Metaphysics. Or maybe I'm repeating myself?

Here is an anti-metaphysical metaphor:

Instead of imagining that we all live within a specific metaphysical net (a possibility that is either incoherent or empty), imagine instead that we do not. Imagine that our individual worlds are so different as to be incommunicable. No words can capture them.

When we try to capture them in words, we find that the words dissolve and become meaningless. Instead of being able to treat our shared language as transparent, we discover that it has become unintelligible. We become mired in paradox and confusion.

And yet, we remain able to say this to one another: 'There is paradox and confusion here ...'

Does this mean that we have a 'shared world' of paradox and confusion? What on earth could that mean?

But this is, of course, very familiar after all ...

Our 'shared language' is kind to the illusion that our worlds are not so different until we begin to examine that language itself and find that we cannot look behind our semantic mechanisms - that even when we seem to succeed it is only because we have mistaken a more occult semantic mechanism for a metaphysical groundwork.

From the perspective of this metaphor, I look within myself for a response to your noises, scratchings, tappings ... I tap back, and wait to see whether something further happens that I also 'find intelligible'.

Perhaps you do the same. I have no way of 'knowing' this that takes me further than my knowledge of how to respond. I don't even have a way of 'knowing' what 'the same' might mean in this context. And 'you' are just my (presently imaginary ...) interlocutor - necessary to avoid the incoherence of hypothesising private semantic structures. (If I'm not talking to 'you', then I'm not talking at all.)

And we can't 'reduce' all of this to the noises, scratchings, and tappings, either. We can only represent and distinguish these in a shared language - there is no usefully 'pre-linguistic' mechanism here. And we can replace them with anything that does the same work for us - that we can look within ourselves for a response to. (This is what makes 'meaning' seem fundamental ... another framework that turns out to be a projection rather than a support.)

And without the metaphor?

If I must hypothesise something, it might be shared internal worlds. But this hypothesis cannot go beyond the claim that it might (initially) seem to support: that we are able to talk to one another. It is a comfort, rather than an explanation. It says only that we should treat our mutual incoherences, our radical differences, as being 'cancelled out' when we talk to one another; a device at least as obscure and pragmatic as treating ratios with infinite parts as zeros or ones.

And this is not a solipsistic position - I do hear you tapping, and I do respond.

Language and Experience

An interaction with a counselling client brought something into focus for me - something obvious, on reflection, but obscured (perhaps) exactly by its own nature ...

We often have experiences - we feel things, or think things - that cannot be put into words, that may even challenge our confidence in our capacity to put things into words. Ironically, and often cruelly, these experiences can be among our most intense - and meaningful (in the sense resisted by semanticists and most insisted upon by nearly everyone else).

In the company of an engaged interlocutor, attempting to put these experiences into words can be profoundly therapeutic. What I suddenly realised, while listening to my client, was that two pictures we might have of the internal 'pre-articulation' processes were mutually incongruous but, at the same time, 'behaviourally' indistinguishable.

One is the picture we have from the Analytic tradition - Hume to Fodor, perhaps - of an internal space that is very like the space we describe to one another when we speak. A space of logic and experience, which, to be articulated, only needs 'translating' into words.

The other is a picture that has more of the character of religious inspiration - of words forming from the incoherent swirl within, almost without preliminary, in a way that seems necessary, that seems to participate in the deep nature of human communication, but whose processes themselves cannot be intelligibly articulated.

We might imagine that we can distinguish between these two cases on the basis of content or accompanying behaviour. This hypothesis is revealed to be ridiculous even as it is formulated - what is it about it, itself, that might give us a clue to its generation?

The desire to appear intelligible, of course, may - in our present cultural context - push us towards narratives of generation that have the first character. However, our capacity to be intelligible is just our capacity to engage in conversation - nature is indifferent to method, distinguishing only contextual success ...

So, while my inspirations may appear to be the product of profound calculation and superior interpretation, you must just take them for what they are, asking not from whence they come ...

 (!)

On Instruction

We don't learn to talk by having it explained to us. If we can't talk, we can't take instruction either.

