Noam Chomsky - Understanding Reality

uh, Donald Davidson in an article called a nice EPS EPS disorder uh said uh or basically argued that there is no such thing as language and um, I've always thought that you probably don't want to admit it, but on some level I probably agree with that, right, No, in fact, I think he ended up contradicting himself. I think there is some discussion about this here or somewhere. If you look at the end of the article, it turns out that it presupposes that there is a notion of language in the technical sense. technical sense of an internal generative procedure that relates sounds and meanings, etc., says that there is no notion of language in another sense, the sense of some communal property or whatever, well, first of all, I don't think that's true, It's just that it's not a scientifically usable sense, uh, but I think the article is riddled with confusion.

I've written about it, so you think there are things like languages, yeah, like they exist in the anal sense, like there are things like the meaning of life, you know. and I understand it when people ask what is the meaning of life, so yes, there is the meaning of life, there is the financial crisis in Argentina, you know, there are all kinds 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 have to look at it differently than the way we look at primates, other primates and Fa, well, let me read a quote from something you wrote recently, okay, you say me I doubt that people think that among the constituents of the world there are entities that are simultaneously abstract and concrete like books and banks or that have the amalgam of properties that we discover when we explore the meanings of even simplistic words like River, person, City, etc. do you believe? the average person doesn't believe in the technical question, okay it's a question if you try to find out what a person's popular science is, you know how people think that the world is really made up of entities, which it's not, I'm talking about books, of course.

We talk about books, we talk about the meaning of life, etc., but if you ask people right, you know how they think the world really works, that's a problem of ethnoscience, like if you go to another community and try to find out what is your idea about how the world works like maybe the classical Greeks thought that Apollo pulled the sun across the sky or something like that is your popular scientific image of how the world works, that's a difficult topic, it can't just be done armchair philosophy about it, that's why ethnic scientists have to work, you know, and when they work, what they find, I think, if they worked on People Like Us instead of just talking about it in a common room, you know , they would discover that our popular 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 does not mean that we cannot talk about them.

I'm sure we talk about them all the time, but we don't, at least I don't, and I guess other people don't consider them constituents of the way the world operates, but we don't do that when we talk to each other about informally, now that sounds a little more moderate than what you said. said elsewhere um uh here's a passage from I think 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 of the search for the laws of nature, objects do not They are conceived from peculiar perspectives. provided by common sense concepts, that's absolutely correct, but there are several different companies that you have to distinguish here and no, I don't think it's more or less moderate, it's a different topic, uh, when you're trying to understand something. about the nature of the world, you and me, anyone starts with some kind of what is called folk science, almost every society we know has some picture of the way the world works, which is more or less commonly shared if you try Do this more thoughtfully. and carefully, uh, and you know, by incorporating other criteria and probably incorporating other cognitive faculties, we don't know for sure, but I suspect that then it becomes the Enterprise of science, which is a different and peculiar Enterprise, it's not popular science.

It is science that works in other ways. This comment has to do with our culture and with which the enterprise of science is understood directly in our intellectual culture and in that when we try to discover how the world works we discard common sense concepts. very quickly, but it seems to me that what you're saying is that the only things that are really correct are the ones that science tells us are real, so it seems like what you're saying here is that, well, this table isn't . real, but maybe you know that real is an honorific term, you can use it however you want.

I mean, if I say something is true and then add, well, it's the actual truth. I'm not saying there are two different kinds of truth. truth and real truth. I'm just emphasizing what I said and the actual term is basically used honorific, so yes, you can use it horribly in various ways, if we are trying to figure out the way the world works and really understand it in the sciences way, very quickly we abandon the notions of common sense, if we carry out popular science, you know in a less reflective way, probably using different cognitive faculties, we also abandon the notions of common sense, but in different ways, well, you can say one I mean a lot of statements about that something is honorific, like what is real is honorific.

I mean, 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 is the difference? In these cases, then, because I think that rationality is something that we can understand, that morality is something real and it's part of us and 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 eh, but about

reality

we have to ask ourselves what we are talking about, right?

If we're talking about the

reality

in the business of trying to figure out the way the world works in a physics department or a linguistics department or whatever. Common sense notions are irrelevant if we try to explore our intuitive

understanding

of the way the world works. common, without common sense. The notions are relevant, but we discard them if you use them in a more informal way, like the meaning of real life, yeah, sure, okay, look, there is a kind of space between ethnoscience and science, and meaning common and all that, and it's been explored by philosophers for 2,500 years and it's called metaphysics.

