Communication, Understanding, and Progress: Towards an Ideal Discourse

Suggestions for improving the fidelity and efficiency of communicative transfer of semantically interpretable information between philosophical agents.

            For the purposes of this disquisition, Philosophical Discourse will be defined as those activities which consist in the formulation, refinement, and advocacy of truth functional propositions by Philosophical Agents.  Philosophical Agents will be defined as that class of agents which are able to understand the external world by means of some sort of mental activity which, in turn, consists of a complimentary function of sensory perception and a preformed conceptual framework which includes linguistic categories.  Understanding will mean the state of affairs in which a philosophical agent finds itself to be in possession of a semantically interpretable internal informational state to which its consciousness has access which accurately models the external world.  I do not intend to tackle the particular details of mental states, the nature of consciousness, the problems of semantic interpretation, and other issues raised by these definitions.  My hope is that the conception of philosophy I wish to employ be quite broad and accepting of different models of agency, language, and meaning.  It is intended to be an account of a pragmatic, functional manner of undertaking philosophical discourse, leaving the issues of accurate metaphysical description aside. 

            Philosophical discourse takes place whenever a philosophical agent makes use of natural language as a medium of exchange of meaningful information (information with semantic content) between itself and an audience with the intention of bringing that audience into a state of shared understanding.  The elucidation which follows will examine the enterprise of philosophy as a communicative activity engaged in between or among these philosophical agents whose final cause is to create, in those agents, a set of maximally reasonable beliefs about the external world.  The means by which we will achieve this is by promoting progress toward shared understanding.  Philosophy, in short, is Cognitive Progress. 

            In 1948 Claude Shannon published a paper entitled “A Mathematical Theory of Communication” which many attribute to be the genesis of Information Theory.  It was a work primarily concerned with the improvement of communication of information between two spatially distinct locations.  As aptly defined by Shannon:

 

            “The fundamental problem of communication is that of producing at one point…approximately a message selected at another point.”

 

            He described a “Communication System” as one consisting of these 5 parts:

 

I.                   An Information Source

II.                A Transmitter

III.             A Channel

IV.             A Receiver

V.                A Destination

 

Though Shannon was concerned with the more narrow, functional, engineering problem of how to optimize a system of transfer of digital information from one source to another in the most efficient and accurate way, his models can be of great use when turned to focus on philosophical discourse as well.  Shannon explicitly states in the introduction to his paper:

 

“Frequently, the messages have meaning; that is they refer to or are correlated according to some system with certain physical or conceptual entities.  These semantic aspects of communication are irrelevant to the engineering problem.”

 

            The semantic aspects, however, are precisely those with which the “Philosophical Problem of Communication” is concerned.  Agents of philosophical discourse need not be concerned with engineering systems, but rather with methods for improving the capacity of the systems of which they have come into possession by way of evolutionary contingencies: including a consciousness with the ability to receive information, including that transmitted by language, through interpretation of the external world by its perceptive and cognitive systems, imbue it with semantic content, formulate beliefs about the external world, and act volitionally upon those beliefs.  The question becomes: How can philosophical agents maximize the functionality of these naturally occurring systems to achieve the goal of attaining accurate understanding of the truth functional propositions expressed by its fellows?  A proposed answer to this question constitutes the remainder of this paper. 

The primary mode of communication between contemporary human philosophical agents is Natural Language (English, French, Chinese, etc.).  One of our designs is: to examine how understanding can be maximally transmitted between philosophical agents by means of natural language, and further: to propose methods by which to improve the efficiency, fidelity, and accuracy of philosophical discourse as so construed.  I would like to begin by translating Shannon’s five parts of a communication system into a useful parlance to address the philosophical problem of communication of linguistic, semantically interpretable information:

 

I.                   The information content of a mind/brain state of the philosophical agent who is taking the position of the expositor

II.                The mind/brain function of the expositor whereby the information is translated into natural language and transmitted into the world by means of physical manipulation (speech, writing, etc.)

III.             The perturbations of the external world caused by the physical expression of the translated information to be perceived by the audience

IV.             The sensory system of the audience which perceives these perturbations and delivers this information to their consciousness

V.                The mind/brain state of the audience created by the perception of the information for whom the message was intended

 

The purpose of such a system is to maximize the similarity between I and V.  Were I and V to be equivalent, the goal of transmission of understanding would have been achieved as the audience would be functionally commensurate to the expositor.  The skeptical claim of the impossibility of equivalence of mind/brain states (even functionally equivalent) I believe to be without teeth, because our purposes are not to perfect our system, but simply to make progress within its constraints.  Recall that we are not concerned here with engineering better systems of language or mentality, but merely with improving the functionality of those which we do possess.   Progress toward improving the process of transfer of understanding is progress toward an increase in the likelihood of I and V being functionally equivalent. 

