Attached below is the 1st paper to be presented at the Colloquium on Language
Play and the Construction of Meaning Among Working Class Teenagers in Hong
Kong (Convenors: Chris Candlin and Angel Lin) at Sociolinguistics
Symposium 12, March 26-28, 1998, Institute of Education, University of
London, U.K. If you're interested in the other papers of the colloquium
(Language Play and Group Dynamics of Working Class Teenagers In and Out of
Youth Centres, by Tit-Wing Lo, Kevin Chu, Chris Candlin, and Angel Lin;
Language Play and Resistance in the English Classroom in Hong Kong,
by Michelle Kwan), e-mail me (enangel who-is-at cityu.edu.hk) and we'll e-mail them
to you in April when we come back from SS12 in London. Comments and
feedback most welcome!
Angel
--------------------
Angel Lin
Dept of English, City University of Hong Kong
e-mail: enangel who-is-at cityu.edu.hk
--------------------------------------------------
Language-play as Experimenting with Forms of
Life
Isaac H. K. Lam
Ph.D. Candidate, Department of Philosophy
Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shatin,
N.T., Hong Kong
E-mail address: isaaclam who-is-at cuhk.edu.hk
Paper to be presented at the Colloquium on Language
Play Among Working Class Adolescents
(Convenors: Chris Candlin and Angel Lin),
Sociolinguistics Symposium 12, March 26,
1998, Institute of Education, University of
London, England. (Comments and feedback
welcome)
At the turn of the first half of this
century, there appeared two philosophical
works the impacts of which went far beyond
philosophy into other human sciences.
Despite the difference in their approaches
and styles, they had one thing in common:
both had language as their focus. In
Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations
and Gadamer's Truth and Method, language is
shown to be the key crucial to the
understanding of human existence. By drawing
on their insights about language to
understand the language-play of the at-risk
youths recorded in the audio- and video-tapes
in this study, which will be discussed in
further detail in the next paper in this
colloquium, I hope to attain a deeper
understanding of their lives, and this, I
hope, will contribute to youth education in
general. My starting-point will be
Wittgenstein's view of language.
In his well-known but enigmatic Philosophical
Investigations, with his notion of "language-
game", Wittgenstein turned 180 degrees from
his earlier logical atomist view of language
in Tractatus, a view which also has a
tremendous impact on the philosophy of
language. As we shall see in a moment, this
earlier view may be characterized as the
"language as picture view". According to
this view, "[t]he totality of propositions is
language." (T,4.001) Therefore, the workings
of language can be understood in terms of
workings of propositions. To the
Wittgenstein in Tractatus, "[a] proposition
is a picture of reality." (T,4.01) In other
words, language can do its job because it
pictures a reality, or more accurately, a
possible reality to us. That is why he
further supplemented the above statement with
the following words: "A proposition is a
model of reality as we imagine it." (T,4.01)
Therefore, the "language as picture view"
must be understood in terms of Wittgenstein's
concept of picture. Parallel to the notion
that "a proposition is a picture of reality",
Wittgenstein suggested that "[a] picture is a
model of reality." (T,2.12) A picture can be
a model of reality because the fact that its
elements, as "the representatives of
objects", "are related to one another in a
determinate way represents that things are
related to one another in the same way."
(T,2.13-15) This view goes hand in hand with
his logical atomist worldview at that time.
In Tractatus 1.1 and 1.2, he claimed that the
world can ultimately be divided into some
atomic facts. A fact "is the existence of
states of affairs" (T,2) whereas "[a] state
of affairs (a state of things) is a
combination of objects (things)." (T,2.01)
This parallel between the internal structure
of a state of affairs and the internal
structure of a picture explains why a picture
can be a model of reality. Consequently, as
a picture, a proposition can also be
ultimately dissolved into some uniquely
determined elementary propositions which in
turn can be dissolved into names and their
logical forms. Hence, each proposition "has
one and only one complete analysis" (T,3.25)
which corresponds to a specific state of
affairs in the world.
In other words, Wittgenstein's "language as
picture view" is founded on the insight that
humans are fundamentally related to the world
in a somehow pictorial link (i.e., in his
words): "We picture facts to ourselves."
(T,2.1) This distantly echoes the Kantian
idea of "categories" though he may not be
aware of it. In other words, to be humans,
it is necessary to be able to perceive states
of affairs of the world in certain forms.
Thus it leads to a point which is also
important to his later view: Understanding a
proposition is not itself a linguistic
activity; to understand a proposition has
already involved a pre-reflective
understanding of how things are in the world.
This is the ground of Wittgenstein's insight
that "[a] proposition shows its sense"
(T,4.022). He further explicated this ideas
in Tractatus 4.021:
A proposition is a picture of reality;
for if I understand a proposition, I
know the situation that it represents.
And I understand the proposition without
having had its sense explained to me.
