Searle: Philosophy of Language, lecture 19

well we're at that stage of the course where I guess I've sort of finished talking about mainstream philosophy of language we didn't we went through reference and truth from roughly speaking Fraga at the present time to Putnam and Kripke and Dunnellon an arrest and we did talk about at our skis theory and I am I have a deep respect for mainstream philosophy of language I think it's very intelligent but I think it's hopelessly mistaken from beginning to end for reasons that I've tried to explain and I'm now going to return to the main line of argument of the course which is that we ought to think of language as essentially an intentional form of human human behavior in speech acts I said rule govern human behavior and a lot of it is rule governed but today we're going to discover some limits to that and in particularly the notion of the background okay now before we resume that though I want to finish the brief discussion I began of relativism why well I talked about relativism at all well it seems to be appealing to people people persistently find relativism attractive and I began by arguing last time and I'm going to finish that argument now by saying that you can't state it coherently that there is no coherent position of relativism it ends up as a kind of nonsense for reasons that I'll spell out and I've even written a short piece called the reputation of relativism that I'll put on bSpace I found I've even got one that's formatted in a version you can read the one that's on my website is formatted in UNIX you can read that too but it's but I have a version that's formatted and one of the more currently fashionable programs and if somebody reminds me I'll put that on bSpace today that is a new reading assignment read a five-page I think it's five pages a five-page article no six pages six page your article by me called reputation of relativism yes I know it but what should we do here's a problem my normal mic is lost and I will try to turn this one down how about that is that better and I can't hear it at all now you can't hear it at all all right well we just live with it I don't know what else to do up there somebody has removed or stolen the normal wireless mic that I use and I'm using this one in desperation if I get away from the source is that better maybe you can't hear anything like that is it working at all what oh that's all right that just adds a kind of musical background I think of that as like the drumbeat in in rock and roll music okay we go on with a reputation of relative is simple I said that it's difficult to state relativism without appearing to contradict yourself because if I say all truth is relative then what about the claim that all truth is relative is it relative or not well if it isn't relative then it's not true that all truth is relative you contradicted yourself if it is relative then why should we accept it if it says well you don't have to believe something if you don't want to believe it then you wouldn't have to believe that all truth is relative it's just somebody else's it's just some opinion like any other so there's a difficulty in stating a coherent version of relative it's simple but most relativists I think are not worried by this they think that's kind of logic chopping that they're in possession of a deep insight and it's that insight that they want to get across and we might put this insight by describing it as perspective ilysm the idea that they think is the deep idea that underlies their view is that all claims are made from some perspective or other and there is no transcendentally prized perspective there's no master perspective from which all other perspectives have to be surveyed so if I say something I say it from my perspective and you say something you say it from your perspective and that's all a relativism we need that everything is made from a perspective and maybe something would be true from some perspective but not true from another perspective but from that other perspective things that would be true it wouldn't from the first perspective so on this view now this is the key test point of relativism inconsistent propositions according to the relevance can both be true so it can be true that it's raining and true that it's not raining because it's raining said by me is from my perspective or my point of view and it's not raining said by you is your perspective from your point of view now that doesn't mean if you happen to be in London and I happen to be in Berkeley of course it might be raining in Berkeley and not raining in London though that's less likely than the converse and I must say but that's the whole point is any proposition at all two plus two equals four it's raining here now in Berkeley all of those are relative and the whole point of the relativism is that the same proposition can be true relative to one person and false relative to another now I want to maintain there is no coherent position of relativism and the first step is to apply this quotation you remember this quotation says for any proposition P a P or any proposition s any sentence or statement s S is true if and only if P where you I get P by dropping the quotation marks around s so snow is white this statement snow is white is true if and only if snow is white you simply drop the quotation marks' that's why it's called this quotation but now that's a law of logic I don't think you can make sense out of the notion of truth without this quotation but if that's right if it's a law of logic then if truth is relative all of reality is relative so by this quotation if it's only true relative to me that it's raining then it's only raining relative to me and it might be raining relative to me and not raining relative to you or two plus two might be four relative to me and two plus two would not be four relative you there is no intermediate position of truth relativism between total ontological relativism and absolutism absolutism being the idea that now lots of truths are absolutely doesn't matter what anybody thinks hydrogen atoms have one electron regardless of what ain't what anybody thinks that let's call that absolutism because absolutism sounds so offensive and politically incorrect but I think it's the right way to put it because a lot of proofs are unpleasant and difficult to accept but all the same they're true and that's true true because there's some fact in the world in virtue of which or because of which they are true so the first step in the argument is to see that once you apply Disko tation and I don't think you can make sense of any account of truth without dislocation once you apply this quotation then there is no such an intermediate position of truth relativism it immediately forces you to ontological relativism to the idea that all of reality only exists relative to points of view or powers or observers or spectators or preferences or whatever your favorite term is now while why should that worry the relativist why not say why can't the relative to say well that's what we really want why the hell should reality be able to force me to accept something I don't want to accept why not just say yeah well what's real for me is real for me and what's real for you is real for you and they might be completely different realities well the problem with that is that you can't really state that position without a kind of incoherence and I now want to go through the steps if I say all of reality is relative to people and their points of view then how about the people and their points of view are they relative as well well they must be because if they're parts of reality then they must be relatively what are they relative to it seems to me you've only got two options one is you can say well your existence and your preferences is relative to me but