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Thoughts on holism

These days I've been listening to lectures from the Teaching Company on Wittgenstein, Quine, Habermas, etc. I have gathered the following: that our starting point for understanding the nature of language should be the starting point for how to "do" language: which is commands, requests, rather than pointing and naming. Language is most primitively about how to act...together. It presupposes a common activity toward a common goal. But what about the command of the superior to the inferior (as in parent/child and master/slave)? Well, I don't know about the latter, but the former requires empathy and a common goal. That common goal is not the private having of a thing by each of the communicators: it is a living and acting together. It might itself be communicative in nature. So in that case, there would be a kind of circularity in what I am saying. Language is a giving directions about how to act together (somewhat instrumentally or quasi-instrumentally) in order to act together (somewhat finally (as in finis or telos)). This telos is not conceptualized as one activity, it is not understood univocally. It may be grasped somewhat messily. Think family resemblance or analogy.

Also, when Wittgensteinians say meaning is use, they seem right on. But then again I am taking "meaning" here not as lexical "meaning" but intentionality. That is, the intentionality of a word includes the way it fits together with a network of belifs, goals, interaction. Part of that intentionality is the belief or beliefs in which the lexcial meaning can be found. But such meaning can never be fragmented from goals and actions.

The analysis of beliefs/goals/actions found in my article in the Thomist is really key to understanding the Witt doctrine of meaning is use. And it is key to understanding the private language argument as well. There is no "picture" of the world that I have or can have apart from my interacting with what is pictured. There is no image that I can conceive as being "just inside of me" --there are only different ways of imagining how I could interactingly and telically perceive, experience.
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