Wittgensteins, Heideggers, and Gadamers, Oh My!

Practices thus provide the background against which, to use Schaztki’s terms, both “doings” and “sayings” have the meanings they do. The same physical action that would constitute a pick in a basketball game mean either something else or nothing at all in a board meeting, during spring cleaning, or on a night on the town. Similarly, the same utterance that would count as a challenge of another player’s foul call in that same game of basketball will mean either something else or nothing at all in any of these other contexts. Now, however, it is worth considering more carefully Schaztki’s distinction between doings and sayings. Doings are basic human actions or noteworthy refusals to act such as standing still or remaining silent. Sayings are a subset of doings, specifically those aimed primarily at expression, changing the intelligible environment without altering the physical environment. Utterances, including the conveyance of propositions usually studied by philosophers of language, are a subset of sayings, which in fact form a fuzzy continuum with non-saying doings. Indeed, it is difficult for a doing not to “say” something; or, to put the same point another way, the mere doings that carry out a practice express meanings that participants can and usually do “read” so as to understand what is going on. This is, in fact, precisely the sort of non-linguistic, praxis-based meaning we have discerned on display in the philosophies of the Founders and, in a somewhat different form, in that of the Pittsburgh Hegelians. On this account, then, to call a particular doing a “saying” is to signal that its principal function is to say something, as any doing could potentially do so. To return briefly to the basketball example, in the hurly burly of even the fairly slowly paced game in question, smooth play requires coordination between teammates largely without benefit of spoken instructions or requests. Instead, players quickly “read” the doings and anticipated doings of various other players on the court, and act against the resulting, instantaneously shifting background, on the basis of their “feel for the game.” Certain configurations of bodies mean “an easy basket” or “don’t drive there,” though those words need never be spoken or even thought. That this last point can scarcely be conveyed in the present context — that of writing a philosophical article — without use of language says much about the intelligible structure of philosophy, but not about the intelligible structure of basketball.