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Mutual misunderstanding: Scepticism and the theorizing of language and interpretation
Language S&nces, Volume 15. Number 3, pp. 261-267. Printed in Great Britain
1993
0388+0001193 $6.00+.00 Pergamon Press Ltd
BOOK REVIEW CHRISTOPHER HUTTON Talbot J. Taylor, Mut~l misunderstanding: Language and interpretation, Duke University
~cepticis~ and the ~eorizing of Press, Durham and London, 1992.
Imagine watching a board-game played over a period of time in which the same pattern of moves seems to occur in each of the different matches. Not only are the pieces moved by the players in rather limited ways, but the games quickly reach a position of stalemate or the parties fail to agree on whether the game has ended to the advantage of one side or not. For the observer, the experience of watching endlessly unresolved games becomes increasingly frustrating, and, like the apocryphal spectator at Othello who called out ‘Can’t you see?‘, the urge to intervene becomes overpowering. ‘Can’t you see?’ could serve as a summation of the speech act this book is intended to perform. Mutual Misunderstanding is about where explanations of linguistic phenomena begin, how they proceed and where they end. They end, Taylor seems to say, nowhere in particular (see pp. 235-239), but with the transcendental assumptions with which they set out still intact. They proceed by means of a dialogic game (p. 239) between scepticism and theory, a dialogue which Taylor also refers to as an embrace (p. 200). This dialogue is analysed by Taylor as a kind of strategic board-game with moves and counter-moves. As an expository device, different theories are analysed in terms of the answers they implicitly or explicitly give to three central questions: WHETHER communicators ordinarily understand each other, WHAT it is for communicators to understand each other and HOW co~unicational unders~nding occurs. By adopting this avowedly reductionalist method of presentation, one he compares to the enlargement of a particular area of a photograph, Taylor aims to foreground the role of the sceptic in the structure of a diverse range of theories. In so doing he offers neither history of ideas, text-book condensation nor polemical argumentation. Mutual Misunderstanding is not about replacing wrong theories with correct ones; it is about seeing a picture of communication for what it is-a picture-and thereby making other ways of seeing possible and desirable. The scepticism invoked by Taylor consists simply in the denial that communicators ordinarily understand each other (strong scepticism) or that a particular hypothesis
Address correspondence Hong Kong.
to: Dr C. M. Hutton, Dept English, University
261
of Hong Kong,
I Pokfulam Road,
262
CHRISTOPHER
HUTTON
about how people ordinarily understand each other has been proven (weak scepticism). The sceptic takes propositions about WHETHER as empirical hypotheses, but denies that they hold either in general or in a particular theoretical case. Modern theorists of language on the other hand hold with the commonsense view that of course we understand each other and attempt to give an account of WHAT and HOW. In Taylor’s terms, linguistic theorists take commonsense, ‘practical me~discourse’ (‘of course we normafly understand each other!‘) and make of it ‘intellectual metadiscourse’. Once the claim that we understand each other moves into the academic realm, then, Taylor points out, it becomes an empirical hypothesis and must be justified with reference to accepted academic criteria for supporting or proving statements. The important point is that this step from practical to intellectual metadiscourse is prompted in dialogue with the sceptic. Both the sceptic and the theorist concur in treating statements about mutual understanding as empirical hypotheses and it is on this basis that the various dialogues proceed. Modern theories of language are in symbiotic relation with scepticism, since they seek in different ways to give an answer to the sceptical challenge. Communicational scepticism is therefore ‘one of the defining rhetorical characteristics of modern language theory’ (p. 23). Taylor illustrates this position by presenting the approaches of a number of theorists including Frege, Saussure, Grice, Fish, Herrnstein Smith, and Garfinkel. Frege, for exampfe, in attacking psychologism, uses communicational scepticism as what Taylor terms a ‘limiting case’ (p. 22), i.e. as the consequence of a reducfio ad ffb~~rdu#l. If one accepts that logical inferences are generalizations from mental operations, then, given the assumption that mental phenomena are private and that communication is the transfer of meanings from one mind to another, one is forced into communicational scepticism. This follows from the premise that ‘there is no sense in which we can speak of the same ideas or thoughts in two people’s minds’ (p. 98). Since psychologism leads to communicational scepticism, it must be based on an error. In recent work in the philosophy of language concerning the status of rules, the sceptic, the realist and the anti-realist are engaged in a three-way dialogue where the anti-realist (Kripke, Dummett on what it means to follow a rule) may use scepticai arguments against the realist (Sperber and Wilson, Grice), while at the same time seeking to explain the phenomenon of social coherence and apparently successful communication against the communicational sceptic (pp. 148-149): ‘The anti-realist’s ultimate goal is to effect. within theoretical discourse on rule-followmg, the abandonment of realist strategies in favor of a strategy which is specifically constructed 50 as to render theoretical discourse on rule-following invulnerrrbie to scepticai criticism.’
