The question isn’t whether the sky is blue , as though there were such things as neutral facts whose meaning could be isolated from contexts of use, motive and purpose that define their sense, but why it matters to us and in what context it becomes an issue. — Joshs

I agree with most of that.

I don't believe that for Wittgenstein we ever have access to a world outside discursive practices, which is not the same thing as saying that our discursive practices are hermetically sealed within themselves and closed off to an outside. — Joshs

My impression is that he talks about practices, and never about discursive practices. Perhaps you are thinking of language games as practices. Fair enough. But practices and forms of life are wider concepts than that. That's a crucial part of the point. IMO.

There is no determinate scheme or context that can fix the content of utterances, and hence no way to get outside of language. — Joseph Rouse

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.

How a theory or practice interprets the world is itself inescapably open to further interpretation, with no authority beyond what gets said by whom, when — Joseph Rouse

Why do we need some authority beyond what gets said by whom, when?

I think that the most important points are:-
1. Language has developed in the world, out of the world, as part of the world.
2. Language is inescapably adapted to the world and our lives in it.
3. Rouse has adopted the theoretical stance towards the world, forgetting or setting aside the inescapable fact that we live and act in it. That's what creates his problem. But language reflects our capabilities and our needs and interests, as you point out in the first quotation above. There would be no point to it if it did not.

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'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 skeptical solution. — Apustimelogist

Well, what I was most interested in was the point that "and hence no way to get outside of language." has no determinate meaning. If that argument fails, I can argue that that particular phrase has no determinate meaning anyway.
But surely, "there is no determinate scheme or context that can fix the content of utterance" includes itself in its reference. If it is true, it has no determinate meaning. If it is false, it might have determinate meaning, but that would depend on coming up with the scheme or context that fixes its meaning.

But meaning is determined by context of utterance, etc., That determines meaning to an entirely satisfactory extent and enables us to sort out any issues that arise. So I see Kripke's scepticism as a search for the absolute determinacy of meaning, which is an ideal that, so far as I can see, has no meaning.

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

Well Kripke's Crusoe is isolated from birth IIRC. The distinction is important and has led to the differentiation between your Tarzans (always isolated) and your Crusoes (isolated at some later point).

To be honest, the whole debate seems like a sort of philosophical blind alley to me.

It's a while since I've read Kripke's text, but that seems to be right. But it's a bit more complicated than that. If the thesis is that meaning is established by practices, then it does not seem to be wrong to say that there is no fact of the matter that determines it. However, given that the sky is blue, it is true to say that there is a fact of the matter that makes the statement "the sky is blue" true. IMO.

Well, this is tricky. The fact that we call the sky blue, think water is composed of hydrogen and oxygen, or think that dogs and cats are different species is not "social practices all the way down." The shape of language games, their evolution, the hinge propositions we accept as fundemental, etc.— these don't spring into our minds uncaused. It would be a mistake to think that just because we cannot formulate propositions outside of language games and the context of social practices that nothing exists outside that context or that such things are unknowable tout court.

At the root of deflationary theories of truth (which is often how On Certainty is read) lies an error that is isomorphic to the Cartesian error that Wittgenstein is at pains to correct. The error is to assume that language games, theories, models, words, ideas, etc. are what we know instead of that through which we know. It's unsurprising that a deflationary reader of Wittgenstein like Rorty uses the image of words and ideas as "a mirror of nature" as a foil through which to dismiss metaphysical notions of truth, while a phenomenologist relying on the pre-modern tradition like Sokolowski would rather have us speak of "lenses we look through" (not at).

Why do practices develop the way they do? Why do some things seem "self-evident?" If it isn't "for no reason at all," then we have something sitting posterior to any individual language game or any hinge propositions, namely metaphysical truth. What's missing from deflationary or skeptical accounts is any concept of the causality specific to signs, that they make us think one thing instead of another. Instead, we have the sign vehicle mistaken from the sign, leading to it becoming disconnected from its object. This turns the sign vehicle into an impermeable barrier between the interpretant and the world, rather than it being what joins them in an irreducible tripartite gestalt, a nuptial union. (Reductionist assumptions might play a role here too, in that it is assumed that sign relations can be decomposed into their parts without losing anything).

I think the move to deflation vis-á-vis truth became inevitable after the move to place logic entirely within the "subject." After the Cartesian divide between been subject and object, things has to be assigned to one or the other, leading to Lewis' "bloated subject," the sui generis source of beauty, goodness, logic, intelligibility, meaning, and eventually truth itself. (The "What is Logic?" thread discussed this: https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/14593/what-is-logic/p1)

But if we're willing to allow that we and our language games have causes external to ourselves, then there is no need to question the existence of "facts" that lie outside any specific game. After all, the absolute view is not reality as set over and against appearances, but rather must itself include all of reality and appearance. When Kripke or Rorty want to appeal to usefulness they have to allow that there is some truth about what is actually useful, and presumably this will be determined by factors outside of any language game. Otherwise we get the infinite regress of appeals to pragmatism that deny any truth (e.g. https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/15308/pragmatism-without-goodness/p1). That or usefulness is just whatever we currently prefer, which then leaves us in the position of Protagoras in the Theatetus, having no reason to philosophize because no one can ever be wrong about anything.

I'm always uncomfortable with those grand philosophical concepts. But I would agree in many cases that our access to - no, better, our practices in - a world "outside" language does ground meaning. I think the game may be differently played in fields like mathematics and logic - though even there, there are facts that kick us in the face; we are not simply in control.

