What is 'natural' about the 'natural numbers'? Without some primitive (and, so, poorly defined) conception of 'sequence', we cannot generate them.
We could just as well regard the primes as 'prim-ative' and define an operator for their combination into complexes. ('Multiplication').
Would these primes appear in a 'natural' sequence if there was nothing peculiar about our conception of sequence? Maybe we're trying to make it do the wrong thing.
The combination of sequence and primes gives us the 'no largest prime' proof, and sequence generates unlimited quantities and unlimited complexities in a counter-intuitive way. We know these cannot exist in any articulable world. To say that they exist in the word 'prior' to articulation is to say something about this world, to partly articulate it ... and to say, about it, that it cannot be completely articulated. 'There will always be things we don't know'. Is that all? Or will there always be important things that we don't know?
I don't want to know the position, mass, and velocity of every molecule; but I do want to know whether my bath water is too hot.
Saturday, December 22, 2012
Sunday, October 28, 2012
And another thing ...
Here is, perhaps, a better way of wording the argument:
Remember that we are introducing this possibility - that someone may believe that it is not possible to talk - into our present converstaion. To do this, we need to be able articulate this attribution coherently.
If I say "Mary knows how to talk but doesn't believe that it works", I am either saying something false, or showing that I don't understand what 'talk' means.
The only properly complete answer to "What does 'talk' mean'?" is recursive, and the root is ostensive: it is what we are doing now, in having this conversation, in writing and reading this post. And we are doing this successfully (on the whole), or we are not doing it at all.
Since I would be saying of Mary (in the example) that she does not understand this - that she does not accept that we are talking now - I am also saying that she does not mean by 'talk' what we mean by 'talk'; and so that my statement about her does not mean what it initially appears to mean.
It is, in fact, another Moorean 'paradox'.
Remember that we are introducing this possibility - that someone may believe that it is not possible to talk - into our present converstaion. To do this, we need to be able articulate this attribution coherently.
If I say "Mary knows how to talk but doesn't believe that it works", I am either saying something false, or showing that I don't understand what 'talk' means.
The only properly complete answer to "What does 'talk' mean'?" is recursive, and the root is ostensive: it is what we are doing now, in having this conversation, in writing and reading this post. And we are doing this successfully (on the whole), or we are not doing it at all.
Since I would be saying of Mary (in the example) that she does not understand this - that she does not accept that we are talking now - I am also saying that she does not mean by 'talk' what we mean by 'talk'; and so that my statement about her does not mean what it initially appears to mean.
It is, in fact, another Moorean 'paradox'.
Some other things we can't not believe in ...
Of course there are others that are peculiar, and almost certainly related.
Could we say, for instance, that someone understood basic arithmetic if they also believed that it didn't work? This is a tricky one.
They would need to give us an explanation with made arithmetic sense.
If they said, for instance, "I can see how adding up works for the examples you have shown me, but I don't think you can extrapolate from these cases to all possible cases"; we would know they were making a mistake of some kind.
On the other hand, Gödel's proofs are, exactly, proofs that arithmetic does not work in the way that many Arithmeticians previously thought. Certain basic expectations cannot be extended to the set of all possible numbers.
No-one, however, would draw the conclusion from Gödel's argument that there must be something fundamentally wrong with arithmetical computation - or, for instance, with the fundamental theorem (unique factoring into primes).
We're just changing out a bit of structure here, not rebuilding the boat. Even if the change makes some aspects of the navigation appear more mysterious than they did before...
Could we say, for instance, that someone understood basic arithmetic if they also believed that it didn't work? This is a tricky one.
They would need to give us an explanation with made arithmetic sense.
If they said, for instance, "I can see how adding up works for the examples you have shown me, but I don't think you can extrapolate from these cases to all possible cases"; we would know they were making a mistake of some kind.
On the other hand, Gödel's proofs are, exactly, proofs that arithmetic does not work in the way that many Arithmeticians previously thought. Certain basic expectations cannot be extended to the set of all possible numbers.
No-one, however, would draw the conclusion from Gödel's argument that there must be something fundamentally wrong with arithmetical computation - or, for instance, with the fundamental theorem (unique factoring into primes).
We're just changing out a bit of structure here, not rebuilding the boat. Even if the change makes some aspects of the navigation appear more mysterious than they did before...
Monday, October 22, 2012
Why we can't believe it is not possible to talk ...
What does 'talk' mean in 'We can talk to one another?'
It means our participation in the functioning language game we are presently engaged in (with all its relevant contiguities), within which we are interlocutors. And it only means this - there isn't some further way of defining what we mean by 'talk'. No other account can be complete or unambiguous (for Kripkean reasons).
This means that a belief that we cannot talk is internally incoherent - it is a belief that the functioning language game in which we are engaged is not a functioning language game.
It is not just that we cannot reliably attribute this believe, we cannot coherently attribute it.
It means our participation in the functioning language game we are presently engaged in (with all its relevant contiguities), within which we are interlocutors. And it only means this - there isn't some further way of defining what we mean by 'talk'. No other account can be complete or unambiguous (for Kripkean reasons).
This means that a belief that we cannot talk is internally incoherent - it is a belief that the functioning language game in which we are engaged is not a functioning language game.
