Something that can't be explained

There is (literally) no explanation for the 'fact' that I see the world from over here (from my 'perspective') and you see it from over there ...

Why should I have special access to some of the world's events and not to others? Why am I aware of any of them? Why not all of them?

We can sort of imagine (or maybe only think we can imagine) an impersonal physical universe - not LaPlacian, perhaps, but some more up to date equivalent. We might even say things like 'you are a part of this universe - a sub-system - which interacts with the rest in a specific way, and therefore is only "aware" of some events and not of others'. But this doesn't solve the problem of why I am this particular sub-system and not some other. Why am I not you?

Externally, of course, lots of kinds of explanations can be suggested. Psychologists and neurologists looking for a 'seat of consciousness' or for some systemic explanation of consciousness focus on behaviours and cognitive structures characteristic of those of us who think of our selves as conscious and of those others we attribute consciousness to.

This doesn't help very much, though, because these behaviours are only accessible to theory once they have been described, and they are - in some sense - associated with all conscious beings. What I'm interested in is my consciousness, not everyone else's. I want to know why I'm aware of the world I'm aware of. And much of this world is not only unverbalised, its unverbalisable.

So far as my participation in this conversation is concerned, of course, I could be anyone - or at least anyone like me. I wouldn't actually have to be me. If I was replaced by a cunning automaton, who would know except for myself? I might, like a Stepford wife, be ousted by a murderous doppelganger - and it might be ousted in its turn - for all this conversation was concerned.

But it would, surely, concern me. I wouldn't be here any more.

Does this make any sense? Well, not in this conversation - it is a 'hinge' of this conversation that I am the same person who wrote the previous posts in this Blogg.

Is this being a 'hinge' a solution to the problem?

In one sense yes, because it points to the public conception of a continuing person with the ability to converse. We can even understand (in this public world) why some people know some things that other people don't.

But in another sense, it just evades the question. Why am I sitting typing at this keyboard, looking at this screen. Not a public puzzle, but a question about my particular phenomenology.

Why was my world constructed with this subject? There is nothing in our shared world that can explain this to me.

Is this the same as the Zombies problem?

No. Whether or not we treat each other like zombies is a normative issue. I don't think mind theorists take the normative aspects of mind attribution seriously enough, but that's another problem. I can't treat myself as a zombie, so this question is not the same as the zombies problem.

In a sense, posing this question is a poetic move in this conversation - I am suggesting something, alluding to something, that cannot really be said; and I am doing this by appearing to say it.

(I can put the idea that it may not be possible to talk into your head by saying 'It is not possible to talk' even if this is strictly nonsensical).

Whether or not you can engage with this may have something to do with how self-conscious you are of your linguistic abilities - how much you are aware of talking as an activity depending on an inarticulable substrate of skills ...

Propositions and Rules?

Some Wittgensteinian scholars might like to distinguish between propositions and rules - or 'hinges' - but sometimes a statement functions like a propostion, and sometimes like a rule.

It's hard to say this, though because whether or not we are dealing with a proposition or a rule depends on what game we are playing - or, rather, on which part of the 'overall' game we are playing. And the game we're playing determines what we can say and what we can't say ...

When we move from one game to another, we indicate that we have done so by using explicit truth-predicates, which, I think, are always used in a rule-like way. When I say 'My cat is hungry' I mean that my cat is hungry. When I say 'It is true that my cat is hungry' I am telling you how I am going to talk, and inviting you to talk the same way. You might respond by pointing out that this rule won't work for some reason, or you might find you don't know how to play the game I seem to be proposing, but while the first statement can legitimately be described as being about the world (with it's hungry cat), the second cannot.

Thinking that we are talking about the world when we use truth predicates, rather than about how we are going to talk, is one of the most fundamental errors that philosophers have made.

Ramsey's Ladder, again

Maybe I've said this before:

We want to preserve the first rung, but not the rest. We want to leave S meaningful, or rather usefully meaningful (!) where S="X is true"; but we want to leave "S is true" vacuous.

Rules, of course, work like this. If S="It is a rule that X", this means something. But to say "It is also a rule that S" is vacuous. We don't have a 'master' rule that says we must follow the rules. To propose something as a rule is just to propose that it should be complied with (with contextual qualifications, and under agreement).

