IV. CONCLUSION
Chapter 9: The Question of Language
"Now I am tempted to say, that the right expression in language for the miracle of the existence of the world, though it is not any propositionin
language, is the existence of language itself."
-Wittgenstein
If there is such a thing as language, the historical singularity of the analytic tradition lies in its ambition to lay it open to view, and so to render its underlying principles, the form and order of its terms, and the basis of its possibilities of meaning open to philosophical criticism. The unprecedented envisioning of language that the analytic tradition undertook from its first stages would, if successful, have delivered the human “capacity” for linguistic meaning to philosophical thought as an explicit object of description. In so doing, it would have revealed language as the previously unthought ground of the expressive possibilities of a human life, the source of its deepest possibilities of clarity and the root of its most threatening illusions. Yet as we have seen, the critical discourse that originally sought to produce a clarified life by policing the bounds of sense could not foreclose a more problematic encounter with the pervasive question of the basis of its own authority. Thus, with a necessity that is the same as that of reason’s own reflection on its inherent forms, the analytic tradition’s modalities of linguistic analysis and interpretation became more and more involved in the underlying problems of our everyday access to language itself.
Over the course of this work, I have sought to document some of these problems as they have arisen, and exerted their effects, upon the texts and questions of twentieth-century philosophy. They are apparent, most of all, in relation to thestructuralist
picture of language whose detailed pursuit evinced them as theoretical results in the projects of philosophers like Quine and Wittgenstein. But since, as I have also attempted to show, this picture is already implicit in the first self-reflective words of ordinary language, the problems that these projects demonstrate are by no means limited to the philosophically special project of “explaining” or “accounting for” our understanding of language. If language is never simply given to the theoretical reflection that would reveal its overall structure, and if the theoretical projects that have pursued it have ended by eliciting the inadequacy of their own explanatory modes, then our everyday access to language becomes all the more mysterious. The specific critical results of the tradition’s envisioning of language are then visible as linguistic epiphanies of the extraordinariness of the ordinary, the strangeness of what is most familiar, the puzzling and uncanny possibility of our everyday access to language, and of the ordinary language that ceaselessly inscribes this access, from its first word, in the circumstances and practices of our lives.
For the philosophical discourse that counted a turn to the analysis of language as the essence of its revolutionary break with the philosophical past, the question of the bearing of language on a human life could never count simply as one problem among others.
The progress of the tradition, in particular with its determinative discovery of the problems of the relationship of “meaning” to “use” or “practice” and the projects and results that evinced the ineliminable interdependence of the “syntax” and “semantics” of meaning with the “pragmatics” of the actions and goals of human practice, moved to liberate this problem from the obscurity in which it was initially cloaked. At the same time, the explanatory assumptions of those theories that formulated one or another theory of “meaning” in terms of “use” or “practices” tended to obscure the problem once again, dissimulating it at the point of its fundamental threat to the intelligibility of a human life. Thus the problem of the existence of language, although visible within a larger history as the basis of analytic philosophy’s own most significant critical innovations, has repeatedly been disavowed or forgotten within the tradition whose own methods and modes it continues to structure. The disavowal is itself, as we shall see in this final chapter, rooted in a recurrent tendency of the tradition to hide its own most central problems. Reversing it could bring about the substantial methodological renewal of a tradition whose dispersal and exhaustion have often, of late, been bemoaned.
If the problems of our access to language indeed inflect the most ordinary acts and circumstances of our lives, then the analytic inquiry can also be seen as the tradition’s critical encounter with their most pervasive contemporary ideological determinants. For the claim to comprehend language is itself, in part, a claim of power; the analytic tradition’s reflection on this claim provides internal resources for resisting it, at the point of the everyday metaphysics of meaning that it presupposes. The structuralist picture of language itself figures determinately in some of the most deeply seated assumptions and strategies of power in the modes of life definitive of advanced industrial societies of the twentieth century. The critical results that articulate its failures are therefore intelligible, as I have argued, as chapters of a liberatory project of demystification, the checking of claims of power by the diagnosis and criticism of the false and misleading pictures of human life that form their basis. Here, reflection leads to freedom: the demystification of structuralism’s false pretense to master language’s own inherent possibilities offers to deliver a clarified human life from the claims of power it facilitates.
