:up: Your quote exhales an aroma resembling wisdom — ucarr

My deodorant must be wearing off.

I don't need to know neuroscience to have the common sense to not take at face value a research paper (which isn't made for laymen) from 2011 with 2 citations and 1 no-name researcher. — Lionino

They call it common sense for a reason. It relies for its validity on normative conventions, which are a mixed blessing. They allow for social cohesion at the expensive of the intelligibility of novel insights, especially in less conventionally oriented fields like philosophy. Sometimes what is needed is uncommon sense. As Heidegger wrote “ …a philosophy is creatively grasped at the earliest 100 years after it arises.”

If the laws are underdetermined, how can they determine those mechanistic processes - except, perhaps, by some version of blind action? I do agree that there are complicated physical processes going on. But we do not know how to translate from the physical level of description to the human - it's called the hard problem. But if there were a translation how would it not be a matter of rules? — Ludwig V

The translation of physical processes into the language of human intersubjectivity may be made easier if we start by asking ourselves what we are doing when we posit conceptions of the physical and the mechanistic and attempt to found indeterminate intersubjective discursivity on these.

I like to quote Evan Thompson on this issue:

“Many philosophers have argued that there seems to be a gap between the objective, naturalistic facts of the world and the subjective facts of conscious experience. The hard problem is the conceptual and metaphysical problem of how to bridge this apparent gap. There are many critical things that can be said about the hard problem, but what I wish to point out here is that it depends for its very formulation on the premise that the embodied mind as a natural entity exists ‘out there' independently of how we configure or constitute it as an object of knowledge through our reciprocal empathic understanding of one other as experiencing subjects. One way of formulating the hard problem is to ask: if we had a complete, canonical, objective, physicalist account of the natural world, including all the physical facts of the brain and the organism, would it conceptually or logically entail the subjective facts of consciousness? If this account would not entail these facts, then consciousness must be an additional, non-natural property of the world.

One problem with this whole way of setting up the issue, however, is that it presupposes we can make sense of the very notion of a single, canonical, physicalist description of the world, which is highly doubtful, and that in arriving (or at any rate approaching) such a description, we are attaining a viewpoint that does not in any way presuppose our own cognition and lived experience. In other words, the hard problem seems to depend for its very formulation on the philosophical position known as transcendental or metaphysical realism.

“I would give up both realism and anti-realism, then, in favor of what could be called a pluralist pragmatism. What the pluralist insists on is that there is no foundational version, one which anchors all the rest or to which all others can be reduced. The pragmatist insists that the world is both found and made: it is made in the finding and found in the making.To erase the boundary between knowing a language and knowing our way in the world gives us a fresh appreciation of the world. That world, however, is not given, waiting to be represented. We find the world, but only in the many incommensurable cognitive domains we devise in our attempt to know our way around. The task of the philosopher is not to extract a common conceptual scheme from these myriad domains and to determine its faithfulness to some uncorrupted reality; it is, rather, to learn to navigate among the domains, and so to clarify their concerns in relation to each other.

Metaphysical Imagination' - what do you think it is? How have you used it?
In the meantime, I found this: https://philarchive.org/archive/MCSMAE — Amity

The author of the paper you linked to writes

…justified belief aims at truth, not imaginative capacity, or understanding. If we focus too much on having justified beliefs, it is harder for us to suspend disbelief and try to inhabit views that we don’t believe.

Thinking of metaphysics this way as split off from empirical truth perpetuates a dualism between ideas and reality, the physical and the metaphysical. The philosophers I follow don’t treat the metaphysical as ‘imaginative capacity’, but as the plumbing undergirding the intelligibility of a true belief.

The equations in our theories written down on paper and the words we physically say cannot actually do anything independently of the minds that generated them and do things with them; neither is there necessarily a determinate way of expressing models and theories which is not contextualized by what is deemed acceptable by people in the context of their cognitive abilities and neuronal architectures. Therefore, in this kind of view, minds and cognition are only as deep as our experiences and the momentary unfolding of their dynamics.

I do like what you’re saying here, and I think it’s pointing in the same direction that I am inclined to go in reconciling philosophical and scientific images of the world. I would just add that a thoroughgoing reflexivity between word and world implies that cognitive abilities and neuronal architectures are themselves responsive to, and continuously shaped by, the social world that they are exposed to and intertwined with. We can’t use biological concepts as the court of last appeal and legitimation for grounding conceptual meaning when they are not split off from the social milieu.

I personally like Sokolowski's image here, that we should think of language (and our senses) as a lens we use to investigate the world. A lens is of course something you tend to look through not at. Hence, reason would ground the ability to translate between disparate conceptual schemes. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I think the optical metaphor is a good way to illustrate the difference between a metaphysical realist and a deflationary reading of Wittgenstein. The former associates empirical truth with observation, a representational seeing which places the observer and the observed, perceiving and acting, on opposite sides of a gap. By contrast, I read Wittgenstein as doing away with the gap by replacing the notion of observation with practical engagement , performance or doing rather than seeing. As Rouse argues, “the sciences ofer not a single synchronic “image” of the world, but a temporally extended field of research opportunities, intelligible disagreements, outstanding problems, and the conceptual and practical capabilities that guide them. Scien­tifc understanding reaches out from, beyond, and partially against “what we take to be the case”…To ask how our representations can ever get a foothold in the world is to presume, erroneously, that one could ever make or understand representations without already having a foothold in the world. “

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.

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.

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)

It's a common American (and I assume elsewhere) social trope/meme whatever you wish to call it that a teen with a car is "cool" or otherwise desirable to his peers versus someone who does not and has to walk or take a scooter. So it's about being in possession of the greatest item or object desirable to society, mostly for superficial reasons, but also supported by the factual beneficial and general status reasons that come with. Isn't it? — Outlander

Apparently times have changed.

https://theweek.com/tech/gen-z-cars-driving-less

https://www.carscoops.com/2024/05/teen-not-interested-in-driving-theyre-not-alone/

https://nypost.com/2024/05/26/lifestyle/gen-z-teens-largely-put-the-brakes-on-driving-signaling-seismic-shift-in-us-car-culture-study/

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’).

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.

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.

While the IEP has articles about every philosopher you might think of, there is none for Marx, while there is one for socialism — Lionino

And what are the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, chopped liver?

But the ‘I’ , and with it the world it makes sense of, changes its meaning completely , but subtly, every moment. You are not the same you from moment to moment , so blaming whoever came before ‘you’ makes about as much sense as blaming the you of yesterday for your current woes. You have a chance to start over again with each tick of the clock, because it s a subtly different you and a subtly different world
— Joshs

And yet people feel they can't start again because they are on a loop. Habits seem to become compulsion. How do we work with this? — Tom Storm

Habits aren’t automatisms. They continually adjust themselves to changing circumstances. It isn’t habits that keep us from transforming ourselves but the lack of intelligibility of potential alternative ways of living. Even though it is the case that self and world are changing in subtle ways from moment to moment, we can’t move forward coherently without some resonance between the new and the old. There is such a thing as continuing to be the same differently. In fact, it only occurs to us to begin labeling our alway of life in negative terms as a habit , as boring, as being stuck in place, when it has already being to change. ways that are unrecognizable to us. We use words like stagnant and boring to refer to this incipient alienness that keeps us from moving forward.

I am assuming this holds if you believe that we are on some kind of eternal cycle. And/or that death is not the end. But if there is a loop we pick up again, doesn't this suggest being is ongoing and consistent in some way? A ceaseless cycle of boredom and suffering. Are you hinting at a Nietzschean solution to recurrence — Tom Storm

The cycling is between modes of creativity, between phases of life where we know how to go on creatively and phases where we are stuck in place as a result of not knowing how to make sense of our circumstances.