then that's solipsistic salep sisters that exist the only absolute existence would be me and your existence in your preferences relative to me subsystem is a peculiar doctrine in philosophy because I might say there's an asymmetry your salep system is immediately refuted by me if you come to me and say look I've become a solid system I don't think you really exist I don't think well you know maybe the guy's right maybe I don't exist I don't think that at all on the other hand I said I saw your solecism is no threat to me at all on the other hand if I am a solipsistic shion's are no use to me if I say I'm a solipsistic cyst and it's no good you say oh yeah I really do exist because of course that's still consistent with my saw ups ISM I mean I take authorities my uncle Chet was a great authority on all kinds of things if I had problems with a carburetor I'd call him up because he was good on stuff like that but it's no good calling up uncle Chet and say do you really exist because of course anything he says will be consistent with my solipsism so myself your salep system instantly refuted by me my solid system instantly refuted by you if you exist on the other hand if my cell ops ISM is true there's no way that I can find counter evidence through it by appealing to the standard ways that one usually Appeals for evidence however there's an oddity about solecism and that is as far as I know no great philosopher has ever been a solid system now our almost every nutty view you can imagine has been held by some famous philosopher or other I mean beginning with Plato we don't know about Socrates because he never published we don't know what what do you actually help but we have to trust Plato but beginning with Plato you can find every nutty view held by some philosopher or other I'm usually some famous guy but not salep system now maybe the reason for that is if somebody was a self system telling us him or her telling us because of course we don't exist as far as he claimed so why bother to tell us about his about our own non-existence now I'll take questions a second I have been told that fixed up the one of the many German philosophers I never read was a solipsistic but I'm not sure about Viktor so you go look up do your google fix down and see what comes up though don't believe it if it's on Wikipedia yes ok there's a philosopher at MIT called Caspar Harris who is a solipsistic just refuted him okay.i so there are two options if you want a relativism about reality ontological relativism and that is you can say everything is relative to me but that's solid ISM and it is not an attractive position I think if you can show that a view results in solid system view refuted the view on the other hand you can say no no it's relative a each person has his own existence even though it's relative well then what's it relative to and it looks like you've got an infinite regress because if I say well look it's raining here now but only relative to you and your preferences well how about that statement that it's raining relative to you and your statements isn't that relative or is it absolute well if it's relative there must be something that it's relative to and that means well there's some other set of preferences and people that that's relative to what you see where that's going that's an infinite regress now some regresses are vicious and others are not the infinite regress of the natural numbers so for any number there's always a larger number 1 2 3 4 or 5 you can keep going that's not a vicious regress but the regress in relativism whereby you can only state something relative to somebody's existence and preferences if those preferences and themselves are relative then you have to state what their relative to and that infinite regress is vicious because it in May it prevents you from stating anything you never succeed in saying anything because once you state the relative truth then there's always some other relative truth behind it which you will need to state in order to make clear what you're stating with the first truth I'm gonna take question of sanity so we've got a big piece of spaghetti I want to get it all out here okay so let me summarize this that there is no coherent position of relativism once you accept relativism a relativism about true you're stuck with disco tation now dis quotation forces you I just say while relativism about truth leads immediately to relativism about reality because if the truth that snow is white is relative then the fact that snow is white is relative to because of this quotation now you might say well what's wrong with that let's make reality relative what the hell let many flowers bloom let's be democratic everybody can have their own reality but that won't do either because you've got to say what is the reality relative to and it turns out you've got two options as far as I can see now maybe somebody give me a third option the reality is either relative to me in which case I got salep system the only reality is my reality or it's more democratic everybody can have their own reality but then that leads to a vicious infinite regress you can't state anything what's going on in this debate well I think what's going on is this the relativist would like everything to be like matters of taste if I say chocolate really tastes great and you can't stand chocalate well ok we can say I when I say it tastes great I mean it tastes great to me and that can be true even though it doesn't taste great to you that's what that's our model for what relativism would look like but that's not genuine relativism because that chocolate tastes great to me is absolute and that it tastes lousy to you is also absolutely so what the relativist would like would be to generalize the relativity of the good taste of chocolate to everything but leave out the absolute existence of the the good and bad taste in specific individuals but you can't do that you're forced to either solecism or a vicious infinite regress so I think that that the model that the relative has had is something like expression of taste and expression of preferences but the difficulty with that and this is a perfectly general point whenever you say anything is relative you've got to say exactly what is it relative to and once you say what it's relative to then you're forced to something that's absolute or you're forced to something that's got another relative phenomenon behind it that is it's got some other thing which is relative to when we apply that to relativity about truth you either get solipsistic existence of me and my preferences and my reality or you get a vicious infinite regress so that's the end of my reputation of relativism now there are a bunch of hands up yeah the guy at the back first yeah yeah yeah I the problem about skepticism is there many different versions of skepticism and skepticism does not necessarily imply relativism because a skeptic I mean human for example could say look I'm skeptical about the existence of material objects I think we really don't have any reason for believing in the existence of material objects we can't help believing it but there's no there's no ground for it but then why not because all we can ever perceive our own impressions impressions and ideas that's all we ever have access to but now that for Hume is not skeptical about that so in in typically in the skeptic in our philosophical tradition the skeptic uses some foundational basis such as our own experience and then says given that foundational basis you can never know for sure that other people exist the material objects exist that the Sun will rise in the east tomorrow so the skeptic is not like the relativist than I imagined because the skeptic begins with a basis that he said that he's not skeptical about humans skeptical about the existence of eye