In defense of pragmatic contextualism: Wittgenstein and Dewey on meaning and agreement

Philosophical Forum

Volumn 35, Issue 3, 2004, Pages 341-369

  Medina, Jose ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 33646550905     PISSN: 0031806X     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9191.2004.00177.x     Document Type: Article

References (45)

1. L. Lauden, Demystifying Underdetermination, Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science 14 (1990)267-97
2. N. Goodman, Fact, Fiction and Forecast, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1979)
3. W. Quine, Word and Object, (Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 1960)
4. As Thomas Kuhn's arguments (The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2nd ed. (Chicago: U of Chicago P) 1970
5. Objectivity, Value Judgement, and Theory Choice. The Essential Tension: Selected Studies in Scientific Tradition and Scientific Change, ed. Thomas Kuhn (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1977) 320-39.) have emphasized, there are also non-epistemic factors that contribute to narrow down the set of hypotheses that are considered reasonable or plausible in science at any particular time given the socio-historical conditions that affect the development of the discipline in question. It is important to note that the issue of plausibility and rational acceptability goes beyond epistemic warrant
6. Following standard usage, I will refer to Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations (Oxford: Blackwell, 1958a)
7. and to Dewey's Experience and Nature, The Latter Works, 1925-1953, Vol 1: 1925. ed. J. Dewey, (Carbondale: Southern Illinois U of P, 1998) as PI and EN, respectively. All other references are given by year of publication
8. Wittgenstein, Wittgenstein's Lectures on the Foundations of Mathematics, (Chicago and London: U of Chicago P, 1975), 183-84
9. Wittgenstein, Lectures, 205
10. Wittgenstein, Remarks on the foundations of Mathematics, (Oxford: Blackwell, 1978)
11. See Jose Medina, Wittgenstein and Nonsense: Psychologism, Kantianism, and the Habitus, International Journal of Philosophical Studies, (11) 2003a, 293-318
12. and Jose Medina, On being "Other-Minded": Wittgenstein, Davidson, and Logical Aliens, International Philosophical Quarterly (43) 2003b, 463-75
13. Mead, Mind, Self, and Society, (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1934), Of course, this convergence is no accident but the result of the long interaction between Dewey and Mead at the University of Michigan and the University of Chicago
14. Sleeper, The Necessity of Pragmatism. John Dewey's Conception of Philosophy, (Urbana and Chicago: U of Illinois P, 2001) 117
15. Sleeper, The Necessity of Pragmatism, 119
16. I have offered a critique of this interpretation in Jose Medina, The Unity of Wittgenstein's Philosophy, (Albany NY: SUNY Press, 2002) and Medina, Wittgenstein and Nonesense
17. See Diamond, The Realistic Spirit. Wittgenstein, Philosophy, and The Mind, (Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 1988) and The New Wittgenstein, eds. Crary and Read, (London and New York: Routledge 2002)
18. Sleeper, Necessity of Pragmatism, 18; my emphasis
19. Sleeper correctly points out that for Dewey, pace Peirce. "the 'interpretant' of a 'sign' is not just another 'sign' " (2001, p. 138). However, here too I want to take exception to one part of Sleeper's analysis of the contrast between Dewey and Peirce. He contends that "what Dewey is arguing is that we get our semiotic from our semantics, not our semantics from our semiotic" (p. 139). But this is (at best) misleading because the most fundamental level of Dewey's view of language is pragmatics, not semantics. Although Sleeper recognizes that social action is at the core of Dewey's account of language and communication, his realist interpretation gives a conceptual priority to semantics that it should not have
20. There are also unlearned elements that constitute preconditions for the participation in linguistic activities. The very possibility of training requires certain unlearned spontaneous reactions on the part of the trainee, which support the learning process. In this respect, Wittgenstein calls our attention to the "natural reactions" that are prerequisite for the pupil being trainable in the practice (cf. Wittgenstein, The Blue and Brown Books, (Oxford: Blackwell, 1958b), pp. 89-90, p. 93, and p. 105). In a similar vein, in the passage quoted above, Dewey talks about innate reactions to the movement of the pointing gesture as the requisite starting-point of the learning process. (It must be pointed out, however, that whether these reactions are in fact innate has been called into question by recent research in developmental psychology. See, for instance, Tomasello, The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1999).)