It is not just that we cannot reliably attribute this believe, we cannot coherently attribute it.
Tuesday, August 21, 2012
Proving rules
There is a saying that 'the exception proves the rule'. I used to find this very puzzling when I was young.
It means (I think) that an exception which honours the purpose of the rule helps us to understand how to follow it 'properly'.
In a Dworkinesque example, the rule 'do not walk on the grass' is made intelligible by the exception of the gardener's behaviour. Because the gardener can walk on the grass, we understand the rule as having the purpose of preserving the lawn, and this helps us to follow it: it makes it more intelligible even though (apparently) less universal - less mechanical.
If we want to construct a machine, however, we do not need intelligible rules, we need reliable rules. We need to be able to use the rules to predict the behaviour of the machine. Production line manufacturing, particularly in it's earliest manifestations, increased control and predictability, as well as efficiency (although efficiency dominated the PR). A human production line worker is expected to behave in a machine-like way.
I expect that the tacit negotiations of just how machine-like would reflect important aspects of the power structures of particular institutions.
A syntactical, mathematical, or 'physical' rule can look machine-like. It operates over a restricted domain, and has explicit outcomes for all the possibilities within that domain. It is 'embedded' in the description of the domain. When we explain 'mass', we also explain 'acceleration' and 'force'. We can write down some equations which exhaust these concepts and their interactions.
There are appropriate and inappropriate ways of applying this 'formalism' to the 'real world', of course, and the rules for doing this have to be intelligible rather than computationally reliable.
It means (I think) that an exception which honours the purpose of the rule helps us to understand how to follow it 'properly'.
In a Dworkinesque example, the rule 'do not walk on the grass' is made intelligible by the exception of the gardener's behaviour. Because the gardener can walk on the grass, we understand the rule as having the purpose of preserving the lawn, and this helps us to follow it: it makes it more intelligible even though (apparently) less universal - less mechanical.
If we want to construct a machine, however, we do not need intelligible rules, we need reliable rules. We need to be able to use the rules to predict the behaviour of the machine. Production line manufacturing, particularly in it's earliest manifestations, increased control and predictability, as well as efficiency (although efficiency dominated the PR). A human production line worker is expected to behave in a machine-like way.
I expect that the tacit negotiations of just how machine-like would reflect important aspects of the power structures of particular institutions.
A syntactical, mathematical, or 'physical' rule can look machine-like. It operates over a restricted domain, and has explicit outcomes for all the possibilities within that domain. It is 'embedded' in the description of the domain. When we explain 'mass', we also explain 'acceleration' and 'force'. We can write down some equations which exhaust these concepts and their interactions.
There are appropriate and inappropriate ways of applying this 'formalism' to the 'real world', of course, and the rules for doing this have to be intelligible rather than computationally reliable.
Monday, June 18, 2012
Compositional meanings, again.
Does a sentence have meaning?
Davidson seems to dispense with word meanings, but retain sentence meanings. This is OK, if you think (as he does?) of words as affecting sentence meaning through composition rules, but not having meanings on their own. But if we distinguish 'having a meaning' from 'having a role in generating meaning', we need to have some kind of criteria for doing this.
Clearly, for Davidson, the sentence/fact relationship won't work for this, because he accepts the relevance of the slingshot argument.
So why do sentences have meaning? We have to be careful here: if sentences only have meaning as individual elements in a playable language game, then they may be no better off than words or other sub-sentential elements.
But we can't think of the game as a whole as having 'a meaning'. We can think of it as being meaningful.
Davidson seems to dispense with word meanings, but retain sentence meanings. This is OK, if you think (as he does?) of words as affecting sentence meaning through composition rules, but not having meanings on their own. But if we distinguish 'having a meaning' from 'having a role in generating meaning', we need to have some kind of criteria for doing this.
Clearly, for Davidson, the sentence/fact relationship won't work for this, because he accepts the relevance of the slingshot argument.
So why do sentences have meaning? We have to be careful here: if sentences only have meaning as individual elements in a playable language game, then they may be no better off than words or other sub-sentential elements.
But we can't think of the game as a whole as having 'a meaning'. We can think of it as being meaningful.
Matrix questions and intelligibility
If the question 'Are we living in a matrix?' can be taken seriously, it cannot also be a question which it is only possible to ask in the matrix world.
If we think of the matrix world as a kind of deception, and that we are deceived that we are asking a question - including a question about whether we live in a matrix world - then we are not asking a question. If we are 'really' asking a question, then it is a question which makes sense in the 'real' world and so is not, itself, a product of the matrix.
If we can ask the question, some part of us is cognitively independent of the matrix.
If we think of the matrix world as a kind of deception, and that we are deceived that we are asking a question - including a question about whether we live in a matrix world - then we are not asking a question. If we are 'really' asking a question, then it is a question which makes sense in the 'real' world and so is not, itself, a product of the matrix.
If we can ask the question, some part of us is cognitively independent of the matrix.
Saturday, June 16, 2012
Verifiability ...
