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Pragmatism

"The Importance of Herder"
from Philosophical Arguments (1995) by Charles Taylor (79-99)

80:  . . . 'designative' approach to the question of meaning.  Words get their meaning from being used to designate objects.  What they designate is their meaning.  This ancient view gets a new lease on life in the 17th century with the theories of Hobbes & Locke.

Herder . . . zeroes in on this story & declares it utterly inadequate.  As an account of origins, it presupposes just what we want explained.  It takes the relation of signifying for granted, as something that the children [those learning a language for the first time] already grasp instinctively . . . .

81:  The problem is that Condillac endows his children from the beginning with the capacity to understand what it means for a word to stand for something, what it means therefore to talk about something with a word.   But that is the mysterious thing.  * * *  But what is this capacity, which we have & animals don't, to endow sounds with meaning, to grasp them as referring to, & used to talk about, things?

82:  To understand Herder's objection to Condillac, we have to take the inner standpoint, that of the agent: we can't accept an account of how a creature possesses language exclusively in terms of the correlations an observer might [make, because that simply removes the mystery one step, into the subjectivity of the observer].

We can focus on understanding & still take it as something obvious, unproblematical.  * * *  That words can stand for things is taken as something immediately comprehensible [cf. universal, automatic].  * * *   What Herder did was to make us appreciate that this understanding doesn't go without saying . . . that acquiring this kind of understanding is precisely the step from not having to having language.  So it is just this step [capacity, process] that a theory of origins would have to explain.

83:  What Condillac's children have to grasp in order to learn a new word is different from what animals grasp when they learn to respond to signals.

84:  To learn to use the signal is to learn to apply it appropriately in the furtherance of some non-linguistically-defined purpose or task.

[Whereas] . . . if we want to think of a task or goal [which must exist in a field or context or process] which would help to clarify the rightness [appropriateness, accuracy] of words . . . it would itself have to defined in terms like truth, descriptive adequacy, richness of evocation, or something of the sort [that is not capable of being rendered into a simple correspondence with a putatively pre-existing "chunk" of reality].

A creature is [only] operating in the linguistic dimension when it can use & respond to signs in terms of their truth, or descriptive rightness, or power to evoke some mood, or recreate a scene, or express some emotion, or carry some nuance of feeling . . . .  To be a linguistic creature is to be sensitive to irreducible issues of rightness.  * * *  Whether a creature is in the linguistic dimension in this sense isn't a matter of what correlations hold between the signals it emits, its behavior, & the surroundings -- the kind of things the proponents of chimp language focus on.  It is a question of subjective understanding of what rightness consists in for it, qua what word is right.

88:  Animals respond to natural & accidental signs (smoke is an accidental sign of fire, clouds portend rain).  Humans also have instituted signs.  The difference lies in the fact that by means of the latter [language] humans can control the flow of their own imagination . . . .

89: [Materialists] assumed this kind of rightness as unproblematically present [as a skill].  People introduced signs to "stand for" or "signify" objects (or ideas of objects), & once instituted these plainly could be rightly or wrongly applied. Their error from a Herderian perspective was that they never got this constitutive feature [skill] into focus [to be recognized].  Such failure is easy, one might almost say natural, because when we speak, & especially when we coin new terms, all this is in the background.

What is being lost from sight here is the background of our action, something we usually lean on without noticing.  More particularly, what the background provides is treated as though it were built into each particular sign, as though we could start right off coining our first word & have this understanding of linguistic rightness already incorporated in it.  Incorporating the background understanding about linguistic rightness into the individual signs has the effect of occluding it very effectively.\

This is a fault in any designative [correspondence] theory of meaning.

90:  . . . Articulating a part of the background, in such a form that our reliance on it in our thought, or perception, or experience, or understanding language, becomes clear & undeniable [pragmatism].  The background so articulated is then shown to be incompatible with crucial features of received doctrine in the epistemological tradition [materialism, AI].  We can find this type of argument in Heidegger, Wittgenstein, & Merleau-Ponty.

[Materialism] Coming through Hume, it held that the original knowledge of reality came in particulates, individual impressions.  At a later stage the bits were connected together, as in beliefs about cause & effect.

91:  Kant goes on to argue that this relation between knowledge [relationships] & object would be impossible if we really were to take the impression [sensation] as utterly isolated [atomic], with no link to others.  To see it as about something is to place it somewhere [in a context], to give it a location in a world that has to be familiar to us in some respects [because we inhabit it].  To succeed in breaking every link between individual impressions would be to fall into incoherence, to lose all sense of anything.

92:  These 2 directions, retrieving the background & situating our thinking, are obviously interwoven [as axioms for pragmatism].

Herder's 1st important insight was to see that expression constitutes the linguistic dimension.  This emerged from his understanding of linguistic thought as situated.  * * *  Language comes about [originates] as a new, reflective stance toward [having experienced] things.  It arises among our earlier stances toward objects of desire or fear, to things figuring as obstacles, supports, & the like [i.e., contexts, processes].  Our stances are literally bodily attitudes or actions on or toward objects [i.e., we are not objective, unaffected observers].  The new stance can't be in its origins entirely unconnected with bodily posture or action [embodied knowledge].  But it can't be an action just like the others [i.e., unconscious], since those are definable outside the linguistic dimension.   It has to be seen rather as an expressive action, one that both actualizes this stance of reflection & also presents it to other in public space.

93:  . . . Holism of meaning.  A word has meaning only within a lexicon & a context of language practices, which are ultimately embedded in a form of life.  * * *  This insight flows from the recognition of the linguistic dimension as Herder formulated it.  Once you articulate this bit of our background understanding, an atomism of meaning becomes as untenable . . . .  To posses a word of human language is to have some sense that it's the right word . . . .

94:  . . . A being who emitted a sound when faced with a given object but was incapable of saying why . . . would have to be deemed to be merely responding to signals [like a parrot, like a computer].

This is what the holism of meaning amounts to: individual words can be words only within the context of an articulated language [a grammar].   Language is not something can be built up one word at a time.

95: . . Getting it right for a signal is merely responding appropriately.  Getting it right for a word requires more, a kind of recognition:   we are in the linguistic dimension.

96:  The aspiration to be in no degree whatever a prisoner of language, so dear to Hobbes & Locke, is unrealizable.
 

Oct. 96
On to Philosphical Arguments: Overcoming Epistemology