‘What is truth…Perhaps I can tempt you to ask it…’ You got it R-, I’m willing to consider that question. What have you to say about it? ‘Do you believe in duckbills? Perhaps you have seen one in a zoo…’ Yeah, I guess I have. ‘Does that settle the question for you? Will you say, “I have seen a duckbill therefore I know it exists.”?’ Not personally, but I imagine many people would. ‘Do you take the man seriously who says that it is possible to saw a girl in half [because] he has seen in done in vaudeville?’ Well, I should hope not! ‘What is so ridiculous about the farmer who said “There ain’t no such animal” when he saw a giraffe?’ Other than the diction? ‘Do you believe the world is round? Does it look round?’ All this is to bring readers to these basic skeptical questions, ‘Which criteria do you use when you assert that something is true? Are they always the same criteria? Are you sure your criteria are always valid?’ Rapoport is impressed by the tendency (though not the ubiquity) to mention ‘the senses’ as a ‘substantial part’ of our path to ‘the truth’.
He has a few points to make about ‘the senses‘: (1) There are more than five, and each has various ‘modalities’ (‘the “sense of sight” includes the ability to distinguish shapes, distances, and color independently…’). (2) The way our ‘senses’ are rigged up [evolutionarily] effects how we perceive (‘if we had no retina the light “outside” would never affect us the way it does’). (3) Animals differ widely in the senses they possess (‘many are color blind…the range of frequencies they can hear varies’). And this talk of teh ‘senses’ appears mostly aimed at introducing this claim: ‘of all animals man is the only one seriously preoccupied with symbols. He may be said to possess a “symbolic sense”.’ R- defines ‘sense’ as ‘a way of reacting to some special class of events’, and a ‘symbol’ as ‘something that stands for something else’. So the claim here is that human beings (alone) have a ‘way of reacting’ to ‘stand-ins’. That seems plausible, what does he draw from that?
‘Two characteristics of the symbolic sense are of utmost importance in understanding behavior. (1) The response to a symbolic stimulus is, in general, independent of the intensity of the stimulus [whisper ‘a snake is behind you’ or shout it] (2) Response to symbols makes possible comparison of experiences out of which the notion of truth arises. To be concerned with truth is to compare experiences.’ I think he concentrates more on the second point, but the first appears to be an interesting insight as well.
Rapoport thinks, ‘Without the symbolic sense, language of any kind would be impossible. Without language, concern with truth is meaningless, because concern with truth involves comparison either of (I) language with other language, or of (II) language with direct experience.’ This also makes sense to me with the way it seems the word is used. It is awkward to say ‘Event X is “true”,’ much less so, ‘Statement X is “true”.’
Part of R-‘s phenomenological picture is, when presented with the assertion ‘Grass is green’ this happens, ‘In our concern with the “truth” of the noises “grass is green,” we compare the resulting “picture in our mind” with an actual experience of grass and see if the two experiences are similar…We have compared a symbolic experience with a non-symbolic one, that is, language with fact.’ On a given level, this is agreeable, but I can only imagine the technical details that some cognitive scientists might get hung up on. Nevertheless, R-‘s picture of how we assess the ‘truth’ of many assertions is by comparison with our own experience, or our own opinions about our own experience (or remembered experience). But sometimes this can’t be done, ‘”The world is round” cannot be inferred from…direct experience alone. Such an inference necessarily involves…comparison with other symbolic experiences…’ In which case we evaluate authorities, and/or consult logic, etc. ‘Both the origin of verbalized controversies and the possibility of their resolution are rooted in language.’ And that’s an important part of what ‘semantics’ (in the sense of General Semantics) is good at, according to R-.
But, when we discover discrepancies, and we cannot consult direct experience, ‘How can we decide which set of beliefs is to be kept and which set discarded. What is a reliable authority?‘ That is the topic of Chapter 5. ‘Two things are important to consider when we are being told something, (1) What are my informants motives? (2) How does he know?’ R- states that there is one ‘special’ domain in which we don’t have to worry about ‘motives’ because ‘the only object of communication is to inform’ and this is ‘the areas of scientific inquiry’. His argument for this is that what is asserted in ‘science’ can be checked (the findings reproduced) by other scientists, so there could be no incentive to mislead. ‘Areas of scientific inquiry are by definition those where assertions are constantly checked against experience…’ I am not totally in R-‘s boat with this, but I see where he is coming from. My current bent would be to argue Kuhn with Rapoport, that at least some of the time, what ‘scientists’ are doing is ‘interpreting’ data in light of theory, that ‘experience’ itself is not ‘direct’ but already theory-laden. This comes up repeatedly.
