Philosophy and the Vision of Language (routledge Studies in Twentieth-century Philosophy)
NOTES
[^1] Wittgenstein (1934), pp. 4-[^6]:
[^2] A methodological directive for this clarification comes from Wittgenstein’s Tractatus [^6]:521:
“The solution to the problem of life is seen in the vanishing of the problem.
(Is this not the reason why those who have found after a long period of doubt that the sense of life became clear to them have then been unable to say what constituted that sense?)”
[^3] In what follows, I use “meaning” or “linguistic meaning” to characterize anything that can be the answer to the questions “What is the meaning of ‘…’?” or “What do you mean by ‘…’?” where ‘…’ is a sign or sequence of signs. By “meaningfulness” I mean whatever serves to answer the question whether such a sign or sequence has meaning (in a particular context and on a particular occasion of use).
[^4] Within the logical space of structural views, it is possible to distinguish several sub-variants. One variant -- what we might call "content-structuralism," – holds that the basic elements structured or organized by the logic of language are already contents before they are so structured or organized; these may be, for instance, the basic elements of phenomenal experience, which are sometimes thought of as having ‘intrinsic’ or non-relational content. (This kind of view was held, e.g., by Russell (1914) and Schlick (1932)). These can be distinguished from views (like those of Carnap (1934) and Saussure (1913)) that hold that the basic elements only get or have their contents in virtue of their roles in the relational or differential structure in which they participate. Cross-cutting this classification is a distinction between reductive and non-reductive forms of structuralism. Reductive forms hold that structured elements are reducible to simpler, constituent ones. Non-reductive forms, by contrast, hold that description of the structure of an element may be defined in terms of its relations of similarity or difference with other elements, but does not necessarily involve its decomposition into simpler elements.
[^5] The commitments of structuralism so defined are obviously closely related (especially if one brackets number 5) to some of the assumptions underlying the project of the analysis of generative and transformational grammar suggested by Chomsky (1957, 1965). Some of the issues affecting structuralism that I discuss below also certainly affect the prospects for the success of Chomsky’s classic project. Nevertheless I have largely left the projects of transformational linguistics out of discussion, since (whatever the successes of their description of an underlying universal grammar of phrase structure and sentence formation) they have had great difficulty handling the issue of the relationship of the syntax they describe to the semantics or meanings of ordinary terms and utterances. (For some discussion, see, e.g., Searle (1972)).
[^6] In what follows, I use “structure” to mean any totality of elements that, minimally, i) bear intelligible relations of identity, similarity, and difference to one another and ii) are intelligibly interconnected by rules, regularities, or principles governing or underlying these relations.
[^7] Hahn, Neurath, et. al (1929), p. [^309]:
[^8] Hahn, Neurath, et. al (1929), pp. 306-[^307]:
[^9] Cf. Carnap’s statement in the 1932 article “The Elimination of Metaphysics Through Logical Analysis of Language:” “The researches of applied logic or the theory of knowledge, which aim at clarifying the cognitive content of scientific statements and thereby the meanings of the terms that occur in the statements, by means of logical analysis, lead to a positive and a negative result. The positive result is worked out in the domain of empirical science; the various concepts of the various branches of science are clarified; their formal-logical and epistemological connections are made explicit. In the domain of metaphysics, including all philosophy of value and normative theory, logical analysis yields the negative result that the alleged statements in this domain are entirely meaningless. Therewith a radical elimination of metaphysics is attained, which was not yet possible from the earlier antimetaphysical standpoints.” (Carnap 1932a, pp. 60-61).
[^10] It is instructive to compare Moritz Schlick’s description, written in 1931, of the revolution in philosophy to which he saw the new logical methods as leading: “There are consequently no questions which are in principle unanswerable, no problems which are in principle insoluble. What have been considered such up to now are not genuine questions, but meaningless sequences of words. To be sure, they look like questions from the outside, since they seem to satisfy the customary rules of grammar, but in truth they consist of empty sounds, because they transgress the profound inner rules of logical syntax discovered by the new analysis.” (Schlick 1931, pp. 55-56).
[^11] Frege (1879), p. [^49]:
[^12] Russell 1900, p. 8
[^13] Russell (1905).
[^14] Russell (1914)
[^15] Russell formulated the slogan of this practice of analysis: “The supreme maxim in scientific philosophizing is this: Wherever possible, logical constructions are to be substituted for inferred entities” (Russell 1914, p. 112). The motto subsequently served as the epigraph for Carnap’s Der Logische Aufbau der Welt.
[^16] Frege’s critique of psychologism about logic, particularly in the Grundlagen (Frege 1884), was anticipated by nineteenth-century philosophical logicians such as Bolzano and Lotze, who had held that the contents of thoughts must be sharply distinguished from the psychological events that lead to their being thought, judged, or entertained. In drawing this distinction, and underlying it with his Platonistic conception of mental contents, Frege most often cited Mill as his polemical target. Nevertheless, it is not clear that Mill actually held the psychologistic theory that Frege attributed to him; for discussion, see, e.g., Skorupski (1998). Frege’s critique of psychologism was also the basis of his notorious attack on Husserl’s first work, The Philosophy of Arithmetic, in [^1894]:
[^17] In 1959, Russell described his initial motivations this way: “It was towards the end of 1898 that Moore and I rebelled against both Kant and Hegel. Moore led the way, but I followed closely in his footsteps… I felt … a great liberation, as if I had escaped from a hot house onto a windswept headland. In the first exuberance of liberation, I became a naïve realist and rejoiced in the thought that grass really is green.” (Russell 1959, p. 22).
[^18] The hope to “structuralize” science by showing its logical structure – and thus demonstrate the objectivity of its claims by purging them of any dependence on ‘subjective’ or ‘ostensively indicated’ elements was, in particular, the central ambition of the ‘construction theory’ that Carnap pursued in his influential Der Logische Aufbau der Welt of [^1928]: See, e.g., Carnap (1928), section 16.
[^19] Throughout much of his career, Russell insisted that the proper task of philosophy must be the investigation of “the world” rather than language or thought. Prior to 1918, he saw language as “transparent,” and even afterwards he conceived of the task of logical analysis as showing the structure of the world rather than language. (Monk 1997, pp. 38-40) The question of Frege’s relationship to the philosophy of language is equally complex. For helpful discussions, see Dummett (1981b, chapter 3), Sluga (1997) and Hylton (1990), chapter [^6]:
[^20] (Leibniz 1679, p. 8) Compare Frege’s description, in Begriffsschrift, of the powers of his new conceptual notation (Frege 1879, p. 49).
[^21] Carnap (1928), section [^3]:
[^22] Michael Friedman has convincingly documented the pronounced legacy of post-Kantian philosophy in the logical positivism of Reichenbach, Schlick, and Carnap. See Friedman (1999), especially chapters 1, 3, and [^6]:
[^23] Although Schlick and Carnap initially conceived of this program, in strongly reductionist terms, as involving the isolation of the private, experiential content of any empirical proposition, their circle colleague Otto Neurath conceived of the project differently. Recognizing that it would be difficult or impossible to determine the empirical content of each proposition individually, Neurath recommended a holistic approach that would identify the content of whole bodies of theory in terms of their public, empirical verification. Nevertheless, Neurath shared Carnap and Schlick’s adherence to a structuralist picture of language. For more on the methodological differences and similarities, and their implications for the subsequent “protocol sentence debate,” see, e.g., Coffa (1991), Uebel (1992), Oberdan (1996), Friedman (1999), and Livingston (2004), chapter [^2]:
[^24] See Livingston (2004), chapter [^2]:
[^25] The terms “analytic” or “analyticalphilosophy themselves, though used occasionally as early as the 1930s, were not in widespread use until after 1940 (Richardson 2005), (Hacker 1997).
[^26] A. J. Ayer gave the principle of verification a clear and influential early expression in Language, Truth, and Logic (Ayer 1936, p. 35). This formulation was responsible for much of the discussion that followed, but the verification principle itself had actually played only a small role in the thinking of Carnap, Schlick, and the other members of the Vienna Circle. For these philosophers, the determination of the empirical meaning of individual propositions was less important than the overall determination, by analytical means, of the structure of scientific concepts.
[^27] Quine (1950).
[^28] Significantly, even when the new generation of philosophers rejected the metaphor of “analysis,” they still tended to employ metaphors that imply a structuralist picture of language and the interrelationships of its terms. Ryle, for instance, described his project in The Concept of Mind as aiming to “rectify the logical geography” of concepts (Ryle 1949, p. 7). Along similar lines, Strawson (1992) has defended a “connective” style of analysis that, while avoiding reductionism, nevertheless preserves the project of tracing structural, grammatical relations among concepts.
[^29] Attention to the continuity of structuralism in determining the main problematics of the analytic tradition therefore provides grounds for doubting the accuracy of a standard and received picture of the history of the tradition as a whole. On this standard and received picture, the tradition has consisted largely of two distinct phases: an initial “positivist” phase dedicated to a reductionist, foundationalist and methodologically solipsistic project of “conceptual analysis” and a “postpositivist” phase determined by the repudiation of this original project and the triumph of holistic and anti-foundationalist projects of reflecting on language as a public and intersubjective phenomenon. (For the broad contours of this picture, see, e.g., Clarke (1997), Soames (2003), and Rorty( 1979); it has its roots in the brief retrospective sketch of the background to his own repudiation of the analytic/synthetic distinction that Quine already gave in Quine (1950))As we shall see, however, the historical continuity of the tradition’s most prevalent conceptions of language is much greater than this picture would suggest, and it obscures the underlying dynamics of some of the tradition’s most pervasive conceptual determinants, from its earliest phases to the present. (See also Livingston (2005) and (2006)).
[^30] Much recent work has been devoted to the question of the best way to define and understand the tradition as a unity. See, e.g., Hacker (1997) and (1998), Ross (1998), Matar (1998), Rorty (1979), Dummett, (1994), Føllesdal (1997). Sluga (1997) Typically, these considerations fall into one of three broad categories. First, there are those, like Dummett (1994) and Kenny (1995), who suggest defining the tradition in terms of one or another doctrine or claim, often about the nature of philosophy, held by its practitioners. Typical candidates include the claims that philosophy of language is fundamental to all philosophy, or that a semantic clarification of language is more fundamental than epistemology. Second, there are those who aim to define the tradition as a unity of methods or “styles”; commentators who fall into this category often cite, for instance, the typical methods of “conceptual analysis” or simply a looser and more general preference for clear argument and rational justification (see, e.g., Føllesdal (1997); Rorty (1979), Monk (1997)). Finally, some philosophers, (e.g. Hacker (1998), noting the large variations in doctrines and methods across the scope of twentieth century analytic philosophy, despair of such a unifying definition in terms of commitments or methods and define the tradition, instead, simply as a loosely connected historical/genealogical unity. (Some of these commentators employ the Wittgensteinian notion of “family resemblances” to subsume what are in fact a large variety of different projects, with different aims and results, marked by individual similarities but lacking any one unifying element). Without taking a position on this difficult question of the definition of the tradition as a whole, I simply aim to identify the interlinked commitments of the structuralist picture of language as one that has played a significant role, in various ways, in many (though not by any means all) of the projects and theories that are commonly recognized as part of the tradition. For more on the specific legacy of structuralism within this tradition, see Livingston (2004) and Peregrine (2002).
[^31] The tendency to take “analytic philosophy” to be equivalent to the (presumably now repudiated) project of “conceptual analysis” simpliciter, and accordingly to deny that there is anything interesting to say about its legacy for contemporary projects, is evident, for instance, in Rorty’s (1979) dismissive discussion of the contemporary use of the label ‘analytic philosophy’: “If there are no intuitions into which to resolve concepts … nor any internal relations among concepts to make possible ‘grammatical discoveries’… then it is indeed hard to imagine what an ‘analysis’ might be.….
I do not think that there any longer exists anything identifiable as ‘analytic philosophy’ except in some such stylistic or sociological way.” (p. 172). Rorty is right to hold that the characteristic methods of analytic philosophy persist largely in a stylistic register; but he is wrong to think that this register is innocent in determining philosophical projects or that there is no need to reflect on it. For a recent attempt to rehabilitate a form of “conceptual analysis” in the context of the philosophy of mind, see Chalmers and Jackson (2001).
[^32] As early as 1913, Saussure defined language as a system of “differences without positive terms.” (Saussure 1913, p. 653). Benveniste gives a clear and general articulation of structuralism in the article “Categories of Thought and Language”: “Now this language has a configuration in all its parts and as a totality. It is in addition organized as an arrangement of distinct and distinguishing ‘signs,’ capable themselves of being broken down into interior units or of being grouped into complex units. This great structure, which includes substructures of several levels, gives its form to the content of thought.” (Benveniste 1958, p. 55) One chief difference, however, between the structuralist picture, as it appears in the texts of Saussure and Benveniste, and the picture that is usually presupposed in the analytic tradition is that the Saussurian picture does not typically see the significant relations between signs as primarily, or predominantly, logical in character.
[^33] Ryle (1949), Austin (1947), Sellars (1956), Wittgenstein (1951), and Quine (1960), in particular, were seen as reversing methodologically solipsistic prejudices earlier prevalent of theories of mind and experience. In fact the philosopher who had first formulated the project of “methodological solipsism” – namely Carnap – had already abandoned this position, in favor of a “physicalist” position influenced by Neurath, as early as 1931; see Carnap (1931) and (1932b).
[^34] Quine gives an exemplary statement of the picture of language as inculcated and controlled by means of public, social practices in Word and Object “ ‘Ouch’ is a one-word sentence which a man may volunteer from time to time by way of laconic comment on the passing show. The correct occasions of its use are those attended by painful stimulation. Such use of the word, like the correct use of language generally, is inculcated in the individual by training on the part of society; and society achieves this despite not sharing the individual’s pain. Society’s method is in principle that of rewarding the utterance of ‘Ouch’ when the speaker shows some further evidence of sudden discomfort, say a wince, or is actually seen to suffer violence, and of penalizing the utterance of ‘Ouch’ when the speaker is visibly untouched and his countenance unruffled … Society, acting solely on over manifestations, has been able to train the individual to say the socially proper thing in response even to socially undetectable stimulations.” (Quine 1960, p. 5)
[^35] See, e.g., Brandom (1994), Rorty, (1979), Kripke, (1984) and Davidson, (1984). Brandom’s statement of the presumed identity of language and social practices, on the first page of the “Preface” to Making it Explicit, is typical: "This book is an investigation into the nature of language: of the social practices that distinguish us as rational, indeed logical, concept-mongering creatures--knowers and agents." (p. xi)The idea of a basis for linguistic behavior in social practices has also played a major role in various recent attempts at rapprochement between analytic philosophy and the tradition of critical theory and hermeneutics. For instance, Habermas (1981) reads what he takes to be Wittgenstein’s account of linguistic practice as a contribution to the theory of communicative rationality that he aims to work out; and Apel (1972) construes participation in a Wittgensteinian “language-game” to be a pragmatic precondition for any possibility of mutual understanding or communication.
