Human rational judgement, including, paradigmatically, empirical judgement, may have truth as its formal aim. This formal aim is being acknowledged in the explicit claim "I think P" whereby one locates one's act in the space of reasons (i.e. within the public game of giving and asking for reasons). — Pierre-Normand

Good, and likewise your subsequent formulation in terms of shared mental representations, rather than a strictly individual/psychological construal.

acts of receptivity (intuitions) and acts of spontaneity (concepts) always must be involved together in contentful acts of judgement. ("Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind.") — Pierre-Normand

Yes. Though we can always raise the question, concerning Kant, of whether a thought without content is even possible. (An intuition without a concept is possible -- though, as the motto says, we can see nothing with it.) This doubt might have interesting implications for Rödl's version as well.

Rödl usefully stresses the fact that one expressing what it is that one believes regarding any proposition P isn't a separate act from the one involved in making up one's mind regarding the truth of P. — Pierre-Normand

Would you agree that Rödl also wants to call to our attention that "making up one's mind" is necessarily 1st personal? That there is no objective form of this?

the need for acts of representation to be internal to the sphere of the conceptual, while public discourse also is internal to that sphere and must hence also be answerable to what it is that "we" think. — Pierre-Normand

We could say: The act of representation brings 1st personal experience into the Space of Reasons. We could even continue the Kantian parallel and say that our subjective life is "heteronomous," while the Space of Reasons allows us to enter as "autonomous" individuals, under the law of reasons rather than causes, just as Kant claimed in the moral sphere. The place to keep pressing, here, is how to fill out "subjective life" -- to what extent must this refer to intersubjectivity? And how far would Rödl buy in? His "absolute idealism" could be taken as strictly, individually determined, could it not? He might not desire this reading, but what prevents it?

What makes the expression of those commitments warrant the use of the first-personal pronoun in "I think" just is the fact that we each are individually responsible for our own moves. — Pierre-Normand

Well, yeah, but Rödl is "continental" enough to be saying something in addition. I think he wants a phenomenological reading as well. He's reminding us that "I think" is something that happens. It's not merely a formal term. The Space of Reasons, the "moves in a game" -- none of this can occur without me, without us. And we don't just posit this stuff, we actually experience it. In order for me to say, "I think 'The cat is on the mat'", I am first saying something about an event that occurred at time T1. There was a previous time during which I did not have this thought -- or, if you prefer verbs, that I did not think that the cat was on the mat -- then came a time when I did. Now, as result, I can offer "I think 'The cat is on the mat'" in an entirely different way. It's no longer merely a report of a psychological event at time T1; I can now, if I like, assert it. Rödl is rightly bothered by the idea that there could be assertion without this background story.

Rather than "I Think..." as the only option in the transcendental argument, Davidson would reject a transcendental subject, having instead a triangulation between belief, world and meaning. — Banno

Yes, good. And I can imagine Rödl being frustrated with this, because of how thoroughly it leaves out the 1st person, whether construed as singular or plural.

Now we should pursue @Pierre-Normand's attempt to link this back to the "what is the aim of philosophy" question.

You don’t see ‘better’ until you see ‘best’. — Fire Ologist

I don't think this can be right, at least not across the board.

I assert that the Beatles were a better band than Gerry and the Pacemakers.

I can make my case, we can discuss, and no one will be in any serious doubt what we're talking about -- whether one was better than the other, musically.

Does this mean we know what "the best band" means? Hardly. It doesn't mean anything, as far as I can tell.

There's an equivocation here between "best" as a conceptual or metaphysical endpoint -- this is what I'm claiming we don't know, or even understand, in the musical example -- and "best" as "out of X number of choices, the top choice." Sure, we can call that "best" if we want to, but it's tangential to what we're interested in, here in this thread, I think. Here, we're surely asking into "best" as a kind of telos, optimum, or endpoint.

if I understand Rödl correctly, the specific act of spontaneity involved in making the explicit claim "I think P" always also is involved in the making of the claim "P". It is the Kantian "...I think [that] must be able to accompany all my representations..." — Pierre-Normand

Yes, there it is. That is what I take him to mean, and he himself ties it back to that Kantian motto. Highly controversial, but I think he's onto something important. It shakes up the whole framework about assertions.

I'll say more about this soon . . . . getting late in my world.

