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?