Seems to me that all sorts of facts can "kick us in the face," e.g. when we design a plane based on a flawed understanding of lift and it crashes. Reason might be "defenseless," in that it cannot justify itself from outside itself, but truth asserts itself in our lives all the time. Regardless of which hinge propositions you hold to, if you jump off a building, it seems truth will show up to hit you on the way down.

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".

The set up for the skeptical problem is based on a very analytic notion of certainty and also seems to assume that meaning must be grounded in a nominalist context. I would say there are grounds for rejecting the "skeptical problem" rather than finding a solution for it. So this isn't the same thing as the skeptical solution. Kripke's argument could be framed as a dilemma syllogism, and we could "grab it by the horns," and reject its premises, rather than looking for a path through the horns.

This entails neither "ignoring indeterminacy" nor "acting blindly." Gadamer's views re hermeneutics are instructive here. The fact is, a prejudice against all prejudices is itself a prejudice. The "view from nowhere," isn't a coherent model of knowledge. Most of philosophy accepts this now, and yet the VFN continues to haunt us because it is often dragged out as a strawman/punching bag to argue for various flavors of relativism or nihilism, as if realism can only exist within the context of the VFN.

It is possible to rely upon one's prejudices and still question them. We can question the Law of Non-Contradiction or the Law of the Excluded Middle while still maintaining that we must hold to them. Folks like Hegel have done this fruitfully for example. But we always keep some things constant. We don't "begin from nowhere." Indeed, on the classical and phenomenological view we begin untied to the intelligibility of being; meaning is "always already there." The solution, à la Gadamer (or Hegel), is a consciousness that is aware of the process by which it comes to know things. E.g., we don't become dislodged for any historical context, but rather we become aware of and can question our specific context.

This sort of finding isn't new. Aristotle's solution to the skeptical problem re syllogisms (that every premise in a syllogism must be justified by a prior syllogism, and so on, ad infinitum) relies on using self-evident truths as axioms. Likewise, Plato looks at how it is impossible to give an argument justifying reason and argument that isn't circular. Reason is transcedent, hence it can question its own foundations. Like G.E. Moore's point re goodness, we can always ask coherently of any proposition "but what if it is false?" or "what if we are mistaken?" But the problem only results in a sort of nihilistic crisis if other presuppositions are in play (i.e., subject/object dualism, nominalism).

I guess one key difference here is the idea that abstraction is just induction. On the Aristotlean, immanent realist account they aren't the same thing; abstraction involves the mind's access to the intelligibility of things, the eidos that makes them anything at all. A purely inductive account of abstraction cannot overcome indeterminacy and the problem of induction. But then such an approach assumes subject/object dualism.

Against this view we might consider Eric Perl on Plotinus:

In arguing that being qua intelligible is not apart from but is the content of intellectual apprehension, Plotinus is upholding what may be called an 'identity theory of truth,’ an understanding of truth not as a mere extrinsic correspondence but as the sameness of thought and reality. The weakness of any correspondence theory of truth is that on such a theory thought can never reach outside itself to that with which it supposedly corresponds.1 Thought can be ‘adequate’ (literally, ‘equal-to’) to reality only if it is one with, the same as, reality. In Aristotle’s formulation, which as we have seen Plotinus cites in support of his position, knowledge is the same as the known.2

If thought and reality are not together in this way, then, as Plotinus argues, there is no truth, for truth just is the togetherness of being with thought. Plotinus’ arguments against the separation of intellect and being thus resonate profoundly with the nihilistic predicament of modernity. If
thought and reality are conceived in modern terms, as ‘subject’ and ‘object,’ extrinsic to and over against one another, and truth is conceived as a mere correspondence between them, then thought cannot get to reality at all,
then there can be no knowledge, and in the end, since nothing is given to thought, no truth and no reality. We must rather understand thought in classical Platonic, Aristotelian, and Plotinian terms, as an openness to,
an embracing of, a being-with reality, and of reality as not apart from but as, in Plotinus’ phenomenological terms, “given” (V.5.2.9) to thought. This, again, is the very meaning of the identification of being as εἶδος or ἰδέα. Being means nothing if it is not given to thought; thought means nothing if it is not the apprehension of being. Hence at the pure and paradigmatic level of both, intellect as perfect apprehension and the forms as perfect being,
they coincide. “We have here, then, one nature: intellect, all beings, truth” (V.5.3.1–2).

So your solution is basicallythat we just know things inherently?

If it isn't "for no reason at all," then we have something sitting posterior to any individual language game or any hinge propositions, namely metaphysical truth. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Or perhaps a functioning brain.

So your solution is basicallythat we just know things inherently?

As opposed to what, that conclusion we are inherently unable to know things? "Know" might be the wrong word here. Maybe "learn?"

Or perhaps a functioning brain.

Not sure if this is supposed to be snide or actually an appeal to everything about what we find useful being explained by "having a functioning brain," without reference to the other things I mentioned. Presumably the evolution and individual development of each functioning brain depends on physics, chemistry, etc., and presumably no language games existed before individuals with brains, so the point stands that something sits prior to usefulness. Brains don't spring from the void uncaused, and what constitutes proper function for a human brain is dependent upon "how the world is."

Anyhow, Kripke's other work is of a realist bent, so I'm not totally sure where Kripkenstein fits in his development. I would think, given his other work, that Kripke would think: "but why is human practice the way it is?" and "why do people find such and such useful?" are completely valid questions that might be explained fruitfully by "facts" about biology, physics, etc. That such facts are ultimately expressed in a language grounded in social practices should not be a barrier to "knowing the world outside of language," unless language, words, theories, etc. are exclusively "what we know," instead of being the "tools we use to know."

