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Proust's Swann is obsessed by what he doesn't know about Odette. Hisanguish has no remedy; finding out more only adds to what he doesknow about her, which isn't what's worrying him. Since Kant, lots of philosophers

have suffered from a generalized and aggravated form of thesame complaint. They want to know what the world is like when theyaren't thinking about it; what things are like, not from one or other pointof view, but "in themselves." Or, anyhow, they think that maybe that'swhat science aims to know, and they wonder whether it's a projectthat makes any sense. They are thus concerned with "the possibility ofobjectivity ."

Moore's book is a sort of defense of the possibility of objectivity (whathe often calls the possibility of "absolute representations"). He doesn'targue that objectivity is ever attained or ever likely to be; perhaps noteven in our most scrupulous investigations. All he wants is that the goalshould be coherent. Given the modesty of the enterprise, it 's reallyshocking the conclusions that he's driven to. 'Weare shown that absolute

representations are impossible. . . . [But] . . . we do well to remind ourselves. . . that what we are shown is nonsense. Properly to replace

'x'in the schema "A is shown that x" is a quasi-artistic exercise in which onecreates something out of the resonances of (mere) verbiage. There is noreason whatever why this should not sometimes involve making playwith inconsistency. . ." (272)

It's, anyhow, a fascinating story how Moore gets to this. I think, in fact,that it 's a cautionary tale. Moore takes on board, from the beginning andessentially without argument, the currently received view of meaning inphilosophy. The rest follows as the night the day. What's splendid aboutthe book is that, unlike most philosophers who share his premises, Mooreis prepared to face the consequents. What's appalling is the tenacity withwhich Moore clings to an account of representation from which it followsthat his own philosophical views, inter alia, are nonsense. ('inter alia"because, of course, your views and mine are nonsense too.) Not just likenonsense, mind you, but the real thing: on all fours with "Phlump jing

Chapter 7Review of A . W. Moore's Points of View

ax," since "there can be no other reason for an utterance's failing to be a

representation than that certain [of the] words lack meaning" (201). I propose to trace, briefly, the course of these events. At the end, I' ll moralize a

little about how things stand if Moore's book is read, as I think it shouldbe, as a reductio of his theory of meaning.

The book starts oddly: "[A] representation need not be objective. . . . [A ]representation can be from a point of involvement.. . . I shall call any[such] representation. . . 'subjective' " (8). This makes representations thatcontain indexicals (like "It is humid today") perspectival and subjective,since "[I]f I wish to endorse an assertion I made yesterday of [this] sentence

, I have no alternative but to produce a representation of some othertype ('It was humid yesterday')" (12). This, to repeat, is an odd way tostart.

.

For although indexical sentences are uttered from a point of view (inthe sense that "it 's raining" can be true here and false there at one and thesame time; or true then and false now in one and the same place), theredoesn't seem to be anything particularly subjective about them. If whatyou want is subjectivity, try "red is warmer than green" or "Callas wasbetter than T ebaldi."

Indexicality is about content, whereas objectivity is about truth. If youtake indexicality as a paradigm of the perspectival, then it

's a mistake torun "perspectival

"

together with "subjective." What's interesting about asentence like "it 's raining" is that the content of the assertion that I makewhen I say it depends on where and when I am. What's interesting about"red is warmer than green" is something quite different; namely, that(maybe) it can be true for me but false for you, or (maybe) there's nomatter of fact at all about whether it 's true. There's, anyhow, certainly amatter of fact about whether it 's raining; so what on earth does whether arepresentation is indexical have to do with whether it

's objective? So onewonders as one reads along.

I guess what Moore has in mind is something like this: The content ofan indexical representation depends on its context. But so likewise do thecontents of representations of every other kind since having a representation

means having a language, and "having a language involves having anoutlook; or, more specifically . . . having a language involves having itsown distinctive outlook" (94). Moore swallows whole not just Wittgen-stein, but also Whorf and Saussure; which is, perhaps, a little quaint ofhim. So the content of a representation, indexical or otherwise, is fixedpartly by its conceptual role, by the inferences it licenses. That one canonly represent things from the point of view of one

's inferential commitments is therefore part and parcel of what content is. But representations

from a point of view are ipso facto perspectival, hence ipso facto notobjective. It seems, in short, that semantics puts pressure on epistemology

