To speak, we must (a) attribute rule following and (b) attribute belief in natural laws (the 'rules' which the world follows).
Some of these rules have an indefinte scope. This can make it sound as though their scope precedes and exceeds the scope of language - of what we can talk about. We can only imagine such a thing by considering the possibility of a world that we cannot (in principle) talk about, but which, nevertheless, follows the rules. Whatever the value of this as a metaphysical speculation, we can't test it.
A specific case is the rules we presume to underpin the possibility of language itself. We imagine that logical and mathatical laws have a wider scope than simply guiding how we speak. This belief is associated with the kinds of things we say about them - among which are statements like 'these laws have indefinite scope'. Such a statement is true with respect to any testable case, since such a case must be articulable. Also, to qualify it would suggest that there was some articulable case in which they did not hold.
But its generality and lack of qualification do not need to extend to 'things we cannot talk about'. And there can be no rule that defines the boundary between what we can talk about and what we cannot.
When we explore this boundary, we generate paradoxes. This does not mean that the exploration is invalid or absurd. It means we must be careful about the conclusions we draw from these explorations - and about what we mean when we talk about them.
All the objects in the metaphysical world beyond the reach of speculation are paradoxical.
Conclusions drawn from the indefinite scope of our rules of intelligibility will also be paradoxical, since they depend upon speculations about these objects.
Meaning sneaks into the incompleteness and inconsistency proofs at the level of the rules themselves.
Thursday, February 24, 2011
Saturday, February 19, 2011
Worlds without people ...
Suppose we imagine a world - perhaps this world at a different time - without any people in it, so that 'there is no language in that world' is true. What are our grounds for saying that this, or that anything at all, is true in this 'non-linguistic' world? Only that you and I, now, can agree about it - and can agree about what any such world would be like.
We cannot say that there might be some other world, that we cannot imagine or agree about, and yet that there is some definite thing that must be true about it. What kind of thing could a truth that no-one could ever agree about be?
We cannot say that there might be some other world, that we cannot imagine or agree about, and yet that there is some definite thing that must be true about it. What kind of thing could a truth that no-one could ever agree about be?
Tuesday, February 15, 2011
Barry Stroud
It may be a contingent matter that there was no language at the time of the dinosaurs, but only we can say so. We cannot imagine the truth of some state of affairs separately from the possibility of expressing it except by imagining a conception of it that cannot be translated into our conception. If I think 'at the time of the dinosaurs, there was no language' I am imagining being transported to that time and having no-one to talk to. What else could I be imagining? That some invisible, even non-existent, person was similarly transported ...
The dinosaurs could not know that it was true that they had no language.
If I say to you 'There was no language at the time of the dinosaurs', what non-linguistic 'fact' about the time of the dinosaurs are we expressing that makes that time different from what we would say of it in any case? We say a lot of things about dinosaurs, but we don't say 'and there was no language then'. What would this add if we did? We don't wonder whether they could talk to one another, and so go to find an expert who can tell us.
And it is not whether there was language at the time of the dinosaurs that is important, it's that we can, now, talk about the dinosaurs. This is no different from talking about anything else - including things that happen now, contemporaries of our linguistic abilities.
If I say something about the time of the dinosaurs, I am not concerned about whether what I say was true then, but with whether it is true now: and the only conception I can give to whether it was true then is whether I would say now that it was true then ....
What is it, exactly, that was true then except what we agree about now? And If we don' t have that agreement, how do we identify the thing we might have agreed about?
The dinosaurs could not know that it was true that they had no language.
If I say to you 'There was no language at the time of the dinosaurs', what non-linguistic 'fact' about the time of the dinosaurs are we expressing that makes that time different from what we would say of it in any case? We say a lot of things about dinosaurs, but we don't say 'and there was no language then'. What would this add if we did? We don't wonder whether they could talk to one another, and so go to find an expert who can tell us.
And it is not whether there was language at the time of the dinosaurs that is important, it's that we can, now, talk about the dinosaurs. This is no different from talking about anything else - including things that happen now, contemporaries of our linguistic abilities.
If I say something about the time of the dinosaurs, I am not concerned about whether what I say was true then, but with whether it is true now: and the only conception I can give to whether it was true then is whether I would say now that it was true then ....
What is it, exactly, that was true then except what we agree about now? And If we don' t have that agreement, how do we identify the thing we might have agreed about?
Thursday, February 10, 2011
Private Language Questions
This is the real power of the Private Language Argument:
The question 'Is it possible to ask questions?' can have only one answer if it is a question. We might imagine, however, that it is something we could wonder about, non-linguistically. It would be like wondering whether it was possible to talk.