But then the difficulty is that underdetermination is as much of a problem for making any inferences about nature as it is for inferring meaning. For example, all the observations consistent with Newton's Laws or quantum theory are also consistent with an infinite number of other rule-like descriptions of nature. Yet the same sort of solution doesn't seem open to us here. It would seem strange to say that nature, or the scientific study of it, is defined entirely by the expectations of members of the natural/scientific community, which are in turn based on usefulness.

From whence this usefulness? Usefulness is defined in terms of nature and then nature is defined in terms of expectations and usefulness. This is circular, but perhaps not viciously so if we allow that expectations are shaped by things outside practices. Surely there must be a truth about what is actually useful though. What is useful to us cannot be whatever we currently think is useful, else we can never be wrong about anything.

Presumably the evolution and individual development of each functioning brain depends on physics, chemistry, etc., and presumably no language games existed before individuals with brains, so the point stands that something sits prior to usefulness. Brains don't spring from the void uncaused, and what constitutes proper function for a human brain is dependent upon "how the world is." — Count Timothy von Icarus

Trying to ground language games in the sovereignty of empirical truth (how the world is) misunderstands the larger metaphysical implications of the concept of language games, reducing them to the human side of a mind-world divide and treating world as sovereign legitimator.

Trying to ground language games in the sovereignty of empirical truth (how the world is) misunderstands the larger
ontological implications of the concept of language games, reducing them to the human side of a mind-world divide and treating world as sovereign legitimator.

Ok, but where are we doing that? The claim is that language is not social practice and expectation "all the way down," and that what we expect or find useful has causes/explanations outside of social practices themselves. There is no need to divide the mind and world at all. The world is indeed sovereign, because minds are part of the world.

It would seem strange to say that nature, or the scientific study of it, is defined entirely by the expectations of members of the natural/scientific community, which are in turn based on usefulness. From whence usefulness? Usefulness is defined in terms of nature and then nature is defined in terms of expectations and usefulness. Surely there must be a truth about what is actually useful though. What is useful to us cannot be whatever we currently think is useful, else we can never be wrong about anything. — Count Timothy von Icarus

The criterion and meaning of being wrong can only be defined from within the very practices which define a certain sense of usefulness. When we abandon a particular set of social practices, a particular language game, we arrive at a new sense of usefulness , and with it new criteria of right and wrong. So we are wrong all the time, but what this means is not something that gets its justification from outside of the practices that determine the bounds of validation.

I mean, what is the counterpoint here. If we ask: "why do social practices evolve the way they do?" "Why do we find certain things useful? E.g. why is mathematics useful? or Why did disparate cultures break down and label animal species in a similar fashion?" Is the only appropriate answer "expectations and social practices," and these become explanatory primitives? Is it impossible to explain usefulness in terms of anything else? Does it have causes?

There seems to be a risk here of confusing "meaning is always bound up in social practices," with "meaning is explicable in terms of nothing but social practice."

Ok, but where are we doing that? The claim is that language is not social practice and expectation "all the way down," and that what we expect or find useful has causes/explanations outside of social practices themselves. There is no need to divide the mind and world at all. The world is indeed sovereign, because minds are part of the world. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I follow the thinking of the poststructuralists, of Nietzsche, and his heirs (Foucault , Deleuze, Heidegger and Derrida). They dispute the claim that language is not social practice and expectation ‘all the way down’. But by social they do not mean the practices of a biological being called ‘human’. Their notion of the primacy of language and the social is pre-personal, pre-humanistic. It applies equally to all phenomena of ‘nature’ but requires a different understanding of materiality, one that is agential rather than reductively causal ( check out Karen Barad’s ‘Meeting the Universe Halfway’ or Joseph Rouse’s ‘Articulating the World’).

I'm just trying to get a grip on what your solution is and how it actually differs from the skeptical one because I am not sure I understand. If your solution is something like "we just know things", it doesn't look that different from the skeptical solution except for applying the word 'realism' to it.

But then the difficulty is that underdetermination is as much of a problem for making any inferences about nature as it is for inferring meaning. For example, all the observations consistent with Newton's Laws or quantum theory are also consistent with an infinite number of other rule-like descriptions of nature. Yet the same sort of solution doesn't seem open to us here. — Count Timothy von Icarus

The difference is quite subtle but they aren't the same problem at all. The kripkean problem is about word meaning and the scientific underdetermination problem is about picking one correct model. There is no immediate issue where not knowing a scientific model is correct interferes with the ability to use it or advocate it. On the otherhand; you would think that being able to use a word appropriately implies that you are doing so because you have determined its meaning. The skeptical solution effectively inverts this final dilemma - meaning doesn't determine use; use creates the illusion of objectively determinate meaning in words through blind agreement. Underdetermination in scientific theories doesn't need such a solution though you can obviously apply the Kripkean problem to the meanings of scientific words.

It would seem strange to say that nature, or the scientific study of it, is defined entirely by the expectations of members of the natural/scientific community, which are in turn based on usefulness. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I mean, this is more or less just Kuhn whos views are either heavily influenced by or heavily compatible with PI - extensions of concepts such as family resemblance, language games, forms of life arguably appear in Kuhn's work quite blatantly, albeit the context slightly different: science in terms of implicitly-followed practise vs. explicit well-defined rules.

Scientific consensus obviously depends on agreement of the scientific community (almost circular). Scientists may prefer certain theories because they explain data but at the same time scientists are making choices about which theories they advocate despite underdetermination.

