Writing

A difficulty with writing is that my interlocutor must be imaginary. My apologies if you are reading this, and feel quite real.

There is a problem with talking to ourselves. Well, there are a pile of problems, really, not least being the private language argument.

One somewhat phenomenological aspect of this occurred to me this morning. When I ‘talk to myself’ it is generally in fragmentary phrases. The more anxious I feel, the more these resolve into definite sentences and short paragraphs, as though I am preparing a more thorough defence.

And yet, even while I do this, I am losing touch with the inner part of myself and paying attention to how I will seem to others. I am leaving my principal source of authenticity and insight behind and paying attention to coping strategies, to verbal ping pong, to ritual combat …

Our model of cognitive capacity as comprising a ‘rational’ functional element – an ‘executive process’ – is quite dangerous here. I think Jerry Fodor has most clearly fallen for the ‘internal monologue’ picture of rationality. It is a picture which is catastrophically self-referential: ‘I know that what I think makes sense because it looks like what I would say if I was making a good case. And I know this because that is how I report my thoughts to others’ … which is no more than to say that I know how to talk. How to be intelligible. Accounting for this in terms of some kind of ‘internal intelligibility engine’ is almost ridiculously circular.

The public-facing imagination is where we are most likely to find what Rogers and others have called ‘introjected values’ – the cut-and-paste patchwork of psychological grafts and donated thought processes that pinch and itch when we try to reconcile them with our lived experience. Values which not only do not come from ourselves, but which we are almost bodily aware of as inconsistent with any possibility of authenticity.

The more explicit and articulate my prepared inner monologue is, the more likely it is to be infected – to be a rationalisation built out of introjections.

In the public sphere, how do we distinguish between writing as case-making and writing as authentic exploration? Between self-justification and self-discovery?

Why am I writing this here?

Determinism, Prediction

The metaphor of universal determinism is based on our ability to predict and/or control the behaviour of some parts of the universe. We presume, from our knowledge of this ability, that the whole behaves like these parts.

I've hinted at why this must be wrong before, and also at some problems with the perspective that I've tried to take. What I want to do here is to draw attention to the the central incoherence of the metaphor.

First, it is a metaphor which is impossible, in principle, to completely unpack. It doesn't matter how much computing power we have, the machinery which implements it will be part of the universe we are trying to predict, and so would be subject to the halting problem (the open question paradox as it appears in algorithmic processing). The machine could not predict relevant aspects of its own behaviour.

Secondly, our predictive theories are captured in a semantic net which cannot, itself, be completely analysed. This is because this analysis must depend on semantic assumptions. Even the law of non-contradiction can only be stated in words.

I've mentioned the necessity of attributing agency to interlocutors, and the problems this creates for universal determinism. There is more to the semantic dimension than this, though. The Kripke/Goodman paradox shows us that there will always be competing semantic interpretations of any finite set of mechanical signals. And yet it is only mechanical processes (and signals) that a universal determinism can predict. No determinism can, therefore, predict the correct interpretation of, for example, a string of characters. This means that no determinism can absolutely establish the correct interpretation of any string of characters which might be taken to be a statement of universal determinism. There is no determinism which allows us to give an unequivocal semantic account of itself.

In some respects, this might be bundled in with other catastrophic implications of the Kripke/Goodman paradox - one of which seems to be that we cannot give an unequivocal account of anything at all. The worst of these implications can, however, be resolved within a recursive account of truth-telling, and a proper understanding of the irreducibly semantic character of whatever conversation we are having now.

This kind of solution is very unfriendly to the deterministic metaphor, however. It puts semantic, rather than mechanical, characteristics at the roots of our explanations and predictions. Also, because our conversations must take place 'in the world' the idea that there is a perspective from which a universal determinism could be demonstrated is incoherent. Not only is there no god-like perspective, but no being with such a perspective could have a private language any more than the rest of us. And certainly not one we could ever learn to speak...

The incoherence of the mechanical metaphor doesn't, at first, seem particularly relevant to the problem of logical determinism, which arises from the fact that the truth-value of a properly contextualised statement about the world - even if it is about the future - cannot vary. If it turns out to be the case that I live into my eighties, then our conventional understanding of the logic requires that this was always the case, but that we just didn't know until the relevant bits of the future had been properly examined. Letting the truth-values of properly contextualised statements vary breaches the rule of non-contradiction, which strikes at the very heart of intelligible semantic processing.

