Wittgensteins, Heideggers, and Gadamers, Oh My!

The question becomes how sayings, however elaborate their grammatical structure, alter the meaning of a situation from that available when mere doings are at work, even given the saying-doing continuum previously noted. The two main indicators on this question are Brandom’s work on explication and Charles Taylor’s work on articulation. Briefly, Brandom treats language primarily as a means of codifying meanings already implicit in practice, and hence likely expressed in doings, in such a way as to make them more susceptible to what he terms “deontic scorekeeping,” which we can gloss here as the normative accounting of the rightness of our own or another’s behavior, particularly according to the canons of formal logic. Taylor, on the other hand, focuses on humans as self-interpreting animals, and stresses the role of language in making manifest understandings and self-understandings implicit in our practices, hence expressed in doings, thereby typically altering those conceptions and affiliated future behavior, if for no other reason than that such manifestations can clarify such meanings. The clarity here is essentially a hermeneutic and not a logical clarity.

For the Hermeneuts language plays a much greater role in the constitution of meaning. Gadamer, for instance, maintains an emphasis on praxis in his account of games and dialogue. Indeed, his account of the sort of play in which the players lose themselves and any consciousness of that with which they play is akin both to the early Heidegger’s account of transparent coping and to Lance and O’Leary-Hawthorne’s take on the praxis of basketball. The subject matter of a dialogue controls the unfolding of the verbal exchange for Gademer much as the game of basketball indicates its own emendation for Lance and O’Leary-Hawthorne. However, in spite of this general praxis-orientation, Gadamer explicitly ties meaning entirely to language, as when he states that “Being which can be understood is language.” This claim goes beyond the Brandomian view that language can make explicit meanings already implicit in practice, as the latter for Brandom appear to be already understandable while yet only implicit.

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.

Brandom develops Sellars’ position in interesting ways. First, he characterizes that sort of awareness common to non-language using animals as “sentience” in contrast to that available to language-users, which he calls “sapience.” This distinction allows for some sort of meaningful engagement in the world on the part of mere sentients while maintaining the Sellarsian conviction that language institutes distinctly new modes of meaning. Second, Brandom elucidates language’s relationship to praxis as follows. Language provides the capacity for speakers to make explicit meanings that are already implicit in their practices. The resulting explications would not have the meaning they do absent those already established implicit meanings, but they take on new roles not available to mere unspoken aspects of  practices. Most of all, linguistic explications can play normative roles, particularly as “tokens” in Sellarsian games of giving and asking for reasons — arguments and other practices of logic and reasoning.

As I suggested in an earlier post, the trick to philosophy is to ask the right question. Frequently it takes several questions and even more answers before you can find the right one. I think the end of my last post sharpened my question appropriately, although it still needs some work.

We did not initially conceive our article as a study of the constitution of meaning, but that did prove to be a useful way of organizing the thoughts I’ve laid out so far. We could, then, frame the issue thus: What constitutes human meaning – consciousness, language, or praxis? One problem with this framing is that only certain instances of the first sort of approach speak of “constitution,” and that technical term brings with it a great deal of baggage that I’m sure we’d rather leave behind. Such is the challenge of speaking across multiple philosophical traditions. That might not prove insupperable, however.

Is it the case, though, that Sellarsians are really concerned with anything like the constitution of meaning? Well, yes. Check out Brandom’s Making it Explicit p. 4 as he unpacks his conception of sapience.

What is it we do that is so special?…Our transactions with other things, and with each other, in a special and characteristic sense mean something to us, they have a conceptual content for us, we understand them in one way rather than another.

As Brandom goes on to explain, these characteristics of sapient beings distinguish them from “merely reliable” responders to their environment such as thermometers as well as merely sentient creatures such as cats who are awake without being “subject to the peculiar force of the better reason” (p. 5). Meaning, for Brandom, is “constituted” in practices by humans’ normative attitudes and “deontic scorekeeping” concerning each other’s performances. Not only does this account not rule out a place for some sense of meaning prior to language, it demands it, as the work of language is principally to make explicit those meaning (or proto-meanings) that are implicit in our praxis. In some sense, then, Brandom straddles the fence separating the constitutive language and constitutive praxis camps.

By comparison, in The Grammar of Meaning Lance and O’Leary-Hawthorne’s whole purpose is to argue that “the grammar of meaning is normative,” i.e. that making meaning claims (e.g. “‘rot’ means ‘red,’” “his upraised fist means he’s going to set a pick for you,” or perhaps even “that crying means you need to go home now”) is not a descriptive undertaking (as Brandom holds), but rather is itself a normative act. I plan to look more closely at this matter, but for now I think it’s safe to say that Lance and O’Leary-Hawthorne seem safely ensconsed with the constitutive language crowd.

So what’s to argue here? Discard consciousness for now and focus on the language vs. praxis debate. Surely no one would hold that praxis accounts for all human meaning. Language’s role is too clear, and cannot be supplanted by mere doings. One would have to claim that praxis underlies all use of language, and in some sense I think that’s true, but not the strong sense required to make this a noteworthy claim. The question cannot be whether language or praxis is the source of meaning, but rather how they jointly generate meaning. It’s a matter of balancing, not preferencing. Too much has been claimed for language, but the balance sheet will not be set aright by crediting all the same claims for praxis.

So the question as I see it is how praxis makes language possible, and how language in turn makes new sorts of praxis possible. In my early post on Wittgenstein I gave some hint about my answer to the first part, but there is more to say. Speaking generally, I am inclined to say that praxis (including both practices and the arrangements of equipment that Schatzki highlights in The Site of the Social) provides the temporally and conceptually primary disclosure of meaning in which sayings can play any role at all. As Lafont notes and Brandom and others echo, however, sayings are the sort of equipment that can themselves disclose or reorder meaning, in part by offering rules, occasionally by articulating understandings, and more often by articulating ends and concommitant means. In short, language allows participants in practices to take new sorts of stands on their practices, which in turn can change those practices, including making them more complex. These new modes of disclosure do not remain embedded in language, however, but come to life in praxis itself. Indeed, I hypothesize that much of the trick of interpreting anything is sorting out the tensions between the mutually supporting and conflicting strands of meaning at work in any group’s language and its praxis.