[^36] A particularly explicit formulation of this kind of interpretation is given by Bloor (1983). Among commentators who favor this kind of interpretation, it is typically to take Wittgenstein’s supposed failure to develop such a theory as an indication of his ‘quietism.’ See, e.g., Brandom (1994) , pp. xii-xiii.
[^37] Here, the exegetical situation is complicated by the internal complexity of Wittgenstein’s method and the tendency of commentators to read his remarks, out of contexts, as contributions to a philosophical theory of language or to the expression of what are supposed to be his “views.” A remark that has regularly been misread in this way is PI 202: “And hence also ‘obeying a rule’ is a practice. And to think one is obeying a rule is not to obey a rule. Hence it is not possible to obey a rule ‘privately’: otherwise thinking one was obeying a rule would be the same thing as obeying it.” In context, the point of the remark is not to introduce or adumbrate a theory of practices, but to bring out the regularity that characterizes anything we will ordinarily call “following a rule” and does not (could not, on its own terms) characterize anything we call “private experience.” Just a few paragraphs later, at PI 208, Wittgenstein makes it clear that his discussion regularity does not subsume a theory of practices, but rather refers to a kind of teaching (of a first language) that is not, and cannot be, captured by a communicable concept of practice.
[^38] Wittgenstein (1934), p. [^5]:
[^39] Wittgenstein’s use of this method of diagnosis, with particular reference to Frege, occurs more than once in his corpus. For instance, in Philosophical Grammar he gives it a briefer formulation:
In attacking the formalist conception of arithmetic, Frege says more or less this: these petty explanations of the signs are idle once we understand the signs. Understanding would be something like seeing the picture from which all the rules followed, or a picture that makes them all clear. But Frege does not seem to see that such a picture would itself be another sign, or a calculus to explain the written one to us.
(Wittgenstein 1933a, p. 40). On signs and their “life,” compare, also, PI 432: “Every sign by itself seems dead. What gives it life?—In use it is alive. Is life breathed into it there?—Or is the use its life?” and (Wittgenstein 1933b, p. 3):
“I want to say: one can’t interpret language in its entirety.
An interpretation is always just one interpretation, in contrast to another. It attaches itself to a sign and integrates it into a wider system.
All I can do in language is to say something: one thing. (To say one thing within the realm of the possibilities of what I could have said.) (No metalogic).
When Frege argues against a formal conception of arithmetic he is saying, as it were: These pedantic explanations of symbols are idle if we understand the symbols. And understanding is like seeing a picture from which all the rules follow (and by means of which they become understandable). But Frege doesn’t see that this picture is in turn nothing but a sign, or a calculus, that explains the written calculus to us.”
[^40] Within the twentieth-century projects Priest considers, at least, the operator of transcendence is typically diagonalization. Given an arbitrary set of elements, all of which are within the larger set, diagonalization generates an element that is in the larger set but not in the smaller one. The method, which was crucial to Cantor’s proof of the existence of multiple infinities, also plays a crucial role in the proof of Gödel’s incompleteness theorem.
[^41] See Livingston (2004), chapter [^2]:
[^42] See, e.g., Haugeland (1998), Searle (1992).
[^43] For more on the genealogy of the concept of “qualia” (which derives from C.I. Lewis (1929)) and their relationship to the problem of ostensive definition, see Livingston (2004), chapter [^1]:
[^44] For Neurath’s structuralist criticism of Schlick’s views on the given contents of experience, see Neurath (1931), (1932), and (1934); see also discussion in Livingston (2004), chapter [^2]:
[^45] As Priest notes, the underlying reason for the inclosure paradox in all of its forms is the phenomenon of self-reference; both the closure and the transcendence operations typically rely on some form of it. Here, the situation is no different; it is the capacity of language to include terms (such as “language,” “meaning,” and “reference”) that refer to itself and to its relationship to the world that involves systematic theories of the referents of these terms in the paradoxical situation under discussion here.
[^46] The internal ambiguities of structuralism I discuss here also do not (much) affect the prospects, positive or negative, for giving a generative and transformative grammar of natural languages in the sense of Chomsky (1957, 1965). For the problem that Wittgenstein identifies in Frege’s conception of signs and their use affects structuralist theories of language only when they attempt to characterize and describe in structural terms (in addition to describing the syntax or abstract combinatorial structure of a language) the basis of (what we ordinarily grasp as) linguistic meaning or “semantics.” For some discussion of the relationship of Wittgenstein’s rule-following considerations to Chomsky’s project, see Baker (1981), Peacocke (1981), and Chomsky (1986).
[^47] See, e.g, TLP [^4]:112
[^48] For the interpretation, see, e.g., Diamond (1991) and (2000), Conant (1989) and (2000), and Ricketts (1996).
[^49] At TLP [^5]:5563, Wittgenstein held that:
In fact, all the propositions of our everyday language, just as they stand, are in perfect logical order.—That utterly simple thing, which we have to formulate here, is not a likeness of truth, but the truth itself in its entirety.
Russell, in his 1922 “Introduction” to the Tractatus, notoriously misunderstood the implications of this remark.
[^50] Hintikka and Hintikka (1986), along similar lines, interpret Wittgenstein’s philosophical thought as a whole as determined by the guiding opposition between a conception of language as a calculus (whose principles could be determined, described and explained from an outside position) and that of “language as a universal medium.” On the latter conception, it would be impossible to present the structure of language exhaustively, since any description is still caught up in the system it would aim to describe. Though Hintikka and Hintikka are right to assert that much of the productiveness of Wittgenstein’s thought can be traced to the productive tension between these two views of language – corresponding to the two parts of Priest’s “inclosure schema” – they misleadingly read into Wittgenstein a “linguistic relativism” that would deny the possibility of knowledge of things as they are “in themselves”, independently of language.
[^51] Carnap (1934b), pp. 9-[^10]:
[^52] See, e.g., the project of eliminative materialism defined by Churchland (1981) and Rorty (1965).
[^53] Frege (1879), preface; compare Frege (1892), which makes the sense/reference distinction explicit.
[^54] It is striking, in reference to the most usual way of talking Wittgenstein’s “language-game” concept, that here he explicitly and decisively rejects any claim that language is in fact something like a game. Such comparisons are, as he says, useful to bring certain features to light, but to take it that he is claiming that languages are games is to commit just the misunderstanding that he warns against here. Indeed, “language games” are, for Wittgenstein, always objects of comparison and never (as the most usual interpretation suggests) the basis of a theoretical explanation of language itself (cf. PI 109). In the Big Typescript, he makes this explicit: “When I describe certain simple language-games, I don’t do this so I can use them to construct gradually the processes of a fully developed language – or of thinking – (Nicod, Russell), for this only results in injustices. – Rather, I present the games as games and allow them to shine their illuminating effects on particular problems.” (Wittgenstein 1933b, p. 156).
[^55] Kripke says in the introductory chapter of Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language that the interpretation first occurred to him in the academic year 1962-1963; it was first presented in seminar at Princeton in 1965 and subsequently, to a broader audience, at the Wittgenstein Conference in London, Ontario in [^1976]:
[^56] Kripke (1982), pp. 8-[^11]:
[^57] Kripke (1982), p. [^55]:
[^58] Kripke (1982), p. [^66]:
[^59] Kripke (1982), pp. 74-[^75]:
[^60] Kripke (1982), pp. 96-[^97]:; cf. pp. 92: “Now Wittgensten’s general picture of language, as sketched above, requires for an account of a type of utterance not merely that we say under what conditions an utterance of that type can be made, but also what role and utility in our lives can be ascribed to the practice of making this type of utterance under such conditions. We say of someone else that he follows a certain rule when his responses agree with our own and deny it when they do not; but what is the utility of this practice? The utility is evident and can be brought out by considering again a man who buys something at the grocer’s. The customer, when he deals with the grocer and asks for five apples, expects the grocer to count as he does, not according to some bizarre non-standard rule; and so, if his dealings with the grocer involve a computation, such as ‘68+57’, he expects the grocer’s responses to agree with his own. … Our entire lives depend on countless such interactions, and on the ‘game’ of attributing to others the mastery of certain concepts or rules, thereby showing that we expect them to behave as we do.” (pp. 92-93).
[^61] For a helpful overview and review, see Boghossian (1989).
[^62] For a sustained critical discussion of the significance of the “natural” as it may be seen to operate in this, and similar, contexts, see Cavell (1979), chapter 5, “Natural and Conventional.” Compare, also, Cavell’s recent discussion of the difference between his and Kripke’s ways of understanding the upshot of Wittgenstein’s “rule-following” paradox, with respect to the threat that skepticism represents, in Cavell (2005), pp. 134-[^138]:
[^63] See, e.g., Saussure (1913); Husserl (1900), especially Investigation 1, and Cassirer (1929). For more on some of these points of comparison, see, e.g., Dummett (1994) and Friedman (2000).
[^64] Heidegger (1927), p. [^20]:
[^65] Some instructive recent historical work has focused on the notorious episode of Carnap’s rejection, in the 1932 article “The Overcoming of Metaphysics Through the Logical Analysis of Langauge,” of Heidegger’s claims about the relationship of being to nothingness in his 1929 Freiburg inaugural lecture “What Is Metaphysics?” For clear and insightful discussions, see, e.g., Friedlander (1998) and Friedman (2000). As Friedman argues, understanding the significance of the episode requires that we appreciate the deep roots in neo-Kantianism that Heidegger and Carnap shared, as well as the grounds for the personal and philosophical dispute between the two young philosophers that came to a head in the disputation between Heidegger and Cassirer over the interpretation of Kant’s philosophy at Davos in [^1929]:
[^66] Derrida (1966).
[^67] Derrida (1966), pp. 279-[^80]:
[^68] Derrida (1966), p. [^280]:
[^69] For decades, analytic philosophers have routinely ignored or ridiculed Derrida’s project. An unfortunate paradigm for their reaction to it has been Searle’s (1977) scathing critical response to Derrida’s interpretation of Austin in Derrida (1972). Derrida’s side of the polemic, together with an extended response to Searle’s criticism, is published in Derrida (1988). Two recent books (Staten 1986 and Wheeler 2000) attempt to remedy this situation by pointing out connections between the project of deconstruction and some of the main results of analytic philosophy. The connections they draw are salutary and may certainly make Derrida’s concerns more accessible to analytic philosophers. In both cases, however the interpretations of Derrida are vitiated by a tendency to take the object of deconstruction’s critical project with respect to the history of philosophy to be something of a straw man – Wheeler, for instance, takes Derrida to be criticizing the tendency to believe in the existence of a “magic language” (p. 3) whose terms are “self-interpreting” in determining their own referents; and Staten holds Derrida and Wittgenstein to be unified in criticizing a general concept of “form” tracing to Aristotle (p. 5). Briefer, but more critically specific discussions of connections between Derrida’s project and some of the concerns of analytic philosophy are Priest (2003, chapter 14) and Mulhall (2001). See also Cavell’s expansive discussion of the issues – especially the question of philosophical “seriousness” – at stake among Austin, Derrida and Searle in Cavell (1994), chapter [^2]:
[^70] Frege (1884), p. 90 (p. x in original).
[^71] Frege (1884), p. 108 (p. 71 in original).
[^72] Frege (1884), pp. 109-110 (p. 73 in original). The principle expressed here, to the effect that numbers can be defined in terms of judgments of equinumerosity, traces to Hume and has recently become the basis for an attempt to rehabilitate Frege’s original logicist program. For a useful review of the “neo-logicist” project, see MacBride (2003).
[^73] Interpretation of the role of the context principle in Frege’s philosophy as a whole is notoriously complicated, not only because Frege seems, after the Grundlagen, to accord it less and less emphasis, but also because it is not immediately clear how to read the principle itself in the light of the distinction he would later draw between sense and reference. See Dummett (1981a) pp. 495-96 and Dummett (1981b) pp. 369-85 for discussion of this issue. Another exegetical obstacle to understanding the significance of the context principle is posed by the fact that Frege’s statements of the principle, even in the Grundlagen alone, vary widely in their strength and level of applicability. (see, .e.g, Baker and Hacker (1984) pp. 199-205).
[^75] Frege (1918)
[^76] See, e.g, Husserl (1900), Investigation II. Frege had famously reviewed Husserl’s earlier work, The Philosophy of Arithmetic, in 1894; Frege had found it rife with psychologistic prejudices. Husserl seems to have accepted the criticism in developing the Logical Investigations’ deeply anti-psychologistic theory of logic. For useful commentary on the exchange, see Dummett (1994).
