Intelligibility Is Not a Practice: Against Relativism, Naturalism, and Inferential Closure

 

1. The Evasion of Intelligibility

One of the most striking features of contemporary philosophy of language and logic is not what it argues for, but what it quietly avoids. Across otherwise divergent traditions, there is a shared reluctance to treat intelligibility itself as a real philosophical problem. Meaning is analyzed, reference theorized, normativity reconstructed, and inference regimented, yet the question of how anything can count as intelligible at all is either deferred or dissolved.

This avoidance is not accidental. The notion that intelligibility might be irreducible, non-formal, and ontologically basic sits uneasily with dominant methodological commitments. It threatens naturalism by introducing normativity that is not causally explicable. It threatens pragmatism by locating standards of correctness outside social practice. It threatens formalism by insisting that no amount of structure can close the gap between syntax and meaning.

The response has been predictable. Rather than confronting intelligibility directly, contemporary philosophy has sought to explain it away by appeal to models, to behavior, or to practice. The result is not theoretical economy, but conceptual self-sabotage. In attempting to eliminate non-formal conditions of meaning, these approaches quietly presuppose them.

The claim defended here is straightforward but uncompromising: intelligibility is not generated by formal systems, empirical regularities, or social practices. It is a condition of their possibility, and any theory that denies this either collapses into regress, triviality, or eliminativism.

2. Formal Determination and the Persistence of Meaning

It is uncontroversial that formal systems do not interpret themselves. Yet this fact is routinely treated as a technical limitation rather than a metaphysical one. That is a mistake.

No formal system can, from within its own resources, establish that it is the correct system for the domain it purports to represent. The notions of correctness, adequacy, and relevance are not formal predicates. They are not derivable from axioms or inference rules. They govern the application of systems, not their internal operations.

This is not a merely epistemic limitation reflecting human ignorance or computational constraint. Even an ideal reasoner supplied with unlimited resources would face the same structural situation. Formal derivation presupposes semantic uptake; proof presupposes satisfaction; and syntax presupposes meaning.

Attempts to evade this by appeal to meta-systems simply reproduce the same structure. A meta-system may encode rules about object-level systems, but the judgment that the meta-system is doing so correctly again relies on standards it does not itself generate. The hierarchy does not terminate in closure, but presupposes a space in which hierarchies can be evaluated at all.

The persistence of this space is not a defect of formalism. It is revealed by formalism at its most rigorous. Logic teaches us, by its own internal limits, that intelligibility cannot be fully objectified.

3. Why Model-Theoretic Relativism Cannot Do the Job

The model-theoretic argument associated with Hilary Putnam is often taken to show that reference and truth cannot be determinate independently of interpretive schemes. The existence of multiple non-isomorphic models satisfying the same theory allegedly undermines metaphysical realism and supports a form of conceptual relativism.

The argument, however, rests on an equivocation, for while the technical result shows that formal theories underdetermine interpretation, it does not demonstrate that interpretation is therefore conventional or indeterminate. To reach that conclusion, one must assume that all satisfying models are equally acceptable. Yet that assumption renders the argument unintelligible.

Notice that the distinction between intended and unintended models is not itself a model-theoretic distinction: it is not fixed by satisfaction relations. It presupposes standards of relevance, salience, and adequacy that are not themselves formalizable, and if those standards are abandoned, the argument collapses into the trivial claim that any interpretation is as good as any other, including interpretations on which the argument itself fails to refer.

The model-theoretic argument therefore presupposes what it denies. It relies on a non-formal sense of correctness to distinguish meaningful interpretations from pathological ones, while refusing to acknowledge the ontological status of that sense. The result is not deflationary clarity, but conceptual incoherence.

What the argument actually demonstrates is not the relativity of meaning, but the impossibility of eliminating extra-formal intelligibility. The very act of recognizing model-theoretic underdetermination depends on a prior space in which interpretations can count as better or worse.

4. The Failure of Naturalized Semantics

Naturalized semantics promises a more austere solution. Meaning is reconstructed in terms of causal relations, dispositions, or evolutionary success, and normativity is redescribed as reliable response to environmental stimuli. On this view, no irreducible semantic facts remain.

This approach fails not because it is insufficiently detailed, but because it misconstrues the problem. Causal regularities do not distinguish between correct and incorrect application. They describe what happens, not what ought to count as right or wrong. A pattern of reliable behavior does not, by itself, amount to rule-following unless standards of correctness are already in place.

