III
Grounded in the envisioning of language that is decisive for analytic philosophy, the structuralist picture of language has articulated, for many of the philosophers within the tradition, the specific relevance of language for philosophy and so comprised the theoretical basis for a wide variety of projects of analysis, clarification, description, and explanation. And even among those philosophers who have not accepted all of its claims or made its influence explicit, the structuralist picture has played a decisive role throughout the twentieth century in thematic and methodological conversations about language and its relevance to the methods of philosophy. But the structuralist picture of language isconstitutively unstable
and even activelyself-undermining
in a historically significant way. Its instability, I shall argue, repeatedly troubles the positive theoretical ambitions of the projects of the analytic tradition that have depended on it. The particular historical and conceptual dynamic to which this instability leads, moreover, has repeatedly determined the inquiry of twentieth-century philosophy about language and philosophy’s access to it, playing a key role in generating many of the specific developments of theory and practice that the tradition has witnessed.
The instability that repeatedly troubles the structuralist picture arises directly from its own essential commitments. Recall, in particular, the second commitment of the structuralist picture sketched above. This commitment requires that ordinary linguistic use be describable in terms of a body ofrules
orregularities
conceived as determining or constraining it, and furthermore requires that these rules or regularities be intelligible and describable. It was the hope of partially or fully describing them, indeed, that most directly supported the original project of logical analysis undertaken by Russell, Carnap, Schlick and others, and this hope has continued to play a decisive role in the analytic tradition even after the empiricist and positivist commitments of these particular philosophers were widely repudiated. But the constitutive instability that troubles the structuralist picture is apparent as soon as ask how such a description of the rules and regularities underlying language isitself
possible.
The question of the possibility of articulating the rules or regularities definitive of the normal or correct use of language is clearly an essential one for the structuralist picture and all the methodologies of analysis, clarification, and reflection it supports. If language is to be conceived as a total system governed by expressible rules or regularities, it is essential, in particular, to know how these rules or regularities are to be conceived as actuallyoperating
to determine or constrain linguistic practice. Why should we think ofthese
rules rather than others as the correct ones? What shall we say to someone who, willfully or ignorantly, refuses to follow them? Even once we have determined the underlying rules, what verifies the legitimacy of our critical application of them to pass judgment on ordinary locutions? How shall we justify our uncritical acceptance of them in everyday practice, and how account for our learning them in childhood? And what is it that allows the rules or regularities to confermeaning
ormeaningfulness
upon the (otherwise bare and “lifeless”) signs whose use they constrain?
Such questions are often dissimulated,within
structuralist projects, by means of a negative analysis of the meaningfulness of theirown
constitutive terms; but they are bound to appear decisive whenever structuralism itself is articulated or defended. Thus structuralism, having presented the constitutive rules and regularities as the essential determinants of the system of language, comes to demand an account of the basis of their existence and the force of their legitimate application. But the demand to give such an account faces the structuralist theorist with an exceedingly general and apparently irresolvable dilemma. The dilemma can be simply stated: does the basis for the existence and legitimacy of the rules and regularities constitutive of the system of language lieinside
oroutside
this system itself? A natural and recurrent response, when faced with the demand to account for the existence and legitimacy of the rules and regularities constitutive of language, is to posit their basis in some grounding item or phenomenonoutside
language itself. For instance, their basis may be located in the intentionality of consciousness, or the ostensive demonstration of some object or image that is seen as determining thecorrect use
of the word that is demonstrated along with it. Such an item, if located outside the system of signs itself, must be (in respect to its ability to determine meaning) ineffable or indescribable, lying as it doesoutside
the range of application of the conditions of meaningfulness it explains. But if the original basis for the existence and legitimacy of the constitutive structure of language is ineffable, it cannot after all do the explanatory work that was required of it. If the description of the total structure of language depends on the invocation of a mute, ineffable presence that, itself, cannot be described, then the justificatory question about the basis of this structure and the ultimate source of the meaning of signs must finally go unanswered.
If, on the other hand, the basis for the system of languageis
positively described as existing within the system itself, the description invites the question of itsown
meaningfulness and application. The description of the basis of the existence and force of linguistic rules thus leads to a repetition, rather than a solution, of the question it was supposed to answer. Thus the theoretical proposition and application of structuralism, which invites, almost as soon as it is formulated, the question of its basis, cannot comfortably locate this basis eitheroutside
orinside
the total economy of language. Its descriptions of language and applications of these descriptions to its analysis thereby experience an ongoing and unstable oscillation, whereby the sought principle and source of linguistic meaning is repeatedly located outside the total system of language, only to be brought again within it.