*

A) I think: "I judge that the cat is on the mat."
B) I think: "The cat is on the mat."
— J

As he says, A is about my judgment, something I do or think, while B is about the cat.
— J
B is not about the cat - it is plainly about a thought. It will be true not if and only if the cat is on the mat, but if and only if I think the cat is on the mat. — Banno

You're right, sloppy phrasing on my part. Both A and B are about a thought, since each begins identically: "I think . . " What I should have gone on to say -- and this is what Rodl means -- is that what is being thought, in A, is something about a judgment, whereas what is being thought, in B, is something about a cat. You don't actually even need B to get where Rodl is going: "My thought of judging that things are so is a different act of the mind from my judging that they are so." This is apparent merely from the way A is formulated.

Excellent. Let me say this in slightly different words, to see if I've understood.

You're positing that science goes about its business by splitting off its own rational warrants, so as to avoid making science itself a totalizing critique of those warrants. In other words, a thoroughgoing scientism would seem to leave no room for parts 2 and 3 of your description of how science works. It would have to admit that "observing" and "theorizing" are subject to laws that are ultimately physical, just like anything else. So we're left with the familiar problem of how to give reason the last word -- how to exempt the truths we're claiming to discover from the obvious point that we would presumably be saying them anyway, true or not, if scientistic law-like explanations prevailed.

And I think you're right that quantum weirdness doesn't change this picture -- at least not yet.

You write:

The practice of science doesn't make a universal claim about not being subject to the laws it studies. — Srap Tasmaner

The example you give is the piece of paper on which the equations are written, but as you say, that's theoretically unimportant. I'd rather take your claim to be stronger: Scientists have to either ignore the question of how their own pronouncements may or may not be the result of law-like processes, or simply declare what you have declared: "We don't really know, but we make that assumption and it doesn't matter for our practice."

Now what about philosophy?

Is philosophy in danger of also being a totalizing critique of itself? Is there such a thing as "philosophism," which would cast into doubt the very conclusions that philosophy tries to deliver, on the grounds that there are "philosophical explanations" that explain them away?

By putting it this way, I think we can see what's wrong with that picture. A "philosophical explanation" can't call into question the entire practice of philosophical explanation in the same way that a "scientific explanation" can call into question the practice of scientific explanation, or at least make us scratch our heads and wonder how to justify the "breaking into parts." We don't have to break anything into parts when we apply philosophy to other philosophy. Philosophy's framing is unique among the inquiries.

So if that's right, I guess that puts me in camp 1.

Why might someone argue for camp 2? As you say, either fork you take there is problematic. But one might say: "Well, that's just how it is. We don't know whether 'applying norms' to our theories about norms is necessarily viciously circular. Some of us think so, some don't. Nor do we know whether the possibility of 'different norms' is enough to make the whole camp-2 approach wrong, and move us over to the camp that believes we need laws, not norms. This unresolved question requires . . . more philosophy."

Writing that, I've almost persuaded myself! At any rate, I'm not so clearly in camp 1.

I think Williamson wishes to describe something like an experimental approach to philosophy, and that's what his whole competition between theories business is meant to be. — Srap Tasmaner

Yes, I picture him invoking a kind of ideal community of practitioners, converging Peircean-ly (sorry, that's an adverb) on the truth, much as we would hope exists in a scientific discipline. I'm not sure how close this is to actual scientific practice. How close do you think it is, or could be, to philosophical practice? I think you've been saying, Not very.

Well, yes, but it could still be that consciousness is related to something undreamt of in our philosophy. — frank

True. My comment reveals which ticket I hold in the Consciousness Lottery: I think it'll turn out to be biological. But we don't have a clue at the moment.

I realize my homemade origin story may make eyes glaze over, but it's an interesting possibility to me. — frank

Yes, it is. My eyes got wider, not glazed! And we need to acknowledge that any story we wind up telling about the origin of propositions, or reasons, or rationality itself -- anything that we say occupies the Space of Reasons -- must also have a biological/evolutionary/cultural story to go along with it. The fact that we need both stories is itself the gateway to one of the biggest philosophical problems, right?: How to reconcile physical and rational accounts, which seem to begin from incompatible premises.

