Time Travel, Prenatal Ethics and other Miscellania

Random thoughts, mostly things I have posted online elsewhere:

Wow, this is simply HORRIBLE journalism. There are so many things wrong with this article - it's simply sensationalism. A text from hundreds of years after Jesus' death, written in the area from which we get all Gnostic writings which mixed up Jesus and Christianity with the mystery religions, has Jesus mention a "wife", a fact that even the person working on the text admits has nothing to do with whether Jesus was ever married, and what does the journalist say? "A small fragment of faded papyrus contains a suggestion that Jesus may have been married...The discovery, if it is validated, could have major implications for the Christian faith. The belief that Jesus was not married is one reason priests in the Catholic Church must remain celibate and are not allowed to marry. It could also have implications for women's roles in the church, as it would mean Jesus had a female disciple." Ugh. Then the journalist proceeds to undermine everything they just said. Way to go.

The real title of this article should be "I Like Incoherent, Logically Inconsistent Stories because I cannot Understand the Concept of Time Travel", but I think that would've been too long. It's because of writers like this that we have all the incoherent time travel stories that we do (and which I therefore despise, though I tend to give Doctor Who and Back to the Future a pass since criticizing them for lack of logic is like criticizing the Hitchhiker's Guide for letting Arthur turn into an infinite number of penguins). Seriously, this is horrible. Not all of the 4 options are even KINDS of time travel at all, nor even necessarily incompatible options. Number 3 is simply incoherent, 4 isn't really time travel but universe-hopping. Number 2, which is how non-contradictory time travel would work, has nothing to do with predestination, pre-ordination of events, or lack of any agency.

(1) New-born infants have a right to live;
(2) If there is no relevant intrinsic difference between the members of two sets, then the members of one set will have the same rights as the other;
(3) There is no relevant intrinsic difference between new-born infants and late-term, un-born fetuses;
(4) Therefore, late-term, un-born fetuses have a right to live.
This is a deductively valid argument, which means the only way to avoid the conclusion would be to reject at least one of the premises 1-3. But 2 seems to be a basic principle about rights and 3 is a scientific fact. 1 is therefore the most vulnerable, but few, I think, would be able to stomach the idea that infants have no right to live - to accept that would be pretty implausible. Since 1-3 are fairly certain and the argument is valid, then, we have to accept 4 as well.

Obama seems to deny 4, though, which makes me wonder which of 1-3 he would reject. But I'm sure he hasn't really thought about it (remember the "above my paygrade" remark?). This is just one of the reasons why I cannot understand people's enthusiasm for Obama (his unprecedented rolling back of various freedoms including religion and conscience are some of the other reasons). I understand people really liking some things about him or liking him more than Romney or liking him in general, but the unqualified enthusiasm some people have I cannot relate to. (Almost no one has any kind of enthusiasm for Romney (I certainly don't), so that's not an issue on his side!)

Since I did a potshot at Obama, here's one aimed at Romney: I think the rich should be taxed a lot more than the poor sheerly as a matter of fairness. Suppose we tax everyone 10% - then the person making 20,000 a year will be forced to pay 2000 - a chunk of their income they would be much better off holding onto. For them, missing that money is going to make a noticeable difference in their life. But suppose then we have someone making 100 million - 10 million is just a drop in the bucket and won't affect the quality of their lives in any noticeable way. Money has a diminishing marginal value as income goes up - 10% for a rich person, say, is an entirely different beast from 10% for a poor person. Suppose we actually scaled taxes according to the actual value money has for the individuals concerned (our tax brackets go some way towards this), then the rich person would be paying a much higher percentage of their income then the poor person and the two would be equally affected (or not affected) by the tax. And that's not even taking into account arguments you might make concerning the increased debt the rich have towards society for creating the possibility and infrastructure for such wealth in the first place. Those are just my own opinions, though.

 I don't always agree with him or think he's always fair to conservatives, but Jon Stewart is reliably hilarious. Apropos the above on taxation, this is pretty entertaining (be sure to click to watch on part two too).


