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.