Introduction: Realism after the Linguistic Turn

The present volume brings together philosophical essays that were written between 1996 and 2000 and pick up on a line of thought that I had set aside since Knowledge and Human Interests. With the exception of the final essay (“The Relationship between Theory and Practice Revisited”), they deal with issues in theoretical philosophy that I have neglected since then. Of course, the formal pragmatics that I have developed since the early 1970s cannot do without the fundamental concepts of truth and objectivity, reality and reference, validity and rationality. This theory relies on a normatively charged concept of communication [Verständigung], operates with validity claims that can be redeemed discursively and with formal-pragmatic presuppositions about the world, and links understanding speech acts to the conditions of their rational acceptability. However, I have not dealt with these themes from the perspective of theoretical philosophy. I have pursued neither a metaphysical interest in the being of Being, nor an epistemological interest in the knowledge of objects or facts, nor even the semantic interest in the form of assertoric propositions. The linguistic turn did not acquire its significance for me in connection with these traditional problems. Rather, the pragmatic approach to language [Sprachpragmatik] helped me to develop a theory of communicative action and of rationality. It was the foundation for a critical theory of society and paved the way for a discourse-theoretic conception of morality, law, and democracy.

This explains a certain one-sidedness of my theoretical strategy, which the essays in this volume are meant to redress. They revolve around two fundamental questions of theoretical philosophy. On the one hand, I here take up the ontological question of naturalism: As subjects capable of speech and action, we “always already” find ourselves in a linguistically structured lifeworld. Flow can the normativity that is unavoidable from the perspective of the participants in this lifeworld be reconciled with the contingency of sociocultural forms of life that have evolved naturally? On the other hand, I turn to the epistemological question of realism: How can we reconcile the assumption that there is a world existing independently of our descriptions of it and that is the same for all observers with the linguistic insight that we have no direct, linguistically unmediated access to “brute” reality? Needless to say, I deal with these topics from within the formal-pragmatic perspective.

I Communication or Representation?

Once Frege replaced the mentalistic via regia of analyzing sensations, representations, and judgments with a semantic analysis of linguistic expressions and Wittgenstein radicalized the linguistic turn into a paradigm shift,1 Hume and Kant’s epistemological questions could have taken on a new, pragmatic significance. In the context of lived practices, of course, they then would have lost their primacy over questions in the theory of communication and action. Yet even within philosophy of language, the traditional order of explanation has persisted. As ever, theory takes precedence over practice, representation over communication; and the semantic analysis of action depends on a prior analysis of knowledge.

Still caught up in the tradition of Platonism, the philosophy of consciousness privileged the internal over the external, the private over the public, the immediacy of subjective experience over discursive mediation. Epistemology rose to the rank of a First Philosophy, while communication and action were relegated to the realm of appearances, thus retaining a derivative status. After the transition from philosophy of consciousness to philosophy of language, it seemed to make sense not to turn the hierarchy of explanatory moves upside-down, but rather to level it. After all, language is used to communicate as much as to represent, and a linguistic utterance is itself a form of action, which is used for producing interpersonal relationships.

After the linguistic turn, the relation between proposition and fact replaces the relation between representation and object. Charles Sanders Peirce already eschewed focusing too narrowly on semantics and expanded this two-place relation into a three-place relation. Thus the sign, which refers to an object and expresses a state of affairs, must be interpreted by a speaker and hearer.2 Subsequently, speech act theory following Austin showed how, in the normal form of a speech act (Mp), the propositional component’s reference to the world and to objects is interlinked with the illocutionary component’s reference to other interlocutors. By creating an intersubjective relationship between speaker and hearer, the speech act simultaneously stands in an objective relation to the world. If we conceive of “communication” [Verständigung] as the inherent telos of language, we cannot but acknowledge the equiprimordiality of representation, communication, and action. As representation and as communicative act, a linguistic utterance points in both directions at once: toward the world and toward the addressee.

Nonetheless, even after the linguistic turn, the analytic mainstream held fast to the primacy of assertoric propositions and their representational function. The tradition of truth-conditional semantics founded by Frege, the logical empiricism of Russell and the Vienna Circle, the theories of meaning from Quine to Davidson and from Sellars to Brandom all start from the premise that the proposition or assertion is paradigmatic for linguistic analysis. Aside from the important exception of the later Wittgenstein and his unorthodox students (such as Georg Henrik von Wright),3 analytic philosophy has meant the continuation of epistemology by other means. Questions pertaining to theories of communication, action, morality, and the law were as ever considered to be of secondary importance.

In the face of this fact, Michael Dummett explicitiy raises the question of the relationship between representation and communication:

Language, it is natural to say, has two principal functions: that of an instrument of communication, and that of a vehicle of thought. We are therefore impelled to ask which of the two is primary. Is it because language is an instrument of communication that it can also serve as a vehicle of thought? Or is it, conversely, because it is a vehicle of thought, and can therefore express thoughts, that it can be used by one person to communicate his thoughts to others?4

For Dummett, this question is based on a false dichotomy. On the one hand, (a) the communicative function of language must not be rendered independent of its representational function since this would yield a distorted intentionalistic picture of communication. On the other hand, (b) the representational function can no more be conceived independently of the communicative function since this would mean losing sight of the epistemic conditions for understanding propositions.

(a) By asserting Kp a speaker does not merely express her intention (in Grice and Searle’s sense) of making her interlocutor recognize that she takes p to be true and that she wants him to know this. Instead of her own thought p, she wants to communicate the fact that p to him. The speaker’s illocutionary goal is that the hearer not only acknowledge her belief, but that he come to the same opinion, that is, to share that belief. But this is possible only on the basis of the intersubjective recognition of the truth claim raised on behalf of p. The speaker can realize her illocutionary goal only if the cognitive function of the speech act is also realized, that is, if the interlocutor accepts her utterance as valid. To this extent, there is an internal connection between successful communication and factual representation.5

(b) This intentionalist emancipation of the communicative function of language mirrors the truth-theoretic privileging of its cognitive function. According to this conception, we understand a sentence or proposition if we know the conditions under which it is true. However, language users do not have direct access to truth conditions not requiring interpretation. Hence Dummett insists that we must have knowledge of the conditions under which an interpreter is able to recognize whether the conditions that make a sentence true obtain. With this epistemic turn, understanding shifts from solipsistically accessible truth conditions to conditions under which the sentence to be interpreted can be asserted as true and thus can be justified publicly as rationally acceptable.6 Knowing a sentence’s assertibility conditions is connected to the sorts of reasons that can be cited in support of its truth. To understand an utterance is to know how one could use it in order to reach an understanding with someone about something. If, however, we are able to understand a sentence solely with regard to its conditions of use in rationally acceptable utterances, then there must be an internal connection between the representational function of language and the conditions of successful communication.7

It follows from (a) and (b) that the representational and communicative functions of language mutually presuppose one another, in other words, that they are equiprimordial. Although Dummett shares this view, even he follows the prevailing spirit of contemporary analytic philosophy. The purpose of his own theory of meaning is essentially to...