The Human Question

While listening to a recorded lecture on Quine's Two Dogmas of Empiricism, it occurred to me that every rule is in a way, a fact about the world. Think about baseball: from the p.o.v. of an individual player, a baseball rule is not a thing but a guide for acting and interpreting the actions of others.  But this rule, like the action it guides, is part of a concrete individual --i.e., part of an institution that has come into existence at a particular place and time, has endured and  may eventually go out of existence.  The baseball rule, as a feature of that individual, is likewise individual.  The term "baseball rule," on the one hand, links us to a unique cultural event; it can, on the other hand, name a certain type of being.  In this way, it transgresses the boundary between proper and common noun. If there were no such overlap, then we might be tempted to divide our ontology between a bunch of facts "out there" and a bunch of common nouns "in here....

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 or...