My question is: in what sense do you mean meaning in the last paragraph? Is this a pre-Wittgenstein Augustinian thing or something else?

That's self-refuting. If there is no determinate scheme or context that can fix the content of utterance, then the content of this quotation (utterance) is not fixed.
In particular, the phrase "outside of language" has no determinate meaning. — Ludwig V

I'm not sure it is actually self-refuting. If anything it complements itself in a weird way. It would be self-refuting if there was a determinate meaning to the phrase, since it would be its own counterexample.

Hmm, it does seem like a paradox though; maybe the solution to the paradox is the skepticsl solution.

I disagree. How do we derive, conceptually, consciousness from behaviour? — bert1

You can't. But from our knowledge of the natural world, what is it that differs sentient creatures from non-sentient things? The activity of complicated dynamical systems. The differences between death, coma, sleep, wakefulness and psychedelia are the activities of a complicated dynamical system. I don't need to know what it is like to be such systems to make this observation.

I think consciousness is likely causal, possibly even uniquely so. And then the causal closure of the physical is an idea we have to tackle. If panpsychism is the case, we might be able to replace the concept of law with that of will, perhaps, honouring both phychological causation AND the causal closure of the physical. — bert1

I think issues of causal closure only come about when you take models of the physical too literally as more than models - because we are capable of describing reality pluralistically and at different scales. People then get the idea that we need to accomodate causation at different levels when these are just descriptions that model at different scales from different perspectives; there isn't a necessity that it is about some intrinsic causality.

We then don't need to "honour(ing) both phychological causation AND the causal closure of the physical." because they aren't two inherently, fundamentally different categories. One very generic description of "things" I like is the following (https://scholar.google.co.uk/scholar?cluster=10954599080507512058&hl=en&as_sdt=0,5):

To address the nature of things, we start by asking how something can be distinguished from everything else. In pursuing a formulation of self-organisation, we will call on the notion of conditional independence as the basis of this separation. More specifically, we assume that for something to exist it must possess (internal or intrinsic) states that can be separated statistically from (external or extrinsic) states that do not constitute the thing. This separation implies the existence of a Markov blanket; namely, a set of states that render the internal and external states conditionally independent...

In brief, the formulation on offer says that the states of things (i.e., particles) comprise mixtures of blanket states, where the Markov blanket surrounds things at a smaller scale. Effectively, this eludes the question “what is a thing?” by composing things from the Markov blanket of smaller things...

More specifically, we will see that the Langevin formulation of dynamics – at any given spatiotemporal scale – can be decomposed into an ensemble of Markov blankets. These blanket states have a dynamics at a higher scale with exactly the same (Langevin) form as the dynamics of the original scale. When lifting the dynamics from one scale to the next, internal states are effectively eliminated, leaving only slow, macroscopic dynamics of blanket states. These become the states of things at the next level, which have their own Markov blankets and so on. The endpoint of this formalism is a description of everything at progressively higher spatial and temporal scales. The implicit separation of temporal scales is used in subsequent sections to examine the sorts of dynamics, physics or mechanics of progressively larger things.

We just have recursively nested "things" in reality and as you expand the scale, or zoom out, the fast, random, precise details get coarse-grained over by the slower regularities. This seems an intuitive way to me of characterizing say the difference between conscious experiences and microscopic "physical" structures nested within them. The difference is only a difference of scale and how information is lost as you zoom out, as written in the bold above. Seems to me that the structure of our experiences reflects this loss of information from smaller scales.

On the question of the difference between consciousness and non-consciousness being sharp or fuzzy, I think it's clearly sharp. I'm with Goff, Antony and Schwitzgebel (and not doubt many others)on that. — bert1

I disagree. I don't think there is even any fact of the matter you could use to demonstrate the difference between conscious experience and the absence of conscious experience.

I think we're in agreement on that. — Wayfarer

Yes, I see no conflict with the idea that - all our knowledge is perspective-dependent yet we can make statements like "there is an objective way the world is". If you think about it, a statement like that doesn't even really have any content, yet it is still completely intelligible. We understand what it means without having to specify something as totally precise and veridical, not because we don't want to - we cannot; but just because we cannot, doesn't mean we cannot make the word convey something. At the end of the day, all meaning regresses into something ineffable on pains of circularity - For instance, I cannot define for you what it means "to do something", you just have an ineffable, intuitive understanding of that phrase and can identify what accords with "doing something" coherently. Imo, all word-use and all knowledge is enaction within experience, and that enaction is totally primitive from our immediate experiential perspective - just a flow of experiences.

The scientific image of man often tends to deprecate or belittle that. — Wayfarer

I just simply disagree, I guess. Science may not tell us about ethics or aesthetics but that doesn't mean it isn't in conflict with that. Neither does it mean that fields like ethics or other parts of philosophy don't use similar critical faculties to a science. At the same time, I just don't see God or teleology in reality.

How could you possible confirm that: — AmadeusD

Science does not tell us about the intrinsic nature of things, but vicariously through our experiences and other technological extensions of our senses, we can still glean something about the structure of reality and the way it behaves. That is what physics is about. We make inferences from our senses, technology and science that there is an objective world out there when we aren't looking, that was here before we were born and shall be around after we die. You can't definitively confirm anything, let alone in a perspective-independent way but I personally don't see strong reasons to believe otherwise.

All well and good - but that also embodies a perspective, somewhere outside both the mind and the world. A mental picture, if you like, or image of the self-and-world. — Wayfarer

I'm not sure what you mean here.

Hoffman et al — Wayfarer

I don't think I have anything additional to say about Hoffman for this paragraph that isn't in recent previous posts on him.

But is it? — Wayfarer

Yes, but I am talking about studies on the brain, not philosophers: e.g., studies where the brain is stimulated or examining damaged brains and associating it with changes in experience and behavior. Obviously imaging studies too.

But going back to the point I made above, brains and neurons and physics are themselves mental constructs, in some fundamental sense — Wayfarer

Yeah, I don't deny that all our explanations and knowledge are models enacted and embedded within our perspectives, experiences, whatever other relevant contexts to us, etc. But these stories are supposedly about something... They are stories about the world; and through observation, we glean consistent structure to the world, even if through many different means, tools, perspectives. There is an inherent connection between the experiences we have and what is observed as activity in the brain.

I guess though the deeper nature of the connection may not obvious but if our scientific constructs regarding neurons, brains, physics... are just that... constructs, there is no need imo to reify a stark separation between experience and what those constructs are purportedly accessing or about or what we are interacting with when we probe them empirically.

