Configuring the Usage: The Social Epistemologist as a Postmodern Grammarian

The subject is almost grammatical, which I announce as a warning to those readers who have condemned (in the name of friendship) my grammarianisms and requested a human work. I could answer that there is nothing more human (that is, less mineral, vegetal, animal, and even angelical) than grammar; but I understand and beg their indulgence this once.

—Jorge Luis Borges

At the end of his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Wittgenstein (1961) describes an activity he wants to call "philosophy" but knows will not easily be accepted as such. It is to consist mainly in the articulation of the propositions of science, which in their totality constitute "everything that can be said." These propositions, of course, include truths as well as falsehoods since if a proposition is meaningful its negation is also meaningful. We can imagine this "philosopher" arranging statements of material fact one after the other, some true and some false (some known to be true and some known to be false), and by this means "elucidating" the nature of truth and the nature of falsehood (along with the nature of knowledge), which is to say, imparting wisdom. Wittgenstein adds one other operation to the activities of this philosopher. Whenever someone in his audience "tries to say something metaphysical," the philosopher is to demonstrate that one or more of the words employed in this effort are devoid of meaning. In this sense, the philosophical activity would, of course, be a critical one. It amounts to drawing attention to the conditions that make language meaningful and correcting such usage as obscures awareness of these conditions. If we imagine that the audience consists of scientists, there is little doubt that insofar as their interest can be maintained, the exercise would be a useful one. It would be a little like the experience that connoisseurs of any art pursue as a matter of course. On the basis of such experiences, one's ability to immediately distinguish sense from nonsense and to identify the sensible and insensate elements within an expression at a glance would grow over time. If this skill was applied to writing, one can only imagine that the texts of those who submit to Wittgenstein's regimen of rigorous exposure to the sayable and strict censure of the unsayable would improve—assuming, of course, that we believe that an increase in clarity constitutes an improvement.

In one sense, the "rhetoric" in Steve Fuller's Philosophy, Rhetoric and the End of Knowledge (PREK 1993/2004)¹ draws this assumption into question. On Fuller's own account, the "philosophy" of social epistemology is very much in the spirit of logical positivism, which in its turn was conducted largely in the spirit of Wittgenstein's Tractatus. There are things sayable (science) and things unsayable (metaphysics) and in between there is philosophy (to sort things out). The aim of scientific communication, to borrow a phrase from C. S. Peirce, is "to make our ideas clear." But what social epistemology also takes seriously is the need to maintain an interested (and endowed) audience: the problem of getting our ideas across. Here Edmund Burke's classical treatise from 1757 on the sublime (Burke 1998) raises an interesting possibility, albeit one that is not wholly palatable to the positivist mindset. "In reality a great clearness . . . is . . . an enemy of all enthusiasm whatsoever," he tells us (104). Citing Milton as a master of the sublime, he praises the poet's "judicious obscurity" (103) and "well managed darkness" (121). Here the epithets "judicious" and "well managed" point to rhetorical choices that can be made with greater or lesser wisdom. A text that simply and clearly sets out a series of factual propositions may have the potential of transmitting knowledge but it does so at the expense of severing the relation of this knowledge to the passions of the reader and therefore to the felt need for action. This shift of emphasis from the way in which a text represents facts (and possible facts, i.e., objects) to the way in which it represents acts (and possible acts, i.e., subjects) is also effected in...