Paragraph 12
April 7, 2007
The point we wish to highlight here is that this translation concerns not words but actions. The meanings the Chamberlain rules sought to reorder were not those of utterances, but those concerned with putting a leather ball through a metal hoop. Lance and O’Leary-Hawthorne leave unarticulated questions such as whether such translation of praxis meanings is possible without language, and the extent to which such praxis meaning itself depends on language in roughly the way Sellars holds that perceptual understanding does. They do, however, develop Brandom’s account of the sort of meanings that may be implicit in practice and thus unexplicated in language. Whatever role training in language may turn out to play in structuring even those practices that do not involve overt uses of words, Lance and O’Leary-Hawthorne’s example of the Chamberlain Rules indicates the vast richness of praxis meaning that that language that appears after the fact to attempt to make full sense of it will typically find difficult to capture.