Beyond the word

Notes for a reflection on the constitutive character of language

Abstract

The late Wittgensteinian perspective of language has given rise to an enormous flow of writings and developments of various kinds and topics. To pretend to add something to this flow seems almost provocative and it is undoubtedly a great risk. In this paper I intend to accept the challenge of proposing an initial reading of the famous philosopher. We hold that language, taken as a social practice, has a marked ‘constitutive’ character in itself. We will try to show what it consists of, according to the author. It starts with a distinction, for merely heuristic effect, between two spheres: the ontological and the epistemological spheres. After this century, these two spheres become closely connected with that of Semantics, which answers the question: what is the relationship between the name and that which is named? If is considered that, from the second Wittgenstein’s point of view, language is the condition that makes our access to the ontological sphere possible, that is, the ‘opening to the world’. It al so allows out access to the epistemological domaine, that is, the experience of the world. It is in this sense that this essay intends to show the constitutive character of language. Its purpose is to defend the idea that if it is acknowledged that our relationship with the world is symbolically mediated by language, then we may consider language as the instance which constitutes out experience.