Jmmrnal of the His tory of the Behoviorol Scienca 16 (1980): 145-149.

MALINOWSKI’S INFLUENCE ON WITTGENSTEIN ON THE MATTER O F USE IN LANGUAGE

DAN ROSE

Language use in social contexts plays a central role in the thinking of philosophers and social scientists. Evidence is presented that suggests that the anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski influenced Ludwig Wittgenstein on the contexted use of language. It is also proposed that non-Western peoples have been a heuristic for Western thinkers on epistemological matters.

Research on the history of the unit of analysis in sociolinguistics and the ethnography of speaking reveals that the double source of the speaking event or the speech act lies in the work of Bronislaw Malinowski, the anthropologist, and Ludwig Wittgenstein, the philosopher. These men represent the two sources in the human sciences for the analysis of situated talking.’ Both are completely modern figures of the early twentieth century and both stood at the center of their disciplines. Wittgenstein remains the single most influential philosopher in the English-speaking world. Malinowski, because he developed a wide range of ideas and the method of intensive ethnographic field investigations, continues to be one of the first anthropologists that nonanthropologists and anthropologists alike examine when mounting a critique of the discipline.*

Brilliant and charismatic, both men were influential beyond their respective fields but registered their greatest impact among their colleagues and students. Malinowski’s initial remarks on languages and his two-volume treatise Coral Gardens and Their Magic ‘ were extended in the influential prosodic analysis of J. R. Firth and his students in England. Writing in honor of Malinowski in 1957, Firth traced the course of his ideas through the British school of linguistics, and noted that Malinowski’s formulation that language was a mode of action, not a countersign of thought, “finds echoes in Wittgen- stein, who would probably have endorsed Malinowski’s views on meaning.” Firth here inferred from Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigationse that Malinowski employed a language use model before Wittgenstein. My thesis is that there is more than an echo, that evidence suggests that Wittgenstein could not have written the Philosophical Investigations as he did without the formulation that Malinowski developed from his anthropological fieldwork and skills as a gifted polyglot.

Wittgenstein’s influence continues to be felt among those philosophers who dare to approach ordinary language. The chain of transmission of this tradition extends from J . L. Austin to John R. Searle and H. Paul Grice. The problems Wittgenstein tackled quite outside the problem of language continue to shape philosophical thinking at the present time. One can, for instance, pick up traces of the way he posed problems in the new es- sentialism associated with Saul Kripke.

The evidence for the power of Malinowski’s ideas of meaning in language use for

I would like to thank Dell Hymes for encouraging the writing of this research.

DAN ROSE, Ph.D. is Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Landscape Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia. PA 19104. He has done extensive ecological fieldwork in the United Stares linking narural and human ecosyslems. His major academic inierests also include aesthetic anthropology. the history of anthropology. and the ethnography of speaking. Research on Malinowski and Wittgenstein was conducted in England in the fall of 1976.

145

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Wittgenstein is circumstantial and comes from his essay, “The Problem of Meaning in Primitive Languages,” in Ogden and Richards’s The Meaning of Meaning: A Study of .,.. tlrq.t!rfl~v.rr,~-d.& a n g r . . u l ; p , r r n ~ n , ~ t I ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ . ~ ~ &e.Q.iP~o.& S x m b ~ l i ~ d . l ; ; . u r ~ ~ ~ Malinowski’s text, which was dictated to students during 1934-1935, with Wittgenstein’s. Malinowski writes:

An animated scene, full of movement follows, and now that the fish are in their power the fishermen speak loudly, and give vent to their feelings. Short, telling ex- clamations fly about, which might be rendered by such words as: ‘Pull in,’ ‘Let go,’ ‘Shift further,’ ‘Lift the net’; or again technical expressions completely un- translatable except by minute description of the instruments used, and of the mode of action.”

Wittgenstein, a decade later, dictated: Imagine this language:-1). Its function is the communication between a builder and his man B. B has to reach A building stones. There are cubes, bricks, slabs, beams, columns. The language consists of the words “cube”, “brick”, “slab”, “column”. A calls out one of these words, upon which B brings a stone of a certain shape. Let us imagine a society in which this is the only system of l a n g ~ a g e . ~

By the time he published the Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein had modified his statement bound in the Brown Book as follows:

The language is meant to serve for communication between a builder A and an assis- tant B. A is building with buildingstones: there are blocks, pillars, slabs and beams. B has to pass the stones, and that in the order in which A needs them. For this pur- pose they use a Ian uage consisting of the words ‘block’, ‘pillar’, ‘slab’, ‘beam’. A

call.-Conceive this as a complete primitive language.’O

It is not difficult to visualize Malinowski’s fishermen yelling to one another to coor- dinate their actions, and to see Wittgenstein’s more subdued workman issue single word utterances while another mutely follows the order. The evidence, I think, is there that the work of the two men was at some point of time either worked out together in conversa- tion, derived from some mutually known third source, or taken directly by one from the other. It is crucial to note that both were engaged in work on meaning, a topic that com- manded a great deal of attention in English academic thinking at that time.

