Language and lying

I thought for a while that lying depended on the possibility of truth-telling. So it might, but there are other kinds of deception than lying - kinds which might depend only on the possibility of interpretation (and so on presenting behaviour designed to deceive).

There are deceptions in nature - the moth with eye patterns on its wings is not literally saying 'I am the face of a dangerous creature', although it has evolved the spots to sustain this deception.

But that's *our* explanation (interpretation), of course...

Thoughts on thoughts ...

The 'phenomenology' of thinking is, possibly, one of the things we feel most familiar with - thus Descartes' infamous computation.

But we only know what each other thinks because either (a) we have drawn conclusions from behaviour or (b) we have been told by the thinker.

(a) is always corrigible (Kripke), and (b) depends on the presumption that we understand what we are saying to each other.

Actually, behaviour interpretation isn't just 'freely' corrigible - these theories, themselves, need to be intelligible to those who discuss them.

Of course we have unarticulated thoughts. And we have thoughts which could not easily (or ever) be discovered from our behaviour. But thoughts which are forever private are also forever outside the scope of public theory - and so are outside the scope of its tests of intelligibility. Private thoughts are private.

Philosophical theorising is a public business, carried on through participation in a 'language game'. In so far as unarticulated thoughts appear in philosophical theories, they appear as intelligible - articulated - interpretations of behaviour. No private thoughts appear here in any substance (perhaps all we can say is that we may have private thoughts ...).

This isn't behaviourism: I don't deny private phenomenologies. But it does seem clear that it is only when they are articulated that they engage with theory. (Articulating them is an important and creative business, of course - but we don't always do it).

Suppose we said of all these unarticulated thoughts - whether they are disengaged from public theory, or precursors to it - that they are just the private phenomenology of language users? That we only think we share the unarticulated part because we share the articulated part through our participation in the language?

This would shed a different light on the motivation to talk of 'languages of thought'. Actually, what we have is 'thoughts of language'. And, of course, these thoughts appear to have a grammar ...

The rest remain private.

Truth telling ...

The rules for truth telling are whatever rules (tacit and explicit) that we follow to make conversation possible.

Sometimes, maybe generally, tacit rules can only be made explicit by changing the rules - even to the extent of changing what we mean by 'explicit'.

The open question argument guarantees that we can never make all the rules we are using explicit (in any intelligibly translatable sense).

A language for which the rules have been made fully explicit can be treated entirely syntactically - as s signalling system, or not a language at all.

Meaning and 'transmission'

Suppose I believe that it isn't possible to talk to people. I might still know that if I utter the string "It isn't possible to talk to people" in your hearing, then you will entertain this same thought.

This is credible without any mention of meaning, because I can make you think things without 'saying' anything at all. I can make you think there is someone behind you by glancing over your shoulder.

But despite the causal process being credible, I cannot mean by my utterance that it isn't possible to talk. If I did, then I would also mean that that utterance didn't mean anything - including that it isn't possible to talk.

Suppose you were disabling a bomb, and I was instructing you. You have to choose one of two wires to cut: a red one and a blue one. If you cut the blue wire, you will be blown to bits, and if you cut the red wire the bomb will be disabled.

You don't know which wire to cut, but I do. However, you believe that I want to blow you up, and that I will tell you to cut the wrong wire. Unknown to you, I know of this belief - however, I do not want to blow you up.

I therefore tell you to cut the blue wire, knowing that you will, as a result of your belief, cut the red one.

I have transmitted a signal to you that has led you to cut the right wire, but this does not render 'Cut the red wire' as a valid translation of what I said, which was 'Cut the blue wire'.

Meaning Commitments

We need to be committed to something *intelligible* by what we say, and there's a 'public' aspect to intelligibility.

And there's also a normative aspect. We partly 'decide' to treat some moves as intelligible. We certainly decide how much effort to put into rescuing intelligibility...

(More 'private language' issues ...)

The Private Language Argument

The problem with trying to construct a private language is that it can't count as a language - it can't be translated.

Only public languages can be translated.

It isn't so much that we wouldn't be able to check our rule following, as that intelligibility is conferred by public descriptions and explanations.

If I was the last human being, and was 'writing' this, I would really be saying nothing (whatever my delusions). At best, I would be acting out my own (unintelligible) nature.

