Wittgensteins, Heideggers, and Gadamers, Oh My!

 To sum up, then, the Pittsburgh Hegelian view gives praxis a significant role in the constitution of meaning, but one that remains clearly subordinate to that played by language. Meaning as such, for these philosophers, is inherently linguistic, though this contention is leavened somewhat by what they see as the thorough embeddedness of language in praxis. On these accounts, praxis in the absence of language might not be meaningful at all, but language has its meaning by virtue of being part of praxis, and at least for beings trained in language, there are meanings implicit in practices independent of those concretized in 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.

For the Heidegger of Being and Time praxis contributes at least as much as language to the constitution of meaning. Dasein’s engagement with the equipment he or she finds ready to hand always already comprises an interpretation both of that equipment and of Dasein’s own Being. That is, in their everyday activity human beings typically find themselves dealing with an array of entities (clothes, vehicles, pens, tools) in an unreflective, “transparent” way to carry out a variety of tasks, and in so doing they manifest understandings both of what those entities are and of who they are. For example, I get into my car and run, without need for thought, through all the motions that comprise driving until I reach my destination and deliver my pizza or pick up my date, thereby living out an understanding of what cars, roads, and stop lights mean, as well as what it means to be a pizza delivery guy or a boyfriend. The further articulations of such interpretations via what Heidegger terms “discourse” build upon, refine, or otherwise intertwine with those contained in Dasein’s praxis, but do not found that activity or its meaning. In talking about my car, this pizza, my date, and the terrible traffic, I expand upon the interpretations already active in my praxis, but the meanings embedded in those interpretations do not depend on my talk for their instantiation. Human activity alone is enough to generate such meaning. Furthermore, Heidegger states that the content of any discourse is not something that can be gathered from language, but is instead that which makes anything like language ontologically possible (SZ 162). That is not to say that praxis in turn founds language for the early Heidegger, but rather simply that praxis is its own source of meaning.

The philosophers whose work we will investigate here fit into three camps:

(1) Early Heidegger and the later Wittgenstein (”The Founders”);

(2) Sellars, Brandom and Lance (”The Pittsburgh Hegelians”); and

(3) The later Heidegger and Gadamer (”The Hermeneuts”).

Perhaps ironically from a simple historical perspective, it is the earliest established camp, that of the Founders, that gives greatest primacy to praxis, treating non-linguistic action in practices as at least equiprimordial to language in the constitution of meaning. The faction with the longest temporal spread, the Pittsburgh Hegelians, grounds language in practices, but arguably ultimately situates meaning clearly in the house of language. Finally, the Hermeneuts take an interesting turn away from praxis, leaving it only a minor place in an account dominated by language. We contend that the Founders were actually on a course preferable to that of their successors in this lineup, though their philosophies have much to gain through dialogue with these contrasting views. Furthermore, all of these camps would benefit from a synthesis with a more thoroughgoing analysis of social practices than any of them provides. By means of a comparison of the understandings of language and praxis in each of these philosophies, and also Theodore Schatzki’s practice theory, we will show how language is grounded in praxis, as well as how language makes new modes of praxis possible, in the process clarifying the relationship between linguistic meaning and meaning embedded in praxis.

The twentieth century bore the fruit of what came to be known as “The Linguistic Turn,” the refocusing of philosophical attention from minds to words. As Theodore Schatzki indicated in his introduction to The Practice Turn, the same century also witnessed the development of a parallel reorientation from words to praxis. In fact, many of the same philosophers who paved the path toward recognizing language as the fundamental component of human experience also sewed the seeds of what we call “praxis philosophy,” Heidegger, the later Wittgenstein, and Sellars chief among them. By arguing, indicating, and hinting that praxis, by which we understand the engagement with the world of things and beings, particularly as organized by social practices, provides the meaningful ground on the basis of which language itself can have meaning, these philosophers and their intellectual progeny have indeed cast a dim light along a path that might lead to a new way of philosophizing by which neither minds nor language would hold primacy of place, and recent and classic questions of the field would take on new and intriguing form. Such a transformation awaits at least, however, a critical analysis of the relationship between praxis, language, and meaning built on the work in this area to date. That analysis is our task in this essay.

