Grounds of Meaning

Imagine that I said to you "The only sentence with any meaning is the one you are reading now, and it means exactly what it says."

This has to be false, a kind of nonsense. Apart from anything else, it excludes the possibility of any statement explaining the meaning of the 'only meaningful statement' having any meaning.

Why does this incoherence disappear when we are dealing with a whole linguistic practice?

For instance, "Only statements which are part of practices we recognise as language use have any meaning, and they mean exactly what they say" (or some suitably qualified equivalent) must be literally true.

There are some differences between these statements, though:

The first refers to a closed group - it has only one member. The second is not closed - what counts as a 'statement which is part of our linguistic practice' is not determinate. This can, in fact, be discussed and adjudicated upon within the linguistic practice. (It can only be discussed and adjudicated upon within the practice.)

What is involved in a statement 'meaning exactly what it says' is not unambiguous. (Remember the 'Brexit means Brexit' sleight of hand). It's like the joke about a balloonist who lands in a field in the fog, and asks a passer-by where they are, getting the reply: "You're in a field".

We can only have an unrestricted capacity to make meta-linguistic adjudications (about meaning, truth, etc.) in an 'open' language - this is exactly why formal languages are always so disappointing. Not to say useless for any sort of serious enquiry ...

Crucial enquiries nearly always have a semantic element - incorporate some (tacit or explicit) investigation of meanings. Whether or not some specific statement 'means exactly what it says' is always open to interrogation.

'Real' Conversation

This might seem a bit random, and is related to my experience as a counsellor (as well as to more present meanderings):

I've been making a list of characteristics of real conversations. A provisional list (as should be obvious, as will certainly become obvious):

In a real conversation, wordless silence is respected. A participant who is uncomfortable, but finds it hard to say why they are uncomfortable, helps us to find the defects in our tools.

In a real conversation, there are no rules. The boundaries of the conversation are discovered, and sometimes these discoveries - when expressed within the conversation - can sound like rules. If we can break the rule and remain intelligible, then it is not a universal rule. At the boundaries, truth and intelligibility converge.

(Philosophy tries to give accounts of intelligibility and of truth as though they were, at root, different things. In specific contexts they may appear to be separate because a whole context can rest upon a false belief, but still remain internally intelligible.  It is not possible to separate them for very general enquiries, however, where the only context is the possibility of articulated enquiry.)

A real conversation may project a metaphysics onto the world, but will never depend on one for its intelligibility.

In a real conversation, any metalinguistic enquiry is permissible, but the language of the present conversation (the one we are using to make these enquiries) is always at the top of the metalinguistic hierarchy. We can make judgements about the intelligibility of other conversations, but cannot question the intelligibility of the one we are engaged in. (Some very general statements about other conversations - e.g. 'Everyone talks at cross-purposes except for us' - are also likely to be unintelligible, but possibly not 'immediately'.)

In a real conversation, we exercise the Principle of Charity, we presume good faith, that we can make ourselves intelligible to one another, and that the truth can be borne.

Real conversations are punctuated by focusing episodes, as examined and explored by Eugene Gendlin, working with Carl Rogers.

Real conversations have more than one participant. This is not guaranteed by someone being 'physically present', nor ruled out by other participants not being immediately and physically present. My interlocutor is whoever reads this. It is not just someone in the room exchanging pleasantries.

A Mondalology (Part 2)

Perhaps this is a better metaphor:

The experience of participating in a conversation has an internal and an 'external' aspect. The internal aspect is the phenomenological space of the speaker (the 'first person') and the external aspect is the world projected in the public sharing - the conversation itself. Or, perhaps, in the 'ideolect' the conversation employs - the local language agreed, by experiment, between the speakers.

This text is an element of the ideolect that I share with the reader. You. If you are reading this.

(One of the odd things about textual language is the presumption of asynchronous, ambiguously defined participation. Another confusion for another day.)

