Language and The World

The ontology of our world is a reflection of our 'grammar', in the sense that grammatical rules are taken to include mathematics.  This is why we are tempted to 'explain' one in terms of the other, but our sense of 'explanation' breaks down here.  We explain by talking, and we cannot somehow drag the unarticulated world into our discourse.  Similarly, whatever our visceral phenomenological convictions, we cannot show each other how they make our conversatoin intelligible - we can only do this by engaging in the conversation.

And we cannot 'explain' both at once - either in terms of some other 'substrate' (which would be a silly mistake, simply deferring the confusion), or by playing with what we mean by 'explanation'.  We cannot explain the grounds of our explanations, however we conceive these;  and if we remove the open question difficulty from the concept of explanation, it is no longer explanation - it no longer has the appropriate normative scope.

This  is, again, reminiscent of what happens with all these normative meta-hierarchies - they leave no place for a language which we can use to describe the hierarchy.  This language must either be at the 'top' of the hierarchy - so rendering the hierarchy redundant - or it must be incoherent, and so not a language.  This is just Russell's paradox and the incompleteness/inconsistency proofs in another guise.

But it is only within this world that we can intelligibly raise sceptical questions, and so questions of this kind about the existence of the world are unintelligible.  We can bootstrap from the incoherence of certain scepticisms - e.g. about the existence of the world which enables the asking of sceptical questions.

This is not comforting either for traditional epistemology or for the naive realism of some practising scientists.  Private phenomenological anxieties come out as a kind of inarticulable madness, and the practical success of naive realism only shows that it is a successful heuristic.