After hearing David Chalmers talking about The Matrix in Aberdeen:
This is probably not novel, but the verification theory of meaning had at least one thing to be said for it: that a statement which cannot in principle be verified or falsified is meaningless. The difference between the film matrix and the philosophical matrix (the brain in the vat) is that in the film Neo escapes from the matrix. There is a narrative of discovery.
It's when we think we might live in a matrix from which we cannot escape, that we are thinking nonsense. We are wondering, then, whether Neo 'really did' escape, or whether he only passed into another illusion - another manifestation of the 'real' matrix.
Without the narrative of escape - the possibility of making a test, at least in principle - the metaphysical speculation becomes meaningless. With the possibility of a test, the 'metaphysical' speculation stops being metaphysical. Perhaps we'd better not say it becomes 'scientific', as other tests might be appropriate.
There are some special cases - logical rules, for instance - where the alternative to their truth is that all statements become meaningless. This prevents certain kinds of (experimental) speculation about alternatives to them, but still allows this argument for their truth to be made. And in real cases where a potential interlocutor cannot be interpreted in a way which is consistent with their conforming to these rules, exactly their status as an interlocutor is called into question.
When we speak meaningfully, we are not claiming to have a fully worked out verification scheme in mind - far less a methodologically privileged one along the lines of the Logical Positivists' - but we also can't claim that no verification scheme could ever be available. This claim is catastrophic for meaningfulness.
And, of course, both skeptics and religious believers do make this kind of claim: the first that nothing can be proved and the others that certain things can never be disproved.
This is probably not novel, but the verification theory of meaning had at least one thing to be said for it: that a statement which cannot in principle be verified or falsified is meaningless. The difference between the film matrix and the philosophical matrix (the brain in the vat) is that in the film Neo escapes from the matrix. There is a narrative of discovery.
It's when we think we might live in a matrix from which we cannot escape, that we are thinking nonsense. We are wondering, then, whether Neo 'really did' escape, or whether he only passed into another illusion - another manifestation of the 'real' matrix.
Without the narrative of escape - the possibility of making a test, at least in principle - the metaphysical speculation becomes meaningless. With the possibility of a test, the 'metaphysical' speculation stops being metaphysical. Perhaps we'd better not say it becomes 'scientific', as other tests might be appropriate.
There are some special cases - logical rules, for instance - where the alternative to their truth is that all statements become meaningless. This prevents certain kinds of (experimental) speculation about alternatives to them, but still allows this argument for their truth to be made. And in real cases where a potential interlocutor cannot be interpreted in a way which is consistent with their conforming to these rules, exactly their status as an interlocutor is called into question.
When we speak meaningfully, we are not claiming to have a fully worked out verification scheme in mind - far less a methodologically privileged one along the lines of the Logical Positivists' - but we also can't claim that no verification scheme could ever be available. This claim is catastrophic for meaningfulness.
And, of course, both skeptics and religious believers do make this kind of claim: the first that nothing can be proved and the others that certain things can never be disproved.
Wednesday, April 25, 2012
Open Questions
Open question paradoxes arise from questions that have this structure:
"What intelligible account can we give of the reliability of our intelligible accounts?"
What sensible story can we tell about how to tell sensible stories?
Formal systems within which questions with this character can be raised will be incomplete or inconsistent. Even if we try to ask the question in a very disguised way - for instance by looking for a foundation for mathematics in set theory - our trick will be found out.
It cannot be sensible, or even intelligible, to say that we cannot give sensible or intelligible accounts - because our 'serious' statements must be accompanied by a tacit claim that they are, themselves, sensible and intelligible. The claim that we cannot give intelligible account is either unintelligible or false.
So (a) we must be able to give intelligible accounts and (b) we cannot give a 'complete' account of why they are intelligible.
We can, however, found our accounts of the intelligibility of some statements on the intelligibility of others - even down to the intelligibility of logical axia, to the extent that these can be shown to be intelligible as a consequence of the necessity of intelligibility itself.
So that's OK, then.
However intolerable our private epistemic anxieties, we cannot intelligibly aritculate them.
"What intelligible account can we give of the reliability of our intelligible accounts?"
What sensible story can we tell about how to tell sensible stories?
Formal systems within which questions with this character can be raised will be incomplete or inconsistent. Even if we try to ask the question in a very disguised way - for instance by looking for a foundation for mathematics in set theory - our trick will be found out.
It cannot be sensible, or even intelligible, to say that we cannot give sensible or intelligible accounts - because our 'serious' statements must be accompanied by a tacit claim that they are, themselves, sensible and intelligible. The claim that we cannot give intelligible account is either unintelligible or false.
So (a) we must be able to give intelligible accounts and (b) we cannot give a 'complete' account of why they are intelligible.
We can, however, found our accounts of the intelligibility of some statements on the intelligibility of others - even down to the intelligibility of logical axia, to the extent that these can be shown to be intelligible as a consequence of the necessity of intelligibility itself.
So that's OK, then.
However intolerable our private epistemic anxieties, we cannot intelligibly aritculate them.
Thursday, March 22, 2012
Obvious arrangements
I have four socks which comprise two pairs.
Two of the socks have red toes, and two have green toes.
I bought these socks in a yacht chandlers.
Two of the socks have red toes, and two have green toes.
I bought these socks in a yacht chandlers.
