I would like to reach a decision on the question of whether any proposition can remain without a truth-value on account of its not being asserted. First of all, it seems reasonable to ask whether there is any such thing as a proposition which is not asserted. Perhaps the special content of a propositional question? The question demands and waits for answer: is this so, or not? It incorporates a proposition into the structure of a demand. It asks for a decision, and this decision has built into it the same special content as does the demand. Should I assert this, or not? I should, if I find it true. Then how does this finding happen? Do I examine the proposition as a neutral object and then measure my beliefs for agreement or disagreement? If so, in what does this measuring consist, and how is it commensurable with the proposition? i should be looking for a belief that looks like the proposition or like its negation. This means that I must already know what the proposition says, and what my beliefs say, so that I can see whether my beliefs and the proposition say the same thing. But an unasserted proposition:--what does it say? Nothing, but that its assertion would say something. It is this latter something which is to be measured against my beliefs. Therefore, to undertake this measuring, I must first posit the assertion of the proposition, since the unasserted proposition says something incommensurable with the beliefs which need to be checked in order to decide whether I should make it.
Then it is impossible to reach a decision about an unasserted proposition, as to whether it should be asserted, and we do not find any proposition prior to the assertion of it. The appearance that the assertion of a proposition may be suspended in a question arises from the fact that we sometimes find ourselves trying to reach a decision on some point or other (as even now I am trying to do). We think that, because we have externalized the assertion in a realm of possibility, there has been no actual assertion. But wherever (in whatever "realm of being") we put it, we still actually put it there, as an assertion, and so we put it there along with the truth-value which is supposed to be deferred.
"But wherever (in whatever "realm of being") we put it, we still actually put it there, as an assertion, and so we put it there along with the truth-value which is supposed to be deferred."
ReplyDeleteI think this concluding statement is dependent upon two presuppositions that have yet to be established in assertoric fashion:
1.) The insistence upon the fact that we "still actually put it there" presupposes that the formal and the material component of the assertion are originally distinct. The assumption however, has, since Hegel, been challenged and allegedly rendered obsolete. It therefore requires at very least some manner of explicit grounding or demonstration.
2.)Your entire consideration of the non-assertoric takes as its orientation and pre-given criterion the concept of truth value. This is significant insofar as the locus of any truth-value has traditionally been understood as the assertion. Thus, your consideration of, e.g., the question, is committed in advance and unquestioningly to consider it in terms of what it, as you have no problem admitting, is not, namely an assertion. A preliminary question therefore announces itself: when you assert that "I would like to reach a decision on the question of whether any proposition can remain without a truth-value on account of its not being asserted", do you sufficiently establish the form such a decision will take, namely as assertion? In other words, how would you respond to the objection that you have simply presupposed your own result, i.e. your concluding ASSERTION?
As usual, despite my three years of trying to understand Hegel, I fail to recognize your reference. What are the material and formal components of a proposition? The names and the manner in which they are arranged? Please help me see what this distinction has to do with the supposed distinction between asserted an unasserted propositions.
ReplyDeleteThat the locus of truth-value is the assertion is part of the point. My reasoning is that no proposition fails to have a truth-value because no proposition fails to reach the level of assertion. In other words, there are no genuinely non-assertoric propositions.
I would caution you not to overcomplicate my above characterization of your first presupposition. The distinction between material and formal logic is one that was introduced by Aristotle' organon; this fact alone should suffice for you to know that it will resurface in a transmuted way in Hegel. I am sure in fact that this is nothing new to you, so I will assume I was simply too brief/unclear in my first comment. Obviously, however, if what logic treats of can be view under both a formal aspect or alternatively, a material aspect, then the proposition is can be grasped formal in terms of its structure as a judgement which posits by way of the copula, or materially in terms of its content. Because in Hegel it is understood as a necessity of history that all such dichotomies attain their concrete union, Hegel maintains that, in a true proposition (i.e. one that is scientific and therefore already at home in the System of Science which constitutes Absolute Knowledge)the content that is posited is in know way different from the positing itself. In your analysis you do not justify your decision to keep the formal and material component of the proposition distinct, in so far as you think that the possibility contained in the material component, i.e. the content of the interogative statement, is at variance with and trumped by the actuality of the formal component, i.e. the poeiting of the interrigative statement. This is at least how I understood you when you wrote: "But wherever (in whatever realm of Being) we put it, we still actually put it there, as an assertion..."
ReplyDeletePerhaps I misread you?
Also, sorry for the typos!
ReplyDeleteAlso to respond to your second point:
ReplyDelete"That the locus of truth-value is the assertion is part of the point. My reasoning is that no proposition fails to have a truth-value because no proposition fails to reach the level of assertion."
I believe this actually confirms my initial critique. Let me try to state it more clearly from a slightly altered vantage point. You stated your goal right from the outset in the following manner:
"I would like to reach a decision on the question of whether any proposition can remain without a truth-value on account of its not being asserted."
The difficulty here involved arises when one tries to characterize the question as just such a non-assertoric proposition, i.e. as an utterance which does not pro-pose anything. The problem isn't that the question, contra all this, actually does pro-pose something. The problem is whether we are justified in trying to measure the question with the yardstick of the propostion at all. Should we hastily yoke the question under the category of a proposition? Can this be decided by looking for the truth-value of a question, when the concept of truth-value is already prejudiced to think of the condition for the possibility of truth or falsity in predication, thereby deciding the answer in advance to the question of whether a truth-value necessarily belongs to the non-assertoric proposition, i.e, in this case the question. In other words, if the criterion for your investigation, namely truth-value, already interprets truth in terms of the assertion, is it any wonder that the question can neither remain without a truth value nor be non-assertoric? But what if the question, instead of being judged in light of its truth-value, already corresponded more purely and primally to a non-propositional truth? In this case the question would at once partake of truth while remaining without truth-value.
I see now that I simply stated what I hoped to accomplish in this post in a way that did not get across how very little I meant to accomplish.
ReplyDeleteBecause I am reasoning here regarding a dispute between Wittgenstein and Frege (namely, the dispute as to whether there are propositions which have sense but no reference), the purview of my question is at first limited to their categories, and I have taken up the "propositional question" as defined by Frege in his article on negation, as an example of what might appear to be an unasserted proposition.
Now, as I understand it, Frege's notion is not that there is an utterance which does not propose anything, but rather a proposal which could be handily applied in the right circumstances, but which presently has nothing to refer to (e.g. a proposition in which a fictional character is the subject). Such a proposition is not asserted, but could be if there were someone really existing (say, Ivan Karamazov) to assert it of.
My conclusion is simply that if an utterance proposes something (leaving aside the question of how it might be possible for an utterance to do so), it thereby already asserts it. I don't believe this conclusion has any bearing on discourse which is not circumscribed by the proposition, and indeed I take it that no real utterance (question or otherwise) is correctly identified as a proposition, the latter being only an abstraction of logicians.
The same abstraction drove Wittgenstein to his elementary propositions and their correlative atomic facts, and so kept his logic perfectly irrelevant to language.