(Emphasis mine.)
Although Wittgenstein eventually gave up this
"language as picture view" in his
Philosophical Investigations, the insight
that our linguistic activities have a more
primordial ground in our other activities had
been preserved in his later idea of "form of
life". This ground of linguistic activities
has remained the fundamental concern for him.
So let us now turn to the question why
Wittgenstein abandoned his earlier view.
His earlier view is intuitively appealing at
the level of proposition. However, it
becomes less so once we consider how words
can get their meanings. In the case of a
picture, its sense is not clear unless we
have already known what are represented by
all, or at least most, of its elements. How
to interpret what each element of a picture
represents can significantly change our
understanding of the whole picture. Usually,
it does not pose a problem because we know
what each element is by the resemblance
between the object and the image that depicts
it. However, in the case of a proposition,
how to know the meaning of each word in it is
not an easy question to answer: How can we
know what is depicted by a word?
Wittgenstein recognized this problem from the
very beginning. In Tractatus 4.026, he
contrasted the way of obtaining the meaning
of a proposition with the way of getting the
meaning of a word:
The meanings of simple signs (words)
must be explained to us if we are to
understand them.
With propositions, however, we make
ourselves understood. (T,4.026)
But the real problem is: How can the meaning
of simple signs be explained to us? In
Tractatus, he only gave us these cryptic
words:
3.262 What signs fail to express,
their application shows. What
signs slur over, their application
says clearly. (T,3.262)
But throughout history, we think that we have
already known how the meanings of words are
taught to us. In the very beginning of
Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein
showed that this deep-seated view of language
can be at least traced back to St. Augustine.
According to this view,
the individual words in language name
objects---sentences are combinations of
such names.---In this picture of
language we find the roots of the
following ideas: Every word has
meaning. This meaning is correlated
with the word. It is the object for
which the word stands. (PI,1)
This view in fact bears a resemblance to the
earlier Wittgenstein's "language as picture
view". However, in Philosophical
Investigations, Wittgenstein saw that this
view had committed some grave errors. In
Philosophical Investigations, section 3, he
pointed out how this view had have its
fundamental error:
Augustine, we might say, does describe a
system of communication; only not
everything that we call language is this
system. ...
It is as if someone were to say: "A game
consists in moving objects about on a
surface according to certain rules ..."-
--and we reply: You seem to be thinking
of board games, but there are others.
You can make your definition correct by
expressly restricting it to those games.
His example in section 2 may be helpful in
illustrating this point.
Let us imagine a language for which the
description given by Augustine is right.
The language is meant to serve for
communication between a builder A and an
assistant B. A is building with
building-stones: there are blocks,
pillars, slabs and beams. B has to pass
the stones, and that in the order in
which A needs them. For this purpose
they use a language consisting of words
"block", "pillar", "slab", "beam". A
calls them out;---B brings the stone
which he had learnt to bring at such-
and-such a call.
In this situation, the meaning of each word
seems to be completely determined by the
object being referred to. However, we can
immediately see two problems.
First, a word does not get its meaning only
because of its reference, it must also depend
on the specific setting in which it is used.
We can imagine another equally possible
setting, e.g., in a language-game between a
carpenter and his assistant, in which the
same word can have a different meaning. In
contrast to his belief that each proposition
"has one and only one complete analysis" in
Tractatus, the Wittgenstein in Philosophical
Investigations showed us that a proposition
can have different analyses and this all
depends on the setting in which the
proposition is used. Wittgenstein did not
say that St. Augustine was completely wrong.
The problem is this: "not everything that we
call language is this system." In section 7,
Wittgenstein explicitly called a specific
setting in which only certain linguistic
activities can be meaningful as a "language-
game". In other words, St. Augustine's view
(and also our common-sense view) leads us to
mistakenly believe that the "ostensive
definition language-game" is the only
language-game in which a word can have its
meaning.
Secondly, the words in this language-game of
mason and his assistant are not merely names
of different kinds of stones. They are
propositions. They each have a sense beyond
simply being a name of something. When the
mason calls out "block", his assistant
understands it as: "Bring me a stone block!"
In this language-game, a proposition can no
longer be analyzed as a picture which is
self-sufficient to present its sense to us by
showing how objects are related in some
determinate way. Instead, its sense is based
on something extra-linguistic, (something
outside the "picture",) i.e., the practice of
this game by which a word can be a token for
some more or less determinate moves in the
game. If we compare this with what he said
in Tractatus: "What signs fail to express,
their application shows", we can see that his
insight of "language-game" has its root back
in his early period. Thus Wittgenstein came
to this conclusion of how a word and also a
proposition can get their meanings in a
language-game: they have certain applications
in the game. In other words, we are
socialized into making a certain move within
a certain language-game with a certain
utterance in our process of language
acquisition.