• Leontiskos
    3.7k
    The reason for the fable is we are misled by being able to refer in our language into thinking that there is some fixed reference.Moliere

    Okay, so now you are saying that reference is inscrutable even to fellow language-speakers. Or more precisely, that there are no fixed referents amongst fellow language-speakers.

    But that doesn't seem right. If you and I are sitting in a room together there will be any number of fixed referents available, e.g. "table," "chair," "dog," "television," "photograph," etc. So how does that work? Do you mean something very specialized by "fixed reference"?

    A fact is a set of true sentences.Moliere

    "Moliere understands 'chair' to signify <chair-concept>."
    "Leontiskos understands 'chair' to signify <chair-concept>."
    "Therefore, Moliere and Leontiskos understand 'chair' to refer to the same kind of object."

    Those are three propositions, and if they are a set of three true sentences then on your view they would be called a "fact." If this is a fact, then it looks like there are facts of the matter with respect to reference.

    So when I say Truman is dead that is a true sentence about Truman. That Truman is dead, however, does not affix the reference of "Truman" -- nor do any other true sentences.Moliere

    Right: the (conventional) association between Truman and 'Truman' is already "affixed" before the true sentence is uttered. If it were not then the true sentence would not be true.

    You ever read about feral and dramatically maltreated children?Moliere

    I've read some, and I agree that it seems to substantiate my thesis.

    My solution is that if I check in with you and ask "Oh, do you mean this Truman or that Truman" we can refer in a given conversation, rather than that "Truman" always refers to Truman because of this or that theory of reference.Moliere

    I definitely agree that there is more than one person named "Truman."


    I think what you and some others are trying to say is this: "Reference cannot be fully and exhaustively explained." I would say that it depends what tools we have to hand and what we mean by "fully and exhaustively explained."
  • Moliere
    5.1k
    Okay, so now you are saying that reference is inscrutable even to fellow language-speakers. Or more precisely, that there are no fixed referents amongst fellow language-speakers.

    But that doesn't seem right. If you and I are sitting in a room together there will be any number of fixed referents available, e.g. "table," "chair," "dog," "television," "photograph," etc. So how does that work? Do you mean something very specialized by "fixed reference"?
    Leontiskos

    Nothing specialized on my end -- I'm only attempting to formulate my thoughts.

    I want to say that there's a difference in meaning between your opening sentences --

    "Reference is inscrutable even to fellow language-speakers" does not mean the same thing as "There are no fixed referents amongst fellow language-speakers"

    So if you and I are sitting in a room together there won't be fixed referents due to the facts alone, such as any given set of true sentences at a given time. There are too many facts to contend with in thinking that this will affix reference --it's reference is a social act whereby we make a judgment call that could be wrong, some of the time, but if we are willing to listen to one another we are able to refer.

    The main thing I'm getting at is the lack of some philosophical criteria which a philosopher can use to tell if something has successfully referred -- no such criteria exist, because reference isn't something done from the armchair.
  • Moliere
    5.1k
    "Moliere understands 'chair' to signify <chair-concept>."
    "Leontiskos understands 'chair' to signify <chair-concept>."
    "Therefore, Moliere and Leontiskos understand 'chair' to refer to the same kind of object."
    Leontiskos

    I'm not convinced that <chair-concept> is the object being referred to in using 'chair' -- I'd say that it's the chair being referred to, rather than the <chair-concept>

    It took me a minute to get here but I think I agree with Derrida's critique of the sign in Husserl and Saussure.

    But in Quinean terms -- I don't think there are such things as <chair-concept>'s, at least. Quine wants to eliminate as much conceptual machinery as he possibly feels he can get away with without denying the truth of natural science.

    Those are three propositions, and if they are a set of three true sentences then on your view they would be called a "fact." If this is a fact, then it looks like there are facts of the matter with respect to reference.

    But that there's a fact to the matter doesn't affix the reference, is what I'm contending.
  • Moliere
    5.1k
    Right: the (conventional) association between Truman and 'Truman' is already "affixed" before the true sentence is uttered. If it were not then the true sentence would not be true.Leontiskos

    And, yes! This is much more to my thinking with respect to "reference" at least -- at least, if it is not so affixed, if we listen to one another we can probably figure out what we mean.

    It's just not a metaphysical or ontological connection -- only a collective effort, or social dance.
  • Moliere
    5.1k
    I think what you and some others are trying to say is this: "Reference cannot be fully and exhaustively explained." I would say that it depends what tools we have to hand and what we mean by "fully and exhaustively explained."Leontiskos

    I think this is close -- but there's one thing added. Not only can it not be fully and exhaustively explained, it most certainly cannot be explained by the facts.
  • Leontiskos
    3.7k
    reference is a social act whereby we make a judgment call that could be wrong, some of the timeMoliere

    "There are no fixed referents," vs, "We could be wrong some of the time." Do you see how the latter does not justify the former?

    If you and I are sitting in an empty room with a dog, and I say, "The dog," there is a fixed referent. You know exactly what I am referring to. So it looks like there are fixed referents (i.e. referents that are fixed between at least two individuals).

    I'm not convinced that <chair-concept> is the object being referred to in using 'chair' -- I'd say that it's the chair being referred to, rather than the <chair-concept>Moliere

    Well you just used the word 'chair'. What chair are you referring to? And do I know what you are referring to?

    In fact there is no chair, and yet you used the word successfully. That is, I know what you are referring you despite the fact that there is no individual chair being referred to. That is what it means to say that we both have the same concept of a chair. Back to the original point, if we do not mean the same things by the words we use, then we cannot now be communicating.

    But that there's a fact to the matter doesn't affix the reference, is what I'm contending.Moliere

    And I just showed how it does. You and I mean the same abstract thing by 'chair', therefore the reference is fixed.

    It's just not a metaphysical or ontological connection -- only a collective effort, or social dance.Moliere

    Sure, but conventions are factual.

    1. "Moliere understands 'chair' to signify <chair-concept>."
    2. "Leontiskos understands 'chair' to signify <chair-concept>."
    3. "Therefore, Moliere and Leontiskos understand 'chair' to refer to the same kind of object."

    (1) and (2) are either true or false, and if they are true then on your definition they represent a fact. No one is saying that there are chair-concepts floating about in the Platonic ether. The point is that we both have an abstract notion of a chair such that the word signifies equivalently for each of us.

    (Perhaps I should clarify that "same kind of object" != chair-concept. The idea was rather that a chair is a kind, namely a kind of object. The concept is what connects different chairs to that same kind. If you are a descendent of Frege then you can explicate this in terms of sets and extension. The point is only that "chair" is a reference common to us both, i.e. it is fixed between the two of us.)
  • Banno
    26.1k
    If you and I are sitting in an empty room with a dog, and I say, "The dog," there is a fixed referent. You know exactly what I am referring to.Leontiskos

    Perhaps your landlord? The police officer you met on your drive home last night? The best in show of last year's Crufts?
  • Apustimelogist
    676
    "Moliere understands 'chair' to signify <chair-concept>."
    "Leontiskos understands 'chair' to signify <chair-concept>."
    "Therefore, Moliere and Leontiskos understand 'chair' to refer to the same kind of object."
    Leontiskos

    But I would say that the chair concept is in itself fuzzy, vague, indeterminate. If I bring a specific chair to mind then that is only an exemplar. There is no fixed definition of what a chair is. It seems to be a kind of know it when you see it kind of thing.

    Sure, I can bring up specific words to say a what a chair is but usually you can probably define a chair in many different ways and the words you use are probably as fuzzy and vague and indeterminate as the original concept you wanted to define. When you bring up a definition it usually helps you in your kind of know it when I see it cognition by prompting things in your brain. But imo, I don't know if it ever specifies something.

    When I say a chair refers to something it is almost better said that it refers to a shared ability to make certain kinds of distinctions in the world, and we don't necessarily need to specify this uniquely because we all know that everyone in the room is going to be equally good at agreeing on the distinctions from the same kind of stimuli and predicting the kinds of things they do, using them appropriately, etc.

    And its in this sense that the need to give strict definitions or translations of words becomes redundant - learning how to translate words in a foreign language isn't the aim; the aim is learning how to use words in another language. This is why I have thought recently that the translation example can be misleading in appearing to say that "well gavagai could plausible really mean undetatched rabbit appendage", but really I would like to view these kinds of examples (like the kripke one as well) as a kind of reductio in which to say - what is fundamental is the underlying use.

    If we want to use the concept of reference it is going to be filtered through how we use words and how we recognize things which can seem indeterminate, fuzzy and vague. Sometimes you can even recognize objects and you aren't even sure how you did it. Sometimes there is something inarticulable about our ability to pick out certain patterns and use words in complicated ways. And in that I would hope we can still use the concept of reference but in this context of fuzzyness, indeterminacy, vagueness. Reference isn't about look-up table or translation manual in your head. And maybe this is obvious to some people who want to talk about reference in a strongly realistic sense.

    In some ways, I think the difference between people on different poles of this debate are about whether you are sensitive to the details and in doing so possibly kind of de-emphasize the coarser picture. Or on the other hand, think the details don't really matter because our ability to talk about and engage with things like chairs is so damn good, why worry about them!
  • Leontiskos
    3.7k
    Perhaps your landlord?Banno

    Presumably we all agree that words signify by convention ("nomina significant ad placitum").

    So then a token like J-o-h-n will be indeterminate if there is more than one person named John (or if our interlocutor knows more than one person named John).

    If that is all that is meant by inscrutability of reference then it strikes me as trivial.
  • Leontiskos
    3.7k
    And in that I would hope we can still use the concept of reference but in this context of fuzzyness, indeterminacy, vagueness. Reference isn't about look-up table or translation manual in your head.Apustimelogist

    I will say that Moliere and I are referring to the same thing with 'chair' or 'rabbit'. Someone else will come along and tell me that there is a 0.1% chance that we might disagree on what is a chair or a rabbit. And then we can argue about whether that 0.1% chance secures some particular thesis of "inscrutability of reference." To me it seems like this is really stretching the meaning of that word "inscrutability."

    Perhaps the modern focus on quantity makes it hard to understand reference. If reference has to do with the extension of sets then there is nothing arbitrary about a 0.1% offset. If that is right then it's back to the old question of nominalist collections vs. universals and genera.
  • Apustimelogist
    676
    I will say that Moliere and I are referring to the same thing with 'chair' or 'rabbit'.Leontiskos

    Yes, you could say that, but I think upon deeper examination it is more complicated. Its your perogative I guess to just say that we don't need to worry about messy details - we both know that we will know it when we see it.

    Someone else will come along and tell me that there is a 0.1% chance that we might disagree on what is a chair or a rabbit. And then we can argue about whether that 0.1% chance secures some particular thesis of "inscrutability of reference."Leontiskos

    I think this misses the point partially though in the sense that under the thought experiment there may never be a [dis]agreement, but plausibly one could interpret how words map to each other in different ways whilst preserving the same verbal behavior. The consequence of the indeterminacy I think is not that we may sometimes disagree but that there is nothing intrinsic to words. We just use them in certain ways as allowed by our brains. Those are the physical facts. We use words, and interpreting words or debating about reference is also just word-use, albeit in a more meta-cognitive manner. I don't think you need to do away with reference. But all we are are physical beings that say stuff because neurons do stuff because physics allows us to. Thats obviously very blunt and simplified but I think its fine. We believe in an objective world, right?

    Edit: [ ] mistype
  • Banno
    26.1k
    Are you now suggesting that there is a convention that if you and I are sitting in an empty room with a dog, and I say, "The dog," there is a fixed referent?

    The consequence of the indeterminacy I think is not that we may sometimes disagree but that there is nothing intrinsic to words.Apustimelogist
    Yep.
  • Moliere
    5.1k
    I'm going to start with the bon motte and then move to a dry explanation.

    The only way that "the dog" refers in this conversation is if it one of the two sly dogs talking to one another right now -- and "the room" would have to be a metaphor for the internet forum known as TPF.

    Though I believe I know what you mean when you say "The dog refers to <dog-concept>", sans some sort of metaphysical commitment to concepts.

    My thinking is that since there is no dog, and no room, there is no true sentence which affixes "the dog" to "<dog-concept>" -- what it seems to me what's going on is we're engaging in using language in the same way we do when telling stories about Bilbo Baggins or others like that, and we're doing so on an internet forum for the purposes of exploring philosophical ideas.

    Though supposing we were in this room and there were three dogs, the bon motte above would still apply -- we'd have to make a choice, in the conversation, as to which of the three dogs in the room we are referring to.

    If we make a mistake, given that we speak the same language, we can probably figure out reference in a given conversation -- I'll believe you if you believe me when I say what I'm thinking or referring to. (but it's not like conventions make reference factual -- there are facts about reference after we make a reference, but we have to refer to the reference to get there)
  • Arcane Sandwich
    2.2k
    Why did the roo hesitate? Because he didn't want to jump to a conclusion!
  • Leontiskos
    3.7k
    Though supposing we were in this room and there were three dogsMoliere

    But you've changed the scenario. There is one dog, not three. Or do you think it is not possible to have a room with one dog? So you've reiterated the problem that elicited my question to you:

    "There are no fixed referents," vs, "We could be wrong some of the time." Do you see how the latter does not justify the former?Leontiskos

    You claim that there are no fixed referents, then you say that we could be wrong some of the time (which doesn't justify your claim); and then you repeat the whole thing by refusing to talk about a room with one dog and insisting on talking about a room with three dogs. As I said:

    Presumably we all agree that words signify by convention ("nomina significant ad placitum").

    So then a token like J-o-h-n will be indeterminate if there is more than one person named John (or if our interlocutor knows more than one person named John).

    If that is all that is meant by inscrutability of reference then it strikes me as trivial.
    Leontiskos
  • DifferentiatingEgg
    199
    I happen to find that comment hilarious cause its precisely the type of reification Quine is talking in the Inscrutibility of Reference. Through incipient reification you created a wedge into understanding Quine from your own bias.
  • Moliere
    5.1k
    But you've changed the scenario. There is one dog, not three.Leontiskos

    The three dogs are you, me, and the pooch. I'd call you a sly dog in order to demonstrate that "dog"'s referrent isn't fixed by convention, but by our conversation.
  • Count Timothy von Icarus
    3.2k


    The consequence of the indeterminacy I think is not that we may sometimes disagree but that there is nothing intrinsic to words

    Yes, I think this is correct. It's similar to how the eliminitivist claims that when we claim that we are "conscious," "selves," or "taste, smell, hear, etc." we are simply confusing ourselves with "folk terms" that have no more place in proper scientific/philosophical discussion than do references to "the astrological effects of Mercury being in transit," in political economy or demons in medicine. Like I said earlier, I think there is a tendency to undersell the radical nature of the theses that get generated from underdetermination in general. For instance, I think Russell had something right when he said Hume's similar argument against induction collapsed any distinction between sanity and insanity.

    Unfortunately, I think equivocation sometimes plays a role here. For instance, following other arguments from underdetermination, what is meant by "truth" and "knowledge," etc. is radically redefined. In these cases, I think it would be more fair to the average reader to say: "my argument shows that knowledge (and knowing truth) are impossible, therefore we must settle for this other thing." A denial of reference seems less radical, but it is still fairly radical. It would disallow any notion of the sciences as involving per se predication, which I think would force one quite far from common perceptions of the scientific endeavour and scientific knowledge.



    As I noted before, if someone says "the rabbit in this room," in a room with one rabbit, and they mean to refer to anything but that rabbit, they have misspoken (barring of course, some sort of complex work around, like "the rabbit in this room" being the WiFi password, etc.).

    People do misspeak. I am not sure why this has generally be counted as any more mysterious than the fact that someone can fail to pay attention to another's words and mishear them.

    On a standard semiotic analysis, we would say the words "the rabbit in this room," are the sign vehicle linking the rabbit (object) and the person spoken to (interpreter). But of course, you could also analyze this as the object being the intentions of the speaker. If the full sentence is: "I want to eat the rabbit in this room," the motivation for such a shift becomes more clear.

    However, in that example the rabbit is still referred to. But do we refer to such things directly, or only through referring to our own intentions? The latter is not fatally problematic if we both experience the same rabbit (particularly given some sort of sense realism). We can triangulate the external reference. Notably, this ambiguity does not come up for all signs, for instance, smoke as a sign for fire, or even an angry badger's aggressive behavior as a sign of their internal state.

    From an information theoretic perspective, the same sort of ambiguity remains. The issue of what constitutes the proper object/sign vehicle/interpretant is very similar to trying to determine what the proper information source/transmitter/receiver/destination is when applying the Shannon-Weaver model to natural phenomena. For instance, the rabbit could be seen as the information source, with the speaking man serving as the transmitter, although no doubt one could decompose this into very many instances of communications (or instances of semiosis). We could also have the speaker as the information source. Either way, whatever message is received, it will contain information about all the preceding parts and any source of noise (e.g. a garbled message can tell you something about your receiver or transmitter).

    What I take from this is that it doesn't need to be one or the other, verbal communication can contain information about and reference both things and the speaker's intentions about things. "This rabbit right here, the only one in this room, the black and white one," spoken in the context of a room with one black and white rabbit, has a very determinant reference as per the English language. Any competent speaker will know what is referred to.

    Nonetheless, there may still be ambiguity. If the receiver of the message has agnosia and cannot make out the rabbit from the background clutter of the room, we have a problem with the alignment of the two speakers' intentions. This isn't really that different from the case where the receiver is hard of hearing and doesn't know what was said. Likewise, sometimes people use the wrong words; they say "baseball" when meaning to say "rabbit," etc. Some disorders make this sort of slip very common. Nonetheless, people often understand quite determinant references even when this sort of mixup occurs, and we still get our intentions to line up. Hell, even poorly trained dogs can communicate well enough to direct our attention to what they view as a threat.

    But if the alignment of determinate intentions is possible, then I think there is a strong sense in which reference must be. To even make the inscrutability argument, one has to assume that determinate intentions exist, so that one is given, but then it obviously seems possible to communicate them as well.



    Can you please expand on this? I am not sure what the critique is supposed to be. It's an "incipient reification" to disagree with Quine re first philosophy? I am not even sure what in that post could constitute reification. Can one not disagree on this (or his criteria for what constitutes as evidence, which is what I find most problematic) without having misunderstood the argument?
  • Count Timothy von Icarus
    3.2k


    However, if reference wasn't fixed by convention at all there would be no need for languages in the first place. The sound of "dog" could be arbitrarily assigned to some referent in each instance.

    Borges has two interesting short stories on this:

    One is "Funes the Memorious," about a guy who has an accident and then is cursed by an absolutely perfect memory. Because of this, he gets annoyed with language. Why have so few words? Why not a specific word for the specific cloud I saw on the afternoon of 11/7/1932? Hell, why not unique words for different moments where he saw that cloud? In pursuit of this, he begins assigning unique numbers to proper names.

    I think this gets at a few things. One is Aristotle's idea that we must use universals to have the possibility of our claims being false. If we just predicate unique terms of unique things, terms that only apply to those things, we can never be wrong. Second, language and reference must always be more general and less determinate than perception to be useful.

    The second is "The Library of Babel," about an incomprehensibly large library of all possible 500 page books (every possible arrangement of characters). This gets at how it doesn't make sense to look at language as having any meaning at all in isolation from speakers, or at least some information source. Librarians in the story go seeking for passages that will tell them their future (of course, mostly they only find gibberish or at most a few words). Yet it's a simple fact that every possible description of one's future that can be written exists somewhere in the library with a probability of 100%. But finding such a story would tell someone nothing about if it was a true prediction or not. The same is true of the messages of a truly random text generator. All information is ultimately information about an information source. Signal alone gets us nowhere at all, and so it cannot be analyzed in isolation.
  • Leontiskos
    3.7k
    What I take from this is that it doesn't need to be one or the other, verbal communication can contain information about and reference both things and the speaker's intentions about things.Count Timothy von Icarus

    Yes, I think this is a key point.

    But if the alignment of determinate intentions is possible, then I think there is a strong sense in which reference must be.Count Timothy von Icarus

    Right, and when we teach someone a new language we are teaching them about the intentional relations that attach to words (namely, the intentional relations of a language community via convention). I think a big part of the problem is that this tradition flowing from Russell can't understand or incorporate intention. It is as easy to talk about reference apart from intention as it is to talk about cars apart from engines.

    See Klima's, "Three Myths of Intentionality vs. Some Medieval Philosophers."

    To even make the inscrutability argument, one has to assume that determinate intentions exist, so that one is given, but then it obviously seems possible to communicate them as well.Count Timothy von Icarus

    Definitely. :up:

    This whole thread has largely been a bouncing between the two poles of "obvious/tautological" and "absurd/incoherent." What this indicates is that, on a natural reading, Quine was simply wrong. Or else, he said some strange things because he was reacting to and critiquing a very strange idea about reference. But since the thread is not interested in that context, we are left with the idea that Quine was either saying something obvious or something incorrect.

    Hell, even poorly trained dogs can communicate well enough to direct our attention to what they view as a threat.Count Timothy von Icarus

    :lol:
  • Leontiskos
    3.7k
    The three dogs are you, me, and the pooch.Moliere

    Does "pooch" refer to the three of us equally? Do you see how if I adopt your methodology we will be unable to communicate?

    I'd call you a sly dog in order to demonstrate that "dog"'s referrent isn't fixed by conventionMoliere

    I've only said that reference is fixed by convention about a dozen times now. Even within our conversation I have said it a number of times. Here is one example:

    Right: the (conventional) association between Truman and 'Truman' is already "affixed" before the true sentence is uttered.Leontiskos

    -

    but it's not like conventions make reference factualMoliere

    If I can know your intention then I can know the "fact" of what you are referring to. And to say that we can never know someone's intention seems a bit crazy.
  • Moliere
    5.1k


    The focus on reference as a gateway to meaning or communication is kind of the target that I have in mind here -- if reference is affixed in a particular conversation, meaning by each of us agreeing that this is what we mean and having nothing to bring up then we've referred successfully.

    What this doesn't rely upon is a fact about what we are referring to, or whether or not "dog", or any other sign, has some pre-assigned meaning wrapped up in it.

    The focus on convention is because we live in a society which prizes being able to say who does something better than another person, and with language that indicates the need for standards to judge others' in order to give a grade.

    But language will always slip away from the conventions recorded in the books. New meanings will pop up, even with old words. Entirely new forms of grammar within the same language will emerge. Shakespeare's English, while readable, doesn't sound like our English on the fora.

    Basically what you say I'm doing the "on its head" move -- there are conventions, but we already have to understand how to use language in order to establish them. "Reference" must already be understood.


    Does "pooch" refer to the three of us equally? Do you see how if I adopt your methodology we will be unable to communicate?Leontiskos

    You haven't given it enough time yet. That we cannot ascertain, as an individual, what "pooch" refers to before asking our conversation partner doesn't stop us from continuing to ask questions.

    So sure -- "pooch" could refer to the three of us equally. It would certainly be a point in favor of there being more than one referent :D.

    Which is really the argument I've been making all along against convention: sometimes convention doesn't decide the referent. But we can still successfully refer. So there must be more to reference than convention.
  • Moliere
    5.1k
    I think this gets at a few things. One is Aristotle's idea that we must use universals to have the possibility of our claims being false. If we just predicate unique terms of unique things, terms that only apply to those things, we can never be wrong. Second, language and reference must always be more general and less determinate than perception to be useful.Count Timothy von Icarus

    I'm not so sure we must have universals for a claim to be false. If Truman's hair were black then "Truman's hair is blonde" would be false, for instance, even though we're only talking about that Truman right there and not any other Truman.

    I'm not sure I'd separate language from perception, either. Seems to me that language has too much of an effect on perception to think that language even could be more general than perception.

    Rather than a sign over here and a world over there, the world is always-already interpreted and the sign folds into reality.
  • Count Timothy von Icarus
    3.2k


    What this doesn't rely upon is a fact about what we are referring to, or whether or not "dog", or any other sign, has some pre-assigned meaning wrapped up in it.

    I'd say it does. If it didn't rely on this at all, then communicating with someone with whom you do not share a common language (a common set of pre-assigned stipulated meanings and a grammar for form) should be just as easy and successful as communicating with someone with whom you do share a language. Indeed, if it didn't rely on this fact, it's hard to see why languages should exist at all.

    Obviously, it doesn't rely exclusively on this fact. Most mammals can understand each other well enough (e.g. aggression) for certain functions. The reason "reptilian" or "insectoid" is a sort of slur is because these species don't tend to have relatable communicative behaviors in the same way. Snakes are deceivers because they lash out following unintuitive (to us) threat displays.

    So for this:

    The focus on convention is because we live in a society which prizes being able to say who does something better than another person, and with language that indicates the need for standards to judge others' in order to give a grade.

    No, I think we focus on convention because it aids with communication. Part of good grammar is reducing ambiguity. The reason rhetoric and dialectical (and public speaking) were the cornerstone of education for so long is because fostering agreement and persuasion was the key tool of political life in pre-literate societies.

    Changes in conventions have accelerated because memorization is far less important in an era of both high literacy and, as important, cheap access to data storage (digital or analog, paper, etc.). Back when huge amounts of information had to be memorized, when prize libraries were smaller than your average professor's office collection, you couldn't have conventions moving wildly around at the same rate. I've seen the hypothesis that this is also why almost everything was put into metered, rhyming verse, it helps with memorization, but then metered verse requires stable conventions.
  • Moliere
    5.1k


    There's a bootstrap problem involved in the sense that we can definitely tell when something does not speak (a stone) and obviously tell when something does speak (you and I), and we believe that somehow the speaking-thing came out of the not-speaking-thing.

    Fostering agreement I can certainly get behind -- but I'm not sure convention answers that call. I'd think shared purpose does that more than convention. If you had to survive in a society in which you did not speak the language you could figure out some of what they mean through trial-and-error, where the error is measured by your purposes or by feedback from the other language speakers.

    It's because, when we are learning a language, that we want to be able to speak to other language users that we adhere to the conventions. The conventions certainly helps us learn, as well as making it so we are able to grade who is a better speaker.

    But those poetic rhythms -- which I tend to think of as the earliest form of writing recognized as writing (though speech is always writing) -- came about as conventions because there was already a meaning.

    So, yeah, the old "on its head" move.
  • Moliere
    5.1k
    Though here's the bit where I think I'd disagree with Quine -- I like the idea of a web of beliefs, but I'm not sure they really affix reference, either. Even with Davidson it seems that charity can often fail.

    And sometimes even common purpose doesn't help in assigning reference because the reason I want to know what my enemy is saying is in order to thwart them -- so related purposes, in that they are opposed, but not common.

    The one thing I'm fairly certain about is that there is no public shelf of meaning from which we can judge others', and that we cannot ascertain how a particular individual is referring by reference to the language spoken and the circumstances they are in alone. Now that we live in an era where it seems writing is more permanent than speaking, where we can look things up that others' have done, I think it's easy to get lost in thinking that language behaves like other things in the world.

    So easy even someone as smart as Aristotle has been caught up in that way of thinking ;)
  • Janus
    16.7k
    Perhaps personal identity outlasts biological life? After terrorist attacks we still speak of dead Christians, dead communists, etc. One can still refer to "George Washington" or to "medieval Muslims," yet surely they are not still around.Count Timothy von Icarus

    Is this and identity in general not simply a matter of the way we speak about things. Take the 'Ship of Theseus' example. Replaced bit by bit, is it the same ship as it was when originally built? The question becomes 'What do we mean by "same ship?". There is a sense in which the ship is never the same from one moment to the next. And once parts that have worn out are replaced...how much less so? And then when all parts are replaced...?

    Of course, ships are not alive, but I don't think the question regarding whether a corpse is the same person as the living being, only now dead, is any different. It would depend on what we mean by "person'. The point I want to make is that there is no fact of the matter in these kinds of questions, but rather merely different ways of thinking and talking.
  • Count Timothy von Icarus
    3.2k


    I'm not so sure we must have universals for a claim to be false. If Truman's hair were black then "Truman's hair is blonde" would be false, for instance, even though we're only talking about that Truman right there and not any other Truman.

    "Blonde" and "black" are universals. If either we're unique terms that are only predicable of Truman's hair then they certainly couldn't fail to apply.

    I'm not sure I'd separate language from perception, either. Seems to me that language has too much of an effect on perception to think that language even could be more general than perception

    But don't babies without language and people with aphasia who cannot produce or understand language (or both) still perceive?

    I'm skeptical of such a fusion, not least because the Sapir-Worf hypothesis is supported by very weak evidence, normally very small effect sizes and failures to replicate, despite a great deal of people having a strong interest in providing support for it. For instance, different cultures do indeed divide up the visible color spectrum differently, but the differences are not extreme. Nor does growing up with a different division seem to make you any better and spotting camouflaged objects. But moreover , aside from disparate divisions remaining fairly similar, no culture has a name for any of the colors that insects experience through being able to see in the ultraviolet range, and for an obvious reason.

    Likewise, disparate cultures have names for colors, shapes, animal species, etc. They don't pick any of the vast range of options that would be available to a species that largely creates their own perceptual "concepts." I know of no cultures that mix shape and color for some parts of the spectrum, and then shape and smell for another part, etc. or any of the innumerable possible combinations for descriptions.

    J mentioned Gadamer earlier, and I like Gadamer, but the idea that all understanding is done through language seems suspect. It seems like the sort of judgement a philosopher focused on language would have. But does an MLB pitcher finally have it all click and understand how to throw a knuckleball through language? Does a mechanic understand how to fix a motorcycle engine primarily through language? Or what of demonstrations in mathematics based on visualization?

    My thoughts are that language is a late evolutionary arrival that taps into a whole array of powers. It enables us in a great many ways. But thought also isn't "language all the way down." Nor do I think we need to suppose that non-verbal individuals lack understanding (or else that we have to suppose that they have "private languages" for them to understand anything) or any noetic grasp of reality.

    To my mind, part of the problem here is the ol' reduction of reason to ratio (which is maybe enabled by computational theory of mind). But my take is that reason is broader than language and that the Logos is broader than human reason.
  • Moliere
    5.1k
    "Blonde" and "black" are universals. If either we're unique terms that are only predicable of Truman's hair then they certainly couldn't fail to apply.Count Timothy von Icarus

    This isn't in response to the rest of your post, just the first question that popped to mind -- I had that thought, but suppose we allow negation. Then even "Truman's hair is Truman-blond", if true, the negation would have to be false. So even if we aren't speaking in universal terms we can use true/false.
  • Banno
    26.1k
    However, if reference wasn't fixed by convention at all there would be no need for languages in the first place. The sound of "dog" could be arbitrarily assigned to some referent in each instance.Count Timothy von Icarus

    I must be missing something, since it seems clear enough that the sound of "dog" could be arbitrarily assigned to some different referent in each instance.

    We work out that it is - or isn't - as the conversation progresses. Sense making is a process, not a given, not fixed by divine providence or some such nonsense.
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