1 Dewey, Wittgenstein, and Linguistic Instrumentalism My paper ...

Dewey, Wittgenstein, and Linguistic Instrumentalism
My paper outlines some of the instrumentalist features of John Dewey’s
philosophy of language. It will draw parallels to the later Ludwig Wittgenstein,
especially Philosophical Investigations. While using Wittgenstein to illumine Dewey, I also
believe Dewey elucidates Wittgenstein. 1 We will concentrate on their many similarities,
leaving the task of working out any differences for another occasion. Whatever their
discrepancies, I am inclined to believe they may be made to complement each other
more than conflict. Mostly their dissimilarities involve the scope and purpose of
philosophy, which Dewey pursues in its most expansive etymological sense. 2
We will concentrate on such familiar themes in Wittgenstein as context, use,
practice, and “form of life.” These resonate strongly with similar themes in Dewey.
However, this approach is fraught with great danger since neither of them is a linguistic
instrumentalist per se, although it does contribute to their thinking about language.
Many make the catastrophic mistake of confusing Dewey’s instrumentalism with
his entire philosophy. For him, “communication is consummatory as well as
instrumental” (LW 1: 157). The consummatory phase or what he calls “immanent” or
“sense” meaning includes instrumental linguistic reference while expanding on it.
Involving feeling and doing not just thinking, consummatory meaning is an integral
component of Dewey’s aesthetics. Those who accuse him of narrow instrumentalism
ignore the fact that he wrote an influential book on aesthetics.
Instrumental meanings, like logical means to ends, mediate experience while
consummatory meanings are, like ends, immediately immanent in the intellectual
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eference. Immanent meanings provide a richer understanding and appreciation of an
otherwise cold proposition. They are the unity not just of the thought that went into
arriving at the conclusion or reference, but also of the feeling and action. It is largely a
matter of distinguishing linguistic reference from an embodied, habitualized, and felt
consummatory qualitative experience of the self in practical dynamic unity with the
world, which the reference provides as an aid to coordinating our activity. 3
While an ardent anti-dualist, Dewey is always willing to support subtle
distinctions as long as we do not hypostatize them. Here is a particularly relevant
example where he distinguishes among three aspects of experience:
It is not possible to divide in a vital experience the practical, emotional, and
intellectual from one another and to set the properties of one over against the
characteristics of the others. The emotional phase binds parts together into a
single whole; “intellectual” simply names the fact that the experience has
meaning; “practical” indicates that the organism is interacting with events and
objects which surround it. (LW 10: 61)
Instrumental, referential, or what Dewey calls “significant” meanings emphasize the
intellectual component of vital experience, while immanent meaning includes the other
two phases in proper dynamic equilibrium. Immanent meanings involve an
understanding, appreciation, perhaps even an enjoyment that depends on the prior
achievement of objective intellectual reference. Because they are not cognitive, the
affective and practical features are, in themselves, inarticulate. At best, words may only
gesture toward them, yet they matter immensely in the wise conduct of life.
2

Ignoring Dewey’s aesthetic dimension has disastrous consequences for
comprehending his philosophy, including his philosophy of language. In Art as
Experience, Dewey writes: “works of art are the only media of complete and unhindered
communication between man and man that can occur in a world full of gulfs and walls
that limit community of experience” (LW 10: 110). The artful use of language may
achieve unhindered communication by creating a community of shared aesthetic
communion. Dewey declares:
Communication is uniquely instrumental and uniquely final. It is instrumen tal as
liberating us from the otherwise overwhelming pressure of events and enabling
us to live in a world of things that have meaning. It is final as a sharing in the
objects and arts precious to a community, a sharing whereby meanings are
enhanced, deepened and solidified in the sense of communion . . . . Here, as in so
many other things, the great evil lies in separating instrumental and final
functions. (LW 1: 159)
As in poetry, proper non-instrumental use of language shows as well as says. We may
create images with words. My insufficient discussion of Dewey’s consummatory
“immanent meaning” implies a great evil of omission.
I also wrong Wittgenstein. While we are mostly interested in his later work, the
Tractatus already asserts that the richer meanings language seeks to communicate can
only be shown, not said. At best, we may only point to them with words. “What we
cannot speak about,” Wittgenstein (1922/ 2009) famously concludes, “we must pass
over in silence” (§ 7). We get a clue as to what he is up to from his approving response
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to a poem sent to him by his friend Paul Engelmann: “And that is how it is: if only you
do not try to utter what is unutterable then nothing gets lost. But the unutterable will be
—unutterably—contained in what has been uttered” (Monk, 1990, 151). 4 One will never
grasp the meaning of a poem if all one comprehends are its references. We may say the
same of science, mathematics, logic, or any other intelligent activity theoretical or
practical. Full understanding involves appreciating and, perhaps, enjoying inarticulate
meanings that include linguistic reference, but go beyond it. We need a feel for the
subject matter if we are to know what to do with it.
Wittgenstein’s discussion of experience along with the distinction between
“imponderable” and “documentary” evidence in Philosophical Investigations shares
many similarities with Dewey’s distinction between “immanent” and “significant”
meaning. Wittgenstein believes, “Imponderable evidence includes subtleties of glance,
of gesture, of tone” (PI II § 228). Therefore, ”I may recognize a genuine loving look,
distinguish it from a pretended one . . . . But I may be quite incapable of describing the
difference. And this not because the languages I know have no words for it ” (228).
