Do we understand one another?

Anything worth saying is worth saying in more than one way. There is no ‘best’ way of saying it, since the reader is going to interpret the utterance in ways that are not fully predictable.

Consider for instance Ray Jackendoff’s (1992) essay on ‘The Problem of Reality,’ which explains why ‘constructivist’ psychology is a more viable model of our relationship to external reality than analytical philosophy which tries to base meaning on ‘truth-conditions.’ (He does not consider the Peircean alternative that the sense of reality is grounded in a ‘dyadic consciousness.’) Toward the end of the essay he takes up an objection to the constructivist view, stated as a more or less rhetorical question:

If reality is observer-relative, how is it that we manage to understand one another? (This objection is essentially Quine’s (1960) ‘indeterminacy of radical translation,’ now applied at the level of the single individual.)

— Jackendoff (1992, 173)

Jackendoff gives two answers to this. Translating the first into my own terms: assuming that ‘we’ are both human, our common biological nature makes it a good bet that our meaning spaces are similar. (Jackendoff uses ‘combinatorial space’ where i use ‘meaning space.’)

The second answer to this objection is that we don’t always understand each other, even when we think we do. This is particularly evident in the case of abstract concepts. Quine’s indeterminacy of radical translation in a sense does apply when we are dealing with world views in areas like politics, religion, aesthetics, science, and, I guess, semantics. These are domains of discourse in which the construction of a combinatorial space of concepts is underdetermined by linguistic and sensory evidence, and innateness does not rush in to the rescue.

Since we are now at work in one of those domains of discourse, it is possible that Jackendoff’s ‘combinatorial space’ is more different from my ‘meaning space’ than i think it is. Investigating that possibility would involve exploring the context of each usage more fully, always guided by Peirce’s ‘maxim of pragmatism.’

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