I'm not sure this single sentence can bear the scrutiny we are applying to it. — Leontiskos

Fair. The thing about existence surprised me, so I took it seriously.

I have been doing some dot-connecting and reading between the lines in these recent posts.

I think we do have a tendency to treat every word as a term of art, with a specific technical meaning. Hence I have been treating as equivalent 'assertoric force', 'judgment', and 'assertion'.

Until I'm convinced Kimhi means these consistently differently.

(The man will put in parentheses "a thought, a sentence, a state-of-affairs", so that's not an invitation to split hairs or take these all in distinct technical senses, at least not for his point.)

I see the edits now.

Once that is in place "conferral" takes on a different sense, for then the verb and not the speaker is what confers on the proposition its existence and nature or meaning. — Leontiskos

Then it does turn on what is understood by "use". Is there a real sense in which a word is just there in a sentence -- and thus "used" in it -- without someone "using" it in a sentence? What can a verb do on its own?

"Display" something seems to be the answer -- and I will look into that -- but there's another way to take that too, that this only means it is by this use of this verb that one indicates or expresses or shows forth or even represents their judgment that ...

Does a Fregean formula like "Fa" display the independent existence of a thought or a state of affairs? Or is it a judgment?

Huh.

Well, I'm not about to claim his writing is crystal clear on this point.

What do you make of his use of the word "existence" in the first quote?

I suppose "allowed them to construe" is ambiguous. I took it as a rhetorical denial of the claim that truth-bearers have some existence besides what is conferred upon them by judgment. Do you read that differently?

Yeah I did quote that. Thought so.

I'll take a look at displays.

But unless you're reading "use" creatively, he does say what I said he did.

where does Kimhi say that, "the proposition [...] has existence conferred upon it by someone affirming or denying [it]"? — Leontiskos

Thought I had quoted it somewhere, but no. I'm away from the book, but it's early, coming off the discussion of the veridical sense of 'to be' and into the syllogisms of thinking and being. I take the veridical use of 'to be' to be 'assertoric force'.

classically speculative knowledge is thought to undergird practical knowledge. On this classical account we never carry out practical activities without also engaging in speculative knowing. For example, if you want to eat an orange you must first be able to recognize it and see that it is edible, nutritious, desirable, etc. If you can't possess that kind of knowledge about it then the question of eating it will never come up. — Leontiskos

Kimhi says that the proposition "The orange is good to eat" has existence conferred upon it by someone affirming or denying that the orange is good to eat.

That seems to leave knowledge in a somewhat precarious position. "The orange is good to eat" needs to be available as a proposition that can be known, but on the hylomorphic reading I have suggested, it is only available in a judgment that the orange is good to eat (or not), as "what is asserted," the content of the judgment. But then you would have to judge that things stand thus-and-so (or don't) even to be capable of knowing that they do or don't. Sounds like a cart and horse situation.

All of the propositional attitudes will face this problem if there are, as Kimhi says explicitly, no forceless truth-bearers.

This problem remains even if we make some obvious improvements to my reading. When Kimhi says "conferred" there is some ambiguity. You could think of a judgment as an event, and "what is thought" as persisting only for the duration of the event.

But we often use such locutions in the past tense -- "what Frege thought," "what Kimhi said." That suggests that "conferring existence" might have some staying power, so thinking, judging, or saying P brings it into existence --- and leaves it there, for others to think and judge and say. I get to say that what Frege said is right or wrong.

If that's so, Kimhi might be offering an interesting philosophical just-so story about where propositions come from, assigning priority to judgment over wondering, wishing believing, hoping, guessing, knowing, doubting, and so on.

Except that he explicitly says that P does not persist as a truth-bearer with no force, and that seems to deny its availability for being governed by the other propositional attitudes that might come along.

But does it? Or does it only say that propositions *only* appear governed by a propositional attitude? If I wonder whether P, there's P as "what I wonder". If I guess that P, there's P as " what I guess."

What propositions never do is just hang out bearing truth or not.