Wittgenstein’s gloss on Frege’s reaction to formalism illustrates this oscillation particularly clearly. Although the views of the formalist philosophers to whom Frege reacted were explicitly restricted to the philosophy of mathematics, Frege perceived within these views the key commitments of the structuralist picture of language. Conceiving of mathematics as a formal, abstract system of logical rules for the manipulation of symbols, the formalists hoped, all of mathematics could be described as a calculus of signs that were themselves devoid of any intrinsic meaning. But this structuralist picture of mathematics invited the recoil evident in Frege’s reaction. Rejecting the claim that meaning can be completely explained by the system of language itself, the recoil seeks to identify the basis of meaning, instead, with somethingoutside
this total system. As Wittgenstein notes, it is characteristic of this recoil to cite, as essential for meaning, something beyond the material signs of language or their regular combination and recombination: something, for instance, like the animating intentionality of an idea or mental image, or the meaning-conferring force of an ideal sense. Frege himself thought that his conception ofcontents of thought
, existing outside the subjectivity of any individual mind but also outside the total economy of language, could provide the needed basis. But as Wittgenstein says, the introduction of any such item,within
the economy of language, as the principle of meaning, amounts always only to the introduction of another sign, comprehensible (if at all) simply as another element of the generality of language:
If the meaning of the sign (roughly, that which is of importance about the sign) is an image built up in our minds when we see or hear the sign, then first let us adopt the method … of replacing this mental image by some outward object seen, e.g. a painted or modeled image. Then why should the written sign plus this painted image be alive if the written sign alone was dead? - In fact, as soon as you think of replacing the mental image by, say, a painted one, and as soon as the image thereby loses its occult character, it ceases to seem to impart any life to the sentence at all. (It was in fact just the occult character of the mental process which you needed for your purposes.)
As a part of the system of language, one may say, the sentence has life. But one is tempted to imagine that which gives the sentence life as something in an occult sphere, accompanying the sentence. But whatever accompanied it would for us just be another sign.
Insofar as we can understand the sought basis of meaning as such at all, it will be by understanding its effects on the use of signs; insofar as we cannot so understand it, it is simply a further mystification. But to understand the effect of an item or object on the use of signs is already to inscribe it within a total picture of the use of signs. The attempt to satisfy the protest against the totality of the structuralist picture of language ends by inscribing the basis of meaning, initially located outside the picture, within this picture itself, producing no ultimate satisfaction but only a repetition, on other grounds, of the same underlying complaint.
The paradoxicality of this theoretical situation is exceedingly general. It arises almost inevitably, in fact, as soon as serious reflection about the nature and limits of language begins. Priest (2003) has recently documented the arising of paradox in a variety of philosophical projects, both inside and outside the analytic tradition, that grapple with questions about the limits of thought or language. As he argues, it results whenever two natural theoretical requirements are fulfilled. The first requirement isclosure
: that it be possible to refer to or generalize over the totality of elements of a given kind (e.g. everything sayable, thinkable, etc.). The second is what Priest callstranscendence
: that there be a regular operation which, given such a totality, generates an element that is outside it.
The satisfaction of these two elements, as Priest argues, leads a general and pervasive form of paradox. For given the closure of the totality of language (or thought), we can then use the transcendence operation to generate a new element that isoutside
this totality. But the new element is itself sayable or describable - it must be, if we can refer to it at all - so it is alsowithin
the totality of the sayable (or thinkable). This generates an inconsistency at the limits of thought and language that Priest describes as informing the traditional projects of philosophers ranging from Aristotle and Anselm to Kant and Hegel. In its specifically linguistic form, however, the paradoxical dynamic of inclusion and exclusion at the limits of thought is endemic to any systematic attempt to theorize language as a total structure. This attempt in itself producesclosure
in articulating a conception of the totality of the meaningful or sayable; and any articulation of the basis of the rules or principles that constrain meaning amounts totranscendence
. The result is the constitutive instability that Wittgenstein locates in Frege’s reaction to the formalists, and that recurs in various forms throughout the history of the tradition, whenever the supposed basis for the determinate applicability of the rules and regularities of language to specific instances of linguistic use is itself described.
