More meaning

The standard forms, the rules, seem to be essential to meaning, but this is misleading. It is only in evaluation that real meaning arises, not in 'analysis' (or at least not in any formal analysis).

If I repeat what you have said to me, however exactly, I am not doing what you were doing when you said it.  I will have repeated form, not meaning. (Not use, intention, context, occasion, etc. ... an incompletable list).

I write this now only once, although I may reuse the words - even in this order - on other occasions.  You may believe that you have understood them as a consequence of certain conventions, but when you try to articualte these you will find them melting away under your analysis: the concept of a convention cannot be elaborated by appealing to conventions, especially when it is our ability to recognise these that is being investigated.

We should not try to say new things, but only be aware that evey saying is new, and look to its novelty for its meaning.

You might accuse me, saying that I take it as some original, some article of faith, that we can speak. But your accusation is only an accusation on exactly those grounds.  I do not 'believe' that we can speak, I just speak. It is in my speaking with you that the meaning of  'believe' arises.

Underlying directions ... ?

We can distinguish two cases:

(1) We discover that we are following a tacit rule which we can articulate without substantially disrupting our present linguistic practices.

(2) We discover a similar rule, but its articulation would cause substantial semantic disruption.

The second is a bit puzzling - how can we 'discover' a rule without articulating it?  I think the answer is that we make an experiment, and it has a revolutionary effect on the language community.

We can resist rules of the second type by refusing to articulate them. But we cannot articulate the rule 'do not articulate rule X' without articulating rule X. We can see approaches to dealing with this in authoritarian institutions. Or so I think. And maybe I'm getting ahead of myself.

A signalling system cannot be semantically 'open' - it would just be ambiguous, or incomplete. A language must be semantically 'open' if it is to develop (even in response to what we think of as 'empirical' inputs).

Signalling systems don't need to develop in this way. They are semantically closed. Perhaps we say that they have a formal semantics - which is as much as to say they have an eliminable semantics. So maybe no semantics at all. Apart from their dependence on the semantics of the language in which they are formally described.

Why would the discovery of a tacit rule cause semantic disruption? A simple case is dogmatic truth: insistence on a literal fundamental truth is vulnerable to open question observations. (To ask why the dogma is true is to contemplate the conditions under which it might not be.)

A language which cannot contemplate some of its own tacit presuppositions also cannot articulate which of those presuppositions cannot be contemplated. It must depend on habit or fear rather than argument.

The 'safe' thing to do will be to avoid too  much ...

Unintelligible Fundamentals (again)

The possiblity that the 'substrate' of intelligibility is, itself, intelligible, is blocked by open question considerations.  (A language cannot be used to articualte a theory of its own intelligibility without begging the question.)

We have two possibilities:  (1) that it cannot be explicated in any language (which is as much to say that it is unintelligible) and (2) that it can be explicated in a language which cannot be wholly translated into ours because of the open question problem.

The problem with (2) is that translatability is the only criterion of somethings being a language (Davidson).  Whatever the 'super' language can do, that part of it that articulates the theory underpinning the intelligibility of our language cannot be translated, and so cannot be identified as a language at all.

So nothing intelligible can complete the sentence "Our language is intelligible because ..." that doesn't also beg the question.  Again this is OK because 'our language is not intelligible' is unintelligible - we don't need a constructive account to guarantee intelligibility.

There are some further things to reflect on here:

'Our language is intelligible' has consequences for the way the world is organised, as this organisation cannot conflict with the intelligibility of this language we use for describing the world (among other things).  This is not quite trivial:  the world need not be organised in the way that we think it is (i.e. much of what we literally say about it need not be exactly true) in order for our language to 'work'.  (On the other hand, we run into problems with what we can mean by 'true' if we try to push this too far - Davidson, again.)  What we can be sure of, in a sense, is that any new discovery we make about the world (however disorienting to our present conceptions) will, if it is articulable, not turn out to be unintelligible.  This keeps the 'world of things' within certain 'grammatical' boundaries.

Again, one 'fact about the world' that must be literally true is that the world permits us to talk about it in the way that we do.

