Noam Chomsky - Understanding Reality

uh Donald Davidson in a paper called a nice derangement of eps EPS uh said uh or basically argued that there's no such thing as language and um I've always sort of thought that you probably you may not want to admit it but on some level you probably agree with that right no in fact I think he ended up contradicting himself I think there's some discussion of it in here or somewhere if you look at the end of the paper turns out he's presupposing that there is a notion of language in the technical sense technical sense of an internal generative procedure that relates sounds and meanings and so on uh he says there's no notion of language in another sense uh the sense of some community property or whatever well okay first of all I don't think that's true it's just it's not a scientifically usable sense uh but I think the paper is just rif with confusions I've written about it so you think there are such things as languages you yeah like there's such in anal sense like there's such things as the meaning of life you know and I understand it when people ask what's the meaning of life so yeah there's such a thing as the meaning of life there's such a thing as the financial crisis in Argentina you know there are all kind of things in the world but if you want to uh proceed to understand what you and I are doing those Notions just don't help you've got to look at it differently the way we look at primates other primates and Fa well let me read a quote from something you wrote recently okay you say I doubt that people think that among the constituents of the world are entities that are simultaneously abstract and concrete like books and Banks or that have the amalgam of properties we discover when we explore the meanings of even the simplist words like River person City Etc um you think the average person doesn't believe in technical question okay it's a question if you try to figure out what a person's folk science is is you know how people think the world is actually constituted of entities which is not do I talk about books of course we talk about books we talk about the meaning of life and so on right but if you ask people well you know how do you think the world really works that's a problem of ethnoscience like you go to some other community and you try to figure out what's their idea about how the world works like maybe the classical Greeks thought Apollo pulls the sun through the sky or something that's their folk scientific picture of how the world works that's hard topic you can't just uh do armchair philosophy about it that's why ethnos scientists have to work you know and when they work what they find if I think if they worked on People Like Us instead of just talking about it in a you know in the common room they would discover that our folk science yours and mine does not include entities that are simultaneously abstract and concrete and does not include entities like the meaning of life that doesn't mean we can't talk about I'm sure we talk about about them all the time but we don't at least I don't and I presume other people don't think of them as constituents of the way the world operates these are we don't do that when we're talking to each other informally now that that sounds a little bit more moderate than than what you've said elsewhere um uh here's a a passage from I believe this is from uh New Horizons where you say in the domain where questions of realism arise in a serious way in the kind context to the search for laws of nature objects are not conceived from The Peculiar perspectives provided by the concepts of common sense that's absolutely right see but there's several different Enterprises you have to distinguish here and I don't I I don't think it's more or less moderate it's about a different topic uh when you're trying to understand something about the nature of the world you and I anybody you start with some kind of what's called folk science almost every society we know has some picture of the way the world Works which is is more or less commonly shared if you try to do this more reflectively and carefully uh and you know bringing in other criteria and probably being bringing in other cognitive faculties we don't know that for sure but I suspect it then it becomes the Enterprise of science which is a different Enterprise and A peculiar one it's not folk science it's science that works in other ways this comment has to do with our culture and with which the Enterprise of science is understood right our you know intellectual culture and in that when we try to find out how the world works we discard the concepts of Common Sense very quickly but it sounds to me here like what you're saying is that the only things that are real right are the things that science tells us are real so it sounds like what you're saying here is that well this table isn't real but maybe you know real is an honorific term you can use it any way you like I mean to say if I say something is true and then I add well it's the real truth I'm not saying there are two different kinds of truth the truth and the real truth I'm just emphasizing what I said and the term real is basically used honorific uh so yeah you can use it h horrifically in various ways uh if we're trying to find out the way the world works and to really understand it in the manner of the Sciences we very quickly give up Common Sense Notions if we're carrying out folk science you know less reflectively uh probably using different cognitive faculties we also give up Common Sense Notions but in different ways well you can say a lot of I mean claims about something being honorific like real being honorific I mean uh Alan gibbert for example has argued that terms like rational are honorific or moral are honorific well I don't agree with that I think real is quite different what's the difference in these cases then because I think rationality is something that we can understand that morality is something real and it's part of us and uh we can try to figure out what it is we can try to figure out what our moral faculties are we understand something about what rational action is uh but about reality we have to ask what we're talking about right I if we're talking about reality in the Enterprise of trying to discover the way the world Works in a physics department or a Linguistics department or whatever Common Sense Notions are irrelevant if we're trying to explore our intuitive understanding of the way the world Works common no common sense Notions are relevant but we discard them if uh you have if you're using it in a more informal