experiences he thinks you got to start with that he's like Descartes in that respect say some more yeah but you can't get I mean humans one of our all-time champions for skepticism it's hard most of the things that we kind of think we've not we'd rather not give up on humans you gotta be skeptical about so the existence of material objects the fact that I'm the same person the day that I was yesterday the fact that I have an identity across time and that objects have an identity across time the fact that that we can trust the results of science and that we can assume that the Sun will rise in the east tomorrow Hume thinks you can't help believing all that you go I'm gonna explain to you in the next chapter why you're why the old mind works in such a way you just can't help yourself you're gonna believe that whether you want to or not but there's no rational basis whatever if we believe that fire warms and water refreshes tis only because it to costs us too much pains to think otherwise I'm quoting verbatim Hume is grateful for 18th century English and incidentally I go look at you for the use of the subjunctive far be it from me to cite humans use of the subjunctive but anyway he is wonderful with as a stylist but the point I'm making now is that in general it's a skeptic I is skeptical about something because it doesn't meet a standard set by something else and there's something else he's not skeptic about humans not skeptic about the existence of experiences now maybe there are such skeptics who are so damn skeptical I can't say anything Cratylus I don't know any Greek philosophy but Cratylus is it's a reputed to have said well we can't really know anything can't say anything he just sort of waved a finger that was about the most that he could actually bring himself to I took commits himself too so I'm no expert on cratylus but the skeptics I know like the guys in our philosophical tradition since Descartes I are not like the relativist that I've been imagined okay other questions I would say a good one yeah yeah well okay we have our own reality determined by our observations are they are they the people and the observations absolute looks to me like they gotta be so you have an absolute existence and your observations set a certain conception that you have a reality from that point see most crazy philosophical theories are under lane by some deep truth and the deep truth that underlies relativism is that all claims are made from a point of view from a certain perspective that's right it doesn't follow that the claims made from a perspective can only be about the perspective no I can say from my perspective hydrogen atoms have one electron but guess what the damn things do regardless of whether or not I said that from my perspective so the person the truth of perspective ilysm that all utterances are made from a point of view from a certain set within a certain set of framework doesn't mean that you can't there for you that therefore you can't make statements that are absolutely true you can I can make a statements it's absolutely true two plus two equals four even though the statement is made by me from my perspective and that's the point I want to leave you with is the the underlying motivation behind relativism namely perspective a perspective ilysm that why everything is made from a perspective that doesn't imply relativism indeed if you take it seriously the perspectives themselves have to have an absolute existence people in their perspectives have to have an absolute existence and then once you see that then it's not hard to see often people from their perspectives can make claims that are absolutely true yes I make these claims from my perspective Barack Obama's president knighted States two plus two equals four hydrogen atoms contain one electron but all of those truths are true even though I there are they have an absolute in this sense absolutely they're absolutely true even though they're made by me from my perspective okay well now having gotten through relativism let's now struggle with the background is that okay I mean I I don't want to shut people up about relatives and there must be some relatives out there who like to defend their position but in any case let's now turn to the background now I make this strong claim and I have to say an awful lot of people disagree with me and but that is that all interpretation linguistic interpretation and indeed even perceptual interpretation is always made relative to a set of background capacities and dispositions that people have I and we only understand it relative to the background and the argument for that is that the same sentence with the same literal meaning will be given different interpretations relative to different backgrounds and I Ellis traited that you remember with the word cut if if I say a sally cut the cake and bill cut the grass the word cut means the same but of course it's interpreted quite differently as you see if you imagine an imperative sentence if I say to Bill please go cut the grass and he stabs it with a cake knife or if I say to sally cut the cake and she runs over it with a lawn mower I well they didn't do what I asked them to do and she did she's might say well do you know you let bill run over the grass when you asked him to cut the grass and that's how he did it now what's the matter way so unfair to me and my lawnmower look we did a nice job on this cake you can peel it off the lawnmower blades I but I think we would feel no she really didn't do what I asked her to do if you hire a guy to cut your grass once a week and once a week ago stabs it with a knife you kind of legitimately feel I on my summer vacation you were supposed to cut the grass and you didn't do it I did too watch this is what I did i okay so I think it the point I'm making there is this generally the case that that literal meaning is interpreted relative to a set of background capacities dispositions ways of behaving social practices biological biological features by alleging the common features so if you read in a book that they all went I and a reading a novel they all went and had dinner you know that they ate food they didn't have dinner the way they might have had twins they didn't give birth to dinner I and that they ate when they ate dinner they ate it by putting food in their mouths they didn't stuff it in their ear or absorb it through their skin through by osmosis now how do you know all that well you have a set of background capacities you know how to cope with the environment and this this set of background abilities is though it is essential for the operation of literal meaning is not itself part of literal meaning now why not why can't we make it part of literal meaning why don't we spell it out as a part of literal meaning and the answer that is if you try to spell it out you'd only get more sentences that would themselves be subject to further background interpretations that would themselves be a subject to the requirement that you have to have a background you know to understand the sentences and I have made the claim that this is true really involves actions that you understand any sentence only against a set of background presuppositions capacities dispositions and that those cannot be made as part of the literal meaning of the sentence if you try to make them as part of the literal meaning of a sentence you simply require more background capacities in order to understand the further sentences that in order that you postulated in order to fix the interpretation of the sentence that was in question now some people have used the background as an argument for relativism but it's not I mean to tell you the way that's one person one floor unknown is it and that's Terry Winograd at Stanford Winograd take the sentence take the question is there any water