Introspection

If you can participate in this conversation, then you are a language user - you will feel like a language user (if you have any relevant feelings about it at all).

If you think 'what do I feel about what it would be appropriate to say, here?', then you are likely to come up with the right answer, since knowing the right thing to say is just what competent language users can do.

But the reliability of these introspections is misleading: it can make us think that these feelings and internal processes are at the root of the reliability of the move we feel is appropriate, or even of the language game itself.

(In order to show that a particular move in the game is reliable, or correct, we must produce an argument, not a feeling. It is incoherent to ask for an argument for the reliability of the whole game: an argument for the reliability of argument would not demonstrate anything.)

And this observation extends to our empirical intuitions as well as our 'language instinct'. It is not our sensory perceptions which make us reliable theorists - it is our ability to agree with each other about them. Our theories are linguistic artifacts.

Our ability to act in a rational way - an ability any moderately sentient animal exhibits to a greater or lesser extent - is not an ability to theorise, except under interpretation. If I describe a cat as having a theory, I am describing its behaviour in a certain way - as having a certain normative content. There will always be an alternative 'cognitive', or computational (homeostatic?) interpretation which elminates this content. This isn't possible in the case of a person who articulates a theory, because we can only produce a computational account of this behaviour by reducing the linguistic performance to something mechanical. Articulating a theory is participating in a conversation - we don't automatically do this by moving our jaws in certain ways and producing certain sounds.

I might, in a very complex conversation with you, give you an account of how your physiology and neurology instantiated certain cognitive/computational process in such a way as to produce the output we recognise as 'speech'. But when you said 'Ah yes, I see', I would hardly respond 'And there's another example of it working'.