If statements of truth values are, or are importantly like, statements of rules, then statements attributing truth or falsehood to statements of truth values will always be vacuous.

The traditional liar paradox is a statment about the truth value of itself: "This statement is false" contains a statement about a truth value. Taken as a rule, it is simply incomprehensible: there is no answer to the questions 'What way does this rule require us to talk?'.

And it only appears to be consequential if we allow the rule that we should follow the rules ...

Is it true that we should tell the truth (generally, with appropriate caveats etc.)? It's vacuously true, in a playable game. Its falsehood can't be a move in a playable game.

And:

"We should always talk as though this statement is false" is incomprehensible at the first level - it simply cannot mean what, at first sight, it pretends to mean. It tells us to do something that is logically impossible. (What it appears to mean is something that would falsify an interpretive hypothesis, in the Davidsonian sense).

Cartesian Anxiety

Our central phenomenological terror is not that our perceptions might deceive us, but that our friends might:

The inexpressible hyperbolic doubt that we are always talking at cross purposes.

Pace Dante, the gates of hell bear no intelligible warning.

Interpreting behaviour

We often re-interpret or misinterpret behaviour. Kripke shows that there can always be more than one intentional description of the same behaviour.

It is natural to think, here, of there being (a) the behaviour and (b) a set of interpretations. But we shouldnt make the mistake of thinking that there must, therefore, be a way of describing the 'uninterpreted' behaviour. The only descriptions we may have might be interpretations, and the 'sameness of behaviour' might only consist in our agreement that the interpretations are interpretations of the 'same' behaviour.

We may demonstrate this 'sameness' by identifying key aspects of the situation ('navigation markers') - such as time, place, actors etc. - but these are not descriptions of behaviour, and might not include anything which told us what was actually happening.

We might imagine, also, that some mechanical descriptions of limb movements and interactions with objects might somehow 'capture' the raw elements without introducing an interpretation. Computer simulations are based on models which encode this kind of information, but they are extremely difficult to interpret as 'descriptions' - they contain a great deal more information than our normal descriptions, and it is organised in a way which is hard for a human being to decode.

While the possibility of this modelling language might have been predicted from our judgements of sameness (and the existence of the 'navigation markers') , it certainly hasn't played any important role in producing judgements or demonstrations of sameness.

Also: it isn't clear that any such language really could capture all of the things which contribute to our actual arguments for sameness (where these are produced). The navigation markers relevant to a particular demonstration may be idiosyncratic, and missing from the the encoded description. We may not refer to time and place or personae but infer these from some other data which are not generally included in the descriptions encoded in the modelling language.

So what we have is just interpretations and the judgement of sameness. And we can make this judgment reliably - it would be incoherent to suggest that we don't. We also produce intelligible arguments for sameness which do not depend on 'full descriptions', or anything like these.

Speaking Correctly

We might talk about 'speaking correctly' in terms of uttering / recording the correct sounds or symbol strings etc. When we try to say what this is we end up being very clumsy - the idea, which seems so clear to start with, evaporates as we try to articulate it. We can give examples (such as the string of characters that comprises this post), but what could we exclude?

Instinctively, we say - we could exclude meaningless utterances/recordings/artefacts (... etc.).

So does 'speaking correctly' require only that we follow the 'rules of meaningfulness'? (And if, for isntance, we allow false statements only as the contraries of true ones, and let Duns Scotus deal with the issue of trying to make them work as serious assertions ...).

This is no better, because we need to know the meanings of the rules in order to follow them correctly and also because we cannot know (Kripke) what rule someone is following simply from their behaviour: and we we would need to know this in order to know that we knew what they were saying. And we must, broadly, know what they are saying if we are having a conversation with them. (E.g. discussing meaning).

And there is another problem: we might say that two 'expressions' mean the same thing if they are correct translations of one another. This could be a practical matter - e.g. we use them interchangably in certain contexts; or a theoretical one - we say that they mean the same thing. This second option is another move in the game; and the first is identified by a move in the game - a description of the relevant practices.

In order to speak correctly we follow certain syntactical rules, but this is neither (ultimately) sufficient nor necessary. We can create new rules and we can follow the rules meaninglessly.

