Wittgensteins, Heideggers, and Gadamers, Oh My!

In addition, it is typically the case that a particular series of human events takes part in multiple major practices. The practice of basketball itself of course can contain within it numerous minor practices, including such dispersed practices as asking questions, such more complex practices such as arguing attuned to basketball as arguing calls, and basketball specific practices such as setting picks that will most likely appear in other contexts only as jokes — setting ordinary actions in unexpected social settings is a simple and common comedic tool. Minor practices, however, are organized only by understandings and rules, and it is the teleoaffectivity expressed in major practices that most interests us here. In the practice before us winning need not be the only end. Staying in shape and making and maintaining friendships are other possibilities, and each can ultimately specify actions that conflict with the sole goal of winning, indicating safer plays for health’s sake and less competitive play in certain circumstances to maintain a collegial  mood.

One puzzling aspect of the Sellarsian account of meaning I presented in my last post concerns the sentience of non-human animals and human infants. While the danger of anthropomorphizing the former and “adultizing” the latter should not be ignored, I propose that an accurate account of the lives of a great many animals and infants would require an inferential vocabulary that allowed for something like a self-understanding in a roughly Heideggerian sense. As the early Heidegger said (again, roughly) shortly before he made the famous turn toward becoming the late Heidegger, humans have worlds, rocks have no worlds, animals are world poor.

To clarify, “world” and “self-understanding” refer to the same fundamental arrangement I glossed in an earlier post while presenting Dasein engaged with equipment. Coping transparently with equipmental totalities entails, among other things, having ends, tasks, and projects (Schatzki’s terms in The Site of the Social), and this typically unexplicated teleology forms much of the structure of the Dasein/world whole. To have ends and a sense for how to pursue them is to have an understanding at once of oneself and one’s world.

The philosophies of the Pittsburgh Hegelians and praxis philosophers such as Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Hubert Dreyfus, Charles Taylor, and Theodore Schatzki approach one another yet remain at a remove in significant part because the latter orient themselves toward human ends whereas the former are more concerned with epistemology, or human knowledge. Even the example I gave in my last post of a chain of inferences flowing from “That apple is red” to “I should take that apple to my sister” was couched more in praxis-terms than in Pittsburghese.

In spite of this divide, the parallels are powerful. In claiming that a Sellarsian should employ an inferential vocabulary in order to make sense of the behavior of infants and some non-human animals (that is, that he should speak of them as if they were making inferences themselves), I am saying that those creatures are world poor — that they have ends, even if they are either incapable or scarcely capable of articulating them. I am close here to advocating a “constitution” (in Lance and O’Leary-Hawthorne’s sense in their The Grammar of Meaning), or perhaps something a bit more like a treaty, that would license the easy translation of Sellarsian language into a Heideggerian idiom and vice versa. Indeed, I am entirely in favor of such an agreement. This treaty is not yet ready to be signed, however.

Even if one made the Pittsburghers more practical, and oriented their inferences (and inference attributions) more toward human ends and away from human knowledge absent such ends, it’s not clear that inferences really match up with, say, signifying chains or practical intelligibility (both adaptations of Heideggerian concepts by Schatzki in his Social Practices). For one thing, as presented by Brandom, inferences move from the inside-out, so to speak. One begins with a claim and moves from there to conclusions. By contrast, a signifying chain seems to move instead outside-in, from ends to means, as when my desire to be famous signifies my appearing on American Idol, which signifies going to local open mike nights, which signifies practicing, which signifies my going into the basement right now to warm up my voice. I believe that these accounts could be brought into greater confluence, but as yet they do not coincide. For now, however, I am going to continue to pair Sellarsian inference and Heideggerian signification to see in practice how well these perspectives mesh.

Back, then, to infants and non-humans, e.g. chimpanzees and bonobos.  Are they merely sentient, or do they exhibit signs of sapience even in the absence of language? Let’s understand sapience here as that which allows me to see something as something — as that which leads me, on the rare occasions that I draw, to draw what I know is there rather than what I actually see, literally to draw my inferences. Don’t infants and bonobos alike act as if they see as? Doesn’t understanding them require attributing inferences and ends to them, albeit typically of a simpler sort than those we attribute to other human adults? Indeed, a careful reading of Sellars indicates that he agrees that infants at least must develop sapience in something like stages, which suggests that sentience is itself a proto-sapience. Holding such a view without giving into a full-blown version of the Myth of the Given, however, is no easy task.