City of Language

In Who’s Afraid of Relativism?, his recent brief for Christian pragmatism as a philosophy of contingency and creaturehood, James KA Smith summarizes a wonderful little analogy from Wittgenstein: 

“Language [is] a city. While referentialist theories of meaning might recognize that there could be other uses of language, they will ardently insist that assertions (indicative claims) are at the heart of language: they are the ‘downtown’ of language. All other uses, then, are ‘suburbs’ of language. . . . But in Wittgenstein’s account, language is more like an ‘ancient city: a maze of little streets and squares, of old and new houses, and of houses with additions from various periods; and this surrounded by a multitude of new boroughs with straight regular streets and uniform houses’ – but no ‘downtown’ that constitutes the heart or ‘foundation’ of language use (47).

He adds that Wittgentein’s effort to socialize meaning – to show that it is “game-relative” and dependent on a “community of practice” is the very opposite of subjectivism. Smith acknowledges that Wittgenstein’s theory is a form of “relativism,” but this doesn’t mean that meaning is relative to me. Rather, “it is relative to the conventions of a community.” Because Wittgenstein rejects what Smith, following Charles Taylor, calls the I/O  (inside/outside) paradigm of knowledge, for him “there is no ‘I’ that is not always already indebted to a community of practice.” This is a relativism without solipsism because for Wittgenstine “Solipsism is simply an impossibility” (48).