Friday, March 09, 2012
Chinese Rooms, Translation, and Semantic Chaos
If I wanted to talk to you, and we spoke different languages, I might employ a translator - someone who spoke both your language and mine.
Translation software, of variable reliability, is also available. We might look forward to this improving.
Suppose software existed which reliably translated your language into mine, and mine into yours. Why would either of us, then, learn the other's language? In fact, why would anyone learn both languages?
If no-one learned both languages, how would the software be maintained? We could explore misunderstandings by discussing them with one another via the software ... which is approximately how we maintain our monoglot exchanges?
We feel as though we can ignore the problems this creates for settling the meanings of monoglot exchanges, because we do (a priori) manage to mean some definite things by what we say. We always have the starting point of the present exchange that we are engaged in.
Would we be able to ignore these problems in a much more machine mediated system? What about a world where every communication depended on mechanical mediation, where everyone needed a translation machine in order to speak at all?
It's not just a matter of hearing unfamiliar languages being translated here, but of having to treat what is going on as a language entirely on the evidence of the translation device. And by 'what is going on' we can only mean 'whatever the device is translating' - which may be nothing we can independently discern ...
What could we say, in this environment, about the objects of the translation software? There doesn't seem to be a coherent sense in which we could claim that it was preserving some kind of semantic content, since there would be no independent community of interlocutors to regulate this. There would be no linguistic community that did not depend on the translation devices.
Translation software, of variable reliability, is also available. We might look forward to this improving.
Suppose software existed which reliably translated your language into mine, and mine into yours. Why would either of us, then, learn the other's language? In fact, why would anyone learn both languages?
If no-one learned both languages, how would the software be maintained? We could explore misunderstandings by discussing them with one another via the software ... which is approximately how we maintain our monoglot exchanges?
We feel as though we can ignore the problems this creates for settling the meanings of monoglot exchanges, because we do (a priori) manage to mean some definite things by what we say. We always have the starting point of the present exchange that we are engaged in.
Would we be able to ignore these problems in a much more machine mediated system? What about a world where every communication depended on mechanical mediation, where everyone needed a translation machine in order to speak at all?
It's not just a matter of hearing unfamiliar languages being translated here, but of having to treat what is going on as a language entirely on the evidence of the translation device. And by 'what is going on' we can only mean 'whatever the device is translating' - which may be nothing we can independently discern ...
What could we say, in this environment, about the objects of the translation software? There doesn't seem to be a coherent sense in which we could claim that it was preserving some kind of semantic content, since there would be no independent community of interlocutors to regulate this. There would be no linguistic community that did not depend on the translation devices.
Thursday, February 16, 2012
Phenomenology, again...
Hume, expressing a central Enlightenment norm, warns us against projecting our normative needs onto an indifferent reality.
Neither this thought, nor any other, can be articulated without observing the norms which make conversation possible; but these, themselves, can only be partly articulated, and provide only slight phenomenological comfort - so Hume's injunction has been practically reliable. The moral certainties he was tilting at were misleading in proportion to the comfort they pretended to provide.
But we are left with (1) the necessity of conversational norms to philosophical theory and (2) the visceral intuitions to which we, as competent language users, are subject. The possibility of articulating anything at all rules out certain skeptical positions, and we only respond to, rather than understand, the mechanism which drives our articulations. We know we can talk, and we see the world as talkers see it.
Our phenomenological state, beyond supporting our conversations, fuels much wordless anxiety and confusion. Perhaps we can take a perverse comfort from not being obliged to be able to account for every twinge.
Neither this thought, nor any other, can be articulated without observing the norms which make conversation possible; but these, themselves, can only be partly articulated, and provide only slight phenomenological comfort - so Hume's injunction has been practically reliable. The moral certainties he was tilting at were misleading in proportion to the comfort they pretended to provide.
But we are left with (1) the necessity of conversational norms to philosophical theory and (2) the visceral intuitions to which we, as competent language users, are subject. The possibility of articulating anything at all rules out certain skeptical positions, and we only respond to, rather than understand, the mechanism which drives our articulations. We know we can talk, and we see the world as talkers see it.
Our phenomenological state, beyond supporting our conversations, fuels much wordless anxiety and confusion. Perhaps we can take a perverse comfort from not being obliged to be able to account for every twinge.
Wednesday, February 08, 2012
Emergence?
If the biosphere is to include intentional creatures, then the problem of stating its boundary conditions is not to do with complexity or emergence, but is a consequence of our being part of the biosphere.
To be able to state boundary conditions is to be in a certain intentional state, and any statement of biosphere boundary conditions would, inter alia, be a statement of the boundary conditions for being in intentional states, and so of the boundary conditions for being in that one in particular. This means that these boundary conditions would have to define what it was to be in an intentional state, and what it was to be in the intentional state of being able to state boundary conditions. It would be a boundary condition and also define what a boundary condition was.
This can't work, of course, because such a boundary condition would be computationally incomplete, or self-referential. We couldn't state the boundary condition without first stating a boundary condition for stating boundary conditions, and so on ...
Again, we have to give our fundamental accounts in terms which include 'primitive' intentional states which cannot be defined away.