Or I might be making notes for myself to read later ...

Whatever that would mean?

In fact, there's maybe an even better way of putting it:

If I talk of a group (Group S) having a 'social norm', or of sharing a judgement (N), I am saying to the participants in my conversation (Group E) that this is the case. If the shared norm or judgement of Group S is expressed in the language of group S, then the norm must also be intelligible in the language of Group E. Otherwise we would have to doubt whether we had a correct translation (Davidson and Quine).

What I'm saying here is that if we understand the language of Group S, then we understand N.

Here's a slightly contentious step: If we understand N, then we understand how to adhere to N, at least in principle. This means that, even if we believe N to be a 'bad' norm for us, we understand how Group S has come by it. For a shared conversation to work (one that included S and E), we would need to resolve this dissonance - either S would come to reject N, or we would come to accept N, or we would both adhere to a norm N' which gave a contingent account of N that we could both accept (S would see that there were circumstances in which N didn't hold, and we would see that there were circumstances in which it did).

If, despite our best efforts, we cannot achieve a shared conversation between E and S because we cannot reach an accommodation over N, then we have, again, to be sceptical about our understanding of N, and, therefore, of our judgement that we can attribute this norm to S.

Kripke's presentation of his paradox is deceptive because 'quadding' is intelligible to us, as are a great many (maybe infinitely many) other rules that a subject might be following.

But each one of them can receive the 'N' treatment, or it doesn't count as a rule. In other words, the paradox relies on a dissonance which can always be resolved.

If we could never guess, nor check, which rule a subject was following, why would we imagine they were following a rule at all? Can it make sense to say they are definitely following a rule, but not one of the ones we have been able to check? (This is beginning to sound like Gregory Chaitin territory ...).

If we try to recast Kripke, in line with this suggestion, we find ourselves saying that we can never guarantee that our interpretation of someone's behaviour as intelligible is correct. This doesn't seem so radical.

This approach also solves a problem for 'group judgements': there is nothing especially privileged about a group over an individual with respect to the private language argument. Each may make exactly the same mistake - judging that they are following a rule when they are not. This is perfectly clear from real examples of groups amending judgements about social norms under economic or political pressure.

What is not possible is to speculate that the rules of the conversation within which we are speculating may vary in a way which fundamentally changes the nature of the activity of speculation.

Is the solution I've outlined for Kripke the same as his solution?

Maybe.

I don't like 'collective brute facts', but that may just be an unfortunate coining. He definitely relates the solution to a 'form of life'.

He gets into a muddle about groups - talking as though 'we all roughly agree' can mean anything, and doesn't just beg the question. This is similar to a kind of mistake Wittgenstein could be accused of - treating the 'form of life' as something that could be described, or even pointed to, within the language game. I know he could be read as denying this in a few places, but he talks as though it can be done.

Do I? Only metaphorically, or heuristically. I have a better way of saying the same thing: through the unintelligibility of denying we can talk, and constructing a more conventional analytic argument from that starting point.

If the solution to the paradox is tied to the possibility of language, it has the neat result that we can only state the paradox if it is either soluble or harmless (like the semantic paradoxes).

Also: I think my solution reduces the attractiveness of 'internalist' accounts (like Chomsky's?). Or at least, it renders these scientific rather than normative or epistemological. We may discover all sorts of brain processes which underpin, or 'explain', language use in our case, but this is just functional sub-strate, and the normative/truth-telling/meaning aspects could be implemented in other ways - e.g. by a computer programme, or an alien.

We can rule out these possibilities, of course, but that , itself, would be a normative judgement. Computer's are beginning to 'talk' quite well. Whether or not we finally include them, or their descendants, in our community of conversation will be a social issue rather than a cognitive one.

Just as whether we, now, would regard that development as acceptable is.

Version 8

I've changed my mind about 'as if' - it's not that easy ...

And I have made some necessary changes the bit about Kripke.

Aesthetics

Here's an odd thing: there doesn't seem to be an open question argument against a general aesthetic theory. Asking whether a theory of beauty is beautiful seems to be perfectly intelligible.

Maybe it's just a mix of the other four - knowledge, truth, goodness and meaning. Maybe Keats was partly right ...

