Meaning, metalanguage, and internal/external criteria

Putnam's 'twin world' example only works, I think, if we allow ourselves to articulate the possibility of seriously confused interlocutors - a possibility that cannot be articulated within any conversation they are having with each other. It's a language/meta-language confusion.

We can talk about the twin worlds, and their confused (?) inhabitants, but they cannot - without resolving the ambiguity his example depends on. In order for them to talk to one another, the water/twater issue would have to be resolved.

We can't hypothesise that we may, in some systematic way, be making water/twater mistakes, or be subject to water/twater ambiguities - we might as well hypothesise that we are confused about our hypotheses.

The conversation we are having now is always at the top of whatever meta-hierarchy is coherently conceivable. We can hypothesise about the confusions of users of lower level languages, but we can't extrapolate upwards from these hypotheses. And: interpretations which render the native confused are always corrigible (Kripke again ...). We can only (and we must) make incorrigible mutual attributions of intention in a shared conversation.

Davidson's idea that we must always be interpreting each other also has to be considered in this light: we do not have an internal conversation within which we make 'interpretive judgements' about what an external interlocutor means. We are able to make correct judgements about this, but these judgements can only be considered when they are expressed - when statements of them form part of the conversation. At this stage, the 'internal' becomes just whatever it was - whatever private precursor or accompaniment we happened to have.

If we imagine this 'internal' separated from the external statement, what is it that we are imagining? Just our own beetles. Not irrelevant, but not an 'internal representation' either.

Whatever is going on 'inside my head' (whatever beetle scratches there ...) it only gets out, it only becomes available to philosophical theory, as the intentional component of my participation in this conversation. And by that stage, all the important bridges have been crossed. It has become my 'beetle', and not [my beetle].

In this context, as well, the question of 'first person authority' becomes an issue of linguistic competence - the 'capacity' to correctly report on (or otherwise reflect) our intentional states when we speak. We attribute this 'authority' when we attribute interlocutor status - "You have no idea what you really think" is, here, more or less equivalent to "You do not know how to speak". This is not, of course, a playable move - it can't be part of a shared conversation.