Rationality

To explore a subject, to theorise about it, is to discover what is intelligible to say about it. Sometimes we demonstrate intelligibility by showing that we can continue playing the game, and sometimes we can say why a certain move is or is not intelligible. A consequence of the open question argument is that we cannot give a general account of what would make any statement intelligible or not.

We are sometimes confused by the fact that false statements seem to be intelligible. What is not intelligible, however, is to agree that a statement is false but to 'assert' it - to play it as though it were a legitimate move in the conversation.

Exploring rationality is, however, exploring this kind of intelligibility. A theory of rationality asks what we can intelligibly say about intelligibility. This threatens to generate open question problems. We can avoid this by giving a recursive account - by pointing to examples of intelligible moves and showing how the intelligiblity of others can be illustrated or demonstrated from these.

It is different from other kinds of account of alethial or epistemological processes, though - for all of these, we can say (of any metaphysical, physical, or formal theory 'X') either 'X is true' or 'We can talk as though X is true'. These are more or less equivalent, and the second is not inconsistent with 'We can talk as though X is false'. Where X includes an essential element in any account of intelligibility, however, we cannot talk as though X is false. Also 'We can talk as though we can talk' in tautologous, and is not a simile.

We think that we have two things - rationality, and how to talk. This is partly because we believe we have a pre-linguistic, or sub-linguistic rational process that we have phenomenological access to. However, we can only bring these processes into the game by giving an intelligible account of them - by showing that they can be represented as rational processes. In this context, sensory phenomena are no different from any others.

To be able to speak is to be able to speak intelligibly - to be able to tell the truth (whether or not we exercise this ability). It is always unintelligible to 'seriously' claim otherwise. It is not possible to know what such a claim might mean, since to take it seriously is also to render it unintelligible.

The world, one way or another, must be the kind of place in which intelligible conversations can take place. While we might imagine some other world, we cannot imagine living there.

To say that the world is like this is to make a fairly complex empirical claim, since the possibility of intelligibility implies the possibility that a fairly complex game can be played - the one we actually play when we talk, with all its certainties and uncertainties, clarities and ambiguities, concrete claims and abstract structures. It also must allow - perhaps require - that we play this game 'from the inside'. We must respect the constraints imposed by open question considerations, and much of what we do when we explore what can intelligibly be said will feel like empirical discovery.