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.

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.

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.

Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations exhibits a series of what he calls “language games,” which are simple practices in which words and other linguistic units have uses. Many of these games amuzingly involve the genderless, perhaps inhuman “builders” known only by the names ‘A’ and ‘B’. In the first of these activities, presented in paragraph 2, A and B build an unidentifed structure or structures with building stones and communciate solely (at least verbally) with the words “block”, “pillar”, “slab”, and “beam”. With these words A calls for a stone and B responds by fetching an appropriate exemplar. Wittgenstein ends this passage typically cryptically with the injunction that we should “(c)onceive this as a complete primitive language.” Presumably this means that no other linguistic resources should be necessary for this language game to be meaningful to the participants.

The words of this building game play different roles than the stones, but I propose first that they are meaningful in effectively the same way as the stones are, i.e. by having a functional role in the carrying out of the practice, and second that this means of being meaningful is essentially that which Heidegger attributes to the pragmata encountered in transparent coping.

That is to say, Wittgenstein provides here an account of how something that could reasonably be termed “language” could derive its meaning from its elements’ (i.e. its words’) place in the equipmental totality. “Slab” means what it means because it references (in Heidegger’s sense of the term) not only slabs or a particular slab, but also the structure that A and B are building, the walkway on which B must walk to fetch a slab, and so on; and this meaning is effectively of the same type as, though not identical to, the meaning of the slab itself, which also references the structure under construction and the walkway, as well as the word “slab”.

As with my earlier post on Heidegger I am not primarily attempting historical scholarship here, but am instead drawing on resources from a prominent philosopher to sketch a view that he himself would almost surely not have endorsed, at least in full. Wittgenstein’s accounts of language games such as the one above aphoristically echo the early Heidegger’s contributions to the concept of primal praxis while indicating further how language itself might derive its meaning from such praxis rather than the reverse being true. If language gets its meaning by being embedded in practices, just as is true on this view for other sets of objects, then it becomes less intuitive to suppose, as most philosophers since the linguistic turn have, that the human capacity for linguistic meaning is temporally and conceptually prior to meaningful behavior. Perhaps primal praxis comes first.

Using the old Macquarrie and Robinson translation of Being and Time one finds on p. H. 68 Heidegger’s referencing of the ancient Greek term for things (pragmata) which he glosses thus: “…that is to say, that which one has to do with in one’s concernful dealings,” which dealings he further denotes as the ancient Greek praxis. So “praxis” refers to concernful dealings with “pragmata,” or things as they figure in those dealings — which is not as they appear to distinterested contemplation.

Heidegger then designates these pragmata as “equipment,” and notes that equipment is always part of a totality, is something one uses in order to do something else by means of further equipment. The relationship of equipment to other equipment is that of Verweisung, translated here as “reference.” Heidegger states that we encounter a totality of equipment, an arrangement, first, and only within the context of such arrangements do we use and become aware of particular bits of equipment. For example, I encounter the road and stop lights and my car and other cars all together as an arrangement, and only within this context do I deal with my steering wheel and the gas pedal.

 Heidegger goes on to stress that our original engagement with such equipment is ready-to-hand and hence non-thematic. That is, equipment such as a hammer appears to us first not as a distinct thing, an object, set over against us as subjects and distinct from other objects, but instead fits in seemlessly as that which is transparently referenced by our activity in the workshop. When we need to hammer, we reach for the hammer. When our coping in this manner works smoothly, we need not even be aware of the hammer in the sense of awareness priviledged by most Western philosophy.

This account reverses the order of meaning presumed by most philosophers since Descartes and even Plato. The more traditional account begins with the individual mind’s representations of that which it encounters, from the sum of which are eventually somehow built up the subject’s valuings of and involvements in the world. In this always already thematized world it is easy to discern where language would fit. Language provides extensive resources for representing entities to subjects (a point not contradicted by those such as Brandom who conceive of language primarily as means of making inferences rather than representations), and thematic thought can easily be understood as language-spoken-to-oneself.

My question here is whether the early Heidegger’s alternative account of being human effectively elides this link with language. As I stated in my last post, clearly Heidegger’s account in Being and Time does give a prominent place to language. So, what I’m asking is not whether early Heidegger actually showed how language is unnecessary for a meaningful existence, but whether he provided resources for making such a case. 

Assuming for the sake of argument that his account of transparent coping with equipmental totalities is basically correct, we can ask whether language is necessary for such experience, and if so, whether such a languageless experience is in fact meaningful. For now, simply to stake a claim without yet supporting it, I will posit that language, in any appropriate sense of the term, is not necessary for transparent coping with equipmental totalities, either proximally (i.e. actually employed in the experience) or foundationally (i.e. providing a prior structure for the understanding at work in such endeavors), and that the hammer and the nails, the steering wheel and the road, are indeed all meaningful to the Dasein engaged with them. And this is primal praxis.