Ep. 240: David Lewis on Possible Worlds and Language Games (Part Two)

0:00 Mark: Let's move on to the more linguistic stuff now that we've got the idea of counterfactuals and possible worlds at our disposal to use as necessary. Matt, this scorekeeping in a language game. This was the first thing you had pulled out and said, oh, this is so fun. You know, obviously the word language game is in there, so it's some kind of later Wittgenstein thing. There were some responses to J.L. austin on performatives. We've talked about performatives again recently on this podcast. Do you want to give us a sum up or your point of entry into this.

0:29 Matt: So this is a hugely influential and I would say important paper. I mean, it depends on what your priorities are, I guess, but certainly hugely influential, both in linguistics and philosophy and the area you might call natural language semantics, which is the thing where you try to analyze precisely what sentences in a language like English or French or Hungarian or Chinese try to just precisely nail down what they mean and how they get their meanings. So in that interdisciplinary field, this paper has been hugely influential. And I guess I'll just mention two things that have been taken up in all manner of papers and all manner of disciplines.

So one is this idea of accommodation. And the idea behind accommodation is that if you're talking with somebody and then they say something that goes against what you've been presupposing, your natural inclination as a charitable interlocutor, as somebody who's trying to make the conversation work, is going to be to just be like, all right, I'll just take for granted that the assumption that what they just said made. I'll just take for granted that it's true and that we've been assuming it all along. So that's intuitively what the idea of accommodation is.

Although, as we'll get to, he applies this idea of accommodation to tons of other examples besides just accommodating a background assumption of something somebody said. Another idea is this sort of analogy between the score in a game and the state of a conversation at any given point in time. So he uses the example of baseball, but you could think of any game that has rules and a scoreboard. And this was a really influential idea going into the early 80s, where people in linguistics and philosophy started getting more and more interested in how the change of the state of the conversation from when it started up till now can affect the meanings of the stuff you say now and later.

So the prior context can actually change the meanings of stuff you say. So it matters when you say things, in other words, relative to what you said before. And this is one very influential model of how the state of a conversation evolves. It's like a score in baseball.

2:23 Mark: And I like how some of the examples at the end here get to practical issues in you think somebody made a clever philosophical point, but really they just changed the rules of the game. Skepticism being one of the examples that I know that my keyboard is in front of me. Just to continue this terrible example. This is a totally unimaginative example.

2:43 Matt: Well, philosophers usually use a cup, so that's not any better.

2:46 Mark: I know that this keyboard is in front of me. But then the skeptic can come along like, well, it might be a demon deceiving you. Like, but that wasn't the context I was talking about in normal epistemological terms. In other words, like, I know because I'm looking at it. It's right there. Like, I was not considering possible worlds in which they're demons, so I was restricting my range of possible worlds to a certain. That was the context. And you, by making this objection skeptic, have changed the context more widely. You've stretched it out. And so maybe I want to jump. Okay, from here on now we're talking philosophically. Now we're talking about the ultimate foundations of knowledge. But that doesn't mean that I was wrong originally in the way that I said things.

3:31 Wes: Right.

3:31 Dylan: Did anybody else think of Calvinball when they read that part of it

3:35 Mark: in Calvin and Hobbes where he just changes the rules as he goes?

3:38 Dylan: Yes.

3:39 Matt: Oh, can somebody explain that to me since I haven't read that? Calvin Hobbes.

3:42 Dylan: There's a recurring activity in the series in which Calvin and Hobbes are playing Calvinball. And the main feature is that the rules are constantly changing based upon the perspective of whatever the player wants to do.

3:58 Matt: Oh, so they always bend in such a way that Calvin always wins or whatever, Something like that. They retroactively change.

4:03 Dylan: That would be one criteria. But basically, the rules are changing constantly.

4:08 Matt: Okay, got it. Moving the goalposts, as we say colloquially.

4:10 Wes: Yes.

4:11 Mark: So that's what made this analogy to scorekeeping a little misleading, that he sets it up and says, okay, well, what is the score of a conversation? Well, let's not take the analogy so literally that we want to, you know, come up with an n tuple of assumptions or whatever. We're not going to characterize exactly what it is, but we know that you have some set of expectations about what the hell's going on when we're having a conversation. And that's kind of like a score. But how does the score change? I mean, things happen in the conversation. In other words, I say something that that makes you assume, you know, I refer to my car.

I just say, oh, you know, I was driving to work yesterday. You infer from that that I have a car. Maybe I never brought up my car before, but the fact that I just said I was driving, it's possible that, you know, I was driving someone else's car, but the normal assumption would be that I have a car, and this is something that I do periodically. That's like scoring a goal. Not in such that, you know, I'm closer to winning the conversation, but it's changing the scoreboard, it's changing the expectations going forward that we all look to. So he says, like with baseball, the fact that there have already been two strikes means we have certain expectations that if you get another strike, you're going to be out.

Whereas if you didn't have any strikes, then it's different expectations. So it's not the winning, the losing part. It's all about the expectations and how they match up to sort of what has objectively happened.

5:31 Dylan: I think the word scorekeeping is a sort of unfortunate term, actually, for the reason you just said Mark. It's not like you're trying to win or lose, because even in the way he's talking about baseball, you could. From the score that he presents, one thing you could do is make a judgment about whether somebody is winning or losing. But there's only one element of score. Score here is, as you said, an n tuple of characteristics that allow you to make all kinds of judgments about how the game is proceeding and make judgments about whether something is correct or incorrect.

So, for instance, in his case, it has the number of hits and the number of innings and the number of strikes and the number of balls, all these characteristics that go into assessing the game. It's almost like I've only been to a couple baseball games in my life, but there's, you know, activity that you would do is go through and keep track of all these statistics on the game, and these are like those statistics on the game. And then you'd be able to have an argument, you know, or extrapolate, like Mark said, like, we're at the bottom of the eighth.

Well, you know, that you can make that judgment just based upon the score and what are the possibilities of what could happen at any given moment.

6:43 Matt: Yeah, absolutely. I think I agree with that. Yeah, there's no such thing as winning a conversation. So that part of the analogy doesn't carry over. And probably we want to expand the notion of a score to include not just literally, like, how many points each team has, but anything involved in the state of the game, like who's on which base and stuff like that, too. But also probably part of this sort of scoreboard that he's imagining it's bottom

7:03 Mark: of the ninth, two balls, two strikes, and the bases are loaded, like that's the full score. And the fact that people actually say the whole thing like that means that in baseball, it's not indeterminate it's not just like looking at batting averages of the pat. Like that's not part of it. Right. It's just the official state of, you know, those five things.

7:22 Dylan: In addition to giving you the state as he goes through on 342, you get two other really important things. You get the specifications regarding the kinematics of score. So you know something about how those different states are related to one another. And then there's specifications regarding correct play so that you can judge correct and incorrect play. You know the rules.

7:47 Mark: Yeah. So this goes back to, you know, the idea of language games in the first place, that there are going to be things that you would do in baseball that if the person on third just runs straight into the outfield, like that is incorrect play, then it's. You could just say it's not incorrect, it's just unwise. Right. The person is getting out. But part of the regulations is that you're trying to win. Right. That the person is not going to just run some random direction. They're going to run toward home.