But if the claims of linguistic reason that threaten to exert violence over life are, as I have argued, rooted in the very forms that would make (thatdo
make) language intelligible to us at all, the critical work of “demystification” becomes more complex and harder to place. For this work can no longer ascribe the violence of identity and totality simply to the consequences of an optional picture of language or its claim on a human life. Since there is noother
picture, they are revealed as instances of a more fundamental violence, one that arises with, and is already fully present in, the first word of language’s reflection on itself. In tracing the pictures that mystify the heterogeneous moments of our lives by assimilating them to the identical and totalizable, the critical inquiry that aims to check the violence of language can, similarly, no longer count these pictures simply as errors or illusions. For the claims of identity and totality that structuralism more explicitly formulates are revealed as inherent to the irreducible phantasmatic core of ordinary language itself, and invoked in its every word. In this way, at the point of its encounter with the basic question of the relationship of life to language, the analytic project of demystification yields to a more fundamental mystery (one that is, yet,not
a mystification) at the center of our ordinary access to words and the fatedness of our lives to what they can say. The mystery is that of (as we may put it) the existence of language itself, thefact
of its constant accessibility to the individual moments and circumstances of an ordinary life. It can be the occasion for wonder, or for a transformed sense of the immanence of a life given over, in every word of language, to the openness of its possible discovery of itself.
I
In the contemporary texts that are today most representative of analytic philosophy, the question of language has neither the methodological nor the thematic centrality it had in the original and founding moments of the tradition. Once grasped as the basis for a revolutionary philosophical program of linguistic clarification, the question of the nature of language and its relationship to a human life has largely retreated from the explicit concerns of many analytic philosophers, even those who most centrally continue the methods originally suggested by this program. The forms of this retreat are various, but they share (as I shall argue here) a common, if normally obscure, root in the critical tendencies of the program of clarification itself. Documenting this root can help to remove the obscurity and re-open the question of language for the methods of analytic philosophy, or those that inherit them in a broader and more inclusive space of philosophical discussion.
In the recent analytic literature, dissimulation or obscuration of the original question of language takes several typical forms. One of the most common of these is evident in many of the projects of contemporary philosophicalnaturalism
. Within these projects, if language is positively described at all, it often appears only as an empirically explicable phenomenon of biology or sociology, one whose own structure bears no specific relevance to the problems of philosophy or their resolution. In this literature in particular, the project of “explaining” language or linguistic representation is then treated as the project of explaining a range of facts of behavior, biology, neuroscience, cognitive science, or some combination thereof.
The naturalistic projects that take up the project in this way, and so construe the totality of language as comprised by such facts, are themselves heirs to the critical results of analytic philosophy that demonstrated the inherent difficulties of accounting for linguistic meaning by means of a description of the basis of its possibility. Their restriction of material for the explanation of language to the facts of nature is legitimate, insofar as there is certainly noother
range of facts available for this explanatory project. But the totalizing assumption that all of what we pre-theoretically discuss under the heading of “meaning” must beeither
completely and adequately explained in this way, or unreal, is not demanded or even supported by any actual empirical result or collection thereof.
An often-cited basis for this assumption is Quine’s rejection of the analytic/synthetic distinction and the purported consequence, drawn indeed by Quine himself, that facts about linguistic meaning (if they exist at all) are, in a sufficiently broad sense, “empirical” facts amenable to explanation within a “naturalized” epistemology. But as we have seen, the critical result of Quine’s own inquiry into possibilities of translation is not simply that the facts of language are comprehensible as causally determined within a total theory of language use, but that even such a theory will leave what we intuitively or pre-theoretically grasp as identities and differences of “meaning” systematically indeterminate. The alternatives, then, are two: either to deny the utility of ordinary discussion of “meanings,” as Quine himself sometimes suggests we do, and take up the purely empirical description of the causal regularities and preconditions of language use; or to renew the critical reflection that the analytic tradition has long undertaken on the elusive role of meaning in our lives. If this second alternative is taken, the question of the adequacy of naturalist accounts can be brought into a more sophisticated dialogue with the forms of theoretical desire that actually motivate them. The naturalistic restriction of material for explanation to structures of causally interrelated facts invokes a research program that would indeed, if complete, produce akind
of understanding of the “facts” or “phenomena” of language, but it does not succeed in quieting the desire for intelligibility that would still persist in posing its question of the significance of language even if all the facts were in.
Another often-cited basis for the widespread assumption that a critical inquiry into language is unnecessary or irrelevant to the contemporary practice of analytic philosophy is the claim that the utility of such an inquiry has been refuted or disputed by positive theoretical results of the tradition itself. In particular, in 1972, Kripke’sNaming and Necessity
demonstrated the existence of “metaphysically necessary” identities and judgments that are at the same timea posteriori
.
For instance the identity “Water is H2O” is metaphysically necessary since water could not be, in any metaphysically possible world, anything other than H2O, although it is alsoa posteriori
.
The result, together with Kripke’s apparatus of “rigid designation,” was widely taken to support the possibility of an analysis of modality in terms of the metaphysical notion of possible worlds rather than the epistemic notion ofa priori
city. In a related fashion, the “causal” theories of reference suggested by Kripke and Putnam were taken to establish an alternative to Russell’s analysis of names as concealed descriptions. For “causal” theorists, they are, instead, directly linked to their objects by means of an initial act of ostension, demonstration, or baptism.