To be able to state boundary conditions is to be in a certain intentional state, and any statement of biosphere boundary conditions would, inter alia, be a statement of the boundary conditions for being in intentional states, and so of the boundary conditions for being in that one in particular. This means that these boundary conditions would have to define what it was to be in an intentional state, and what it was to be in the intentional state of being able to state boundary conditions. It would be a boundary condition and also define what a boundary condition was.
This can't work, of course, because such a boundary condition would be computationally incomplete, or self-referential. We couldn't state the boundary condition without first stating a boundary condition for stating boundary conditions, and so on ...
Again, we have to give our fundamental accounts in terms which include 'primitive' intentional states which cannot be defined away.
Saturday, February 04, 2012
Methods, Family Resemblances, and Rules of Reference
'Object Oriented Programming' is a structured programming approach adopted by software designers, and which is supported in fairly disciplined (although somewhat varying) ways by certain programming environments (e.g. Java, C++, Visual Basic, and others).
In these contexts, an 'object' can be thought of as a collection of data items, and a set of methods for accessing and manipulating them. Each object has its own private set of data, and that data can only be accessed by calling on one of its methods - and not, for instance, through a public structure of variables or constants.
The power of this structure is that once an object, or rather an object 'class' - a type of object - has been constructed and tested, it can be relied upon in a large number of different contexts. Because its methods and data are 'private' to it, their operations will not be interfered with in unexpected ways by other processes in the system, because the disciplines of the environment, or the structure of the software, prevent this.
What I want to say a little bit more about here is the concept of a 'method' borrowed from this environment.
Imagine (as in a classical example given in other expositions) that your objects are simulacra of vehicles in, say, a traffic network simulation. Each of these vehicles will have methods associated with the kinds of things that vehicles do - we may want to feed them instructions about speeding up, slowing down, turning, stopping etc. In interactions between them (collisions, collision avoidance etc.) we will want to define the ways that they will behave and calculate the outcomes.
For some instructions, the vehicles will react in different ways. For instance, the instruction 'open the throttle 10%' initiates a method, with an argument, to a vehicle simulacrum. The 'open the throttle' method of each vehicle type will tell it how to respond, and that response will be mediated by, and will alter, its internal data states. A lorry, for example, will accelerate more slowly than a sports car. A vehicle that already has its throttle fully open will not change its behaviour. A vehicle with its engine switched off will not change its behaviour. Some vehicles in certain icy conditions might lose adhesion.
Once we have constructed the classes of objects required (different types of vehicle) and instances of the classes (actual vehicles, with initial data states) the fact that all objects from certain classes have an 'open the throttle' method, simplifies the simulation. We can, for instance, see what happens if everyone on the M6 between 7:30 and 8:30 in the morning were to open their throttles by 5%.
The relevance of this example is in the fact that there is no disciplinary or structural reason why methods with the same name should execute in commensurate ways over objects. There is no reason why the method 'open the throttle' in some object classes would not produce bizarre behaviour (driving off into a field, deleting itself from the programme, sending a recording of 'Yankee Doodle' to the sound card ...).
Clearly the programme will be much easier to understand if different objects executed similar sounding methods in commensurate ways, but what counts as 'commensurate' for this purpose will be a feature of the programmer or of the reader and user, not of the objects or methods. If these interlocutors find the ways that different object classes executed homonymal methods commensurate, then they are commensurate.
We might give a 'family resemblance' (after Wittgenstein) account of why a group of methods seemed commensurate. This kind of semi-descriptive account can give the extension of a class, but at the expense of rendering membership decisions, themselves, in terms of methods which vary with the objects subject to the decision. In other words, 'family resemblance' accounts really tell us no more about the way that methods are commensurate than the fact that they share a name does, since they, themselves, may depend upon a set of methods which we can only show to be commensurate by referring to some further family resemblance a little higher up the hierarchy of accounts.
Object oriented programming, then, has done something very odd. In pursuit of reliability and predictability, it has created a place for natural language categories that it is hard to give a formal account of. It has done this by allowing these to be coded in a variety of different ways, depending upon the objects they are to be applied to. It has placed the decisions about how to organise these in an intelligible way in the hands of the programmers and users, so that this intelligibility is an aspect of the playability of the language game in which they are interlocutors, and not of structural features of the methods themselves.
It is sometimes useful to keep this model in mind when considering some of the 'hinges' of intelligibillity in general - hinges upon which anything that counts as a language must turn.
An example might be made, here, of reference and naming. It's clear (although perhaps a more formal argument to this effect should be constructed) that it is necessary to be able to refer and to name in order to be able to speak at all. Powerful instances of this suggest themselves - in particular the case of referring to interlocutors, but also cases of referring to and identifying the great range of 'objects' which are projected from nominal grammatical forms. 'Me', 'my pig', 'pig' and 'Piggy' (the name of my pig) all seem to need 'content'.
In the empiricist tradition, some of these contents have been sought in the world, and so the 'reference' relationship has seemed to have a special epistemological and linguistic significance.
If we think, instead, of 'reference' and 'naming' as being essential grammatical or semantic categories requiring contextual methods (as throttle manipulations might be to a traffic simulation), we can see that all this requires is that thes methods are adequately defined for the objects they are relevant to, and that this 'adequacy' is no more than that they are intelligible for, i.e. usable by, interlocutors.