I don't agree with all of this, but some interesting thoughts from a Christian philosopher on reforming higher education.

Notes on Boyd's Satan and the Problem of Evil Chapter 4B

At the end of chapter four (see here for some criticisms of the first part), Boyd, in Satan and the Problem of Evil, gives what he takes to be scientific and experiential support for his open theism - that is, evidence that is supposed to show that the future does not exist (and hence is not known in an exhaustive definite manner by God). Boyd suggests that science supports this view by appealing to the fact that most plausible interpretations of quantum theory in physics require indeterminism. But of course indeterminism - causal "openness" - is perfectly compatible with the future not being open in Boyd's sense. Indeterminism and eternalism (the view that all times past or present or future exist) are perfectly compatible. It is a common confusion not to notice this, but of course Boyd is pretty much entirely confused throughout this science section. He takes indeterminism to show that the irreversibility of time is real, however, I'm not really sure what he even means by "the irreversibility of time". I take it that he has in mind something like the arrow of time - that is, the directedness of time or the things within it. But of course, indeterminism has no direct bearing on this issue, contra Boyd. A system can be indeterministic in a past-to-future direction, a future-to-past direction, or even both. So indeterminism on its own, even quantum mechanical indeterminism, really says little if anything about Boyd's "irreversibility of time" (despite the people he cites in support of what he says - these are issues that scientists unfortunately often get as confused about as lay people). Thus, contra Boyd, quantum mechanics does not in the slightest support his views and is perfectly compatible with all manner of eternalist or anti-open theist views.

If Boyd's discussion of quantum mechanics was somewhat confused, his discussion of relativity theory is a complete mess. First of all, though, he suggests that Scripture treats God as temporal but I've dealt with these sorts of contentions in this previous post. Boyd then notes that relativity theory doesn't show that time is unreal as if that helped him. But of course those who object to theories like Boyd's based on relativity theory would mostly agree with this, so I'm not sure how this is supposed to be helpful. Boyd claims that the theory does not address the ontological status of the future but this is contentious and, I would suggest, false. For instance, say event E1 is in the absolute future of my current space-time coordinate (pretend for the moment that I'm a point-particle). Now, given relativity, any event E2 which is neither in my absolute past nor present nor "light-like" related to me will be simultaneous with me in some reference frames and not in others (these are called "space-like" related to me). So let us take an event E2 which is very close to the space-time cone carved out by my absolute future. There are parts of my absolute future which, in some reference frames are simultaneous with E2 since they are space-like related to it. Assume E1 is space-like related to E2. Now we have two events - E1 and E2 - which lie on a simultaneity line but one of them - E2 - lies on such a line with me and the other lies in my absolute future. So there's no room to say that E1 doesn't exist since it lies on a simultaneity line with E2, which also exists, and everything which lies on a single simultaneity line is equally real. So Boyd (or Capek, who he cites) really can't get out of eternalism without reinterpreting relativity theory or treating it merely instrumentally (which sometimes Boyd confusingly sounds like he's doing, other times not - I'm not sure even he knows exactly what he's trying to do here). The rest of Boyd's discussion is basically the same as the mass of confusions he's posted on his blog and which I've addressed previously in this post.

In response to the argument that time was created with creation and since God is above creation he is above time, Boyd confusingly tries to respond to this by saying that God's experience or measurement of time is different than ours. But that doesn't even address the argument at all since it wasn't about experience or measurement in the first place - this is a metaphysical or physical argument based on the nature of God and the apparent fact that our time dimension is essentially a component of our space-time universe and hence cannot have existed outside of it. I'm really not sure what Boyd was after when he started talking about measurements here.

Boyd's argument from experience is essentially this - our experience of ourselves as free and morally responsible presupposes or is the same as an experience of ourselves as being undetermined. But of course this, again, does not support his views in the slightest. As I've said previously, indeterminism is perfectly compatible with eternalism or anti-open theism. So again, nothing Boyd says here provides even the slightest shred of evidence for his views.

Next time, more on Boyd's book...

