The Scope of ‘Meaning’ and the Avoidance of Sylleptical Reason: A Plea for Some Modest Distinctions

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Notes

The stimulation provided by this small work is wholly disproportional, since it evokes views and arguments that Sahlins (2004) made in Apologies to Thucydides, which, in turn, reminds the reader of all the marvellously stimulating – almost evangelical – works that he has produced since the 1970s, after turning his back on the star he had been as a younger man.

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Of course, this is likely to be seen as something less than an innocent claim about the provenance of my view; no less than Marx, Weber was a complex and prolific writer capable of inspiring very different scholars to see what Turner (2000:2) calls ‘subterranean’ paths connecting his thought and their own. In anthropology, for example, it is less remarked than it might be that both Geertz and Bourdieu claim deep inspiration from Weber.

It is worth reminding ourselves that Geertz's earliest interventions – including some of those that have proved most influential (e.g. ‘religion as a cultural system’) – were often explicitly aimed only at supplementing functionalism. And while this is no place to argue the case, I think it is clear that Geertz had a quite particular interest in philosophy; with his writer's temperament, and impatient with the technicalities, he saw professional philosophy as a means to the end of advancing anthropology's claims on a Deweyan moral imagination.

Harré (like his students, Russel Keat and Roy Bhaskar) agreed that relations between the conceptual and the empirical needed to be handled carefully, but differed from the Winch-inspired followers of Wittgenstein, many of whom cleaved to a dichotomy between the social and the natural sciences, no less than he did from logical empiricists/positivists.

Geertz first cites Wittgenstein in his 1964, ‘Ideology as a cultural system’, and Ryle in 1962, in ‘The growth of culture and the evolution of mind’. But he concluded his 1957, ‘Ethos, world-view and the analysis of sacred symbols’ with the sentence: ‘The role of such a special science as anthropology in the analysis of values is not to replace philosophical investigation, but to make it relevant’ (All three essays reprinted in his (1973)).

There were also some signs that the divide might be under pressure from social science – not in the way the positivists (and many hermeneuticists) had desired (worried about) it, through an assimilation of the social to the natural sciences – but in the novel post-positivist way, through the idea that meaning and its interpretation was at the heart of all inquiry. Mary Douglas's Implicit meanings (1975), for example, had appeared the year earlier; it is worth noting – here, only in passing – the mutual influence of Douglas (‘the most interesting living Durkheimian’ according to Bellah (2005)) and the pioneers of the Strong Programme's Durkheimian approach in the sociology of science (Bloor 1976). Here was one area of academic life where the extent of the impact of the critique of traditional models of science became obvious early on. Geertz would himself move closer to these early radicals in later essays, although he never did get round to offering us ‘Science as a cultural system’.

One might suggest, though, that it is the tacit acceptance of the logical positivists'/empiricists' account of science as the search for natural laws that does most of the work in perpetuating the idea of a basic divide between the Natur- and Geisteswissenschaften (a ‘peculiarly German’ distinction that was actually introduced to the academy by Mill's Austrian translator, who used it to gloss Mill's empiricist opposition between the natural and the moral sciences (Ryan 1987)).

Lyons (1977) begins his two volume study, Semantics, by distinguishing 10 ways in which ‘means’ is used, and noting how important it is that linguists take account of these differences if confusion is to be avoided. It is not clear that anthropologists need to be less careful (see below).

That there is a normal use of the sentence in the context sketched emerges if we consider how we would construe the interaction had it turned out that although there is a supermarket around the corner, it was closed on that day and the speaker knew this when he spoke but did not mention the fact.

For a deeply thoughtful and comprehensive account of what this might mean, see Sterelny's (2003) study.

A warning that seems to me to be rather ironical; Tambiah's important role in drawing anthropological attention to the speech-act theory is qualified by his sometimes eccentric construal of the basic distinctions it involves. His approach seems to be grounded in an unsustainable conviction that such theory could augment basic Durkheimian approaches to ritual. In fact, Durkheim's (2001) view that ritual and belief differ fundamentally, as ‘thought differs from action’ (p. 36) seems to be a major source of a false dichotomy that has dogged anthropology more or less ever since (and is particularly clear in the interpretation of ritual).

As I noted at the beginning of this piece, the works mentioned – those by Sahlins and Agyrou no less than Engelke and Tomlinson – all work with this notion of meaning.