This seems to be a grammatical matter, however, and possibly less consequential for the attribution of agency, since that seems to be as necessary to semantic processing as the invariability of truth values.

The problems with the mechanical metaphor may have this relevance, mind you: that there are factual statements about the future whose truth values cannot in principle be determined from current facts. This gives the 'truth value' a very abstract flavour. It also means that the logical grammar will never undermine the 'use-meaning' of these statements, or of anything intelligible we might care to say about how we attribute truth-values to them, or about what we mean when we do. Preserving the rule of non-contradiction here can have no awkward practical consequences, and any time it seemed threatened re-contextualisation would remove the threat.

Choice

If I have a theory about why people choose things – if I can predict what they will choose – can I still call it choice?

Is their perception of this relevant? If it is, wouldn’t I say ‘They believe they are choosing, but really they are obeying a law of nature’. Can I claim both that they are choosing and that they are rule-bound?

There may be a long argument to be had here, but I don’t think we can. We do not attribute ‘choice’ to inanimate objects – even to complex objects such as machines or computers – if we have a mechanical account of their behaviour and interactions.

We attribute choice when it is convenient to attribute intentional states, and we must attribute choice when we must attribute intentional states - e.g. to interlocutors. This bounds any theory of choice, of course, since all our theories are grounded (ultimately) in the possibility of theorising – the possibility of language. Any attempt to ‘ground’ a theory of choice would find that it had to presume the possibility of choice in order to make theorising intelligible (since it is something that we do with interlocutors).

This is a slightly more circuitous version of the OQ paradox generated by the concept of ‘rational choice’ directly – that we cannot give an intelligible account of how we might rationally choose a method of making rational choices.

It has a novel coda with respect to the tired debate about mechanical determinism, however: The language in which our mechanical theories are constructed is only intelligible if we attribute the capacity to choose to our interlocutors.

Wittgenstein

Wittgenstein approached, and circled, the question of the language within which we do philosophy, but did not address it directly. He didn’t see what conclusions should be drawn from such an examination.

 

I think about this often. I’m not a W scholar, but have read a good deal of him, and about him. I don’t know whether he made a mistake, or whether I have. It is possible that, despite his therapeutic recommendations, he was simply unable to face what an enquiry in this direction might produce. Academics, and particularly academic philosophers, are deeply committed to a certain view of the generality of their disciplines and their methods.

 

He spoke a good deal about mysticism, and mentioned ‘that of which we cannot speak’, but avoided the boundary between this and what we actually say. And yet it is exactly the exploration of this hinterland, the discovery and rediscovery of its rules and conflicts, that lends meaning to the rest – that shows us, by discovery and demonstration, that we cannot give a syntactical or a ‘correspondence’ account of truth and meaning. We can only discover these things in the course of our conversational experiments.

 

The central limitation that philosophers find hard to accept is that there cannot be a theory about how to do philosophy properly. Their core activity cannot be rendered intelligible by explicating its validity rules.

 

And yet the desire for intelligibility – in ourselves, in our interlocutors, and in the world – seems like the whole ground of rationality. If this is not an intelligible desire, then what is?

 

We have to attribute minimal intelligibility to any potential interlocutor, of course. And it is obvious that to be an interlocutor one must be intelligible. But there does not seem to be a categorical imperative to be an interlocutor? Maybe its easier to think ‘whereof we cannot speak’ than ‘to whomsoever we cannot speak’. This is the picket fence that bounds the jurisdiction of argument, beyond which the dragons roam.

Bob Tait

Just before Christmas, a good friend of mine died unexpectedly. I knew Bob slightly for quite a number of years, but from about 2011 we had been meeting regularly - weekly - to talk about some of the things I ponder in this blog, and about how they related to his interest in wider cultural structures which are captured by, and in which are embedded, all out linguistic behaviour.

Anyone with peculiar interests will know the joy and relief associated with discovering someone else similarly afflicted. I will miss Bob very much.