Being able to talk to one another, being able to give and take instructions, appears to depend on what we might vaguely call 'shared understanding' or 'shared appreciation of meanings'. This doesn't really add anything to 'shared ability to talk to one another,' but its specific components (things like 'shared experience', 'shared grammatical/logical capacities', our understanding of foundational concepts like 'same' and 'similar', the apparent persistence of common memory etc.) all have the character of Wittgensteinian 'hinges' - not just of specific enquiries but of any possible intelligible enquiry, including any enquiry into their own nature.

When a philosopher tells you that there is a 'right' way to do something - to translate a linguistic expression, to understand an experience, to perform an experiment or a calculation - they are already depending on your having a shared concept of  'rightness' and a shared appreciation of at least one (very disjunctive and distributed) example of it, which is 'the right way to talk'.

If we don't know the right way to talk, we have, of course, no way of discussing this with one another - never mind being able to attribute it to any failure to 'follow instructions' ...

Metaphysics (again)

More generally, any 'complete' story we tell about the world must include an outline (at least) of how the ordered collections of tokens (marks, noises, gestures) which are used to express true accounts can be distinguished from those which are not. (These, too, are part of the world our metaphysics might seek to explain.)

In other words, any general metaphysics must offer a theory of truth. It must allow us to distinguish the actual representations of statements (in the 'substance' of the metaphysics) into classes commensurate with our semantic concepts of truth and falsehood.

But this theory of truth must include the metaphysics itself within its scope. The marks, noises, gestures which represent a statement of this metaphysics can only be shown to belong to a privileged class on grounds derived from the metaphysics.

A metaphysics that does not project conditions of truth is pointless, and one which does is paradoxical.

It's just the OQ problem again.

Machines

We might distinguish between a 'mechanism' and a 'machine'. 

A mechanism, as I want to characterise it, may be a discovered item - a set of interacting parts whose behaviour may be predictable if the relationship between the parts, and between the mechanism and its environment, is understood.

A machine is a mechanism accompanied by a promise: that it will function according to a normative rule.

This promise has to be a human promise, of course. A human being may construct a mechanism, but will only have constructed a machine if the constructor gives it a purpose and warrants (to some extent) that this purpose will be achieved.

This might seem to render all 'natural' mechanisms purposeless, by ruling out 'discovered' purposes. This isn't quite the case, however.

Human beings have always wanted to find a proxy for purpose in the natural world - this was provided by hypothesising deities (especially in the case of the 'argument from design'). The promise of evolutionary theory is slightly different, but still has a normative core:

Evolutionary theory gives an account of how a natural mechanism, including a 'human being' (as biologically characterised), can appear to have a purpose. The promise, here, is from the theorists - that if evolutionary theory is correct, we may rely on some of its products.

The tricky thing, of course, is that it appears to be the human 'biological machine' that attributes purpose to things. Evolutionary theory itself is only valid because it is intelligible when expressed in human language. Can we say something about the 'purpose' of this language?

Probably not. Partly because the 'machinery' of language cannot be identified independently from its normative and intentional concomitants ...

More on this later, I think.

Intelligibility, Rule-Following and Mechanism

I've driven some wedges between these concepts on open question grounds already in this blog, but I want to draw attention to a particular conclusion that we can draw with some confidence:

If the whole of reality was, in some sense, 'mechanically deterministic' - even, in fact, if this hypothesis was adjusted to accommodate the kind of uncertainties projected by quantum mechanics - then decisions about truth and falsehood would also have to be rendered in mechanical terms.

This would include the truth or falsehood of any statement of mechanistic determinism. In other words, if MD is true, then it is only true on deterministic grounds.

And, of course, if there are other grounds then there are things in the world which cannot be accounted for in terms of mechanistic determinism.

Sameness: A Joke

Sameness looks like an indispensable concept, without which we would be unable to make sense. Surely we need to be able to identify words that are 'the same', or meanings that are 'the same', in order to speak at all?

But what does this mean? Can we be sure that the 'sameness' we employ today is the same 'sameness' we used yesterday? Must 'sameness' be a thing we can find in the world, or a feature of things we can find in the world, in order for it to work in our language and thought? How could we be sure that we had found it, and that it was the same each time that we did?