A Couple of Comments on Gregory Boyd on Relativity Theory

In a recent post on his blog, Gregory Boyd says the following (in comments about the recent Quincy Science and Theology Conference):

We all know thawt Relativity Theory stipulates that the NOW of every finite perspective cannot be absolutely correlated with the NOW of any other finite perspective, since WHEN an event happens depends on WHERE you are, and HOW FAST you're traveling, relative to the event in question. Yet, each finite perspective has ITSELF as a NOW, and this NOW has a real "before" and a real "after." So the universe is comprised of all finite perspectives with their own NOW and their own "BEFORE" and "AFTER." (In relativity language, each perspective has its own "time cone").Now, if we believe in an omnipresent God, God would be internally present to, and thus contemporaneous with, each finite perspective, and thus each NOW. God could therefore have -- indeed, MUST have -- a "NOW" that synchronizes and integrates ALL finite perspectives. Thus, for God, there is an absolute NOW that encompasses all NOWS. So even with Relativity Theory, I argued, God and the universe are moving forward from a real past to a real future...

But none of this actually works given Relativity as it stands (you could, of course, decide to reject Relativity as being literally true but that would be a different move, though more common). When Boyd talks about "perspectives" the only thing I can think of that he might mean is a space-time point or a space-time point considered in a particular frame of reference (given what he says about perspectives having an absolute earlier and later there really isn't much else he could mean in the context of Relativity Theory). But then, if God's NOW is just the

combination of all NOWs and each perspective is its own NOW then God's NOW would just be the whole space-time universe. How do you get a real past and future just from that or any movement from one to the other? This isn't to say that there is no past or future or anything that might be called "flow" (I think there is, though I think the tensed version of this is incorrect). It's just that Boyd's idea doesn't seem to get him anything like what he might want.

He also reports on this:

But the main topic for the day was what science has to say about the nature of time. Among the many things Robert said was that there are 7 indicators in science (as we presently understand it) that suggest that the flow of time from the past to the future is real. (This is very important since the flow of time has for the most part been considered superfluous for the physical sciences, since most equations work forward or backward. Prediction and retrodiction are essentially the same).I don't have time to explain these, but for those who are curious, these 7 arguments are:

1) Cosmological: Evidence of the big bang suggests the universe is moving from a start in the past to a finish in the future.

2) Radioactive: Light and sound diverge outward but don't converge inward.

3) Thermodynamics: Disorder increases over time. (This is the famous "Second Law of Thermodynamics").

4) Gravitational: Black holes absorb all matter in a one way motion. There are no "white holes" that reverse the process.

5) Subatomic: Anti-kaons (the anti-matter of kaons) disintegrate faster than kaons.

6) Measurement: The collapse of the quantum wave is irreversible.
And....

7) Psychological: People uniformly remember the past and anticipate the future. (This one, of course, is not a strictly scientific piece of evidence, but perhaps Mann included it simply because its a phenomenon that needs explaining.)

...At one point Mann seemed to suggest that Special and General Relativity Theory entailed a "block view" of the universe (this is the view that the past, present, and future are timelessly present as a sort of settled block. The flow of time, in other words, is not real ).

Of course, all of those things do indicate that there is flow to time - they simply do not, however, indicate that there is flow in the sense that tensed theorists like Boyd want there to be. What these things indicate is that time has an arrow, but that doesn't have much to do with whether there is a block universe or not (if by "block universe" all we mean is the view that all times are equally real, existent, and determinate - this may not be exactly what Boyd has in mind, though I'm not sure what else he might mean since a block universe in this sense does not have all times being "timelessly present"). Again, nothing here to write home about from the perspective of a tensed theorist or open theist.