way like is the meaning of life real yeah sure okay well look there's there's a sort of space between ethnoscience and science right and Common Sense and all of those and it's been explored by philosophers for for 2,500 years and it's called metaphysics right no that's different okay that is a question about what's ethnoscience is a branch of science right ethnoscience is the branch of science that tries to figure out what people's beliefs are about the way the world works right metaphysics is not that I understand that but do you think that metaphysics is impossible no science is metaphysics oh okay good it's talking about what the world is made of all right so but then the question is why do you think that science gets to claim what's real now let let me give you an example so in the scientific image BOS and frosten is a scientific anti-realist so he says the things posited by science quarks Etc are not real but midsize Earthbound objects are real now you've got the flip side of that right I don't have any side because I don't think the word real is sensible enough to use I they're all real in different senses if you're trying to understand the way the world actually works whether you're bus fren or you or me we're going to go to the scientists because they tell us how the world really works if we're interested in exploring people's Common Sense beliefs we'll go to the ethnos scientists and see what they discover what if we're interested in something like whether there are events or whether there are properties or whether there are um mological sums or something well let's take events which plays a prominent role in modern semantics right so here you can ask a lot of different questions uh for one thing you can ask whether in say davidsonian semantics uh where there's a lot of or anything that developed from It event based semantics whether the things whether what are called events are internal to the mind or outside the head right but I think they're internal to the mind can't they be both well they could but then we're asking another question if we're asking well how do these things that are internal to the Mind relate to Something in the outside world we'll say okay let's take a look at what you mean by an event so for example is the American Revolution an event yeah it was an important event in history does that event include uh the fact that uh the man who the indigenous population called the town Destroyer uh took off a little time in the middle of the Revolution to destroy the iroy civilization is that part of the event called the American Revolution well not when you study it in school you know uh you want to find out about that event you got to e probably the iry remember uh the ones who were left or you've got to look at serious scholarly history then you find out that one part of what was going on in the event that we call the American Revolution was a side operation in 1979 to wipe out the ocoy civilization so that the colonies could expand if they got rid of the British well is that part of the event or isn't it well you know here come hard questions about what we're really going to call events in the outside world and those questions don't have answers because they are uh you know they're highly dependent on our interests our perspective our goals you know all kinds of factors so I don't think we're going to find external events in any sense worth pursuing for investigation World why external events just be complicated objects it can be anything you like but it is is what is the town Destroyer exploit part of the American Revolution or isn't it well that event you know that's your choice there's no answer to that yeah but now it sounds like you're saying that well I have representations of events right the representations representations you have representations I have representations some which we formally call events right but now one might ask what on Earth is a representation it's not a representation of something well see that's a mistake that comes from a philosophical tradition the way the term represent is used in the philosophical tradition it's a relation between an internal object and an ex an external object it's not the way it's used either in ordinary speech or in the Sciences so when uh when a perceptual psychologist say it talks about an internal representation of you know a cube or something there doesn't have to be any Cube there they're talking about something that's going on in the head in fact what they may be studying and usually are studying is a relation between things like kcop presentations and internal events there's no Cube but nevertheless they talk about it an internal representation I mean the concept internal rep there's a long discussion of that in here the concept internal representation is used in The Sciences and I think that's ordinary speech too in ways which don't involve a relation between an internal thing and an external thing I mean that deres from a particular interpretation of the theory of ideas you know which said well ideas represent something out there I should interject here inally I should say that that's not the interpretation of the theory ideas that were given by the people who used it so like say hum for example I quote him in there what he he raises a serious empirical question uh he says uh it's about the nature of U um the he terms he uses the identity that we ascribe to things meaning how do we individuate things right and he asks the question well is this A peculiar nature common to the thing or is it what he calls fictitious uh a construction of the mind right and he says it's fictitious there is no entity there is no common nature there is no nature common the thing there's a construction of the mind which we used to talk about the world not he's not an idealist not an idealist not here he's saying we interact he believes there's an external world out there there's a coffee cup on the table and so on but he says that the he's talking about the individuation of things how we organize things how we construct our picture of the world right and that involves the way our minds work uh and that doesn't mean the world isn't there you know it's just what his predecessors called our cognos of powers which use the data of sense to construct an account of the world and he's saying well you want to look at the identity of thing the identity that we ascribed to things like what makes us call something a book or an event and so on he's saying well it's fictitious in the sense that it's a construction of the Mind based on the data of sense that's not an idealist