Sorry, I misunderstood the diction of your question to mean that, like me, you weren't quite sure about this. But obviously you know a lot about it. Yes, I'd very much like to hear your exploration of the indefinability of truth for Frege. Should it open a fresh OP? Or here is fine too.

Does "Berlin" have extension? If it does then it is not an object. If it does not then it is an object. All you are doing is trying to have it both ways. You want objects with inherent extension, which is impermissible. — Leontiskos

I feel like I'm stuck in an Abbot & Costello routine! If this really represents what Frege would say to me when I ask him whether he comprehends the word printed on that slip of paper he found on the beach, I could only reply, "Well, yeah, but Herr Frege, I'm not asking about extension or objects or what's permissible or impermissible in your philosophy. Have pity on a fellow beachcomber and just tell me whether you understand the word on the paper or not."

And I'll leave it at that.

I'm hoping @Banno could speak to this. I'm pretty sure Frege thought truth was definable within his predicate logic, but that might not amount to the same thing you're talking about.

He is proposing what he calls "psycho / logical monism" and claiming Wittgenstein as a fellow monist. Understanding this is, for me, by far the most difficult part of the book, and Kimhi occasionally indulges in an obscurity worthy of, yes, Hegel. But what this tells me is merely that it's hard, and that Kimhi is not the greatest writer -- I'm by no means ready to dismiss his ideas just because I'm still working on them. Sorry not to be able yet to explain the monism part, but I undertstand it better each time I reread. The clue, once more, is that "The difference between 'p' and 'I think p' is syncategorematic," or metaphysical, rather than a matter of logical form. Kimhi wants to go on to show how this distinction will lead to a unity of thinking and being, in a very old tradition he traces back to Plato and Aristotle.

[Kimhi contests] Frege's underlying assumptions of logic.. That logic is not psychological, according to Frege, but rather metaphysically real in some Platonic way... — schopenhauer1

Yes, Kimhi calls this "psycho / logical dualism" and rejects it. According to him, neither the Platonists nor the "it's just how we think" philosophers are correct, because the dualism is all wrong.

It’s hard to tease out a direct answer here to my “What would Frege say about comprehending a singular term?” question, but here are a couple of things you do say:

Are you asking what your incomplete sentence is supposed to mean without any verb? Suppose you begin speaking a sentence very slowly, "The grass in my backyard..." We have a subject ("the grass"), an accidental modifier of place ("in my backyard"), and we are awaiting the verb and predication. — Leontiskos

if you want to talk about some x apart from any function then Frege will not have it. So if you want to conceive of your "term" of "The grass in my backyard" as a proper name, then Frege will ask you to say something about the proper name. — Leontiskos

OK. Evidently my choice of “The grass in my backyard” was unfortunate, because it looks like its grammar may confuse the logical point. Let’s change the term to “Berlin”. If I say “Berlin,” I doubt if anyone would call it an incomplete sentence. Or, if you like, imagine Frege walking along a beach and finding a scrap of paper with the word “Berlin” written on it. In either of these cases, I’m guessing the natural response would be something like “What about Berlin?” or “I wonder why ‛Berlin’ appears here.” But what my question about comprehension is asking to you to affirm, is that in neither case would the response be “What is Berlin? I don’t understand this term” (if you’ll grant that the folks involved have heard of Berlin before).

To the second quote: I do indeed want to talk about (in the sense of "mention") some x apart from any function. I’ve just done so. You say that “Frege will not have it.” That may well be true. But again, what I’m asking is, does “not having it” mean that Frege doesn’t comprehend the term “Berlin”, or doesn’t think that I do? Or is it, rather, that he’s urging me to understand that I can’t say anything about the term without its taking its place to saturate a function?

I’ll drop this if the question still isn’t clear. This was all in aid of trying to build up a picture of how Frege regarded existence, but there are other ways to approach it.

But I guess the bigger picture here is that Kimhi seems to think Frege is lacking something that, say, someone like Aristotle captured in his logic- some sort of active engagement of the thinker and the logic. — schopenhauer1

This is a good discussion among you, @Banno, and @Srap Tasmaner. I'll just step in to say that the quoted passage sounds like it's on the right track to me. Kimhi does think there's something important -- indeed, fundamental -- missing in Frege, and that something has to do with the role of the thinker. Here's a passage from T&B that talks about this, perhaps unfortunately in terms of the syncategorematic:

The difference between "p" and "I think p" (and hence the difference between consciousness and self-consciousness) is syncategorematic -- and so too is the difference between p and not-p. This difference . . . cannot be associated with a difference in predicative content or form. . . . In the end we shall see that the various capacities which philosophical logic finds itself called upon to elucidate -- capacities for judgment, for language, for the deployment of logical words (such as "not" and "and") [Note: These would be syncategorematic in the traditional use of that term - J] , and for self-consciousness (and hence for the use of the word "I") -- are all one and the same capacity. To appreciate this is to appreciate the uniqueness of thinking. — T&B, p. 16

Kimhi is very blithe in his use of "hence" to arrive at the concepts of consciousness and self-consciousness. And many would take issue with the idea that philosophical logic is "called upon to elucidate" anything whatsoever about self-consciousness. But I think we can at least see what Kimhi believes his problem is about -- and the passage from Rodl, via Boynton, quoted earlier is also on point. As to whether this is reflected in Aristotle, I'm not qualified to say.

