Ownership is an artificial construct where you apply an arbitrary personal authority over a physical object or domain, or an intellectual one - be it an idea/concept or piece of art etc. — Benj96

So theft results in the thief owning what has been stolen.

And folk hereabouts think this a good argument?

Kimhi's book is much shorter but I believe the depth and importance is there, — J

Like Alice on Jabberwocky:

“It seems very pretty,” she said when she had finished it, “but it’s rather hard to understand! Somehow it seems to fill my head with ideas—only I don’t exactly know what they are!”

Not being able to say what your ideas are is death in philosophy. Or rather, it ought be; but folk do go on so.

Hmm. It is logically possible for there to be a present King of France. That is, in some possible world there is a Present King of France.

The trouble with "The present King of France is bald" is that given there isn't a present King of France, It's unclear what truth value the sentence has. If there is no present King of France, then he is neither bald nor hirsute.

He doesn't exist because he's logically inconsistent. Same for the present unicorns on this planet. — litewave

There's nothing logically inconsistent about the present King of France, no contradiction that follows from the very idea.

It's just that there isn't one.

Existent/thing: in humans, that which is, or possibly is, an affect upon the senses. — Mww

A recipe for solipsism.

Yep, more or less. After that we just have to explain what to do with the present King of France.

To be is to be the value of a (bound) variable remains a favourite.

So to exist is to be the sort of thing that can be slotted into the expression "something is f". Grass exists because it satisfies "Something is green". The cat exists becasue it satisfies "Something is on the mat".

Benj's "something exists if it acts" works in a limited way becasue to act is to lie within the scope of a predicate. It amounts to a restricted version of Quine's chestnut.

This is not to say there are no issues remaining. The main one here is convincing folk that "exist", "real" and "physical" are not synonyms.

Nice.

Yep.

Much the same.

Kripke had other ideas, of course. All good fun.

(Apologies for the edit - poor expression and poor memory. )
(And a second edit, becasue the point needed bolding. But it will not be regarded, and folk will continue arguing about whether energy exists for page after page...)

Cheers, and success to your endeavours in the "Other Life". Thanks also for the reference. I have by now read a few such reviews, but all have in common the lack of a clear argument or thesis from Kimhi. It bothers me that no one seems able to set out in a few hundred words what is being argued – I think you might agree with this. There's also a question of what might be called "style", in that so much of the writing on this topic is circuitous and off-point, reminiscent of Hegel rather than of Russell. Despite that I have some sympathy for views apparently expressed in the book. Oddly, the hardcover and kindle editions are nearly the same price. So I still baulk at forking out the money.

Anyway, given my tight wallet and the absence of a clear account of what Irad Kimhi has to say, I've probably finished with my comments. I'll keep an eye on developments.

Just to be sure, I would agree that "assertoric force may be dissociated from predication" but am disincline to say "assertoric force is necessarily dissociated from predication".

An example. Consider two predications: "Grass is green" and "J believes that Grass is Green". We might perhaps happily remove the assertoric force from the first "grass is green", but not so much from the second. That's because it is within the scope of the belief. It's extensionally opaque.

Now "It is raining" presumably is the same in both.

I don't wish to rule out a logical analysis of such belief statements. So I don't wish to say that the force, in this case a belief, must necessarily be dropped. There's no need for such a broad preemption.

This is by way of leaving open the possibility of say formal treatments of belief, doxastic modal logics, or analysis of belief revision.

And yes, this "wreaks havoc with synonymy", so that Davidson for example splits such belief predicates into "p" and "J believes that p" to bring out this very issue. The repetitions of "p" here are not identical - one is a proposition, the other is a name in a different proposition.

If you like, I would maintain the possibility of treating such utterances logically. 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.

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

Ok., good. Before I go on – if it seems worth going on – I might go over what I'm up to. Again, I haven't access to Kimhi, so can't address the book directly. But then it appears that you are after a better understanding of the context anyway, so rehearsing Frege may be useful.