Here in Chicago it is a constant battle between the forces of motocentrism and those advocating for pedestrian-friendly neighborhoods. Chicago has enough density and a good enough public transportation that one can get by without a car, but some neighborhoods are more pedestrian-friendly than others. Thefirst attempts at taking back the streets from the automobile occurred with the creation of urban malls in the 1970’s. Downtown’s State st was closed off to cars, but this proved disastrous in Chicago as well as many smaller communities who ‘mallified’ their main street. More recent attempts have been on a smaller scale, including the use of speed bumps, the narrowing of streets and the expansion of bike lanes. Also helpful have been multilevel parking structures in place of street level seas of asphalt, and the addition of planters, playgrounds and benches.
Here’s some other innovative ideas:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/interactive/2024/superblocks-barcelona-cities-congestion/?itid=hp_mv-top-stories_opinions_p003_f001

Marx as well was a drunkard who had an illegitimate child with his maid, whom his best friend Engels had to take fatherhood of, his best friend who constantly had to give Marx money because he couldn't bother to support his own family. Not to speak of Marx's poems where he claims to have struck a deal with Satan — Lionino

Marx isn’t one of my favorite thinkers, but this just comes across as ad hominem gossip. I don’t quite see what Marx’s personal life has to do with his political philosophy. Unless you can connect the two maybe you should focus on his ideas.

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… 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. IMO — Ludwig V

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. Is it a declaration, an observation, a response to question? I dont 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. As Joseph Rouse remarks:

There is no determinate scheme or context that can fix the content of utterances, and hence no way to get outside of language. 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…. we can never get outside our language, experience, or methods to assess how well they correspond to a transcendent reality.“

Intuition explains nothing. Drill (learning what to do by repetition) is the explanation. That's the basis of practices. — Ludwig V

Do we learn what to do by repetition, and then just do it? Doesn’t the habit then become a picture we consult, albeit reflexively or unconsciously? At one point Wittgenstein described following a rule as a crossing of pictures. I think this captures what using a rule (or a word) consists in better than being trained in a habit that then dictates what we do. A crossing of pictures is not the consulting of an inner intuition, or an already structured habitual way of proceeding. It’s a creative invention that melds previous training and experience with novel circumstances to produce something new, not the repetition of a habit.

One is always playing a game that one did not and cannot choose. Accepting suffering is just the default because we have not killed ourselves — schopenhauer1

Who is this ‘one’? Schopenhauer made the mistake of thinking the ‘I’ who wills as a metaphysical subject. But the ‘I’ , and with it the world it makes sense of, changes its meaning completely , but subtly, every moment. You are not the same you from moment to moment , so blaming whoever came before ‘you’ makes about as much sense as blaming the you of yesterday for your current woes. You have a chance to start over again with each tick of the clock, because it s a subtly different you and a subtly different world. The question is what are you going to do with that opportunity? I happen to think that the concept of non-being is a metaphysical chimera, a notion of death as pure nothingness that we invented and used as either a source of threat or comfort. But it is a human-invented illusion which only exists when we summon it as a thought. And when we summon it, it is fraught with suffering because built into the concept is a reminder that we currently fail to achieve what it promises. Imagine killing yourself , only to pick up right where you left off, with all your sufferings, questions, imperfects, but without the memory of your past history. I think something lien that is closer to the case than the metaphysical notion of pure nothingness. Them d of peace you’re looking for in the metaphysics of pure nothingness can only be found by getting in tune with the continual flow of change. Transcendence of suffering is an active, dynamic achievement that must be continually repeated. It’s about discovering the unities, patterns, relations in the flow.

What is questionable is wanting to continue suffering and calling it good and most perplexingly, necessary. — schopenhauer1

As you and I know, no one is really motivated to pursue suffering for its own sake. One endures suffering and hope it leads to a reward, a release from suffering. Is suffering necessary? If we aren’t motivated to suffer for its own sake , what does motivate us? I suggest placing an interpretation over life to make sense of it is its own motivation. An interpretation aims to make sense of things by bringing order to chaos, flattening and covering over discord and contradition. The buddhist notion of a compassionate, loving no-self is an example of how the fundamental desire for an a unifying interpretation produces an ethical stance of non-ego.

What about the pessimist-antinatalist view? The desire for non-being is just as much a unifying interpretation as any life-affirming doctrine. The pessimist-antinatualist wills the perfect and pure living thought of non-existence, and tries to live over and over through this thought, this vital organizing interpretation. The thought requires suffering in that it can only appear as a resistance to , or escape from the chaos it addresses. The weakness i see in the pessimist’s living interpretation of non-being is that it can’t apply its ordering scheme to enhance an understanding of human behavior, so it lives in a state of resignation, depression and self-imposed suffering.

With just the id, we achieve the pleasure similar to the utopia. But then the ego, intervenes and exposes us to the outside world. — L'éléphant

I think the opposite is the case. The more id -like, the more suffering ensues ( fear, rage, etc). The more effectively the primitive id is guided by anticipative sense-making, the better we are able to avoid profound emotional pain.

To live in a society where we were incapable of experiencing such things as unhappiness, sadness, pain would be the same as being colour blind to the complete palette of human emotion of what truly makes us human — kindred

Let me break this down in terms of priorities. Physical pain may be significantly reduced with medical advances, and perhaps even immortality is a conceivable possibility. But of all forms of suffering, I suggest the most profound is emotional pain, and this is a result of social conflict. Can we eliminate this source of suffering? Perhaps not completely, but we can make enough progress in understanding each other that we can make a huge dent in the frequency and intensity of experiences like anger and guilt. What makes us human is our creative capacities, and this does not requires that our mood colorations include intense feelings of suffering. Those are not a function of what it means to be human, but only reflect a stage in our development

I read your discussion. I think I agree with it. It doesn't mention (or use) the word "intuition", so I'm no further forward in understanding how that concept comes to be a part of Wittgenstein's deconstruction. I must have missed something. — Ludwig V

I wrote that for Wittgenstein “the meaning of a word doesn’t function like a picture. Words aren’t first created and then used. They only exist in their use. Furthermore, to use a word is always to change the sense of its meaning, and this is a social process. Meaning something is a social enactment, the production of something new rather than the referring back to a picture.”

In PI, Wittgenstein treats intuition as an inner picture one consults:

186. "What you are saying, then, comes to this: a new insight — intuition — is needed at every step to carry out the order '-f-n' cor-rectly." — To carry it out correctly! How is it decided what is the right step to take at any particular stage? — "The right step is the one that accords with the order — as it was meant" — So when you gave the order -\-z you meant that he was to write 1002 after 1000 — and did you also mean that he should write 1868 after 1866, and 100036 after 100034, and so on — an infinite number of such propositions? — "No: what I meant was, that he should write the next but one number after every number that he wrote; and from this all those propositions follow in turn." — But that is just what is in question: what, at any stage, does follow from that sentence. Or, again, what, at any stage we are to call "being in accord" with that sentence (and with the mean-ing you then put into the sentence — whatever that may have consisted in). It would almost be more correct to say, not that an intuition was needed at every stage, but that a new decision was needed at every stage.

