Barry Stroud's 'Privileged Statements'

In his celebrated paper Transcendental Arguments' (Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 65, No 9 - May 1968), Barry Stroud talks about 'privileged statements' - statements which must be true in any language. These are exactly the statements I have drawn attention to as roots of recursive accounts (e.g. of concepts such as truth, accounts of which otherwise generate open question paradoxes).

Denial of a 'privileged statement' generates (as I've said elsewhere in this blog) a 'Moorean' paradox - a statement which undermines the possibility of its own intelligibility.

Curiously, Stroud doesn't seem to see the relevance of these privileged statements to accounts of necessity, reliable knowledge etc., even in much later writing (See 'Engagement and Metaphysical Dissatisfaction', Oxford, 2011). He seems to want to insist on a distinction between what we can say about the world and the way the world really is. A question than cannot arise in a playable language game, such as 'are we really able to talk to one another?' might still, in some sense, be an unsettled matter in the real world.

He says (in the original article):

“…from the fact that a proposition is a member of the privileged class it does not follow that it is a necessary truth, and so it seems that there are some propositions, such as ‘There is some language’, the truth of which is necessary for anyone’s ever asserting or denying anything, but which are not necessary truths. It could have been, and undoubtedly was, the case at one time that there was no language, and it probably will be again. Although it could not be truly denied, still it might have been, and might yet become false.”

There are lots of possible objections to this - the main one being that we do philosophy by talking to one another, and the idea of a philosophical position that cannot be intelligibly articulated is fairly odd. The temporal context issue is irrelevant, of course (I commented on this before), because we can talk about it now. 'Necessary' is a word we know how to use - it works in our language. If we can only use the word because there is something in the world that gives it sense, then we must assume that that something is there, because the sense is there. I'm inclined to think this supposed substrate causes more confusion than it addresses, of course.

The point is that the tail-chasing we get into trying to give 'necessity' a metaphysical ground arises just as much with 'metaphysical necessity'. What ground should we give to this?

Anyhow, I had a correspondence with Professor Stroud about this, and I don't think we understand each other any better. Well, I don't understand him, at any rate.  (!)

How is it possible to make a conception of metaphysical necessity, independent of 'privilege', philosophically intelligible? Stroud would need us to be able to say that a philosophical position that cannot be put into words might still be intelligible. That while no argument could every count against our being able to talk to one another, it might, nevertheless, not be necessary that we are able to talk to one another. What possibility is he pointing to here?

He might say: it is possible that the Universe might not have contained talkers. But this Universe needs to be describable - we need to be able to say of it 'it does not contain talkers' - in order for this example to make sense. In order to figure in a philosophical example, a something - including a universe - needs to be minimally articulable. Its intelligibility depends upon our making it intelligible here and now.

There is a kind of problem here, though - which Stroud describes as a 'metaphysical dissatisfaction' - an uneasiness about the link between what we are constrained to say (if we are to agree that we can say anything at all) and our own phenomenological condition, our visceral interaction with a world which is not, on the face of it, much constrained by words at all. This dissatisfaction cannot be articulated, of course - I might even ask why we call it dissatisfaction, except that I feel it connects with something sympathetic, something in us which wants to have something 'beyond language' that has, nevertheless, language-like powers of demonstration and calculation.