Reductionism

The central ethical decision that each of us has to make is whom to treat as intelligible.

There are two aspects of intelligibility:

(1) Being able to talk - being someone with whom we can hold a conversation.
(2) Being the subject of an intelligible narrative - acting in a way which can be explained.

There are no intelligible rules which completely determine the limits of intelligible talk or action. This is the open question argument again - perhaps the central case of it. If we could state all these rules we could ask whether they defined intelligibility - whether it was intelligible to say this.

In particular, there cannot be a list of rules which relates intelligibility to factual conditions. There is a reason for this in addition to the open question problem: what counts as a fact depends on what we count as intelligible. Claims about facts are subject to intelligibility decisions.

Similarly, it is not the case that just anything can count as intelligible. We do make decisions about this, and they are not arbitrary or random. For any language game (for any 'game of intelligibility') there will be moves (e.g. allowing contradictions) which would render the game unintelligible.

Some of the conditions of intelligibility of our language game (the one we are playing now) will look universal - will look like general rules of intelligibility. We can do experiments with some of these - Quinean experiments - to see which ones we can vary or do without, and which we cannot.

There are factual statements ("we can talk") and formal statements (the non-contradiction rule) which must be true in any language game. If we found a game which rendered these false under any possible translation schema, we would have to say that it was not a language game.

But whether we had exhausted all possibilities would be an empirical matter, and subject to Kripkean limitations (had we considered all possible interpretations?). There would always be some interpretation which rendered the game trivially intelligible - though possibly too complex to play.