76 Chapter 7

across the board; there is a prima fade conflict between the possibility ofobjectivity and the idea that content is holistic. How to resolve this conflict

is what Moore's book is really about, though I doubt he'd want to put

the case this way.You don't have to resolve it, of course; you could try to just live with

it . Quite a lot of philosophers, including some of our most eminent contemporaries, seem to think that's indeed the best that you can do. So

Thomas Kuhn famously maintained that, because concepts are implicitlydefined by the theories that endorse them, radically different theories areipso facto

"incommensurable." There is, to that extent, no such thing as arational choice between conflicting theoretical paradigms, and there is nofact of the matter which, if either, of conflicting paradigms is objectivelycorrect. Changing your paradigm isn

't changing your mind, it's changing

your lifestyle.Variants of this disagreeable idea are on offer from philosophers with

as little else in common as, say, Wittgenstein, Quine, Goodman, Putnam,Derrida, and Davidson, among many others. Part of what

's wrong with itis that it's so unstable. Just how major does the disagreement in background

commitments have to be before incommensurability sets in? Andif, as seems likely, there is no principled answer to this question, isn

't itthe moral that all judgment turns out to be more or less subjective? We'renot far from the view that argument and persuasion are mostly powerpolitics in disguise; class politics on some accounts, sexual politics onothers. Whatever became of the disinterested pursuit of objective truth?

There is, however, a traditional, more or less Kantian way to split thedifference between what's perspective and what isn

't; it 's the doctrinecalled "transcendental idealism," and much of what's most interestingin Moore's book is about it . It's one thing, Moore says, to suppose thatrepresentation is ipso facto

"from an outlook"; it 's another to concludethat representation is ipso facto not objective. The second follows fromthe first only on the assumption that apparently conflicting perspectivalrepresentations aren

't capable of being integrated from a point of viewthat embraces both.

Suppose one takes for granted that representation is, as Moore puts it,always "of what

's there anyway." That is, all of our points of view areperspectives on the same world, the world to which our beliefs conforminsofar as they are true. True beliefs have to be mutually consistent, so itmust be possible, in principle at least, to integrate all of the true perspectives

, even if only by conjoining them. At the end of the day, representation is still perspectival, but perhaps the only perspective to which it

is intrinsically relative is our point of view as rational inquirers, or cognitive systems, or (as Moore sometimes puts it) as processors of knowledge.

Maybe you can't know what things are like in themselves, but you can,

Review of Moore's Points of View 77

78 Chapter 7.

at least in principle, know what they are like insofar as they are possibleobjects of knowledge. If this sounds a bit truistic, so much the better.

That's encouraging as far as it goes, but it doesn't really go far. For onething (a point Moore doesn't emphasize), the perspectival relativists heis trying to split the difference with are unlikely to grant him his

"basicassumption

" of a ready-made world. To the contrary, it 's part and parcelof the Kuhnian sort of view that thinkers with different paradigms ipsofacto live in different worlds. That's the metaphysical obverse of thesemantic claim that you can't integrate divergent paradigms. (Since Kuhntakes content to be paradigm-relative, what you get if you conjoin representations

from different paradigms is just equivocations.) Indeed, themany-worlds story is, arguably, just the incommensurable-paradigms storytranslated from semantics to metaphysics; so, arguably, you can

't haveone without the other. If it 's not clear how literally we're to take either, oreven what taking them literally would amount to, that just shows what a

, .mess we re m.And second, a point to which Moore is entirely alert, transcendental

idealism looks to be self-refuting. If you really can't say anything about

the world except as it is represented, then one of the things that you can't

say is that you can't say anything about the world except as it is represented. For the intended contrast is between how the world is as represented and how it is sans phrase. But how the world is sans phrase is how it

is not from a perspective, and it's part of the story we

're trying to tell thatrepresentation is perspectival intrinsically. It

's worth remarking how muchworse off Moore is than Kant in this respect. Kant thought that there aresubstantive constraints on the "form" of the possible objects of knowledge

, and hence that we can't know about what fails to conform to theseconstraints. Moore, following the early Wittgenstein, thinks that there aresubstantive constraints on the form of the possible objects of representation

