Freeing speech & limiting acts
Published by Ben Samuel Nelson October 20th, 2006 in Philosophy, Law and Society, JurisprudenceIn reply to a recent thread, Cosim had two pressing concerns over the ethics and legal philosophy behind free speech.
(1) “I’m not sure why the law should tolerate racist opinions; general propositions donât decide concrete cases. For example, to take the Brandenburg case from American constitutional law, Klansmen spoke about sending “the Black back to Africa, the Jew to Israel”. Although the threat was surely not imminent, I’m not certain why a society should permit such talk, even if it is only that: talk by white men in white bedsheets.
In such a case, the risk-of-error - supression of speech that might in the long term come to good - seems exceedingly small so I think one can saely consider the limit of this over onto zero.”
(2) “Speech/act distinction: how viable? It’s mentioned several times, and I’m unsure as to whether and how much useful it is.”
On the surface, their arguments seemed somewhat plausible to me, for two reasons. One, I’m a Canadian, and I’ve grown up in a legal climate which is not especially interested in tolerating abuse in the name of free speech. True enough to that tradition, I can’t help but admit that I have no sympathy for hatemongers. Two, there is a distinction between the freedom to express content and the freedom to make particular speech acts, where the former is treated as sacrosanct, while open season may be declared on the latter. Yet this distinction can be troublesome. For instance, elsewhere in comments, I’ve admitted that the law may be more flippant with some kinds of cases of speech, and more wary with other kinds. For certain kinds of claims have a traditional rhetorical force than others; imagine the difference between an activist’s impassioned plea for desegregation as a direct commandment of the Constitution, versus a man giving an impassioned plea for the liberation of turnips. The former has a force on our sympathies which the latter obviously doesn’t, and the distinction in some part rests on the content, and not the manner of speech. The former would seem to have more political force than the latter.
Still, flying by on one’s initial reactions is a crappy way to live one’s life, so (1) and (2) need further examination.
(1) Let’s say for the moment that what Cosim says is true for a certain category of cases — in other words, that the speech act will always produce some kind of bad, and avoidable, consequence. If what he/she says is true, it would seem that the utilitarian (like myself) would be compelled to make an exception against free speech in that kind of case. The topic then zeroes in on the question, “Is free speech really a right?”.
I want to say, ultimately, “yes, it is a right”, because there’s always the worry about a slippery slope. So we have to ask ourselves two questions:
First, will the exception made by the community have a negative impact on its habits — i.e., will it weaken or destroy our understanding of “rights”? I believe so. Still, if the distinction we make is a principled exception, then that might seem more permissible — though it’s like a stop-gap measure which protects us from the collapse of a dam.
Second, will a principled exception made by the polity have a negative impact on the polity’s habits of enforcing rights? The entire judicial system works on the basis of precedent, so the answer seems to be an undeniable “yes”. But what do we figure would be the extent of the damage? Would people simply accept the exception to the rule, and leave it at that — or would they use it as a springboard for further erosions?
It’s hard to say; so much seems to be context-contingent. And if we do look at the present context, I can’t help but be pessimistic. Just think of the fiascos of recent years. The political attitude appears to be an eagerness toward the suppression of free speech, both in America (Bill Maher’s firing), Europe (anti-Islamist postures), and the Mideast (Danish cartoons). That worries me. But anyway, giving the benefit of the doubt, I could at best only claim agnosticism about the possible consequences. But whenever I’m blocked from the application of the principle of utility into a judgment, I must err on the side of principle — in this case, in favor of free speech. This “deontology-as-a-last-resort” attitude is perhaps not at all convincing. But I think it is no more convincing than any sweeping argument that the principled erosion of some right will have no potentially disastrous impact at all upon the way that right in general is applied (and understood) in the future.
(2) I worry about the viability of the act/content distinction as well. First, there’s obviously the worry that people will, in practice, make errors in applying the distinction. But there are also worries about whether a speech act can be divorced from the context of the act and the sensitivity of the audience, which would affect the force of the perlocutionary act.
What are we talking about here, in plain terms? I must confess, I don’t even know. Really, it doesn’t seem as though there’s any such thing as a perlocutionary act. For an act is supposed to be the product of some agent’s intentions; yet the perlocutionary act varies from audience to audience.
For example, let’s say that a popular comedian, Lenny, gets on stage before a large audience. Let’s also say that part of Lenny’s act is to make racist-sounding remarks in order to parody racist people. Most of the audience laughs at the joke. But let’s say that a prude in the audience, Richard, doesn’t quite understand that Lenny is actually mocking racists — rather, he thinks that Lenny is himself being a racist. Richard despises racists, and so, is offended. Now — given that because an act is supposed to be the product of some agent’s intentions, and given that we are working with the definition of “perlocutionary act” linked above — Lenny has performed an action, and that action was to offend Richard. But Lenny never intended to offend Richard; so how could he be said to have performed the act of offending him?
If we were to maintain that Lenny’s perlocutionary act was to offend Richard, nonsense would follow. Not only have we seemingly washed away the distinction between action and a mere consequence, we’d seem to have to say that the expressed content of the joke was all there was to the speech act.
A more nuanced examination would say something like, “Lenny’s speech act was to tell a joke; his perlocutionary act was to make the audience laugh; but a latent consequence was that Richard was offended”. But if that was the case, then Richard’s hurt feelings would not be the target of a perlocutionary act, but rather something else. Still, happily, the act/content distinction would seem undamaged in this case, because we can point to the content of the words and then contrast it to communicative intentions in a social context.
Perhaps Cosim had other concerns about how the viability of the distinction might be challenged, but the above was (I think) my big lumpenworry.
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Thanks for thoughtful remarks on my musings.
1. “Bad tendency”
This was the name given an early not-so-expression-protective analysis thought up by Oliver Wendell Holmes. That formulation - or fabulation, rather - was criticized by Zechariah Chafee on the ground that “any tendency in speech in speech to produce bad acts, no matter how remote, would suffice to validate a repressive statute.”
Learned Hand - his nihilism still not having taken firm hold - wrote around the same time, “I prefer a test based upon the nature of the utterance itself. If, taken in its setting, the effect upon the hearers is only to counsel them to violate the law, it is unconditionally illegal. [For] other utterances, it appears to me that regardless of their tendency they should be permitted.”
Does Hand take it too far the other way, though from Holmes’ bad tendency (sham) inquiry? Language, following Wittgenstein, Waismann, and Hart (among others), has an “open texture”, but the game is still probabilistic. (This is where I feel that Hand - and perhaps Ben too - make proscription of speech a priori impossible, since I doubt we could ever be sure of the “only” in Hand’s test or the “always” in Ben’s). Certainty in any field is hard to come by, and certainly I think that inquiry into content is essential, but also something we must be pragmatic about.
