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The later Heidegger goes ever further than Gadamer in locating meaning constitution in language, as indicated by his affirmation of the poet Stephan George’s line, “Where word breaks off no thing can be.” The later Heidegger even attempts to demonstrate, rather than merely state, the disclosive possibilities of language, eschewing traditional modes of philosophical argument in favor of a “mytho-poetic” reverie, seeking thereby to invite the reader into the experience of language as open thinking toward emergence. Compared to most philosophers concerned with language, the later Heidegger interests himself less in the utterance, sentence, or proposition, and more in the word itself. What he intends here is no mere statement of a purported matter of fact or state of affairs, but a calling forth, an evocation, via a name. It is, in fact, a stretch to say that the later Heidegger still concerns himself with praxis even to the extent that Gadamer does, though the quasi-mystical experiences he indicates perhaps still involve an encounter with Being qua Being revealed in praxis.

The Frame Remains the Same

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.