The world does not have to have 'sameness' in it, far less something that 'sameness' is the same as, for 'sameness' to work, grammatically.
It is only necessary that the world embodies the preconditions of the grammatical category of sameness (if we wish to talk of a world at all - and I think we should). We need not even be able to fully articulate these preconditions, although if talk of the world is to be useful we must be able, find it useful, to articulate some of them.
When I talk (meaningfully, or I am not talking) of something's being the 'same' as something else, I am depending on this grammatical category - and am therefore committed to the world's being the kind of place that will sustain the category, and my use of it. I would be projecting the conditions of the use of sameness on to the world, not finding them in it.
It might be, of course, that to attribute anything at all to the world we must be able to attribute 'sameness' to 'sets' of its 'contents' - it may be such a fundamental grammatical concept that we can't do without it in our attributions. This still doesn't mean that we have found 'sameness' (or 'sets' or 'contents') in the world in a way which accounts for - validates, if you like - the concept.
I can draw conclusions about the world (that it is constructed in such a way as to allow me to use the concept 'same') from the fact that I can use the concept 'same'. I cannot demonstrate the validity of the use of 'same' from the contents of the world - this would be circular. Particularly if 'same' has the character of being necessary for quality/content attribution in general.
If I reject the validity of the concept 'same', then I no longer need to attribute these supporting conditions to the world. I also lose a very useful concept - possibly even an essential one, if we want to say that we talk to one another. This is because it is hard to think of how we would articulate this idea without some minimal 'sameness of meaning' construction: what I believe I say is (in some minimal sense) the 'same' as what you understand me to say.
If I found I could not render my sense of 'same' intelligible to someone else, then no amount of pointing at the world would enable me to resolve this.
I may become personally convinced that those with whom I share the concept see the 'same' world as I do - that they are comfortable with what our use of 'same' commits us to saying about it. The strength of this conviction is a product of the shared use, not the grounds of it. If the shared use breaks down, if we become unintelligible to one another in this respect, then the conviction that we share a world breaks down with it - unless we attribute error or dishonesty to them, although in what language might we make this attribution? (What world do I find their error or dishonesty in?)
Saturday, December 07, 2019
Saturday, August 17, 2019
Rules, Meaning and Machines
I did a search of this blog just now, looking for 'machine', and find that I've posted a lot more than I thought on the topic. I want to shine a different kind of light on some of the machine stuff by making a suggestion. Or perhaps focusing on it, if I've made it before...
The suggestion is that these two 'facts' are actually equivalent:
(A) We can talk about the world in the way that we do.
(B) We can construct machines.
If it isn't immediately obvious that these are equivalent, think about the following:
(1) It is always possible to re-state a 'natural' law as a kind of grammatical principle - an instruction about how to talk. If we talk in a way which radically ignores a 'true' natural law, we risk becoming unintelligible. By 'always' I mean that it is not possible to articulate a natural law which cannot be re-stated as a grammatical principle.
I am going to suggest that the 'grammatical principle' view of natural laws is the view that is the most epistemologically relevant.
(What I mean by a 'grammatical principle' here is something Wittgensteinian. Something like a 'rule about how to talk', taken very generally.)
(2) Meaning and prediction are strongly linked. Knowing what someone means allows us to make predictions about their behaviour (whether represented semantically or physically). I don't mean (obviously) that we can exactly predict their behaviour, just that if we couldn't draw some conclusions about it from what they appeared to be saying, then we couldn't be said to understand what they actually were saying.
(3) When we make predictions based on 'natural laws' we can be thought of as making predictions based on 'grammatical' rules. We are saying something like: 'If we understand each other now, then we also share some expectations'. If we deny the expectations, we undermine our present understanding. We discover that we were not as intelligible to one another as we thought.
Remember that there is no scientifically or philosophically relevant test which can distinguish between (i) the world having certain characteristics and (ii) our being able to talk as though it has those characteristics (both taken completely literally and generally).
It seems unexceptionable to say that physical laws permit the construction of machines. What the above outline indicates is that we must conclude from this that grammatical laws (of the right kind) entail the possibility of constructing machines. When we say 'if you want Y to happen, you should do X', we may as well be saying 'If your behaviour falls under description "X", then the statement "Y" will come to be true about the world'.
These hypotheticals can be enormously complicated, of course - we can construct very complicated machines. But encapsulated in the statements of these hypotheticals are the conceptual machines that we expect our 'real' machines to instantiate. If we are forced to concede that the 'real' machine does not behave according to the blueprint, then the hypothetical is, with qualification, falsified. We might experiment with the bounds of intelligibility here, but only to repair them - not to abandon them.
