Wittgenstein’s Pragmatic Strain

1. A CENTRAL debate within conversations about Wittgenstein’s later philosophy turns on the significance of what is sometimes called the “pragmatic strain” in his writings. At issue in the debate is Wittgenstein’s tendency to urge philosophers concerned with the meanings of particular linguistic expressions to attend to how those expressions are used. Interpretations of Wittgenstein’s later thought diverge conspicuously over the question of the implications of this pragmatic gesture. What distinguishes many of the more influential interpretations is an understanding of the gesture as expressive of a form of skepticism about our basic logical ideals (such as, for example , truth, objectivity, and rationality.). A number of respected interpretations claim that Wittgenstein’s larger goal in emphasizing ways in which we employ expressions is to suggest both that sentences have meanings and are truth-value candidates in virtue of being embedded in a coherent set of practices and, in addition, that talk about the truth or objective correctness of a sentence is therefore properly conceived as talk—not about whether the sentence does justice to the world, but rather about its bare practical importance. Thus, for instance, according to Richard Rorty’s well-known interpretation, one of the later SOCIAL RESEARCH, Vol. 70, No. 2 (Summer 2003) Wittgenstein’s Pragmatic Strain* ALICE CRARY *I would like to thank Jay Bernstein, Nathaniel Hupert, and Sanford Shieh for their helpful suggestions about how to improve this paper. An earlier version was presented at the March 2003 annual meeting of the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy in Denver, Colorado, at a panel on “Cavell and the Contested Bounds of the Pragmatic Tradition.” I am grateful to Stanley Cavell for his response, which included a number of useful comments and criticisms. Wittgenstein’s overarching ambitions is to describe a “pure ‘language -game’ view of language” on which “questions about ‘ties to the world’” do not arise (1982: 114), and on which characterizing a bit of language as true or objective is at bottom nothing more than a matter of complimenting it for how well it enables us to “cope” (1982: xix). Despite their prevalence, interpretations that proceed along these lines are far from exegetically unproblematic. The most fundamental challenge they face comes from the fact that Wittgenstein himself never represents his pragmatic emphasis as inconsistent with logical ideals such as truth and objectivity. Although proponents of the interpretations attempt to meet this challenge in various ways (for example, by depicting Wittgenstein as a “quietistic” thinker who is reluctant to fully spell out implications of his pragmatic views)1, the mere fact that they are obliged to confront it provides some incentive to consider the merits of alternative interpretative approaches. And there are in fact a number of insightful and interesting interpretations that qualify as “alternative” in the relevant sense, namely, in that they both accent Wittgenstein’s pragmatic concerns and also represent those concerns as consistent with the preservation of our basic logical ideals.2 In this paper, I want to sketch an interpretation of this alternative variety. My main aim in doing so is not, however, to arbitrate the exegetical debate I have just outlined. A decisive contribution to this debate would require a comprehensive survey of Wittgenstein ’s writings, and I will limit myself here to considering a few passages in which Wittgenstein airs his pragmatic concerns. What I hope to show is that the relevant passages are plausibly understood , not as attempts to repudiate our ideals of objectivity, truth, etc., wholesale, but rather as efforts to correct inadequacies of familiar philosophical renderings of those ideals. In undertaking this project, I will be rejecting the suggestion of convergence between Wittgenstein’s thought and the specific strand of neopragmatic thought that Rorty, for example, associates with it. But 370 SOCIAL RESEARCH it is no part of my ambition to deny the existence of any fruitful connection between Wittgenstein’s philosophy and work in the pragmatic tradition. On the contrary, one of my central goals is to show that, when its pragmatic emphasis is properly understood, Wittgenstein’s view of language equips us to address and illuminate problems of political thought in reference to which contemporary pragmatisms attempt to demonstrate...