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.

Cristina Lafont’s Heidegger, Language, and World-Disclosure is quite a book. Against both those (such as Gethmann) (p. 12) who see Being and Time as merely an adjustment from the philosophy of consciousness (p. 2, note 3)(particularly, of course, as propogated by Husserl) and those (such as Okrent in Heidegger’s Pragmatism, Dreyfus in Being-in-the-World, Lorenz and Mittelstrass in “Die Hintergehbarkeit der Sprache,” and, presumably, Schatzki and perhaps Rorty and those Pittsburgh Hegelians who take note of Heidegger) who interpret the early Heidegger as some sort of pragmatist (p. 12), Lafont marshalls an impressive range of quotations from a number of sources, particularly Heidegger’s lectures from the 1920s but also from several of his works after his Kehre, to argue that language, rather than Dasein or praxis, was always the “house of Being” for Heidegger, though at times in his early writings he lost sight of this commitment.

Ultimately Lafont will wish to indict Heidegger for the unfortunate reification of language that she believes his resulting “linguistic idealism” commits him to, and it is unclear to me what position Lafont herself would ultimately prefer. Her focus is largely exegetical, and so from the fact that she thinks that the early Heidegger committed himself to linguistic idealism in lieu of some sort of practice theory it does not follow that Lafont herself would reject the latter view. That matter remains unclear. In any case, in line with things I have said on this blog before, whether or not Lafont is correct about the early Heidegger’s views is of less interest to me than how she articulates the case for language as the source of human meaning.

She begins by noting that in Being and Time Heidegger attempts to overcome the classic subject-object opposition while still remaining, perhaps against his own ultimate inclinations, within that framework. He does this by reconceiving the subject as Dasein, objects as equipment, and adding the world to this arrangement: hence subject/object gives way to Dasein/world/equipment. Lafont notes that this attempt to escape the transcendentalist enterprise, via the substitution of understanding for perception, hinges on the efficacy of the ontological difference between the ontic (things, including Dasein) and the ontological (Dasein alone). But Lafont argues that even in the context of Being and Time it becomes repeatedly clear, no matter how much Heidegger tries to contend otherwise, that language, too, is like Dasein in being both ontic and ontological. In other words, Lafont contends that even the early Heidegger is committed to the claim that the understandings that comprise the world into which each Dasein finds him or herself always already thrown are at root linguistic.

Even in the pre-thematic dealings with equipment characteristic of life in the Heideggerian workshop, linguistic signs take precendence. Chastizing Heidegger a bit in passing for attempting to treat language as a mere tool, in keeping with the philosophy of consciousness he is trying to overcome (but also in keeping with the more pragmatic approaches derived from Heidegger to which Lafont pays little attention), Lafont argues that the fact that “the being of equipment…always [belongs (to)] a totality of equipment” is “not constituted by equipment itself” (p. 32). Instead, Lafont urges, Heidegger’s immediately following analysis shows, almost against his will, how this referential totality is disclosed by the sign, which is “an item of equipment which explicitly raises a totality of equipment into our circumspection so that together with it the worldly totality of equipment announces itself” (p. 34, quoting BT, p. 110).

There’s much going on here that will take a while to unpack. I think that Lafont is arguing that early Heidegger held, though he did not fully appreciate the implications of this conviction until later, that language discloses to Dasein even those world-ly relations at play in wordless, ready-to-hand, transparent coping. We are close here to the repeated theme, taken up by Charles Taylor and Robert Brandom among many others, of language’s power to articulate, or make explicit, that which is somehow already there, implicitly (inarticulately), in praxis. Lafont’s Heidegger goes a large step further, however, to allege that what language really does is to disclose possibilities of being that would, absent language, never appear at all. This is a much stronger claim, arguably parallel to, though quite different from, Sellars’s critique of the Myth of the Given. Furthermore, both of these critiques seem to me to be oriented toward so-called philosophies of consciousness, and thus not necessarily to touch on praxis theories. It might help to sketch these three possibilities:

1. Philosophies of Constitutive Consciousness — Cartesianism, Husserlian Phenomenology, and early analytic empiricisms;

2. Philosophies of Constitutive Language — Sellars and Lafont’s Heidegger; and

3. Philosophies of Constitutive Praxis — Taylor, Dreyfus, Schatzki, and Heidegger and Wittgenstein as interpreted by each of them.