No one has yet explained the main premise, or in any clear manner I can discern. — schopenhauer1

It's hard to do, no question. Does the post about Boynton, above, help any?

And thus this Frege stuff doesn't seem like its leading anywhere other than he doesn't like the little marker that says "This statement is asserted as true". — schopenhauer1

More than a matter of liking or disliking, I would say. I can't recap all the arguments but I'm sure you can see that the need to undertand assertoric force is critical to the whole question. Kimhi claims that a strategy like the judgment stroke is inadequate to the task.

I want to highlight a few things in Owen Boynton’s first-rate essay/review on Thinking and Being. This will be a brief discussion and I really hope everyone interested in this thread will read the Boynton piece – he’s a marvelously good explicator. (And thanks again to @Pierre-Normand for finding the piece.)

Boynton wants to compare certain aspects of Kimhi’s thought with Sebastian Rödl’s, and I’m not qualified to say much about that. But a quote from Rödl that Boynton provides sets the stage very well:

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. For example, when we do epistemology, we are interested in what it is for someone to know—know what? oh yes: p. If we inquire into rational requirements on action or intention, we ask what it is to be obliged to—what? oh yes: see to it that p, intend that p, if p then q, and so on. However, if we undertake to reflect on thought, on its self-consciousness and its objectivity, then the letter p signifies the deepest question and the deepest comprehension. If only we understood the letter p, the whole would open up to us. — Sebastian Rodl, Self-Consciousness and Objectivity

You could say that Kimhi’s entire project – and the Kimhi-inspired challenge to Frege with which I began this thread – rests on this sudden realization that p is mysterious, not “innocent”, not something merely to be taken for granted in its philosophical employment. The first chapter of T&B is called, wryly, “The Life of p,” but it’s no joke. We have to ask, “How does p appear before us, on the page, in speech, in thought? Who puts it here?” Philosophy begins in wonder . . . and great philosophy often begins with questions that seem almost idiotic in their obviousness.

Frege’s system of logical notation, depending as it does on a distinction between the intensional force and extensional force of predicates, cannot account for the inference: “p”→ “A judges p”→ “A rightly judges p.” Within the context of “A judges,” “p” takes on a different intensional force (its sense) from when it stands alone, even though its extension (its reference) remains the same; it is intension, rather than extension, that permits inference. — Boynton

Frege’s remedy, according to Kimhi, is to introduce the judgment stroke, which has no functional role: “it signifies that something has been asserted, but it remains unrelated to the content of asserted propositions.”

Fine. But this removes assertoric force from any possible unity of thought and being – between what is said and what is the case.

Put another way, whereas . . . Fregean logic can provide an account of the content of thought, such an account of that thought will be divorced from [1] being/reality/the world on the one, and [2] of the thinker/subject on the other; a mode of expression not available in formal logic (because not reducible to the elements within propositions) is required in order to close the gap. Kimhi calls this mode of expression the syncategorematic. — Boynton

This is the best attempt I’ve yet seen to get across Kimhi’s notion of the syncategorematic. There’s more to it – for Kimhi, a fact is itself a syncategorematic unit – but the basic idea is that to think about how thought refers to the world is to think syncategorematically, and thus outside the expressions of formal logic.

Boynton doesn’t like the S word any better than I do – he calls it “cumbersome,” “not easily graspable,” and “specialized” -- and in a brilliant stroke he suggests an “obvious alternative”: metaphysical.

For what “syncategorematic” does is to demarcate a realm of expression and thought that cannot be reduced to categorematic notation or analysis—it is very much, in that sense, similar to “metaphysical” . . . In other words, Kimhi wants to suggest that the “meta” prefix, referring to “beyond”, is in fact properly understood as the “syn” prefix, referring to “with.” — Boynton

These are just a few of the insights I found in Boynton’s piece. I could have picked out and commented on a half-dozen other, equally insightful, passages, but you can read it for yourself. I find the essay especially valuable because, to think about Kimhi’s philosophy and its challenges to Fregean logic, we need a kind of vision shift, a big-picture understanding of why we ought to be dissatisfied. That can often be hard to find in T&B. I think Boynton is keeping our eyes pointed in the right direction, on the difficulties formal logic experiences when it tries to connect thought with being. “The metaphysical already accompanies, is already within, our normal propositions, our everyday speech, and . . . such unity is also the unity of thought and being.” The connection with Wittgenstein is becoming clearer and clearer to me . . .