We cannot share the 'internal' aspects of our participation. Another asymmetry. When we try, we either fail or make them into a kind of experimental 'external'. But we can't deny them either - it would be incoherent for me to pretend to you that I had no idea what you were talking about when you tried to point to (without describing) your internal world. Such a denial would bring into question my status as an honest and competent interlocutor. You would wonder whether you could actually have a conversation with me.

(The real solution to the 'hard problem' is an elaboration of thoughts along these lines. It is certainly not either a metaphysical or a 'scientific' matter.)

There is (Davidson and Quine) no methodological test that will distinguish between (a) someone speaking a language I do not understand and (b) someone not speaking a language at all. What I mean here is 'no articulable methodological test'. (I think this qualification is necessary.)

(There is something to be said here about what is and is not shared among idiolectical islands, but of course ...)

So here's the picture: of an 'external' world projected by the idiolect, and 'internal' worlds - individual, unshareable, phenomenological spaces. The internal worlds are the 'monads' and the external world is 'reality', at least as devised by science and intelligible narrative. Including 'philosophy', whatever that is.

Any question about how these might 'correspond' makes no sense, because the phenomenological space is exactly the space that cannot be articulated. 'Noumenal' space, perhaps, with a nod to another genius ...

We can get confused here; we have been confused here. By a lot of things: a naive attitude to language, and particularly to how we might theorise about language; the strange experience of hearing our 'thoughts' spoken aloud, which makes us forget their private aspects; a conviction that the 'world out there' is the one we see rather than the one we describe to one another - a conviction that these must be 'the same' in some way, for the whole system to work at all, whereas even the question whether they can be the 'same' cannot be intelligibly asked. What on earth would the answer look like? By what test would it stand or fall?

And, of course, there is the complex, disturbing, transfixing issue of how what we say to each other changes the internal spaces of each of us. People say things to us that make the world look different. This is not always, perhaps even is very rarely, a matter of being presented with a new description, a new encoding.

A Monadology ...

Leibniz' metaphysics once looked like a quaint 17th century artefact to me - an automaton in a museum, or a mathematical proof of the existence of God ... of historical interest, possibly, but clearly bonkers.

Which is why he was Leibniz, and I am not.

It occurred to me much later that he was trying to solve a very subtle problem, and that his solution has some very modern resonances. The problem is not even visible, far less obvious - or troubling - to an unselfconscious language user - a user inclined to regard language as 'transparent', or 'representational', perhaps. A user who thinks that language 'works' because we live in a shared world, who does not realise that the statement 'we live in a shared world' cannot give meaning to itself.

Anyhow. Monads.

I remarked to someone once - not originally - that however vast and complex the universe might seem to us, that whole vastness and complexity had to fit into a package about the size of a small loaf of bread. A very materialistic observation, so possibly false, but generalisable: whatever conception we might individually have of the universe is contained within us. The system may be 'open', but it is, in some sense, personal - the nature of the universe I am aware of and my capacity to comprehend it must, ultimately, converge.

(I'm assuming that we can talk about such things as 'the nature of the universe' and 'my comprehension of it', of course. Perhaps we can pass over that for the moment.)

And 'other minds'? Also a set of categories mediated by language. We must attribute mental states to interlocutors, but this cannot be a 'mysterious' thing - no metaphysics can help us here ...

Perhaps language does the work of Leibniz' god, keeping everything in step. Except 'in step' is not  'the same'. It can't really mean more than that we can, in fact, talk to one another...

So. Monads (or something a bit like them). And maybe a metaphor, rather than a metaphysics: specifically a metaphor that I hope might direct you to something that cannot be explicitly described. Some features of the real beetle, so to speak.

Here is the metaphor. Or perhaps parable:

Imagine we are all born with a world - a whole world, that is entirely ours, but over which we can exercise only limited control. A world, initially, of sensations, feelings, impulses ... but without 'language'. We don't need a sense of  'self' (and not, of course, of 'narrated', or 'described' self) in this world - we and it are integral.

How we live in this world develops - we discover ways of controlling it, of bringing it to meet our needs. This learning changes the way the world looks to us. Perhaps unfocused impressions become recognisable objects, or patterns (or perhaps even this reconstruction is too naive). Mixed in with this process, and within this world, we acquire some very specific complex skills.