From whence this usefulness? — Count Timothy von Icarus

In the simplest sense (and definitely over-reductive), "usefulness" is just empirical adequacy. And the problem with empirical adequacy is that many theories are plausibly empirically adequate.

In the most general sense, "usefulness" is just what appeals to the scientist.

Surely there must be a truth about what is actually useful though. What is useful to us cannot be whatever we currently think is useful, else we can never be wrong about anything. — Count Timothy von Icarus

The problem is that we don't have some external reference for what is correct. All we have are people who agree or disagree with each other. In an ideal world we pick our views based on what accounts for the data best but realistically this is too messy to guarantee anything close to absolute truth ever (or at least the idea that we can pick a model(s) that accounts for the data and there are no possible non-trivial alternatives).

Scientific realists replace absolute truth with the idea that theories get approximately more true over time but its not clear to me that this is much different from the notion of empirica adequacy an anti-realist might use. Such ambiguities are not so disimilar my thoughts earlier in the post about your solution to the Wittgenstein meaning problem being not so different from the skeptical solution apart from the label of "realism" attached.

I'm sort of puzzled by the presence of Heidegger on that list. The idea of aletheia as "revealedness" or "unconcealment" seems to straightforwardly be a metaphysical vision of truth, as opposed to one where: "all that can be significantly said about truth is exhausted by an account of the role of the expression ‘true’ in our speech," or of truth being in a way dependent on hinge propositions for its existence.

To be sure, one way to deal with the charge that one has recreated the Cartesian mistake by assuming that words are "what we know" instead of a tool used for knowing is to claim there is "nothing but words." It's consistent, but then again there are lots of ways to be consistent. It reminds me a bit of GK Chesterton's comments on the madman in Orthodoxy, which really appeals to the entire underdetermination problem and the demand for a certain sort of certainty.

The madman's explanation of a thing is always complete, and often in a purely rational sense satisfactory. Or, to speak more strictly, the insane explanation, if not conclusive, is at least unanswerable; this may be observed specially in the two or three commonest kinds of madness. If a man says (for instance) that men have a conspiracy against him, you cannot dispute it except by saying that all the men deny that they are conspirators; which is exactly what conspirators would do. His explanation covers the facts as much as yours. Or if a man says that he is the rightful King of England, it is no complete answer to say that the existing authorities call him mad; for if he were King of England that might be the wisest thing for the existing authorities to do. Or if a man says that he is Jesus Christ, it is no answer to tell him that the world denies his divinity; for the world denied Christ's

Nevertheless he is wrong. But if we attempt to trace his error in exact terms, we shall not find it quite so easy as we had supposed. Perhaps the nearest we can get to expressing it is to say this: that his mind moves in a perfect but narrow circle. A small circle is quite as infinite as a large circle; but, though it is quite as infinite, it is not so large. In the same way the insane explanation is quite as complete as the sane one, but it is not so large. A bullet is quite as round as the world, but it is not the world. There is such a thing as a narrow universality; there is such a thing as a small and cramped eternity; you may see it in many modern religions. Now, speaking quite externally and empirically, we may say that the strongest and most unmistakable mark of madness is this combination between a logical completeness and a spiritual contraction. The lunatic's theory explains a large number of things, but it does not explain them in a large way. I mean that if you or I were dealing with a mind that was growing morbid, we should be chiefly concerned not so much to give it arguments as to give it air, to convince it that there was something cleaner and cooler outside the suffocation of a single argument.

Not that the minds of such theorists are necessarily "morbid." I cite the example because it's a good illustration of the dangers in putting too much of a premium on a certain sort of certainty (one I imagine many post-structuralist might agree with, at least in principle). And yet in the context of discussing Kripke this sort of certainty comes up. I recall at one point he throws up the example "skaddition," where skaddition is identical to addition for any number small enough to be added up in any finite lifetime, but then differs from addition at some infinite limit. The invention of such a "problem" seems a little much. Surely, it's possible to ask of literally anything "but what if we're wrong about it," and this seems to boil down to doing something quite similar.

Well Kripke's Crusoe is isolated from birth IIRC. The distinction is important and has led to the differentiation between your Tarzans (always isolated) and your Crusoes (isolated at some later point). — Count Timothy von Icarus

I'm sure you're right. It's a good point even if it isn't Kripke's. I didn't realize there was a hidden code, but I'll know in future. Of course "isolated from birth" nudges us towards the experiences of and with the "wolf children". Not at all like Mowgli!

The error is to assume that language games, theories, models, words, ideas, etc. are what we know instead of that through which we know. It's unsurprising that a deflationary reader of Wittgenstein like Rorty uses the image of words and ideas as "a mirror of nature" as a foil through which to dismiss metaphysical notions of truth, while a phenomenologist relying on the pre-modern tradition like Sokolowski would rather have us speak of "lenses we look through" (not at). — Count Timothy von Icarus

Perfect. Or as near as dammit.

If it isn't "for no reason at all," then we have something sitting posterior to any individual language game or any hinge propositions, namely metaphysical truth. — Count Timothy von Icarus

.... and so we take the next step on the infinite regress. Yet we can't resist, can we? The only way off the merry-go-round is to look for, or perhaps more likely, to create, a different understanding of structures. That's what finally put paid to the idea that if there aren't turtles all the way down, that there must be something else supporting the foundations of the earth. Well, there is, but not another turtle, or Atlas, or whatever. Nor is the earth falling in the sense the Ancient Greek atomists thought. The truth is in an entirely different category - and that's the key.