The idea I keep coming back to is that we instinctively accept that mind is 'the product of' matter. — Wayfarer

which proposes that the brain evolved through the aeons to the point where it is able to generate the mind-states that comprise experience. — Wayfarer

I disagree, such statements presuppose a kind of dualism I do not agree with.

But again, I argue that objective facts are invariably surrounded and supported by an irreducibly subjective or inter-subjective framework of ideas, within which they are meaningful — Wayfarer

Yes, this is not something I disagree with; yet, I seem to have a completely different view to you regarding this matter as a whole.

This is also suggested by a paper on a physics experiment known as Wigner's Friend which creates an experimental setup that calls into question that subjects all see different perspectives on the same thing. This experiment shows that two subjects can see different results that are both supposedly 'objectively true'. — Wayfarer

My preferred interpretation of quantum mechanics does not interpret Wigner's Friend scenarios in this way (at least not in the way I believe that you are implying).

These seem to run into each other quite violently... — AmadeusD

I disagree. For instance, I don't need to know what is happening on the slopes of Mount Everest right now to believe there are some definite events happening on the slopes of Mount Everest right now.

and pointing out that his bar for "certainty" — Count Timothy von Icarus

But you just said his view wasn't about certainty?

Imo, I don't think you are offering any solution that is inherently different from the sceptical solution since what you are saying seems to come down to just ignoring indeterminacy, which then brings up the question of "how are you doing what you are doing?" which comes to be the same kind of acting "blindly".

And I see you as reflexively hanging on to something like scientism, the belief that philosophy must always defer to the white lab coat of scientific authority. — Wayfarer

I think its more about trying to be as clear as possible. I think its about the idea that there is an objective way the world is and the mind is embedded within that. It is a slave to other partsof the objective world that undergird it, not independent from those things; the evidence relating our minds to neurons and physics is overwhelming. There is no harm trying to clarify that relationship as precisely as possible.

To ‘deconstruct’ the mind is to analyse it in terms of something else, or of its constituent elements - the impossibility of which is precisely the point of Chalmer’s ‘facing up to the problem of consciousness’ article. — Wayfarer

Not necessarily, because I think you can analyze the mind from a completely experiential perspective by the same kind of paradigm.

the impossibility of which is precisely the point of Chalmer’s ‘facing up to the problem of consciousness’ article. — Wayfarer

For me, not solving the hard problem doesn't mean that the mind is not still embedded in an objective world and in someways enslaved by the smaller scales of that objective reality.

We may just be limited in the questions we can ask and the answers we can get. All our explanations, scientific or not, are models enacted within the limits of our experiences, the limits of what brains can do. In sympathy with the illusionist, I think there may just be an inability for a mind or brain to explain certain things about itself in a substantial way. Similarly, science cannot tell us anything about the fundamental "intrinsic nature" of things beyond experience.

Yes, I think we are basically in agreement, as far as I can tell!

I agree there with wayfarer there is a difference in these examples. In the heart example, what is being talked about is a single anatomical context or perspective within which heart and blood co-exist and interact directly.

But various claims in the mereological fallacy link talk about things like "decision", "belief", etc. which cannot be defined directly in terms of brain content. Infact, they surely would exist if people didn't know about brains and are learned from experiences of what we do as people as a whole. In a complementary way, I guess, it is difficult talk about what brains do in a complete way without referring to their consequences on the outside world and inputs going in.

I think interpreting these "mereological fallacies" depends on your philosophy of mind, and much of it is possibly about expediency to avoid pedantry. But maybe this just reflects the difference between a cognitive neuroscientists more interested in experimental studies relating brain variables and behavior, as opposed to a philosopher more interested in conceptual clarity.

I honestly don't see inherent differences in any kind of knowledge whether scientific or everyday, just some choose to use vaguer words or reify vague, nebulous hunches. For many of the things I am interested in, that's not interesting. Maybe if I want to analyse music, film or art that is how I would do it. For me, philosophy is a product of the mind and ultimately brain. And insofar as we want clarity in models of how the mind and brain works, I want philosophy - which sits on the shoulders of a functioning brain / mind - to adhere to that. I feel like when going in the opposite direction, its more about clinging onto some kind of spirituality and humanism rather than as clear a view of things as possible... perhaps because deconstructing the mind is perceived as a threat to humanism. People want to hold onto words like "agency" and "rationality" and "subjectivity" without analyzing what they mean because they fear it deconstructs their humanity.

'mereological fallacy' — Wayfarer

I actually agree with much here albeit probably in a weaker sense than the authors. Sometimes these "fallacies" may be genuinely due to the way people think about these things, sometimes it may just be out of expediency. I guess also how someone views these analyses might depend on their philosophy of mind somewhat.

(That link above returns a 404 by the way.) — Wayfarer

Hopefully fixed now.

That is true, if the scope of knowledge is defined in purely objective terms. But then, you tend to naturally look at philosophical questions through a scientific perspective, don't you? — Wayfarer

What are the alternatives? I genuinely can't conceive of any off the top of my head.

Yet each scientific theory that tries to conjure consciousness from the complexity of interactions among brain, body, and environment always invokes a miracle—at precisely that critical point where experience blossoms from complexity. — Donald Hoffman, The Case Against Reality

This is miracle exactly what my quote from above was arguing against.

If we propose that brain activity is identical to, or gives rise to, conscious experiences, then we want the same kind of precise laws or principles — Donald Hoffman, The Case Against Reality

Such a thing is impossible imo. What is the limit on experience? I don't see how there is one. You could conceive of infinite kinds of beings that detect different things and are structured in different ways. Surely, you would expect that there is no limit on the kinds of alien experiences things could have if they were structured in the appropriate way to have them. I don't see how mathematical laws could explain this when experiences would scale with the complexity of brute perceptual abilities for some system. A question is whether an information processing system could in principle "explain" to itself its own perceptual abilities introspectively - I highly doubt this.

which I think is incompatible with Wittgenstein's arguments. — Ludwig V

Well he uses the word himself!

I suppose you are referring to Wittgenstein's point that many algorithms are compatible with any finite series of numbers. — Ludwig V

That may be a good example; but I was more thinking that with "pointing" at something, it is similarly somewhat underdetermined what is being pointed at, so pointing is also "blind" in that sense.

But that doesn't mean there is no criterion for correct and incorrect applications (and for which cases are problematic). That's what the practice is for. So the rule is determined as it is applied. — Ludwig V

Yes, this is part of the skeptical solution albeit I would say it doesn't actually solve indeterminacy, just is used as a way of explaining how coherent word-use emerges.