So at issue is something to do with force, but what is contentious.

In my first post I went over illocutionary force, which we can differentiate from the propositional content of an utterance. Frege, and logic, moved from prefixing"I know..." to something more like "I can write..." over time. To be sure, what Frege does is not to set illocutionary force aside so much as to set it as the default in which all his formulations are couched: his judgment-stroke.

Setting illocutionary force aside allowed a focus on other aspects of language within the scope of illocutionary force.

In my second post I reviewed sense and reference, that we can use different and diverse words to talk about the very same thing, but for our purpose in doing the logic at hand what counts is the thing, not how it is differentiated from other things. So 'Venus' and 'Hesperus' are to be teated as picking out the same thing, and 'Ruth' and 'Richard's sibling' similarly pick out the very same person.

This led to the third post, in which I hope I made it explicit that what setting aside sense and keeping reference allowed us to do was to develop an extensional logic, allowing for developments that allowed truth to be set out in terms of satisfaction.

Looking at the process in reverse, we have some structure to which we give an interpretation, a sense and a use. Satisfaction, and so to a great extent truth, enter into the process if at all at the level of interpretation.

So now back to your OP. You talk of a two-step process, the first step is the observation that "...logical or functional sense is a feature of repeatable occurrences of p", the second that "...a proposition cannot contain assertoric force as part of its logical structure"; and the conclusion is that "...assertoric force is necessarily dissociated from predication".

I'm understanding the first to be something like that the "a" in

is the same in both occurrences. Without this, it would be hard to do anything that looked at the structure of our sentences; indeed it'd be difficult to understand how language could function if this were not so.

The second is perhaps what inspired Frege to place the assertic element – the judgement stroke – so that his logical expressions sit within it's scope. It's a clever move, setting the force aside so that we can focus on other structures.

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. So I'd say "...assertoric force may be dissociated from predication".

I think this sort of thing quite central to logic. Earlier I reminded us that "the grass is green" could be an assertion, a question or a command. Which, depends on what is being done with it. Similarly, there are many ways to parse the same sentence in logical terms. So we might, if our purpose is general enough, need do no more than to parse "grass is green" as "p", a single proposition. That's all we would need to include it in a simple argument. But if we need to bring out a different aspect, say that all grass is green, we might present it as U(x)f(x)⊃g(x) – for all x, if it is grass then it is green. Or we might treat "...is green" as a predicate and "grass" as a noun, and just write "g(a)" – grass is green. We might even pars it as "∃x((Grass(x) ∧ Green(x))", roughly "something is both grass and green", safely leaving it open for grass that is not green and green things that are not grass. The point being that "grass is green" can be understood in many, many different ways. It would be odd to think there was one, true parsing. We pars our utterances differently depending on what aspect of them we would focus on, sometimes focusing on illocutionary force, sometimes on truth value, sometimes on differing quantifications, and so on.

Anyway, that will do for now.

Too far off topic.

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.

So if you are talking about Australian Summer, grass is brown.

Point being we can pretty much drop truth for satisfaction.

Isn't this just the difference between validity and soundness? — schopenhauer1

I don't think so. Asserting that ρ is true is different to asserting that ρ is sound or valid. Not that ρ on its own could be either sound or valid. So I'm not sure what you mean.

What's the better way to understand this? — J

I'll go back over it, just to chaeck we are on the same page. I's said

The "assertoric force" being removed here is at least in part the sense of our statements, so that we might set them aside and deal with the reference. — Banno

and that Frege

...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

The point is a straight forward one, I hope.

Consider

If Richard's sibling is in Sydney then she is in Australia
Richard's sibling is in Sydney
Hence Richard's sibling is in Australia

and

If Ruth is in Sydney then she is in Australia
Ruth is in Sydney
Hence Ruth is in Australia

Since {Ruth}={Richard's sibling}, extensionally, these arguments are the same. Whatever "force" there is in "Richard's sibling" drops out of consideration.