With sufficient experience, almost everyone in all cultures learn to interpret someone’s
mood by their facial gestures (See Ekman, 1973). It is easy to recognize fake smiles while
few can say why. However, there is plenty of documentary (i.e., scientific) ev idence that
fake smiles only involve the muscles around the mouth. Wittgenstein (1982) affirms:
“An important fact here is that we learn certain things only through long experience
and not from a course in school. How, for instance, does one develop the eye of a
connoisseur?” (§ 925). His example is fine art. Most of us are connoisseurs of faces. Few
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ecome connoisseurs of fine art, but fundamentally there is little difference; both
involve a felt consummatory appreciation of inarticulate meanings that can only be
shown not said, yet the showing clearly has a determinate reference. 5
Dewey rejects the traditional Western notion of language such as we find in John
Locke (1690/ 1959) who argues:
Besides articulate sounds, therefore, it was further necessary th at we should be
able to use these sounds as signs of internal conceptions; and to make them stand
as marks for the ideas within his own mind, whereby they might be made known
to others, and the thoughts of men’s minds be conveyed from one to another.
(Book III, 3)
Locke provides an instance of the picture theory of meaning that Wittgenstein himself
held in the Tractatus. Locke’s position is similar mutatus mutandis to that of Rene
Descartes, Ferdinand de Saussure, Edmund Husserl, St. Augustine as portrayed in
Wittgenstein, and Jerry Foder’s Turing machine functionalism. What computers cannot
do is process “immanent meaning” to achieve consummatory qualitative experience.
They can only recursively churn out references as the next line of a program, but these
will lack the emotional unity and practical interaction with events that comprise vital
experience. A computer can no more properly interpret a poem than it can prove all the
propositions of first order logic, although first order logic is formally complete. 6
An untenable inner versus outer dualism, of which the dualisms of mind vs.
body and knower vs. known are merely special cases, haunts most notions of language
ancient, modern, or post-modern along with the correspondence theory of truth. Dewey
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ejects all such dualisms along with correspondence. The notion that the mind should
reflect external reality provides Richard Rorty (1979) with the title of Philosophy and the
Mirror of Nature. There, he stridently challenges traditional philosophy of language and
epistemology.
One of the most influential essays in analytic philosophy written by one of its
most renowned proponents is W. V. O. Quine’s (1969) “Ontological Relativity.” It was
the first annual Dewey lecture at Columbia University. What he says there goes a long
way toward establishing the similarity between Wittgenstein and Dewey’s depiction of
linguistic “use” and “context.” Quine finds: “Philosophically I am bound to Dewey by
the naturalism that dominated his last three decades. With Dewey I hold that
knowledge, mind, and meaning are part of the same world . . . . There is no place for a
prior philosophy” (26). He further adds that, like Dewey, when discussing the
philosophy of mind, he turns to linguistic meaning to comprehend higher mental
functioning. Linguistically, he too wishes to avoid “pernicious mentalism” in semantics
(27).
In opposing mentalisms of all kind s, Quine cites Dewey in support of his own
position: “Meaning . . . is not a psychic existence; it is primarily a property of behav ior”
(27). Here is how Quine expresses his own opinion:
Meanings are, first and foremost, meanings of language. Language is a social art
which we all acquire on the evidence solely of other people’s overt behavior
under publicly recognizable circumstances. Meanings, therefore, those very
models of mental entities, end up as grist for the behaviorist’s mill. (26)
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He goes on to mention that once we understand the use of language in its social context,
we will realize there can be no private language. Again, h e cites Dewey: “ ‘Soliloquy,’
he wrote, ‘is the product and reflex of converse with others’ “ (27). He cites yet another
passage to enlarge the point: “Language is specifically a mode of interaction of at least
two beings, a speaker and a hearer; it presup poses an organized group to which these
creatures belong, and from whom they have acquired their habits of speech. It is
therefore a relationship” (27). Quine acknowledges that his own stance owes much to
Wittgenstein and Dewey before commenting: “Years later, Wittgenstein likewise
rejected private language. When Dewey was writing in this naturalistic vein,
Wittgenstein still held his copy theory of language” (27). Quine goes on to review the
usual complaints against the uncritical semantics of the museum theory of meaning that
Wittgenstein associates with his earlier self and Augustine in Philosophical Investigations.
These criticisms readily extend, mutatis mutandis, to dualistic theories like that of Fodor
and others already mentioned.
Inspired by Quine and others, Richard Rorty (1979) famously combined them
with Wittgenstein, Dewey, and Martin Heidegger to advance his own “epistemological
behaviorism” conjoined with what he called “the linguistic turn.” 7 He takes on various
versions of Descartes’ correspondence theory of truth, which assumes that we have
truth when inner mental representations mirror the events and objects of nature.
Relying on Dewey and Wittgenstein inspired arguments, Rorty eliminates not only the
very idea of “the mind” as traditionally conceived, but also the entirety of epistemology
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as the pursuit of what Dewey calls “the quest for certainty.” 8
Rorty specifically
challenges Fodor (220 and elsewhere).
