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'.