I think my criticism of your criticism is that you assume that consciousness is like a discrete thing that just pops up and then disappears under certain circumstances. I don't think there's any evidence for this. What differs non-conscious from conscious things is how they behave as dynamical systems and it doesn't seem to make sense to say that consciousness is some additional thing that pops up on top of that, under pains of a kind of epiphenomenal redundancy (see sections 4.4, 5.3, 7 of Chalmer's Conscious mind for details, full pdf available on internet).

Nice quote from
https://scholar.google.co.uk/scholar?cluster=7909771384315425233&hl=en&as_sdt=0,5:

On this basis, we can ask whether the FEP really loses some explanatory power as a result of being vacuously true for all sorts of particles.

Having originated in the study of the brain, it might seem dissatisfying that the FEP should also extend to inert things like stones, and that its foundations have nothing unique to say about the brain (or the mind, or living systems, for that matter).

In our view, the fact that the FEP does not necessarily have anything special to say about cognition is something of a boon - it should be the case that cognition is like a more ‘advanced’ or complicated version of other systems, and possesses no special un-physical content.

Indeed, the commitment to a principled distinction between cognitive and non-cognitive systems, or living and non-living ones, commits to a sort of élan vital, wherein the substance and laws of learning, perception, and action should not be grounded in the same laws of physics as a stone, as though they provide a different, more implacable sort of organization or coherence of states [108]. In fact, the opposite has been argued in this paper: that such a theory should be reinterpreted in thermodynamical terms, just as much of the rest of soft matter and biological physics [17,106,109,110]. As such, we reject these implicitly dualistic views.

I don't think we can have a theory of consciousness in the way you want, not only because there is no fine line between conscious and non-conscious, but we are simply limited to describing what living things do (or what things we deem as being alive do) and nothing more.

That phrase suggests that it is possible that I could act not blindly. — Ludwig V

Yes but then there is the opposite perspective on these things where someone might say that we do not act blindly.

I think that "This is what I do!" is, essentially, an ostensive definition, so neither blind nor not blind. — Ludwig V

And the reference in ostensive definition is equally indeterminate!?

Sorry - what is the sceptical solution? — Ludwig V

That people act blindly regardless of indeterminacy.

Now, of course many aspects of Aristotelian philosophy such as his physics have been superseded but I believe the ‘doctrine of the rational soul’ is not among them. — Wayfarer

Well this is all just so antithetical to my viewpoint that I don't even have a response, ha.

Crick believed that the object 'as it is in itself' is simply the same object that our perceptions represent but existing unperceived. — Wayfarer

Yes, I am not suggesting that - we cannot conceive things in a way that steps out of our own perspectives. But I am suggesting a story about an actual objective world and how it would relate to the organism, and it seems less radical than what I interpret Hoffman as saying. Maybe though on some ways its more radical. Hoffman's seems to be saying that the structure of space-time and objects can be different to what we perceive. But if there is not one way for an organism to latch onto structure in the world, to draw distinctions, then is there a fact of the matter that the structure we perceive is different to actual structure? If we are latching onto the world in consistent ways that allow us to navigate it effectively then is there much difference? Seems to me Hoffman would have to show that there is some preferential absolute perspective in which one can view the world in order to show that our perceptions are radically different from it.

Maybe though, all he means is different in the sense of how a whelks perceptions would be radically different from a humans because it lacks sophisticated perceptual faculties. But this doesn't seem as radical as his ideas are made out to be. And obviously, science can always extend those faculties.

You are positing the individual's interpretation of the rule as primary. — Ludwig V

Not at all. Acting blindly is primary.

I have no idea what a determinate objective view might be — Ludwig V

I just mean a view where there was no underdetermination, which is also related to this picture problem you talk about. There is no good presenting another picture because prior assumptions are required, without which we couls not determine action or interpretation or whatever.

So not only can Tarzan not follow rules, but he has no memory and no sense experiences. Seems hard to believe. — Count Timothy von Icarus

No; because like I said, the skeptical solution would apply.

How do we use a basic intuition to avoid an infinite regress of rules? — Joshs

Because its just acting blindly, and "social discursive practise" is just an extension of that involving many individuals.

A picture of meaning would present a determinate , "objective" view of things; but the point is that no such thing can be presented to us. Indeterminacy is always possible.

It seems like it should just as well apply to all memories and all sense experience, resulting in exactly the sort of all encompassing skepticism Wittgenstein was trying to avoid. — Count Timothy von Icarus

If it applies to those things then surely, the skeptical solution also applies.

‘Learning to use’ is not quite the same as ‘inventing’. Was the law of the excluded middle invented by us, or was it discerned? Would it be something that is ‘true in all possible worlds’? — Wayfarer

Well, I would say that such rules and understandings are directly enacted within our experience. And so, just as we are unable to present a perspective-independent view of objects beyond our immediate experience, there is no perspective-independent view of such matters like the law of excluded middle. What can be ascertained is that we learn to enact these notions in various ways in our experience. Are possible worlds much more than a way of making sense of how the mind can generate imaginings we think of as counterfactuals?

Brains don’t do anything, rather agents make judgements. — Wayfarer

Well, agents abilities of doing anything corresponds to the brain's ability to do anything. You may say that what we call the brain is something like a model constructed in experience; but nonetheless, an objective world exists, and we can think of this objective reality as having the kinds of degrees of freedom we consider to be the case in the structure of the brains we observe, down to the level of ions crossing membrane barriers.

An agent can't make judgements without a brain, and messing with an agent's brain will mess with ita judgements.

without the exercise of reason — Wayfarer

I don't see the relevance. You wouldn't consider a damage in someone's reasoning (e.g. due to non-perception-related brain damage) changing the status of how veridical their perceptions are, would you?

The claim is that our cognition is conditioned by adaptation to see in terms of what is useful from the perspective of evolution, not what is true. So - what is true? What does the word even refer to? Well, that’s a question that neither walruses nor whelks can ask. Whereas we can ask it, and the answer matters to us. — Wayfarer

I think my position is not to argue about some single notion of veridicality, or objective truth - If, there is in principle no perspective-independent way that organisms can view and interact with the world perceptually, then such a notion is undermined in the sense that organisms simply cannot pick out such single "veridical" perspective even if there is an actual objective way the world is independently of our perception in principle (very difficult to see how this isnt the case from my perspective).

We are just directly aquainted with experiences, our cognitive faculties and abilities enacted within the flow of experiences. "Truth" is just a word used in conjunction with our abilities and faculties within experience, the ability to (fallibly) use the word then also related to assumptions or contingencies within the perspective. This is not relativism because I am just talking about the use of the word and related abilities. No fact of the matter about reference being assumed here.

However, I guess what gripes me about Hoffman is statements like this:

"Just as the color and shape of an icon for a text file do not entail that the text file itself has a color or shape, so also our perceptions of space-time and objects do not entail (by the Invention of Space-Time Theorem) that objective reality has the structure of space-time and objects."