What would this 'wondering' be like?
It could be like privately articulating the question 'Is it possible to ask questions?' We could wonder whether any previous public questioning and answering we had done had really 'worked' - whether it had comprised real questions and answers. It's hard to separate this question from the question whether we had really been speaking at all in the past - whether we had understood what anything we thought we were saying meant. This is incomprehensible, but it has a specific incomprehensibility here: we could not know what we were 'privately' doing by asking ourselves 'Is it possible to ask questions?' as this private act depends upon the validity of the public practice of speaking - which we wish to query, or about which we have become sceptical.
What the PL argument says is that there cannot be some private language in which we could comprehensibly articulate these queries - e.g. about the possibility of asking questions or about whether it was really possible to talk to people.
The PLA can be reformulated in Davidsonian terms:
If some private language were to count as a language, we would have to be able to interpret it, or translate it, into the public language in which we are conducting our enquiry. I think this is what Wittgenstein meant by saying that otherwise we would not know what rules we were following or whether we were following them correctly.
If we can only render the concept of a rule intelligible in terms of intentionality (which I've argued for earlier), and we can only reliably attribute intentional states to interlocutors (from Kripke's paradox), then this result is what we would expect.
Another perspective on this: how would my (or your) having a thought in our private language be represented, and how would our thought be attributed to us, in the public language of our enquiry? If I say of someone that they have articulated the possibility that it might rain in their private language, then I might as well be saying of them that they thought it would rain.
I could say of someone 'she thinks in Polish', and imagine her thinking the Polish sentence for 'I think it will rain'. I can imagine her inventing a language which can be translated into our language, and using that language to say something that would translate as 'I think it will rain'. I cannot imagine her thinking it will rain, but somehow representing this in a language I cannot translate. Such a language might as well be random - have no rules, but just mean whatever she took for the moment it to mean. She might think it would rain, attach this thought to a noise, a colour, an unpleasant memory, her confusion about linear programming algorithms, and any of these would do. Anything at all could 'stand for' her thought that it would rain, and so anything could be 'translated' into our language of enquiry as 'I think it will rain', and different things could be translated so at different times. There could be no rules in this translation schema, and so it could not even be reliably applied from one occasion to another.
If we translated:
'X, on occasion Y translates from our language of enquiry into "It will rain" in Sophie's private language'
into Sophie's private language, we could not know whether our translation was correct.
And if we could not know whether our translation into Sophie's language was correct, we could not know whether the translation of any such statement back into our language of enquiry was correct, and so we could not know what anything in Sophie's 'language' meant.
The question 'Is it possible to ask questions?' can have only one answer if it is a question. We might imagine, however, that it is something we could wonder about, non-linguistically. It would be like wondering whether it was possible to talk.
What would this 'wondering' be like?
It could be like privately articulating the question 'Is it possible to ask questions?' We could wonder whether any previous public questioning and answering we had done had really 'worked' - whether it had comprised real questions and answers. It's hard to separate this question from the question whether we had really been speaking at all in the past - whether we had understood what anything we thought we were saying meant. This is incomprehensible, but it has a specific incomprehensibility here: we could not know what we were 'privately' doing by asking ourselves 'Is it possible to ask questions?' as this private act depends upon the validity of the public practice of speaking - which we wish to query, or about which we have become sceptical.
What the PL argument says is that there cannot be some private language in which we could comprehensibly articulate these queries - e.g. about the possibility of asking questions or about whether it was really possible to talk to people.
The PLA can be reformulated in Davidsonian terms:
If some private language were to count as a language, we would have to be able to interpret it, or translate it, into the public language in which we are conducting our enquiry. I think this is what Wittgenstein meant by saying that otherwise we would not know what rules we were following or whether we were following them correctly.
If we can only render the concept of a rule intelligible in terms of intentionality (which I've argued for earlier), and we can only reliably attribute intentional states to interlocutors (from Kripke's paradox), then this result is what we would expect.
Another perspective on this: how would my (or your) having a thought in our private language be represented, and how would our thought be attributed to us, in the public language of our enquiry? If I say of someone that they have articulated the possibility that it might rain in their private language, then I might as well be saying of them that they thought it would rain.
I could say of someone 'she thinks in Polish', and imagine her thinking the Polish sentence for 'I think it will rain'. I can imagine her inventing a language which can be translated into our language, and using that language to say something that would translate as 'I think it will rain'. I cannot imagine her thinking it will rain, but somehow representing this in a language I cannot translate. Such a language might as well be random - have no rules, but just mean whatever she took for the moment it to mean. She might think it would rain, attach this thought to a noise, a colour, an unpleasant memory, her confusion about linear programming algorithms, and any of these would do. Anything at all could 'stand for' her thought that it would rain, and so anything could be 'translated' into our language of enquiry as 'I think it will rain', and different things could be translated so at different times. There could be no rules in this translation schema, and so it could not even be reliably applied from one occasion to another.