The effects of this dialectic of appropriation and expropriation are perspicuously discernible in the longstanding analytic debate about the role of various forms of “givenness.” Whereas appeals to the “given contents of experience” or to the givenness of facts were experienced as relatively unproblematic in the positivist and empiricist projects of the 19th century (witness, for instance, Mach’s positivist analysis of the facts of science as uniformly grounded in such givenness), analytic philosophers began to question them, early in the tradition, on the basis of their own understanding of language as a structure of signs. The critique particularly singled out for criticism claims of theineffability
of the given, claims which seemed to place it beyond the total structure of language. One of the first versions of this interrogation was Neurath’s physicalist criticism of Schlick’s conception of protocol sentences as grounded in the “ineffable” fact of our experiential relationship to the world. Given Neurath’s structuralist understanding of language, the specter of such an ineffable grounding of empirical content from outside the totality of language could only appear to be the last remnant of a metaphysical picture of meaning which a thoroughgoing physicalism about language would successfully repudiate. From Neurath’s program, widely perceived as successful even if unsupported by any decisive triumph of his arguments over Schlick’s, grew (largely through Quine’s adherence to it) the subsequent forms of physicalism that analytic philosophy inherits as “naturalism” today.
In this particular debate as well as subsequently within the tradition, “givenness” in a broad sense has figured not only as the ineffable content or character of experience but also as the (putative) semantic privilege of first-person or indexical utterances or the “original intentionality” or meaning that is supposed by some philosophers to characterize mental states that underlie meaningful language.
Its most pervasive and obvious form in the contemporary dialectic of analytic philosophy is probably the invocation of “qualia,” supposed facts or properties of the immediate, ineffable first-person quality of experience. But its problems are closely related, also, to those of the role of ostensive demonstration in (what is sometimes supposed to be) the fixation and regulation of linguistic meaning.
Starting with Neurath, analytic philosophers have regularly criticized appeals to the “given” on the basis of structuralist considerations about language; just as regularly, its invocation in one form or another has served, within the tradition, as an inarticulate protest against the totality of those considerations.
Where structuralist methods would totalize our understanding of language as that of a regular structure of signs, adherents of the “given” in its various forms protest the possibility of this totality by claiming to introduce facts, events, or objects that both exceed the grasp of this totality of signs and are purported to account for the basis of their meaning.
By explicating the general form of the paradox of inclusion and exclusion that arises naturally from the key commitments of the structuralist model, Priest’s framework also reveals the deep formal similarity between this paradox and some of the most significant formal results of the analytic tradition, most notably Russell’s paradox and Gödel’s incompleteness theorem. Each of these results historically marked the failure of a strongly formal and reductionist program of logical analysis and structural description, showing respectively that Frege’s axiomatization of set theory and the logicist program of reduction of mathematics to a language like that of Russell and Whitehead’sPrincipia Mathematica
could not succeed. Although Russell’s paradox and Gödel’s proof are both essentially negative results, demonstrating the impossibility of carrying out projects that were once thought definitive of the program of logical and linguistic analysis, we can nevertheless learn from them about the internal dynamics, development, and implications of structuralist programs of analysis and explanation in general. In this way, the rigorous formal attempt to account for mathematics as a logically founded structure suggests, by its own failure, the possibility of a more critical reflection on the existence of language and our ordinary and philosophical access to it.
In describing the structuralist picture as self-undermining in this way, I am not claiming that its commitments are individuallyfalse
or even, in any straightforward way, individually or jointlyincoherent
. Indeed, the picture is almost inevitable, as soon as systematic reflection on the basis of linguistic meaning begins; and this reflection has begun as soon as ordinary language has the ability to refer to itself and thus take up, however implicitly or vaguely, the question of the meaning of its words. The tendency of the picture, in its more complete formulations, to undermine itself demonstrates, as I shall argue, an underlying and genuine instability in ordinary language itself, one that inhabits this language wherever and whenever, in the varied occasions and circumstances of life, the meaning of terms or expressions is at issue. The aim of the present analysis is therefore not to suggest any alternative theoretical picture of language or to suggest that we somehow drop the structuralist picture from our everyday use of, and reasoning about, language. It is, rather, to document the effects of its detailed theoretical pursuit on the texts and projects of analytic philosophy, and say something about the critical significance of these texts for the question of our relationship to the language we speak.
IV
The reading of the analytic tradition that I carry out here draws centrally on Wittgenstein’s lifelong inquiry into the nature of language and its implications for human life. One paradigm for it, in fact, is the project of philosophically based clarification of language that Wittgenstein articulates in theTractatus Logico-Philosophicus
.