As I understand Ben, he’s making a point similar to Hand - or at least the Hand of circa 1919 - that since the inquiry into the likelihood of certain acts flowing from speech is to difficult to ascertain (such that we tacitly require a sure chance of unity and nothing less to act on our prediction), we should instead look at content. Hand’s move against Holmes seems to me an effort not to provide absolute certainty but rather more certainty - such that a reviewing court can be more sure of its look at the open texture of language in some situation than its predicting risk-of-harm and imminence thereof.
2. Is that all there is?
Hand’s move also seems to suggest to with its examination of content in context that discourse ethics covers a rather smaller conceptual space than ethics. Our inquiries in this area can’t be just procedural - although procedure has a lot - but not everything - to do with it.
3. Distinctions not dualisms.
I think that if we treat speech/act as a distinction useful in some cases, there’s nothing so bad about it. But once you end up putting all expression under that rubric it becomes instead like what Dewey maligned as a dualism (the fact/value dichotomy in his case)
4. Private language?
But on a still deeper level, I wonder if the speech/act distinction isn’t susceptible in many cases to a version - more or less - of Wittgenstein’s (anti-)private language argument. I won’t now elaborate on this for I’ve not worked it out in my head just yet except intuitively, so I shall let this one steep fro awhile longer.
It was evidently only the early Holmes who believed only in the bad tendency doctrine. From what I understand, he would later add the clear-and-present-danger doctrine which would counterbalance it. So I’m not sure that it’s fair to talk about him in a black-and-white way, much less to suggest that my similar worry about the effects on our habits is black-in-white in this way.
There are dissimilarities between our opinions, anyway. I don’t believe that there should be any direct governmental regulation of the content of speech, while Holmes evidently did. Rather, I think that the act/content distinction can do all the work.
Examples. When a man shouts “fire” in a theatre, it is the forseeable and unnecessary harm that makes the act a crime, not the content of the utterance. And when a man learns top secret classified information and spills it to the press, it is the disregard for the foreseeable harm against a (supposedly) lawful entity which is the moral crime, not the actual passing on of information itself. (Let’s say that a purely hypothetical man — Norbert Rovak, let’s call him — tells people about a secret FBI agent’s identity — call her Palerie Flame. If we were to forget all about the consequences, and just focused on the act of sharing certain meaningful information, then there’s nothing really wrong with that in itself. It’s not until one realizes (or is capable of realizing) that the consequences of revealing that information are dire that they understand the moral wrong involved. A distinction which is, perhaps, merely academic, but still). Of course, a person is liable to lawsuit for libel and slander, and that seems to be based on the content of the utterance; we might want to say that the telling of a dirty mean lie is in and of itself a bad consequence, so long as it is immediately understood. But a) that’s a civil matter, not a criminal one; and b) it’s really only a bad consequence if it’s foreseeable that people take it seriously, and that is part of the perlocutionary act, not the content of the utterance.
One virtue of a defence of free speech is that, if it is successful, it gives us enough time to get a taste of the consequences, and thus, of the very real threat of the slippery slope. That is also one of the advantages of having a case be treated by civil, and not criminal, court: evidence of damages is a major part of how punishments are laid out.
Another place where my argument seems to differ from the quoted authors is the default-deontology stance that I took. I admitted that consequences are hard to understand, but far from spurring forward more interpretations and reactions, my response was, “When in doubt, follow the relevant habit”: namely, protect free speech. It’s precisely content which I want to get away from (despite some admitted temptations to do the opposite).
I won’t claim that the act/content distinction is airtight, because it isn’t. Still, I’m not satisfied that I’ve defended it here to a degree of true certainty. I think I’ve protected it, to some extent, but there are still some cracks in the veneer. If it turns out that all content is merely conversational usage, then the distinction collapses, and my ensuing argument will have been exploded.
1. Tracing the Holmesean Arc
Indeed, the Oliver Wendell Holmes of the bad tendency test is not the heroic Holmes of later note, but I bring up his (pseudo-)debate with Learned hand because it illuminates greatly through a turbulent time the trajectory of his thought.
One of Holmes’ early free expression opinions on the Supreme Court is Patterson v. Colorado (1907), in which he essentially says that the First Amendment goes so far as - and no further than - William Blackstone’s Commentaries: speech was, therefore, protected only from prior restraint.
Holmes first explications of the clear-and-present-danger test came in the Schenck, Frohwerk, and Debs cases (1919). If one examines his opinions for the court, however, it then becomes apparent that he wasn’t at all yet the darling of free speech. The trilogy does move beyond the bad tendency test, but I think any reader of Holmes in the trilogy is required to fault him for rather putting the old test in a new suit.
But in the Abrams case (also 1919, but later in the year), Holmes wrote up one of his legendary dissents, in which clear-and-present-danger moves from a formula to an attitude (the free marketplace of ideas).
In early 1919, Hand lamented to Holmes that whether or not we criminalize speech doesn’t turn “upon reasonable forecast”, and that “in nature the causal sequence is perfect, but responsibility does not go pari passu.”
In their exchanges - then mostly private, nowadays available in their correspondence - Holmes tended always to go, even in his later more liberal views, onto calculating the likelihood that harm will result from expression. (Abrams itself is an example of that. Holmes and the majority (per Justice Clarke) have a disagreement mostly over the likelihood of the speech and whether it was incitement or not, although to be sure, Holmes also offers a liberal justification (via Milton and Mill) for the mechanism of his computation). Hand’s approach is by contrast more tightly focused not on gravity-imminence of the harm threatened by expresion, but rather on the value of the speaker’s words. As Hand wrote in a great opinion that didn’t become good law until after his death, when he was still a District Judge in the Masses case (1917), his inquiry isn’t causal (like Holmes, early or later) but normative. Hand asks whether challenged expression “falls within the scope of that right to criticise either by temperate reasoning, or by immoderate and indecent invective, which is normally the privilege of the individual in countries dependent upon the free expression of opinion as the ultimate source of authority.”
That might seem a lot like Holmes’ homily to the free marketplace of ideas where fighting faiths duke it out, but Hand discusses the meaning of the speaker’s words in context; his concern seems much less for determining the effect of those words in time, much more for what those words are for.
