Language Games and Pre-Linguistic Experience
Language Games and Pre-Linguistic Experience

Summary/Abstract: The article tries to show, from the phenomenological position, that it must be possible to reflect on so called pre-linguistic experience. The argumentation is based on a disputation with a symptomatic example used by Wittgenstein to substantiate his language games theory. The analysis of the example at¬tempts to indicate that the language games theory, which has to justify the rejection of the existence of pre-linguistic experience, meets with discre-pancies and difficulties which limit the range of this theory to a certain extent. Because it presupposes the existence of „private“, experiential sphere in which – even before language and verbalization enter the game – the structuring of the world, identification of things and an elementary under-standing of these processes must be realized. It seems that the discussion on this topic is not only a specific polemic over one problem that can be found in Wittgenstein, but has wider implications because the language games concept in the form of various „discourses“, „vocabularies“ or „cultures“ has found great favour in contemporary postmodern philosophy. On its basis postmodern philosophy very radically (and perhaps against the will of Wittgenstein himself) crosses out the world, profanes its rational, objective description and calls for free variation of different interpretations – their legitimacy is authenticated only by a consensus of their users. In this dispute, phenomenology does not declare that there is a single true description of the world and that it is possible to find a reliable criterion for its definite legitimization. It does, however, draw on the fact that so called pre-linguistic experience does not succumb to the variability of langu¬age games and the interests of its users, but that it more and more clearly reflects the unitary and scrutable style of showing the real, objectively given world even though this always happens in seemingly impalpable subjective acts.

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