Notes on Ludlow: Chs. 7-9

**WARNING: Technical Post**

In Chapter 7, Ludlow begins to construct an alternative, tensed semantics. Parts of this have a strongly antirealist, idealist, or verificationist sort of feel about them. In fact, Ludlow seems to agree with uberantirealist Michael Dummet, stating, 'As Dummet (1969) has argued,a semantic theory that accounts for an agent's semantic knowledge must show how portions of the language are learned from the evidence available to the language learner' (p.99). I'm not sure that this is really correct as it pushes us towards an untenable kind of antirealism about practically everything. And I'm not sure whether Ludlow wants to be committed to such a view. Then again, he seems to flirt with idealism throughout the book, so maybe I shouldn't be so surprised. To continue the quote,

But now consider how we learn to use past-tense expressions such as (4).
(4)
Dinosaurs roamed the Earth.
We do not evaluate this sentence by imagining some time earlier than now and determining whether at that time (4) is true. Rather, we evaluate (4) by right now conducting the sort of investigation that is appropriate for past-tense statements like (4). (For example, we might study fossil records.) Likewise for any past-tense statement. We have certain procedures for determining whether a past-tense proposition is true, and these procedures do not involve the evaluation of a proposition at some time past; rather, we simply evaluate the proposition in a particular way - a way which is independent of how we evaluate present-tense and future-tense propositions.
Consider the future-tense proposition (5).
(5)
The economy will recover in the third quarter.
Clearly we do not evaluate such a proposition by picking some time in the third quarter and determining whether it is true at that time that the economy is recovering. Rather, we evaluate it by studying the currently available economic data. Crucially, our evaluation of (5) can proceed without our ever attending to a corresponding present-tense proposition at some future time index.

It's not quite clear to me how any of this is relevant to the debate over tense. After all, the tenseless theorist can simply grant that Ludlow is correct that we look at present evidence to determine the truth of past or future tense statements. The mistake is to infer from this that when we determine the truth or falsity of past or future statements we are not thereby determining whether a certain tenseless fact holds. Using present evidence and not attending de dicto to any present-tense proposition at some future time index is perfectly compatible with this. The only way one could think otherwise would be to assume that tensed r-mirroring truth-conditions must also be m-mirroring truth-conditions. And that, as I've been arguing is clearly a mistake. After all, the same sorts of things Ludlow says about tensed statements could be said about first-person or 'here' sentences as well.

But he continues,

If this picture of the underlying robust theory is correct, then it immediately leads to a second advantage for the A-theory [tensed] proposal under discussion - in fact, a striking epistemological advantage. The B-theorist is in the untenable position of asserting that there is actually reference to past and future times and/or events. However, this flies in the face of everything we know about reference. We are in neither a perceptual relation nor a causal relation with future events, and our causal connection with most past events is tenuous at best. In regard to times, the idea that there could be reference to such abstract objects surely requires major adjustments to current epistemological thinking.

This argument or set of arguments here seems to be a non-starter. I'm not sure how anything Ludlow says makes reference to or quantification over future or past events or times at all problematic. That our causal relation to past things is tenuous seems irrelevant since all that is needed for causal theories of reference is causation - not "super duper not-so-tenuous causation". And if we have a causal theory of reference, then it is reference to present things that is problematic since causation is a cross-temporal relation. That we do not have any causal relation with future things is, I think, not as clear as Ludlow seems to think, but let's give him that for the moment (I tend to think it's false, actually). But quantification or reference do not necessarily require causal relations - one can fix the reference of a name, for instance, by introducing it via an identifying description without having any clear causal contact whatsoever with the object satisfying the description. And quantification over certain entities does not seem to require being causally related to all of them and there's no clear reason why we would need to be. In addition, on most theories of time, times are not abstract but rather concrete objects. In any case, they are treated the same sort of way as places or parts of space. We seem to be able to refer to or quantify over space or regions thereof, so why not times? There seems to be no difference here. All of Ludlow's criticisms here could just as well be thrown against the view that other persons or object outside of myself exist and that we quantify or refer to them. If Ludlow were correct, his views would be pushing us towards a dangerous ontological solipsism where only I exist or an epistemic or semantic solipsism where only I can be referred to or quantified over by myself.

Ludlow ultimately comes to think that his semantics leaves presentism as one of the only plausible, consistent accounts of time. But if we accept presentism for time based on the problems outlined in the book, it seems that similar problems for first-person sentences or 'here' sentences are going to force us into the ontological solipsism mentioned above. After all, if presentism is a main way to get out of McTaggart's Paradox for time, solipsism will be an analogous way to get out similar paradoxes for persons.