Scientific reasoning itself presupposes norms of evidential relevance, explanatory adequacy, and inferential legitimacy that cannot be reduced to causal history. Appeals to evolutionary advantage merely shift the problem: advantageous for what, and according to which standards? The invocation of function presupposes intelligibility rather than grounding it.

A naturalized semantics must therefore either smuggle normativity back in under another name or deny that rational normativity is real. The former yields inconsistency and the latter yields eliminativism. Neither can support the authority of science or philosophy.

The problem is not that naturalism explains too little, but that it explains the wrong thing. It explains behavior while presupposing meaning.

5. Inferentialism and the Social Turn

Inferential pragmatism, most prominently associated with Robert Brandom, represents a more sophisticated attempt to take normativity seriously without reifying it. Meaning is constituted by inferential role within a social practice of giving and asking for reasons. Norms arise from mutual recognition and scorekeeping.

This view is correct to reject reduction to causal regularity. But it mislocates the ground of normativity. While social practices can transmit, stabilize, and contest norms, they cannot generate normativity without circularity. The distinction between correct and incorrect inference cannot itself be constituted by communal endorsement unless correctness is reduced to authority or consensus. In that case, disagreement ceases to be rationally intelligible.

Moreover, inferential roles are intelligible only within a prior space in which inferences can count as about something rather than merely occurring. A practice of scorekeeping presupposes that there is something to keep score of. That presupposition is not supplied by the practice itself.

Inferentialism therefore presupposes intelligibility while denying its independence. It treats the social articulation of norms as their ontological ground, rather than as one mode of their manifestation.

6. Against Naturalism Once More

It may be objected that the foregoing critique relies on an inflated notion of normativity, one that contemporary philosophy has learned to distrust. Perhaps intelligibility simply is what competent users do. Perhaps there is no further fact of the matter. But this response merely restates the problem.

If intelligibility is exhausted by use, then there is no distinction between correct and incorrect use beyond what is contingently accepted. But then the authority of philosophy, logic, and science evaporates. Critique becomes sociology. Argument becomes reportage.

No one who engages in philosophy actually accepts this consequence. Appeals to error, misunderstanding, misapplication, and confusion are ubiquitous. They presuppose standards that transcend local practice. The refusal to acknowledge these standards does not eliminate them. It merely renders them philosophically invisible.

7. Intelligibility as a Condition, Not a Product

The common failure of relativism, naturalism, and inferentialism lies in their shared assumption that intelligibility must be produced by systems, by organisms, or by practices. When production fails, intelligibility is either relativized or denied.

The alternative defended here is that intelligibility is a condition of determinability. It is not an entity, a rule, or a theory. It is the space in which determinate meanings, judgments, and truths can arise.

This space is not formal, because any attempt to formalize it collapses it into what it conditions. It is not subjective, because subjects participate in it rather than generate it. It is not social, because practices presuppose it in order to function as practices.

It orients rational activity without necessitating outcomes. It grounds normativity without competing with causal explanation. It makes disagreement, correction, and progress possible without guaranteeing closure.

To deny the reality of this space is not to adopt a leaner metaphysics. It is to undermine the very distinction between sense and nonsense on which philosophy depends.

8. Quine and the Refusal of the Question

The resistance to treating intelligibility as irreducible can be traced back, in part, to the influence of W. V. O. Quine. By rejecting the analytic-synthetic distinction and advocating a thoroughgoing naturalism, Quine sought to dissolve questions of meaning into empirical science. But what is dissolved is not confusion, but authority.

Quine’s holism presupposes that some revisions of belief are better than others. His naturalized epistemology presupposes standards of evidential relevance. His own arguments presuppose intelligibility at every step. What he denies is not normativity as such, but its philosophical articulation.

The refusal to articulate the conditions of intelligibility does not free us from them. It merely leaves them unexamined.

9. The Inescapable Conclusion

The attempt to explain intelligibility away has failed. Formal systems do not close the gap. Naturalism cannot ground normativity. Social practice cannot generate correctness. Each approach presupposes what it denies.

The conclusion is not mysterious, but it is unwelcome: intelligibility is real, irreducible, and ontologically basic.

One may resist this conclusion. One may redescribe, deflect, or postpone it. But one cannot eliminate it without eliminating the very enterprise of philosophy. If intelligibility is not real, nothing we say means anything. If it is real, then the project of explaining it away is incoherent. The burden of proof now lies with those who claim otherwise.

