Résumé
According to Peter Geach, "a proposition may occur in discourse now asserted, now unasserted". Geach calls this "the Frege Point". It conflicts with the view (held by Aristotle) that to predicate a property of an object is to ascribe the property to the object (i.e., to judge/assert that the object has the property). The Frege Point suggests that the propositions generated via predication are intrinsically forceless: force is added from outside, as it were, when the act of judging or asserting occurs. There is another option, however, which Geach mentions and associates with Spinoza. According to the Spinozist thesis, as described by Geach, "a thought is assertoric in character unless it loses this character by occurring only as an element in a more complicated thought". The aim of this talk is to clarify the (complicated) relations between the Aristotelian view, the Frege Point, and the Spinozist thesis.