2. Between causality and normativity
With all respect, I think it’s too easy a brush-aside to split the difference between civil liability and that imposed by the criminal law. Free expression is a principle that applies just as well to both. (One of the great things about New York Times v. Sullivan (1964) was that Justice Brennan’s landmark opinion about a civil libel suit brought by a public official rejects seditious libel, period). Rumours concerning Vale…umm Palerie Flame seem to have been spread without regard for truth. To borrow a notion of Harry Frankfurt’s, the rumours appear not so much (mere) falsehood as bullshit itself - an unconcern for the truth. (I have felt that way about the way about the ‘justifications’, before and after, for the invasion and occupation of Iraq. They’re just statements calculated to some end, not very much - if at all - concerned with truth). The Sullivan case recognizes that - at least respects public officials (later public figures) - bullshit is more dangerous - treating another only as an end - than reasonable untruth. (Recall that in the case, there were, in fact, some inaccuracies in the advertisement taken out in the Times protesting the treatment of the protesters, but there was no bullshit, so no liability. I’m reminded of something by Lyotard on too much concern for the truth holding back discourse, and I think that’s right - but only to a point).
While you’re correct to note that “evidence of damages is a major part of how punishments are laid out” in a defamation suit, I think that Holmesean approach focusing on causality and foreseeability (whether in its freewheeling earlier incarnation or its more restrained maturity) takes a quite similar tack on the criminal side. The harm principle by right deserves just as much, ifn’t more, place on the side of the courthuse where they can lock you away as the branch where they can merely put you into ‘purely’ pecuniary misery.
In terms of being protective in practice of expression, I’m more inclined to think that a content-inquiry will place well in that role, rather than a causality test. While, to be sure, you err completely on the side of free expression I’m not at all so sure that one should be so confident in predictions of judge or jury about harm following words.
As for your last concern, “If it turns out that all content is merely conversational usage, then the distinction collapses, and my ensuing argument will have been exploded”, I think instantly of the memorable 43rd section of Philosophical Investigations:
“For a large class of cases - though not for all - in which we employ the word ‘meaning’ it can be defined thus: the meaning of a word is its use in the language.”
1. On the one hand, I want to hang on to a “Holmes-ish” sensibility, where the intention and force of utterance do all the heavy lifting in determining what ought to constitute the breaking of a criminal law. Although it seems I go even further than Holmes in that direction, wanting to be a bit more rigid about the act/content distinction.
Still, the place where I have intuitions which are “Hand-ish” — appealing to content, not just the act — is when it is obvious that we’re dealing with the breaking of the law (i.e., in civil disobedience), and yet the law being broken is very small, while the spirit of disobedience follows a higher law (i.e., of the constitution). The former is illegal, while the latter is superlegal — the kind of symbolic act that is meant to preserve and enshrine a fundamental and well-recognized institution. But we wouldn’t be able to understand the distinction between illegal and superlegal without being able to examine the content of the utterance involved. That’s how I picture how content ought to make a normative difference. This limited vision of the power of content is probably where we most differ in opinion.
2. You may be right, and I may need to think about it more. Certainly, my remarks have seemed to focus on free speech in the public domain while neglecting it in the private one, and this is a dubious tactic.
Still, my remarks are totally consistent with the abandonment of seditious libel, and causes me concern over the statement that “The harm principle by right deserves just as much, ifn’t more, place on the side of the courthuse where they can lock you away” (depending on what you meant precisely). If I claimed seriously that Dennis Hastert was the adult incarnation of Batboy, then the law gives me some latitude, because he’s a public figure, and also a lawful one. I find it hard to imagine how this disinclination to allow public figures equal access to the harm principle in a civil libel suit would reverse itself and become even worse, i.e., a matter of the criminal court.
Re: bullshit, I think I’ve lost you. The Plame/Flame scandal wasn’t about bullshit, it was about telling the truth without any regard for the consequences.
I don’t want to seem overly confident about being able to predict consequences, but I just wanted to flag one natural fact which can help the ethicist to make the right decisions.
3. Wittgenstein is interesting, and if he turned out to be right, then I would turn out to be wrong. But I prefer Peter Strawson, where meaning is not *just* usage, but also the instructions for usage. This dual-model of meaning is more or less accepted today, I think. You have people, like Sperber/Wilson, who predicate their work on the distinction between encoding/decoding versus pragmatic usage, inference, and implication. But I couldn’t say that this kind of dualism is universally adopted.
1. To borrow John Langshaw Austin’s terms, Holmes’ test seems squarely aimed at evaluating the probability - or in the bad tendency explication, the mere possibility - of a proscribed perlocutionary act. And it seems to me that one could do this ’scientifically’, looking at statistics and such, or relying on the stipulation of some government official whose view is accorded deference by courts.
Hand’s emphasis on content seems to take a rather different view of language. His approach is indeed more useful for such matters as civil disobedience. I also feel that the Hand perspective calls our attention to two aspects of speaker’s meaning - “understanding a sentence in the sense in which it can be replaced by another which says the same; but also in the sense in which it cannot be replaced by any other. (Any more than one musical theme can be replaced by another.).” If this is right, then content makes a difference not only in (normative) judgment (which you call attention to), but also in terms of listener’s perception - it’s an alternate route around the Holmes path.
In terms of modern American jurisprudence, we are averse to examining content. When the government engages in distinguishing between expression on the basis of content, the most searching scrutiny is given by courts. But I do think that Hand’s path, the road rather less taken, is the more interesting.
The other points shall, unhappily, remain for another time.
2. My comment as to the role of the harm principle belonging in criminal law just as in civil law in cases involving free expression especially is directed at looking - just as you suggest in libel cases to *evidence* of damages - to look and see whether there has been harm, and not just affront to the law itself. (perhaps the latter would justify some punishment, but not a lot, by and large, unless we are talking about a tangible risk of harm caused criminally). This criticism, as such, wasn’t meant for your comments, but as a more general critique of various juridical findings of criminal liability over the years in cases where harm (or risk thereof) seems thoroughly never to have entered the analysis. My point being that roughly in those cases if one analogized to proving damages, there would be any, if at all, but regardless, people were hauled off to serve prison terms.
As respects my comments on bullshit, I should not have referenced the Plame case; the fit’s better on these comments over to the role of truth in discourse. Sullivan punishes those who do not care for the truth (not those who merely, in good faith as it was in Sullivan itself, erred on truth).
Your last comment in this section is quite provocative, from the point of view of what - if anything - the ethicist ought do has to do with how the law should treat these problematical situations.
3. Wittgenstein is not at all, I think, about *only* the use theory of language. Many people err on this, I think, when they forget the qualifier in that 43rd section, and the second part of the Investigations completely. Even Austin, who’s viewed as being even more austere on this said something like, ‘Ordinary language is only the starting point. But don’t forget that it *is* that’ and more memorably, “Enough is enough. Enough isn’t everything.” I’m not familiar enough with the other thinkers, though, to hazard more on this, so I shall refrain therefrom.