But if we're willing to allow that we and our language games have causes external to ourselves, then there is no need to question the existence of "facts" that lie outside any specific game. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Or perhaps a functioning brain. — Apustimelogist

That's an interesting suggestion. I'm inclined to accept that there must (!) be an evolutionary explanation for the development of language games, including mathematics and logic. But that seems reductionist. Nonetheless, the brain/evolution idea has the interesting property of setting up a circle of explanation. No beginning and no end, or perhaps a self-sustaining structure.

After all, the absolute view is not reality as set over and against appearances, but rather must itself include all of reality and appearance. — Count Timothy von Icarus

People seldom seem to recognize that appearances are real also (and so are hallucinations and delusions).

When Kripke or Rorty want to appeal to usefulness they have to allow that there is some truth about what is actually useful, and presumably this will be determined by factors outside of any language game. — Count Timothy von Icarus

That seems to be right. But there's that pesky metaphor again. It is almost irresistible. But if we were to describe what we're after in ways like that, they would be part of a language-game, right? So the inside/outside or behind/in front metaphors are seriously unhelpful.

Regardless of which hinge propositions you hold to, if you jump off a building, it seems truth will show up to hit you on the way down. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Yes. There is an alternative model that truth can show up in different ways in apparently incommensurable games. Think of the different conceptions of gravity from Aristotle through Newton to Einstein - and now we have gravitational waves. The same truth is represented in different ways.

I'm sort of puzzled by the presence of Heidegger on that list. The idea of aletheia as "revealedness" or "unconcealment" seems to straightforwardly be a metaphysical vision of truth, as opposed to one where: "all that can be significantly said about truth is exhausted by an account of the role of the expression ‘true’ in our speech," or of truth being in a way dependent on hinge propositions for its existence — Count Timothy von Icarus

Heidegger’s notion of the truth of Being was a deconstruction of metaphysics, the positing of the mutual interdependence of word and world.

Instead of saying that we construct the way the world is, we could just as well say that the world shapes the meaning of our words and deeds. But it would be better to say that our interac­tion with the world takes precedence over any dichotomy between interpreting and the interpreted. This is what Heidegger meant by saying that we are “Being-in-the-world.” Neither world nor our ways of being in it come “first.” Each becomes determinate only in relation to the other. ( Joseph Rouse)

What is useful to us cannot be whatever we currently think is useful, else we can never be wrong about anything. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Maybe look at it in more relative terms? We can improve our understanding of what is useful by degrees, on a wide variety of subjects. Undoubtedly we are wrong about a lot of things, and there is room for improvement in our understanding of what is useful in a variety of ways. We somewhat rely on each other to be experts in various ways. Don't we?

The question we have been circling around is why language should be the way it is instead of any other way? Social practices seem malleable and contingent, soin virtue of what are they the way they are? Here it is worth considering Kenneth Gallagher's summation of the metaphysical (as opposed to physical) principle of causation—“that the order of becoming and existence must be intelligible; that no phase of the process of contingent existence is intelligible in itself; and that therefore contingent existence is always relative existence, essentially referred, qua existing to another.”

To be intelligible—to not be arbitrary—social practice must have its explanation in something outside itself. On the view that being is intelligible, such an explanation must be possible. My position is that the tools of reason (language, theories, logic, etc.) are what join us to these explanations—to metaphysical truth. (Of course, on the view that being is unintelligible I fear that we are simply left with misology and nihilism).

Early in On Certainty, Wittgenstein argues that claims as basic as Moore's “I have hands” can only be satisfied as “part of a language game.” If this is taken as merely entailing that all statements about truth require the use of a language game, deflation is not necessarily an issue. Thus, the crucial consideration here comes down to our view of reason and the tools of reason. If reason is ecstatic, if it pushes beyond itself, joining us to what lies beyond, then we can look at language games as a means through which we access a truth that is not confined to the small quarters offered by any individual game or set of axiomatic hinge propositions.

One difficulty of modern subject/object dualism is that it requires that different elements of being be assigned to one or the other. The result is what C.S. Lewis terms “the bloated subject,” the subject who is the sui generis source of all goodness, beauty, and truth. If the source of all intelligibility is placed on the “subject” side of the ledger it seems it will be impossible to know what lies outside ourselves (and so impossible to use reason to transcend what we already are; hence the view that reason is simply and always a slave of the passions and that arguments are merely a question of power).

The question then is whether such a separation was ever warranted. I would argue that it is not. If “being” is to mean anything at all then it must refer to that which is apprehended by or given to thought. Hence, intelligibility must run through both.

I will not assert that such a position can be meaningfully demonstrated within any specific language game. After all, the assertion in question is the very ability of language games to join us to what is other than them, namely metaphysical truth. Indeed, it is reason’s very transcendence that precludes our ability to capture what it does for us within the confines of any language game.

Here, it might be helpful return to G.K. Chesterton’s discussion of the “madman.". As Chesterton points out, the madman, can always make any observation consistent with his delusions “If [the] man says… that men have a conspiracy against him, you cannot dispute it except by saying that all the men deny [it]; which is exactly what conspirators would do. His explanation covers the facts as much as yours.” Expressing the man’s error is not easy; his thoughts are consistent. They run in a “perfect but narrow circle. A small circle is quite as infinite as a large circle… though… it is not so large.” The man’s account “explains a large number of things, but it does not explain them in a large way.”