[^77] “Now all those features of language that result only from the interaction of speaker and listener … have no counterpart in my formula language, since here the only thing that is relevant in a judgment is that which influences its possible consequences. Everything that is necessary for a valid inference is fully expressed; but what is not necessary is mostly not even indicated; nothing is left to guessing..” (Frege 1879, p. 54 (p. 3 in original)). For an instructive recent discussion of the connections between Frege’s inferentialism and his contextualism and anti-psychologism, see Conant (2000), especially pages 180-[^82]:
[^78] For a contemporary formulation of the same project, see Brandom (1994), chapter [^2]:
[^79] Dummett (1981a), pp. 193-[^94]:
[^80] Dummett (1991), pp. 244-[^245]:
[^81] Compare Tractatus [^4]:024: “To understand a proposition means to know what is the case if it is true…”
[^82] Dummett (1956), p. [^492]:
[^83] Dummett (1981b), p. [^383]:
[^84] Dummett (1981a), p. [^194]:
[^85] “At this point a number of difficult problems arise which are, however, irrelevant to the appreciation of the point Frege is making … we may raise the question how we recognize that someone has this knowledge, since we can only test his understanding of finitely many sentences. (Here we may feel inclined to have recourse to the notion, notoriously difficult to explain, of a type of context: a notion which, it seems to me, plays an important but almost unacknowledged role in Wittgenstein’s Investigations).” Dummett (1956), p. [^493]:
[^86] Diamond (1978, p. 79) raises the same question, albeit quickly and in passing, against Dummett’s way of seeing the significance of Frege’s supposed appeal to the use of a word. Elsewhere, however, Diamond, though at pains to resist Dummett’s reading of the context principle as establishing simply the (“truistic”) claim that a sentence is the smallest unit which may be considered to accomplish any task in the practice of a language, nevertheless concurs uncritically with the suggestion that understanding senses may be taken to be a matter simply of grasping rules of use. See, e.g., Diamond (1980), p. [^111]:
[^87] For the distinction, see Chomsky (1965).
[^88] Compare Kripke’s (1982) discussion of a “dispositionalist” response to Wittgenstein’s rule-following paradox: pp. 22-[^28]:
[^89] Davidson himself normally calls the kind of theory he is after a “theory of interpretation” or a “theory of truth”; he says in Davidson (1974a, p. 142 that such a theory “can be used to describe what every interpreter [of a language] knows.” There has been some debate over whether such a theory can be construed as a theory of what is picked out by the pre-theoretic notion of “meaning,” or should rather be taken as a replacement for this notion; see, e.g., Lepore and Ludwig (2005) for an extended discussion.
[^90] For the project, see Davidson (1967), Davidson (1970), Davidson (1973a), and Davidson (1973b).
[^91] Davidson (1965); Davidson (1973b); cf. Dummett (1975).
[^92] See, e.g., the articles collected in Davidson and Harman (1973).
[^93] See, e.g., Burge (1986), Elugardo (1999), Lepore (1999) and the extended and comprehensive discussion in Lepore and Ludwig (2007); Davidson takes up the issue of metaphor himself in Davidson (1978).
[^94] For the term “modesty,” see Dummett (“What is a Theory of Meaning?”). Cf., also, McDowell (1997)
[^95] Cf. McDowell’s gloss on this point in McDowell (1997), pp. 116-[^17]:
[^96] Dummett (1981a), p. 227; Dummett (1991) pp. 238-[^39]:
[^97] See, e.g., TLP [^4]:022: “A proposition shows its sense. A proposition shows how things stand if it is true. And it says that they do so stand.”
[^98] Frege (1903).
[^99] Frege (1903), pp. 83-84 (p. 91 in original).
[^100] See the epigraph to chapter 1, above.
[^101] “The mistake we are liable to make could be expressed thus: We are looking for the use of a sign, but we look for it as though it were an object co-existing with the sign.” (Wittgenstein 1934, p. 3)
[^102] The immediate basis for Wittgenstein’s use of the metaphor of ‘life’ in connection with Frege may be Frege’s statement at the conclusion of his discussion of the errors of the formalists: “Formal arithmetic can remain alive only by being untrue to itself. Its semblance of life is facilitated by the haste with which mathematicians usually hurry over the foundations of their science (if indeed they have any concern for them), in order to reach more important matters.” (Frege 1903, pp. 344-45 (p. 137 in original).
[^103] Cf., e.g., PI 224-[^225]:
[^104] Compare PI 241-[^242]: For more on Wittgenstein’s complicated use of the term “criteria” in relation to “forms of life,” compare Cavell (1979).
[^105] Dummett puts the issue roughly this way, for instance, at Dummett (1991), pp. 247-48; see also Dummett (1981a), chapter 10 for discussion of the form such a theory might take.
[^106] E.g. Phaedo 78e-79b; 103b-104b; Meno 75a.
[^107] TLP [^2]:18, 2.2ff.
[^108] TLP [^2]:18-2.182.
[^109] TLP [^2]:15. This also explains the somewhat enigmatic 3.1432: “Instead of, ‘The complex sign “aRb” says that a stands to b in the relation R’, we ought to put, ‘That “a” stands to “b” in a certain relation says that aRb.” Only a fact – never simply a sign – can stand for a fact; if they are to stand for facts, propositions must also be facts with an articulated combinatorial structure that is mirrored in the facts they stand for. See also TLP 3.14ff.
[^110] TLP [^3]:1431.
[^111] TLP [^3]:143.
[^112] Insofar as standard commentaries express a view about the logically prior conditions for the meaningfulness of simple signs, they typically make some version of the claim that simple signs get their meaning in virtue of an ostensive connection between them and simple objects. But Wittgenstein actually never so much as suggests this account of the meaning of simple signs, and its interpretive ascription to him is deeply misleading.
[^113] Wittgenstein does not generally draw type/token distinctions explicitly. But since, as we shall see, the logically relevant parts of a sentence are defined by sameness of use rather than sameness of orthographic sign, we can take it that signs in a sentence, prior to such definition, are just to be understood as tokens; orthographic sign-types may, then, crosscut symbol-types defined by uses.
[^114] TLP [^3]:32, 3.322, 3.323, 3.326, 3.327. For interesting discussions (which I partially follow here) of the sign/symbol distinction in the broader context of Wittgenstein’s views about meaning and use, see Conant (1998) and Conant (2000).
[^115] TLP [^3]:341.
[^116] Significantly, Wittgenstein calls this logically perspicuous notation, following Frege, “concept-writing” or Begriffsschrift.
[^117] The problem goes back at least to Stoic theories of the sign. Augustine may have been the first to define the sign explicitly as “something that shows itself to the senses and something other than itself to the mind” (Augustine, De Dialectica, 1975, 86). But compare also Cratylus 434d-435a, where the issue is the power of names to pick out their objects, and Cratylus offers a theory of understanding as grounded in common ‘usage’:
Socrates: When you say ‘usage’, do you mean something other than convention? Do you mean something by ‘usage’ besides this: when I utter this name and mean hardness by it, you know that this is what I mean? Isn’t that what you’re saying?
Cratylus: Yes.
Socrates: Even though the name I utter is unlike the thing I mean – since ‘l’ is unlike hardness (to revert to your example). But if that’s right, surely you have entered into a convention with yourself, and the correctness of names has become a matter of convention for you, for isn’t it the chance of usage and convention that makes both like and unlike letters express things?” Wittgenstein discusses the Cratylus and its question of the signifying power of names explicitly in Wittgenstein (1933b), p. [^35]:
[^118] Compare Locke’s Essay, Book III, chapter 10, sections 26-29, where Locke says that words may fail in their purpose “when complex ideas are without names annexed to them”; “when the same sign is not put for the same idea”; and “when words are diverted from their common use”.
[^119] TLP [^3]:33; Wittgenstein reaffirms this, in the context of a describing the rules governing inference, at TLP 6.126.
[^120] TLP [^3]:331.
[^121] Anscombe (1959), p. [^91]:
[^122] Wittgenstein puts it this way in the Blue Book, p. [^5]:
[^123] As developed, e.g., in Brandom (1994), chapter [^2]: In the Tractatus, it is true, Wittgenstein did not distinguish between what were subsequently called, following Carnap, formation rules and transformation rules; nor did he distinguish between definitional logical relations among propositions and inferential logical relations. For he thought that there is no need for ‘laws of inference’ to justify inferential relations (5.132); what we should call inferential relations among propositions are expressed by these propositions themselves, provided they are written in a symbolism that shows their form (5.13-5.1311).
[^124] TLP [^3]:3; here Wittgenstein endorses Frege’s context principle.
[^125] TLP [^3]:31.
[^126] TLP [^3]:317.
[^127] TLP [^3]:315.
[^129] “A proposition is completely logically analysed if its grammar is made clear – in no matter what idiom. All that is possible and necessary is to separate what is essential from what is inessential in our language – which amounts to the construction of a phenomenological language. Phenomenology as the grammar of those facts on which physics builds its theories.” (PR I, 1, p. 9).
[^130] See, e.g., PR s. 1, para. 9: “Asked whether philosophers have hitherto spoken nonsense, you could reply: no, they have only failed to notice that they are using a word in quite different senses. In this sense, if we say it’s nonsense to say that one thing is as identical as another, this needs qualification, since if anyone says this with conviction, then at that moment he means something by the word ‘identical’ (perhaps ‘large’), but isn’t aware that he is using the word with a different meaning from that in 2+2=[^4]:”
[^131] PR, section 8, para. 82, 84, [^85]: For a helpful and fascinating discussion of Wittgenstein’s route to appreciating this point about systematicity, see Hacker (1996), pp. 78ff.
[^132] See PR III.[^26]:
[^133] For the criticism of Russell’s view, see PR III.21-26; Wittgenstein contrasts it unfavorably with the Tractatus picture theory in III.21, III.25, and III.[^26]: The Russellian theory that Wittgenstein had in mind seems to have been the one in the 1913 manuscript “Theory of Knowledge”(Russell 1913) to which Wittgenstein had, during the period of their initial close interaction, already expressed deep-seated objections.
[^134] PR III. [^21]:
[^135] PR III. [^24]:
[^136] PR III. [^24]:
[^137] Compare Wittgenstein 1933b, p. 116: “So: The word ‘ball’ works only because of the way it is used. But if ‘understanding the meaning of a word’ means knowing its grammatical use (the possibility of its grammatical use) then it can be asked: ‘How can I know straightaway what I mean by ‘ball?’ After all, I can’t have the complete irnage of the use of this word in my head all at once.”
[^138] The relevance of this to the critique of the Tractatus is most clear at PI 82, where Wittgenstein directly mentions his own earlier conception of language as a calculus: “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 and means or understands it he is operating a calculus according to definite rules.”
[^139] Compare Wittgenstein 1933b, p. 121, where Wittgenstein expresses doubts about the Tractatus doctrine of the separable ‘uses’ of words: “For what does it mean when I say that ‘is’ in the sentence ‘The rose is red’ has a different meaning than in ‘Twice two is four’? If we say that this means that different rules are valid for these two words, then the first thing to say is that we have only one word here. But to say that in one case these rules are valid for it, and in another, those, is nonsense.
And this is in turn connected with the question of how we can be aware of all the rules when we use a word with a certain meaning, considering that the rules, after all, constitute the meaning?”
[^140] Hahn, Neurath, et. al (1929), p. [^157]:
[^141] The direct links between the Vienna Circle’s program and the project of a particular kind of modernist, Enlightenment progressivism grounded in the claim that adherence to a scientific method, and the technical developments that result from it, could have profound and revolutionary social consequences is most clear in the writings of Otto Neurath; for a helpful overview, see, e.g., Uebel (1996). But it was by no means limited to him; for instance, as Galison (1996) has documented, Carnap’s project in Der Logische Aufbau der Welt was both implicitly and explicitly linked to the utopian, progressivist projects of some of the dozens of journals and publications that appeared in Germany between 1919 and 1947 bearing the title “Aufbau” (Neurath himself was deeply involved with one of these journals). The utopianism of the Vienna Circle’s main authors is evident, as well, in the Circle manifesto (Hahn, Neurath, et. al 1929), which presented the contrast between the parties to contemporary “social and economic struggles:” and linked them to the struggle against metaphysics: “One group of combatants, holding fast to traditional social forms, cultivates traditional attitudes of metaphysics and theology whose content has long since been superseded; while the other group . faces modern times, rejects these views and takes its stand on the ground of empirical science.” (p. 157). For more on the Vienna Circle’s politics, see also Wartofsky (1982).
[^142] See, e.g., Conant (2001).
[^143] Tarski (1933).
[^144] Strictly speaking, because of the apparatus of Gödel numbering, the Gödel sentence for any particular formal system is not explicitly self-referential. Nevertheless it can be informally treated as such.
[^145] Tarski (1944), p. [^345]:
[^146] Thus, the results that Gödel and Tarski derived from the paradoxes of linguistic self-reference demonstrated, for many of the philosophers who followed them, the impossibility of a purely syntactic analysis of language. It was not, at first, so. When Carnap learned of Gödel’s result in 1931, his first reaction was not to see it as undermining the project of syntactical analysis that he would announce, in systematic form, in 1934; rather, indeed, he took Gödel’s metamathematical technique of arithmetization as supporting it. For Gödel’s method of arithmetization, Carnap reasoned, showed how the logical syntax of a language could be formally captured and systematized, and so indeed made the description of arbitrary languages possible. Gödel’s paradox, and later Tarski’s proof, made it impossible to render a syntactic description of the truth of a language, or show its completeness, within that language itself; but in each case, the relevant properties of any language, including truth, were fully capturable within a metalanguage used to describe its formation and transformation rules, provided that the metalanguage used was at least as strong as the object language itself. (for discussion, see Coffa 1991, pp. 303-305).
[^147] Morris (1938)
[^148] Morris (1938), p. [^43]:
[^149] Morris (1938), p. [^59]:
[^150] Austin (1955), pp. v-vi.
[^151] Contrary to the most common interpretation of him, Austin therefore did not see the methods of logical positivism as falling prey to the dogma of the primacy of propositional meaning that he most directly opposes. Rather, he cites these methods approvingly, as showing that the work of sentences is more complex than had earlier been thought; his own suggestion of performatives simply continues and develops this discovery (Austin 1955, p. 2).
[^152] Austin 1955, p. 3
[^153] Austin 1955, p. [^5]:
[^154] Austin 1955, pp. 14-[^15]:
[^155] Austin 1955, p. [^54]:
[^156] Austin 1955, p. [^67]:
[^157] Austin 1955, pp. 61-[^62]:
[^158] Austin 1955, p. [^60]:
[^159] Austin 1955, pp. 148-[^49]:
[^160] Austin 1955, p. [^149]:
[^161] Drawing on the “metapragmatics” of Silverstein (1993), Lee (1997) has recently given a far-ranging analysis of the implications of this entanglement for questions of the relationship between the meaning of utterances, their contexts, and accounts of subjectivity.
[^162] Of course, this assumption was, in general, a vast oversimplification. Compare discussion in chapter 1, above, and Livingston (2004), chapters 2 and [^4]:
[^163] Ryle (1932).
