Wittgensteins, Heideggers, and Gadamers, Oh My!

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.

This treatment of linguistic meaning as radically normative is insightful, and will play a role in our later discussion. Even more interesting for our present project, however, is Lance and O’Leary-Hawthorne’s discussion of praxis. This occurs in the course of their argument in favor of their “Constitution view” of translation against its two rivals, the Transcendental view and the “Traditional” view. The ultimate purpose of this analysis is to show that meaning is not simply or even primarily a matter either of conforming to a transcendental pattern or of merely maintaining a traditional pattern. To illuminate their point Lance and O’Leary-Hawthorne discuss the normative developments in American professional basketball usually known as “The Chamberlain Rules.” In essence, the player Wilt Chamberlain was so unusually talented that he radically disrupted the prior structure of the game of basketball. In order to maintain the integrity of the game the league elected to ban various actions that no one prior to Chamberlain had attempted, at least regularly, including goal-tending and jumping from the free throw line on free throws to dunk the ball. The authors contend that this action on the part of the NBA cannot be appropriately explained by appeal either to some sort of Platonic form of basketball or to mere past practice. Instead, in order to continue the game of basketball, the officials changed from past practice in order to maintain something more closely like past practice, legislating a “translation” between the pre- and post-Chamberlain games.

Mark Lance and his co-author John O’Leary-Hawthorne further develop a Pittsburgh Hegelian account of the relationship between language, praxis, and meaning in their The Grammar of Meaning. Through most of this book the authors focus even more on language rather than on linguistic praxis or praxis as such than do Sellars and Brandom, yet ultimately they provide the most elaborate and intriguing analysis of praxis of the three sources. Agreeing with and providing new emphasis to the central Sellarsian contention that meaning is normative, Lance and O’Leary-Hawthorne treat meaning claims — that is, claims about what some bit of language means — as more closely related to ethical and political judgments than to statements of fact made in one of the natural sciences. They go so far as to say that in proposing a translation, one effectively licenses a sort of constitution designed to bind two linguistic communities together. The force of such a declaration is, the authors contend, inherently one of “should” (this word should mean that) rather than of “is” (this word does mean that).

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.