OK, it's clear to me now which sentence you meant. I began a reply about the "more to it than that" . . . and found myself in deep waters. To be honest, I'm no longer sure that there is more to it. In other words, your paraphrase ("such sentences have an inherent assertional logical or grammatical structure") may capture the idea just fine. Sorry, I'm a slow thinker . . . thanks for your patience. I'll keep working on it.

I do recall that, thanks for bringing it up: On Denoting.

So we can invite @Leontiskos to compare Russell's view as well -- does he (Leontiskos) think Frege would give the same explanation? Is that his (Leontiskos's) own explanation? Just to refresh us about the point of it all, it has to do with the way in which Frege forbids predicating existence; getting clear on the individual-term question is kind of Step One to making my case that Frege only means, literally, that we can't speak in Logicalese about the existence of entities or the non-existence of entities. I don't take him to mean that we can't understand the difference, or that we can only understand what can be said in Logicalese. But one step at a time.

I’m happy to have both Novak and Rombout on tap. As I mentioned yesterday, my time is a bit curtailed this week but I’m sure they are both worth reading, and I’ll do so.

Fregian logic has an especially hard time with individuals since it is built for concepts or classes. Given that the statement is not Fregian in the first place, it raises a whole host of issues. — Leontiskos

This was your response to these questions of mine:

What do you think the status is of the term ‛The grass in my backyard’? Are you able to understand it? And now a second question: What do you think Frege would say? — J

Are you saying that, because “The grass in my backyard” is an individual term, not "Fregean," not part of a proposition, Frege would be reduced to silence about it? Would he say, “Sorry, I don’t understand that term”? This seems unlikely. I’m deliberately asking a question about an individual term because I’m trying to build up an argument about Frege’s views on existence.

Your response goes on to imagine what Frege would say about a different bit of language, “The grass is in my backyard,” but that of course is a proposition and not at issue. So I pose the question again: Given your understanding of Frege’s philosophy of logic, how would he account for the fact (if it is a fact) that we can understand the individual term “The grass in my backyard”? (I’ve only put it in my backyard to avoid the appearance that I’m asking about a universal term, “grass”; there’s no predication involved. If you prefer, change it to a unique non-composite term, such as “The Hope Diamond” -- anything that can be the argument in a function.) And the question remains for you as well: You are not a Fregean, so what account would you give of that term? Do you understand it? If so, how and why?

yes the quote is direct — bongo fury

Yikes! Thanks for the translation.

Why deny, in the latter case, that each occurrence of the sub-string "P" (considered as such, apart from its context) still says that P? You could perfectly well admit that it does but still say the whole, larger sentence doesn't. — bongo fury

Well, here we are back to the vexing question of "assertion" a la Kimhi. To push you down the rabbit hole, I'd need to persuade you that your use of "say" and "says" is not innocent, but brings with it an entire apparatus involving what it is for a consciousness to think (and possibly assert) a proposition. I'm still working on the best way to talk about this (and I'm not sure it's true, but Kimhi makes it plausible at least).

And if you have a reason, why shouldn't it equally well apply for sense, and disqualify the inner occurrence of the sentence from having the same sense as a free-standing occurrence? — bongo fury

This is a little easier. We can go along with Frege in the separation of sense from assertion as merely meaning that a concrete occurrence of a proposition may actually assert it, whereas this assertive force is not associated with the repeatable symbol 'p'. ("Frege's observation," above). What is necessarily associated is the sense.

That is very kind of you to say, thanks.

Yes, you’ve got it, as your later post with the extensive Kimhi quotes shows. Kimhi agrees with what he calls “Frege’s observation” but not what he calls “Frege’s point.” His line of dialogue should read, “I disagree, if you’re saying that the only thing which gives the predicate its force is assertion. But as I read you, you needn’t be saying that at all. That’s a conclusion that Geach and other Fregeans have imposed on you.” And that’s what I’ve been saying too.
— J

So Kimhi doesn't disagree with Frege after all? He only disagrees with Geach? — Leontiskos

No, you’re right, I was oversimplifying for the sake of brevity. He thinks that both Frege and Geach maintain “Frege’s point.” So a better rewrite of the words addressed to Frege that I put in Kimhi’s mouth: “I disagree, if you’re saying that the only thing which gives the predicate its force is assertion. But as I read you, you needn’t be saying that at all. But you do, and Geach and other Fregeans have emphasized this additional point without seeming to realize that you could have stopped with your ‛observation’ and all would have been well.”

I don't think you're grasping the seriousness with which Frege excludes existence as a predicate. My second quote here literally has Frege explaining why it makes no sense to speak about the existence of entities or the non-existence of entities. I don't see how this claim of yours can be saved:

2) we have to start with a logically grammatical proposition that fills the argument slot with a term, thus creating what Frege called a “name,” before we can say whether it exists or not.
— J

If "before" means "before" and "say whether" means "say whether," then Frege will deny this claim. — Leontiskos

I interpret Frege differently here. To show how, let me start with a question. What do you think the status is of the term ‛The grass in my backyard’? Are you able to understand it? And now a second question: What do you think Frege would say?

