'Real' Conversation

This might seem a bit random, and is related to my experience as a counsellor (as well as to more present meanderings):

I've been making a list of characteristics of real conversations. A provisional list (as should be obvious, as will certainly become obvious):

In a real conversation, wordless silence is respected. A participant who is uncomfortable, but finds it hard to say why they are uncomfortable, helps us to find the defects in our tools.

In a real conversation, there are no rules. The boundaries of the conversation are discovered, and sometimes these discoveries - when expressed within the conversation - can sound like rules. If we can break the rule and remain intelligible, then it is not a universal rule. At the boundaries, truth and intelligibility converge.

(Philosophy tries to give accounts of intelligibility and of truth as though they were, at root, different things. In specific contexts they may appear to be separate because a whole context can rest upon a false belief, but still remain internally intelligible.  It is not possible to separate them for very general enquiries, however, where the only context is the possibility of articulated enquiry.)

A real conversation may project a metaphysics onto the world, but will never depend on one for its intelligibility.

In a real conversation, any metalinguistic enquiry is permissible, but the language of the present conversation (the one we are using to make these enquiries) is always at the top of the metalinguistic hierarchy. We can make judgements about the intelligibility of other conversations, but cannot question the intelligibility of the one we are engaged in. (Some very general statements about other conversations - e.g. 'Everyone talks at cross-purposes except for us' - are also likely to be unintelligible, but possibly not 'immediately'.)

In a real conversation, we exercise the Principle of Charity, we presume good faith, that we can make ourselves intelligible to one another, and that the truth can be borne.

Real conversations are punctuated by focusing episodes, as examined and explored by Eugene Gendlin, working with Carl Rogers.

Real conversations have more than one participant. This is not guaranteed by someone being 'physically present', nor ruled out by other participants not being immediately and physically present. My interlocutor is whoever reads this. It is not just someone in the room exchanging pleasantries.

A Mondalology (Part 2)

Perhaps this is a better metaphor:

The experience of participating in a conversation has an internal and an 'external' aspect. The internal aspect is the phenomenological space of the speaker (the 'first person') and the external aspect is the world projected in the public sharing - the conversation itself. Or, perhaps, in the 'ideolect' the conversation employs - the local language agreed, by experiment, between the speakers.

This text is an element of the ideolect that I share with the reader. You. If you are reading this.

(One of the odd things about textual language is the presumption of asynchronous, ambiguously defined participation. Another confusion for another day.)

We cannot share the 'internal' aspects of our participation. Another asymmetry. When we try, we either fail or make them into a kind of experimental 'external'. But we can't deny them either - it would be incoherent for me to pretend to you that I had no idea what you were talking about when you tried to point to (without describing) your internal world. Such a denial would bring into question my status as an honest and competent interlocutor. You would wonder whether you could actually have a conversation with me.

(The real solution to the 'hard problem' is an elaboration of thoughts along these lines. It is certainly not either a metaphysical or a 'scientific' matter.)

There is (Davidson and Quine) no methodological test that will distinguish between (a) someone speaking a language I do not understand and (b) someone not speaking a language at all. What I mean here is 'no articulable methodological test'. (I think this qualification is necessary.)

(There is something to be said here about what is and is not shared among idiolectical islands, but of course ...)

So here's the picture: of an 'external' world projected by the idiolect, and 'internal' worlds - individual, unshareable, phenomenological spaces. The internal worlds are the 'monads' and the external world is 'reality', at least as devised by science and intelligible narrative. Including 'philosophy', whatever that is.

Any question about how these might 'correspond' makes no sense, because the phenomenological space is exactly the space that cannot be articulated. 'Noumenal' space, perhaps, with a nod to another genius ...

We can get confused here; we have been confused here. By a lot of things: a naive attitude to language, and particularly to how we might theorise about language; the strange experience of hearing our 'thoughts' spoken aloud, which makes us forget their private aspects; a conviction that the 'world out there' is the one we see rather than the one we describe to one another - a conviction that these must be 'the same' in some way, for the whole system to work at all, whereas even the question whether they can be the 'same' cannot be intelligibly asked. What on earth would the answer look like? By what test would it stand or fall?