1. i) In the sphere of law in general, it’s impossible for us to escape something like a “bad tendency” doctrine, since all lawful behavior is to a significant degree predicated upon the obeyance of habits. For every single law, you will find an implicit statement about what habits the law wants to curb or outright eliminate. So you won’t find me disagreeing over the issue of whether or not certain *acts* may be criminal, and whether we might establish a basis for them by looking at social scientific evidence; surely we can. But I want the theoretical justification for criminal law to be based on the speech act, and not the content; and (in our discussion) I need to have a coherant, acceptable formulation of “perlocutionary act” in order to make an exclusion of content defensible.
Austin’s formulation, insofar as it conflates the predictable audience reaction with latent consequences, is unacceptable. This is not just because it is inconvienient for this particular discussion, but also because it seems to rely upon an understanding of “action” which is (I think) bogus. Actions are intentional. To speak of a latent consequence as an “act” is to misunderstand what it means to act.
ii) Taking one view or another of language is all to the good. (IIRC, Gottlob Frege called the irreplaceable components of the utterances their “color”.) I could accept that there is a sense in which one utterance can be replaced by another, while both yield roughly the same proposition, yet roughly have some minor differences. i.e.:
(1) “I hate the bad dog.”
(2) “Je me deteste le chien mauvaise.”
These both say the same thing (assuming I haven’t forgotten my French). But the connotations of the words in one language may be slightly different in another. In this case, the word “le” roughly means “the” in English. However, “le” also carries the connotation of masculinity, while “the” is gender-neutral. But “le” makes little to no real semantic difference, because the connotation of masculinity is just because the French language is gendered, not because it makes a genuine contribution to propositions. Still, the connotation is there, at some subsemantic level; and we probably couldn’t say something equivalent in English unless we really wanted to bend out grammar out of shape in order to do it, like by saying:
(3) “I hate the bad dog[+male].”
But anyway, none of this necessarily leads itself to normative consequences. I can accept all this, and still say, “Let’s keep the content/act distinction, and in criminal cases, only focus on the act”. In fact, the color-proposition distinction could help us identify what is more likely to be a genuinely perlocutionary act (in a non-Austinian sense), and what’s just a latent consequence.
2. i) I must have misunderstood your meaning earlier. I certainly wouldn’t want to espouse a view of the justification for a law which is exhausted by the negative consequences that are produced only because there is a law that can be broken. That would be wacky, circular, Kafkaesque, etc; It would sound something like a scene from Alice in Wonderland:
Red Queen: “You broke the law! Off with her head!”
Alice: “But why is there this law?”
Red Queen: “To protect the people from bad consequences!”
Alice: “But what is the bad consequence here?”
Red Queen: “The breaking of the law! Off with her head!”
So I don’t mean to suggest that criminal law is exempt from having to justify itself on independent grounds. Indeed, we might even (ambitiously) say that a law that has no goal except preserving its own legitimacy, is not a law at all, but just a tantrum. Nevertheless, my comment was more an observation of the natural justificatory “perks” of trying civil cases, rather than an inclination to give criminal law a blank check.
ii) Re: bullshit. Ah, I see. Fair enough. It seems to raise the initial wonder again: does the justification for free speech only lie in the goal of preserving reason and discourse? This remains a point where I’m uncertain. I suppose the Sullivan case (and cases of libel, etc) give us reasons to think that the ‘marketplace’ argument is really the most essential ground for free speech.
iii) In many of my comments, I’ve stressed that I’m approaching the problem, not especially from the tradition of what the law ought to do as law, but from the position I what I think the law ought to do. If I were speaking from the former position, I would be like a computer, merely examining issues according to the quotes of the highest authorities. In the former position, I would have no latitude to disagree with Oliver Wendell Holmes, for instance. But I reserve the right to disagree according to reason and consideration, and on the basis of principles which are more fundamental (i.e, principles of the liberal tradition, following J.S. Mill et al), and which I take to be rooted at least in part in ethics, and which may or may not have received commensurable interpretations in the strict legal traditions of various countries. Canadian legal scholars, for instance, would probably not be especially impressed by my attempts to defend the act/content distinction.
3. I gave the quote a bad reading. My apologies. Wittgenstein and I can get along after all. Thanks for calling attention to the clauses.
1(i). Another boon of adopting *intentional* actions - and I think you’re right to call the ‘intentional’ part rather superfluous - is that it squares with the classical criminal law requirements, then: one must have both the requisite mens rea and actus reus in order so that criminal liability might attach.
Of course , in such cases, it would be nice to know what the speaker was thinking. But we won’t be able to, certainly not to any certainty beyond doubts reasonable in most cases. So we will look to their words and the circumstances as manifestations of their mental states.
1(ii). Translation is one sense in which that line (another from the Investigations) can ring true, in translation. Even in the same language, though, I wonder if there can exist two utterances, say, A and B. For two such utterances roughly paraphrasable (whatever that means), I assume that means that they have correspondingly roughly similar content. Let’s suppose that both utterances are calculated, as it were to be perlocutionary in the way that the law proscribes, but that utterance A is the more provocative, even though utterance B ’says the same thing’. The content of the former statement - or maybe even the way it’s said (style, verve, panache) - might in some cases make the difference between an utterance crossing the line and a paraphrase that doesn’t.
So without denying outright the act/content distinction, one can be pragmatic about it and say that it’s not a useful one in every case. One can conceive of a case where one should look to content, and to my mind since we don’t know a priori which case exactly that is, we have to rule out a hard act/content distinction. That’s not to say we must consult content in every case, but it does deny your idea that we must look only at the act.
2(i). For some reason, I’m reminded of the debate over the duty to obey the law - over its existence.
2(ii). Raz, who I was just thinking of given the foregoing debate, has an interesting view on the right of free expression being more of a good. I’ve only just skimmed it, but I should like to now revisit it. Still, most - if not all - defenses of free expression are going to be instrumental and, therefore, pragmatic to that extent. Not exactly a romantic view, sure, but just like belief in democracy itself - for the instrumentality. My feeling is that one will find a dogmatic, ideological defense of free expression only via dogmatic, ideological defense of democracy. There are dangers in too much - and too little - deontology.
2(iii). I wonder if thinkers like Rawls (post- Political Liberalism) and especially Habermas (post- Theory of Communicative Action) would say that adopting Mill’s position goes “too far”, sine one’s also adopting so much other stuff as well. (Habermas brandished just this argument against Rawls in their 1995 exchange). In other words, is Mill’s doctrine not minimalis enough, compared to, say, Rawls, or even more, to Habermas?
