What is the world really like?

I'm tempted, obviously, to give an oblique, Austinian, kind of answer to this question, but I think it  needs taken seriously. Perhaps Austin was a bit presumptuous and condescending, for all that he was broadly right.

So: I was lying in bed last night, half asleep, thinking about what the world was like, and having some meta-thoughts about what that question meant. I might share these thoughts with you, or I might not. If I did, it would be through this medium of 'textual encoding' that I'm using now. Is this like the medium of picture encoding that I would use to send you a photograph? (Is that, itself, a 'transparent' medium?)

We might say that (a) there is a way that the world is, (b) that I might have thoughts (correct or incorrect) about the way the world is, and (c) that I might (honestly or dishonestly) represent to you what I claimed to be thinking. If my thoughts are correct, and I represent them honestly, then I would be telling the truth.

The problem with this picture (as a sketch for an epistemology) is that stages (a) and (b) are more or less opaque until they have been articulated - a stage (c) process. And yet, somehow,  it provides an intuitively compelling model for empirical truth-telling.

The problems are overwhelming, of course. The way the world is can only be present to my cognition if I'm thinking about it, and I can't bring either the presence or the thought into this conversation with you without articulating them.

So what about the intuitively compelling model?

The Monadology seemed very idiosyncratic to me when I was first introduced to it, as, I'm sure, it does to many who think the problem it addresses can (implausibly) be solved in some other way, but Leibniz' picture of solipsistic universes kept mysteriously synchronized with one another poetically captures the human condition, if some of its elaborations are less convincing.

The synchronicity is, of course, a projection of our shared language. How this reflects back to the interior is a central focus of therapeutic practice, which draws on both the articulable and on the inarticulable (which can only be 'shown' or 'discovered') in the relationship between the therapist and the client - or, as one might more modestly claim, between one human being and another.

The solipsistic condition cannot, of course, be represented (although we can have a name for it - 'beetle', perhaps ...).

The therapeutic dilemma is that the attempt to explore this is both essential and inexplicable. I am quite sure that the things that go on in my 'mind', as I might say to you, are profoundly engaged with what I say and how my behaviour is represented in the world. I can, however, neither show you this nor tell it to you in a way that sidesteps the need to presuppose semantic congruence.

And neither of us should imagine that we can agree about what words we might privately be reciting to ourselves. Words such as: "I wonder if we are making any sense to one another at all."

Far less imagine that we can discover this particular thought in one another without accompanying words.