How Ruth is identified is irrelevant to the syllogism. All that counts is that Ruth satisfies "...is in Sydney".

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”.

So you suggested

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). — J

And that's roughly right, but not quite what I wanted to draw attention to with talk of the extensional aspect fo Frege's logic.

I suspect Frege would not have been able to make the distinction between illocutionary force and what might be called "intensional" force, between the way a sentence is used to make an assertion and the way in which a sense is used to identify an individual. This distinction was made much later.

I've also suggested a seperate point, which I will try to clarify. When one looks at It is clear that what is being asserted is not the first line, but the whole structure. The "|" has the whole within its scope. This is what licences the reduction of this to
$\vdash\forall A\forall B (A \rightarrow (B \rightarrow A))$
with the much reduced use of space. Frege was asserting this, the whole illocution. In Begriffsschrift, it was within the scope of something like "I know..."; in Grundgesetze it was something like "this is true:...". I would suggest that now, the "true" part has faded, and although it is still used, it does not have the force it once had. I suggest it's more akin to "We are entitled to write...".

It might be objected, as I mentioned, that this treats of syntax and not semantics; that to look at soundness and completeness we must assign truth of falsity to the various well formed formulae. But truth and falsity are there defined in terms of satisfaction. We could get the same result by assigning any pair of terms - top and bottom, up and down, flipped and flopped.

The use of "true" and "false" in the development of propositional calculus might seem to imply that some formula are being asserted. But it ain't necessarily so. Further, it's satisfaction, not truth, that decides which formula are to be preferred. And I think that is the case of first order logic as well.

Which is not to say that making assertions is not something we can do with these logics. And indeed, that is the usual use to which all this structure is put. But use is something added on top of the logic. It's just not at the core, which is about manipulating symbols.

Edit: Some of the stuff I've read here (not by you) leads me to think that there are folk who suppose that each part of a theorem is being asserted, as if in
1. ρ⊃ψ
2. ρ
3. ψ
each line must be asserted separately, or even that the "ρ" in "1. ρ⊃ψ" is being asserted. But this need say nothing about wether (1) and (2) are true. What's asserted is the tautological whole of ⊢(((ρ⊃ψ) ^ ρ)⊃ψ). That's something Frege's approach makes clear.

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. On to looking at ⊢. From what I understand, in the Begriffsschrift "⊢" is an explicit judgement; what follows is known, while — would prefix "a mere complex of ideas", un-affirmed (SEP). In the Grundgesetze this has changes significantly; ⊢ now says something like "The following names the true" (SEP). That's much closer to it's modern use, where ⊢ρ is "ρ is a theorem" and ψ⊢ρ says "ρ is derivable from ψ". Notice that in these more recent uses, truth is not mentioned. That's important.

So historically there is a shift from "⊢" being read as "we know that..." to something with much less commitment. It's akin more to "We can write that..".

Notice also that for Frege there is a structure literally hanging from the ⊢. So we have

read from bottom to top, for what we might now write as
$\forall A\forall B (A \rightarrow (B \rightarrow A))$.
In the modern version all the assertive paraphernalia on the left is removed. Along with it goes much of the implication of commitment. (again, stolen from SEP)

Perhaps it would help at this stage to talk about deduction rules such as Modus Ponens. Historically this is thought of as a rule about deriving true propositions; so if ρ is true and ρ implies ψ, then ψ is also true. But that's not how it must be understood. Alternately, it can be seen as simply a licence to write certain things down in a game of symbols: so if you can write "ρ" and you can write "ρ⊃ψ" then you are, for the purposes of that game, entitled to write "ψ". And on this understanding, the truth of ρ, ψ and ρ⊃ψ are irrelevant.

Notice that the supposed "assertoric" implications of the process are here simply absent.