For Chesterton, the mark of madness is this combination of “logical completeness and a spiritual contraction.” In the same way, a view of truth that is limited to the confines of individual language games explains truth in a “small way.” Reason is no longer ecstatic, taking us beyond what we already are. Rather it runs in tight, isolated circles. On such a view, reason represents not a bridge, the ground of the mind’s nuptial union with being, but is instead the walls of a perfect but hermetically sealed cell.

As Wittgenstein puts it: "one is sometimes convinced of the correctness of a view by its simplicity or
symmetry, i.e., these are what induce one to go over to this point of view. One then simply says
something like: "That's how it must be."

Obviously, we can't justify reason with reason in a non-circular manner. This is why for Plato reason is "defenseless."



Well no, the point isn't that we "just know." The claim is that the subject should never have been separated off and set over and against the world in the first place.

See the above for a summary of the position. The crucial point is that reason, and its various tools (e.g. language) joins us to the intelligibility of the world. This is a metaphysical position quite different from the presuppositions that enable Kripke's plunge into nihilism.

Now, if you want to say it is "blind" or must assume "we just know" because it cannot give a demonstration of the "nature of reason as a whole" or "reason's transcendence" in terms of any single language game, that seems to me to be missing the point. The point is that reason cannot be locked down within the confines of any finite axiomatized game. I could indeed provide such a demonstration, provided the right axiomatic hinge propositions, I could even put it into a valid syllogism, but it wouldn't demonstrate the thing in question.

You might consider here Plato's comments in Letter VII about why he cannot explain metaphysical truths in a dissertation.

Instead of saying that we construct the way the world is, we could just as well say that the world shapes the meaning of our words and deeds. But it would be better to say that our interac­tion with the world takes precedence over any dichotomy between interpreting and the interpreted. This is what Heidegger meant by saying that we are “Being-in-the-world.” Neither world nor our ways of being in it come “first.” Each becomes determinate only in relation to the other. ( Joseph Rouse)

IDK, in isolation this to me does not suggest truth or meaning is "social practice all the way down," nor a deflationary vision of truth.

That's an interesting suggestion. I'm inclined to accept that there must (!) be an evolutionary explanation for the development of language games, including mathematics and logic. But that seems reductionist. Nonetheless, the brain/evolution idea has the interesting property of setting up a circle of explanation. No beginning and no end, or perhaps a self-sustaining structure. — Ludwig V

The brain idea is that it doesn't matter if rules are underdetermined because what causes our behavior is not platonic representations of rules but a functioning brain acting under the laws of physics. It is the explanation of how we act blindly and is linked to the possible idea that brains and any kind of neurons learn to perform tasks without any human-interpretable rules. Ergo, the fact the brain can learn tasks, categorize them with words are independent of the idea of rule indeterminacy, since it simply does not use those rules to do what it does... those rules are a post-hoc inference that we perform as categorization acts (e.g. labelling your own behavior "this is plussing") using the exact same implicit mechanisms without human-interpretable rules. Such rule indeterminacy could not matter if you were to actually to consider the full dynamics of how a brain works, which obviously is not information available to anyone's first person experience but fully determines how a person thinks and acts.

Forms of life and language games are all just appeals to the blind behavior produced by the brain - in terms of both cognitive and motor-acts - in an interacting community of brains all "acting blindly" together: bouncing off each other, synchronizing, checking the norms of their use of words that are embedded in the context of their physical environments, culture, ecological/ethological niches, whatever, etc, etc. A single, isolated brain may not necessarily need to come up with words (because it has no one to communicate with) even if the rest of its behavior is totally coherent / consistent; and in any case, it would have no other brains to check its word use - it would be a freewheelin' brain with no social constraints, no pressure for consistency in terms of word-use. However other brains or communities can still classify the isolated brain's coherent behaviors consistently in terms of their own rules. Classification again can be just seen as nothing more than something like the blind acts of saying words when they see that brain's behaviors.

Sure. So then what is "useful" is not "whatever we think is useful." There is some truth of the matter, even if it is hard to discover.

The problem only crops up when it is denied that there is any truth about practical goodness.

I just don't understand what your view is saying other than ignoring the indeterminacy or saying it just doesn't matter (must be since it hasn't been refuted)... and then just saying... well, uhhh, reason. So to me, I don't know if that's meaningfully that different to what I am saying. Maybe the difference is you place "metaphysical truth" at the center where I place an instrumentalist brain.

Maybe the difference is you place "metaphysical truth" at the center where I place an instrumentalist brain.

Well, the similarity might be that you seem to be saying that all your talk of brains is true in the sense of metaphysical truth. For instance, suppose I were a member of a community that had a different conceptual scheme from yours, accepted different hinge propositions, and whose members had different expectations of how words were used. And suppose I claimed that brains don't perform any of the key functions you ascribe to them, that this is all tied to an immaterial
soul. Would my claims be equally true as yours, "truth" being merely how the term is used with some given language-game? So the brain would both have and not have the properties you ascribe to it, depending on where one stands?

Kripke's other philosophy seems a lot more consistent with that sort of naturalism than the Kripkenstein stuff. On a conventional naturalistic view there is no indeterminism problem or finitude issues. Everything is determined. All experiences of meaning are describable in terms of determinant physical interactions. Any instance of the experience of meaning is uniquely specified by facts about the relevant physical system. How language evolves can be explained entirely in terms of physical interactions, which of course involve the environment and not just language users' expectations. Presumably if you had all the data Leplace's demon could tell you how everyone experiences meaning, the casual linkages between experienced meaning, use, users, and the environment, and it could predict exactly how use will evolve in the future.

But the conventional view would also tend to assert that it is true in a way the substance dualism or deflationary relativism is not.