Bob and I both wondered, in different ways, whether the biggest threat facing humanity might be a kind of semantic catastrophe. He felt that we underestimate the confusion caused by our inclination to represent large scale cultural constructs as intelligibly intentional, and I could see our capacity for meaningful exchange being overwhelmed in a technological environment in which semantically moderated structures were less 'successful' than complex control mechanisms that depended only on signal propagation.

And, of course, he tried hard to make sense of cultural constructs, while I pursued semantic fundamentalism. So there.

Phenomenology - what it's like to be a language user ...

Traditional sensory empiricism is incoherent for a lot of reasons, but here's a particularly acute one:

If I have an empirical belief that I am particularly sure about, because I have had some experience which confirms it, the relationship between the belief and the experience must be of a certain kind - it isn't enough that the experience generates the belief. The way the experience generates the belief has to be convincing - it has to conform to our intuitions about the relationship between perceptions and what we conclude from them.

For instance: If I thought there was an ostrich in the room, and based my belief on certain sensory impressions, these impressions would have to have a certain kind of relationship with the presence of ostriches.  If I tried to describe the impressions to you, they might sound like the impressions of something a bit large, fluffy, and bad-tempered. They would be ostrich-like.

If I was wired up badly, so that when my foot was tickled I thought there was an ostrich present, I might be just as convinced as someone who had ostrich like sense impressions, but I would be much less convincing. I might say "I have an ostrich presence foot tickle".

Either that, or I would actually have ostrich like sense impressions when my foot was tickled.  Instead of wriggling and laughing, I would say 'I see something large, fluffy and angry'. I might discover, or be shown, that this had to do with my foot being tickled, but this would not make the sensation tickly - it would remain ostrich-like.

Now, suppose that, in the real world, I was hooked up to a machine in such a way that the presence of an ostrich would result in the ticklish sensation in my foot, but that I did not know this.  Now I have a sensory impression which is a reliable indication of the presence of ostriches, but has nothing ostrich-like about it. Even if the relationship between the tickle and the presence of ostriches was explained to me, I do not think I would be inclined to say that ostriches were tickly. At least not if I wanted to make any sense to someone who doubted my ostrich awareness capacities.

And what if we close the loop? What if I am hooked up to such a machine, but am also in the condition of having ostrich-like sensations when my foot is tickled? An interlocutor unaware of my physical circumstances (speaking to me on the phone, for instance) might find my ostrich description quite convincing, and be, correctly, persuaded that there was an ostrich in the room with me.

And this final case is, perhaps, the most realistic. We have no direct access to each others' perceptions, or to the machinery by which they are produced. We take for granted that this machinery is reliable because it makes us talk in ways which are intelligible - not because we either understand how it works or, further, whether that understanding could ever lead to epistemological insight.

Mechanism and Matrix - a Summary

I'm going to try to succinctly explain why we can never have a unified physical theory that (even in outline) 'explains' consciousness, intentionality etc. I have argued at length that we must attribute these to interlocutors (so we can't do without them), and have also given some slightly meandering accounts of how they cannot 'emerge' from a mechanistic world view (or any pseudo-mechanistic view, involving 'spirit' or 'mental substance', which does not surreptitiously presuppose them).

A mechanistic theory of the world must be articulable. Even if we can conceive of one which is not (I don't think we can, but am prepared to be, in a sense, agnostic) such a theory could have no place in science or philosophy, since both require theorising that can be rendered in language.

To be a unifying theory, of the appropriately fundamental kind, such a theory would have (at least in outline) to point to an explanation of how our linguistic mechanisms - the sounds and 'signals' that make up our exchanges - would work. Some hierarchy from physics, through chemistry, to biology, neurology and social science might be imagined.

My argument will be that no such hierarchy can be imagined, whatever assistance is imported by way of 'emergence' or complexity.

And it turns on a very simple thought: the mechanistic theory (however complex) would have to be true. This means that it would have to incorporate a method of implementing the discrimination of one sub-set of the noises, squiggles, clacks, and semaphores which are linguistic behaviour in a way which was isomorphic with our discrimination of true assertions. This is the open question paradox as applied to the matrix world: either our capacity for truth-telling is outside the world, in which case the matrix doesn't contain the whole of our world; or our capacity for truth-telling is part of the 'matrix illusion' - in which case we cannot hope to give a 'true' account of the mechanism which underpins this illusion.

So that's it.