Upon suspecting that Malinowski had run into Wittgenstein while working on his “Problem of Meaning” paper, I proposed the idea in a letter to Rodney Needham at Ox- ford. We met and talked, and he suggested that Malinowski and Wittgenstein might have met at Bertrand Russell’s, and that to follow up on this presumed relationship 1 should get in touch with Brian McGuinness, Wittgenstein’s biographer, and Audrey Richards, retired from Cambridge, who knew’ Malinowski well. Richards suggested writing to Malinowski’s daughter, Mrs. Helena Wayne-Malinowska, who was acquainted with his papers.

Mrs. Wayne-Malinowska wrote that after scanning the Malinowski archive at the London School of Economics, sorting through his entire remaining library and the papers that her stepmother took to Mexico, and in talking or writing to his former colleagues, she was sure there was no direct or indirect contact between the two men. McGuinness in his letter of reply reported that there was no mention of Malinowski’s name in any of Wittgenstein’s diaries. What he did say was that Wittgenstein had read Ogden and Richards’s The Meaning of Meaning.

calls them out;-B % rings the stone which he has learnt to bring at such-and-such a

MALINOWSKI’S INFLUENCE ON WITTGENSTEIN 147

After receiving a letter and The Meaning of Meaning from Ogden, Wittgenstein

in the last month I have not been quite well, my nerves being run down badly by much work and excitement. This is the reason why 1 have not yet been able to read your book thoroughly. I have however read in it and I think I ought to confess to you frankly that I believe you have not quite caught the problems which-for in- stance-I was at in my book (whether or not I have given the correct solution). l 1

Although the evidence is circumstantial, this remark confirmed my suspicion. Wittgen- stein had read Malinowski’s essay and was jarred into a new way of thinking about the problem of meaning. I n moving from his work in the Tractatus l2 to the Investigations, he moved from posing problems in a visual mode, the picture theory, to a linguistic mode, the language game. Apparently the conventions for citing one’s sources among Cambridge philosophers prescribe that one ought not cite nonphilosophers.

Both Malinowski and Wittgenstein, however, were probably aware of nineteenth- century German scholars, such as P. Wegener, who had developed situational units of analysis for behavior. In his Notebooks of 1914-1916, Wittgenstein noted on “ I 1.9.16” that “the way in which language signifies is mirrored in its use.” l 3 Wittgenstein may have been sensitized to Malinowski’s anthropological formulation based on their com- mon reading in nineteenth-century German literature. I n a sense Wittgenstein’s notebook entry suggests that he was already alive to the problems he would later tackle in the Philosophical Investigations; but I believe that Malinowski’s paper contributed powerfully to this earlier, epigrammatically phrased idea.

Malinowski brought one other critical component to the context of situation that apparently liberated Wittgenstein’s own thinking about language use: his ability to draw upon his experience with non-Western peoples. Already deep in European consciousness, the non-Western aborigine provided a mirror, a reflexive and dramatic alternative way of conceptualizing and visualizing human experience and activity. Often the primitives were given the dramatis personae of good moral alternatives to bad European social practices. Wittgenstein’s Brown Book, which lay the groundwork for the Philosophical Investigations, is laced with imaginary, and, at times, untutored references to the primitive and the native. He alludes to “native language,” “primitive state of society,” “primitive arithmetics,” and “a certain tribe,” for example. I n effect Wittgenstein employed a form of thinking we associate with Margaret Mead-learning from the “native” that our Western modes of action are not given, are not, in truth, the human es- sence. This attitude of taking lessons from the objects of inquiry can, perhaps, be traced to Montaigne, but it has reached unprecedented popularity in this century. For Wittgen- stein, primitive seemed to mean simpler, less cluttered, more easily discernable, in much the same way that with more knowledge, Emile Durkheim treated Australian aboriginal religious life.“ Durkheim’s great contribution lay in examining the sources of the human religious impulses that history and commentary had rendered impenetrable.

There are other, remarkably similar examples of the importation of linguistics into philosophy, up to the present. When in the mid-1950s Willard Van Orman Quine ad- dressed the philosophical questions of meaning and truth, by the analysis of language, he too drew upon Malinowski and the l ing~is ts . ’~ I n this case the linguists included Bernard Bloch and George Trager, Leonard Bloomfield, Kenneth Pike, Benjamin Whorf, and others. Quine was richly indebted to these sources in much the same way that Wittgen- stein was to Malinowski. His references, however, were complete-we know exactly

commented in a return letter, dated March 1923, that

148 D A N ROSE

what work was used and in which argument. He also preserved intact a notion of the con- text of situation employing the words, situation and circumstances. From both real and imagined situations, the philosophers have constructed and relied upon representative anecdotes, as the literary critic, Kenneth Burke, termed them.le Quine, for example, freely created fictive anecdotes and also built from real ones, as when he drew upon Kenneth Pike’s Kalaba linguistic material.