The concept of the syncategorematic may need to be introduced, even if the word is not. — Leontiskos

I’m starting to think so too, and see Boynton. He does a far better job than I thought possible at giving the term some intuitive appeal, especially when he likens it to “metaphysical”.

I am so lost in the sample sentences. Is this really how Dummett presents them? Would you mind either punctuating them differently (parentheses, maybe, to set off the sentences-within-sentences?), or else adding a translation into symbols?

Well, I hope you jump in if the mood strikes you.

It bothers me that no one seems able to set out in a few hundred words what is being argued [in Thinking and Being] – I think you might agree with this. — Banno

I sure do, and also about his style. Where were the editors at Harvard UP?! But let's face it, he has this in common with other great philosophers. Kant's style is appalling, but when you work at it, much is revealed. And if someone asked me to explain the 1st Critique in a few hundred words, I'm sure I couldn't. Kimhi's book is much shorter but I believe the depth and importance is there, so paraphrasing isn't easy. I think the Boynton review does the best job, and I'm going to post a few thoughts about it later.

OK, but I'm still trying to break it down a bit more. 'If p then q' is a sentence, but so are 'p' and 'q', presumably. To answer your question about "whether there's more to it" (the Frege / Kimhi issue), I need to start by getting clear on how you're using "mention" as opposed, I presume, to "use." Pardon the persnicketiness, but it makes a difference in what I want to go on to say. So . . . which sentence are you referring to as mentioned? (or all three?)

So your rule might apply within a first-order logic, and so for Frege, but not for higher order logics in which we predicate with other propositions. — Banno

That's all I meant, yes. And of course there are several points of view in this thread, including Kimhi's, that call into question this way of seeing the matter.

@banno @leontiskos @srap tasmaner @janus @fdrake @schopenhauer1 @russellA. and apologies to anyone I missed:

@Pierre-Normand has found a very good short review of Thinking and Being here: unpublished review essay by Owen Boynton. I actually have a lot to say about it but time is tight, which brings me to the other thing I wanted to say:

I don't know if others have this problem, but I always feel like I ought to reply to interlocutors on an interesting thread as quickly as possible, maybe especially when it was my OP. Part of me knows there's no rule about this, and the fact is that I often can't because I have this Other Life where I have to go places and do things. No big deal, of course -- none of us is so terribly important to the others -- but I thought I'd just say it out loud. Right now, there are a number of points I'm eager to address but you won't be hearing from me till tomorrow at the earliest.

The conclusion I suspect is too strong. I'm not keen in including "necessarily". Seems as what is needed is just to be able to set the force to one side in order to consider the propositional content. — Banno

I'll put my original Step 2 here so we can have it in front of us:

Therefore, a proposition cannot contain assertoric force as part of its logical structure. If it could, then we would no longer be able to recognize repetitions of ‛p’ as “the same”: Some would be asserted, some would not, and that would be internal to the structure. There would be some sort of deep or semantic assertion built into this Uber-proposition. Assertion would be functional in the Fregean sense. And since the self-identity of ‛p’ is critical to the entire logical apparatus, we know this cannot be. — J

Does this amount to an argument for the necessity of Frege's separation? I thought it did, on the grounds stated: We've got to have all repetitions of 'p' as identical, but if some of them have assertions "built in," then it wreaks havoc with synonymy, inference, etc., as Step 1 seems to show. But perhaps my conception here is too narrow.

Yes, a little more, but first let me be sure I understand you. In 'If p then q', are you saying that 'p' and'q' are mentioned?

The assertoric nature of FG consists entirely and only in the syncategorematic ⊢
⊢
. The assertoric nature of KG is at least centered on the verb 'is', but the entirety of the sentence is required in order to understand its assertoric nature. Like Humpty Dumpty, once KG has been separated into FG and FGH it becomes very difficult to put the pieces back together again and find the wholeness of KG. — Leontiskos

Agreed. Good analysis. I'd only add that whether there is indeed a "wholeness of KG" is a central question, and Kimhi is trying very hard to argue for it, using pre-Fregean concepts of logic.

Some of this is good, I agree. "Kimhi argues that a self-conscious, first-person perspective — an 'I' — is internal to logic" -- that's the most perspicacious bit. It takes us right back to our big question about how 'p' is meant to be understood when it stands alone. Can it be "innocent" of consciousness? The parts about how "thinking is not just a cognitive psychological act, but also one that is governed by logical law" and "In other words, the distinction between psychology and logic collapses" are too imprecise and summative to really express Kimhi.

I'm mainly pointing out the difference between the standard epistemological questions "How are we justified in saying p is true?" or "What makes p true?" vs. the meta-question "What the heck do we mean by truth anyway?"