8:13 Matt: Yeah. So there's like a bunch of different kinds of rules. Right. There's the rule like, given that this thing happened, what does that do to the score? Does somebody get a point or not? There's that kind of rule. There's a kind of rule about like, what are you supposed to do? So it will be breaking this kind of rule for every player to drop what they're doing and just run into the audience. That would be like completely not even playing the game anymore. And then maybe there's other stuff that, like what Mark was just saying, which is like good versus bad strategy. Like, yeah, technically you're allowed to run around back and forth and not go across all the bases if you want. It's not a good idea if you want to win, but you're allowed to do it. So there's. Yeah, all these different types of rules are at play in the game. And similarly for conversations is the idea.

8:52 Wes: So he gets into the comparison of the conversation at the bottom of 344, just conversational score. So with any stage in a well run conversation or other process of linguistic interaction, there are associated many things analogous to the components of a baseball score. I shall therefore speak of them collectively as the score of that conversation at that stage. And then he gets into the points of analogy. So they include, for instance, presuppositions, presupposed propositions, and then boundaries between permissible and impermissible courses of action which we can say about what that means in A second.

And then number two. Well, he says what play is correct depends on the score. Scores depend for their truth value on the components of conversational score at the stage of the conversation. So another way of saying that is that as the conversation develops, we develop a lot of different presuppositions. And whether a sentence is true depends on what presuppositions have developed over the course of the conversation. Because as we'll see sentences themselves, the assertions themselves are rather vague. You know, when I say the cat jumped on the table, or am I talking about my uncle's cat far away, am I talking about my cat?

A lot of context dependent things that will tell me what I'm talking about, what's salient, and then whether a sentence is true will actually depend on that. And then the score evolves. Those presuppositions evolve over time in the conversation in a rule governed way.

10:26 Matt: If anyone's wondering what goes into a conversational score, I can't imagine what's the analogy to baseball. One I think easy thing to think of is just imagine it being like a transcript or a record of all the things we've both said so far. And if we've already said a bunch of stuff that's going to affect whether it makes sense to say certain things later or not. So to take Mark's example from earlier, if we spent the first part of the conversation talking about how I bought a car and like, oh, I got a really good deal and I had to negotiate for it and la de da. Then later on I say the phrase my car, that's going to be really easy to understand compared to if out of the blue I just start talking about my car and you didn't know I had a car because we hadn't already talked about that before.

11:03 Wes: Or if you say my car and you have a new, suddenly you're thinking about the car you already own, not the new one you just bought, right? Because now you have two cars and you shift that for the sake of clarity, the score of the conversation suggests that you're talking about the car you just bought. So if you shift it in that way, that may correspond to breaking a rule. Even though he's going to talk about rules of accommodation and how conversations will shift to accommodate new points of salience. But it seems like if you've set up that presupposition that you're talking about a certain car and you shift in a confusing way, that's analogous to disobeying the rules somehow, or if you felt

11:42 Mark: the need to restate that you have a car. We were just talking about your car five minutes ago, extensively. Why are you saying this again?

11:50 Matt: Right. Oh, and by the way, I have a car. That's crazy, right?

11:54 Wes: There exists an X such that it is my car and Right.

11:58 Matt: There's another implicit rule of conversation here, is that if you've already established something in conversation by saying it, it's redundant to say it again. And that's weird. So it's another way in which what you've said accumulates over time and the stuff you say later refers back to the stuff you've already said.

12:11 Mark: So what's interesting, this idea, the kinematics of conversational score. In other words, the way that it moves that we've already said for assumptions, right? If I say something about driving, okay, well, I'm assuming that you have a car. And if I did make a point of, you know, later talking about my blue car or something like that and made a point of saying, oh, I have a blue car, like you might even assume that this is not the car we were talking about before, because why the hell else would you say that? Okay, so you have your new car that we were just talking about, and you have your blue car and you're somehow distinguishing those.

That's the way the score is moving to accommodate the different assumptions we've made. And that seems like it's a one way accommodation, right? In other words, we expand the number of presuppositions, but there's no way to contract those later in the conversation.

13:02 Wes: Right.

13:02 Mark: Whereas for some of these other ones, there's two directions that it can move.

13:07 Matt: So one way to think of the kind of unidirectional thing he points out a number of examples of where it's sort of easier to accommodate in the one direction rather than the other. And the thing with the presupposition that we're talking about a car that maybe the person you're talking to didn't know you had, it's easier to pretend that an additional thing was sort of implicitly already said. It's easier to make as if that was implicitly already established than it is to go back into the conversation and take away something that was previously established and pretend you hadn't established that already when you did. Erasing information from the conversational record is harder than adding information to the conversational record.

13:42 Dylan: What's the difference between a action and the conversation that eliminates possibilities by turning things as opposed to explicitly eliminating them? So it seems to me more likely what you do is you make a change of scope or direction that adds room and subtracts room at the same time. It's not always additive.

14:06 Matt: So there's one thing that's potentially confusing here. So in possible world semantics, taking away worlds means adding information. They're like inversely correlated. Adding worlds means subtracting information. Because if you're considering more possibilities, then you're less pinned down. Because in possible world semantics, you represent a statement as a set of worlds. And the more information there is in the statement, the fewer the worlds there are in it, because the fewer the number of worlds there are that the proposition is true in. So the adding versus taking away depends a little bit on whether you're talking about adding or taking away worlds versus adding or taking away statements.

But they're like inversely correlated in that way. So the version I gave earlier was the statement version. It's easier to retroactively add previous statements to the conversation than it is to take them away. But you would do the opposite thing if you're talking about worlds.

14:50 Dylan: There's a difference between something like the multiplicity of the possible worlds and the space of the possible worlds. I meant to include both. And maybe one of them is excluded by the semantics of possible worlds. That in these rules of accommodation, I would expect that you are able to have a set of conditions for basically the landscape of possibility in the conversation. And really those possibilities are not just it's possible and it's impossible. There's certain degrees of possibility going on is that you basically turn the focus of that light in such a way that you could exclude things that were, or reduce the possibility of things that were higher possibility before, but maintain the sheer number, let's call it the quantitative measure of possibility could be the same, or it could be bigger, but that it would be different and that some things would be excluded now that weren't included.

As opposed to the idea that you're only always accreting possibility. And that to me implies that things in the past maintain their same level of possibility all the way through the conversation. That seems to me like accommodation is acting both to maybe expand possibility in some things but also constrain possibility in other things.

16:16 Mark: I'm not sure I completely understand because the way I was picturing this, and just for listeners, he doesn't talk about possible worlds right at the beginning of this paper, like there's some talk of it at the end in terms of possibilities. But we're trying, I think rightly so, trying to graph this on right at the beginning that Maybe one way to do that is when I'm having starting a conversation with you. There are all these mindsets you might be in before you say anything, but as soon as you say something then the number of possible mindsets that you could be in shrinks radically.

So the more statements you put out, as Matt said, the fewer possibilities there remain that are reasonable. That, you know, maybe you're lying, maybe you're, you know, assuming that you're making truthful statements. If I want to say what is your point of view in the world or what is your point of view regarding the thing that we're talking about that gets narrower and narrower. So in other words, the number of possible worlds that I'm implicitly referring to gets smaller and smaller.

17:11 Dylan: It seems to me that it depends completely on the kinematics of the conversation that just pull an example out of the air. I could be talking about something very specific at my office about how a linac works and photons being created via Bremsstrahlung processes from electrons colliding on them. And the context of that conversation to me is going to be pretty narrow. But it's perfectly possible as a result of that that we end up talking about something about political philosophy. It's sort of a Kevin Bacon. How many steps away from that conversation are you going to be?

