The Primacy of the 1st and 2nd Person Perspective, the Roots of Validation

Hume's observation that we cannot demonstrate the reliability of our sensory inputs, but must, nevertheless, build our knowledge of the world from them stands at the focus of the modern analytic tradition in epistemology. How this observation is made and interpreted, how it 'works' within a community of language users, has had some attention. It deserves much more: We can only share Hume's skepticism if we have a shared understanding of what it is that he is skeptical about.

Almost the whole of philosophy (and empirical science) has oriented itself towards validating third-person narratives - validating that something 'is the case' as though this could be demonstrated independently of whether the statement of that something (or its contrary) is intelligible within our conversation (literally, the conversation between you and me). That this is an error is what we should have learned from Moore's paradox. It is the deep truth that Barry Stroud passed by when he dismissed the epistemological relevance of 'privileged statements'.

There is no such thing as pure third-person validation. A third-person conversation can only count as a conversation if you and I can agree on this. Our agreement about Hume - our confidence in our shared capacity to consider him - is epistemologically prior to anything he might have said.

It is, of course, difficult to imagine how our present conversation might remain intelligible to us if we disagreed very profoundly about certain historical facts, but that does not make the facts the grounds for the intelligibility - it makes our experiments with intelligibility the grounds for what we count (at the limit what we must count) as facts.

However counter-intuitive this might seem, it is - to paraphrase Sherlock Holmes - the only hypothesis which must survive a considered skeptical assault. While we might share doubts about Hume, we cannot intelligibly share doubts about our doubts about Hume without wondering whether we are, in fact, having an intelligible conversation about doubt. Or perhaps about anything.

Metaphysics studies what must be true for our conversations to be intelligible, without considering that intelligibility must be a test of metaphysics, and not vice versa. And intelligibility is not a 'third-person' attribute. We can always articulate a radical skepticism about the intelligibility of a conversation between third parties, but we cannot intelligibly articulate a similar skepticism about the conversation you and I are presently having.

More on Metaphysics ...

A way of talking that we are comfortable with can feel like it has metaphysical roots. Each member of a language community might (silently) refer to 'different' metaphysical roots of this kind, but still be able to sustain conversations with each other (this is an extension of the 'box-beetle' parable).

When we describe these roots, of course, we may find that we disagree. A characteristic of these descriptions (when nothing more nefarious is at stake) is that however different the metaphysical inspirations are, they cannot be distinguished on the basis of 'truth-conditions'. If they could, then some would not survive. Or the community would fragment - members would become unintelligible to one another. Truth conditions, after all, must also be intelligible.

Machines ...

 A machine is not just an object - or even a set of 'processes' (as in a computer program). For it to be a machine it must, in addition to this, be accompanied by a promise. For human-made machines the promise is from the constructor: 'I promise this will fulfil its function'. For 'natural' machines the promise is from the theoriser - the person articulating the hypothesis that the object is a machine - and it is a promise that this person knows how the machine works; knows what its 'function' is.

The 'stability' of machines is therefore a projection of our belief in semantic stability. We can only make promises if we know what we are saying, and we can only know what we are saying if, to some minimal extent, words mean the 'same' from one occasion of use to another.

This is one of the reasons why the 'fact' that we can construct machines and the fact that we can talk about the world are really the same fact.

Most machines are, of course, a bit 'unreliable'. Their accompanying promises are not always fulfilled. We can only make adjudications about this in a working language. (Collapsing bridges - which appear in many 'reality' diatribes - can only be identified through this kind of adjudication.)

What this means is that semantic stability underpins the identification and appraisal of 'machines'. Which, in turn, means that no 'mechanistic' account can be given of semantic stability.

(We should know this, of course, from the Goodman/Kripke paradox.)

We certainly can't intelligibly articulate a speculation that semantic stability is some kind of 'illusion' either ... nor even the related speculation that we might wonder about this privately.

So much, by the way, for mechanistic determinism. Which seems like a fairly trivial corollary, under the circumstances ...

Stroud again ...

Barry Stroud's exact error is that he thought a wedge could be driven between 'X is true' and 'We can in all respects converse as though X were true'. He missed the real force of Wittgenstein's 'beetle' argument.

'X is true', in other words, literally means that we can, in all respects, converse as though X were true. No sense can be attached to it otherwise.