Is there a general limit to this?

Not one that can be stated, because if we try we will generate an open question paradox.

Are there particular limits (boulders in the torrent, to which we can cling or against which we would break)?

There are the rules of logic - whose contraries immediately generate meaninglessness by generating contradictions - but whose scope of application can only be defined after we have agreed on certain interpretations, after we have agreed on what would count as conforming to or breaking the rules. ~(P&~P) is only 'obvious' if both instances of 'P' mean the same thing (and there are deeper, more inarticulable issues of interpretation as well).

We may, in other words, reduce syntax to semantics; we can never reduce semantics to syntax. We can only state syntactical rules, and we can only make unequivocal judgements about whether or not they are being followed, in the context of a meaningful conversation.

What kind of judgement is it that we are engaged in a meaningful conversaion?

It's a normative judgement on the part of the individual participants, but it is not expressed within the conversation (where it would be vacuously true, where its contradictory would be nonsense) - it is instead expressed by their participation. A doubt about it would bear on this, and a serious doubt would lead to withdrawal (not to some absurdity such as 'you are all talking nonsense', except as a rhetorical exaggeration ...).

This withdrawal might express itself in a number of ways, including an apparent, but dishonest, continuation: 'participation' with purely instrumental goals, for instance.

This is the real Cartesian anxiety - not that we are beign deceived by our senses, but that we are being deceived by one another. The first might worry philosophers, but the second could drive anyone mad - and there is no philosophical speculation which could entertain it.

Transcendental arguments ...

"Some argument is valid" (statement "V") must be a reliable move in any valid argument.

There are no reliable moves in an invalid argument (Duns Scotus).

Is it an axiom? Or is it a statement of the possibility of there being some axiomata?

What if we found that some some axiom A was (a) coextensive with V with respect to arguments or (b) was a necessary condition of 'some argument is valid' or (c) was a consequence of 'some argument is valid' but not of some other (independent) statement?

It's hard to imagine (a) being the case without this being a consequence of either (b) or (c), except that logical rules (symbol manipulation rules) look like possible candidates. Without them, it's hard to see how (b) or (c) could be demonstrated and there is some sense in which the scope of these rules is the same as the scope of valid argument (and therefore of V).

A logician might argue that V contains an undefined notion of validity, and so is 'meaningless'.

This is only the case if the definition is absent - not if it is simply incomplete. In a natural language, the concept of validity is both funtional and incomplete. Assertions of validity or invalidity may be stipulative ("This is the way we should talk."), or experimental ("Let's try talking this way.") But these stipulations and experiments may work or not work; and with them the language itself (if the breakdown is widespread) and so any possible concept of 'validty' at all.

Logic works with rules, but the language in which the logical rules are stated cannot be analysed as rule based.

Truth and honest practice

Because we have to recognise that commercial language use has legitimate operational goals, we cannot (as we might in the sciences) render 'honest practice' as 'truth-telling'.

The bomb disposal example (see "Meaning and 'transmission'") illustrates this. Honest practice here clearly excludes truth telling.

Things and Words

Because we can write down syntactical rules for parts of our language, and because we use these to demonstrate certain things, we forget that a demonstration of the validity of our arguments in general cannot be based on rules. Similarly with establishing semantic consequences - we can write down a few of these in a rule based way, but we can't completely eliminate semantic imports into the rules that we use. We can't give a general account of how language comes to have semantic content.

When I say that I can say 'The cat is hungry' - that this is a legitimate move in the language game I am playing (i.e. that it is 'true' for that game) - because of the way the world is, I am not saying that I can say 'The cat is hungry' because the cat is hungry. This is a kind of category mistake - or a mistake about the meta-level we are dealing with.

Of course it is true that if I say (seriously) 'the cat is hungry' I must also believe that the cat is hungry (or I'm not playing the game properly). For the purposes of that game, I must believe that this is the way the world is. But that is only because I am using this language to describe the world, and not some other language - e.g. the language I would use to explain how this language (the one in which the cat is hungry is a fact) works.

If I try to explain how this language works, I end up saying silly things like "'The cat is hungry' is true because the cat is hungry" (or their equivalent). Or, I say: "'The cat is hungry' is true in this language game because the world allows this language game to work". And the second statement doesn't say anything specific about the world except that we can talk about it the way we do, in fact, talk about it ...