in the refrigerator is there any water in the icebox now I the way we would normally interpret that would be is there any bottled water of the kind that you buy in a store or bottled water that you put in a bottle to cool it but of course there are different ways of interpreting there are afterall h2o molecules in the lettuce so somebody say yeah there's water in the refrigerator because they're h2o molecules in the lettuce or indeed even if you don't have any lettuce there's still h2o molecules in the atmosphere inside the refrigerator unless you've got a 100% dehumidifier you're gonna have some h2o but of course that's not what you meant when you said there are h2o molecule ER at wat is there any water in the refrigerator you didn't mean are there any h2o molecules and the vegetables of course there are but that's not the meaning that was attached to the question okay now Terry thinks that's an argument for relativism but it's not he thinks reality then becomes relative to the background but no it doesn't the distribution of h2o molecules will be exactly the same regardless of how we interpret question is there water in the refrigerator the point the relativity here is not a reality the relativity is the interpretation of sentences the interpretation of sentences will depend on a set of assumptions practices ways of doing things I and general capacities okay now for many years I throw up many years for some years I tried to make a distinction a clear distinction between I call the network where you have a sort of network of beliefs and hopes and fears and desires and the background where you have a set of capacities and dispositions but in the end I couldn't do it I mean there and there's a theoretical reason why you can't do it and that is any unconscious belief when it's unconscious this only exists in that unconscious form as the capacity of the brain to produce that belief in a conscious form but if that's right then you can't make a distinction between the network which consists large part of beliefs and the background which consists of capacities because the background capacity of the brain to produce the belief in a conscious form is already part of the network because the belief can function and even function causally when it's unconscious now there are a whole lot of very deep issues about the explanation of human behavior here and we have the assumption that when we explain human behavior you've got to explain it by appealing to a whole lot of explicit but largely unconscious rules and principles that people are following I think that's wrong I think people do follow a lot of rules unconsciously if you watch the world series yesterday people playing didn't have to think about the rules they have those internalized to the point that they just know what to do so the guy hits the ball and he doesn't think now what the hell I run toward third base or first base oh I know there's a picture I'll run and give him a big hug no you don't do that that's you know what to do hi but now you don't have you don't have to think about it it's not a case of well I thought real fast go to first base no you just do it you have a habit and that's a background habit but notice you have the habit you do because the rules are what they are so the rules are still functioning I want to say these guys are following the rules unconsciously and in that respect it's like a background ability but the background ability is sensitive to the structure of the rules when I drove to work this morning I was busy thinking about philosophy and baseball and all that kind of stuff I was not thinking about the rule that says drive on the right-hand side of the road I just did that automatically but that's not because I was thinking very quietly follow the rule drive on the right-hand side of the road no I just drive on the right-hand side of the road but and this is the key point I have the background ability that I have because the rule is what it is so my behavior is ruled sensitive it's sensitive to the rules even though it's not a case of actually applying the rule see when you're actually applying the rule then the rule has to function through intentional causation if the University says there's a rule that I've got to follow that every 30 minutes in the course of lecture I have to stop and have 30 seconds for people to catch their breath or take a seventh-inning stretch or something like that okay then I would have to think about that rule in order to follow it but I don't think about the will drive on the right-hand side of the road all right so we have this idea and I think it's correct idea that we interpret sentence is only relative to a set of abilities habits dispositions and so on that are not part of the semantic content of the sentence semantic content only works because you know what to do with it it's not self interpreting you know how to apply it but your know-how is not itself a knowledge of four their semantic content okay now that is a tough idea I think it's in later Wittgenstein I mean this is what one of the things I learned I may be the most important that I learned from Vic in Stein's later work is that it's not a matter of rule following so to speak all the way down as Wittgenstein says there has to come a point where you just act you just know what to do and you act on your know-how okay I'll take questions in a second but this runs counter to our whole way of thinking of explaining human behavior in for example cognitive science the temptation it's less common now than it was when cognitive science was first invented 20 or 30 years ago but the temptation is to think look there must be a set of algorithms there must be a set of rules and your intelligent behavior is really a matter of carrying out actions in accordance with those rules and often these rules will be extremely complicated computational rules now I think that's a fantasy and let me give you an illustration some of the dogs I've had have been rather good about catching tennis balls Gilbert's not all that good tell you the truth but Russell was fantastic I mean better than Frager I've had for doggies by the way there Frei got Russell Ludwig and Gilbert Gilbert's named after Gilbert Ryle but now Russell was the best by mile Russell could catch a tennis ball no matter which way you threw it in which wallet you'd bounce it off of now how did he do it well the temptation is to think if you're going to explain Russell's ability to catch a tennis ball bounced off a wall you've got to think how you would build a robot that would do it but what programs would you put in the robot and the idea that people have is it has to be a rule like the following this is a rule there's an example I invented but it's in the spirit of the of the research project of early cognitive in order to catch the tennis ball Russell has to follow the following rules calculate the trajectory of the ball by assuming that it is in a parabolic arc pair of parabola and not a catenary it's a parabolic arc the flatness of whose trajectory is a function of impact velocity divided by the coefficient of the friction of the ball and allowing for a certain minimal deduction due to wind resistance and drag okay so poor Russell has to do a prodigious amount of mathematics in order to figure out what that damn ball is gone go remember that I didn't state all the rule I just got started put your mouth and a plane where the angle of incidence is exactly equal to the angle of reflection and the point at which you put your mouth is in a parabolic arc the trajectory of which is a function of impact velocity divided by the coefficient of friction - air resistance now Russell was a smart doggie but he wasn't smart enough to do all that that's not how he did it does everybody get the idea the idea is look there's a