Our question has now been refined to: What communication methods are most useful to increase the likelihood of achieving, in the audience, a functionally equivalent mind/brain information state to that of the expositor?  Any philosophical capital spent on developing an answer toward this question is progressive.  As well, any philosophical discourse which makes use of correct answers to this question is progressive.  Philosophical discourse without disagreement is moot, but philosophical discourse motivated by irrelevant disagreement is not progressive.  I would like to begin a discussion along these lines by introducing five simple conditions which I take to be necessary (but not sufficient) methods by which to reduce irrelevant disagreement, and promote cognitive progress toward shared understanding within the domain of philosophical discourse viewed as a communication process between philosophical agents by means of natural language.

 

I.                   Clearly, publicly, and precisely define relevant terms and concepts

II.                Examine the position for relevant underlying assumptions and explicate these assumptions

III.             Announce and explain the logic/rationality/rules of inference which are used to reach the conclusion

IV.             Monitor and maintain distinctions between relevant levels of description

V.                Construct, analyze, and experiment with useful analogies

 

Disagreement which remains after the proper application of these methods is more likely to lead to cognitive progress and less likely to fall prey to energy wasted on irrelevance.  If it is the case that information in the form of truth functional propositions which is transmitted linguistically between two philosophical agents is more likely to be understood in the case that these tools are correctly applied by the agents involved, these tools are useful methods which ought to be applied to progressive philosophical discourse. 

To the extent which philosophical discourse takes place in natural language, philosophical discourse ought to be concerned with accuracy of its agents’ shared definitions of terms, predicates, and concepts used.  Definitions of units of natural language (words, morphemes) are primarily semiotic interconnections.  Words in natural language are “defined” by other words.  Though this may be a barrier to perfection, it is useful for progress.  Any word in isolation is very difficult to understand, and virtually impossible if one does not take into consideration a non-linguistic context.  A philosophical agent, seated comfortably before a fireplace in discussion with another who utters, “Quark” has no context, linguistic or otherwise, by means of which to attribute semantic meaning to the information it just received and may resort to the assumption that his interlocutor has had his brain replaced by that of a duck with a southern accent.  More words, properly constructed, lend a context to the information, “All baryonic matter consists of quarks” is a more useful utterance (truth functional proposition); there are many contextual clues provided for the audience to construct semantic meaning out of the information with which it has been provided.  However, if the audience is not in possession of a preexisting linguistic construct into which the sound “quark” fits, if it does not know what the relevant terms in this utterance mean (or if the preexisting construct differs from the sense in which the expositor is employing the term) the audience will not be able to understand the proposition.  For the purposes of philosophical discourse, a requirement of the expositor to ostensibly educate the audience is not reasonable, but a request to define “Quark” by the means of other words to such an extent that the audience is satisfied that they do now understand the proposition and the expositor agrees that it is likely to be the case is progress.  Condition (I) will have been satisfied if the agents in the discussion strive to maintain definitions which are reasonably precise, and are reasonable in their shared belief that each is employing the linguistic units in a functionally equivalent manner. 

Assumptions are a necessary component of all philosophical argumentation.  Our program is not to minimize the use of assumptions, but to minimize their tacitness.  Hidden assumptions, whether they remain so due to intentional obfuscation or genuine accident, reduce the possibility of understanding (even within an agent of his own “argument”) and drastically increase the likelihood of irrelevant disagreement.  The “truth functional propositions” (TFP’s) with which aspects of philosophy are concerned are interpretable as the conclusions of arguments.  Arguments require the use of assumptions, from which they proceed, by rules of logic(s), to the conclusions, otherwise known as our TFP’s.  The task of understanding the TFP of an expositor includes the process of gaining possession of the assumptions used by the expositor’s argument by which they reach their conclusion/TFP.  Without a proper understanding of the assumptions themselves, a progressive disagreement about the conclusion is not fruitful.  It should be acknowledged that two philosophical agents can disagree about the truth value of a proposition and both be using valid arguments, if they do not share assumptions.  As both agents are employing valid tacit arguments, it is not likely that they will find themselves able to make progress toward agreement or understanding.  In cases such as this, progress would be achieved by the agents shifting the level of the discussion to the assumptions themselves.  An assumption can itself become a TFP, by shifting the focus of the discourse.  At this point, the agents can examine the assumptions necessary to reach the new TFP (which was an assumption of the previous argument), and proceed in this manner until they reach a state of agreement about a shared understanding.  Only then ought they filter back to the original argument, with a new understanding of the underlying, and now explicit, assumptions.  When the philosophical agents agree upon an understanding of the relevant assumptions to the TFP in question and their relative values, Condition II. has been satisfied. 