Clearly, we can, at least implicitly, agree about this in our present conversation: If you and I had sufficiently incongruous conceptions of 'sameness', if we radically disagreed about which things were the same and which were different, this conversation - perhaps any conversation - would be impossible.

We would not be able to discuss sameness at all.

And now that we have, I suspect it will never seem quite the same to us again.

Maybe the Central Question?

There are two questions we might ask about the relationship between the world and the way we speak:

(1)    How does the fact that we have a shared experience of the world validate the way we talk about it?

(2)    How does the fact that we can talk about the world in the way that we do validate our sense of shared experience?

The first one has been the focus of the Western empiricist tradition, but only the second one can be rendered intelligible.

With respect to (1), we cannot even ask questions about our shared experience, or mutually investigate the intelligibility of what we say, without attributing some minimal sense to what we say to one another.

With respect to (2), the question 'can we talk about the world?' can only be answered in the affirmative, since its denial is a statement about the world - that we cannot talk about it. Since we can talk about the world, we can draw conclusions about its nature, and some of these conclusions will have a bearing on what we mean by 'sharing experience', and to what extent we actually achieve this.

Sensory Empiricist Epistemology - A Moral Risk

This has probably been remarked on by others, at least indirectly, but it's worth spelling out:

At the heart of the 'internal / external', 'subjective / objective', 'senses / science' conundrum lurks an issue of good faith. When we cannot understand what someone (A) is saying - when what they are saying does not 'make sense' to us - we might represent this to another person (B) as a hypothesis about A's competence or honesty as a language user.

Within the empiricist tradition, there are many statements (e.g. first-person observation statements) where this failure, or this dishonesty, must translate into a specific issue with A's sensory apparatus: either it isn't working properly (they don't see what's there) or they are lying (they see, but pretend not to). We know (externally, demonstrably) that the linguistic interaction is going wrong, and we claim (problematically, unresolvably) that this results from a lack of facility or from moral failure.

This easy projection of the external communication breakdown onto the internal space of a potential interlocutor has some ugly consequences. Among mental health practitioners, there is considerable disagreement about whether certain conditions can be treated as personal deficiencies or whether they can only be understood contextually - whether, for example, the family, the society, or the therapist/client relationship need to be considered along with the capacities of the patient or client. Traditionally, people have been diagnosed as mad on the grounds of their social interactions, but treated as though the incomprehensible aspects of these are the product of personal perceptual and moral defects.

If we look for epistemological fundamentals in the possibility of a shared language, we are forced to shift the focus from the individual to the interaction - from personal 'failure' to relationships. From this perspective, we are also forced to recognise that diagnosing someone as having an 'individual defect' must always be provisional and can never have a 'moral' dimension. Once we have put someone outside the class of interlocutors (or potential interlocutors?) our judgments about their intentional states cannot be tested against their participation in the conversation. We cannot know their reasons, and so cannot judge them.

This doesn't mean that we cannot protect ourselves from their actions, of course. It does mean that we cannot pretend that we can know that this is 'for their own good'.

We also cannot legitimately invite them to consult their own internal condition to explain our behaviour towards them; to consult their empirical equipment or their conscience to find the roots of their 'madness'.

Not only do we have no shared language with which to do this, but we have no legitimating empiricist mythology with which to comfort ourselves.

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.

More on Stroud and Privileged Statements

Consider:

(a) The world allows us to talk about it in the way that we do.

(b) The world is the way that we say that it is.

They appear to mean different things but, taken completely seriously and literally, they are methodologically equivalent.

If meaning = truth conditions, in other words, they do mean the same thing.

So what about metaphysical anxiety?

To construct the kind of TA that Stroud specifies, we need to be able to project from the preconditions of scepticism to a refutation of the sceptical position. He offers the possible starting point of 'privileged statements' which must be true in any possible language, but then reflects that there is a world independent of language that may not be limited by our particular grammatical constraints. He forgets, as I've observed, that we need to know what that phrase 'a world independent of language' means before we can consider his objection, and this ultimately comes down to use (in so far as it can be accounted for at all).