It might be objected that truth is somehow implicit in all this, after all even the Open Logic Project uses the falsum, ⊥, in setting out propositional logic, and makes use of gothic F and T. But non of these symbols need have the assertic force - they could happily be replaced by any other symbols. Remember the reading of "⊥" as "bottom"; the whole edifice of propositional logic might be built on "top" and "bottom" as much as on "true" and "false". All that is needed is a pair of opposite that can serve to differentiate the various well formed formula into those we are entitles to write - the theorems - and the rest.

It might also be objected that I'm talking only about syntax here, and that all this disappears when we give things a semantics. But in assigning ⊥ or ⊤ in propositional logic, we are giving it a semantics - since Frege, these are what propositions refer to. The issue becomes more complex with the semantics of predicate calculus, were satisfaction is more complicated, but the point I think remains.

All this by way of pointing out that "assertoric force" doesn't much feature in modern logic for very good reasons. We have the habit now of separating out the illocutionary force from our sentences, as well as setting aside any sense it might have in favour of the denotation (reference). We do this in order to display certain aspects of the structure of our sentences, that we can then examine in far greater detail than was previously possible. And we do it quite self-consciously.

So two things follow from this with regard to what Kimhi might have to say. The first is that while "assertoric force" might have featured in Frege, its place in logic is less prominent now than ever. The second is that the result of setting "assertoric force" aside is a quite powerful discussion, with implications for much of modern life. Kimhi had best present a subtle and powerful argument if he is to convince us of the benefits of doing otherwise.

So we have two different things, sense and reference on the one hand, and illocutionary force on the other. The distinction between them is not, I think, explicit in Frege. It seems instead that the idea of illocutionary force was developed in Oxford and Cambridge in the thirties.

I want to take a look at two more things: the use of ⊢, and the notion of extension.

As I understand it, extensionality enters into Frege's system with Basic Law 5:

$\stackrel{,}{\varepsilon}\!\!f(\varepsilon) =\, \stackrel{,}{\alpha}\!g(\alpha) \equiv \forall x(f(x) = g(x))$

(From SEP). This may be read as "the course-of-values of epsilon is the same as the course of values of alpha if and only if for all x, if x is f then x is g". That is, f and g are the same predicate if and only if every member of f is also a member of g.

The import of this fairly simple point might be clearer if we use a more recent nomenclature and example. I'll refer to the Open Logic Project:

Definition 1.1 (Extensionality). If A and B are sets, then A = B iff every element of A is also an element of B, and vice versa. — Open Logic Project

I'll ask the reader to note that this is the very first formula in this rather extended treatment of logic. This might give an indication of how foundational extensionality is in logic. It is worth I think lingering on what is being said here. Consider the groupings {a,a,b}, {a,b} and {b,a}. Extensionality says that for the purposes of doing the logic that follows, all of these can be treated as {a,b}. What we have here is a tool for simplifying whole groups of expressions down to a single form.

So why the fuss? This all seems straight forward enough. The Open Logic text goes on to give a further example, which I will modify slightly. Consider S, such that S={Ruth}. As it turns out, Ruth is Richard's sibling. So we also have the set S' such that S'={Richard's sibling}. Since Ruth is Richard's sibling, we have S=S'. We say that S and S' differ in sense but not in reference, they differ in intension but not in extension.

Treating groups of things in this way is one of the several great contributions Frege made to logic.

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, but had in mind at least partly something of the sort given here, were the assertive force of "S is Richard's sister" is simplified by treating it extensionally as S={Ruth}. The "assertoric force" being removed here is at least in part the sense of our statements, so that we might set them aside and deal with the reference.

Again, this is by way of setting out what is at stake here, of what Frege did and how it has developed since. The device on which you are reading this might well not be available if it were not for the developments that took place from considering Basic Law 5. It is central to the logic used, albeit in sorting out its inherent inconsistency as much as in making direct use of it.

Ok, thank you.

I see the thread has gotten away, with various posts the relevance of which are uncertain. That makes it difficult to do the step-by-step work needed here.

Let's next take a look at sense and reference. Again, you are probably already familiar with what follows, and think of this as rehearsing the arguments that got us to the sort of accounts being critiqued.