Seems to imply to me that what I perceive is radically different in structure to the actual objective world. But in my story about the actual objective world, if coherent perception is to work effectively by mapping consistently to actual structures of the world so that we can get payoffs, then in some sense it must be the case that our perceptions are still mapping to an embedded subset of the objective of the world with that structure. At the same time, we can manifest synchrony to other parts of the actual world via extending our perceptual abilities with scientific technology and build scientific models.

Still, there may be no single perspective-independent way for an organism to map states or draw boundaries onto the world or particular subset - a compromise, as said before (And can we actually ascertain an objective fact of the matter about perceptual reference from within our perspectives? An even deeper question perhaps). Is there more to successful perception than how our effective our sensory-motor loops seem to be (predicting which perceptions come next or acting appropriately)?

Yes, I agree with this description!

If we had no basic intuitions, then each rule would require further rules setting out how it is to be followed—infinite regress follows. — Janus

Yes, we can say the same for all word meaning, I mean!

This is a general point about meaning and classification so it doesn't really matter where plus-ing came from.

What I’m referring to is the distinction between physical causation and logical necessity, so there’s not much point addressing that issue if you don’t understand it. — Wayfarer

Are you implying that a brain cannot invent or learn to use logic?

…using reason to try to ascertain a reasonable position. — Wayfarer

Surely a position doesn't have to be true to considered a reasonable inference given available information?

Plantinga's argument contends that if our cognitive faculties are the result of evolutionary processes driven purely by survival, then there is no reason to accept that that they produce true beliefs, only that they produce beliefs that are advantageous for survival — Wayfarer

I think perhaps one point is that an organism that survives is an organism that is navigating an actual structure to the world, it must act sensitively to that structure and anticipate that structure in order to make sure it's paths keep within the kinds of bounds for it to survive. Surely, fitness payoffs will have objective places within that objective structure, with objective paths between any part of the world and some payoff or reward. Seems to me that even if there may be no kind of access to a single perspective-independent view of the world, an organism benefiting from fitness payoffs will need perceptual faculties that are synchronized to and can differentiate the actual structure of the world.

There maybe gulfs in terms of sophistication and access to structural information when you compare a whelk to a human to something with access to information about even more detailed, perhaps even microscopic, information; but this doesn't seem so radical to most people. Maybe there is a kind of compromise here; fitness payoffs probably are related to the actual structure of the world, but I question whether it even makes sense to say there is only one "veridical" way for an organism to be perceptually coupled to the environment. The questions is then whether there is a fact of the matter about the veridicality of different kinds of perceptuo-motor couplings that are equally effective? At the same time, even though our perceptual systems may be strongly limited, clearly science and technology has allowed us to probe much hidden structure we are not usually privy to.

What do you think 'natural causation' comprises, and how might it be related to reason? It's actually quite a deep question, explored in part in this earlier thread. The gist is that causation of the kind that characterises physical and chemical reactions, is of a different order to logical necessity, which is the relationship between ideas. — Wayfarer

I don't really know what you mean by different order but seems to me from neuroscience and machine learning that any kind of intelligence can be scaled up from very simple prediction algorithms. For instance, it is proven I believe that recurrent artificial neural networks (and no doubt biological neurons) are Turing complete. They can compute anything. Sure, there may not be great pressure for many organisms like bacteria or whelk to be great reasoners but once you have the first step of neurons which can learn then you have the fundamental basic ingredient that allows for reasoning. In any case, I am not entirely sure what we mean when we say that our reasoning is reliable. Is it actually reliable? Problem of induction might say no. Sure, deduction doesn't rely on that but maybe the assumptions used in deduction do. How reliable would a person's reasoning be if they had never had access to learning things as a basis for reasoning? I don't know if there is anything inherently reliable about reasoning. Not because brains aren't good at what they do but because problems like induction transcend that. Maybe it depends on semantics of reliable - pretty vague word.

If natural causation didn't come up with our reasoning abilities then who ever did did a pretty bad job considering all the people who's reasoning erroneously led them to naturalism.

Doesn't seem incompatible with anything I said

The only form of justification that can be used legitimately involves determining assertability conditions in the public realm . — Joshs

I wouldn't say its a justification as opposed to an explanation for how people use words without being paralyzed by indeterminacy.

There is no fact of the matter that can determine whether the meaning for me of a rule like the plus sign is the same as I apply it now as when I applied it last year — Joshs

I would only add that I think this kripkean idea applies as much to your own meaning as anyone elses. But this is no impediment to your use of these words or behave correctly.

Kripke doesn’t deny that we form meanings of words that bring with them determinate (by determinate I mean that they are unchanging in their sense for as long as they are in effect) instructions , rules and criteria on how to apply them. — Joshs

I am not sure I agree because there can be indeterminacy when you define a rule. There may be indeterminacy about whether your past behavior is consistent with 'plus' or 'quus'; and if this is the case, then surely the fact you are using the word 'plus' or refer to 'plus' cannot rule out that you actually mean 'quus' when you were saying 'plus'. I agree though that also it is implied there is no fact of matter whether you would be using same rule now as before or future.

Kripke thinks of a word meaning as an interpretation, a picture that determines how it is used, and we swap out pictures all the time. — Joshs

Disagree. He is suggesting there is never a picture for determining anything because, it is always underdetermined. We act blindly according to Kripke(nstein); community members hence also agree and disagree blindly, but it is within a community of people agreeing and disagreeing, that some people are viewed as wrong and others right about things (by the community). For a person on their own, anything may go without backlash, as they assert and do what just seems right to them. Agreement and disagreement about use then help build language-games within a community.

we cannot appeal to social regularities or collectively presupposed norms within a practice

Any regularities in what practitioners have previously done does not thereby have any authority to bind subsequent performances to the same regularities.

I think Kripke would actually agree with this given his arguments against dispositionalism.

“It is felt to be a difficulty that a rule should be given in signs which do not themselves contain their use [that is, which are not meaning-objects], so that a gap exists between a rule and its application. But this is not a problem but a mental cramp

To me, this is just what Kripke's sceptical solution is describing.

So from your post, I don't agree with your and I guess some of the cited writer's characterizations of Kripkenstein. Kripkenstein's views don't seem necessarily incompatible with much of the other stuff that has been said imo.

CTM involves mental representations which would determine the connection between a rule and an act, and would prescribe how to act directly from the determinate rule representation. This kind of view is rejected. The point is not to define what a rule is, but that we can act coherently while there is inherent indeterminacy in characterizing what kind of rule is being acted in accordance to.

models do not learn simple, human-interpretable rules or representations of the world; rather, they use local computations to interpolate over task-relevant manifolds in a high-dimensional parameter space. — Apustimelogist

This would be how a brain learns to do a tasks or acts or behaviors like addition.