Another thing is that 'our language' is not a well defined set of structures.  It is constantly being experimented with, modified, and extended.  A particular kind of extension is to make a new 'meta-linguistic' move - to take a step up the hierarchy.  'The way we have spoken up to now is intelligible' remains intelligible, even if in some suitably qualified way.  We can say 'people used to believe that the earth was flat'.  (If that was ever really true ...).  If people used to speak as though the earth is flat, we can only render that as speech if we can show how such a thing might be intelligible.

In the future, we will always be able to attribute some suitably qualified intelligibility to what we say now.  This fact might lead us to speculate that there might be some future super-language in which we can explicate a theory of intelligibility for the language we currently speak.  This doesn't help with the general problem, though, as we could not translate what the speakers of that language meant by 'intelligible' when they applied that description to our language.  In short we couldn't understand what the speakers of the super-language meant by 'suitably qualfiied', because this would require us to articulate, exactly, a theory of intelligibility for our language.

We can read this two ways:  (1) That the idea of a future 'super-language' is unintelligible tout court.  Incoherent science fiction.  or (2) That, in the future, people may lose the capacity to speak in the sense that we presently understand it.  (They might partially retain it, for the purpose of decoding archives ...)

On reflection, these are probably equivalent.  With respect to (2), the speed and volume of human interaction is increasing fast, and the subsumption of the 'individual' into a larger 'super-organism' whose components' mutual signalling behaviours, while structurally complex, might have no determinable semantic content.  Much as present human language might appear to an insightful chimpanzee...

Unintelligible Fundamentals

A cat does not do a physical computation before jumping onto a high wall.

We do not do 'grammatical computations' before speaking.

A robot which could speak might be astonished to be shown its circuitry and programming. How could it map its thoughts to this organised equipment?  (It could not have been programmed to do this.)

A cat could make nothing of the physics associated with wall jumping.  Why do we expect to be able to understand the 'grammabiology' of speaking?  (We are puzzled that we cannot say what it is without talking nonsense.)

What is needed here is not 'more science' but a better understanding of what science is.

We think that reconciling our machinery, our phenomenological condition, and what we can intelligibly say is a kind of amalgam of anatomical, psychological and computational tasks.  We don't even want to think about how different these conceptions of ourselves are, never mind explore the consequences of them all being, themselves, explorations of what can intelligibly be said.

We might want to say there is some kind of mystery here - a ghost, 'something of which we cannot speak' - but even this is a misunderstanding.  The only purpose of trying to point at these things is to reveal the limits of pointing.  Mechanisms of the spirit are still mechanisims; ghosts are just hazy sorts of people; things of which we cannot speak turn out to be things we can say something about - that we cannot speak of them.  Incomprehensibly.

There is not some secret, especially deep, kind of explanation that shows our explanations to be reliable.

A paradox is not a puzzle, nor is it a special kind of road sign.  It isn't even a place where the road comes to an end.  It is like the twist in a moebius strip - we feel our way along it and find ourselves in a place we cannot understand, because to 'undrestand' is to draw a map, and no map can be drawn of this surface.

Kaleidoscope

I walk into a room and find a kaleidoscope, which I pick up and look through.

At first, I see geometrical patterns of coloured shards.  If I manipulate it, turn the tube, I see different patterns; I find that, to some extent, I can predict how these will repeat.

Then I see that the coloured patterns are made up of familiar objects that exist in the room I entered - fragments of furniture, a window frame.  Also tiny fractured and repeated images of myself.

I change my orientation, and see different parts of the room, shattered and rearranged, but increasingly recognisable.  After a while, I learn to find my way around the room looking through the kaleidoscope.  I have learned its subtle rules of operation so well that I can actually see more through the machine than I could before I picked it up.  My world enlarges.  I form a more complete picture.

Then I use the kaleidoscope to examine its own workings.  I turn it and tip it to discover more.  New patterns emerge, of utterly engaging complexity; important meanings are suggested and abandoned.  I search for the fundamental mechanism which makes all this possible.

I peer into the future.

Finally, I turn towards the past.

I see a child walking into a room, and picking up a kaleidoscope.

I discover that what I have learned is not how to make pictures, but how to look.

Private Languages, again

The argument against the possibility of a 'private' language (a language one knows, oneself, how to speak; but which is never used in a conversation with any other person) is, broadly, that our judgements that we were correctly following the rules upon which the intelligibility of the language depended would be no better than our judgements that we were speaking the language properly in the first place.  No internal test of correct usage could avoid relying on judgements which were, themselves, open to questions about correct usage.