Among these are the skills associated with language use. These skills change the internal world in a very profound way, but not, of course, in a way that can be described. Nothing of the internal world can be described: it is a beetle. When I say 'internal world' to you, we both know what we are talking about - but only because we know how these words work, not because we can compare our internal worlds.

I feel as though I want to be very careful here. My 'internal world' is not my 'mind'. Our minds are, in so far as they can have characteristics attributed to them, part of the external world. The mind of intentional states, for instance, is a public object - an object of description and theory.

What I mean by 'internal world' is my world of wordless subjective experience. The groundwork. The 'black hole', linguistically speaking, that seems, to other interlocutors, to exist at the centre of every language user's world but their own.

(I might call it the 'world of consciousness' except that we now have a 'science of consciousness' - and there is so much confusion embedded in this idea that I want to avoid it altogether.)

In this internal world, certain 'experiences' produce 'conviction', to the extent that we might want to locate the reliability of the conviction in the experiences. I might feel I 'know' something, because of certain things I have seen or heard, or because of the consequences of some internal experimental and cognitive process.

One of the things I feel I 'know', in this way, is how to talk to people. When I say something that I believe to be 'true', my internal experience of this is the same experience of visceral conviction I might arrive at with respect to other 'knowledge' states. And, again, I might want to link the validation of these statements to the relevant internal states.

And the experience of learning to speak is not essentially different, not different in kind, from the experience of acquiring other epistemic convictions - e.g. about how to kinaesthetically engage with the world.

But since we have no direct access to each other's 'internal' processes, we cannot externally validate what we say by reference to them. We do this by exploring possible ways of talking, not by pointing to invisible internal states. (And this process, of course, might break down - we might fail to find a way to talk to someone.)

The 'private world' is projected onto the space of language in somewhat the same way as the spacial world can be projected onto an algebra. And, in the same way, geometrical demonstrations may have their algebraic isomorphs but, at the same time, be irrelevant to algebraic computations (except, perhaps, as 'interpretations' - or even metaphors ...).

(Except that geometric demonstrations are artifacts of a wider public language, and what I'm drawing attention to here is individual worlds beyond the reach of public language.)

So what is this 'mystifying' monadology metaphor for?

One part of its purpose is to draw attention to the incoherence of any questions about the 'sameness' of our internal experiences. 'Sameness' is a grammatical category, so cannot be projected into non-grammatical 'spaces'. More specifically, questions about the 'sameness' of the internal worlds of the users of a shared language are incoherent.

We might have an experience that feels like discovering that we can talk about something we previously thought of as 'internal'. This experience, itself, will have internal and external aspects. By writing this, I am trying to trigger experiences of this kind in my interlocutors (perhaps more than I am trying to 'tell' them something ...)

Our private worlds inspire us to speak in certain ways - to say certain things. If we are 'skilled' language users, these things will be more likely to be intelligible than if we are not. The experience of having this skill, and the experience of exercising it, are part of our private landscape. The skill arises from practice, and will develop better if our private world seems to be integrated seamlessly with the public world of communication - if our experience has been that it is respected, even if unseen.

Behavioural Metaphors

There are various senses in which we might imagine something can be 'reduced' to 'behaviour'.

(This is an old chestnut, so I want to explain why I'm turning it over:

The 'technology' of language - the squiggles and noises, the semaphore, anything which can be reproduced by a machine process - is a kind of 'behaviour'. At some level it is tempting to think 'but this is all there really is. What else can there be?' Except that that question itself cannot be reduced to the characters used to present it here ... not even to those characters in a 'wider context' which is assumed also to be of the same nature - squiggles, noises, the machinery of representation ...)

So. Behaviour. Three cases:

We might literally have a behavioural definition: certain semaphore signals can be translated into alphabetic characters because we have a complete set of rules for how to do this. (We must assume, of course, that we are translating semaphore, but I will pass over this because I want to use the case as an example without letting too much depend upon it.)