For decades, interpreters took theTractatus
’ description of the principles of “logical form” underlying the structure of language and the world to contribute to a structuralist project ofline-drawing
, closely akin to the logical positivists’ attempt to purge language of metaphysics by clarifying the boundaries of factual language. Such demarcation projects do, indeed, in general depend on the structuralist picture, relying as they do on a general specification of the rules governing meaningful language to produce both a detailed understanding of its structure and a guide to the limits of its legitimate employment. But the claim that theTractatus
is involved in such a project sits poorly with one its own most pervasive theoretical claims, the claim that logical formcannot
be stated or described, but only “shown” through an ongoing philosophicalactivity
of clarification:
4.121 Propositions cannot represent logical form: it is mirrored in them.
What finds its reflection in language, language cannot represent.
What expressesitself
in language,we
cannot express by means of language.
Propositionsshow
the logical form of reality.
They display it.
It follows from theTractatus
’ own internal picture of language, indeed, that any linguistic expressions that would aim to articulate bounds of sense by specifying the rules of logical form that determine them would, themselves, be nonsense. In the penultimate proposition of theTractatus
, Wittgenstein famously intimates that a kind of insight can result from the transcendence of these propositions, from ourrecognition
of them as nonsense. The claim that we ought to take this intimation completely seriously, indeed that the theoretical propositions of theTractatus
are genuinely and completely nonsense, is the guiding principle of a line of interpretation of theTractatus
-- the so-called “resolute” interpretation - that has recently been formulated and gained some popularity.
On the resolute interpretation, the aim of theTractatus
overall is edifying or elucidatory rather than theoretical. The point of its apparently theoretical propositions is simply to demonstrate their own meaninglessness, thus producing a deflationary or enlightening effect on the reader who might formerly have taken them - or propositions like them - seriously as descriptions.
Analysis, as it has been understood in the tradition since Russell, aims toreveal
logical form, to show the true or underlying structure of linguistic utterances over against the superficial forms of ordinary or everyday language. Such analysis would culminate in showing the categorical, inferential, and semantic structure of language overall, exhibiting the complete set of rules of significance and practice that govern meaning and inference. But the “resolute” interpretation of theTractatus
suggests a very different - almost opposite - understanding of the results of analysis. For on the interpretation, analysis shows not only the structure of language itself but also themeaninglessness
of any linguistic expression that would attempt to articulate that structure, any expression that would articulate a logical or grammatical rule capable of demarcating meaningfulness from meaninglessness. If this is right, the attempt to describe the “logical form of language” undermines itself in the very moment of its expression. Along with it goes the possibility of forming a stable picture of language as a whole as a rule-bound unity, and all the explanatory or normative force that that picture might have been thought to have. Since the articulation of any formal principle of structural meaning undermines itself, the philosophical attempt toenforce
the boundaries of meaning by distinguishing between “meaningful” and “meaningless” propositions also collapses under its own weight.All
propositions are, as such, meaningful; and the activity of philosophical clarification works only within the medium of ordinary language and can no longer presuppose any standard of sense drawn from outside it.
In this way, the actual incoherence of the structuralist picture of language as a whole emerges as the most pragmatically significant result of the theoretical practice that had sought to elucidate it.
V
From the beginning of the career of the structuralist picture within analytic projects, descriptions of analysis often combined a guiding commitment to itsmethods
with a thematicdisavowal
of the problematic of the basis of meaning to which they actually responded. In 1934, for instance, Carnap described the project of analysis as requiring the elucidation of a “logical syntax” that would display the logical structure of language, without, however, implying anything about “meaning” itself:
By the “logical syntax” (or also briefly “syntax”) of a language we shall understand the system of the formal (i.e., not referring to meaning) rules of that language, as well as to the consequences of these rules. Therein we deal first with the formative rules (Formregeln
), which decree how from the symbols (e.g., words) of the language propositions can be built up, secondly with the transformation rules (Unformungsregeln
), which decree how from given propositions new ones can be derived . The formation and transformation of propositions resembles chess: like chess figures words are here combined and manipulated according to definite rules. But thereby we do not say that language is nothing but a game of figures; it is not denied that words and propositions have a meaning; one merely averts methodically from meaning. One may express it also thus: language is treated as a calculus. (pp. 9-10)
Thus Carnap can say that language is to be treatedas
a calculus, without making any claims about its actuallybeing
such a calculus (such a claim he would, indeed, have deemed metaphysical) or about the actual basis of the bearing of its rules on the life of its use. Starting in the late 1920s, indeed, he would treat this bearing itself as a matter ofconvention
, leaving it, in accord with his “principle of tolerance” up to language users to stipulate whatever conventions of use suited them in the varied projects of their lives.