straightforward mathematical way to calculate where the damn ball is gonna be Russell knows where it's gonna be so he must have unconsciously done the mathematics no I'm saying that's wrong Russell didn't do any mathematics well what did he do well what would I do I would try to figure out where the hell is the damn ball go and put my mouth in that spot and by trial and error I would figure it out now somebody later on might say well ok you figured out without knowing it that it was a parabola and not a catenary and not a straight line and I thought maybe a correct way of describing me but that does not describe a rule that I was following the rule I was just following a form of intention I acquired a skill and the skill was such that I I put my mouth I'm assuming I'm I'm good as Russell I never would be but I put my mouth at that point but I doesn't follow that that's the rule that I was following in short there was a there was a kind of overintellectualizing assumption that was made in cognitive science in order to explain anybody's ability you have to imagine how you would design a computer you would design a robot that would carry out this task as a set of computation it doesn't follow from the fact that that's what people were in fact doing let me give you some other examples if you get to be a good skier your body takes over I get good enough so your body just responds more or less automatically and often you'll be amazed at how fast it responds because you reacted to the irregularity in the slope before you were conscious of the irregularity that's called a reflex by the way the notion of a reflex of much more complicated notion than people tend to realize now there are rules that would describe your behavior so in a perfectly car of turn the angle of reverse camber of the ski is exactly equal to the angle of the turn and if you think about that that has to be right if it's perfectly carved then more you bend the ski the tighter the turns going to be the angle of the reverse camber is exactly equal to the anger that turn angle the turn I never met a ski racer who knew that rule and why should they they don't they just skate you just ski them out and it's only philosophers or busy thing and how the hell does the reverse angle work and that's bad for ski racing incidentally you don't want to think too much and this by the way is an advantage of Austrian coaches American coaches all went to college and so when you get through the course they want to give you a theory and you get down the course and they'll say things like well I want you to keep your elbows closer to your body and I want your hands further far forward and when you do the the shift from foot to foot I want that much smoother that's a typical American coach Austrian coaches when you get through that course they and you say well what about it coach they say always the same thing snella go faster yeah okay coach but what about Ellen bogan you know my elbows forget about Ellen bogan Noah go faster but I you know foot to foot hands forward chanela they I mean they have mana so they're rather a laconic Austrian coaches don't give you a heavy-duty theory at least when I was subject to these guys none of them had been to college they were local peasant boys and they tended to beat us I mean the Austrians tended to beat the Americans and maybe that was one reason is that they didn't theorize Americans had all been to college had all been to Dartmouth or Colorado wherever maybe the education wasn't all that good but at least they did have a theoretical bent now I'm suggesting that sometimes we're not applying theory you just learn how to do it and the body takes over with these things oh ok so what is that what is the background as how does it work well one way to explore the background is to see this set of abilities that I've been talking about to see how it actually structures your behavior and I'm going to go through several examples of that but first let's take questions I have to tell you what I'm telling you now it's very controversial most people think that my conservative background is either obviously false are more or less crazy I mean their various attacks on it there's one intelligent attack by my colleague Barry Stroud in a book called John Searle and his critics and you can find it in the library or I'll put it on reserve and I responded to that I think his criticism is mistaken but I think it's an intelligent criticism it's certainly worth reading so you can have a look at that but there most people think that there's something profoundly or not most people but a lot of people think is something profoundly mistaken about this idea that in order that intentionality can function there has to be a set of background abilities that enables you to apply the intentional content that the intentional content of the sentence what we call the meaning of the sentence is not self interpreting so what I want to do in the next few minutes is go through a set of ways in which the background functions things that the background actually does and then you can get some sense of what I'm driving at when I say all intention ality only functions it I mean by function here I mean and in the most strict sense it only determines conditions of satisfaction relative to a set of abilities capacities and dispositions that are not themselves further intentional contents okay questions I thought I saw some hands on everybody's with us so far yeah yeah their answer is it's anti-intellectual ii think that's some kind of mystical background going on here get the algorithms tell us that damned algorithms and we will we'll program the computer so the computer will do it but they have real problems and one of the ways if you're interested in computer science one of the ways that it keeps coming out is the frame problem the frame problem is is the background problem the frame problem is well look in order for the computer in order for the robot to understand anything it's got to understand it within some kind of a frame and how do you put that frame in the program so you program the robot to a telephone you when to call your office and tell you to go home when it gets the five o'clock so the robot looks up in the phone book what your phone number is and then it starts to down and it thinks well wait a second maybe looking the number up changed the number so I better go back and look again and see if it's still the same number and then it looks yes still the same number and then and then the robot thinks we'll wait a second maybe it's the second time that you look at the number that it changes the number way you see where this is going to go now in a way that's kind of an example that I would like to give we just take it for granted as part of our background that you can assume that the material in the phonebook does not change on looking at it but you see other things I backed the car out of the garage well now when you say that you know that the shadow of the car came with you but the floor of the garage did not come with you how do you know that where's that written down now if you're programming a computer you have to tell a computer other computer another shadow does it stay behind or does it go along that's for us that's part of the background and the temptation is to think all of the information you know has got to be in some it's got to be in the database it's got to be part of the information that's encoded in the database of your computational brain and I'm saying you couldn't do that if you tried to write down everything you know let's get a huge piece of paper they're kind of they have in butcher shops where you get roll of the paper and there could be a mile long and you write down everything you know or believe you'd never finish now there's a sense in which you never get started