213. "But this initial segment of a series obviously admitted of various interpretations (e.g. by means of algebraic expressions) and so you must first have chosen one such interpretation."—Not at all. A doubt was possible in certain circumstances. But that is not to say that I did doubt, or even could doubt. (There is something to be said, which is connected with this, about the psychological 'atmosphere' of a process.) So it must have been intuition that removed this doubt?—If intuition is an inner voice—how do 1 know how I am to obey it? And how do I know that it doesn't mislead me? For if it can guide me right, it can also guide me wrong. ((Intuition an unnecessary shuffle.))

↪Joshs
I believe Deacon would agree:
...language is not merely a mode of communication, it is also the outward expression of an unusual mode of thought—symbolic representation. Without symbolization the entire virtual world that I have described is out of reach: inconceivable. My extravagant claim to know what other species cannot know rests on evidence that symbolic thought does not come innately built in, but develops by internalizing the symbolic process that underlies language. So species that have not acquired the ability to communicate symbolically cannot have acquired the ability to think this way either.
— Terrence Deacon — Patterner

I wonder how Deacon would distinguish between human use of word concepts and , for instance, the way a dog responds to a sentence. If a symbol represents a meaning by integrating information from disparate sense modalities, what is a dog doing when it recognizes a word, or an object , on this same basis? And I wonder how he would respond to this recent article in the New York Times?

“Language was long understood as a human-only affair. New research suggests that isn’t so.

Can a mouse learn a new song? Such a question might seem whimsical. Though humans have lived alongside mice for at least 15,000 years, few of us have ever heard mice sing, because they do so in frequencies beyond the range detectable by human hearing. As pups, their high-pitched songs alert their mothers to their whereabouts; as adults, they sing in ultrasound to woo one another. For decades, researchers considered mouse songs instinctual, the fixed tunes of a windup music box, rather than the mutable expressions of individual minds.

But no one had tested whether that was really true. In 2012, a team of neurobiologists at Duke University, led by Erich Jarvis, a neuroscientist who studies vocal learning, designed an experiment to find out. The team surgically deafened five mice and recorded their songs in a mouse-size sound studio, tricked out with infrared cameras and microphones. They then compared sonograms of the songs of deafened mice with those of hearing mice. If the mouse songs were innate, as long presumed, the surgical alteration would make no difference at all.

Jarvis and his researchers slowed down the tempo and shifted the pitch of the recordings, so that they could hear the songs with their own ears. Those of the intact mice sounded “remarkably similar to some bird songs,” Jarvis wrote in a 2013 paper that described the experiment, with whistlelike syllables similar to those in the songs of canaries and the trills of dolphins. Not so the songs of the deafened mice: Deprived of auditory feedback, their songs became degraded, rendering them nearly unrecognizable. They sounded, the scientists noted, like “squawks and screams.” Not only did the tunes of a mouse depend on its ability to hear itself and others, but also, as the team found in another experiment, a male mouse could alter the pitch of its song to compete with other male mice for female attention.

Inside these murine skills lay clues to a puzzle many have called “the hardest problem in science”: the origins of language. In humans, “vocal learning” is understood as a skill critical to spoken language. Researchers had already discovered the capacity for vocal learning in species other than humans, including in songbirds, hummingbirds, parrots, cetaceans such as dolphins and whales, pinnipeds such as seals, elephants and bats. But given the centuries-old idea that a deep chasm separated human language from animal communications, most scientists understood the vocal learning abilities of other species as unrelated to our own — as evolutionarily divergent as the wing of a bat is to that of a bee. The apparent absence of intermediate forms of language — say, a talking animal — left the question of how language evolved resistant to empirical inquiry.

When the Duke researchers dissected the brains of the hearing and deafened mice, they found a rudimentary version of the neural circuitry that allows the forebrains of vocal learners such as humans and songbirds to directly control their vocal organs. Mice don’t seem to have the vocal flexibility of elephants; they cannot, like the 10-year-old female African elephant in Tsavo, Kenya, mimic the sound of trucks on the nearby Nairobi-Mombasa highway. Or the gift for mimicry of seals; an orphaned harbor seal at the New England Aquarium could utter English phrases in a perfect Maine accent (“Hoover, get over here,” he said. “Come on, come on!”).

But the rudimentary skills of mice suggested that the language-critical capacity might exist on a continuum, much like a submerged land bridge might indicate that two now-isolated continents were once connected. In recent years, an array of findings have also revealed an expansive nonhuman soundscape, including: turtles that produce and respond to sounds to coordinate the timing of their birth from inside their eggs; coral larvae that can hear the sounds of healthy reefs; and plants that can detect the sound of running water and the munching of insect predators. Researchers have found intention and meaning in this cacophony, such as the purposeful use of different sounds to convey information. They’ve theorized that one of the most confounding aspects of language, its rules-based internal structure, emerged from social drives common across a range of species.

With each discovery, the cognitive and moral divide between humanity and the rest of the animal world has eroded. For centuries, the linguistic utterances of Homo sapiens have been positioned as unique in nature, justifying our dominion over other species and shrouding the evolution of language in mystery. Now, experts in linguistics, biology and cognitive science suspect that components of language might be shared across species, illuminating the inner lives of animals in ways that could help stitch language into their evolutionary history — and our own.

For hundreds of years, language marked “the true difference between man and beast,” as the philosopher René Descartes wrote in 1649. As recently as the end of the last century, archaeologists and anthropologists speculated that 40,000 to 50,000 years ago a “human revolution” fractured evolutionary history, creating an unbridgeable gap separating humanity’s cognitive and linguistic abilities from those of the rest of the animal world.

Linguists and other experts reinforced this idea. In 1959, the M.I.T. linguist Noam Chomsky, then 30, wrote a blistering 33-page takedown of a book by the celebrated behaviorist B.F. Skinner, which argued that language was just a form of “verbal behavior,” as Skinner titled the book, accessible to any species given sufficient conditioning. One observer called it “perhaps the most devastating review ever written.” Between 1972 and 1990, there were more citations of Chomsky’s critique than Skinner’s book, which bombed.

The view of language as a uniquely human superpower, one that enabled Homo sapiens to write epic poetry and send astronauts to the moon, presumed some uniquely human biology to match. But attempts to find those special biological mechanisms — whether physiological, neurological, genetic — that make language possible have all come up short.

One high-profile example came in 2001, when a team led by the geneticists Cecilia Lai and Simon Fisher discovered a gene — called FoxP2 — in a London family riddled with childhood apraxia of speech, a disorder that impairs the ability of otherwise cognitively capable individuals to coordinate their muscles to produce sounds, syllables and words in an intelligible sequence. Commentators hailed FoxP2 as the long sought-after gene that enabled humans to talk — until the gene turned up in the genomes of rodents, birds, reptiles, fish and ancient hominins such as Neanderthals, whose version of FoxP2 is much like ours. (Fisher so often encountered the public expectation that FoxP2 was the “language gene” that he resolved to acquire a T-shirt that read, “It’s more complicated than that.”)

The search for an exclusively human vocal anatomy has failed, too. For a 2001 study, the cognitive scientist Tecumseh Fitch cajoled goats, dogs, deer and other species to vocalize while inside a cineradiograph machine that filmed the way their larynxes moved under X-ray. Fitch discovered that species with larynxes different from ours — ours is “descended” and located in our throats rather than our mouths — could nevertheless move them in similar ways. One of them, the red deer, even had the same descended larynx we do.

Fitch and his then-colleague at Harvard, the evolutionary biologist Marc Hauser, began to wonder if they’d been thinking about language all wrong. Linguists described language as a singular skill, like being able to swim or bake a soufflé: You either had it or you didn’t. But perhaps language was more like a multicomponent system that included psychological traits, such as the ability to share intentions; physiological ones, such as motor control over vocalizations and gestures; and cognitive capacities, such as the ability to combine signals according to rules, many of which might appear in other animals as well.

