Interpretation

We can imagine a language without the tools to reflect on its own activity - one which functions, but which cannot be used to formulate validity rules or make intelligible attributions of truthfulness.

I think that there are commercial exchanges which take place in a languages like this. We shouldn't insist on interpreting them in terms their use of tokens we also use - they will certainly sound like nonsense if we do this. This is how we should undertstand Moore's paradox - as challenging the conventional meanings of the tokens it employs. Finding that a translation schema for an unknown language produced Moorean statements in critical contexts would invalidate the schema.

We can also imagine a language which does have the relevant capacities - a language in which it begins to be possible to do philosophy.

And we can imagine a language in which it is possible to speculate about how to interpret other languages - or other things as languages.

In our language, a comprehensive validation is one which shows that the falshood of a statement is inconsistent with the possibility of using the language. A comprehensive validation of an interpretation, then, would be a demonstration that the falsehood of the interpretation was inconsistent with the possibility using the language.

We know, from Kripke, that interpretations are always provisional. This doesn't mean that some specific interpretation cannot be ruled out, though. Can we imagine that someone who is quad/adding is actually playing chess? And if we cannot, is this a logical or a cognitive limitation? Is such an interpretation incoherent or just impossibly complex to apply?

Formally, the second seems more likely, but it isn't easy to work out what this means.

In any case, we don't need to worry about that - the interpretive judgements we are making are those that can be made intelligibly within the game we are presently playing.

Is there a problem with giving an account of what it is that we are interpreting, before we interpret it? Imagine a space with a dimension for every freedom of the human body, which could be used to describe any position that we might adopt. A function in this space could describe a movement. What would the function, or functions, associated with 'he waved goodbye' look like? How would we (a) distinguish them from others and (b) recognise them from the mathematics? This is like Wittgenstein on smiles which are only a millimetre too wide ...

We are good at finding the things in the world that we need to be able to recognise in order to be able to talk about it. We know this because we are able to talk about it. It is not a consequence of this that we must be able to say how this knowledge is acquired - contra Davidson. That something is possible is not the same as that it is explicable, or we would be able to explain the possibility of explanation, which is incoherent.