In my previous post, I discussed carving up the world. The idea is that we carve the world and give names to some of the parts into which we carve. Those named parts become the concepts that are part of the true statements we make about the world.
In an earlier post, I indicated that how we carve up the world needs to be a social convention. And the naming that we use also needs to be a social convention. That these are social conventions is what allows us to communicate with one another.
In this post, I will be discussing how these social conventions can be established.
The culture
By the culture we mean, roughly speaking, the society and the social practices of people within that society.
We cannot share things with the culture until there is a culture. Picture the problem for young child. She needs to learn how to carve up the world in order to fill her world with details. So the need to carve up the world starts before the child has much of a world. In particular, the child needs to start carving up the world before she can become aware that she is part of a society. In other words, the carving up must begin without access to any carving conventions from the culture. The child must initiate carving by herself, and not wait until she learns what are the social conventions.
So how do these ways of carving become conventions?
We are a social species. There is something innate about our biology that makes us want to cooperate with others around us. We sometimes use the expression “peer pressure” to describe some aspects of this social nature of ours.
As the child begins to recognize others around her, she begins to notice in their behavior, that they seem to be carving up the world in ways that are a little different from how she does it. Because of this social urge — or, if you prefer, because of peer pressure — she begins to adjust the way that she carves up the world to be closer to that of others around her. This process, of adjusting how we carve up the world to be more consistent with our community, continues into adulthood. It is part of the process of socialization and education that we all experience.
To describe it differently, learning is not merely a matter of acquiring facts. It importantly also involves adjusting the concepts that we already have and acquiring new concepts.
I have some personal experience here. I grew up in Australia, and moved to the USA as a graduate student. As an Aussie in America, I quickly found that my concept acquired in Australia were often a little different from those of Americans. For a while, I resisted change. However, to best communicate and engage in American society, I did find that I had to make those adjustments from time to time. No doubt this is why, when I last visited Australia, my relatives there thought that I had been pretty thoroughly Americanized.
Can concepts be unlearnable?
For ways of carving up the world to become conventional, people need to be able to recognize those ways in our behavior. So what happens if I try carving up the world in a way that is so complicated that other people cannot tell?
Quite simple, an excessively complicated way would not be copied by other people. Perhaps I could maintain it. But it would die when I die. What survives will be what people can copy and can learn. We might think of this as something akin to Darwin’s natural selection.
Following rules
Observing a social convention is similar to following a rule. Wittgenstein has an argument on the impossibility of following a rule. So I might as well discuss that here.
I take “following a rule” to mean behaving in accordance to a rule. Wittgenstein was particularly concerned with rule following in language use. His argument was that you cannot know what the rule is, and thus you cannot follow it. You have seen only finitely many instances of people following that rule. And those instances vastly underdetermine what the rule could be.
Suppose a child sees other people apparently following a rule. What’s the child to do? If he wants to be like the other people, then he needs to follow the rule. But he doesn’t know what it is. So he find a way that seems to work more-or-less. That is to say, he or his brain makes up a rule that seems to fit. And then he uses that. If he find that what he is doing doesn’t quite fit what others are doing, then he adjusts his rule (or his brain adjusts its rule) to more nearly fit. So he gets better at following the apparent rule.
We see this with children acquiring a language. At first they over-regularize their grammar, apparently following rules that are too simple. And then, over time, as they further adjust their rule following they more closely fit the usage within the language community.
The Heretical Philosopher 