From Wos
Weblog (a seemingly endless source of good ideas):
Suppose one day I’ll meet Swampman and the brain in a vat. We will be able to
communicate perfectly well. How could this be possible if we spoke completely
different languages? Perhaps there are aspects of meaning which aren’t directly
relevant for understanding and communication, but this certainly can’t be true
for all aspects.
I just realized that this account
resembles what Lewis says about naming the colours in ‘Naming the Colours’.
Two quick thoughts. First, George Bealer (in his paper in the totally wonderful volume on Conceivability and
Possibility) thinks that similar cases are bad news for two-dimensionalism. The idea
is that since the inhabitants of Dune and Waterworld
share almost no platitudes about water, according to the two-dimensionalist they should not be able to understand each
other, since understanding involves sharing of platitudes. But, says Bealer, they certainly could understand each other. (We
could question that but lets not.) Now if the theory in Naming the Colours
works, we should be able to treat the Dune crew and the Waterworld
crew on a par with the footy people and the rugby people, and explain their
cross-communication the same way.
Secondly, Im not so sure the theory in Naming
the Colours is all that clear. I think I think it ends up being something like
this.
- Red
(in the mouth of an English speaker) is a name for whatever fills the red role
in the theory of redness common to all English speakers. - The
theory of redness common to all speakers says, inter alia, that for each community, the theory of redness of
that community includes paradigms of redness. - The
theory of redness of the footy people includes the claim that the stripe
on the Essendon jumper is actually red.
So I think the upshot of this is that one of
the platitudes about redness is that it is the best deserver of the name red
in the footy peoples theory of redness, and in the rugby peoples theory of redness,
and in the arty peoples theory of redness, and so on. Theres no reason to
think that this iterated Ramsey-sentence approach doesnt make sense. But I do
worry a bit about including something so explicitly metalinguistic
in the platitudes. Only a bit, mind you. If the platitudes do have to be metalinguistic, and metaRamsified,
that would explain why Lewis includes a rather long footnote defending causal
descriptivism about proper names, somewhat without warning, earlier in the
paper. But it didnt seem entirely clear to me at first reading that the game
was going to get this complicated, and Lewis is normally upfront about matters
like that, so Im worried that Im misinterpreting something here.
Bealer has a final worry about this
kind of approach, that Im not quite sure how to respond to. Assume that one of
the platitudes fixing the reference of my
term red is that it is the colour that fills the redness role in the rugby
peoples theory of colour. And assume that I know nothing about the rugby
peoples platitudes. Then, Bealer sort of suggests
(sort of because hes not addressing this particular proposal) I dont
understand my own term. But this is wrong since I do understand it. Now I think
the (implicit) response in Naming the Colours is that since Im a footy
person, and hence have tacit knowledge of the footy peoples theory of colour,
and that theory suffices to fix the reference more or less, that combined with
the knowledge that everyone who speaks English knows some theory that latches
onto more or less the same property is sufficient for understanding. And I
think if thats the response I believe it, though I can see the worry Bealer is pointing to – the Lewisian
theory suggests that learning the
platitudes of the rugby folk would improve my understanding of the term red,
but really that wouldnt improve my understanding at all.
Did you know: the first platitude listed in
the OED to fix the reference of red is that it is the colour of British
Empire countries on traditional maps?