I've told you before about my favourite ball, which came with me from the rescue home. The other week something sad happened: I lost my favourite ball whilst I was out playing with my friend. Luckily, the humans bought me another ball, which is my new favourite ball. Here I am with it: What I like doing most of all with my ball is play The Lola Game with my humans. I tug and pull on the ball, sometimes I make my "raaaa" noise; other times I drop the ball down the stairs and make a human fetch it for me, and then there are those occasions when we simply kick the ball around. Each move follows smoothly from the next; it makes sense to me and I wouldn't have it any other way. Even though I could never satisfactorily woof them at you, I'm quite sure I'm playing by the rules. In spite of that, I sometimes hear the humans complaining to each other that they don't get the rules of my game. "What does she want us to do?" one of them complains. "I have no idea", says the other. Humans, it seems to me, are not in a good position to criticise me over the rules of my game. You get up to all sorts of things which involve following rules. The languages you use, lacking the noble simplicity of woofing, involve you in all kinds of grammatical and inferential rule-following. Then think about mathematics (I like mathematics: the humans use it to count out my food for the day). Suppose you're counting treats before taking a lurcher on a walk. '2, 4, 6, 8...' What comes next? I suppose you'll probably answer '10', thinking that you're applying the rule 'add 2'. But what would be different up until that point if you were following the rule 'add 2, unless the number to which you're adding it is eight, in which case multiply by a thousand?' How could an observer tell which rule you were following, so as to be able to state it explicity? You see, the things you get up to are no better off than the Lola game. Of course, you know how to count. There is a certain human practice, adding, that helps you make sense of the world, and you all just get on with it. It's much the same with the Lola game. The human philosopher Wittgenstein raised the difficulty in the previous paragraph, not to make us sceptical about our ability to follow rules, but rather to bring us to realise that we neither need nor have available to us a certain kind of knowledge (a basis for our practices - like counting and the Lola Game - which transcends those practices themselves and the role they play in our lives). Some human philosophers, like Kripke, have misunderstood this point. I think it's because humans worry too much. They should relax more, stop worrying, and play ball with me.
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AuthorMental walkies with Lola, Archives
May 2019
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