Good, I'll watch for it too.

I'm going to propose what I hope is an alternative view in a separate post, so as to please no one. — Srap Tasmaner

:lol:

Fantastic, I'll read the Boynton immediately, thanks. It will be good to have an introduction to Rodl as well -- I don't know his work apart from the odd reference.

I liked "Life of p" too but fair warning, it's the only joke in the book.

This is a gracious way of phrasing your criticism! As you can see from the exchange with @Leontiskos just above, he and I are also wondering about the ultimate import of all this. I find Kimhi’s book impressive and original; on almost every page there’s an insight or question I hadn’t thought of; and clearly it’s made something of a splash in academic circles. I wrote the OP because I wanted to start discussing some of Kimhi’s challenges to Frege, which are at least plausible and, if correct, very significant. So yes, to me it adds up to “being interesting,” even fascinating, and yes, I can see why it might not be your cup of tea.

About your “elevation”: For you, the question of truth is important, so if we can phrase the Frege/Kimhi discussion in terms of truth, that will make it of interest. Well, I’m interested in truth too, but I don’t see Frege or the analytic philosophers abandoning that question. Indeed, I can hardly think of a more written-about and argued-about question in my lifetime. I think it’s possible that you have a definition of truth which isn’t shared by, e.g., Frege, and therefore it appears that the topic itself is missing from his writings. But a huge meta-question in anal phil (sorry, couldn’t resist) is not just “How do we know which propositions are true?” but “How do we decide what truth refers to, what we can say about it, what logic might tell us about it?” etc. etc.


So no, I don’t think Kimhi is saying that “analytic philosophy often loses its way when it doesn't focus on the older tradition of discerning TRUE propositions.” Now it may well be that, if we can absorb Kimhi’s ideas, we’ll wind up with some important things to say about how to discern truth. But that is not his focus. He does indeed argue that anal phil was wrong from the start in creating a sort of dualism between what can be thought and what the world contains, but that’s different. He wants us to recognize a unity here. Where this might take us in terms of understanding truth, I’m not yet sure.

the assumption that being true or false originally involves a dissociation of what is true or false from the activity of thinking or saying that such-and-such is or is not the case — Kimhi, Thinking and Being, 8

This is his “psycho / logical monism” put quite plainly.

The obvious question is then, "Isolating the assertoric force in that manner is admittedly strange, but what's the concrete issue here?" I have some ideas but no clear answer at this point — Leontiskos

Looks like we’re at a similar place, then. I phrased it as “Is this just playing with words?” but it’s the same question about what, if anything, important follows from this. I have spent the least amount of time, so far, on final essay/chapter of Thinking and Being, which is called “On the Quietism of the Stranger” (referring to Plato’s Sophist) and takes a decidedly enigmatic, even mystical, turn, in a way that does remind me of Wittgenstein. I need to read that chapter more carefully before weighing in on what the point of it all might be. And, more down to earth, that Rombout thesis looks really good and should be a help.

We can understand “The grass is green” without knowing whether or not it is true, and whether we should affirm or deny it. — J


It is that last part I am trying to focus on.. As clearly Frege believes it and Kimhi agrees.
— schopenhauer1

I think the argument has been that Frege believes this must be so, and Kimhi claims it ain't necessarily so, but sometimes it is. I haven't wrapped my head around what is supposedly the main topic of this thread yet. — Srap Tasmaner

I sympathize! I thought you yourself gave it the best interpretation, in your elucidation of the difference between affirming a statement and making a statement about the world. In the first case, we’re saying something about p, a “bit of language,” as Kimhi calls it. In the second case, we are creating a proposition, p, which states what is the case in the world; the world, of course, is not made of language. And the Kimhi-inspired challenge is trying to tie this back to Fregean notions of what can and can’t serve as the argument of a proposition. This is where the dreaded “categorematic / syncategorematic” distinction comes in, but I’ll fight to the bitter end against using those terms if I can present the idea more simply.

As for the quoted exchange with @schopenhauer 1, I think Frege and Kimhi are in agreement here. What Kimhi believes to be importantly controversial is not the separation of sense from (T/F) assertion, but the crucial difference between how logic treats statements of affirmation/denial vs. propositions. In a manner that I too am still struggling to grasp completely, he thinks that Fregean logic presupposes (or is it imposes?) a dualism that is artificial. One way he puts this is:

It is widely accepted, to the point that it is almost a dogma of contemporary philosophy, that we must acknowledge a radical difference between the occurrence of p in extensional truth-functional complexes (such as “~p”) and its occurrence in intensional non-truth-functional complexes (such as “A thinks [judges, asserts] that p”). — Kimhi, p. 11

I added “judges, asserts” because Kimhi is often unclear whether he wants “thinks” to mean “thinks truly” and/or “thinks that __ is the case” or simply "has the thought in consciousness." In this instance, I believe any of those three senses of "thinks" would be part of the point he's making.