It may still make sense to ask how reference works, or how naming works, but the answer to this question will be provided by an examination of the way the related methods are implemented with respect to specific linguistic 'objects', or computational contexts. Any commonality would be provided by the grammatical and conversational needs, not by relationships between the methods (except in so far as these shed light on the conversational needs they might be meeting).
It is not surprising, perhaps, that specific 'methods' of naming (e.g. causal chain accounts) can seem very compelling in specific contexts. References to actual historical figures must, after all, guarantee some narrative of this kind - so that where the narrative fails, the reference fails also. References to fictional figures must, however, work in some quite different way, with different associated failures. And there can be many differences of detail between methods - is Gilgamesh a fictional character in just the same way as are Zeus, or Mrs. Bennet, for instance?
Similarly, we can be tempted into a misleading simple mindedness about whether a proper name can function as a description - cases can vary, so long as the consequences of variation don't threaten local intelligibility. We don't need to give a further account of how intelligibility in general is maintained, as this is guaranteed by our ability to request and give accounts.
This kind of mistake is a consequence of expecting some epistemological or metaphysical significance of a grammatical category, simply on the grounds that it 'works': we think that because it works there must be a unifying underlying mechanism, when in fact grammatical necessity generates the requirement for mechanisms, for methods, which then may vary between classes of object/contexts.
A general demonstration that such methods must fail would be a demonstration that we could not render ourselves intelligible in a language which required reference, but this is not the same as demontrating that there must be some general method (however complex or conjunctive its definition). It does have the consequence that we must be able to produce a method when one is needed, but that is a much weaker conclusion, and unlikely to have much fundamental significance.
An aim of the object oriented approach, after all, is computational robustness, not formal elegance. The discovery that a method implementation is incoherent only affects the class of objects which incorporate that implementation. Other classes sharing a 'commensurate' method (one which does something similar for those classes, and has a similar name) may not be affected at all.
References, and so referential failures, are accomplished in a variety of ways in order to achieve a grammatical object. These 'methods' are defined in the contexts for which they are constructed, and exist to bring these contexts within the scope of a particular grammatical category. It makes no more sense to ask how naming really works, outside of these contexts and this category, than it does to ask what 'open the throttle' really means outside the scope of the traffic simulator and the conversation of the programmers (and ourselves).
We can be confused by the grammatical necessity of reference within any language in which we might want to interrogate our theories and concepts (including the concept of reference) into thinking that we have found a special link between language and the world. What we should see, instead, is the necessity of constructing links of this kind in some way or another in order to bring the world within the scope of our articulated interrogations. (And this may be done tacitly, as well as explicitly.)
Obviously, an account of any one of these links cannot, itself, depend upon the link being accounted for; nor can a comprehensive dictionary of these accounts depend upon any subset of them for its intelligibility. This means that the grammatical concept of reference, the only one that is 'necessary', cannot be accounted for in terms of the methods, even though it is only the methods which do the 'work' we require to be done, by setting out definite computational or narrative approaches to fulfilling the grammatical requirement.
Our story about the relationship between language and the world is not essentially different from other stories in language about the world. It can't depend upon its own account of its possibility or integrity.
In these contexts, an 'object' can be thought of as a collection of data items, and a set of methods for accessing and manipulating them. Each object has its own private set of data, and that data can only be accessed by calling on one of its methods - and not, for instance, through a public structure of variables or constants.
The power of this structure is that once an object, or rather an object 'class' - a type of object - has been constructed and tested, it can be relied upon in a large number of different contexts. Because its methods and data are 'private' to it, their operations will not be interfered with in unexpected ways by other processes in the system, because the disciplines of the environment, or the structure of the software, prevent this.
What I want to say a little bit more about here is the concept of a 'method' borrowed from this environment.
Imagine (as in a classical example given in other expositions) that your objects are simulacra of vehicles in, say, a traffic network simulation. Each of these vehicles will have methods associated with the kinds of things that vehicles do - we may want to feed them instructions about speeding up, slowing down, turning, stopping etc. In interactions between them (collisions, collision avoidance etc.) we will want to define the ways that they will behave and calculate the outcomes.
For some instructions, the vehicles will react in different ways. For instance, the instruction 'open the throttle 10%' initiates a method, with an argument, to a vehicle simulacrum. The 'open the throttle' method of each vehicle type will tell it how to respond, and that response will be mediated by, and will alter, its internal data states. A lorry, for example, will accelerate more slowly than a sports car. A vehicle that already has its throttle fully open will not change its behaviour. A vehicle with its engine switched off will not change its behaviour. Some vehicles in certain icy conditions might lose adhesion.
Once we have constructed the classes of objects required (different types of vehicle) and instances of the classes (actual vehicles, with initial data states) the fact that all objects from certain classes have an 'open the throttle' method, simplifies the simulation. We can, for instance, see what happens if everyone on the M6 between 7:30 and 8:30 in the morning were to open their throttles by 5%.
