Chapter 1 : An Issue About Language
- 1. Presented by : Faiz Muflih Gita Puspita
- 2. This is a pre occupation going back to the very beginning of our intellectual tradition. Language is an old topic in western philosophy, but its importance has grown. All major philosophers have their theories of language : Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Davidson, and all manner of “deconstructionists” have made language central to their philosophical reflection.
- 3. We can cast light on this debate if we identify two grands type of theory. The first is an enframing theory. The attempt is made to understand language within the framework of a picture of human life, behaviour, purposes, or mental functioning, which is itself described and defined without reference to language. The second is constitutive theory. It gives us a picture of language as making possible new purposes, new levels of behaviour, new meanings, and hence as not explicable within a framework picture of human life conceived without language.
- 4. Language plays an important role in this construction. Words are given meaning by being attached to the things represented via the “ideas” which represent them. The introduction of words greatly facilities the combination of ideas into a responsible picture. This is the classical case of an enframing theory. Language is understood in terms of certain elements : ideas, signs, and their association, which precede its arising. Before and after, the imagination is at work and association takes place. We can surmise that it’s pricisely this continuity which gives the theory its seeming clarity and explanatory power : language is robbed of its mysterious character, is related to elements that seem unproblematic.
- 5. Language involves sensitivity to the issue of rightness. The rightness in the descriptive case turns on the characteristics of the described. The rightness involved in description is crucially different. We can’t just define it in terms of success in some task – unless we define this task itself in terms of what it called above intrinsic rightness. In other word, intrinstic righness is irreducible to what we might call task rightness simpliciter : the account only works if we have already incorporated intrinstic rightness in its success criteria.
- 6. The language can’t be explained by the function it plays within a pre- or extra-linguistically conceived framework of human life, because language through constituting the semantic dimension transforms any such framework, giving us new feelings, new desires, new goals, new relationships, and introducing a dimension of strong value. Language can only be explained through a radical discontinuity with the extra- linguistic. Constitutive theory gave a creative role to expression. A word is introduced by being linked with an idea, and henceforth becomes capable of expressing it. In this way, language makes possible science and enlightenment. But at each stage of this process, the idea precedes its naming, albeit its discriminability results from a previous act of naming.
- 7. Whereas to be sensitive to the issue of intrinstic rightness is to be operating as it were, in another dimension. Let it call this the “semantic dimension.” Then we can say that properly linguistic beings are functioning in the semantic dimension. And that can be our way of formulating herder’s point about “reflection.” To be reflective is to operate in this dimension, which means acting out of sensitivity to issue of intrinstic rightness. The semantic dimension also made the agent capable of new kinds of relations, new sorts of footings that agents can stand on with each other, of intimacy and distance, hierarchy and equality. No semantic dimension without language, if we defined the semantic dimension as sensitivity to certain issue concerning the right use of signs, then it follows tautologically that it requires language to be.
- 8. But a more substantive point follows from this way of seeing things. Being in semantic dimension means that we can treat the things which surround us in nvew ways. We don’t just respond to them in virtue of their relevance for our simple. We are also capable of dealing with them as the proper objects of certain descriptions. The substantive point about language is an answer to the question, whether things can have this meaning for us without language. Language is constitutive of reflection, and at the same time, this shows how a constitutive theory of language breaks out of the bounds of the enframing.
- 9. Meaning is being used in phenomenologically derived sense introduced above. Something has meaning for us in this sense when it has a certain significance or relevance in our lives. The neologism will consist in using this as a count noun, so that we can speak of the diffferent ways that things are significant as different “meanings,” or speak of a new form of significance as “a new meaning.” The constitutive theory turns our attention toward the creative dimension of expression, in which, to speak paradoxically, it makes possible its own content. We can actually see this in familiar, everyday realities, but it tends to be screened out from the enframing perspective, and it took the development of constitutive theories to bring it to light.
- 10. Being constitutive means that language makes possible its own content, in a sense or opens us to the domain it encodes. The two cases we have just looked at : • Bodily expression and ordinary description, • Seem to involve somewhat different form of this. Language gives us access in a new ways to a range of pre- existing things. The parallel between the two cases is that in both language makes possible new meanings. The new meaning is just things showing up as something. The descriptive language invariably fits in the first category, while expressive gesture makes up the second. Many uses of descriptive language have primordially existential import. New descriptive language lay out new topographies, a new disposition of places, and a new topography of the self can’t but have existensial import.
- 11. Impassivity is itself a form of projective expression. And this claims amounts to more than an arbitary reclassification, because describing is something we do, and we project ourselves through what we do. The expressive-constitutive outlook is leading us rather far afield from the old enframing doctrine. It is leading us to reconceive the scope of the phenomenon which needs explanation.
- 12. Covert speech builds on the capacities acquired in overt conversation. It has an inescapable expressive- projective dimension, that’s what i’ve just been urging. The first, and inescapable locus of language is in exchange between interlocutors. Language involves certain kinds of links with others. In particular, it involves the link of being a conversational partner with somebody; let’s call this an “interlocutor.” Standing to someone as an interlocutor is fundamentally different from standing to him/her as an object of obeservation, or manipulative interaction. Language marks this most fundamental distinction in the different of persons.
- 13. An important issue for any theory of language is : what difference it makes, if any, for our understanding of descriptive speech that it is inescapably embedded in an activity which has at least the two other features, that it has an expressive dimension, and that it makes a huge difference. Not acknowledging this has been fatal to a number of contemporary theories. Expressive-constitutive theories have generally thought that it did make a difference, and some of the reasons they did derive naturally from the considerations we’ve been examining. These theories, as we saw, recognize the creative role of expression. They recognize that expression can open us to the range of meanings it articulates.
- 14. But implicit in this is the recognition that the constitutive forms of expression, those which open us to a new range of meanings, go beyond descriptive language, and even beyond speech of any form, to such things as gesture and stance. Provided we take the word “language” in a broad sense, englobing all expressive forms, his world is as linguistically constituted as that of the philosopher. That is just to say that he lives in a human world. In its most unreflecting, just-lived-in, underdescribed, Descriptive language doesn’t erupt in a world of pure animal purposes. This is important to bear in mind, both to understand the pre-objective world, and to grasp the conditions in which descriptive language operates.
- 15. From a constitutive perspective, this hypothesis seems eminently plausible, but also one which will have greater force in certain domains of language than others. It is therefore surprising to see not only that a great deal of effort has been expended in trying to refute it, but also that some of this has concentrated on thecase of color concepts. The evolution of living languages gives us fresh examples of incommensurability. New generations arise, with new practices, new ideals, new admired ways of being. Their parents even may find it hard to see what they’re going on about; grandparents are often completely baffled. If one imagines going back farther, one can see that the communication would be almost impossible.
- 16. For us, things in theworld, those which are neither human beings, nor expressions of human beings, are “outside” of mind. They may in their own way impinge on mind – really, in two possible ways: (1) We may observe these things, and therefore change our view of the world, or be stirred up in ways that we otherwise wouldn’t be. (2) Since we are ourselves as bodies continuous with these external things, and in constant exchange with them, and since our mental condition is responsive causally to our bodily condition in a host of ways (something we are aware of without espousing any particular theory of what exactly causes what), our strength – moods, motivations, and so on – can be affected, and is continually being affected by what happens outside.
- 17. Thought is the perceptions we have, as well as the beliefs or propositions which we hold or entertain about the world and ourselves. Now all this has very important consequences for a whole way we live our experinence.
- 18. THANK YOU AND GOOD LUCK !