To reverse the point, even the linguists have found refuge in made up situations, as when Leonard Bloomfield explored the niceties of interpersonal, language-based un- derstandings. In his definitive Language of 1933, he called upon two unreal but familiar people, Jack and Jill, and had them walk down a lane and find an apple tree.17 From this miniature story he analyzed elements of the speech act in behaviorist terms. It is in- teresting that Bloomfield had already done linguistic fieldwork among the Menomini and had quantities of real-life experience to draw upon, had he chosen to.

The fictive anecdote, however, offers the philosopher or scientist a resource with which to explore the nuances of human situations without being tied to the rather fixed empirical reality of an actual occurrence. Both philosophers and scientists rely upon creative speculation to advance their arguments, and the representative anecdote has been one of those irreducible pieces of human life that are ready-made for it. 1 think the power for philosophers of the tiny story, whether fictional or factual, lies in the light it can shed on epistemological problems. A linguist provides the clue. The first inter- nationally recognized American linguist, William Dwight Whitney, considered the foun- dation of language to be based upon mutual intelligibility: “Mutual intelligibility, we have seen, is the only quality which makes the unity of a spoken tongue; the necessity of mutual intelligibility is the only force which keeps it one; and the desire of mutual in- telligibility is the impulse which called out speech.” Is The story captures the flow of an event, illuminating what we mean by our statements, and makes possible interpersonal understandings. The question of how mutual intelligibility is established as meaningful language communication in social contexts became in the twentieth century an empirical scientific question and makes possible interpersonal understandings.

One of the roles that anthropologists in the universities and increasingly in the mass media have, is to provide a window on a human diversity often radically at odds with the Western vision of self, society, and cultural expression. A second role is indicated in this brief report. When Malinowski formulated his context of situation and illustrated it with Trobrianders shouting to one another to orchestrate their fishing activities, he was con- verging in his thinking with deep philosophical streams flowing in the West; for both anthropology and philosophy were concerned with epistemological problems, par- ticularly how humans made meaning. Malinowski addressed this problem in his work on translation, in Coral Gardens, where he unsuccessfully attempted to translate Kiriwinian texts into meaningful English. In brief, the anthropological materials (the lives of natives) are used as heuristics by those outside anthropology, in order to develop their own thoughts about how we know or how society ought to be ordered. Wittgenstein, drawing from many sources and indebted to many influences, including Malinowski, if the circumstantial evidence is granted, found resources within anthropology that played a powerful part in his own thinking about meaning. I t would seem that the very language game notion was developed with the heuristic of native life enacted in their own contexts and situations. Obviously the threads of the sciences, humanities, and philosophy have crossed and crossed again, and this provides the fascination and demand for an historical untangling.

M A L I N O W S K I ’ S I N F L U I N C E ON WITTGENSTEIN 149

By way of summary, I am suggesting, based on obvious inferences and leaps, that Malinowski influenced Wittgenstein and that anthropological (and anthropological linguistic) thought has played a powerful, enduring, and increasing role in epistemology, as practiced by the philosopher, and as practiced by persons in everyday life. In language analysis the focus upon use emphasizes the diversity of human language behavior in the texture of everyday life, and thus it holds a central place in contemporary thinking.

NOTES

I . Dan Rose, “Malinowski and Wittgenstein: Continuities and Discontinuities of Experience in Talking.” Structuralist Research Institute, Occasional Paper 22 (Nashville, Tennessee: Vanderbilt University, 1978). 2. Marshall Sahlins, Culture and Practical Reason (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976). 3. Bronislaw Malinowski. “The Problem of Meaning in Primitive Languages,” Supplement I , in The

Meoning of Meaning: A Study of the Influence upon Thought and of the Science of Symbolism. ed. C. K. Ogden and I . A. Richards (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1923), pp. 296-336. 4. 5 .

138. 6. 7. 8. 9 .

10. I I .

..

Bronislaw Malinowski, Coral Gardens and Their Magic, 2 vols. (London: G. Allen & Unwin, 1935). F. R. Palmer, Selected Papers ofJ. R . Firth 1952-59 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1968), p.

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (New York: Macmillan, 1953). See note 3. MalinowskI, “Problem of Meaning.” p. 3 1 I . Ludwig Wittgenstein, The Blue and Brown Books (New York: Harper & Row, 1965), p. 77. Wittgenstein, Investigations, p. 3e. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Letters to C . K. Ogden with Comments on the English Translation of the Trac-

tutus Logico-Philosophicus (Oxford: Basil Blackwell. 1973), p. 69. 12. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tracrotur Logico-Philosophicus (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1961). 13. Ludwig Wittgenstein. Notebooks. 1914-19/6 (New York: Harper & Row, 1961), p. 82e. 14. Emile Durkheim. The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (New York: Free Press, 1965). 15. Willard Van Orman Quine, From a Logical Point of View (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1953). pp. 47-64; idem, Words and Object (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1960). pp. 26-79. 16. Kenneth Burke, A Grammar of Motives and A Rhetoric of Motives (New York: World Publishing,

17. Leonard Bloomfield. Languoge (New York: Holt, 1933), pp. 22-27. 18. William Dwight Whitney, Languoge ond the Study of Language (New York: Charles Scribners, 1869), p. 404.

1962), pp. 59-61.