Fitch, whom I spoke to by Zoom in his office at the University of Vienna, drafted a paper with Hauser as a “kind of an argument against Chomsky,” he told me. As a courtesy, he sent the M.I.T. linguist a draft. One evening, he and Hauser were sitting in their respective offices along the same hall at Harvard when an email from Chomsky dinged their inboxes. “We both read it and we walked out of our rooms going, ‘What?’” Chomsky indicated that not only did he agree, but that he’d be willing to sign on to their next paper on the subject as a co-author. That paper, which has since racked up more than 7,000 citations, appeared in the journal Science in 2002.

Squabbles continued over which components of language were shared with other species and which, if any, were exclusive to humans. Those included, among others, language’s intentionality, its system of combining signals, its ability to refer to external concepts and things separated by time and space and its power to generate an infinite number of expressions from a finite number of signals. But reflexive belief in language as an evolutionary anomaly started to dissolve. “For the biologists,” recalled Fitch, “it was like, ‘Oh, good, finally the linguists are being reasonable.’”

Evidence of continuities between animal communication and human language continued to mount. The sequencing of the Neanderthal genome in 2010 suggested that we hadn’t significantly diverged from that lineage, as the theory of a “human revolution” posited. On the contrary, Neanderthal genes and those of other ancient hominins persisted in the modern human genome, evidence of how intimately we were entangled. In 2014, Jarvis found that the neural circuits that allowed songbirds to learn and produce novel sounds matched those in humans, and that the genes that regulated those circuits evolved in similar ways. The accumulating evidence left “little room for doubt,” Cedric Boeckx, a theoretical linguist at the University of Barcelona, noted in the journal Frontiers in Neuroscience. “There was no ‘great leap forward.’”

As our understanding of the nature and origin of language shifted, a host of fruitful cross-disciplinary collaborations arose. Colleagues of Chomsky’s, such as the M.I.T. linguist Shigeru Miyagawa, whose early career was shaped by the precept that “we’re smart, they’re not,” applied for grants with primatologists and neuroscientists to study how human language might be related to birdsong and primate calls. Interdisciplinary centers sprang up devoted specifically to the evolution of language, including at the University of Zurich and the University of Edinburgh. Lectures at a biannual conference on language evolution once dominated by “armchair theorizing,” as the cognitive scientist and founder of the University of Edinburgh’s Centre for Language Evolution, Simon Kirby, put it, morphed into presentations “completely packed with empirical data.”

One of the thorniest problems researchers sought to address was the link between thought and language. Philosophers and linguists long held that language must have evolved not for the purpose of communication but to facilitate abstract thought. The grammatical rules that structure language, a feature of languages from Algonquin to American Sign Language, are more complex than necessary for communication. Language, the argument went, must have evolved to help us think, in much the same way that mathematical notations allow us to make complex calculations.

Ev Fedorenko, a cognitive neuroscientist at M.I.T., thought this was “a cool idea,” so, about a decade ago, she set out to test it. If language is the medium of thought, she reasoned, then thinking a thought and absorbing the meaning of spoken or written words should activate the same neural circuits in the brain, like two streams fed by the same underground spring. Earlier brain-imaging studies showed that patients with severe aphasia could still solve mathematical problems, despite their difficulty in deciphering or producing language, but failed to pinpoint distinctions between brain regions dedicated to thought and those dedicated to language. Fedorenko suspected that might be because the precise location of these regions varied from individual to individual. In a 2011 study, she asked healthy subjects to make computations and decipher snatches of spoken and written language while she watched how blood flowed to aroused parts of their brains using an M.R.I. machine, taking their unique neural circuitry into account in her subsequent analysis. Her fM.R.I. studies showed that thinking thoughts and decoding words mobilized distinct brain pathways. Language and thought, Fedorenko says, “really are separate in an adult human brain.”

At the University of Edinburgh, Kirby hit upon a process that might explain how language’s internal structure evolved. That structure, in which simple elements such as sounds and words are arranged into phrases and nested hierarchically within one another, gives language the power to generate an infinite number of meanings; it is a key feature of language as well as of mathematics and music. But its origins were hazy. Because children intuit the rules that govern linguistic structure with little if any explicit instruction, philosophers and linguists argued that it must be a product of some uniquely human cognitive process. But researchers who scrutinized the fossil record to determine when and how that process evolved were stumped: The first sentences uttered left no trace behind.

Kirby designed an experiment to simulate the evolution of language inside his lab. First, he developed made-up codes to serve as proxies for the disordered collections of words widely believed to have preceded the emergence of structured language, such as random sequences of colored lights or a series of pantomimes. Then he recruited subjects to use the code under a variety of conditions and studied how the code changed. He asked subjects to use the code to solve communication tasks, for example, or to pass the code on to one another as in a game of telephone. He ran the experiment hundreds of times using different parameters on a variety of subjects, including on a colony of baboons living in a seminaturalistic enclosure equipped with a bank of computers on which they could choose to play his experimental games.

What he found was striking: Regardless of the native tongue of the subjects, or whether they were baboons, college students or robots, the results were the same. When individuals passed the code on to one another, the code became simpler but also less precise. But when they passed it on to one another and also used it to communicate, the code developed a distinct architecture. Random sequences of colored lights turned into richly patterned ones; convoluted, pantomimic gestures for words such as “church” or “police officer” became abstract, efficient signs. “We just saw, spontaneously emerging out of this experiment, the language structures we were waiting for,” Kirby says. His findings suggest that language’s mystical power — its ability to turn the noise of random signals into intelligible formulations — may have emerged from a humble trade-off: between simplicity, for ease of learning, and what Kirby called “expressiveness,” for unambiguous communication.

For Descartes, the equation of language with thought meant animals had no mental life at all: “The brutes,” he opined, “don’t have any thought.” Breaking the link between language and human biology didn’t just demystify language; it restored the possibility of mind to the animal world and repositioned linguistic capacities as theoretically accessible to any social species.

This summer, I met with Marcelo Magnasco, a biophysicist, and Diana Reiss, a psychologist at Hunter College who studies dolphin cognition, in Magnasco’s lab at Rockefeller University. Overlooking the East River, it was a warmly lit room, with rows of burbling tanks inhabited by octopuses, whose mysterious signals they hoped to decode. Magnasco became curious about the cognitive and communicative abilities of cephalopods while diving recreationally, he told me. Numerous times, he said, he encountered cephalopods and had “the overpowering impression that they were trying to communicate with me.” During the Covid-19 shutdown, when his work studying dolphin communication with Reiss was derailed, Magnasco found himself driving to a Petco in Staten Island to buy tanks for octopuses to live in his lab.

During my visit, the grayish pink tentacles of the octopus clinging to the side of the glass wall of her tank started to flash bright white. Was she angry? Was she trying to tell us something? Was she even aware of our presence? There was no way to know, Magnasco said. Earlier efforts to find linguistic capacities in other species failed, in part, he explained, because we assumed they would look like our own. But the communication systems of other species might, in fact, be “truly exotic to us,” Magnasco said. A species that can recognize objects by echolocation, as cetaceans and bats can, might communicate using acoustic pictographs, for example, which might sound to us like meaningless chirps or clicks. To disambiguate the meaning of animal signals, such as a string of dolphin clicks or whalesong, scientists needed some inkling of where meaning-encoding units began and ended, Reiss explained. “We, in fact, have no idea what the smallest unit is,” she said. If scientists analyze animal calls using the wrong segmentation, meaningful expressions turn into meaningless drivel: “ad ogra naway” instead of “a dog ran away.”