The brain idea is that it doesn't matter if rules are underdetermined because what causes our behavior is not platonic representations of rules but a functioning brain acting under the laws of physics. It is the explanation of how we act blindly and is linked to the possible idea that brains and any kind of neurons learn to perform tasks without any human-interpretable rules — Apustimelogist

Maybe you would agree that the brain idea must incorporate into its assumptions that natural scientific concepts such as functioning brain, neuron and physical law are not the product of human observation and representation of a world independent of our representations, but practices of interaction with others in the world. This does not mean that human linguistic practices are somehow ontologically prior to the biological history which gave rise to them, it means that we can’t legitimize biological facts on a different basis (empirical realism, instrumentalism) than we would the meaning products of language games. I think Wittgenstein would agree with Rouse’s critique of instrumentalism .

The distinction between the observable and the unobservable is a pragmatic one that has no ontological implications. Observation and observability should not play an important role in an account of science. Philosophers of science have traditionally thought of science as a system of representation, whose aim is to describe accurately a world that is indifferent to how it is represented. Observation was important because it provided the only link between the world as we represented it to be and the world itself. Only in sense experience does the world impinge upon us in a way that constrains the possibilities for representing it. Thus we have Quine’s claim as typical: “Whatever evidence there is for science is sensory evidence.” Things look considerably different from my perspective. The question is not how we get from a linguistic representation of the world to the world represented. We are already engaged with the world in practical activity, and the world simply is what we are involved with. The question of access to the world, to which the appeal to observation was a response, never arises.

The question isn’t whether the sky is blue , as though there were such things as neutral facts whose meaning could be isolated from contexts of use, motive and purpose that define their sense

This is a false dilemma; as if the sky cannot be blue and facts cannot exist unless they can be intelligible isolated from the world in which they exist. It amounts to a demand that contingent being be wholly subsistent if it is to be being at all.

Or as if it must be the case that a truth cannot be truth unless it can expressed in a language spoken by nobody from nowhere.

Such an atomistic view of propositional truth was dominant in a relatively small community for a fairly short period of time. I think it's now had a far longer and more widespread life as a sort of ready made foil than it ever did as a position actually embraced by anyone.

hence no way to get outside of language.

To paraphrase Big Heg: to have recognized a limit is to have already stepped over it.

This is a false dilemma; as if the sky cannot be blue and facts cannot exist unless they can be intelligible isolated from the world in which they exist. It amounts to a demand that contingent being be wholly subsistent if it is to be being at all.

Or as if it must be the case that a truth cannot be truth unless it can expressed in a language spoken by nobody from nowhere — Count Timothy von Icarus

On the contrary, it is the assumption of world as corrective to contingent being that harbors unexamined presuppositions isolating language from world. As Rouse argues:

In saying that what is real is indepen­dent of what we do or say, the realist has a definite picture of the relations between our interpretations of the world and the world
itself. Our interpretations say something definite about the world, which sometimes matches the way the world is and sometimes does not. This is the case not just with our sentences, but with our actions: sometimes what I pick up and (try to) use as a hammer is a hammer, and sometimes it is not. This difference is what accounts for whether the nail goes in or not. Any correspondence or fit between our in­terpretations and their intended objects is therefore contingent.

The problem with this picture is that it takes as already determined both the way the world is and our understanding of how our in­terpretations take it to be. The realist of course recognizes that we do not know in advance how the world is. But once we have some definite interpretations of the world, we can use them as the basis for our actions, which in turn test the adequacy of our interpretations. If our actions fail to achieve their aims, something must be wrong with the interpretations they were based on. If our actions succeed, this success
of course does not entail that their underlying interpretations do accord with the reality they interpret. But if a wide variety of actions in differing circumstances generally succeed, the best explanation for their success is that those interpretations at least approximately ac­cord with the way those objects really are.

But where do we acquire our understanding of what cur various interpretations do say about the world and of what would count as success in our actions? The realist needs to give some account of understanding such that we can understand how our interpretations take the world to be independent of how the world actually is. Otherwise the alleged independence of object and interpretation can never get off the ground. Sentences and practices do not have ready-made meanings, nor do they acquire meaning by convention. (How could the parties involved understand what they were agreeing to?) They acquire meaning only in their performance or use.

Well, this seems to me like more of the same problem. That is, starting off with subject-object dualism and a correspondence view of truth, and then concluding that if this view has problems we must simply do away with metaphysics and truth. But this of course targets a very narrow segment of "realist theories." Plotinus, for instance, is already launching a somewhat similar critique of correspondence theories of truth in the 200s.

Does realism imply that "what is real is indepen­dent of what we do or say?" Independent in what way? Certainly, its generally a realist view that looking at the moon doesn't cause it to exist, or that Mt. Everest existed, and was even experienced, prior to anyone coining a name for it. The contrary of these claims would indeed be implausible. So, there is some sort of independence there.

Yet this isn't any sort of absolute independence, else we could never come to know these things. On the scholastic view that all created things exist within a web of relations, and are defined in terms of these relations, the whatness of the moon or a mountain cannot be independent of the mind. Indeed, if their "being real" is to mean anything at all it must mean what is given to thought.

To have any linkage, the intelligibility of thoughts and language must run through all things, and indeed the argument is that here is generally no good reason to create a cleavage through being between knower and known in the first place. Unity is one of the transcendental properties of being, going back to the doctrine's embryonic form in Aristotle (or even Parmenides).