Public languages have access to a further resource - the judgements of other language users.  A usage which could not be rendered intelligible to these could not be part of the shared language.  As Kripke observes, however, this only helps with judgements within the language, and not with judgements about the intelligibility of the language as a whole, where the problem of external validation arises once again - in a fairly catastrophic way.  So the PL problem is not just a problem for strictly private languages.

The solution to Kripke's problem is, as I've suggested, to realize that all of our judgements of validity and intelligibility are also moves within a language game - to ask whether the whole game (to include 'all' language games) is valid or intelligible is to ask whether judgements of validity and intelligibility are possible. The answer to this question is either 'yes' or unintelligible.

An interesting question is whether this approach can be taken to private languages as more traditionally explicated (as in the parentheses in paragraph 1).  The motivation for asking this question is that something like a private language seems to be required to rescue the idea of intelligible private thought, in so far as we are able, in thought, to reflect on the reliability or our own perceptions and judgements.

One way we do this, of course, is to apply our public conceptions of validity and intelligibility to our private ruminations - either by imagining how they might be articulated in a public language, or by actually articulating them. Our imaginings here are at least as reliable as our imaginings that we can speak ...

The problem with this approach is that it requires the private language to be translated into the public one for testing - so rendering it non-private.  The private language can only be private in the required sense if it cannot be so translated, a fact which strengthens the PL argument rather than otherwise, given Donald Davidson's observations on how we determine whether something is or is not a language.

Untranslatable private thought is just part of that 'of which we must remain silent'.  Why would we need to worry (somewhat unintelligibly ... ) about its 'intelligibility'?

Only because we project inwards from public intelligibility?  We will find what we are looking for if we do this, as Chomsky and Fodor demonstrate.  Chomsky finds that anything that looks like a language must look like the language he (more or less) shares with us; Fodor finds that for any internal process to come out as intelligible it must be translatable into the language of his enquiry, which we (more or less) follow.

But if even the mechanisms which underlie public intelligibility need not be rendered as generally reliable (see my last post on the Turing test), why should we expect our phenomenological experience of them to be intelligible?

Of course what we say must make sense, but that making sense is such a struggle suggests that it cannot be just a matter of translation ...

The Turing Test

The Turing test captures the ambiguities of 'intelligent', which is one of the reasons it is so compelling.

One of these is that it leaves moot the relevance of the internal structure of the talking machine.  This is just as well given the Kripke/Goodman paradox, and open question problems.  If the structure of the machine was relevant - if the machine need not only pass a specific finite test, but would also be required to pass all imaginable future tests of the same kind, then we'd be in trouble.

The OQ question here is obvious - that the programing of the machine would have to embody a general language competence engine, and therefore a theory of truth for the language the machine spoke.

The Kripke/Goodman problem is worth a further comment, though.  Clearly a machine that incorporated a flawed language generation program could pass the Turing test so long as the specific test circumstances did not reveal the flaws.  Would we say here that the test was imperfect?

If we did, then we would (as the paradox suggests) have to say that we could not conclude that any potential interlocutor was really an interlocutor (capable of intelligent conversation), and so that we could not conclude that any conversation was possible.  So far so Kripke, and I've already explained the problem here: if we can't say anything we can't articulate the paradox either, so there must be some other way of thinking about this.

Since we know that we can talk to one another, we don't need to worry about how, or why our words make sense.  In fact, we can only consider these questions if we already know that their answers can't 'legitimize' our use of language.

What this means is that we don't need to worry about whether we are all imperfect, accidental, Turing 'intelligences'.  What counts as intelligence is not intrinsic to the machine, but captured, instead, in the language game in which any question about 'intelligence' can arise - and this neither can be, nor needs to be, modeled in some mechanistic way.  It is the game within which formal modeling takes place, but which cannot, itself, be modeled (in its entirety).

So this aspect of the test's ambiguity cashes out nicely:  what counts as an intelligent machine is a judgement we make within a game which itself provides the unarticulable context for our judgments of intelligence, and of rationality.

More on emergence and heuristics ...