Quine (1969) writes: “When we turn thus toward a naturalistic view of language
and a behavioral view of meaning, what we give up is not just the museum figure of
speech. We give up an assurance of determinacy” (28). He is correct. Quine uses
Wittgenstein and Dewey to develop his own thesis of “ontological” indeterminacy,
which goes far beyond the indeterminacy of ordinary translation:
When . . . we recognize with Dewey that “meaning . . . is primarily a property of
behavior,” we recognize that there are no meanings, nor likenesses nor
distinctions of meaning, beyond what are implicit in people’s dispositions to
overt behavior . . . . If by these standards there are indeterminate cases, so much
the worse for the terminology of meaning and likeness of meaning. (29)
In Quine’s “Ontological Relativity,” things turn out much the worse. The cor e of the
argument derives from Quine’s example of an ostensive definition of “rabbit” in a
hypothetical culture that uses “gavagai.” The ontological question is: Does it mean
rabbit, “undetached rabbit part,” “rabbit stage,” or something else (30). The problem is
that ostensive definition regardless of however much we come to agreement in action,
fails to ultimately fix the meaning of “rabbit,” which may have an endless array of
ontological assemblages. Identical twins raised in the same happy home may never be
sure that they are in ontological agreement.
With two such instances of internationally recognized philosophers such as
Quine and Rorty not merely noting the similarity, but making extensive use of it to
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develop their own widely influential philosophical programs, it is remarkable that the
resemblance between Wittgenstein and Dewey have not been more richly explored. 9 I
do worry about their use of the word “behaviorism.” Quine and Rorty may somewhat
misrepresent Dewey and Wittgenstein. Dewey worked out his ideas about language,
intentionality, and mental functioning in collaboration with his long-time friend and
colleague George Herbert Mead. It might have helped if Dewey had used Mead’s
phrase “social behaviorism” to describe linguistic activity. 10 However, a close reading of
Dewey and Wittgenstein shows they more frequently use the word “action,” and
especially socially structured action. For instance, here is a typical Wittgensteinian
connection between words and a context of social action:
We can also think of the whole process of using words . . . as one of those games
by means of which children learn their native language. I shall . . . call the whole,
consisting of language and the actions into which it is woven, the ‘language-
game.’ (PI § 7)
Examples like this one make it worth remembering that Wittgenstein and Dewey were
former schoolteachers. The passage illustrates an instance of social learning. It is part of
what we might call the pedagogical turn in the later Wittgenstein (see Macmillan, 1983).
Wittgenstein frequently uses pedagogical examples, especially in On Certainty (1972),
but we find many similar references in Philosophical Investigations (1953). Of course,
Dewey was one of the most famous educators of the Twentieth-Century. In reference to
Quine, it is useful to remember that Wittgenstein found “ostensive teaching of words”
and training more fundamental than ostensive definition (PI § 6). Dewey simply says,
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“language is primarily a mode of action” (LW 1: 160). Dewey means social action of
which teaching is a fine example. Elsewhere, Wittgenstein writes, “words are deeds”
(CV 46). The word “deed” is especially cordial for pragmatists (pragma in ancient Greek
meant “deed”). Below, I will use words like action, activity, deed, operation, and
practice interchangeably with behavior. 11
Wittgenstein and Dewey (Heidegger as well) assert the primacy of social practice
as the context for linguistic practice. Wittgenstein maintains that “the term ‘language-
game’ is meant to bring into prom inence the fact that the speaking of language is part of
an activity, or of a form of life” (PI § 23). Meanwhile, Dewey insists, “we have to be able
to re-state the whole social context which alone supplies the meaning” (LW 1: 160).
Most philosophers are familiar with what we might call the builders' language-game
early in the Investigations. In this game, language enables communication between a
builder A and an assistant B. They are building with blocks, pillars, slabs, and beams. B
has to pass the materials in the order in which A needs them (PI § 2). One possible
move in this game involves the request: “Bring me a slab” (PI § 19 ff.). Now compare
Wittgenstein’s slab game to the following example of what we might call Dewey’s
flower game:
A requests B to bring him something, to which A points, say a flower. There is an
original mechanism by which B may react to A's movement in pointing. But
natively such a reaction is to the movement, not to the pointing, not to the object
pointed out. But B learns that the movement is a pointing; he responds to it not in
itself, but as an index of something else. His response is transferred from A's
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direct movement to the object to which A points. Thus he does not merely execute
the natural acts of looking or grasping which the movement might instigate on
its own account. The motion of A attracts his gaze to the thing pointed to; then,
instead of just transferring his response from A's movement to the native reaction
he might make to the thing as stimulus, he responds in a way which is a function
of A's relationship, actual and potential, to the thing. The characteristic thing
about B's understanding of A's movement and sounds is that he responds to the
thing from the standpoint of A. He perceives the thing as it may function in A's
experience, instead of just ego-centrically [sic]. . . . Such is the essence and import
of communication, signs and meaning. Something is literally made common in at
least two different centres of behavior. To understand is to anticipate together, it
is to make a cross-reference which, when acted upon, brings about a partaking in
a common, inclusive, undertaking. (LW 1: 140-141)
Notice the importance of coordinating action with regard to some object literally made
common in action. It is a three-term relationship involving A and B taking each other’s
attitude with regard to a third thing, the referent (e.g., a slab or flower). This functional
coordination resonates with Wittgenstein’s slab game (see especially PI §§ 18-21).