            Condition (III) is the last in the series of conditions which could be viewed as approximating a formal system in natural language.  It is well established that formal (syntactic) systems can provide users with deductive certainty, but the cost is that the symbols of the system are meaningless; formal systems are not semantic.  Being as the philosophical problem of communication deals with how to transfer semantically interpretable meaningful language between agents, formal systems will not suffice.  However, progress toward approximating their beneficial attributes (certainty, deduction, proof, etc) can be made without giving up all of semantics.  The first three conditions listed above are, basically, strides in the direction of  progress toward gaining the rigor of formal systems without losing the meaning vehicle which is natural language. Formal systems consist in syntax, axioms, and manipulation rules.  We have dealt with the philosophical counterpart to the first two items, now for the third. 

            Expositors who engage in the communication process of uttering truth functional propositions in the company of an audience with the intent of bringing this audience into a state of shared understanding must have an argument as to why the audience should accept their proposition.  This argument will be constructed in natural language, be based upon assumptive premises, and have some process of decision rules by which the conclusion relates to the premises.  This process is what I mean by Rational.  The particular process by which a philosophical agent constructs arguments, and the tools used to connect premises (assumptions) to conclusions (truth functional propositions) is their rationale.  What is reasonable to one agent may not be to another.  Just as two agents can use a single word to mean different things, they can also be using different decision procedures to argue for their position.  Our suggestion, then, parallels that for the first two conditions: Explicate the rationale employed.  Remaining disagreement shall then shift the level of discussion to a meta-rational level about the rules themselves, and can in this way make progress.  Condition III is met when the agents involved in the discourse agree upon an understanding of the rules of rationality currently in use. 

            The pragmatic conception of argument, meaning, and truth employed in philosophical discourse leaves room for fluctuation.  It is possible for natural language truth functional propositions to have multiple or shifting truth values depending on the Level of Description currently in use.  This is another important difference between natural language and formal systems, the syntactic units not only are also semantically interpretable, their legitimate reasonable semantic interpretations fluctuate depending on their context.  The cliché “it’s all relative” or “it’s all in how you look at it” are salient to philosophical discourse as regards to the contextual level of description on which the discourse is taking place.  These levels are often shifting, and difficult to delineate.  I reiterate that the slippery character of these conceptual difficulties to ideal discourse are not a hindrance to progress, merely to perfection. 

            An example of one possible cause of a proposition’s shifting truth value due to a change in levels of description was elucidated by the physicist Heinz Pagels under the term “causal decoupling”:

 

"Causal decoupling" between the levels of the world implies that to understand the material basis of certain rules I must go to the next level down; but the rules can be applied with confidence without any reference to the more basic level. Interestingly, the division of natural sciences reflects this causal decoupling. Nuclear physics, atomic physics, chemistry, molecular biology, biochemistry, and genetics are each independent disciplines valid in their own right, a consequence of the causal decoupling between them.... Such a series of "causal decouplings" may be extraordinarily complex, intricate beyond our current imaginings. Yet finally what we may arrive at is a theory of the mind and consciousness - a mind so decoupled from its material support systems that it seems to be independent of them - and "forgot" how we got to it.... The biological phenomenon of a self-reflexive consciousness is simply the last of a long and complex series of "causal decouplings" from the world of matter.

 

            A proposition can be useful, meaningful, and have an agreed upon reasonable acceptability of its truth value on the level of atomic physics, and yet be false or meaningless on another level.  Ethical judgments do not apply to essential particles, but may be useful concepts on the level of societies of conscious agents.  Evolution may be explicable in terms of chemistry, but there are more general levels of description which also contain “true” and arguably more useful concepts, such as individuals, species, environments, etc. which are difficult at best to explain in chemical terms.  The question as to what levels may be more useful than others is beyond the scope of this work, what concerns us here is the way the maintenance of distinctions between levels of description effects philosophical discourse. 