Some more thoughtful thoughts on emergence:

Of course a general theory which drags in 'emergence' must be false, but we shouldn't leap to conclusions here.  The important question is why we need that particular general theory, what it does for us.  This can be a hard question to address, because addressing it requires us to decode some of our fundamental heuristics - many of which will have acquired an almost metaphysical status, so that relinquishing or revising them will have disturbing emotional consequences.

If we believe, for instance, that a rational science is only possible if the world can be reduced (at least in principle) to mechanism, then we will hang on to emergence to retain our rationality.  (The thought that this, itself, may be an irrational strategy, will be almost too terrifying to entertain.)

Also, spooky alternatives to emergence simply don't explain anything.  The ghost in the machine is just another place-holder for ignorance, or evidence of error - perhaps about the kind of machine, or about what can be done with mechanism, but error nonetheless.

The way forward is not via some more comforting metaphysics, however.  (All metaphysical accounts will also be place-holders, if something like what I'm saying turns out to be correct).

The way forward is to start with the irreducibles of account giving, which include the possibility of accounts and of the givers of accounts.

Correspondence, truth and class paradoxes - tidying up?

Let's suppose that the set of English assertive sentences of less than n (for n>6) words is finite.  We can then associate a physical token (a sound, a scribble, an object) with each of these sentences.

We will now make two piles of these objects - Pile A and Pile B.  We will put all of the objects associated with true assertions in Pile A and all of the objects associated with false assertions in Pile B.

All statements of the form "Object X is in Pile B" are, of course, associated with an object in one of the piles.

Now let Z = "Object P is in Pile B", and let Object P be the token for Z.

If Object P is in Pile B, then Z is true.  However Pile A contains the tokens for true statements.  However, if Object P is in Pile A, then Z is false, and Pile B contains the tokens for false statements.

So far, this is looks like a re-statement of a traditional paradox.

However, this construction of it is particularly awkward for any kind of correspodence semantics, because the paradox is a direct consequence of the kind of token/fact relationship such a semantics would require.

Probability

Let's say that we need reasons to attribute a probability p to an event e.  Without the possibility of reasons, attribution of probability is unintelligible.  This might be taken to be a way of saying that there are no 'real' probabilities, but since 'real' and 'can talk as if real' work in the same way in all discourse, we don't need to worry about this.

If I say 'e is more probable than ~e', I am saying that p > 1/2.  All probability attributions are at least strict inequalities, if not specific values.

My reasons for attributing probability p to event e must, then, include a computation that demonstrates the vailidity of the strict inequality.  In Baysian computations, we show how some probabilties are derived from others - the results of statistical tests are an example.  At the basis of these are appeals to theories (e.g. combinatorial considerations, engineering descriptions, or wave and field equations) from which basic probabilities can be directly derived.

These computations, and the theories which provide the primitive probabilities, must be articulated in a shared language.  There is no way of attaching a meaning to questions (in the same language) about the probability that the way we speak the language, or the language itself, may be unreliable here (whether or not we can attach a meaning to the possibility of this).  We cannot say 'it is more likely than not that our language works' because no conceivable computation could validate the relevant inequality.

(Equally, we cannot say 'It is quite certain that our language works' if we read this in the sense of the probability of its not working being zero.  Our ability to attribute probabilities depends upon our ability to speak, so attributing a probability to our ability to speak is circular.)

We can make the classical distinction between risk and uncertainty by saying that we can attribute probabilities to risky outcomes, but uncertain ones may only be partly tabulatable.  We can make a list of some of them, but neither attribute probabilities to them nor be sure that the list is exhaustive.

To say that there is a definite, but unknown p of e is to promise a computation that produces p.  The Born rule can be accepted in the 'world' in which we speak, because - in that world - it is a testable empirical theory.  Maybe if we want to talk about many worlds then we cannot talk - and we do not need to talk - about Born probabilties.  Only the illusion of 'real' probability makes this seem puzzling.

Consequential intelligibility

It is a profound mistake to think that a process which generates intelligibility must itself be intelligible.

Paradox and method

No method can be shown to parsimoniously select methods which do not generate paradoxes, since it, itself, could not be independently shown not to generate paradoxes without generating a regress of such methods.  (Apart from all the halting problem etc. issues ...)

