Wittgensteins, Heideggers, and Gadamers, Oh My!

Now is probably as good a time as any to throw Schatzki fully into the mix. Ted was my dissertation chair, so no doubt I’m biased, but I think his account of social practices is more comprehensive and more coherent than any of its rivals. When I was dissertating I relied on his Social Practices, but his later work The Site of the Social adds some additional features while maintaining the same fundamental perspective, and is consequently the better text to rely on. Citations below are from the latter text.

The issues in front of us at this point concern the nature of the meaning that infuses human life, the rootedness of that meaning in either language or praxis (or both), and the puzzle of whether (non-human) animals and human infants participate in this sort of meaning, if so how, and if not, how infants come to participate in it. At the end of my last post I proposed that many animals and infants do have ends, which is to say that they have some sort of understanding of themselves and of the equipment that comprises their worlds. Let me now turn to Schatzki to develop his account of human meaning in order to tie some of these loose ends together.

Starting on p. 70 of The Site of the Social Schatzki presents his theory of social practices. Expanding on Charles Taylor’s Heideggerian conviction that, contra all manner of philosophical individualisms, meaning is “out there in the practices,” Schatzki conceives a practice as ”an organized nexus of actions.” These actions, understood as both doings and sayings (i.e. doings, such as uttering certain vocalizations or scribbling certain marks, that say something) are organized by understandings, rules, and “teleoaffective structures.” Furthemore, doings and sayings typically count in their practices as the undertaking of certain tasks, aimed at completing certain projects, all with ultimate ends (p. 73).

 An understanding is primarily the knowing how to do something, e.g. how to vote (such as by raising one’s hand or saying, “Aye”) or to make a righthand turn or to ask a question. Rules are explicit formulations (in language) directing what should be done, what may be done, how things are to count, and so on (including not just regulations but also definitions, instructions, etc.). The rather infelicitous term “teleoaffective structures” refers to orderings of “ends, projects, and tasks” typically linked with emotions and moods (p. 80). Schatzki goes on to stress that such structures are the property of practices and not of the agents who participate in them: they are “expressed in the open-ended set of doings and sayings that compose the practice” and are adopted to varying degrees and in different ways by different practitioners. Crucially, the ends in question need not be conscious goals of anyone individually or of the group collectively.

I have always had a penchant for examples from games, and I will use one here: the practice of basketball. In the old men’s pickup basketball “league” I play in on Saturday mornings between Thanksgiving and the long-awaited Wisconsin summer there are certainly doings and sayings that count as tasks within projects directed toward ends. For example, being a poor shooter I frequently attempt the task of setting a pick for one of my better shooting teammates. There are a number of different bodily behaviors (doings) that can compose this task, some more successful and more legal than others. This task is part of the project of running our offense (such as it is), all with the ends of winning, playing well, enjoying ourselves, staying in shape, and so on. In the whole complex of our activity there are vast linkages (e.g. sayings, such as, “pick right” that the defense frequently offers so that they can respond effectively to our pick attempt, the extended fist that signals one’s intent to set a pick to a teammate, and the pick-setting player’s subsequent move toward the basket that completes the shared task that goes by the name “pick-and-roll”) as well as definite affective structures: the emotions of extreme competitiveness, particularly anger, are not appropriate here, while expressions of humility and frequent joking between and among the teams is encouraged.

Social practices as Schatzki presents them are infused with language, as they should be, since he is theorizing about human actuality. Schatzki nevertheless keeps language in its place, indicating that meaning is primarily carried by praxis (and, in this book, by “sites”). I’ll develop this point in later posts. For now I merely want to make some connections to issues raised or hinted at in earlier posts.

First, it seems plausible to me that infants take part in certain (perhaps vague or simple) ends, and that their doings count at times as tasks or even tasks in pursuit of projects, but that only by coming to take part in social practices do their ends, tasks, and projects expand to the degree of variability and level of complexity one associates with human adults. Indeed, how, without have some primal capacity for aiming at ends could an infant begin to take part in even the simplest practices? He would need the sort of extensive training behaviorists once trumpeted, and it is the rare practice that requires that sort of disciplining. Call this infantile orientation toward simple ends “mere sentience” if you want. Whatever it is, it seems to me to be there and steadily growing from very early in a child’s life outside the womb (if not before). And that does not in any way deny that most of those children will come to dwell within vastly more elaborate, intricate, and peculiar ends than they could possibly fathom in their toddlerage. All this involves is a typical biological development, in contrast to an oscillation between a logician’s binary categories.

Second, go back to the three examples of doings and sayings I gave in conjunction with setting a pick: saying, “Pick right,” extending a fist, and rolling toward the basket. The first is clearly a saying, the third clearly a doing. The second is ambiguous. Extending one’s fist in this manner should count as a saying, as it says, “I’m setting a pick for you” without counting as a word, phrase, or sentence. That’s not to say that arm gestures cannot count as instances of language — clearly they can. However, the users of this particular gesture do not speak sign language, and cannot employ this sign (if we call it that) in other speech acts. It works only in this practice. With that said, this is clearly no mere doing as it does nothing unless it is understood.

