Semantic Consistency (2)

I made a mistake in my last post: 'from one occasion to another ...'.

Time, repetition, comparison, are also - in the sense I've been exploring - 'grammatical' categories and concepts. So when I say 'from one occasion to another' I'm  'projecting' these onto the world I'm describing.

I'm not saying here that time isn't 'real' - what I'm saying is that it can't be a ground of, or 'prior to',  intelligibility (or of 'semantic consistency') because any claims we make about the 'reality of time' already presuppose minimal semantic consistency.

What can we say about this? What roots can we find?

Once again, all we need here is for 'minimal semantic consistency is required for intelligibility' to be true in our present conversation. If it is, of course, we are committed to making a similar claim about other conversations in the 'past', 'future', and elsewhere ... claims about semantic consistency become, again, just claims that we can, in fact, talk to each other.

So instead of saying that the world must be a certain way in order to validate semantic intelligibility, we say that because we are intelligible to one another, the world must permit this. The epistemological dependence goes in the opposite direction to the 'empirical' dependence. The epistemic argument is a modus tollens, not a modus ponens.

Semantic Consistency

To a minimal extent, we need to believe that words have the same meanings on different occasions of use. We play with counters, marks and clicks and imagine that we are abstracting - and so create abstractions of 'counters', 'clicks', 'marks', 'abstraction'...

Kripke/Goodman considerations tell us that this belief cannot be grounded in any conception of material or behavioural consistency, because these permit a kind of ambiguity which would be catastrophic for semantic content. In order to talk about the world (in other words ...) we employ devices with normative characteristics that nothing in the world they represent can instantiate.

Another reason why semantic consistency can't be grounded in any empirical substrate is because it is a pre-requisite to speculating about empirical substrates (or about anything ...).

Can the world enable semantic consistency without instantiating it? Or is the question: 'How can the world enable semantic consistency without instantiating it?'

This might be 'box beetle' and 'private language' territory. (Perhaps in a different guise.)

We might think, for instance, that the world only needs to make it seem to us that it enables semantic consistency (i.e. that it 'might not be real', or something like that?). A difficulty with this is that any speculation of this sort must, itself, depend on a presumption of semantic consistency. Even to speculate that some words may change their meanings, we need others to be consistent. I can't wonder whether my speculations about semantic consistency are actually about something else altogether - perhaps not even speculations.

(A sub-linguistic world of 'meanings' and 'propositions' doesn't really help here - this is definitely 'box beetle' territory.)