On addressing understanding

People know what they do; they frequently know why they do what they do; but what they don't know is what what they do does. (Foucault, quoted in Dreyfus and Rabinow 1982:187)

It's only by thinking even more crazily than philosophers do that you can solve their problems. (Wittgenstein 1980:75)

Do others understand what we say or write? Do we understand them? These are questions not often addressed in language theory. Those professionals who work in language theory—literary theorists, linguists, philosophers of language, communication theorists, semioticians, theorists of rhetoric, discourse analysts, etc.—are more interested in the problem of specifying what it is to understand and how we understand than in asking whether we understand. Apparently, the fact that communicators ordinarily understand each other is a pre-theoretical given, the sine qua non of academic discourse on language, meaning, and interpretation. Consequently, asking whether we understand our fellow communicators is typically treated as the sort of non-serious question that only a radical sceptic would even consider raising.

After all, if we cannot in fact understand what others say or write and if they cannot understand us, it seems natural to conclude that each of us is little more than a psychological island: that is, we are isolated solip-sists who hear only the echo of our own voices, all the while believing and acting under the tragicomic illusion that we are hearing and being heard by others. With such a conclusion as the only apparent alternative, it is not surprising that language theory has consigned the discussion of sceptical doubts about communicational understanding to the realm of non-serious discourse.

It is not my intention to argue for or against the seriousness of communicational scepticism. Rather, I intend to challenge the implication of the view just discussed: that is, that communicational scepticism has little or no influence in the intellectual discourse that constitutes modern Western thought on language. I will attempt to bring to light the importance of communicational scepticism to the rhetorical structure of that discourse, an importance that is concealed by familiar assertions of the status of communicational understanding as a pre-theoretical given (or by the equally common practice of dismissing this status as not even worthy of mention).

This aim fits into a larger task to be undertaken here: investigating the rhetorical source of Western ideas on language, meaning, and interpretation. Why are particular sorts of concepts, problems, arguments, assumptions, methods, puzzles, and solutions characteristic of this episteme? Why do language theorists of various intellectual persuasions and disciplinary schools all play one of a quite closely related family of (meta)language-games?

Again, questions such as these do not attract the attention of language theorists. Moreover, if language theorists ever were to address such questions, they would probably offer the unhesitating response that language theory simply attempts to produce an accurate account of the facts of language, as that task is understood within the general framework of the Western scientific tradition. The roots of that tradition, they might say, form a topic for the philosophy or history of science, not for language theory itself. Still, such a response—although direct—begs the question. For, one might ask, why is the task of "producing an accurate account of the facts of language" understood as it is within the Western tradition? And, in particular, what role in intellectual discourse on language (that is, in what I will call "intellectual metadiscourse") is played by the purportedly unquestionable assumption that it is non-serious to doubt the effectiveness of language as a vehicle of communicational understanding?

Destitute of faith, but terrified at scepticism

A popular introduction to the philosophy of language articulates what I take to be the defining issue of language theory in the modern era. The author places the following task at the very center of inquiry into language:

We need a philosophy of mutual understanding, protecting shared understanding in the face of divergent ways and experiences. (Blackburn 1984:8)

In writing this book it is not my intention to respond to such calls for a philosophy of mutual understanding; instead, I will investigate the motivation for asserting that a philosophy or theory of mutual understanding is something "we need." This will lead me to consider how intellectual discourse on language represents that which needs to be "protected," what it needs to be protected from, why we need to protect it, and how it is vulnerable, as well as the protective strategies that may be deployed and the methods of comparing the relative strengths of those strategies.

Moreover, by means of this investigation, I hope to afford some insight into the more general proposition that the discourse of modern humanist thought characteristically takes the form of a dialogue between the sceptic and his anti-sceptical adversaries. It is of particular interest that, within this discourse, the sceptic's adversaries are typically portrayed as split personalities. They combine the "commonsense" faith of the layman (who is attacked by the sceptic for believing in propositions of foundationless dogma) with the intellectual discipline of the theorist (who responds to the sceptic's attack by attempting to construct a sceptic-proof "protection" for those "commonsense" propositions). For, the theorist argues, to abandon those propositions would mean to lose our self-understanding and our understanding of the world in which we live.

One conception of the rhetorical importance of scepticism to modern thought is expressed in the writings of John Stuart Mill. In On Liberty, Mill recommends a free and open dialogue with the sceptic as a rhetorical buttress to the foundational distinction between truth and opinion:

In the present age—which has been described as "destitute of faith, but terrified at scepticism"—in which people feel sure, not so much that their opinions are true, as that they should not know what to do without them—the claims of an opinion to be protected from public attack are rested not so much on its truth, as on its importance to society. (Mill 1859:965)

Mill suggests that the confrontation between received opinion and scepticism is necessary to ensure that the propositions we continue to hold are those, and only those, that have been shown to be true....