A Short Take on the Indeterminacy of Meaning

The American philosopher Ernest Lepore (1950-) put the case that if the (general) indeterminacy of meaning thesis (which is broader than — and a consequence of — the indeterminacy of translation and the indeterminacy of reference theses) were the case, then

“you and I mean different things when we say ‘dog’”.

The (perhaps) counterintuitive and/or dismissive response to that statement is to ask this question: Is that really such a bad thing? Indeed do the implications of Lepore’s statement actually amount to much?

Ask yourself what it means — yes, means — when someone states the following:

You and I mean the same thing by the word “dog”.

Of course we can both say that we both mean dog by the word “dog”. However, that won’t get us very far. (This is somewhat like Alfred Tarski’s seemingly vacuous T sentence. Namely: “The sentence ‘Snow is white’ is true if and only if snow is white.”)

Lepore’s claim (i.e., “you and I mean different things when we say ‘dog’”) wouldn't seem quite so outlandish if we were referring, instead, to a word like “democracy”. Thus:

You and I mean different things when we say “democracy”.

Most of us would happily accept the fact that what different people mean by the word “democracy” may be — or even will be — different (if only to varying degrees). So why couldn’t the same — or something similar — also be the case with the word “dog”?

Of course the word “democracy” is an abstract noun; whereas the word “dog” is a concrete noun. But does that difference really make much of a difference? Sure, it’s easier to refer to — or pick out — a dog than it is to do the same with democracy. Yet that ease of referring to — or picking out — a dog with the word “dog” doesn’t necessarily mean that you and I mean the same thing — or exactly the same thing — when we use that word. Both you and I always — or nearly always — successfully pick out (or refer to) dogs with the word “dog”. Again, it doesn’t follow from this that we do so because we mean the same thing by the same word.

Does it matter, for example, that you think of — or simply mean — creatures with wagging tails, and I think of — or mean — canine animals when we use the word “dog”? (Of course we may not even rely on any explicit — or conscious - definitions at all when we use the word “dog”.) Yet despite these (possible) differences, both you and I both still successfully refer to — or pick out — the same things when we use the word “dog”.

All this may even be true if we take W.V.O Quine’s well-known example of rabbits. The American philosophy Michael J. Loux (1942-) put it this way:

“If there is indeterminacy in our use of the term ‘rabbit,’ [or ‘dog’] it is an indeterminacy that is somehow rabbit-involving [or dog-involving]. While it may be indeterminate whether a given individual’s use of the term ‘rabbit’ [or ‘dog’] involves a reference to three-dimensional enduring substances, their temporal parts, their undetached spatial parts, their fusion, or some universal they instantiate, all the alternative reference assignments that are admissible here are tied together by being, in some rough sense, all rabbit-centered [or dog-centered].”

Alternatively, perhaps we don’t really mean anything when we use the word “dog”. Or perhaps it’s our causal and/or historical connections with dogs (i.e., rather than our internal meanings) which really matter. In addition, perhaps you (in homage to Quine again) pick out dog-parts, temporal dog-slices or doghood with the word “dog”; whereas I — being the sensible person that I am — pick out… dogs when I use the word “dog”.

Lepore goes on to say that

“this line of argument leads to such surprising claims as that natural languages are not, in general, inter-translatable”.

According to Lepore, Quine believed this. Yet Quine could speak fluent German — so how could he have believed this?… Of course I’m being slightly rhetorical here.

What Quine did believe is that the (in his own words) “facts of the matter” about, say, German meanings aren’t kept complete and intact in any translation. That’s because there are no facts of the matter when it comes to translation and therefore to meaning! (All of this is well captured in Quine’s paper ‘Ontological Relativity’.) That’s primarily because there can be no one-to-one correspondence between the language of translation and the object language — and that’s not only the case when it comes to “alien speakers”. Again, that’s primarily because there’s nothing determinate to translate — and therefore no determinate translation — in the first place. And this isn’t only because of the banal reason — among others — that there are certain German words which don’t (really) have an English translation (at least not a precise one). It’s because there are no abstract meanings, meanings as mental items or even meanings simpliciter — to correctly (or incorrectly) translate in the first place.

