Wittgensteins, Heideggers, and Gadamers, Oh My!

At this point we are ready to begin reformulating the guiding questions of this investigation. We began by asking after the relationship between praxis, language, and meaning. Through consideration of a number of different approaches to aspects of this relationship, we have gathered the resources necessary to carry out this analysis with fuller understandings of what each of our three guiding terms mean. We can also both separate out and integrate questions concerning the phylogeny, ontogeny, founding, and scaffolding of the praxis/language whole.

Schatzki presents his praxis philosophy in two volumes, delivering the heart of his theory in his Social Practices and developing it further in his The Site of the Social. He does not directly or extensively address the relationship between language and praxis, but he provides ample tools for doing so. Schatzki defines a social practice as nexus of doings and sayings organized by understandings, rules, and what he terms “teleoaffective structures.” An understanding is a sense of how to go on in a basic activity, e.g. knowing how to ask questions, give orders, make a left-hand turn, show respect by bowing, and so on. A rule is a linguistic formulations concerning how things should count or how they should or should not proceed. A teleoaffective structure is a linking of ends, means, and moods appropriate to a particular practice or set of practices and that governs what it makes sense to do beyond what is specified by particular understandings and rules.

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.

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.