We might imagine that a 'thought' can be true, or a 'proposition' can be true, independent of language. But this is exactly to imagine that the contents of my box must be the 'same' as the contents of your box for our discourse to be meaningful. In fact, issues of 'sameness', and even the concept of 'sameness' itself can only arise within a functioning discourse.

'Sameness' is, fundamentally, a semantic concept. When we say 'we can only speak to one another because there are some things in the world that are the same as one another', we are arguing that sameness 'in the world' can be deduced from our ability to converse.

Our ability to converse is the fulcrum - not some fact about the world. If there is a 'verificationist principle' at work here, it is the possibility of verification itself - the possibility of producing an intelligible account of anything at all.

Our private phenomenological space is, to a relevant extent, radically unshareable. When we make it the locus for intentional states, we do no more than claim that we can talk to one another. When we attribute intentional states to those with whom we cannot converse (our pets, for instance) we are no more than saying 'if they could talk, they would talk this way'.

I can only ask a philosophical question in a functioning conversation. The idea of a philosophical question about whether it is possible to have a functioning conversation is unintelligible. We would need a 'private' language in which to ask such a question, and such a language would only be intelligible if it could, in principle, be shared.

Bomb Disposal Revisited

In a 2007 post entitled "Meaning and Transmission", I (slightly) explored an example of good-faith falsehood. In a draft of a paper on Business Ethics that I put together a while later, I found a better development of the example:

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A claim, or a belief, that a conversational move is honest cannot be sustained if it is also recognised by interlocutors that the move has consequences which are inconsistent with the possibility of the conversation.  This follows from the characterisation given elsewhere in this blog – the method of recursion cannot produce inconsistent results; the language game must remain playable.  This has the consequence that any honest move must be consistent with the indefinite extension of the conversation (in principle) on the basis of any general rules, or attributed intentional states, implied by the move.

In order to explore this, I am going to outline a strong apparent counter-example, and then explain why it fails.  In the course of this, some more detailed aspects of the approach will become clear.

Imagine that A is a bomb-disposal expert, and that she is advising B how to disarm a bomb.  A is safe from the effects of making a wrong decision, but B will be blown up if he cuts the wrong wire.  B, with two wires left to cut – a red one and a blue one – asks A which one to cut first.  Both know that the wrong choice will be fatal to B.  A knows that the red wire should be cut first.

Now add the following circumstance:  B completely believes that A wants him dead, and wishes to exploit the current situation to that effect.  A knows that B believes this, but B does not know that A knows this.  A does not want B dead.

The obvious consequence of this is that if A is to save B’s life, she must tell him to cut the wrong wire – because whichever wire she tells him to cut, he will cut the other.

The interesting issues here are:

1. A, clearly, should not tell B the truth about which wire to cut first, if she wants to save his life..

2. We have no grounds for thinking that killing B is a good thing to do.  At least for A and for B, it is not a good thing to do.

3. By telling B to cut the blue wire, A confirms B’s suspicion that she is trying to kill him, and – presumably – does substantial damage to the possibility that B might regard A as an honest interlocutor.

In the absence of complicated and unlikely presuppositions, I think we would want to regard A’s participation in this conversation (‘Cut the blue wire’) as honest engagement.  However, it is both untruthful and fatal to the conversation (though not, happily, to B).

Why is this not a counter-example?

The answer is that it only works as a counter-example if something like the interpretation we have given to the circumstances is correct.  However, the grounds we have for thinking that it is correct are very peculiar.  If we try to imagine this situation without the explanatory gloss given to A’s intentional state – her knowledge, desires, and beliefs – B’s interpretation of the situation would have seemed the most likely.  In this circumstance, we have no behavioural, or indeed any public, evidence that A is trying to save B’s life – indeed, quite the contrary.

We can only come to know unambiguously what A’s intentional state is through having a conversation with A, with the presumption of honest (and now truthful) engagement that this requires.  We can be misled by the authorial access of a narrator here – it is only because we (improbably, and without explanation) ‘know the whole story’ that the counter-example seems to make sense.  Once we have spoken to A, it is no longer a counter-example, but a perfectly intelligible (and true) account given in A’s conversation with us.  In order to complete this, we would surmise that if B knew the ‘whole story’, and was an interlocutor in the shared conversation, B would share our interpretation – or if there was conflict, it would have to be resolved for the conversation to continue.

It can be difficult to untangle the various complications of self-reference, authorial access, behavioural implication, and conversational competence that this kind of example illustrates.  It’s worth setting some of these out in a summary:

4. Authorial access:  I have produced this counter-example in a conversation with you (the reader), and provided no account of how I came to know A’s intentions.  If I failed to provide this account when queried, the quality of my participation in this conversation would be in doubt.  Given the circumstances, a reliable account would need to refer to a conversation I had with A that was contiguous with the one I’m having with you.  Any other evidence would have to include this, at least indirectly – e.g. if a third party told me of A’s intentions, based on A’s account to them.

5. Behaviour:  An interpretation of A’s behaviour, in the absence of some conversation with A, would be unlikely to include the possibility that it was well intentioned.  It could not exclude it either, but there are great many things it could not exclude (the Kripke/Goodman paradox, again).

6. Competence and honesty:  If, in some conversation I had with A, A had lied to me about her intentions (e.g. to cover up her attempt to kill B), then A would not have been an honest participant in that conversation, and so its status as a conversation would be degraded.  This either (a) could be discovered through further conversational experiment or (b) is not an intelligible possibility.

7. Self-reference:  While we might think we can intelligibly theorise about a circumstance where honest participation necessarily produced an ultimate conversational disaster, we can only do this by presuming that, at least for us, this disaster has not occurred.  The tragedy of A and B can only be narrated if someone can narrate; its details (which include their intentional states) are only credible if they have participated in some part of the extended conversation in which this narration takes place.

On being the value of a bound variable ...

A difficulty with theological dogma (whether about god or about 'reality') is its insistence on metaphysical literality. Dogmatic truth cannot just be 'a way of speaking', however carefully we qualify that phrase. 

There is an important sense in which science can be comfortable with  'We can talk as though X is true' and 'X is true' being methodologically indistinguishable, when understood in the most unrestricted way. Dogma cannot.

This has some odd consequences. One is that religious 'truth' trumps intelligibility - so that we end up with 'mysteries' like the Catholic trinity. Another, related to this, is that it must be possible to distinguish meaning from truth-value - since specifying a theory of truth ('X is true iff Y') implies a methodological test (in the broadest sense of a 'specific way of finding out') that at least implies a difference in meaning, even if meaning can't be entirely reduced to methodology. 'God exists' and 'we can talk, in the most unrestricted way, as though God exists' must mean different things, even though the methods used to test the truth of the first are exactly the same as the methods used to test the truth of the second.

One place that we could look for such a difference might be in subjective experience which, as David Hume observed, commands conviction without providing arguments. No methodological test can be specified. Willard Quine went with this in the end, by more or less stipulating that sensory input just was the basis of scientific proof - a perspective as dogmatic as any credo.

From a psychological perspective, the experience of conviction without awareness has its place in what is called 'procedural knowledge' - we can know how to do something without being able to explain how to do it or even being able to properly articulate our knowledge; frequently without even being able to give a very satisfactory account of how we came by this knowledge. Facility with language depends upon extensive procedural knowledge - most people have far more semantic and grammatical knowledge than they can articulate or give an account of. The 'obviousness' of how to talk, to most language users, makes the link between the inner world of 'experience' and the shared world we describe to one another. Our congruent public narrative convinces us of the congruence of our sensory apparatus. Without any 'argument' ...

If we attempt to construct a more public test based on this ('let me show you and you will agree with me'), we render important truths vulnerable to empathic failure unless we are ready to resort to accusations of bad faith. If say that I do not see your god from the best perspective you can construct, then either your test has failed or I am a liar.

'We agree about how to talk', however, must be true, to some minimal extent, before we can put together narratives about 'procedural knowledge', or ask questions about 'reality', or construct advantageous perspectives. This is a matter of intelligibility rather than visceral conviction (although it may be this as well) and so doesn't solve the 'really' problem in the kind of way that would relieve any felt metaphysical anxiety. If the existence of God could be derived from the possibility of intelligible speech, the 'as if' problem would go away, but would make the existence of God a consequence of our ability to talk to one another. I'm not sure how satisfactory this would be to a dogmatic believer.

The same thing applies to the relationship between the experience of being here and the value of the noun 'I'. While solipsism may be grammatically unintelligible, the 'fact' that we directly experience only one 'sensorium', and the 'fact' of our limited ability to share it, point in the other direction - which means no more nor less than that the 'unshareable' parts are outside the scope of intelligible discourse. The experience of 'I' and our knowledge of 'God' seem to belong in the same sensory wilderness.

It is much harder to dispense with 'I' than with 'God' in first-person conversations of course. And substituting 'God' into sentence functions doesn't generate Moorean paradoxes. Which, I suppose, is a kind of demonstration of agnosticism without relativism. "I don't need 'God'" makes sense, but "I don't need 'I'" doesn't.

A person as viscerally convinced of the existence of God as they are of the existence of the objects in the room they are in may find it difficult to hold a conversation with someone who does not share one or the other of these convictions. Whether it is a 'matter of fact' that the objects, or God, are 'really' in the room will not be relevant to their difficulty. If the difficulty is insurmountable, it won't even be clear what they might mean by a 'matter of fact'.

When Richard Dawkins asked Robert Winston, a practising Jew, how he, a 'man of science' could believe in God, Winston said "I'm going to give you a very Jewish answer: It depends on what you mean by 'God'".

He understood some important aspects of the relationship between methodology and meaning. As he might.

Unpredictability and Unintelligibility

Einstein's famous dictum that 'God does not play dice' might be a projection of a problem with the semantic grounding of scientific (or any...) theories.

In order to make sense to one another, we must (at least) be able to predict, to some extent, how honest and competent interlocutors will use the words we use to do this. For Wittgenstein, this predictability of use was what we really meant by 'meaning'.

If the world is arranged in such a way that two participants in a conversation might be using a word correctly but still semantically diverge, then the consequent confusion cannot be resolved. We might imagine that a fundamentally stochastic universe could be like this - that two experimenters might correctly give conflicting answers to a question about, for example, when a uranium atom emitted an alpha particle.

This is not, of course, what happens. While they might only be able to agree on a probability distribution beforehand, we do not expect them to disagree on the actual timing of the event afterward. The 'Many Worlds' interpretation of quantum mechanics, and possibly other holistic approaches to it, avoids the problem by ensuring that interlocutors who might give different accounts of the actual event can never converse, so no semantic incoherence can arise.

We might wonder whether any solution of this kind to the problem can really be satisfactory. My instinct is that Einstein would have thought not.

But we need to be wary of instinct here - both mine and Einstein's. We are inclined to treat the world as semantically transparent - as though it was possible to be quite explicit about the meanings and uses of the words we use to give our accounts of it. But we know that this heuristic leads us into confusion. When we try to be (exhaustively) explicit about the meanings of words we find that we need to be explicit about the meaning of our explicit account as well, and so run into an open question problem. Some minimal ambiguity must remain. So long as it is not 'methodologically' relevant, it may do no harm ...

The appearance and persistence of the heuristic of semantic transparency is not surprising - it's a productive metaphysical posture, for one thing, and many specific ambiguities turned out to be resolvable, for another.

Once again, however, we mustn't imagine that a specific grammatical structure reflects an independent metaphysical substrate. Semantic transparency is a product of our language use, not a grounding for it. While a world in which radical semantic divergences were irresolvable would not support language users, we cannot draw any conclusions about this beyond that we do not live in such a world.

In particular, we can't say now how we might resolve future threats of semantic divergence. Perhaps by reviewing what we mean by 'playing dice', for instance ...

Epistemological Empiricism - an Alien Experiment

I may have posted this before, but I came across a copy of it, and wanted to make sure:

No adequate answer to the question of how we validate the knowledge-acquisition role of sensory input has ever been found.  It may be a “mad” (Wittgenstein) question, but it is very hard – embarrassingly hard, for traditional sensory empiricism – to say why.  And it needs to say why, if it is to give the kind of account of knowledge acquisition suggested by the paradigm case.

In fact, however, it is quite easy to demonstrate that no account of this kind can be given.  Consider the following thought experiment:

The central characters are some newly discovered aliens.  These aliens actually look surprisingly human, except for some obvious differences that I will come to.  They walk on two legs, they speak languages that we can translate and they have many social, technical, and artistic accomplishments which, though superficially strange to us, are entirely recognisable to us for what they are.  They are our new friends in a friendless universe.

The difference between these aliens and ourselves is that they have no discernible sense organs of any kind, and their language is entirely devoid of elements that depend on or refer to sensory perception.  Instead of saying “I see the painting on the wall” they say, instead, “There is a painting on the wall”.  Instead of “I hear beautiful music playing” they say “There is beautiful music playing”.  If we ask them how they know about these things, they are entirely puzzled - surely they just “know” them.  How can there be a process preceding knowledge?

After some interaction with us, and a great deal of epistemological discussion between their philosophers and our philosophers, we are able to establish the following facts about their knowledge-acquisition processes:

(1) They are likely to know more about things that are physically close to them than about things that are far away, although there are many exceptions to this rule.

(2) They sometimes believe that they know things, and later turn out to be wrong.  Aliens that do this a lot receive community support from other Aliens.

(3)  Some of them have specialist knowledge - they know things that others do not.  Some who have specialist knowledge are acknowledged among their kind as having unusual talents.  Others have it because they have spent a lot of time thinking about things, talking to aliens that have different knowledge from theirs, and working out new relationships between different kinds of knowledge.

Perplexed by this limited understanding our philosophers write to their philosophers with the following helpful advice.  They say:

"It is not possible to know things directly - you have to find them out somehow.  There must be some process by which you acquire knowledge from the world.  Look at us - we have eyes to see the world with, ears to hear it with, we can taste it, smell it, and feel it.  This is how we know about the world.  If we were like you, and couldn't account for our knowledge, we would be extremely insecure - we would be afraid of getting things wrong.

"We advise you to discover the basis of your knowledge - there must be some hidden connection between the world and your understanding, some sensory apparatus, perhaps complex and mysterious, which you and we have not yet discovered.  Until you discover it, your knowledge must always be qualified and uncertain.  Put your best brains on it immediately!"

At the same time as our philosophers are licking the stamp on this communication and putting in the intergalactic post, their philosophers are sending us the following message:

"We know about your sensory apparatus - you have ears to hear with and eyes to see with.  You can taste smell and feel the world around you.  But you are entirely mistaken about the role these have in knowledge determination - surely you must understand that knowing comes before sensing, that your sensory apparatus would be useless to you if you didn't already know that it was reliable.  Without a secure knowing, your senses would provide you only with unreliable sensations - not much better than entertainment.

“And you cannot found your knowledge of the reliability of your senses on the evidence of your senses - this would be a non-sequitur of the most elementary kind.  Only on secure knowledge can you build other knowledge.

“This is obvious to the youngest child among us!"

On receipt of these pieces of advice, the philosophers on both sides fall into two different camps.  One camp says:

"Those people are defective.  They cannot have real knowledge of the world because they [humans: can't relate it to any reliable sensory input / aliens: think sensory input is more reliable than secure knowledge].  They may appear to be making sense, but we know their heads are filled with nonsense because [humans: their knowledge isn't supported by anything / aliens: they allow the most egregious question-begging to pass as reliable theory]."

The other camp says:

"Despite appearances, and entirely mysteriously, we know from the way they talk that these people seem to have acquired real knowledge of the world, despite the fact that [humans: they cannot base it on sensory input / aliens: they think sensory input is more reliable than definite knowledge]."

And, of course, it is the second camp that has it right.

Metaphysical Anxiety - the 'Inside' and the 'Outside'

'Traditional' epistemology has often concerned itself with the reliability of experience as a source of understanding, rather than directly with the reliability of our scientific theories. The link between these has been taken for granted by empiricists, a position that is congruent with a kind of 'common sense' picture of how our experiences and our conversations are related.

I have argued, through this blog, that this perspective is profoundly wrong. It is wrong for reasons which empiricists have been struggling with since the seventeenth century. In particular, it is wrong because it generates an open question paradox that cannot be resolved without doing serious harm to what we mean by 'experience', 'knowledge', 'truth' and 'meaning' - harm that quickly spreads to the intelligibility of any conversation in which these words are used.

It's wrongness, however, is less interesting than why - despite its wrongness - it has been so compelling. There seem to be two reasons for this - a positive one and a negative one.

The positive one is our visceral experience of the relationship between our internal ('phenomenological')  states and what we say. From a primitive expression of pain through to the articulation of an abstract theory, the 'internal' seems to drive the 'external'. In addition to this, we have a strong intuition that honest and informed theorising is linked to a definite set of internal circumstances and attitudes. Truth-telling and truth-living seem to be connected.

The negative one is that it seems hard - or has seemed hard - to otherwise account for the 'reliability' of our scientific theorising. If it is not grounded in 'experience' then in what is it grounded?

The occasional unreliability of experiences, and the occasional confusions that arise in our conversations, show that the problem has serious practical aspects.

