Interpreting behaviour

We often re-interpret or misinterpret behaviour. Kripke shows that there can always be more than one intentional description of the same behaviour.

It is natural to think, here, of there being (a) the behaviour and (b) a set of interpretations. But we shouldnt make the mistake of thinking that there must, therefore, be a way of describing the 'uninterpreted' behaviour. The only descriptions we may have might be interpretations, and the 'sameness of behaviour' might only consist in our agreement that the interpretations are interpretations of the 'same' behaviour.

We may demonstrate this 'sameness' by identifying key aspects of the situation ('navigation markers') - such as time, place, actors etc. - but these are not descriptions of behaviour, and might not include anything which told us what was actually happening.

We might imagine, also, that some mechanical descriptions of limb movements and interactions with objects might somehow 'capture' the raw elements without introducing an interpretation. Computer simulations are based on models which encode this kind of information, but they are extremely difficult to interpret as 'descriptions' - they contain a great deal more information than our normal descriptions, and it is organised in a way which is hard for a human being to decode.

While the possibility of this modelling language might have been predicted from our judgements of sameness (and the existence of the 'navigation markers') , it certainly hasn't played any important role in producing judgements or demonstrations of sameness.

Also: it isn't clear that any such language really could capture all of the things which contribute to our actual arguments for sameness (where these are produced). The navigation markers relevant to a particular demonstration may be idiosyncratic, and missing from the the encoded description. We may not refer to time and place or personae but infer these from some other data which are not generally included in the descriptions encoded in the modelling language.

So what we have is just interpretations and the judgement of sameness. And we can make this judgment reliably - it would be incoherent to suggest that we don't. We also produce intelligible arguments for sameness which do not depend on 'full descriptions', or anything like these.