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.

One of the keys to understanding the practice theoretic approach to understanding human activity is to appreciate, as Schatzki does, Charles Taylor’s insistance that “the meaning is out there in the practices.” That is, although understandings, rules, and ends-means-moods relations can all be expressed in the activity and captured in the consciousness of individual human beings, they are more properly considered the property of their home practices. Consider, for instance, some ways the game in question may play out. Player A is dribbling and his teammate B tries to set a pick on A’s defender. Both A’s and B’s defenders move to guard A, who passes the ball to B. As B turns to shoot, a third defender appears in his way and the two and the ball all fall to the floor. The main teleoaffective structures at play here concern the end of winning, which signifies scoring and defending, which in turn signify various further actions that are further governed by understandings and rules. For instance, knowing how and when to set a pick, how and when to make use of it, and how to defend against it all constitute largely unspoken understandings that basketball players tend to develop. The decision as to which side will maintain possession of the ball following the collision in question is a matter of rules, even though there is no official rule book for this informal contest and these players may never have to articulate the relevant rules to each other. It is principally such means of organization that establish the meaning of any particular incident, action, or phenomenon that appears on the stage of a practice. Furthermore, one participates in a practice only to the extend that one grasps and acts in accord with its organization. That is why standing on a basketball court during the course of a game does not by itself entail participating in that game.