Such that the landscape of possibility is going to be completely different later if I make a couple of small steps regarding how I understand this as an analogy or it made me think about X, Y or Z or whatever, that the landscape of my conversation could change dramatically in like two or three exchanges so that all of a sudden I'm no longer talking about a Linux, but now I'm talking about right and wrong in a specific court case in California. And then the landscape of what that conversation is happening to me is not expanded. There's the question of it being expanded and the landscape being changed in direction.

The focus of the light is different.

18:29 Mark: Yeah, actually let me just correct myself in light of what you just said. It's not that I come to a conversation completely open minded about what might be in your head. I might have a very specific, you know, I'm only considering a couple possible worlds. And then you say something that indicates that you're a much more interesting person than I suspected and then it opens up. Is this a sort of analysis appropriate?

18:51 Matt: I think what you two guys are saying is compatible because it sounds to me like you're talking about slightly different things. So I think what Mark was talking about with the narrowing Possibilities. That's more a matter of, like, asserting things in a conversation. So if Mark and I start a conversation and I go, hi, Mark, how's it going? And he goes, oh, not bad. I just got back from the Doctor, and I go, oh, cool. And I accept that statement. Then I throw all the worlds in which Mark didn't just go to the doctor out of the worlds that we're both considering out of our common pot of information.

So in that sense, every time a new thing gets asserted and we agree that that's a reasonable assertion, that's some stuff that we're sort of throwing out of the common ground of our conversation. That's kind of an act of constriction. The way I was hearing Dylan's idea, it's that the kind of topic of what we're interested in can shift around a lot in a conversation, and that's not unidirectional. It can expand to be really broad, and then it can get really specific here, and then it can get really broad again. And there doesn't seem to be restricted to always going one way.

I think those two things are compatible. Mark's point is more about, like, you don't want to just contradict yourself, contradict previous stuff you said. So if Mark was like, I just got back from the Doctor, and I'm like, oh, cool, how was it never going to the Doctor? Then that would be like, a really weird thing to do in conversation. But if I want to change topic, I'd be like, okay, yeah, the Doctor, that's fine. What's your favorite movie? Let's talk about that. That's not logically contradictory to change the topic. So it's kind of interesting observation.

I think that the shifts in topic aren't beholden to this. They aren't favored in one direction versus the other. Unlike shifts in the amount of information we're both agreeing to when we proceed ahead in the conversation.

20:24 Mark: It is interesting that he's talking about some kinds of convention in conversations, but not others that I would expect if you asked me, what did you just do when I said I went to the doctor? And then you say, oh, cool. Like, that's a weird response to I just went to the doctor. That's not the socially expected response.

20:41 Matt: Yeah, maybe are you okay? Would have made more sense.

20:43 Mark: Yeah, yeah, exactly. So your move there sort of opened up possibilities because I'm like, what kind of freak is Matt that he says, thinks that that's cool? There's a variety of types of freak.

20:55 Matt: I just say cool. Is the response to everything.

20:57 Dylan: In thinking about this, did you guys find yourselves thinking about how humor was working? Because, like, in the conversation we're having right now, I'm thinking about Monty Python skits over and over again and about the way in which those Monty Python skits actively present violations of these kinds of things. Or maybe the better way to put it is of very abrupt accommodations and very abrupt changes of score. So, like the parrot sketch, right? Or the cheese shop sketch, right?

21:30 Matt: Yeah, the cheese shop I was thinking of, too. Yeah.

21:32 Dylan: The cheese shop is a good example of this, where you're going through. I guess that's the best way to put it. The accommodations are incredibly abrupt, and that is an important factor in them being funny.

21:44 Matt: Yeah. I think my cousin Vinnie is another great font of examples, this kind.

21:48 Dylan: This is probably a whole. It's like a gigantic tangent we don't have to get onto. But it made me think about the ways in which things are funny because they intensify the kinds of aspects of language and the dynamics, not the kinematics. The dynamics of language that he's talking

22:04 Matt: about is that accommodation, especially as people think about it now, because they're still like, whatever. People are still writing the dissertations on a combination after this paper. It's kind of amazing. Combination, as people think about it now, is like a linguistic repair mechanism. So something went awry in the conversation, but I want to save it. I want to rush in and kind of fix it retroactively. Fix it so that we can keep having the same conversation without getting derailed.

22:27 Dylan: But that fixing might lead to mutations.

22:29 Matt: Absolutely. Yeah. And the fact that something broke down in the first place is already kind of humorous. Potentially. There's some kind of connection between the incongruity involved in humor and conversational breakdowns or near breakdowns that need to be repaired. Or also, like bad accommodations, too, are source of humor as well, I think. Right. So maybe I misunderstand a presupposition that you intend to accommodate and I make a bad presupposition for the first five minutes we're talking, and then we all have a good laugh about it later because that was not what you intended. Any kind of, like, misunderstanding, any kind of hilarious misunderstanding that we have a chuckle about later is often the result of a presupposition. Accommodation gone awry.

23:03 Mark: We should look at example 5 on vagueness. That seems a pretty important one. So I kind of talked about this in terms of standards of skepticism is going to be a later example. But it's the same principle in terms of there's a standard that you're setting. So we've talked about the example of Francis hexagonal.

23:23 Matt: Oh, that's Austin.

23:25 Mark: So is that true enough? Just like we might accommodate each other in terms of admitting presuppositions when we're talking. Like, if I start a conversation, he gives example and start talking about Italy as boot shaped. I mean, clearly it's only roughly boot shaped. So then in that context, if you respond, oh, yeah, and France is hexagonal, you know, that's going to be true enough. But that can move and in fact moves in the direction of more precision. So that if instead of, you know, maybe I say Italy's boot shaped, you say, Frank is hexagonal.

I say, well, no, actually it's not hexagonal. You know, sort of shifting. I would say illicitly here, because I was just being sloppy. And now I'm accusing you of sloppiness in the. Even though you're not any more sloppy than I was just being. But now we've gotten more precise. And then you can respond, well, Italy's not actually boot shaped either. And then we can. Now we're talking more precisely.

24:17 Matt: There seems to be this scenario where, like, if you increase the level of pedantry, it's, like, harder to go back. Or at least that's the claim. It's kind of hard to know exactly what to think about that. There's definitely something to the point he's making there. There's got to be some way to de. Escalate the pedantry. It's not like it moves once and then forever. We're always pedantic. You have a good night's sleep and you wake up in the morning. And now you're not pedantic again, I don't know. And like, it moves back somehow.

24:37 Mark: He weaponizes this point specifically against Peter Unger, this other writer, which I've heard some variation on this. But the term flat. Peter Unger has argued that hardly anything is flat. Take something you claim is flat. He will find something else and get you to agree that it is even flatter. You think that the pavement is flat, but how can you deny that your desk is flatter? But flat is an absolute term. It is inconsistent to say that something is flatter than something that is flat. Having agreed that your desk is flatter than the pavement, you must conceive that the pavement is not flat after all.

Perhaps you now claim that your desk is flat, but doubtless Unger can think of something you will agree is even flatter. Than your desk. And so it goes. So he's accusing you of by agreeing with him, you know, I said this was flat, but then I recognize, you know, what I really should say is it's more nearly flat. Like this is the most pedantic kind of grammatical, picking that, yes, yes, flat is technically an absolute term. You can't talk about the comparative flatness of things. You have to say flat is an absolute and these things are more nearly flat.

