Naming and Metaphysics

And, of course, there is this:

We can only determine that 'A' and 'B' are not two names for the same thing if we can account for the way we distinguish between the 'things' they might be names for. This doesn't reach 'outside the language'. It's just like the game of 'Pangolin' - Is there a question we can ask about something that must have a different answer for A than for B?

If there is no such question, we have no grounds for denying identity. To claim that there may be a 'real' distinction that we cannot discern is no more than to claim that we may have to review our conclusion in the light of new circumstances. If the possibility of review is unintelligible, then the identity is necessary.

Meaning, Use, and Method

Wittgenstein's conflation of meaning and use, and Davidson's (and others') conflation of meaning with 'truth conditions' could be mashed together into an approach that yields some interesting results.

The truth-condition account of the meaning of an assertion could be generalised in terms of 'instructions for use'. We could say 'The right time to say "It is raining in Nebraska" is when it is raining in Nebraska'.

This kind of account would allow us to go beyond assertions - so long as we can either show or explain the use of an expression, we could say that we can introduce someone to its meaning.

Now imagine two circumstances that we want to distinguish - circumstance A and circumstance B. We can only succeed practically if we can show that there is a methodological (in the broadest sense) wedge that we can drive between them - if we can show someone a way of discovering, for instance, that it is A, and not B, that we have an example of on a particular occasion. If there is no methodological wedge, and we still insist that a distinction can be made, we have nothing to point to. (A distinction based on naming itself would be question-begging.)

(Once, when I was visiting a university in Beijing, a local member of staff showed me a sculpture that they described as 'the pigeon of peace'. I struggled to think of how I might explain their 'mistake' to them. In the end, I didn't try - but various 'use' type explanations have occurred to me since ...)

The point of all this is that if I cannot communicate use distinctions to you, then I cannot communicate meaning distinctions either.

This has some important consequences - for instance, for whether we can distinguish between:

"The world is the way we say it is", and

"The world allows us to talk about it in the way that we do."

Semantic Experiment and Artificial Intelligence

We use 'linguistic tokens' in two distinguishable ways:

(1) In accordance with pre-existing grammatical and semantic rules.

(2) Experimentally - by exploring new possible rules and uses.

It is possible to imagine building a definite model of (1) for some particular state of our language use, but it is far from clear that modeling (2) is possible.

It is, in other words, possible to imagine programming (1), but not (2).

Human intelligence does both, and while there might be some sense in which a sophisticated self-learning algorithm might also do both, our grounds for thinking it might do this in a 'human-like' way are very weak. We don't have the appropriate kind of understanding of human intelligence to build an algorithm that can be guaranteed to behave like a human being, that would never diverge in some monstrous way.

Nature, after all, struggles to avoid monstrosity: and nature works more slowly, and has fewer combinatorial options available to it, than our AI experimenters do.

Turing avoided this difficulty by putting 'human intelligence' on both sides of the equation - we can't specify it, but, as human beings, we know it when we see it.

Until we don't ...