Philosophical ‘situations’ is a very ambiguous category of anecdotes. They’re descriptions of the world (hypothetical or realistic) that can be seen as problems in their own right, or counter-examples to some commonplace theories, or evidence in favor of a particular theory, etc.
I wander in from a different culture, into an auction house
There, the significance of waving your hand is bidding the next amount on whatever is being auctioned.
But all I know of the local customs is that waving usually is a greeting for people.
So, I go in there and greet my friend by waving.
I’m unaware that, in this context, doing that has the significance of bidding $500 for that armoire.
Now, if, as a matter of fact, I’m held responsible there (“You’ve implicitly accepted these rules by going into the auction house!”), then I’ve actually bid. That’s what I’ve done.
Even though I didn’t intend to do that, I didn’t mean to do that. But I produced a performance that has that significance.
A parallel story:
In Napoleon era, England, they needed sailors
This was a terrible life; nobody would want to do this.
Yet the law was that one had to voluntarily join Her Majesty’s Navy.
Because people were illiterate, taking the Queen’s shilling from a duly authorized representative of Her Majesty’s Government showed that you had voluntarily joined the service
If you did that, you had joined the Navy. You had committed yourself.
So, they’d go to the bars and wait until somebody was drunk and out of money to say, “Like a shilling for another drink, mate?”
They weren’t wearing the uniform or anything that shows that they were the duly authorized representatives
But they had the papers to show they were. You couldn’t deny there were all these witnesses that you took the shilling from this person.
This is an equivalent of having bid on the armoire: the law was, if you performed that act, regardless of intention, that counted as committing yourself.
An empirical phenomenon: when a foraging bee discovers a supply of food, it returns to the hive and does a waggle dance. The rest of the hive then flies out in a certain direction and distance, locating the food. In some sense, the bee communicates the information of the food supply to the hive.
What’s philosophically interesting about this?
How do we talk about what the bee is doing?
Is the bee ‘speaking a language’? Is the bee saying that ‘food is located in this direction’?
Can’t we explain why a particular bee on one occasion does that by invoking the pattern that it’s an instance of?
What would it mean to say of a bee returning from a food source that it’s turnings and wiggling has occurred because they’re part of a complete dance?
This is related to distinction of pattern governed vs rule obeying behavior.[1] Ruth Milliken, Sellars’ student, devotes her career to this, developing the field of teleosemantics and writing about it in Language, Thought, and Other Biological Categories.[2]
A simpler example: imagine that beavers slap their tail when there’s danger, and beavers flee when they hear another beaver slap its tail.
The idea of teleosemantics is an evolutionary sort of semantics.
Acknowledge language use is normative (make distinction between correct and incorrect use).
You have to draw the distinction in the way that’s compatible with any degree of badness of the participants actually following the rules.
We look at a reproductive family, the normal explanation (a tehcnial term) of tail slapping is that, in the evolutionary history, lives were saved by it.
When the explanation of the persistence of tail slapping turns on particular events in the past where things worked well that way (expressed in terms of counterfactuals - no tail slap, then species dies out), then we can say its part of the proper function (technical term) to perform that behavior.
This solves some puzzle cases: it allows us to say the proper function of sperm is to fertilize eggs even if a vanishingly small fraction of them actually do (because if they hadn’t fertilized eggs in the past, there wouldn’t be sperm now).
Well, this is the form of explanation for semantics in general. Because the same thing can happen when the reproductive families are uses of words.
You can explain why we use the word ‘Aristotle’, as we do, if has having a proper function of, in the end, referring to Aristotle, because if people in the past had not used it, in particular ways, we wouldn’t be using it today.
And similarly, for predicates, and so on.
These are not biological norms. But we can understand words as having proper functions in the same sense in which even in the merely biological case, we can understand things as having proper functions. And we can understand them as having proper signaling functions.
So, there’s a proper function for producing these things and a proper function for receiving them.
There, the analogy of the of the tail slaps is a good one.
In order to understand semantic content, we don’t need to use any principles of explanation that aren’t already intelligible.