Parsons translations of Weber raise some questions (Schmid 1992:95–8), as do some of his rearrangements of the original texts (Tribe 2007); his actions seem to reflect his own view of the nature of adequate grand theory which, it seems, he could not envisage without Durkheimian structural foundations.

Even sensitive and knowledgeable, Weber scholars sometimes let down their guard. Thus, Campbell (2007) speaks of ‘consumers … creating their own world of meaning’ as though this ‘creation’ involved something more ineffable than the consumers' perceptions, motives and beliefs as a function of their embeddedness in a definite milieu, at a definite juncture. More broadly, the implications of the line of argument I pursue in this piece extend also to the increasingly influential cultural sociology practiced by Jeffrey Alexander and his colleagues, in whose formulations Geertz's views looms very large.

So, the hyphenated (and oxymoronic) adjective is meant to capture the fact that ‘the problem of meaning’ can be considered in relation to collective representations of religion, seen as a primordial social institution that, as part of its systemic function, creates a ‘world of meaning’ for those partaking of it, or in relation to the ‘moods and motivations’ of individuals faced with having to choose courses of action, in concrete social situations, on the basis of values and specific understandings. Or it can be considered under both these rubrics, in which case, perhaps, the hyphenated term could be replaced with ‘Parsonian’ or ‘Geertzian’.

Consider also this, possibly the most charming – though decisive – incitement to watchfulness about use-mention issues, from Quine (who elsewhere (p. 27) warns against ‘the myth of the museum’ in which meanings are the exhibits and words the labels):

• ‘Boston is populous’ is about Boston and contains ‘Boston’; ‘“Boston” is disyllabic’ is about ‘Boston’ and contains ‘Boston’. ‘Boston’ designates ‘Boston’, which in turn designates Boston. To mention Boston we use ‘Boston’ or a synonym, and to mention ‘Boston’ we use ‘Boston’ or a synonym. ‘Boston’ contains six letters and just one pair of quotation marks; ‘Boston’ contains six letters and no quotation marks; and Boston contains some 800,000 people. (Quine 1979:24)

The example of water and the term used to designate it is one of many ambiguous formulations – sometimes in portentous titles of books or articles – taking the form of ‘The meaning of x’, where x is filled with more or less ordinary nouns: ‘culture’, ‘death’, ‘things’, ‘ritual’, ‘affinity’, ‘nature’, ‘paternity’, ‘death’, ‘style’, to cite a few other examples. It might be argued that this ambiguity is motivated by widely shared disciplinary conceptions – and I might agree, but my problem is with their justification or coherence (see footnote 19).

Of course, the light-heartedness would not negate an important point, close to Carroll's (Dodgson's) heart. Also, Carnap's (1932) critique of Heidegger's ‘metaphysics’ stemmed from his view that sorting out the way language works was fundamental to producing a coherent framework for science – that getting logic and ontology right would decisively improve the epistemological problems; his notorious citation of Heidegger on ‘nothing’ and the confusion it involved about the logical category of the noun stems from this conviction. (Friedman's (2000) book begins with details of the trip Carnap made, 3 years before this paper's publication, to Switzerland to attend the disputation between Heidegger and Cassirer; Carnap had friendly discussions with his two senior colleagues – who knew and expressed admiration for his own work – with whom he shared a neo-Kantian heritage.)

They also refer to Putnam's (1975) rather different paper, ‘The meaning of “meaning”’, which might well have counted Ogden and Richards' work – notwithstanding its insistence upon the multiplicity and heterogeneity language's functions – as among those ‘heroic if misguided’ attempts to bring the concept of meaning out of the ‘darkness’ (p. 215).

Interestingly, he takes this programme to necessitate reconceptualising the social and its relations with the psychological; this is no coincidence, of course, but the complexities here mean it must be set aside in this context. I should acknowledge the role of Sperber's early work in causing me to worry about my Durkheim-honed convictions, worries that are directly connected to the content of this piece, despite the length of the interval between 1975 and now.

It is worth noting that this slim volume, which has enjoyed a rather ambiguous career in mainstream anthropology, is intellectually continuous with the work for which Sperber is now most famous, in psychology and linguistics. Indeed, the PhD thesis (‘Presuppostion and non-truth conditional semantics’, supervised by Noam Chomsky) of Dierdre Wilson, Sperber's co-inventor of relevance theory, with whom (I presume) he had been in conversation about the relations between semantics and pragmatics since both were at Oxford, in the 1960s, is the most up-to-date work in listed in the bibliography. I would argue that the extent to which this text was connected to seminal developments in a whole raft of neighbouring disciplines was underappreciated by Sperber's contemporaries.