Both developments were seen by some philosophers as demonstrating the limitations of a purely “conceptual” analysis of the significance of any name or referring term in language. Such analyses, it became common in the 1980s and 1990s to urge, must be supplemented with at least partially causal or empirical descriptions of the phenomenon of reference. Additionally, the development of model theory and its “possible world semantics” was seen by some as suggesting the possibility of a methodological return to “metaphysics” in some non-pejorative sense.
This metaphysics would be the analysis of the metaphysical structure of possible worlds without especial regard to the semantic or linguistic possibilities of our description of them. More broadly, all three developments have been seen by various philosophers and interpreters as showing the limitations of “linguistic analysis,” at least as it was practiced by the first generation of analytic philosophers, or even as ushering analytic philosophy itself into a second phase whose methods can no longer be characterized as grounded centrally in the analysis of language.
Within a comprehensive history of the methods and results of the analytic tradition, these developments of modal logic, model theory, and the “theory of reference” ought certainly to be accorded a prominent place. They have called into question previously undoubted conclusions and suggested new ways of thinking about the epistemology and metaphysics of logic itself. But whatever their importance, the interpretation that takes them to have established the irrelevance of the “linguistic turn” to the continuing methods of the analytic tradition is ungrounded in these results themselves or any of their actual implications. It may certainly be legitimate, in light of the results of Kripke, Putnam, and others, to hold that earlier descriptive theories of nominal reference must be supplemented with partially causal accounts of reference, or that it is possible to draw a logically motivated distinction between metaphysical and epistemic necessity that was often missed by earlier analysts. None of this, however, goes even part of the way to establishing the impossibility of linguistic analysis or reflection or its irrelevance to the continuing methods of analytic philosophy. Insofar as all of these results, indeed, have their basis in extended applications of modal logic and model theory, they follow most directly from the very same project of “conceptual” reflection on the structure of language and logic that analytic philosophers have practiced since the beginning of the tradition. The relatively more formal and symbolic areas of this reflection can be distinguished from those relatively less so, but no result of midcentury logic or inquiry into its epistemology or metaphysics can by itself establish the irrelevancy of the project, or the impossibility of re-opening the question of language in which it is rooted.
Even where language is still discussed, and the hope of a positive description of its structure and nature still pursued, the underlying and basic critical question of the relationship of language to life is again often routinely dismissed or obscured. The normal form of this obscuration, in the contemporary texts of analytic philosophy thatdo
still take up explicitly the question of language, is the prejudicial assumption that language must, if it is intelligible at all, be intelligible as consisting in, or based in, some form ofeveryday social practices
. As we have seen, the assumption appears often enough, and with little enough independent argument, in the texts and projects of contemporary analytic philosophy to confirm its status as something like a dogma. And as we have also seen, it is grounded in a recurrent misreading of the significance of the analytic tradition’s determinative posing of thequestion
of the relationship of language to its everyday use or practice. This posing, in the texts of Quine and Sellars as much as the later Wittgenstein, articulates the fundamentallyopen
question of language’s application by exposing the underlying failures of its structuralist description. The recurrent misreading, by contrast,closes
this question by assuming the explicability of use in terms of one or another set of practices. But in the sense in which we can say that such things as playing cards, issuing legal judgments, or holding elections are “practices,” using language isnot
itself a “practice.” For in the sense in which we can say, of any of these garden-variety “practices,” what their ordinarypoint
is, what the significance of their undertaking, what the qualifications necessary, what regions of life they are likely to arise in, what are likely to be the characteristic forms of their successes and failures, frustrations and illusions, wecannot
say this, in any general way, about language.
Whereas, we might say, we can normally (or at least, often) count on an understanding of thepoint
of practiceswithin
our lives, language has no such pointwithin
our lives because its forms are coextensive with these lives. And the various sub-regions of activity into which we might divide the speaking of language (arguing, debating, asserting claims, chatting, giving orders, making pleas, demanding excuses; or asserting claims, evaluating them, drawing inferences from them; or “saying things” vs. “doing things” with words; or mumbling, screaming, singing songs, speaking loudly or softly, emphatically or deferentially? - the classifications cross-cut one another)
are too richly intertwined and too mutually inseparable in the most ordinary experiences of language to provide any help to the theoretical imagination that would grasp their structure overall.