Imo, actually categorizing some behavior as addition or being aware of it, having knowledge about it... or whatever... would itself be nothing more than acts or behaviors (e.g. saying "I am adding", pointing out a mistake someone has made when adding).

We then make choices about these categorization acts or distinctions or knowledge acts despite inherent underdetermination. And we continue to use these categorizations until we perceive they are no longer fit for purpose, like a scientist (perhaps an instrumentalist scientist specifically) might continue to use theories until a better one comes along - criteria for better just being how well it works, how adequate it is at accounting for observations, agnostic to any notion of realism for these theories (Edit: maybe this last analogy needs some work I think; it was inspired by the Kripke Humean analogy I quoted here:

Note again the analogy with the Humean case. — Apustimelogist

).

The quote from above (about models not learning human-interpretable rules) imo also applies to the categorization act behaviors:

models do not learn simple, human-interpretable rules or representations of [categorizations]; rather, they use local computations to interpolate over [categorization]-relevant manifolds in a high-dimensional parameter space. — Apustimelogist

And again, the categorization itself is just a behavior or act, like saying "I am adding"; not necessarily assuming that there is any representational content to this phrase. It is just a phrase - phonemes, letters. They don't have any inherent significance in terms of some symbolic representation with semantics attached. Their significance is that if you plug these inputs back into some neural machine, the neural machine [whether your own or another person] will be able to return appropriate acts (to be extremely simplistic about all it). (I feel like the PI sections on reading particularly are good examples for the kind of thing - reading in terms of surface perceptions and acts and nothing more).

Alot of this is being filtered through through additional neuroscientific ideas that obviously were not around at the time, but that's how I flesh out these ideas to give them more tangibility. I still feel like they reflect the same kind of anti-essentialist leanings in PI.

This sounds a little reductionist. Sure, I am all for this kind of predictive/enactive/semiotic understanding of the neurobiology involved. The brain and nervous system are the basis of the modelling relation we call "consciousness". But then on top of neuro-semiosis is stacked socio-semiosis – humans learning how to think and behave at the level of "parts of a larger sociocultural organism".

Socio-semiosis shares all the same general processing principles. The same Darwinian and thermodynamic logic. Yet it is still a further level of "embodied intelligence". — apokrisis

I don't see what any of this has to do with what was in my quote. I'm talking about people experiencing and justifying beliefs about their own behaviors, not social dynamics. I don't think two areas do not share competing explanations.. from what I can tell.

I would put it the other way around. The requirement for becoming the higher level thing of a social organism is to have a culture that can shape all its individuals into precisely the kind of self-regulating and socially-cooperating agents that would allow such a social organism to exist. — apokrisis

I was alluding to Wittgenstein's arguments about the impossibility of private language argument as connected to why Wittge-kripke-nstein evokes social agreement regarding rule-following paradoxes. I just used the word 'sociality', perhaps rather idiosyncratically, to refer to that social agreement thing. I wasn't really making any general statements about social behavior in the way you are talking about now. But sure, culture is central to social behavior like you said.

So that's a critical difference. — apokrisis

Difference between what?

Never rated Hoffman. I remember thinking when I read one of the original "fitness beats truth" papers that the model he made was too rudimentary to really support his conclusions. Overextends albeit things felt in reasonable territory still.

However, saw Phillip Goff's and Keith Frankish's Mindchat episode with him and was just basically spewing unintelligible garbage.

Where is the social component in the operation of this prediction machine? — Joshs

It's a special case. Changes in brain parameters (e.g. changes in membrane ion channels, synaptic receptor growth / recession, plasticity generally) occur due to external input changing the cascades of firing reverberating through the brain. Social inputs are just a special case of that input. My description you were replying cggo can be contextualized from my earlier comment that the brain is a deeper explanation than sociality. You can view sociality as a mechanism of how language works but it doesn't actually explain why we agree, why we come up with new words, how thinking and underlying processes work that are ultimately responsible for how we can use language. So sociality is a more superficial explanation than brains imo and probably does not cover many cases of relevant learning.

To put the question in enactivist terms, does it make sense to analyze behavior in terms of subpersonal mechanisms solipsistically ensconced within a brain? This is the critique often leveled against active inference predictive processing approaches. In recent years P.P. models have moved closer to fully embodied 4EA approaches in recognizing the inseparable reciprocity of interaction between brain, body and environment. — Joshs

No, it doesn't make sense to analyze this way since neuronal behavior will appear meaningless to a scientist without knowing things about the world outside an organisms brain and what an organism does, how it lives.

But when we talk about the question of 'how a brain does what it does?', then it is just a fact that the only thing a brain has access to is its external inputs. A brain does what it does and achieves all of these incredible things without access to the outside world.

Personally, I think active inference and predictive processing can only make complete sense in an enactive characterization so I am with you there: (e.g. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1059712319862774)

What’s missing here is the crucial normative character of perception and cognition. Perception is not not a one-way fitting process between organism and world in which the organism must adapt its perception to the facts of an environment external to its functioning. It is instead a reciprocal process where the nature of the ‘external ‘facts’ confronting the organism arrive already pre-interpreted in accordance with the organism’s normative purposes and goals. — Joshs

I disagree about pre-interpreted (Darwinian natural selection is blind) but I know what you mean. I think the article I linked earlier is very amenable to this kind of stuff and mentions both evolution and ecological psychology:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S089662731931044X

It makes explicit parallels between the blind-fitting of neural processes and the blind-fitting of natural selection. Therefore, while genes will lead to constraints on our biological phenotypes and how the brain works, there is no reason to think such constraints should be viewed teleologically or "pre-interpreted" or normatively except for as a kind of useful fiction when talking about evolution. The evolutionary blind-fitting has as little interpretable "comprehension" to the problems it is solving as the brain has access to what is going on past its sensory boundaries.

Some quotes from paper:

"Our affordances are constrained by our bodies and brains, and there is an intimate relationship between how our bodies and neural networks are wired and what we can learn."

"Direct fit, as an algorithmic procedure to minimize an objective function, allows neural networks to learn the transformation between external input to meaningful actions, without the need to explicitly represent underlying rules and principles in a human-interpretable way.