An international initiative called Project CETI, founded by David Gruber, a biologist at the City University of New York, hopes to get around this problem by feeding recordings of sperm-whale clicks, known as codas, into computer models, which might be able to discern patterns in them, in the same way that ChatGPT was able to grasp vocabulary and grammar in human language by analyzing publicly available text. Another method, Reiss says, is to provide animal subjects with artificial codes and observe how they use them.

Reiss’s research on dolphin cognition is one of a handful of projects on animal communication that dates back to the 1980s, when there were widespread funding cuts in the field, after a top researcher retracted his much-hyped claim that a chimpanzee could be trained to use sign language to converse with humans. In a study published in 1993, Reiss offered bottlenose dolphins at a facility in Northern California an underwater keypad that allowed them to choose specific toys, which it delivered while emitting computer-generated whistles, like a kind of vending machine. The dolphins spontaneously began mimicking the computer-generated whistles when they played independently with the corresponding toy, like kids tossing a ball and naming it “ball, ball, ball,” Reiss told me. “The behavior,” Reiss said, “was strikingly similar to the early stages of language acquisition in children.”

The researchers hoped to replicate the method by outfitting an octopus tank with an interactive platform of some kind and observing how the octopus engaged with it. But it was unclear whether such a device might interest the lone cephalopod. An earlier episode of displeasure led her to discharge enough ink to turn her tank water so black that she couldn’t be seen. Unlocking her communicative abilities might require that she consider the scientists as fascinating as they did her.

While experimenting with animals trapped in cages and tanks can reveal their latent faculties, figuring out the range of what animals are communicating to one another requires spying on them in the wild. Past studies often conflated general communication, in which individuals extract meaning from signals sent by other individuals, with language’s more specific, flexible and open-ended system. In a seminal 1980 study, for example, the primatologists Robert Seyfarth and Dorothy Cheney used the “playback” technique to decode the meaning of alarm calls issued by vervet monkeys at Amboseli National Park in Kenya. When a recording of the barklike calls emitted by a vervet encountering a leopard was played back to other vervets, it sent them scampering into the trees. Recordings of the low grunts of a vervet who spotted an eagle led other vervets to look up into the sky; recordings of the high-pitched chutters emitted by a vervet upon noticing a python caused them to scan the ground.

At the time, The New York Times ran a front-page story heralding the discovery of a “rudimentary ‘language’” in vervet monkeys. But critics objected that the calls might not have any properties of language at all. Instead of being intentional messages to communicate meaning to others, the calls might be involuntary, emotion-driven sounds, like the cry of a hungry baby. Such involuntary expressions can transmit rich information to listeners, but unlike words and sentences, they don’t allow for discussion of things separated by time and space. The barks of a vervet in the throes of leopard-induced terror could alert other vervets to the presence of a leopard — but couldn’t provide any way to talk about, say, “the really smelly leopard who showed up at the ravine yesterday morning.”

Toshitaka Suzuki, an ethologist at the University of Tokyo who describes himself as an animal linguist, struck upon a method to disambiguate intentional calls from involuntary ones while soaking in a bath one day. When we spoke over Zoom, he showed me an image of a fluffy cloud. “If you hear the word ‘dog,’ you might see a dog,” he pointed out, as I gazed at the white mass. “If you hear the word ‘cat,’ you might see a cat.” That, he said, marks the difference between a word and a sound. “Words influence how we see objects,” he said. “Sounds do not.” Using playback studies, Suzuki determined that Japanese tits, songbirds that live in East Asian forests and that he has studied for more than 15 years, emit a special vocalization when they encounter snakes. When other Japanese tits heard a recording of the vocalization, which Suzuki dubbed the “jar jar” call, they searched the ground, as if looking for a snake. To determine whether “jar jar” meant “snake” in Japanese tit, he added another element to his experiments: an eight-inch stick, which he dragged along the surface of a tree using hidden strings. Usually, Suzuki found, the birds ignored the stick. It was, by his analogy, a passing cloud. But then he played a recording of the “jar jar” call. In that case, the stick seemed to take on new significance: The birds approached the stick, as if examining whether it was, in fact, a snake. Like a word, the “jar jar” call had changed their perception.

Cat Hobaiter, a primatologist at the University of St. Andrews who works with great apes, developed a similarly nuanced method. Because great apes appear to have a relatively limited repertoire of vocalizations, Hobaiter studies their gestures. For years, she and her collaborators have followed chimps in the Budongo forest and gorillas in Bwindi in Uganda, recording their gestures and how others respond to them. “Basically, my job is to get up in the morning to get the chimps when they’re coming down out of the tree, or the gorillas when they’re coming out of the nest, and just to spend the day with them,” she told me. So far, she says, she has recorded about 15,600 instances of gestured exchanges between apes.

To determine whether the gestures are involuntary or intentional, she uses a method adapted from research on human babies. Hobaiter looks for signals that evoke what she calls an “Apparently Satisfactory Outcome.” The method draws on the theory that involuntary signals continue even after listeners have understood their meaning, while intentional ones stop once the signaler realizes her listener has comprehended the signal. It’s the difference between the continued wailing of a hungry baby after her parents have gone to fetch a bottle, Hobaiter explains, and my entreaties to you to pour me some coffee, which cease once you start reaching for the coffeepot. To search for a pattern, she says she and her researchers have looked “across hundreds of cases and dozens of gestures and different individuals using the same gesture across different days.” So far, her team’s analysis of 15 years’ worth of video-recorded exchanges has pinpointed dozens of ape gestures that trigger “apparently satisfactory outcomes.”

These gestures may also be legible to us, albeit beneath our conscious awareness. Hobaiter applied her technique on pre-verbal 1- and 2-year-old children, following them around recording their gestures and how they affected attentive others, “like they’re tiny apes, which they basically are,” she says. She also posted short video clips of ape gestures online and asked adult visitors who’d never spent any time with great apes to guess what they thought they meant. She found that pre-verbal human children use at least 40 or 50 gestures from the ape repertoire, and adults correctly guessed the meaning of video-recorded ape gestures at a rate “significantly higher than expected by chance,” as Hobaiter and Kirsty E. Graham, a postdoctoral research fellow in Hobaiter’s lab, reported in a 2023 paper for PLOS Biology.

The emerging research might seem to suggest that there’s nothing very special about human language. Other species use intentional wordlike signals just as we do. Some, such as Japanese tits and pied babblers, have been known to combine different signals to make new meanings. Many species are social and practice cultural transmission, satisfying what might be prerequisite for a structured communication system like language. And yet a stubborn fact remains. The species that use features of language in their communications have few obvious geographical or phylogenetic similarities. And despite years of searching, no one has discovered a communication system with all the properties of language in any species other than our own.

For some scientists, the mounting evidence of cognitive and linguistic continuities between humans and animals outweighs evidence of any gaps. “There really isn’t such a sharp distinction,” Jarvis, now at Rockefeller University, said in a podcast. Fedorenko agrees. The idea of a chasm separating man from beast is a product of “language elitism,” she says, as well as a myopic focus on “how different language is from everything else.”