No, that's different, okay, that's a question about what it is. Ethnoscience is a branch of science. Ethnoscience is the branch of science that tries to discover what people's beliefs are about the way the world works. Metaphysics is not that I understand that, but do you think metaphysics is impossible? No science is metaphysics. Oh, it's fine. Well, it's about what the world is made of, but then the question is why do you think science can claim what is real? Let me give you an example. In the scientific image, BOS and Frosten are an anti-scientist. realistic, so it says that the things proposed by scientific quarks, etc., are not real, but medium-sized terrestrial objects are real.

Now you have the other side of that, right? I have no side because I don't think the actual word is sensible enough. To use I, everyone is real in different senses, if you are trying to understand the way the world really works, whether you are a bus passenger or you or I, we will go to scientists because they tell us how the world works . It really works if we are interested in exploring people's common sense beliefs, we will go to ethnological scientists and see what they discover. What if we are interested in something like whether there are events, whether there are properties, or whether there is umology? sums or something, let's take events that play a prominent role in modern semantics, so here you can ask a lot of different questions.

To begin with, you can ask whether, for example, in Davidsonian semantics, there is much or anything that developed from that. event based semantics if things, whether called events, are internal to the mind or outside the head, true, but I think they are internal to the mind, can't they be both? Well, they could, but then we're asking another question if I'm asking, how do these internal things of 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. For example, is the American Revolution an event?

Yes, it was an event. An important event in history, does that event include the fact that the man whom the indigenous population called the Destroyer of the city took a little time in the middle of the Revolution to destroy the Iroy civilization? It is that part of the event called the American Revolution. Well, not when you study it in school, you know, you want to know about that event, you probably have to remember those who were left or you have to look at serious academic history and then you find out that. Part of what was happening in the event we call the American Revolution was a parallel 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 not?

Well, you know, here come difficult questions about what we're really going to call events in the outside world and those questions don't have answers because, you know, they depend largely on our interests, our perspective, our goals. I know all kinds of factors, so I don't think we're going to find external events in any sense worth investigating. World why external events are just complicated objects, it can be whatever you want, but that's the City Destroyer exploit. part of the American Revolution or it's not okay that event you know it's your choice there's no answer to that yes, 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 of which we formally call correct events, but now one might wonder what the heck is a representation, it's not a representation of something, we'll see, it's an error that comes from a philosophical tradition, the way the term represent is used in philosophical tradition is a relation between an internal object and an external object is not the way it is used either in ordinary speech or in the sciences, so when a perceptual psychologist says he is talking about an internal representation of, either you know, a cube or something there, it doesn't have to be any Cube, there they are talking about something that is happening in the head, in fact, what they may be studying and usually are studying is a relationship between things like kcop presentations and internal events.

There is no Cube, but they still talk about an internal representation. I am referring to the concept of internal representation. There is a long discussion about that here. The concept of internal representation is used in the Sciences and I believe it is also ordinary discourse in ways that do not involve a relationship between an internal thing and an external thing. I mean it comes from a particular interpretation of the theory of ideas, you know, which said, well, ideas represent something that's out there. I should intervene here. Finally, I should say that that is not the interpretation of the theoretical ideas that were given by the people who used them, so let's say hum. for example, I quote him there and he raises a serious empirical question, he says, it's about the nature of U, the terms, he uses the identity that we attribute to things, that is, how we individuate things correctly and he asks the question.