Quine himself argued that all we actually have (or need?) is “stimulus-synonymy” (as well as behavioural-response synonymy) when it comes to the translation of alien utterances. And that’s also the case — if to a lesser extent — when it comes to German speakers and even to our fellow English speakers! As for a circumscribed translation, even if all the physical and behavioural facts are available, various translations — perhaps indefinitely many — will always be possible. Thus it will be our choice of which “translation manual” to use — and that will largely determine the translation. Thus no single translation will capture the true meaning better than any other translation. Again, that’s because there’s no true meaning to capture. That said, perhaps some translations will be better or worse than others (say, for pragmatic or other reasons). We may — or will — also need to adopt the principle of charity when it comes to translating other speakers. Still, these qualifications (if that’s what they are) of the indeterminacy of meaning thesis may be hard to argue for.

The only way it would be possible to capture the true meaning of any utterance would be if there were true meanings to capture in the minds of the speakers of another language. Yet there are no such things — as Ludwig Wittgenstein and others have forcefully shown. (See the Private Language argument.) Indeed even if there are such private mental items, then how can we — as third parties — gain access to them? Thus the only way we can access them is when the translated person overtly expresses them. (Quine often used the words “overt behaviour”.) Consequently, if there’s no missing part when it comes to such behavioural expressions (in that they don’t really lose anything of the mental meanings), then perhaps such mental meanings can be entirely dropped from the picture. And that’s because such a (private) mental meaning (or item) will be a (to use two of Wittgenstein’s phrases) “wheel without a function” and a “beetle in a box”.

Lepore himself goes on to admit that the people he calls “mitigated holists” needn’t be too concerned with meaning indeterminacy in that to them

“a notion of similarity of meaning (of mental content) somehow replaces the notion of semantic identity”.

Thus perhaps we simply don’t require any identity of meanings in order to understand other people when they use the same words we use. And we especially don’t require it when an alien speaker uses a word which we believe is his own word for, say, dogs. However, if we can’t have identity of meaning, it can now be asked why we can have similarity of meaning. Perhaps if meaning identity isn’t available (or possible), then neither is meaning similarity. A further question is:

What would count as similarity of meaning and how would that in itself solve the problem of the indeterminacy of meaning?

[I can be found on Twitter here.]

Do the (Hidden) Motives of Philip Goff and Immanuel Kant Matter?

 

“… Philippe Sollers asserts… that our private lives ‘merit investigation’: ‘What do they like? What paintings do they have on their walls? What are their wives like? How are those beautiful abstract statements translated in their daily and sexual lives?’ Well! Let’s concede once and for all that we are arrogant, mediocre, sexually frustrated scientists, ignorant in philosophy and enslaved by a scientistic ideology (neoconservative or hard-line Marxist, take your pick).

“But please tell us what this implies concerning the validity or invalidity of our arguments.”

— Jean Bricmont and ‎Alan Sokal (in their book Intellectual Impostures)

It’s likely that straight after reading some of my words in this piece that — at least some — readers will claim that I too have an (as the phrase has it) “ulterior motive” for arguing that Philip Goff and Immanuel Kant have (or had) ulterior motives for advancing their own philosophies.

So it’s now worth making a distinction.

A Distinction Between Known and Unknown Motives

Perhaps there are those ulterior motives which philosophers are well aware of; though which they then hide or deny. On the other hand, perhaps there are also those motives (which aren’t ulterior) which are uncovered by people external to the philosophers themselves (say, by psychologists, social/political theorists, historians, etc). Indeed it can be argued that if the “ulterior motives” aren’t acknowledged by the philosopher as his own motives, then they aren’t actually ulterior motives at all.

Yet perhaps all this depends on how complex we take the mind to be and whether or not it can work on different semi-independent levels. (It’s not necessary to believe in a Freudian unconscious — or any equivalent — here.) The point is that there’s a difference between a philosopher who quite consciously has a (to use the cliche) “hidden agenda” (whether political, religious, etc.); and a philosopher who’s simply not aware of his motivations, social positioning, professional status, his place within a historical context, etc. The latter may have no idea how these things can — to lesser or greater degrees — determine his philosophical views (or at least his choice of subjects).