But for others, the absence of clear evidence of all the components of language in other species is, in fact, evidence of their absence. In a 2016 book on language evolution titled “Why Only Us,” written with the computer scientist and computational linguist Robert C. Berwick, Chomsky describes animal communications as “radically different” from human language. Seyfarth and Cheney, in a 2018 book, note the “striking discontinuities” between human and nonhuman loquacity. Animal calls may be modifiable; they may be voluntary and intentional. But they’re rarely combined according to rules in the way that human words are and “appear to convey only limited information,” they write. If animals had anything like the full suite of linguistic components we do, Kirby says, we would know by now. Animals with similar cognitive and social capacities to ours rarely express themselves systematically the way we do, with systemwide cues to distinguish different categories of meaning. “We just don’t see that kind of level of systematicity in the communication systems of other species,” Kirby said in a 2021 talk.

This evolutionary anomaly may seem strange if you consider language an unalloyed benefit. But what if it isn’t? Even the most wondrous abilities can have drawbacks. According to the popular “self-domestication” hypothesis of language’s origins, proposed by Kirby and James Thomas in a 2018 paper published in Biology & Philosophy, variable tones and inventive locutions might prevent members of a species from recognizing others of their kind. Or, as others have pointed out, they might draw the attention of predators. Such perils could help explain why domesticated species such as Bengalese finches have more complex and syntactically rich songs than their wild kin, the white-rumped munia, as discovered by the biopsychologist Kazuo Okanoya in 2012; why tamed foxes and domesticated canines exhibit heightened abilities to communicate, at least with humans, compared with wolves and wild foxes; and why humans, described by some experts as a domesticated species of their ape and hominin ancestors, might be the most talkative of all. A lingering gap between our abilities and those of other species, in other words, does not necessarily leave language stranded outside evolution. Perhaps, Fitch says, language is unique to Homo sapiens, but not in any unique way: special to humans in the same way the trunk is to the elephant and echolocation is to the bat.

The quest for language’s origins has yet to deliver King Solomon’s seal, a ring that magically bestows upon its wearer the power to speak to animals, or the future imagined in a short story by Ursula K. Le Guin, in which therolinguists pore over the manuscripts of ants, the “kinetic sea writings” of penguins and the “delicate, transient lyrics of the lichen.” Perhaps it never will. But what we know so far tethers us to our animal kin regardless. No longer marooned among mindless objects, we have emerged into a remade world, abuzz with the conversations of fellow thinking beings, however inscrutable.

(Sonia Shah is a science journalist and the author, most recently, of “The Next Great Migration: The Beauty and Terror of Life on the Move.”)

This gave me the opportunity to outline some of the ways that language is special — Deacon

Michael Tomasello argues that rather than there being something called language as a special phenomenon in itself differentiating humans from other animals, what separates humans from animals is a cognitive complexity that leads to the sophisticated social interaction making language possible.

No, I’m not positing individual intuition, I’m trying to show how Wittgenstein deconstructs the idea. I should add that Wittgenstein was no behaviorist, and training into following a rule involves more than reinforcement contingencies, it requires understanding the relevance of the rule, what is at stake in following it.
— Joshs
I'm afraid I couldn't detect how what you said was a deconstruction. There must be something earlier that I missed or have forgotten. Can you explain or refer to your explanation? — Ludwig V

I discussed it here:

https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/923347

Is an intuition a robustly persistent interpretive content of meaning that we can consult again and again to tell us how to follow a rule? Is an intuition an internal cognition as opposed to a socially discursive practice?
— Joshs
Because its just acting blindly, and "social discursive practise" is just an extension of that involving many individuals.
— Apustimelogist
You both seem to me to have got this the wrong way round. You are positing the individual's interpretation of the rule as primary. But we can only interpret rules because we have learnt to do so - from other people. No doubt it is a complex process, but it seems overwhelmingly likely that it is develops by trial (responses of whatever kind) and error, coupled with positive and negative reinforcement — Ludwig V

No, I’m not positing individual intuition, I’m trying to show how Wittgenstein deconstructs the idea. I should add that Wittgenstein was no behaviorist, and training into following a rule involves more than reinforcement contingencies, it requires understanding the relevance of the rule, what is at stake in following it.

Perhaps there is a neurological element to it. For someone who went through a great crisis, everyday life will often be a high. For those however who have dwelt forever in mundane mediocrity, life is like a constant barely-worse-than-average experience. — Lionino

'Every activity as such gives pleasure' -say the physiologists. In what way? Because dammed-up force brought with it a kind of stress and pressure, a state compared with which action is experienced as a liberation? Or in that every activity is an overcoming of difficulties and resistances? And many small resistances, overcome repeatedly, easily, as in a rhythmic dance, bring with them a kind of stimulation of the feeling of power?

The normal unsatisfaction of our drives, e.g., of hunger, the sexual drive, the drive to move, does not in itself imply something dispiriting; instead, it has a piquing effect on the feeling of life, just as every rhythm of small painful stimuli strengthens that feeling, whatever the pessimists would have us believe. This unsatisfaction, far from blighting life, is life's great stimulus. - Perhaps one could even describe pleasure in general as a rhythm of small unpleasurable stimuli . .(Nietzsche)

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! — Apustimelogist

How do we use a basic intuition to avoid an infinite regress of rules? Is an intuition a robustly persistent interpretive content of meaning that we can consult again and again to tell us how to follow a rule? Is an intuition an internal cognition as opposed to a socially discursive practice? How is consulting an intuition different from consulting a reliably stable internal picture of meaning, the use of Kantian reason to make sense of sensuous intuition?

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. — Apustimelogist

As you probably know, Kripke’s reading of Wittgenstein’s solution to the skeptical paradox is controversial, and even Kripke admitted that Wittgenstien may very well not have approved of his interpretation. There’s no reason to reject his approach merely on this basis. After all, there’s far from a general consensus among Wittgenstein scholars as to how to read him. All I would like to do here is illustrate how far apart Krpike’s take on the later Wittgenstein is from writers whose perspectives I find more consonant with P.I. and other later works (Cavell, Braver, Antony Nickles).

As I understand it, Kripke’s argument begins with the skepticism that ensues from rejecting a classical realist approach to the factual justification of meaning interpretation. 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. The only form of justification that can be used legitimately involves determining assertability conditions in the public realm .

The evidence justifying us to assert or judge that Jones means green by “green” is our observation of Jones’s linguistic behavior, that is, his use of the word under certain publicly observable circumstances. We can justifiably assert that Jones means green by “green” if we can observe, in enough cases, that he uses this word as we do or would do, or more generally, as others in his speech-community are inclined to do. This is the only justification there is, and the only justification we need, to assert that he means green by “green”.( I.E.P)

Let me summarize the key points that I want to contrast with my reading of Wittgenstein. 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. For however long a period of time a particular meaning survives, it causally determines its use. The skeptical problem arises because the meaning can shift over time, and along with it the rules of its application. We can’t discern from the user’s disposition facts that will tell us how they meant to use a word. Put differently, 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. Kripke’s solution involves comparing the picture of one member of a community with the consensus picture of the community as a whole to see if there is a match between interpretations of meaning.

How does my reading of Wittgenstein differ from Kripke’s? For starters, the meaning of a word doesn’t function like a picture. Words aren’t first created and then used. They only exist in their use. Furthermore, to use a word is always to change the sense of its meaning, and this is a social process. Meaning something is a social enactment, the production of something new rather than the referring back to a picture. What allows for the relatively stable normativity of social use of word meanings is the stability of language games. A language game doesn’t lock down a determinate definition of meaning, it provides a framework of relative consistency of sense, within which the specific meanings of words constantly slide and shift in subtle ways without causing a crisis of intelligibility. Because we are always ensconced within one language game or another, the issue of skepticism never comes up for Wittgenstein. For Kripke , language games, and the normative ‘agreements’ that he claims they produce, accommodate themselves to already formed picture-like word meanings within individuals. Since this agreement occurs after the fact of creation of word meanings within individuals, it must undo a skepticism born of the indeterminacy of individually formed meanings, which in turn results from the assumption of a gap between how these meanings were formed and how they are interpreted within a community. For Wittgenstein, by contrast, word meanings are not created by the individual first and then submitted to social interpretation , they only emerge out of discursively formed language games , and thus never suffer from the interminably that Kripke’s model presupposes.