Well, is this a peculiar nature common to the thing or is it what he calls fictitious? A construction of the mind. And he says it's fictitious. There is no entity. There is no common nature. There is no common nature. The thing is a construction of the thing. mind with which we used to talk about the world no, he is not an idealist he is not an idealist he is not here, he is saying that we interact, he believes that there is an external world out there, there is a cup of coffee on the table, etc., but he says he's talking about the individuation of things how we organize things how we construct our picture of the world correctly 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 your predecessors called our knowledge of powers that uses data from the senses to construct an explanation of the world and he says, well, you want to look at the identity of things, the identity that we attribute to things like that which makes us call something a book or an event, etc., he says, well, it is fictional in the sense that it is a construction of Mind based on sense data which is not an idealistic position, in fact, that is the position of modern science because people will call you a cryptoidealist and then they won't quite understand what idealism is okay, leave me there. a topic I wanted to get to here and this involves what we mentionedabout representations and whether representation requires that there be something that is a representation of now in a very important and somewhat influential book by Saul kryy there is a Renaissance of the kind of vidin staran argument about following rules, let me read the relevant passage here, so in that book, kryy says that if statements attributing rule following should not be considered a statement of fact, nor should thought be given to explaining them or behavior, it would seem that using the idea of ​​rules and competition in linguistics needs serious reconsideration, even if these notions do not lose their meaning now The term rule has been used for thousands of years, in fact in the study of language it is not the kind of rule that he had in mind, so if someone reads a book that you know you study Latin, let's say, or you studied it a thousand years ago , they would have a rule that tells you when to use the ablative case or something that is not a rule in Wienstein's sense, it is a description of a part of correct language so that questions about rule following simply do not arise, but no we need to obsess over rules and stuff, that's what he's talking about.

I get it, but in a sense you're talking about any kind of computational state. but hey, just take a computer, forget about human beings for a second, look, computers are a different story, okay, let's take a look, yeah, okay, yeah, look, why don't these questions be asked about insects? I mean insects when you study insects. What you attribute to them is that computational statistics is a problem, I mean, isn't it real? If you say what an insect does, you know, is determine the position of the sun based on the time of year and time of day, and here's the calculation it's using that's why it's not science.

That would be it, but the argument would be that the reason you can get away with it is because you're talking about what representations you're attributing to. bugs are externalized and anchored, meaning you couldn't do it unless you had an integrated system. That is not true. You could do it in an experimental situation where you have a light, and in fact, if you knew how to do it, you could do it. do it by stimulating the insect's external sensory organs, everything would be internal and there doesn't have to be a sun, no, it's just that yes, you are talking about it the way it happens in the real world, but you would just as well say the same thing in a experimental environment where you don't have an external world because you're talking about the internal construction calculations of the insect, uh, on the occasion of sensory perception, it doesn't matter what's outside.

However, he changed there because he went from saying that he went from saying that he doesn't need the sun in the experimental environment to saying that he doesn't need it, that he 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 that if you look at what insect scientists are studying, they're studying what 17th century philosophers used to call the sense constructions of the mind, right now it happens that in the world they're looking at uh the occasions of meaning turn out to be related to the fact that there's something 93 million miles away but the study could continue as if it were what Hillary called an innovative brain.

I'm the studies are internalist uh because We don't know anything other than studying, but this is in dispute, right? I mean, there's a dispute about David Mah, right, I mean there's two stories about Tyler Burge and Martin Davis, for example, arguing that Mah is kind of a Frau with an externalist. Sort of yes, but they're just mis

understanding

it. Well, I mean, actually, they have to know more personally, but I'm sure if he were here, he would say this if you look at the informal exposition on marah in the Vision of Marah book, let's say. Vision, you look at the informal exposition to motivate what he's doing, he says, well, you know, imagine you meet an elephant or something like a stick figure, uh, and you're trying, you and you, we want to know how that thing works .

The visual system interprets that there is some three-dimensional object, however, if you look at the experiment, M's experimental procedures did not have elephants, in fact, what they were using was the gcop, uh, and yes then they had dots on the screens and if they had known how to stimulate the optic nerve they would have done it. When you move from informal exposure to real science, you see that, like everything else, it is a study of inner nature. of the Beast uh and in fact you already know this and they would have loved to get to the point where they could tell you something about how to identify an elephant, but they never came close to that, however, even if they did, it wouldn't matter if the elephant is there or not, it wouldn't matter what sensory what is the occasion of sense again, the 17th century formulation of this was I think quite appropriate in occasion of sense knowledge sounds archaic but knowledge of the powers of the mind uh build internal structures complicated things that have all kinds of properties, gestal properties, knowing what Hume later called the identity that we attribute to things and that seems right and that's the way modern science sees it, the fact that informal expositions, you know to motivate what you're doing, talk about identifying objects outside, that's fine, but you have to know how to distinguish the informal exhibits from the real science program and if you look at the real program, they never looked at the things outside other than Tachistoscopic images because they are as close as possible to the occasion of the sins.