Thus Taylor aims to show how scepticism is fundamen~1 to the very fiber of the argumentations, both as a limiting case and as a rhetorical weapon. The realist is depicted by the anti-realist as giving unnecessary hostages to scepticism and thus opening up the way to a sceptical attack on communicational coherence. Scepticism is used as part of what is ultimately an anti-sceptical strategy. Ethnomethodology emerges within this expository framework as an attempt to show the sceptic mutual understanding in action. Understanding is what interactants ‘do’
BOOK REVIEW
263
‘The ethnomethodologist completes the anti-realist strategy of ‘reducing to practice’ the theoretical topics of intellectual metadiscourse. From the point of view of ethnomethodology, lay communicational agents are themselves preoccupied by the very same problems that have long bedeviled communicational theorists. ’ (p. 228-229)
The ethnomethodologist’s task is therefore simply that of describing the ‘mundane methods’ by which understanding is achieved (p. 229), i.e. the ways in which interactants exhibit and enforce their mutual (moral) accountability in the cooperative enterprise of conversation. In ethnomethodology, the intellectual questions that arise out of taking everyday talk about language as empirical hypotheses are ultimately reduced back to the practices of interactants in mundane settings going about their everyday meaning-producing tasks. Taking seriously the sceptical challenge-‘But the ethnomethodologist to how do you know people understand each other ?‘-leads undertake an elaborate description of people ‘doing understanding’ as a practical achievement. The sceptical question about understanding is reduced to the interactants’ shared problem of achieving understanding in the face of potential socio-semantic disorder. Mutual Misunderstanding presents a particular picture of the relationship between commonsense remarks about language and academic theory. Theorists are depicted as habitually taking everyday, ‘locally’ relevant metadiscourse and treating it as consisting of statements of empirical belief. Taylor points out that what linguists and others take to be commonsense, i.e. that we ordinarily understand each other, need not be universally accepted as such (p. 72). Locke’s theory of language rests on the premise that such assumptions are not only often false, they are misleading. Both Locke and Hobbes take a normative view of understanding, presenting it as a desirable state of affairs which must be achieved by individual acts of good intention. Mutual understanding is a product of the will to communicate. In modern linguistic theories based on the notion of a shared lungue (what Taylor refers to as ‘code-theories’), mutual understanding is simply affirmed against the limiting case of communicational scepticism. Taylor points the reader towards the Wittgenstein who sees in ‘reified’ questions philosophers creating sophisticated nonsense, tying themselves into conceptual knots. Thus ‘Magenta means this’ (said while pointing at a coloured bead) raises for the theorist a series of general or categorical questions: ‘What is it for one property of the physical world-a sequence of sounds-and another property of the physical world-the color of a bead-to stand in the relation here called ‘meaning”? How is this relation formed? How does it endure? [ ] Moreover, does the sequence of sounds uttered in pronouncing magenra mean only the particular color in the object to which the speaker is pointing? Does it not mean similar colors in other objects? How is this possible? How similar do the colors have to be? Does that relation-between magenta and the color magenta-exist independently of speakers and hearers? (pp. 15-16)
In Wittgenstein (and Taylor) there seem to be two possible responses to this: one to leave things as they are, to submit oneself to a Zen-like discipline of not asking as far as possible (see p. 250). The other is to think ‘even more crazily than philosophers’ (Wittgenstein, quoted in Taylor p. 3). Both kinds of responses are acts of will, again
264
CHRISTOPHER
HUTTON
a preoccupation Taylor shares with Wittgenstein (see quotation from Wittgenstein on p. 9, discussion of the will pp. 239, 242, 248, 253). Taylor is keen to avoid the trap of directly opposing the normative pictures presented by theorists of communication. For to oppose something is to be required to replace it. In ethnomethodological terms, the critic of a theory is within academic discourse held morally accountable for the vacuum ~tentially created. But replacing theory X by theory Y requires that Y does the work of X, that it serves the same needs as X and therefore force of circumstance will ensure that it will look very much like X. Nonetheless Taylor is addressing himself to a ‘condition’, a term which he prefers over ‘disorder’ (p. 26). The condition involves a compulsion, that of moving only between certain fixed points of academic orientation to the exclusion of others (p. 248): ‘If my representation of intellectual metadiscourse as a frustrating and vacuous dialogic game instills in the reader the wiit to avoid the consequences of theorizing practical metadiscourse. then a strategy which can bring about a change of aspect in how the reader sees pracricicaf metadiscourse may offer the means of taking the next crucial step towards the realization of that goal.’