On the other hand, we need to assume that whatever method we are using to construct this argument does not lead to paradox, since that would render it unintelligible.  And, ultimately, we can't constructively substantiate this assumption without generating a regress.

However, we have the comfort that 'nothing can be shown to be intelligible' must, at least, be intelligible - and so false.  This gives us a recursive solution to the 'constructive substantiation' problem, and possibly also the problem of paradoxes - although I think these will turn out to be necessary, rather than inconvenient.

The reason for this is that we give reasons.  Any attempt to give complete reasons that doesn't point to a recursive root will generate paradoxes, and recursive roots are (at least tacitly) agreed rather demonstrated.  (Persistent denial of candidates has the consequence of rendering even the denial unintelligible.)

Emergence

Emergence is a process required to save a fundamental theory which 'must' be true but which cannot provide the explanations it promises.

It is an arbitrary device for avoiding counter-examples, and any theory which must resort to it is false.

I don't really know why this isn't obvious.

A tiger is not a bounded sub-space of some set of physical properties, however defined.  A tiger is a tiger even without it's whiskers, and sometimes without it's tail.  It may also be a tiger when it is the wrong colour, or has some deformity.  'Tiger' is not a complete concept (Waismann).  We haven't made up our minds yet about all the things that might count as tigers.

Well.  It's late ...

Languages and Truth - a clearer exposition ... maybe ...

The 'brick slab' language, and Tarski's object languages (which avoid paradox?) are only languages by stipulation.  There is no behvioural or reductive test for something being a language that doesn't fall foul of Kripke's paradox.

If we want to be able to say 'these people are speaking a language', then we need to have a concept of truth, because we need to be able to say 'these people are speaking a language properly'.

If we find someone speaking a language 'improperly' it is because they can do otherwise.  A noisy dog is not a deficient speaker of English.  Only an English speaker can lie or make mistakes in English.

For someone to be a speaker of a language they need to be able to tell the truth in the language (whether or not they actually do).  When we attribute the capacity to speak to someone, we also attribute the capacity to tell the truth.

When we agree that something counts as a language, we are saying (with Davidson) at least that it is translatable.  When we say that what we are using now (in this conversation) counts as language, we are saying something that, if it can be speculated explicitly (within this conversation), must be true.  It's falsehood is inconsistent with its explicit speculability.



So:

The statement 'we are using a language' is reliably true if it occurs in a conversation in that language, because its contrary (in the context of that conversation) would be unintelligible.  Kripke's problem makes any behavioural or material ground for the judgment that we (or others) are using a language radically unreliable.

We might judge of others that they are using a language, but until we share that judgement with them in a conversation it remains subject to Kripke's paradox.

Also, since any judgement that a language is being used includes a judgement about it's being used properly, such a judgement depends upon a judgement that it is possible to tell the truth (since this is part of the judgement that the language is being used properly).

The judgement that we have correctly translated a language used by third parties is (Davidson and Kripke) radically unreliable without some 'Principle of Charity'.  However in the context of any shared conversation with the natives - using either or both languages - this radical unreliability is ruled out a priori since 'we may have radically failed to interpret your language' (expressed in either language) would not, if it were true, mean what it appeared to mean to all participants in the conversation.  It would entail that there was no conversation of which it could be a part.

The 'slab and brick' game, and all games in which paradoxes have been excised (languages without truth predicates), the judgement 'we are speaking a language' cannot be formed, because they cannot contain their own truth predicates.  Because of this, they can only be identified as languages by stipulation or on material or behavioural grounds - and so these identifiecations are vulnerable to Kripke's problem, or are arbitrary.

Solving the problem of paradox this way comes at the price of rendering any judgement that we are using a language radically unreliable.

On the other hand, living with paradox allows us to make a priori, and incorrigible, judgements that we are using a language.

And worse:  it is the possibility of these judgements that gives sense to the word 'language', whether we use it to refer to the tools of our present conversation, or whether we use it to speculate about other possible conversations - corrigibly or otherwise.  The meaning of 'language'  depends, necessarily, on being able to point to 'what we are doing now, in speaking to one another'.  To call something a language, corrigibly or incorrigibly, is to rely on a concept which can only be rendered recursively, with a root in what we are presently doing when we speak to one another.