David Hume spells out the dilemma very clearly - pointing out that while we cannot demonstrate that our sensory inputs - our 'impressions' - provide reliable knowledge, we nevertheless are compelled to rely on them. He also strictly insists on their being the only test of scientific knowledge - drawing a clear distinction between our knowledge of formal relationships between concepts - as found in mathematics and logic, for instance - and knowledge acquired via the senses (which includes scientific knowledge). The former can be demonstrated, and the latter we are compelled to rely on but cannot demonstrate. 

This distinction between 'analytic' statements and 'synthetic' statements was part of the bedrock of the Anglo-American analytic tradition in philosophy until well into the 20th century, when it was recognised as having two flaws:

The first, courtesy of Willard Quine, is that it is often contextual. A statement that can work as a principle of argument in one context (can seem to be analytic) can look more like a statement of fact (can seem to be synthetic) in another. Think, for instance, of conservation laws in physics - are these descriptive of the world, or are they principles that must be recognised in any physical argument?

The second flaw is that the distinction itself is neither an analytic nor a synthetic truth. It cannot be shown to be a consequence of formal reasoning, nor can it be shown to depend on experience. This has the consequence that either there must be some other ground for reliable knowledge, or that we cannot be sure that Hume was right. In fact, we can be quite certain that we can legitimately entertain the possibility that he was not, for reasons that are not analytic.

In this blog, I have argued that we do not need to 'validate' our experiential substrate, nor its relationship with empirical theorising, in order to validate the empirical theorising itself. We validate our theorising by grounding it on the possibility of theorising - upon those statements whose rejection cannot be part of a playable language game (Barry Stroud's 'privileged statements' - although he did not recognise their foundational importance). These cannot be restricted to 'rules of the game' (analytic truths), since we cannot make the analytic/synthetic distinction in a way that would support this. And since it is a fact about the world that we can theorise about it, so it would be a fact about the world if we could not, and so unintelligible.

The root of empirical theorising is not some link to internal experience, but those statements which must be true for empirical theorising to be possible. And, since 'empirical theorising is not possible' is, essentially, an empirical theory (about the knowability of the world), some of these statements will have the character of universally necessary truths.

To those who might, with Barry Stroud, point to the possibility of necessary truths outside the scope of what can be articulated in language, I have to ask, how can these be identified? How can we consider them, accomodate them in our theorising, without articulating them? What are they?

But Stroud's problem points back to a deeper issue that I want to address: What do we do with the phenomenological 'space' - the internal world that we inhabit, and from which we hurl our words at one another? What can we do with the possibility that this internal world may become unhitched from the public world, and that we might become unintelligible to others simply as a consequence of honestly recognising our own experiences and feelings?

This is exactly the experience, I think, that many people suffering from severe (and perhaps not so severe ...) mental illnesses have. Perhaps we hope that a true grasp of rational theorising might preserve us from this, and justify our conflation of  'madness' and 'irrationality'.

To try to get a proper - though possibly not completely reassuring - grasp of what is going on here, it's worth making a few observations.

The first is that relying on our internal processes to keep ourselves publicly intelligible must work pretty well on the whole. An empirical theory to this effect might not even be hard to test - arguably we are engaged in just such an investigation as we move through the world and experiment with communication strategies. No empirical theory can count as an argument for the reliability of empirical theorising in general, of course (pace Quine), but this is not what we are looking for here - we can ground empirical theorising elsewhere. As Hume suggests, the qualified metaphysical status of our 'impressions and ideas' doesn't make them generally misleading.

And as Donald Davidson (more or less) points out, they can't be generally misleading or we wouldn't have a language that worked well enough for us to speculate to that effect.

The second is that there is a relationship between the language acquisition process and the apparent 'boot-strapping' of our capacity for truth-telling from the fact that we can talk to one another. In the early pages of the Investigations, Wittgenstein draws attention to the question-begging involved in accounting for language acquisition on the basis of some proto-linguistic communication device (such as pointing at things). He also explores at some length the experience of learning new meaning rules - how they suddenly just 'make sense', so that 'we know to carry on'. There seems to be no underlying 'language of thought' or 'micro-program' that we use to calculate what we should say - and even if there seemed to be, it wouldn't help us here.

(Quine, of course, also remarks on the essential ambiguity of proto-linguistic devices such as pointing: What, exactly, is the teacher 'pointing' at?).

Wittgenstein suggests a way of thinking about this that anyone who has engaged with a small child learning to speak would find very recognisable: he points out that there are things that can be shown, but not said. Children learn to speak by being spoken to and listened to - not (obviously) by taking instruction.

Just as we do not need our internal states to ground our knowledge claims, neither do we need an account of this process that demonstrates the reliability of the child's language acquisition. The child's capacity to speak is discovered and demonstrated within the conversations we might have with it about this. We will either find it intelligible, or we will not - just as we do with others we are assessing as potential interlocutors.

And just as with other potential interlocutors, there is no 'matter of fact' about their general intelligibility. If we don't find someone intelligible, we can never know whether this is because they 'really' don't make sense, or because we haven't tried hard enough (haven't found the right way to talk to them).

The experience of the child - as with anyone exploring a new communication strategy - will be of trying to 'get it right'; of trying to find out 'how to go on'. What it is not is an experience of trying to master the explicit dictionary and grammar of a demonstrably intelligible language, in order to express a coherent internal reality. (The task is enormously complicated, of course, by the way the child's experiences of its experiments feeds back into that internal reality.)

So: while we are convinced that these internal processes must validate as well as inspire, we must (with Hume) be satisfied with just inspire. But the failure of one validation model does not imply that there is no validation model. We experiment with how to talk to one another, and so experiment with validation models at the same level as we experiment with stories about the world.

Our language does not depend upon our having a shared phenomenological space, nor even upon our phenomenological spaces being somehow commensurate beyond what is required for us to speak to one another. It is only our ability to speak to one another that convinces us that there is a shared space, and it is only within our conversations that we can give meaning to that conviction and to its content.

Naming and Metaphysics

And, of course, there is this:

We can only determine that 'A' and 'B' are not two names for the same thing if we can account for the way we distinguish between the 'things' they might be names for. This doesn't reach 'outside the language'. It's just like the game of 'Pangolin' - Is there a question we can ask about something that must have a different answer for A than for B?

If there is no such question, we have no grounds for denying identity. To claim that there may be a 'real' distinction that we cannot discern is no more than to claim that we may have to review our conclusion in the light of new circumstances. If the possibility of review is unintelligible, then the identity is necessary.

Meaning, Use, and Method

Wittgenstein's conflation of meaning and use, and Davidson's (and others') conflation of meaning with 'truth conditions' could be mashed together into an approach that yields some interesting results.

The truth-condition account of the meaning of an assertion could be generalised in terms of 'instructions for use'. We could say 'The right time to say "It is raining in Nebraska" is when it is raining in Nebraska'.

This kind of account would allow us to go beyond assertions - so long as we can either show or explain the use of an expression, we could say that we can introduce someone to its meaning.

Now imagine two circumstances that we want to distinguish - circumstance A and circumstance B. We can only succeed practically if we can show that there is a methodological (in the broadest sense) wedge that we can drive between them - if we can show someone a way of discovering, for instance, that it is A, and not B, that we have an example of on a particular occasion. If there is no methodological wedge, and we still insist that a distinction can be made, we have nothing to point to. (A distinction based on naming itself would be question-begging.)

(Once, when I was visiting a university in Beijing, a local member of staff showed me a sculpture that they described as 'the pigeon of peace'. I struggled to think of how I might explain their 'mistake' to them. In the end, I didn't try - but various 'use' type explanations have occurred to me since ...)

The point of all this is that if I cannot communicate use distinctions to you, then I cannot communicate meaning distinctions either.

This has some important consequences - for instance, for whether we can distinguish between:

"The world is the way we say it is", and

"The world allows us to talk about it in the way that we do."

Semantic Experiment and Artificial Intelligence

We use 'linguistic tokens' in two distinguishable ways:

(1) In accordance with pre-existing grammatical and semantic rules.

(2) Experimentally - by exploring new possible rules and uses.

It is possible to imagine building a definite model of (1) for some particular state of our language use, but it is far from clear that modeling (2) is possible.

It is, in other words, possible to imagine programming (1), but not (2).

Human intelligence does both, and while there might be some sense in which a sophisticated self-learning algorithm might also do both, our grounds for thinking it might do this in a 'human-like' way are very weak. We don't have the appropriate kind of understanding of human intelligence to build an algorithm that can be guaranteed to behave like a human being, that would never diverge in some monstrous way.

Nature, after all, struggles to avoid monstrosity: and nature works more slowly, and has fewer combinatorial options available to it, than our AI experimenters do.

Turing avoided this difficulty by putting 'human intelligence' on both sides of the equation - we can't specify it, but, as human beings, we know it when we see it.

Until we don't ...

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' ...