You seem to treat it as fairly transparent. So what is it? — Banno

Frege's notion of assertic force is to do with the judgment stroke, it was further developed in different directions by model theory and Oxbridge linguistic philosophy, both of which became ubiquitous. — Banno

So my experience of it is benign, although I can easily see how it could be used for mischievous or malevolent purposes. — Wayfarer

Chilling editorial from Vox on the latest moves at OpenAI and the change of status from Not for Profit. — Wayfarer

Negotiation can be really one-sided. Suppose you tell me you have to take care of something and then we can go; I wait by the car and when you arrive I ask, "Did you take care of it?" If you say, "Take care of what?" all I have is "Whatever you told me you had to take care of!" I take myself to be talking about something that only you can pick out. — Srap Tasmaner

To be clear - are you saying that there is common content between the assertion and rejection but that this common content is inexpressible as (some) linguistic form p, or are you saying that there is no common content between the assertion and rejection which could have been expressed in any linguistic form whatsoever, in virtue of there being no common content between the assertion and the rejection?

I suppose strictly speaking you are expressing uncertainty regarding one of the above claims, rather than committing yourself strongly to either. — fdrake

Am I right in thinking that you are construing that in order for an expressive thingybob containing a singular term expressing a de re sense to count as a thought, the singular term expressing a de re sense must be a successful act of reference to the entity associated with the de re sense - in this case the apple? And you are rejecting the claim "this apple is on the table" distally because there isn't an apple on the table but proximately because the singular term with the de re sense doesn't successfully refer as it is desired to? — fdrake

If you are incapable of entertaining a statement without deciding if it is true or if it is false, then you and i are different. I can. — Banno

Rejecting a claim can carry, therefore, a rejection of the expected conditions under which that claim is expressed rather than forcing a commitment to the negation of the rejected claim on the speaker. I believe that is the kind of non-logical factor Martins was referring to.

I believe what marks this flavour of thing as a "non-logical" factor is that it is "extra-logical" to implied context of an assertion. One rejects the rules of the implied game. Rejecting the pin-angels claim comes from rejecting the operations of thought and expression - language use, deduction, informal reasoning, gut feelings - that would enable its expression in the first place, rather than negating it in its assumed context of expression. One rejects the it-makes-sense-to-think-about-angels-on-pins-to-begin-with rules. — fdrake

Perhaps that was Plato's belief, though I doubt it, but it needn't be ours. It doesn't sound as if your thoughts about hylomorphism would rule out talk of abstracta in a less reified way. — J

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

Called in the nukes. Cheers. — Banno

I baulked at Martin's paper mostly because I found the notion of force used throughout to be unclear. Facetiously, again, it's worth noting that nothing (at least nothing physical..) is moved by an assertoric force. Further, the example in the conclusion, that p has no force while ~p has a force all it's own seems fraught:

"The unembedded negative thought ~p must therefore be tied to a logical act with a non-assertoric negative force of its own, and judging that not p, accordingly, consists in rejecting the actualization of the possibility to judge that p."

I'm puzzled by what seems an unnecessary multiplication of p's... — Banno

I'd understood Wittgenstien's notion to be that understanding p and understanding ~p amount to the very same thing, but that judging p or ~p was undertaking a further step. That step I would put in terms of intent, well before the much less lucid notion of force. So proceeding the judgement of the cat not to be on the mat is the separation of cats from mats within a suitable form of life, together with the intent of representing thing in that way.

That is, I'm not seeing "force" as overly helpful here.

Should we picture the meaning of a sentence as something we approach only asymptotically, as our comprehension of the context improves? — Banno

Who was it said " "It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it"? — Banno

I wonder if the impetus for separating content from assertoric force is related to the 'view from nowhere.'

It's language that's detached from any particular human. It's like the narrator of the novel we inhabit. — frank

It's the alternating monologues model of conversation, where the speaker simply expresses their thought out loud within earshot of an audience; language exists to mediate the connection of my mind to the world, and my audience more or less eavesdrops on my review of that relation. — Srap Tasmaner

---- I'll try to catch up so we're not having two conversations, but I'm going to hold off on your post just after this one for a bit. — Srap Tasmaner

I thought of this because if instead you were told to sort the marbles by color, there's no ambiguity -- well, not this particular ambiguity. Someone might distinguish the reds and blues more finely, but then we'd be back at the first ambiguity, which is really along a different axis, right?

