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.)