The second case is where we imagine there is some such set of rules, but that we do not know, or do not know entirely, what they are. We imagine that with enough time and computational capacity we could encode and enact them and that only 'human limitations' prevent this. We imagine we are dealing with something that is in principle like semaphore, that it is the chess to semaphore's noughts and crosses.

The third case is where we know that even in principle there is no way to write down all the behavioural rules, and we know that natural language is like this because the rules must be written down in some part of it, and so will remain, to some extent, systematically ambiguous because of the 'open question' problem.

In this third case, we might imagine, however, that some 'semaphore' or 'in principle semaphore' metaphor can be appealed to, even though we know that the metaphor can never be fully 'unpacked'. This, of course, is a profound and misleading mistake.

(It can be hard to accept this, because we might still find ourselves asking 'but what else is there?' - and this just demonstrates the power of the metaphor. It's like believing that some step forward is taken when we 'recognise that everything is just atoms' - or some other materialistic substrate. Before we can make statements like these, we have to know what 'all interaction is behaviour' or 'everything is just atoms' means, and this question cannot be answered in terms of behaviour or atoms ...)

There are two dimensions to this mistake - one is the OQ issue, which I've discussed at length.

The other is to do with the explanatory power of metaphor.

A metaphor may suggest a way to speak, but it cannot command, or even support, semantic conformity. We can see, for instance, the ways in which electricity 'flow' is somewhat like fluid flow, and this might help us to understand some aspects of an electrical circuit (although it makes others more obscure ...).

But if someone tried to explain basic arithmetic, or the principle of non-contradiction, by way of a metaphor we would wonder whether they properly understood the subject. Equally, we cannot regard arithmetic or logic as simply a 'game' with 'rules' since they are anchors of the intelligibility of our explanations, and so of the intelligibility of our shared world. (And we have to include, here, explanations of what we do when we appeal to metaphors ...)

The 'rules' we should be interested in are only those without which we cannot explicate rules. And these rules are rules about how to speak that turn out to be, through that, rules about the way the world must be.

Sonnet 18

So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

Pontius Pilate's question is always an indication of bad faith. 'Is this true?' is fine. 'Can we define truth?' is not. As a rhetorical move, it is always dishonest. The purpose of our conversation is to discover what we should count as true. We cannot predict what we might find.

Within that conversation, some particular things must count as true, or it becomes unintelligible (and so not a conversation). In other words, the question 'Is this true?' must, occasionally, get a unanimous 'yes' from all participants. And we cannot entertain certain doubts about what the participants are doing when they say 'yes' without also doubting the quality of their engagement.

('What is truth?' is like 'We may all be engaging incompetently or dishonestly.' And we should ask: Even when we say that? If Pilates's question was honest, he would not know what to do with the answer. Of course, it plays a complex role in that particular narrative and it's exegesis...)

So who is participating in this conversation? I don't know, of course. I sit here tapping away, doing something that works in other 'conversational' contexts, but I do it on my own.

We think by imagining interlocutors, but they are only other versions of ourselves.

(It's a curious thought that our ability to talk to one another, and then to imagine conversations, might have displaced a more 'native' cognitive engagement with the world. Maybe we're not as clever as we think ...)

Rights

Think about:

R - 'You have no rights at all'.

No right to attach any intelligible interpretation to R?

No right to expect you to be saying something intelligible to me?

No right to be told the truth?

All incoherent, of course. We must attribute some minimal rights to interlocutors.

Is this a ground for a general theory of rights? (Do we have the right to rice pudding and income tax?)

Perhaps. Depending on what kinds of conversation we want to have...

Meaning and Truth Conditions

There is a strong tendency within Analytic Philosophy to identify the meaning of a statement with its truth conditions.

While this is almost right, it ignores the ambiguity introduced by the problem of interpreting truth conditions - of, literally, establishing their meanings.

This is just the OQ problem, of course, in another guise - but it represents an absolute bar to avoiding ambiguity entirely when it comes to questions of meaning. Meaning will always be contextual - consequent upon a context of (to some extent tacit) agreement. In circumstances where that context can be shown to be any possible linguistic exchange, statements about meaning will become 'privileged', in Stroud's sense.

