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...
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4 comments:
I don't think your speakers of some future language can give a complete account of the intelligibility of the language we now speak any more than we can. Any account the future speakers give would be open to two objections: (1) the familiar "open question" problem; and (2) how would they know that the grounds of intelligibility they specify are actually the grounds on which our language makes sense to us? Generalising at least point (1): no one can give a complete account of ANOTHER LANGUAGE any more than they can give a complete account of their own.
We can imagine/allow the following situation, however. Suppose these future speakers have forgotten how to speak in the ways we do now - so at that point our present language doesn't make sense to them. Clever future speakers may figure out/reconstruct the semantic and referential norms we (currently) rely on. What they can't do (and this would amount to a complete account if they could) is definitively and finally explain why just THESE norms are intelligible; nor, come to that, can they be sure that the norms they "unearth", so to speak, or reconstruct are indeed the norms we currently rely on. (For all they can be sure of, we may actually be relying on rather different norms which have, as regards meaning and reference, the same effects as the ones they think we use.
I don't think your speakers of some future language can give a complete account of how we currently speak any more than they can give a complete account of their own language. This is because their attempt is vulnerable (1) to the familiar "open question" objection and to (2) the question of how they can know what makes things meaningful for us.
We can, however, imagine or allow for the following situation. Future speakers may be able to reconstruct in their own language semantic and referential norms that we APPEAR to rely on. But they can't be sure that even this much is so, because we may be relying on other norms that happen to have the same effects as regards semantics and reference, Moreover, they can't give a definitive account of what makes just this set of norms (or any other set of norms) productive of meaning/intelligibility. Because to do so would be to give that full account that is in principle beyond reach as regards our own or any other language.
This is very useful.
Bob - you're right. I was just approaching the reductio from another direction (making different ultimately unintelligible assumptions ...).
Something counts as a language if and only if we agree on a translation schema - and the judgement is only incorrigible if it is agreed by the native speakers (in some shared language, or by using the translation schema - these are the same thing).
We can't, therefore, imagine a language in which our language is explained, as we cannot translate the explanation.
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