because anything you write down only makes sense relative to a set of background capacities for interpreting it so if I was write down everything I know I'd say well there's a chair here and a chair here and a chair here and sure and I'd have to I and there's chairs next to that chair and this ones next to that chair and so on and that's it's really rather boring a lot of stuff I've got but I understand all that only relative to a background I know for example the chairs don't disappear as soon as I point at them our as soon as I think about them I take for granted that there's a certain type of way that things behave the alternative view is to think everything can be made fully explicit and this is a powerful feature of our tradition of our intellectual tradition is the idea that all of our cognitive capacities can be made fully explicit as a set of precisely stated rules and when we behave or think or act it's because we're following the rules now there there are several things wrong with that I'm Vicki Stein pointed many of these out one is the rules are always going to be subject to different interpretations you know how to interpret the rule but that means that I there you don't want to have to say well then there's a rule for interpreting the rule there because there's a rule for following the rule because you see where that's going you're going to get a regress if you say well any rule is understood only because you got a rule it tells you how to understand it then you're gonna have to say oh yes and then you need a rule for telling you how to interpret the rule it tells you how to interpret the rule you're gonna have a problem with that there are just ways that people have of behaving which they're brought up on or which are part of their biological makeup and by and large they're taken for granted one that varies from culture to culture is how far apart you stand from people when you're having a conversation I and if you ever I go to a lot of international conferences and one of the things you notice is that Italians like to get closer then English people do and there's a kind of standard scene that you see at international conferences where two guys are having a conversation and the Italian is trying to get close enough I'm waving his hands all the time so that he can actually tell you what he's trying to tell you the Englishman on the other hand he's trying to back up to a respectful distance so that he can have a civilized conversation alright so they continue to waltz around the room in this dance with the Italian trying to get close enough to actually converse with this guy and the Englishman trying to maintain a civilized distance now neither of them is actually thinking about that that's just the way that they are the way they've been brought up to behave the way that they have of relating to social situations that and it isn't that well the Englishman follows the 37 centimeters rule and the Italian follows the 25 centimeter rule that's not it at all there's no rule because of course this situation will determine how the rule is applied if the Englishman is trying to seduce the French woman that he met at the reception then the 37 centimeter rule is off and it's a totally different set of relationships are involved here and by the way one of the ways to study the background is different sexual practices different ways that people have of behaving I in situations involving relationships between those sexes what constitutes going out on a date for example I don't know if that still exists but when I was a kid it was a horrible experience and there was a certain set of ways that people had it behaving and it didn't work in foreign countries I mean I had a date with a German girl well I won't tell you about that's another story but in any case there's ways that people have of behaving which are not matters of of following a rule that you couldn't get an algorithm for doing that and insofar if you had a rule the rule itself is subject to different interpretations relative to two different contexts and then there's a sort of standard interpretation which I'm suggesting as part of the background so they the alternative view is that everything is fully algorithmic and that everything is a matter of following explicit rules which could be formalized just we haven't got around to doing it yet and I'm suggesting you can't do it if you wrote down everything that you do or everything that you believe everything you presuppose you'd never get the list complete and there's a sense in which you never really get started because anything you write down will itself be subject to different background interpretations okay other questions about that now I'm going to tell you someone yes yeah the idea that question for people the back was is there a gradient I'm not quite sure what you mean by that but I think I I do between consciousness and the background in general the background functions unconsciously you don't have to think about it when you're walking for example you don't think first the left foot then the right foot then back to the left oh my god what do we do now jump with both no no it's right next you see you don't have to think that you just walk now that's the background in action you know how to walk without thinking about it but again those are the way the styles that people have a walking are very much influenced by the background I think I probably walk in a typical American slouchy way I and it is not at all the way that people in some countries are brought up to walk but that would be a case where the background functions unconsciously now you can always bring an element of the background to consciousness but it's not clear that it works better when it's brought to consciousness I know how to park a car perfectly but then I had to teach somebody how to park a car and it turns out I didn't know how to held it do it you see and they in driving schools they do have certain things they teach people but those rules are rules of thumb get your front wheels next to the back wheels of the guy next to you and then start turning I turned the wheel this way until that your wheels are parallel those wheels and then turn it that way that's the way they teach him I don't know if that works but that's not the way I learned the way I learned is try to keep an eye on the curb and try and keep an eye on that other guy's car so he get close to the curb without hitting his car I don't know if that's a rule or not but anyway this is a case I think when you when I Drive most of the stuff I do is unconscious and it's ground ability so any part of the background can always be brought to consciousness but it doesn't follow that when it's functioning its function in the same way as when it's conscious and an illustration of that is often when you bring it to conscious it becomes less fluent less melodic the whole point about a skillful background behavior is it's it's quite fluid and melodic the good skier just does it just goes down their mountain now that doesn't mean no effort is required on the contrary you want to see effort watch a guy in a serious race one of the best background movies ever made is the Winter Olympics in Innsbruck and I can't remember names anymore that crazy Austrian who won the downhill race there's a wonderful movie of him and you see his body constantly adjusted going 70 miles an hour and his body is constantly adjusting to changes in the terrain it wasn't surance it was a different guy anyway let me give you another illustration of backgrounds and now it's same Olympics jean-claude Killy skied what he thought was an absolutely perfect race he technically it was absolutely textbook perfect and the French go for elegance they like to have technically perfect performances but when they posted the times he was 5 