This tendency topractice
structuralism methodologically while disavowing the truth or meaningfulness of its explicit commitments is in fact a recurrent gesture of twentieth-century analytic philosophy. It plays a role, not only in Carnap’s definitive project, but in a wide variety of projects that judge the meaningfulness or possibility of various (philosophical or non-philosophical) claims, even (and especially) while disavowing the inclination to explain or account theoretically for the possibility of meaning itself. Some contemporary projects, for instance, even while purporting to establish strongly revisionist consequences with respect to ordinary usage, nevertheless continue to disavow any particular interest in the analysis of meaning.
Others present their philosophical task simply as consisting in the schematization or “systematization” of pre-existing “intuitions.” In both cases, structuralist considerations of the systematic meaningfulness of terms continue to play a central methodological role, even though they are no longer grounded in anexplicit
picture of the structural basis of meaning.
In any case, Carnap’s statement invokes a faith in the separability of doctrine and method that the subsequent dialectic of the analytic tradition would effectively and repeatedly call into question. The question of the relevance of the life of language’s practice to its structuralist analysis, which the young Quine was the first to pose in relation to Carnap’s own project, challenges the methods of structuralism to demonstrate their utility to our understanding of the ways language is actually employed, of the desires it serves and the forms of intelligibility it permits. Structuralism, even when pursued “purely methodologically,” pre-determines the nature of language as that of a regular structure of signs, and so can only subsequently present this relevance as their indifferently specified “use,” arbitrarily or conventionally determined by stipulation or decision. Against this, the historical dialectic of structuralism and those who have contested it evinces the actual and pervasive ambiguity of the relationship of language to life, its inherent complexity and the failure of this attempt at pre-determination.
The disavowal of the question of meaning evident in Carnap’s statement of a purely methodological structuralism aims to eliminate the taint of metaphysics which may still adhere to the explicit statement of structuralism’s commitments. But rather than eliminating the fundamental instability of these commitments, it inscribes it in the dialectic between the adherents of the structuralist project (both in its thematic and “methodological” forms) and those who contest its specific versions. The history of the successes and failures of the projects that have aimed to understand language, over the course of the twentieth century, demonstrates the ongoing effects of this dialectic. In it, those who would contest the totality of structuralism’s commitments repeatedly point to their inadequacy in accounting for specific phenomena of the ordinary life of meaning. Structuralists subsequently respond by echoing Carnap’s gesture, disavowing the need to account for meaning, along with the theoretical meaningfulness of these commitments themselves. Such is the dialectic of structuralism and its inarticulate contestation in which much of the twentieth-century attempt to comprehend language has remained confined. The historical recounting that interrogates its underlying motivations aims to bring the sources of the dialectic to light and thereby to show their regular effect on our understanding of the meaning of language.
VI
The analytic tradition’s sustained inquiry into language and linguistic meaning has often presupposed and promulgated the structuralist picture that treats language as a total structure of signs. But with and beyond the formulation and articulation of this picture, the methods and results that have articulated its constitutive instabilities and paradoxes compriseanother
legacy of the analytic tradition, a significantcritical
legacy of thinking about language in relation to everyday life that may represent one of the tradition’s most important outcomes for the philosophical future. Like the results that marked the failure of Frege’s axiomatization of set theory and of the logicist program, the critical results of the tradition’s sustained consideration of the structuralist picture of language may at first seem to be wholly negative in character, demonstrating simply the failure of structuralism to account adequately for the ordinary phenomena of linguistic meaning. But like the legacy of an earlier age of critical thought in relation to the conceptions of reason it interrogated, the results that articulate the constitutive inadequacies of the structuralist picture bear consequences far beyond their tendency to repudiate the specific theoretical pictures to which they react. Just as Kant’s critical interpretation of the constitutive inadequacies of reason’s self-understanding did at an earlier time, the reading that traces the inherent tensions of the structuralist picture in the history of the analytic tradition exhibits the broader ethical, social, and practical consequences of linguistic reason’s ongoing dialogue with itself.
The sustained analytic critique of our relationship to the language that we speak operates primarily by interrogating the categories that articulate a pervasive and general conception of the nature of linguistic meaning, as it is assumed to determine the acts and institutions of everyday life. When Frege conceived of the possibility of using a regular, symbolic language to clarify the underlying logic of thought, he took it for granted that only the rules of such a language could explain the possible determinacy and objectivity of judgments leading to truth. With respect to the ordinary language that Frege himself wanted to criticize, the ultimate source of this objectivity of judgments could only be the rule-governed identity ofsenses
that, distinct from either the symbols of ordinary language or their referents, nevertheless ensured the possibility of uniform reference to objects in the world. Such senses might indeed coordinate only poorly with terms in everyday language, but one of Frege’s key insights was that a logical notation could nevertheless make them perspicuous and thereby exhibit their regular and essential role in determining the actual reference of these terms.
