Sider on thinking the limits of the Linguistic Turn.

The reader may have a sense that we have gone off  the rails. To be honest, I share that sense. The claim that the category of sentence carves at the joints, for example...strains to the breaking-point my intuitive grip on the notion of joint carving...[I]t's evident from examples that there just is a metaphysically significant notion of saturation. I invite the skeptical reader not to simply dismiss the issue, but rather to join my struggle to make sense of this notion, and perhaps come up with something better. T.Sider, Writing the Book of the World (257) [emphasis in original--ES.]

An uncharitable -- not to be confused with the "skeptical" -- reader might interpret the passage above as a rhetorical way to dismiss an important worry (recall my earlier post). But this would miss what is at stake here;  Sider here recognizes (to speak pompously) the crucial, world-historical significance of his project, which madly pursues the 'linguistic turn' to its near-breaking point within analytical metaphysics. For, with 'saturation' Sider makes clear how his knee-jerk realism and his embrace of the method of final (or fundamental) language come together: the world consists of joints and these correspond to "a linguistic category: that of the complete sentence in a fundamental language. In a fundamental language, a language in which the category of sentence carves at the joints, sentences are always "metaphysically complete"--saturated." (254)

Now, this is not the place to offer Sider's ingenuous and persuasive argument for his idea that "there's something metaphysically distinctive...abut all parameters being filled. When all parameters are filled, we can call the result a [metaphysical] fact." (252). Let's accept that a fully regimented fundamental language contains a primitive operator that attaches to a dummy sentence-variable. We have here a way of thinking about submission to fact (recall and here) that is internally satisfying (and consistent). To put Sider's insight more informally, but it in the spirit of Sider, "when God created the world" she needed sentences to write the book of the world.

Sider's picture comes attractively close to offering a metaphysical bedrock that dispenses with the Principle of Sufficient Reason (and, thus, exorcise the ghost of Bradley's infinite regress that has haunted analytical philosophy since inception).

But as Sider recognizes in the quote above, it is one thing to be in the business of offering an account of a final language, which surely is allowed to have sentences or the sentence category [it's a language, after all]; it's another thing -- and quite anthropomorphic, too -- to think that this language must contain the category sentence not just as efficient short-hand, but fundamentally.

As an aside, if one is in the grip of a certain form of onto-theology -- cf. John 1:1, or the "book of nature" in Galileo and Berkeley --, of course, then, indeed, one might think that the project is very much on the rails. But it is hard to see how one then eventually escapes linguistic idealism, which is anathema to Sider's 'knee-jerk' realism (and also a juicy target for Derrida-ean ridicule).

Now, it is no option to just give up on saturation and keep the rest of Sider's project. For without some such concept, it is impossible to point to a privileged class of 'facts' when such pointing is not, in some sense, arbitrary. So, saturation must be given a non-sentential (and preferably non-linguistic) interpretation to salvage Sider's project and, to speak frankly, the whole project of a fundamental language within analytical metaphysics. Rather than being uncharitable, we should welcome Sider's willingness to think through the linguistic turn and create the conditions for its overcoming from within.