Action, Interaction, and Deep Socio-Genic Impact

Of course we have always to start from everyday experience and everyday acting. We know that even this is deeply interpretation-laden. We might with Abel modify Wittgenstein: Thus we interpret as we are used to (or accustomed to) interpret: we are in a deep sense the designing, interpreting, meta-interpreting and acting as well as valuating beings—even if we know that this self-interpretation is again interpretative in an anthropological, (according to Wittgenstein and Kripke) “deeply social” and epistemological context.

To be true, the later Wittgenstein would say: Thus we interpret in and how we act (we are accustomed to act). This does not exclude an insight about the interpretation-dependence of this very model and of all activities including everyday (re)cognitions and theoretical constructions in science (and also philosophy).

Such conditions and restrictions would be valid for any conceptual and linguistic foundations in Wittgenstein’s deeply socially entrenched sense. Also language as a quasi “transcendental”-epistemological basis is interwoven with conceptual and factual potentials of “grasping” and acting. Thus, we have to go beyond Wittgenstein’s transcendental lingualism not only in digging deeper to the very forms and requirements of acting, but also more basically to the forms and requirements of schematizing and non-linguistic interpreting in the first place. In my book on “Schema-Games” (1995) I extended the Wittgensteinian model of “language games” to the schematic forms of “grasping” or shaping any representations and actions whatsoever. We have to go beyond Wittgensteinian restrictions to just ordinary language formations. Transcendental lingualism (as E. Stenius interpreted Wittgenstein’s philosophy) has to be superseded. Language is not the last and only basis for everything. Even the usage of language is necessarily dependent on the forms of actions and schematizations as well as non-linguistic interpretations in the elementary sense of IS1 and IS2 as well as IS_3a.

Language only comes in later, though as a very important means of additional interpretative differentiation. Language is itself however actualized, it does only exist in acting and interpreting and resides, as the later Wittgenstein indeed saw, in socially conventionalized institutions, societal structures and customs, in rules, norms, symbols (as conventional signs or gestures etc.). “World” cannot be dissolved in or reduced just to language and signs and also not, as Nietzsche had it, to an ontologically hypostatized interpretative “happening”. As we saw, we cannot just produce from our interpretativity anything existing at all. Not everything is a total result of interpretation, although anything whatsoever can only be “grasped” in an interpretation-dependent manner—or even indeed be conceived that way.

Would all this only be valid for world representations or the processes of “grasping” world versions? Indeed projections of meanings, hypostatizations are themselves interpretative, in some sense they are “world-producing” insofar as the manipulation of linguistic and symbolic signs as well as the respective systems of applications and embeddings in socio-cultural contexts are dependent on such interpretations. But this is only a projective, “secondary” relationship of constituting not a really extremely radical one as Goodman for instance would postulate: To be sure, we “have” only world versions, i.e., we can only refer to “the world” in the light of our interpretational perspectives and interpretative constructs. Any world concept whatsoever is an interpretative construct. However, the world does not totally consist in such constructs; it is not disjunctively separated into incompatible “worlds” (or the “world versions” the late Goodman had in mind, misleadingly calling them “worlds”), i.e., special restricted world perspectives or related interpretative constructs are to be taken seriously instead of a global talk about “incompatible” and “disjunctive”, if not “many worlds”.

Any “grasping” of “the world” or “worlds” (or, for that, “world versions”) is/are certainly interpretation-dependent; therefore, any world version in Goodman's sense is interpretatively constituted. This does not exclude that we do, for pragmatic and practical reasons, hypostatize a common social world of actions and interpretations: We act, to be sure, in one and the same world like our neighbor or partner—even at times including an interaction partner from another culture. However, any world versions we would avail ourselves of are indeed to be embedded—at least in practice and practical interacting—in a common world (to be represented in a comprehensive model of suchlike). Even the Indians of the recently discovered tribes in Bolivia and Brazil which have never to date been confronted with the so-called (Western) “civilization” would necessarily act (thus we are obliged to hypostatize) in one and the same world—“our” common world as we have to stipulate—when (and even before) the first encounter took place. This is true even regarding the fact that no common language or symbolic or representational world version does thus far exist. In spite of distinct and different world versions we necessarily have to hypostatize one common and “real” world. We yet know that “grasping” world versions of it would always be interpretative—and that would a fortiori also apply to the hypostatized basic common world. We really—in terms of actions and interactions—do not live in totally different worlds: There are overlapping zones of confrontation, action and interaction contacts in a situation which has to be located in one and the same world despite all differing perspectives with regard to differing projections, languages, cultures and different modes of inter- pretations—maybe from both sides. Even if inhabitants of different world regions, cultures or even remote planets never would encounter each other or get into contact living in or under totally distinct world versions a la Goodman, nevertheless they are as acting and interacting beings to be located as existing in the same world. (At least thus we have to understand it, and similarly the other side has correspondingly mutatis mutandis to conceive of it also.) (The many-worlds interpretation as of Goodman's is practically equally absurd as the many-worlds interpretation developed in interpreting quantum mechanics.)

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Source: Agazzi E. (ed.). Varieties of Scientific Realism: Objectivity and Truth in Science. Springer,2017. — 411 pp.. 2017

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