The challenges for approaches of type 3 are (a) showing how they avoid 2’s critique of 1 (b)successfully overcoming 1 themselves, and (c) clarifying the relationship between praxis and language. For this article we’ve set (c) as our main task. Accomplishing (a) and (b) here as well might make the project too big, but I think it could be done in principle.

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.

It’s worth stopping at this point to take stock of some of the major questions that I’ve avoided addressing in the foregoing. Chief among these are:

What is language? and What is meaning?

As a matter of philosophical methodology I prefer to begin with definitions to fundamental questions such as these that I expect will change over the course of my study, as opposed to setting those definitions in stone from the outset. The implied conviction of the latter procedure is that philosophy should begin with certainty and move logically from set premises to justified conclusions. I am convinced that it is preferable to instead develop ideas from positions that seem reasonable at the outset but that you are willing to reexamine and change in accord with the findings of your argument. It is, after all, the fundmental positions that are of most import to philosophy, and if we truly did have the right views of those foundations at the outset and were certain of those views, the logical movement from those views to further conclusions would actually be trivial. The trick in philosophy is reaching the right starting point, and I believe that we can only do so by continually critiquing where we happen to start in order later to begin anew in another, better place.

With that said, I should acknowledge the difficulty with providing even a provisional account of what language is given the variety of uses to which that term is put. There are empirical understanding of language that focus on the actual production of speech, writing, and other signs (roughly what Saussuere called “parole” and what Schatzki calls “sayings”) and also transcendental understandings that highlight language’s structuring of meaning (roughly what Saussuere called “langue”). Chomskian linguistics studies langue as an aspect of individuals, whereas other approaches such as sociolinguistics are more interested in the interpersonal applications of language.

As some sort of pragmatist, I confess my predilection toward a definition of language that begins with the uses to which language users put words, sentences and the like, and that conceives langue as an abstraction from that prior practice. I make this confession not so that I may atone for it or even in order to ask forgiveness, but to mark my inclinations so that they may more easily be countered later as necessary. For now, though, I will stand by my Wittgensteinian understanding of language as a set of resources (akin to tools in a toolbox) that those who know how to use them can employ in order to perform a number of tasks, including in particular communicative tasks. The various other major accounts of language are all, I believe, ultimately consistent with this perspective, though they will not share its emphases.

As for meaning, that is an arguably even trickier concept to analyze adequately. To keep things simple here I will simply say that by “meaning” I really mean neither of Frege’s terms, neither Sinn (sense) nor Bedeutung (reference), though Sinn is closer. In order to make sense of primal praxis I need a conception of meaning that fits with the non-thematic, concernful coping that Heidegger says underlies the sort of conscious awareness Husserl was concerned with and that has an as yet undetermined relationship with the detached word-world linkages that occupied Frege. This would have to be ready-to-hand meaning, the sort expressed in my taking a dish out of the dishwasher and putting it in the cupboard rather than in the trash or on the floor.

There’s danger here, of course, of serious question begging, but that doesn’t strike me as a problem so long as I’m clear about that very fact and am inclined to keep this presupposition about meaning in front of me as we go forward. If this definition of meaning proves untenable or highly questionable given our further investigations, everything I’ve said here may need to be revised.

So much for primal praxis and the “primitive” language embedded within it. Now we move on to look at two other philosophical traditions for comparison: the hermeneutics of Gadamer and the later Heidegger and the “Pittsburgh Hegelian” school of Sellars, Brandom, and Lance. Greig is the hermeneut among us, so I’ll count on him to supply the Gadamerian ore, while I’m off to the Sellars mines in search of myths of the given. Yukon ho!