Sense without Sense?

Quine, Carnap, and the Persistence of Intelligibility

The reflections that follow were occasioned by a recent paper by Lucas Ribeiro Vollet, “Sense (Sinn) as a Pseudo-Problem and Sense as a Radical Problem: A Reading of the Motivations of Quine against Carnap" (https://independent.academia.edu/s/c59ed03835). Vollet kindly invited comment on the piece, and it repays careful reading. The article revisits the familiar—but still unsettled—Quine–Carnap dispute over Sense, not as a merely historical episode, but as a diagnostic window into the limits of semantic theory in the twentieth century.

Vollet’s central claim is worth stating clearly at the outset. He argues that Quine’s skepticism about intensions is not eliminativist in the crude sense often attributed to him. Quine does not regard the question of Sense as a pseudo-problem in the way some moral or metaphysical notions are dismissed as meaningless. Rather, he believes the question is incorrectly framed. What Carnap treats as a semantic problem—the need for intensional identity conditions stronger than extensional equivalence—Quine reinterprets as a scientific and methodological challenge: the ongoing task of coordinating empirical investigation, theory revision, and socially stabilized paradigms of meaning.

As Vollet summarizes in his abstract, Quine’s naturalism applies skepticism about intensions not to deny the reality of the problem, but to expose its mislocation. The appeal to sense functions as a semantically dogmatic expression of a broader difficulty already present in scientific practice itself: the challenge of providing coherence to inquiry, securing rational consensus, and stabilizing paradigms of meaning over time. Vollet names this the radical problem generated by the idea of Sense.

This reframing is philosophically serious and historically sensitive. It resists the temptation to caricature Quine as a blunt extensionalist and instead situates his critique of sense within a broader vision of scientific rationality. There is much here with which one can agree. Yet the very sophistication of Vollet’s reconstruction also sharpens a question that neither Quine nor his interpreters fully resolve: what becomes of intelligibility once formal semantics has been dismantled, but scientific practice itself presupposes more than extensional structure can supply?

It is this question—rather than the fate of “sense” as a semantic object—that motivates what follows.

I. The Legitimate Collapse of Intensional Semantics

Quine’s central insight was not merely that intensional entities resist formal definition. It was that the criteria by which such entities were supposed to be individuated—analyticity, synonymy, necessity—could not be specified without circularity. Any attempt to regiment them either presupposed what it claimed to explain or relied on pragmatic judgments smuggled in under the guise of logical form.

Vollet is right to insist that this is not a technical oversight but a structural failure. There is no algorithm for sense. No calculus decides synonymy. No formal rule distinguishes what is merely coextensive from what is cognitively equivalent. To that extent, the Carnapian project fails decisively.

This failure should not be minimized. It forces a clean and non-negotiable distinction between what syntax can secure—derivability, consistency, inferential order—and what it cannot: meaning, reference, or truth. Formal rigor does not rescue sense; it exposes its absence as a formal object. Any attempt to recover sense by enriching syntax, appealing to semantic rules, or invoking linguistic frameworks only relocates the difficulty without resolving it.

In this respect, Quine’s critique remains one of the most important negative results of twentieth-century philosophy.

II. The Non Sequitur: From Failure to Elimination

Where the argument falters is in the inference drawn from this failure. Quine famously concluded that since intensional semantics cannot be formalized, there is no fact of the matter beyond extensional equivalence and the evolving practices of empirical science. Meaning becomes, at best, a byproduct of theory choice, pragmatic convenience, and holistic revision.

But this conclusion does not follow.

The failure of formal capture does not entail the unreality of what resists capture. It shows only that the object in question is not an object of the same kind as formal derivations or syntactic structures. To infer elimination from non-formalizability is to mistake a methodological limitation for an ontological verdict.

Indeed, Quine’s own account of scientific practice quietly depends on distinctions that extensionalism alone cannot generate. Theory revision is not arbitrary. Scientific change is constrained by judgments of relevance, coherence, explanatory power, and unification—none of which are derivable from extensional relations alone, and none of which can be dictated by data without remainder. These judgments are not internal to a theory in the way axioms are; nor are they reducible to convention. They presuppose a space in which theories can count as making better sense of a domain rather than merely succeeding instrumentally.

