Philosophy & Social Criticism http://psc.sagepub.

com/

Heidegger on meaning and reference

Cristina Lafont Philosophy Social Criticism 2005 31: 9 DOI: 10.1177/0191453705048316 The online version of this article can be found at: http://psc.sagepub.com/content/31/1/9

Published by:
http://www.sagepublications.com

Additional services and information for Philosophy & Social Criticism can be found at: Email Alerts: http://psc.sagepub.com/cgi/alerts Subscriptions: http://psc.sagepub.com/subscriptions Reprints: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.nav Permissions: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav Citations: http://psc.sagepub.com/content/31/1/9.refs.html

>> Version of Record - Jan 26, 2005 What is This?

Downloaded from psc.sagepub.com at The University of Manchester Library on August 3, 2012

Cristina Lafont

Heidegger on meaning and reference

Abstract This paper is an attempt to criticize the reication of language present in Heideggers writings after the Kehre. The steps of the argument are as follows. First, it is argued that the specic features of Heideggers conception of language after the Kehre can be traced back to Heideggers conception of the ontological difference in Being and Time. The common element in both conceptions is the assumption that meaning determines reference (i.e. that the way entities are understood determines which entities we can refer to). In the next step the implications of this assumption are shown through an analysis of Heideggers conception of designation in Being and Time and after the Kehre. Finally, this conception of designation is criticized with the help of the analysis of designation offered by the socalled theories of direct reference. Key words Donnellan Heidegger language linguistic idealism meaning ontological difference reference referential/attributive distinction

The conception of language that Heidegger develops in his writings after the Kehre leads to a linguistic idealism and a reication of language that has been pointed out repeatedly from the most diverse philosophical perspectives (from Habermas1 to Rorty2). This reication is not only readily conceded but it practically hits the reader over the head, certainly no later than in Heideggers provocative statement that language speaks. Nonetheless, Heideggers approach appears to be so internally consistent that, once its crucial premises are accepted, it appears virtually impossible to determine where exactly the purported reication arises. I will try to answer this question in what follows. However, I will not focus exclusively on Heideggers deliberations on language after the
PHILOSOPHY & SOCIAL CRITICISM vol 31 no 1 pp. 920
Copyright 2005 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi) www.sagepublications.com DOI: 10.1177/0191453705048316

PSC

Downloaded from psc.sagepub.com at The University of Manchester Library on August 3, 2012

10 Philosophy & Social Criticism 31 (1)

Kehre. For only by considering Heideggers entire program for a hermeneutic transformation of philosophy is it possible to gain a view of those basic premises that must be held responsible for his later, explicit reication of language. The central premises that determine Heideggers conception of language follow from the crucial change that Heidegger introduces in Being and Time in his confrontation with transcendental philosophy. In order to bring about a hermeneutic transformation of philosophy, Heidegger substitutes the ontological difference for the empirical/transcendental distinction. The ontological difference (the distinction between being and beings) is established by Heidegger in such a way that it follows that there can be no access to entities without a prior understanding of their being. It is for this reason that entities appear to us as always already understood in one way or another, or, as Heidegger puts it, this is why we always already move about in an understanding of being. This is the fact from which Being and Time starts, and which lies at the basis of Heideggers philosophy as a whole. However, remaining under the inuence of the empirical/transcendental distinction, Heidegger invests this fact with a normative signicance: given that our understanding of the being of entities is constitutive for what these entities are for us, it determines how we understand, perceive, and experience the world. It provides the ontological framework for everything that can appear within the world. Such an understanding of being or world-disclosure has, therefore, a quasi-transcendental status. On the one hand, it is valid a priori, although only in the sense that it cannot be called into question from within, i.e. by those who share it. There is no way to step outside of our understanding of being in order to check its validity, to test whether our understanding of being coincides with the being of the things themselves. For there is no being without an understanding of being. But on the other hand, it is not the (eternal) endowment of a transcendental ego (which would guarantee the objectivity of experience, and thereby the possibility of valid knowledge for all human beings), but it is merely contingent, changes historically and cannot be put under control at will. It is a fate into which human beings are thrown. The crucial challenge to transcendental philosophy in Being and Time, therefore, is to be found in Heideggers thesis that disclosedness is essentially factical (1962: 264).3 From this brief characterization of Heideggers hermeneutic turn in Being and Time, it is possible to extract the basic elements responsible for both the continuity and the break between this new, hermeneutic approach and transcendental philosophy. On the one hand, with his interpretation of the ontological difference, Heidegger is taking for