This is related to the problem of: suppose you follow a rule. You use a representation of that rule to train the next generation to follow the rule. How do we know that the same rule is being passed on? Isn’t it like a game of telephone, given the ambiguity of following rules (gerrymandering problem - you have a rule in your head and punish me for lifting the glass of water, but I interpret this as punishment for lifting my arm or one of a million other possible explanations). Brandom’s response:
Well, maybe so and maybe it a given rule isn’t as stable as we think. I mean, it’s only if it had enough coherence and enough stability, that we’re here. (Anthropomorphic principle). And when Wittgenstein harps on this, you know, unless as a matter of fact, we tended to go on the same way when trained the same way, to a remarkable extent, we wouldn’t get a language game off the ground.
I should mention that this gerrymandering issue is what was wrong with classical behaviorism from an empirical point of view. 1 Remember, the stimulus and response were supposed to be objective features of the critters you were looking at. So that the behavioral scientist modeled on the natural scientist, her own conceptual scheme was not supposed to be involved in characterizing the behavior of these critters. But if you ask sort of classical studies, so I take the rat, and set him down four steps away from the bar, and train him, then if he walks four steps forward and presses down on the bar, he’ll get a rat yummy. And that stimulus, let’s say, the light goes on, walks, four steps, pushes down on the bar gets a rat yummy. We indoctrinate him with that, conditioned learning, he can do that. And now we ask the behavioral scientist. And now if I put in eight steps away from the bar, what do you predict he’s going to do? Is he going to go four steps forward and move his paw up and down? Is that the behavior that has been associated with the stimulus? Or would you predict that he’ll go eight steps forward and press down on the bar. That is, the right description is that he’ll go from where he is to the bar and press on the bar? Well, the minute you think about this, you realize that we can gerrymander, what he was taught, there are many descriptions, that that are available to us for what he was taught. And in fact, no one who works with the animals would expect him to move four steps forward, and not be pressing on the bar. But why is that? Is that something that you without importing any understanding of this are objectively reading off of the situation? Or have you, in fact, all along been importing, your characterization of what the regularity is that you are, that you’re characterizing? This is actually empirical as well a methodological problem. What is the prediction that you’re supposed to make at this point? And how do you justify the one rather than rather than the other by your methodological lights?
From: [3]:
A mother lets me watch her kids and says to me: Show the children a game. When she returns, she sees me teaching them to gamble with dice. She angrily exclaims I didn’t mean that sort of game! Must the exclusion of the game with dice have come before his mind when he gave me the order?
It’s true that she did mean not that sort of game. but she need not have had the conscious thought at the time of the request. Somehow her request made a normative division of proper responses.
If you find this puzzling that, nonetheless, what you did was an inappropriate response to her request, then you are trapped in a possibly Cartesian trap. You’re missing what distinguishes a sign from a piece of wood.
A common metaphor used to critize someone’s inquiry:
One night, a drunk man is searching on the ground under a streetlight. An officer approaches and asks “What are you looking for?”
“My keys.”
They look together for a while until the officer asks, “Are you sure you dropped your keys here?”
The man replies, “No, over there” and points to a dark patch far from the streetlight.
“Why in God’s name are you looking here, then?”
“Because there’s no light over there.”
Montaigne is impressed that his dog, when chasing a rabbit and coming to a fork, runs a little way down one of the paths and smells no rabbit, then immediately runs down the other fork of the path without stopping to smell to check if the rabbit went that way. [4]
The dog is acting in accordance with the disjunctive syllogism. Do we say that the dog understands disjunction?
We can sometimes underestimate the generativity of language, it’s radical novelty. Consider something as easy to understand as “For the picnic today, I hope you packed all the sandwiches we made last night and the baseball gear.”
Almost every sequence of words uttered by an adult native speaker is radically novel. Not just in the sense that that speaker has never produced or heard that sequence of words, but in the sense that no one ever has.
Example from Charles Travis [5] (Pragmatics, pg 97): - Maple trees have red leaves naturally, but Pia paints them green. - One day, a decorator asks her if she has any green leaves for her display, and Pia answers yes. - Another day, a chemist asks her if she has any green leaves for her experiment on green leaf chemistry, and Pia answers no. - In both cases, Pia answered truthfully.