If there is a difference between Wittgenstein and Dewey, it is that Dewey is not
only offering a philosophy of language, but also a theory whereas the later Wittgenstein
eschews theory and argumentation in terms of describing linguistic games. O ften, he
presents them pedagogically in terms of how someone like A might teach a tyro like B
how to use words correctly within a form of life. Significantly, we now have extensive
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empirical research supporting this “theory” of language (see Tomasello 1999, 2008a, and
2008b). 12 We also now know that having mirror neurons is immensely helpful in taking
the attitude of the other for organisms such as ourselves and many other species. 13
While decrying scientism and the pretense of even good science to completing the quest
for certainty, Dewey nonetheless thought philosophy participated in both literature and
empirical science. 14 Meanwhile, Wittgenstein insists that philosophy is separate from
science (see Tractatus § 4.111 and PI § 109).
Many consider Wittgenstein’s remarks on private language, “form of life,” and
grammar, or conventional normative rules-governed linguistic activity, as the most
prominent notions in the Investigations. They are all intimately connected. Let us
compare some remarkably resonate passages in Dewey on similar themes. We begin
with the argument against private language. For Wittgenstein, a private-language, in
which “individual words . . . are to refer to what can only be known to the person
speaking; to his immediate private sensations” is not a genuine, meaningful, rule-
governed language (PI § 243). The signs in language can only function when there is a
possibility of judging the correctness of their use; so, “the use of [a] word stands in need
of a justification which everybody understands” (PI § 261). Compare Wittgenstein to
Dewey: “Primarily meaning is intent and intent is not personal in a private and
exclusive sense” (LW 1: 142). Dewey finds that if “we had not talked with others and
they with us, we should never talk to and with ourselves” (135). Indeed, for Dewey, to
have a mind at all is to have meaning: “Through speech a person dramatically identifies
himself with potential acts and deeds; he plays many roles, not in successive stages of
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life but in a contemporaneously enacted drama. Thus mind emerges” (135). We owe our
minds and selves to others, our family, community, and public institutions.
The following is a fine statement of the importance of forms of life for Dewey’s
theory of language with a stunning bonus at the end:
Language is specifically a mode of interaction of at least two beings, a speaker
and a hearer; it presupposes an organized group to which these creatures belong,
and from whom they have acquired their habits of speech. It is therefore a
relationship, not a particularity. This consideration alone condemns traditional
nominalism. (LW 1: 145)
The added advantage is that participating in structured social relations requires a role
for universals, however restricted (perhaps to only a linguistic community of two; for
example, a builder and assistant). For Dewey, “every meaning is generic or universal; it
is something common between speaker, hearer and the thing to which speech refers”
(147). The following from Wittgenstein says something similar:
And hence also ‘obeying a rule’ is a practice. And to think one is obeying a rule is
not to obey a rule. Hence it is not possible to obey a rule ‘privately’: otherwise
thinking one was obeying a rule would be the same thing as obeying it. (PI § 202)
For his part, Dewey reminds us: “Meaning is objective as well as universal” (LW 1: 148).
The universality and objectivity of meaning depends on its intersubjectivity. Remember
that the builder A and assistant B must come to intersubjective agreement regarding the
referent that coordinates their trans-action.
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Wittgenstein and Dewey concur on the conventional socially normative (i.e.,
grammatical) nature of language, but are cautious about avoiding a common confusion.
For them, linguistic conventions arise from (largely tacit) agreement in action and not
convening a convention where we vote on meanings or some such. Dewey insists:
The particular physical existence which has meaning is, in the case of speech, a
conventional matter. But the convention or common consent which sets it apart
as a means of recording and communicating meaning is that of agreement in
action; of shared modes of responsive behavior and participation in their
consequences. The physical sound or mark gets its meaning in and by conjoint
community of functional use, not by any explicit convening in a "convention" or
by passing resolutions that a certain sound or mark shall have a specified
meaning. (LW 12: 52)
Here is how Wittgenstein says something quite similar:
“So you are saying that human agreement decides what is true and what is
false?" -- It is what human beings say that is true and false; and they agree in the
language they use. That is not agreement in opinions but in form of life. (PI §241;
see also PI II p. 226) 15
It is an important point. For instance, Jacques Derrida (1974) follows Ferdinand de
Saussure (1916/ 1972) in exploring the arbitrariness of language; however, he also
follows him in ignoring the forms of life whence language emerges and that acts to
considerably constrain “undecidable” deconstructive possibilities. Saussure and
Derrida sometimes seem to think language resembles a constitutional convention.
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Dewey remarks: “For a meaning is a method of action, a way of using things as a
means to a shared consummation . . . . Meanings are rules for using and interpreting
things; interpretation being always an imputation of potentiality for some consequence”
(LW 1: 147). At first, the following long passage from Investigations appears to contradict
Dewey:
This was our paradox: no course of action could be determined by a rule, because
every course of action can be made out to accord with the rule. The answer was:
if everything can be made out to accord with the rule, then it can also be made
out to conflict with it. And so there would be neither accord nor conflict. . . .