This process of law discovery - discovery of what it is intelligible to say about the world - and successful machine construction has left us with the 'machine world' metaphor. The metaphor is reinforced by the related 'discovery' that any intelligible description of the world gives it machine-like characteristics. It's hard to step back and see that it is the intelligibility that carries the machine metaphor into 'the world'.
No matter how successful our project of rendering parts of the world intelligible becomes, it gives us no grounds whatsoever for believing that we can render it completely intelligible. This is a corollary of the Goodman/Kripke paradox. The Open Question paradoxes generated by the hypothesis that the world is completely intelligible tell us that not only do we not have grounds for believing that it is, but that there is a sense in which it cannot be.
It's worth saying, here, that an intelligible 'mystery' implies its own sets of mechanisms, so this perspective creates no space for 'supernatural' processes.
It also doesn't permit contradiction or radical incongruence - the scope of intelligible theory does not include incoherence. (By definition).
The boundaries of intelligible theorising cannot be directly drawn, either. We may be able to show that there are incomprehensible numbers, but we cannot do arithmetic with them.
What it does mean, though, is that our effective judgements about these things are, in a sense, parochial. 'Intelligible' means something like this - 'can, in principle, be made intelligible to us now'. Some of our descendants may participate in interactions that we would find incomprehensible, and be able to do things that would seem magical to us. We might be tempted to say 'they speak a language we cannot understand', but this would only make sense if we had some hope of learning it. If we didn't, we'd have no idea what they were doing, or even whether they were properly human.
Any useful conception we might form of a machine world has this same parochial quality. This means that it cannot be 'absolutely' generalisable (in any meaningful way).
To suppose that the 'whole' world can be rendered intelligible in terms of law-like characteristics is to suppose that our intelligible rendering depends on these same characteristics that we are investigating. And this problem is metaphysically agnostic - no additional substances or processes can dissolve it.
But our parochial concerns do have some general consequences.
One is that however our language practices might change, we will never talk in a way which renders the way we presently talk completely unintelligible. It must always be at least a limiting case. This isn't because what we say now somehow binds the future - it's just that we can only count something as a language if it can be rendered intelligible in the language within which we make the judgement: the language we are speaking now.
For this to be the case, we do not need to give some account of 'the language we are using now' much beyond pointing to it. If we want to talk about talking, we are pretty much committed to some conception of what we are talking with.
A slightly more disturbing consequence of this approach is to do with the relationship between conceptual machines and what we might call 'real' machines - the machines we build or find in the world. It's easy to see that the conceptual machine will always provide the normative standard against which the performance of the 'real' machine can be judged. This can't work the other way around - the 'real' mechanism, the constructed mechanism, cannot work as a normative standard. The Kripke/Goodman paradox makes this formally impossible, and the possibility of mechanical failures make it impractical.
This has an obvious consequence - that if we think of a person as a kind of biological machine, we cannot also think of them as providing a reliable normative standard of language use - of meaning. On the other hand, we must attribute something like this to someone we wish to count as a competent interlocutor.
A kind of way around this comes via the recognition that being a competent interlocutor includes being open to correction - being able to learn, when one has made a mistake. The normative standard is provided by the whole language community, in some sense - it is within the shared language that the practical issue of normative standards is resolved. And this doesn't give rise to any of the formal problems hinted at above, because the shared language is a context of adjudication, rather than a machine whose performance we might adjudicate on. We can think of a person, an interlocutor, as a kind of correctable machine; but we cannot think of the whole of the linguistic community in this way.
The suggestion is that these two 'facts' are actually equivalent:
(A) We can talk about the world in the way that we do.
(B) We can construct machines.
If it isn't immediately obvious that these are equivalent, think about the following:
(1) It is always possible to re-state a 'natural' law as a kind of grammatical principle - an instruction about how to talk. If we talk in a way which radically ignores a 'true' natural law, we risk becoming unintelligible. By 'always' I mean that it is not possible to articulate a natural law which cannot be re-stated as a grammatical principle.
I am going to suggest that the 'grammatical principle' view of natural laws is the view that is the most epistemologically relevant.
(What I mean by a 'grammatical principle' here is something Wittgensteinian. Something like a 'rule about how to talk', taken very generally.)
(2) Meaning and prediction are strongly linked. Knowing what someone means allows us to make predictions about their behaviour (whether represented semantically or physically). I don't mean (obviously) that we can exactly predict their behaviour, just that if we couldn't draw some conclusions about it from what they appeared to be saying, then we couldn't be said to understand what they actually were saying.
(3) When we make predictions based on 'natural laws' we can be thought of as making predictions based on 'grammatical' rules. We are saying something like: 'If we understand each other now, then we also share some expectations'. If we deny the expectations, we undermine our present understanding. We discover that we were not as intelligible to one another as we thought.
