“Our different worlds are linguistically constituted, but our languages are responding to something, trying to articulate something in the human condition.”
- Hubert Dreyfus and Charles Taylor
If there is something akin to an atom or a gene at the base of our many worlds, the word is the only plausible candidate. We might reject this by saying ‘there are different sounds (phonemes) that make words’ or ‘there are smaller units of meaning (morphemes) that make words’. But these are just the mechanics of how we learn to speak their names, and the archaeology of how they took upon their meanings. Words are far more than just this.
The brilliant yet troubled soul Ludwig Wittgenstein recognised that to use a word is to learn the game within which it takes on its meaning. Babies learn to speak nouns first, because the art of language begins with the idea that what we are perceiving has a name - and the babe must learn first to recognise the sound of that name, and then to form the noises that allow it to be uttered. Learning to speak our first word is thus preceded with an earlier game - learning to hear our first word. Until that game is mastered, language literally has no meaning.
A puppy too learns this game. Dogs cannot speak our words - they lack vocal chords - but they can learn to recognise the noises we make. In fact, dogs are much more attuned to motion than to sound, and typically learn to recognise our gestures first, only later associating our noises with our actions. The language games of a dog living with humans are thus different from the non-verbal language games of wild dogs. But it is living together in packs, in families, or in towns and cities that provides even the possibility of language. A dog who spent its entire life alone would have no language of any kind.
We can say that a dog who lives among humans lives in a different world to a dog who lives solely with others of its kind. But we can also say that a human who lives with a dog and learns to communicate with it lives in a different world to a human who does not. It is not that the human who lives with dogs learns different words to one who does not - they likely can say the same things - but the meanings of the words take on different aspects. ‘Sit’ is not just an instruction involving chairs or crossing legs - it now also entails tails on floors and the possibility of a treat.
Dreyfus and Taylor, whose quote opens this piece, attempt to answer the question of how it is that our minds are separated from the reality beyond it (which can never be directly observed) and yet we are still able to negotiate our existence. They suggest that there is something wrong with the idea of our being locked away in our own individual subjective worlds that are forever barred from an objective world ‘outside’. This is Plato’s vision expressed in terms devised by Immanuel Kant, terms so successful almost everybody today uses them.
If we were all sequestered into unique worlds, we could never communicate. Yet we can and do talk to one another successfully - and this is not a miracle but rather entirely inevitable. We are thrown together into the same world as our family, we learn the words (and the games those words have meaning within) and thus gradually master living in this world first, before learning the games of other worlds. We do this together with the other humans (and dogs!) playing these same games, and together also with the planet we live upon, the source of our perceptions and thus the co-creator of our experiences.
The games that give our words meaning are played upon the chessboard we make from real things. It perches, as it were, atop of reality and is our surface of contact with it. When we are teaching how to ‘sit’, it is part of our game that there is a chair, or that the dog is about to get a treat. The chair and the treat are an intersection between our planet and our worlds, available within our games because we have both the words to name them and perceptions of what is really there. Reality is not forever barred to us: our different worlds have always been in contact with it.