What is it to Represent the World?
How, if at All, do Zalabardo and Price Differ?
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.30827/trif.32831Keywords:
Neo-Pragmatism, No-Fault Disagreements, Causality, Scientific Objectivity, RepresentationalismAbstract
Zalabardo (2023) and Price (2023) largely agree on what it is to represent the world, by rejecting representationalism and using pragmatist meaning grounds, but disagree regarding whether the truth or falsehood is absolute and objective. The key to representing the world is to understand that it is at base the procedure for ascribing truth or falsehood that comprises the meaning ground of a sentence. Zalabardo has this as an absolute, accept or reject, objective process, and employs a strict divide between sentences as representational or non-representational in function. Price accepts pragmatist meaning grounds as providing meaning, but argues for the possibility of ‘no fault disagreements’ rather than ‘an absolute standard of correctness’ [Price (2023), p. 50] and envisions a graduated sliding position in terms of representational or non-representational function, which I am more sympathetic to. For Price, ‘meaning depends on what are at base simply contingent dispositions to treat one thing as like another’ (ibid.). Building on Ramsey- Wittgenstein’s hypothetical, future-oriented direction of thought and language (e.g. properties/ concepts as ‘dispositions’) [1930; 1929], Price suggests that the Predictive Processing Framework [Clark (2013); Godfrey-Smith (2013)], is largely consistent with his neo-pragmatism, excluding Hohwy’s Cartesianism (2013). Disagreements remain from outside and within neo-pragmatism concerning subjectivism about probability; the cosmological versus psychological understanding of global ‘now’ or ‘becoming’; the determinability/ openness of the future; the metaphysical question of what probabilities are, versus why we psychologically model probabilities; and finally, whether memory or agency is implicated in causal asymmetry. Price and Zalabardo’s divergence creates a fruitful new platform to investigate various issues arising e.g. Are we continually misrepresenting the world; does Zalabardo’s absolute standard of correctness stand up to scrutiny? A persuasive case has been made for pragmatism and pragmatist meaning grounds, which posit that representing the world involves the idea that meaning is grounded in the procedure for accepting/not-accepting a sentence, rather than via representationalism and representationalist meaning grounds, however I favour Price’s recognition of no-fault disagreements.
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