Yeah, I spent a lot of last year struggling with the reference thing. In the end I decided that reference was not fundamental even within the human-centered picture, and that reference was just a special case of communication (in the sense of Quine, Grice, et al.: I do a communicative act because I model you as modeling why I do it.)
Figuring this out made me a bit upset with academic philosophy, because I’d been looking through the recent literature fruitlessly before I found Quine basically solving the problem 50 years before. This is the opposite of the problem I usually pin on philosophy, that it’s too backward-looking. In this case, it’s more like the people talking about reference within the last 20 years are all self-selected for not caring about Quine much at all.
Whether or not you find this useful may depend on a certain mental maneuver of taking something you were asking a question about, and breaking it into pieces rather than answering the question. In this case, “How are the semantics of a sentence determined?” is a question, but rather than answering it I’m advocating getting rid of this high-level-of-abstraction word “semantics” by working in a more concrete level of description where there are humans with models of each other. And of course I’ve framed this in a very palatable way, but I think whether this maneuver feels good or not is a big dividing line—if you have the unshakeable feeling that I have missed something vital by not answering the original question, then you fall on the other side of the line—though perhaps one can still be lured over with practical applications.
Anyway, I don’t think this changes the picture much. If we replace “is X true” with “is saying X a useful communicative act” then the questions in the post still apply. Useful communicative acts are standpoint-dependent; useful communicative acts use words that don’t have physical definitions; useful communicative acts can’t go through a view-from-nowhere; etc.
Well, I was skimming through Word and Object when I “became enlightened,” but it may have mostly been a catalyst. Still recommended though?
I don’t think l was very clear about what problem I was solving, and I don’t think you managed to read my mind, so let me try again.
The problem I was interested in was: how does reference work? How can I point at or verbally indicate some thingie, and actually be indicating the thingie in question? And could I program that into an AI?
In your post, you connect this to indexicals, which I’ve interpreted as a question like “how does reference work? How can I point at or verbally indicate some thingie, and actually be indicating that thingie, in a way that you could explain to a microscopic physics simulation?”
One of the key parts of the solution is that words don’t have inherent “aboutness” attached to them. Reference doesn’t make any sense if you just focus on the speaker and try to define the aboutness in their statements. It needs to be interpreted as communication, which uses some notion of a functional audience you’re constructing a message for.
So that question of “How do I verbally indicate the thing and really indicate it?” has to be left unanswered to the extent that we have false beliefs about our ability to “really indicate” things. Instead, I advocate breaking it down into questions about how you model other people and choose communicative acts.
So I am absolutely not saying we should replace “is x true?” with “is x a communicatively useful act?”. The closest thing I’m saying would be that we can cash out “what is the referent of sentence x?” into “what is the modeled audience getting pointed at by the act of saying sentence x?”.
I’m not sure how you’re interpreting physicalism here. But if we single out the notion that there should be some kind of “physics shorthand” for human concepts and references—like H2O is for water, or like the toy model of reference as passing numerical coordinates—then yeah, there is no physics shorthand. Where there is something like it, it is humans that have done the work to accomodate physics, not vice versa.
Yeah, I spent a lot of last year struggling with the reference thing. In the end I decided that reference was not fundamental even within the human-centered picture, and that reference was just a special case of communication (in the sense of Quine, Grice, et al.: I do a communicative act because I model you as modeling why I do it.)
Figuring this out made me a bit upset with academic philosophy, because I’d been looking through the recent literature fruitlessly before I found Quine basically solving the problem 50 years before. This is the opposite of the problem I usually pin on philosophy, that it’s too backward-looking. In this case, it’s more like the people talking about reference within the last 20 years are all self-selected for not caring about Quine much at all.
Whether or not you find this useful may depend on a certain mental maneuver of taking something you were asking a question about, and breaking it into pieces rather than answering the question. In this case, “How are the semantics of a sentence determined?” is a question, but rather than answering it I’m advocating getting rid of this high-level-of-abstraction word “semantics” by working in a more concrete level of description where there are humans with models of each other. And of course I’ve framed this in a very palatable way, but I think whether this maneuver feels good or not is a big dividing line—if you have the unshakeable feeling that I have missed something vital by not answering the original question, then you fall on the other side of the line—though perhaps one can still be lured over with practical applications.
What’s a good starting point for reading?
Anyway, I don’t think this changes the picture much. If we replace “is X true” with “is saying X a useful communicative act” then the questions in the post still apply. Useful communicative acts are standpoint-dependent; useful communicative acts use words that don’t have physical definitions; useful communicative acts can’t go through a view-from-nowhere; etc.
Well, I was skimming through Word and Object when I “became enlightened,” but it may have mostly been a catalyst. Still recommended though?
I don’t think l was very clear about what problem I was solving, and I don’t think you managed to read my mind, so let me try again.
The problem I was interested in was: how does reference work? How can I point at or verbally indicate some thingie, and actually be indicating the thingie in question? And could I program that into an AI?
In your post, you connect this to indexicals, which I’ve interpreted as a question like “how does reference work? How can I point at or verbally indicate some thingie, and actually be indicating that thingie, in a way that you could explain to a microscopic physics simulation?”
One of the key parts of the solution is that words don’t have inherent “aboutness” attached to them. Reference doesn’t make any sense if you just focus on the speaker and try to define the aboutness in their statements. It needs to be interpreted as communication, which uses some notion of a functional audience you’re constructing a message for.
So that question of “How do I verbally indicate the thing and really indicate it?” has to be left unanswered to the extent that we have false beliefs about our ability to “really indicate” things. Instead, I advocate breaking it down into questions about how you model other people and choose communicative acts.
So I am absolutely not saying we should replace “is x true?” with “is x a communicatively useful act?”. The closest thing I’m saying would be that we can cash out “what is the referent of sentence x?” into “what is the modeled audience getting pointed at by the act of saying sentence x?”.
I’m not sure how you’re interpreting physicalism here. But if we single out the notion that there should be some kind of “physics shorthand” for human concepts and references—like H2O is for water, or like the toy model of reference as passing numerical coordinates—then yeah, there is no physics shorthand. Where there is something like it, it is humans that have done the work to accomodate physics, not vice versa.