So if we’re talking about truly subliminal motives, then it’s clearly not worth criticising the philosopher concerned because a philosopher can’t be culpable for something he doesn’t know about. (I suspect that this will be disputed in ethics.) Of course the philosopher’s putative “hidden” motives could be pointed out to him and his reactions to this will be interesting in itself. On the other hand, the philosopher who systematically hides his overall game plan is a different case entirely.

So let’s now tackle what Philip Goff himself said about other philosophers “believing what they want to believe” (i.e., rather than him actually using the words “ulterior motives”).

Philip Goff

The contemporary English philosopher Philip Goff expressed the following when interviewed for a YouTube video:

“When we’re doing science or doing philosophy, then we should certainly be thinking about not which view we’d like to be true; but which view is most likely to be true.”

In the context of everything else Goff had said in this interview, wasn’t this a hopeless ad hominem aimed at Goff’s own philosophical opponents?

More specifically, Goff claimed that materialists shouldn’t “believe what they want to believe”. But surely that claim is against the man and not against any specific argument. Clearly Goff believes that various (though not all?) physicalists, Darwinians and scientists would “like their views to be true” and for panpsychism to be false. However, I can just as easily turn this ad hom on its head and aim it at Goff himself. That is, Philip Goff may like — or want — panpsychism to be true. After all, panpsychism has been tied to almost three-thousand years of religious, spiritual and moral beliefs/views of various kinds — not least in the video itself.

Of course panpsychists and others may dispute my claim that Goff was aiming his ad-hom statements exclusively at the critics of panpsychism. In other words, they may argue that Goff was expressing a “general approach” to philosophy and science when he talked about people wanting P to be true or false. Yet, as already stated, in the context of what Goff says in this video — and elsewhere — about the detractors of panpsychism, I simply believe that this isn’t the case. That is, Goff believes that many philosophers and scientists are emotionally against panpsychism. And, in the context of the video above, I think it’s also clear that he’s only — or at least mainly — targeting panpsychism’s opponents.

It didn’t help either when Goff said that “materialism is dismal”. Surely that’s not a philosophical comment.

I suppose none of this matters if Goff’s arguments work. However, it was Goff himself who used ad homs against others — and he’s done so on more than one occasion.

So this is where we are now.

Goff claimed — if implicitly or obliquely — that those who’re against panpsychism don’t want it to be true. And then I aimed that way of “arguing” against Goff himself by saying that he wants panpsychism to be true. In turn, it can now be turned against my own position against Goff… Consequently, many philosophers — especially analytic philosophers — may well see all this as a hopeless game.

But not so quick!

One can confront the arguments and also do some — amateur — psychology and sociology. Indeed the sociology and psychology may help us understand the arguments. So pointing out these possible motivations for believing in panpsychism (which Goff himself happily acknowledges and even cites in the video and elsewhere) may not be philosophy; but it may still be relevant.

Now let’s take the case of Kant.

Immanuel Kant

We can’t be sure how honest Immanuel Kant was being about what can indeed be called his own (as it were) ulterior motives when he wrote the following words:

“[T]here can only be one ultimate end of all the operations of the mind. To this all other aims are subordinate, and nothing more than means for its attainment. This ultimate end is the destination of man…The superior position occupied by moral philosophy, above all other spheres.”

This seems to be a statement that “moral philosophy” should be — or is — First Philosophy. (Relevantly, the mid-20th-century French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas explicitly stated that Ethics is — or should be — First Philosophy — see here.) In other words, the quote above is a more or less honest acknowledgement by Kant of his own ulterior motives. (Of course Kant would never have used these precise words about himself.) That is, he stated that “all the operations of the mind” (including, it must be assumed, all Kant’s own philosophising in metaphysics, epistemology, etc. — i.e., everything outside his moral philosophy) were nothing more than

“means for [the] attainment [of the] ultimate end [of] moral philosophy”.