We find it useful to differentiate between what was referred to and how it was referred to. So we use the word "Venus" to refer to Venus, and we can also use "Hesperus" to refer to Venus, but seen in the evening. What differs here is not the individual being talked about. There were attempts to remove individuals all together from the calculus, but there turned out to be cases where they were most useful, especially in modal logic. So now we usually use constants, a,b,c..., sometimes even calling them "names", and usually think of them as simply referring extensionally to individuals.

But that's a more recent development. It seems Frege worked with a more general understanding of the things he was representing. So his

might now be parsed as U(x)f(x), and we might think of "x" as ranging over individuals. For Frege the gothic $\mathfrak a$ was the argument of a function.

What I would draw attention to is that illocutionary force is a different issue to sense and reference. Frege was perhaps unable to accomodate this difference in his nomenclature.

Again, small steps. Does this seem correct to you?

Thanks for the excellent OP. I don't have access to Kimhi, but have read a few reviews and other articles. Instead of addressing Kimhi directly, I'll go over my own understanding of the Fregean account and subsequent developments. You are probably already familiar with what follows, so think of it as my rehearsing the arguments that got us to the sort of accounts being critiqued.

First we should be clear about the nature of illocutionary force. Taking your example, "The grass is green", we can imagine various situations in which this utterance does quite different things. Imagine a meeting in which a landscape gardener is presenting their plan for the forecourt of a new build. One of those present is unclear as to which parts of the drawing are cement and which are lawn, and asks "The grass is green?". The designer replies, "Yes. The grass is green." There follows a conversation about how best to represent the lawn after which the manager gives the instruction "The grass is green!". Here we have the same sentence being used in three quite different ways - as a question, as a statement and as an instruction. The same sentence is being used with three differing illocutionary forces.

Notice that the content of the sentence is much the same - in all three cases it is about the colour of the grass. Now truth-value is usually, but not always, associated with statements. So the statement "The grass is green" is the sort of thing that might be true or false, but the instruction "The grass is green!", meaning something like "You will colour the grass green in your diagram!", is neither true nor false. But we might answer the question "The grass is green?" with "Yes", or with "True". This has led to the idea that there is a propositional content that is the same for all three, which sets out the reference and the predicate in each case, and takes differing forces depending on the use to which the sentence is put. So the question, statement and instruction can be seen as all sharing the same propositional content but differing in illocutionary force.

We might right the propositional content in subject-predicate form: Green(grass). This is usually considered not to have an illocutionary force, but just to be setting out what the sentences are about. A big advantage of this is that it can be treated extensionally - as concerning only the things that it denotes. It's generally taken as read that in logic we are dealing not with sentences that include a full illocutionary content, that we set this aside for the purposes of examining in detail the propositional content.

What's salient here is that making an assertion is as much part of the illocutionary force of an utterance as is asking a question or giving an instruction.One might see this as setting aside the "assertoric" aspect of the sentence in order to deal with other aspects of its structure - what it is about.

The rather large advantage of this is the structure of formal logic. This is no small thing, since this provides the foundations of mathematics and computer science. Treating sentences in this way has undeniable advantages.

This is a somewhat seperate issue from the sense-reference distinction. I think it may be helpful for us to acknowledge that illocutionary force differs from sense and reference. I'll prehaps come back to sense and reference in another post.

For now, @J, do we agree roughly on the account I've given above?

...capacity for senses a priori... — schopenhauer1

I don't see how to put these ideas together coherently. The a priori is theoretical, the supposed stuff we do prior to observation. The capacity to sense is biological. If the claim is that we need neural nets and sense organs before we can make observations, that's fine - but a priori seems to signify something logical, presumably something like that Kantian stuff about space being a priori intuition. I just find this line of thinking unproductive.

Might leave it there.

The internal aspect can’t just simply be communal activity. — schopenhauer1

I think we would find it very hard to explain "internal" here, apart from contrasting it with "communal".