But nobody talks like that. He says the right response to Unger is to suggest that he's changing the score on you. When he says the desk is flatter than the pavement, what he says is acceptable only under raised standards of precision. Under the original standard, the bumps on the pavement were too small to be relevant either to the question of whether the pavement is flat or to the question of whether the pavement is flatter than the desk. Since what he says requires raised standards, the standards accommodatingly rise, then it is no longer true enough that the pavement is flat.

This does not alter that it was true enough in its original context. Did you find this section particularly inspiring, Wes?

26:10 Wes: So I think, yeah, I mean it's interesting that there are standards of precision and those are subject to rule accommodation and that it's harder once someone has said let's make the conversation more precise. I'm raising the standards of precision. It's difficult to actually go back. As you've pointed out before, I don't know what the utility of this paper is in general. I don't know enough to know what influence all this stuff has had philosophically, what practical use it can be put to. So that's what leaves me with less to say about something. I mean, it's interesting, but what is the larger point of making note of all these things?

26:54 Matt: So I could go on for hours about this, obviously, but maybe one starting point for thinking about the significance of this is think of all the times that a politician says, oh, I was quoted out of context and you didn't understand what I was saying in its full context. So the topic of how all the stuff you said previously affects the meaning of the thing you say now is pretty complex and hard to get your mind around all the details. I don't know if this is necessarily your guys interest, but it poses lots of very tricky challenges for logic because logic likes formulas to be self contained.

It doesn't like the idea that there are previous formulas that could affect the meaning of this formula. Right now, anytime where you're wondering about like, well, how would saying the Exact same thing be different if it had been in a different context, or if my friend had said a different thing right beforehand, that would have changed the meaning of what I said. Now seems like that topic, if you look at a lot of contemporary discussions in the news or in popular culture, you know, it's pretty important. It comes up a lot like, how does context affect the meaning of what we say?

So that's potentially maybe one way into the significance of this type of thing.

27:54 Mark: I just thought that each example as it went on, maybe, except for the last one I'm planning, got more interesting than the previous one.

28:00 Matt: I love the communism one. Right. Isn't that fun?

28:03 Mark: Yeah. Do you want to read.

28:04 Matt: We've kind of already talked about this, but let's just read it anyway because it's fun. This is example 6, relative modality. Relative modality, by the way, is the thing we were talking about earlier with Kripke's relational semantics for modal logic. So that's the idea that physically necessary and morally necessary and epistemically necessary kind of all mean the same thing. We just one thing vary. So that's the relative modality idea. So he says, suppose I'm talking with some elected official about the ways he might deal with an embarrassment.

So far we've been ignoring those possibilities. That would be political suicide for him. He says, you see, I must either destroy the evidence or else claim that I did it to stop communism. What else can I do? I rudely reply, there is one other possibility. You can put the public interest first for once. So often when we say the word must, we're not considering all the logical possibilities. We're considering a kind of constricted range of possibilities, in that case, maybe the most politically expedient possibilities. But someone could try to redraw the boundary of which possibilities we're considering when we say the word must.

I guess one thing that really speaks to me about this example is just think of all the times somebody has tried to justify a morally reprehensible action in some post hoc way by being like, well, I had to do it. I was forced. All kinds of atrocities have been justified in this way. All kinds of genocides like, oh, they forced our hand. We had no choice. There was no alternative. They were a danger to us. That's why we, whatever, put them in concentration camps or whatever we did, or we put them under house arrest. So much of the justification for policies and behaviors and decisions uses these words like must, whether the claim is true or not and whether it's disputable you know, how you dispute it depends on which possibilities you're considering.

When you say must.

29:38 Mark: Yeah, I come at this from the other direction that I feel like this has been used on me. I remember I had somebody in one of my bands that wanted us to be more devoted than we were. And if so, if I'd say, yeah, I can't practice tonight. Oh, really? You can't practice tonight? No. You're choosing not to practice tonight? I'm like, well, what I meant the context of my can was given other reasonable priorities of being a human being and having relationship that you need to maintain and duties that I have to take care of in my job, I can't do it. I was not wrong. I was not. Stopped being pedantic at me.

30:12 Wes: The point of this example that he's given is that if someone shifts that boundary on you, it stays shifted and that you're the one in trouble. Right. So the whole communism example, you should have done what's in the public interest. That would be false if the boundary between relevant and ignored possibilities remain stationary. But it is not false in this context. For hitherto ignored possibilities come into consideration and make it true. So hitherto ignored possibilities, Mark, like, screw your family practice. And the boundary, once shifted outward, stays shifted. If he protests, I can't do that. He is mistaken. But I mean, Mark's example makes it seem like that's kind of trivial. Yeah. What he really means is I have other priorities. There are things more important than me doing what's in the public interest.

31:00 Dylan: And isn't there a dynamic that there has to be a acceptance or assent to that change?

31:07 Matt: Yes, I think that's the idea.

31:08 Dylan: So in the case of Mark's case. Right. Is he's not agreeing to the change of terms. Right. In fact, he's irritated about the attempt to change the terms. And that's the source of friction regarding it. It's like, screw your terms. It's not just that someone can in the conversation just willy nilly change the terms.

31:28 Wes: Well, he's saying kind of both, so. Right. He'll say later. Once the boundary is shifted, the commonsensical epistemologist must concede defeat. That's like conceding defeat. When someone says, oh, you can't practice, you're like, okay, yeah, technically I can. That's the concession to defeat there. And yet he was not in any way wrong when he laid claim to infallible knowledge. It's a different example. But you're not in any way wrong when you say can't do that under different assumptions. So maybe those two things are in a way compatible. But it's just different levels of analysis. One has very outward shifted boundaries and one has more narrow boundaries.

32:07 Dylan: There are two examples that come to mind in this. One is the example of pundit speak where someone replies to something. Let's say the reply amounts to invoking a conspiracy theory or the reasoning behind the action that the people in the conversation were not presuming and therefore accusing somebody of something or another. One would be asking the question, how long ago did you stop beating your wife? Where you changed the presumed context of it.

32:39 Matt: Indeed, the question is infelicitous because there is a presupposition failure there, namely that you used to engage in domestic abuse. Yeah.

32:47 Mark: Like you said, Wes, once the boundary shifts, it's hard to shift it back. But anybody can at any point just deny. No, I'm not shifting the boundary that way because a lot of. Particularly with possibilities. Again, you know, if we're in a science lab and I'm saying, you know, what are the possibilities? What are the hypotheses that are reasonable given the evidence that we've given. And you say, well, maybe ghosts did it. Maybe God did it with his magic fingers, came in and messed with the results. Well, probably I'm not going to admit that in the first place. If I do admit that and now we're engaged in a different language game. Well, let's just not do science anymore because it's irreversible.

33:29 Matt: I agree with Dylan's interpretation earlier. I think that's where Lewis wants to be. So it's like if you were to accept the ghost thing, I don't know in what universe you would accept the ghost thing. Maybe you should actually believe in them or something. Oh, that's true. I forgot.

33:39 Mark: Yeah.

33:39 Matt: No, I have to consider ghost too. Yeah, if you accepted it, then it would be hard to go back to.

33:44 Wes: You would have to admit it's a logical possibility. That's the thing that you would have to admit. You would just be saying, that's not what I'm talking about here.