Downloaded from psc.sagepub.com at The University of Manchester Library on August 3, 2012

11 Lafont: Heidegger on meaning and reference

granted the constructivism expressed in Kants highest principle of synthetic judgements (namely, that the conditions of possibility of experience are at the same time the conditions of possibility of the objects of experience). After his hermeneutic turn, this principle is interpreted in the sense that entities can only be discovered by a prior projection of their being (1962: 414) and it is justied, in turn, by the assumption that meaning determines reference. That is, the way in which entities are understood determines what these entities are (for us), determines which entities we can refer to. But on the other hand, through this interpretation, that which constitutes the objects of experience (the totality of a priori synthetic judgements) is detranscendentalized. It can no longer be understood as a unique synthesis of apperception, valid for all rational beings, but rather only as the plurality of linguistic world-disclosures resulting from the contingent, historical process of projecting meaning for interpreting the world. Given that meaning is holistic, plural, and just as contingent as the languages in which it is articulated, the resulting world-disclosures are not universally valid but rather essentially factical. Thus Heideggers hermeneutic turn seems to be based on this combination of theses or, more exactly, on the presupposition that, although meaning is holistic (i.e. contingent, relative, etc.), it nonetheless determines reference. However widespread it may be, my view is that it is this unfortunate combination of theses that in all consistency leads to the kind of reication of language that we nd in Heideggers later writings. On the basis of this interpretation, my argument against Heideggers reication of language will follow the indirect path of showing that these two theses are, in fact, incompatible. Precisely to the extent that meaning is holistic, contingent and plural, it cannot determine reference; or, to put it differently, the referents of our expressions cannot be identied with the contingent and plural ways in which we conceive them. The assumption that meaning determines reference, anchored in Heideggers interpretation of the ontological difference, represents a remnant of transcendental philosophy that should have been undermined by the very insights brought about by Heideggers hermeneutic turn. For to presuppose that our knowledge of meaning is constitutive for our knowledge of the world and, in this sense, has an a priori status, requires that we postulate a strict separation between these two kinds of knowledge, a separation incompatible with Heideggers own theses concerning meaning holism the very theses on which his hermeneutic turn relies. If this is the case, the reication of language that we nd in Heideggers writings after the Kehre can be traced back to the reication of the ontological difference already at work in Being and Time (and never called into question by Heidegger).

Downloaded from psc.sagepub.com at The University of Manchester Library on August 3, 2012

12 Philosophy & Social Criticism 31 (1) I Heideggers conception of designation

In the key sections on understanding in Being and Time, we nd an implicit conception of designation that provides the basis for the hermeneutic approach developed by Heidegger with the aim of transforming traditional philosophy. As it is well known, one crucial motive behind Heideggers analysis of understanding in these sections is his attack to the model of perception presupposed by traditional philosophy. As Heidegger remarks explicitly:
From the beginning onwards the tradition of philosophy has been oriented primarily towards seeing as a way of access to entities and to being. . . . By showing how all sight is grounded primarily in understanding . . . we have deprived pure intuition of its priority, which corresponds noetically to the priority of the present-at-hand in traditional ontology. Intuition and thinking are both derivatives of understanding. (1962: 187)

But to support this thesis Heidegger has to be able to show that the traditional assumption of the possibility of a neutral perception or a simple seeing, is just a misconception of what in fact can only be a simple understanding seeing (1962: 189). To this end, Heidegger argues that while traditional philosophy had presupposed that in the rst instance we [experience] something purely present-at-hand, then [take] it as a door, as a house (1962: 190; emphasis added), such an as-free understanding of the present-at-hand is only the result of an abstraction from what is rst accessible to us, namely, the ready-to-hand:
In dealing with what is environmentally ready-to-hand by interpreting it circumspectively, we see it as a table, a door, a carriage, or a bridge. . . . Any mere pre-predicative seeing of the ready-to-hand is, in itself, something which already understands and interprets. (1962: 189; emphases added)