So, even if we accept the claim that "words acquire meaning only in their performance or use," it doesn't seem that we have to accept deflation. Intelligibility must lie prior to words acquiring meaning through acts, since we don't use words arbitrarily and "for no reason at all." The claim that words get their meaning from use need not imply that use has no relation to anything outside use.

The question we have been circling around is why language should be the way it is instead of any other way? Social practices seem malleable and contingent, so in virtue of what are they the way they are? — Count Timothy von Icarus

OK. I think I've already pointed out my view that every foundation requires another, just because the question why is it so? is always available. So I've essentially asked for this. I hope you won't think I'm ungrateful just because I'm not happy with your answer. After all, it's disagreements that keep philosophy going.

To be intelligible—to not be arbitrary—social practice must have its explanation in something outside itself. On the view that being is intelligible, such an explanation must be possible. My position is that the tools of reason (language, theories, logic, etc.) are what join us to these explanations—to metaphysical truth. — Count Timothy von Icarus

There's that pesky metaphor again. I guess you mean that social practices are not self-explanatory. But then I think that if I can practice a social practice, I understand it (and if I can't, I don't). So I'm wondering what kind of explanation would be appropriate. I can't see that re-importing reason (language, theories, logic, etc.), which was to be what social practices explained, is going to help. Unless you are saying that social practices and reason etc. are mutually supporting, which would conform to the "outside" requirement, I suppose. But then that would form a new structure which would generate a new "why".

In the same way, a view of truth that is limited to the confines of individual language games explains truth in a “small way.” Reason is no longer ecstatic, taking us beyond what we already are. — Count Timothy von Icarus

There are soaring aspirations here and it is hard to resist. But my ambition is to understand where I am. Nor am I sure what "ecstasy" means here. You posit reason etc as what "joins" us to "the world", and if we were not already in the world, that would be a useful function. I suppose it is true to say that reason is what enables us to understand the world, but, given that we are already in it, that doesn't seem much like ecstasy.

For Chesterton, the mark of madness is this combination of “logical completeness and a spiritual contraction.” In the same way, a view of truth that is limited to the confines of individual language games explains truth in a “small way.” Reason is no longer ecstatic, taking us beyond what we already are. Rather it runs in tight, isolated circles. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Yes. Confronting delusions of that kind is indeed a tricky business. Though I've seen people behave like that - running round and round a single argument - and thought that although they are very irritating, they are not clinically unwell. Perhaps Chesterton means "madness" in a more informal sense, and of course, there is very likely to be a spectrum.
I think we would indeed regard someone who endlessly played noughts and crosses (tic-tac-toe) without ever becoming bored even though they realized how limited it is, as in poor mental health. But that's not Wittgenstein's vision.

On such a view, reason represents not a bridge, the ground of the mind’s nuptial union with being, but is instead the walls of a perfect but hermetically sealed cell. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Forgive me, but I don't quite understand. You represent the one view as desirable and the other as undesirable. I get that. But I still find myself asking which one is true? It would seem odd to choose the one view because it has more desirable consequences, but that's what you seem to be expecting me to do.

Our language can be regarded as an ancient city: a maze of little streets and squares, of old and new houses, of houses with extensions from various periods, and all this surrounded by a multitude of new suburbs with straight and regular streets and uniform houses — Wittgenstein, Phil. Inv. 18

I'm more hesitant than I used to be about treating the notion of a language-game as some sort of analytic tool, but it is clear, isn't it, that he is showing us a complex of structures which are interconnected and interactive, and most definitely not a monolith. Surely, even though he doesn't make the point, it is clear these structures are flexible and dynamic. Not, I would have thought, prisons.
I don't, therefore, think that Wittgenstein's ideas lead us to the narrow view of reason, language and truth. It does allow that each "language game" and "practice" does actually define truth in its own appropriate way and therefore does link us to its own relevant category of being. That's enough for me.
So I'm afraid I still don't know how to answer the question.

Well, the similarity might be that you seem to be saying that all your talk of brains is true in the sense of metaphysical truth. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Well I think it is certainly a better story than just appealing to reason or metaphysical truth without any explanation of how people do it and without being open to the subtleties of people being fallible or interacting with the world in a perspective-dependent way.

Would my claims be equally true as yours, "truth" being merely how the term is used with some given language-game? — Count Timothy von Icarus

That's not how I would characterize truth. And certainly, yes, I would believe my claims were better or more correct than the immaterial soul. Better arguments in favour of it.

Kripke's other philosophy seems a lot more consistent with that sort of naturalism — Count Timothy von Icarus

I don't believe that.

On a conventional naturalistic view there is no indeterminism problem or finitude issues — Count Timothy von Icarus

I don't know what you mean by the thought that there is no indeterminism under naturalism as if it were a choice. I don't see why naturalists wouldn't also see this indeterminacy, perhaps in a similar way to how there can be underdeterminism in scientific theories, etc.

All experiences of meaning are describable in terms of determinant physical interactions. Any instance of the experience of meaning is uniquely specified by facts about the relevant physical system. How language evolves can be explained entirely in terms of physical interactions, which of course involve the environment and not just language users' expectations. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Well I am not this kind of naturalist but I have said that all our acts, cognition and behaviors are a product of the brain. The problem is that "acting" doesn't sufficiently determine what we normally mean by meaning imo; neither does the brain need to use human-interpretable rules or "meanings" in order to produce the kinds of behavior humans are capable of. Plus, I have already mentioned how I think brains are a deeper explanation more fundamental - brains interacting with their environments, multiple brains interacting together.

I'm not totally sure where Kripkenstein fits in his development. — Count Timothy von Icarus

LMAO