[^164] Ryle (1938)
[^165] Ryle (1938), p. [^287]:
[^166] Ryle (1938), p. 283
[^167] Ryle (1949), p. 29; for more discussion see Livingston (2004), p. 121ff.
[^168] Ryle [^1953]:
[^169] Ryle 1953, p. [^173]: For some well-placed early doubts about Ryle’s conception of meaningfulness as grounded in “rules of use” see Abelson (1957).
[^170] Gellner (1959), p. [^32]:
[^171] For a fascinating discussion of Gellner’s book and its (unfortunate) influence, see Uschanov (2002). See also Cavell’s roughly contemporary discussion, with reference to the distinctive methods of ordinary language philosophy, in Cavell (1969), chapter [^4]:
[^172] Austin (1947); Ryle (1949); Sellars (1955)
[^173] Ryle (1949), pp 29-[^32]:
[^174] On a standard misinterpretation of Ryle’s project, though, the dispositionalist analyses he suggests of particular mental terms is an analysis of the referents of these terms as dispositions or their categorical bases, for instance patterns of behavior or the neurophysiological structures or states of affairs that underlie such patterns in the brain. This construal is a mistake, for Ryle’s view of the logic of mental-state terms suggests no such reduction, and he opposes the physicalist’s mechanical explanations of mental states as thoroughly as he does the Cartesian’s “para-mechanical” explanations (see, e.g., pp. 327-30); for more discussion, see Livingston (2004), chapter [^4]:
[^175] Ryle (1949), pp. 119-[^21]:
[^176] Ryle (1949), p. [^121]:
[^177] Ryle (1949), pp. 122-[^23]:
[^178] Ryle (1949), p. [^125]:
[^179] Ryle (1949), p. [^123]:
[^180] Ryle (1949), p. [^141]:
[^181] Ryle (1949), pp. 217-[^18]:
[^182] Ryle (1949), pp. 219-[^220]:
[^183] Ryle (1949), p. [^229]:
[^184] This default assumption is recognizable as the semantic core of what is traditionally discussed as epistemic ‘privileged access’ to one’s own mental states. For helpful discussion, see, e.g., the essays collected in Gertler (2003), especially chapters 8, 10, 11, and [^13]:
[^185] Sellars (1955), p. [^86]:
[^186] Sellars (1955), p. [^87]:
[^187] Sellars (1955), pp. 87-[^88]:
[^188] Sellars 1955, p. [^78]:
[^189] Sellars 1955, p. [^74]:
[^190] Sellars 1955, p. [^75]: Another formulation of the same point is in section 19, p. 44: “Now, it just won’t do to reply that to have the concept of green, to know what it is for something to be green, it is sufficient to respond, when one is in point of fact in standard conditions, to green objects with the vocable ‘This is green.’ Not only must the conditions be of a sort that is appropriate for determining the color of an object by looking, the subject must know that conditions of this sort are appropriate.”
[^191] Sellars (1955), pp. 75-[^76]:
[^192] Sellars summarizes Schlick’s view, quite accurately, in section [^32]: Schlick originally expressed it in Schlick (1934) and Schlick (1935).
[^193] Sellars (1955), section [^34]:
[^194] Sellars (1955), section [^38]:
[^195] Sellars (1955), section [^36]:
[^196] Sellars 1955, p. [^74]:
[^197] Brandom (1998) has recently discussed the question of Sellars’ relationship to reliabilism.
[^198] Sellars (1955), p. [^74]:
[^199] Sellars (1955), p. [^92]:
[^200] Sellars (1955), section [^56]:
[^201] Sellars (1955), section [^57]:
[^202] Some of the relevant articles are Sellars (1947a) , (1947b) (1948a), and (1948b).
[^203] Sellars (1947b), p. [^33]:
[^204] Sellars (1947b), p. [^31]:
[^205] The suggestion was influential, in particular, in leading to the “functionalism” of Putnam (1967), Armstrong (1968), and Lewis (1966).
[^206] The discussion unfolds, mostly by dialogue, in sections V and VI of Sellars (1953).
[^207] Sellars’ attribution of “logical behaviorism” to Ryle is in fact inaccurate. Ryle was never a behaviorist of any kind (see discussion in Livingston (2004, chapter 4).
[^208] Sellars (1953), pp. 230-[^34]:
[^209] Sellars (1953), pp. 234-[^35]:
[^210] Sellars (1953), p. [^235]:
[^211] Sellars (1953), p. [^236]:
[^212] Sellars (1953), p. [^237]:
[^213] Sellars (1953), p. [^237]:
[^214] Sellars (1953), p. [^245]:
[^215] Sellars (1953), p. [^244]:
[^216] Sellars (1955), pp. 92-[^93]:
[^217] Thomasson (2005) draws a suggestive analogy between Sellars’ theory of first-person knowledge in EPM and Husserl’s method of epoche or bracketing to gain access to the contents of first-person experience. Somewhat like Husserl, Thomasson suggests, Sellars can be seen as suggesting that the possibility of identifying first-person contents depends on our ability to bracket or isolate the contents of ordinary observationally or perceptually based judgments. This bracketing, Thomasson suggests, is akin to quotation: it makes the contents themselves available to our reflective consideration of them. The suggestion could perhaps be developed even further in connection with Sellars’ earlier account of the semantic knowledge involved in our ability to describe first-person experience.
[^218] Carnap (1934a), p. 2
[^219] Carnap (1934a), p. [^2]:
[^220] Carnap (1934a). p. [^284]:
[^221] Carnap (1934a), p. [^2]:
[^222] Carnap (1934a), pp. xiv – xv.
[^223] In 1950, in “Empiricism, Semantics, and Ontology,” Carnap would make this even more explicit by introducing the term “linguistic framework” and distinguishing between questions internal and those extenral to such frameworks. According to this later work, metaphysical questions can universally be treated as external questions about the pragmatic choice of a language framework, rather than as the substantial “internal” questions about the nature of entities or objects that they might otherwise appear to be.
[^224] Carnap (1934a), p. 286, p. [^301]:
[^225] Carnap (1934a), p. 286, p. [^298]:
[^226] Cf. the discussion of Carnap’s project in intercalary chapter 1, above.
[^227] Significantly in view of Quine’s later formulation of the radical translation scenario, Carnap’s conception of languages in Syntax also contains a conception of the translation, or interpretation, of one language in another. For Carnap, a language is interpretible in another language if both can be formulated as sub-languages of a third whose syntactical rules correlate sentences in the first with sentences in the second as equivalent in meaning (Carnap 1934a, p. 229).
[^228] It is true that Carnap stops short of identifying languages with calculi; in addition to their purely formal aspects, he holds, languages also have semantic and pragmatic aspects that are not accessible to the study of pure syntax (Carnap 1934a, p. 5). But it is essential to his conception in Syntax that a purely formal treatment of a language can expose the rules of grammatical formation and derivation that are responsible for a language’s signs having the meanings that they do, and so that any language can, for the purposes of logical syntax, indeed be treated as a pure, otherwise uninterpreted calclulus.
[^229] Carnap 1934a, p. xv.
[^230] Carnap 1934a, p. xiii.
[^231] At one point in Syntax, Carnap seems to admit this. On page 228, while discussing the possibility of translation of one language into another, he writes: “We have already seen that, in the case of an individual language like German, the construction of the syntax of that language means the construction of a calculus which fulfils the condition of being in agreement with the actual historical habits of speech of German-speaking people.” But the reference to what has already been seen is obscure. In any case, Carnap evidently considers this restriction unimportant, to be used only in making the decision whether a given calculus adequately captures an existing natural language, rather than in the derivation of the calculus itself.
[^232] A closely related problem for Carnap’s logical syntax project is the problem of the “name of the name” already pointed out by K. Reach in 1938 (Reach (1938)). Carnap had held that it is possible for logical syntax to speak of the names of a language through the ordinary device of quotation; for instance, if I wish to talk about Smith’s name, I simply employ the ordinarily tacit convention by means of which “ ‘Smith’ ” can serve as a name for the name ‘Smith’. In answer to the question “What does ‘ “Smith’’ ’ mean? “ I can then answer: “ ‘Smith’ ” (i.e., the name for Smith). But as Reach pointed out (p. 99) the answer cannot be informative; for it presupposes that I already understand the tacit convention of naming names by quoting them. If the hearer already knows this convention, the answer is not informative; but if I do not use this convention it will again be impossible to informatively answer the question since the listener will not understand the response. (Cf., also, Anscombe’s discussion (1957, pp. 51-52) ). It follows that there is in genera now way to formulate, within a language, an informative description of what is said in that language when a name is named. (Reach 1938, p. 109). Agamben (1990, pp. 69ff.) has also discussed the more general implications of this problem for the question of linguistic self-reference.
[^233] Quine (1934b), p. [^61]:
[^234] Quine (1934b), p. [^60]:
[^235] Quine (1934a), pp. 49-[^50]:
[^236] Quine (1934a), p. [^50]:
[^237] Quine (1935), p. [^73]:
[^238] Carroll (1895).
[^239] Quine (1935), p. [^97]:
[^240] Quine (1935), pp. 98-[^99]:
[^241] Following the publication of “Truth by Convention,” Quine’s incipient doubts about analyticity and related issues developed during some correspondence with Carnap about intensionality in 1938 (Quine and Carnap 1990, p. 240) and, more importantly, in discussions with Carnap and Tarski in 1940-[^41]: But it was not until 1947 that Quine developed the argument against analyticity explicitly, largely in correspondence with Nelson Goodman and Morton White. For a helpful review of this history, see Isaacson (2003), pp. 233-35.
[^242] One reason for its notoriety is that it has been considered to represent a turning-point in the methods of analytic philosophy. For Quine’s rejection of the analytic/synthetic distinction seemed, especially in conjunction with the semantic holism and epistemological naturalism that he already recommended in that article, to demand the abandonment of any conception of philosophy as consisting purely in the logical or conceptual analysis of the structure of language. Instead, on at least one widespread conception, the philosophical investigation of meaning after “Two Dogmas” becomes continuous with natural science, to be construed behavioristically as the analysis of the actual speech dispositions of speakers in a given community. This story is, at best, a caricature of what is in fact a much more complicated historical development from the initial methods of Russellian or Wittgensteinian “analysis,” through the structuralist projects characteristic of logical positivism, and toward the more broadly based and eclectic forms of “ordinary language” analysis and reflection that were beginning to be practiced, as Quine was writing, at Oxford. Few of these forms of analysis and reflection require anything like the analytic/synthetic distinction that Quine criticizes in Carnap, and its repudiation does not at all require that philosophical reflection on language become partly or wholly “empirical.” The usual historical story gives an implausible picture, as well, of Quine’s own development. As we have seen, the repudiation of Carnap’s analytic/synthetic distinction was essentially complete by 1934; it was only much later that Quine would set it within the context of the naturalist view of epistemology that he drew from Neurath and the behaviorism that he drew from Skinner.
[^243] Quine (1950), p. [^33]:
[^244] Quine (1950), p. [^24]:
[^245] Quine (1954), ,pp. 119-[^120]:
[^246] Carnap (1938), p. [^169]:
[^247] Carnap (1963), p. [^919]:
[^248] See, also, Ricketts (2003).
[^249] Ebbs (1997), pp. 105-[^107]:
[^250] Ebbs (1997), p. [^98]:
[^251] It would hold equally, for instance, against any view according to which the practice of a language is determined by rules thought to be represented explicitly (not in the social practice of a language but) in the brain or mind of an individual speaker; for these rules, too, there would be an open question about the source of their interpretation and their justificatory application.
[^252] Quine (1960), p. [^28]:
[^253] Quine (1960), p. [^71]:
[^254] Quine (1960), pp. 29-[^30]:
[^255] Quine (1960), p. [^27]:
[^256] See, e.g.,Quine (1960), p. [^28]:
[^257] For another argument to the effect that the indeterminacy result does not depend in any deep way on behaviorism, see Harman (1969). There is a large literature about the implications of Quine’s particular way of restricting, and describing, the facts available to the radical interpreter, which is sometimes described as “verificationist” in origin. See, e.g., Rorty (1972) and, Kirk (2003). In arguing that Quine’s indeterminacy result does not depend essentially on his behaviorism, I do not mean to deny that his avowed behaviorism played an important role in leading him to arrive at the result, and continues to play a role in the way that he states it. Nor do I mean to deny that the indeterminacy result itself played an important role in his move toward naturalism and naturalized epistemology. The claim is just that the indeterminacy result does not itself require, at the outset, any restriction to facts about behavior or facts about dispositions to behavior. The operative restriction is, rather, to all of those facts about the practice of a language that may be considered to be available independently of an interpretation of that language; and this does not require any particular further characterization of the form or subject matter of those facts.
[^258] There is a substantial literature debating the extent to which the indeterminacy result differs from, or is similar to, Quine’s independent thesis of the underdetermination of theory by evidence in scientific theorizing generally. See, e.g., Gibson (1986). In Quine’s responses to this literature, he clarifies that the two results are genuinely different: whereas a scientific theory may be underdetermined by all actually available evidence, yet still be considered to embody facts, a translation manual outstrips all the actual or even possible facts of the matter. (See, e.g., Quine (1986a)).
[^259] The point is significant, as well, in that it affects the status and scope of the indeterminacy result itself. For decades after Quine’s formulation of indeterminacy, commentators repeatedly attempted to respond to it by suggesting that the introduction of further facts, perhaps about the neurophysiological constitution of the brain, could suffice to reduce or eliminate the scope of translational indeterminacy by narrowing the space of possible interpretations of a language or demanding a single, unique one. As Quine repeatedly pointed out in response, however, no such introduction of further facts affects the indeterminacy result. (See, e.g., Quine (1979) and Quine (1986b), where he says directly that “…even a full understanding of neurology would in no way resolve the indeterminacy of translation.” (p. 365)) For the radical translation scenario is already formulated to include, in the evidentiary base antecedently accessible to an interpreter, any and all facts (of whatever kind) that such an interpreter could, in principle, antecedently observe. There is no bar, explicit or implied, to facts (for instance) about neurology, nor to any fact about the social practice of language that is evident in observable linguistic or non-linguistic behavior.