The relevance of this example is in the fact that there is no disciplinary or structural reason why methods with the same name should execute in commensurate ways over objects. There is no reason why the method 'open the throttle' in some object classes would not produce bizarre behaviour (driving off into a field, deleting itself from the programme, sending a recording of 'Yankee Doodle' to the sound card ...).
Clearly the programme will be much easier to understand if different objects executed similar sounding methods in commensurate ways, but what counts as 'commensurate' for this purpose will be a feature of the programmer or of the reader and user, not of the objects or methods. If these interlocutors find the ways that different object classes executed homonymal methods commensurate, then they are commensurate.
We might give a 'family resemblance' (after Wittgenstein) account of why a group of methods seemed commensurate. This kind of semi-descriptive account can give the extension of a class, but at the expense of rendering membership decisions, themselves, in terms of methods which vary with the objects subject to the decision. In other words, 'family resemblance' accounts really tell us no more about the way that methods are commensurate than the fact that they share a name does, since they, themselves, may depend upon a set of methods which we can only show to be commensurate by referring to some further family resemblance a little higher up the hierarchy of accounts.
Object oriented programming, then, has done something very odd. In pursuit of reliability and predictability, it has created a place for natural language categories that it is hard to give a formal account of. It has done this by allowing these to be coded in a variety of different ways, depending upon the objects they are to be applied to. It has placed the decisions about how to organise these in an intelligible way in the hands of the programmers and users, so that this intelligibility is an aspect of the playability of the language game in which they are interlocutors, and not of structural features of the methods themselves.
It is sometimes useful to keep this model in mind when considering some of the 'hinges' of intelligibillity in general - hinges upon which anything that counts as a language must turn.
An example might be made, here, of reference and naming. It's clear (although perhaps a more formal argument to this effect should be constructed) that it is necessary to be able to refer and to name in order to be able to speak at all. Powerful instances of this suggest themselves - in particular the case of referring to interlocutors, but also cases of referring to and identifying the great range of 'objects' which are projected from nominal grammatical forms. 'Me', 'my pig', 'pig' and 'Piggy' (the name of my pig) all seem to need 'content'.
In the empiricist tradition, some of these contents have been sought in the world, and so the 'reference' relationship has seemed to have a special epistemological and linguistic significance.
If we think, instead, of 'reference' and 'naming' as being essential grammatical or semantic categories requiring contextual methods (as throttle manipulations might be to a traffic simulation), we can see that all this requires is that thes methods are adequately defined for the objects they are relevant to, and that this 'adequacy' is no more than that they are intelligible for, i.e. usable by, interlocutors.
It may still make sense to ask how reference works, or how naming works, but the answer to this question will be provided by an examination of the way the related methods are implemented with respect to specific linguistic 'objects', or computational contexts. Any commonality would be provided by the grammatical and conversational needs, not by relationships between the methods (except in so far as these shed light on the conversational needs they might be meeting).
It is not surprising, perhaps, that specific 'methods' of naming (e.g. causal chain accounts) can seem very compelling in specific contexts. References to actual historical figures must, after all, guarantee some narrative of this kind - so that where the narrative fails, the reference fails also. References to fictional figures must, however, work in some quite different way, with different associated failures. And there can be many differences of detail between methods - is Gilgamesh a fictional character in just the same way as are Zeus, or Mrs. Bennet, for instance?
Similarly, we can be tempted into a misleading simple mindedness about whether a proper name can function as a description - cases can vary, so long as the consequences of variation don't threaten local intelligibility. We don't need to give a further account of how intelligibility in general is maintained, as this is guaranteed by our ability to request and give accounts.
This kind of mistake is a consequence of expecting some epistemological or metaphysical significance of a grammatical category, simply on the grounds that it 'works': we think that because it works there must be a unifying underlying mechanism, when in fact grammatical necessity generates the requirement for mechanisms, for methods, which then may vary between classes of object/contexts.
A general demonstration that such methods must fail would be a demonstration that we could not render ourselves intelligible in a language which required reference, but this is not the same as demontrating that there must be some general method (however complex or conjunctive its definition). It does have the consequence that we must be able to produce a method when one is needed, but that is a much weaker conclusion, and unlikely to have much fundamental significance.
An aim of the object oriented approach, after all, is computational robustness, not formal elegance. The discovery that a method implementation is incoherent only affects the class of objects which incorporate that implementation. Other classes sharing a 'commensurate' method (one which does something similar for those classes, and has a similar name) may not be affected at all.
References, and so referential failures, are accomplished in a variety of ways in order to achieve a grammatical object. These 'methods' are defined in the contexts for which they are constructed, and exist to bring these contexts within the scope of a particular grammatical category. It makes no more sense to ask how naming really works, outside of these contexts and this category, than it does to ask what 'open the throttle' really means outside the scope of the traffic simulator and the conversation of the programmers (and ourselves).
We can be confused by the grammatical necessity of reference within any language in which we might want to interrogate our theories and concepts (including the concept of reference) into thinking that we have found a special link between language and the world. What we should see, instead, is the necessity of constructing links of this kind in some way or another in order to bring the world within the scope of our articulated interrogations. (And this may be done tacitly, as well as explicitly.)