33:52 Matt: Right. But I think Mark's earlier move, where he's like, yeah, technically I'm physically capable of coming to rehearsal ten times a day. That's not what's at issue here. What's at issue is whether I can do that and also have a life. I think Lewis would count that as rejecting the shift in possibilities. It's not much of a concession to be like, yeah, technically, in some sense I could.

34:09 Wes: It's I don't want to. In a sense, maybe you do want to, but there's the conflict. But want translates into can't, given these constraints. It's not absolute can't. It's not logical impossibility, something like that, even physical impossibility either. You could physically do it, but it's given a certain set of constraints, obligations to family, other sorts of desires, then it becomes can't you treat those constraints, you treat that context as if it were physically binding?

34:39 Mark: So I thought example 7, then performatives. This was the most powerful of them because Austin has been claiming in how to Do Things with Words that we discussed in this podcast, that these performative sentences don't technically have a truth value. If I say I do in a marriage ceremony, I'm not describing the fact that I am making this commitment or something I'm performing the action of. So his example is, I hereby name this ship the Generalissimo Stalin. It's not like a description, but actually, Lewis now thinks he can say it is a description.

And it has. It has truth conditions. It's just that by hereby naming the ship you have now in the conversation, you know, provided that there's other background, you know, the things that Austin talks about, that you are, whatever official you have to be to officially name ships, the fact that this is a ship that you own, you know that all this stuff has to be in place. Yeah, but once that's in place, it wasn't the case before, you said that, that this was the name of the ship, but now that you've said that, it's like the facts accommodate your statement, and so your statement actually becomes true.

In the same way that we've been talking about accommodation in other parts of a conversation.

35:52 Dylan: That's a different meaning of truth than Austin was talking about. Right. Austin was saying that the statement didn't have truth value. But isn't Lewis saying that as a result of the statement, there is something that has truth value in it that's directly related to the statement? The statement changed the context.

36:09 Matt: I think Lewis really is kind of disagreeing with Austin here, although it's kind of hard to adjudicate the disagreement. But I think he does want to say the performative. He writes about this elsewhere, too. So this type of statement Austin called performatives, like, I now pronounce you man and wife, or now pronounce you husband and wife, or wife and wife, whatever the case may be. And yeah, Austin wants to say it doesn't. It's neither true Nor false. When I say, I now pronounce you husband and wife. And one way to see that is it would be weird for somebody to be like, no, you don't. I mean, that would be funny. But it's funny precisely because it's a weird thing to say. But Lewis wants to say, no, it is a true or false statement. I now pronounce you husband and wife. So that's sort of the disagreement here. What exactly is at stake in the disagreement? That gets a little.

36:49 Mark: Well, we'd have to get into what Austin thought he was accomplishing with his theory. I kind of like Dylan's interpretation that it's actually not the statement that is the performative, it's some statement related to that. Right. That the only things I think that Austin is concerned, I think, like most logicians with the only things that you can really assign truth value to are these absolute sentences. In other words, you've somehow specified, you've translated it so it's context free. In other words, the entire context is summed up within the sentence.

So you don't just say it is raining, you say it is raining on this and you spell out a date. So you remove all the indexicals that if I say it is raining, we're kind of assuming where I am, it is raining, it is raining now when I am. But you could translate all those things into a temporal. You give latitude and longitude on the earth. And that's the kind of thing that is actually true or false because anything else is going to be vague. It's like, well, it's all relative. It's because it's relative to where you're standing, whether it's raining at that place or not.

Or maybe I'm through contextual clues. Maybe I'm a weatherman, I'm already talking about Florida, or I'm pointing to Florida on the map. And if I say it is raining, the context matters. And I think that Lewis is fighting against that notion that like, somehow we can get rid of the messiness that's in natural language and break things down to the logical components. Because really we're playing on this shifting battleground. And so you have to consider the truth of the statement at its moment of being said. And he says, with this ring, I thee wed is verified by its felicitous use, since the marriage relation is a component of conversational score governed by a rule of accommodation.

So it's not that when I say with this ring I thee wed or I do that, I then set up a new situation in which now there is a. A temporal fact or an absolute statement that I can now assign a truth value of true to that very statement changed things and made itself true.

38:50 Wes: Well, does verification necessarily mean that. Because the sentence after that is marriage, then a linguistic phenomenon. Of course not. Which. But that was not implied, which is a way of reminding us, right. That this is something Judith Butler didn't seem to get in gender trouble, which is that performatives aren't just, you know, I. Magically. There are certain sentences which magically bring about things just by virtue of saying them. Because language constructs things or concepts, constructs things. There have to be all sorts of circumstances, presuppositions and other sorts of circumstances that would make a performative work. Does the fact that it works mean that it's true?

39:31 Matt: I think we're still pretty much thinking of these issues, or at least whatever. It's most common for philosophers these days to think of these things in the way. Something like the way Austin did. And Austin's notion was something like, there's the language part, which is me saying something, and then there's a social status, which is not a matter of something somebody said. It's just a matter of do we have the legal status of being married or not? Let's say it's not the same thing as some people talking. But just so happens that these are interesting cases where kind of language meets up with the world of social statuses.

Because the way you get a social status like being married is by somebody saying something in the right circumstances. That's the rule for that social status switch getting flicked in you. But the status itself is. That's a social status, which is different from something to do with language, but it's kind of flicked on by language, as it were.

40:21 Wes: I was just wondering with regard to Mark's. So the priest says, I hereby pronounce you husband and wife. And that makes it so. And then, yes, you can say, yes, the priest did marry him. That's true. Are we giving a truth value to, I hereby pronounce you husband and wife. Does that have a truth value?

40:41 Matt: So I think the way you just said it is Austin's way.

40:45 Wes: Lewis does argue that there's a truth value, because it's not obvious to me from this reading.

40:50 Matt: Yeah, I think that's the idea. So the version you just said, I think, is Austin's take on it, which is, I now pronounce you husband and wife does not have a truth value. But after I do it, if I do it felicitously later on, we can say it is true that whoever the two people are now married. Lewis's idea is when I say, I now pronounce you husband and wife, I'm trying to say something that's true or false, and we retroactively make it true or false if I say it felicitously. So it's the same kind of statement as when I just described something that's either true or false.

And it's this act of accommodation where we retroactively bend the previous assumptions of the conversation to fit what we just did, what we just said. That's what happens when you utter a felicitous performative and make two people married. But it's the same kind of thing that you're doing when you're describing reality. It's just that in this case, accommodation is involved. So he's trying to reduce these examples from Austin to be the same kind of thing as ordinary statements of fact.

41:46 Mark: Well, I just want to take you up, Wes, on your challenge there, whether we can see what Butler's account in this language would be if we want to say Butler agrees with Lewis and not with. I guess, let's see. So if someone, you know, whatever the underlying biology says, I am a man, and maybe we can say saying in a. A broader sense, dressing in ways customarily like, you know, associated with manliness, talking that way, blah, blah, blah, since she thinks that gender is a performative act, then just by doing those things, you are making it true. You're making your set. Your statement, I am a man. You're making that true, like, because there is no underlying fact of the matter before you make that statement that it would refer to.

