Mark Lance
Interrelationist accounts retain a principled distinction between the mental and the corporeal—a distinction that is reflected in contrasts like semantics versus syntax, the space of reasons versus the space of causes, or the intentional versus the physical vocabulary.
—John Haugeland, “Mind Embodied and Embedded” (HT, 208)
What could it mean to say that Dasein’s world “lets entities be” …?
—John Haugeland, “Letting Be” (DD, 94)
How should a Heideggerian—especially one who accepts the general contours of Haugeland’s powerful development of Heideggerian ideas—understand the phenomenon of language in its epistemological and ontological significance? In particular, if we take language to involve the production of speech acts via the utterance of (repeatable) sentences that have a content that can be shared with or embedded within other sentences used in other contexts, how are we to understand the Being of such speech acts and sentences, and the relation between them? Put another way, how can a Haugeland-style Heideggerian make sense of a category of Being that incorporates a force–content distinction?
It is not uncommon to characterize the epistemologically central Heideggerian notion of engagement, or embodied coping, by contrast with reasoning, representation, calculation, linguistic articulation, and related notions. For some—notably Dreyfus—little if anything is said about what concepts, reasoning, sentence meaning, or propositional knowledge are, other than the elements we should not take to be fundamental to understanding.
Dreyfus’s efforts to distinguish his own approach to understanding from that of traditional artificial intelligence often leave one with the impression that he is abandoning the linguistic ground to the representationalist, accepting that there is little more for the Heideggerian to say about language than that it arises in
breakdown by way of distancing oneself from a world.
Brandom is, in one sense, nearly the opposite of Dreyfus. Whereas Dreyfus neglects language, it is Brandom’s primary focus. And in Making It Explicit:
Reasoning, Representing, and Discursive Commitment (Brandom 1994), he begins his elaborate discussion of language in a place familiar to Heideggerians: suggesting that any understanding of language must be in terms of the practical role that speech acts play within a context of engaged skillful understanding. Thus whereas Dreyfus contrasts linguistic practice with engaged coping, Brandom purports to understand it as a special case.
Sentences in Brandom’s view, that is, are ready-to-hand.
But by the end of Making It Explicit, Brandom has severely transformed this idea. An account emerges that ultimately abandons its Heideggerian roots in all but the most rarefied formal sense, leaving linguistic practice a thin and abstract shadow of engaged coping—linguistic practice is merely scorekeeping, and one is engaged with no more than scorecards—and connecting linguistic and nonlinguistic modes of engaging the world only causally. The practice of scorekeeping, out of which Brandom constructs contents, that is, has no essential connection to embodied and embedded coping in a material world. It is itself a practice, to be sure, but it is merely the practice of moving abstract tokens about in a rule-governed manner. Any embedding in the environment is explicitly deemed contingent. Thus, for Brandom, language gets interesting when it ceases to be understood in terms of the richly embodied and embedded coping of a typical Heideggerian world, and we are left again with a Dreyfusard dualism of practical and linguistic understanding.
John Haugeland rejected this separation of the contentful and the richly practical. In his masterful “Truth and Rule-Following,” he argued that one cannot retrieve a genuine notion of semantic content from the interrelation of a normatively structured practice of moving linguistic tokens about—syntax—
and various causal interactions with an environment. If we are to make sense of empirical content—of the very idea that claims have contents that are true or false insofar as they get the world right—we must understand the normative role the world plays in constituting linguistic correctness. It seems to me, however, that Haugeland does not address the central problems inherent in such a project. In particular, his talk of allowing the world to constrain our normative practice remains frustratingly metaphorical.1 Further, a strange individualism lurks in Haugeland’s discussion of these issues. Certainly one
must attend to the right sense of worldly embeddedness if one is to understand genuinely empirical content. But one would think that the central ontological context of language would be Being-with. Language is, after all, most fundamentally the vehicle of communication, and yet this dimension is simply not a significant moving part in “Truth and Rule-Following.”2
Rebecca Kukla and I have tried to offer another approach. In Kukla and Lance 2009, we offered a more systematic account of the normative functional space of speech acts, and in Kukla and Lance 2014, we offered an account of normative accountability to the world that emphasizes the essentially intersubjective ground of such accountability. But semantic content was not the topic of either of these works. And even if it is a mistake to begin one’s theorizing by helping oneself to a dichotomy between syntax and semantics, or the space of reasons and the space of causes—as Haugeland, I believe rightly, claimed—these are distinctions that surely must emerge. Even the most semantically nihilistic philosopher must admit that there is something pragmatically significant to the question of whether a given pair of sentences
“share content.” Meaning talk is legitimate talk, with a legitimate place in the language game, whether or not it is the theoretical key to understanding language as a whole. It is just as obvious that one can express a content in multiple syntactic structures, or with different pragmatic performances, as it is that justifying and causally explaining an event are different performances.
While I certainly offer here nothing that can be called a “theory of content”
(and, indeed, have grown increasingly skeptical of the very project over the years),3 my goal is to clarify the place of “semantic content” (or, better, something very much like the speech act of judging that two performances have the same semantic content) within the broadly Heideggerian conception of understanding developed by Haugeland. I begin with some phenomenological observations about the role of simple signaling performances among creatures engaged in simple social practices. I look at the ways that engagements with the world are functionally augmented by the addition of various layers of
“protolinguistic complexity”—more and more structurally complex, normatively constrained signaling behavior—until we see the emergence of something recognizably like semantic content, specifically the force-content distinction.4
Proceeding in this manner will have two points. First, looking at the way that protolanguage works will point us toward a more phenomenologically plausible idea of the function of language (and move us away from what I take
to be the seriously misguided idea that language arises only in breakdown of engaged comportment). Second, beginning with toy examples and developing them carefully will allow us to frame the question of what it would be for (embodied and embedded) social norms to institute norms related to the content of, rather than the particular contextual performance of, a given speech act. The answer to this question will add a surprising social-structural element to the ontological constitution of objective purport.