Quine identifies the failure of intensional semantics correctly. What he fails to identify is what that failure presupposes.

III. Intelligibility Without Intensions

Once sense is rejected as a formal intermediary, we are left with a striking alternative: intelligibility without intensional objects. The question is no longer What is the sense of this expression? but How is sense-making possible at all, if no formal structure can generate it?

Vollet gestures toward an answer by appealing to coordination, rational negotiation, and scientific practice. But these gestures remain descriptive rather than explanatory. They name sites where intelligibility is exercised without accounting for what makes such exercise possible in the first place.

Theory choice, interpretive adequacy, and conceptual revision all presuppose a non-formal orientation toward meaning. This orientation is not itself a theory, nor a rule, nor a convention. It is the condition under which theories, rules, and conventions can be assessed as intelligible rather than merely adopted.

This is the point at which extensionalism quietly depends on what it officially disavows. The rejection of sense does not eliminate the problem of meaning; it relocates it to a level that resists objectification.

IV. Determination and the Space of Orientation

What emerges here is not a new intensional entity, but a structural distinction: the distinction between determination and determinability. Formal systems determine relations within a domain. But the capacity for such determination—to count as relevant, adequate, or successful—depends on a space of orientation that is not itself formally determined.

This space is neither subjective nor sociological, though it is encountered through finite judgments. It does not dictate outcomes, but it orients inquiry toward intelligibility. It guides without necessitating. It grounds without competing with determinate structures.

Attempts to collapse this space into practice, convention, or revisionary habit fail for the same reason that intensional semantics failed earlier: they confuse the exercise of intelligibility with its condition. What is presupposed in every successful act of interpretation cannot itself be reduced to the history of such acts.

V. Translation, Stabilization, and a Persistent Remainder

A brief exchange following Vollet’s paper sharpens this point further. In response to a comment emphasizing the importance of language–metalanguage distinctions, translation procedures, and higher-order logical resources for reconstructing ontological commitments—especially in contemporary AI contexts—Vollet agrees that such distinctions are crucial. They allow ontological commitments to be reorganized through mapping rules that preserve predictive roles while revising theoretical vocabulary.

Yet Vollet also raises an important hesitation. Translation frameworks, he suggests, may not be the only way to model ontological stabilization. Fixed-point constructions, iterative self-mapping, and convergent computational paths might also generate stable ontological frameworks internally, without appeal to pre-given semantic foundations. From this perspective, intensional—or even “supersensible”—structures emerge as products of convergence rather than as metaphysical primitives. Quine, Vollet suggests, might allow such internal stabilization, provided it remains constrained by biological, social, or cultural selection pressures that guide coordination toward shared reference.

This exchange is illuminating precisely because it confirms the deeper issue. Whether one appeals to translation, fixed points, or convergence, the question remains the same: what makes stabilization intelligible as stabilization rather than mere iteration? What distinguishes convergence from coincidence, coordination from collapse, agreement from brute alignment?

No amount of internal reorganization can answer that question from within.

VI. A Limit Quine Cannot Cross

Quine was right to dismantle the myth of sense as a semantic object. He was wrong to suppose that nothing remains once the myth is dispelled. What remains is intelligibility itself—real, irreducible, and non-formal.

Extensional logic shows us, with remarkable clarity, what form can and cannot do. But it also shows us that meaning is not generated by form. It is presupposed by it. The recognition of this fact does not require a return to intensions. It requires acknowledging that intelligibility has an ontological ground that formal systems inhabit but do not produce.

To say this is not yet to speak theologically. But it is to arrive at a threshold. The problem of sense dissolves. The problem of intelligibility does not. And it is precisely at that point—where philosophy has exhausted its formal resources without collapsing into irrationalism—that a deeper account of meaning becomes unavoidable.

That account begins not with semantic enrichment, but with the recognition that the space in which meaning appears is itself grounded. 

On Rabbits and Christology

The philosopher Willard Van Orman Quine schooled us on the indeterminacy of translation using the example of a tribesman speaking the unknown language Arunka employing the locution 'gavagai' whenever he saw what we might think is a rabbit.  But while we might think that 'gavagai' refers to the object rabbit, we can never know for sure what the tribesman is actually referring to when employing 'gavagai'.  There is, after all, an inscrutability of reference.  