Heidegger already defends this thesis in his History of the Concept of Time when in objection to Husserl he claims that: Our simplest perceptions and constitutive states are already expressed, even more, are interpreted in a certain way. It is not so much that we see the objects and things but rather that we rst talk about them. To put it more precisely: we do not say what we see, but rather the reverse, we see what one says about things (1992: 56). However, our understanding of something as a table, a door, a carriage, or a bridge already determines what we see only to the extent that these signs (general names) are not merely pure designative expressions. That is, only if by using them, as Heidegger remarks, we are not simply designating something; but that which is designated is understood as that as which we are to take the thing in question (1962: 189). Thus such designation involves the implicit attribution of a property, through which the entity in question becomes accessible within the

Downloaded from psc.sagepub.com at The University of Manchester Library on August 3, 2012

13 Lafont: Heidegger on meaning and reference

world (by being classied as something). The entity is then differentiated from all others through the properties that are ascribed to it. Through this understanding of names as attributes, in which they are assimilated to predicates, Heidegger interprets designation as an implicit attribution. The key point of this conception lies in the assumption that every identication of entities is based in a prior understanding of meaning in terms of which something becomes intelligible as something (1962: 193). To the extent that such understanding of meaning, in the case of identifying something as something, determines the as-what of entities, it follows for Heidegger that it constitutes a knowledge of essence. Thus, our understanding of meaning is not only involved de facto in our understanding of intraworldly entities, but also enjoys a constitutitve role for our access to them: it is a priori determinative for all attainable a posteriori knowledge (about those entities). In The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, Heidegger explains the priority of the understanding of meaning over the ascertainment of facts in the following terms:
We distinguish not only terminologically but also for reasons of content between the uncoveredness of an entity and the disclosedness of its being. An entity can be uncovered, whether by way of perception or some other mode of access, only if the being of this entity is already disclosed only if I already understand it. Only then can I ask whether it is real or not and embark on some procedure to establish the reality of the entity. (1982: 72)

This understanding of designation as an implicit attribution that we find already in Being and Time is developed more explicitly by Heidegger after the Kehre. In his later writings on language he will again defend the view that reference (that is, naming something with a word) cannot be understood as a pure relation of designation between a name and an entity. Taking poetry as his point of departure Heidegger explains in Hlderlin und das Wesen der Dichtung:
This naming [that of the poet] does not consist in the fact that something with which we are already acquainted is provided with a name, but rather . . . through this naming alone does the entity rst become known as what it is. In this way, it is acknowledged as an entity. (1944: 41; emphases added)

In a similar fashion Heidegger remarks in Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes: When language names the entity for the rst time, such naming alone brings the entities to word and to appearance. This naming nominates the entity to its being from out of this being. Such saying is a projecting of the clearing, in which it is announced as what the entity comes into the open (1980: 5960; emphases added). Now, if this understanding of designation or naming is correct, it seems nothing but consistent to draw the conclusion that Heidegger

Downloaded from psc.sagepub.com at The University of Manchester Library on August 3, 2012

14 Philosophy & Social Criticism 31 (1)

expresses using the concluding line of one of Stefan Georges poems, namely, that there is no thing where the word is lacking. Heidegger comments in Unterwegs zur Sprache:
The thing is a thing only where the word is found for the thing. Only in this way is it. . . . The word alone supplies being to the thing, [for] . . . something only is, where the appropriate word names something as existing [seiend] and in this way institutes the particular entity as such [emphases added]. . . . The being of that which is resides in the word. For this reason, the following phrase holds good: language is the house of being. (1986: 1646)

However, once it is recognized that language absolutely determines our intrawordly experience with entities, it seems also nothing but consistent to recognize with Heidegger that:
Man acts as though he were the shaper and master of language, while in fact language remains the mistress of man. . . . For strictly, it is language that speaks. Man rst speaks when, and only when, he responds to language by listening to its appeal. (1994: 184)4