Grasping the difficulties that arise in the course of attempts to describe theoretically the rules of the practices that are supposed to underlie language, some have attempted to save the picture by portraying the learning of a language as a species of irreducibly practical competence or “knowing-how,” analogous to learning a skill or technique, rather than a “knowing-that” that would be describable in terms of clearly stated rules. The distinction, which goes back to Ryle’s (1949) discussion of the dispositional “know-how” involved in the ability to make various kinds of assertions and reports, actually provides no help. For again, in the sense in which various performances of everyday life can be said to involve knowing how to do various things (riding a bicycle, speaking a second language, pole-vaulting and the like), learning a first languagecannot
be said to involve learning how to do anything
(unless it be learning how todo
anything, that is, how to do anything at all).
How, then, can we think about the “point” of our “linguistic” practices, regular experiences or phenomena of language that are also the constitutive moments of our lives? It is true that ina great many
of these experiences, ‘meaning’ or ‘significance’ is regularly (that is,can
regularly be) at issue. That is, the question “what does that mean”? (or “what doyou
mean”?)can
arise (although this does not mean that there isany
case in which ithas
to arise, or that it has to ask after the same thing in each case when itdoes
arise), and where it does arise, it can be the occasion for conversation or reflection, negotiation of interests or demands, the imposition of power or submission to its claims. But to treat all of these varied and diverse experiences of language as if there were some single description that covered them all (e.g. “communication”), or some particular set of purposes that they all served, would be to falsify their everyday reality and artificially foreclose the movement of the desires that animate them.
The question “what do you mean?” posed in the course of a mutually undertaken project, the negotiation of a possible future, is not just a request for theoretical explication; it can also aim, or purport to aim, for consensus or mutual understanding. It can also challenge assumptions, interrogate the bases of claims or the implications of pseudo-claims, seek to expose those linguistic effects of authority that depend on the presumption of meaningfulness where there is actually none. In all of these cases where the question of meaningcan
arise, the analogy of language to a practice inscribes an answer, or the form of an answer, in advance. And so its imposition amounts todenying
the significance of this question. Where the question of meaning would inquire into the significance of our practices themselves, where it would ask after their implications for our other or larger goals, the possibilities they open or close, their role in a human life, the misconceived analogy of language to a practice blocks these inquiries before they can even get started.
II
The analytic tradition has systematically and pervasively interrogated what is involved in our ordinary access to meaningful language, asking, in some of its most foundational gestures, what makes it so much as possible for spoken or written signs to have meaning at all. It has just as often, and in the same ambiguous modes of criticism, foreclosed this question as an instance of a kind of theorizing that it has taken, more or less clearly, to be impossible owing to the central and decisive ambiguities of the enterprise of envisioning language itself. We can see the methodological roots of this tendency to foreclosure in a 1940 paper by Austin in which he proposes to take up the vexed question of the sense of the phrase “the meaning of a word.” He concludes that the phrase is, in many, if not all, of its uses, “a dangerous nonsense-phrase” that ought, on the whole, to be avoided.
The confusions to which it regularly leads, particularly in philosophy, arise in particular from the specific kind of error of generalization to which it tempts us:
Having asked in this way, and answered, ‘What is the meaning (of the word) ‘”rat’”?’, ‘What is the meaning of (the word) “cat”?’, ‘What is the meaning of (the word) “mat”?’ and so on, we then try, being philosophers, to ask the furthergeneral
question, ‘What is the meaning of a word?’ But there is something spurious about this question. We do not intend to mean by it a certain question which would be perfectly all right, namely, ‘What is the meaning of (the word) “word”?’:that
would be no more general than is asking the meaning of the word ‘rat’, and would be answered in a precisely similar way. No: we want to ask rather, ‘What is the meaning of a-word-in-general?’ or ‘of any word’ - not meaning ‘any’ word you like to choose, but rather no particular word at all, just ‘any word’. Now if we pause even for a moment to reflect, this is a perfectly absurd question to be trying to ask… This supposed general question is really just a spurious question of a type which commonly arises in philosophy. We may call it the fallacy of asking about “nothing-in-particular” which is a practice decried by the plain man, but by the philosopher called ‘generalizing’ and regarded with some complacency. Many other examples of the fallacy can be found: take, for example, the case of ‘reality’ - we try to pass from such questions as ‘How would you distinguish a real rat from an imaginary rat?’ to ‘What is a real thing?’, a question which merely gives rise to nonsense.
58
Having once committed this error of asking the question of the meaning of any word in general (Austin writes it “What-is-the-meaning-of a word?”), Austin says, we may all too easily pass to another question or pseudo-question, namely “What is the-meaning-of-a-word?” that seems to ask what “meaning” itself is. And in response tothis
question, Austin says, we now are forcibly tempted to introduce various entities that might seem to provide reassurance, but are in fact fictitious, entities such as “ideas,” “concepts” and “sense-data” that have been the characteristic stock-in-trade of philosophy, whenever questions of meaning and generalization arise.