And, of course, there is the complex, disturbing, transfixing issue of how what we say to each other changes the internal spaces of each of us. People say things to us that make the world look different. This is not always, perhaps even is very rarely, a matter of being presented with a new description, a new encoding.

A Monadology ...

Leibniz' metaphysics once looked like a quaint 17th century artefact to me - an automaton in a museum, or a mathematical proof of the existence of God ... of historical interest, possibly, but clearly bonkers.

Which is why he was Leibniz, and I am not.

It occurred to me much later that he was trying to solve a very subtle problem, and that his solution has some very modern resonances. The problem is not even visible, far less obvious - or troubling - to an unselfconscious language user - a user inclined to regard language as 'transparent', or 'representational', perhaps. A user who thinks that language 'works' because we live in a shared world, who does not realise that the statement 'we live in a shared world' cannot give meaning to itself.

Anyhow. Monads.

I remarked to someone once - not originally - that however vast and complex the universe might seem to us, that whole vastness and complexity had to fit into a package about the size of a small loaf of bread. A very materialistic observation, so possibly false, but generalisable: whatever conception we might individually have of the universe is contained within us. The system may be 'open', but it is, in some sense, personal - the nature of the universe I am aware of and my capacity to comprehend it must, ultimately, converge.

(I'm assuming that we can talk about such things as 'the nature of the universe' and 'my comprehension of it', of course. Perhaps we can pass over that for the moment.)

And 'other minds'? Also a set of categories mediated by language. We must attribute mental states to interlocutors, but this cannot be a 'mysterious' thing - no metaphysics can help us here ...

Perhaps language does the work of Leibniz' god, keeping everything in step. Except 'in step' is not  'the same'. It can't really mean more than that we can, in fact, talk to one another...

So. Monads (or something a bit like them). And maybe a metaphor, rather than a metaphysics: specifically a metaphor that I hope might direct you to something that cannot be explicitly described. Some features of the real beetle, so to speak.

Here is the metaphor. Or perhaps parable:

Imagine we are all born with a world - a whole world, that is entirely ours, but over which we can exercise only limited control. A world, initially, of sensations, feelings, impulses ... but without 'language'. We don't need a sense of  'self' (and not, of course, of 'narrated', or 'described' self) in this world - we and it are integral.

How we live in this world develops - we discover ways of controlling it, of bringing it to meet our needs. This learning changes the way the world looks to us. Perhaps unfocused impressions become recognisable objects, or patterns (or perhaps even this reconstruction is too naive). Mixed in with this process, and within this world, we acquire some very specific complex skills.

Among these are the skills associated with language use. These skills change the internal world in a very profound way, but not, of course, in a way that can be described. Nothing of the internal world can be described: it is a beetle. When I say 'internal world' to you, we both know what we are talking about - but only because we know how these words work, not because we can compare our internal worlds.

I feel as though I want to be very careful here. My 'internal world' is not my 'mind'. Our minds are, in so far as they can have characteristics attributed to them, part of the external world. The mind of intentional states, for instance, is a public object - an object of description and theory.

What I mean by 'internal world' is my world of wordless subjective experience. The groundwork. The 'black hole', linguistically speaking, that seems, to other interlocutors, to exist at the centre of every language user's world but their own.

(I might call it the 'world of consciousness' except that we now have a 'science of consciousness' - and there is so much confusion embedded in this idea that I want to avoid it altogether.)

In this internal world, certain 'experiences' produce 'conviction', to the extent that we might want to locate the reliability of the conviction in the experiences. I might feel I 'know' something, because of certain things I have seen or heard, or because of the consequences of some internal experimental and cognitive process.

One of the things I feel I 'know', in this way, is how to talk to people. When I say something that I believe to be 'true', my internal experience of this is the same experience of visceral conviction I might arrive at with respect to other 'knowledge' states. And, again, I might want to link the validation of these statements to the relevant internal states.

And the experience of learning to speak is not essentially different, not different in kind, from the experience of acquiring other epistemic convictions - e.g. about how to kinaesthetically engage with the world.

But since we have no direct access to each other's 'internal' processes, we cannot externally validate what we say by reference to them. We do this by exploring possible ways of talking, not by pointing to invisible internal states. (And this process, of course, might break down - we might fail to find a way to talk to someone.)

