Wittgensteins, Heideggers, and Gadamers, Oh My!

One of the keys to understanding the practice theoretic approach to understanding human activity is to appreciate, as Schatzki does, Charles Taylor’s insistance that “the meaning is out there in the practices.” That is, although understandings, rules, and ends-means-moods relations can all be expressed in the activity and captured in the consciousness of individual human beings, they are more properly considered the property of their home practices. Consider, for instance, some ways the game in question may play out. Player A is dribbling and his teammate B tries to set a pick on A’s defender. Both A’s and B’s defenders move to guard A, who passes the ball to B. As B turns to shoot, a third defender appears in his way and the two and the ball all fall to the floor. The main teleoaffective structures at play here concern the end of winning, which signifies scoring and defending, which in turn signify various further actions that are further governed by understandings and rules. For instance, knowing how and when to set a pick, how and when to make use of it, and how to defend against it all constitute largely unspoken understandings that basketball players tend to develop. The decision as to which side will maintain possession of the ball following the collision in question is a matter of rules, even though there is no official rule book for this informal contest and these players may never have to articulate the relevant rules to each other. It is principally such means of organization that establish the meaning of any particular incident, action, or phenomenon that appears on the stage of a practice. Furthermore, one participates in a practice only to the extend that one grasps and acts in accord with its organization. That is why standing on a basketball court during the course of a game does not by itself entail participating in that game.

As an example, consider the Saturday morning “old men’s” basketball game one of us plays in most Saturday mornings between Thanksgiving and the merciful end of the seemingly endless Wisconsin winter. As is almost always the case in human life, multiple major and minor practices intersect when the players show up, but the practice of pick-up basketball and the associated arrangement of the gymnasium and relevant equipment provide the primary staging ground for these further activities. The day begins around 7:30 AM with greetings, stretching, and a shoot around. Then the players divide into teams a play a series of contests until approximately 9:00 AM or when too few participants have avoided injury for the game to continue.

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.

For the Hermeneuts, then, language takes precendence over praxis in the constitution of meaning. That which cannot be said cannot be meant, and the purported meanings embedded in wordless praxis presumably must somehow be founded by language in some sense of the term. This view contrast with that of the Founders, who recognize praxis as at least an equal contributor with language to the constitution of meaning, and with that of the Pittsburgh Hegelians, who give precendence to language, but conceive language as itself fundamentally tied to language. We have at this point, then, the three majors positions before us. To begin sorting them out it will help us to have a more thoroughgoing conception of praxis and social practices at play. We thus turn now to the work of Theodore Schatzki.

The later Heidegger goes ever further than Gadamer in locating meaning constitution in language, as indicated by his affirmation of the poet Stephan George’s line, “Where word breaks off no thing can be.” The later Heidegger even attempts to demonstrate, rather than merely state, the disclosive possibilities of language, eschewing traditional modes of philosophical argument in favor of a “mytho-poetic” reverie, seeking thereby to invite the reader into the experience of language as open thinking toward emergence. Compared to most philosophers concerned with language, the later Heidegger interests himself less in the utterance, sentence, or proposition, and more in the word itself. What he intends here is no mere statement of a purported matter of fact or state of affairs, but a calling forth, an evocation, via a name. It is, in fact, a stretch to say that the later Heidegger still concerns himself with praxis even to the extent that Gadamer does, though the quasi-mystical experiences he indicates perhaps still involve an encounter with Being qua Being revealed in praxis.

For the Hermeneuts language plays a much greater role in the constitution of meaning. Gadamer, for instance, maintains an emphasis on praxis in his account of games and dialogue. Indeed, his account of the sort of play in which the players lose themselves and any consciousness of that with which they play is akin both to the early Heidegger’s account of transparent coping and to Lance and O’Leary-Hawthorne’s take on the praxis of basketball. The subject matter of a dialogue controls the unfolding of the verbal exchange for Gademer much as the game of basketball indicates its own emendation for Lance and O’Leary-Hawthorne. However, in spite of this general praxis-orientation, Gadamer explicitly ties meaning entirely to language, as when he states that “Being which can be understood is language.” This claim goes beyond the Brandomian view that language can make explicit meanings already implicit in practice, as the latter for Brandom appear to be already understandable while yet only implicit.

 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.

Mark Lance and his co-author John O’Leary-Hawthorne further develop a Pittsburgh Hegelian account of the relationship between language, praxis, and meaning in their The Grammar of Meaning. Through most of this book the authors focus even more on language rather than on linguistic praxis or praxis as such than do Sellars and Brandom, yet ultimately they provide the most elaborate and intriguing analysis of praxis of the three sources. Agreeing with and providing new emphasis to the central Sellarsian contention that meaning is normative, Lance and O’Leary-Hawthorne treat meaning claims — that is, claims about what some bit of language means — as more closely related to ethical and political judgments than to statements of fact made in one of the natural sciences. They go so far as to say that in proposing a translation, one effectively licenses a sort of constitution designed to bind two linguistic communities together. The force of such a declaration is, the authors contend, inherently one of “should” (this word should mean that) rather than of “is” (this word does mean that).