The Unavoidable Guidance in Language

ABSTRACT

Considering the profoundly collaborative nature of human communication, the notion of guidance needs more careful consideration and foregrounding in the philosophy of language. The practically crucial ideal of a well-balanced, fruitful relationship with a human guide motivates a conception of language as guidance, more specifically as the unavoidably applicable guidance in a communicative situation that language users are always in. The situation has at least three dimensions, with three corresponding forms of the guidance: (1) the performed guidance of the interlocutor in actual speech (cueing the speaker when to stop or change wording, for example); (2) the usage guidance of an available language; and (3) the basic teleology of the collaborative project of building up and maintaining a useful and interesting shared model of life in the world and providing for acceptable relations among communicating subjects.

KEYWORDS:

• Guidance
• language
• linguisticality
• pragmatics
• Wittgenstein
• Davidson

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Note the unemphasized verbal distinction between Technik and Gepflogenheit (‘custom’) in §205; note also the deliberate intertwining of psychological and social regularity in the discussion of talking oddly about pain in §288 and about ‘beetles’ in §293. On the interpretive issues see Baker and Hacker (1985), who attack the view that Praxis in Wittgenstein’s reasonings about rule-following means social practice, with critique by Malcolm (2002) and response by Baker and Hacker (2001).

2. Dummett observes about ‘“A Nice Derangement”’ that ‘it would be an exaggeration to describe [Davidson] as concerned with interaction. In his picture, there is no interaction, no exchange of the roles of speaker and hearer: the hearer remains mute throughout the conversation, or, rather, monologue’ (1986, 462). I do not think this is an essential limitation of Davidson’s position; the ‘passing theory’ concept can serve as a doorway to full communicative dynamism.

3. Perhaps the most relevant example of a social function of linguistic communication that Davidson considers is the meaning-determining ‘linguistic division of labor’ (Putnam) between the variously expert and inexpert, where he concludes: ‘we could get along without it’ (2005b, 114).

4. I will not appeal to empirical evidence for this premise except to note that collaborative interdependence is an increasingly important theme in evolutionary anthropology, as represented by Tomasello (2009) for example.

5. For the first shaping of this paper, I am grateful to the organizers and attendees of the conference on ‘Is There Such a Thing as a Language?’ at the University of South Florida in November 2016. Subsequently, I have benefited from suggestions by anonymous reviewers.