I wouldn't even throw this little puzzle out there if it weren't for what Kimhi says about propositions versus actual occurrences. The options you get dealing with marbles are different from the options you get dealing with the colors of marbles. — Srap Tasmaner

It might be closer to the argument given to say that Frege, in particular, does not set aside force (even if other and later logicians do) but that he brings it in in a way that is somehow at odds with the unity of force and content in our utterances. That might be a claim that it is a fool's errand to distinguish force and content (somewhat as Quine argued the impossibility of separating the analytic and synthetic 'components' of a sentence), or it might be a claim that Frege has distinguished them incorrectly, or something else, I don't know. — Srap Tasmaner

These two objects have the same mass.

These two cartons have the same number of eggs.

These two sentences mean the same thing. — Srap Tasmaner

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

I think that when you entertain a thought, you're imagining it as an assertion, even if there was no such event. For instance, if you contemplate "the cat is on the mat", in terms of thought, all you have is a sentence that could mean all sorts of things. It's not truth-apt. To the extent that meaning is truth conditions, it's meaningless. Am I wrong? — frank

And I think that's what we do all the time when we communicate. We rationalize. I don't think you can really see any meaning in the output of an AI unless you take it as having assertoric force. It's a reflexive part of communication.

I'm not seeing that as tangential. I think it would highlight, especially for the naive, like me, the difference between a formal language where apparently there are propositions that aren't thought of as asserted in any way, and ordinary language, where the listener always thinks of what's being asserted in the light of who asserts it, or in what setting it's asserted. — frank

Would you say an AI can assert a proposition? Or are we just treating it as if it can? — frank

Well, I think this avoids the force of my point a bit. Frege said, "A proposition may be thought..." He did not say, "A thought may be thought..." There are apparently good reasons why he didn't use the latter formulation, and they point a difference between a proposition and a thought. Specialized senses can "solve" this, I suppose, at least up to a point. (Nor am I convinced that IEP is using 'proposition' in a non-Fregian way, but I don't want to get bogged down in this.) — Leontiskos

If "thought" is understood in a specialized sense then, sure. Again, my point is that these invisibly specialized senses of "proposition" and "thought" are not getting us anywhere. — Leontiskos

Hi! I was hoping to get some clarification from a professional. Did Frege think propositions were thoughts? Abstract objects, but basically thoughts? — frank

Have you read the OP?

Frege says, “A proposition may be thought, and again it may be true; let us never confuse the two things.” (Foundations of Arithmetic)
— J

Here is IEP:

For this and other reasons, Frege concluded that the reference of an entire proposition is its truth-value, either the True or the False. The sense of a complete proposition is what it is we understand when we understand a proposition, which Frege calls “a thought” (Gedanke). Just as the sense of a name of an object determines how that object is presented, the sense of a proposition determines a method of determination for a truth-value.
— Frege | IEP — Leontiskos

Perhaps, but I reserve judgment on Monsieur Bitbol's apparent quantum quackery until an English translation is available of his book Maintenant la finitude. Peut-on penser l'absolu? which is allegedly a critical reply to 'speculative materialist' Q. Meillassoux's brilliant Against Finitude. — 180 Proof

Bitbol (whom you introduced me to, by the way) is a very different kind of thinker to Weinberg. — Wayfarer

But philosophers have been regularly thinking outside the box for millennia. That's not what Wittgenstein was talking about, is it? Wasn't he talking about speculating where nothing can be known? — frank

Hence his well-known quotation 'the more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless.' Physics is constructed to as to exclude meaning, context, etc - as you point out. — Wayfarer

Interesting (to me anyway) that this suggests a 'visuo-spatial' element to Chat GPT o1's process. — wonderer1

Also related to the heightening specialism of knowledge over time? And the propagation of arbitrarily specific caveats. — fdrake

If you're trying to stop making both errors - you probably can't. You can just try to make them less. I don't have much good advice there unfortunately. — fdrake

Just so you know, I'm not going to read that. — Srap Tasmaner

On the other hand, in the wake of the Tractatus and Carnap and the rest, we got possible-world semantics; so you could plausibly say that a picture showing how things could be is a picture showing how things are in some possible world, this one or another.

The feeling of "claiming" is gone, but was probably mistaken anyway. In exchange, we get a version of "truth" attached to every proposition, every picture. Under such a framework, this is just how all propositions work, they say how things are somewhere, if not here. Wittgenstein's point could be adjusted: a picture does need to tell you it's true somewhere -- it is -- but it can't tell you if it's true here or somewhere else. — Srap Tasmaner

Let me add that I think Hanna’s piece is ill-considered and shallow, full of careless reading, and a terrible place to start if you’re interested in Kimhi. — J