Yes. I
believe I do follow this argument. It is not unlike the argument
@Michael Allen has been making and the "perspectival" argument I have been exploring.
I think it's worth following the argument as closely as possible and to the very and bitter end ... he explains things several different ways and then concludes:
"Though I will not develop these arguments here, however, I do think there are two broad ways in which one can argue for this irreducibility on principled grounds connected to what is plausibly the structure of these functions themselves. The first way would be to argue that because the presentational phenomena are, just as such, “semantic” in the sense first used by Tarski to characterize truth, the functions that characterize them exhibit an essential “meta-logical” irreducibility to (first-order) “syntactic” structures or systems.51 On this sort of position, just as Tarski demonstrated that truth must be irreducible to the syntax of an extensional language, so, and for essentially similar reasons, the presentational phenomena might actually be seen as irreducible to the extensional description of facts. Monism on the level of these facts themselves could, however, naturally be preserved; and the metalogical implications of “diagonalization” (in the sense in which Tarski’s theorem applies it) would themselves suffice to guarantee the real irreducibility of consciousness as presentation. The analogy considered here – between the irreducibility of the mental to the physical, on the one hand, and the irreducibility of semantics to syntax, on the other – is actually offered by Davidson in his original defense of anomalous monism, in “Mental Events.”52 But rather than applying it, as Davidson does, to considerations about law and causation, the present considerations appear to suggest its use to establish the actually ontological conclusion of the irreducibility of presentation to the totality of what is presented, while monism is nevertheless preserved.
The second way might be to appeal to broadly “Kripkensteinian” considerations about the application of the “content” of a presentation across cases, including (as we have seen) the variety of possible worlds, considered as actual. If, as Kripke interprets Wittgenstein as arguing, any attempt to capture this application by means of a finitely stated rule leaves open the skeptical possibility of a (purportedly) “non-standard” application in a new case,
smcder this is also an interesting argument "plus or quus?" then the actual pattern of application that is embodied in this content cannot in general be reduced to such a finite statement.53 This is perhaps why Wittgenstein says that, although any provision of a rule appears to demand another rule for interpreting that one, there is nevertheless a way of “grasping a rule” which is “not an interpretation” but rather turns on “what we” call following or going against the rule as we proceed from case to case.54 As I have suggested in connection with primary intensions and individuating functions, the collective first-personal “we” here may indeed be essential: it is not possible in general to account comprehensively for what is involved in a conscious presentation – that is, to account exhaustively for what it in fact determines, across possible worlds considered as actual – purely in third-person or indeed in simply extensional terms, and the irreducibility of presentational content as such to these terms would then once more be vindicated. It would be a further and welcome exegetical consequence of this that, far from repudiating or rejecting the idea of the essentiality of “inner” or consciously presented contents of thought, Wittgenstein’s considerations would rather be seen as pointing out, in a profound way, their real ontological character."