The error responsible for the pseudo-question about the meaning of a word, and for all the mischief it causes, is thus, according to Austin, both typical of philosophy and avoidable through reflection on the grammatical forms and structures of ordinary language, as they are ordinarily employed. The process of spurious generalization from which it arises is one that may be suggested or intimated by certain forms of our everyday language (in particular, the phrase “the meaning of…”) but it would not be tolerated, even for a moment, by the “plain man” whose image Austin contraposes to that of the philosopher. Nevertheless, according to Austin, we may easily, especially when doing philosophy, be tempted to it by implicit or explicit theories of language that seem to permit it, for instance the “curious belief that all words arenames
” or a more general tendency to take “the meaning of (the word) ‘x’” to be, ineach
case, a referring phrase.”
In thus considering and criticizing philosophical uses of the phrase “the meaning of a word” and the fallacies of generalization to which they can tempt us, Austin displays in a particularly clear form some of the most characteristic diagnostic and critical tendencies of the analytic tradition. Applying the various methods of what would later be called “ordinary language philosophy,” he undertakes to judge the meaningfulness of one of the typical questions of philosophy by considering the typical or ordinary uses of its main phrase. He concludes that the phrase is legitimate insome
of its employments, but “dangerously” misused in those philosophical employments that depend on the error of the projective imagination that he diagnoses. And although he acknowledges that “one should not impute motives,”
he does not hesitate to give a diagnostic account of the characteristic temptations that lead us to this error. These temptations, Austin suggests, arise from our too easily moving between forms of language that appear similar but are “actually” very different in context, our assuming that a question that has sense in particular cases must therefore have sense in all cases or in the “general” case, and then inventing all sorts of fictions to answer it.
The conclusion that Austin reaches about “meaning” has also often been repeated in the history of analytic philosophy. Indeed, virtually every project that has critically considered the term or concept “meaning” has reached a similar conclusion.
It is that there really are no such “things” as meanings, that the tendency to treat meanings as objects over against the words whose meanings they are, or to assume that every term must be like a proper name in referring to some particular object, is grounded in a characteristic error of the imagination and ought to be rejected. The conclusion is recognizable as an instance of the analytic tradition’s more general inclination to criticize what it sometimes describes as theobjectification
of meaning, to criticize the tendency to treat the meanings of words as if they were themselves objects correlative to the words that stand for them.
But the success of the criticism tends to eliminate the trenchancy of its terms of critique. If it is indeed not onlyfalse
butimpossible
to answer the general question “what is the meaning of a word?” with the specification of an object or a type of object, then it will indeed have been impossible to have committed the error that the critique claims to identify. The error will not have been in giving the question a false answer, but in thinking one could give a (referring) answer at all. The error of attempting to do what is impossible (at least by the lights of the critique that determines the positive and negative conditions of the possibility of our speaking about language at all) will be intelligible only as the false analogy of an imagination that, assimilating linguistic forms to one another, sees here the illusion of a question where there is none, and so the possibility of an answer that, in the end, is no answer at all.
Austin’s critique must therefore rule out the general question “What is the meaning of a word?” along with all of the objectual answers that have been offered for it. Having pre-determined the impossibility ofanswering
the question, he must exclude even the possibility of posing it. But the very terms of criticism by means of which Austin excludes the question are grounded in responses to this question itself. For, as we have seen repeatedly over the last several chapters of this work, it was the question of the possibility and ground of linguistic meaning that made possible, to begin with, the very modes of linguistic criticism that Austin here employs. In consigning the phrase “the meaning of a word” at least in itsphilosophical
uses, to the category of “dangerous nonsense,” Austin employs both reflection on ordinary linguistic usage and diagnosis of the errors to which a failure to comprehend this usage may lead us. Yet in thus rendering judgment on the possibility of significant employments of the phrase, Austin practices the critique of language in an unreflectively juridical mode that the tradition’s better reflective judgment would learn to overcome. His appeal to the judgment of the “plain man” - certainly itself a “philosophical” straw-man whose appearance (one thinks of Berkeley’s appeal to the opinions of the “ordinary man” in his defenses of idealism) has long been responsible for any amount of mischief - itself constructs the illusion of a determinate standard of sense that can hardly be discharged by any analysis of the grammatical or logical forms of ordinary language yet accomplished. The employment of such a standard - in which the philosopher purports to pass judgment on what is permissible, and what impermissible, in an ordinary language untainted by the philosophical imagination - was always recognizably problematic, and grew more so as Oxford philosophers presented successive analyses, always incomplete, of the forms of this ordinary language.