Remember that there is no scientifically or philosophically relevant test which can distinguish between (i) the world having certain characteristics and (ii) our being able to talk as though it has those characteristics (both taken completely literally and generally).
It seems unexceptionable to say that physical laws permit the construction of machines. What the above outline indicates is that we must conclude from this that grammatical laws (of the right kind) entail the possibility of constructing machines. When we say 'if you want Y to happen, you should do X', we may as well be saying 'If your behaviour falls under description "X", then the statement "Y" will come to be true about the world'.
These hypotheticals can be enormously complicated, of course - we can construct very complicated machines. But encapsulated in the statements of these hypotheticals are the conceptual machines that we expect our 'real' machines to instantiate. If we are forced to concede that the 'real' machine does not behave according to the blueprint, then the hypothetical is, with qualification, falsified. We might experiment with the bounds of intelligibility here, but only to repair them - not to abandon them.
This process of law discovery - discovery of what it is intelligible to say about the world - and successful machine construction has left us with the 'machine world' metaphor. The metaphor is reinforced by the related 'discovery' that any intelligible description of the world gives it machine-like characteristics. It's hard to step back and see that it is the intelligibility that carries the machine metaphor into 'the world'.
No matter how successful our project of rendering parts of the world intelligible becomes, it gives us no grounds whatsoever for believing that we can render it completely intelligible. This is a corollary of the Goodman/Kripke paradox. The Open Question paradoxes generated by the hypothesis that the world is completely intelligible tell us that not only do we not have grounds for believing that it is, but that there is a sense in which it cannot be.
It's worth saying, here, that an intelligible 'mystery' implies its own sets of mechanisms, so this perspective creates no space for 'supernatural' processes.
It also doesn't permit contradiction or radical incongruence - the scope of intelligible theory does not include incoherence. (By definition).
The boundaries of intelligible theorising cannot be directly drawn, either. We may be able to show that there are incomprehensible numbers, but we cannot do arithmetic with them.
What it does mean, though, is that our effective judgements about these things are, in a sense, parochial. 'Intelligible' means something like this - 'can, in principle, be made intelligible to us now'. Some of our descendants may participate in interactions that we would find incomprehensible, and be able to do things that would seem magical to us. We might be tempted to say 'they speak a language we cannot understand', but this would only make sense if we had some hope of learning it. If we didn't, we'd have no idea what they were doing, or even whether they were properly human.
Any useful conception we might form of a machine world has this same parochial quality. This means that it cannot be 'absolutely' generalisable (in any meaningful way).
To suppose that the 'whole' world can be rendered intelligible in terms of law-like characteristics is to suppose that our intelligible rendering depends on these same characteristics that we are investigating. And this problem is metaphysically agnostic - no additional substances or processes can dissolve it.
But our parochial concerns do have some general consequences.
One is that however our language practices might change, we will never talk in a way which renders the way we presently talk completely unintelligible. It must always be at least a limiting case. This isn't because what we say now somehow binds the future - it's just that we can only count something as a language if it can be rendered intelligible in the language within which we make the judgement: the language we are speaking now.
For this to be the case, we do not need to give some account of 'the language we are using now' much beyond pointing to it. If we want to talk about talking, we are pretty much committed to some conception of what we are talking with.
A slightly more disturbing consequence of this approach is to do with the relationship between conceptual machines and what we might call 'real' machines - the machines we build or find in the world. It's easy to see that the conceptual machine will always provide the normative standard against which the performance of the 'real' machine can be judged. This can't work the other way around - the 'real' mechanism, the constructed mechanism, cannot work as a normative standard. The Kripke/Goodman paradox makes this formally impossible, and the possibility of mechanical failures make it impractical.
This has an obvious consequence - that if we think of a person as a kind of biological machine, we cannot also think of them as providing a reliable normative standard of language use - of meaning. On the other hand, we must attribute something like this to someone we wish to count as a competent interlocutor.
A kind of way around this comes via the recognition that being a competent interlocutor includes being open to correction - being able to learn, when one has made a mistake. The normative standard is provided by the whole language community, in some sense - it is within the shared language that the practical issue of normative standards is resolved. And this doesn't give rise to any of the formal problems hinted at above, because the shared language is a context of adjudication, rather than a machine whose performance we might adjudicate on. We can think of a person, an interlocutor, as a kind of correctable machine; but we cannot think of the whole of the linguistic community in this way.
Tuesday, May 28, 2019
Dead Versions
In early posts, I provided links to what I thought might be a more organised presentation of the less speculative bits of my explorations.
These links no longer work, and I don't feel inclined repair them - I have the documents if anyone is interested in the history.
Since my friend Bob Tait died - Bob and I used to discuss, at some length, the kinds of issues I have raised here over the last few years - I have put together some notes to summarise our discussions. Perhaps, more correctly, to summarise them from my point of view ...