Whereas for Kripke we understand how someone means a rule by looking for a picture within their words that corresponds to our own, for Wittgenstein we do not rely on previously formed normative interpretations of the meaning of rules , either individual or collective, to understand each other (Kripke says the members of a speech-community agree to use “plus” in specific ways). Rather, within actual contextual discursive situations we transform the sense of our past history of word application This is what it means to use a word, and what it means for a word to have a meaning. According to Braver, Kripke’s grounding of word meaning in individually formed pictures which change their meaning over time is a “virulent distortion introduced by philosophical contemplation.”

As commentators continue to instruct Kripke's interpretation, Wittgenstein's discussion is a reductio of traditional conceptions of thinking. He is not bringing to light a profound discovery that exposes a heretofore unknown vulnerability of understanding, but charting a particularly virulent distortion introduced by philosophical contemplation. The philosopher's bafflement before suddenly mute or excessively permissive signs is an artificial product of the characteristic philosophical behaviors discussed in chapter 1: stopping ongoing usage and staring.

Wittgenstein writes:

“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. That this is so appears on asking when this problem strikes one. It is never when we lay down the rule or apply the rule. We are only troubled when we look at a rule in a particularly queer way. The characteristic thing about all philosophical problems is that they arise in a peculiar way. As a way out, I can only give you examples, which if you think about them you will find the cramp relaxes. In ordinary life one is never troubled by a gap between the sign and its application. To relieve the mental cramp it is not enough to get rid of it; you must also see why you had it. (AWL 90)

Joseph Rouse argues:

..we cannot appeal to social regularities or collectively presupposed norms within a practice: there are no such things, but more important, if there were they would not thereby legitimately bind us. Any regularities in what practitioners have previously done does not thereby have any authority to bind subsequent performances to the same regularities. The familiar Wittgensteinian paradoxes about rule following similarly block any institution of norms merely by invocation of a rule, since no rule can specify its correct application to future instances (Wittgenstein 1953). Practices should instead be understood as comprising performances that are mutually interactive in partially shared circumstances.

The intelligibility of performances within a practice then depends upon the anticipation and partial achievement of appropriate alignment with others' performances and their circumstances, toward what I described above as their "end," as Aristotelian energeia. Through discursive niche construction, human beings have built up patterns of mutually responsive activity. These patterns make possible newly intelligible ways of living and understanding ourselves within this discursively articulated "niche.""

"Brandom's talk of "norms" is then misleading: norms are not already determinate standards to which performances are accountable but are instead temporally extended patterns that encompass how we have already been living this part of our lives as well as the possibilities open for its continuation. Just what this pattern of practice is-what we are up to, and who we are in our involvement in it-is always partly ahead of us, as that toward which the various performances of a practice are mutually, but not always fully compatibly, directed. The temporal open-endedness of our biological niche construction and that of social practices are two ways of describing the same phenomena."

"This understanding of conceptually articulated practices as subpatterns within the human lineage belongs to the Davidsonian-Sellarsian tradition that emphasizes the "objectivity" of conceptual understanding. Yet the "objects" to which our performances must be held accountable are not something outside discursive practice itself. Discursive practice cannot be understood as an intralinguistic structure or activity that then somehow "reaches out" to incorporate or accord to objects. The relevant "objects" are the ends at issue and at stake within the practice itself. "The practice itself," however, already incorporates the material circumstances in and through which it is enacted. Practices are forms of discursive and practical niche construction in which organism and environment are formed and reformed together through an ongoing, mutually intra-active reconfiguration.

If there is a car crash, again one needs to identify the fault; sometimes it might be the brakes, and sometimes it might be the driver. There was one recently in which a child was killed - the fault was in the driver, but it was not alcohol, but epilepsy. The driver was unaware of their epilepsy because they had not been diagnosed. They were found not guilty of causing death by dangerous driving.
— unenlightened
1h — Leontiskos

It seems to me that if you’re going to apply the concept of forgiveness to this particular example you’re stretching its meaning well beyond the way it is commonly used.

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 — Apustimelogist

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. What Merleau-Ponty wrote about the organism applies equally well to Wittgenstein’s view of social relations. One might even say that the normative organization of perception is akin to a the normative nature of a language game.

“[t]he world is inseparable from the subject, but from a subject who is nothing but a project of the world; and the subject is inseparable from the world, but from a world that it itself projects”

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. — Apustimelogist

Braver’s point is that Kripke’s solution is no solution. Whereas Wittgenstein’s starting point is radically social , deriving individual subjectivity from sociality, Kripke tries to explain intersubjective objectivity on the basis of the combined activity of individual subjects. 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). Kripke then tries to repair this gap with a theory of the activity of the subject which can then be applied to social relations. 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.

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 — Apustimelogist

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

As I say, I am not a big fan of the term forgiveness. In relation to the OP I would suggest that the issue is more likely to be one of needing a new way viewing oneself rather than needing to forgive. If we recognize that we are imperfect beings who sometimes make mistakes and inadequate choices, we can roll with challenges and mistakes more readily and improve our approach.
@Tom Storm

Your posts make me think you do not understand forgiveness, as they are replete with false dichotomies. For example, you here diminish forgiveness and promote the recognition of imperfection. And yet, without the recognition of imperfection forgiveness is utterly impossible. Recognition of imperfection is not an alternative to forgiveness, it is its prerequisite. This is but one example of the odd dichotomies I see — Leontiskos

There are many forms of imperfection, including decisions that seemed to be optimal at the time they were made but in hindsight, with the benefit of knowledge not available during the original decision process, now appear imperfect. I don’t forgive someone for mistakes they make due to understandable limitations of knowledge. Only a particular sort of imperfection is a prerequisite for forgiveness, and that is blame. We learn and grow by doing what Tom Storm described as modifying our ways of interpreting events. Each of us differs in how much emphasis , if any, we place on imperfections that deserve a judgement of blame, and thus provide an opportunity for forgiveness. When it comes to making sense of the imperfections of others, It sounds to me like blame and forgiveness are more useful concepts for you than they are for Tom.

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 — Apustimelogist

If a rule must always be applied in a specific context of use in order for it to have meaning , does that indicate that the meaning of a rule is therefore ‘indeterminate’, or that it is precisely determinate , but in a way that is unique to each use? It seems to me that to characterize this particularly of use meaning as indeterminacy presupposes what Wittgenstein is trying to get us to get beyond, the picture theory of meaning whereby exposing an ambiguity within ostensible definition indicates a failure to lock down epistemological meaning rather than a self-imposed grammatical confusion originating in the concept of ostensive definition. Lee Braver cites Kripke’s reading of Wittgenstein as a symptom of this misunderstanding.