What this shews is that there is a way of grasping a rule which is not an
interpretation, but which is exhibited in what we call “obeying the rule” and
“going against it” in actual cases. (PI § 201)
Let us begin to resolve the seeming conflict by quoting the following passage that leads
up to the one just cited:
“But how can a rule shew me what I have to do at this point? Whatever I do is, on
some interpretation, in accord with the rule."— That is not what we ought to say,
but rather: any interpretation still hangs in the air along with what it interprets,
and cannot give it any support. Interpretations by themselves do not determine
meaning. "Then can whatever I do be brought into accord with the rule?"— Let
me ask this: what has the expression of a rule—say a sign-post— got to do with
my actions? What sort of connexion is there here?— Well, perhaps this one: I
have been trained to react to this sign in a particular way, and now I do so react
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to it. But that is only to give a causal connexion; to tell how it has come about
that we now go by the sign-post; not what this going-by-the sign really consists
in. On the contrary; I have further indicated that a person goes by a sign -post
only in so far as there exists a regular use of sign-posts, a custom. (PI § 198)
Wittgenstein explicitly states that an isolated interpretation alone does not decide
meaning while Dewey seems to say it does. 16 But, look again. Wittgenstein is saying
shared practice is more important to rule following than interpretation, although it has
a place. Meanwhile, Dewey argues that while meanings are rules for using and
interpreting things; it is primarily a “method of action,” that is, customary practice (i.e.,
organized deeds, actions, and not just random behavior). Wittgenstein’s emphasis on
custom helps connect him to Dewey. Wittgenstein writes: “To obey a rule, to make a
report, to give an order, to play a game of chess, are customs (uses, institutions)” (PI §
199; italics in original). We grasp a rule beyond the limits of explicit interpretation when
we follow the cultural customs (norms, grammar, etc.) that apply to a contextually
dependent practice. Wittgenstein wants us to “make a radical break with the idea that
language always functions in one way, always serves the same purpose: to convey
thoughts – which may be about houses, pains, good and evil, or anything else you
please “(PI § 304). Communicating thoughts and desires, even if that is fully possible,
only contributes to coordinating human action. The coordination itself is what is most
crucial. Think of a sign-post, such as a stop sign. Rules coordinate action (public
practice) around objects (laws, institutions, and such) within a form of life. However, it
is not primarily about agreement in communicating an opinion, an interpretation, or
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even following a rule correctly. More fundamentally, it is about agreement in action
within a customary form of life whence we may subsequently communicate opinion
and interpretation or formulate rules.
Dewey too makes many references to customs, often with accompanying
comments about embodied habits, which does differentiate him some from
Wittgenstein. We acquire our habits from our habitat, which includes habits of social
convention such as rule following and language, by participating in the norm-governed
customary practices of our community. Social practices occupy us from birth if not
before:
We often fancy that institutions, social custom, collective habit, have been
formed by the consolidation of individual habits. In the main this supposition is
false to fact . . . . But to a larger extent customs persist because individuals form
their personal habits under conditions set by prior customs. (MW 14: 42)
Customs have us as experienced necessities that condition our habits of conduct long
before we reflectively have them. For better and worse, unconscious embodied cognitive
habits of practice often take over where explicit cognitive reasoning, rule following, and
interpretation fail. While we may interpret and follow rules many different ways in the
context of a socially organized practice (i.e., form of life), the epideictic rhetoric of those
already initiated in the practice such as the builder A in the builder’s game will only
approve a very narrow range of interpretations. In driver’s training, we learn the rules
of the road including how to habitually react to the various sign -posts we will
encounter along the way. Successful ostensive teaching and training tell us “how it has
17

come about that we now go by the sign-post; not what this going-by-the sign really
consists in” (op. cit.). If our practice is not socially satisfactory, those empowered to
enforce the laws may pursue and punish infractions. The institutional social practice
called courts will decide the correct interpretation. Those who cannot acquire the habits
of some customary practice will find themselves more or less ostracized from the
society or repeatedly punished by it. 17
So far, we still have only a partial connection between Wittgenstein and Dewey
regarding customs and practice. I believe a Deweyan understanding of habits helps us
better understand what Wittgenstein is up to in his discussion of customs. For Dewey,
“habits are arts,” that is they “involve skill of sensory and motor organs, cunning or
craft, and objective materials” (15). Habits are embodied know how:
But after all, this practical work done by habit and instinct in securing prompt
and exact adjustment to the environment is not knowledge, except by cou rtesy.
Or, if we choose to call it knowledge—and no one has the right to issue an ukase
to the contrary—then other things also called knowledge, knowledge of and about
things, knowledge that things are thus and so, knowledge that involves reflection
and conscious appreciation, remains of a different sort . . . . For it is a
commonplace that the more suavely efficient a habit the more unconsciously it
operates. (MW 14: 124-125)
What we have here is the distinction between “knowing that” and “knowing how.”
Habits are the means of knowing how, which is why Dewey declares: “Concrete habits
do all the perceiving, recognizing, imagining, recalling, judging, conceiving and
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easoning that is done . . . . Yet habit does not, of itself, know, for it does not of itself
stop to think, observe or remember” (124). Since habits can conceive and judge, they
provide the know how, techne, cunning, and craft of practice.