A major task taken up by the school of ecological psychology was to characterize each animal’s objective functions, conceptualized as affordances, based on the information the animal needs to behave adaptively and survive in the world (Gibson, 1979, Michaels and Carello, 1981). For cats, a chair may afford an intermediate surface for jumping onto the kitchen counter, whereas for humans, it may afford a surface on which to sit while eating. Like in evolution, there is no one correct way to fit the world, and different direct-fit networks, guided by different objective functions, can be used in the same ecological niche to improve fit to different aspects of the environment. Furthermore, as argued by the school of ecological psychology, information is defined as the affordances that emerge in interactions between the organism and its ecological niche. As opposed to strongly representational approaches common in computational neuroscience, the direct-fit approach learns arbitrary functions for facilitating behavior and is capable of mapping sensory input to motor actions without ever explicitly reconstructing the world or learning explicit rules about the latent structure of the outside world. Marr (1982), for example, speaks favorably of Gibson’s theory of vision but, unsatisfied with the theory’s vague treatment of information processing, instead suggests that the goal of vision is to recover a geometrical representation of the world. In contrast to the representational stance, the direct-fit framework is aligned with Gibson’s treatment of the goal of vision: to recover information in the world that affords the organism its adaptive behaviors.

Gibson believed that animals are entangled with their environment in a closed perception-action feedback loop: they perceive to act and act to perceive. Furthermore, actions and affordances are shaped and constrained by the structure of the environment and the organism’s physiology. Similarly, from the direct-fit perspective, neural networks implicitly learn the structure of the environment as a means to an end, but this learning is ultimately driven by internal objectives aligning perception to action with an eye toward adaptive fitness (see Box 3)."

So, yes for sure; for an indepth understanding of how an organism works, you will always want to look at what the brain is doing in the context of its environment and its evolved phenotypes. But when talking about how the brain actually achieves what it does, the brain is essentially insulated. The constraints from an organism's evolutionary history and body are filtered through the sensory inputs it receives (e.g. from its own body, partly in reaction to motor signals it sends out), and the actual internal structure of the brain.

Put differently, Kripke comes up with rules describing the behavior of an autonomous subject which are not indeterminate, and then attempts to use them to explain the indeterminate use of rules in social situations. — Joshs

I think this is ass-backward. He starts with indeterminacy of rules and then uses sociality to explain why we seem to pick out specific concepts for our experiences when they are in principle indeterminable. I find Kripke's interpretation of Wittgenstein very agreeable; it makes sense to me and I have never been tempted to look at Wittgenstein in a way incompatible with the Kripkean view of rules.

Quote from Kripkenstein:

We cannot say that we all respond as we do to '68+ 57' because we all grasp the concept of addition in the same way, that we share common responses to particular addition problems because we share a common concept of addition. (Frege, for example, would have endorsed such an explanation, but one hardly needs to be a philosopher to find it obvious and natural.) For Wittgenstein, an 'explanation' of this kind ignores his treatment of the sceptical paradox and its solution. There is no objective fact - that we all mean addition by '+', or even that a given individual does - that explains our agreement in particular cases. Rather our license to say of each other that we mean addition by '+' is part of a 'language game' that sustains itself only because of the brute fact that we generally agree. (Nothing about 'grasping concepts' guarantees that it will not break down tomorrow.) The rough uniformities in our arithmetical behavior may or may not some day be given an explanation on the neurophysiological level, but such an explanation is not here in question. 77

Note again the analogy with the Humean case. Naively, we may wish to explain the observed concomitance of fire and heat by a causal, heat-producing, 'power' in the fire. The Humean alleges that any such use of causal powers to explain the regularity is meaningless. Rather we play a language game that allows us to attribute such a causal power to the fire as long as the regularity holds up. The regularity must be taken as a brute fact. So too for Wittgenstein.

This leaves us in the thrall of a Cartesian skepticism, a gap between the subject and a social world outside of the subject (parallel to neural models positing an internal prediction machine adapting itself to an impervious external world). — Joshs

I think I see this point but I don't see it as a problem. It is not just parallel to a brain processing information from the external world but a special case. We have no access to what is going on in other things and people apart from externally observable regularities - what suffices for our intelligible models and concepts then is empirical adequacy:

How does agreement emerge in the case of a term for a sensation, say 'pain'? It is not as simple as the case of 'table'. When will adults attribute to a child mastery ofthe avowal "I
am in pain"?80 The child, if he learns the avowal correctly, will utter it when he feels pain and not otherwise. By analogy with the case of 'table', it would appear that the adult should endorse this utterance if he, the adult, feels (his own? the child's?) pain. Of course we know that this is not the case. Rather the adult will endorse the child's avowal if the child's behavior (crying, agitated motion, etc.) and, perhaps, the external circumstances surrounding the child, indicate that he is in pain. If a child generally avows pain under such appropriate behavioral and external circumstances and generally does not do so otherwise, the adult will say of him that he has mastered the avowal, "I am in pain."

Since, in the case of discourse on pain and other sensations, the adult's confirmation whether he agrees with the child's avowal is based on the adult's observation of the child's behavior and circumstances, the fact that such behavior and circumstances characteristic of pain exist is essential in this case to the working of Wittgenstein's sceptical solution. This, then, is what is meant by the remark, "An 'inner process'
stands in need of outward criteria." Roughly speaking, outward criteria for an inner process are circumstances, observable in the behavior of an individual, which, when present, would lead others to agree with his avowals. If the individual generally makes his avowals under the right such circumstances, others will say of him that he has mastered the appropriate expression ("I am in pain," "I feel itchy," etc.).

I feel like the emphasis on sociality comes from the feeling that language for insular, private individuals is redundant and unnecessary; and so regardless of the possibility alluded earlier that "The rough uniformities in our arithmetical behavior may or may not some day be given an explanation on the neurophysiological level", sociality is deemed by Wittge/Kripke-nstein as integral to the heavy lifting of constraining word use (including that describes the applications of rules) because word use wouldn't even arise for an insular, private individual.

Originally an edit to my post

blindly — Apustimelogist

that was replying to . But became too long I thought just make new self-contained post.

-

By blindly, I mean that if rules are underdetermined then there is clearly no observable foundation for the way we act; we just act confidently with intuition. There are no floating internal symbolic representations of rules that prescribe our acts perfectly, there is only a flow of unfolding acts over time within one's experience; we infer rules from this flow after the fact (not infallibly) and all there is to the demonstration of understanding rules is more acts embedded in the aforementioned flow (e.g. stating a definition is an act; expressing disagreement is an act). Understanding a rule does not require a symbolic representation of a rule.

If you trawl through all the ways of trying to determinatrly characterize an act as a case of a rule, we end up with no foundation other than "it just feels that way, strongly; this is the use of plus" even if it is actually difficult to define what 'plus' even means without circularity and more indeterminacy.

