Questions, I’ve Had a Few, But Then Again, Too Few to Mention

It’s worth stopping at this point to take stock of some of the major questions that I’ve avoided addressing in the foregoing. Chief among these are:

What is language? and What is meaning?

As a matter of philosophical methodology I prefer to begin with definitions to fundamental questions such as these that I expect will change over the course of my study, as opposed to setting those definitions in stone from the outset. The implied conviction of the latter procedure is that philosophy should begin with certainty and move logically from set premises to justified conclusions. I am convinced that it is preferable to instead develop ideas from positions that seem reasonable at the outset but that you are willing to reexamine and change in accord with the findings of your argument. It is, after all, the fundmental positions that are of most import to philosophy, and if we truly did have the right views of those foundations at the outset and were certain of those views, the logical movement from those views to further conclusions would actually be trivial. The trick in philosophy is reaching the right starting point, and I believe that we can only do so by continually critiquing where we happen to start in order later to begin anew in another, better place.

With that said, I should acknowledge the difficulty with providing even a provisional account of what language is given the variety of uses to which that term is put. There are empirical understanding of language that focus on the actual production of speech, writing, and other signs (roughly what Saussuere called “parole” and what Schatzki calls “sayings”) and also transcendental understandings that highlight language’s structuring of meaning (roughly what Saussuere called “langue”). Chomskian linguistics studies langue as an aspect of individuals, whereas other approaches such as sociolinguistics are more interested in the interpersonal applications of language.

As some sort of pragmatist, I confess my predilection toward a definition of language that begins with the uses to which language users put words, sentences and the like, and that conceives langue as an abstraction from that prior practice. I make this confession not so that I may atone for it or even in order to ask forgiveness, but to mark my inclinations so that they may more easily be countered later as necessary. For now, though, I will stand by my Wittgensteinian understanding of language as a set of resources (akin to tools in a toolbox) that those who know how to use them can employ in order to perform a number of tasks, including in particular communicative tasks. The various other major accounts of language are all, I believe, ultimately consistent with this perspective, though they will not share its emphases.

As for meaning, that is an arguably even trickier concept to analyze adequately. To keep things simple here I will simply say that by “meaning” I really mean neither of Frege’s terms, neither Sinn (sense) nor Bedeutung (reference), though Sinn is closer. In order to make sense of primal praxis I need a conception of meaning that fits with the non-thematic, concernful coping that Heidegger says underlies the sort of conscious awareness Husserl was concerned with and that has an as yet undetermined relationship with the detached word-world linkages that occupied Frege. This would have to be ready-to-hand meaning, the sort expressed in my taking a dish out of the dishwasher and putting it in the cupboard rather than in the trash or on the floor.

There’s danger here, of course, of serious question begging, but that doesn’t strike me as a problem so long as I’m clear about that very fact and am inclined to keep this presupposition about meaning in front of me as we go forward. If this definition of meaning proves untenable or highly questionable given our further investigations, everything I’ve said here may need to be revised.

So much for primal praxis and the “primitive” language embedded within it. Now we move on to look at two other philosophical traditions for comparison: the hermeneutics of Gadamer and the later Heidegger and the “Pittsburgh Hegelian” school of Sellars, Brandom, and Lance. Greig is the hermeneut among us, so I’ll count on him to supply the Gadamerian ore, while I’m off to the Sellars mines in search of myths of the given. Yukon ho!