Language, Normativity, and Knowledge

Wittgenstein: To know the meaning of ‘blue’ is to know the use of the linguistic item, i.e., to know the appropriate circumstance for employing it.

Quine: One learns the usage of ‘blue’ via induction, i.e., by observing and generalizing over other people’s verbalization behaviors.

David Lewis: The motivation for conforming to the convention consisting in the average behavioral patterns of the community is survival, and linguistic conventions contribute to survival by enabling information exchange.

Kripke: The meaning of 'blue' is the rules rather than the psychological inclination (or disposition) associated with the use of the linguistic item. The rules are social, i.e., established and maintained by the community.

Synthesis: To learn (the meaning of) ‘blue’ is to train one’s impulse to employ ‘blue’ only under certain circumstances the appropriateness of which is determined in respect to the conventions inaugurated by the community for information exchange that maximize one’s chance of survival.

This picture of language-learning implies that human must be possessing the ability to sort observations (of behaviors) and impulses according to their similarities, i.e., to put things in order; one must categorize similar observations (perceptual impulses), group similar (internal) impulses, and connect between these two classes. The (neural) network of these node-impulses is underwritten by normativity. The legitimacy, validity, or authority of the normative network is conditional on their survival utility. The notion of truth, factuality, reality, or objectivity—as the proxy for survival—has a regulating function in this network activity. Rule-following is our coping strategy. That is, humans have the aptitude to put things in order as to follow its rules in their attempt to survive and prosper. To put it metaphorically, humans are apt to perceive things in terms of their guiding framework and walk its way (into the Land of Promise) as to preserve their life.

The (constantly changing) normative network of impulses provides one with a (linguistic) theory to interpret (one’s sensorial reception of) other people’s behaviors. The theory is the proximate, and the survival is the distal. 

There is the need to distinguish between natural and social language. Due to the aptitude to put things in order, should one be left alone without any social interaction, the subject may develop a language that is natural to his initial sorting of impulses. In learning to exchange information with others, one learns social language, the linguistic convention of the community within which the subject broadens the neural network by making connections between observations and (internal) impulses; social language is the outermost layer of one's reservoir of knowledge as it is through the linguistic convention does one access the trending information (commonsense).

The internal impulses alone provide analytic hypotheses (which are the sources for intension), but are constrained by (whether they can make the most out of) observations (perceptual impulses). Thus, humans construct deductive-nomological models of the world that are empirically defeasible. Given that what constitutes the content of information is inferentiality, to engage in linguistic, i.e., rational, activities is to construct empirically defeasible deductive-nomological models of the world for self-preservation.