Does this sound solipsistic to you? — Joshs

No. but this does:

We have to be careful to recognize distinctions in the sense of ‘existence’. For instance, if we ask ‘does this chair exist?’, we might mean , does it persist as relatively self -identical over time for me when I observe it. Or we might mean, does it exist objectively such that its existence does not depend on an observer. — Joshs

You might instead have said something about the chair being constituted at least in part by a common dialogue. Then there may have been some agreement.

Sure. The big difference is the Wittgenstein rejects the solipsism of phenomenology by insisting on the place of perception as communal activity.

I know" is meant to mean: I can't be wrong

yet

One always forgets the expression "I thought I knew".

Wittgenstein juxtaposes these two statements, showing that knowledge must admit to the possibility of doubt.

So "I left the keys in the room and no one has been in there" is a justification, for "I know the keys are on the table" - there is room for doubt. But "The keys are on the table" is no justification for "I know the keys are on the table". Yet if the keys are on the table, then we can be certain that "The keys are on the table" is true.

Why isn't showing the key on the table sufficient to conclude that I knew where the key is? — Fooloso4

Good question, despite the mixed tense.

13. For it is not as though the proposition "It is so" could be inferred from someone else's utterance: "I know it is so". Nor from the utterance together with its not being a lie. - But can't I infer "It is so" from my own utterance "I know etc."? Yes; and also "There is a hand there" follows from the proposition "He knows that there's a hand there". But from his utterance "I know..." it does not follow that he does know it.

Supose that you had guessed that the key was on the table. Then "the key is on the table" is not sufficient evidence to conclude that you knew where the key is. A guess will not suffice - it is not a justification for your claim to know.

But moreover, this is the sort of puzzle that Wittgenstein is trying to unknot.

How about I know this is a hand because I am pointing to it, we both see it, and we both understand what I am talking about. — Richard B

Thanks.

There are two ways to know - explicit and implicit, knowing that and knowing how. In PI Witti deals in knowing that – with propositional knowledge. But arguably Moore was dealing with knowing how – setting out how we use words like "here" and "hand" and "is".

And I don't think this is at odds with what Wittgenstein has to say.

So "I know this is a hand" might be more like "I know how to ride a bike" than "I know the distance to the shops".

The justification for "I know how to ride a bike" is getting on the bike and riding it.

The justification is showing that the key is on the table. — Fooloso4

Again, the justification for "I know the key is on the table" cannot be "The key is on the table"; that's just a repetition of the claim.

There is a difference between knowing the key is on the desk and being certain that the key is on the desk.

That's kinda the topic of On Certainty.

The justification for a claim to knowledge is the answer to "How do you know?" It will not do here to simple repeat your claim - I know the key is on the table because the key is on the table; I know this is a hand because it is a hand.

This is what is being said in the first few pages of On Certainty. Moore is unjustified in claiming that he knows this is a hand. Yet, it is true that this is a hand; and he is certain that this is a hand. The remainder of the book is an exploration of this oddity.

We have to be careful to recognize distinctions in the sense of ‘existence’. For instance, if we ask ‘does this chair exist?’, we might mean , does it persist as relatively self -identical over time for me when I observe it. Or we might mean, does it exist objectively such that its existence does not depend on an observer. The kind of certainty of existence that Wittgenstein has in mind with respect to the chair is the certainty of the intelligibility of the scheme of understanding underlying any and all senses of the word ‘existence’. — Joshs

I suspect that this sort of philosophical meandering would not have impressed Wittgenstein. Frank is right; there is a chair over there if it can be moved, sat on, sold at auction and so on. But this is not about phenomenology, not just about perceptions. It is about the interactions between you, the chair and the folk around you.

If I say "the key is on the desk"...the only thing that justifies it is not a proposition but finding the key on the table. — Fooloso4

If you say "I know the key is on the desk" and asks how you know, asks for a justification for your claim, do you think Frank will find "Because I will find it there when I go in" satisfactory?

