A Thought Experiment

 

tl;dr
A scenario is developed in which people participate in an activity with several of the key elements of linguistic exchange, but in which there is no communication or other representational value. The elements are sufficient to motivate a convincing concept of truth. This tells us something about truth.

 

Let's do a thought experiment. (Yes, it's the Model again).

Suppose everyone is born with a small, low-res pixel square on her or his forehead which allows us to display random, QR-code-like patterns. And suppose pretty much everyone quickly learns to be able to display any pattern if s/he sees it, and to invent new ones. Let's say, additionally, that we naturally sort these patterns into two buckets, A and B, with some being obviously As, others obviously Bs, but yet others just a toss-up. People mostly agree which are the As and which the Bs, but not in all cases. Finally, for now, let's say that encountering for the first time some small fraction of A-type patterns gives us a really nice, pleasurable shiver - a little shot of dopamine or endorphins. Sometimes, generating patterns on your own (seeing them with your mind's eye, if you like), you can find one which gives you this shiver, but it's not easy. This is all a bit weird, I concede, but not obviously impossible or without mundane parallels.

Pretty clearly, people would form a kind of unspoken contract whereby they would exchange their respective patterns for their mutual benefit - I'll give you my latest pleasurable patterns if you give me yours. People would naturally engage in pattern-trading as a social activity. People who often have new pleasurable patterns to offer would be sought-out as good company, those who always just offer-up the same old ones, not so much. Obviously, people who offer-up patterns widely agreed to be B-type, which we've stipulated never give the shiver, would be spurned. The whole point is to get the shiver.

Now, let's add two crucial assumptions. We're supposing people to have stored-up in their memories a personal stock of A-type patterns, hopefully some new and shiver-worthy to others, ready to exchange. First, let's now suppose that whether you recognize a new pattern to be an A or a B depends in part on what patterns you've encountered and judged to be an A in the past -on what you've got in your stock. Your experience colours your judgement. And second, let's suppose that people have some small latitude to revise their estimations as to whether patterns are A's or B's. People aren't completely malleable, but they can generally tweak things a bit. It does, though, take some effort to change - there's a personal cost.

The first thing to observe is that small divergences would potentially amplify. Even two people who would, without this assumption, almost completely agree on what's A and what's B, would, if they by chance came to diverge in what they had in their personal stocks, disagree on new patterns dependent on their divergent stored patterns, and this disagreement would potentially propagate and grow.

The second thing to notice is that cajoling others to change their patterns to align with yours would become not just possible but desirable. My chances of getting a shiver from one of your offered patterns will be importantly greater if you and I broadly agree than if we are widely divergent, and vice-versa. Moreover, you will, in your exchanges with others, be a more effective proxy for me both in getting patterns I will value when relayed in future exchanges between us, and in disseminating my patterns to the wider community. And vice-versa. Shiver-worthy pattern discovery would come to be a collective undertaking, one whose productivity would be directly dependent on people being aligned in their personal stocks of patterns.

The people in this scenario would naturally compile a kind of shared catalogue of agreed pleasurable patterns, and would, upon individually finding a new personally pleasurable one, strive to have it included in the catalogue. Having my patterns in the catalogue would mean that others would pull in the same direction as I, and so increase the chances of my getting more shivers down the road. Having it excluded would mean either that I would have to put in the work to tweak my own stock, to come to see it as not really an A, or just to resign myself to missing out on all the pleasure to be got from the eventually accumulating, divergent stock of patterns in the catalogue with which I would disagree. If you disagree with me about some new pattern, I would struggle with you to try to convince you that you are wrong and I am right, about the worthiness of this pattern for inclusion.

In short, people would naturally cooperate to accumulate a shared catalogue of patterns which would redound to the personal benefit of them all, but they would also compete to get their own patterns in the catalogue, where there's divergence.

It would be useful to have a name for patterns in the catalogue. 'True' is as good as any.

I hope the analogy to familiar linguistic exchange is clear. What is absent here, of course, is the imparting of any information about non-linguistic reality.

I anticipate two related reactions. First, the pleasurable shivers are a contrivance which needs to be cashed-out in terms of the benefits truth affords. And second, what the Model lacks is any explanation as to why people lump patterns into the A or B buckets. It's in the answering of the implied questions here that the usual work done by a semantic theory would lurk, some might think.

The first reaction is surely correct - the shivers have no obvious correlate in ordinary talk. I think they can be innocently factored-out in terms of mundane benefits got from learning truths. My entry titled 'Pleasure' under 'The Model', tries to do this. The important immediate moral is that truth can be fully explicated with just a simple, one-dimensional concept - it doesn't depend on the diversity of the many benefits we get from linguistic exchange.

The implication of the second reaction - that we are owed an explanation in the vocabulary of semantics as to why people judge as they do - is incorrect. Natural science can explain all that's opaque and needs to be explained about language in non-semantic terms. And our everyday, common-sense meaning- and truth-involving explanations are in order as they are. Philosophy's problems in this domain begin when we imagine there to be an intelligible explanatory idiom adverting to mental sub-states or faculties or abilities of persons as such. Explanations in terms of substates of our bodies or brains are fine. And common sense, in whose explanations we definitely do figure as persons, likewise, is fine. But our selves do not admit of decomposition into sub-parts, the as-yet opaque constitution or operation of which awaits our unravelling.