Maybe this is 'the fact' of the slingshot - I would need to look at this again. It's where we go when we try to make general statements about what must, ultimately, be true in order for anything to be true. We end up with just this one feature of the world: that something can be true about it.

Two Dogmas

If there is something about the world that makes 'Vixens are foxes' true, it is not that Vixens are foxes, but that the world allows us to speak that way.

In fact, the only 'fundamental' thing we can say about the world is that it allows us to speak the way we do: and we can know this a priori, because we can know (in the context of speaking to one another) 'we can speak about the world' a priori.

If we try to say anything else, if we propose some other metaphysical fundamental, we are introducing a new constraint. We can do this with respect to more constrained games (for which these constraints might be hinge propositions), but in the most general cases we are caught by the 'as though' problem: that no philosophical importance can be attached to distinguishing between, for example, 'There are real physical objects in the world' and 'we can talk as though there are real physical objects in the world'. 'We can talk' and 'We can talk as though we can talk' is the only general circumstance in which the metaphysical implication is direct - the second statement is just a repetition of the first.

Syntax and Semantics

For many 'information' channels (e.g. the computer I'm using to type this, or a gas whose temperature is interesting) there is a huge disparity between the number of possible messages and the number of semantically useful messages that can be passed. There are many billions of states that my computer could be in that are entirely useless, and many many more billions of states that a cubic centimetre of air at 12 degrees Celsius can be in on a cool day in Aberdeen. Chaos and redundancy are intuitive barriers for many people coming to information theory for the first time: we instinctively think that 'information' means useful information - information that means something.

But we only get meaning through interpretation - the different states of the cubic centimetre of air are only interesting if we can distinguish them - by their consequences, or by decoding them in different ways.

This may be difficult with the gas example. We might think the computer example is easier - we can list the states of all the independent storage elements, and show where the differences lie.

But this doesn't meant that we can 'reverse engineer' all of these states and represent them as the intelligible output of a programme - even one with errors in in it.

Some states cannot arise as a result of programming errors (at any level) and can only result from hardware faults, but a single hardware fault might result in a large number of possible memory states, so that we only need to recognise them as members of a class in order to find the fault - we don't need to be able to identify and interpret each one separately.

The overall plan ....

Here is a rough synopsis:

(1) For broadly Davidsonian reasons, as well as others, we can roughly identify our 'conceptual scheme' with the conversation we are presently engaged in, and since we identify other things as conversations only if we can translate them, we end up with, in a rather ragged way, only one conceptual scheme. If we think it might have inconsistencies, we can try to find them & eliminate them. We have no intelligible way of speculating about what kind of language game this process would result in, because we would need to be able to translate it into the language we use now in order to indulge this speculation; and this is something we cannot, by definition, do.

(2) Although synthetic a priori beliefs may be elusive, synthetic a priori statements are easy to construct, as we can make general statements about the possibility of language: 'We can speak' is either true or not a statement. We need to be able to make assertions, because to deny this is to make an assertion. If we can make assertions, then 'We can speak' has the corrollary 'We can tell the truth'.

(3) Generic theories of truth (of how to speak) are blocked by the open question argument. Statements that it isn't possible to know we're telling the truth are self-refuting. So we must be able to know we're telling the truth without being able to say why, in order for language to work: and since we can assert the latter a priori, the former must be the case.

(4) The structure of fundamental arguments now becomes recursive: we can never argue 'X must be true because it is a theorem of my theory of truth', and we certainly can't argue 'X must be true because it isn't possible to tell the truth with certainty'. The only alternative is the transcendental argument: 'X must be true or it would not be possible to tell the truth'.

(5) Since 'We can speak' is an empirical statement, it is possible to construct fundamental empirical arguments transcendentally: Either Empirical(X) is true or it is not possible to make empirical statements. This is the bridge from reason to the world.

(6) While it may be possible to construct a transcendental argument (as in 5) for the reliability of the senses, this would not rescue traditional sensory empiricist epistemology - it would show that the reliability of the senses depended upon the reliability of empirical statements, and not vice versa.