The difference presupposes a certain kind of sentence reification — Leontiskos

Could you say more about this? I’m not sure what sentence reification would be.

My impression is that you have spoken about assertoric force independent of assertions, and not just force, but I could be wrong about that. — Leontiskos

No, you’re right. In part, this thread for me has been a process of clarifying terminology. I now think it’s better just to speak of “force” understood as positive or negative predication rather than using the term “assertoric force.” This (my) sense of "force" might be close to what you’re calling intentional force, but I’m still not sure whether you mean “intentional” or “intensional”. Interestingly, either meaning might apply on this point!

Well, "before we can say whether it exists or not," seems to be simply anti-Fregian, given that we can never say that that an "argument" (in Frege's language) does not exist.. . . I think Frege would go even further and say that there is no reason or sense in "claiming that Fido exists" via predication. — Leontiskos

There’s an important question here. Yes, once an argument is attached to a predicate, we say it exists. But the question is, What was the status of the argument term before something was predicated of it? A rather Zen-like question, but what I’m arguing is that an infinite number of nouns (just to simplify it to nouns) are floating around in our language, their status unknown. To place one into a function grants it existence in the only way that Frege thought made sense. So I do think it’s meaningful and important to speak about entities/nouns that may or may not exist – it will depend on whether they become arguments in a function. Frege, on my reading, never disagrees with this. He is always talking about what we can say, that is, make grammatical propositions about. ‛Grass’ is a word. The moment we try to do something with it, predicate something of it, we are inducting it into the world of things that can be talked about, that can be said to exist. It’s not so much that Frege thinks some magic is at work here that brings objects into existence ; it’s more that his attitude is, “Well, if you don’t think it exists, why are you saying things about it?” That's the sense in which he "assumes" existence, I believe.

Okay, but do you see how this reading of Kimhi fails to contradict Frege?

Frege: "Assertoric force is dissociated from the predicate."
Kimhi: "I disagree, because the predicate has force."
Frege: "Unless you say that the predicate has assertoric force, you have not disagreed with me." — Leontiskos

Yes, you’ve got it, as your later post with the extensive Kimhi quotes shows. Kimhi agrees with what he calls “Frege’s observation” but not what he calls “Frege’s point.” His line of dialogue should read, “I disagree, if you’re saying that the only thing which gives the predicate its force is assertion. But as I read you, you needn’t be saying that at all. That’s a conclusion that Geach and other Fregeans have imposed on you.” And that’s what I’ve been saying too.

the Original Post tries place Kimhi's thesis in a cage so we can talk about it without talking about Kimhi (and for good reason!), but this can never be fully carried out by those who do not understand Kimhi's thesis as well as he does. — Leontiskos

I’m afraid this is probably true, but I’m still going to avoid as much of Kimhi’s terminology as possible, out of consideration for others following the thread. The “good reason!” you mention isn’t just his odd use of singular terms like “syncategorematic,” but his whole style of writing, which is dense, lacks examples, and asks you to remember his labels for complicated arguments (“Frege’s observation” vs. “Frege’s point,” for example). I agree that the ND review is a help. And everything you’ve cited from Thinking and Being here is absolutely on the mark, and important; I’m just afraid it will be opaque without context and a lot of reflection.

A proposition will be true, given some interpretation, only when that interpretation assigns that individual to that property. That is, "Grass is green" will be true only in interpretations that assign "...is green" to all instances of "grass". Or to put much the same thing slightly differently, when the interpretation is such that "grass" satisfies "...is green".

What counts as being true is being satisfied, under some interpretation. — Banno

I recommend we adopt this, for purposes of this discussion, as a reasonable consensus on “criteria of truth” etc. The huge potential area of disagreement would center on whether "some interpretation" is the best we can do, of course, so it leaves out some meta-philosophical issues, but we can’t get distracted trying to work out a Theory Of Everything.

Or we can just agree to disagree about what makes a statement true, and stay focused on the Kimhi-inspired challenges to Frege.

But what is dropped here is not an illocutionary assertion. What is dropped is the sense, as used to make the identification. It seems that it must be something like this that Frege meant by “dissociating the assertoric force from the predicate”. — Banno

Ahh, the light goes on. Got it, thanks.

This is super helpful, thank you. I want to mull over several points you make before responding. But for now, could you expand a little on this?:

In other words, by identifying the two extensional sets as the same, we're able to "make the assertion" that S is Richard's sister without any appeal to some actual act of assertion
— J

Not quite. — Banno

What's the better way to understand this? Is the problem that I'm still thinking in terms of assertions, which, as the rest of your post shows, are no longer much needed in logic?