Taylor is not proposing-indeed he cannot consistently proposethat we set about studying practical metadiscourse with the aim of seeing it correctly. The aim of Mutuul Misunderstunding is to ‘destabilize the normative logic’ (p. 256) upon which modern academic metalinguistics is built, with Taylor assigning to himself the role of academic gadfly in the struggle against a particular form of ‘conceptual addiction’ (p. 244). What Taylor is arguing for is the freeing of metadiscourse from the domination of a single set of dogmas enshrined in modern theories of language. The source of those dogmas he identifies as the urge to treat everyday expressions of belief as empirical hypotheses and the rhetorical consequences of that decision. The reader will of course ask Taylor how this liberation is to be achieved, even supposing the will is there. This involves what Taylor refers to as a ‘second rhetorical front’ (p. 251). One aim would be that of conceiving practical metadiscourse in new or different ways. This might involve, for example. following Wittgenstein’s strategy of continually posing different analogical possibilities. Thus Wittgenstein compares an utterance of the type ‘Red means THIS’ uttered while pointing at a red object to the citing of a rule in chess. ‘This piece moves like THIS’ is uttered while pointing at the chess piece in question (p. 244). This analogy leads us away from the temptation to ask essentialist questions about the nature of meaning. Another way of imagining new metadiscourse is to use Wittgenstein’s technique of comparing everyday language with an imaginary ‘primitive’ language-game such as the builder’s language described in the ~~j~osop~i~a~ ~~~~~st~gutions,Taylor discusses a modified version of this hypothetical language. His aim is to show how statements that seem to serve as belief statements in ‘our’ language function in a hypothetical primitive language. Taylor suggests that the builder’s language, which consists in Wittgenstein’s version entirely of the words ‘block’, ‘pillar’, ‘slab’ and ‘beam’. be amended to include the supplementary remarks ‘Do you understand?‘, ‘Yes’. ‘No’ and ‘We understand each other’ (pp. 246-247):
BOOK REVIEW
265
‘After the builder calls for one of the stones, he says to the assistant, ‘Do you understand?’ The latter replies ‘Yes’ or ‘No’. If he replies ‘No’, the builder then shows the assistant a sample of the type of stone he wants to be brought. But when the assistant replies ‘Yes’, it is he who then indicates to the builder a sample of the type of stone which he will bring. If this is the kind of building-stone the builder wants, the latter replies, ‘We understand each other’, and the assistant goes to find the stone. If it is not, the builder says ‘No’ and indicates which type of stone he does want.’
This allows us to imagine such statements as ‘Do you unders~d?’ outside a framework where they are taken as hypotheses about belief states. Taylor suggests that we could substitute nonsense syllables for these supplementary moves, such as ‘Flurp’ for ‘Do you understand?’ and ‘Gavagai’ for ‘We understand each other’ (p. 247): ‘Thus reformulated, it would seem absurd to take ‘Gavagai’ as the expression of a belief held by its utterer, a belief of which it would be appropriate to ask such questions as ‘Do the facts obtain which would justify that belief?’
Furthermore, given that this primitive language has no further metalanguage, such a question could not even be fo~ulated within it. This allows us to consider ‘our’ language by analogy with a simple or primitive language. It also brings sharply into focus the question of the relationship of language to metalanguage which lies at the heart of the concerns of Mutual Misunderstanding. For while one might wish to say that ‘We understand each other’ is metalanguage or at least metadiscourse, since it asks a question about the discourse that has already taken place, one is less inclined to say that of ‘Gavagai’ which seems to be simply another possible move in the game, a move which the interactants have no means to theorize as being ‘above’ or ‘about’ discourse. This discussion then raises a series of further questions for ‘our’ complex and reflexive language: is there a way of talking about language which does not presently exist in our practical or intellectual metadiscourses? How does intellectual metadiscourse influence everyday discourse? Do linguists, in transforming metalanguage, also transform language? At the close of the book Taylor poses a key question (p. 257): ‘Would inquiry into the relation between discourse and metadiscourse lead language theory into equally frustrating and self-deceptive rhetorical games? That, as I have come to learn, is hard to say.’