The 'private world' is projected onto the space of language in somewhat the same way as the spacial world can be projected onto an algebra. And, in the same way, geometrical demonstrations may have their algebraic isomorphs but, at the same time, be irrelevant to algebraic computations (except, perhaps, as 'interpretations' - or even metaphors ...).

(Except that geometric demonstrations are artifacts of a wider public language, and what I'm drawing attention to here is individual worlds beyond the reach of public language.)

So what is this 'mystifying' monadology metaphor for?

One part of its purpose is to draw attention to the incoherence of any questions about the 'sameness' of our internal experiences. 'Sameness' is a grammatical category, so cannot be projected into non-grammatical 'spaces'. More specifically, questions about the 'sameness' of the internal worlds of the users of a shared language are incoherent.

We might have an experience that feels like discovering that we can talk about something we previously thought of as 'internal'. This experience, itself, will have internal and external aspects. By writing this, I am trying to trigger experiences of this kind in my interlocutors (perhaps more than I am trying to 'tell' them something ...)

Our private worlds inspire us to speak in certain ways - to say certain things. If we are 'skilled' language users, these things will be more likely to be intelligible than if we are not. The experience of having this skill, and the experience of exercising it, are part of our private landscape. The skill arises from practice, and will develop better if our private world seems to be integrated seamlessly with the public world of communication - if our experience has been that it is respected, even if unseen.

Behavioural Metaphors

There are various senses in which we might imagine something can be 'reduced' to 'behaviour'.

(This is an old chestnut, so I want to explain why I'm turning it over:

The 'technology' of language - the squiggles and noises, the semaphore, anything which can be reproduced by a machine process - is a kind of 'behaviour'. At some level it is tempting to think 'but this is all there really is. What else can there be?' Except that that question itself cannot be reduced to the characters used to present it here ... not even to those characters in a 'wider context' which is assumed also to be of the same nature - squiggles, noises, the machinery of representation ...)

So. Behaviour. Three cases:

We might literally have a behavioural definition: certain semaphore signals can be translated into alphabetic characters because we have a complete set of rules for how to do this. (We must assume, of course, that we are translating semaphore, but I will pass over this because I want to use the case as an example without letting too much depend upon it.)

The second case is where we imagine there is some such set of rules, but that we do not know, or do not know entirely, what they are. We imagine that with enough time and computational capacity we could encode and enact them and that only 'human limitations' prevent this. We imagine we are dealing with something that is in principle like semaphore, that it is the chess to semaphore's noughts and crosses.

The third case is where we know that even in principle there is no way to write down all the behavioural rules, and we know that natural language is like this because the rules must be written down in some part of it, and so will remain, to some extent, systematically ambiguous because of the 'open question' problem.

In this third case, we might imagine, however, that some 'semaphore' or 'in principle semaphore' metaphor can be appealed to, even though we know that the metaphor can never be fully 'unpacked'. This, of course, is a profound and misleading mistake.

(It can be hard to accept this, because we might still find ourselves asking 'but what else is there?' - and this just demonstrates the power of the metaphor. It's like believing that some step forward is taken when we 'recognise that everything is just atoms' - or some other materialistic substrate. Before we can make statements like these, we have to know what 'all interaction is behaviour' or 'everything is just atoms' means, and this question cannot be answered in terms of behaviour or atoms ...)

There are two dimensions to this mistake - one is the OQ issue, which I've discussed at length.

The other is to do with the explanatory power of metaphor.

A metaphor may suggest a way to speak, but it cannot command, or even support, semantic conformity. We can see, for instance, the ways in which electricity 'flow' is somewhat like fluid flow, and this might help us to understand some aspects of an electrical circuit (although it makes others more obscure ...).

But if someone tried to explain basic arithmetic, or the principle of non-contradiction, by way of a metaphor we would wonder whether they properly understood the subject. Equally, we cannot regard arithmetic or logic as simply a 'game' with 'rules' since they are anchors of the intelligibility of our explanations, and so of the intelligibility of our shared world. (And we have to include, here, explanations of what we do when we appeal to metaphors ...)

The 'rules' we should be interested in are only those without which we cannot explicate rules. And these rules are rules about how to speak that turn out to be, through that, rules about the way the world must be.