[^260] Quine 1960, p. [^68]:
[^261] Quine’s example of this is the rabbit-fly that the native uses to recognize the presence of a rabbit; given the collateral information that rabbit-flies are reliable indicators of the presence of rabbits, information which the translator lacks, the native will assent to “Gavagai” under different conditions than those under which the translator will assent to “rabbit”, necessitating an interpretive decision undetermined by the observable facts. (Quine 1960, p. 37).
[^262] Quine (1960), pp. 51-[^53]:
[^263] Quine (1960), pp. 51-[^52]:
[^264] Quine (1969b), p. 46; see the helpful discussion of this in Hookway (1988), pp. 141-[^42]:
[^265] This is obscured, according to Quine, by the fact that in understanding our compatriots, we ordinarily translate “automatically” or homophonically, associating token sentences in our compatriots’ mouths with the like-sounding sentences for us. But this does not eliminate the systematic sources of indeterminacy, as for instance when we must trade off between taking a friend’s utterances to be false, and taking him to be using the same words with a different meaning (p. 59); indeed, it would be possible (though perverse) to use a non-homophonic translation manual, while still preserving all the facts about linguistic usage (p. 78).
[^266] Quine (1960), p. [^26]:
[^267] See, e.g., Alston (1986) and Ebbs (1997), both of whom appeal to versions of the thought that being a master of a language must qualify a speaker to know the meanings of her own sentences; for a similar thought, expressed in terms of intuitions about the “supervenience” of “facts about meaning” on natural facts, see Soames (2003), p. [^251]: Along similar lines, Hacker (1996) argues that what the radical translator, in Quine’s scenario, interprets is not even a language at all, since languages are not only factual structures but include an essential dimension of normativity. But as Kirk (2003) responds, Quine’s thesis can also naturally be posed as a question about the relationship between facts and norms of linguistic behavior, without prejudicing the question of what is the object of translation.
[^268] Alston’s (1986) statement of this is typical: “Clearly … it seems obvious that I know what I mean by ‘rabbit’ and other words in my language. I know that, e.g., I use ‘rabbit’ to denote complete enduring organisms like that, rather than the parts or stages of such organisms or the kinds to which they belong. My assurance as to what I mean by ‘rabbit’ does not rest on what I or anyone else is able to do in translating one language into another, much less on what is possible by way of radical translation. Even if everything Quine says about that were correct, I would still know what ‘rabbit’ means in my language. I know this just by virtue of being a master of my language. Knowing this is an essential part of what it is to have that language; knowing this is required for being able to use that language as a vehicle of thought and means of communication.” (pp. 59-60).
[^269] Nevertheless, it may break down at any point as well.
[^270] In chapter 6 of Word and Object, Quine argues for the systematic eliminability of posited entities such as ‘propositions’ and ‘sentence meanings’ from a regimented analysis of natural language; it is unclear whether he thinks reflection on the systematic basis of what we intuitively grasp as “linguistic meaning” is similarly eliminable.
[^271] Quine (1960), chapter [^5]:
[^272] Quine (1969a).
[^273] It is an interesting, and remarkable, fact of ordinary discourse that the question “what does that mean?” can ask after both what words mean and what people mean “by them”; the first asks after something like a dictionary definition; the other (and herein lies its significance) asks after something else which, although not independent of definitions, is not exhausted by them. Compare Cavell (1979, p. 207ff).
[^274] Kant (1789), A vii.
[^275] TLP [^4]:0031.
[^276] “The book deals with the problems of philosophy and shows, as I believe, that the posing of these problems rests on the misunderstanding of the logic of our language … The book will, therefore, draw a limit to thinking, or rather – not to thinking, but to the expression of thoughts; for, in order to draw a limit to thinking we should have to think both sides of this limit (we should therefore have to be able to think what cannot be thought). … [T]he truth of the thoughts communicated seems to me unassailable and definitive. I am, therefore, of the opinion, that the problems in their essentials have finally been solved. And if I am not mistaken in this, then the value of this work secondly consists in that it shows how little has been done when these problems have been solved.” (TLP, preface, 4-5; I modify the Ogden translation slightly in a couple of places.) The preface bears comparison to the preface of the first edition of Kant’s first Critique: “It is a call to reason to undertake anew the most difficult of all its tasks, namely that of self-knowledge, and to institute a tribunal which will assure to reason its lawful claims, and dismiss all groundless pretensions, not by despotic decrees, but in accordance with its own eternal and unalterable laws. This tribunal is no other than the Critique of Pure Reason … I have entered upon this path – the only one that has remained unexplored – and flatter myself that in following it I have found a way of guarding against all those errors which have hitherto set reason, in its non-empirical employment, at variance with itself. I have not evaded its questions by pleading the insufficiency of human reason. On the contrary, I have specified these questions exhaustively, according to principles; and after locating the point at which, through misunderstanding, reason comes into conflict with itself, I have solved them to its complete satisfaction… In this enquiry I have made completeness my chief aim, and I venture to assert that there is not a single metaphysical problem which has not been solved, or for the solution of which the key at least has not been supplied.” (Axi-Axiii)
[^277] PI 201; I modify Anscombe’s translation slightly to bring out the sense of Wittgenstein’s German more clearly.
[^278] More specifically, this is the question of the power of reason to motivate, which Kant treats in terms of our capacity to recognize its force. But part of Wittgenstein’s point is that if there is a problem of force here, there is just as much a problem of the conditions for the possibility of recognizing it.
[^279] PI [^217]:
[^280] Cavell (1979), p. [^175]: Compare Cavell (2005), chapter 8, and Cavell (1989) “Declining Decline,” where Cavell characterizes the Philosophical Investigations as containing a kind of “philosophy of culture:” “Wittgenstein’s appeal or ‘approach’ to the everyday finds the (actual) everyday to be as pervasive a scene of illusion and trance and artificiality (of need) as Plato or Rousseau or Marx or Thoreau had found. His philosophy of the (eventual) everyday is the proposal of a practice that takes on, takes upon itself, precisely (I do not say exclusively) that scene of illusion and of loss; approaches it, or let me say reproaches it, intimately enough to turn it, or deliver it; as if the actual is the womb, contains the terms, of the eventual.” (p. 46). See also Cavell’s recent discussion of “The Investigations’ Everyday Aesthetics of Itself,” (Cavell 2004).
[^281] Cf. von Wright (1993), who describes the history of modern logic, in the analytic tradition, “as a process of ‘rational disenchantment’” (p. 19) and indeed situates the entirety of the tradition, as well as its legacy for the future, within the extended development of enlightenment modes of disenchantment and demystification (eg., p. 50).
[^282] “Language (or thought) is something unique” – this proves to be a superstition (not a mistake!) itself produced by grammatical illusions.” (PI 110). Cf. what Wittgenstein says in reference to behaviorism at PI 307: “ ‘Are you not realy a behaviourist in disguise? Aren’t you at bottom really saying that everything except human behaviour is a fiction?’ –If I do speak of a fiction, then it is of a grammatical fiction.”
[^283] In particular, one might say, psychologism presents language as ultimately under the control of thought, and thus as secondary and inessential to the content that is lodged in the privileged interiority of a subject wholly intelligible to itself. This picture of agency and mastery presents linguistic meaning as if it depended wholly and only on the decisions or experiences of such subjects, as if its determination and the play of its significance did not depend inescapably on the forms of our mutuality as well, on the ways that, in intersubjective discourse, words are risked or ventured, their significance discovered or lost.
[^284] E.g., Dummett (1994).
[^285] Hylton (1990) gives a fascinating account of this rebellion.
[^286] Heidegger (1929); Carnap (1932a). For interesting commentary, see Friedman (2000).
[^287] E.g. McCumber (2001).
[^288] One such incident was the polemic between Schlick and Husserl over the analysis of experience (see Livingston 2004, chapter 2 for discussion).
[^289] See, for instance, John Searle’s (1977) notorious and scathing critical response to Derrida’s discussion of Austin in “Signature, Event, Context.” The polemic between Searle and Derrida about the reception of Austin has unfortunately represented, for several decades, the most prominent and visible encounter between deconstruction and the analytic legacy of speech act theory. Derrida’s side of the polemic, including a long response to Searle, is reprinted in Limited Inc. Cavell has discussed the question of Austin’s reception helpfully in Cavell (1969), chapter 4 and, with reference to the Searle-Derrida polemic, (1994).
[^290] Gebrauch or “use” in this sense ought to be distinguished from cognates like Benutzung (“employment”), which Wittgenstein uses generally to occurrences of words in the speaking of a language, and Anwendung or “application,” which Wittgenstein uses most often in reference to the use of a word or a rule in a new case. Section 43 of the Philosophical Investigations, the section that is most often cited to support the usual interpretation of Wittgenstein as holding a “use-theory” of meaning, in fact turns in large part on these distinctions, holding that “for a large class of cases” of the employment [Benutzung] of the word ‘meaning’, this word, [viz., ‘meaning’] can be explained [erklaren] by saying that the ‘meaning’ of a word is its use [Gebrauch] in the language.
[^291] A 302/B [^359]: Unless otherwise noted, citations in this chapter are to Kant (1789).
[^292] A 305/B 361
[^293] “Thus the pure concepts of reason, now under consideration, are transcendental ideas. They are concepts of pure reason, in that they view all knowledge gained in experience as being determined through an absolute totality of conditions. They are not arbitrarily invented; they are imposed by the very nature of reason itself, and therefore stand in necessary relation to the whole employment of understanding. Finally, they are transcendent and overstep the limits of all experience; no object adequate to the transcendental idea can ever be found within experience.” (A 327/ B384)
[^294] (A 322/B 378-79)
[^295] A 323/B 379
[^296] Sallis (1980), pp. 154-[^55]:
[^297] Adorno (1959), p. [^66]:
[^298] Adorno 1966, p. [^5]:
[^299] [Wittgenstein’s] philosophy was a critique of language very similar in scope and purpose to Kant’s critique of thought. Like Kant, he believed that philosophers often unwittingly stray beyond the limits into the kind of specious nonsense that seems to express genuine thoughts but in fact does not do so. He wanted to discover the exact location of the line dividing sense from nonsense, so that people might realize when they had reached it and stop. This is the negative side of his philosophy and it makes the first, and usually the deepest, impression on his readers. But it also has another, more positive side. His purpose was not merely to formulate instructions which would save people from trying to say what cannot be said in language, but also to succeed in understanding the structure of what can be said. He believed that the only way to achieve this understanding is to plot the limits, because the limits and the structure have a common origin. The nature of language dictates both what you can and what you cannot do with it.” (Pears 1970, pp. 2-3).
[^300] E.g., Gellner (1959). Philosophers within the tradition of critical theory have also sometimes rejected Wittgenstein’s thought as fundamentally conservative in its supposed limitation of philosophical criticism to the standard of “ordinary use”; see, e.g., Marcuse (1964).
[^301] See, e.g., Nyiri (1981).
[^302] Thus, Winch (1958) argues on what he takes to be Wittgensteinian grounds against projects in anthropology and social science that attempt to interrogate social practices “from without,” holding that the only way appropriately to practice social science is reflexively, from within the very practices that are investigated. The position is similar, as well, to that of Apel (1972, chapter 1), who takes ‘language-games’ to be structured preconditions of possible understanding, holding that “the understanding of meaning always presupposes participation in the language-game, through whose context the meaning structure of a situation is revealed a priori.” (p. 31). For an instructive criticism of Winch’s position, see Pitkin (1972), pp. 254-[^63]:
[^303] In particular, the usual interpretation of the Kantian element in Wittgenstein is continuous with a long-standing tendency, within the analytic tradition’s interpretations of Kant, to emphasize the limit-fixing project of the Transcendental Analytic over that of the dialectical one of the Dialectic. The tendency may have its origin in Strawson (1966). For a helpful criticism of it, see Neiman (2000).
[^304] Crary 2000, p. [^119]:
[^305] Crary (2000), p. [^138]:
[^306] Along similar lines, Cerbone (2003) argues that we should resist the temptation to interpret Wittgenstein as holding any view according to which “ ‘our form of life’ serves as a boundary, a set of constraints, in short a limit, ‘within’ which our concepts can be legitimately applied” (p. 44). The thought that such limits could be described is itself, Cerbone argues, one of Wittgenstein’s favored critical targets. Like Crary, Cerbone suggests that the deepest object of Wittgenstein’s criticism is in fact the illusion of a position from which we could draw a stable line between sense and nonsense within our language as a whole. Indeed, the effect of this criticism, if it is successful, is to remove any grounds for either a “relativistic” or an “absolutist” account of the dependence of language on our language-games or practices; for if there are indeed no grounds within Wittgenstein’s methods for assuming meanings to be “fixed” either within language-games or in a way transcendent to them, then there is no way to employ these methods to support either a relativist or an absolutist theory of this fixation.
[^307] Diamond (1991), pp. 155-[^56]:
[^308] See, e.g., Ostrow (2001): My contention … is that the Wittgensteinian view of the nature of his own claims, of philosophy generally, … is contained in the seeing how our philosophical assertions change their character, how they undermine their own initial presentation as straightforward truth claims … In different terms, what this discussion helps to make evident is the fundamentally dialectical nature of Wittgenstein’s thought in the Tractatus. It brings to the fore the extent to which we are, at every juncture of the book, engaged with the very metaphysics that is apparently being disparaged. (p. 12)
[^309] “ ‘It is as if we could grasp the whole use of the word in a flash.’ Like what e.g.? – Can’t the use – in a certain sense – be grasped in a flash? And in what sense can it not? – The point is, that it is as if we could ‘grasp it in a flash’ in yet another and much more direct sense than that. – But have you a model for this? No. It is just that this expression suggests itself to us. As the result of the crossing of different pictures” (PI 191).
[^310] PI [^11]:
[^311] PI 3, [^4]:
[^312] PI [^4]:
[^313] PI 13, PI [^22]:
[^314] “It is interesting to compare the multiplicity of the tools in language and of the ways they are used, the multiplicity of kinds of words and sentence, with what logicians have said about the structure of language. (Including the author of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus)” (PI 23).
[^315] PI [^117]:
[^316] PI [^102]:
[^317] PI 103, [^107]:
[^318] “When someone says the word ‘cube’ to me, for example, I know what it means. But can the whole use of the word come before my mind, when I understand it in this way?”