Indeed, Ludlow's tensed semantics could be transformed into an analogous first person or 'here' semantics. Ludlow claims in Chapter 8, for instance, that apparent reference to times like 'June 24, 1972' can be paraphrased away as 'when standard calendars read "June 24, 1972"' and that normal tensed sentences will actually be decomposed as complex sentences composed of two tensed sentences joined by 'when', 'after' or 'before'. But we can do the same sorts of things with apparent reference to places and decompose 'here' sentences as complex sentences composed of two 'here' sentences joined by 'where', etc. So 'Paris' becomes something like 'where standard tracking systems read "Paris"'. If we do want reference to times, we can build times up as collections of when-clauses, according to Ludlow. But then if we want reference to places, we can build them up as collections of where-clauses. Perhaps we can do this sort of thing with persons as well - only I exist, but I can refer to other persons as collections of who-clauses (?).

At the end of Chapter 8, Ludlow shows that his theory can apparently get him out of one formulation of McTaggart's Paradox. But it's far from clear that it can escape a reformulation to match Ludlow's theory. Heather Dyke's formulation, suitably adjusted to face Ludlow, seems, for instance, like it would cause Ludlow particular trouble.

Chapter 9 consists in listing some psychological considerations that may or may not help the tensed theorist. I think they do not - the tenseless theorist should be at ease with all the data discussed. In fact, that's just the sort of data one would expect if the New Tenseless Theory were true - people think tensedly. In fact, some have argued that the data actually favors the tenseless theory. In addition, not all of the discussion is clear or very clearly well-motivated. Some of the discussion of and quotes from Merleau-Ponty, for instance, is metaphorical and opaque at best and of unclear relevance to the topic or the use Ludlow seems to want to put it to. So I think chapter 9 is inconclusive at best.

The last-ish notes are soon to com.

Notes on Ludlow: Chs. 5-6

**WARNING: Technical Post**

In the beginning of Chapter 5 Ludlow says,

A first attempt at a semantical theory consistent with this [the tenseless] picture would be to give "tenseless truth conditions" for tensed sentences. That is, we want the right-hand sides to be free of A-series predicates (including 'past' and 'future' as well as temporal indexicals. (p.77)

Such a theory, as Ludlow sketches in the remainder of the chapter, would involve use of temporal language committing us to the existence of other times standing in various temporal relations (or, if we wanted to adopt more of a reductionist or relationalist picture, the existence of events standing in various temporal relations).

In the next chapter, Chapter 6, Ludlow details what he takes to be problems for the tenseless theory. The main problem is something I already addressed in my post on Chapter 3 - Ludlow thinks that the tenseless theory cannot deal with 'the indexical nature of temporal discourse'. This is just the problem with the man in the house of mirrors again. To give just one example, Ludlow claims that the following two sentences as said on March 12 express different semantical knowledge and that the tenseless theory cannot deal with this because it will have to give them the same truth conditions (in the rest of the chapter, Ludlow also, despite earlier toying with the theory, rejects token-reflexive theories for temporal language (rightly, I believe)):

(1) My fifth anniversary is (this) March 12.

(2) My fifth anniversary is today.

He also notes, with Prior, that it seems that one is not thanking goodness for any tenseless fact when one is thankful that a painful dentist visit is over with but the tenseless theory seems to require that this is what one is thankful for.