His instinct that projecting from language to a metaphysical reality doesn't get us very far is correct, though. We would only be establishing 'metaphysical realism' at the expense of reducing it to a grammatical requirement - we certainly couldn't then point to it as a support for the validity of our linguistic computations. We would be achieving a metaphysical result at the expense of rendering it pointless.

We might deal with a sceptic who expresses doubts about physical reality this way, but only by showing that physical reality has no role to play in any foundational epistemology.

A sceptic of the possibility of any foundational epistemology can be dealt with more directly, of course, by pointing to the grammatical preconditions of the possibility of asking sceptical questions. We cannot treat someone as a competent interlocutor without attributing reliable knowledge states to them  - 'Do you know you are asking a sceptical question?' can have only one answer, if the sceptic is engaged in the conversation.

In both cases - of physical reality and of knowledge states - the 'metaphysical projections' can be exhaustively accounted for in grammatical terms. Going back to (a) and (b) above - the world allows us to talk as though both exist, and we cannot methodologically distinguish this case from the case in which they 'really do'.

Language and Humanity

What is language?

Or, what is 'language'? Perhaps, in an Austinian frame, 'How do we use the word "language"?

Except that I don't want to duck what Barry Stroud would have called 'metaphysical anxieties', the acknowledgement of which does not, of course, commit me to any metaphysical conclusions.

So. We can start with some potential 'root-like' statements:

"A language is what we use to talk to one another."

It is partly the collection of behaviours, technologies, objects, and expressions of capacities, which are necessary to the sense of 'We are having a conversation'. This is a bit messy, of course. And I say 'partly' because none of these things could count on their own - it is the way they are used that make them the components of a language. If I look at an ancient carving that has patterns of dots and lines on it, I might hypothesise that it is an inscription in a contemporary language, but until I can translate it I cannot be sure. And, of course, without a native speaker to test this hypothesis with I cannot deal with a certain kind of sceptical uncertainty about my conclusion. In the language I am using now, I can ask the question whether I have got the translation wrong in some subtle but catastrophic way. In a conversation with a native speaker in the language itself, I cannot explore this possibility without (unintelligibly) expressing doubt about whether we are having a conversation at all.

(Another consequence of the Quine/Davidson radical translation problem is that we can't firmly draw a line between language and non-language on the grounds of these components.)

The string of characters you see on this page only comprises an example of language use because you can interpret them, and believe they were written by someone in a certain complicated intentional state, and with certain objectives. If you discovered they were a surprising output from a random process you might be puzzled and disturbed, but you would have to acknowledge that your initial supposition about their linguistic nature was a mistake.

Ursula le Guin had this about right.

(Do we need a word here? Why don't we stop at 'we can talk to one another' or 'we can communicate'? We can't if we want the ancient inscription question to be intelligible; if we want to ask: 'Is what I am looking at a language?')

Perhaps another root:

"A language is anything we can intelligibly translate into the language we are using now."

"Can intelligibly translate" must imply "Could have a conversation with native users of the language", for Davidsonian (at least) reasons. (Think of "I have successfully translated Martian, and have found that nothing Martians say in it makes any sense.")

Like the other concepts which generate open question paradoxes, 'language' is both a useful/necessary concept and also one that can only be given a recursive account of. But the problem seems bigger here: we are left with something like 'medium of communication', which depends only on the possibility of communication and is completely unspecific about the nature of the medium.

What about grammar, spelling, constructive meaning etc.? Surely these things are required to sustain intelligibility? After all, it was at least a pattern of lines and dots I was hypothesizing about, not a pictorial representation or a geometric construction.

But le Guin is right here as well: the existence of these clues guides and does not determine. We can only say 'we find it easier to come up with a translation hypothesis where these are present'. We cannot say (without circularity) 'These are essential to something being translatable'.