One could imagine a number of responses to Mutual Misunderstanding, but it is unlikely to strike a chord with the audience to which it is directed, theorists of language and communication. Most academic linguists, for example, work within a set of assumptions they share with an academic network, one that guarantees that everyone can communicate with everyone else and address common problems of a specific and (within the theory) concrete kind. Furthermore, linguists as a group tend to have a problem-solving, sleeves-rolled-up perception of their academic selves and a liberal, undogmatic perception of their sociopolitical selves, contrasting themselves to linguistic bigots and racists on the one hand and teachers and others over-concerned about ‘correctness’ on the other. These senses of professional self are conveyed strongly in Geoffrey Pullurn’s recent collection The great Eskimo vocabulary hoax and other irreverent essays on the study of language (1991). As far as philosophy of science goes, linguists ‘get by’ with an informal blend of Popper and Kuhn. Philosophies of linguistics tend to consist in assertions about the ontological nature of the linguistic
266
CHRISTOPHER
HUTTON
system as a preliminary to the ‘real work’ of analysing linguistic data. Most ‘empirical’ linguists are therefore more or less comfortable with the fundamental assumptions of modern linguistics and perfectly happy to see their task as the exploration of the contingent descriptive uncertainties thrown up by the individual theory or school they espouse. This they view as a scientific exercise leading from worse to better descriptions of natural languages, one that involves questions such as ‘one phoneme or two?’ or ‘is VP a universal category?‘. Taylor himself rates the chances of success of his rhetorical project as ‘remote’. citing the lack of inclination and the strength of ‘institutional forces’ that keep the current metadiscourse in place (p. 256). Mutuul Misunderstanding is not in any case a call for these descriptive practices to cease, and Taylor implicitly acknowledges that by talking of ‘destabilizing’ the discourse, he is in symbiotic dialogue with it, just as the theorist is in symbiotic dialogue with the sceptic. Any book which characterizes itself as ‘a discourse about discourse about discourse’ may lay itself open to the charge of being ‘excessively reflexive’ (p. 7). The sociologically-inclined might see a preferable task in the analysis of how this particular dialogue works as institutionalized inside and outside the university as a form of socially sanctioned professional knowledge. The neo-Marxist in the same vein might object to the treatment of academic discourse as a game of intellectual hide-and-seek. The historically-minded might ask for an elaboration of the evolving exchange (dialectic?) between common sense and academic sense. The empirically-minded might ask how the dialogue of sceptic and theorist could be transcended so as to open the way for a genuinely empirical linguistics. The post-Freudian might look askance at the liberated, autonomous, or transcendent will that Taylor appears to evoke. Taylor might be accused of disingenuousness in his denial that he sees the discourse of language theorists as ‘wrong’ and in need of replacing. ‘Vacuous’ comes pretty close to ‘wrong’ and ‘wrong’ implies ‘right’. The response to Mutual Misunderstunding may well consist in a chorus of these and other complaining voices, many of which have surfaced in this reviewer in the course of reading Mutual Misunderstanding. Yet these are themselves largely standardized ‘games of objection’, language-games into which academics are socialized as part of their training, labeling practices which include terms such as ‘historicist’. ‘Eurocentric’, ‘Positivist’, ‘Idealist’, ‘taxonomist’. The purpose of such labeling is always to achieve a rapid closure in any dialogue or debate, with the value of a label in achieving closure depending on the context and the audience to which it appeals. It would be a pity (and indeed ironic) if a book which challenges the reader at such a fundamental level were to be set aside in so peremptory a fashion. So where does this leave us? It leaves us with the problem that the very culture of academic life as we know it is bound up with these and other discursive strategies, with specific methods of argumentation. Linguistic theory may be. from one point of view available in Taylor/Wittgenstein, a sophisticated form of nonsense. a condition. a form of intellectual blindness. Yet it is also a form of life, no less so. one might
BOOK REVIEW
267
say, than the everyday practices on which it is partly dependent. Wittgenstein developed what might be termed a ‘circular’ style which involved exploring a discursive terrain, circling continually around an issue or a usage, coming back to the same point from a different angle armed with a particular awareness. To have put arguments in ‘linear’ form, in the language of premises, inferences and conclusions or in the language of the empirical sciences would have made him morally accountable in the language-game to give answers to such questions as ‘If meaning is not in the head, then where is it?‘, ‘If language does not picture reality, how do we know that what we say bears any relation to reality at all?’ These are not necessarily sensible questions, but to exclude them requires a mastery of a different kind of sry&=, a different form of academic life. The defender of linguistic theory might concede Taylor’s central point-the role of the sceptic in the dialogic game with the theorist-but argue that only through treating beliefs as empirical hypotheses do we have a means of moving the debate along. In other words, we ‘progress’ specificalty through the dialectic between common sense and academic praxis. Without formulating empirical hypotheses we have no way out of the rhetorical circle, for they at least provide a (rhetorical) window on ‘facts’ or ‘reality’ constructed by the theory as lying outside its own labeling practices, ‘facts’ from which new sources of information, new ‘data’ etc can be drawn and new questions asked. Contrary to Taylor, it might be argued that empirical hypotheses are the ‘motor’ that drives us to challenge existing language-games. Only in as much as we can formulate our objections as empirical hypotheses can we challenge existing routinized ways of thinking about language. Empirical hypotheses function as appeals to a theory-transcendent authority (‘reality’) which all participants in the debate are pledged to respect. But this, Taylor might say, is a new debate, one in which we do not yet know our way about.
REFERENCE PULLAM, Language.