Sonnet 18

So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

Pontius Pilate's question is always an indication of bad faith. 'Is this true?' is fine. 'Can we define truth?' is not. As a rhetorical move, it is always dishonest. The purpose of our conversation is to discover what we should count as true. We cannot predict what we might find.

Within that conversation, some particular things must count as true, or it becomes unintelligible (and so not a conversation). In other words, the question 'Is this true?' must, occasionally, get a unanimous 'yes' from all participants. And we cannot entertain certain doubts about what the participants are doing when they say 'yes' without also doubting the quality of their engagement.

('What is truth?' is like 'We may all be engaging incompetently or dishonestly.' And we should ask: Even when we say that? If Pilates's question was honest, he would not know what to do with the answer. Of course, it plays a complex role in that particular narrative and it's exegesis...)

So who is participating in this conversation? I don't know, of course. I sit here tapping away, doing something that works in other 'conversational' contexts, but I do it on my own.

We think by imagining interlocutors, but they are only other versions of ourselves.

(It's a curious thought that our ability to talk to one another, and then to imagine conversations, might have displaced a more 'native' cognitive engagement with the world. Maybe we're not as clever as we think ...)

Rights

Think about:

R - 'You have no rights at all'.

No right to attach any intelligible interpretation to R?

No right to expect you to be saying something intelligible to me?

No right to be told the truth?

All incoherent, of course. We must attribute some minimal rights to interlocutors.

Is this a ground for a general theory of rights? (Do we have the right to rice pudding and income tax?)

Perhaps. Depending on what kinds of conversation we want to have...

Meaning and Truth Conditions

There is a strong tendency within Analytic Philosophy to identify the meaning of a statement with its truth conditions.

While this is almost right, it ignores the ambiguity introduced by the problem of interpreting truth conditions - of, literally, establishing their meanings.

This is just the OQ problem, of course, in another guise - but it represents an absolute bar to avoiding ambiguity entirely when it comes to questions of meaning. Meaning will always be contextual - consequent upon a context of (to some extent tacit) agreement. In circumstances where that context can be shown to be any possible linguistic exchange, statements about meaning will become 'privileged', in Stroud's sense.

This test, of course, depends on what we mean by 'language' ...

Facts

I feel as though I'm crisscrossing a familiar landscape, now, but perhaps revisiting it is worthwhile ...

Demonstrating the truth of  'It is a fact that A' is exactly the same as demonstrating that 'It is not a fact that A' is unintelligible. The two cases are methodologically indistinguishable.

We want to believe that an 'unintelligible' statement is unintelligible because it breaks some specific (explicit) rule - perhaps it is self-contradictory. This has led us astray. I have identified (in previous posts) three different ways in which a statement can be unintelligible:

(1)    The familiar one (above), which is that it contains or entails an explicit contradiction.

(2)    One in which it entails an implicit contradiction, so that any 'conventional' semantic interpretation makes the 'content' of the 'statement' inconsistent with its being a statement at all. Examples are Moore's paradox, and other more general cases such as 'we are unable to converse' (as in Stroud's 'privileged class').

(3)    One in which we simply fail to be able to talk to one another, where we do not know 'how to go on'. This would happen if, for instance, we were unable to agree on some immediate empirical facts.

We can find ourselves uncertain about which of these applies to any particular case, of course, because the boundaries of intelligibility are also the boundaries of definite meaning. A contradiction or a Moorean paradox can only be demonstrated on the grounds of definite meanings, and meaning begins to evaporate quite quickly if we cannot agree on facts.

And, of course, the sense of 'demonstrating' in the second paragraph is also quite hard to pin down. We can only 'demonstrate' the truth of something if we can agree that something counts as a demonstration; can give specific examples and answer questions about why they work.

The bounds of this process are, of course, exactly the bounds of intelligibility - and this is what saves us from incoherent relativism or scepticism. Without the possibility of some valid demonstrations we have no language - no possible way of distinguishing truth from falsehood, and so no 'meanings'.

No way of asking questions, never mind answering them ...

Experimenting with intelligibility and experimenting with reality are, ultimately, the same activity.

Theories of Conversation

No theory, statement, claim, or narrative can have a higher epistemological status than the conversation within which it is expressed.