Formas aristotélicas y leyes de la naturaleza

Rafael Abuchedid kindly translated my piece on Aristotelian forms and laws of nature into Spanish.

Signatures, translations and lies

Suppose I am hired to be an interpreter for a diplomatic meeting. When I translate claims that I know to be lies, am I lying or deceiving?

Of course, I’m not. I am being relied on for the accuracy of the translation, not the accuracy of the claims. The point is clear if I am being paid by the side that is lied to, but whether I am lying or deceiving surely does not depend on who pays me. By the same token, the typist who takes down and posts his boss’s lying letter is not lying or deceiving.

But that one is not lying or deceiving does not mean that one is off the hook. The interpreter and typist, while neither lying nor deceiving, are cooperating in another’s lies. Whether such cooperation is morally permissible will probably depend on further details. (A fairly clear case of permissibility: One knows that the other party will see through the lies.)

But what if instead the boss asks the typist to take down a lying letter purporting to be from the competing company’s boss, which the boss plans to post on social media in order to discredit the other company? Now I think the case is different. Suppose, for simplicity, that the typist’s boss is Natalie Nixon and the other company’s boss is Cathryn Cato. When the typist signs a letter “Natalie Nixon”, he is himself purporting to the reader that the letter comes from Nixon, and if the typist signs the letter “Cathryn Cato”, he is purporting to the reader that letter is from Cato, and that’s a deceit—maybe even a lie—from the typist.

Similary, if the interpreter says “We strongly believe in freedom of speech”, she is purporting that this is what her principal said the equivalent of. If her principal said that, the interpreter is off the hook for deceit even if the claim is a lie, but if the interpreter made that up, the interpreter is deceiving.

It looks to me like the interpreter’s speech acts are equivalent to prefacing every sentence with: “X says that…”, and the typist’s speech act is equivalent to prefacing the letter with: “X claims that…”.

If this is right, then in my earlier post, Bob is actually lying. But he’s not lying in the content of the letter of recommendation, but in his secretarial claim that the letter is Alice’s.

But I am far from confident about any of this.

"Ręka" and "hand"

I've been thinking about a curious issue in translation, which is not that uncommon. In most ordinary contexts, the Polish "ręka" and the English "hand" would be interchangeable in the sense that where a speaker of one language would use the one, the speaker of the other would use the other. Where the English-speaker talks of having something in his hand, the Polish-speaker talks of having it in his ręka, and so on. But the two terms are not synonymous. In non-medical Polish, "ręka" refers to the whole of the upper limb (though in medical Polish, it refers just to the hand), while the English "hand" refers only to the area from the wrist to the fingertips. The Polish term referring to the exact same part of the body as the English "hand" does is "dłoń", but the word is significantly less used than "ręka" (as per Google hits in .pl sites, say), and in many ordinary contexts using "dłoń" for "hand" would make for awkward translation. Conversely, to translate the Polish "ręka" as "arm", which would refer to the same part of the body (I am assuming that the arm includes the hand), would in most cases lead to awkwardness as well. It sounds funny to talk of picking up one's phone with one's arm, and so on.

Thus, it seems that these are cases where the natural translation from one language to the other does not in fact preserve the truth conditions. One can pick up one's phone with one's ręka without picking it up with one's hand (say, use the crook of the elbow), even though in the context of picking up a phone one would translate "ręka" as "hand", unless it was obvious from the context that the hand wasn't the part of the arm that was being used.

Maybe what is happening here is that when a sentence asserts a proposition p and implicates a stronger proposition q, we feel no qualms about using a translation that asserts q, or vice versa. To say in Polish that one picked up one's phone with one's ręka implicates the stronger proposition that one did this with one's hand, since if one had picked it up in the unusual way with the crook of the elbow, say, we would have expected the speaker to mention this. (This is a case where the usual Gricean presumption that one will use an equally brief but more precise term in place of a less precise one is defeated by the fact that the more precise and equally brief term "dłoń" is also less commonly used.) So one translates the implicature rather than the assertion.

I wonder, though. Maybe cases like this are evidence that the distinction between implicature and assertion is artificial. This would have the important consequence that the wrongness of implicating contrary to one's mind, or at least intentionally doing so, is the same sort of thing as lying. I don't want to embrace that consequence in general. I think false implicature is qualitatively less morally problematic than lying.

Vagueness, definitions and translations

If we are to define a vague term, the definiens will need to be vague in exactly the same way as the definiendum is. But it is exceedingly improbable that the contextual profile of the vagueness of the definiens would exactly match the contextual profile of any complex definiendum that we could practically state, or maybe even that we could state in principle.

For instance, suppose we're trying to define "short". Now, "short" has a certain contextual vagueness profile which specifies, perhaps vaguely, in what context what lengths do and do not count as short and in what way, Either there is vagueness all the way up or at some level we get definiteness.

