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.