So, unlike the common conception of Kant as a systematic and objective “system builder”, it can be said that Kant wasn’t working from the bottom up (i.e., from foundations), but from the top down. That is, Kant’s “moral philosophy” wasn’t born of his general philosophy. Instead, Kant’s moral philosophy gave birth to — and determined — his overall philosophical system. So no matter how systematic, coherent and internally valid (or indeed true) Kant’s philosophical system (or at least the parts or propositions thereof) is, its (as it were) First Cause was Kant’s moral philosophy.

And who’s to say that Kant’s moral philosophy (which he also admitted — if obliquely — was determining his entire philosophical system) was not itself built up from — and determined by — its own First Cause? That is, just as Kant’s moral philosophy determined his entire philosophical system, so perhaps something completely outside philosophy determined his moral philosophy. And let’s not beat around the bush here. Perhaps it was Kant’s Pietist Protestantism (or Lutheranism) which determined his moral philosophy, which in turn determined his entire philosophical system.

There is more — strictly philosophical — evidence of Kant’s religious (or moral) a priori when it came to his destruction of the Ontological Argument for the existence of God.

In this precise technical case, Kant attempted to prove that the word “‘exist’ is not a predicate”. And by so doing he believed — and many others did too — that the support underneath the Ontological Argument had been taken away. And let’s not forget here that Kant and other philosophers believed that they had previously refuted all the other “proofs” of God’s existence too.

So what were Kant’s ulterior motives for refuting the Ontological Argument?

Perhaps Kant himself told us in the following passage:

“No one, it is true, will be able to boast that he knows that there is a God…No, my conviction [that God exits] is not logical, but moral certainty… it rests on subjective grounds.”

And what did Protestants generally (or even always) believe when it came to their religious beliefs and the existence of God? They believed that it should rest on “faith, not reason”. Kant, therefore, “made room for faith” by destroying the (supposed) rational proofs of God’s existence. This too he — indirectly — admitted to in this segment:

“[T]he principles of reason…do not conduct us to any theological truths…we recognise [Reason’s] right to assert the existence of a perfect and absolutely necessary being, [but] this can be admitted only from favour, and cannot be regarded as the result of irresistible demonstration.”

Kant’s moral philosophy also squares very well with another important feature of Protestant Pietism: the emphasis on personal morality. And, as all Kantians and those knowledgeable about Kant will know, “the moral sense within us all” is essential to Kant’s ethics.

Conclusion: A Long Ad Hominem?

It can of course now be said that all the above is nothing more than an elaborate and long ad hominem. And, as already stated in the introduction, surely what matters is whether or not Kant’s system (or its propositions taken individually or collectively) is true.

For example, it may well be the case that some particular person has an ulterior motive for believing that 2+2=4. That doesn’t thereby stop 2+2 equalling 4. And even outside arithmetic this logic may still apply. For example, someone may believe x solely because he is inherently nasty or vicious. However, his statements about x may still be true.

So perhaps it would be wise to come down somewhere in the middle on this issue.

We shouldn’t believe that if a philosopher states P and that he’s also culpable in some way, then that (somehow!) makes P false — or at least probably false. And neither should we believe P is false — or even suspect — simply because it was articulated by a philosopher — or by anyone else — at a certain suspect point in history (or in a certain suspect environment) which somehow automatically invalidates P.

That said, neither should we completely ignore the aetiology of beliefs and ideas. And one reason it’s unwise to do so is that from the (as it were) context of discovery and belief (whether psychological, historical, political, etc.) we can gain a better understanding of the beliefs or ideas themselves — not only the contexts of such beliefs or ideas. The contexts, in this case, would only be a means to a (philosophical) end.

So by learning about Kant’s motives (if that’s what they truly were) we may actually gain an insight into his philosophical ideas themselves. More particularly, if we know that Kant was “making room for faith” in certain — or even all — areas of his philosophy, then that may also help us come to know what he was doing and why he was doing it.

Notes:

1) Kant wasn’t the only Pietist thinker of the Enlightenment era: there was also Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi (1743–1819). It just so happened that they took different approaches to the “excesses” of the Enlightenment. Jacobi emphasised the necessity of faith and irrational belief. Kant, on the other hand, knew that the Enlightenment mind would only accept Reason to set limits on Reason. And that was precisely what Kant attempted to do.