42:32 Wes: Right. So we would need circumstances to be felicitous. Right. So if you're Austin, you have to say, yeah, you can't just go around saying, I am this or that. You actually have to have felicitous circumstances. But I think with Butler, I'm not sure that's a tangent we should get on, get into, because the social constructionist element of that taints all the performative stuff. Performatives, I think, for her, come down to the concept of social construction. And of course, they are related. But her version of social construction involves this idea that anything that we use language to describe is, in a sense, socially constructed. So I think, you know, trying to understand her view of performatives is difficult in light of that.

43:18 Mark: Well, and it's not gonna let us decide between Austin and Lewis here. That was what I was trying to do, but it clearly doesn't.

43:26 Matt: One way to think about how Austin relates to Butler, how Austin relates to social construction theories, is Austin is talking about examples where it's very clear you're talking about a social status. So if there's a statement, you're fired, that changes your status from being an employee of a firm to not being an employee of the firm anymore. Nobody thinks that your social status of being an employer or not is anything other than determined by people agreeing to treat you as having that status. And similarly for marriage, nobody thinks you find employee employer relations out there in the wild.

Nobody thinks you find marriages out there in the wild. They come into existence because of social convention. So Austin started with clear cases of social statuses. What social constructionist people tend to do is look at an example of something where you wouldn't necessarily have thought that you were dealing with a social status and try to argue that actually, really this thing that you thought was something other than a social status that secretly is a social status.

44:22 Wes: So it's complicated by the fact that it's also applied, say, to things like quarks.

44:26 Matt: Yeah. Which you definitely wouldn't have thought were social statuses.

44:29 Wes: And we get into this in our social construction episodes. There are different ways of talking about social construction. The social status stuff is easier to explain, let's put it that way, also more plausible. But in people internalizing certain roles or obeying the rules of collective intent, then you can explain social construction. But if you're thinking of social construction as something as broad that. So broad that you might be able to describe scientific facts as socially constructed. So, for instance, the designation of sex, the idea that those designations are performative becomes much different.

45:04 Mark: Blackburn, when we interviewed Simon Blackburn about truth, that he was a pragmatist about truth. So it wasn't that he was the correspondence theory. When you make a scientific claim, for instance, that there has to be some fact in the world that it corresponds to, it's that you're participating in social enterprise. Right. I think Rorty talks like this a lot too. You're participating in a social enterprise that itself establishes truth. And that's how the performative act. So in other words, all this is where I think, you know, maybe Austin was leaning toward that.

He uses these examples of, you know, obvious things to make a larger point about language, that all language is performative in some way. So I think about the statement, you're not my son. You know, if you say that to your son because he's disappointed you or whatever, like Is it appropriate to say, but I am your son? That's a biological fact. Like what you're doing when you say you're not my son. You're asserting this very contested right that I get to decide who I recognize to be part of my family or not. And so that's the same thing. When somebody, the gender fluid person or whatever is saying, I'm a man, you might not believe I'm a man, but I'm a man, they're making that sort of assertion.

They're participating in a social enterprise to, through a linguistic act which could be accompanied by a bunch of against behavioral things that support it. I'm making a case, a political case for this being true.

46:25 Matt: Maybe one thing I'd add into this as well is that I think there are some states or properties a person could have, features a person can have, where it's legitimately in question whether their social status is or not. So maybe like psychological characteristics might be an example of that. So maybe the psychological characteristic of being an introvert. So is that just something a matter of my brain, kind of in my brain chemistry, determining what type of personality profile I have, or something like that. Or maybe my neural pathways and my habits play a role as well.

But is it just the fact about me intrinsically as an individual that I'm an introvert? Or is the fact that I'm classified by other people as an introvert playing a non trivial role in determining whether I am in fact an introvert? That would be one example of a category where there's kind of an interesting and intriguing kind of a deep question there about like, is it a social status or not? You could imagine people arguing either way.

47:17 Wes: This is what hacking calls a looping effect.

47:19 Matt: Yeah, looping effect. That's exactly what I had in mind.

47:21 Mark: Do you think that maybe just to connect this back to score keeping directly, that what we're seeing in this conversational dynamics in a particular conversation, this is the microcosm level. And if you add enough of these conversations together, then you get the sort of, sort of greater social statement, potential social change. Right. In other words, so if you accommodate enough, let's say I enter a land that I'm unfamiliar with and it ends up being a land that is they have slaves or maybe they have some weird social designation where like there's a special uncle.

And I don't understand like what makes the uncle special or what the social status of special uncle is, but they refer to this enough in conversation that I, and I, and I use these principles of Combination to accept that, like, okay, for the purposes of this conversation going forward, I know that that's who you're talking about. I know that, you know, certain things are going to follow from that, that you're paying extra respect for the special uncle or whatever. And with enough of those, then it becomes like, maybe this actually started as a prank, like there is no special uncle designation.

But every time somebody from my land goes to this foreign land and they play the special uncle trick, and so this actually becomes, I don't know.

48:33 Dylan: But you're invoking the prank notion is like invoking the demon, Descartes' demon. Right. So before you invoke the prank part, it's explicitly part of the context of the conversation. Right. That you are making accommodation for those rules. Right. And you're adjusting to them.

48:51 Mark: I shouldn't have added that prank part. You know, we're just establishing they've decided, isn't it like, okay, our family, we're a mess, we fight all the time, but we're going to get together with these new friends of the family, we're going to be a new us, we're going to establish new social relations in their eyes and thereby in reality. That seems like an analogy that might work. Yeah.

49:12 Matt: I like this idea. Following the metaphor of accommodation being your repair mechanism, maybe encounters between people from very different cultures who have very little common background. Like most of the moves that take place in the conversation between those two people are going to be accommodating because there's a lot that's breaking down because there's so little common ground. But eventually that might coalesce into something a little more rule followy and where you don't have to just accommodate everything.

49:35 Dylan: Isn't this kind of thing at the root of Mark use the example of a father saying to a son, you're not my son anymore. And saying, well, couldn't you say, well, you're wrong about that, you know, I'm still your son. But isn't the accommodation being made there in the same way that adoption works or other kinds of joining of people where sons, daughters, family members are determined by assenting to something other than biological fact?

50:06 Mark: Right.

50:06 Dylan: So adopt a child, and that child's my son and I am his father. And what, what I mean by that is something arguably broader, bigger, at least different than a biological fact, and would argue that the biological fact is a different fact than what the relationship is between a father and a son and so on those terms, then the example that Mark gave is the father could say, you are not my son anymore. In the same way that you could to someone who wasn't your biological progeny, you are my son.

50:43 Mark: So I'm just trying to think if we can use our last essay, Truth in Fiction, to enrich what we've just been talking about. We're going to do the short and shoddy treatment of this, and I'll just encourage people to read this on your own.

50:56 Wes: So the article is called Truth in Fiction, right?

50:58 Mark: Yes, yes. Regarding fictional characters. So you might think, for instance, that you need a modal operator. In other words, like, in the world of Sherlock Holmes, Sherlock Holmes smoked a pipe. Like that is correct. If you just say Sherlock Holmes smoked a pipe, it sort of implies, in the world of Sherlock Holmes, if you explicitly say, in the real world Sherlock Holmes smoked a pipe, then that's just false or meaningless.

51:24 Matt: Right.

51:24 Mark: Because there's. Sherlock Holmes does not have a referent. So this kind of connects to that. We talked about Bertrand Russell on Definite Descriptions long ago, where. But David Lewis is not interested in deciding between does it just not have a referent or is it false? Like, that's not what his point is. His point is we understand what this sort of prefix is, you know, in the world of Sherlock Holmes, and when it is implied, when it is not implied anyway. So somebody want to give the next step of the argument. Matt, do you want to?