            Two philosophical agents may be each employing distinct levels of description (which may or may not be reducible to some sort of mental “context”) or a single expositor may switch or “jump” levels during the course of a discussion for the purpose of deception or because of a mistake.  It is to be the responsibility of all discursive participants to be mindful of descriptive levels and their pragmatically appropriate application, which is to be defined by intersubjective agreement.  Levels of description include “use/mention” distinctions, causal decouplings, equivocations, and other potential hang-ups. 

            To drive home the philosophical mistake of “level jumping” (one agent purposively or mistakenly using the same word or proposition or argument on distinct and incommensurate levels of description), contrast it with traditional equivocation by way of the intension/extension method of meaning determination.  When a philosophical agent employs a word in natural language in the context of a philosophical discursion, it is reasonable for the audience to assume that the expositor possesses an internal conception, a semantic essence which atomizes the set or category which thusly defines the concept: this is the intension.  The extension is the set of actually existing objects in the external world which satisfies the conditions of the semantics of the intensional linguistic concept.  With this in mind, we can see that classical equivocation is the use of an identical utterance which has two different intensions (Wells Fargo “bank” and river “bank” etc.)  This sort of equivocation is with intensions, the extensions follow along appropriately, but the audience can have difficulty distinguishing them because of the identity of the utterance.  However, a level-jumping equivocation would be an issue with extensions  An agent can be said to be correctly employing a term when his intension matches his intended extension.  But, when an agent shifts levels of description, the semantic context of the new level will not contain an identical extensive class, and therefore the agent’s intension no longer matches his intended extension.  For example, someone is using a term such as “consciousness” on the level of description which can be approximated by the term “human interaction”.  This, it could be argued, is a legitimate use of “consciousness” because the agent intends this term to mean something which has an extension which is embodied by human beings who interact at a societal level.  However, if by some discursive contingency, the level of description shifts to a level more accurately described as “cell dynamics”, there is no extension on this level which applies to the intended intension of human agents.  The claim is that extensions are only sensible concepts upon distinct levels of description, and if an agent shifts levels of description without shifting its intensions, it is possible for that agent to lose the legitimacy conditions of his term usage.  This is a hindrance to progress, and fertile ground for cultivation of irrelevant disagreement. 

            Analogy is, basically, the process of noting the similarities between otherwise disparate concepts or entities.  This can be an indispensable tool for conveyance of understanding.  Part of our definition of philosophical agents is that they are in possession of some sort of preformed cognitive framework, without which they could not function as philosophical agents.   Individual pre-formations are highly likely to vary significantly between agents.  A metaphysician may have a different “knowledge base” than a philosopher of science, etc.  Appreciation of this tendency leads the philosopher who values transmission of understanding to create and publicly examine possible analogies to the particular topic at hand.  When understanding transfer between agents feels like “trying to put a square peg in a round hole”, restating the problem in analogous terms can serve to blunt the corners. 

            As well as the simple effectiveness of co-opting individual pre-formed cognitive machinery for the purposes of catalyzing understanding, analogies can be persuasive to those agents who are in agreement that one ought minimize contradictory beliefs.  If an expositor is aware of the position of an audience member on a certain topic which is analogous to his proposal, but is resistant to accept the current point, it would do well to bring the audience member’s attention to the similarity between the aforementioned scenarios, and request that the audience member listen for cognitive dissonance. 

            Finally, there is also philosophical usefulness to be discovered in logical analogy: the analysis of extents of similarity.  Inductive arguments can be formed of the sort: Item A is similar to Item B in respects r, s, and p: Therefore it is reasonable to conclude that they are also similar in respect t.  Or, similarly: Item A can be classified as a Type t because of x known features, Items of Type t also possess features y and z: Therefore it is reasonable to test Item A for possession of features y and z.  This study should be undertaken with caution and skepticism, but has the potential to make novel discoveries of relevant and important attributes which otherwise may have gone unnoticed.   Like definitions and rationality, analogies are imperfect and flawed.  However, the argument I wish to make is (merely) that they are a potentially useful tool to achieve progress toward a shared understanding. 

To exemplify the potential fruitfulness of this suggestion, I would like to close by sharing this original analogy between Philosophy, construed as a “Science of Belief”, and the internal cellular process of protein synthesis:

I am, sometimes, of the opinion that a useful way to answer the question “What is Philosophy?” is “The Science of Belief”, by which I mean, a relatively rigorous rational conscious cognitive process of belief formation by means of inference to the best explanation; doing the best we can to create and maintain a set of beliefs which happens to be (in some sense) accurate with regard to the actual state of affairs.  As both an argument for, and an elucidation of, this position: I introduce you to Philosophy as Rational Noetic Activity (RNA): An Analogy.

