Because we have to recognise that commercial language use has legitimate operational goals, we cannot (as we might in the sciences) render 'honest practice' as 'truth-telling'.
The bomb disposal example (see "Meaning and 'transmission'") illustrates this. Honest practice here clearly excludes truth telling.
Saturday, March 28, 2009
Monday, March 16, 2009
Things and Words
Because we can write down syntactical rules for parts of our language, and because we use these to demonstrate certain things, we forget that a demonstration of the validity of our arguments in general cannot be based on rules. Similarly with establishing semantic consequences - we can write down a few of these in a rule based way, but we can't completely eliminate semantic imports into the rules that we use. We can't give a general account of how language comes to have semantic content.
When I say that I can say 'The cat is hungry' - that this is a legitimate move in the language game I am playing (i.e. that it is 'true' for that game) - because of the way the world is, I am not saying that I can say 'The cat is hungry' because the cat is hungry. This is a kind of category mistake - or a mistake about the meta-level we are dealing with.
Of course it is true that if I say (seriously) 'the cat is hungry' I must also believe that the cat is hungry (or I'm not playing the game properly). For the purposes of that game, I must believe that this is the way the world is. But that is only because I am using this language to describe the world, and not some other language - e.g. the language I would use to explain how this language (the one in which the cat is hungry is a fact) works.
If I try to explain how this language works, I end up saying silly things like "'The cat is hungry' is true because the cat is hungry" (or their equivalent). Or, I say: "'The cat is hungry' is true in this language game because the world allows this language game to work". And the second statement doesn't say anything specific about the world except that we can talk about it the way we do, in fact, talk about it ...
Maybe this is 'the fact' of the slingshot - I would need to look at this again. It's where we go when we try to make general statements about what must, ultimately, be true in order for anything to be true. We end up with just this one feature of the world: that something can be true about it.
When I say that I can say 'The cat is hungry' - that this is a legitimate move in the language game I am playing (i.e. that it is 'true' for that game) - because of the way the world is, I am not saying that I can say 'The cat is hungry' because the cat is hungry. This is a kind of category mistake - or a mistake about the meta-level we are dealing with.
Of course it is true that if I say (seriously) 'the cat is hungry' I must also believe that the cat is hungry (or I'm not playing the game properly). For the purposes of that game, I must believe that this is the way the world is. But that is only because I am using this language to describe the world, and not some other language - e.g. the language I would use to explain how this language (the one in which the cat is hungry is a fact) works.
If I try to explain how this language works, I end up saying silly things like "'The cat is hungry' is true because the cat is hungry" (or their equivalent). Or, I say: "'The cat is hungry' is true in this language game because the world allows this language game to work". And the second statement doesn't say anything specific about the world except that we can talk about it the way we do, in fact, talk about it ...
Maybe this is 'the fact' of the slingshot - I would need to look at this again. It's where we go when we try to make general statements about what must, ultimately, be true in order for anything to be true. We end up with just this one feature of the world: that something can be true about it.
Saturday, March 14, 2009
Two Dogmas
If there is something about the world that makes 'Vixens are foxes' true, it is not that Vixens are foxes, but that the world allows us to speak that way.
In fact, the only 'fundamental' thing we can say about the world is that it allows us to speak the way we do: and we can know this a priori, because we can know (in the context of speaking to one another) 'we can speak about the world' a priori.
If we try to say anything else, if we propose some other metaphysical fundamental, we are introducing a new constraint. We can do this with respect to more constrained games (for which these constraints might be hinge propositions), but in the most general cases we are caught by the 'as though' problem: that no philosophical importance can be attached to distinguishing between, for example, 'There are real physical objects in the world' and 'we can talk as though there are real physical objects in the world'. 'We can talk' and 'We can talk as though we can talk' is the only general circumstance in which the metaphysical implication is direct - the second statement is just a repetition of the first.
In fact, the only 'fundamental' thing we can say about the world is that it allows us to speak the way we do: and we can know this a priori, because we can know (in the context of speaking to one another) 'we can speak about the world' a priori.
If we try to say anything else, if we propose some other metaphysical fundamental, we are introducing a new constraint. We can do this with respect to more constrained games (for which these constraints might be hinge propositions), but in the most general cases we are caught by the 'as though' problem: that no philosophical importance can be attached to distinguishing between, for example, 'There are real physical objects in the world' and 'we can talk as though there are real physical objects in the world'. 'We can talk' and 'We can talk as though we can talk' is the only general circumstance in which the metaphysical implication is direct - the second statement is just a repetition of the first.
Thursday, March 12, 2009
Syntax and Semantics
For many 'information' channels (e.g. the computer I'm using to type this, or a gas whose temperature is interesting) there is a huge disparity between the number of possible messages and the number of semantically useful messages that can be passed. There are many billions of states that my computer could be in that are entirely useless, and many many more billions of states that a cubic centimetre of air at 12 degrees Celsius can be in on a cool day in Aberdeen. Chaos and redundancy are intuitive barriers for many people coming to information theory for the first time: we instinctively think that 'information' means useful information - information that means something.
But we only get meaning through interpretation - the different states of the cubic centimetre of air are only interesting if we can distinguish them - by their consequences, or by decoding them in different ways.
This may be difficult with the gas example. We might think the computer example is easier - we can list the states of all the independent storage elements, and show where the differences lie.
But this doesn't meant that we can 'reverse engineer' all of these states and represent them as the intelligible output of a programme - even one with errors in in it.
Some states cannot arise as a result of programming errors (at any level) and can only result from hardware faults, but a single hardware fault might result in a large number of possible memory states, so that we only need to recognise them as members of a class in order to find the fault - we don't need to be able to identify and interpret each one separately.
But we only get meaning through interpretation - the different states of the cubic centimetre of air are only interesting if we can distinguish them - by their consequences, or by decoding them in different ways.
This may be difficult with the gas example. We might think the computer example is easier - we can list the states of all the independent storage elements, and show where the differences lie.
But this doesn't meant that we can 'reverse engineer' all of these states and represent them as the intelligible output of a programme - even one with errors in in it.
Some states cannot arise as a result of programming errors (at any level) and can only result from hardware faults, but a single hardware fault might result in a large number of possible memory states, so that we only need to recognise them as members of a class in order to find the fault - we don't need to be able to identify and interpret each one separately.
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