51:54 Matt: Sure, yeah. So I guess the way I would summarize the big question in this paper is in the actual world, if there's something you don't know, there's a way to go find it out for, like, a normal fact, right? Like, oh, is this city located in Hungary? I don't know. I'll go look on Wikipedia and find out. Or I'll go fly there and I'll find out. If you're wondering whether a statement about a fictional scenario is true in the way that we talk about the storylines of movies, like, was such and such character really from this place? I don't remember.

Oh, yeah. They say at the beginning of the movie he's from this place. If you want to figure out what's true about a fictional character, we kind of have nothing to go on in a way other than just what's in the text, whether it's a movie or it's a novel or whatever. So for Sherlock Holmes, is it the case that he lived at 221B Baker Street? Yes, it says so on a number of the stories. But if it didn't say that in the stories, we kind of have no basis for Saying that, yeah, in the story, Sherlock Holmes lived at 221B Baker Street. So that's kind of, I think, something we maybe all take for granted in talking about the plots of movies and the plots of books is whatever it says in the book is true, assuming reliable narrator and all that.

But what about the stuff that the author doesn't mention? Is that true or false? So what do you know? To go back to Dylan's intro, Conan Doyle never specifically said that Sherlock Holmes didn't have three nostrils. How do we know whether he had three nostrils? It's not like there was a whole story about exactly how many nostrils Sherlock Holmes had. It just never comes up.

53:22 Mark: The logical puzzle here is that I describe the, you know, in the story or in the real world that these are kind of modal operators, these are context specifiers. And so it shouldn't be possible logically, if we say in the story, holmes lived at 221B Baker Street. In the real world, 221B Baker street is a bank. Therefore Holmes lived in a bank. Like, clearly that doesn't follow because we're ignoring those operators. We don't know if he lived in a bank in the story, and we certainly don't know that he lived in a bank in real life. Like, we need to pay attention to those prefixes, those intentional operators.

If we only know what's in the story, then we shouldn't be able to conclude, right. In the story, there was a guy named Sherlock Holmes who's a human. In real life, humans have two nostrils. Therefore, in the story, Sherlock Holmes had two nostrils. We shouldn't be able to do that, because in the same way the two premises, one had the operator in the story, the other one had a different operator in real life. He wants to use this possible world's terminology. To say this is actually how we read fiction, is that we assume that for the unspecified stuff that the possible world being described, the world of Sherlock Holmes is the closest possible world to ours.

Except that these things happened that are spelled out in the story.

54:43 Matt: Absolutely. There's no way that Conan Doyle wrote those stories with the intention that we seriously consider the whole time that Sherlock Holmes have three nostrils. Like, that's not the way they're meant to be read. They're meant to be read as though other things that are normal that we can presume to be the case about our world also apply in this imaginary world. But how much is kind of the question how much of the normal things we can presume to hold in our world also hold in the fictional world. And that's what he tries to sort of get a handle on there.

55:09 Dylan: Like the fact that wherever Watson's war wound is, it ought to be the same place. But.

55:15 Matt: Well, this is a further. Yes, right. Often authors are inconsistent.

55:20 Dylan: Yeah, exactly.

55:21 Mark: No, say more about that. That's what makes this article interesting is when he gets into these. What we just said about the closest possible world, like that kind of sums up the article. But the nuances that he gets into are when the author is inconsistent or when you spot something he gives the example. In the Adventure of the Speckled Band, a victim has been killed by a Russell's viper that has climbed up a bell rope. But in real life, vipers are not constrictors. So vipers cannot climb anything. So therefore, again, in the story this happened in real life, vipers can't do this. Can you conclude from that that in the story he didn't actually catch the murderer at all? Or in, you know.

56:02 Dylan: Or did Conan Doyle just make a mistake?

56:04 Matt: Right. And in this case, it seems like Conan Doyle probably made a mistake. But there could be other cases where it's genuinely like, up in the air. We don't know whether the author was, like, leaving a little bit of ambiguity in there for us to fuss over as fans of the book, or whether the author was just mistaken and intended for us to assume that vipers could climb ropes.

56:20 Mark: I want to say that in the possible world that's being described by the books, vipers do climb ropes.

56:26 Matt: Right.

56:27 Dylan: Those vipers are constrictors then.

56:28 Mark: Yes.

56:29 Matt: Right. How far out do you want to, like to the consequences. Do you want to go? Yeah, yeah.

56:33 Dylan: That's like saying a horse is a cow. So in this possible world, a horse is a cow. But that seems like a weird kind of metaphysical contradiction. Right. You're just doing either a trivial kind of renaming or you're making a mistake. So it could be that it's just the trivial kind of renaming that the things we called vipers before now we call are constrictors, and things we call constrictors before are vipers or whatever.

56:57 Mark: In other words, if he had a whole story where he's describing this person's horse in great detail that they're riding, but you realize as you like, that he's milking the horse and there's all this weird cow like stuff, and they refers to the horse, his meat, as being beef. And, you know, I'm trying. Obviously that's a pretty serious mistake. So I guess the question is, is That a situation describing a possible world in which the word horse actually refers to cows, the fact that he's riding it means there's actually something weird. That it's not just that because you wouldn't ride a cow either. It's not a complete. It's a hybrid. You know that in fact, the word horse refers to a hybrid horse, cow, something.

57:37 Dylan: It's a.

57:37 Wes: How.

57:39 Matt: The fact that this is such a hard case, I think illustrates that writing realistic fiction is challenging. And, you know, it really takes some technique to do it. And it's easy to make a mistake. And when you make a mistake, you produce a book that kind of frustrates readers, attempts to thoroughly make sense of it.

57:54 Dylan: And wouldn't that be one of the things that Lewis would point to as supporting his way of talking about possible worlds is the fact that we can have this argument about fiction means that one of his points about possible worlds is it allows you to have a logic of possibility.

58:13 Matt: Yeah, I mean, I definitely think he's like. He thinks that the kind of reasoning you're engaged in when you read a work of fiction is very similar in kind to the kind of reasoning you're engaged in. Do these what if counterfactual scenario things like, well, what if Hitler had won the war? What would have happened?

58:25 Dylan: How is it actually any different?

58:26 Matt: No, I mean, I think he actually is treating it as basically the same thing, maybe. The difference being that there's this text to reckon with here. And another difference in this case being that there's a pretense. So when you tell a fiction, you're pretending to utter a true statement, knowing that it's false and that the person you're uttering it to knows that it's false, like when you tell a joke or things like that. So there's this element of pretense here that's not necessarily operative in the counterfactual statement. It's more like you're explicitly supposing that some other thing were the case.

You're really, really explicit about it. Whereas in the case of a fiction you kind of jokingly like. And then Sherlock Holmes did this. Like you're talking about it as though it was actual, but it's understood that it's a pretense. But apart from those little differences, I think he's viewing them as similar.

59:07 Mark: So a big thing is just the fact that designation works differently, that, you know, he follows Kripke in believing that a name used in this actual world is a rigid designator. It refers to the same thing in all possible worlds. And so you can ask, is that the case? In other words, if I'm considering, again, the world in which Wes keyboard is on the floor, the word Wes is referring to him in here, and then his counterpart, let's say, in this other world. And it's not just that whoever it is that's sitting in front of the keyboard ends up being Wes in that world.