Suppose first that at some level we get definiteness. For simplicity, suppose it's after the first level of vagueness. Then for any context C, there will be precise lengths x₁ and x₂ such that anything shorter than x₁ is definitely short, anything of length between x₁ and x₂ is vaguely short, and anything longer than x₂ is definitely non-short. These precise lengths will be some exact real numbers determined by our actual linguistic practices—which things we've called "short" and which we haven't. It is exceedingly unlikely that we could construct a definiendum which will make the definitely/vaguely/definitely-not transitions in exactly the same spot. Suppose, for instance, we define "is short" as "has small length." Well, small will have its own vagueness profile, defined by a different set of social practices. It is exceedingly unlikely that this vagueness profile would exactly correspond to that of "is short", so that the exact point of transition between being definitely short and vaguely short should be the point of transition between being definitely of small length and being vaguely of small length.

Suppose now that we have vagueness all the way up. Then we're going to have arbitrarily long predications like "a is vaguely definitely vaguely vaguely vaguely definitely definitely vaguely definitely short." And which such predications apply to which objects will be determined by our complex linguistic practices surrounding "is short". It is, again, exceedingly unlikely that our complex linguistic practices surrounding some other term, like "has small length" would in every context match those of "is short".

For exactly the same reason, except when the users of one language self-consciously use a term as an exact translation of a term used by another language, it is exceedingly unlikely that we could find an exact simple translation of a vague term from one language to another, and for the same reasons as above, a complex translation is also unlikely. For we would have to exactly match the vagueness profile, and since the social practices underlying the different languages are subtly and unsubtly different, it is very unlikely we would succeed.

It may be worse than that. It may well be that no two people have the same vagueness profile in their homophonic terms, except when both defer in their usage to exactly the same community. And they rarely do.

In practice, when translating and giving dictionary definitions, we are satisfied with significant similarity between vagueness profiles.

Reduction and translation

These are very rough notes for myself.

The translatability of B-talk to A-talk as either a necessary or a sufficient condition for a reduction of Bs to As is generally rejected. Translatability can be symmetric, so it obviously can't be a sufficient condition. And it is generally thought that translations are so hard to come by, even in cases where it is very plausible that there is a reduction, that we shouldn't ask the reductionist for a translation. As an example, it seems pretty plausible that being oval is not a fundamental property. But the hopes of a reduction of being oval to more fundamental geometric concepts are pretty slim. We can start: An oval is a convex domain with a twice differentiable boundary approximating a non-circular ellipse. But if we try to explain the respects in which the oval approximates the ellipse, I expect at some point we would have to throw up our hands and say: "In the way definitive of an oval!"

It should not surprise us if there were no good translations. Words are rarely precisely redundant, and I suspect that cases of non-trivial synonymy are pretty rare. Certainly, few of the things listed in a thesaurus are genuine synonyms, i.e. words expressive of the same concept. Similarly, translation between different languages is rarely exactly right. For instance, "Il neige" and "It is snowing" are unlikely to express the same proposition. Here is one reason to think this. The boundaries of "neiger" and "to snow" are vague, and the behavior of the corresponding concepts near the boundaries will be determined by use. But different linguistic communities occupy different physical and social environments, and it is unlikely that the boundaries will be exactly the same. The same is likely to be true for most ordinary sentences, though the effect is probably decreasing with globalization.

However, I think there is a somewhat neglected option for translation. Instead of translating to an actual language, one can translate to a counterfactual language. And for purposes of testing hypotheses about ontological commitment, that should be enough.

We could imagine a community that has practices that outwardly and normatively resemble our practices of artifact production, use and possession. But they never say anything that commits them to the existence of these. They have other ways of talking. Maybe they say "It is chairing here" in circumstances that correspond to those in which we say "There is at least one chair here." They also describe the intensity of a chairing with a non-negative integer: "It is chairing here with intensity three" corresponds to our "There are three chairs here." They have some ways of talking that correspond to our possession practices. "It is Smithly chairing here with intensity three" corresponds to our "Smith owns three chairs here." They also have ways of talking that correspond to our talk of clear identity. Thus, they say "It is t₀ly chairing with intensity two at t₁" correspondingly to our "Two chairs that existed at t₀ exist at t₁."

Now here is a move that I like. It might turn out that some of our sentences have no corresponding sentences in that community. This will be a problem for the reductionist, unless those very sentences are ones that lead to logical problems in our community. For instance, it might turn out that one cannot translate all diachronic identity sentences about chairs. But that could be an asset if the untranslatable sentences are precisely the ones that lead to ship of Theseus problems. And this could, further, provide an asymmetry that could help fix the direction of reduction: in our language we can get paradoxes, while in theirs maybe we can't. We could, then, simply say that the untranslatable sentences (or maybe now we should call them "quasi-sentences") in our language are nonsense.