Reason, experience, and critical-historical pragmatics

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Journal of Pragmatics 33 (2001) 1631-1636 www.elsevier.com/locate/pragma

Discussion note

Reason, experience, and critical-historical pragmatics Wataru Koyama Department of Linguistics, University of Chicago, 1010 E. 59th St., Chicago, 1L 60637, USA Department of English, Kansai Gaidai University, 16-1 Kita Katahoko-chou, Hirakata, Osaka, 573-1001, Japan

Received 23 May 2000; revised version 30 October 2000

1. Historicizing Chomsky's doublet "For the threshold of our modernity is situated not by the attempt to apply objective methods to the study of man, but rather by the constitution of an empirico-transcendental doublet which was called man" (Foucault, 1973:319). With these words, 'structuralism' started a 'neo-historicist' critique of modem epistemology and empirico-transcendental reason, whose condition of possibility is the very anthropocentric, humanist assumption that there is, unproblematically, such a thing as 'man' (Homo). Obviously, this was part of the early Foucault's relativistic, historicizing attempt, pursuing the Kantian project of critical philosophy: delimiting the bounds of modem 'empirico-theoretical' reason, or the human sciences (empirical sciences of, and by, if not for, the human subject), such as investigating an 'Ideal Speaker-Hearer', the speaker's subjective consciousness, etc., which take for granted the positivity (givenness) of what they intend to investigate, i.e., 'man' qua both the subject and object of scientific inquiries. As Foucault would come to admit later, this 'historical turn' of critical-transcendental reason was itself just a continuation of the modem project of the 'Enlightenment', which brings to the tribunal of critical reason not only the empirical, but also logico-mathematical reason (of rationalism), pragmatico-instrumental reason (of empiricism), and, even more reflexively, criticaltranscendental reason itself, by relentlessly investigating its own empirical, historicpragmatic conditions of possibility, plausibility, and verity (cf. Koyama, 1999, 2000a,b,c). Certainly, then, pace the early Foucanlt (who thought that we are 0378-2166/01/$ - see front matter 6) 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved. PII: S0378-2166(00)00070-9

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witnessing 'the death of man'), we still live in an age of 'man', an empirico-transcendental doublet, and it is the tensions, interactions, or 'dialectics' between these two categorially distinct spaces, i.e., the empirical and the (critical-)rational, that keep creating new kinds of theories and facts (such as 'human kinds'), in the dialectical interactions between the rational (e.g., 'words' and theories) and the behavioral (what we do with them) which constitute a 'hot', dynamic, historical, ever-evolving and ever-incomplete epistemological age such as ours, as opposed to, e.g., the (relatively) 'cold', static, 'harmonious' cosmological orders of many a non-modem society (cf. Koyama, 1997, 1999, 2000a,b,c). This is, roughly, the current critical-scientific, socio-philosophical understanding of 'man' and the sciences of 'man', which tries to come to grips with post-Kantian critical philosophies and post-Herderian social sciences, such as Western Marxism, Weberian historical-interpretive sociology, and Boasian historic-linguistic anthropology. Ever since Chomsky, however, epistemological discussions in linguistics, pragmatics, and cognitive psychology have remained at a dismally pre-Kantian level of 'dogmatic slumber', with their gratuitous, uninformed assumption that the entire field of epistemology is exhausted by rationalism and empiricism. Kopytko (2001 : 1637-1642), nicely captures this scandalous state of our art, in that (1) he appeals to the L6vi-Straussian 'binary logic' of primitive reason, when setting up a one-dimensional scale of epistemology, the two poles of which are (pure) rationalism and empiricism (as if there had been no Kantian critical turn), and (2) he appeals to the 'probabilistic' or 'fuzzy logic' of instrumental empiricism, when arguing that these epistemological categories are, in actuality, 'degree' notions. It remains as thoroughly pre-Kantian as Chomsky's system of ideas, whose epistemological 'binarism' is still the reference point for Kopytko and many others in achronic and precritical linguistics and pragmatics. In this note, without arguing against Kopytko's interpretation of the recent development in pragmatics ('from rationalism to empiricism'), I shall, following Foucault, try to suggest the historical bounds of Kopytko's interpretive matrix itself.