Exhibiting an ambiguous but essential tendency of analytic philosophy, Austin’s analysis thus moves to close the very question whose openness is the basis of the possibility of its own critical terms. His attempt to exclude the question of linguistic meaning by introducing a standard of meaningfulness grounded in what is supposed to be the linguistic grammar of an ordinary life presupposes, as an essential methodological precondition, the openness of the very question he wishes to close. This ambiguity is, as we have seen, rooted in the deep critical ambiguity involved in the analytic tradition’s envisioning of language itself, whereby the description of the positive structure of language tends essentially and repeatedly to undermine the basis of its own possibility. It is also the root of all of the various critical gestures by means of which the analytic tradition, especially in its most recent instances, having opened the question of language in a vague and indeterminate way, repeatedly again moves to close the question by undermining, dissimulating, or obscuring it.
Further reflection on the roots of this ambiguity tends to demonstrate, moreover, how deeply, and inextricably, the language of the everyday is indeed bound up with the “dangerous” forms of philosophical imagination of which ordinary language philosophy, in some of its forms, would like to purge it.
The distinction between “ordinary” and philosophically “extraordinary” employments of language, which philosophers like Austin and Ryle (but not Wittgenstein) would have liked to draw, develop, enforce and police through their description of the forms of ordinary language, is perspicuous, within this further reflection, as another instance of the attempt to fix the bounds of sense by means of pre-determined criteria. Precluding the question of meaning by means of a standard of sense that is nowhere actually specified or defended, it forecloses the desire that leads us to pose the question of meaning in “ordinary” as well as “philosophical” life, thereby missing the opportunity for a deeper reflection on its forms and implications here as well.
In this way, the tendency to disavow or reject the problems of linguistic meaning that has become widespread in recent analytic philosophy has its roots, ironically, in the critical impulses that originally underwrote the most central projects of the analytic tradition itself. Following Quine’s indeterminacy result and developing further its implications for what might be involved in an understanding of language in relation to social and intersubjectivepraxis
, Donald Davidson developed, over the course of the 1960s and 70s, a series of analyses of those possibilities of linguistic interpretation in which, he followed Quine in assuming, all theoretical descriptions of meaning must be grounded. For Davidson, all comprehension of linguistic meaning was grounded in what he called radical interpretation, a generalization of Quine’s radical translation.
Within the course of the attempt to understand another, according to Davidson, speakers and interlocutors exhibit a practical competence which could be described by means of an empirical theory of a certain form, a so-called “theory of interpretation” or “meaning” for a natural language. Such a theory, Davidson supposed, would exhibit certain formal constraints, relating truth and meaning in the language as a whole by means of recursively applicable axioms.
But because, on any real occasion of interpretation, determinations of the truth of utterances and of their meanings are deeply and inseparably intertwined, and because of the indeterminacies that Quine had adduced, the actual application of a theory of interpretation will always depend on certain auxiliary assumptions, so called “charity assumptions” that, without any direct basis in empirical fact, assume the conformity of the alien community’s large-scale beliefs and general understanding of the world with one’s own.
The conclusion led Davidson to repudiate “the very idea of a conceptual scheme” and the metaphysical picture of the relationship of such a scheme, or a language, to the world that it presupposes.
Because charity assumptions are, according to Davidson, necessary presuppositions for any understanding of the meaning of an alien language to be possible at all, it makes no sense, in the actual practice of interpretation, to suppose that they might not hold. From this, Davidson draws an anti-relativist conclusion: that since it makes little sense to suppose that conceptual schemes could differ in large-scale respects in their relation to a commonly shared world, we must reject the whole notion of such schemes, as set over against a world of objects, experiences, or events that they capture or “organize” at all. Accordingly, Davidson argued, it makes little or no sense to suppose, in the actual course of interpretation, that an alien culture’s large-scale understanding of the world is different from our own. The indeterminacies already adduced by Quine, together with the necessity of charity assumptions in translation, thus demand that we reject the idea of a conceptual scheme, along with the metaphorical picture of the possible variety of schematizations of the world that it supports.
In 1986, Davidson drew what might well be seen as the larger implication of this line of thought for analytic philosophy’s project of comprehending language:
I conclude that there is no such thing as a language, not if a language is anything like what many philosophers and linguists have supposed. There is therefore no such thing to be learned, mastered, or born with. We must give up the idea of a clearly defined shared structure which language-users acquire and then apply to cases. And we should try again to say how convention in any important sense is involved in languages; or, as I think, we should give up the attempt to illuminate how we communicate by appeal to conventions.
Following out Quine’s result, Davidson thus ultimately rejects the structuralist picture of language along with the notion of determinate conventions that has often supported it. His counsel is one of defeat: the attempt to understand language as a structure that can be acquired or learned, shared by a community and clearly defined by analytical interpretation of its practices, has failed and with the failure, we must reject the very idea of a language that is presupposed by it. Thus developing the consistent aporetic results of the analytic tradition’s attempt to envision language as a structure, Davidson concludes that the attempt should be abandoned, or at least seriously rethought.