This test, of course, depends on what we mean by 'language' ...

Facts

I feel as though I'm crisscrossing a familiar landscape, now, but perhaps revisiting it is worthwhile ...

Demonstrating the truth of  'It is a fact that A' is exactly the same as demonstrating that 'It is not a fact that A' is unintelligible. The two cases are methodologically indistinguishable.

We want to believe that an 'unintelligible' statement is unintelligible because it breaks some specific (explicit) rule - perhaps it is self-contradictory. This has led us astray. I have identified (in previous posts) three different ways in which a statement can be unintelligible:

(1)    The familiar one (above), which is that it contains or entails an explicit contradiction.

(2)    One in which it entails an implicit contradiction, so that any 'conventional' semantic interpretation makes the 'content' of the 'statement' inconsistent with its being a statement at all. Examples are Moore's paradox, and other more general cases such as 'we are unable to converse' (as in Stroud's 'privileged class').

(3)    One in which we simply fail to be able to talk to one another, where we do not know 'how to go on'. This would happen if, for instance, we were unable to agree on some immediate empirical facts.

We can find ourselves uncertain about which of these applies to any particular case, of course, because the boundaries of intelligibility are also the boundaries of definite meaning. A contradiction or a Moorean paradox can only be demonstrated on the grounds of definite meanings, and meaning begins to evaporate quite quickly if we cannot agree on facts.

And, of course, the sense of 'demonstrating' in the second paragraph is also quite hard to pin down. We can only 'demonstrate' the truth of something if we can agree that something counts as a demonstration; can give specific examples and answer questions about why they work.

The bounds of this process are, of course, exactly the bounds of intelligibility - and this is what saves us from incoherent relativism or scepticism. Without the possibility of some valid demonstrations we have no language - no possible way of distinguishing truth from falsehood, and so no 'meanings'.

No way of asking questions, never mind answering them ...

Experimenting with intelligibility and experimenting with reality are, ultimately, the same activity.

Theories of Conversation

No theory, statement, claim, or narrative can have a higher epistemological status than the conversation within which it is expressed.

Metaphysics. Or maybe I'm repeating myself?

Here is an anti-metaphysical metaphor:

Instead of imagining that we all live within a specific metaphysical net (a possibility that is either incoherent or empty), imagine instead that we do not. Imagine that our individual worlds are so different as to be incommunicable. No words can capture them.

When we try to capture them in words, we find that the words dissolve and become meaningless. Instead of being able to treat our shared language as transparent, we discover that it has become unintelligible. We become mired in paradox and confusion.

And yet, we remain able to say this to one another: 'There is paradox and confusion here ...'

Does this mean that we have a 'shared world' of paradox and confusion? What on earth could that mean?

But this is, of course, very familiar after all ...

Our 'shared language' is kind to the illusion that our worlds are not so different until we begin to examine that language itself and find that we cannot look behind our semantic mechanisms - that even when we seem to succeed it is only because we have mistaken a more occult semantic mechanism for a metaphysical groundwork.

From the perspective of this metaphor, I look within myself for a response to your noises, scratchings, tappings ... I tap back, and wait to see whether something further happens that I also 'find intelligible'.

Perhaps you do the same. I have no way of 'knowing' this that takes me further than my knowledge of how to respond. I don't even have a way of 'knowing' what 'the same' might mean in this context. And 'you' are just my (presently imaginary ...) interlocutor - necessary to avoid the incoherence of hypothesising private semantic structures. (If I'm not talking to 'you', then I'm not talking at all.)

And we can't 'reduce' all of this to the noises, scratchings, and tappings, either. We can only represent and distinguish these in a shared language - there is no usefully 'pre-linguistic' mechanism here. And we can replace them with anything that does the same work for us - that we can look within ourselves for a response to. (This is what makes 'meaning' seem fundamental ... another framework that turns out to be a projection rather than a support.)

And without the metaphor?