21. This account of intersubjective mediation through language has been made popular by Davidson's idea of triangulation (Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001) 2001, pp. 86-88, pp. 117-21, and pp. 128-9). This idea of triangulation was already present in Vygotsky's genetic account of linguistic competence: "The path from object to child and from child to object passes through another person" Vygotsky, Mind in Society, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1978) 30. It is also present in Mead's account of pointing (1934, chapter 2), which is very similar to Dewey's
22. Joseph Margolis, The Politics of Predication, Philosophical Forum (27) 1996, 195-219
23. What, After All, Is a Work of Art? (University Park: Pennsylvania State UP, 1999)
24. Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex", (New York and London: Routledge) 1993
25. Excitable Speech. A Politics of the Performative, (New York and London: Routledge, 1997)
26. Margolis, What, After All, 63
27. Goodman, Fact, Fiction
28. Butler, Excitable Speech, 3
29. Butler, Bodies that Matter, 220
30. Jose Medina, Identity Trouble: Disidentification and the Problem of Difference, Philosophy and Social Criticism. (29): 2003c, 657-82
31. Lance and O'Leary-Hawthorne. The Grammar of Meaning. Normativity and Semantic Discourse. (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997)
32. We can find such an explanation in the material-inferentialist account recently developed and defended by Brandom, Making it Explicit (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1994). As I have argued elsewhere, Wittgenstein also offers an account of the special semantic stability of certain terms in his discussions of logic, mathematics, and "grammar." See Medina, The Unity and Medina, Wittgenstein and Nonsense
33. It would be a mistake to assimilate Dewey's distinction to the popular distinction in philosophy of language between speaker's meaning and semantic meaning. See Strawson On Referring, Mind, 1950, 320-14
34. Donnellan Reference and Definite Descrptions, Philosophical Review, 1966, 281-304
35. Putnam Meaning and Reference, Journal of Philosophy, 1973, 699-711, and Searle Expression and Meaning Studies in the Theory of Speech Acts, (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1985). Although there may be some surface similarities between this distinction and Dewey's, there are crucial differences. One of these differences is that, for Dewey, both proximate and ultimate meanings are social through and through, whereas in the traditional distinction, there is a divide between social (semantic) meanings and individualistic (speaker's) meanings
36. Kripke,Naming and Necessity. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1972)
37. Putnam, The Meaning of Meaning, Mind, Language, and Reality: Philosophical Papers, vol. 2, (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1975)
38. See esp. Dewey's Logic: A Theory of Inquiry and Wittgenstein's Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics (Oxford: Blackwell, 1978)
39. This convergence between Dewey's and Wittgenstein's philosophy of mathematics is recognized by Sleeper, He points out that both Dewey and Wittgenstein view action as fundamental for the study of the logical foundations of mathematics, which should provide an account of the emergence of mathematical systems from ordinary practices and activities such as counting and measuring. See esp. Sleeper The Necessity, pp. 156-7
40. Drawing on conversation analysis, I have also developed an argument to this effect in Jose Medina, Anthropologism, Naturalism, and the Pragmatic Study of Language, Journal of Pragmatics (36): 2004, 549-73
41. For the full elaboration of this point and the development of my notion of contextual determinacy through conversation analysis, see Medina, Anthropologism
42. Kripke's Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1982) community view of meaning and rule following seems to come close to this semantic view
43. and it has been read in this way by many. For instance, in his critique of Kripke, Blackburn attributes this kind of social conventionalism to him, in The Individual Strikes Back, Synthese, (58); 1984, 281-301
44. A full discussion of this point can be found in section 6.4 of my Medina, The Unity of Wittgenstein's Philosophy, pp. 185-94
45. See 6.1 of Medina, The Unity of Wittgenstein's Philosophy as well as Wittgenstein and Nonsense and On Being Other minded