Kant’s pro-Enlightenment position was basically an ultra-Protestant stance against Church authority. To Kant, the Enlightenment was a reaction against a Catholic past in which there was an “inability to use one’s reason without the guidance of another”.

2) It’s interesting to see the way in which individual philosophers have set out to defeat scepticism. In other words, we may not be mistaken in being sceptical about their anti-scepticism. It can be argued that philosophers like Kant knew precisely where they wanted to go before they had even set off on their philosophical journeys. (This is often said about the studies written by academics too.) In other words, perhaps these philosophers weren’t only led by truth or sound arguments: perhaps they were also led by the desire to, say, squash scepticism.

Now Take these words:

“Kant regarded the failure to refute scepticism as a ‘scandal’ to philosophy, and offered his Critique of Pure Reason as a solution.”

Similarly, perhaps Descartes knew where he was going before he set off on his philosophical journey. More particularly, Descartes believed that God would keep His high place in the universe after all his radical philosophising. And he also believed that all globally-sceptical views would be crushed by his “method of doubt”.

[I can be found on Twitter here.]

Semantic Realism: “There was a big bang” is True (or False) Regardless of Evidence

 

“Ultimately, these statements about the early universe are still just theories. The fact remains [ that] evidence is piling up to confirm that such an event took place according to the predictions of the quantum theory and the theory of relativity.” — Michio Kaku (1987)

The philosopher Michael J. Loux (whom I take to be a semantic realist) provides us with the following statements which he uses to clarify various realist and anti-realist positions on the truth-values of statements generally:

1) “There was a big bang.”

2) “Magenta was Charlemagne’s favourite colour.”

In parenthesis directly above, I mentioned that Michael Loux is a semantic realist.

The position of semantic realism is that every grammatically-acceptable statement (or proposition) is bivalent (i.e., it’s “determinately” true or false); as well as being evidence-transcendent (i.e., it’s true or false independently of our means of establishing its truth value).

Thus if we take any given statement S, the following can now be stated:

Statement S is determinately true (or false) regardless of any proof, evidence, experimental data, etc. we may (or may not) have for it.

This immediately elicits two questions:

1) Can a statement be true or false regardless of whether we know it to be true or false?

2) Can a statement be true or false regardless of how we can show it to be true or false?

There was a Big Bang

Firstly, Michael Loux offers this statement:

“There was a big bang.”

Loux argues that we could be “wrong in accepting” that statement even though we “might have evidence meeting the highest standards” for stating it. As it is, many scientists admit that we may be wrong about our cherished scientific theories — at least in some small (or even large) details. However, they’d still argue that only new evidence could decide if the theory is true or false simpliciter. Thus the theory of the Big Bang was established by evidence — yet it may still be overturned by… evidence. That is, by contradictory evidence. Of course the precise status and standing of the theory of the Big Bang doesn’t really matter in this context of semantic realism. Nonetheless, I included the Michio Kaku quote (at the beginning of this piece) for some food for thought.

So what function is (as it were) Realist truth playing here?

Loux is arguing that S is true (or false) regardless of evidence. But it can just as easily be said that we can have evidence for S without also needing to say that “S is true” — as with the statement about the Big Bang. Thus we can jettison truth altogether in this context. Indeed many scientists do place scare quotes around the word “truth” when they use it within the context of scientific theories.

In more basic terms, why does the Realist say that “S is true” (or false) even if “we would lack the warrant requisite for asserting or denying S”? Why does the Realist argue that the statement “There was a big bang” could be “wrong” even if we have “evidence meeting the highest standards” for it? What does it mean to say that “S is true” (or “S is false”) in the context of any given any given statement S being without any evidence whatsoever?

Surely the only way we could say it S is true (or false) is via (epistemic) warrant, justification, evidence or whatever. How can S be true (or false) without these things?

So is “could” (as in “S could be true”) the important word here?

Could Be True or Is True?

Loux then offers us this statement:

“Magenta was Charlemagne’s favourite colour.”