R- thinks that the ‘How does he know?’ question is more difficult. He goes on a slight tangent about how definitions should be treated in our philosophy of language, and is pragmatic about it. ‘Definitions… are rather arbitrary. There is no a priori reason why a word should be defined one way rather than another. The important thing is to be consistent in the meaning of a word once we have defined it…To avoid confusion it is advisable to choose definitions which are already implied in the way words are used by a great many people.’ Cool, I’m with ya. What do people usually mean by ‘knowledge’, R- asks, and his answer is, with Bacon, ‘those assertions which can be linked with experience’. He says, ‘there is no arguing with a definition. The man is using a word and he tells you what that word refers to.’ Ok, so he has told us what he means by ‘knowledge’, and that is not up for discussion.
I think that R- thinks that it follows from this definition: ‘to answer the question “How do I know” is to establish a chain of comparisons between assertions, and the last link of that chain must be something that is not an assertion; it must be direct experience.’ But allows that ‘Once we have established knowledge by direct experience we can “preserve” it by putting it into the form of an assertion…”canned knowledge”.’ I don’t know if he thinks all unverifiable assertions are ‘circular reasoning’, but many are. He foreshadows a discussion of so-called ‘self-evident’ assertions, which he will argue against, we can see upon what grounds.
Given that knowledge is that which we can experience, R- stipulates a ‘democratic’ attitude towards it, ‘given equal means of making observations, no man’s experience is to be preferred to another’s…’ Perhaps this is not possible, but it is at least an idealized value statement.
So, if truth is a property of assertions, assertions are linguistic entities, but their truth depends on the non-linguistic (experience), ‘We know there must be a connection between language and experience.’ Which strikes me at the moment as being possibly circular based on Rapoport’s own position. How would he think that we ‘experience’ a connection between language and experience itself? But this may be a misunderstanding on my part, let’s press on. ‘How is this connection made? How is experience translated into experience? How is language translated into knowledge?’
Chapter 6 begins with R- making an analogy with the telegraph. ‘The operator at one end beat out a rhythmic pattern with the key. Each time the key was pressed, an electric circuit was closed…It is these current spurts which were transmitted over the wires, not the movements of the key. The current spurts were a mapping of the key movements. At the other end…the currents were mapped on the disk movements…’ which were then ‘interpreted’ by the human operator on that end. R- says the phone, the radio, and the phonograph are all the same ‘communication problem’, as is ‘The transmission of experience by means of language’. He defines ‘fidelity’ as maximal resemblance between the source and receiver, and hints that semantics may be the field of maximizing linguistic fidelity, or I put that on him because I say that myself sometimes. Either way. ‘Experience itself is not words [I don’t know if I agree there]…To be transmitted, experience must be mapped on language. it is this language, then , which is transmitted.’
But, ‘language must be retranslated into… something resembling direct experience’ on the other end, because it itself is not language (at least in the same sense). However, ‘one can never tell all one sees. Our neighbor…invokes in response to the information we give him depends on not only the information…but also on the way he translates it in terms of his own past experiences.’ I think this is great stuff, and I want to stress that this is a source of great ‘noise’ in communication, and being ‘conscious of’ it is important for communication, understanding, and progress. R- agrees that, ‘Communication fails if its processes are poorly understood’, and suggests ‘Semantics…to study the functions and malfunctions of language…Bad use of language usually leads to unresolved controversies.’
Completing Chapter 6 is a nice list of his argument thus far, ‘To resolve controversies, there must be a desire to agree. A desire to agree arises if we become concerned with truth. The concern with truth involves “symbolic experience”, hence language…experience is the only ultimate source of knowledge. But experience is…only transmissible through the medium of language…If experience is to be transmitted by language, then language must be the carrier of something…To that something we give the name “meaning”.’ Which will be our next subject…
Philogging 