Chomsky makes a mistake here: He thought he had found a deep grammar, some abstract characteristic of all languages, but in fact he only found our cognitive limitations. There are only some kinds of organisations of objects and technologies which we have the capacity to translate, or the inclination to attempt to translate. This does not have the consequence that there are languages we cannot translate - which would be incoherent (le Guin's story is satire) - but it does have the consequence that 'language' is something human beings have the capacity to produce. To imagine that we can translate Martian or Dolphin is to imagine Martians and Dolphins having quite parochially human characteristics - to imagine them as being like quasi-human-beings dressed up in funny suits. As Wittgenstein speculated about lions: if they could talk we could not understand them. Or, in other words, that they cannot talk is part of what makes our conception of what counts as language intelligible. A Dolphin at a keyboard is not substantially less puzzling than a random text generator appearing to produce a 'theory of language'.

(In case this sounds 'human-centric', I would ask you to consider what happens when we do have instances of communication with animals - the range of what can be 'said' is quite narrow, even where it is important to us. I love my cat, and believe that she knows how to 'tell' me she's hungry, but I can't distinguish between real linguistic intention and my empathic interpretation of her behaviour. And she certainly doesn't try to do philosophy ...

We really haven't done a lot better with dolphins than with domestic cats, despite many efforts. And, of course, Martians don't exist.)

Where I'm headed, whether you think this is the only possible destination or not, is somewhere like this:

'Language' is a concept we can only give a recursive account of - by pointing to some undeniable examples (e.g. what we are using to have this conversation), and showing how other examples depend on these (via translation, implication, etc.).

Also, talking to one another is a profoundly human capacity. Language is, without qualification, human language. The thing that we have been able to construct that we call language has certain structural features because that is how human cognition works. We can do grammar and spelling, but we can't do the integrated phase transition gyrations of the globular group minds of Gliese 667Cc, because we have no idea what that means.

We might ask, of course, why we can do grammar and spelling (and all the other stuff that goes with linguistic capacity), and we have found partial answers. We will only ever find partial answers, however, for two reasons that occur to me just now:

(1) The question is hard to articulate without confusion - if it is about what kind of biological machinery a human being has in order that it can produce language, we find ourselves in a self-referential loop.

(2) We can't give an account of linguistic capacity in terms of an individual. The sense of an individual having linguistic capacity can only be given in terms of the individual's membership of a language-using community.

(2) has a consequence similar to (1), but also the further consequence that no capacity or incapacity on the part of an individual member of the community would trump the community's judgement of their status as a language user. While we might refer to behavioural or biological facts about an individual, these would never be conclusive (for Goodman/Kripke reasons), and could not stand against the community's judgement. The only constraint on the intelligibility and correctness of this judgement would be whether making it rendered the members of the community unintelligible to one another (in which case no intelligible judgement, rather a false intelligible judgement, would have been made).

And of course, such a judgement would have to be internal to the community. A judgement from outside to the effect that the community clung to unintelligible beliefs is not distinguishable from a judgement that the translation schema of the outside observer was defective (Martians and nonsense again).

(At least that is the only intelligible judgement of this circumstance that can be made in our community ...)

So, if you're with me so far, here is another good thing we can do:

The structure of language (Chomsky, constructive theories of meaning, fascination with computation etc.) has been a distraction. We project this structure onto 'the world', and 'the world' allows us to do this, so the distraction has taken a terrible grip on the imagination of theorists. What has received less attention is exactly how human beings use, or can use, this structure. The mistake here is like imagining that enumerating the logical states that a piece of computer hardware can, in principle, be in, is more important than exploring the logical states that a working computer (doing human-useful tasks ...) might actually explore.

(It's easy to see this from some of the themes in this blog. For instance, it is very clear that a kind of anxiety - perhaps Stroud's metaphysical anxiety - blocks our recognition of the consequences that the various paradoxes I have taken seriously - "Moore's"; Open Question; Goodman/Kripke - have for theorising about truth, knowledge, meaning, and language. These consequences are not only not blocked by the structural and computational features that have been the focus of theorists, but they are also consequentially tied to them - both as a way of giving an account of their 'validity' and because they are the only foundational account that they will allow. The law of non-contradiction prevents us from discarding the consequences of this train of thought since other possibilities are incoherent; and it is also explained by the approach, since it, itself, can be thought of as a conclusion drawn from linguistic experiments in contradiction. Despite being the 'Sherlock Holmes' solution, some deep prejudices about the relationship between language and reality - prejudices that have nothing to do with any structural or semantic features of any actual or possible language - stand in the way of understanding it. Just as they seem to have stood in the way of Stroud's recognising the profound importance of his 'privileged statements'...)