Well, but on the other hand isn’t the meaning of the word also determined by this use? And can’t these ways of determining meaning conflict? Can what we grasp in a flash accord with a use, fit or fail to fit it? And how can what is present to us in an instant, what comes before our mind in an instant, fit a use?” (PI 139).
[^319] PI [^195]:
[^320] Wittgenstein (1984).
[^321] Thus Cavell (1989) has read Wittgenstein as a “philosopher of culture” in that he gives, in the Investigations, something like a critical “portrait of a complete sophisticated culture” (p. 74). Cf. also the instructive analysis given by Pitkin (1974) of some of the implications of Wittgenstein’s thought for questions of justice, power, and the nature of action.
[^322] E.g. Carnap (1928); see next chapter.
[^323] Recently, some commentators have begun to explore the possibility of reading Wittgenstein in a way that shows the relevance of his commentary to Marxist critique. Andrews (2002), for instance, argues that Marx’s description of the origin of value in Capital can be read, in Wittgensteinian terms, as a critical description of the “language-game” of value in bourgeois society. Along similar lines, Rossi-Lundi (2002) suggests that the forms of philosophical language that Wittgenstein criticizes as “language on a holiday” can be read, within a Marxist critical register, as “alienated” forms of linguistic praxis. Pleasants (1999) argues on Wittgensteinian grounds against the very idea of a “critical social theory.” As Pleasants argues, Wittgenstein in fact submits the idea of a theory of social practice to devastating critique. This significantly problematizes the kind of use that contemporary critical theorists, for instance Habermas (1981), have sought to make of what they take to be Wittgenstein’s theory of language. But it leaves open the possibility of an entirely critical, practical, and non-theoretical application of reflection on language to contemporary political and social problems, a prospect that is much more reminiscent of the work of Adorno, Horkheimer, and other members of the early Frankfurt School.
[^324] See also Horkheimer and Adorno (1944).
[^325] Robert Pippin (2005, chapter 5) has recently criticized the position of Adorno’s Negative Dialectics on the basis that Adorno’s notion of “identity thinking” is too broad to serve as a useful term for the critique of prevelant social practices and norms and that Adorno’s critique of Kant accordingly misunderstands the specificity of Kant’s notion of practical reason. One of Pippin’s complaints is that the recommendation to avoid “identity thinking” can only amount to a recommendation to remember the essential “inadequacy” of general concepts to the particulars that fall under them (Pippin 2005, p. 105). If I am right, however, reading Wittgenstein’s critique of rule-following as also involving a critique of what Adorno calls ‘identity thinking’ might indeed give us grounds for questioning what is involved in “applying concepts” in ordinary cases that do not simply amount to this kind of supplementation to (what is supposed to be) the ordinary operation of subsuming particulars under concepts.
[^326] Cavell (1979, p. 175) gives an apt description of the form of this self-critique: “If philosophy is the criticism a culture produces of itself, and proceeds essentially by criticizing past efforts at this criticism, then Wittgenstein’s originality lies in having developed modes of criticism that are not moralistic, that is, that do not leave the critic imagining himself free of the faults he sees around him, and which proceed not by trying to argue a given statement false or wrong, but by showing that the person making an assertion does not really know what he means, has not really said what he wished.”
[^327] Pippin (2005), chapter 3, has recently given a helpful account of Heidegger’s description of the structure of Dasein in Being and Time, as well, as determined by the possibility of a withdrawal or failure of “meaning.”
[^328] E.g., section 34: “Discourse is existentially equiprimordial with attunement and understanding.” (Heidegger 1927, p. 161)
[^329] Heidegger 1927, section 34, p. [^166]: I modify the Stambaugh translation in a couple of places to bring out the sense of the original more clearly.
[^330] “Recognizing the ontologically insufficient interpretation of the logos at the same time sharpens our insight into the lack of primordiality of the methodical basis on which ancient ontology developed. The logos is experienced as something objectively present and interpreted as such, and the beings which it points out have the meaning of objective presence as well. This meaning of being itself is left undifferentiated and unconstrasted with other possibilities of being so that being in the sense of a formal being-something is at the same time fused with it and we are unable to obtain a clear-cut division between these two realms.” (Heidegger 1927, p. 160).
[^331] “Presence” is meant here in both a temporal and a non-temporal sense.
[^332] Heidegger 1938a, p. [^3]:
[^333] I follow the practice of the English-language translators in translating “Seyn” as “Be-ing”
[^334] “This saying does not describe or explain, does not proclaim or teach. This saying does not stand over against what is said. Rather, the saying itself is the ‘to be said,’ as the essential swaying of be-ing.” (Heidegger 1938a, p. 4);
[^335] Heidegger 1938a, p. [^26]:
[^336] This point about language’s failure remains constant throughout Heidegger’s treatments of language and its being. Consider, e.g., his statement of it in “The Nature of Language” in 1957: “There is some evidence that the essential nature of language flatly refuses to express itself in words – in the language, that is, in which we make statements about language. If language everywhere withholds its nature in this sense, then such withholding is in the very nature of language.” (Heidegger 1957a, p. 81).
[^337] Thus, in section 34 of Being and Time, keeping silent [Schweigen] and hearing are described as possibilities of discourse [Rede], which is itself equiprimordial with “state-of-mind” and “understanding” as constituents of the existential structure of “Being-in” as such. There is no suggestion that the possibility of “keeping silent” has any essential privilege over other existential structures of discourse; nor, indeed, that discourse itself has any privilege over the other structures essential for Being-in. Even in these descriptions, however, what is disclosed in reticence is not connected in any significant way to a general failure of language; nor is it explained as indicating anything decisive about the general character of language itself. Instead, the emphasis throughout Being and Time remains on the way that the possibility of an individual’s reticence implies also that she “has something to say”, and so defines herself as someone “with” a conscience. Insofar as an individual Da-sein can practice “reticence” in this sense, she “takes the words away” from the fallenness of “idle talk.”
[^338] See, especially, “The Nature of Language,” (Heidegger 1957a) and for an exceptionally clear reading of the implications of “words failing one” in this lecture, see Bernasconi (1985), especially chapter [^4]: Cf., also, Heidegger (1929).
[^339] As Heidegger uses it, the term die Seienden can be translated “beings” or “entities.” Entities are whatever has any kind of existence: things and objects, but also properties, acts, and events.
[^340] In colloquial German, “Machenschaft” refers, like the English word “machination,” to calculating and technical ways of making and doing; but we should also keep in mind the etymological connection between “Machenschaft” and “Macht” or power, as well as the corresponding resonances of Heidegger’s critique of machination with his critical consideration of Nietzsche’s “will to power” [Wille zur Macht].
[^341] Heidegger 1938a, section [^50]:
[^342] But the second beginning is by no means just like the first beginning in its fundamental character and attitude. Whereas the first beginning was “attuned” towards wonder and the questioning contemplation of beings, the second beginning is attuned toward “foreboding” and opens the question of the truth of be-ing itself. (Heidegger 1938a, section 6).
[^343] The character of machination is thus deeply ambiguous; machination comes to the fore as an aspect of the absence and withdrawal of being, but nevertheless does so as an expression or aspect of being itself, and therefore harbors within itself the possibility of giving us a new understanding of it. This notion of the twofold or ambiguous nature of technology is a familiar theme of Heidegger’s later writings about technology. See, e.g., “The Question Concerning Technology,” (Heidegger 1953).
[^344] Heidegger 1938a, section [^58]:
[^345] See, e.g., Dilthey (1931).
[^346] Heidegger (1927), p. [^44]:
[^347] For an interesting analysis of the influence of Lebensphilosophie in phenomenology and in relation to Wittgenstein’s thought, see Gier (1981), especially chapter [^3]:
[^348] Heidegger 1938a , section [^66]:
[^349] Heidegger 1938a, section 63
[^350] Heidegger (1953).
[^351] Heidegger (1938b), pp. 153-55
[^352] Heidegger (1938b), p. [^155]:
[^353] “There was a time when it was not technology alone that bore the name techne. Once the revealing that brings forth truth into the splendour of radiant appearance was also called techne.
There was a time when the bringing-forth of the true into the beautiful was called techne. The poiesis of the fine arts was also called techne.” (Heidegger 1953,p. 339).
[^354] Heidegger (1938b) p. [^155]:
[^355] Heidegger (1938b) p. [^155]:
[^356] Heidegger 1938a , section [^61]:
[^357] Heidegger 1952, p. [^244]:
[^358] Heidegger 1952, p. [^241]:
[^359] Heidegger 1957b, p. [^25]:
[^360] Compare also the largely parallel discussion in Heidegger (1954), pp. 81-[^83]:
[^361] Heidegger 1957b, pp. 25-[^26]:
[^362] Wittgenstein 1930, p. [^7]:
[^363] Carnap 1928, pp. xvi-xvii. I owe this juxtaposition of the Carnap and Wittgenstein quotations, as well as the suggestion that Wittgenstein may have had Carnap in mind, to von Wright (1993), pp. 208-[^09]: For more on the deep linkages between the attitude expressed by Carnap and contemporary versions of utopian and progressivist thought, including the architectural modernism of the Bauhaus architects, see Galison (1996).
[^364] Carnap 1928, p. [^29]:
[^365] Of course, Carnap’s underlying motivation is not to portray a picture of subjectivity but rather to eliminate it from the structural description of the ‘objective’ world; it is for this reason that the description of objective statements as grounded structurally in basic experiential units or “erlebs” will itself soon drop out of Carnap’s picture. Following the suggestions of recent scholarship (e.g. Friedman (2000)) we might think of the projects of Carnap and Heidegger as – particularly with respect to their shared animadversity to metaphysics – strikingly convergent in their underlying critical motivations but strikingly (and decisively) divergent in the ways they sought to carry them out.
[^366] PI [^23]:
[^367] The connection is evident in the only known remark by Wittgenstein about Heidegger, from December 30, 1929, which begins:
I can readily think what Heidegger means by Being and Dread [Angst]. Man has the impulse to run up against the limits of language. Think, for example, of the astonishment that anything exists. This astonishment cannot be expressed in the form of a question, and there is also no answer to it. Everything which we feel like saying can, a priori, only be nonsense. Nevertheless, we do run up against the limits of language. This running-up against Kierkegaard also recognized and even designated it in a quite similar way (as running-up against Paradox)”
(McGuinness 1967). The remark is translated in Murray (1978); an earlier translation appeared, without the title “Zu Heidegger” and the first and last sentences, at the end of Wittgenstein (1933c); see also Murray (1974).
[^368] TLP [^5]:6, 6.45.
[^369] TLP [^6]:522.
[^370] TLP 7
[^371] Compare Heidegger (1957a): “There is some evidence that the essential nature of language flatly refuses to express itself in words – in the language, that is, in which we make statements about language. If language everywhere withholds its nature in this sense, then such withholding is in the very nature of language.” (p. 81).
[^372] Cf. also PI 34, where an interlocutor is presented as holding that “I always do the same thing when I attend to a shape: my eye follows the outline and I feel…”
[^373] In a footnote to his now-classic discussion of Wittgenstein’s rule-following paradox (Kripke 1982), pp. 18-19 discusses the question of whether the paradox might be construed as an attack on some notion of “absolute” identity and thereby resolved by some concept of identity as “relative,” for instance that described by Geach (1980). As he says, this resolution cannot work, since no standard of identity, even a ‘relative’ one, suffices by itself to establish that my way of following a rule can indeed always be seen as grounded in its repetition.
[^374] PI. [^218]:
[^375] PI. [^201]:
[^376] Wittgenstein has sometimes been taken to be criticizing the language of metaphysics by supposing it possible to return to a more innocent “ordinary language’ in which metaphysical confusions “cannot arise.” Such an impression of Wittgenstein’s sense of the origination of philosophical problems is, as we have seen repeatedly, quite superficial. The temptations to error and confusion that reach their fullest expression in the projects of philosophers are, for Wittgenstein, already present in the ordinary forms of language themselves and in our standing tendencies to mistake them.
[^377] Some recent discussions that connect Heidegger with Wittgenstein are: Apel (1998), chapter 6, Rorty (1993), and Guignon (1990).
[^378] Versions of the “social pragmatist” interpretation of Heidegger are given by Haugeland (1982), Brandom (1983), and Rorty (1993). The further development of this interpretation has also been influenced by Dreyfus’ (1990) analysis of the first division of Being and Time.
[^379] Some prominent examples of projects that make this appeal, in one way or another, include: Brandom (1994), Rorty (1979), Kripke (1984), and Davidson (2001).
[^380] These historical readings are spelled out, in more detail, in Brandom (2002).
[^381] Brandom (1994), p. [^20]:
[^382] Brandom,(1994) [^11]:
[^383] Brandom (1994), [^32]:
[^384] For another representative example of this kind of appeal, see, e.g., Robert Pippin’s (2005) description of the significance of norms in the course of his recent attempt to rehabilitate a Hegelian conception of freedom and subjectivity: “Genuinely leading a life is rightly taken to involve the problem of freedom, and in the Kantian/Hegelian tradition I am interested in, freedom means being able somehow to own up to, justify, and stand behind one’s deeds (reclaim them as my own), and that involves (so it is argued) understanding what it is to be responsive to norms, reasons..” (p. 11).
[^385] Brandom (1994) 19-[^20]:
[^386] Brandom, (1994), p. [^20]:
[^387] Brandom, (1994), p. [^20]:
[^388] In the Tractatus, at [^4]:002, Wittgenstein does speak of “tacit conventions” underlying the use of everyday language; but the claim that language-use depends on conventions in this sense is, as I have argued, a direct target of the later Wittgenstein’s criticism of his earlier position. Compare, also, the somewhat fuller discussion of Ramsey’s remark in the Big Typescript (Wittgenstein 1933b), pp. 198ff.
