Wittgensteins, Heideggers, and Gadamers, Oh My!

It is important to note at this point, however, that we are not simply equating sayings as such with doings. As the anthropologist William Hanks notes in his Language and Communicative Practices, an adequate account of lived language must give equal consideration to both the pragmatic aspects of language as action and the structure of grammar as conceived by Chomskian linguistic and other formal approaches. That is to say, the meaning of sayings depends both on the role those actions play in practices and on their internal structure. Those who wish to emphasize the former point are apt to highlight examples of simple utterances that fit neatly into a given practice, such as a basketball defender yelling, “Pick right!” to signal an oncoming pick to a teammate, or a builder commanding, “Slab!” to an assistant as an order to bring a slab hither. Those who wish on the contrary to stress the latter view will be more likely to consider the complexity of sentence- or paragraph- length utterances, or even more extensive texts, extracted from their sites of use. For our purposes in this essay it is important to acknowledge the distinctive modes of meaning made possible by grammatically structured sayings while always returning to social practices as the context in which such sayings find their home. There is no contradiction between the conviction that language is an inherently praxis-based condition and the view that human beings are genetically predisposed to understand and be able to produce grammatical utterances whose structure is underdetermined by the data he or she encounters.