any force to me, except as, ironically, unsupported assertions. — schopenhauer1

One of the best and most accessible parts of T&B is Kimhi's discussion of the four ways we can think about the relation of logic to thought (and reality). I wish I could refer you to this but I don't think it's online anywhere. He tries to develop an argument that, if successful, would answer your request. Oversimplified, here's the idea: If thought does not, necessarily, reflect reality via logic, that gives us a version of psychologism. Thought is just that -- merely thought. And logic represents the way we think, ideally. Kimhi agrees with Frege that this is a non-starter; he calls it "self-refuting":

It cannot ground the normativity of the logical requirements that underlie the objective purport of every claim about how things are -- including the claims of psycho-logicism itself.

In other words, it can't explain the very link you regard as so important -- that between logic and truth about the world. Kimhi goes on to talk about why the thought/world dualism isn't satisfactory either, but I don't want to paraphrase him to death. I hope this gives you a taste of how he justifies his views.

On this account, both "Berlin" and "2+2=4" are names. Indeed, if a proposition is considered to be a statement with a truth value, then any proposition is just the name of either the true or the false. — Banno

Yes, that’s how I understand it too. And for Frege, names are, in an important sense, outside logic, because logic only deals with things with “judgeable content.” Julian Roberts, to whom I often turn for insights into Frege, puts it this way: “Logic [according to Frege] has nothing to say about anything that is not a statement [i.e.], something that can be true or false. The utterance ‛house’, for example [or ‛Berlin’ in my example], is not a statement and cannot be of concern to logic.”

So far as existence is defined, it is defined in terms of the universal quantifier. — Banno

Good. I’m only vaguely aware of how Frege’s concavity differs from our modern universal quantifier, but I think I can still ask these next questions. The Fregean universal quantifier ranges over objects as well as formulae/functions, right? So maybe my question about “Frege on the Beach” (sounds like a hit song) could be phrased as: "When you comprehend the term ‛Berlin’ (as I’m going to assume you do, Herr Frege), does your comprehension depend on the universal-quantification symbol? And then, should you choose to use the term to fulfill a function, does the existence commitment change to ∃x?” So the idea is that ∀ can range over names or terms that are not (yet) part of functions. Clearly, I’m trying to find a way to make a name (and its sense) a “thinkable thought” without violating Frege’s understanding of what logic can do. Does this sound at all sensible to you?

Are you puzzling over the context principle, is that it? Are you asking if Frege is literally saying a word isolated like this, not part of a sentence, is meaningless? — Srap Tasmaner

No, I'm confident Frege would never say such a thing, and I was trying to get @Leontiskos' agreement on what he would say. I thought about including something specifically about the context principle, just to show I wasn't making that connection, but I decided to keep it simple.

As for your "Berlin" example, you don't understand it. It could be a lot of things. — Srap Tasmaner

An interesting takeaway from this little sub-thread: It's harder than I would have expected to come up with a individual term that will simultaneously be recognizable to (pretty much) everyone and also unambiguous. So sure, "Berlin" can be comprehended different ways. But that isn't really the point. The point is that there would be a finite number of candidate meanings, and while Frege might well say, "I'm not sure which one this piece of paper is referencing," he would not say the equivalent of "Huh? No idea what this could mean. I can't 'comprehend' any of the candidate meanings."

If this still seems not nailed down, maybe we should imagine the beach example as involving an absolutely unambiguous term -- "the Hope Diamond," say -- and just stipulate that Herr Frege has learned this term prior to his walk. Now we pose the question to him about whether he comprehends it.

Lastly, and I've said this repeatedly, this wasn't supposed to be some kind of "gotcha" about how Frege is contradicting himself about the existence of individual terms, or terms outside of functions, or whatever. I was trying to build a case, step by step, to show that we have alternatives about how to understand "existence can't be predicated." This was meant to be an early step in the argument. It goes all the way back to that thread on quantifier variance.