A potentially tragic consequence of this diad - fascination with computational structure and blindness to its human application - is that we imagine we can construct talking machines without taking some important features of the human nature of language processing into account. We have picked out structure, parsing, some aspects of perception, computation, and computational prediction as the most important elements of 'intelligence' without really asking ourselves critical questions about whether these fully capture it. (Turing's infamous test side-steps the problem by cancelling out the 'humanity' term - he lets a human being be the ultimate judge.)

('Neural networks' which model some aspects of the way the human brain functions produce results in ways that cannot be ultimately validated. We can observe their spooky accuracy, but we have no way of predicting whether they might fail in some crucial test. We have sacrificed knowing how they work to the production of a simulacrum, demonstrations of whose 'reliability' depend on quite a shaky metaphor.)

Our capacity to construct machines that mimic these computational structures (permitted by a 'world' that allows us to talk about it in the way that we do) has progressed to a point where the ambiguities avoided by Turing's sleight of hand cannot be ignored. When these machines 'talk' to one another, they develop 'languages' that we do not understand. At the same time, some very ordinary human capacities seem to defy computational tractability. We do not understand our own 'intelligence' in a way that allows us to safely attribute it to our constructions.

When I talk to a human being, I have the comfort of knowing what human beings are like. This comfort does not depend upon a ground upwards demonstration of their humanity. It depends only on my ability to recognise them, and the relative absence of  'difficult cases' (although I'm sure we all know one or two ...). I might also be reassured by my knowledge that millions of years of evolution (with a good deal of attendant death and misery) have produced the biological and social behaviour that I now depend upon.

I don't have any of these comforts when I 'talk' to a machine. Cats and dolphins, if not Martians, seem a lot less alien.

Stroud's Error

We might say 'I can only mean what I say if I know how to talk', and even 'this requires that I have a more general capacity for reliably knowing things'.

While this is true, it does not render the meaning of what I say dependent upon, or derivable from, some prior account of what it is that I know, or how I know it.

Not does it make the meaning of what I say dependent upon, or derivable from, some prior inarticulable set of processes or structures that might comprise my 'state of knowledge'.

In certain central, paradigmatic, cases 'knowing' is just, and exactly, 'knowing how to talk'.

When we want to extend this - e.g. to cases of knowing how to act, or by attributing intentional states to non-language-users - we have to recognise their derivational dependence on the paradigmatic cases. I can only imagine my cat thinking that it is dinner time if can also say 'My cat thinks it is dinner time'. Attributions of this kind are always projections by language users. To say that cat A believes that cat B thinks it is dinnertime is either (a) to attribute some linguistic capacity to cat A, or (b) to leave oneself open to Kripke-esque scepticisms about how we could reliably make such a claim. Or, possibly, both.

Attribution of knowledge-states to interlocutors is, on the other hand, a consequence of their being interlocutors. To say of you, absolutely, generally, and literally: 'You do not know what you are talking about' is a kind of nonsense - a statement made to you (incongruently) that you do not know how to play the game in which making statements is a kind of move.

So when I say that my capacity to mean is rooted in my capacity to know, I am really saying that my capacity to know is a projection of my capacity to mean.

If meaning depended on something that went 'beyond' intelligibility - was something that tied our language to a material or phenomenological substrate, so that it could mean nothing without this support - we could never know for certain what we meant.

And could therefore never know, when we tried to ask these kinds of questions, what questions we were asking.

Physical Constraints

It is a (literally) undeniable fact that the world is the kind of place that we can talk about in the way that we do. This is not quite the same as saying that it is the way we say that it is, but the two conditions are, at least, methodologically indistinguishable.

How does the world guide our words, and so our intelligible thoughts?