, and hence that we can't even think about what fails to conform tothese constraints. For Kant, transcendental idealism was strictly meremetaphysics (that is to say, its truth is unknowable); for Moore it isstrictly mere babble (that is to say, its content is unspeakable). It is, Ithink, a general rule that whenever philosophy takes the

'

linguistic turn"

the mess it 's in gets worse.Transcendental idealism is nonsense by its own standards. So be it :

"[T] his leaves scope for all sorts of distinctions. . . . We can think of theNonsense Constraint as offering the following guideline when it comes tomaking sense of th~ schema

' A is shown that x' : namely to prescind altogether from considerations of content and to think more in aesthetic

terms. . . . To say of some piece of nonsense that it is the result of attempting to express the inexpressible is something like [sic] making an aesthetic

evaluation. It concerns what might be called, justly, if a little grandilo-

quently, the music of words" (202). One is powerfully reminded of Frank

Ramsey's salubrious wisecrack about the embarrassing bits of the Tractatus: 'What can't be said can't be said and it can't be whistled either."

I'll spare you the details, which are complicated and, in my view, muchless than convincing. Roughly, we have lots of

"

inexpressible" knowledge

. Its being inexpressible is somehow connected with its being knowing how (e.g., knowing how to process knowledge) rather than knowing

that, though I find this connection obscure. Anyhow , sometimes we're

driven to try to express the inexpressible (that we are has something todo with our aspiring to be infinite); when we do so, we talk nonsense.For example, we say things such as that representations can (or can't) beabsolute. Since this is nonsense, saying it can, of course, communicatenothing. But that we are inclined to say it shows all sorts of things. Forexample,. the nonsense we

're tempted to talk about value shows that"

things are not of value tout court. Nothing is. However, another thingwe are shown is that they are of value tout court. Our aspiration to beinfinite, precisely in determining that these things are of value for us,leads to our being shown this

" (xiii ). It's tempting to dismiss this sort ofthing as merely irritating . But if you propose to do so, you have to figureout how to avoid it while nevertheless relativizing meaning to perspective

and retaining a respectable notion of objectivity . It is enormouslyto Moore's credit that he has faced this squarely.

But, after all, where does having faced it get him? According to enemiesof objectivity like Kuhn, it 's false to say. that the world chooses betweenour theories. According to friends of objectivity like Moore, it 's nonsenseto say that the world chooses between our theories. Objectivity mightreason ably complain that with such friends it doesn

't need existentialists.What's remarkable is that neither side of the argument considers, even fora moment, abandoning the premise that

's causing the troubles; namely,that content is ipso facto perspectival and holistic.

Perspectival theories of meaning make objectivity look terribly hard. Somuch the worse for perspectival theories of meaning; objectivity is easy.Here's some: My cat has long whiskers. He doesn

't (as Moore would bethe first to agree) have long whiskers "from a perspective" or "relative toa conceptual syste:n

" or "imminently"; he has long whiskers tout court.That's what my cat is like even when I am not there (unless, however,someone should snip his whiskers while I'm not looking; which is not thesort of thing that Moore is worrying about). Prima facie, the onto logicalapparatus that

's required for my cat to have long whiskers is extremelyexiguous; all that

's needed is my cat, long whiskers, and the state of affairsthat consists of the former having the latter.

Likewise, it is possible for me to represent my cat's having long

whiskers. Indeed, I just did. The semantic apparatus required for this is

Review of Moore's Points of View 79

80 Chapter 1

also exiguous, and for much the same reasons. All I need is to be able torepresent my cat, long whiskers, and the state of affairs that consists ofthe former having the latter. First blush at least, neither my cat's havinglong whiskers nor my representing it as having them would seem toimply a perspective or an outlook or a desire for in6nity, or anything ofthe sort; the objectivity of the fact is about all that the objectivity of therepresentation requires. So whence, exactly, all the angst?

That all this is so, and objectively so, is far more obvious than anygeneral principles about the relativity of content to perspectives or conceptual

systems. If, therefore, your perspectivist semantics leads you todoubt that it is objectively so, or that it can coherently be said to beobjectively so, it 's the semantics and not the cat that you should considergetting rid of. That this methodological truism should have escaped somany very sophisticated philosophers, Moore among them, seems to meto be among the wonders of the age.

P art III

Cognitive Architecture

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