[1.] ii) I think that very persuasive arguments have been made to the effect that two utterances which have a) the indicative grammatical mood, and b) are not analytic statements, are paraphrases of one another if they are true under the same (relevant) conditions. That is to say, no relevant conditions are either left out or added. By “relevant”, I mean that the conditions have been inferred such that they do not blantantly distort the intentions of the speaker in terms of what has been spoken.
That’s a mouthful, with a load of qualifiers. It also hinges on issues of speaker’s intention and interpreter’s intention by use of ideas like “relevance”. This explanation of content can borrow ideas from Pragmatics, concerning personal intentions and so on, but if it cashed an explanation out only in terms of Pragmatics, then I would be in trouble; since that would collapse the act/content distinction. Luckily, we take things like “truth-conditions” to be sufficiently different from questions of “intent”, in the relevant sense, that the distinction gets to hold up.
To see why I one should bother considering relevance at all in this discussion, as it threatens the act-content distinction, we can take the following utterances:
1. Most homeowners want it all and they want it now. (Mike Holmes, of “Holmes on Homes”)
2. There is a set of homeowners (a), and a subset (b) which constitutes most of (a), such that (b) want all of something (x), and (b) want something (x) now.
(2) is a literal paraphrase of (1). It makes sense, once we wade through the predicate-logical gobbledygook, because it gives a treatment of (1) on the basis of what is contributed to the utterance by the sentence (and words) alone. The fact we can do this, shows that there’s some truth to the idea that we can make content-only paraphrases, and also, that we have such a thing as “content” which is different from context and intent.
But it also doesn’t capture the relevant aspects of (1) that are implicit, as revealed by (3):
3. There is a set of persons who own homes, such that most of them want improvements to their homes as speedily as possible.
By adding contextually relevant stuff (i.e., knowing who Mike Holmes is, what he does, etc), and by relaxing the stranglehold of a predicate logic metalanguage on our interpretation, we get something that’s both a paraphrase and more easily interpreted, although it presumably contains the same truth-conditions as (1). Whereas (2) was a literal paraphrase, (3) is more like a paritable paraphrase, which is to say, it holds parity with the conversation goals of (1).
Similarly, we might subtract irrelevant information, while keeping the same truth-conditions. Take the following flowery sentence (taken from a post here by a user named “tous ensemble”):
4. Buried underground, the conduit becomes invisible; it is obliterated, concealing in a hidden art, the ‘mechanical’ art that metamorphoses that physis of the element water, from the drop to the water organ and including the whirlpools, cascades and fountains of all sorts, gentle streams and thundering waterfalls.
Translated by removing irrelevant information:
5. Buried pipes transport water to fountains.
As tous ensemble admits, some meanings have been lost. Yet we might say that the paraphrase is paritable. Whatever the overarching truth-conditional goals were, they have been accomodated. Some conditions (like the asserted existence of whirlpools, cascades, etc.) have been chopped away. But still, I think we can take it to be a rough paraphrase of (4).
So I think that helps to defend a particular formulation of the act/content distinction.
I’m not sure I understand your proposed defeater, when you wrote: “One can conceive of a case where one should look to content, and to my mind since we don’t know a priori which case exactly that is, we have to rule out a hard act/content distinction.” I don’t believe that any knowledge is ‘a priori’, and so, I would agree that no case can be known a priori. But surely this feature should not condemn my analysis right away.
[2] i) I can see why you would be reminded of that. It brings up the wider issue. Still, there’s a distinction between the justification for following the law in general (at the very least, simply out of the benefits of political stability) and the justification for following a particular law. The Red Queen’s problem is her hope that the lame defence of the law in general will bleed over to a defence of a particular law. This is a fallacy, since (I think) some acts of defiance of the law are themselves superlegal.
iii) If I tried to answer that, I would only be putting on airs. I need to research the positions of both more. I’ve not been especially compelled by the Rawlsian arguments for liberalism, given his anti-utilitarian stance. And Habermas is a bit laborious to read, and I’ve not received the benefit of formal instruction on his work (since appearantly he’s ignored in North America, for some arbitrary reason).
I.
I don’t dispute that the act/content distinction doesn’t exist in some cases, but does that make it such that one can meaningfully speak of the distinction in every case? Perhaps ninety percent of the time, the distinction will find use, but in the tenth remainder, what can we say?
Some statements will be paraphrasable, sure, but something of them is lost in the paraphrase. Not just content, I think - it’s rather that the statements are not atomistic particles floating in the void. They come generally within some rubric of what we can broadly call by the name of context. Getting back to the quote that spurred this line of questioning, the analogy was made to a musical theme. That is something more than a statement.
Statements we can reduce - and therefore paraphrase - but something like musical themes? I can (sort of) paraphrase, but quickly paraphrase loses its meaning just as my references to north nearer the North Pole don’t quite find much use. Going from statement to theme is like representing n dimensions by X less than n dimensions. One can reduce (paraphrase) statements by other statements, but a theme by statements? Not quite - and one theme can’t really replace another theme either; all that synergism and holism go by the wayside.
So I wonder about the case where act and content don’t make a sharp distinction - how in such an instance, one rather is required to examine content to talk about act.
II.
The Red Queen’s argument seems indeed in error, going from general to particular instead of the other way around. I’m also reminded of Hobbes, who made a brief appearance in this discourse already, how he felt that the stipulations of the sovereign were so essential to civility (which is nothing less, but nothing more, than an absence of rank barbarity). Interestingly, Hobbes’ sovereign did not care one iota about what a subject thought, so long as that subject obeyed in behavior. Hobbes felt, if you reduce him to his crudest - perhaps a bit unfairly - that order in the universe was achieved through absence of conflict. And how better to stave off our chaotic impulses than to simply rely on the sovereign’s stipulations which govern our conservative, conventionally defined society, or so would Hobbes argue.
As has been noted, Hobbes was perhaps the first legal positivist, given these aspects of his theory, but he’s also in many ways a moral positivist - at least, morality-in-the-world is positively given by the sovereign, as opposed to morality-in-one’s-head (which is to stay, on Hobbes’ thinking, in the caverns of the mind).
III.
That reminds me of a quip once by a former professor of mine, “While it’s Habermas that writes in a German better fitting an engineering tract than philosophy after translation, Rawls who writes in English has similar difficulties even without translation.” Basically, I figure my point can be captured via Habermas’ (stated?) aim that he’d like to be a (metaphysically) minimalist Kantian in his discourse ethics, which doesn’t look to content, which is a second-order ethical system basically.