As far as I know, Wittgenstein has little if anything to say about habits, although
he does say a lot about training. 18 Hence, he does say things such as: “To understand a
language means to be a master of a technique” (§ 199). We may know how to perform the
various techniques of a practice, know how to use the blocks, pillars, slabs, and beams
of a builders’ game, yet lack statable knowledge that certain things and relations are thus
as so. As your assistant, I may habitually bring you a slab every time you ask for it
without understanding what I am doing much less being able to state it, although you
may as a master builder. Due to such observations, Wittgenstein writes: “We may say:
only someone who already knows how to do something with it [the King in chess] can
significantly ask a name” (§ 31). Statable knowledge, “knowing that,” often depends on
a prior “knowing how” within a cultural practice. It is exceedingly common for people
to know how to do something, but not be able to state how they do it. We can also know
how to play games properly without being able to state their rules. 19
Because primordially language is something we make and use in a context to
mediate social practices, Dewey frequently calls one component of his philosophy of
language and logic (i.e., organum) instrumentalism. Here is an example:
"Utensils" were discussed . . . in connection with the useful arts and knowledge,
and their indispensable relation with science pointed out. But at every point
appliances and application, utensils and uses, are bound up with directions,
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suggestions and records made possible by speech; what has been said about the
role of tools is subject to a condition supplied by language, the tool of tools. (LW
1: 134)
Wittgenstein too has plenty to say about tools in his variants on the builder’s game (PI
§§ 11, 14, 15, 41, 42, and elsewhere). He explicitly states: “Language is an instrument. Its
concepts are instruments” (PI § 569). Indeed, since a competent practitioner must
embody the skilled habits of the practice, we may feel confident that Wittgenstein
would agree with Dewey when he remarks:
Yet till we understand operations of the self as the tool of tools, the means in all
use of means, specifying its differential activities in their distinctive
consequences in varying qualities of what is experienced, science is incomplete
and the use made of it is at the m ercy of an unknown factor, so that the ultimate
and important consequence is in so far a matter of accident. (LW 1: 189-190)
Intending to deflate the bloated claims of philosophical idealism and rationalism,
Dewey insisted that all reasoning was practical means-ends reasoning. The pretense of
pure reason is simply a misleading elitist hypostatization of abstractions drawn from
the various practices. He remarks: “There is nothing novel nor heterodox in the notion
that thinking is instrumental. The very word is redolent of an Organum —whether
novum or veterum.” (MW 10: 367). Similarly, Wittgenstein urges: “Look at the word ‘to
think’ as a tool” (PI § 53). Language and logic contribute to the practical arts of making
meaning and using the meanings made to make other things with forms of life. Of
20

course, as we said at the beginning, for Dewey and Wittgenstein, language and logic are
more than tools, but that is a topic for another time.
Bibliography
Citations of the works of Dewey are to the critical edition published by Southern Illinois
University Press. Volume and page numbers follow the initials of the series.
Abbreviations for the volumes used are:
EW The Early Works (1882-1898)
MW The Middle Works (1899-1924)
LW The Later Works (1925-1953)
Black, M. (1962). Dewey's Philosophy of Language. The Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 59, No.
19, 505-523.
Crocker, T. (1998). Wittgenstein’s Practices and Peirce’s Habits: Agreement in Human
Activity. History of Philosophy Quarterly. Vol. 15, No. 4.
Dreyfus, H. (1992). What Computers Still Can’t Do: A Critique of Artificial Reason.
Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press.
Derrida, J. (1974). Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins Press.
Ekman, P. (1973). Darwin and Facial Expression: A Century of Research in Review. New
York: Academic Press.
Klagge, J. (2011). Wittgenstein in Exile. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
Locke, J. (1690/ 1959). An Essay Concerning Human Understanding: Volume II. New York:
Dover.
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Medina, M. (2004). In Defense of Pragmatic Contextualism: Wittgenstein and Dewey On
Meaning and Agreement. The Philosophical Forum, Vol. XXXV, No. 3, 341-369.
Macmillan, C. J. B. (1983). "On Certainty" and Indoctrination. Synthese, Vol. 56, No. 3,
363-372.
Mead, G. H. (1934/ 1967). Mind, Self, and Society: From the Standpoint of a Social
Behaviorist. Charles W. Morris (ed.). Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Monk, R. (1990). Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius. New York, N. Y.: Penguin
Books.
Provine, R. (2005). Yawning. American Scientist. Vol. 93, 532-539.
Putnam, Hilary (2002). The Collapse of the Fact/Value Dichotomy. Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press.
Quine, W. V. (1969). Ontological relativity. In W. V. Quine, Ontological Relativity and
Other Essays (26-68). New York: Columbia University Press.
Richard Rorty (1961). "Pragmatism, Categories, and Language." Philosophical Review.
Vol. 70, No. 2.
Rorty, R. (1979). Philosophy and the mirror of nature. Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University
Press.
Rorty, R. (1982). "Pragmatism, Relativism, and Irrationalism." Consequences of Pragmatism,
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Saussure, F. (1916/ 1972). Course in General Linguistics. Chicago, Ill.: Open Court.
Scarry, E. (1985). The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
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Tomasello, M. (1999). The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition. Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press.
Tomasello, M. (2008a). Cooperation and Communication in the 2nd Year of Life. Child
Development Perspectives, Vol. 1, No. 1, 8-12.
Tomasello, M. (2008b). Origins of Human Communication. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT
Press.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig (1922/ 2009). Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. New York, N.Y.:
Rutledge.
Wittgenstein, L. (1953). Philosophical Investigations. New York: The Macmillan Company.
PI in the text.
Wittgenstein, L. (1972). On Certainty. New York: Harper & Row.
Wittgenstein, L. (1978). Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics. Oxford: Basil
Blackwell.
Wittgenstein, L. (1980). Culture and Value. Oxford: Blackwell.