It isn't possible to give a complete answer to this question, because that answer itself would have to be a statement, or thought, that the world has guided. We cannot give a (constructive) justifying account of our ability to give justifying accounts.

With respect to 'external reality', we can say a bit more. There is clearly a (somewhat vaguely circumscribed) set of statements that we think of as 'empirical', and which we also want to think of as 'obviously true'. Among these we would probably include the kinds of statements about immediate perception which traditional epistemological empiricism focused on. I've spoken about these, and the errors that our intuitions about them have led us into, but I feel I could be more explicit about what I think about them, if I don't think of them as epistemological fundamentals (which I don't).

The most obvious thing, of course, is that philosophers have tended to focus on the reliability of our perceptions themselves rather than on the intelligibility of our statements about them. They have been vaguely aware of the difficulties about 'shared perceptions', but have tended to think of these in terms of puzzles about perspective.

Wittgenstein's repeated demonstrations (via the 'beetle in the box' parable, and in many other places) that the meanings of our words could not depend on internal processes which others did not have access to should have put a stop to all this, but the tanker of prejudice has proved hard to turn. It should have been obvious to anyone who took his arguments seriously that the 'shared experience' was a projection of the shared meaning and not a determinant of it. We project the contents of our boxes from our shared use of 'beetle'. The question of what is 'really' in each box cannot even arise - and so is strictly meaningless. So long as 'beetle' works in the language, we have as much access to the 'shared content' as we need. We can only ask for more by inventing more words - by moving the goalposts, so to speak - and so generating new hidden beetles.

If we disagree about some 'matter of fact' (such as the existence of a table in a philosophy classroom), we do not resolve this by investigating each other's perceptual apparatus. We resolve it by trying to find out whether we can make such a disagreement intelligible - whether we can play a language game around 'this table does not exist', for instance. By doing this, we find out interesting things about the words and concepts, and about the limits of intelligible conversation. By discovering how much we have to throw away if we don't agree about the table, we also discover something about the universality of basic physical concepts. It's very hard to talk about anything without them ...

It is possible that scepticism about the reliability of our agreements about our immediate physical environment strictly entails a scepticism about our ability to talk to one another. (One route to such an argument might be through the fact that agreement about the physical coding of our language seems to be a necessary preliminary to agreeing about the content of what we say, but I'm not sure about this.) If this entailment was reliable, then our agreements about our immediate physical environment - our agreements about our empirical perceptions and intuitions - would be as reliable as our ability to talk to one another. (They would be among Barry Stroud's 'privileged statements', whose importance he seemed determined to ignore...)

What is clear is that it is, in practice, very hard to have a conversation with someone who seems to see an entirely different world from the one that we do. A table sceptic is hard to take seriously as an interlocutor (as we discover in our philosophy experiments ...)

I have been arguing, in this blog, that we don't need - that it is incoherent to ask for - a metaphysical underpinning to our scientific theorising; that 'privileged statements' about the possibility of language and their consequences provide a completely adequate foundation for this.

Meaning is internal to our linguistic practices, and as a consequence of this so is any world that we can describe to one another. Our experience of a private 'conscious' world outside the scope of articulation, of public theorising - our conviction that the 'real beetles' have some role in establishing the validity of that theorising - is misleading here; is, in fact, quite false.

In order to make sense of  'real necessity,' we must be able to give some kind of account of it - and to agree about the meaning of that account. Its nature is entirely captured in our shared account. Even if we could project it onto the world in an undeniable way - if we could show that any describable world must exhibit real necessity (as we accounted for it), for instance - we would be showing that the existence of real necessities was a consequence of our capacity to theorise, and not a justification of it.

If we want to say 'X must be true of the world', we need to know what 'X' means. We discover this meaning through our experiments with the way we use 'X'. When we 'discover' that X is true of the world, we cannot distinguish this from discovering that 'X is true of the world' is, in the most general way, intelligible. It's meaning is exhausted by its role in our linguistic interactions, and our tests of its truth depend upon our capacity to agree about how to talk about it.

It is an undeniable part of our human experience that there seems to be more to it than this, but this 'more' is both outside the scope of our public theorising and irrelevant to its validity.