2. Rationalism, empiricism, and beyond First off, note that, as rationalists have kept pointing out, much of 'AI' and 'cognitive science' assumes the empirical, non-rationalist construals of 'language' and 'mind'. Second, note that empirical reasoning is, generally speaking, data-driven, inductively-oriented, and 'pragmatically'-, or better, contextually-centered. Hence, naturally, 'context(ualization)' ought to be a central concern for linguistic empiricism. In other words, insofar as one takes 'the empirical' (vs. the conceptual, or the symbolic) as one's point of departure, the object of one's analysis cannot be justifiably detached from its 'context', and this 'a priori impossibility of radical decontextualization' is a consequence of the empirical perspective. Thus, if one tries to empirically investigate, say, 'cognition', it cannot be legitimately isolated from its contextual surrounds: emotion, conation, or the social. As Kopytko has nicely shown, concrete works of cognitive science have, in general, properly followed this

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meta-theoretical 'logic', as they are clearly moving towards a 'holistic' view of the mind, even though one might notice that the social has been kept at bay, due to socio-historical contingencies of disciplinary compartmentalization (cf. Koyama, 1997, 1999, 2000a,b,c). Yet, if there is one thing that is valid in the Chomskyan critique of empiricist linguistics, it is that much of the argument and evidence advanced by the latter presupposes the empirical perspective, which the Chomskyans find unwarranted, questionable, or 'uninteresting'. As Kopytko is acutely aware of (cf. his references to Popperian 'critical rationalism'), empirical findings are 'always already' theoryladen, and it is the empiricist theoretical perspective that the rationalists are skeptically disposed towards. Given this cross-perspectival 'incommensurability', or astigmatism, the choice between empiricist and rationalist theories comes to depend crucially on the 'productivity', 'fruitfulness', or 'progressiveness' of the competing 'research programs', and Kopytko seems to count on these Lakatosian notions as ultimate meta-theoretical criteria. Unfortunately, the rub is that these utilitarian (if not evolutionist) criteria are also theory-laden, and possibly teleological (circular) notions (cf. Koyama, 2000a). Thus, the problem with the anti-rationalist agenda which Kopytko advances is two-fold: firstly, no decisive argument against rationalism can be, in principle, made insofar as one starts one's anti-rationalist critique from the empiricist perspective; and secondly, the meta-theoretical criteria which could be used to make evaluative judgments vis-h-vis rationalist and empiricist theories or programs are themselves problematic. A better, more decisive and effective way to rebut Chomskyan linguistics may be, firstly, to show how it fails to live up to its own standard, and, secondly, to construct a theory which explains how such failures are principled and explicable in meta-theoretic terms. First, since 'rationalist pragmatics' is merely a set of 'auxiliary hypotheses' or a 'protective belt' for rationalist linguistics as a whole, whose 'core' or 'paradigm cases' lie in its structural theory, one should squarely attack the latter, and demonstrate its systematic shortcomings in terms of its own assumptions or evaluative criteria. For example, we ought to show that rationalist structural theories are, despite themselves, systematically dependent on their contexts, such as the socio-historical conditions which give rise and life to such theories, theorists and their 'data', habits of thinking, fashions of speaking, etc. If one does this, it can be claimed that the very assumption of rationalist linguistics, i.e., the decontextualization of 'language' (as defined by the rationalists) and, more fundamentally, of 'linguistic theory' itself, is undermined by the linguists' own practice. That is, one can show the pragmatic, contextual conditions for rationalist theories, or 'theoretical reason', thereby demonstrating their empirical bounds (cf. Koyama, 1999, 2000a,b,c). To this end, obviously, one needs to construct a theory which can systematically deal not only with language(s), but also with linguistic theories and theorists. That is, following Kant's path, we must take a critical, transcendental turn, going 'beyond' both Chomskyan linguistics and linguistic empiricism, and show (1) how and to what extent linguistic experiences (of not only 'ordinary language users', but also 'scientists') are theory-laden, (2) how and to what extent linguistic theories and

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concepts (of both ordinary language users and scientists) are empirically, socio-historically bound, and (3) how such dialectic relationships between the empirical and the conceptual constitute the linguistic reality in which linguistic rationalists, empiricists, and 'ordinary' language users all live (cf. Koyama, 2000b,c). Rather than arguing for empiricism and against rationalism (or inversely), we should construct a theory which can describe and explain how linguistic empiricism and rationalism interact with each other, both at the level of 'ordinary language' and of 'scientific discourse', a 'dialectic' which constitutes 'language' as a historic totality (at least in modernity; see above).

2. Contextualizing the empirical and empiricism: Where does 'context' lead us? If, as Kopytko correctly argues, 'context(ualization)' is a key term for linguistic empiricism, we should rigorously pursue this notion further. First off, we ought to note that, to the extent that the conceptual (or the symbolic) is irreducible to the empirical (the indexical, or pragmatic) and vice versa, the two contextually presuppose each other, as Jakobson pointed out a long time ago, under the rubric of 'mutual implication, of la langue and la parole. In other words, from the perspective of the conceptual, indexicals constitute the context of the symbolic universe, and from the perspective of the empirical, symbols constitute the context of the indexical universe. The genuinely contextual theory must squarely acknowledge the realm of the symbolic (as a special kind of context to which indexicals point), and see that the real problem is how the symbolic and the indexical are contextualized with each other, and in fact 'interpenetrate' each other. As it turns out, firstly, linguistic structures symbolic phenomena par excellence - are organized by an indexical principle (see Koyama, 2000b for details); and, secondly, no pragmatic phenomena can exist for us (or, at least, can be known by us) without symbolic, interpretive, ideological mediation (cf. Kant's noumena, or Peirce's asymptotic approach to the indexical (the 'really real') via symbols). This 'full-blown' mutual implication between the symbolic and the indexical strongly suggests that both dogmatic rationalism and naive empiricism are, in principle, wrong (see Koyama 1999, 2000a,b for evidence). The empiricist theory of 'context' must overcome itself by relentlessly pursuing the implication of this all-important notion. But not only does the empirical have the symbolic as its context; also empirical theories have contexts of their own, since theories do not exist in a socio-historical vacuum. Instead of reifying theories as autonomous entities, we must theorize them as having addressers, addressees, and other pragmatic and conceptual contexts of theorization. No theory, be it 'rationalist' or 'empiricist', has been observed which is not socio-historically contextualized. Thus, we should start to squarely face the contextual interactions between empiricist theories and the socio-historical universes in which they acquire their possibility, plausibility, and 'verity', and which they create and re-create dialectically. For example, we might observe that the (weakly) 'indeterministic', probabilistic, post-Newtonian, or post-Laplacean scientific theories

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(characterized by non-linearity, irreversibility, etc.), which Kopytko appeals to as the paradigm case of an emerging (neo-Carnapian) unified empirical science, are nothing but the newest development in the nomothetic-scientific movement which, ever since the dawn of modernity, has been trying to reduce historic contingency, individuality, or uniqueness to something (at least partially) calculable, controllable, and govemable: or, to use Hacking's (1990) felicitous phrase, "to tame chance (Fortuna, haecceity, or indexicality)" (cf. Shapiro, 1983; Gigerenzer et al., 1989; Koyama, 2000c). That is, the case can be made that these post-Newtonian and antiCartesian theories are Baconian sciences par excellence, driven by (Benthamite) instrumental reason and its epistemic, political-economic and ethical correlates, which constitute much of the ontico-epistemic and praxeological universe in which we live (cf. Foucault, 1979; Latour, 1987; Rouce, 1987). They are, I am suggesting, at the 'growth point' of the post-Nominalist nomothetic sciences (cf. Blumenberg, 1987; Taylor, 1989), expanding the realm of human knowledge, certainty, and control, from the narrowly restricted Cartesian universe of logico-mathematical demonstration, to the empirical universe of Newtonian and Laplacean causality, and then more deeply into the empirical universe, now engulfing the realm of relative predictability and indeterminate calculability as well, an epistemic-praxeological drift in which more and more of the natural and human universe becomes subject to human knowledge, control, and government: i.e., 'instrumentally rationalized', in the Weberian sense. Thus, the universe is made increasingly 'value-free', and the ethical and the aesthetic become marginalized, insignificant, or suspect for those who live in this universe. In such a universe, one might even find cogent a pragmatic theory which does not have any place for 'good life', a central notion in the Aristotelian theory of praxis (cf. Maclntyre, 1984). Note how the political and the ethical are left in the obscure background under the general rubric of 'the social' in Kopytko's paper, where 'cognition', 'intention', and 'emotion' are, predictably enough, given primary focus, as befits our modem, epistemically-centered, instrumentally-oriented, and individualistically psychologized universe (cf. Taylor, 1989).

3. From rationalism and empiricism towards post-Kantian critical sciences As Foucault taught us, systems of knowledge are constructed within the universes of 'utterables' (utterances that are possible, plausible, or 'truthful', relative to their socio-historic contexts upon which they are dependent). Here, notice that the problematic of 'Cartesian' vs. 'non-Cartesian' pragmatics, which Kopytko sets up without much justification, conveniently eclipses the post- or neo-Kantian problematic of 'nomothetic-natural' vs. 'idiographic-historical' sciences, thereby effectively closing off the discursive possibility of 'pragrnatics as a socio-historic science' (cf. Koyama, 1997, 1999, 2000a,b,c). This ahistorical, na'fvely universalist matrix restricts, a priori, the theoretical and empirical field of investigation, viz.. the historic relativity of our own sciences. That is, such an ahistorical matrix is itself a 'historic a priori' (Canguilhem, 1994) for both the Cartesian and non-Cartesian pragmatics which exhaust Kopytko's and, perhaps, many others' historically limited vision.

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