Sorry to interrupt you, cosim, but in the context of the discussion about whether paraphrase results in loss of meaning (itself in the context of the speech/act distinction), I thought I’d interject a quick comment about the discovery of ‘mirror neurons’ in the brain. Apparently, there is some overlap in the brain’s neural response to both direct perception of (say) someone kicking a soccer ball, and reading a *linguistic account* of someone kicking a soccer ball. As a rough test, then, we might propose that a paraphrase accurately reflects an original statement when the evoked imagery (and maybe even emotional response) is comparable.
For some interesting (and light) reading on the subject, check out this article in the Washington Post.
Interruptions welcome!
An interesting take on the (literally!) picture theory of language: we can paraphrase when the pictures of two statements are roughly equivalent.
But I wonder if that view doesn’t take on all of the horrendous load foisted on the picture theory of language.
Borderline cases - the old lady/young woman or the duck/rabbit - can make problems for the picture theory. Plus, I’m not sure that pictures remain constant - if there are pictures, they’re moving. My emotional response and the pictures in my head depend, perhaps in no small part, on my state of digestion or whether or not the train was on time.
More fundamentally, the picture theory only applies to statements as such. How do I paraphrase a short story in Joyce’s Dubliners? I can paraphrase every sentence-statement, and every picture can be kept constant between Joyce and his paraphrased doppleganger, but have I then paraphrased the story?
I’m also reminded of two thought experiments. The first is Nozick’s experience machine. To some extent, if I am wrong about either our being unable to paraphrase Araby or any of the rest, then Nozick was wrong too - we would be just as happy in the experience machine. Decades before Nozick, William James - great philosopher and great psychologist that he was - spoke of,
[W]hat I called an “automatic sweetheart”, meaning a soulless body which should be absolutely indistinguishable from a spiritually animated maiden, laughing, talking, blushing, nursing us, and performing all feminine offices as tactfully and sweetly as if a soul were in her. Would anyone regard her as a full equivalent?
The picture theory has usefulness, but of a rather limited kind, I think.
Cosim-
Thanks for the interesting response. I’ve never heard of the picture theory of language, although it does seem to bear some kinship to the imagistic semantic test I was proposing. Let me dive into a reply:
I.
I don’t think the fact that “pictures” are (by definition) static is fatal to an imagistic theory of language comprehension. The word “imagery”, as I used it in my original comment, can be expanded to accomodate motion. In fact, I find such an imagistic conception of language almost intuitively obvious from experience: when I read a good book, there definitely seems to be a kind of accompanying “movie” that unfolds in my mind’s eye along with my reading of the text, complete with (partial and stylized) mental-images of the characters and settings. Of course, this “movie” isn’t nearly as well-defined, seamless, or continuous as a real motion picture, but its sketchy conceptions of characters (half-shell, half-soul) and places (more like impressionistic Monet paintings) do seem vital to my comprehension (and enjoyment) of the book. In fact, when I later recall portions of the plot, the exact words of the text have invariably faded from memory, while my narrative “sense” of the story, structured by that original stylized imagery, remains.
And this “narrative sense” of a story will certainly vary from individual to individual, probably according to such factors as availability biases (e.g., if the people you’ve recently been spent time with share a certain skin color, the characters of the book will probably possess the same), biography, and perhaps even, as you suggested, digestive flux. We might also conceptualize this “narrative sense” as a kind of cognitive paraphrase of the story-as-text. And no two will be identical. In fact, sit in on a book club discussion, and you’ll find that different brains accentuate or deemphasize certain portions of a story, perhaps according to that portion’s resonance with their own personal experiences. But each also shares a relatively stable memory of the skeletal plot. So while there may some stable core of content, the very process of communication results in a reconstruction of meaning within individually unique mental engines of meaning-making. I think the interesting point (perhaps to be scientifically validated by the discovery of “mirror neurons”) is that the particular imagery chosen will be drawn from an each individual’s well of personal experience. So, back to my soccer example, different people, each reading the phrase “The player kicked the soccer ball” will irresistably find an image evoked in their mind’s eye, but the image will vary. Some will imagine a male, others a female; some will imagine a straightforward kick, others an aggressive shot on the goal; and even the ethnicity of the player will vary, as will clothing. [Feminists have long recognized the point that stereotypes are perpetuated by the use of the residually-masculine pronoun “he” in a gender-neutral role.] Ssome semantic core remains, but that core seems to have nothing to do with *the words themselves*, but rather the overlapping experience of various minds.
And I’m willing to take this argument further. I don’t see any inherent difference in the *necessary truth-value* of the imagery evoked by reading (say) an Isaac Asimov sci-fi novel, or the daily newspaper. It’s obvious to us when we read about the ‘memory hole’-style revisionism in Orwell’s 1984 that the factual universe constructed by Oceania’s citizens (from the information available in state-owned newspapers) is flagrantly false, even though, on further reflection, we might concede that perhaps to them it is cognitively real. [”Cognitively real” in the sense that if the newspaper reported a (fabricated) declaration of war by enemy Eurasia, the citizens would feel a genuine sense of dread and pessimistically re-calibrate their conceptions of the near future, and act accordingly.] But I believe the same is true of the factual universe we ourselves generate from good-faith reportage. When we read a news article, we are generating mental imagery in response to the words, which may not accurately represent the real-world events *as they occurred*, or the flesh-and-blood people *as they are*. In fact, we are three-degrees of interpretive separation from the actual “real-world” events: according to Paul Ricoeur’s theory of three-fold mimesis, the initial observer constructs a story based on her observations, which is then encoded (more or less) in language, which is then reconstructed by the reader. And Habermas’s “communicative action”, by which social actors consult one another and reach a common understanding of reality, begins to look a lot like a book club meeting.
II.
James’s thought experiment has been explored by sci-fi writers (in books such as PK Dick’s ‘Blade Runner: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep’) and even popular movies, such as Spielberg’s ‘A.I.’. The more interesting case to my mind is (what I assume to be) Nozick’s exploration of the boundary between the “real world” and a simulated one by virtue of a fictional ‘experience machine’.