Set within a broader critical reflection, his result might have occasioned, instead of or in addition to this counsel of defeat, a wider consideration of the possibilities and limits of the human capacity to discuss linguistic meaning. The aporetic results of the analytic tradition do indeed bear witness to the repeated failure of this capacity in its explicitly developed structuralist mode. The results of this attempt give reason to believe that this capacity undermines itself, in a surprising and revealing way, as soon as language itself is named, envisioned, conceived or described. Davidson, following out this envisioning in the specific context of structuralism, and recording its aporetic consequences there, does not ask whether, and to what extent, the problem that he evinces exists already, and inscribes its implications, in the everyday life of language itself. Imagining that he can avoid structuralism simply on the level of theory, he fails to ask about its continued inscription in the very forms of discourse that we employ to consider and criticize the meanings of terms every day. Had he done so, his consideration of the ground of linguistic meaning in the interpretive practices of everyday life might have, beyond simply counseling defeat, shown more thoroughly the lived implications of our problematic use of language, or of its constant critical reflection on itself.
III
In a far-ranging and much-discussed recent work, John McDowell aims to resolve a dilemma that characterizes recent analytic inquiry into the relationship of experience to thought. Faced with the question of this relationship, McDowell claims, analytic philosophers are prone to oscillate between an untenable empiricist appeal to the “givenness” of empirical content, on the one hand, and (on the other) a “coherentism” that tends to present thought as entirely unconstrained by anything external to it.
Help in resolving the dilemma, McDowell argues, is to be found in a conception of experience as drawing on the same conceptual capacities that are responsible for the spontaneity of thought.
By realizing that the capacities drawn on in thought and experience are largely the same, McDowell argues, we can picture the objects upon which our experience bears as genuinely constraining this experience, although not from outside the “logical space of reasons,” the total space of relations of rational constraint and justification that governs the logic of empirical concepts.
This responsiveness of objects of experience to conceptual relations within the “logical space of reasons” is bound to look mysterious, as McDowell argues, if we conceive of the natural world as simply the realm of causes and effects and of our experience of it simply in causal terms. He therefore argues for a re-conception of the shape of our openness to nature itself, what he calls a “naturalism of second nature” that presents this openness to a rationally organized world as the normal outcome of a specifically human process of maturation. Drawing on Gadamer’s distinction between a human “world” and a (merely animal) “environment”
, McDowell argues that we can adequately picture to ourselves what is involved in responsiveness to reasons only by picturing our normal maturation as coming to be at home in such a world:
Thought can bear on empirical reality only because to be a thinker at all is to be at home in the space of reasons.
Now it is not even clearly intelligible to suppose a creature might be born at home in the space of reasons. Human beings are not: they are born mere animals, and they are transformed into thinkers and intentional agents in the course of coming to maturity. This transformation risks looking mysterious. But we can take it in our stride if, in our conception of theBildung
that is a central element in the normal maturation of human beings, we give pride of place to the learning of language . This is a picture of initiation into the space of reasons as an already going concern; there is no problem about how something describable in those terms could emancipate a human individual from a merely animal mode of living into being a full-fledged subject, open to the world.
McDowell thus pictures the learning of a language as making intelligible the very possibility of our rational responsiveness to the world, as orienting us to a world whose rational structure is already present as a “going concern.” Drawing further on Gadamer’s hermeneutic description of the constitutive structures of our living in the world, McDowell furthermore conceives of natural language as “a repository for tradition” or in other words a “store of historically accumulated wisdom about what is a reason for what.”
By reminding ourselves that a normal human upbringing involves, decisively, introduction to such a tradition, and with it, openness to a world that is already structured by its determination of the space of reasons, we can, according to McDowell, resolve the dilemmas and contradictions that can otherwise trouble our conception of our relation to the world.
In the perspective of a historical consideration of the analytic tradition’s critique of language, McDowell is, doubtless, right to see the problems and contradictions of our attempts to understand our relation to the world as grounded in the problems of our envisioning, or failing to envision, language in its role in human life. But his attempt to render these problems innocuous simply by reference to the learning of a language is futile. For it presents as self-evident and unmysterious just those features of our relationship to language that repeatedly emerge, in the history of the analytic tradition, as problematic and aporetic, as incapable of positive theoretical description or total elucidation. Following Gadamer in his attempt to assure the distinction between a human and a “merely animal” life by reference to the learning of a language, McDowell writes as if this learning is itself an unproblematic and readily intelligible fact of our normal maturation.