Kripke understands Wittgenstein's “skeptical paradox” to be that since rules and, by extension, the meanings of words can be interpreted in indefinitely different ways, “there can be no such thing as meaning anything by any word. Each new application we make is a leap in the dark; any present intention could be interpreted so as to accord with anything we may choose to do. So there can be neither accord, nor conflict. This is what Wittgenstein said in §201.” 48 This is the problem that reveals the need for social interaction for both Kripke and Davidson. But, as has been pointed out many times, PI §201 continues past where Kripke stops reading:

“it can be seen that there is a misunderstanding here from the mere fact that in the course of our argument we give one interpretation after another…. What this shews is that there is a way of grasping a rule which is not an interpretation, but which is exhibited in what we call ‘obeying the rule' and ‘going against it' in actual cases.” 49

The skeptical paradox that Kripke fixes on is actually being presented as “a misunderstanding,” a pseudo-problem produced by the artificial perspective that gets foisted on us when we cease interacting naturally:

“the confusions which occupy us arise when language is like an engine idling, not when it is doing work.” 50

When we stop performing the daily activities in which understanding comes easily, strange possibilities pop up that cannot be ruled out by reasoning alone. This is when it strikes us that “any interpretation still hangs in the air along with what it interprets, and cannot give it any support.” 51 Rules suddenly look terrifyingly unsupported and we are tempted to cry out in despair, as Kripke does, that “the entire idea of meaning vanishes into thin air.”

Luckily the point of PI §201 is not the endless interpretations but the non-interpretive immediate grasping that occurs “in actual cases.” The infinite interpretability functions as a reductio of the idea that we are interpreting rules rather than just following them in a more direct and practical sense. 54 If we can recover this mundane understanding, overlooked because of its ubiquitous inconspicuousness, 55 then we will dismiss the skeptical paradox the way Hume's philosopher laughs at his own bizarre thoughts once he gets a good beer and a pool cue in his hands.

“‘How can one follow a rule?' That is what I should like to ask. But how does it come about that I want to ask that, when after all I find no kind of difficulty in following a rule? Here we obviously misunderstand the facts that lie before our eyes.” 56

Wittgenstein considers his job to be assembling reminders of our normal immersion in the meaningfulness of everyday life.

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. — Apustimelogist

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?

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

Wittgenstein’s notion of family resemblance is meant to prevent us from being tempted to subsume the particular within the general, to define the instances of ‘life’ on the basis of the category ‘life’ in such a way that we presuppose a centrally defining meaning of the category which can be understood independently of its instances.
Shared propensities, common responses , cultural norms, categorical patterns of word meanings, are only the presuppositions for the possibility of having shared rules if we recognize that what is common to a group, what is shared, what is associated with a rule, a norm, a category is nothing that strictly belongs to , is encompassed by any framework. There is nothing common to all language games or particular applications of a rule. Wittgenstein's metaphor of “spinning a thread we twist fibre on fibre” shows the difference between language use as applications of pre-existing categorical , normative and rule-governed frames and language use as a subtle or not-so-subtle re-invention of the sense of norms, rules and categories. Family resemblance is the continuous overlapping of fibers altering previous patterns of language use via fresh contexts of use, rather than the churning out of a new instance of a superordinate theme or rule.

67.” I can think of no better expression to characterize these similarities than "family resemblances"; for the various resemblances between members of a family: build, features, colour of eyes, gait, temperament, etc. etc. overlap and criss-cross in the same way.— And I shall say: 'games' form a family. And for instance the kinds of number form a family in the same way. Why do we call something a "number"? Well, perhaps because it has a—direct—relationship with several things that have hitherto been called number; and this can be said to give it an indirect relation ship to other things we call the same name. And we extend our con cept of number as in spinning a thread we twist fibre on fibre. And the strength of the thread does not reside in the fact that some one fibre runs through its whole length, but in the overlapping of many fibres. But if someone wished to say: "There is something common to all these constructions—namely the disjunction of all their common properties"—I should reply: Now you are only playing with words. One might as well say: "Something runs through the whole thread— namely the continuous overlapping of those fibres.

If one treats a rule as a logical inclusion structure, a category to which particular applications belong, then it seems perfectly reasonable to make a distinction between the idea that different senses of a word relate to each other via family resemblance, and the idea that a categorical, normative concept like rule , being that essence common to a family of resemblances , cannot itself be dissolved into an infinity of related senses. But I imagine Wittgenstein asking, is not ‘rule' also a word? And if so, are only some words situational senses tied to other situational senses by resemblance? Are there other , special words, like ‘rule', that exist in some metaphysical , empirical or theoretical space that resists the situational contingency of sense? Such that while its applications would always differ in sense, it in itself would remain ideally self-identical in its own sense whenever and wherever we speak the phrase ‘this rule'?I am inclined to construe actual situational sense as the precondition for the understanding of what would otherwise be considered ideal structure( an essence common to its particulars) , rather than the other way around.

Also, the argument in the quote from Grayling in the OP is pretty much the argument Davidson presented in "On the very idea of a conceptual scheme". Davidson's triangulation of speaker, interpreter and truth comes in to play here, at least as a first approximation.

Forms of life cannot be incommensurable because they must all occur embedded in our activities in the world. So despite not being able to speak Chinese (an increasingly inappropriate example for all sorts of reasons) we will recognise a Chinese builder or grocer by their activities… Forms of life are fastened together by all of them occurring in the world. — Banno

If I can’t persuade another to take on the form of life necessary to make my actions intelligible to them, then don’t those actions continue to appear incommensurable with their form of life? Do forms of life simply occur in a pre-given world , an objective world for all, or do different forms of life develop the world in different directions? Is there not a sense in which worlds are intersubjectively constructed through forms of life?

It seems to me one can dispense with theism, recognize that More is Different and that humans have more cortical neurons than any other species, and thereby have a basis for recognizing a uniqueness to humans. — wonderer1

Ah, but the devil is in the details. To what extent, if any, does this difference in degree between the neurons of humans
and other animals translate into a difference in kind? Think of all of the historical assumptions concerning brain-based qualitative differences between human and animal behavioral capabilities that have turned out to be wrong-headed:
Only humans have language
Only humans have heritable culture
Only humans have cognition
Only humans have emotion
Only humans use tools

Perhaps more isnt so different after all.

↪Antony Nickles

But Witt shows is that the world has endless ways of being “rational” (having ways to account, though different), and so we can disagree intelligibly in relation from those practices. Ultimately we may not come to resolution, but that does not lead to the categorical failure of rationality, because a dispute also only happens at a time, in a context (which also gives our differences traction).

I don't think Wittgenstein shows this at all, as evidenced by the extremely diverse directions this thread is taken in by different Wittgensteinians. He leaves this incredibly vague; vague enough that a common take is that rationality just bottoms out in cultural presuppositions that cannot be analyzed. This view in turn makes any conflict between "heterogenous cultures" or "heterogenous language games," either purely affective/emotional or else simply a power struggle— i.e. "fight it out." This is especially true if the individual subject is just a nexus of signifiers and power discourses — Count Timothy von Icarus

The differences between language games are neither purely affective, as though pure affect could be separated from conceptual meaning, nor are they merely a matter of blind power. Convincing someone to change their perspective is not a function of coercion but of persuasion, and this is simultaneously affective and rational.

92. However, we can ask: May someone have telling grounds for believing that the earth has only existed for a short time, say since his own birth? - Suppose he had always been told that, - would he have any good reason to doubt it? Men have believed that they could make the rain; why should not a king be brought up in the belief that the world began with him? And if Moore and this king were to meet and discuss, could Moore really prove his belief to be the right one? I do not say that Moore could not convert the king to his view, but it would be a conversion of a special kind; the king would be brought to look at the world in a different way. Remember that 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”. (On Certainty)