If I must hypothesise something, it might be shared internal worlds. But this hypothesis cannot go beyond the claim that it might (initially) seem to support: that we are able to talk to one another. It is a comfort, rather than an explanation. It says only that we should treat our mutual incoherences, our radical differences, as being 'cancelled out' when we talk to one another; a device at least as obscure and pragmatic as treating ratios with infinite parts as zeros or ones.

And this is not a solipsistic position - I do hear you tapping, and I do respond.

Language and Experience

An interaction with a counselling client brought something into focus for me - something obvious, on reflection, but obscured (perhaps) exactly by its own nature ...

We often have experiences - we feel things, or think things - that cannot be put into words, that may even challenge our confidence in our capacity to put things into words. Ironically, and often cruelly, these experiences can be among our most intense - and meaningful (in the sense resisted by semanticists and most insisted upon by nearly everyone else).

In the company of an engaged interlocutor, attempting to put these experiences into words can be profoundly therapeutic. What I suddenly realised, while listening to my client, was that two pictures we might have of the internal 'pre-articulation' processes were mutually incongruous but, at the same time, 'behaviourally' indistinguishable.

One is the picture we have from the Analytic tradition - Hume to Fodor, perhaps - of an internal space that is very like the space we describe to one another when we speak. A space of logic and experience, which, to be articulated, only needs 'translating' into words.

The other is a picture that has more of the character of religious inspiration - of words forming from the incoherent swirl within, almost without preliminary, in a way that seems necessary, that seems to participate in the deep nature of human communication, but whose processes themselves cannot be intelligibly articulated.

We might imagine that we can distinguish between these two cases on the basis of content or accompanying behaviour. This hypothesis is revealed to be ridiculous even as it is formulated - what is it about it, itself, that might give us a clue to its generation?

The desire to appear intelligible, of course, may - in our present cultural context - push us towards narratives of generation that have the first character. However, our capacity to be intelligible is just our capacity to engage in conversation - nature is indifferent to method, distinguishing only contextual success ...

So, while my inspirations may appear to be the product of profound calculation and superior interpretation, you must just take them for what they are, asking not from whence they come ...

 (!)

On Instruction

We don't learn to talk by having it explained to us. If we can't talk, we can't take instruction either.

Being able to talk to one another, being able to give and take instructions, appears to depend on what we might vaguely call 'shared understanding' or 'shared appreciation of meanings'. This doesn't really add anything to 'shared ability to talk to one another,' but its specific components (things like 'shared experience', 'shared grammatical/logical capacities', our understanding of foundational concepts like 'same' and 'similar', the apparent persistence of common memory etc.) all have the character of Wittgensteinian 'hinges' - not just of specific enquiries but of any possible intelligible enquiry, including any enquiry into their own nature.

When a philosopher tells you that there is a 'right' way to do something - to translate a linguistic expression, to understand an experience, to perform an experiment or a calculation - they are already depending on your having a shared concept of  'rightness' and a shared appreciation of at least one (very disjunctive and distributed) example of it, which is 'the right way to talk'.

If we don't know the right way to talk, we have, of course, no way of discussing this with one another - never mind being able to attribute it to any failure to 'follow instructions' ...

Metaphysics (again)

More generally, any 'complete' story we tell about the world must include an outline (at least) of how the ordered collections of tokens (marks, noises, gestures) which are used to express true accounts can be distinguished from those which are not. (These, too, are part of the world our metaphysics might seek to explain.)

In other words, any general metaphysics must offer a theory of truth. It must allow us to distinguish the actual representations of statements (in the 'substance' of the metaphysics) into classes commensurate with our semantic concepts of truth and falsehood.

But this theory of truth must include the metaphysics itself within its scope. The marks, noises, gestures which represent a statement of this metaphysics can only be shown to belong to a privileged class on grounds derived from the metaphysics.

A metaphysics that does not project conditions of truth is pointless, and one which does is paradoxical.

It's just the OQ problem again.

Machines

We might distinguish between a 'mechanism' and a 'machine'. 