Some stages obviously need elucidation (!) and there are lots of interesting consequences and further developments...

But the main elements are all here.

Another take on the Open Question Argument?

Suppose a group of interlocutors agreed on an articulated theory of truth for the language they were using: they would also, then, have to be considered to share an interpretation of the theory. And this is something they cannot articulate within the language - they can only point to the continuation of the conversation.

Another way of putting this: Sharing an articulated theory of truth is also sharing an interpretation of such a theory, and our only grounds for saying that we share an interpretation are the same grounds we have for saying we share a tacit theory of truth - that we can can continue talking to one another. And within the language game we are using to converse, we know this a priori. If the interpretations diverge, the game breaks down - and we don't even have anything with which to say that it has broken down, far less discuss our varying interpretations.

(We do, obviously, discuss varying interpretations of some linguistic moves - but only within a shared framework of truth-telling.)

Phenomena

Phenoma are also ontological constructions.

We think we 'really' share them because we can talk as though we do.

They seem fundamental because we seem to 'refer' to them introspectively. But there is no reason why any two individuals' internal states should be 'commensurable' beyond what is required for mutual intelligibility.

This is why there can be no 'science' - no articulated theory - of consciousness. We do not share the aspects which we would need to articulate in order to make such a science possible.

Reminiscence ....

This now seems more important to me than when I first wrote it down:

"Kripke’s paradox cannot have the consequence that we cannot be sure that someone who states it is following the rules that make its statement intelligible."

It's really the solution to the paradox, and also an explanation of how we should think about language and certainty.

Introspection

If you can participate in this conversation, then you are a language user - you will feel like a language user (if you have any relevant feelings about it at all).

If you think 'what do I feel about what it would be appropriate to say, here?', then you are likely to come up with the right answer, since knowing the right thing to say is just what competent language users can do.

But the reliability of these introspections is misleading: it can make us think that these feelings and internal processes are at the root of the reliability of the move we feel is appropriate, or even of the language game itself.

(In order to show that a particular move in the game is reliable, or correct, we must produce an argument, not a feeling. It is incoherent to ask for an argument for the reliability of the whole game: an argument for the reliability of argument would not demonstrate anything.)

And this observation extends to our empirical intuitions as well as our 'language instinct'. It is not our sensory perceptions which make us reliable theorists - it is our ability to agree with each other about them. Our theories are linguistic artifacts.

Our ability to act in a rational way - an ability any moderately sentient animal exhibits to a greater or lesser extent - is not an ability to theorise, except under interpretation. If I describe a cat as having a theory, I am describing its behaviour in a certain way - as having a certain normative content. There will always be an alternative 'cognitive', or computational (homeostatic?) interpretation which elminates this content. This isn't possible in the case of a person who articulates a theory, because we can only produce a computational account of this behaviour by reducing the linguistic performance to something mechanical. Articulating a theory is participating in a conversation - we don't automatically do this by moving our jaws in certain ways and producing certain sounds.

I might, in a very complex conversation with you, give you an account of how your physiology and neurology instantiated certain cognitive/computational process in such a way as to produce the output we recognise as 'speech'. But when you said 'Ah yes, I see', I would hardly respond 'And there's another example of it working'.

Belief, Interpretation, and Criticism

In order to believe what you say, I have to understand it. I have to interpret it.

This means that I can't just 'accept' it. There is no belief without interpretation.

And there is no interepretation without critical interpretation. If I wonder 'what sense does this make?' then I am wondering 'how can this make sense?' This is the same as trying to figure out how I can continue the conversation with you.

Just because the outcomes of these reflections can seem obvious, and the reflections themselves 'subconscious', they are not therefore 'given' in any useful sense. They are the outcomes of cognitive processes which, if we are not able to articulate them, are still our 'practice'. They are things that we do.

In this sense, I cannot believe you without critically interpreting what you say: without, in the literary sense criticising you.

Whatever private reservations we might have, and however we might (again privately) engage only provisionally in a conversation, there are only some interpretations which are consistent with it being a conversation. When we articulate a criticism, therefore, it must be consistent with the possibility of the conversation within which it is articulated.