Something rings true about this, though: a work of art can guide us to something new by way of meaning, truth, knowledge or goodness. It does this without saying - but by showing. We can't 'translate' it, but we can tell stories about it.

Kripke and Goodman

Kripke's paradox depends on attributing a single intentional stance on the basis of a specific description of behaviour.

This is probably incoherent.

We don't describe a table as wanting to remain stationary, regardless of the "behavioural" evidence.

To attribute a single intentional stance is also to attribute the capacity to have intentional stances - and, therefore, to attribute other intentional stances. It seems unlikely that it could ever be intelligible to attribute a completely incoherent set of intentional stances to someone. In fact, for Davidsonian reasons, attributing intentional stances is probably like attributing rationality, or language: there is a normative aspect to it, and it's likely to be holistic. We're attributing a form of life.

In particular we're not depending on a restricted set of evidence, nor on a purely 'computational' argument - and most of the peculiar possibilities allowed by Kripke's account would be eliminated by holistic and 'principle of charity' types of consideration.

A similar type of argument can probably deal with Goodman's paradox. A language game needs to be playable - this is a significant constraint on 'grue' type semantics.

Version 7

Another update, with some new sections started ...

The famous objection to logical positivism - that its fundamental discriminatory principle was neither analytically true nor synthetically testable - can be extended to any general empiricist epistemology (any theory about how we obtain reliable knowledge about the world).

This is because any theory of this kind must also be a theory about the world - a theory that the world is the kind of place about which knowledge can be acquired in this way.

Our epistemological theories are theories about the world, and so must either be self-validating or incomplete.

Perhaps this is just another way of saying that they are subject to the open question objection, and so require recursive exposition.

The typology constrains the scope of "membership" in a specific way. Also, the construction of the typology depends upon the way this constraint works.

The rule "A set cannot be a member of itself" sounds simple but isn't. When it's modified to avoid 'overkill' it rapidly becomes complex - only becoming intelligible again when it approaches very closely to "A set cannot be a member of itself if this would result in contradiction" - which, of course, is exactly what we're trying to avoid by other means.

This pattern is beginning to sound familiar ... Which means, I suppose, that I may have made it up.

The reason that meta-language solutions to the semantic paradoxes can't work is because to characterise the concept which generates the paradox (e.g. 'truth'), a language which is not in the hierarchy is required.

I would suppose that the theory of types is similarly vulnerable to a diagonalisation paradox based on the intensional definition of a set which depended on a feature of the hierarchy in such a way that the set became both typeless and typed?

I'm sure this must have been done, and I'll have a look.

Version 6

More corrections and clarifications.

Coming Next:

I have (consistent?) stories to tell about:

Speaking rationally and acting rationally.

Thought.

The form of a 'complete' explanation or argument, and the (only partly surmountable) barriers to constructing these. And more on why we can't always say why they fail.

Issues with 'absolute truths': statements about what must be true which are not 'boundary' statements (about the possibility of the game). These appear in religious dogma, but also in epistemological dogma.

I think they are statements about how to think rather than about the limitations of talk. They break the rule about ambiguous behavioural attribution of intentionality.

Ursula le Guin's 'The Author of the Acacia Seeds' from Buffalo Gals (Capra, 1987) is a nice satire on what can be treated as language.

Version 5

Minor clarifications and a table of contents ...

We choose to treat each other as human - as being able to think and to talk.

There is no final 'fact of the matter' here.

This should be clear from Davidson's need for a 'principle of charity'. (Unless he thought this was a 'principle' which we must observe - a condition of our own humanity.)

This has important consequences for any 'science' of psychology that includes the study of consciousness, or even intentionality.

Version 4

Including a parable against sensory empiricist epistemology.

Version 3

More groundwork.

Version 2

There will be a lot more. Leave it for a couple of weeks if you can't be bothered with the frequent updates.

I think recursive approaches to avoiding the open question problem are likely to be productive though. I've outlined one for meaning here, and will do the other OQ categories as well (truth, knowledge, validity, goodness ...).

Version 1

O.K.

I've been quiet for a while, but now I have a method, I think.

I'm going to maintain a single file for the general theory, but post to this blog on progress.

In each post, I'll link to an updated version of the file.

The first few paragraphs are linked to 'Version 1' above.