Wittgenstein, L. (1982). Last Writings On The Philosophy Of Psychology. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
1
In his Introduction to Dewey's The Quest for Certainty, Stephen Toulmin remarks
"Viewing Wittgenstein as a pragmatist of a sophisticated kind can certainly be helpful”
(LW 4: xiii). Toulmin, who studied with Wittgenstein in 1940 and again in 1946-1947,
draws many favorable comparisons between Wittgenstein and Dewey in his
introduction.
2
Dewey alludes to the etymological sense of philosophy in many places including the
ensuing:
Philosophy is love of wisdom, of wisdom which is not knowledge and which
nevertheless cannot be without knowledge. The need of an organ on of criticism
which uses knowledge of relations among events to appraise the casual,
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immediate goods that obtain among men is not a fact of philosophy, but of
nature and life (LW 1: 305-306).
It is not easy to find anything so bold and broad in Wittgenstein, although I sense its
presence. He is a far more encompassing philosopher than many of his followers
appreciate.
Oftentimes in the Tractatus Wittgenstein seems to think that all there is to
philosophy is the logical clarification of propositions, which function as pictures of
reality. If a proposition is incapable of picturing reality, it is nonsense. Logic itself
cannot discover empirical truths only distinguish sense from nonsense. There is much
more that we may show, but never say. Once we complete the task of the logical
clarification of propositions, there is no more work for philosophy to perform.
Therefore, the earlier Wittgenstein thought he had brought philosophy to an end with
the publication of the Tractatus. After the critiques of Frank Ramsey and others,
Wittgenstein abandoned this position. It increased the scope of what he considered
philosophy.
Many analytic philosophers and those in the ordinary language tradition read
the Philosophical Investigations as clarifying philosophical (i.e., not empirical) problems
and thereby relieving us from the bewitchment of language that, among other things,
leads us to assume that words always have a reference. They assume we may establish
normative logico-grammatical conceptual truths constitutive of any empirical
propositional truth within a language game. Often, they confine themselves to
investigating the proper rule-governed use of language. While no doubt correct as far as
it goes, such a reading of the later Wittgenstein results in a logico-grammatical
transcendentalism that understands the role of philosophy in much the same way as the
Tractatus. Some accept this formal transcendentalism and combine it with an almost
mystical transcendentalism about the meanings that transcend the limits of langua ge.
Deweyans reject all form versus content dualisms and all forms of transcendental (e.g.,
Kant) or transcendent (e.g., Plato) philosophy. However, they do agree that there is a
great deal that transcends conceptual containment (e.g., the New England
Transcendentalists). We only need to expand the scope of philosophy to include extralinguistic
understanding and appreciation to bring Wittgenstein and Dewey into
agreement.
For Dewey, all sentient beings have completely anoetic experiences that
transcend the limits of language. Further, there is “immanent meaning” or what he
more frequently calls “sense” meaning, that assumes but surpasses linguistic reference.
Dewey thought we could not fully understand the meaning of a proposition without
appreciating it qualitatively, emotionally, and in embodied (habitual) action. Dewey
asserts: “A universe of experience is the precondition of a universe of discourse.
Without its controlling presence, there is no way to determine the relevancy, weight or
coherence of any designated [conceptual] distinction or relation” (LW 12: 74).
“Experience” is Dewey’s word for all that occurs when any sentient creature such as
ourselves trans-acts with other events in the universe. When we experience, we
experience existence whence we m ay construct meaning and knowledge. We must
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carefully distinguish existence from the essences we make from it. No one creates ex
nihilo. Beyond the bounds of such constructions many aspects of life are such that we
may artistically show them to each other, but otherwise must remain eternally silent.
We may approach such aspects of existence linguistically through poetry and
nonlinguistically through other arts.
Dewey finds that philosophy participates in both the actualities disclosed by
empirical science and the possibilities disclosed by literature (including poetry) and all
the other arts (LW 1: 304-305). Dewey took the stance that “science itself is but a central
art auxiliary to the generation and utilization of other arts” by which he meant that
science is the art of constructing tentative, falsifiable, and contingent warranted
linguistic assertions (judgments) that the other arts may use to create their artifacts (LW
10: 33). Wittgenstein understands the task of philosophy as something apart from
science. It is what James C. Klagge (2011) calls “Wittgenstein’s insulation thesis” (85). As
Klagge shows, it is largely unsustainable when we examine Wittgenstein’s own
statements in a broader context (see chapter 7). However, as Klagge also shows,
Wittgenstein’s primary targets are not so much science as reductive, materialistic, and
mechanistic scientism. Dewey too rejected reductive, materialistic, and mechanistic
scientism. His alternative was to develop an emergent, organic, naturalism that defied
materialistic reductionism.
Both Wittgenstein and Dewey seem to agree that philosophy is a form of
criticism. Dewey was clear that for him philosophy is cultural criticism. Such wisdom
requires artistic creativity as well as aesthetic appreciation. We may also r ead
Wittgenstein as a cultural critic, although most of his interpreters confine his
contribution to epistemological or, at best, logico-grammatical clarification. In footnote
twenty, I suggest a reading of Wittgenstein that depends on the primacy of practice that
if correct would bring him much closer to Deweyan pragmatism by dissolving the
logical form versus empirical content dualism.
3 For the classical pragmatists, habits are embodied universals in that they are
generalized responses to a class of stimuli. A large part of becoming a rational being
involves making our habits conscious, correcting them, and rendering them under our
control. If we can make them conscious, we can perhaps even state them linguistically.
