Talking, and talking about talking ...

When we are talking about talking about the world, are we also talking about the world?

In one way, yes - because we are exploring what it is possible to say, and so what it is possible to say about the world.

Does this only tells us something about its 'grammatical structure', perhaps - only that it is a place we can talk about, which is much less than we would wish to say?

Except:  so many things need to be true for us to be able to talk at all - we might call these things Wittgensteinian 'hinges'.  They are true because they follow from the possibility of the conversation which requires them, and they feel true because we know how to participate in that conversation.

What about more 'contingent' facts?

Even commonplace contingencies will beccome hinge-like in certain circumstances.  That we put our rubbish out on Wednesdays may seem to be something that could easily be true or false, but a very serious dispute about it would raise issues of meaning and trustworthiness that would threaten the fabric of the conversation in which it was embedded.

It is here that our talk about talking can confuse us:

I might say to you (now, in this posting) 'Imagine you and I watching the bin lorry coming down the street on a Wednesday morning, taking the rubbish from each house, including ours - how could we disagree about what was going on?  Would I not have demonstrated to you that the bin lorry came on Wednesdays?'.

This makes the issue sound like one of empirical testing, but only because you understand - and do not seriously dispute - the account that I have just used as an example.  To talk about talking, we need, already, to be participating in a mutually intelligible game.  We can convince ourselves from this, if we are insufficiently reflective, that we have somehow found its roots.  All we have really found, after all, is that we can, in fact, play it.  Which is something we must already know.

Does this not threaten (unintelligibly?) to make every true 'fact' a priori?

If any true fact can be a hinge in some circumstance, then any true fact looks necessairly true, at least in that circumstance.  Does this lose the distinction between necessity and contingency?  Or does it make it 'context dependent'?

And, of course, do the answers to these questions depend on context?

This is a similar mistake.  We always have one general context - the context of the conversation we are now having - whose 'hinges' are therefore absolutely a priori.  When we, in that context, talk about talking, we can talk about different ways that it might be possible to talk.  'Shall we call Tuesdays Wednesdays?', we might say.  This process has bounds - the outcome must be something we can recognise as a language, something we can translate into the language we are using now; using to have this conversation.

(Not forgetting that the judgement that that this is the case will always have a normative aspect to it).

When I ask some empirical questions - e.g. 'What day is the bin collection where Mary lives?' - neither of us might know the answers.  We don't know how to talk here.

How do we find out how to talk here?  This question has an answer in our game or 'What day is the bin collection where Mary lives?' doesn't make any sense.  If I say 'Are there squagworts?' and you say 'What are squagworts, and how would we find out?'  I cannot answer 'There is no way of knowing either of these things'.  (This can sound like a metaphysical exchange, when the questions and answers are produced in a very serious way, in certain social contexts.)

There can, of couse, be no general way of answering these kinds of questions - there must only be some way.  If there were a general way, we could (unintelligibly) ask whether it was correct.  We can ask this question about particular ways, but the answers to it must always be particular.  A demand for generality here will result in the breakdown of the game:  it is like a child's game of 'Why?'.

Unless we say that the general method is the method of exploring how we can talk.  And this is not a method at all.

We might make some distinctions between types of question based on what kinds of answers we would accept.  We might decide, for instance, to accept each other's reports on certain 'matters of fact' so long as they were accompanied by, or could be accompanied by, an observation account.  This doesn't make these observation accounts especially reliable - it is just the way that we play this game.  The game 'turns out' to be playable so we feel comfortable with it.  Then someone makes a mistake, or tells a lie, and we become uncomfortable.  We don't know how to play.

(Remember that I have said, in this post, 'someone makes a mistake, or tells a lie'.  As players who do not know that this is what has gone wrong, we just have the resulting confusion.)

Perhaps, of course, you are confused by all of this - by my way of talking here.  To the extent that you are, we have failed to talk about talking.  We don't yet know why, but we might find out - either I might find out how to be less confusing, or you might show me that this is not possible, that I have made some mistake.

Consequences ...

I've been thinking about what follows from 'we can talk'.  Hinge propositions (since their contraries threaten intelligibility) are obvious candidates.

Something I hadn't thought of is this:  we also need honest and competent interlocutors.  Without these, talk is impossible - and so, they must exists.  To wonder whether there are any is to wonder whether it is possible to talk - to ask whether there are any is to ask whether it is possible to ask questions.

And the link to 'madness' is clear hear, as well.

Sensory Empiricism

Sensory epistemological empiricism has traditionally focussed on whether our sensory inputs can give us reliable theoretical knowledge of the world.

The public artifact of articulated theoretical knowledge - especially, perhaps, modern empirical science - depends not on whether we can take our own sensory inputs seriously, but on whether we can take the sensory reports of potential interlocutors seriously.  If we are to be able to talk to each other about the world, we must trust each others' reports about the way it is - or the way it seems.  And if it seems the same to everyone - if everyone agrees - then there is no room in our shared game for doubt about the reality.  If some Martian meta-philosopher managed to engage us, we might change our minds, but only if we could understand it - only if we and it could share a language game ...

This is the ground of the link between sensory empiricism and the liberal scientific tradition - the practice of taking each others' sensory reports seriously, and articulating this agreement.

Taking our own sensory experiences seriously becomes just a psychological condition, which is exactly Hume's conclusion.  He was just a bit confused by his unreflective linguistic competence ...

The phenomenology of rules and meta-rules

If I hypothesise that you are following a rule on the basis of your behaviour, then that hypothesis can never be 'proved' - it is always provisional.

If I suggest to you that we follow a rule, then we must know for sure what the rule means.  If we fail to agree here, then we just have confusion - not a counter-hypothesis within the game.  This is because our attempts to negotiate the rule must result either (a) in an unambiguous rule (agreement) or (b) in breakdown.

An 'external' observer might, metalinguistically, hypothesise about the breakdown (in a conversation with an appropriate meta-interlocutor...).  But this hypothesis would be based on behaviour, and so would be corrigible.

If I (or you) 'hypothesise' that our conversation has broken down, this can only be in a meta-conversation which has not broken down - can only be in a conversation with someone else.

We might have a 'private' hypothesis, here, but only in a derivative way:  it would need to be a hypothesis that could, in prinicple, be articulated.  This is a problem for any general 'hypothesis' about the playability of language games:  a negative judgement here could not, in prinicple, be articulated.  It could never be part of a rule in a shared game.

We could not incorrigibly attribute such a private hypothesis to someone else, and we could not entertain it ourselves without a private language in which it could be articulated ...