This phrase, "just an ontological move", is interesting. — Srap Tasmaner

Very interesting, and what you’re saying about it applies to a lot of issues, not just Roberts here with the separation of function and argument. To stick with that for a minute: I read the passage from Roberts as suggesting that Frege’s “ontological move” is a somewhat ad hoc or tendentious solution to a potential problem about psychologism. It’s not enough, for Frege, to show that subjects and predicates (arguments and functions) are given an asymmetric treatment in the “formal rules of calculation.” He also wants to eliminate psychologism as an option for understanding what logic is fundamentally about. Logic is not about the way we think, it is rather a description of the objective structure of thought. By calling a function a “thought,” Frege wants to rule out the possibility of its appearing in the argument position, as a possible subject of logical discourse. Here’s a bit more from Roberts:

So if we purport to describe thinking [that is, predicate something about it], or to explain it in terms of empirical categories, then whatever we purport to describe is by that very token not the formalism of pure thought. Ultimately, as Wittgenstein emphasized, thought in this sense can only be shown, or demonstrated in practice; it can never have things said about it. — Roberts

I’m not sold on the Wittgensteinian leap at the end, but I include it because a number of people on this thread have also noted this similarity. As for the legitimacy of this “move,” your comments now become pertinent. I agree that Frege is saying, “Here is my method, these are the terms I’ll use, this is how I intend to proceed.” But he seems also to be firm about the ontological difference between arguments and functions. Roberts is asking, “Has Frege explained anything, or is he merely declaring his own ‛way of going on’?” We know we can rule out your 2nd option (that Frege would invoke “all in the head / language / culture” as his explanation), since that would be psychologism on steroids. So what about the 1st? It seems to me this is pretty close to what Frege believed, but again, we want to know why he believed it. I’m not sure it’s enough simply to point out how tidy this makes everything, and how effective a weapon it is against psychologism. Frege was smarter than that. Like you, I’m not sure what to say about it, and I’d defer to those who know Frege better than I do.

I would also love to return, maybe in a fresh OP, to the wider implications of whether “carving the world at its joints” (Plato and Sider) is more than an ontological “move,” understood as something you just declare as useful methodology. A minor topic in philosophy! :wink:

Nice to meet another Merrill fan!
— J

I didn't consider for a moment anyone would get that reference! — Srap Tasmaner

Oh heck yeah -- the man was a genius.

All of which, I think, explains both J 's sense that statements display assertoric force without themselves being assertions -- in much the way a screwdriver has a clear and unambiguous purpose ---but also why Frege distinguishes them, because the coupling of a statement to the assertion it would naturally be used to make is loose. — Srap Tasmaner

I like the screwdriver analogy. ‛The grass is green’ is all set, ready to go -- its "purpose" is what I'm calling its force -- but someone does have to pick it up and use it. A lot of the interest in this thread centers on how best to understand picking it up and using it. The Fregean “loosening” is also good – for him, it is logically necessary that assertion does nothing to sense.

The distinction [between arguments/subjects and predicates in Frege] is total and fundamental. — Srap Tasmaner

This passage from Julian Roberts is worth quoting in full:

Psychologism rests on the assumption that we can coherently say things about thinking itself. To rule this out, something stronger than asymmetry of the function-argument relation is needed. Frege achieves this strengthening by interpreting ‛functions’ as ‛thinking’. This semantic interpretation involves an ontological commitment. The distinction between functions and arguments becomes an ontological one. So the asymmetry of the relation is ‛explained’ by saying that the entities denoted at either side of the relation are themselves, ontologically, distinct. There are function-entities, and there are argument-entities. As a result of this ontological move, the rule ceases to be a formal rule of calculation and becomes a declaration about the necessary properties of certain entities. Thoughts, in a word, are ontologically distinct from their objects; and that is why thoughts may never be arguments. — Julian Roberts, The Logic of Reflection

I agree with this, and it seems to support your understanding as well. Notice, though, that Roberts puts “explained” in scare-quotes. Fair enough: Is this really an explanation or just an “ontological move”?

I think we're all on the same page, I'm just using the word "claim" instead of "assert", and also drafting the word "say", all three of which have considerable overlap in everyday speech. — Srap Tasmaner

Yeah, and it’s this overlap that’s driving us all slightly crazy! So far we lack a rigorous analysis of how the terms relate.

There's a little bit of a puzzle about the "affirming" language, because it makes asserting sound like it has an extra step, so that it strongly resembles indirect discourse. — Srap Tasmaner

That’s a big chunk of Kimhi’s argument as well. I was going to save the whole “believes that” / “thinks that” / “judges that” issue for a different OP, but (sigh) of course it’s relevant here too.

As if a person making an assertion were "channeling" a spirit guide: there's an internalized claim presented, which you speak on Ephraim's behalf, and by so speaking endorse it. — Srap Tasmaner

Nice to meet another Merrill fan!