seconds out now that's like losing a football game by 50 points I mean it's that's a disaster what races are won by less than a tenth of a second I so after that he forgot about technique he just went as the Austrians say now ah he just went fast forget about that technique and cutting a Bella Figaro to switch to Italian and then he won everything at the next Olympics which were in France and Val d'Isere so I again this is a good illustration I forget that when you're actually in the in the competition when you're actually in a performing at the highest level you often forget about the rules those word rules of thumb anyway and you just do what's work do what is most effective in this situation okay let me tell you some ways that the background functions and that'll make clear what it is well first of all and this is the one we've been saying it enables linguistic interpretation I want to say pick up the San Francisco Chronicle today the front page is all about the Giants and ask yourself how much do you have to know to understand what this is about and there a lot of it will be explicit things you know such as that the Giants made it to the World Series but there are an awful lot of things that are implicit or awful a lot of things that are background knowledge about the way that people regard winning and losing for example okay so that's the first point the second point related to that is that perceptual interpretation is a function of background abilities so you automatically when you look around this room I you your eyes adjust in such a way that you know that the people at the back of the room are not smaller than the people of the front of their home even though they occupy a much smaller portion of your visual field but you you're automatically adjust to the background presupposition that figures the same sized figures will appear smaller when they're further away so perceptual interpretation is as much a function of background abilities as is linguistic interpretation and again Mikan Stein gives a good example there's a picture of a man walking up a hill now what fact about it makes it the case that it's a picture of the man walking up the hill and not a man sliding backwards down a hill it could be either way well the answer is because we have a background tendency to interpret it as a man walking up a hill but if somebody said drawing a picture of a man sliding backwards down a hill I might produce exactly the same picture okay so there is a the perceptual interpretation is a crucial background function now a third background function and I think this is the importance of this is probably in adequately appreciate it and that is we tend to structure our experiences according to a set of what you might call narrative expectations we have a dramatic structure to the experiences that we undergo we tend to fit them into categories and these categories involve a certain dramatic or narrative factors let me give you a bunch of examples so everyone sound so vague you have you know what is involved in going into a supermarket and buying some food or for that matter going to a lecture and listening to a lecture going into a restaurant and ordering a meal and eating it in all of those you have a set of expectations about what to do and what's going to happen it is and now you have much larger dramatic structures you're much much larger background narrative structures so there is so to speak a dramatic structure of going to college selecting major falling in love getting married pursuing a career all of those have a certain dramatic or narrative structure and you experience them in light of the structure it's often hard for people to perceive things that depart from the structure a famous case was when Captain Cook arrived in Sydney Harbor the local natives literally didn't see anything because they had no expectation that would fit this big hunk of wood as a ship but it's when the men began to climb down the sides of the ship and get into little row boats that they panicked because they could recognize those were guys now they now they had something that fit into their narrative structure that fit fit into their background presuppositions as long it was just a great big ship it might as well have been a cloud but the moment that got actual human beings poured over the sides of the ship and got into boats then it became terrifying and it became something that they were aroused about so we have these narrative structures of what to expect and watch the behavior of people during the elections now it's very interesting to watch the background in operation as you see that the nasty attack ads are attempts to trigger certain things of the background there's this sort of background assumption that there's something bad about career politicians that you if you show that the guy is about that your opponent is a career politician that immediately is supposed to be it makes him out as a villain in the political narrative and the innocent guy who comes off of the street or from a business that that is again part of this narrative structure is somehow to be preferred so I want you to keep your eye out for narrative structures I in interpreting your experiences and this was especially the case in the in the 1960s in the Free Speech Movement the single thing that most astounded me was that we won I never expected us to win and I was quite I was a little bit disconcerted when we won and I'm not sure it was a good idea but we did win now why what what happened well I was brought up in the fifties and in the 50s a people who were protesting in justices assumed you would lose but you made a difference you thought maybe in the long run but you expected to lose you expected that and in this particular conflict I'm going to say against Senator McCarthy the den senator from Wisconsin we didn't think we'd actually beat him but we would make a problem for him but in the 60s and my total amazement the Free Speech Movement we destroyed the legitimately constituted authority of a major American University and with what I mean a ragtag bunch of students and a few young faculty members who really didn't know what the hell they were doing anyway I was one of them and now how did it work well what happened a part of what happened was that we succeeded in undermining the background' presupposition of legitimate Authority the authority works best when you never worry about it when it's quite invisible and you just take it for granted but once the authority has become be legitimated once the authority is no longer regarded as legitimate once a different narrative structure comes into play and the narrative structure is idealistic young people confronted with a corrupt and evil establishment then you get a different set of background presuppositions I'm not saying which is right which is wrong I just want you to be able to perceive the assumptions which enable you to interpret the data and once they once the authorities had become D legitimated that is once the authorities weren't could no longer take it as a background given that they were to be respected then everything they did was perceived you know in a very bad light and there's a terrible movie made about this called Berkeley in the 60s I'm not saying you should see it but if you do see it you will observe the operation of these background factors in action okay so that's the third thing that the background does the first is its structures it enables linguistic interpretation the second is its structures our perception and the third is that it gives a narrative structure over time you tend to perceive the events that occur in your life as predictable as manageable you know what to do next because you've mastered the background you know what to do it supermarket you know what to do in a restaurant this is