The first projects of analytic philosophy, like Frege’s, pictured the identity of senses as grounded in their status as universals or idealities. Later projects conceived of it as grounded in the regularity of social practices, including the regularity of evaluative and reflective procedures for determining the “actual” sense of an utterance. The difference between these types of projects in the way they account for the unity and identity of sense is less important, in a historical context, than their shared assumption of the existence of an intelligible ground, accessible to philosophical analysis of language, for ordinary judgments of sameness and difference of meaning. By pursuing the implications of this assumption in the texts and projects that have developed the implications of the structuralist picture most clearly, we can bring into view, as well, the tradition’s sustained internal critique of it.
The best model and example of this internal critique is the late Wittgenstein’s consideration in thePhilosophical Investigations
of the nature of rules and rule-following. As in theBlue Book
, Wittgenstein’s discussion in theInvestigations
begins by taking up the deep sources of the temptation to understand language as a structure of signs:
81.All this, however, can only appear in the right light when one has attained greater clarity about the concepts of understanding, meaning, and thinking. For it will then also become clear what may lead us (and did lead me) to think that if anyone utters a sentence andmeans
orunderstands
it he is operating a calculus according to definite rules. (PI
81).
Over the next 120 paragraphs, Wittgenstein considers the basis and implications of this picture of language as a calculus and the conception of rule-following that it depends on.
Central to the consideration is the description and diagnosis of a “mythology” of meaning that attributes to a learner who develops a mathematical series or uses a word or sentence correctly the knowledge or understanding of a rule with the superlative capacity to determine an infinite number of instances of application “in advance,” as if pre-inscribed in some item or symbol that the learner grasps in understanding how to go on. Wittgenstein’s method of consideration and diagnosis of this picture, here, is a descendent of the one he used in theBlue Book
; by noting that any item that manifests understanding of a rule is itself nothing more than a symbolic expression, and so is open tovarious
interpretations, he exposes the conception of rule-following in terms of superlative items as empty and inadequate to its explanatory purpose. The conception, and the structuralist picture that it underlies, lead to the famous “paradox” ofPI
201:
This was our paradox: no course of action could be determined by a rule, because any course of action can be made out to accord with the rule. (PI
201)
Here as elsewhere in the analytic tradition, seeing the force of the paradox requires interrogating the deeply-held assumptions of the structuralist picture and the various conceptions of language and practice that depend on it. Given the structuralist picture that envisions the total description of the rules governing and constraining the everyday practice of language, the paradox ofPI
201 arises almost inevitably and marks the picture’s inability to explain what it seeks to. By interrogating the roots of this picture, Wittgenstein’s inquiry also interrogates the deeply held assumptions that can make the structuralist picture of language and its associated conception of rules seem simply obvious and unquestionable wherever the nature of language is in question.
Beginning in 1965, Saul Kripke put the Wittgensteinian “rule-following paradox” in a clear and general form that has subsequently made his version of it widely accessible and broadly discussed.
As is familiar, Kripke presents Wittgenstein’s considerations as introducing or inventing a new and unprecedented form of “skepticism” about the possibility of linguistic meaning. Its basis is the challenge that Kripke’s “bizarre skeptic” poses to an ordinary interlocutor. The challenge is to justify the claim that one’s present usage accords with one’s past usage, for instance that my previous acts of computation actually accorded with the normal function “plus” rather than the bizarre function “quus.”
The skeptic demonstrates that there is no fact about this previous usage thatdemands
that I meant “plus” rather than “quus,” since any such fact can be interpreted as according witheither
function. The conclusion that Kripke pictures the skeptic as drawing is that:
There can be no such thing as meaning anything by any word. Each new application we make is a leap in the dark; any present intention could be interpreted so as to accord with anything we may choose to do.
To this paradox, Kripke responds with a “sceptical solution” that, without denying the truth of the conclusion, seeks to provide grounds for asserting that, even despite it, “our ordinary practice … is justified because - contrary appearances notwithstanding - it need not require the justification the sceptic has shown to be untenable.”
In particular, Kripke suggests that such a solution is to be found in what he construes as Wittgenstein’s replacement oftruth conditions
(conditions for thetruth
of propositions) withassertibility
conditions that simply record the circumstances under which we areallowed
to make various assertions within our ordinary “language game.”
