QUALIA IS ALREADY EXPLAINED BY A MULTIPARTITE LANGUAGE
The Langauge of science is also a language of explanation. When metaphysically conjoined with NL (Natural language), it becomes an acceptable part of NL therefore making it multi-partite in scope and in substance. In other words, the Langauge of science is already part of NL. It just needs a systematic clarification at the metaphysical level.
You might wonder and ask Why?
Well, according to Frank Jackson’s thought experiment, scientists do have a way of numerically identifying all the colours and naming them. In the thought experiment, Mary, a Neuroscientist in a black and white room, knows all names of all the colours and how to uniquely associate each colour name with each wavelength on the light spectrum, which metaphysically and epistemologically implies that she can communicate these colour names (Red, Green, Yellow, Blue, etc) and wavelengths (w1, w2, w3 ….. wn) to her fellow scientists. This epistemologically implies
Colour Name + Wavelength = Knowledge of each colour
For example:
“Red” + W2 = Knowledge of Red colour”
But, according to Jackson, Mary does not know colours in real experience because she has never seen any colour before. This means that Mary can numerically (physically) account for all the colours but she cannot experientially (consciously) account for them. According Jackson, this means that there are some facts about conscious experience that are irreducible from physical experience
Mary knows that
“Green” = Wavelength (w3)
But Mary does not know that
“Green” = Experience (
Green)
Ok, let us use the Possible World Semantics to analyse this:
POSSIBLE WORLD 1
In this world Jackson’s theory applies. Mary is a scientist in a world where everyone else there is a scientist. In this world everyone knows that:
Colour Name = Wavelength (n)
But does not know that:
Colour name = Experience (Colour)
“Green” = Experience (Green)
Such that whenever Mary says;
“The Green Car is coming”
This would be understood by all the scientists in PW1 as:
“The car with wavelength n is coming”
Metaphysically, Mary and fellow scientists in this world can substitute not only the colour term for the wavelength numerical value but also they can substitute any sentence containing the colour term for any sentence containing the wavelength numerical value. So long as they can be communicated from one scientist to another scientist without losing their information contents or semantic values, then they are metaphysically and epistemologically equivalent.
POSSIBLE WORLD 2
In this world Jackson’s theory is modified such that Mary is no longer a scientist but an ordinary citizen in a world where there are no scientists. In this world Mary and everyone are competent speakers of Natural Langauge (NL) and they all know that:
Colour Name = Experience (colour)
“Green” = Experience (Green)
But do not know that:
Colour name = Wavelength (n)
“Green” = Wavelength (n)
Such that whenever Mary says;
“The Green Car is coming”
This equivalently implies:
“The car that I am now experiencing or seeing coming towards me is green”
POSSIBLE WORLD 3
In this world Jackson’s theory applies. This world is identical to ours in that it is composed of scientists and non-scientist. When Mary is with her fellow scientists she speaks of colour in terms of their names and their wavelengths in the way that they all fully understand each other. But Mary is also blessed that she and all her fellow scientist have seen colours before and therefore they all have privileged access to colours in both their numerical and experiential forms plus their appellations. But you also have the non-scientists that know colours only by their appellations and experiential contents. When you climb out of the metaphysical realm to look at things, you would think that this strange habit of directly labelling or naming experience without explaining them is a disadvantage. Of course, at the metaphysical level or realm, things that are naturally self-explanatory such as qualia can be directly labelled or named. They are self-explanatory in the sense that you can directly point at them and people will see and understand them without any need for verbally explaining them. This means that (nature permitting) we can directly name them without endangering our own existence in the process. In this world Mary and her fellow scientists know that:
Colour Name = Wavelength (n)
And they also know that:
Colour name = Experience (Colour)
“Green” = Experience (Green)
Such that whenever Mary says;
“The Green Car is coming”
This would be understood by all the scientists in PW3 as:
“The car with wavelength n is coming”
In this case Mary would substitute all the co-referential terms and sentences in the world accordingly.
(a) “Green” for wavelength (n)
(b) “Green” for experience (green)
(c) Wavelength (n) for experience (green)
And so on. However, when it comes to communicating the knowledge of colours to non-scientists in the same world, as is typical of our own present world, Mary (likewise her fellow scientists) has to do so experientially – that is, directly name and physically point at them to identify them.
Well, the
TRANSWORLD IDENTITY THEORY says that names should have the same meanings across all possible worlds or that they should not vary in meanings as we travel from one possible world to the next. At least this is what Kripke’s theory of Rigid Designator was attempting to demonstrate. According to Kripke, names do not vary in meanings in all possible worlds because they are rigid designators. Well, if this is true, then if Mary in the Possible World 3 were to board a spaceship and traveled to Possible Worlds 1 and 2, the name “Green” should have the same meaning in all the three worlds regardless of if Mary was speaking to scientists or non-scientists. Metaphysically, this would be equivalent to objectively picking an item in a public realm and introducing into a discourse in a manner that every participant in that discourse fully understands what is being referred to. Note that in my above three analogical examples, both the scientists and non-scientists use the same colour names (“Green”, “Blue”, “Red’, etc.) to name what they each understand as representing or standing for those names (wavelengths for scientists and real colour experience for non-scientists) respectively. This, in my opinion, seems to render the overplayed notion of “
WHAT IT IS LIKE TO EXPERIENCE QUALIA metaphysically and epistemologically redundant because the transworld identities of colour names are rigid. They mean the same thing regardless of which world you are in. And the fact that some experiences are directly identified and named does not metaphysically pollute this fact. The only fundamental difference is that some experiences are linguistically describable and nameable while some are non-linguistically describable but directly experiential and nameable.
In this way we have conjoined the language of science with the Natural language in other to describe and communicate different aspects of the same reality to each other without falling into error judgement. The Langauge of science conjoined with NL produces an Multipartite Metalanguage with which to describe multipartite reality. For a Multipartite reality requires a Multipartite Langauge to describe it.
