Paragraph 25
April 11, 2007
The question becomes how sayings, however elaborate their grammatical structure, alter the meaning of a situation from that available when mere doings are at work, even given the saying-doing continuum previously noted. The two main indicators on this question are Brandom’s work on explication and Charles Taylor’s work on articulation. Briefly, Brandom treats language primarily as a means of codifying meanings already implicit in practice, and hence likely expressed in doings, in such a way as to make them more susceptible to what he terms “deontic scorekeeping,” which we can gloss here as the normative accounting of the rightness of our own or another’s behavior, particularly according to the canons of formal logic. Taylor, on the other hand, focuses on humans as self-interpreting animals, and stresses the role of language in making manifest understandings and self-understandings implicit in our practices, hence expressed in doings, thereby typically altering those conceptions and affiliated future behavior, if for no other reason than that such manifestations can clarify such meanings. The clarity here is essentially a hermeneutic and not a logical clarity.
