Between Pragmatism and the language animal

Abstract

This essay compares and contrasts the pragmatist naturalist approach to the distinctiveness of language, exemplified principally but not exclusively by John Dewey, with Charles Taylor’s extensive discussion in his The Language Animal. Taylor, inspired by the work of Hamann, Herder, and Humboldt, relies on different conceptual and philosophical resources for delineating what he calls ‘the shape’ of the human linguistic capacity. But both Dewey and Taylor arrive at overlapping but not identical positions: language is the constitutive defining feature of human beings. Human beings are defined by the rise of ‘as’ consciousness, a ‘break’ in our immediate immersion in the world, and, as Peirce and Dewey so perspicuously showed, a reflexive awareness of the use of signs and sign systems of all sorts. These systems potentiate and transform our access to the world and to ourselves. They do not just label a world already existing. They create realms of significance and value that would not have come into being without them. Taylor’s pivotal distinction between designative and constitutive models of language is fully supported by pragmatist accounts of language, which Taylor does not advert to. This distinction is shown to be of especial importance for Dewey and Taylor in the creation of existentially vital landscapes of meaning embodied in self-descriptions and in the delicate practices of the arts of self-reflection. Both Dewey and Taylor show that just as the open textures of experience grow by their edges so language itself has its own ‘edges’ and points us toward ‘liminal’ domains that bear upon thresholds of sense beyond the fully sayable. These domains, which they show in different but complementary ways, are accessed as realities by non-discursive forms encompassing art works, what Taylor calls ‘portrayals,’ and enactive and restorative rituals, both personal, civic, and religious that embody meanings. Dewey and Taylor diverge, however, on whether and how these domains need to transcend nature.