The chain of theses just sketched may be judged to be the outline of a straightforward argument or to be a slippery slope; in either case, however, the reader is confronted with a puzzling situation. On the one hand, it seems that, once Heideggers conception of designation is admitted (more exactly, once it is conceded that meaning determines reference), nothing much can be said against Heideggers conclusions. On the other hand, such a conception of designation is by no means a bizarre or even revolutionary feature of Heideggers philosophy. In fact, it is an inherited view. It was already defended by his predecesors, from Humboldt5 to Frege6 and Husserl.7 What is unique about Heideggers approach is rather the consistency with which he develops the linguistic idealism hidden behind this conception. Thus the reader seems to have only two options: either it can be shown that something is wrong with the apparently harmless assumption that meaning determines reference, or one has to bite the bullet and go along with Heideggers conclusions. In my attempt to avoid the second option, I will refer to the arguments developed by a number of philosophers from the Anglo-American tradition who have tried to break with the traditional conception of designation by articulating a new approach: the so-called theories of direct reference. These authors (Putnam, Donnellan, Kripke, etc.) have not yet provided a fully developed account of designation. But they have already placed into question the unrestricted validity of the thesis that meaning determines reference. It is their questioning of this thesis rather than the technicalities of their own theories that is of interest in our context.

Downloaded from psc.sagepub.com at The University of Manchester Library on August 3, 2012

15 Lafont: Heidegger on meaning and reference

Since it is not possible within the framework of this paper to survey the different accounts of direct reference offered by the aforementioned authors, I will concentrate on K. Donnellans distinction between the referential and attributive uses of denite descriptions. With the help of this distinction, it is possible not only to illustrate Heideggers own conception of designation but at the same time also to identify its limitations.

II Donnellans analysis of designation

Although Heideggers examples of designation are always related to the use of general names (such as door, carriage or bridge), Donnellans analysis of denite descriptions is instructive in this context. For Heideggers understanding of designation seems even more plausible in the case of such descriptions than in the case of names, whether they be general or proper names. Already on the supercial level with the use of denite descriptions some attributes are explicitly ascribed or denied to the referents of these expressions. Thus, at rst glance, these expressions do not simply designate something. Rather, it is through their meaning that it can be determined what they designate, namely, whatever satises the description. However, this is precisely what Donnellan calls into question with the distinction between the attributive and the referential uses of denite descriptions. Donnellan introduces this distinction in his essay Reference and Denite Descriptions. There he remarks:
I will call the two uses of denite descriptions I have in mind the attributive use and the referential use. A speaker who uses a denite description attributively in an assertion states something about whoever or whatever is the so-and-so. A speaker who uses a denite description referentially in an assertion, on the other hand, uses the description to enable his audience to pick out whom or what he is talking about and states something about that person or thing. In the rst case the denite description might be said to occur essentially, for the speaker wishes to assert something about whatever or whoever ts that description; but in the referential use the denite description is merely one tool for doing a certain job calling attention to a person or thing and in general any other device for doing the same job, another description or a name, would do as well. In the attributive use, the attribute of being so-and-so is all important, while it is not in the referential use. (1977: 46; emphases added)

To clarify this distinction, Donnellan outlines his well-known example of the assertion, The murderer of Smith is insane. The use of this sentence can express two different things. On the one hand, this assertion and the denite description it contains (the murderer of Smith)

Downloaded from psc.sagepub.com at The University of Manchester Library on August 3, 2012

16 Philosophy & Social Criticism 31 (1)

can be used to make a judgement about the one who is the murderer of Smith, whoever it might be. On the other hand, it can express a judgement about the state of mind of the person who is on trial for the murder of Smith, or of someone who is generally held to be the murderer of Smith. In the rst case, the denite description the murderer of Smith is used attributively, in the second case it is used referentially. What is remarkable about the second possibility of using a denite description consists in the fact that with it reference can succeed, even if the description is not correct. Suppose that a speaker uses the description the murderer of Smith to make an assertion about the person who is accused of murdering Smith, who is located in the same courtroom as the speaker, or who is generally known to those the speaker is addressing. In this case, successful reference does not depend on whether or not the accused is actually the murderer of Smith. Indeed, it is not even dependent on whether the hearers really believe that the accused is actually the murderer of Smith. With his assertion, the speaker has simply made a judgement about the behavior of a specic person whom he has indicated by means of a denite description, a description that allows the hearers to know what the speaker is referring to. But the speaker would not necessarily have to use precisely this expression. For the same purpose, for making the same judgement about this specic person, he could also use different expressions (other descriptions, a pronoun or even the name of the accused). The communicative success would not be affected in the least if it turned out that Smith was not murdered at all, but instead has committed suicide. What Donnellans examples show is that with one and the same expression we can refer to objects in different ways. On the one hand, we may want to refer to whatever satises the conditions implicit in the expressions meaning. On the other, we may want to refer to some particular object that we try to describe the best we can, so as to allow the hearers to identify it. However, if this is the case, the possibility of referring to some particular entity in the world does not depend exclusively on the descriptive content of the expressions used, but also on the speakers understanding of the designation. As soon as speakers interpret the descriptions in a statement in a referential way, as designating something particular in the world, they recognize the logical independence of the referent from our ways of describing or identifying it. Precisely for this reason, they do not have to avoid the use of expressions with descriptive content in order to refer to something in the world, they only have to consider them as (contingent) means for picking out the referent rather than as necessary conditions of the referents identity. But this also immediately calls into question the role that Heidegger ascribes to our understanding of meaning, as something constitutive for our access to the referent. The meanings inherent in the expressions we