If we translated:
'X, on occasion Y translates from our language of enquiry into "It will rain" in Sophie's private language'
into Sophie's private language, we could not know whether our translation was correct.
And if we could not know whether our translation into Sophie's language was correct, we could not know whether the translation of any such statement back into our language of enquiry was correct, and so we could not know what anything in Sophie's 'language' meant.
Friday, February 04, 2011
Linguistic Rules and Bush Tracks
It's a mistake to think that because we can discern linguistic rules a language user must, in some sense, know what these rules are. This is like saying a train knows where the track is.
A language user may have a quite restricted kind of linguistic competence, and still be able to function - and to appear to function well.
Imagine someone who knew, say three thousand sentences and was competent in selecting the occasions on which to produce them. It might take considerable study to be sure that this was a case of rote learned responses, rather than what we might think of as full linguistic competence.
What is more important, though, is that these rote learned sentences would sound as though they had been constructed according to grammatical rule - whereas in fact they had just been memorised.
This isn't to say that there may be no such thing as grammatical rules, or other linguistic rules. It is to say that these rules are a tool of the linguistic student, not of the speaker. We should know this from the opening examples from the Investigations - the builders. The rules appear when we analyse, interpret, or translate the builders linguistic behaviour. We do not have grounds for saying that the builders are intentionally following these rules of grammar that we have discovered.
Grammatical rules are rules of linguistic behaviour, not of meaning or truth. We discover them as we discover 'laws of nature', and so these discoveries are subject to the same Goodmanesque or Kripkean uncertainties.
A language user may have a quite restricted kind of linguistic competence, and still be able to function - and to appear to function well.
Imagine someone who knew, say three thousand sentences and was competent in selecting the occasions on which to produce them. It might take considerable study to be sure that this was a case of rote learned responses, rather than what we might think of as full linguistic competence.
What is more important, though, is that these rote learned sentences would sound as though they had been constructed according to grammatical rule - whereas in fact they had just been memorised.
This isn't to say that there may be no such thing as grammatical rules, or other linguistic rules. It is to say that these rules are a tool of the linguistic student, not of the speaker. We should know this from the opening examples from the Investigations - the builders. The rules appear when we analyse, interpret, or translate the builders linguistic behaviour. We do not have grounds for saying that the builders are intentionally following these rules of grammar that we have discovered.
Grammatical rules are rules of linguistic behaviour, not of meaning or truth. We discover them as we discover 'laws of nature', and so these discoveries are subject to the same Goodmanesque or Kripkean uncertainties.
Thursday, February 03, 2011
Hume, Is->Ought, Open Questions ...
Hume's paragraph on deriving ought from is suppresses the methodological rule by which he selects 'is' statements.
This rule is, of course, normative - and so Hume cannot allow it to be deduced from factual statements. It can, however, be induced - as his method for selecting facts.
This leaves him with a dilemma if asked to respond to an explicit statement of the rule: He can either (a) deny the validity of the rule (which undermines his is-ought insight) or he can (b) accept it as implied by his fact selection process, if not by the 'facts' that he selects. In the second case, the selection method must either include or imply the rule 'no value statement can be a fact', rendering the argument circular.
If the rule depends on the fact selection process, it doesn't depend on the facts. Does this leave the argument intact (though weakened by circularity)? The scope of Hume's 'facts' is narrow: arguably only the direct evidence on which natural science depends. Most 'social facts' include value statements or value commitments, from which 'oughts' can be deduced (as in Searle's argument).
This rule is, of course, normative - and so Hume cannot allow it to be deduced from factual statements. It can, however, be induced - as his method for selecting facts.
This leaves him with a dilemma if asked to respond to an explicit statement of the rule: He can either (a) deny the validity of the rule (which undermines his is-ought insight) or he can (b) accept it as implied by his fact selection process, if not by the 'facts' that he selects. In the second case, the selection method must either include or imply the rule 'no value statement can be a fact', rendering the argument circular.
If the rule depends on the fact selection process, it doesn't depend on the facts. Does this leave the argument intact (though weakened by circularity)? The scope of Hume's 'facts' is narrow: arguably only the direct evidence on which natural science depends. Most 'social facts' include value statements or value commitments, from which 'oughts' can be deduced (as in Searle's argument).
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