position in fact that's the position of modern science because people will call you a crypto idealist then they're misunder understanding what idealism okay let me there's an issue that I wanted I wanted to get to here and this involves the thing we mentioned about representations and whether representation requires there being something that it is a representation of now in a very important and somewhat influential book by Saul kryy there's a Revival of the sort of vidin staran argument about rule following let me just read the relevant passage here so uh in that book kryy says if statements attributing rule following are neither to be regarded as stating facts Norther to be thought of explaining or behavior it would seem that the use of the idea of rules and compet idence in linguistics needs serious reconsideration even if these Notions are not rendered meaningless now I know you've I've written written on that in knowledge of language crucial word is if right okay and Beyond and the fact is that in the way in the sense in which the term rule is used in for thousands of years in fact in the study of language it's not the kind of rule he had in mind so if somebody if you read a book you know you study Latin let's say or you studied it a thousand years ago uh they would have a rule that tells you you know when to use the ablative case or something that's not a rule in wienstein sense it's a description of a part of the language right so the questions about rule following just don't arise but we don't need to get hung up on rules and so forth that's what he's talking about I understand that but in a certain sense he's talking about any sort of computational state but there so take take just a computer right forget about human beings for a second see computers are a different story okay let take an ins yeah okay yeah see what what why aren't these questions asked about insects right I mean insects when you study insects you attribute to them computational stat is that a problem I mean is it not real like if you say that an insect is doing you know is uh determining the position of the sun as a function of the time of year and time of day and here's the computation it's using isn't that why isn't that science uh that would be but the argument would be that the reason you can get away with that is because you're talking about what it's the the the representations that you're attributing to the insect are externalised anchored that is you couldn't do it unless the you had an embedded system that's not true you could do it in an experimental situation in which you have uh a light and in fact if you knew how to do it you could do it by stimulating the external sensory organs of the insect it would all be interior and there there doesn't have to be a sun there no it's just that yeah you're talking about it the way it happens actually in the real world but the same thing you would say the same thing in an experimental setting where you don't have an external world because you're talking about the internal construct computations of the insect uh on the occasion of sense notice doesn't matter what's out there notic the shift there though because you went from saying you you went from saying you don't need the sun in the experimental setting to saying you don't you could you could run the experiment in a world that didn't have the Sun and that's a different story right no no it's not a different story the point is if you look at what insect scientists are studing they're studying what 17th century philosophers used to call the constructions of the mind on the occasion of sense right now it happens that in the world that they're looking at uh the occasions of sense happen to be related to the fact that there's something 93 million miles away but the study could go on as if it's what Hillary called a brain inovat I'm the studies are internalist uh because we don't know anything else to study but this is disputed right I mean I mean there is this dispute about David Mah right I mean there's two stories on this Tyler Burge and and Martin Davis for example argue that Mah is sort of Frau with externalist sort of yeah but they're just misreading him okay I mean in fact the um have to know more personally but I'm sure if he was here he would say this if you look at the informal Exposition in marah in marah's Vision let's say book Vision you look at the informal Exposition in order to motivate what he's doing he says well you know imagine you know an elephant or something or anything like a stick figure uh and you're trying to you and you we we want to know how that thing out there is interpreted by the visual system as you know some three-dimensional object right however if you look at the experiment the experimental procedures of M they didn't have elephants out there in fact what they were using was the gcop uh and if they so they were having you know dots on screens and if they had known how to stimulate the optic nerve they would have done that uh when you go from the informal exposition to the actual science you see that like everything else it's a study of the internal nature of the Beast uh and in fact you know and they would have loved to get to the point where they could tell you something about how you identify you know an elephant but they never anywhere near that however even if they did it wouldn't matter whether the elephant is there or not it wouldn't matter what sensory what's the occasion of sense again the 17th century formulation of this was I think quite appropriate on the occasion of sense the cognos of it sounds archaic but the cognos of powers of the mind uh construct complicated internal structures which have all sorts of properties gestal properties know what Hume later called the uh identity that we ascribe to things and so and that looks correct and that's the way modern science looks at it uh the fact that the informal expositions uh you know to sort of motivate what you're doing uh talk about identifying objects on the outside that's fine but you have to know how to distinguish informal expositions from the actual scientific program and if you look at the actual program they never looked at things outside aside from tachistoscopic images because they're as close as you can get to the occasion of sins

Channel: Chomsky's Philosophy

Views: 285,157

Keywords: Philosophy, Metaphysics, David Hume, Noam Chomsky, Philosophy of mind, philosophy of science, ethnoscience, folk science, science, knowledge, reality

Id: cQd6QGQIxmQ

Length: 19min 27sec (1167 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 28 2016