This means that there are some criticisms which are wrong (inconsistent with the the possibility of their supporting conversation), and some which are not-wrong. A disjunctive list of the not-wrong criticisms must be a correct criticism - however qualified and inconclusive.

The consequences of this may be trivial, however. Northanger Abbey is neither a Western nor a vaccuum cleaner repair manual. And the 'disjunctive list' may be unmanageably long.

Version 12

Showing incoherence ...

The statement 'It is not possible to talk' can't mean exactly what it says and still be true. However, the following seem reasonable (at least superficially):

(1) We know what it means, because otherwise we couldn't decide that it was false.

(2) There is some sense in which we can think that it's impossible to talk:

- there is behaviour that would be consistent with this (although it would also be consistent with other things which were inconsistent with it).

- it seems possible to imagine finding out (as in some nightmare) that we have never been able to talk, and that whenever we thought we were talking we were always making some kind of mistake.

- in order to understand the falsehood of the statement, we need to have some conception of what it would be for it to be true.

(3) When I say 'It is not possible to talk', you might think 'well - can this be true?'. If you thought it was true, you would (a) not answer me (or not answer me honestly) and (b) realise that I hadn't really spoken to you. You might think 'these sounded like words that meant something, and because I was taken in by their apparent meaning they made me think - and come to a remarkable conclusion - but in fact they didn't mean anything at all'.

All this clearly has a kind of fairytale quality to it, and, I think (for reasons that are peripheral for the present, but related to the private language argument), may also be incoherent.

However - it suggests something useful:

We can show things without saying them (obviously), but we may also be able to show things by saying something, and even by seeming to say what it is that we mean to show - even though what we seem to be saying can't be true.

Imagine you have a rare kind of colour blindness, so that under indoor lighting you see red as green & green as red, but in daylight you don't. You are coming to me for evening classes in road safety, and I need to show you which colour of light means stop and which means go. What do I show you?

And what if we don't know which one of us is making the mistake? What do the words 'red' and 'green' mean here? All we know is that we don't agree about which indoor light looks like the outdoor light. We can talk, though, because we can predict what each other will say when asked.

If I wanted to show you what to look for in an outdoor red light, I would show you an indoor light that looked green to me. I might even say 'look - this is a red light'.

When I say 'it is possible to talk' must be true in any language game in which its equivalent (under interpretation) can be constructed, I may be simultaneously introducing you to the possibility of its contrary.

And: maybe if you can't imagine the contrary you can't understand the statement.

The construction of the theoretical certainty depends upon an appreciation of the phenomenological uncertainty. If you can't think the unsayable - if you can't live with Cartesian anxiety - then you will never have theoretical certainty.

My thesis depends upon showing you a possibility that cannot be articulably entertained, and showing you by pretending to entertain it - the argument is a reductio from the presumption of its own unintelligibility.

Instead of an axiomatic contradiction, we have a contradiction with the possibility of axiomatisation.

Syntax and Paradoxes

Syntactical rules may appear to set minimal standards of intelligibility, but they don't guarantee intelligibility.

We shouldn't be deceived by the 'obviousness' of some of these rules - finding them obvious is really just the condition of being able to talk. In other words, we wouldn't be able to to talk if we didn't find quite a few of them obvious.

For Kripkean reasons, we cannot render a syntactical rule mechanically: any potential mechanical isomorph could be unreliable. We cannot say 'to find the consequence of the non-contradiction rule, press this button', because we would have to use the non-contradiction rule to test the reliability of the button.

We can only state syntactical rules if we have a working semantic context: if we can speak.

So while they might represent boundaries of intelligibity they cannot exist independently of it. They cannot conceptually precede it. We can't make sense of a syntactical rule outside of a semantic context.

So: incompleteness/inconsistency theorems, which seem to be purely syntactical, can only be constructed in a semantic context within which the normative syntactical rules can be stated unequivocally. It is within this semantic context that the rules have the correct scope, and can stand as tests for any potential mechancial isomorph.

It is because we can describe a logic gate functionally that it counts as a logic gate.

(But also: we describe the world this way as well. It is only because we can describe the world functionally that we can describe it at all - Goodman's paradox is constructed the same way as Kripke's).

Godel's paradoxes, then, become semantic paradoxes because we can say whether it is true that certain syntactical rules have been observed.

?