Sperber is not the only notable anthropologist to realise the need to complicate anthropological understandings of meaning in relation to the diversity of action and interaction and to have made contributions widely appreciated in cognate disciplines; consider, for example, the impressive body of empirical and theoretical work of Stephen Levinson, who is also, perhaps, more widely cited in linguistic than in cultural anthropological circles. Sperber, though, is particularly forthright in arguing for his perspective in and insisting on its connections to philosophical, psychological and biological positions.

Thus, the question whether the following instance of the string – GIFT – signifies a German word meaning ‘poison’ or an English word for that which preoccupied Mauss, or both (as well as an indefinitely large number of terms in the universe's hitherto undescribed languages), has no determinate answer outside the specification of an agents use.

I resist here the temptation to return to Sahlins's (2004) scintillating discussion.

This, in turn (and in passing), suggests that the distinction between structure and agency, as it is sometimes, presented is a false dichotomy; structures are ‘immanent’ in the relations agents have with one another (which is just another way of saying that relations between agents are ordered or structured), but agents and structures do not interact, except metonymically. When we speak of a player's having a certain kind of relationship with the team, we are referring to her relation with other players. When the head of department outlines the department's relationship with the university, she speaks metonymically of the relations between that department and the other departments and the administration, etc, that together constitute the whole. Here the broader point – which is an ontological/mereological one, about wholes and their parts – can be made clearer if we see it applies too to the relations between, for example, the planets and the solar system. We talk about the relations between Mars and the system, but few of us would be tempted to make an opposition here; we appreciate that the system is constituted by the relations between the planets and their properties.

These represent only a subset of Austin's distinctions, but nothing relevant to this discussion is lost by using only these. It is worth noting, though, that acts of speech and speech-acts sometimes need to be distinguished, at least in a rough and ready way it is easier to exemplify than spell out – for speech-acts entail agents’ project, in a way that acts of speech need not. Thus, locutions like ‘It is raining’ issuing from the mouth of a sleeper, or a language learner repeating what the teacher instructs her to do, will not count as statements about the weather (even if it is raining); on the other hand, one can utter a sentence, know that it is a sentence, and even utter it in circumstances where it has the right sort of effects (i.e. a native speaker, overhearing it, comes to learn something she did not know) without having any idea about the speech-act it is standardly used to perform (for instance, because one does not speak the language the grammar of which defines the sentence).

The points made through here – and the implicit contrast between the actions undertaken and the acts performed by an agent – suggest the possibility of a critical engagement with Humphrey and Laidlaw's (1994) interesting and influential perspective on ritual. They also pertain to the questions that must arise from a suggestion that intention and communication are linked in ways that are contingent on cultural context (Robbins 2008).

A lesson very nicely set out in Papineau's (1978) careful and highly readable first work.

To that extent, Geertz's discussion of winks and twitches, dependent as it is on the metaphor of depth, is unhelpful; as though an action were to its behavioural manifestation as depth is to surface, when it is more like the ontological contrast between a work by Picasso and a counterfeit, or between the government's and a forger's banknote – albeit ever so perfect. (Logical empiricism's ‘myth of the given’ lingers even here, in Geertz's seminal text, hidden behind the innocuous seeming metaphor.)

For an impressively sensitive and nuanced discussion of interpretation and explanation in relation to action and to social science interests – one that is informed by more than a passing knowledge of the anthropological literature – see Risjord (2000).

Characterising an action in terms of its consequences is not, though, more distorting than characterising it in terms of the causal grounds it presupposes. If I claim of someone – a person with a broad Liverpudlian accent, say – who has just requested that I close the window that what she said ‘means that she comes from Liverpool’, the distortion in respect of her request is not less than if I make the claim that what she said means that the cells in her vocal cords had just metabolised numerous molecules of ATP; in both cases, part of the causal antecedents are spoken of as the meaning of what she said, yet these are necessary antecedents to anything whatsoever that she may have said. The act itself – the request – is, once again, completely erased in a genus for species substitution. Edmund Leach's penchant for saying what things like making a cup of tea ‘say’ is subject to this critique.