Response to Samuel Wheeler: “Naturalist Structuralism's Aporia? Essentialism, Indeterminacy, and Nostalgia”

Abstract

Samuel Wheeler has insightfully and helpfully responded to my essay, “The Breath of Sense: Language, Structure, and the Paradox of Origin,” which was itself a partial summary and development of interpretative views about the history of twentieth century philosophy articulated in my recent book Philosophy and the Vision of Language (Routledge, 2008). In the following, I respond briefly to Wheeler’s commentary, tracing areas of convergence and remaining disagreements. Specifically, Wheeler’s response focuses in detail on the implications of the aporia implicit in Quine’s “indeterminacy of radical translation” thesis, including the development of these implications in the work of Donald Davidson. On my view, this aporia, in its general form, has deep and important implications for our understanding of our everyday, lived relationship to the language that we speak. Wheeler agrees about the existence and philosophical significance of translational indeterminacy as stated by Quine, but seeks, largely through his sympathetic exposition of Davidson’s position, to limit the implications of Quine’s result and related aporias for our everyday experience of language. My main disagreement with Wheeler is that I do not think these implications can be thus limited. Davidson’s mature views about language and interpretation do indeed represent a reasonable systematic development and extension of Quine’s aporia, but they also, as I shall briefly argue, mean giving up on the structuralist project of providing a description in neutral terms of a language by displaying its underlying and constitutive structure of rules of use. But if such a neutral description is impossible, as both Quine’s and Davidson’s views tend to suggest, then our everyday, lived relationship to language is very different than that which both ordinary discourse and “traditional” philosophy have presupposed, and the problem that Heidegger discusses as that of the “being of language” indeed unavoidably rears its (ugly or promising?) head. The question of how we relate to our own (ordinary) language also clearly bears important implications for the legacy of the analytic tradition, which has centrally and decisively made the meaning of ordinary language a main topic of philosophical investigation. In sketching the motivations for Quine’s internal critique of Carnap’s conventionalism, Wheeler suggests