The suggestion enables Kripke to offer what has been called a “communal” or “communitarian” picture of rule-following as grounded in the evaluative procedures of a community that subjects individual responses to criticism on the basis of their agreement or disagreement with the responses that are normal within “our shared form of life.”
In the years since Kripke’s initial formulation of the paradox, discussion of his work has grown to comprise a vast literature.
Much of this literature consists in attempts to evaluate or criticize the legitimacy of Kripke’s “communitarian” solution to the rule-following paradox, either as a reading of Wittgenstein or in its own right, or attempts to replace it with one or another form of alternative “solution.” My aim in this work in relation to the Wittgensteinian “paradox” of PI 201 is, however, different from these. Instead of trying to find a solution thatprotects
“our ordinary practices” from philosophical criticism based in reflection about possibilities of meaning, I have attempted to trace some of the ways in which these ordinary practices are in fact regularly interrogated, questioned, criticized and problematized by the implications of the “philosophical” problem that Wittgenstein (among others) discovers. For the distinction between the ordinary life of our “practices” and the forms of “philosophical” reflection on them is nowhere more complicated, regularly contested, and open to criticism than in those manifold occasions of (“ordinary” or “philosophical”) life where linguistic meaning is itself open to question, and where Wittgenstein’s problem about this possibility may therefore be seen to operate.
Paraphrasing Wittgenstein, Kripke at one point describes the temptation to supplement “our ordinary concept of meaning” with additional superlative facts that would answer to the skeptic’s worry as “based on aphilosophical
misconstrual - albeit a natural one - of such ordinary expressions as ‘he meant such-and-such’, ‘the steps are determined by the formula’, and the like.” (pp. 65-66; my emphasis). A good way to begin a renewed critical tracing of the complicated and various implications of the analytic tradition’s sustained inquiry into language for the ordinary life of “our practices” is to ask what is “philosophical” and what is “natural” about this kind of response, what (false?) forms of reflection or pictures of life motivate it or seem to demand it, what specific instances of ordinary life are likely to prompt it, and what determines that it is indeed a “misconstrual” of these instances.
Both Kripke’s project and many of those that explicitly oppose him refer to “ordinary practices” only in order to find grounds for insulating them from the threat that philosophical skepticism is supposed to pose. In so doing, they predetermine the question of meaning that is the site of Wittgenstein’s paradox as “philosophical” in a pejorative sense. They thereby miss the significance of the regular arising of this question in the course of the pursuit of our “ordinary practices” themselves.
VII
By understanding the implications of Wittgenstein’s internal critique of the structuralist picture of language in theInvestigations
, it is possible to see some of the deep methodological parallels that exist between the analytic tradition’s sustained consideration of language and the neighboring traditions of phenomenology, critical theory, and deconstruction. These traditions, like the analytic one, have centrally taken up the nature of language and the question of its accessibility and relevance to philosophy. As we shall see, the methodological course of these traditions’ treatment of language, arising in part from Saussure’s structuralist picture of language as a “system of differences” without positive terms, Husserl’s logically articulated and anti-psychologistic phenomenology of linguistic meaning, and the neo-Kantian influences that shaped Heidegger’s inquiry into the meaning of being, indeed significantly parallels the analytic tradition’s inquiry into language through the whole course of its development.
For all of these “continental” projects the investigation of language in relation to the human life that it articulates ultimately yields far-rangingcritical
consequences for the metaphysics that underlies both ordinary and philosophical conceptions of language. In 1927, near the beginning of the introduction to his masterpiece,Being and Time
, Martin Heidegger wrote of the need for philosophy to reconsider the forms and concealments of the tradition it inherits:
If the question of being is to achieve clarity regarding its own history, a loosening of the sclerotic tradition and a dissolving of the concealments produced by it is necessary. We understand this task as the destructuring of the traditional content of ancient ontology which is to be carried out along the guidelines of the question of being …
This call for a de-structuring of the history of philosophy’s consideration of the meaning of being has resonated throughout the variety of phenomenological and hermeneutic projects that have grown from it the course of the twentieth century. With respect to the legacy of metaphysical thinking, indeed, the critical motivations underlying this call were not far removed, either in form or content, from those that philosophers like Carnap and Wittgenstein cited in relation to their own critical projects.
For these philosophers as for Heidegger, taking up the tradition of metaphysics, whether approvingly or critically, requires an inquiry into thelimits
of its structure and the structural basis of its claims, an inquiry whose goal is not the adumbration of theory but rather the attainment ofclarity
about the implications of these claims.