[^389] Cf. PI 60-63, where Wittgenstein critically discusses the prospects for an analysis of orders, and PI [^133]:
[^390] Brandom (1994), p. [^34]:
[^391] Brandom (1994), p. [^36]:
[^392] Brandom, (1994), p. [^39]:
[^393] “The challenge is to show how these two approaches (normative pragmatics modeled on deontic scorekeeping and inferential semantics) can be combined into a single story about social practices of treating speech acts as having the significance of assertions … Describing practices sufficient to institute such a significance is the way to fill in the notion of assertional commitment. Such an account provides an answer to the question, What is it that we are doing when we assert, claim, or declare something? The general answer is that we are undertaking a certain kind of commitment. Saying specifically what kind is explaining what structure must be exhibited by the practices a community is interpreted as engaging in for that interpretation to be recognizable as taking the practitioners to be keeping score for themselves and each other in virtue of the alterations of their practical deontic attitudes of attributing and undertaking assertional commitments and their corresponding entitlements.” (Brandom 1994, p. 167).
[^394] P. [^134]: Brandom follows Sellars in speaking of these “inferential norms,” in an extended sense, as determining the complex “roles” that “expressions…play in the behavioral economy of those to whom they are attributed.” (Brandom, 1994, p. 134).
[^395] Some support for the latter interpretation is apparently given by PI 25, 415, and perhaps 206; but for a different and much more subtle view of what might be meant by Wittgenstein’s “naturalism”, see Cavell (1979), chapter [^5]:
[^396] The word that Anscombe translates as “abolish” can also mean “sublate.”
[^397] For these doubts, see PI 126-[^132]:
[^398] PI 224-[^225]:
[^399] PI [^228]: Thus it cannot be the point of Wittgenstein’s discussion to (as Habermas (1981, pp. 17-18) suggests) provide grounds for “securing” the “identity of rules” and so for practices of “reciprocal criticism and mutual instruction.”
[^400] Cf. PI 211: “How can he know he is to continue a pattern by himself – whatever instructions you give him? -- Well, how do I know? – If that means “Have I reasons?” the answer is: my reasons will soon give out. And then I shall act, without reasons.”
[^401] PI 201
[^402] PI 221
[^403] PI 84, [^288]:
[^404] Another reason Brandom seems to miss the force of Wittgenstein’s paradox, indeed, is that he spends so much effort arguing against such conceptions of “norms” as autonomous that he misses Wittgenstein’s more basic challenge to the explanatory utility of the notions of “norms” and “facts” themselves.
[^405] PI [^81]:
[^406] See, e.g.Brandom (1994), p. 34, p. [^63]:
[^407] Brandom appears to concur with this when he follows Samuel Pufendorf in treating the institution of normative statuses as depending on the operation of authority, which is itself conceived as depending on the power of “obligating,” what Pufendorf calls “sovereignty.” Brandom seeks to discharge this suggestion of the authoritative basis of normative statuses by holding, along with Kant, that “our own acknowledgment or endorsement of a rule is the source of its authority over us…” (Brandom 1994, p. 51). What goes missing is an analysis is a description of the constitution of this “us,” the ways its practices are defined and derived, and the possibility of the kind of failure of acknowledgment that I’ve discussed above.
[^408] In a recent text, Cavell reacts explicitly against Kripke’s interpretation of Wittgenstein’s rule-following paradox as requiring a “skeptical solution” in terms of the formulation of socially inculcated standards for various kinds of conventional language use. His criticism of Kripke’s communitarian solution also, if I am not mistaken, bears against Brandom’s picture of socially inculcated “implicit” norms: “But in taking Wittgenstein’s discovery to constitute for itself a skepticism about meaning, taken as the thesis that there is no fact which constitutes our meaning one thing rather than another, to which Wittgenstein then provides a solution in the form of a systematic demand for conformity to supposedly transparent interventions of the speech of others, Kripke at once accepts skepticism’s self-understanding as presenting a thesis, and attributes to the Investigations a picture of education, call it education as, let’s say, monitoring, both of which I find antithetical to Wittgenstein’s teaching in that text. Wittgenstein early speaks of training (for example, in S. 5); it is strict, but it is limited. At some point, demonstration and monitoring come to an end, and the other goes on alone, and within bounds of mutuality, or not.” (Cavell 2005, p. 138) Compare also the deconstructive treatment of some of these issues of force, authority, and violence in Derrida (1992).
[^409] In this paragraph and the next one, I am heavily indebted to Mulhall (2003).
[^410] Cavell (1969); Cavell (1979).
[^411] Cavell (1979), p. [^185]:
[^412] Cavell (1969), p. [^52]:
[^413] Cavell (1969), 49-50; compare the sentence from Brandom quoted above: “Applying a rule in particular circumstances is itself essentially something that can be done correctly or incorrectly.”
[^414] Again, the reason for this is not that at some point norms must cede to “facts” purged of normativity or normative implications. It is, rather, that there is in an important sense no “all the way down,” – that is, nothing requires that it must even be so much as possible for the theoretician to describe all of what is involved in our “game of giving and asking for reasons,” whether in factual or normative terms. As far as we go with explanation, we may still find grounds for agreement lacking; and here (as I shall argue) what is needed is not further facts or norms, but something of a fundamentally different kind than either.
[^415] “… I should emphasize that, while I regard it as empty to call this idea of mutual attunement ‘merely metaphorical’, I also do not take it to prove or explain anything. On the contrary, it is meant to question whether a philosophical explanation is needed, or wanted, for the fact of agreement in the language human beings use together, an explanation, say, in terms of meanings or conventions or basic terms or propositions which are to provide the foundation of our agreements. For nothing is deeper than the fact, or the extent, of agreement itself.” (Cavell 1979, p. 32).
[^416] “Appealing to criteria is not a way of explaining or proving the fact of our attunement in words (hence in forms of life). It is only another description of the same fact; or rather, it is an appeal we make when the attunement is threatened or lost.” Cavell (1979, p. 34).
[^417] Cavell (1979), [^115]:
[^418] In a helpful recent discussion of Cavell’s uptake of the methods of ordinary language philosophy, Espen Hammer (Hammer 2002, p. 9) makes a similar point with respect to the responsibility of the speaker for her utterances; along similar lines Eldridge (1986) urges that claims of reason are essentially connected to claims of self-knowledge or understanding.
[^419] “If what can be said in a language is not everywhere determined by rules, nor its understanding anywhere secured through universals, and if there are always new contexts to be met, new needs, new relationships, new objects, new perceptions to be recorded and shared, then perhaps it is as true of a master of language as of his apprentice that though ‘in a sense’ we learn the meaning of words and what objects are, the learning is never over, and we keep finding new potencies in words and new ways in which objects are disclosed. The ‘routes of initiation’ are never closed. But who is the authority when all are masters?” (Cavell 1979, p. 180) For Brandom, by contrast, the “institution” of norms is always dependent on the imposition of (positive or negative) sanctions, whether these be understood as reducible to non-normative facts or definable only in terms of other norms. (Brandom 1994, pp. 44-45).
[^420] Cavell 1979, p. [^207]:
[^421] Levinas (1961).
[^422] Levinas (1974).
[^423] Of course, there are alternatives to this reading of the significance of logos in Heidegger’s texts (see chapter 7 above).
[^424] Levinas (1974), pp. 45-[^46]:
[^425] Levinas (1974), p. [^48]:
[^426] Cavell discusses Levinas briefly in his recent (2005), chapter [^6]: One remaining question that Cavell suggests, while nevertheless acknowledging the similarities between his and Levinas’ understanding of the ethical relationship to the other, is about the basis for Levinas’ claim that my responsibility to the other is “infinite” and his position, with respect to mine, necessarily captured in figures of “elevation” and height. (Cavell 2005, p. 205).
[^427] Wittgenstein (1933c), p. [^11]:
[^428] “The aspects of things that are most important for us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity. (One is unable to notice something – because it is always before one’s eyes.) The real foundations of his enquiry do not strike a man at all. Unless that fact has at some time struck him. –And this means: we fail to be struck by what, once seen, is most striking and most powerful. (PI 129). Compare Cavell’s sense, in “Declining Decline,” (Cavell 1989) of the significance of Wittgenstein’s appeal to the ordinary: “Wittgenstein’s insight is that the ordinary has, and alone has, the power to move the ordinary, to leave the human habitat habitable, the same transfigured. The practice of the ordinary may be thought of as the overcoming of iteration or replication or imitation by repetition, of counting by recounting, of calling by recalling. It is the familiar invaded by another familiar. Hence ordinary language procedures, like the procedures of psychoanalysis, inherently partake of the uncanny.” (p. 47)
[^429] Cf. the first sentences of Jacques Derrida’s Of Grammatology, which declares, in a different register, the same paradoxical turn to language: “However the topic is considered, the problem of language has never been simply one problem among others. But never as much as at present has it invaded, as such, the global horizon of the most diverse researches and the most heterogeneous discourses, diverse and heterogeneous in their intention, method, and ideology. . It indicates, as if in spite of itself, that a historico-metaphysical epoch must finally determine as language the totality of its problematic horizon. It must do so not only because all that desire had wished to wrest from the play of language finds itself recaptured within that play but also because, for the same reason, language itself is menaced in its very life, helpless, adrift in the threat of limitlessness, brought back to its own finitude at the very moment when its limits seem to disappear, when it ceases to be self-assured, contained, and guaranteed by the infinite signified which seemed to exceed it.” (Derrida 1967, p. 6).
[^430] A typical statement is given in the preface of Biletzki and Matar (1998): “It seems beyond argument that analytic philosophy has been, for some time now, in a state of crisis – dealing with its self-image, its relationships with philosophical alternatives, its fruitfulness and even legitimacy in the general philosophical community.” (p. xi)
[^431] Some recent versions of the naturalist project that bear on language are, e.g., Millikan (1984), Papineau (1993), Dretske (1997) and Fodor (1992). Several of these projects, in particular, attempt to explain meaning or intentionality in terms of teleological notions drawn from the philosophy of biology. Others attempt to “naturalize” meaning by portraying it as a kind of natural correspondence.
[^432] Of course, if the phrase “adequately explained” is taken as meaning “explained in terms of structures of facts,” then this claim becomes a tautology and is certainly justified (although it no longer determines a research project). To take it this way, however, is to beg two questions that ought to be kept open, since they are in fact open in the history of the analytic tradition: first, what counts as criteria for a “complete,” “total,” or “adequate” causal explanation; and second (and more importantly) whether and to what extent what is wanted from an understanding of language is an “explanation” at all.
[^433] Kripke (1972).
[^434] The suggestion of applying Kripke’s framework to natural-kind terms is developed by Putnam (1975).
[^435] For these developments, , see, e.g., Lewis (1986) and Stalnaker (1976).
[^436] For a recent comprehensive treatment that develops all of these historical and interpretive suggestions, see Soames (2003), volume II.
[^437] “Couldn’t I look at language as a social institution that is subject to certain rules because otherwise it wouldn’t be effective? But here’s the problem: I cannot make this last claim; I cannot give any justification of the rules, not even like this. I can only describe them as a game that people play.” (Wittgenstein 1933b, p. 145).
[^438] Cf. PI 23: “But how many kinds of sentence are there? Say assertion, question, and command?—There are countless kinds: countless different kinds of use of what we call ‘symbols’, ‘words’, ‘sentences’.”
[^439] In a far-ranging recent text (Hanna and Harrison 2004), Patricia Hanna and Bernard Harrison undertake to solve what they take to be a central debate between realism and conventionalism about linguistic categories and reference. They do so by means of a “two-stage” theory of language, whereby objective linguistic reference is accomplished only in the context of conventionally designed and maintained “practices.” Though they formulate many interesting points and touch on issues of importance, the account is ultimately vitiated – like the accounts of Brandom and Kripke we have examined above – by their unargued reliance on the assumption that reference to what we can see as the purposes of “practices” suffices, by itself, to provide an answer to the question of how any symbol gains sense. (Consider, for instance, their endorsement of the practice-based “solution” to Kripke’s rule-following paradox that they derive from Goddard (1961) (Hanna and Harrison 2004), p. [^185]:
[^440] Cf PI 363: “I should like to say: you regard it much too much as a matter of course that one can tell anything to anyone. That is to say: we are so much accustomed to communication through language, in conversation, that it looks to us as if the whole point of communication lay in this: someone else grasps the sense of my words – which is something mental: he as it were takes it into his own mind. If he then does something further with it as well, that is no part of the immediate purpose of language.”) In the Big Typescript, he makes the critique of ‘communication’ even more explicit: “If it were said: ‘Language is everything one can use to communicate with’, then it needs to be asked: What does ‘communicating’ consist in?’ (Wittgenstein 1933b, p. 146) The remark comes in a section of the Typescript entitled “Language in Our Sense not Defined as an Instrument for a Particular Purpose. Grammar is not a Mechanism Justified by its Purpose.”
[^441] Austin (1940), p. [^56]:
[^442] Austin (1940), pp. 57-[^58]: I owe some of the ideas in the paragraphs to follow to Alan Nelson.
[^443] Austin (1940), P. 61
[^444] Austin (1940), P. 62
[^445] Cf. Ryle (1953): ” Later on, when philosophers were in revolt against psychologism in logic, there was a vogue for another idiom, the idiom of talking about the meanings of expressions … They construed the verb 'to mean' as standing for a relation between an expression and some other entity. The meaning of an expression was taken to be an entity which had that expression for its name. So studying the meaning of the phrase 'the solar system' was supposed or half-supposed to be the same thing as studying the solar system. It was partly in reaction against this erroneous view that philosophers came to prefer the idiom "the use of the expressions ‘ . caused . ‘ and ‘ . the solar system' ". … Learning how to manage a canoe-paddle, a traveller's cheque or a postage-stamp, is not being introduced to an extra entity. Nor is learning how to manage the words 'if', 'ought' and 'limit'.” (pp. 172-173). (Compare, also Quine’s (1969b) criticism of what he calls a “museum myth” of substantial meanings and the “externalist” argument of Putnam (1975).
[^446] Compare Cavell’s (1979) reading of the same tendency to criticize ‘the objectification of meaning:’ “ ‘The meaning is the use’ calls attention to the fact that what an expression means is a function of what it is used to mean or to say on specific occasions by human beings. That such an obvious fact should assume the importance it does is itself surprising. And to trace the intellectual history of philosophy’s concentration on the meaning of particular words and sentences, in isolation from a systematic attention to their concrete uses would be a worthwhile undertaking. It is a concentration one of whose consequences is the traditional search for the meaning of a word in various realms of objects, another of which is the idea of a perfect understanding as being achievable only through the construction of a perfect language. A fitting title for this history would be: Philosophy and the Rejection of the Human.” (pp. 206-207).