So Kimhi is an anti-realist.

Let's leave it.

There was a point there that was intended to be near the subject of the thread. If it gets close enough, I might bring it up again.

I don't think the "modeling mindset" is an improvement, and I think the main reason approaches like Frege's turn out to be useful is because they were intended to be more than just models. — Leontiskos

Nowhere that I've noticed in Frege or Kimhi is there any recognition that ordinary people, who do most the thinking and asserting (and working and paying, and living and dying), also think about what they're doing, not from off to the side as philosophers, except maybe sometimes, but in the midst of doing it, because thinking about how you're speaking, for example, or how someone else is, whether they mean what they say, whether there's something else implied by what they say or the way they say it, whether you might be giving the wrong impression, all of this matters tremendously to understanding each other (or manipulating each other, etc). This kind of theorizing is not optional, but an important part of everyday thinking and talking.

And the kind of theorizing people do everyday is my kind, not Frege's or Kimhi's, and I would call it modelling because people know that most of what they think is only true "for the most part" or "usually" or "depending", and that you have to be willing to adapt and adjust, and the strategic choices we make in thought and speech and action don't have guaranteed results, just chances. My sort are for this kind of probabilistic modelling because it works.

he's committed to vouching for their truth — J

Yes and no.

You've played with this stuff, right? You write down "P" and that means P is a premise; it's *treated as* true. In essence, all symbolic logic is hypothetical. You just see how things work out *given* certain premise and inference rules. (And natural deduction systems have additional ways of doing this.)

What I think is unavoidable is vouching for P as a truth-bearer, and for its availability. That is, that it is a proposition.

we don't yet know — J

The book has been out what since 2018? I don't know how many articles have been updated since then, but he gets not a single mention on SEP. (I haven't checked his Google scholar or PhilPapers rankings.)

who cares if it's a bit off? — Leontiskos

Btw, Timothy Williamson tells a story about explaining the Gettier cases to an economist, who was mystified by the importance philosophers attach to them. "So there are exceptions. So what? All models have exceptions." And Williamson -- who's been doing just fine in the current regime -- thought, maybe we really have been going about this wrong, and has become an advocate for at least incorporating the modeling mindset into philosophy.

those in the thread who said, "Frege is just giving a model, so who cares if it's a bit off?" — Leontiskos

Ahem.

Of course he is not giving a model — Leontiskos

I absolutely think he is, even though he didn't think so. Newtonian mechanics? Pretty damn good model used appropriately, within certain limits, but its author thought it was Truth. And he was wrong. Doesn't matter what he thought he was doing, the model he left us is useful.

And so it is with Frege.

Wittgenstein — Leontiskos

Yeah there are certainly hints, and that alone makes him an outlier these days.

the depth and originality of Kimhi's thought — J

I consider the jury decidedly out on this.

Kimhi is too bound up in a Fregian paradigm to overcome Frege — Leontiskos

I don't know the contemporary landscape well, but I think the dominance of something recognizable as analytic philosophy was already slipping in the 70s and 80s. Rorty, Stanley Cavell, Annette Baier (I think also of the Pittsburgh crowd) and others seem distinctly post-analytic.

But Frege and Husserl, this is the last moment before the split. So if you want not to join one side or the other, you might go back to the most recent common ancestor. (Without just taking Kant for another spin.)

But I think it's pretty uncommon to see anyone who isn't doing ancient philosophy or Heidegger talk about "the unity of thinking and being". That's pretty out there, but again I don't know the scene well anymore.

syncategorematicity — Leontiskos

Yeah I haven't gotten to that stuff yet.

It's painful reading. I know a lot of that is just me, that I'm out of practice, but I never felt so frustrated reading Dummett or Sellars, writers many people dislike. There's something disorganized about Kimhi's writing, that nothing he says makes sense on its own, without all of his other thoughts. But you can't say everything at once; as a writer you have to impose some structure, if not lemma-theorem-corollary, then at least something pedagogical, building it up. Wittgenstein struggled with this and found not one but two solutions! Kimhi doesn't seem to have.

he's not using the judgment stroke merely to mark a purported truth. But how shall we characterize what he is doing? — J

I have a thought about this, which almost made it in an earlier post.

Kimhi says that existence is conferred on propositions by the veridical use of 'to be', so that's judgment or assertion.

Frege wants propositions to be the object of thought, but he also wants them to have independent existence. It's almost as if he half accepts Kimhi's position, but then confers existence on his propositions in perpetuity by borrowing the veridical use of 'to be' and tacking it right onto the proposition. There! Fixed!

But this is worse than doing nothing in Kimhi's view because this is a complete sham. Propositions exist only in the judgments of thinkers; the veridical use of 'to be' no more stands *on its own* than propositions do, so you cannot just rip it from a thinker's mouth and solve the problem of the independence of propositions.

(This turns out to be the other side of my realization that Frege probably means 'judgment' in some strangely objective sense.)

attempting to wrestle with the bigger picture — Leontiskos

Quite the opposite. I'm just forcing myself to try to understand the damn book. Although maybe you're right, in the sense that I'm just picking out the bits that seem to address The Tradition.

Yes, but why are we to think that Kimhi is committed to "atomicity"? That's what puzzled me about your first post. — Leontiskos

That was an hypothesis: if he doesn't attack the "atomic" part of "atomic proposition" (which is what Quine did), maybe he's okay with it.

most parties are agreed that in order to assert ~p there is a "reliance" on an understanding of p — Leontiskos

I believe Kimhi wants to say these are the same thing, in the following sense (although there's some labor over it): extensionally, ~p is a complex proposition dependent certainly for truth-value but perhaps also for sense on p; intensionally, to consider p at all is also to consider ~p, to think or judge or say one is also to take a position on the other.

Another way to get there has been discussed earlier in the thread, but I don't know if it's Kimhi's way or equivalent, and that's to deny that ~p is a component of an intensional complex like "A thinks ~p", and construe this instead as "A thinks-not p" or "A denies p".

That would be a pretty Fregean move, like saying "A is" is not a component of "A is red."

Next bit of deviation from mainstream analytic philosophy:

For example, it is widely accepted, to the point that it is almost a dogma of contemporary [ analytic ] 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 that p”). Given the way this distinction between logical contexts is usually understood, it has the consequence that, if one wants to answer our above question (what is it for p to occur in propositions of both of these sorts?), one must conclude that the p in question possesses the logically prior character of being something which is in and of itself true or false. — p. 11

There's more, but let's stop here a moment.

Extensional complex propositions are truth-functions of their component propositions, but intensional complex propositions are not. That means that p occurs in an extensional complex on the expectation that it can be given a truth-value contributory to the truth-value of the complex; but when p occurs in an intensional complex, its truth-value makes no difference to the truth-value of the complex. So yes, those ways of occurring are different, maybe even "radically" different.

So how does that lead to "in and of itself true or false"? I think it's just the claim that for p to work in an extensional context it has to be ready to provide a truth value. In particular, that truth value cannot depend on the truth value of any other proposition, so --- atomicity.

Which we had *some* reason to think Kimhi was into, but he has a specific issue here, something about the "logical unity of p and ~p" and he doesn't want to say you can consider p without considering the complex ~p.

That matters because what occurs in an intensional complex like "A thinks p" is the very same proposition that's in ~p, which means we get to consider how p works in these intensional complexes. And any A that affirms p denies ~p. (I'll have to check tonight when I can look at the text, but I think this is one of those self-evident, non-inferential things for him.)

In short, if you take this detour through intensional complexes, you get a specific failure of atomicity, which extensional complexes just require.

Why is this the fault of the extension / intension distinction? I think it's sort of a revenge pattern: yes, the truth-value of p doesn't matter to the truth of "A thinks p", but there's still an exclusionary relationship between "A thinks p" and "A thinks ~p" that the usual view cannot account for, precisely because it blinds us to the p in "A thinks p."

So we are talking about illocutionary force — Banno

Don't think so. At least at first, Kimhi says nothing to suggest that you do anything by saying that things stand thus-and-so.

So in what way does a proposition "exist"? — Banno

Only as an abstract object, immanent in an actual use. What I think so far.

What problem? — Banno

He defines three sorts of problems related to non-existence: (1) empty predicates; (2) vacuous singular terms; (3) problems that implicate the whole proposition, not just its parts as in (1) and (2). The third set includes the Parmenidean problems: how do we think, falsely, that the world is how it is not; how do we say, truly, that the world is not as it is not. His examples come from Wittgenstein, one from the early Notebooks, one from the Blue & Brown books.

(Reminder: Parmenides puzzle number one is, how can we think what is not the case? Number two is, how can we talk about what is not the case, even to say that it is not?)

Here's most of the footnote on pages 9 and 10. This is not an argument per se, but does lay out pretty well what Kimhi takes himself to be up to in relation to early-ish analytic philosophy.

(1) no objection

Over the course of its history, analytic philosophy has associated different modes of non-existence with different components of a simple proposition. One of the early contributions of the tradition was the construal of non-existence claims as concerning the extensions of predicates through the use of quantifiers.

(2) also fine

Once issues of non-existence that could be understood in terms of empty extensions of predicates were set aside, the interest of analytic philosophers turned to the mode of non-existence associated with the singular term in a simple proposition, and hence to issues such as the status of vacuous names and fictional entities

(3) an eyebrow is raised

While the problems of intentionality and non-existence, analytic philosophers remained notably untroubled by the problems under discussion here— ones that arise in connection with the proposition as a whole. [ The grammar here evades me, and we may be missing a word. ]

(4) a fateful decision

The adoption of the force / content distinction allowed them to construe that which is true / false or is / is-not the case (e.g., a thought, a sentence, a state of affairs) as having its own existence independent of that conferred upon it through the veridical use of the verb “to be.” [ That is, the use of it to mean "is the case". ] Hence they were assured by the force / content distinction that the existence of the underlying propositional whole is guaranteed.

(5) and this is the result

Analytic philosophy thus became completely unconcerned with the problem of non-existence associated with the propositional whole—hence with the difficulties raised by Parmenidean puzzles.

(6) which we decry

The aim of this work is to show that the very notion of a forceless truth-bearer is an illusion through and through, and hence that the difficulties of non-existence associated with the propositional whole—precisely those which are at issue in those puzzles— are inescapable.

TL;DR Kimhi is a proposition skeptic.

He is not the first. Quine was a proposition skeptic, and his issue was indeed with the "propositional whole"; he concluded that our beliefs face the tribunal of evidence en masse. The atomic proposition, Quine argued, was a myth. (Quine effectively declared the end of early analytic philosophy here, and suggested his new "logical empiricism" was in the tradition of American pragmatism.)

Kimhi's proposition skepticism is different; he objects, so far as he indicates here, not to atomicity, but to forcelessness. It is the force / content distinction, he says, that allows philosophers to attribute to propositions independent existence.

This would be an interesting choice. Who believes in atomicity anymore? It's been on the outs for half a century. What might Kimhi find attractive about it?

If it turns out Kimhi is not committed to atomicity, then the proposition is already dead and does not need killing. Perhaps he is not convinced by the previous reports of its death.

Read and re-read part (4) up there. That's the heart of it (but y'all were talking historical context, so you got it).

(4) says not that there are no atomic propositions, but that their existence is "conferred upon" them by the veridical use of "to be", that is, by what we have been calling 'judgment' or 'assertion'.

This does indeed look like the hylomorphic claim that "what you say is the case" exists only immanently in your saying so, not independently as we all suppose Frege to believe. (As variously Aristotle, @Leontiskos and I have suggested.)

In a sense, this claim alone solves the Parmenides puzzles! Or at least the second one. By speaking, we can bring into existence an atomic proposition; we need only say that something is or is not the case. There is no reliance on anything else here, nothing that would be needed to support the existence of our atomic proposition (no "negative fact" for instance, no missing truthmaker). It is entirely within our power.

(He will say something similar about thinking, not relying on anything external to itself.)

What do we think about Kimhi's in-the-moment atomic propositions?

Is that something worth having?

Is it something we will get to keep, or will the various arguments against atomicity sweep these away too?

talking about language rather than thinking — Banno

I guess you could read my examples that way, but it wasn't my intention.

It's a little harder to show collaborative thought, but I expect most of us have had an experience like this: you're trying to express or even explain something you don't quite have a grasp of, and the person you're talking to puts it in such a way that it clarifies your own thinking for you. (I've already posted elsewhere Fry & Laurie's "That's It!", so only a link this time.)

Well I suspect not just our language use but almost all of our thinking is just as collaborative as in this example, it's just usually harder to see. "I think ..." "I judge ..." Bullshit. Tens of thousands of years have gone into every thought you've ever had, every word you've ever uttered.

The content of a thought ought to specify its truth conditions. Hence, the content of a simple predicative thought must have a referent to its singular term such that its truth or falsity depends on how things are with the referent. — Pierre-Normand

Natural enough. For a lot of cases, we usually say we need two elements for assertion: what we're talking about (to be picked out by a referential expression) and what we're saying about it (the predication).

Two small points about this though.

1. If you think of this in terms of communication, there's a fairly clear sense of "picking out" or "specifying" available: you negotiate until you agree on the subject; enough for your audience to know what you're talking about is enough for you to say what you want to say.

There is no standard as clear that doesn't consider communication. If someone is just expressing their views in language for fun, speaking their beliefs to the universe at large, what standard do they meet to count their referential expressions as successful?

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.

2. Principally for descriptions (with a bound variable) but even for names, we can sometimes choose -- to use the programming language terminology -- between early binding and late binding, between fixing reference at "compile time", when we first speak, and at "run time", which can vary.

Consider a direction like "Don't forget to put your tools away after". The tools that are already where they should be can't be put away, so the intention is to pick out whichever tools are out at the time you're carrying out the directive. That can also be expressed as a conditional --- something like, "For all members of your tools, if it's out then put it away." The variable is singular now, but it's still not going to be bound until run-time, and then a number of times, also not known until run-time. Same thing.

This example is similar to the example in the first point, but one person gives the criterion and the other applies it; together they fix the reference, but not immediately.

---

Both points are intended to cast a bit of doubt on the presumption that our propositions are always referentially determinate, and thus their truth conditions too, at the time of our choosing, or that they need to be. (And I didn't even mention vagueness.)

There are similarly open-ended options for predication.

None of this matters to Frege or Kimhi, I'm sure. I don't know if it helps with @Banno's cat.

rule out talk of abstracta in a less reified way — J

No no, of course not.

We don't have to continue this here, or anywhere. Roughly, I'm just carrying the flag for population thinking versus essentialism. --- The bit earlier in the thread about loose and tight coupling, that's a suggestion that hunting for the essence of assertion, for example, is misguided.

Maybe some other time, though I really hate talking at this level of generality. Everything I say sounds like hand-wavy bullshit.

the role "the laws of thought" in Frege — fdrake

Have a glance at SEP's article on psychologism. Some curious stuff there I haven't really absorbed.

I may come back to some of your other points tonight after work.

For Kimhi, the key concept is affirmation and denial, not positive or negative predication. — J

Which has a weirdly moral ring to it. You're either right with God or you're not. You affirm the truth or you deny it. It's your soul that's at stake.

But I insist it's worth it. — J

Whereas I think it's all horseshit, but it's an opportunity to explore what I find so ridiculous about this way of doing philosophy.

I do find it curious that I reached for hylomorphism right before identifying the magnitude of the platonism at issue. The old war still rages, and an enemy of my enemy is a friend.

This is what drives him crazy -- how can we unify what appears to be a hopeless gap between the psychological and the formal? How can we bring "I judge p rightly" into some kind of entailment relation with what is the case about the world? — J

I find reading Kimhi pretty unpleasant, so a lot of what I say is kind of half-baked because I'm trying to avoid *studying* him, but that's what it takes. That said---

This is the main thing, near as I can tell.

My last few posts are trying to express my shock when it occurred to me there is a non-psychological sense of 'judgment' and this is probably Frege's sense.

I can't quite wrap my head around something like "impersonal judgment". It's not a movement of mind, not inferential. Maybe intuition? (Or revelation!) A mind and a thought just are related correctly or incorrectly.

And in trying to make sense of this, it keeps sounding like exactly what Kimhi wants, and that he says is *not* on Frege.

Could you give me some more words on that please, or a link to where you've previously spelled it out? — fdrake

It's from Kimhi's book. I don't know if anyone has posted that quote. If not I can do it tonight.

What have I said which has given you the impression that I like the forms? — fdrake

Oh! Nothing. No no, I'm not accusing you of platonism.

Roughly, I suppose I'm claiming that nothing in this discussion makes sense at all without a pretty robust platonism. It's Frege. We're arguing over which version of platonism is most satisfactory in whatever sense. I'm suggesting we own up to that.

And where's Kimhi? There's something about bringing psychology and logic back together, so he's messing about with the core of Frege's worldview, his platonist anti-psychologism. Does he bring them back together by ditching the platonism? That's not the impression I've gotten but I don't think I've stumbled on him addressing it either way.

I just think we should quit throwing around 'proposition' and 'judgment' and 'inference' in ways that allow people to give those words their preferred reading. Frege is a Laws of Thought guy. I don't think you get to tweak his position by pulling in a little "social context" here and there, for example.

Either Kimhi is underselling the rigidity with which Frege's system excludes psychology, or what he Kimhi means by 'psychology' might not be what people think.

The thing is, this thread is about what sort of thing the judgment of a proposition is. I mistook it, for some time, to be about "assertion" in a speech-act or language-game sense, because of the phrase "assertoric force", and because my memory of Frege is a bit hazy. But it's about judgment. Kimhi wants to show there is no "logical gap" between P and "We who think P are right".

We all know the status Frege assigns to propositions; it seemed to me the same considerations would apply to the judgment of P. For the case when P is true, I think Frege might very well consider judging P true to amount to following a law of thought. (If P is the case, you ought to judge P true.) As the thought P is not your personal property, not just a psychological fact about you, so judging it is also not just a matter of your personal mental behavior, but is already marked down in Plato's great hall as right judgment or wrong judgment. Thoughts aren't psychological facts, and neither is your comportment toward them (in judgment) or handling of them (in inference, for instance).

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

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

You cannot have a tidy little special-purpose platonism just for logic and mathematics, which have kind of an "eternal forms" vibe to them already. You both seemed happy to pick and choose which things get Forms and which don't, but I think you'll be stuck with a Form for "disappointment with the last season of Game of Thrones".

That post reads like I addressed @J as a defender of Frege, but it was meant to be addressed to @J as someone who believes Kimhi is making a point about Frege, but it keeps coming out as just the sort of thing we'd expect Frege to say.

The truth cannot be told in such a way as to be understood and not be believed. — Blake, not Frege or Kimhi

Suppose we go along with Frege and think of thoughts (propositions) as objective, in his sense, not the personal property of anyone.

What about judgment? What about inference?

If I judge P true, and so do you, aren't we making something we'd want to call "the same judgment"?

If I infer Q from P, and so do you, aren't we making something we'd want to call "the same inference"?

We can go further.

Suppose I forget to "carry the 1" in a piece of simple arithmetic, and so do you. Aren't we making "the same mistake"?

How far can this analogy go? Couldn't we have the same taste in music? The same fear of snakes?

Or is there some reason all of these things aren't just as objective as Frege's propositions?

I was rather arguing for something that is very much the polar opposite of that view. — Pierre-Normand

Which is what I had expected! Obviously I must have misread you.

I suppose we can leave it there for now, though I'll certainly go back through your posts.

Several posts back it felt like we were finally dealing with the central issue of this thread, so I would feel bad if we lost sight of that.

Why not say that there is a common purported content (how things are, state of affairs) that is here denied and there asserted? Consider the content of the assertion "this apple is red" or "p". When one asserts that, what one thinks is that the apple is red. When you use the same linguistic form to deny that the apple is red, one says "it is not the case that this apple is red" or "not p", this can not be construed as you standing in the different relations (with the "force" of negation, say) to the same state of affairs consisting in the apple being red since, from your point of view, there is no such state of affairs in the world. — Pierre-Normand

(my bolding)

I can't provide an adequate response to this, with appropriate citations and such, but I can say this: I am deeply, deeply suspicious of the model suggested here. 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.

I'm not going to deny the sentence I bolded, but I think this is entirely backwards. It's the other person who mediates my connection to the world, and I hers, and language is an important part of how we connect to each other, for that purpose.

Force, in particular, if we can define such a thing adequately, is meaningless absent an audience. I'm not denying that we internalize this dynamic; we very much do. But the origins of assertion, question, command, and so on, clearly --- to me, at least --- lie in our relations with others. We can play at making assertions to ourselves, asking ourselves questions, giving ourselves orders, but nothing could be more plainly derivative of what we do with others, and it is necessarily a make-believe sort of business.

(Oh, you could, if you wanted, cobble together some sense of force appropriate to our dealings with the non-minded world --- putting nature to the question, imposing your will on her, blah blah blah --- but I don't have any idea why anyone would speak a language for that purpose, since nature isn't listening.)

This doesn't directly address the scenario you described, much less provide an alternative analysis, but the starting point strikes me as completely hopeless.

the full context principle assigns meanings (Fregean senses) to subsentential expressions (e.g. names predicates and logical connectives) not only in the context of whole sentences but also in the context the other sentences a sentence relates to in a language game — Pierre-Normand

I have mixed feelings.

Yes, this is the natural way to go, but I think there's a risk that it flattens communication too much. We need different levels to play off against each other, unless you intend words to drag other language-games along with them to provide the necessary contrast. (Which, okay, and I know LW talked that way sometimes, but there are several issues with that.)

The examples I have in mind are irony, sarcasm, exaggeration, implicature (and we could go on) -- none of these are at all intelligible without something that counts, even if temporarily, as the literal meaning to play off of. That could just be some "other" meaning, but it has to be something widely enough available to count as "literal" for the relevant speech community.

So I lean toward what I take to be Grice's approach: logic is all we need for the semantic connections between sentences; pragmatics can't even get started unless that analysis stands as it is. For instance, to trigger the recognition of implicature, a response has to violate the principle of cooperation if taken literally. If you assign as meaning the use being made of the sentence (the speaker's meaning rather than the sentence meaning), you undermine the whole process. What's more, the sentence used to trigger the recognition of implicature (or irony, exaggeration, etc.) has to have a particular literal meaning for it to be suitable for the job in the first place, and thus selected and uttered. (Obligatory chess analogy: being used to block check doesn't change what a piece is, only its role in this position in this game.)

how contents are differently understood or differently individuated within different language games that warrant different ways to mark the content/force distinction — Pierre-Normand

Indeed.

It seems like I'm very nearly giving content to logic and force to pragmatics, and I'm not sure that's a terrible first thought, but I'd be interested in alternatives.

And nothing I've said does much to ground or explain the content/force distinction ...

---- 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.

Yeah there you go.

I don't it's a case of ambiguity. You just don't have enough information to know what's being asked. You'd have to go back and get the request clarified, right? — frank

Because it's ambiguous. I'm struggling here to guess how you understand that word.

But communication failure is not the main point here; it's that you have the option to treat shared abstract properties as singletons, but you do not have that option with the objects instantiating them.

That sounds very promising.

This is definitely a tangent, but I was just thinking of a puzzle that can arise with properties -- it's close to the distinction between in sensu diviso and in sensu composito, or maybe it's just the order of quantifiers, I'm not sure really. Suppose you have a bunch of marbles, some red and some blue, and you are asked to "list the colors of these marbles." There are two good answers: {red, blue} and {red, blue, red, red, blue, red,...} What is wanted? "Of each color, that it is represented"? Or "Of each marble, its color"?

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.

I think abstract objects are products of analysis. — frank

Yes, but I would suggest that we shouldn't take the word "analysis" there to indicate a practice that stands outside the everyday use of language, as if this is only something done by a linguist examining a corpus or a philosopher examining whatever she does, arguments, intuitions and whatnot.

Instead, this kind of analysis is engaged in every day by ordinary speakers and listeners; making distinctions like what-you-said vs how-you-said-it are strategies we all use, sometimes to understand each other and sometimes for other reasons. Doing this kind of thing is as much part of being a member of a linguistic community as knowing the word for "window" or the polite use of pronouns.

I hope I didn't suggest that there's only one type of abstract object. Quite the contrary. Mathematics alone provides a considerable menagerie.

For purposes of this thread, the ones that would matter would be, at least, content and force.

There is a suggestion, speaking roughly and quite broadly, that a system of logic intended to deal with our utterances only as content, without force, is somehow mistaken. That may be so, but it's no argument to say that our utterances also have force if the whole point of the enterprise is to set force aside without denying it.

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.

I've not spent as much time as I might have thinking about Kimhi's argument, but the claim of conflation suggests that there is a point you can make about content, the proposition, and a different point you can make about actual occurrences, in which that content features, but Frege, I think it is claimed, forgets what he's about and tries to make a single point about both, or tries to make a point about one that can only be made about the other, and somehow tricks himself into thinking he has not mixed up the two.

That's the terrain of the argument I'm unable quite to present, I think.

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

If you start with a strongly materialistic bias, you're likely to lean toward behaviorism, which says that we never really agree on anything. — frank

I can say we agree, and I can say what we agree on, without attributing to "what we agree on" independent existence, but instead treating it hylomorphically as an abstract object that is immanent within our agreement. "Our agreement" is another such abstraction. Does it exist independently of our agreeing?

These two objects have the same mass.

These two cartons have the same number of eggs.

These two sentences mean the same thing.

I take this passage to be central to what Kimhi wants to say — J

For this thread, it is absolutely central, this claim of conflation.

You can consider a physical object as having properties such as mass, velocity relative to a frame of reference, and so on. The mass of an object, for instance, can be treated as an abstract object, but hylomorphism comes naturally here, and almost no one is tempted to say that the mass of the object has some existence separate from it. Nor does its velocity or any other property.

Now consider things people say to each other. You might very well find reason to distinguish what someone says from how they say it, or what someone says from the importance they attach to it, and so on. You might distinguish what someone says from the specific words they used to say it, including which language they used, so that people speaking English and German can say "the same thing".

"What he said" looks a lot like an abstract object, along the lines of mass, but for some reason many people, perhaps including Frege, have been tempted to treat "what he said" as having an existence independent of the words he used or the sounds he made.

For the issue Kimhi wants to raise, the issue would be whether you are conflating two different objects (or kinds of objects) that have independent existence, or whether Geach and Frege have conflated two different 'descriptions', I suppose we could say, two different 'qua ... ' formulations.

Does it matter what's being conflated?

I think it might for Kimhi's argument because one way of buttressing the idea that propositions have independent existence is to align them with the mental, rather than the physical. There's more, of course, but here, I think clearly, the question is in what sense "what he said" is a thought, while the actual words spoken were merely a physical "expression" or even representation of that thought.

If we take a more hylomorphic view, there may still be an argument, but it won't be this one.