Unintelligible Fundamentals (again)

The possiblity that the 'substrate' of intelligibility is, itself, intelligible, is blocked by open question considerations.  (A language cannot be used to articualte a theory of its own intelligibility without begging the question.)

We have two possibilities:  (1) that it cannot be explicated in any language (which is as much to say that it is unintelligible) and (2) that it can be explicated in a language which cannot be wholly translated into ours because of the open question problem.

The problem with (2) is that translatability is the only criterion of somethings being a language (Davidson).  Whatever the 'super' language can do, that part of it that articulates the theory underpinning the intelligibility of our language cannot be translated, and so cannot be identified as a language at all.

So nothing intelligible can complete the sentence "Our language is intelligible because ..." that doesn't also beg the question.  Again this is OK because 'our language is not intelligible' is unintelligible - we don't need a constructive account to guarantee intelligibility.

There are some further things to reflect on here:

'Our language is intelligible' has consequences for the way the world is organised, as this organisation cannot conflict with the intelligibility of this language we use for describing the world (among other things).  This is not quite trivial:  the world need not be organised in the way that we think it is (i.e. much of what we literally say about it need not be exactly true) in order for our language to 'work'.  (On the other hand, we run into problems with what we can mean by 'true' if we try to push this too far - Davidson, again.)  What we can be sure of, in a sense, is that any new discovery we make about the world (however disorienting to our present conceptions) will, if it is articulable, not turn out to be unintelligible.  This keeps the 'world of things' within certain 'grammatical' boundaries.

Again, one 'fact about the world' that must be literally true is that the world permits us to talk about it in the way that we do.

Another thing is that 'our language' is not a well defined set of structures.  It is constantly being experimented with, modified, and extended.  A particular kind of extension is to make a new 'meta-linguistic' move - to take a step up the hierarchy.  'The way we have spoken up to now is intelligible' remains intelligible, even if in some suitably qualified way.  We can say 'people used to believe that the earth was flat'.  (If that was ever really true ...).  If people used to speak as though the earth is flat, we can only render that as speech if we can show how such a thing might be intelligible.

In the future, we will always be able to attribute some suitably qualified intelligibility to what we say now.  This fact might lead us to speculate that there might be some future super-language in which we can explicate a theory of intelligibility for the language we currently speak.  This doesn't help with the general problem, though, as we could not translate what the speakers of that language meant by 'intelligible' when they applied that description to our language.  In short we couldn't understand what the speakers of the super-language meant by 'suitably qualfiied', because this would require us to articulate, exactly, a theory of intelligibility for our language.

We can read this two ways:  (1) That the idea of a future 'super-language' is unintelligible tout court.  Incoherent science fiction.  or (2) That, in the future, people may lose the capacity to speak in the sense that we presently understand it.  (They might partially retain it, for the purpose of decoding archives ...)

On reflection, these are probably equivalent.  With respect to (2), the speed and volume of human interaction is increasing fast, and the subsumption of the 'individual' into a larger 'super-organism' whose components' mutual signalling behaviours, while structurally complex, might have no determinable semantic content.  Much as present human language might appear to an insightful chimpanzee...

Unintelligible Fundamentals

A cat does not do a physical computation before jumping onto a high wall.

We do not do 'grammatical computations' before speaking.

A robot which could speak might be astonished to be shown its circuitry and programming. How could it map its thoughts to this organised equipment?  (It could not have been programmed to do this.)

A cat could make nothing of the physics associated with wall jumping.  Why do we expect to be able to understand the 'grammabiology' of speaking?  (We are puzzled that we cannot say what it is without talking nonsense.)

What is needed here is not 'more science' but a better understanding of what science is.

We think that reconciling our machinery, our phenomenological condition, and what we can intelligibly say is a kind of amalgam of anatomical, psychological and computational tasks.  We don't even want to think about how different these conceptions of ourselves are, never mind explore the consequences of them all being, themselves, explorations of what can intelligibly be said.

We might want to say there is some kind of mystery here - a ghost, 'something of which we cannot speak' - but even this is a misunderstanding.  The only purpose of trying to point at these things is to reveal the limits of pointing.  Mechanisms of the spirit are still mechanisims; ghosts are just hazy sorts of people; things of which we cannot speak turn out to be things we can say something about - that we cannot speak of them.  Incomprehensibly.

There is not some secret, especially deep, kind of explanation that shows our explanations to be reliable.

A paradox is not a puzzle, nor is it a special kind of road sign.  It isn't even a place where the road comes to an end.  It is like the twist in a moebius strip - we feel our way along it and find ourselves in a place we cannot understand, because to 'undrestand' is to draw a map, and no map can be drawn of this surface.