I'm also not clear on what an "exact connection between assertion and truth values" could be. If I claim something is the case I am either right or wrong depending on whether what I've claimed is the case or not. I can't see what more could be said about that. — Janus

Perhaps nothing more, in that simple case. But as this thread demonstrates, "assertion" gets used in some much more complicated and ambiguous contexts. As @Banno points out, above, Frege didn't think in terms of actual illocutionary acts such as the one you're using as an example. And Russell talks about a "non-psychological sense" of assertion whereby we can say that "If p then q" asserts an implication without asserting either p or q. And I would add, though Russell doesn't, that the implication "If p then q" can be asserted on paper, so to speak, without anyone claiming it's true.

So when Frege 'wrote that his most important contribution to philosophy was “dissociating the assertoric force from the predicate”', he could not have been talking simply or explicitly about illocutionary force . . . — Banno

Right.

. . . but had in mind at least partly something of the sort given here, where the assertive force of "S is Richard's sister" is simplified by treating it extensionally as S={Ruth} — Banno

In other words, by identifying the two extensional sets as the same, we're able to "make the assertion" that S is Richard's sister without any appeal to some actual act of assertion (i.e. illocutionary act). Have I understood you? And if I have, do you see the addition of the judgment stroke as referring to assertion in this sense? This is one place where Frege confuses me. When he says that the judgment stroke marks "a true thought," does he mean a thought asserted to be true, or one that actually is true? So again, different senses of "assertion" might arise here.

@Banno @Leontiskos @Srap Tasmaner @RussellA @fdrake
Whew, we’ve got the makings here of a solid weeklong conference on Frege and Kimhi!

Impossible to address all the interesting points and questions, but I’ll do my best to respond to folks one by one. Leontiskos up first!

(1) Assertion is (a person, an agent) claiming that the possible state of affairs, let's say, described by a statement does in fact hold.
(2) Assertion is (a person, an agent) affirming the claim about the world made by a statement.
— Srap Tasmaner

I am struggling to see the difference here, but maybe that is just me. — Leontiskos

The difference is that (1) is an assertion, couched of course in language, about something in the world, e.g. the green grass. (2) is an assertion, couched as affirmation or denial (which could be in symbolic language rather than words) of the sentence used in (1) about the grass.

The irony is that Kimhi claims there is no difference – this is his monism. He says there’s no “logical gap” between (1) and (2). But in order to appreciate how he could say such a thing, we first have to get clear on what appears to be the difference. Hope this helps.

I thought J was saying, "This thing has assertoric force even before you pick it up and assert it." — Leontiskos

I know, this is really hard to be clear about. When I suggested “adding a nuance to the vocabulary” that would separate force from assertion, I was suggesting a possible way to clarify. My idea was that we could then talk about “displaying force” without “asserting.” So, to respond to your paraphrase: No, not exactly. I‛m suggesting that we should stop thinking of “force” as something that only an assertion can create. The term “assertoric force” kind of twists our arm into thinking that there’s no force without assertion. So instead, “This statement has force [positive or negative predication] even before you pick it up and assert it.”

For Frege we don't quantify things and then go on to decide whether they actually exist — Leontiskos

Right, but it’s the introduction of the argument into the function that allows us to claim it exists. I see how you could have read my “before we can say whether it exists or not” to mean that there would be a further decision process. But no, all I’m positing is that, for Frege, ontological commitment can only be shown through his predicate logic.

Okay. I can see how Frege mandates a dissociation between sense and assertion. Is that the same as mandating a dissociation between sense and force? Or sense and assertoric force? Kimhi seems to believe that something can have assertoric force without being asserted. It seems like Frege wants to make one big distinction (between propositions and their truth values), and Kimhi wants to make lots of small distinctions (between different kinds of force, or different levels of assertoric force). — Leontiskos

Good questions. If you accept my proposal to disambiguate “force” from “assertion,” then we need to clarify the relations among all these terms, which is a headache, not just for Kimhi -- much less so than for Frege, as you point out. Just to repeat the point from above, though: I think Kimhi believes that something can have force (not assertoric force) without being asserted.

I think @J's confusion about Frege may stem from a similar place. J may be thinking, "Kimhi criticizes Frege for divorcing the sense of a proposition from its assertoric force; 'Fido exists' is a proposition; therefore Frege divorces this proposition's sense from its assertoric force; therefore Frege thinks we can quantify over Fido before predicating existence of Fido." At the same time, J knows that Frege does not accept the idea that existence is a predicate, and so there is a tension. — Leontiskos

Hmmm. Well, ‛Fido exists’ isn’t a proposition, if I understand Frege. So for that very reason, we don’t have to do anything with Fido other than use him in a function in order to claim he exists. We do have to do that much, though.

Can you say more about this point? It’s possible I’m not following you.


Oh, and about the Novak paper: Your link didn’t seem to take me there. Mind verifying and posting it again? Thanks.

Thanks. As I mentioned earlier, at some point I want to quote a few passages from Kimhi interpreting Aristotle and see if you, @Count Timothy von Icarus, and others who know this field agree with him.