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For Wittgenstein and Heidegger linguistic meaning is grounding in the meanings established in praxis. Conceiving language primarily as a mode of action, these philosophers acknowledge that people can do certain things with language that they cannot do as easily if at all via other sorts of activity, but indicate that linguistic actions mean what they do only because they play their particular roles in the spatiotemporal structures of social practices. In the order of meaning, then, for the Founders praxis meaning is prior to linguisitc meaning.

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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.

What a Wittg’ed Game You Play

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.