Loux says that “[t]he Realist takes it as obvious” that this statement

“could be true even though it is in principle impossible for us to find evidence on way or the other”.

Is it that “S could be true”? Yes; S could be true… if we had the evidence, warrant, etc. to show that it is true. Yet surely it isn’t true (or false) until then.

Of course using the words “could be true” isn’t the same as using the words “is true”. In the former case, Loux seems to acknowledges that we can’t say that the statement “Magenta was Charlemagne’s favourite colour” is true (or false) because there is no evidence to say that it is true (or false). Still, it could be true. Yet in the proceeding paragraph Loux also stated the following:

“The Realist will insist that S [my bold] is , nonetheless, true (or false).”

So what would make S (above) true “even though it is in principle impossible for us to find evidence on way or the other”? What status (or nature) does S’s (to use an adjective from Bob Hale) “evidence-transcendent” truth (or falsehood) have? Basically, what makes S either true or false regardless of evidence, etc? (I use the abbreviation “etc” because I could just as easily also refer to justification, warrant, experimental data, empirical observation, etc.)

Charlemagne’s Favourite Colour

Now let’s return to the original statement again:

“Magenta was Charlemagne’s favourite colour.”

Charlemagne might have had a favourite colour. So it can now be said that once upon a time there might have been a state of affairs of Charlemagne saying “Magenta is my favour colour” or simply having the propositional attitude that magenta is my [his] favour colour. We can accept that — except, of course, that we can question whether or not there are such things as states of affairs when it comes to the past.

So here we must distinguish possible states of affairs from bivalent statements such as “Magenta was Charlemagne’s favourite colour” or “There was a big bang”.

Of course Charlemagne might never have thought about the colour magenta. But let’s just say that he did. (Again, how could we know?) What does this possible state of affairs in the past have to do with the actual statement “Magenta was Charlemagne’s favourite colour”? More accurately, what has this past state of affairs got to do with S’s being true (or false) regardless of evidence? Again, it can be accepted that there might have been a state of affairs of Charlemagne having a position on magenta, but what of the statement “Magenta was Charlemagne’s favourite colour” itself? How would we establish (or know) that S is true (or false)? Surely only via evidence. But Loux’s argument is that any given S is true (or false) regardless of evidence. So what is it for any given S to be true (or false) regardless of evidence? What does any given S’s evidence-transcendent truth (or falsity) amount to?

Say that we accept that the statement “Magenta was Charlemagne’s favourite colour” could be true (i.e., not “is true”) — where does that get us? What is the “cash value” — or even philosophical value — of this acceptance of semantically-realist truth?

Does this really establish truth as a realist (as it were) property of statements? “Magenta was Charlemagne’s favourite colour” could become true — but only if we discovered evidence for it. Of course many strongly deny that truth has this temporal nature. For most/all semantic realists the statement “Magenta was Charlemagne’s favourite colour” is either true for all time or it is false for all time. (Actually, it can’t have been true before Charlemagne was born.) So, on this reading, the statement “Magenta was Charlemagne’s favourite colour” can’t become true simply because we gain the evidence which gives us warrant for asserting it. A semantic anti-realist, on the other hand, can settle for saying that a statement is not truth-apt at this moment in time. However, a statement can (or could) have its precise truth-value determined in the future and then it will be true (or false). The realist will counter that by arguing that statement S is both truth-apt and true at this moment in time.

Yet if we don’t have evidence for the statement “Magenta was Charlemagne’s favourite colour”, then what is its actual (or precise) philosophical — or otherwise — status?

Of course the statement “Magenta was Charlemagne’s favourite colour” is a perfectly grammatical — and therefore acceptable — sentence. However, what is its philosophical (or semantic) status bearing in mind that “it is in principle impossible for us to find evidence one way or the other”? The realist says that it is true (or false) regardless of our evidence. This must mean that the realist’s phrase “could be true” (or “could be false”) actually morphs into “is true” (or “is false”). That is, if any given statement could be true (or false), then it must either be true (or false) now and be so regardless of evidence.

[I can be found on Twitter here.]