I have only two lenses to slide on top of that boundary. The first is my limited experience with the philosophical stance of ‘radical constructivism’. Instead of wind myself describing it here, I’ll let Hanno do the work for me. The second is my (again limited) practice of advaita vedanta Hinduism. A central teaching of that tradition (as I know it from the teachings of Sri Nisargaddata Maharaj) is that all that we perceive around us is merely the reflection of the world in the ‘mirror’ of the mind, and that our conscious experience of the world is much more like a dream-state than we realize. In fact, this teaching is reflected (no pun intended) in the teachings of various Buddhist traditions. For example, the Zen koan: “Two monks were standing by the road, debating whether the flag or the wind was moving. A Zen master overheard the exchange, and told the monks: ‘Neither flag nor wind moves. Mind is moving.’” More fundamentally, some strands of the Theravada tradition of Buddhism emphasize a ‘mistaken sense of self’, ‘false identity’, ‘ego’, or ‘identification with the body’ as the core delusion that gives rise to attachment and suffering. Collectively, these teachings point the way to the following truth: Look around you. Everything you see, from your own body to your computer to the sky outside, is all *you*, all ‘thought’, all a kind of reverberation, or rippling, inside the mind. (Science hasn’t yet provided adequate language, so we must look to other knowledge-traditions for words.) There is no direct access to “the real world”. We live inside our own simulations. Personally, I find in this teaching a kind of “knowledge-paradox”: I understand it ‘intellectually’, but I cannot ‘feel’ its truth directly, much like I ‘know’ that earth is rotating around its axis, and yet I don’t sense in a sunset the fact of my own motion, and even still resort to such anachronistic verbiage as ’sunset’. (Buckminster Fuller has proposed the alternative formulation ’sunclipse’.) In the case of either ‘truth’, if I were to grasp the enormity and majesty of the directly, as a first-order sensory experience, I would fall to my knees in awe. The fact that I don’t suggests to me that I haven’t yet “understood”.
So, back to the thought experiment of ‘experience machines’, I think we all live in them. As for happiness inside, I think all emotion takes place inside the ‘machine’, although Buddhist teachings would suggest that the mechanism for ending suffering is recognizing the fallacy of duality and freeing oneself from attachment to the images projected inside the machine. But I haven’t read anything about Nozick’s ‘experience machines’, other than the name, so I may be drawing unwarranted parallels and darting down alleyways.
Cosim, it does seem true that, in the case of libel, a strong case can be made to say that a wrong has been committed merely on the basis of examining its content. So I admit that that’s a potential “ten-percent” case. Still, it seems to me that even this can be argued against, by pointing out that a case of libel is really only of consequence if it’s foreseeable that people take it seriously, and that is part of the perlocutionary act, not the content of the utterance.
I don’t deny that there are cases where the act cannot be understood until one has grasped the content of the utterance, and I don’t deny that color and theme can affect the content of an utterance. Rather, what I deny is that negative consequences lie in the content itself, exclusively from the act.
–
The picture theory / idea theory of meaning has been sorely beat up upon. I wrote much of this article, you can take a look at some of the criticisms. My prof, Rob Stainton, once gave an excellent example which defeated my tentative support for idea theories of meaning. He said: “So what is the meaning of ‘Rob’s mother’ if you’ve never met her?”. I have never met his mother, I have no idea what she looks like, and yet, I still seem to recognize that there’s meaning to the description. So the idea theory must be sorely lacking.
Still, I sympathize with it, for reasons that Matt brings up. Pictures seem like sound interpretations of a meaning, even if they’re not themselves exhaustive of the meaning.
Ben-
If I understand your professor’s query rightly, he is attacking the picture theory of language comprehension on two levels:
1. Absent direct experience, the evoked image does not correspond with Rob’s mother’s actual appearance.
I don’t find this objection all that serious, because a primary goal of my previous comment was to demonstrate this very fact. I don’t believe in any necessary correspondence of image to fact. Indeed, as I argued, I think that what we commonly call “comprehension” of something as unembellished and “objective” as a newspaper article is nothing more than approximated, simulational understanding.
2. The picture, besides being somewhat arbitrary, is also semantically fungible to a certain extent: Readers of the same phrase will conjure vastly different pictures of Rob’s mother, and yet still share some common comprehension - such as the fact that she gave birth to Rob, stands in a nurturing relation to him, etc. So the picture itself can’t be the repository of all meaning.
This objection is more serious, and deserves to be handled with care. It might be useful if I started out by making clear exactly what claims I’m *not* making for an imagistic theory of language. If such a theory postulated that *all* linguistic meaning could be found solely within the ‘four corners’ of the picture evoked from moment to moment by encounters with language, then I would share your skepticism. Obviously, a birthing and nurturant relation to another isn’t obvious from a person’s face. But I must resist any effort to collapse the proposed imagistic theory of language into a “pure” picture theory.
Instead, let’s look at the developmental origins of language acquisition. A priori, no baby is born into the world with any particular conception of any particular entity, much less a complete lexicon. [Evidence for this proposition lies in the relatively undeveloped state of the infant’s brain.] Invoking a little ‘folk psychology’: the sound-cluster “mother” comes to be associated with a (more or less) repeated pattern of relationship that is *directly experienced* by a child. As a corrollary, the exact meaning evoked upon hearing/reading the word “mother” will vary depending upon the individual’s experience with real-life “mothers” (per society’s allocation of that signifier by convention). Indeed, how could it not? Imagine a world in which all “mothers” merely perform a birthing function, and children are raised by the state. Surely any possible nurturant connotation the word “mother” may have once had would evaporate (assuming of course that the signifier continues to refer to “the one who gives birth”).
Admittedly, the semantic content of the word “mother” is more than a simple image… something more akin to a global sense of relations, feelings, and expectations, including but not limited to imagery. I’m proposing that this global sense is forged in direct experience, prior to the application of language. Whether we invent a word for it or not, a more or less regular pattern of relationship exists between what we call “mothers” and “children” - a particular subpopulation with identifiable, non-linguistic characteristics interacting on a regular basis. And our pattern-sensing brains certainly seem capable of detecting this interaction as a repeated, recognizable pattern without the aid of language. Words (including “mother”) seem to be predated by the perception of their referents. Granted, language may foster recognition (accelerating the pattern-recognition process in a learning child) and promote semantic regularity among social actors (by enabling conversation and hence a common perceptual-linguistic experience of the world). But I think that words, as tiny bundles of stylized sound (when heard) or image (when read), merely serve an evocative function, and that meaning lies in those evocations, which are themselves experientially motivated.
(Forgot to add…) I think that linkage between semantics/meaning and experience is beginning to be uncovered by science, beginning with the discovery of those ‘mirror neurons’ I mentioned earlier. [The ones activated both upon direct perception of an object and upon reading the word signifying that same object.] Ultimately, I think that’s what I meant when I used the phrase ‘imagistic’ test of meaning originally… not just ‘picture’-as-meaning, but the entire nucleus of remembered (pre-linguistic) experience-as-meaning.
Matt,
Rob’s intent was primarily to critique the idea theory of meaning, IIRC. But there was an underlying argument, too. Ever since the logical positivists, and especially since Hillary Putnam, we’ve met up with the position of semantic externalism, which says that things themselves can be actual components of meaning. That is, if I talk about “Rob’s mom”, I’m really talking about that lady herself, not a picture of her, not a mental representation, or any of that. The person herself enters into the proposition.