A mechanism, as I want to characterise it, may be a discovered item - a set of interacting parts whose behaviour may be predictable if the relationship between the parts, and between the mechanism and its environment, is understood.

A machine is a mechanism accompanied by a promise: that it will function according to a normative rule.

This promise has to be a human promise, of course. A human being may construct a mechanism, but will only have constructed a machine if the constructor gives it a purpose and warrants (to some extent) that this purpose will be achieved.

This might seem to render all 'natural' mechanisms purposeless, by ruling out 'discovered' purposes. This isn't quite the case, however.

Human beings have always wanted to find a proxy for purpose in the natural world - this was provided by hypothesising deities (especially in the case of the 'argument from design'). The promise of evolutionary theory is slightly different, but still has a normative core:

Evolutionary theory gives an account of how a natural mechanism, including a 'human being' (as biologically characterised), can appear to have a purpose. The promise, here, is from the theorists - that if evolutionary theory is correct, we may rely on some of its products.

The tricky thing, of course, is that it appears to be the human 'biological machine' that attributes purpose to things. Evolutionary theory itself is only valid because it is intelligible when expressed in human language. Can we say something about the 'purpose' of this language?

Probably not. Partly because the 'machinery' of language cannot be identified independently from its normative and intentional concomitants ...

More on this later, I think.

Intelligibility, Rule-Following and Mechanism

I've driven some wedges between these concepts on open question grounds already in this blog, but I want to draw attention to a particular conclusion that we can draw with some confidence:

If the whole of reality was, in some sense, 'mechanically deterministic' - even, in fact, if this hypothesis was adjusted to accommodate the kind of uncertainties projected by quantum mechanics - then decisions about truth and falsehood would also have to be rendered in mechanical terms.

This would include the truth or falsehood of any statement of mechanistic determinism. In other words, if MD is true, then it is only true on deterministic grounds.

And, of course, if there are other grounds then there are things in the world which cannot be accounted for in terms of mechanistic determinism.

Sameness: A Joke

Sameness looks like an indispensable concept, without which we would be unable to make sense. Surely we need to be able to identify words that are 'the same', or meanings that are 'the same', in order to speak at all?

But what does this mean? Can we be sure that the 'sameness' we employ today is the same 'sameness' we used yesterday? Must 'sameness' be a thing we can find in the world, or a feature of things we can find in the world, in order for it to work in our language and thought? How could we be sure that we had found it, and that it was the same each time that we did?

Clearly, we can, at least implicitly, agree about this in our present conversation: If you and I had sufficiently incongruous conceptions of 'sameness', if we radically disagreed about which things were the same and which were different, this conversation - perhaps any conversation - would be impossible.

We would not be able to discuss sameness at all.

And now that we have, I suspect it will never seem quite the same to us again.

Maybe the Central Question?

There are two questions we might ask about the relationship between the world and the way we speak:

(1)    How does the fact that we have a shared experience of the world validate the way we talk about it?

(2)    How does the fact that we can talk about the world in the way that we do validate our sense of shared experience?

The first one has been the focus of the Western empiricist tradition, but only the second one can be rendered intelligible.

With respect to (1), we cannot even ask questions about our shared experience, or mutually investigate the intelligibility of what we say, without attributing some minimal sense to what we say to one another.

With respect to (2), the question 'can we talk about the world?' can only be answered in the affirmative, since its denial is a statement about the world - that we cannot talk about it. Since we can talk about the world, we can draw conclusions about its nature, and some of these conclusions will have a bearing on what we mean by 'sharing experience', and to what extent we actually achieve this.

Sensory Empiricist Epistemology - A Moral Risk

This has probably been remarked on by others, at least indirectly, but it's worth spelling out:

At the heart of the 'internal / external', 'subjective / objective', 'senses / science' conundrum lurks an issue of good faith. When we cannot understand what someone (A) is saying - when what they are saying does not 'make sense' to us - we might represent this to another person (B) as a hypothesis about A's competence or honesty as a language user.