[^447] Hampshire’s reaction to Ryle.
[^448] Davidson (1973b).
[^449] Davidson (1965); Davidson (1970); Davidson (1973).
[^450] Davidson (1973b); Davidson (1974a).
[^451] Davidson (1974b)
[^452] Davidson 1986, p. [^446]:
[^453] Rorty (1986, p. 353) reads Davidson’s moral as allowing a dissolution of the temptation to impose tertia between “us” and “the world” which, according to Rorty “created the old metaphysical issues in the first place.” This conclusion is continuous with Rorty’s endorsement, in a series of articles of what he takes to be the anti-representationalist moral of Davidson’s repudiation of conceptual schemes. But as we have seen, a different, more critically sensitive way of taking Davidson’s point could allow for the best results methods of the analytic tradition to be seen as critically continuous with the metaphysics they (partially) repudiate in their ability to interpret this temptation itself.
[^454] McDowell (1994), p. xvi.
[^455] McDowell (1994), p. 9ff.
[^456] This conception of “world” itself has its roots in Heidegger’s (1927) description of “being-in-the-world”.
[^457] McDowell 1994, pp. 124-[^25]:
[^458] McDowell (1994), p. [^126]:
[^459] McDowell’s text, like many of the twentieth-century texts that formulate structuralism, thus enlists what is envisioned as our access to the rational structure of language in part to help consolidate a distinction between human beings and those animals that are conceived as, definitively, innocent of it. The gesture is the same as the philosophically conservative one that identifies human nature with rationality in order to draw an enforce a distinction between humans and animals and is coeval with the ancient definition of the human being as the zoon logon echon, the “animal having language” or “animale rationale”; for some critical thoughts, see Derrida (1987) and Agamben (2002).
[^460] McDowell (1994), pp. 34-35
[^461] Cf. the moral of Rorty (1975).
[^462] The point seems to affect some versions of the “resolute interpretation” of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus (cf. chapters 1, 3 and 6 above). For it is indeed incoherent to (even so much as) suppose there could be a perspective “outside language” from which we could view it as a whole, then it cannot be the point of Wittgenstein’s practice to (even so much as) repudiate the claim that there is such a perspective. For a version of this point, see Hacker (2000).
[^463] Cavell 1979, p. [^239]:
[^464] In a far-ranging recent work, Ranier Schürmann (1996) has described the history of Western thought and action in terms of the successive dominance of a series of guiding images or idealities, imaginatively grounded structures of pre-determination that he calls “hegemonic phantasms” and that act to interpret the basic meaning of being at any particular time. Equally conversant with Wittgenstein and Heidegger, Schürmann reads the origin of these organizing phantasms as deeply linguistic: “The gap between the being a word presumes and the ordinary use it serves never closes up, and thoroughly preserving this gap is a never-ending task. Witness the ceaseless struggle in the Philosophical Investigations against the in-itself or essence, against everything that may be grasped from within. His is a battle without end as was Kant’s dispersing of transcendental illusions. The drive of idioms that speak to us as if they made us grasp things from within them – as if we were grasping them within ourselves – is a thoroughgoing drive. … There is an evil lodged in everyday speech, manifesting itself in the dispersion of singular cases from which rises the megalomania of saying what is …” (Schürmann 1996, p. 33)
[^465] “Grammatical rules, as they currently exist, are rules for the use of words. Even if we transgress them we can still use words meaningfully. Then what do they exist for? To make language-use as a whole uniform? (Say for aesthetic reasons?) To make possible the use of language as a social institution? And thus – like a set of traffic rules – to prevent a collision? (But what concern is it of ours if that happens?) The collision that mustn’t come about must be the collision that can’t come about! That is to say, without grammar it isn’t a bad language, but no language.” (Wittgenstein 1933b, p. 147).
[^466] In this paragraph I am indebted to the reflective analysis of Giorgio Agamben (1993). In “Form-of-Life” he hyphenates the Wittgensteinian phrase to interpret it as alluding to the possibility of a futural life that can no longer be separated from its form (and so cannot any longer be captured or controlled by the in-forming projects of metaphysics). He describes its significance this way: “By the term form-of-life, on the other hand, I mean a life that can never be separated from its form, a life in which it is never possible to isolate something such as naked life. A life that cannot be separated from its form is a life for which what is at stake in its way of living is living itself. What does this formulation mean? It defines a life – human life – in which the single ways, acts, and processes of living are never simply facts but always and above all possibilities of life, always and above all power. Each behavior and each form of human living is never prescribed by a specific biological vocation, nor is it assigned by whatever necessity; instead, no matter how customary, repeated, and socially compulsory, it always retains the character of a possibility; that is, it always puts at stake living itself.” (unnumbered pages). For more on the significance of the vision of language for this vision of life, see also Agamben (1984).
[^467] Wittgenstein (1933b), p. [^210]:
[^468] Compare, also, Plato’s Cratylus 400b-d:
“Hermogenes: What are we going to say about the next one?
Socrates: Are you referring to the name ‘body’?
Hermogenes: Yes.
Socrates: There’s a lot to say, it seems to me – and if one distorted the name a little, there would be even more. Thus some people say that the body (soma) is the tomb (sema) of the soul, on the grounds that it is entombed in its present life, while others say that it is correctly called ‘a sign’ (‘sema’) because the soul signifies whatever it wants to signify by means of the body…”
[^469] The picture is the same as the one that produces the metaphysical conception of a rule: “You say that pointing to a red object is the primary sign for ‘red’. But pointing to a red object is nothing more than a particular motion of the hand towards a red object, and is no sign at all except within a system. If you say you mean: pointing to a red object understood as a sign – then I say: The understanding that is our concern is not a process that accompanies the pointing (say, a process in the brain), and if you do mean such a process after all, then it too is not inherently a sign. Again and again the idea here is that meaning, interpretation, is a process that accompanies the pointing and provides it with a soul, as it were (without which it would be dead).
Here it seems as if the sign were a summary of all of grammar – that the latter is contained in it like a string of pearls in a box and that all we have to do is pull it out. (But it is precisely this picture that leads us astray.) As if understanding were an instantaneous grasping of something, and all one had to do was then to draw out its consequences; so that these consequences already existed in an ideal sense before they were drawn.” (Wittgenstein 1933b, pp. 126-27). Compare, also, PI 36: “Where our language suggests a body and there is none: there, we should like to say, is a spirit.”
[^470] Elsewhere, Wittgenstein puts the point this way:
I don’t think that logic can talk about sentences in any other sense than we ordinarily do when we say “Here’s a sentence that’s been written down” or “No, that only looks like a sentence but isn’t one”, etc. etc. (Wittgenstein 1933b, p. 57) Compare PI 108: “The philosophy of logic speaks of sentences and words in exactly the sense in which we speak of them in ordinary life when we say e.g. ‘Here is a Chinese sentence’, or ‘No, that only looks like writing; it is actually just an ornament’ and so on.
We are talking about the spatial and temporal phenomenon of language, not about some non-spatial, non-temporal chimera [Note in margin: Only it is possible to be interested in a phenomenon in a variety of ways].”
[^471] “The difference between signified and signifier belongs in a profound and implicit way to the totality of the great epoch covered by the history of metaphysics, and in a more explicit and more systematically articulated way to the narrower epoch of Christian creationism and infinitism when these appropriate the resources of Greek conceptuality. This appurtenance is essential and irreducible; one cannot retain the convenience of the ‘scientific truth’ of the Stoic and later medieval opposition between signans and signatum without also bringing with it all its metphysico-theological roots. To these roots adheres not only the distinction between the sensible and the intelligible – already a great deal – with all that it controls, namely metaphysics in its totality. And this distinction is generally accepted as self-evident by the most careful linguists and semiologists, even by those who believe that the scientificity of their work begins where metaphysics ends.” (Derrida (1967), p. 13).
[^472] Heidegger 1959, pp. 400-401
[^473] Heidegger quotes Wilhelm von Humboldt’s (1836) On the Diversity of the Structure of Human Language and Its Influence on the Intellectual Development of Mankind: “Even its preservation through writing is always a merely incomplete preservation, a kind of mummification, which is necessary if we are to try to render once again the delivery of the living word. Language itself is not a work, but an activity. Its true definition can thus only be a genetic one. For language is the eternally self-repeating labor of spirit to make articulated sound capable of being expression of thought. Taken strictly and directly, this is the definition of every instance of speaking; but in the true and essential sense, one can also regard the totality of such speech only as an approximation to language.” (Heidegger 1959, p. 403).
[^474] Heidegger (1938a), pp. 353-[^54]:
[^475] In Heidegger’s own texts after the 1930s, constant reminders of the ongoing prevalence of the categories of metaphysics and the difficulties of simply escaping them are delicately balanced with attempts, like that in the quotation above, to portray the unity of sound and sense in language in non-metaphysical terms. See, e.g., Heidegger (1957a), pp. 98-99:
“And let no one suppose that we mean to belittle vocal sounds as physical phenomena, the merely sensuous side of language, in favor of what is called the meaning and sense-content of what was said and is esteemed as being of the spirit, the spirit of language. It is much more important to consider whether, in any of the ways of looking at the structure of language we have mentioned, the physical element of language, its vocal and written character, is being adequately experienced; whether it is sufficient to associate sound exclusively with the body understood in physiological terms, and to place it within the metaphsysically conceived confines of the sensuous…”
[^476] Cf. Wittgenstein: “ “Language” and ‘living being’. The concept of a living being is as indeterminate as the concept of language.” (Wittgenstein 1933b, p. 146).
[^477] Saussure (1913) first formulated the notorious thesis of the “arbitrariness” of the signifier/signified relation; see also Derrida’s critical discussion in Derrida (1967), chapter [^1]:
[^478] We may therefore take the late Wittgenstein’s critique of rule-following to involve, to a first approximation, what Diamond (1991) calls the “realistic spirit” in contrast to the spirit of metaphysics: “…I understand by metaphysics the laying down of metaphysical requirements, whether in the form of views about what there is … or in the rather different form exhibited by the Tractatus and also (as I believe) in Frege’s work … Wittgenstein’s kind of response … is that of the realistic spirit. The criticism of the metaphysical demand by Wittgenstein is never that what is demanded is not there, that there are no facts of the kind which is necessary if the demand is to be met. Our needs are met, but how they are met we can see only by what Wittgenstein calls the ‘rotation of the axis of reference of our examination about the fixed point of our real need’ (PI 1, section 108).” (Diamond 1991, p. 20). But only to a first approximation. For if – as I have argued -- the sources of metaphysical ‘requirements’ are as pervasive as language itself, and if their satisfactions are therefore no more to be found on the level of the ordinary practice that invokes them incessantly than on the level of the philosophical discourses that theorize them explicitly, how shall we know, and how, guarantee what Diamond assumes, that we can indeed see them to be satisfied by the circumstances of an ordinary life that we can know as such?
[^479] “In order to exceed metaphysics it is necessary that a trace be inscribed within the text of metaphysics, a trace that continues to signal not in the direction of another presence, or another form of presence, but in the direction of an entirely other text. Such a trace cannot be thought more metaphysico. No philosopheme is prepared to master it. And it (is) that which must elude mastery. Only presence is mastered.
The mode of inscription of such a trace in the text of metaphysics is so unthinkable that it must be described as an erasure of the trace itself. The trace is produced as its own erasure. And it belongs to the trace to erase itself, to elude that which might maintain it in presence. The trace is neither perceptible nor imperceptible …
But at the same time, the erasure of the trace must have been traced in the metaphysical text. Presence, then, far from being, as is commonly thought, what the sign signifies, what a trace refers to, presence, then, is the trace of the trace, the trace of the erasure of the trace. Such is, for us, the text of metaphysics, and such is, for us, the language which we speak.” (Derrida 1968, pp. 65-66).
[^480] Wittgenstein 1933c, p. [^6]:
[^481] Wittgenstein 1933c, p. [^6]:
[^482] Wittgenstein 1933c, p. [^7]: Wittgenstein’s claim here does not rest on some (possibly tendentious) attempt to distinguish “facts” from “norms” or purge language of an inherently “normative” vocabulary. For even a “normative” proposition remains a proposition; it stands in relationships of justification and inference to other propositions and cannot express the claims of absolute value in which Wittgenstein is interested.
[^483] Wittgenstein 1933c, p. [^7]:
[^484] Wittgenstein’s scattered references to the problem of the existence of the world bears comparison to phenomenological analyses of the nature of the “world,” including Husserl’s notion of the “life-world.” For an interesting discussion, see Gier (1983), chapter [^6]:
[^485] Wittgenstein 1933c, p. [^10]:
[^486] Wittgenstein 1933c, pp. 11-[^12]:
[^487] TLP [^6]:45.
[^488] “That there is language is as certain as it is incomprehensible, and this incomprehensibility and certainty constitute faith and revelation.” (Agamben 1984, p. 42). Compare Wittgenstein (1933b): “Again and again there is the attempt to delimit and to display the world in language – but that doesn’t work. The self-evidence of the world is expressed in the very fact that language signifies only it, and can only signify it.” (p. 315).
[^489] Cf. Derrida’s response, in a 2001 conference, to the question whether ordinary language “constantly invites its own misunderstanding”: “I don’t know if I am answering your question, but if I never use the concept of ordinary language in my name – I just quote it or borrow it – it is because I do not see a radical and necessary opposition (and I am not against oppositions and distinctions as such) between the ordinary and the extraordinary. This does not mean that, for me, all language is ‘simply’ ordinary. While I think there is nothing else but ordinary language, I also think that there are miracles, that what I said about the impossible implies the constant call for the extraordinary. Take, for example, trusting someone, believing, someone. This is part of the most ordinary experience of language. When I speak to someone and say ‘Believe me’, that is part of everyday language. And yet in this ‘Believe me’ there is a call for the most extraordinary. To trust someone, to believe, is an act of faith which is totally heterogenous to proof, totally heterogenous to perception. It is the emergence, the appearance in language, of something which resists anything simply ordinary. So, while I am not against distinctions, I cannot rely on the concept of ‘ordinary language.’” Glenndining (2001), pp. 119-[^120]:
[^490] Agamben 1984, p. [^45]: