Unpredictability and Unintelligibility

Einstein's famous dictum that 'God does not play dice' might be a projection of a problem with the semantic grounding of scientific (or any...) theories.

In order to make sense to one another, we must (at least) be able to predict, to some extent, how honest and competent interlocutors will use the words we use to do this. For Wittgenstein, this predictability of use was what we really meant by 'meaning'.

If the world is arranged in such a way that two participants in a conversation might be using a word correctly but still semantically diverge, then the consequent confusion cannot be resolved. We might imagine that a fundamentally stochastic universe could be like this - that two experimenters might correctly give conflicting answers to a question about, for example, when a uranium atom emitted an alpha particle.

This is not, of course, what happens. While they might only be able to agree on a probability distribution beforehand, we do not expect them to disagree on the actual timing of the event afterward. The 'Many Worlds' interpretation of quantum mechanics, and possibly other holistic approaches to it, avoids the problem by ensuring that interlocutors who might give different accounts of the actual event can never converse, so no semantic incoherence can arise.

We might wonder whether any solution of this kind to the problem can really be satisfactory. My instinct is that Einstein would have thought not.

But we need to be wary of instinct here - both mine and Einstein's. We are inclined to treat the world as semantically transparent - as though it was possible to be quite explicit about the meanings and uses of the words we use to give our accounts of it. But we know that this heuristic leads us into confusion. When we try to be (exhaustively) explicit about the meanings of words we find that we need to be explicit about the meaning of our explicit account as well, and so run into an open question problem. Some minimal ambiguity must remain. So long as it is not 'methodologically' relevant, it may do no harm ...

The appearance and persistence of the heuristic of semantic transparency is not surprising - it's a productive metaphysical posture, for one thing, and many specific ambiguities turned out to be resolvable, for another.

Once again, however, we mustn't imagine that a specific grammatical structure reflects an independent metaphysical substrate. Semantic transparency is a product of our language use, not a grounding for it. While a world in which radical semantic divergences were irresolvable would not support language users, we cannot draw any conclusions about this beyond that we do not live in such a world.

In particular, we can't say now how we might resolve future threats of semantic divergence. Perhaps by reviewing what we mean by 'playing dice', for instance ...