I think the objection against [1] is pretty serious so long as we’re working in the paradigm of “truth-conditions”. That is to say, “The meaning of ‘p’ is the conditions under which it is true that p”. For it seems to suggest the plausibility of semantic externalism. If, instead, we’re working in the broader paradigm of apprehension-conditions (as you suggest), then we might very well abandon semantic externalism. (As it happens, I’ve argued for something like this elsewhere, so I’m quite sympathetic, to say the least.)
But that doesn’t mean that the position is free of troubles. For instance, let’s say you have a certain mental picture of Rob’s mom. One day you happen to be sitting around with Rob, and two ladies walk in. Rob says, “Matt, here is my mother and my aunt”, but doesn’t indicate which is which. One of the ladies looks exactly like your mental picture of Rob’s mom, while the other doesn’t. You say, “Hello, Rob’s mom” to the mental approximation-Mom. It turns out she is the aunt, and you were wrong. Isn’t it therefore fair to say you were confused about the meaning of “Rob’s mom”?
Ben-
Maybe a little cleaving is in order here. I take as my point of departure - in a discussion of semantics - the observations of Humberto Maturana, a founder of the Santiago theory of cognition. He has constructed a theory of “knowing” whose basis is biological science, not philosophy, and employs systems theory to arrive at an autopoietic model of the organism. Within this theory, Maturana describes an organism as bringing forth a world, so to speak, from its interactions both “without” (between its physical “unity” and an external environment) and “within” (ie, dynamics within its own internal structure, or pattern of organization). This world constitutes a “cognitive domain”, a pool of experience from which all the organism’s knowing emanates, internal to the organism and its structure, and from which all higher abstraction must be constructed. This fact is captured by the phrase “informational closure”. A key point is that this world, or “cognitive domain”, arises solely from distinctions the organism itself makes. These distinctions are neither governed by nor determined by the environment (which includes other organisms). However, “structural coupling” may take place, in which two organisms engage in a cycle of reciprocal perturbation. “Languaging”, as I understand Maturana to use the term, involves a structural coupling that results in shared patterns of orientation along roughly commensurate distinctions, called “consensual domains”. According to this theory, language does not “convey” or “transport” meaning - a common misconception motivated by a complex “conduit” metaphor - but is instead a process of environmental stimulation, which sets into motion (but does not govern) a cascade of structural responses internal to the organism, from which emerges the utterance’s “meaning”, or semantics, as unique to the individual hearer.
So a word has no unitary meaning. It has the meanings (plural) that it evokes in a population of listeners. The meaning evoked within Rob’s cognitive domain when he hears the phrase “Rob’s mom” is not the same as that evoked within his friend’s cognitive domain. These evocations may differ, for example, in the appearance of the person they envision. Yet these disparate meanings may enable what Maturana calls “operational effectiveness”, and hence yield “truth” (a pragmatic conception of it, at least), insofar as Rob and his friend are able to orient productively within a “consensual domain” evoked by their use of language - by which I mean coordinate their behavior in a productive manner. So, even as your hypothetical above (involving Rob’s mom and aunt) reveals, one sedimented conception attached to the word “mom” (among many) likely to be shared by separate human organisms, within a common language tradition, at least, is an intuition about age, both free-standing and in relation to that of the known child. This knowledge enables further knowledge-entailments, which in turn enable the organism to reason, at least approximately, about the entity “Rob’s mom” along certain dimensions of experience. Thus, a certain degree of empathy is enabled, for example, when Rob describes, say, something his mom did last weekend and how Rob felt about it, to his friend. This productive coordination of behavior does not require perfect correspondence between the listener’s conception of Rob’s mom and her actual being (in fact, even Rob’s conception of his mom will not *exactly* mirror her actual being, only mirror it more closely). Rather, the “consensual domain” evoked by languaging permits useful shared orientations, and hence results in effectively coordinated behavior. And as my Orwell/newspaper example in a previous comment illustrates, the overwhelming majority of our “knowledge” of the world is approximate and constructed in precisely this same manner. But this fact doesn’t prevent language from being a powerful instrument of reason, prediction, cooperation, and survival.
Matt,
It is surely true that language as a topic is not exhausted by the norms of a community in the abstract, but also the cognitive and linguistic system of the individual idiolect. So it is also surely true that meaning is not “conveyed”, in a sense, but always self-generated. And this model gives us insight. For instance, it gives us a rough-and-ready idea about how semantic shifts take place; why “muscles” now means what it does, and does not mean what it used to (”little mice”).
That having been said, we may find that the difference in effect amounts to nothing. I say a novel word, “Burnarbapus”; I point to something that has certain features — the features (say) of prickliness, green-ness, upwards length, tends to be in a pot or in the ground, cylindrical with little stubby branches, etc. If you then in turn point to a basset hound and say “Burnarbapus”, then I will correct you; while if you point to a cactus, I nod. Something about the external environment has obviously had an impact upon you in this instance — namely, both my presumptions as a language-bearer, and (more importantly) the pattern-generating features of the ostensive object(s). Whether we call this “structural coupling”, or “social interaction”, or whatever, the bottom line is that something we take to be external (the pattern) has had an influence upon a system that we take to be internal (the idiolect). Without any semantic anchor, as provided by experience and thought, there is no meaning at all; we will have committed semanticide.
I don’t dispute your remarks about consentual domains, etc. I sympathize with them (and, if my PORG project is to go anywhere, I *must* sympathize with them). But I am having a hard time understanding how it provides a counterexample to the “Rob’s mom” point. The question is, would a person be right to say that Rob’s friend has misunderstood the meaning of the utterance, if they make such a grievous error as the one in the example? If all this were contingent upon truly *consentual* domains, and we presume that the friend has already acquiesced to the knowledge of Rob in determining the meaning of “Rob’s mom”, then we’d also need to say that the friend has been in error, as if he had broken a contract. And if the domains were not consentual, then they would be miscalibrated, and no utterance like “Rob’s mom has a daughter” could have a relevant cognitive impact on the friend: it would not meet with any apprehension conditions, due to a lack of conversational effort on the part of the friend to engage in the behavior necessary to communicate.
To come full circle, I believe there is a way out of this puzzle without having to concede semantic ground to the “thing theorists”: we simply insist upon the Pragmatics/Semantics distinction, or the distinction between act/utterance and genuine content/speech. We may say that things are only a part of our meanings insofar as they are referred to — and they are only a part of our utterances, not our language itself. The friend will have minimally apprehended the expression “Rob’s mom”, but will not have understood the conversational utterance involved in the above example.
So to the extent that Cosim’s objections to the act/content divide are cogent, the project for understanding language which you and I share will have to be abandoned (apart from any ethical/legal consequences that we also discussed).