I can imagine a culture, that does not individuate the world like my own does.  Perhaps the tribesman's culture actually has no rabbits, but does work the world up by thinking in terms of temporal rabbit stages.  Let S be a linguist from culture X and P be a tribesman from culture Y.  X sees the world as a place where there are unified rabbits while Y understands that the world is a place where there are rabbit parts, some detached and some undetached.  When P utters 'gavagai', P is referring to a set of undetached rabbit parts, but when S hears P utter 'gavagai', S thinks in terms of rabbits.  So what is there really?  Does the world come with rabbits as a basic ontological category, or is it a place where rabbit parts proliferate and where 'gavagai' refers to a collection or set of rabbit parts suitably ordered? 

Suppose Q from culture Z uses 'gavagai' only to talk about a set of temporal rabbit stages.  Culture Z is extremely time sensitive, and they "see" the world as a place where the temporal slices of things are ontologically primary. The linguist S hearing 'gavagai' could scarcely imagine that Q associates the term with a set of temporal slices of a particular kind. Again Q's culture finds temporal slices of things ontologically primary to the collections in which they are ingredient. So what is there really?  Does 'gavagai' properly refer to rabbits or to temporal rabbit stages?  Or does it rightfully refer to spatially extended, undetached rabbit parts?  

Mereology is concerned, of course, with the unities that parts comprise.  Culture X finds a unity in the rabbit which is made up of parts. But cultures Y and Z seem to find unities in the parts that comprise collections.  Our question really boils down to a question of what the proper unities there are of things, and if there are no such unities in themselves, what unities we seemingly commit ourselves to when experiencing and articulating the world. 

But there are other possibilities than those of P and Q and their cultures. What if R and his friends read so much Plato that they actually see the world as the "shadowy place" where the primary forms are dimly instantiated?  R and his culture U work the world up such that rabbithood has ontological priority over rabbits, over any concrete instantiation of that  rabbithood. But while we might say that rabbithood is instantiated in rabbits, culture U might simply say, "there is rabbitthood here."  Each and every time R uses 'gavagai', S uses 'gavagai', but they are not meaning the same thing in their using of the term.  S means rabbits, after all, while R means that rabbithood is present.  So what is there really?  Does the world come with rabbits pre-made, as it were, or is their existence ontological dependent upon something more basic: the form of rabbithood? Is the particular ontologically dependent upon the universal, or does the universal ultimately depend upon the particular?

Finally enter T of culture V who sees the world quite differently than the rest. Everything is made up of processes for the denizens of V.  Perhaps it is not the raindrops that a culture knows, but the entire process of raining.  Perhaps rain drops are ontologically dependent upon the event of rain. A fortiori, perhaps rabbits are mere distillations of rabbiting.  When T utters 'gavagai' she means that it is rabbiting.  What is there really?  Does 'gavagai' refer to rabbits, undetached rabbit parts, temporal rabbit stages, the form of rabbithood, or the event of rabbiting itself?  If people in cultures X, Y, Z, U and V use 'gavagai' in similar ways and on similar occasions, then how could we ever tell what S, P, Q, R and T really mean when employing the term?  Is there not an inscrutability of reference here? How can S ever really know what P, Q, R and T are referring to when they use 'gavagai' each and every time they are in the presence of what S assumes is a rabbit? 

Quine's indeterminacy thesis has been around for many decades. The statement of the thesis is consistent with reflection within the last seventy years on language and its relationship with the world. How does language anchor to the world?  What is the world?  Does it come as a set of self-identifying objects, properties or events?  Are there natural kinds, or do human beings gerrymander the world, imposing through their individuation their own ontological prejudices upon it?  Whose power is served by understanding the world to have rabbits at its deepest level rather than rabbithood?  Who is marginalized by seeing rabbiting instead of undetached rabbit parts?  If the world has no objective ontology, but rather receives the ontology of our prejudice, then does not ontology become a projection of our interest and power, specifically as pertains our race, sex, class, sexual orientation, etc.?  

Indeed. One might say that if the world has no ready made ontological structure, then the world is really worldless, for it becomes merely the field that the self projects.  Accordingly, the world cannot sustain an over and againstness with respect to the self to which it relates. Here, the self devours the world.  