The answer here is a fairly easy one - distinguish between, on the one hand, Ludlow's "semantical" truth-conditions which are intended to mirror the speaker's perspective and way of representing things (we can call these r-mirroring truth conditions, since they are supposed to mirror our way of representing the world), and, on the other, "metaphysical" truth-conditions which are supposed to capture the metaphysical structure of the world as it matches up (or fails to do so) to our representations (we can call these m-mirroring truth conditions, since they are supposed to mirror the metaphysical structure or "joints" of reality). "'e is now' is true iff e is now" can be a correct account of the truth conditions as represented by the knower (that is, the r-mirroring truth conditions) but it can still be true that what makes 'e is now' true is the tenseless fact that e is at t (these are its m-mirroring truth-conditions). That is, it can still be true that a mental or public tokening of 'e is now' at t is true iff e is at t since at t 'e is now' and 'e is at t' express the exact same fact, just with a different representational form - the former is needed for action whereas the latter is not sufficient so that when one represents the truth conditions one needs, for action, to represent them in the latter way - in an r-mirroring rather than m-mirroring way. If they are represented as ' 'e is now' is true iff e is the time of this utterance', for instance, that will not be sufficient for action or sufficient to know that e is now since i don't know this utterance is now.

So ultimately I don't think the failure Ludlow notices in providing tenseless r-mirroring truth conditions is really relevant to whether or not we should be tenseless theorists. A tenseless theorist just isn't committed to giving r-mirroring truth conditions. Indeed, this can be seen as the characteristic difference between the Old Tenseless Theory of Russell and company and the New Tenseless Theory of Mellor and others - the Old theorists were trying to give r-mirroring truth conditions and that was shown, as Ludlow has shown once again, to be a failure. The New theorists, on the other hand, have abandoned that project as hopeless and wish instead to give us tenseless m-mirroring truth conditions while allowing that we cannot give tenseless r-mirroring truth conditions for all tensed language. I think this is where Ludlow fundamentally misunderstands what Mellor is trying to do.

This is similar to what's going on in phil mind over property dualism (the view that there are irreducibly mental properties). The phenomenal concept strategy tries to show that physical descriptions do not miss anything in the world that can be captured by phenomenal descriptions but that this is compatible with the conceptual irreducibility of the phenomenal to the physical - that is, phenomenal descriptions must be given phenomenal r-mirroring truth conditions but that's compatible with giving them physical m-mirroring truth conditions.

On the last page of the chapter, Ludlow is somewhat cryptic about why tensed truth conditions or tensed beliefs require a tensed reality:

If the world contains only B-theory resources, then precisely how do we avoid having a B-theory psychology?

The illusion of a possible way out here is fostered by thinking that there could be psychological concepts that are, as it were, disembodied - cut off from the actual world in important ways. How can a psychological property (call it foo) that bears no relation to tense in the actual world have anything to do with tense?

It is no good to say that our abstract property foo is tensed because it is grounded in our time consciousness or temporal perception. That merely keeps the question one step removed. Then we must ask what it is about time consciousness or perception that makes them tensed. Why do we call consciousness or perception tensed if it does not correspond to something tensed in the actual world?

[...]psychological states (particularly perceptual states) are individuated in part by relations to the external world. In this case, that means that if the world is not tensed then it is difficult to see how our perception of the world could be tensed. (p.96)

I'm not quite sure what the problem is here - the tenseless theorist has perfectly reasonable accounts of how our tensed psychological states hook up to the tenseless world. It is necessary for our representations in general to fed into our cognitive systems in certain forms for them to be useful to us - in order for the ordinary descriptive facts of the world to be useful for action they need to represented by us in certain special ways. Facts about time are like this too and we call our special-functioning representations tensed when they have this function with relation to time. Tense has to do with the structure of our representations, not the facts they are about. Just because our representations have particular features doesn't mean the facts they represent have to have those features. So much should be pretty darn obvious. So this plea at the end of the chapter just seems to me to be pretty lame.

Four chapter to go...

Notes on Ludlow: Chs. 1-2

**WARNING: Technical Post**

A lot of my dissertation is going to be about the debate between the tensed and tenseless views of time. Roughly, the main idea behind the tensed view is that reality itself is fundamentally tensed - there is an absolute, single present and absolute past and future and any description of reality must fundamentally be tensed as well. The tenseless view, on the other hand, sees talk of past, present and future as reducible to talk about various times merely being earlier or later or simultaneous and views tense as merely linguistic - reality itself is not in any way fundamentally tensed. So perhaps when I say 'We are eating now' at 6pm what makes that true or false is whether we are eating at 6pm - there's no need to talk about anything being present or past or whatever.