No.

"I left it there and no one has been in the room" is a justification for your claim. And a proposition.

This sounds like you're misunderstanding what a proposition is. — frank

Yep.

7. My life shows that I know or am certain that there is a chair over there, or a door, and so on. - I tell a friend e.g. "Take that chair over there", "Shut the door", etc. etc.

But

12. - For "I know" seems to describe a state of affairs which guarantees what is known, guarantees it as a fact. One always forgets the expression "I thought I knew".

We might talk about the ball as having a colour but that's a fiction...
— Michael

...The ball is red. — Banno

And stubbing one's toe is painful, but pain is still a sensation. — Michael

Sorry - is your claim now that pain is also a fiction? :chin:

Are you OK?

Red comes from mind meeting world. — frank

That's wise.

Yes. And you can say the statue is beautiful while knowing that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. — frank

Yep. Although the two are not exactly analogous. We can agree the fork is on my right while still maintaining that it is on your left. We can agree that the statue is beautiful for you while I find it only curious. If we swap places, we will swap what we say about the forks, but not what we say about the statue. If subjective and objective mean anything, this is a case in point.

I'm just a word in your game — Hanover

Language games do not involve only words. They are locked into the world by what we do. So fortunately or unfortunately, you are not mere words.

Who are you talking to? I'm just one of your perceptions.

One can consistently believe that the Earth spins and that the sun rises in the East. These two statements depend on differing frames of reference, and say much the same thing when suitable transformations are applied.

Must the justification for a belief that is true be in the form of a proposition? — Fooloso4

Not all beliefs have justification. If a belief is to count as a piece of knowledge, then according to the usual account, it must be justified. Hence unjustified true beliefs on that account do not count as knowledge.

If A justifies B, presumably the truth of A justifies B. I don't know what could count as a justification that could not be put into propositional form and take a truth value.

There's a bunch of misunderstanding about "propositional form". What should be understood is that if A justifies B, then B is true because A is true. Hence it should be possible to provide a proposition that states A.

Midgley's idea of differing areas of discourse.

We say the sun rises in the east when it's really that the earth is spinning. — frank

Well, yes. It is true that the sun rises in the East; and we say it is true that the ball is red. What is "really" doing there? Prioritising one narrative over another?

Everything is the product of the brain. The question is what stimulates the brain to cause that perception — Hanover

If everything is the product of the brain, then what simulates the brain is the product of the brain. Your narrative leaves you unable to interact with the world. But of course for you the world is just a product of the brain.

You built yourself a self-consistent self deception. Solipsism.

Sunrise is an issues of differing coordinate systems. Is that what is being said about colour?

We might talk about the ball as having a colour but that's a fiction... — Michael

THis alone should be sufficient to show Michael's error. The ball is red.

But since repetition is de rigueur, Here's my observation. I agree entirely with the scientific account of the physiology of colour. However, this account is not well reported by abbreviating it to "colours are just mental percepts" or some such. Overwhelmingly, we agree as to the colour of the things around us. It follows that colours are constructed from information about the world around us. We have also been able to constructed various group enterprises concerning the colours of our world - those involving red pens and red tomatoes, for example. This shared facet of the nature of colour involves more than just the firing a few neurones in an individual.

So I'll go along with an analysis that says that red is a property of most ripe tomatoes, depending on variety.

Some folk claim properties must in some way inhere in the individual in question, and so suppose that while the tomato might be round and firm, it is not red. That strikes me as unneeded philosophical theorising.

I'll also say things such as that this is a closed box of red tomatoes. Some philosophers will claim that such knowledge is impossible. I find their accounts unconvincing.

All this by way of pointing out that while being red involves the firing of certain neurones in an individual brain, there are in addition an assortment of other issues. Colours are more than individual mental percepts.

46 pages. Even @Mp202020 gave up long ago.

What a mess. After reading this I've no idea of what what I am accused.