Truth theory sketch

"We can talk to each other", taken literally, must be either hopelessly ambiguous (not a statement at all) or true and undecidable.

This is because it requires a tacit conception of truth - 'using the language properly', so to speak, and also of what counts as a language.  Both of these must be reasonably reliable if the statement is to be true, but no algorithm written down in the language can demonstrate this reliability.

Also, no algorithm in a 'higher order' language would be translatable, so speculations of this sort are irrelevant (if any sense at all can be attached to them).

The reason the statement is true is not algorithmic:  it's falsehood would be unitelligible, a Moorean paradox.  If someone insisted on its literal falsehood, we would have to wonder what they meant (certainly not something related to the conventional uses of the words it contains).  They would be doing something at the same time as seeming to claim that it was impossible.  Either we'd be wrong about what they were doing, or we and they did not share an interpretation of 'impossible'.  This is not an algorithmic demonstration because no explanation to such an objector would have any weight - we could never be sure that there was enough mutual understanding to articulate an explanation.  We would either find a way of working out what they did mean - would find a way of continuing to talk with them which rendered their objection interpretable - or the conversation would disintegrate.

The tacitly implied predicate 'is true', here, is not grounded in Kripke's sense.  But it is still a kind of basis for grounding.

Diagonalisation (?), behaviour, and meaning ...

Does something like this work:

Suppose we were to give a behavioural account to of how to say things in a language - say a list of noises, and what they meant.  The list could include not only 'primitive' expressions but also any complexes constructed from them.  If we could describe the records in this list, then the list would be enumerable.

Notice that while one side (say the left side) of this list comprises specific physical circumstances (behaviours, or noises), the other side (the right side) is a list of contents, and so can only be identified intentionally.


If we can describe records in the list, then we can describe the contents of each left side of each element.  (This means, among other things, that the descriptions of the physical behaviours must also appear as the contents of the intentional side somewhere else in the list, and so have their own describable physical counterparts.)


Everything that can be said could be somewhere in this list, linked up to a way of saying it.

Although the list is formally interminable, however, any actual statement would have to be finite.  This is a barrier to the actual list containing the behaviour which counted as a description of itself, since this would require something like infinite repetition of nested representations of the list.

Also, although the list would contain statements about whether some statement was a member of the list, the number of these would be 'smaller' than the number of items in the list - otherwise the only thing the list could contain would be statements about what was in the list.

Since a description of the list would containt a complete statement of what was in the list, this description could not be in the list since there have to be some statements which do not have membership statements in the list.

Rationality

Rationality is produced in our shared language activity.

The fulcrum of intelligibility is intelligible conversation.  Intelligible action is action of which we can give an intelligible account.

Classical economics is mainly grammatical enquiry:  how can we use 'choose'?

Indirect locutions

I ask "what's for lunch?", and you answer "I'm opening a tin of soup."

Should I tranlsate your answer into this form:  "We are having soup for lunch."  Or perhaps, even "Soup".  Or does this only sound plausible given some theoretical objective?

Why not translate "Soup" into "I'm opening a tin of soup."?

If we say 'context', we're really ducking the question, because this only helps if there is some context in which we can consider the effect of context in general (otherwise we just clamber from one to another).  It's hard to think of a better definition of a context-independent enquiry.

What is possible?

Here is a question for metaphysicians:

Are there 'possible worlds' that we cannot imagine?

How would we go about demonstrating that there weren't without begging the question?

If there are, what use is our 'modal intuition'?

Non-Contradiction

Maybe we should think of the rule against contradiction as a translation rule rather than as a speaking rule.  It should be a test of a translation schema that it does not render the native speaker as uttering contradictions.

This becomes a 'speaking rule' in the sense that we may say to someone:  'I do not understand you because you seem to be contradicting yourself'.  The 'seem to be' is not eliminable:  we may have made a translation error.  This can never be ruled out on purely formal, or empirical, grounds.

This renders the reductio ad absurdum correctly:  it required prior agreement on the issues which generate the contradiction, if it is to be valid.  It has this form:  I cannot make sense of what you are saying, because however I interpret ('translate' it) it produces a contradiction.

So the RAA is always vulnerable to a 'translation error' defence.

This is fine, though:  mathematics depends on agreement about how to speak, and not vice versa.