G. K. 1991 The Great Eskimo Vocabulary University of Chicago Press, Chicago.
Hoar And Other Irreverent
Essays on the Study of
1993
0388+0001193 $6.00+.00 Pergamon Press Ltd
BOOK REVIEW CHRISTOPHER HUTTON Talbot J. Taylor, Mut~l misunderstanding: Language and interpretation, Duke University
~cepticis~ and the ~eorizing of Press, Durham and London, 1992.
Imagine watching a board-game played over a period of time in which the same pattern of moves seems to occur in each of the different matches. Not only are the pieces moved by the players in rather limited ways, but the games quickly reach a position of stalemate or the parties fail to agree on whether the game has ended to the advantage of one side or not. For the observer, the experience of watching endlessly unresolved games becomes increasingly frustrating, and, like the apocryphal spectator at Othello who called out ‘Can’t you see?‘, the urge to intervene becomes overpowering. ‘Can’t you see?’ could serve as a summation of the speech act this book is intended to perform. Mutual Misunderstanding is about where explanations of linguistic phenomena begin, how they proceed and where they end. They end, Taylor seems to say, nowhere in particular (see pp. 235-239), but with the transcendental assumptions with which they set out still intact. They proceed by means of a dialogic game (p. 239) between scepticism and theory, a dialogue which Taylor also refers to as an embrace (p. 200). This dialogue is analysed by Taylor as a kind of strategic board-game with moves and counter-moves. As an expository device, different theories are analysed in terms of the answers they implicitly or explicitly give to three central questions: WHETHER communicators ordinarily understand each other, WHAT it is for communicators to understand each other and HOW co~unicational unders~nding occurs. By adopting this avowedly reductionalist method of presentation, one he compares to the enlargement of a particular area of a photograph, Taylor aims to foreground the role of the sceptic in the structure of a diverse range of theories. In so doing he offers neither history of ideas, text-book condensation nor polemical argumentation. Mutual Misunderstanding is not about replacing wrong theories with correct ones; it is about seeing a picture of communication for what it is-a picture-and thereby making other ways of seeing possible and desirable. The scepticism invoked by Taylor consists simply in the denial that communicators ordinarily understand each other (strong scepticism) or that a particular hypothesis
Address correspondence Hong Kong.
to: Dr C. M. Hutton, Dept English, University
261
of Hong Kong,
I Pokfulam Road,
262
CHRISTOPHER
HUTTON
about how people ordinarily understand each other has been proven (weak scepticism). The sceptic takes propositions about WHETHER as empirical hypotheses, but denies that they hold either in general or in a particular theoretical case. Modern theorists of language on the other hand hold with the commonsense view that of course we understand each other and attempt to give an account of WHAT and HOW. In Taylor’s terms, linguistic theorists take commonsense, ‘practical me~discourse’ (‘of course we normafly understand each other!‘) and make of it ‘intellectual metadiscourse’. Once the claim that we understand each other moves into the academic realm, then, Taylor points out, it becomes an empirical hypothesis and must be justified with reference to accepted academic criteria for supporting or proving statements. The important point is that this step from practical to intellectual metadiscourse is prompted in dialogue with the sceptic. Both the sceptic and the theorist concur in treating statements about mutual understanding as empirical hypotheses and it is on this basis that the various dialogues proceed. Modern theories of language are in symbiotic relation with scepticism, since they seek in different ways to give an answer to the sceptical challenge. Communicational scepticism is therefore ‘one of the defining rhetorical characteristics of modern language theory’ (p. 23). Taylor illustrates this position by presenting the approaches of a number of theorists including Frege, Saussure, Grice, Fish, Herrnstein Smith, and Garfinkel. Frege, for exampfe, in attacking psychologism, uses communicational scepticism as what Taylor terms a ‘limiting case’ (p. 22), i.e. as the consequence of a reducfio ad ffb~~rdu#l. If one accepts that logical inferences are generalizations from mental operations, then, given the assumption that mental phenomena are private and that communication is the transfer of meanings from one mind to another, one is forced into communicational scepticism. This follows from the premise that ‘there is no sense in which we can speak of the same ideas or thoughts in two people’s minds’ (p. 98). Since psychologism leads to communicational scepticism, it must be based on an error. In recent work in the philosophy of language concerning the status of rules, the sceptic, the realist and the anti-realist are engaged in a three-way dialogue where the anti-realist (Kripke, Dummett on what it means to follow a rule) may use scepticai arguments against the realist (Sperber and Wilson, Grice), while at the same time seeking to explain the phenomenon of social coherence and apparently successful communication against the communicational sceptic (pp. 148-149): ‘The anti-realist’s ultimate goal is to effect. within theoretical discourse on rule-followmg, the abandonment of realist strategies in favor of a strategy which is specifically constructed 50 as to render theoretical discourse on rule-following invulnerrrbie to scepticai criticism.’
Thus Taylor aims to show how scepticism is fundamen~1 to the very fiber of the argumentations, both as a limiting case and as a rhetorical weapon. The realist is depicted by the anti-realist as giving unnecessary hostages to scepticism and thus opening up the way to a sceptical attack on communicational coherence. Scepticism is used as part of what is ultimately an anti-sceptical strategy. Ethnomethodology emerges within this expository framework as an attempt to show the sceptic mutual understanding in action. Understanding is what interactants ‘do’
BOOK REVIEW
263
‘The ethnomethodologist completes the anti-realist strategy of ‘reducing to practice’ the theoretical topics of intellectual metadiscourse. From the point of view of ethnomethodology, lay communicational agents are themselves preoccupied by the very same problems that have long bedeviled communicational theorists. ’ (p. 228-229)
The ethnomethodologist’s task is therefore simply that of describing the ‘mundane methods’ by which understanding is achieved (p. 229), i.e. the ways in which interactants exhibit and enforce their mutual (moral) accountability in the cooperative enterprise of conversation. In ethnomethodology, the intellectual questions that arise out of taking everyday talk about language as empirical hypotheses are ultimately reduced back to the practices of interactants in mundane settings going about their everyday meaning-producing tasks. Taking seriously the sceptical challenge-‘But the ethnomethodologist to how do you know people understand each other ?‘-leads undertake an elaborate description of people ‘doing understanding’ as a practical achievement. The sceptical question about understanding is reduced to the interactants’ shared problem of achieving understanding in the face of potential socio-semantic disorder. Mutual Misunderstanding presents a particular picture of the relationship between commonsense remarks about language and academic theory. Theorists are depicted as habitually taking everyday, ‘locally’ relevant metadiscourse and treating it as consisting of statements of empirical belief. Taylor points out that what linguists and others take to be commonsense, i.e. that we ordinarily understand each other, need not be universally accepted as such (p. 72). Locke’s theory of language rests on the premise that such assumptions are not only often false, they are misleading. Both Locke and Hobbes take a normative view of understanding, presenting it as a desirable state of affairs which must be achieved by individual acts of good intention. Mutual understanding is a product of the will to communicate. In modern linguistic theories based on the notion of a shared lungue (what Taylor refers to as ‘code-theories’), mutual understanding is simply affirmed against the limiting case of communicational scepticism. Taylor points the reader towards the Wittgenstein who sees in ‘reified’ questions philosophers creating sophisticated nonsense, tying themselves into conceptual knots. Thus ‘Magenta means this’ (said while pointing at a coloured bead) raises for the theorist a series of general or categorical questions: ‘What is it for one property of the physical world-a sequence of sounds-and another property of the physical world-the color of a bead-to stand in the relation here called ‘meaning”? How is this relation formed? How does it endure? [ ] Moreover, does the sequence of sounds uttered in pronouncing magenra mean only the particular color in the object to which the speaker is pointing? Does it not mean similar colors in other objects? How is this possible? How similar do the colors have to be? Does that relation-between magenta and the color magenta-exist independently of speakers and hearers? (pp. 15-16)
In Wittgenstein (and Taylor) there seem to be two possible responses to this: one to leave things as they are, to submit oneself to a Zen-like discipline of not asking as far as possible (see p. 250). The other is to think ‘even more crazily than philosophers’ (Wittgenstein, quoted in Taylor p. 3). Both kinds of responses are acts of will, again
264
CHRISTOPHER
HUTTON
a preoccupation Taylor shares with Wittgenstein (see quotation from Wittgenstein on p. 9, discussion of the will pp. 239, 242, 248, 253). Taylor is keen to avoid the trap of directly opposing the normative pictures presented by theorists of communication. For to oppose something is to be required to replace it. In ethnomethodological terms, the critic of a theory is within academic discourse held morally accountable for the vacuum ~tentially created. But replacing theory X by theory Y requires that Y does the work of X, that it serves the same needs as X and therefore force of circumstance will ensure that it will look very much like X. Nonetheless Taylor is addressing himself to a ‘condition’, a term which he prefers over ‘disorder’ (p. 26). The condition involves a compulsion, that of moving only between certain fixed points of academic orientation to the exclusion of others (p. 248): ‘If my representation of intellectual metadiscourse as a frustrating and vacuous dialogic game instills in the reader the wiit to avoid the consequences of theorizing practical metadiscourse. then a strategy which can bring about a change of aspect in how the reader sees pracricicaf metadiscourse may offer the means of taking the next crucial step towards the realization of that goal.’