Obviously, an account of any one of these links cannot, itself, depend upon the link being accounted for; nor can a comprehensive dictionary of these accounts depend upon any subset of them for its intelligibility. This means that the grammatical concept of reference, the only one that is 'necessary', cannot be accounted for in terms of the methods, even though it is only the methods which do the 'work' we require to be done, by setting out definite computational or narrative approaches to fulfilling the grammatical requirement.
Our story about the relationship between language and the world is not essentially different from other stories in language about the world. It can't depend upon its own account of its possibility or integrity.
Wednesday, January 11, 2012
Intentionality, Function and Description
I don't think Dennett ever realy tells us how a bag of molecules can take an intentional stance, but his hierarchy has some appeal.
I offer the following version:
Physical
System (signalling)
System (function)
Intentional
Reflexive
And, as before, while we must attribute intentionality to an interlocutor, we may attribute otherwise if it 'works' (though always fallibly, from Kripke).
What I hadn't thought about properly until a talk with BT on Monday, is that there are circumstances where we must practically, as opposed to 'logically' (or to avoid undermining our own intelligibility), attribute intentionality (and function). This is where lower level descriptions are just too complex.
Higher level biological systems are a good example: a physical description of them woud be hopelessly complicated, and only a functional description is tractable.
With some computer systems, it is possible (depending upon the level selected) that even a system level descriptions would be too complex. And it looks like brains might be like this too ....
These are still different reasons from the ones we have for treating interlocutors as intentional. What I'm wondering, though, is whether there is some relationship here that I'm missing.
One of the reasons I'm wondering is that there isn't such a big difference between treating a system as law bound and treating it as functional. Maybe.
And if we cannot maintain intelligibility without attributing intentionality on practical grounds, what then?
I offer the following version:
Physical
System (signalling)
System (function)
Intentional
Reflexive
And, as before, while we must attribute intentionality to an interlocutor, we may attribute otherwise if it 'works' (though always fallibly, from Kripke).
What I hadn't thought about properly until a talk with BT on Monday, is that there are circumstances where we must practically, as opposed to 'logically' (or to avoid undermining our own intelligibility), attribute intentionality (and function). This is where lower level descriptions are just too complex.
Higher level biological systems are a good example: a physical description of them woud be hopelessly complicated, and only a functional description is tractable.
With some computer systems, it is possible (depending upon the level selected) that even a system level descriptions would be too complex. And it looks like brains might be like this too ....
These are still different reasons from the ones we have for treating interlocutors as intentional. What I'm wondering, though, is whether there is some relationship here that I'm missing.
One of the reasons I'm wondering is that there isn't such a big difference between treating a system as law bound and treating it as functional. Maybe.
And if we cannot maintain intelligibility without attributing intentionality on practical grounds, what then?
Saturday, January 07, 2012
Indispensible Indexicals
(Maybe this is just more on Moore's Paradox ...)
Traditional approaches to formalising natural language have tended to treat indexicals as a kind of short-hand: as though they can always be substituted with non-contextual names or descriptions without changing the sense of the embedding expression.
I'm not sure whether this presumption has ever been thoroughly examined. What would a language without indexicals look like? If we always referred to ourselves by name, or by description, for instances ...
There would be an important epistemological difficulty, arising from the point I have made in earlier posts about Kripke's rule following argument: While 'Mary is talking to John' is a corrigible intentional description of their behaviour, 'I am talking to you' is not.
Only the first and second person have this character - 'They are having a conversation' is subject to behavioural justification in a way in which 'We are having a conversation', or 'I am talking to you' are not. We can probably alwasy replace 'they' with a context free name or description, but not so 'I' or 'you'.
If this is correct, then not only are the first and second person indexicals not dispensable, but their role is epistemologically fundamental.
Traditional approaches to formalising natural language have tended to treat indexicals as a kind of short-hand: as though they can always be substituted with non-contextual names or descriptions without changing the sense of the embedding expression.
I'm not sure whether this presumption has ever been thoroughly examined. What would a language without indexicals look like? If we always referred to ourselves by name, or by description, for instances ...
There would be an important epistemological difficulty, arising from the point I have made in earlier posts about Kripke's rule following argument: While 'Mary is talking to John' is a corrigible intentional description of their behaviour, 'I am talking to you' is not.
Only the first and second person have this character - 'They are having a conversation' is subject to behavioural justification in a way in which 'We are having a conversation', or 'I am talking to you' are not. We can probably alwasy replace 'they' with a context free name or description, but not so 'I' or 'you'.
If this is correct, then not only are the first and second person indexicals not dispensable, but their role is epistemologically fundamental.
Sunday, January 01, 2012
Knowing the answer. Happy New Year.
If we could look into the future to see the answers to our questions, we would hear people uttering sublime truths without understanding. They will even live their lives by them, and build and use machines which depend upon them.
But they will not have arrived at them via our questions, and, because they 'know' the answers, they will not understand our confusion.
We might live among them for a while thinking this, and then begin to wonder whether we had understood their language at all, or simply stumbled into a jungle of misleading homonymy.
But they will not have arrived at them via our questions, and, because they 'know' the answers, they will not understand our confusion.
We might live among them for a while thinking this, and then begin to wonder whether we had understood their language at all, or simply stumbled into a jungle of misleading homonymy.
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