A Wittgensteinian Approach to Discourse Analysis(1)

Culture and Value, a collection of Ludwig Wittgenstein's aphorisms, contains a puzzling remark:

"In a conversation: one person throws a ball; the other does not know whether he is supposed to throw it back, or throw it to a third person, or leave it on the ground, or pick it up and put it in his pocket, etc."1

The remark is puzzling because in the vast majority of cases that take place under ordinary circumstances, it seems that any two people engaged in a conversation have little trouble interpreting and responding meaningfully to each other's utterances. Perhaps Wittgenstein intends the remark to illustrate that when two interlocutors engage inconversation, they are often forced to feel their way -- to try to determine as best they can the kind of the game that is being played, its rules and goals, its boundaries and players. Yet precisely how interpretation and response are carried out in the game of conversation remains a puzzle. The goal of discourse analysis, as broadly conceived, is to unravel this mystery: To describe the game, to illuminate its often obscure rules, to clearly mark out its boundaries and to identify its players, coaches and referees.

Although discourse analysis has come to be seen as a subdiscipline of linguistics, the roots of several of the seven established approaches to discourse have grown out of philosophy, and at least two of them are based directly in the writings of prominent philosophers. The approach known as speech act theory was formulated by the philosopher John L. Austin and developed by John Searle. A second approach, often called pragmatics, has its foundations in the writings of H.P. Grice. Both approaches have been influenced, at least on the margins or in their maturation, by Wittgenstein's later writings, especially Philosophical Investigations. There are especially strong parallels between speech act theory and Wittgenstein's emphasis on usage and language-games.2

This essay seeks to take Wittgenstein's influence on discourse analysis a step further by using his writings as the theoretical foundation for an approach to analyzing discourse that is distinct from speech act theory,

which stems from the analytic tradition in philosophy, and to suggest that a Wittgenstein-inspired approach may actually be closer in spirit and content to that of an unlikely candidate whose views, in contrast to the analytic school, harbor a distinctly Continental flavor which has come to influence critical theory: Mikhail Bakhtin.

The essay begins by attempting to outline in fairly broad strokes an approach to discourse analysis based on Wittgenstein's philosophy of language in Philosophical Investigations. The approach will appeal to the following Wittgensteinian views and constructs: a focus on ordinary language, meaning as use, the language-game and context, function, speech activities, the connection of language to life, the role of customs and rule- governed activities, the indeterminacy of meaning, an antipathy to reductionism, and a focus on moves in a game. As I develop a Wittgenstein-driven approach to discourse, I will point out in passing several ways in which it differs from a speech act approach.

As the essay progresses, I will increasingly turn toward analyzing a particular kind of discourse from a Wittgensteinian perspective: psychoanalytic conversation. Even though I do not realize this ambition here, it is my hope that, as an extension of Wittgenstein's views on the interpretation of an utterance's meaning in a particular context, a Wittgensteinian approach to discourse will provide the basis for analyzing the rhetoric that surfaces in psychoanalyst-patient dialogue. Toward this end, the essay will close by briefly testing the approach's explanatory yield by applying it to an early psychoanalytic conversation.

Points of Departure

Before beginning to outline a Wittgensteinian approach to discourse, it may prove useful to clarify some general objectives of discourse analysis, which coincide with at least two of Wittgenstein's philosophical concerns in Philosophical Investigations: the concepts of meaning and understanding. Even though discourse analysis and philosophy have common points of departure in their concern with meaning and understanding, discourse analysis moves in a slightly different direction as it begins to explore these concepts. Quite broadly, it strives "to give an account of how forms of language are used in communication."3 More specifically, it examines "how addressers construct linguistic messages for addressees and how addressees work on linguistic messages in order to interpret them."4 Discourse analysis, then, departs from the philosophy of language by taking an orientation that "on the one hand includes the study of linguistic forms and the regularities of their distribution and, on the other hand, involves a consideration of the general principles of interpretation by which people normally makes sense of what they hear and read."5 In stark contrast to the theorizing of philosophy, the investigation of these concerns often takes the form of empirical analysis. Yet discourse analysis finds itself in need of appealing to philosophy as well as its progenitor, linguistics, for its theoretical framework. Hence the attempt of this essay to construct from Wittgenstein's work the theoretical underpinnings of another approach to discourse analysis.6

The Basis for a Wittgensteinian Approach

Some aspects of Wittgenstein's thought as laid out in Philosophical Investigations readily lend themselves to analyzing discourse. His focus on ordinary language, rather than on such ideal or logical languages, is, for instance, a rather obvious starting point for any meaningful analysis of conversation or text. Such logic-based approaches to studying meaning as Tarskian truth-conditional semantics, while they have their place in postulations about how semantic meaning may be represented in the mind or brain of a speaker, are of little help in analyzing the meaning of utterances in actual conversation. Quite obviously, the analysis of meaning in the context of social discourse must be addressed not through formal logic or the modeling of cognitive structures but through attention to the influence of cultural and social factors on the use and interpretation of language across contexts.

Wittgenstein's appeal to ordinary language leads him to abandon the tendency to attribute the meaning of a word to the object it names, offering instead a nonreductionist principle that forms the foundation of a Wittgensteinian approach to analyzing conversation: "For a large class of cases--though not for all--in which we employ the word `meaning,'" he writes, "it can be defined thus: the meaning of a word is its use in the language."7 Thus, a participant in a conversation interprets a word's meaning in accord with its use. This principle is a fine starting point, but as a theoretical construct it may be so broad that its application to conversation may be limited, leaving some common signs accounted for. For instance, it cannot account for the inferences and implicatures that people commonly make in conversation. Furthermore, appealing to the use of a word may capture its direct meaning but leave untouched meanings that manifest themselves in the tone or inflection with which the word is used. Wittgenstein is not unaware of this objection. He quickly moves to delimit his definition of meaning more sharply by asking how to explain the difference in meaning between a report and a command that employ the same words. The answer: "It is the part which uttering these words plays in the language- game."8 With this remark Wittgenstein slightly restricts his earlier remark on meanings while expanding it from the level of the word to that of the utterance, producing a principle with greater utility for an approach to conversation, where the emphasis must be more on the interpretation of utterances than single words. Wittgenstein's remark can be seen as accomplishing two moves crucial to extending his philosophical perspective to the analysis of discourse: First, it expands the focus of analysis from the use of words alone to their use in an utterance; second, it connects use to not only the language in general but the particular context in which it is being used at the time of the utterance.

After introducing meaning as use and the notion of a language-game in Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein quickly adds another angle to the point of view he is developing: function. For Wittgenstein, the function of language goes beyond the mere conveyance of thought. He exhorts us to "make a radical break with the idea that language always functions in one way, always serves the same purpose: to convey thoughts."9 For Wittgenstein, language, including discourse in both conversation and text, can serve a multiplicity of functions or purposes. Language's function, in any given case, can be just as much to do something as to convey a thought. In this way, Wittgenstein's notion of function can, I believe, be distinguished from his notion of use. A function of a word or sentence is tied up more with what it is used to do, in contrast to its use, which is its meaning: A word is used to do something; the use of a word or a sentence has a function: A word or sentence is used to carry out a function.

A problem that arises by associating a word's function with what it is used to do is how to differentiate Wittgenstein's notion of the function of language from that of speech act theory, which also focuses on what an utterance is used to do. The difference lies in the connection that Wittgenstein makes between activity and the function of language -- both of which, in his view, may take an infinite variety of forms. Further: Activity and language are in turn closely connected to life, a relation that seems to be missing in speech act theory.

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