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.