But as the last hundred years of reflection has taught us: there is no privileged access to an objective self that can be full of itself. The self that is not full of itself, is itself a battle ground of different cultural, linguistic and conceptual ideologies.  The self is dispossessed, and the worldless world now finds itself in relation to a dispossessed self. The world and self each have lost their inseity, and must now be understood ecstatically. We now suspect that while the putative determinacy of the world rests upon the putative determinacy of the self, the putative determinacy of the self rests upon that which is not itself and can never be itself.  So in these late postmodern days there is ripening the realization that world and self, the original Dyad, has breathed illusion since the Beginning.  But I digress.  

It is important for theology to know the ontological contour of the land it must work. Theology must relate the kerygma to the concrete historical-cultural situation in which it finds itself.  Theology must concern itself with proclaiming and understanding the life, death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth in a time of a worldless world and a dispossessed (self-less) self. Accordingly, it must understand how to do christology in this time of rabbits. 

Looking at christology in this time of the absence of presence of world and self -- this time of the indeterminacy of reference and translation -- it is clear that we are going to have to specify what we mean in ways we have never had to do before in the history of theology.  Because meaning is no longer "in the head" -- we have no immediate access to a cartesian self with pure intent -- we are only going to gain clarity as to what we mean by employing the tools of semantic modeling.  

Language is syntax and theory, and theory refers semantically to that which is not language.  There must be something that language is about if there is ever going to be the possibility of truth and objectivity.  If language is not to collapse into itself -- or into the black hole of the self -- it must specify something in the world that it means, something on the basis of which it is true or false.  As we have seen, that to which language refers can be expressed set-theoretically.  What is necessary is that we start with a domain of objects, and then define relation and function operators on this domain. In this way we, we provide the possibility of an extra-linguistic reference to language.  (At least this is the hope.  Clearly, if one holds that sets and operations are affairs of language, then we are thrust back into Derrida's position of language being an "infinite play of signifiers.). 

So what do we do with christology in a time of the relativity of rabbits?  Clearly, just as we are able to specify the salient differences between undeatached rabbit parts, temporal stages of rabbits, and the instantiation of rabbithood, we must be able to specify the differences in meanings of 'person', 'nature', 'happy exchange', 'justification' or 'theosis' when it comes to Christ.  But what are the conditions for the possibility of difference?  What makes if possible that "gavagai" could apply to such different things?  More to the point, what are the conditions for the possibility that differences of meaning of 'person' and 'nature' could obtain?  

Some theology proceeds, I think, on the assumption that if one can use language in the same way and in the same situations, then there is substantial agreement about meaning in that language.  If one can say, "it is true that Christ is one person in two natures," then do we have to say anything more about persons and natures?  Why provide some set-theoretic interpretation to theology theory, if "this game is played," that is, that the language of theology is used appropriately and consistently whether used by person S or P above?  

But this objection misses the point. That a game is consistently played does not entail that meaning is consistently had. In a time when an unbridgeable chasm has opened between what is intended and what is said, we have no choice but to provide the relevant models for christological language, pointing out that language's possible interpretations and evaluating those interpretations in terms of their overarching theological plausibility.  In this time of the worldless world and the self-less self, language itself must police itself such that the proclamation of the wording Word is pronounced with clarity.  

Doing christology in a time of rabbits demands we understand profoundly the challenges to christological reflection in the twenty first century. Our naivety is gone.  Even the stability of what Quine called "stimulus meaning" is seemingly absent for theology. While linguist S sees and understands the stability of P, Q, R, and T's occasions of uttering "gavagai' in the face of some experience which can be understood differently, what constitutes the stability in uttering 'person' christologically, an uttering that seemingly is not linked deeply to experience at all?  

There is ultimately no other choice here for finding stability in the occasions of use of 'person', than to locate that stability within the Bibical-historical tradition of the Christian community.  In this time of the worldless world, and self-less self, there can be only the linguistic event of the utterance of 'person' consistently and stably throughout the Christian tradition.  While Quine could speak of the stimulus meaning of 'gavagai' in a field of perception, christological reflection must locate a meaning of 'person' within the revelatory event of the Biblical-historical tradition itself.  Only when we can make sense of the stability of occasions of using 'person' can we begin the task of providing models for the interpretation of 'person' christologically.  

Clearly, there is a great deal of work that must be done.  However, the first step in moving forward is to no what direction is presupposed in the semantics of 'forward'.  Beginning with rabbits can help us in christology, but the path forward is not at all easy.  In fact, some of the way forward will not look like a path at all.  But this is how it must be if we are going to do christology in this time of rabbits.