To complicate matters further, however, consider the mere setting of a pick without the accompanying extended fist (the third example above of the roll works as well). If my teammate sees me set myself properly, he understands what I am doing and may make use of my pick. This was, however, more properly a doing than a saying, as the point of my behavior was principally to achieve the physical goal of blocking my teammate’s defender. These statuses of pursuing physical and communicative goals are not mutually exclusive, however, and “reading” a basketball court consists primarily in instantaneously seeing what key players are trying to do and discerning what it makes sense to do in that context. Not surprisingly, deception plays a big role here, and occurs primarily in doings (e.g. when a player tries to look unready to race for a pass from the other team that he is anticipating) rather than doings.

This is one reason I doubt that language, by any reasonable definition of the term, underlies all human meaning. Even if we forbade a group of people for a certain period of time to use not just sayings (e.g. “pick right”) but even those doings/sayings that were primarily communicative (e.g. extending a fist), we would still “say” a great deal — we would understand each other’s engagement in the tasks that comprise our shared practices. I am inclined to entertain the proposal, though I have my doubts about it, that because our training in language makes us capable of grasping the world in a new way,  that language consequently does found even those meaningful human encounters that do not appear to employ words or other linguistic elements at all. I have trouble with the more radical idea, common to much postmodern thought, that language in a deeper sense underlies all meaning. Next I’ll see if Cristina Lafont can help me see the light.

One puzzling aspect of the Sellarsian account of meaning I presented in my last post concerns the sentience of non-human animals and human infants. While the danger of anthropomorphizing the former and “adultizing” the latter should not be ignored, I propose that an accurate account of the lives of a great many animals and infants would require an inferential vocabulary that allowed for something like a self-understanding in a roughly Heideggerian sense. As the early Heidegger said (again, roughly) shortly before he made the famous turn toward becoming the late Heidegger, humans have worlds, rocks have no worlds, animals are world poor.

To clarify, “world” and “self-understanding” refer to the same fundamental arrangement I glossed in an earlier post while presenting Dasein engaged with equipment. Coping transparently with equipmental totalities entails, among other things, having ends, tasks, and projects (Schatzki’s terms in The Site of the Social), and this typically unexplicated teleology forms much of the structure of the Dasein/world whole. To have ends and a sense for how to pursue them is to have an understanding at once of oneself and one’s world.

The philosophies of the Pittsburgh Hegelians and praxis philosophers such as Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Hubert Dreyfus, Charles Taylor, and Theodore Schatzki approach one another yet remain at a remove in significant part because the latter orient themselves toward human ends whereas the former are more concerned with epistemology, or human knowledge. Even the example I gave in my last post of a chain of inferences flowing from “That apple is red” to “I should take that apple to my sister” was couched more in praxis-terms than in Pittsburghese.

In spite of this divide, the parallels are powerful. In claiming that a Sellarsian should employ an inferential vocabulary in order to make sense of the behavior of infants and some non-human animals (that is, that he should speak of them as if they were making inferences themselves), I am saying that those creatures are world poor — that they have ends, even if they are either incapable or scarcely capable of articulating them. I am close here to advocating a “constitution” (in Lance and O’Leary-Hawthorne’s sense in their The Grammar of Meaning), or perhaps something a bit more like a treaty, that would license the easy translation of Sellarsian language into a Heideggerian idiom and vice versa. Indeed, I am entirely in favor of such an agreement. This treaty is not yet ready to be signed, however.

Even if one made the Pittsburghers more practical, and oriented their inferences (and inference attributions) more toward human ends and away from human knowledge absent such ends, it’s not clear that inferences really match up with, say, signifying chains or practical intelligibility (both adaptations of Heideggerian concepts by Schatzki in his Social Practices). For one thing, as presented by Brandom, inferences move from the inside-out, so to speak. One begins with a claim and moves from there to conclusions. By contrast, a signifying chain seems to move instead outside-in, from ends to means, as when my desire to be famous signifies my appearing on American Idol, which signifies going to local open mike nights, which signifies practicing, which signifies my going into the basement right now to warm up my voice. I believe that these accounts could be brought into greater confluence, but as yet they do not coincide. For now, however, I am going to continue to pair Sellarsian inference and Heideggerian signification to see in practice how well these perspectives mesh.

Back, then, to infants and non-humans, e.g. chimpanzees and bonobos.  Are they merely sentient, or do they exhibit signs of sapience even in the absence of language? Let’s understand sapience here as that which allows me to see something as something — as that which leads me, on the rare occasions that I draw, to draw what I know is there rather than what I actually see, literally to draw my inferences. Don’t infants and bonobos alike act as if they see as? Doesn’t understanding them require attributing inferences and ends to them, albeit typically of a simpler sort than those we attribute to other human adults? Indeed, a careful reading of Sellars indicates that he agrees that infants at least must develop sapience in something like stages, which suggests that sentience is itself a proto-sapience. Holding such a view without giving into a full-blown version of the Myth of the Given, however, is no easy task.