Well, I was skimming through Word and Object when I “became enlightened,” but it may have mostly been a catalyst. Still recommended though?
I don’t think l was very clear about what problem I was solving, and I don’t think you managed to read my mind, so let me try again.
The problem I was interested in was: how does reference work? How can I point at or verbally indicate some thingie, and actually be indicating the thingie in question? And could I program that into an AI?
In your post, you connect this to indexicals, which I’ve interpreted as a question like “how does reference work? How can I point at or verbally indicate some thingie, and actually be indicating that thingie, in a way that you could explain to a microscopic physics simulation?”
One of the key parts of the solution is that words don’t have inherent “aboutness” attached to them. Reference doesn’t make any sense if you just focus on the speaker and try to define the aboutness in their statements. It needs to be interpreted as communication, which uses some notion of a functional audience you’re constructing a message for.
So that question of “How do I verbally indicate the thing and really indicate it?” has to be left unanswered to the extent that we have false beliefs about our ability to “really indicate” things. Instead, I advocate breaking it down into questions about how you model other people and choose communicative acts.
So I am absolutely not saying we should replace “is x true?” with “is x a communicatively useful act?”. The closest thing I’m saying would be that we can cash out “what is the referent of sentence x?” into “what is the modeled audience getting pointed at by the act of saying sentence x?”.
I’m not sure how you’re interpreting physicalism here. But if we single out the notion that there should be some kind of “physics shorthand” for human concepts and references—like H2O is for water, or like the toy model of reference as passing numerical coordinates—then yeah, there is no physics shorthand. Where there is something like it, it is humans that have done the work to accomodate physics, not vice versa.
Well, I was skimming through Word and Object when I “became enlightened,” but it may have mostly been a catalyst. Still recommended though?
I don’t think l was very clear about what problem I was solving, and I don’t think you managed to read my mind, so let me try again.
The problem I was interested in was: how does reference work? How can I point at or verbally indicate some thingie, and actually be indicating the thingie in question? And could I program that into an AI?
In your post, you connect this to indexicals, which I’ve interpreted as a question like “how does reference work? How can I point at or verbally indicate some thingie, and actually be indicating that thingie, in a way that you could explain to a microscopic physics simulation?”
One of the key parts of the solution is that words don’t have inherent “aboutness” attached to them. Reference doesn’t make any sense if you just focus on the speaker and try to define the aboutness in their statements. It needs to be interpreted as communication, which uses some notion of a functional audience you’re constructing a message for.
So that question of “How do I verbally indicate the thing and really indicate it?” has to be left unanswered to the extent that we have false beliefs about our ability to “really indicate” things. Instead, I advocate breaking it down into questions about how you model other people and choose communicative acts.
So I am absolutely not saying we should replace “is x true?” with “is x a communicatively useful act?”. The closest thing I’m saying would be that we can cash out “what is the referent of sentence x?” into “what is the modeled audience getting pointed at by the act of saying sentence x?”.
I’m not sure how you’re interpreting physicalism here. But if we single out the notion that there should be some kind of “physics shorthand” for human concepts and references—like H2O is for water, or like the toy model of reference as passing numerical coordinates—then yeah, there is no physics shorthand. Where there is something like it, it is humans that have done the work to accomodate physics, not vice versa.