Downloaded from psc.sagepub.com at The University of Manchester Library on August 3, 2012

17 Lafont: Heidegger on meaning and reference

use de facto imply an indirect attribution of properties to the referent, but this is not a sufcient reason to regard them as constitutive of that to which speakers refer with them. This is only the case for the attributive use but not for the referential use of designative expressions. To the extent that the attributive use of descriptions implies to understand these expressions as referring to whatever satises them, their meaning is ex hypothesi constitutive of the referents. Thus such a case does not allow for disagreement or revisions concerning the correct ways of describing the referent. If the hearers disagree with the description, if they believe that there is nothing that satises it, this means eo ipso that the speaker has failed to refer to anything at all. From their point of view, there is nothing to be redescribed. But in the case of referential use of descriptions, the hearers can disagree with a description as inappropriate for the referent that they themselves would describe in a different way. Consequently, they can also express their disagreement by reformulating the speakers statement using their own terms. (In Donnellans example, if the hearers do not consider Jones to be the murderer of Smith, they might reply to the speaker as follows: you have said of Jones that he is insane, but this is not true, and by the way the fact that he is accused of Smiths murder does not mean that he is the murderer of Smith). Such a redescription shows that the hearers can meaningfully commit themselves to the existence of the referent, but not to the particular way the speaker describes it. This possibility is what cannot be accounted for by Heideggers conception of designation as an implicit attribution. The importance of such communicative possibility should not be understated. For it is only by learning the referential use of linguistic expressions, that speakers can understand the independence of the referent from the linguistic means used to refer to it. And only on the basis of this understanding is it possible for the speakers to consider and discuss alternative ways of conceiving the same referents, and to learn from each other about the best way of describing them. From this perspective it seems clear that Heideggers conception of the designative function of language confuses the obvious fact that our descriptions of referents (via the meanings of the words we use) express our de facto beliefs about them with the purported fact that our descriptions thereby determine that to which they refer. While the former presupposition amounts to recognizing that the limits of my knowledge are the limits of my world (of how I believe the world to be), the latter gives rise to the myth that the limits of my language are the limits of my world (of the world that I can talk about). Taken in the second, normative sense, this conception of language presupposes that we can refer only to whatever corresponds to our beliefs, to whatever happens to satisfy our descriptions, rather than to the real referents however it is that they should be correctly described.

Downloaded from psc.sagepub.com at The University of Manchester Library on August 3, 2012

18 Philosophy & Social Criticism 31 (1)

However, once these two alternative accounts of reference are contrasted, the former seems highly counterintuitive in comparison with the latter. The practice of referring seems to force us to treat the referents of our expressions as logically independent of our particular ways of conceiving them. For only in virtue of this presupposition can speakers refer to the same things, even if they disagree about how these things ought to be described. In this sense at least, and contrary to Heideggers presuppositions, language enables us to transcend the limits of our beliefs. Language not only plays a crucial role in our access to the world, but also has an equally important role for our understanding of the world as logically independent of any particular way of conceiving it. By learning the referential use of language, we learn about precisely this independence. The limits of our languages are never the limits of our world because of the role that the world plays in our use of language. Department of Philosophy, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, USA