(Please accept the simplifications, as my intentions are to be accurate only to the extent which is useful for this analogy rather than for biological precision.)  Human bodies are made, partially but essentially, of proteins.  Proteins are curled up “chains” of amino acids.  Amino acids are organic molecules.  There happen to be 20 amino acids from which the proteins in the human body are assembled.  The assembly instructions for proteins are embodied in DNA.  DNA consists of two long and interconnected polymers of the four nucleotides adenine, cytosine, guanine and thymine held together by sugars and phosphates.  The sequential order of these four nucleotides upon the DNA molecule provides us with information, some of which can be used as instructions by which to assemble viable proteins.  RNA is (usually) a single strand of nucleotides.  The process of RNA transcription is the process by which enzymes synthesize molecules of RNA based on the structure of the DNA molecule.  Then amino acids are brought together and assembled into chains by matching them up with the order of nucleotides on the RNA molecule, which in turn was determined by the order of nucleotides on the DNA molecule.  After assembly, the amino acids curl up and form proteins, which then go on to take part in pretty much every cellular process (including the process just described!). 

With this framework in mind, let us examine in what manner our proposed notion of Philosophy can be analogously applied to this model.  Let us interpret the DNA of our biological model with the external world, the “actual state of affairs” as regards the philosophical model.  Both are relatively stable storehouses of information which are relatively, but not totally, independent of observational influence, and embody the “stuff” from which biological or philosophical agents assemble their proteins or beliefs.  The Proteins, then, will be analogous to the belief states and/or propositional opinions which will in turn make up the totality of their cognitive “soma”: the “body” of beliefs of the individual agent.  This leaves the process of RNA transcription and protein synthesis to be considered analogous to the process of philosophy as rational noetic activity and conscious belief formation.

The process of doing philosophy can be viewed as analogous to interpreting the external world (enzymatic synthesis of RNA molecules based on the information contained in/on DNA), and then assembling belief states/propositional opinions in language (assembling amino acids into protein chains).  This leads us to extend our analogy one step further.  Perhaps we would do well to consider amino acids as analogous to words, and protein chains/belief states to sentences of natural language.  By doing this we would on the one hand fall into some technical philosophical problems of belief vs. opinion, propositional attitudes, etc. but we would gain another level of accuracy and usefulness from our analogy.  If we accept that in some general sense there is a useful concept called “belief” which can in some useful sense be viewed to consist of (or be translatable into) linguistic entities (sentences, propositions), this analogy should hold.

Then, to extend the analogy even further: the totality of proteins which make up an individual body, on the biological side, then goes out into an actual environment in which it is subject to the mechanisms of natural selection and evolution over time.  A body which is made of survivalistically optimal proteins will have selective benefits for individuals who possess them over individuals who do not.  This is why it is important to have a high-fidelity system of protein synthesis from the DNA information, mediated by the processes of the various RNA molecules.  To turn our attention back to the philosophy analogy: we could argue that an agent would be more likely to survive if its belief states were accurate to the actual state of affairs embodied by the external world.  Therefore, the more progress we can make toward perfecting the process of philosophy as Rational Noetic Activity, the more likely our beliefs/opinions, expressed as linguistic strings, are to be in accordance with the information contained in the external world, and the more likely we, as agents with a “body of beliefs” are to survive and succeed.

It seems likely that there are more useful aspects to this analogy, but for the purposes of this introduction, I will leave it there.  Even this preliminary sketch serves to exemplify how analogies serve to convey understanding of and argument for a position simultaneously and effectively.

The goals of this paper have been: to delineate a useful purpose for the enterprise of philosophical discourse, examine this conception for essential aspects, and set forth an introductory method for making progress toward the achievement of an Ideal Discourse which would satisfy our demands of improving the fidelity and efficiency of communicative transfer of semantically interpretable information by means of natural language between philosophical agents with the purpose of achieving shared understanding defined as a functionally equivalent mental state.  Other philosophers who share this goal are encouraged to make additions to the method, while employing the tools which have been laid out herein.  Discursive experiments will provide a sort of “test” whose results in satisfaction, agreement, and philosophical progress can be potentially applied to the recursive assessment of methodological pragmatism to determine the extent to which these suggestions serve to achieve the stated goals. 

Author's Note

Good luck! As always I appreciate greatly anyone willing to take the time to read, consider and reply in any way they see fit.