Models

A model provides a grammar and a vocabulary. When it 'works' we think there is some additional similarity, some isomorphism, which underlies this. All there is is a judgement - and we cannot speculate on whether such judgements are, in general, reliable.

Talking about talking

We can imagine a language which doesn't have certain self-reflective capacities - e.g. which doesn't have an explicit truth predicate. This is because we would still be able to translate this language into the one we are presently speaking.

(We can't, of course, translate - or, therefore, imagine - a language which did have a truth predicate, but whose truth predicate worked in a significantly different way from 'ours'.)

Some language-like games might not be able to have a truth predicate. The introduction of a truth predicate (which would have to, again, be isomorphic with 'our' truth predicate) would render them unintelligible. Bargaining games are like this - when a salesman swears that everything in the brochure is true, we know he cannot be using 'is true' in the same way as, say, a logician or a natural scientist. On the other hand, the bargaining game would be unplayable if it was complemented by a logical or natural-science-style truth predicate, because this game depends upon a certain amount of conventional dishonesty. The extent of this dishonesty is explored by the participants in the game, but not explicitly explored - it is explored practically, by finding out what moves 'work' and what moves don't. Salesman do not make good philosophers, but this does not render the bargaining game intrinsically corrupt.

What would render it corrupt would be dishonest practice on the part of any players. I'm going to give a definition of this here which I'm not sure I can fully support, but which I think is roughly right:

Dishonest practice is practice which exploits the expectations of other players in a way which sacrifices the playability of the game to the instrumental aims of the practitioner.

Since the bargaining game cannot include a truth predicate, and since it is hard to construct a normatively self-reflective game without a truth predicate, it is possible that the bargaining game cannot be used to explictly adjudiate on honest practice. To test any practice against the definition, we would need to make a judgement about the objects and consequences of moves within the game - and particualrly about whethe a move rendered the game unplayable. This last, I think, would definitely require self-consious reflection on the possibility of truth-telling.

This raises a tricky moral issue: Can we, from outside, using a language with the capacity to articulate truth related issues, adjudicate on the language of the bargainers, which does not? We would be presuming to be able to translate this language, while knowing that we could not discuss the quality of this translation with the bargainers - we could not ask them whether the translation was correct.

We could, of course, learn to play the game. If we had an appropriate facility with it, we could then reflect on this facility using our native meta-language. This looks tricky: the character of our engagement would be different just because we had access to the meta-language. A physicist discussing mass with a weights and measures inspector does not participate in the weights-and-measures game in the same way as another inspector would.

This may be harmless. We certainly wouldn't want to say that the physicist and the weights and measures inspector didn't understand one another - we wouldn't want to say that they weren't able to play this game together. We would, however, find that their game became more difficult if it developed in a certain self-reflective way. There would be some truths about mass that they could only share by changing the game.

Natural Laws

We can't just say that it is a law of nature that nature follows laws.

What kind of law can this law be?

We can only talk about a predictable nature - anything else would be incomprehensible. Natural laws are the grammar of this talk.

Conviction, Certainty and Argument

The world is careless of our phenomenological convictions - it produces them without warranting them. We might imagine that we have some 'evolutionary guarantee' that the internal products of our sensory apparatus contribute to our survival, but this comforting mythology can't be grounded, itself, in our phenomenological convictions; and Darwinian evolution selects on the basis of publicly available behaviours and characteristics - not on the normative character of intentional states. It is indifferent between lucky misconception and 'true knowledge'.

We might argue that, over time, evolution would tend to weed out ignorance and misconception. There isn't any evidence for this beyond our own, present, existence. This existence, though, is the outcome of just one of many rolls of the evolutionary dice; and we know already that it is very probably temporary. Attributing intentional states to past 'evolutionary successes' in support of a phenomenological evolutionary epistemology would be circular and gratuitous.

It is absurd to say that our whole language game is reliable because it has 'survived' an evolutionary process which can only be given an intelligible account of if the game is reliable ...

Martian intentionality

And we couldn't unambiguously attribute intentional states to them - such as knowing how to tell the truth in Human.

Goodman, chess machines, and physical standards

It's as though we decided to mean by 'green', 'parrot coloured'. Now a previously grue parrot would remain green, but the meaning of green would change.

Chess playing computers

While we might learn a lot about chess from the behaviour of a computer, and might learn how to play from such a computer, we cannot define chess in terms of the computer's behaviour. The rules of chess determine whether the computer is playing correctly - they are not tested against the behaviour of the computer.

This is also true of people: we might believe that people act rationally, but we cannot define rationality in terms of the behaviour of any individual or group - however apparently exemplary.

This extends to their internal 'behaviour' - no neurological account of brain processes can capture the normative aspects of rationality, just as no actual 'or' gate could count as the effective standard for the logical operator.

Under certain circumstances, we might have to choose between deciding that the standard meter had grown or that our prior measurements all needed to be proportionally corrected. If we standardise the meaning of 'or' on the behaviour of an 'or' gate, the meaning of 'chess' on the behaviour of a computer, or the meaning of 'rationality' on either a neurological process or the behaviour of an individual or group, we do not know what adjustment this might lead us to have to make - we do not know what changes in meaning we might have to accomodate.

The standard metre can only change in one way, resulting in a uniform scalar adjustement to length. The standard 'or' gate could change the meaning of 'or' in a way which rendered the world unintelligible.

The standard chess computer might redefine chess in terms of any option available to it - whether or not it was functioning correctly.

Rules and Laws

So I think this is where I am:

Language requires attribution of intentional states, and is 'a priori' possible or we wouldn't be able to say so.

Certain irreducible intentional states - 'thoughts' (Frege?) - cannot be expressed unless it is possible to attribute generic properties. Predication requires universals.

To know how to talk is, among other things, to know how to attribute these generic properties.

Also - 'X knows how to talk' attributes some specific generic properties, including the ability to follow rules, to X.

To be able to attribute universal properties is part of being able to talk, it is part of being able to follow the rules of talk.

Asking whether the world 'really' contains universals (including whether it 'really' follows general laws); or asking whether certain people 'really' follow rules is like asking whether it is possible to talk about the world, or whether these people do, in fact, talk. It's a Moorean error - a question which can only have one answer if it is to make any sense at all.

To talk about a world is to talk about a world of this kind.