Novelty (1): the conundrum

The aspect of the phenomenon of novelty that continues to puzzle me, is this: How does a new meaning occur to the creating individual? And how is it recognised as meaning by others? The social constitution of individuals that form a community in which meaning is constituted by shared rules for use, strictly speaking leaves no room for there to be a new meaning, a new way of use. After all, what counts as use is determined by the spatio-temporally extended behaviour of the community. Outside that, there is no such thing as meaning, no such thing as use that constitutes meaning.

It seems that the emphasis on social constitution forces Wittgenstein to resort to some ‘von Münchhausen trickery’. And note the same problem arises with the question how a group of individuals establishes itself as a rule-following community: the construction of the relevant concepts as being determined by such a community does not answer how such a community comes into existence in the first place. (At the individual level this is the problem of the solitary cave dweller.)

A similar tension, by the way, can be discerned with regard to the normativity of rule-following. Wittgenstein’s private language argument aims to show that the concept of normative self-determination does not make sense: no individual by themselves is able to constrain their behaviour in a normative way. (Cf., again, the problem of the cave dweller.) The kind of normative determination that comes with rule-following can be established only at the level of the interaction between an individual and a community of which they are part. So far, so good, one could say. But how do such communities come into existence? (The appeal to other, larger communities obviously does not help: that’s turtles all the way down …)

Thus the bootstrapping issue is this: if meaning is a social construct, then a radically new meaning cannot come into existence. For a new meaning cannot be recognised as a meaning, because, by assumption, it is new and thus not part of the meanings that the community recognises.

One possible way around this might be to claim that new meanings are never radically new, but rather variations/extensions of existing meanings. That might be a good move if the ways in which meanings can be varied and extended are shared in the community.

Another way out is to question the implicit assumption of complete homogeneity of a linguistic community, viz., that we all share exactly the same meanings. That is obviously not how linguistic communities operate. There is lots of variation, between subgroups, experts and laypersons, and so on. But here, too, it seems that one must assume shared mechanisms in order for these differences to be productive. If a difference cannot be overcome, there is no novelty.

Martin Stokhof
from: Radical Discussion Board
date: spring 2021