Language and thought

We can attribute intelligible thoughts to someone on the basis of their behaviour, or on the basis of what they say about them.

In the case of behavioural attribution, we always have Kripkean ambiguities. If someone explicitly claims to believe something, we can only doubt whether they do by doubting whether they are an honest and competent interlocutor. This doubt, if it is radical, cannot intelligibly be expressed in any conversation with them, since it is exactly whether we can have a conversation with them that we doubt.

A belief attribution can be incoherent for different reasons. The belief might be incredible, in the context of the behavioural evidence. It might be incoherent in the conversational context - e.g. a self-attribution of the kind instantiated by Moore's paradox: If someome persistently appears to claim to have a belief which we cannot intelligibly attribute to them, our conversation with them breaks down - we no longer know what they are talking about.

I think there are beliefs that cannot be attributed to anyone because to have the mental equipment to have the belief would also make the belief incoherent. A belief that it isn't possible to talk might be like this. Someone who had this belief would have to (a) understand what people thought they were doing when they spoke to one another and (b) believe that they were failing.

It would only be possible to meet criterion (a) if one knew how to talk. We might think this could be like knowing how to cast a horoscope, without believing the outcomes. But to know how to talk is to know, very generally (with a certain acceptable error rate), what is true and false - what it is appropriate and inappropriate to say. (b) cannot be an appropriate thing to say in any playable language game, so a person who knew how to talk (in the relevant context) would also assert that (b) was false. Someone who believed it wasn't possible to talk, but knew how to 'mimic' talk in this way, would sound as though they believed it was possible to talk - they would sound just like everyone else.

We might say 'but they would be lying'. This claim is not ruled out, but finding grounds for it is complicated by the fact that it depends upon certain interpretations which have an irreducably normative element to them. It is not simply a 'matter of fact' whether someone is an honest interlocutor or not, particularly where the evidence of their dishonesty is not acknowledged in any conversation we have with them.

Chinese beetle consciousness ...

I'm not sure if this is even a partly original metaphor ...

Suppose you are in a prison, in solitary confinement. You are entirely restricted to a cell with no access to the outside world except for a window you can look out of, and a small hole through which you can send and receive messages to and from other prisoners.

No one lives outside the prison.

Suppose you look out your window and see a tree, and send a message to other prisoners asking them what they see outside their windows. Some say 'a tree' and some say 'nothing'.

You might imagine that some of the prisoners look out the same side of the prison as you do - where the tree stands - and others look out the other side - where this is no tree. But you might also imagine many other possibilities consistent with the answers that you have received.

You might ask further questions to choose between these possibilities.

What if you ask other prisoners where they live, and they all answer 'a cell'. What would this mean? Is 'a cell' the same kind of place that you live, or is it just a name for the place that a prisoner lives?

What questions could you ask that would help you to answer these questions? What if different prisoners' cells were different in some respects, but were still called 'cells'? How different could they be?

What if there were no prisoners, but only computers, scanners, and printers on the other sides of the holes in the walls?

Some speculations can be checked with other prisoners, and some cannot - can only be entertained in the conversation we are having now, and not in any conversation that would be possibly among the prisoners. (If you send a message saying 'are you computer?' and get the answer 'no', would you know more than you did before you asked?)

We should not be deceived, though, by the possibilities which we can entertain in our present conversation, nor into believing that we can intelligibly speculate - within it - on certain of its constraints.

I might ask you where you live, and you might (reassuringly) say 'here, in my consciousness ...'

Consciousness

I can't imagine what it would be like to be my cat.

I think I can imagine what it would be like for me to be my cat - what it might be like to be a human person in a cat's body, perhaps with some specific and recognisable cat-like desires and capacities. Would my eyesight be the same but more acute? What about hearing and smell?

Would I only have a cat brain, unable to think very clearly about what I am imagining? (!)

When I imagine being you, I really only imagine what it would be like for me to be you. For me to be standing where you are standing, to have some of your physical characteristics. Perhaps also some of your capacities.

Suppose you have no idea what I'm talking about: would I have to imagine that as well? How would I do that?

The 'mystery' of consciousness arises from thinking that things are not like this; from thinking that I can 'really' imagine being you. This is what makes us think there is something 'commensurate' or 'similar' going on here - that your consciousness is 'like' mine.

But if I imagine being you, in some complete way, I would also be imagining not being me - I would be imagining having no idea that I had ever been me; perhaps that this problem had never occurred to me.

'Consciouness' is a mystery if I think that by attributing it to you I am attributing what I think of as being me to you - if I think you are 'just like me' but with some different interests, capacities, understanding, and senory inputs.

I can imagine being me, with these differences, but I can't literaly imagine being you.

What is the world like?

This is a question.

It is the kind of place in which questions can be asked, the kind of place about which we can talk. Which gives it some empirical structure.

It is also like something we can say about it - if we say 'the world is real' then we can say 'it is as though the world is real'. Everything that 'is true' can also be a way that we can talk. We can say 'there are objects', and 'we can talk as though there are objects'.

When we say 'but what is the world really like?' we seem to be asking for an answer which cannot be re-rendered in this hypothetical form. The grammar of this leaves only one possibility: 'We can talk as though we can talk'.

We might also be asking for an answer which validates our capacity to ask questions and give answers, but this is confused. If I don't know whether I can ask questions and get answers, I wouldn't know whether a proper questioning and answering had taken place when I try to ask.