The moral: any true sentence in some context has a context which would make its negation true.
We think it’s straightforward when a teacher points to a plate and says ‘plate’. However, one might argue the teacher has also pointed to:
the color of the plate
the shape of the plate
a piece of diningware
a plate or an elephant
a specific clump of atoms within the plate
etc.
We want it to be true that the teacher did, in fact, point to the plate (this is needed for us to understand how the students learn to respond to plates by saying ‘plate’). But we need an account.
What fact of the matter (the pointing, the thought inside the teacher’s head, the dispositions of the teacher) makes it the case that the teacher pointed to the plate?
This is related to the problem of disjunctivitis.
Pluto was first postulated in order to explain perturbations in the orbit of Neptune (by inference from Newton’s laws). At that point, Pluto was a purely theoretical object. When we got more telescopes and could observe Pluto ‘directly’. Overnight, Pluto’s status changed from theoretical object to observable object, but Pluto itself didn’t change.
From [6]:
A man has arrived at the grocery store to go shopping, but realizes he’s forgotten his shopping list. Unbenknownst to him, a spy is following him tasked with writing a list of everything that is put into the grocery cart. There are now two lists of groceries that have dual relationships to what is put into the cart:
The original shopping list:
If we want to know whether an item that is put into the cart is ‘correct’, we must look to the shopping list
This list has authority over what is put into the cart: the list sets the standards of correctness.
The spy’s list:
This, conversely, says nothing about what should be put into the cart.
If we want to know whether something written on the list is ‘correct’, we must look to the shopping cart.
The cart has authority over the spy’s list.
From [7]:
Imagine a community that talked about having gold or silver in one’s teeth
Later, the community extends that practice to talk about having pain in one’s teeth.
If, as a matter of contingent fact, the practitioners can learn to use the expression ‘in’ in the new way, building on (but adapting) the old, they will have fundamentally changed the meaning of ‘in’.
This can be seen by the fact that, in the old practice, it made sense to ask where the gold was before it was in one’s tooth, whereas in the new practice asking where the pain was before it was in the tooth can lead only to a distinctively philosophical kind of puzzlement.
From [8]:
A man serves in a WWII.
In a battle, he does something extremely heroicly, and lots of people see.
He then gets knocked down, loses his dog tags, rolls down a hill.
He wakes up later and has no memory of who he was until that point in his life.
He wanders off and is eventually found by another regiment who has no idea who he is.
He winds up in a hospital and makes his way back to America to go to college.
Meanwhile, his original troop assumes the heroic soldier died
(He was probably blown to smithereens, since no trace of him other than dog tags)
They start calling him The War Hero, and he’s awarded a posthumous medal of honor.
The solder gets interested in history and does a PhD.
He decides to writes about the battle he knows he was involved in (in some way).
He’s intruiged by the story of The War Hero and makes that his focus.
Soon, he knows everything there is to know about The War Hero in his life up until the battle.
One might say, casually, he knows more about The War Hero than The War Hero himself knew about himself.
This person has two distinct kinds of self knowledge:
- Knowledge of the person one happens to be
- This is the normal kind of self-knowledge
- "I am a graduate student in Berkekey"
- "I have amnesia and no memory of anything before the battle"
- Self-knowledge
- "The War Hero was born in Cinincatti on a cold day."
- "The War Hero was forced to wear shorts even during the winter."
- If it's true, why is it true? Judging by the truth conditions of the sentence, it's true because a certain person born in Cininitati and was fordced to wear short pants, etc.Most of us have both types of knowledge, but because they so easily run together we conflate the two.
What was wrong with classical behaviorism, from a conceptual point of view, is we can see it with the wisdom of hindsight is just a larval stage on the way to functionalism. As all of the considerations that lead people to think have direct stimulus response connections, are satisfied still, if you allow intervening states. It’s still an empirical undertaking, and so on. But there’s a lot more formal power, you can get Turing machines, if you can get functional states, so you can get a lot farther. That’s why nobody should be a classical behaviorist anymore: be a functionalist, you get all the advantages, and a lot more expressive power.↩︎