Like, no, it could be that somebody else is in Wes's room. I'm just refreshing what a rigid designator is. But for works of fiction, it's not the case that across different versions of Sherlock Holmes. Right. Different possible ways of telling the Sherlock Holmes story, that Sherlock Holmes always refers to the same individual because there is no individual. It's a fiction. So it actually is Russell's alternative to rigid designator. It refers to whoever it is that solved all these mysteries and lived in 221B Baker Street and had a friend named Watson and had the funny hat like that is what it refers to across all the various Sherlock Holmes stories.

And different authors writing Sherlock Holmes stories, even though there are different utterances of storytelling.

1:00:23 Matt: Let me just mention that. So I would view the rigid designation thing as his main disagreement with Kripke. So Kripke thinks that names of people, you know, the name Matt Teichman refers to the same individual across all different possible worlds. And then what we're doing when we go to those other worlds and we look at what's the case with Matt, it's the same Matt. He's identical across these different worlds. Lewis, related to the fact that you mentioned earlier that there's no point of contact between possible worlds, in his view, doesn't think that proper name of a person refers to the same person across all possible worlds, which is why he has this counterpart theory.

So the name Matt doesn't refer to me the same guy. I can't. I'm only in this world. It only refers to Matt's counterpart, whatever exactly. That means. Like a Matt prime in another world, who may be a little different from me in some respects. So your last point about going back to Russell is kind of interesting to consider. Yeah. It may be that in a certain respect, Lewis's counterpart theory is kind of going back to the viewing proper names as shorthand for noun phrases beginning with the word the. I think probably it's a bit different from that, but you might argue that in certain respects they're similar.

1:01:24 Mark: So we've opened up a can of worms. You know, this is just a point that there's still a lot of we could explore with counterfactuals and different takes on this and what it means for designation, what it means for causality, what it means for. You know, again, just this literal. I think we raised some issues about the ontological. You know, what is Lewis's move in declaring that these are real? Is that some different use of real? You know, there's just a metaphysical question about reality and is this idea of being deflationary about it? Seems like we just made that up here, but. So there's a lot more we could read in this area, but I'm willing to leave it here. Any other comments about this essay or to kind of sum up where you're at after reading these three things?

1:02:07 Dylan: Having been the novice, I found it interesting I would read more of him and this kind of stuff.

1:02:15 Mark: Do you have a closing, Wes?

1:02:17 Wes: Not really.

1:02:20 Mark: There was nothing in particular about this last essay that appealed to you or didn't appeal to you, or was it just both the linguistic things? It seems like you came out of the second essay really not knowing what really is the point. This is kind of interesting, but I really don't see the ultimate. I mean, was that the same, you know, that this Truth in Fiction one was. Well, it's an amusing look at how the logic of this works, but it's all kind of trivial.

1:02:42 Wes: Yes, I think that's the best way to sum it up. I mean, it's nice to see all that spelled out precisely. I feel like I'm just missing. I don't know enough about how all this stuff is applied. Must be a larger application.

1:02:56 Mark: Is there, Matt, do you want to give us.

1:02:59 Matt: Yeah. So all this stuff has turned into a whole, kind of. Every little paragraph in one of these papers has turned into a whole cottage industry in the contemporary literature. Kind of like when you read some of Frege's papers. I think a similar thing applies here. So a lot of the stuff that Lewis was moving through really quickly in the scorekeeping in a language game paper is sort of like quick hunches that he's sort of like spelling out. I think this is how this probably works, et cetera, et cetera, for like, two paragraphs. Now let's move on to the next example.

A lot of those have really turned into whole kind of areas of research. Maybe I'll just mention two things that I think are very interesting that came out of that paper. So one is this idea of the conversational scoreboard, which has been applied, I think, in very interesting ways in contemporary applied ethics and like, feminist philosophy. So Mary Kate McGowan has very interesting work where she tries to use this idea of the conversational scoreboard to understand the effects of hate speech. So hate speech is having an immediate effect immediately tweaking the conversational scoreboard.

And we didn't read the corresponding work by Robert Stalnaker this week, but I'll just say that Stalnaker has a different notion of the common part of a conversation that you and I establish. And in Stalnaker's view, it's more of a collaborative thing. Whereas in Lewis it's just sort of there and we both. It's a third thing we just sort of interact with. And I think that has led to very fruitful reflections on the like effects in the moment, positive or negative, about stuff you say. And another thing I think is very interesting from that paper that's led to lots of promising ideas is the idea of a repair mechanism.

So you didn't really see that so much in philosophy prior to this paper. I think the paper actually kind of still is in the process of bringing about what to my mind is a very interesting new shift in philosophy where, like traditionally, like you look at Descartes' Meditations or something, philosophers are always obsessed with how do I get everything absolutely right the first time? How do I know something perfectly, just intuitively, immediately? And I think following these explorations of this conversational repair mechanism where we talk past each other for a minute and then we go, wait a minute, what were you talking about?

Oh, we're talking about this. Okay. And then we like retroactively futz with our understanding of the conversational record to enable the conversation to continue. Have been explored in lots of other areas and I think they've been explored fruitfully in epistemology. And you have sort of work being done where the task isn't so much, hey, how do we get everything absolutely right the first time? Or else we're screwed. It's not so much that. It's more like, okay, we're going to make mistakes, but then how do we recover from it collaboratively, as part of this interactive social conversation thing.

And that I also find to be very interesting and just a more practical approach to epistemology. It's like, yeah, we make mistakes, but we recover from them. And how does the recovery work?

1:05:36 Mark: Well, in some case it just ends. It doesn't recover. So thanks for There is no recovery.

1:05:41 Matt: Just kidding. I enjoy this a lot.

1:05:44 Mark: Yep, always fun. Our closing song today is "The Real Life" from the new album by Matt Wilson and his orchestra. I talked to Matt on Nakedly Examined Music Number 118. Find that@nakedlyexaminedmusic.com Next time we are reading Stanley Cavell's "The Avoidance of Love: A Reading of King Lear". So come back for that. Check us out at partiallyexaminedlife.com comment on the Facebook group, tweet at us. Etc. Etc. Good night, everybody.

1:06:10 Matt: Good night. Night.

1:06:15 Unknown speaker: You won't stand in the sunlight there's a story that your rags will tell you won't land in a paradise tomorrow you'll be stuck until the final bell stumble stammer all the wrong grammar you will never get yourself a dear I know all about real life I know all about the real life I know all about real life and I know it's not real I'm on the town with my sweet wife and a bill that I can never pay I'm underground in my real life and I'm wishing I could fly away falling sorrow crawling for tomorrow my collar is a ring of rust I know all about real life I know all about the real life I know all about real life and I know it's not real I know all about real life I know all about the real life I know all about real real life and I know it's not real I know all of these schemes but I always get played and I met for days along a stream till there is the shame shame I want to holler and scream when the melodies play.

Memes are the real life dreams are the real life schemes are the real life I don't believe in the real life because I know I know I know I know it's not real. Does it feel like a real life or a city we will never see? I've been around from the mountain to the valley and there's nothing here for you and me trouble, sorrow forget about tomorrow everybody better hold the wheel I know all about real life I know all about the real life I know all about real life and I know it's not real I know all about real life I know I love real life I know all about real life and I know it's not really.