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.