why so when you go to foreign countries or sometimes bewildered by the fact that the background is different in Italian coffee shops people stand at the coffee barn when there are a lot of empty seats what Americans don't know is you pay a hell of a lot more if you sit in those seats now this is I know where's that written down it's just people just take that for granted that I would say it's part of the network and not the background but the point is the narrative structure in an American coffee shop doesn't give you a different price whether you're sitting or standing it's the same coffee okay and then I want to say a fourth feature of the background and a way it's one that unites these other three is its structures your consciousness all of your conscious experiences are structured by a set of expectations about how things go you know how to respond to your perceptual experiences because you have a set of background presuppositions now this is why Baudelaire was so revolutionary Baudelaire thought we have to disorder the senses you see the 19th century that he was responding to that he was militating against wanted note precisely an order of the senses and this is why incidentally the revolution in painting that began with the Impressionists was so disconcerting to people because the background presupposition that everything had to be that the experience of the painting had to reflect the fixed character of the reality that people assumed they were experienced when they saw anything that was that assumption was challenged now the wonderful thing about the impressionist they had a false theory of perception but they produced great pictures you know I don't want to tell them when they look your theories crazy because it might wreck the pictures the pictures are great even though the theory is mistaken the theory is you don't paint the object you paint your experience of the object well there's no way you can paint your experience of the object without painting the damned object but the results are terrific so stay with the results and don't worry about the theory in any case at the point I'm trying to get now is this fourth feature of the background namely its structures all of your consciousness comes out especially when you see your consciousness disordered in certain ways either by being challenged by the by representations of experience that go against standard background presuppositions and that was true with the Impressionists and the post-impressionists now of course we all know what happened it just kept going until finally we got to Abstract Expressionism and I don't know at which point I became disgusted with other tradition I decided to try to write an article about how art how pictorial representation works as a speech act apply speech act theory of pictures I never published it but it's an interesting question you know how does it work and in the course of this I acquired a passionate hatred for Abstract Expressionism before that point always rather liked what's the name of the guy who throws the paint around on the canvas I can't remember name saying Apollo Jackson Pollock I sort of liked those guys but during the courses I had to go to Chicago and I was working on this I remember going down in the basement of the Chicago Art Institute and there they had Pollock and Franz Kline and and all the rest of them I thought this is where you bastards belong down in the basement but it's intellectual anti-intellectualism on my part I'm not recommending this I'm just telling you how my eye was disconcerted by the eye the fact that I I was suddenly trying to figure out how pictures worked and these guys seem to me not to take the question as seriously as a Monday and Monday and banghak did I think in fact if you look closely at van gock the world never looks the same again the best place is that crazy Museum in Amsterdam which they've got now where they have more of an ox in one place than anywhere else and they also have other people other paintings of other painters that you can compare it with anyway the most profound illustration I found of the operation of background assumptions was a cartoon a small child is being interviewed by the police and the police artist is sketching the criminal anyway you know how it works you describe the guy who assaulted you and the police artist will in draw the picture according to description you give and the police artist draws this picture and the small child says yes officer that's the man now if we can understand why that's funny or why I found it funny we understand a lot about the nature of pictorial representation okay I'm going to keep going on now with these we don't have a lot of time left but let me mention some other features of the background I it also structures your motivational dispositions so if you if you're a mountain climber how you look at mountains differently from the way that other people look at them you tend to look for roots I am NOT a mountain climber I never look for roots I just look for the look at the mountain on the other hand I'm a skier when I ski us when I see a snow-covered show I slope I think I would ski it I think where I would which way I would go around that tree and how I would take that gully you have a motivational disposition if you are loved Arizona cactus and desert landscapes you're elected to find a Paris not a very interesting City if what you like are works of art and architectural contrasts then Paris is a much more interesting City so you have motivational dispositions the kind of things you like or don't like the sort of things that motivate you and the things that don't motivate you if you're obsessed about good wines and good restaurants you will respond to a certain city's a favorable way and other cities in a much less favorable way so you have this set of motivations which become part of your background and which structure your that character of your experiences now another feature I'm kind of I don't know how what number I'm up to here must be about six or seven another feature is is a certain type of readiness that you have a certain readiness for certain things to happen and certain other things not to happen so right now for example I am ready for anybody to raise their hand and questions that's part of my background readiness for a situation like this where I'm lecturing on some controversial topic on the other hand I'm not ready for an elephant to come charging in the room or for that matter a skier to suddenly ski from one side to the other when I'm on a ski slope I am NOT ready to encounter people sitting sitting in chairs raising their hands saying I think I found a mistake in your book on speech acts you see I'm just totally unready for that so your readiness the kind of things you're ready for and not ready for the kind of things you expect and don't expect all of this will be a function of the background okay well look the next topic I want to get to is fiction now why is fiction so important for us well to put it in words in one sentence the words and the sentences in a work of fiction mean exactly the same as what they do in a work of nonfiction we couldn't understand it otherwise and yet the rules of speech acts are off the rules seem to be suspended what's going on in a work of fiction so for next Tuesday I want you to read that article the logical status of fictional discourse and I'll put the refutation of relativism on bSpace today and I want you to read that as well ok I'll say a bit more about the background on Tuesday and then we'll go on with fiction

Channel: SocioPhilosophy

Views: 3,081

Rating: 4.6666665 out of 5

Keywords: John, Searle, Philosophy, of, Language, University, California, Berkeley

Id: bK2Ttbg5Y5U

Length: 73min 34sec (4414 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 26 2011