Abstract
This chapter addresses two remaining issues. The first is the apprehension that in undercutting reference-magnetism views the way I have, I’ve ruled out the possibility that the way the world sorts out for us empirically could be compatible with some version of correspondence metaphysics—an empirically-justified neat correspondence between language (kind terms, in particular) and the world. Previous chapters may also have given rise to the worry that my approach methodologically presupposes a God’s eye view while at the same time undercutting itself by officially regarding that viewpoint as one that neither we nor private rule-followers can make sense of. These issues are connected and I explore them both in this chapter. I also characterize two powerful and apparently conflicting ways of thinking about language, the contrastivist view and the noncontrastivist view. I don’t try to resolve which view is the right one.
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- 1.
I owe much of particularities of how I pose this worry to Douglas Patterson—9/24/09 email.
- 2.
The ways we, in the first-person, apply certain words—“pain,” etc.—strike us as exempt from this. I provide a naturalistic explanation of this later in this chapter.
- 3.
We are aware, of course, that words can change in what they refer to (they can change their “meanings”). But we see this process as sporadic and somewhat slow (e.g., generational)—the kind of process, for example, that William Safire notoriously (and weirdly) denounced.
- 4.
That is, an illusion that we have, but that Crusoe 5 doesn’t have, is that language is a public object; we don’t experience the reality that each of us speaks our own idiolect (which is at best only similar to the idiolects of those around us who we talk to). See Azzouni (2013).
- 5.
I’m here abstracting away from the rich complexity of natural languages, and—of course—from the more complex semantic theories that are available to handle that complexity. In the interests of keeping things simple, we might, for example, restrict our attention to simple statements of the cardinality of collections of objects.
- 6.
Notice that “truth conditions,” as the contrastivist insists they be understood, don’t correspond to how the speakers use their words “true” and “false.” Speakers do not treat their assertions at a time as true by virtue of their dispositions to so assert them. This is because—on the contrastivist view—they’re presupposing a false picture of their language(s).
- 7.
One thing we can’t do is characterize the truth conditions of sentences in terms of dispositions of people to assert or deny sentences when a “mistake” isn’t being made. This would only be to again face the rule-following paradox at the level of semantic theory: the notion of a “mistake” can only have content in relation to the dispositions of speakers at some other time.
- 8.
A Being, perhaps, whose experience of coconuts—and everything in the world, for that matter—is like the human experience of pain.
- 9.
So it’s probably wise to drop phrases like “carving the world at its joints” or “fitting the world as it is” because they are treacherously misleading for metaphysical thinking. The vanilla “suitably applying to the world” glossed—as I suggest—in terms of maximally-positive success curves is better.
- 10.
If someone—counter to my suggestion in footnote 9—insists on continuing to use the metaphor “fits the world,” this is how it must be understood.
- 11.
But if they are terminologically equivalent, there’s no harm in that. Speak as a noncontrastivist does rather than as a contrastivist does: it’s more soothing. (I’ve been echoing pragmatist sentiments, especially in my invocation of plpci dispositions—and apart from what I say about the concept of truth. Now I’m apparently echoing William James because I’m not deciding between the correctness of the contrastivist and noncontrastivist, but instead offering a choice between them based on psychological comfort.)
- 12.
And that’s no disaster, because we labor under lots of illusions about the properties of our language—many of them facilitate our successful use of our language. See Azzouni (2013) for an extensive discussion of these various involuntarily experienced illusions, such as the projection of meaning properties onto semantically inert designs. The psychological facts about these illusions are independent of the question whether contrastivists or noncontrastivists are right.
- 13.
There is a cute analogy between this issue and what’s called “negative theology.”
- 14.
I think we can’t even treat this locality possibility with respect to entire science as one with “low probability”; but that’s not something I’m going to argue for here.
References
Azzouni, Jody. 2013. Semantic perception: How the illusion of a common language arises and persists. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
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Azzouni, J. (2017). Correspondence Metaphysics and the Cogency of a God’s Eye View. In: The Rule-Following Paradox and its Implications for Metaphysics. Synthese Library, vol 382. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-49061-8_7
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