Within the empiricist tradition, there are many statements (e.g. first-person observation statements) where this failure, or this dishonesty, must translate into a specific issue with A's sensory apparatus: either it isn't working properly (they don't see what's there) or they are lying (they see, but pretend not to). We know (externally, demonstrably) that the linguistic interaction is going wrong, and we claim (problematically, unresolvably) that this results from a lack of facility or from moral failure.

This easy projection of the external communication breakdown onto the internal space of a potential interlocutor has some ugly consequences. Among mental health practitioners, there is considerable disagreement about whether certain conditions can be treated as personal deficiencies or whether they can only be understood contextually - whether, for example, the family, the society, or the therapist/client relationship need to be considered along with the capacities of the patient or client. Traditionally, people have been diagnosed as mad on the grounds of their social interactions, but treated as though the incomprehensible aspects of these are the product of personal perceptual and moral defects.

If we look for epistemological fundamentals in the possibility of a shared language, we are forced to shift the focus from the individual to the interaction - from personal 'failure' to relationships. From this perspective, we are also forced to recognise that diagnosing someone as having an 'individual defect' must always be provisional and can never have a 'moral' dimension. Once we have put someone outside the class of interlocutors (or potential interlocutors?) our judgments about their intentional states cannot be tested against their participation in the conversation. We cannot know their reasons, and so cannot judge them.

This doesn't mean that we cannot protect ourselves from their actions, of course. It does mean that we cannot pretend that we can know that this is 'for their own good'.

We also cannot legitimately invite them to consult their own internal condition to explain our behaviour towards them; to consult their empirical equipment or their conscience to find the roots of their 'madness'.

Not only do we have no shared language with which to do this, but we have no legitimating empiricist mythology with which to comfort ourselves.

What is the world really like?

I'm tempted, obviously, to give an oblique, Austinian, kind of answer to this question, but I think it  needs taken seriously. Perhaps Austin was a bit presumptuous and condescending, for all that he was broadly right.

So: I was lying in bed last night, half asleep, thinking about what the world was like, and having some meta-thoughts about what that question meant. I might share these thoughts with you, or I might not. If I did, it would be through this medium of 'textual encoding' that I'm using now. Is this like the medium of picture encoding that I would use to send you a photograph? (Is that, itself, a 'transparent' medium?)

We might say that (a) there is a way that the world is, (b) that I might have thoughts (correct or incorrect) about the way the world is, and (c) that I might (honestly or dishonestly) represent to you what I claimed to be thinking. If my thoughts are correct, and I represent them honestly, then I would be telling the truth.

The problem with this picture (as a sketch for an epistemology) is that stages (a) and (b) are more or less opaque until they have been articulated - a stage (c) process. And yet, somehow,  it provides an intuitively compelling model for empirical truth-telling.

The problems are overwhelming, of course. The way the world is can only be present to my cognition if I'm thinking about it, and I can't bring either the presence or the thought into this conversation with you without articulating them.

So what about the intuitively compelling model?

The Monadology seemed very idiosyncratic to me when I was first introduced to it, as, I'm sure, it does to many who think the problem it addresses can (implausibly) be solved in some other way, but Leibniz' picture of solipsistic universes kept mysteriously synchronized with one another poetically captures the human condition, if some of its elaborations are less convincing.

The synchronicity is, of course, a projection of our shared language. How this reflects back to the interior is a central focus of therapeutic practice, which draws on both the articulable and on the inarticulable (which can only be 'shown' or 'discovered') in the relationship between the therapist and the client - or, as one might more modestly claim, between one human being and another.

The solipsistic condition cannot, of course, be represented (although we can have a name for it - 'beetle', perhaps ...).

The therapeutic dilemma is that the attempt to explore this is both essential and inexplicable. I am quite sure that the things that go on in my 'mind', as I might say to you, are profoundly engaged with what I say and how my behaviour is represented in the world. I can, however, neither show you this nor tell it to you in a way that sidesteps the need to presuppose semantic congruence.

And neither of us should imagine that we can agree about what words we might privately be reciting to ourselves. Words such as: "I wonder if we are making any sense to one another at all."

Far less imagine that we can discover this particular thought in one another without accompanying words.