Taylor is not proposing-indeed he cannot consistently proposethat we set about studying practical metadiscourse with the aim of seeing it correctly. The aim of Mutuul Misunderstunding is to ‘destabilize the normative logic’ (p. 256) upon which modern academic metalinguistics is built, with Taylor assigning to himself the role of academic gadfly in the struggle against a particular form of ‘conceptual addiction’ (p. 244). What Taylor is arguing for is the freeing of metadiscourse from the domination of a single set of dogmas enshrined in modern theories of language. The source of those dogmas he identifies as the urge to treat everyday expressions of belief as empirical hypotheses and the rhetorical consequences of that decision. The reader will of course ask Taylor how this liberation is to be achieved, even supposing the will is there. This involves what Taylor refers to as a ‘second rhetorical front’ (p. 251). One aim would be that of conceiving practical metadiscourse in new or different ways. This might involve, for example. following Wittgenstein’s strategy of continually posing different analogical possibilities. Thus Wittgenstein compares an utterance of the type ‘Red means THIS’ uttered while pointing at a red object to the citing of a rule in chess. ‘This piece moves like THIS’ is uttered while pointing at the chess piece in question (p. 244). This analogy leads us away from the temptation to ask essentialist questions about the nature of meaning. Another way of imagining new metadiscourse is to use Wittgenstein’s technique of comparing everyday language with an imaginary ‘primitive’ language-game such as the builder’s language described in the ~~j~osop~i~a~ ~~~~~st~gutions,Taylor discusses a modified version of this hypothetical language. His aim is to show how statements that seem to serve as belief statements in ‘our’ language function in a hypothetical primitive language. Taylor suggests that the builder’s language, which consists in Wittgenstein’s version entirely of the words ‘block’, ‘pillar’, ‘slab’ and ‘beam’. be amended to include the supplementary remarks ‘Do you understand?‘, ‘Yes’. ‘No’ and ‘We understand each other’ (pp. 246-247):
BOOK REVIEW
265
‘After the builder calls for one of the stones, he says to the assistant, ‘Do you understand?’ The latter replies ‘Yes’ or ‘No’. If he replies ‘No’, the builder then shows the assistant a sample of the type of stone he wants to be brought. But when the assistant replies ‘Yes’, it is he who then indicates to the builder a sample of the type of stone which he will bring. If this is the kind of building-stone the builder wants, the latter replies, ‘We understand each other’, and the assistant goes to find the stone. If it is not, the builder says ‘No’ and indicates which type of stone he does want.’
This allows us to imagine such statements as ‘Do you unders~d?’ outside a framework where they are taken as hypotheses about belief states. Taylor suggests that we could substitute nonsense syllables for these supplementary moves, such as ‘Flurp’ for ‘Do you understand?’ and ‘Gavagai’ for ‘We understand each other’ (p. 247): ‘Thus reformulated, it would seem absurd to take ‘Gavagai’ as the expression of a belief held by its utterer, a belief of which it would be appropriate to ask such questions as ‘Do the facts obtain which would justify that belief?’
Furthermore, given that this primitive language has no further metalanguage, such a question could not even be fo~ulated within it. This allows us to consider ‘our’ language by analogy with a simple or primitive language. It also brings sharply into focus the question of the relationship of language to metalanguage which lies at the heart of the concerns of Mutual Misunderstanding. For while one might wish to say that ‘We understand each other’ is metalanguage or at least metadiscourse, since it asks a question about the discourse that has already taken place, one is less inclined to say that of ‘Gavagai’ which seems to be simply another possible move in the game, a move which the interactants have no means to theorize as being ‘above’ or ‘about’ discourse. This discussion then raises a series of further questions for ‘our’ complex and reflexive language: is there a way of talking about language which does not presently exist in our practical or intellectual metadiscourses? How does intellectual metadiscourse influence everyday discourse? Do linguists, in transforming metalanguage, also transform language? At the close of the book Taylor poses a key question (p. 257): ‘Would inquiry into the relation between discourse and metadiscourse lead language theory into equally frustrating and self-deceptive rhetorical games? That, as I have come to learn, is hard to say.’