I lean toward ontological anti-realism, in other words, I don't think ontological questions are answerable, so the question of the what X is ultimately made of, is one I'm able to drop. — frank

When it's put in terms of "what X is ultimately made of," I almost always agree. If the question is more about "What are we committing ourselves to when we talk about 'existence'?" then I think Quine's motto about bound variables will do fine.

It's unclear to me where talk of propositions fits in here -- what kind of ontology-talk it needs. I was only pointing out that I found "product of analysis" to be no more anti-metaphysical, or common-sensical, or whatever, than "product of a 1st-person judgment". In both cases, we're trying to use a neutral place-holder, "product," to stand in for we know not what. And that's fine, as long as the two cases have parity.

If I'm understanding this, it's similar to what Russell would have said: a true proposition is a state of affairs. — frank

As I understand Rodl, he's setting it out like this:

A) I think: "I judge that the cat is on the mat."
B) I think: "The cat is on the mat."

As he says, A is about my judgment, something I do or think, while B is about the cat. I would say that both A and B are true propositions about states of affairs, or at least truth-apt. Do you think Russell would agree?

Do you think Soames would say that a proposition is a product of 1st-person judgment?
— J

I don't think so, but that sounds a little like an ontological question. — frank

I agree, but no more so than "a proposition is a product of analysis"! At the level of "What is a proposition?" how would we avoid ontology?

Remember when I presented Scott Soames' explanation of propositions, he started with the whole scene of a person pointing and speaking. From there, he leads through an analysis. I think Hegel would approve. Soames' starting point is life in motion. — frank

Good response, thanks. I'd like to find a perspective on this that Soames, Hegel, and Rodl could all accept. Do you think Soames would say that a proposition is a product of 1st-person judgment?

Sadly, at that price, it will be Christmas before I get my hands on it. — Ludwig V

Same boat here with academic presses, but do you have interlibrary loan? My public library got me the Rodl book and let me keep it for months. The only drawback is that, being a respectful reader, I had to make my notes separately from the text.

[Philosophy] may be unique in not leaving the frame of its own discipline. Psychology, perhaps is also self-reflexive, in a way. — Ludwig V

Now that's a can of eels! Do you think the psychologist can ask questions about psychology that are, at the same time, bracketed by psychological explanations of how questions come to be asked? What does that say about the psych's conception of psychology's explanatory powers?

If there was a consensus against Achilles, then the question will be who misunderstood the rules - Achilles or the rest of us. — Ludwig V

Yes, that's just the sort of further dialectic I was picturing. It doesn't have to follow that "consensus wins" will always be the final decision -- even when that decision is itself made by consensus.

I appreciate all your thoughtful replies.

I don't think you have to talk about propositions. It's not a bad idea to know what it is, though. — frank

In Self-Consciousness and Objectivity, Rodl says:

"If only we understood the letter p, the whole world would open up to us."

My comment on this from an earlier thread was:

"He’s being a little sarcastic, in my reading, but his meaning is clear: If we continue to allow p to float somewhere in the [Popperian] World 3 of abstracta, without acknowledging its dependence on [the 1st-person act of thinking], we are going to get a lot of things wrong."

Rodl is asking something that's right in front of our nose, so plain that we rarely question it: How do we describe or explain the being, the presence in the world, of a proposition? Where does it come from? How have we allowed it to become so central to this way of doing philosophy?

He also writes:

"My thought of judging that things are so is a different act of the mind from my judging that they are so. The former is about my judgment, a psychic act, a mental state; the latter, in the usual case, is not; it is about something that does not involve my judgment, my mind, my psyche. It is about a mind-independent reality."

This clarification is well worth keeping in mind, I think.

I didn't mean to suggest that philosophy should be counted alongside painting and music and literature. I would say that philosophy is centrally interested in truth, but, arguably, in some ways, so is painting and literature. Many people want to classify it with science, but that misrepresents it, IMO. — Ludwig V

A philosopher of art whom I respect, Susanne Langer, has pointed out that we can often learn more about an art by noticing what it does not have in common with other arts, rather than trying to find similarities and possible shared properties.

So with philosophy, perhaps. We can discover many commonalities between phil and literature, phil and science, phil and logic, phil and rhetoric, ad infinitum. But what we should be noticing is what makes philosophy different, unique.

And what is that? The candidate answer I like best is that philosophy inevitably questions itself, without leaving the frame of its own discipline.

“Understanding” in this context often refers to a kind of clarity—seeing how language functions, how confusion arises, and how philosophical problems dissolve when we attend closely to our forms of life and linguistic practices. It’s not about accumulating true propositions (knowledge in the epistemological sense), but about achieving perspicuous representation.
— @Banno
That's definitely my page. I do worry, though, about the unselfconscious use of "clarity" to identify some sort of objective property (as in "perspicuous representation") and a psychological state. What is clear to one person is not necessarily clear to another. — Ludwig V

Yes, this is the type of "understanding" we want to highlight, over against knowledge. And to me, it's a feature, not a bug, that "perspicuous representation" requires some sort of consensus. When we discover that Phil X finds something brilliantly illuminating, while Phil Y finds it clear as mud, we are being invited into a critical moment in philosophical dialectic. What separates them? What discussion is needed to bring them together? Is it a framing problem? Just a misunderstanding? A confusion about evidence? A logical flaw? etc. etc.

The reason for reading the canon is to improve on it. But in order to "improve" on it, one does not need already to have an idea of the perfect or ultimate item. — Banno

Yes. In the arts, "improve" might better be thought of as "develop" or "enrich" or, of course, "react wildly against"! And then we have the question of self-expression. There's a curious sense in which an artist does reach for a perfect or ultimate item, but that would be their very self, as expressed in the art. And no one "has that idea" at the start, if ever.

I see that Peter Singer is maybe even the founding figure in the animal rights movement. — hypericin

He certainly is, and a hero to all of us working in that area.

Interestingly, his case for animal rights goes through even if you disagree with the utilitarian framework, as I do. The other one to read as a founding figure is Tom Regan, "The Case for Animal Rights." Regan is also a philosopher, originally specializing in G. E. Moore's ethics, which I prefer. And the illustrious Martha Nussbaum has now joined the chorus.

Davidson is compatible with either realism or anti-realism. — frank

I agree, mostly. I'm rereading "Actions, Reasons, and Causes" right now, on a different issue also prompted by @Banno.

I'm not sure there's a philosophy which aims at understanding as opposed to knowledge. But then I'd accept ↪J 's example if it's important down the line. — Moliere

No, it needn't be an opposition, as my example suggested. In a too-simple sense, we could think of it as hierarchical: Knowledge can lead to understanding. And understanding is something philosophy can provide, that no other inquiry can, on this view.

Interested in the term of art distinction here between understand and know.

Do you mean “important questions in philosophy are driven by a desire to understand what others are saying, not a desire to know the things in the world they are talking about.” — Fire Ologist

Great question. "Understanding" can encompass both, I think. As above to Moliere, no opposition is implied. What's especially interesting is that, for someone like Habermas, in order to understand a subject, or a problem, you do have to reach an understanding with others about it. For him, philosophical is dialogical. You can't stand up from your armchair and declare to others that you have discovered the arguments that will solve some particular problem, or even result in understanding it, if the others haven't participated in formulating the questions which the arguments and understanding address. "Framing" vs. what's inside the frame.

I also like your question because it reminds us not to let what you rightly call a "term of art distinction" become too mesmerizing. These are just words, and vague ones at that. There seems to me to be an interesting difference between, say, knowing how grammar works, and understanding how language works. A child, or a computer, can be taught the rules of grammar. Understanding language -- although arguably a kind of knowledge, if you like -- is different. So, even if we want to think of them both as types of knowledge, calling one "understanding" helps us focus on this interesting difference. That's about as far as I'd go in defending some technical use of the terms. Within hermeneutics, others go much farther, and there are cases where interpretative understanding clearly can't be the same as knowledge.

it is as important to know as it is to understand because you can’t have one without the other, (or you can’t have the objects of one without the objects of the other). — Fire Ologist

Let's take the interpretation of a text. In a sense, yes, we can say that there is an "object" that exists pre-interpretation, or pre-understanding. And yes, without being able to interact in some way with that object, and not some different object, we can't talk about what we want to understand. But to try to bring in "knowledge" at the pre-interpretive level starts to warp the whole description. If there's indeed an "object of knowledge" here, as opposed to a vehicle of meaning, can it be pointed to in the same way that we point to, say, the book in which it is inscribed? (I don't mean point literally, of course). To me, what we're trying to describe is a structure in which knowledge and understanding don't play equal roles, however much both may be necessary.

I think you might be more at home in an anti-realist place. — frank

Heaven forbid! :grin: But thanks for the thought. No, my doubts aren't a good fit for anti-realism. And I don't have any stake in convincing you, or anyone else, that the "standard analysis" of truth-makers, truth-bearers, propositions, etc. can perhaps be challenged while still keeping a robust sense of non-language-game truth. I may not be advocating well for my own doubts, and I'm very far from having a worked-out theory of any of this. If you do have a look at either the Kimhi or the Rodl books, you might get a better sense. Though you have me wondering now . . . Rodl styles himself as an "absolute idealist" in the Hegelian tradition. I wonder if he would agree that that makes him an anti-realist. I don't think so -- the opposition here is not the old one between idealism and realism -- but it's an interesting question.

There is a more definite take on all this available, but I can't name anyone who holds this position. (@J,. . . anyone come to mind?)

The claim would be that philosophy does not aim at knowledge, as science does, but at understanding. — Srap Tasmaner

Hermeneutics. Dilthey, Gadamer. They might not say that all philosophy is interpretation, but I think they would say that most of the important questions in philosophy are driven by a desire to understand, not a desire to know. Habermas is somewhat in that tradition too.

the verb is "understand" not "know". — Srap Tasmaner

Yes, and arguably any philosopher who focuses on structure -- "hanging together" -- is going to use this verb. It's not just what's going on, but why. And this is a big issue within hermeneutics, whether the interpretation controls the "what." Do we have something to interpret if the knowledge claims are in question?

:up: If you note the part I bolded, that's what we call a proposition
— frank
Um - forgive me. But that's what I call a sentence; I would say that when it is used - to tell someone where the cat is, for example, - it becomes a statement in that context. However, I've learnt the philosophical dialect and so I know what you mean, in one sense. However, the SEP article seems to want to say that a proposition is what is in common between a number of sentences or statements. That's what I don't get. — Ludwig V

Yes. It's so hard to detach from our reliance on "proposition." @frank calls the bolded bit a proposition; you call it a sentence; I say -- and I mean it -- that I don't know what to call it because I don't know how to analyze the context in which I'm seeing it, here in a post on TPF. And I say further that the problem is much bigger than just assigning the right terms. We have a problem about subjectivity and objectivity, about how language is in the world.

That's exactly the standard analysis. — frank

And exactly the problem. The standard analysis insists that we read "the cat is on the mat" in this context in the way you did: a sentence that somebody uttered -- Ludwig? -- that asserts a proposition. But what's the warrant for that? Is that really what Ludwig did? You say he "expressed" a proposition by "uttering" a sentence? Where did that happen? How did I miss it? Please don't mind that I'm teasing a little, because I have a serious point to make: All this is indeed the standard analysis, but how is it supposed to be clearly correct?

"The cat is on the mat."

Did I just utter that? Seems to me that I wrote it in a context so bizarre that it calls the whole thing into question. Besides, perhaps I only mentioned it.

So if I merely assert the sentence, without you and I stipulating what an assertion is going to mean, are you able to come to a conclusion about whether I think it's true, or only quite likely to be true?
— J
I'm not sure what "without you and I stipulating what an assertion is going to mean" is doing here. — Banno

I mean that we have to agree on what an assertion is, what counts as an assertion, for Philosophy Room purposes. In real life, we don't, and as a consequence people conceive of themselves to be asserting a variety of things, at various levels of connection to truth, and they're not wrong to do so, because this kind of "wrongness" can only happen in the Philosophy Room.

Let's say I call an assertion "a statement I make about some state of affairs that I think is quite likely to be true." And let's say you call an assertion "a statement I make about some state of affairs that I know to be true." If we never compared our working definition of "assertion," we would sooner or later misunderstand each other, leading to words like "misfire" or "insincere."

I don't mind there being a question about whether this matters much, but is it at least clear? :smile:

Defeasibility, speech acts and illocutionary force are ideas that are quite well established in philosophy. But you may not [know them?]. So if you have come across them, please forgive me if I seem to be teaching my grandmother to suck eggs. — Ludwig V

Not at all, better than assuming I already understand! I am fairly familiar with those ideas but am trying to suggest that, though established, they may not take us as far as we want to go. @Banno quite reasonably keeps asking what is in doubt here. If I had to put it into a sentence, it would be: We are so used to working with the nailed-down logical uses of natural language that we forget that those uses are agreements, often hard won. I think "assert" and "judge" are cases in point, but clearly I need to make a stronger argument for why they seem problematic to me. So I'll work on that.

If you assert something that you think is false, or judge to be false, your assertion misfires - it is insincere. — Banno

But this assumes what I'm calling into question. Why are the only alternatives "true" or "false"? I'm pointing out that ordinary speech doesn't work this way. I don't have to be insincere to assert something that I think is merely quite likely to be true, or quite unlikely to be false -- we do that all the time.

What I'm pressing here is the idea that "to assert", limited to true and false things, is technical, it's talk in the Philosophy Room. We don't have a warrant from ordinary language to say that anyone who asserts something they believe may conceivably be false -- though it's highly likely it isn't -- is either misfiring or insincere. "May be false" covers a huge amount of territory. Why must we insist that the only sincere use of "to assert" is in a case when we believe there is no possibility whatsoever that the sentence is false? Or if that's too strong, where should we cut it off? "Very very very likely"? "Analytically true"? It all goes back to your point about "counts as" -- we have to agree on the usage.

in natural language "assert" is normally taken to imply "assert to be true". — Ludwig V

Right, that was more or less my point. It's not a logical entailment or something that's true by definition. We have to agree on it.

No, I agree that I can't. So if I merely assert the sentence, without you and I stipulating what an assertion is going to mean, are you able to come to a conclusion about whether I think it's true, or only quite likely to be true?

I don't see how you could assert a sentence without thereby stipulating that you judge it to be true. Asserting the sentence counts as judging it to be true. — Banno

This might seem like nit-picking, but I think I could assert a sentence without also judging it to be true. I could merely mean, "Yes, I'm saying this, and it's most likely true -- close enough that I'm willing to assert it." That's why it's a further stipulation that, in some discourse, "to assert" is going to mean "judge to be true." Or, as you say, "counts as judging it to be true."

I realize you want us both to accept the perfectly reasonable definition of what it means to assert something. But that definition is somewhat stipulative, somewhat technical. In particular, it hinges on a particular force of "true" that I maintain is not always intended in everyday assertions, as in the example above. No doubt we should mean this, if we want to have good tight philosophical discussion, but that's a different story,

Does any of this matter? Not as long as we know what counts as judging to be true, in our talk.

I have more to say about your other questions about why there'd be any question about my other sample sentences, but that's for later.

But does this get us to "I judge that the cat is on the mat" or "I judge that it is true that the cat is on the mat"? Are these formulations also meant to say the same thing? How?
— J
Those two statements do not assert the same thing, in my book. The link between them only holds in a very special situation. — Ludwig V

See my reply to @Banno, above. Yes, the link is situational, but perhaps not so very special.

I don't see that this is not captured.

The cat is on the mat.
J judges that to be true
Banno judges that to be true. — Banno

I'm claiming that all three statements have different truth conditions. J and Banno may be "saying the same thing," but the statements are not.

If you assert "That sentence is true" you have also committed to "I judge that sentence to be true" on the grounds that to assert a sentence counts as to judge it to be true. This is not an entailment but a performance. — Banno

OK, this was my question. I agree, and the fact that you make a distinction between asserting the sentence and simply stating the proposition bears out my/our view. "That sentence is true," put forward abstractly in the semi-mysterious manner that propositions are supposed to be statable, doesn't commit anyone to judging it to be true. You need the further statement, "J asserts 'That sentence is true'" in order to do that.

By calling the connection between asserting and judging a "performance" rather than an entailment, some interesting questions surface. I agree that this is not an entailment relation. If we say it's a "counts as" relation, do we mean that it's in some sense arbitrary or stipulative? I think we should. I think we're saying that, among the many ways of using "assert" and "judge," we want to privilege this usage because it captures a relation that's important, and needs to be talked about precisely.

We're not saying that "to assert a sentence is / must be / means to judge it to be true." To say that would required consulting some reference work that lays out logical uses and/or definitions, and we've already said that this is not an entailment relation. All that's going on here is an attempt to capture a typical or standard usage: If I say "The cat is on the mat" and you ask me, do you think that's true, and I reply, "Yes, I do," then we agree that two things have happened. I've judged that the cat is on the mat, and I have asserted this in my statement about it. Could there be nuances and exceptions? Sure. Might other terms be substituted? Sure. But -- bringing in "counts as" again -- this is what generally applies in this sort of discourse.

I don't mean it in terms of expressing their personality, but there's a reason that thinker or researcher is there. . . . There's someone that has to do the interpreting and thinking. It's a creative process, rather than something read off the evidence. — Moliere

Yes, that makes sense to me.

that choice to pursue some line of thought or deeming some evidence as relevant to the topic at hand -- that takes interpretation, which in turn takes standards -- i.e. aesthetics. — Moliere

I was with you till the final word. Sometimes the standards purport to be more than, or different from, aesthetics, no? Plain old pragmatics, for instance. To say that all standards come down to aesthetics requires some justification.

Is that not so? — Banno

Yes. My question is whether "I judge that sentence to be true" ever follows from "That sentence is true"? If I assert the latter, have I also committed myself to asserting the former?

Alternately, after Davidson: aren't "the cat is on the mat" spoken by J and "the cat is on the mat" spoken by frank both true under the very same circumstances? That is, they are extensional equivalent - so what's the issue? — Banno

Right, this is tricky. The question is about "I judge that the cat is on the mat," spoken by each of us in turn. These are different assertions, you'll agree? The "I" in each case is different -- the person who is judging. They aren't extensionally equivalent, despite being phrased identically.

If P is false, then you are mistaken about what you thought. You aren't wrong about having thought it.

The cat definitely doesn't have to be on the mat in order for you to truly express what you think about it, either way. — frank

Good, that's how I see it as well.

How would you revisit it? — frank

Have you read "Thinking and Being" by Irad Kimhi? Or "Self-Consciousness and Objectivity" by Sebastain Rodl? I'd revisit it along their lines, difficult thought that is.

The emoji indicates that you know the answer is "everyone", right? — Srap Tasmaner

Yeah, I was kind of burlesquing the response some novices have -- "Oh, that's a great idea, let's look into it!" not realizing it has, to put it gently, occurred to others before.

The vocabulary around this is incredibly rich and therefore compicated and difficult to organize. I don't think that there are answers waiting in natural language - anything we do would be a specialized use of the terms. — Ludwig V

I'd still like to explore the natural-language usages a bit more, because some of them are fairly common and intuitive, and might teach us something. I bet @Banno knows who's already done this?

For instance, the idea "We're both saying the same thing" is easily grasped by a bright child. So what does that mean, when it comes up in typical contexts? How might it need to be modified in order to serve more rigorous philosophical purposes? Wonder if anyone's ever thought of that before! :lol:

Why would the truth of 2 be dependent on the truth of P? — frank

If P is not true, then the cat is not on the mat. So if I assert Q -- "I think that the cat is on the mat" -- some would allege that I am mistaken. But what am I mistaken about? Not my own thought, presumably. I must be wrong about the cat. This seems to show that the cat needs to be on the mat in order for me to speak truly when I say 2.

But I think all of this is wrong. The truth of 2 has nothing to do with whether P is true.

You're adding another layer to this. — frank

Precisely, following some of Rodl's concerns especially, about how to handle 1st-personal assertions.

I'm not really sure what you're saying though. — frank

That the use of intentional operators is conventional, and admits of different interpretations, especially around "I think". Or, more interestingly, our entire understanding of what a proposition is supposed to be -- as @Ludwig V suggests above -- is in need of revisiting.

If on the other hand, the quoted part is supposed to represent a proposition, then yes, it's definitely two different things. The proposition has all the context of utterance, truth conditions, etc. worked out. — frank

I think we have to let the quoted part represent a proposition; that was my intention, anyway. Though it may not matter, in this sense: If the quoted part is merely a speech act, an utterance, by prefacing it with "I assert" I have arguably turned it into a proposition.

But OK, you agree that the two assertions mean two different things. Now we go back to the question, "What's the problem with 1st- and 2nd-person assertions?"

1) I assert, "The cat is on the mat." - call the quoted material P.
2) I assert, "I think that my cat is on the mat." - call the quoted material Q.

1), "I assert P", is an assertion about a state of affairs that is independent of me, the speaker.

2), "I assert Q", is, or can be taken as, an assertion about me, the speaker -- specifically, about a thought I have concerning my cat.

But this seems to claim that the truth of 2) isn't dependent on the truth of P. The truth of P -- whether or not the cat is on the mat -- will have no bearing on whether the same speaker had a particular thought. This is a very uncomfortable position to defend.

What has gone wrong, if anything has, will be the result of how "think" is being interpreted in Q. We all know that a statement of the form "I think that . . . " can be used to describe a mental event, though we would more commonly say something like, "I have the thought that . . . " or "It's just occurred to me that . . . " In philosophy, though, "I think that . . . " is more often supposed to be transparent. It doesn't refer to some particular mental occurrence at all, but instead to a belief or a position about whatever is being thought: "Do you think so?" "Yes, I do." So "X" and "I think that X" are both taken as 3rd person propositions. Can this be right?

I won't get any deeper into this, because you only asked me where I saw the problem, and this should be a good enough explanation, I hope.

If there were ideas definite enough to be discredited (or not) put forward, Williamson wouldn't have written this paper. Since they refuse to get in the game, as he sees it, they have discredited not their ideas but themselves. — Srap Tasmaner

Yes, and this comes too close for my liking to "flaw-based" resolution of a difficult issue. The anti-realists "refuse to get in the game" -- hmmm. What do they say about that? Would they accept that characterization?

The debate in turn centers on whether self-expression is a key element of art;
— J

Self-expression is a necessary element of philosophy. — Moliere

Interesting. I guess you're using "self-expression" in a very general way. A technical discussion of some point in modal logic, for instance -- you could say that Prof X, who holds one view, is "expressing himself" by doing so. But then what are we comparing self-expression to? What is not self-expressive?

We know how this would go, in an artistic discussion, too. Artists like T.S. Eliot and Stravinsky claimed to be doing the very opposite of expressing themselves -- they wanted to escape from self, and focus on the work, appealing to the much older idea of art as involving making a good thing rather than expressing anything about the maker. But many have replied, "And yet something of yourself is surely being expressed, otherwise how is your work so immediately recognizable as yours?"

This probably hinges on exactly what we want the concept of "expression" to cover. In English, I think we tend to associate expressivity with the personal, the psychological.

I don't think it makes sense to say that a statement makes an assertion. People make assertions. — frank

OK. Let me rephrase:

Compare
1) I assert, "The cat is on the mat."
2) I assert, "I think that my cat is on the mat."

Would you agree that these two assertions by me assert different things?

I'm talking about the confidence that a person's intention is knowable in principle. I think that's probably a priori. — frank

Ah, sorry, I was off track. Interesting. I guess I'd respond that we have the same confidence about this re some other person as we have re ourselves. So that leaves a couple of questions: How confident is that? and, Do you mean a priori to the given circumstances, or a priori in some more deeply metaphysical way? I doubt the latter; I think we learn to be confident just as we learn anything else.

Clarity is a necessary condition for arguments to matter, but clarity can only resolve a disagreement if that disagreement was actually a misunderstanding. — Srap Tasmaner

this is not what happened in the realism/antirealism argument. No solution was found, no one side was shown to be discredited. So was the argument pointless? I don't think so. . . . The turn was towards metametaphysics - and still is, I suspect. — Banno

This is a very good exchange. It shows that a protracted disagreement isn't simply left to rot, with a shrug of the shoulders, nor is it (we hope) dismissed by one side or the other as merely showing that their opponents aren't smart enough or whatever. Rather, it forces questions and new understandings at a different level. It produces insight, not resolution. This is peculiarly characteristic of philosophical inquiry -- that a lack of knowledge and consensus about some point can lead to what turns out to be a more interesting knowledge about another "frame-level" point.

No, we're actually in agreement here. The difficulty with posting is that it's hard to convey the tone of voice, or the fact that something is being proposed for consideration rather than asserted as true! I also think the Fregean conception is, if not a mess, at least deserving of hard questioning. The "contextless sense" of assertion has been critiqued, fairly recently, by both Kimhi and Rodl.

That said, I do think the "utterance/assertion" distinction is useful, as a place to start talking. After all, we need some way to acknowledge that something said by me at time T1, and something said by you at time T2, can assert the same thing, on one reasonable understanding of "assertion." As long as it's 3rd personal.