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.
Monday, June 18, 2012
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.
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