Crispin Wright's Kripke

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Reading Crispin Wright's  "Kripke's account of the Argument Against Private Language", you'd think he got the gist. In fact, the exposition of the skeptical paradox captures in few pages much of the complexity of Kripke's seemingly innocent dialectics, and he does realize how Kripke makes a point which really is all about semantics:

"A second response to the skeptical argument which Kripke discusses (41-50) is the idea that meaning green by 'green' "denotes an irreducible experience, with its own special quale, known directly to each of us by introspection." If there were such an experience "as unique and irreducible as that of seeing yellow or feeling a headache," then-in the presence of the relevant idealizations-it could simply be recalled in response to the skeptic's challenge and that would be that. Kripke's response to this proposal, drawing ex- tensively on themes explicit in the Investigations, is surely decisive. Quite apart from the introspective implausibility of the suggestion, it is impossible to see how such an experience could have the content that understanding is conceived as having, could have, as it were, something to say about the correct use of E in indefinitely many situations." p. 772

I'm not sure anyone ever understood the second part well—I think it's for the good reason that Kripke himself didn't consider it as an exhaustive framework, but rather as a thought experiment which could give us a hint as to where the solution may lie. For this reason, I'll skip this part

However, I couldn't pass the last section, "Resisting the Skeptical Argument", where Crispin Wright asks the very interesting question which Kripke fails to explicitely answer: what kind of rule is the skeptic after? What is the kind of rule he argues to be impossible? Well, inferential rules, it seems. One we can infer from past usages, or, for that matter, any consideration, so far as they are factual. He complains about it in these terms:

"What is unsatisfactory about the suggestion is that it gets the intuitive epistemology of understanding wrong. Recognition that a certain use of an expression fits one's former (and current) understanding of it would not, it seems, except in the most extraordinary circumstances, have to proceed by inference to the best semantic explanation of one's previous uses of that expression." p.773

Thus, "Kripke's skeptic persuades his victim to search for recalled facts from which the character of his former understanding of E may be derived." (p.774) At this point, Crispin Wright's comprehension of "infer" seems to emcompass even causality (at least the classical type). As such, I would argue that his complains are unfounded: it's as if meaning had to come from nothingness.

Hence there ought to be some sort of Deus ex machina to save meaning: Crispin Wright proposes that such things as intentions can play saviors. They can stop the skeptic, according to Crispin Wright, because they have content by their own virtue:

"To come to know that you have a certain intention is not to have it dawn on you that you have an intention of some sort and then to recover an account of what the intention is by reflecting upon recent or accompanying thoughts. It is the other way round: you recognize thoughts as specifying the content of an intention that you have because you know what the intention is an intention to do." (p. 776)

Well, I'll be damned, we have found the source of all semantics! It's all in this magical thing call intention. Now, to be fair, Crispin Wright doesn't believe that intention is the right kind of thing, but he seems to argue that the solution lies in something similar, something which has the same quality of being uninferred, of getting its content ex nihilo.

For my part, I fail to see how this makes for an appropriate response. Just as life isn't an explanation for cells' growth but rather a term that enters in its description, intention can't explain how it has content, i.e. how it relates to its realisation.

Searle as a Closet Dualist ?

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Sometimes, you think you know an author. And then you wonder.

Take John Searle. There is nothing ambiguous about his monism: that mental stuff like intentionality is a physical phenomenon is of utmost evidence. The only reason why we talk about it is that previous philosophers have been arguing about it for the last few millenia (to be fair, Searle stops at Descartes). If we didn't, then we'd see the light without problem. In "Intentionality and its place in nature", 

"One group of philosophers sees  itself as defending the progress of science against residual superstitions.  The other group sees itself as asserting obvious facts that any moment  of introspection will reveal. But both accept the assumption that naive mentalism and naive physicalism must be inconsistent. Both accept the assumption that a purely physical description of the world could not mention any mental entities." p.9

But then, he goes on to say that mental stuff and physical stuff beg for different explanations:

"In  any  causal  explanation,  the  propositional  content  of  the  explanation specifies a cause. But in intentional explanations the cause  specified is itself an intentional state with its own propositional content."

As a matter of fact, he claims that intentional explanations have very specific features. For instance, they repeat the explanandum. Why did I go to Rome? Because I wanted to go to Rome. Furthermore, they generally aren't covered by laws (in the scientific sense) and they frequently take final causes (the end) as complete explanans.

"These features have no analogue in the standard physical sciences. If I explain the rate of acceleration of  a falling body in terms of gravitational attraction together with such other forces  as  friction  operating  on  the  body,  the  propositional  content  of  my explanation  makes reference to features of the event such as gravity and friction,  but the features themselves are  not propositional contents or parts of propositional contents."

Ok, let's repeat this. Intentional and mental stuff is real. It has causal powers. But the explanations that account for them are radically different.

Let's consider again this other sentence he said on p.9: "Both accept the assumption that a purely physical description of the world could not mention any mental entities." Would a purely physical description of the world be made of purely physical explanations? One would expect so. So we could call Searle's description of the world, with intentionality, "not purely physical".

Of course, he could claim that he accounts for intentionality in a way which puts it in the causal loop. But the causality, it seems, is different, since it requires a description of a different kind, which physical sciences would never accept. Descartes—dualism incarnated to Searle—also accounted for a form of causality in his res cogitans, although, just like Searle's, it was of a particular kind.

Anyway, I rest my case. From this article, Searle's a closet dualist.