We have argued that, if there is a logical connection between protocol sentences and affirmations, then it is impossible for affirmations to have a stronger epistemic status than protocol sentences. Since Schlick’s position was that affirmations had a stronger epistemic status than protocol sentences, it was not possible for the two to be logically connected, and so we have argued that Schlick’s
model must have been based on a relation that was weaker than deductive. But we have also argued that this model is less than satisfactory. In this section I want to briefly consider one final area in logical space – could we adopt a view on which affirmations and protocol sentences are both infallible? This view was certainly not Schlick’s, and I will argue that it is flawed in its own right, but it raises considerations that will be important going into the next chapter.
We know that the certainty of affirmations is supposed to be grounded in their demonstrative character, but also that their meaning can’t just be “whatever it takes to make this proposition true” because the notion of truth conditions wouldn’t
apply in that case. However, in order to avoid the risk of using the wrong word to describe experience, Schlick said that the rules for interpreting an affirmation “lead
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to ostensive definitions,” (1935b, [1979b p.413]). This seems to imply that the rules for the interpretation of an affirmation “here, now, φ,” include “φ is defined as ‘that which is here and now,” which looks like exactly the violation of private language concerns that we were worried about.
In chapters 2 and 3 (sections 2.3 and 3.1.2) we argued that, because of his Form and Content philosophy, ostensive definitions play a slightly different role for Schlick than might have been expected (perhaps to the extent that we shouldn’t refer to them as “ostensive definitions”). We argued that, since meaning is logical
form rather than content, ostensive definition provides a way of getting at the grammar of a word without relying on definition by other words, rather than attaching a word to a particular experienced sensation. In this way, ostensive definitions give us a kind of meaning which is publicly available – logical form can be grasped by two different people. However, in the case of affirmations the logical form of the ostensively-defined term is that of the experience of the definer. There is no guarantee that anyone else present has the same form of experience. This means that affirmations fall afoul of our first private language concern from pages 141-142 – the language thus defined does not necessarily line up with the language everyone else is speaking. This appears to make affirmations useless for communication, but we might be able to use them to confirm an individual’s system
of beliefs if we can avoid the second objection – that a statement the meaning of which is whatever makes this statement true isn’t a meaningful statement. For this
to be the case, the speaker must attach a determinate meaning to the words of the affirmation. The meaning of the words can be chosen to correspond with what the speaker believes to be the form of their experience, but the speaker also has to understand that if the world was different then the same affirmation would be false. If that condition is met, then the affirmation is not logically infallible, but we may consider it to be epistemically infallible if we are prepared to accept, as Schlick did, that we can select rules of interpretation for our utterances that we know to correspond with what we are experiencing.
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Affirmations thus construed can be linked to the intersubjective language because, within the Form and Content framework, there is no possibility of a
language which isn’t intersubjective in this sense. Language is about form which can be shared by sentences, minds, and the facts which they express, and there is no distinction between the material world that is the subject matter of science and the internal world of experience. A person has a number of hypothetical beliefs about
the world, such as “when I look through the telescope, I will see red,” and they form
affirmations in the same language. When the subject looks through the telescope and
says “here, now, red,” the way that this affirmation confirms the hypothesis is that
“red” means the same thing in the affirmation as it does in the hypothesis. At the
same time, however, “red” in the affirmation is defined ostensively with reference to whatever the subject is looking at. The implication of this is that what the subject believes about the world – the hypothetical belief here being confirmed – is determined by what they are looking at. When a person looks at, say, Mars and says
“red” they do so because they believe that the word “red” is the appropriate one to
use to describe this colour. They believe that the colour they are now seeing is similar to that of post boxes and contrasts with that of grass. The result is that, on this account, the meaning of not only the affirmation, but the whole network of the
subject’s beliefs is determined by the ostensive definitions which occur moment by
moment in the forming of affirmations.
Affirmations are statements about the world, and when they are uttered sincerely the subject will be choosing the words which they believe are right to describe their present experience. Meaning, on the Schlickian account, is a matter of the rules chosen for the interpretation of signs, and so when a subject sets out to describe whatever is in front of them, whatever that is (but not whatever that is, which we have seen will fall afoul of private language concerns) becomes the
meaning of the term used. But the subject isn’t just using some placeholder term like “this” or “φ” –they’re using a word that has a place in the rest of their beliefs (and
even if they can’t find the right word for what they’re currently experiencing,they’re
still trying to refer to something which bears a relation to the rest of those beliefs – even if I can’t think of the right word for a colour, I can point to it on a colour wheel).
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A person who affirms “here, now, blue,” at the place where they were expecting to see blue is confirming their beliefs, and that just goes to show that what they believe is this. If affirmations are to serve as foundations of knowledge with both infallibility and a deductive link to the system of science, then it looks as though the result must be that a person’s entire network of belief is given meaning by the moments of
experience which verify or falsify them.
This view might hold some appeal to a radical internalist who is happy enough for the entirety of their language to have its meaning determined moment by moment by their current beliefs. The tension here is that, in believing that “blue”
is the appropriate word to describe their experience, the subject seems to bring more to the meaning of the word than we would expect from a simple ostensive
definition. They bring along with them beliefs like “this word is also the word which
applies to such-and-such”, and “this word is the word that most people would use to describe similar situations”. Certainly we think that there is some stability in the majority of our hypotheses about the world, and that would seem to be enough to reduce this account to absurdity, but the problem is present even in the view that we attributed to Schlick in the previous sections. Schlick wants it to be the case that the sense of an affirmation is not determined by common linguistic practices, and that is what we need if we are to retain certainty, but in this case why try to use
common words in expressing them? Why don’t we make up a new word for every new moment of experience? It can only be because we have certain beliefs about the way these experiences link in with our pre-existing beliefs, and that introduces epistemic risk.
So, if the system of science as a whole is, as we assume, fallible, then if affirmations are infallible our use of words like “red” and “blue” is inconsistent
across the language. What we have just seen in this section is that if we hold our use of those words as fixed across the system, and still take affirmations as infallible, then this seems to result in a subject’s language shifting moment by moment in accordance with whatever they’re currently experiencing. That means that in either case we have a troubling lack of consistency in our use of words whenever
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affirmations are held as infallible in the moment of utterance. In the next chapter we will see how the problem of secure foundations for science evolves when we get clearer on the stability of meaning. We will see how Donald Davidson provided an account of language on which we must take it as primitive that people are using language in some systematic way, and we will go on to look at the framework provided by David Chalmers within which we can interpret meaning-change over time with a bit more precision.