When Heidegger wrote in 1927, he did not yet accord the question of the structure of language itself any decisive priority in this project, or in the methods that were to accomplish it. But the structuralist tradition of Saussure, Levi-Strauss, and Benveniste meanwhile gave the question of language, and the structuralist picture of it, a central place in the pursuit of questions of meaning and significance in the discourses of phenomenology and hermeneutics that had inherited Heidegger’s project. In the 1966 article “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” Jacques Derrida brought these legacies together in a far-reaching description of the problematic dynamics of language and its structure.
The classical and historical discourses of the history of philosophy have always, Derrida suggests, sought explanatory structures with which to account for knowledge, truth, meaning or understanding; and in so doing, have characteristically sought to ground these structures in anitem
orpresence
(what Derrida calls the “center”) that is itself not a member of the structure it grounds:
It would be easy enough to show that the concept of structure and even the word “structure” itself are as old as the episteme - that is to say, as old as Western science and Western philosophy - and that their roots thrust deep into the soil of ordinary language, into whose deepest recesses the episteme plunges in order to gather them up and to make them part of itself in a metaphorical displacement. Nevertheless, up to the event which I wish to mark out and define, structure - or rather the structurality of structure - although it has always been at work, has always been neutralized or reduced, and this by a process of giving it a center or referring it to a point of presence, a fixed origin … As center, it is the point at which the substitution or the transformation of elements (which may of course be structures enclosed within a structure) is forbidden … Thus it has always been thought that the center which is by definition unique, constituted that very thing within a structure which while governing the structure, escapes structurality. This is why classical thought could say that the center is, paradoxically,within
the structure andoutside
it. The center is at the center of the totality, and yet, since the center does not belong to the totality (is not part of the totality), the totalityhas its center elsewhere
. The center is not the center. The concept of centered structure - although it represents coherence itself, the condition of the episteme as philosophy or science - is contradictorily coherent. And as always, coherence in contradiction expresses the force of a desire.
The desire that Derrida speaks of is the same one that Wittgenstein finds at the basis of Frege’s criticism of the formalists. It arises, as we have seen, wherever a structuralist account demands the basis of its own structurality in an element or item external to its own order, leading to the historical dynamic that has played itself out repeatedly, as we shall see over the next several chapters, in the development of the analytic tradition over the course of the twentieth century. As Derrida explains, the tendency to produce this dynamics of “contradictory coherence” is present wherever philosophy seeks to ground the explanatory claims of its structures on an item of presence, basis, or center that is itself conceived as ungrounded; and the project of this grounding is none other than the history of metaphysics that Heidegger interrogates. But because the language of the metaphysics that Heidegger sought to de-structure is also deeply implanted in (indeed, inseparable from) the language of the everyday, the integrity of its structure attains a certain new level of self-consciousness when, in the twentieth century, the problematic of its critical reading becomes entwined with that of the structure of language overall:
The event I called a rupture, the disruption I alluded to at the beginning of this paper, presumably would have come about when the structurality of structure had begun to be thought, that is to say, repeated, and this is why I said that this disruption was a repetition in every sense of the word. Henceforth, it became necessary to think both the law which somehow governed the desire for a center in the constitution of structure, and the process of signification which orders the displacements and substitutions for this law of central presence - but a central presence which has never been itself, has always already been exiled from itself into its own substitute. … This was the moment when language invaded the universal problematic …
Those who today inherit the methods of analytic philosophy, with its penchant for expository clarity, precisely defined problems, and rigorously signaled argumentation, may at first be reluctant to take up the pursuit of Derrida’s complicated deconstructive reading of the history of metaphysics. But the dynamics of structure that the deconstructive reading identifies in the history of metaphysics have themselves played a decisive role in the origin and development of these very methods. The envisioning of language in which many of the most significant projects of the analytic tradition are rooted encounters the problematic of grounding that Derrida describes as soon as it pictures language as a total structure of signs. In manifold forms across the decades of the tradition’s development, its theories and claims, results and methods, have demonstrated the implications of this problematic for our understanding and practice of the bearing of language on life. Understanding them can help us not only to overcome the crippling legacy of distrust that still exists between representatives of the analytic and continental traditions but to comprehend the great significance of theshared
project of envisioning language that has, in deeply parallel but seldom-appreciated movements of theory, analysis, interpretation, and practice, linked them over the course of the twentieth century, and continues to define their legacy for the philosophical future.
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Author: Paul M. Livingston