He conceives of it as giving us access to a determinate structure of concepts, largely laid out in advance and subsequently structuring, in detail, both our experience of the world and the possibilities of our thought about it. Though he does not develop, even partially, an account of the actual layout of this structure, he takes it as evident that a mere reference to its “embodiment” in a language, conceived as the bearer of a tradition, is enough to verify its existence and remind us of its role in determining the shape of our lives.
In conceiving of the “space of concepts” as positively determined by the structure of a language, McDowell’s account therefore replicates the structuralism that has, as we have seen, repeatedly characterized analytic conceptions of language. Like other instances of this genre, it forecloses the critical question of our relationship to language by pre-judging this question in the form of an assumed structuralist account. Citing “initiation into a tradition” as an obvious and unmysterious fact of human life, it insinuates without argument the openness of the determinate contours of such a tradition (or of the more general “space of reasons” that they all share?) to philosophical reflection, their availability to the work of rendering unmysterious our access to the world or our relationship to its concepts. It solves the philosophical problem of our human relation to the world only through reference to a human relationship to language that is bound, once removed from the unargued assumption of a structuralist account, to appear just as problematic.
McDowell argues that we can gain a corrected perspective on the role of language in our lives, one that allows us to solve the problem of “oscillation” he addresses, if we avoid taking what he calls a “sideways-on” perspective on the question of the relationship of language to the world.
In other words, the point is that we must avoid conceiving of “language” and the “world” as two separable systems, subsequently somehow to be brought into connection.
The critical claim echoes one that is in fact common in the recent texts of analytic philosophy that address the “relationship” between language and the world; the claim is that we must refuse a “transcendental perspective,” outside our language or ordinary practices, from which we could evaluate or claim to account for the relationship between language and the world at all. The critical intention underlying the claim is laudable, but as with Austin’s criticism of claims to talk about “meaning,” the success of the critique tends to undermine the terms of criticism. For if it is incoherent to suppose we can “get outside language” in order to talk about it, it is just as incoherent to suppose that we can stay inside it and talk about it from there. If the very terms in which we could, or would, define a boundary between what is “inside” and what is “outside” language are indeed successfully and repeatedly undermined by the progress of analytic reflection on them, then the sense of progress, or resolution, that is suggested by the claim that we must stay “inside” language is illusory too. The critique, at the point of its most explicit development, thus undermines the critical line that it itself would earlier have drawn. Talking about “language” is seen to be equally problematic “from the inside” as “from the outside,” and the terms of “practices” and “language-games” in which the contemporary discussion would define it are just as problematic as the old ones of structure, system, and “conceptual scheme.”
It remains that wedo
talk about language, that its structure and possibilities are open for discussion (from within or without) in virtually every moment of our ordinary lives. The trace of its problems in the constancy of our everydayness demands an ever-renewed critique that can no longer claim to achieve the fixity of a perspective (internal or external) that would finally end them.
In a related context, Cavell describes the causes and consequences of what we may be tempted to call (even while recognizing the actual incoherence of the designation) our tendency to “speak outside language games,” our tendency (which is also language’s own tendency) to attempt to replace the particular acts and moments of our struggles with and against language with a statement that would explain our relation to language, all at once:
The reason we cannot say what the thing is in itself is not that there is something that we do not in fact know, but that we have deprived ourselves of the conditions for saying anything in particular. There is nothing we cannot say. That doesn’t mean that we can sayeverything
; there is no “everything” to be said. There is nothing we cannot know. That does not mean we can know everything; there is no everything, no totality of facts or things, to be known. To say we do not (cannot) know things-in-themselves is as much a Transcendental Illusion as to say we do. If we say the philosopher has been ‘misled by grammar’, we must not suppose that this means he has been led to say the wrong thing - as though there was aright
thing all prepared for him which he missed. It is, rather, as I have been putting it, that he is led into supposing that what hemust
say is something hemeans
to say, means as informative. And the question still is: How can we not know (realize) what we are saying; how can we not know that we are not informing ourselves of something when we think we are? Here one might capture a sense of how the problems of philosophy become questions of self-knowledge.
The linguistic critique that begins by claiming to diagnose the “illusions” of a false or distorted picture of the world ends by undermining the grounds for distinguishing between “truth” and “falsity” in picturing the world at all. Its deeper aim is not, as Cavell puts it, to find the “right” thing to say, the picture that is adequate to the world as it is or that accurately or correctly captures our relation to it. It is, rather, to constantly and recurrently recover, and interrogate, the forms of desire that lead us to this search. Its yield is not a corrected picture of the world, but rather the renewal of our own vision of what leads us to seek one, of how this search is begun and ended, how its hopes are ventured or lost.
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Author: Paul M. Livingston
