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.