When we cannot, they comprise the basis of tacit knowledge of the kind needed for
good laboratory work, mathematical proofs, and music composition.
4 The poem is Ludwig Uhland’s “Count Eberhard’s Hawthorn.” Emphasis in original.
5 Ultimately, such matters as these involve exploring Wittgenstein’s remarks on private
language to a greater depth than we will delve into here. It also involves his many
reflections on understanding others and our selves (e.g., pain language), which we will
also largely ignore. Dewey too has much to say about these topics.
6 Dewey directs our attention to the role of intelligent “intuition” of the kind that only
comes from having an appreciative “feel” for the subject matter with which we are
practically trans-acting:
The expert in thought is one who has skill in making experiments to introduce an
old meaning into different situations and who has a sensitive ear for detecting
25

esultant harmonies and discords. The most "deductive" thought in actual
occurrence is a series of trials, observations and selections. In one sense of the
ambiguous word intuition, it is a "series of intuitions," and logic is ex post facto,
expressing a wit that formulates economically the congruities and incongruities
that have manifested themselves. Any "syllogism " which is such ab initio is
performed better by a machine that manipulates symbols automatically than by
any "thinker." (LW 1: 153)
The expert in thought is a connoisseur not just a calculator. For something very similar
from a Heideggerian perspective, see Hubert Dreyfus (1992).
7 I agree with Rorty (1961) when he declares: "The closer one brings pragmatism to the
writing of the later Wittgenstein and of those influenced by him, the more light they
shed on each other” (198-199)
8 We will not explore it here, but the arguments of Dewey in The Quest for Certainty
greatly resemble those in Wittgenstein’s On Certainty.
9 Hilary Putnam (2002) makes very extensive use of Dewey and Wittgenstein as well,
but we will not take him up in the present paper. One exceptionally useful work is Jose
Medina (2004). For a comparison that seriously misreads Dewey, see Black (1962).
10 See Mead (1934/ 1967). In his essay, “Conduct and Experience,” Dewey uses the word
“conduct” to specifically differentiate his position from that of the psychological
behaviorists. The word conduct referred to any intelligent series of trans-actions, not
just linguistic trans-actions.
11 Wittgenstein asks of himself, “Are you not really a behaviourist in disguise? Aren’t
you at bottom really saying that everything except human behaviour is a fiction?” (PI §
307). The answer is no, he is not! Consider: “But you will surely admit there is a
difference between pain-behaviour accompanied by pain and pain behaviour without
pain” (PI § 304). When he famously insists: “An ‘inner process’ stands in need of
outward criteria,” I take him as merely making the sound point that we cannot
intelligently infer someone else’s psychological state without some evidence either
“imponderable” or “documentary.” Dewey would entirely agree (PI § 580). For those
that have them, the inner states themselves are immediate, qualitative experience.
Dewey writes: “Immediacy of existence is ineffable. But there is nothing mystical about
such ineffability; it expresses the fact that of direct existence it is futile to say anything to
one's self and impossible to say anything to another” (LW 1: 74). We cannot speak of
immediate existence, whether pain or pleasure or anything else, so we must remain
linguistically silent, although we may gesticulate. Of pain, we might join Wittgenstein
in saying: “It is not something, but not a nothing either! The conclusion was only that a
nothing would serve just as well as something about which nothing could be said ” (PI §
304).
12 Tomasello specifically refers to Wittgenstein in his work. This does not imply that
Wittgenstein offers us a disguised theory, but that others may use rich depictions of
language games and forms of life to construct their own theories.
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13
Your mirror neurons fire in much the same way as the neurons of someone you watch
gesturing. For instance, try yawning very openly at a social affair and notice how many
also yawn (see Provine, 2005).
14
For Dewey, “Philosophic discourse partakes both of scientific and literary discourse”
(LW 1: 304).
15
Elsewhere, Wittgenstein (1978) writes: “If there did not exist an agreement in what we
call 'red', etc. etc., language would stop" (§ 70).
16 We will soon see that Dewey and Wittgenstein are both arguing against Lockean ideas
as rules determining how to use language.
17 Those wishing to introduce a theory of power into Wittgenstein or Dewey would do
well to start about here.
18 For a paper that connects Charles Saunders Peirce’s philosophy of habits to
Wittgenstein, see Crocker (1998). Crocker explicitly calls attention to the fact that
Wittgenstein himself read and was influenced by William James and that Ramsey read
Peirce extensively. What Crocker says in his paper easily conveys to Peirce’s former
student, Dewey.
19 What I call “the primacy of practice” offers a way out of the form versus content
dualism that many Wittgensteinians commit when they assume conceptual truth
precedes, constitutes, and is normative for empirical truth. Determining the actual
logico-grammatical structure (or norms) of any actual form of life is itself an empirical
inquiry of the kind that, for example, linguistic anthropologists might perform. While
such inquiry has its own logico-grammatical structure, auto-ethnography can render
such structures reflectively conscious to the inquirer. What we have is a virtuous
hermeneutic circle. Conceptual truths and empirical truths are simply different
moments in a mutually dependent process. It resembles theory and value-ladenness in
inquiry. Such an approach is an apt illustration of pragmatist anti-foundationalism.
Among other forms of foundationalism, it eschews all forms of transcendent Platonism
as well as all shapes of Kantian transcendentalism while preserving a place for
transcending the limits of language in the sense of, say, the New England
transcendentalists.
27