Making these notes has given me a framework that I find more helpful than the 'versions' framework, which was a very preliminary attempt at a book-length exposition. Each note introduces a single idea, and each is a spotlight on the whole. I've kept them brief and not bothered too much with explicit references - Google any external material you want to know more about, or drop me a note and I'll fill in the gaps.
Anyhow - the results are here. I'll update them periodically and try to remember to post note on this blog when I do.
These links no longer work, and I don't feel inclined repair them - I have the documents if anyone is interested in the history.
Since my friend Bob Tait died - Bob and I used to discuss, at some length, the kinds of issues I have raised here over the last few years - I have put together some notes to summarise our discussions. Perhaps, more correctly, to summarise them from my point of view ...
Making these notes has given me a framework that I find more helpful than the 'versions' framework, which was a very preliminary attempt at a book-length exposition. Each note introduces a single idea, and each is a spotlight on the whole. I've kept them brief and not bothered too much with explicit references - Google any external material you want to know more about, or drop me a note and I'll fill in the gaps.
Anyhow - the results are here. I'll update them periodically and try to remember to post note on this blog when I do.
Friday, April 26, 2019
Roger Scrutton
I heard Roger Scruton getting quite an extended interview on the ‘Today’ programme this morning. He was being given time to explain, at some length, how right-wing commentators were being misrepresented and silenced. A theme of his complaint was how his views were sometimes misunderstood because people didn’t attend closely to the meaning of what he was saying.
An example he used was a comment he had once made to the effect that ‘there was no such thing as date rape’. In the interview, he explained that what he meant, in the context of the reported discussion, was that there was no such crime as date rape, that it didn’t appear in the statutes. He then went on to say that we had to distinguish between cases where someone was attacked and raped and cases where a night out had ‘gone a bit wrong’ (possibly not an exact quote, but not materially misleading).
Words only have definite meanings if we agree (at least tacitly) about what these meanings are – in effect, about how these words are used. No real conversation starts by defining terms – we can only converse if we already share a great many semantic ‘hinges’. When we depend on one of these, but find ourselves lost in ambiguity or disagreement, it is not helpful to resort to definitions. This simple enlarges the arena of contention.
What we need to do, what we actually do in ‘real’ conversations, is stop, look at each other, and wonder ‘Well, what do you mean by ….?’
It is a technique of Scruton and other traditionalist commentators (Peterson, certainly) to toss ‘definition’ bombs into a conversation in order to derail it. “Aha, but you see what I mean by an ‘atheist’ is …”.
This is a kind of semantic authoritarianism, and it is often justified as a response to ‘relativism’. This dilemma – having to choose between stipulation and incoherence – is exactly the dilemma posed by open question paradoxes.
The ‘What do you mean by… ?’ question reveals its depth here. We may ask it explicitly (the case philosophers are inclined to focus on) or we may make tacit explorations – trying, by experiment, to discover a way of talking that allows the mutual conversation to continue. The conversation we are having now is the recursive root of the whole edifice of intelligibility. When we give it up – either by authoritarian stipulation or by reducing it to tribal signalling – we consign the whole to the flames.
Scruton can only have a conversation with someone about date rape if they are both talking about the same thing. Resorting to definitions and elisions may be a fun game he can report to his mates in the pub later, but that’s not really the relevant context …
Wednesday, March 13, 2019
Conversational trajectory ...
I think that all conversations end up on one of three trajectories:
- Towards confusion and disintegration
- Towards dogma, recitation, ritual
- Towards discovery, insight
The third is the only one that allows the conversation to continue. The first two either lose or eliminate the possibility of semantic content. It isn't possible to continue a confused conversation, and a dogmatic or ritualistic exchange cannot develop. It is possible that the first two options conflate, depending on how they are considered.
When we reject a particular way of articulating the truth (dogma), we do not relinquish objectivity. Objective truth can only be explored in a working language, however much we may wish to find a 'terminal formulation'. What we count as a working language cannot be captured in a specific formula either, but only reveals itself in our practice, in our actual conversations with one another.
Within these conversations, there are certain moves that would be terminally confusing. These moves, however, can only be characterised semantically - there is no 'extra-linguistic' formula for distinguishing them. This is a direct consequence of the indeterminacy of translation - it is only when we know what someone means that we can adjudicate on the sense (intelligibility) of what they are saying.
A Moore's paradoxical statement is only 'paradoxical' if we insist on decoding its representation canonically. And, of course, the insistence on canonical interpretation is also 'paradoxical', for the same reasons. If I insist that the classical example of a Moore's statement uses 'believe', for instance, in the 'normal' way, then my insistence is also a Moore's paradox.
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