Abstract
In this paper, I discuss language learning in Wittgenstein and Davidson. Starting from a remark by Bakhurst, I hold that both Wittgenstein and Davidson’s philosophies of language contain responses to the problem of language learning, albeit of a different form. Following Williams, I hold that the concept of language learning can explain Wittgenstein’s approach to the normativity of meaning in the Philosophical Investigations. Turning to Davidson, I hold that language learning can, equally, explain Davidson’s theory of triangulation. I sketch an account of triangulation as Davidson’s response to the problem of the normativity of meaning and explain the role that language learning plays in this account.
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Notes
Williams calls Wittgenstein’s rejection of these possible accounts of meaning the “three great cornerstones of the Investigations”. (2010, p. 21).
Furthermore, she holds, we masters of a linguistic practice are blind to “…the implicit normative structuring of our everyday life…” (2010, p. 22), so that blind obedience takes on two meanings.
In an aside, Davidson holds that this is the problem that troubled Wittgenstein (and Kripke, in his ‘skeptical’ interpretation of Wittgenstein’s remarks on rule-following and private language).
My italics. Also see Davidson 1992, p. 260.
This is the interpretability of a speaker of one language by the speaker of another language, based purely on what the second observes the first to do in the world. See ‘Radical Interpretation’ (Davidson 1973/1984).
Moreover, radical interpretability requires not only that the speaker reacts consistently to objects and events in the world, but that the speaker reacts to objects and events in the world that the interpreter him/herself finds salient. Wittgenstein held that understanding another presupposes agreement in judgements or forms of life and Davidson would agree.
Compare Williams, 1999, p. 194 -5.
For comment on these passages, see Goldberg, 2009.
I thank two anonymous reviewers for Studies in Philosophy and Education for encouraging me to expand on these points.
Also see Bridges, 2006, p. 292 – 5.
For discussion, see Lasonen and Marvan (2007, p. 190).
Compare Davidson’s (1986) remark about linguistic concepts such as “noun” or “verb” and (even) the concept “language” itself. These explain linguistic behaviour after the fact—they do not underpin linguistic behaviour in a psychological sense.
He is, it must be added, sceptical about the prospects for such a psychological account. See Davidson 1997/2001, p. 128.
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Kotzee, B. Language Learning in Wittgenstein and Davidson. Stud Philos Educ 33, 413–431 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11217-013-9395-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11217-013-9395-y