But we can continue to use concepts like plus ... invoking the word so long as the concept ... to borrow a phrase, is empirically adequate ... but again, there is a sense in which what is "empirically adequate" is just what seems to be the case -

If it is the case that: "it just feels that way, strongly; this is the use of plus", then surely it is also the case that "it just feels that way, strongly; this is empirically adequate".

I like this paper for articulating the blind nature of cognition:

Direct Fit to Nature: An Evolutionary Perspective on Biological and Artificial Neural Networks

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S089662731931044X

Summary / Abstract
Evolution is a blind fitting process by which organisms become adapted to their environment. Does the brain use similar brute-force fitting processes to learn how to perceive and act upon the world? Recent advances in artificial neural networks have exposed the power of optimizing millions of synaptic weights over millions of observations to operate robustly in real-world contexts. These models do not learn simple, human-interpretable rules or representations of the world; rather, they use local computations to interpolate over task-relevant manifolds in a high-dimensional parameter space. Counterintuitively, similar to evolutionary processes, over-parameterized models can be simple and parsimonious, as they provide a versatile, robust solution for learning a diverse set of functions. This new family of direct-fit models present a radical challenge to many of the theoretical assumptions in psychology and neuroscience. At the same time, this shift in perspective establishes unexpected links with developmental and ecological psychology.

"On a moment-to-moment basis, the brain is assimilating dynamic, multidimensional information about the world in order to produce rich, context-dependent behaviors. Confronted with such complexity, experimental neuroscientists traditionally design controlled experiments to reduce the dimensionality of the problem to a few factors conceived by the experimenter (Fisher, 1935). This reductionist program relies on a core commitment to the assumption that the neural computations supporting many of our cognitive functions can be decontextualized and decomposed into a handful of latent features, that these features are human interpretable and can be manipulated in isolation, and that the piecemeal recomposition of these features will yield a satisfying understanding of brain and behavior.

In parallel to the research in neuroscience and psychology laboratories, artificial neural networks (ANNs; see Box 1) are attaining human-level behavioral performance across many tasks ... This research program effectively abandoned traditional experimental design and simple interpretable models ... Such models learn how to recognize faces or respond to natural-language inquiries directly from the structure of the real world by optimizing millions of parameters (“big” models) over millions of examples (“big” data;
LeCun et al., 2015)."

"Although the human mind inspires us to touch the stars, it is grounded in the mindless billions of direct-fit parameters of System 1. Therefore, direct-fit interpolation is not the end goal but rather the starting point for understanding the architecture of higher-order cognition. There is no other substrate from which System 2 could arise. Many of the processes in System 1 are shared with other animals (as in perceptual systems), and some are unique to humans (as in grammar learning), but all are executed in an automatic, fast, and often unconscious way. The brute-force direct-fit interpolation that guides learning in these systems, similar to evolution, can go further than we previously thought in explaining many cognitive functions in humans (e.g., learning syntax in natural text without imposing rule-based reasoning; see Box 2)."

"It can be tempting to impose our own intuitive or folk-psychological interpretations onto the fitted model, but this is misguided. If a generic network learns such a rule, this rule is likely inherent in the training set and is thus not so much a meaningful property of the network as it is a property of the data (see Figure 2). These interpretable rules arise incidentally, as an emergent byproduct of the fitting procedure. The incidental emergence of such rules is not a “goal” of the network, and the network does not “use” the rules to extrapolate. This mindset, in fact, resembles pre-Darwinian teleological thinking and “just-so stories” in biology [as opposed to blind Darwinian natural selection] (Gould and Lewontin, 1979, Mayr, 1992). Evolution provides perhaps the most ubiquitous and well-known example of a biological fitting process that learns to act in the world while being blind to the underlying structure of the problems and their optimal solutions."

I might say that our direct aquaintance with our own intelligence is accompanied by an ineffability because it is automatic, unconscious, "brute-fitting".

Which is why Kripke confessess this undeniable pull and intuition and confidence at his following of a rule despite his inability to justify it. We are directly aquainted with our ability to act coherently and this ability transcends determinate, human-interpretable foundations precisely because our brain doesn't require them to do what it does.

Edit: The phrase "directly aquainted" I used here may be a bit too strong but just trying to convey that it is some strong aquaintance that just comes from a direct feeling rather than looking at some other justification. This is not to say that it is necessarily infallible even if it is a product of an extremely sophisticated machine.

Without further elaboration/clarification, I am not sure what I see written here is much different from Kripke's sceptical solution. Rules are indeterminate but we act coherently anyway blindly.

Isn’t the naturalized, empirical concept of brain an attempt to rescue a picture theory of meaning by recourse to a causal physiology as a ground for the seeming ungrounded indeterminacy of symbolic interaction? — Joshs

I don't really understand what's been asked here. The brain can provide an explanation for blind intelligible behavior without symbolic interpretation. The brain as a prediction machine that can correct or update the parameters (from "error") responsible for its behavior, and underlies our ability to act coherently.

But it is appropriate for the linguist, philosopher of language, or semiotican? Don't grunts and screams share a family resemblance with speech? The issue is that you still need the "right sort of family resemblance," since all things resemble each other in at least some ways. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Its appropriate where the description fits; you have agreed with the concept yourself when you said "There is no "One True Feature," to point to for defining life". Speech, grunts whatever may also be another example. If it is a valid concept then it is a valid concept.

The salience of the concept is that Wittgenstein was using it specifically as counter to philosophical positions that are directly the opposite to it, trying to create rigorous theories of meaning. That is where the significance of this concept is intended, not for creating linguistic or biological theories. It is not intended for linguists and biologists to say "life is a family resemblance and that's it, that's my theory of language"; nevertheless, does that stop someone saying that the concept of life is an example of family resemblances? Ofcourse not.

If someone's behavior is expanded to include their thoughts, experiencing, etc — Count Timothy von Icarus

I am not expanding behavior to include everything. Behavior is a special case of acts we do.

isn't saying much of anything. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I would say the intention is to dissociate the idea of categorizing actions, based on some rule which is inherently indeterminate, from the actions themselves. We act regardless of the indeterminacy. I would also say such a view is in direct contrast to views where thinking is something more than sequences of our surface experiences, e.g. computational theories of mind, "language of thought hypothesis" and views that there is some intelligible, determinate semantic representations / symbols / modules underpinning those sequences.

Ok, but wouldn't this hold for all activities, not just social ones. And wouldn't this be true or animals as well? — Count Timothy von Icarus

Yes.

I do think Wittgenstein brings in social interaction to fix the underdetermination problem. That part seems fairly straightforward. I think I might disagree that it actually addressed the problem though. The argument from underdetermination is too strong, it proves too much. — Count Timothy von Icarus

It demonstrably doesn't fix the problem because the indeterminacy is being described in terms of words we have learned socially. If social interactions fixed the problem then surely there would be no longer any indeterminacy for Wittgenstein to write about.