So for research I've been reading Peter Ludlow's Semantics, Tense, and Time and I must say that so far I am fairly unimpressed. He seems to just be regurgitating old tensed theorist arguments against tenseless theory. For one thing, many of his characterizations of the tenseless theory (which he calls the 'B-theory'), are controversial or misleading at best. No reasonable tenseless theorist, for instance, would characterize their own view as saying "time is simply a sequence of unchanging and tenseless events" (p1) - tenseless, yes; unchanging, no. Nor would they agree that the opposite view is characterized by thinking that "it is fundamental to the notion of time that events [...] have genuine temporal status" (pp2-3) as if the tenseless theory somehow denied this. I don't remember where he says this, but he also characterizes the distinction between the two theories by saying that, unlike the tensed theory, the tenseless theory denies the reality of "genuine change" - a characterization that no tenseless theorist would accept.

Chapter 1 seemed to be rather confused (and this confusion seems to follow through the rest of the book) in that, while Ludlow maintains that the only real language is our innate biological internal I-language (and that public, E-language does not exist), he persistently - in this chapter and in others - seems to treat I-language as if it were English. But that seems implausible since I-language is supposed to be part of our biological endowment whereas the grammar of English and connections between the world and English words definitely is not. We certainly use English words to express our internal representations of the world but I'm not sure that it follows that my I-language is simply English. Ludlow says he thinks he is following Chomsky here but I don't know enough personally about what he says to tell whether that's true. If I-language is just English, then I would have to disagree with Ludlow about it being our Language of Thought. After all, I think we learn English by using mental representations in the first place and this would be impossible if all representation had to be in English to start with. And if I-language is English after all it's not so clear that all our representations are really linguistic in character rather than also geometric or map-like or imagistic or whatever. After all, if animals don't have I-language then, given the similarities in our brains, it seems likely that, in addition to the linguistic representational capacities our brains have, we would also have more primitive forms of representation in common with more primitively brained organisms.

In chapter 2 Ludlow champions a view of semantics on which the job of semantic theory is to tell us what people know when they know the meanings of sentences. This in itself, I think, tells against the idea that my internal representational system is fundamentally English. After all, assuming Ludlow is correct, I learn English by learning the semantic rules for English which I then represent in my mind. But my representation of the rules, if in English, are themselves in need of interpretation and require that I know and represent some further rules in order to know what they mean. But (since global holism is false) this can't keep going on. So if I must know rules for every representation in English I must have some rules I know that aren't in English. But then we must ask about the semantics of these representations. The bottom line is that I must ultimately have some representations that do not require my knowledge of their semantic rules in order to use them competently. Otherwise, my semantic rules would either be circular or I'd be off on an infinite regress. So while showing what rules people know when they know the meaning of a sentence is useful for semantics, it cannot be the entire semantic story (if it is part of it all, which can be disputed - see some of Scott Soames' work for lots and lots of criticism of this view of semantic theory).

Ludlow thinks that semantic theory should take the form of a system of axioms (maybe with axioms like ' "Ted" refers to Ted', etc.) which can in turn be used to derive a system of sentences which give us the truth-conditions (so, for instance, one such sentence would be '"Snow is white" is true iff snow is white') for all the sentences of the language in question. He then supports the view that the truth-conditions derived in such a theory for various expressions will be such that each of them ' "shows" or "displays" the sense of the expressions' (p42). By this, he seems to say a few pages later, he means that the right hand side of the biconditional (the "iff" statement) will have the sense of the expression referred to on the left hand side. What this amounts to will depend on what the notion of sense amounts to. Sense might include functional, cognitive, or practical role, determination of reference or truth, the form taken, etc. The more sense encompasses, however, the more unclear it is that this sort of semantic theory has all the metaphysical ramifications that Ludlow is going to want out of it. The less it includes, on the other hand, the more unclear it is that it includes everything we would want our semantics to include. But he can't have it both ways, it seems.

More tomorrow.