One could imagine a number of responses to Mutual Misunderstanding, but it is unlikely to strike a chord with the audience to which it is directed, theorists of language and communication. Most academic linguists, for example, work within a set of assumptions they share with an academic network, one that guarantees that everyone can communicate with everyone else and address common problems of a specific and (within the theory) concrete kind. Furthermore, linguists as a group tend to have a problem-solving, sleeves-rolled-up perception of their academic selves and a liberal, undogmatic perception of their sociopolitical selves, contrasting themselves to linguistic bigots and racists on the one hand and teachers and others over-concerned about ‘correctness’ on the other. These senses of professional self are conveyed strongly in Geoffrey Pullurn’s recent collection The great Eskimo vocabulary hoax and other irreverent essays on the study of language (1991). As far as philosophy of science goes, linguists ‘get by’ with an informal blend of Popper and Kuhn. Philosophies of linguistics tend to consist in assertions about the ontological nature of the linguistic
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system as a preliminary to the ‘real work’ of analysing linguistic data. Most ‘empirical’ linguists are therefore more or less comfortable with the fundamental assumptions of modern linguistics and perfectly happy to see their task as the exploration of the contingent descriptive uncertainties thrown up by the individual theory or school they espouse. This they view as a scientific exercise leading from worse to better descriptions of natural languages, one that involves questions such as ‘one phoneme or two?’ or ‘is VP a universal category?‘. Taylor himself rates the chances of success of his rhetorical project as ‘remote’. citing the lack of inclination and the strength of ‘institutional forces’ that keep the current metadiscourse in place (p. 256). Mutuul Misunderstanding is not in any case a call for these descriptive practices to cease, and Taylor implicitly acknowledges that by talking of ‘destabilizing’ the discourse, he is in symbiotic dialogue with it, just as the theorist is in symbiotic dialogue with the sceptic. Any book which characterizes itself as ‘a discourse about discourse about discourse’ may lay itself open to the charge of being ‘excessively reflexive’ (p. 7). The sociologically-inclined might see a preferable task in the analysis of how this particular dialogue works as institutionalized inside and outside the university as a form of socially sanctioned professional knowledge. The neo-Marxist in the same vein might object to the treatment of academic discourse as a game of intellectual hide-and-seek. The historically-minded might ask for an elaboration of the evolving exchange (dialectic?) between common sense and academic sense. The empirically-minded might ask how the dialogue of sceptic and theorist could be transcended so as to open the way for a genuinely empirical linguistics. The post-Freudian might look askance at the liberated, autonomous, or transcendent will that Taylor appears to evoke. Taylor might be accused of disingenuousness in his denial that he sees the discourse of language theorists as ‘wrong’ and in need of replacing. ‘Vacuous’ comes pretty close to ‘wrong’ and ‘wrong’ implies ‘right’. The response to Mutual Misunderstunding may well consist in a chorus of these and other complaining voices, many of which have surfaced in this reviewer in the course of reading Mutual Misunderstanding. Yet these are themselves largely standardized ‘games of objection’, language-games into which academics are socialized as part of their training, labeling practices which include terms such as ‘historicist’. ‘Eurocentric’, ‘Positivist’, ‘Idealist’, ‘taxonomist’. The purpose of such labeling is always to achieve a rapid closure in any dialogue or debate, with the value of a label in achieving closure depending on the context and the audience to which it appeals. It would be a pity (and indeed ironic) if a book which challenges the reader at such a fundamental level were to be set aside in so peremptory a fashion. So where does this leave us? It leaves us with the problem that the very culture of academic life as we know it is bound up with these and other discursive strategies, with specific methods of argumentation. Linguistic theory may be. from one point of view available in Taylor/Wittgenstein, a sophisticated form of nonsense. a condition. a form of intellectual blindness. Yet it is also a form of life, no less so. one might
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say, than the everyday practices on which it is partly dependent. Wittgenstein developed what might be termed a ‘circular’ style which involved exploring a discursive terrain, circling continually around an issue or a usage, coming back to the same point from a different angle armed with a particular awareness. To have put arguments in ‘linear’ form, in the language of premises, inferences and conclusions or in the language of the empirical sciences would have made him morally accountable in the language-game to give answers to such questions as ‘If meaning is not in the head, then where is it?‘, ‘If language does not picture reality, how do we know that what we say bears any relation to reality at all?’ These are not necessarily sensible questions, but to exclude them requires a mastery of a different kind of sry&=, a different form of academic life. The defender of linguistic theory might concede Taylor’s central point-the role of the sceptic in the dialogic game with the theorist-but argue that only through treating beliefs as empirical hypotheses do we have a means of moving the debate along. In other words, we ‘progress’ specificalty through the dialectic between common sense and academic praxis. Without formulating empirical hypotheses we have no way out of the rhetorical circle, for they at least provide a (rhetorical) window on ‘facts’ or ‘reality’ constructed by the theory as lying outside its own labeling practices, ‘facts’ from which new sources of information, new ‘data’ etc can be drawn and new questions asked. Contrary to Taylor, it might be argued that empirical hypotheses are the ‘motor’ that drives us to challenge existing language-games. Only in as much as we can formulate our objections as empirical hypotheses can we challenge existing routinized ways of thinking about language. Empirical hypotheses function as appeals to a theory-transcendent authority (‘reality’) which all participants in the debate are pledged to respect. But this, Taylor might say, is a new debate, one in which we do not yet know our way about.
REFERENCE PULLAM, Language.
G. K. 1991 The Great Eskimo Vocabulary University of Chicago Press, Chicago.
Hoar And Other Irreverent
Essays on the Study of