For me, the idea is that symbols cannot do work by themselves because of chronic indeterminacy so you cannot have a theory of meaning that pulls itself up on its own bootstraps. You need some additional "causal" mechanisms to explain why we can act appropriately in terms of the words that we use without the presence of apriori determined boundaries or taxonomies.

Sociality then becomes this invoked as this "causal" mechanism. Obviously though this is not much of an explanation by itself and I think probably much too restrictive. The deeper answer IMO is brains, which cannot be inherently be interpreted representationally (human-interpretably symbolic to be more specific [since the word representation can be plausibly used in an extremely vague sense]), interacting with the environment, and sometimes other brains.

It would be vacuous for a biologist to say "all life shares a family resemblance," and to stop there. Whatever "all life," is it must surely have some sort of resemblance to be deemed "all life" in the first place. What biologists do in reality is posit a constellation of features that make up this "family resemblance," e.g. having a metabolism, undergoing selection, etc. If one stops at the metaphor and introduces nothing else one hasn't said anything. All of being can be said to resemble all that is in some way or another. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I feel like this response is suspect to the same criticism I have already brought up:

I suspect you conflate Wittgenstein's philosophical arguments and rhetoric against the logical positivism at the time for a full-blown scientific theory of language which it clearly is not. — Apustimelogist

I feel like you are attributing more to this concept than required and criticizing it for things not intended. — Apustimelogist

Family resemblance isn't intended as a basis for biological theorizing. The notion of family resemblances is not intended to do any intellectual work for a biologist.

I would say no, understanding has a phenomenological element. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Not sure I would say that a lack of phenomenology is the reason why people say that chat-gp or a LLM does not have true understanding. Conversely i'm sure phenomenology can be devoid of understanding.

Neither was I ignoring phenomenology; in fact, I was always implying it. When I am thinking about my understanding, I am typically thinking about it through the lense of my own experiences when I understand something. I am thinking about understamding in terms of sequences of experiences which include my own behaviors and thoughts.

The "oh, now I get it, moment" you mention is definitely included as part of enacting or demonstrating understanding, and I have many times had that kind of thing in mind when thinking about it.

As a previous poster already pointed out, all empirical science is undetermined. The problem of underdetermination is about as broad as the Problem of Induction or the Scandal of Deduction. It would seem to make most knowledge impossible if one demands "absolute certainty." That's why I never found the arguments about rule following from underdetermination particularly convincing. You could make the same sort of argument about Newton's Laws, quantum mechanics—essentially all empirical claims, or about all induction. That the future is like the past is "undetermined," as is memory being reliable. Thus, the issue of under determination is as much a factor for any sort of social rule following as it is for some person designing their own board game and play testing it by themselves; democratization doesn't eliminate the issue. — Count Timothy von Icarus

The idea is not to resolve indeterminacy. The idea is that we enact appropriate behaviors even when a characterization of them is simultaneously indeterminate in principle. Social interaction doesn't make rules less indeterminate. We learn how to act appropriately by interacting with our environment, including the appropriate use of words when we interact socially, para-socially or whatever.

But I don't think this warrants nescience vis-á-vis phenomena like "understanding a rule," that we are well acquainted with either. The demand for "absolute certainty" is the result of a good deal of ridiculousness in philosophy — Count Timothy von Icarus

Not sure what you are saying here.

The "elements" of Shannon information are typically limited to 1s & 0s — Gnomon

I'm just saying any number of elements are valid since its the logarithmic base and you can choose any base you want without affecting the properties of bits(or trits or nats).

There is no "One True Feature," to point to for defining life, but we generally don't have much disagreement over whether prions or self-replicating silicon crystals are alive. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Yes, this is pretty much the point of family resemblances so I just don't really understand what you are criticizing about it when you agree with it. I feel like you are attributing more to this concept than required and criticizing it for things not intended.

Right, learning the rules is a prerequisite to playing the game. — Count Timothy von Icarus

But what is learning the rule? When they learn people are making observations, whether of behavior or via something like reading, and then subsequently there is the acting out of behavior and cognition. Thats all there is to it.

understanding — Count Timothy von Icarus

And what is understanding over and above the ability to enact or demonstrate understanding? I don't see problems here. You can say that you know that someone understands how a game works without having them doing anything at that moment. But what does that actually mean other than that you know that they will be able to enact an understanding when required to do so? Enacting may be playing the actual game correctly. Enacting may be verbally describing the rules. Enacting may be the ability to attend to an ongoing game in sequence and anticipate what will happen or be surprised when something unexpected happens. There are many ways one can enact an understanding but to me that seems to be nothing above how we behave and think in real time.

Attributing rules to the behavior is chronically underdetermined / indeterminate on some level, and this issue regresses chronically. You can observe some behavior whose description by a rule is completely indeterminate; nonetheless, a person attributes a rule anyway. But then the attribution of the rule itself corresponds to bundles of behaviors / thoughts / words which themselves can be described indeterminately... and the regression goes on. Social interaction imo doesn't necessarily validate, as such, that we indeed are following the these rules we attribute to ourselves; but it does constrain or regulate our behavior through things like agreement, disagreement, instruction, etc. Since rule attribution corresponds to behavior, then social interaction obviously also constrains or regulates our rule attributions.

(But it is not the only thing - we can obviously learn many things without social interaction, though we are still interacting with a world and trying to learn the behaviors that elicit the kind of perception / experiences / outcomes / events we want to see in the external world or even just our own internal thoughts when we are working through a problem in our own heads.)

Rule attributions never truly escape the indeterminacy and regresses, but nonetheless we learn to act anyway in appropriate ways depending on the context. For example we learn to act appropriately in regard to the context of a particular game, or some routine, or in the context of particular instructions, agreements and disagreements, etc. It doesn't matter if the rules are always in principle indeterminate, because we learn to act appropriately anyway in ways that avoid outcomes / events / experiences / perceptions we do not want to see.

I guess, from my personal perspective, the crux is that determinate rules from unshakeable foundations are not required for rule-following behavior - it does not matter if the determinacy of the word "gavagai" can always be questioned by the radical skeptic. What matters is that the word can be evoked appropriately in response or anticipation to particular events in the world. What is deemed appropriate depends on what kind of events we want to see, and attaining what we want to see will usually depend on our behavior and thought being sensitive to the actual structures of the world as accessible through our perceptions (e.g. view from anywhere to some extent). Insofar that a word like gavagai is usually used in a social context, what is appropriate for the word use then also depends on how other people use that word, and whether they agree with your use.