Wittgensteins, Heideggers, and Gadamers, Oh My!

The Ur-Hegelian of the Pittsburgh school, Wilfrid Sellars, offers a contrasting view. His most influential text, Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind, evidences a thoroughgoing praxis-orientation highlighted by his focus on what he, following Wittgenstein, also calls “language games”. For instance, in his reversal of the Cartesian epistemological ordering of appearance and reality, Sellars speaks of “looks” talk and “is” talk, and argues that “looks” language games depend on “is” language games. That is, he holds, contra Descartes, that an utterance such as “That apple looks red to me” makes sense only if one could reasonably say — even if not correctly in the particular case in question — “That apple is red.” Implied in this argumentative strategy is Sellars’ conviction that this sort of language game dependence entails meaning dependence, and hence that praxis is prior to (abstract) language.

Similarly, the later Wittgenstein turns all discussions of linguistic meaning back to the practices in which both words and what Heidegger would call equipment have their place and their use. From his descriptions of various “primitive” language games in which assorted linguistic expressions play functional roles in conjunction with the games’ objects and devices, through his radical reinterpretation of rule-following as fundamentally practical and embodied rather than theoretical and cognitive, to his simple injunction to conceive meaning as “use,” Wittgenstein draws the philosophical accounting of language and linguistic behavior out of the individual mind and back into the “rough ground” of worldly engagement that he contends is its native land. Famously quietist, the later Wittgenstein makes no grand universal claims, yet it is all but impossible to imagine his giving creedence to any account of language that elided the role of social practices as the necessary background to any meaningful employment of words and phrases, so consistently and insistently does he stress language’s dependence on that context. Consequently it seems scarcely a stretch to ascribe to him the view that linguistic meaning is grounded in meaningful praxis. When I call, “Strike!” as an umpire in a softball game, my exclamation’s meaning resides in the way it furthers the action. The same exclamation has a very different meaning if I utter it as a fan, as a fielder, or as a solitary child playing at playing softball. Similarly, when I say, “Hi, how are you?” that greeting is a greeting because it occurs at a certain point in certain practices, such as when friends or acquaintences pass each other in the hallway or speak on the phone, and would be odd, humerous, nonsensical, or simply meaningless if asked in different contexts such as of a patient in the middle of surgery or of noone in particular in the middle of a movie at the theater. For the later Wittgenstein, no practices, no language.