PSC

Notes
1 2 See J. Habermas, Postmetaphysical Thinking (1992: 3948). See R. Rorty, Wittgenstein, Heidegger and the Reication of Language (1993: 33757). I agree with Rortys diagnosis in this essay as regards the fact of the reication of language in Heideggers later writings. But I disagree with Rortys interpretation of the relationship between Heideggers writings from before and after the Kehre. As will become clear in what follows, I consider the basic premises responsible for the reication of language in Heideggers later writings as an essential component of Being and Time. Paraphrasing this thesis in terms of Kants philosophy it amounts to saying that the synthesis of apperception (i.e. the whole of synthetic judgements a priori) is essentially factical, contingent. It is not the condition of possibility of any experience whatsoever for any rational being but rather a contingent projection of meaning developed on the basis of a given, historical understanding of being. This detranscendentalization of the conditions of possibility of experience is responsible for the relativism that distinguishes Heideggers hermeneutic idealism from Kants transcendental idealism. As a result of the same combination of theses, Humboldt had already argued along very similar lines in On Language, where he remarks: Language belongs to me because I bring it forth. It does not belong to me because I cannot bring it forth otherwise than as I do, and since the ground of this lies at once in the speaking and having-spoken of every generation of mankind . . . it is language itself which restrains me when I speak. . . . When we think

Downloaded from psc.sagepub.com at The University of Manchester Library on August 3, 2012

19 Lafont: Heidegger on meaning and reference

how the current generation of a people is governed by all that their language has experienced, through all the preceding centuries . . . it then becomes evident how small, in fact, is the power of the individual compared to the might of language (1988: 63). Humboldt considers the distinction between meaning and reference as applicable to all linguistic signs, including proper names. This allows him to assume as a general thesis that meaning determines reference and thus that designation is only possible as an implicit attribution. In Grundzge des allgemainen Sprachtypus, Humboldt explains: The word conceives of every concept as general, always designating, strictly speaking, classes of reality, even if it is a proper name; for thus it comprehends in itself all the various states, with respect to time and space, of that which it designates (that is, representing the referent as a class that contains the referent in all these states, just as different individuals are contained in a generic concept) (190336: 419). In ber Sinn und Bedeutung Frege remarks that the regular connexion between a sign, its sense, and its reference is of such a kind that to the sign there corresponds a denite sense and to that in turn a denite reference (1986: 42). In Logische Untersuchungen, Vol. II (1), Husserl points out that an expression only attains relation to something like an object through the fact that it has meaning, and that it is also correct to say that the expression designates (names) the object through its meaning or that the act of meaning is the determinate way of intending the particular object (1913: 49).

PSC

Bibliography
Donnellan, K. (1977) Reference and Denite Descriptions, in S. Schwartz (ed.) Naming, Necessity, and Natural Kinds. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, pp. 4265. Frege, G. (1986) ber Sinn und Bedeutung, in Funktion, Begriff, Bedeutung, ed. G. Patzig. Gttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, pp. 4065. Habermas, J. (1992) Postmetaphysical Thinking. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Heidegger, M. (1944) Hlderlin und das Wesen der Dichtung, in Erluterungen zu Hlderlins Dichtung. Frankfurt: V. Klostermann, pp. 3348. Heidegger, M. (1962) Being and Time, trans. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson. New York: Harper & Row. Heidegger, M. (1980) Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes, in Holzwege. Frankfurt: V. Klostermann, pp. 172. Heidegger, M. (1982) The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, trans. A. Hofstadter. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Heidegger, M. (1986) Unterwegs zur Sprache. Pfullingen: Neske. Heidegger, M. (1992) History of the Concept of Time, trans. T. Kisiel. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.

Downloaded from psc.sagepub.com at The University of Manchester Library on August 3, 2012

20 Philosophy & Social Criticism 31 (1)

Heidegger, M. (1994) Vortrge und Aufstze. Stuttgart: Neske. Humboldt, W. v. (190336) Grundzge des allgemainen Sprachtypus, in Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Kniglich Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Vol. 5. Berlin: B. Behrs Verlag. Humboldt, W. v. (1988) On Language: The Diversity of Human Languagestructure and Its Inuence on the Mental Development of Mankind. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. Husserl, E. (1913) Logische Untersuchungen. Tbingen: Max Niemeyer. Rorty, R. (1993) Wittgenstein, Heidegger and the Reication of Language, in C. Guigon (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Downloaded from psc.sagepub.com at The University of Manchester Library on August 3, 2012