Page 26 - Critical and Cultural Theory

MEANING
determined by its practical effects. If ideas are effective, they can
be expected to yield successful outcomes for their users. The effec-
tiveness of ideas can be tested against the various degrees of
success or failure met by a community when it applies such ideas
in practical circumstances. Peirce's successors go even further, by
suggesting that the effectiveness of ideas results from their very
adoption by a community, not from their successful application.
William James (1842-1910) offers a more subjective version of
pragmatism than Peirce's. In order to test the efficacy and success
of ideas, James proposes a shift from the idea of an abstract
community to the notions held by particular people. Truth, relat-
edly, is what individuals are impelled or compelled to believe: it is
a matter of what pays by way of belief. Neopragmatism maintains
that meaning is inevitably bound to a context, thus negating the
possibility of universal notions of truth and reality. Philosophical
attempts to distinguish between the universal and the historical,
the necessary and the contingent, truth and fiction have invariably
failed. This suggests that meaning and truth should be regarded as
nothing but effects of specific cultural circumstances.
Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951), in his Tractatus Logico-Philo-
sophicus (1921), is concerned with establishing a correspondence
between language and the world. The world is seen as a totality of
facts, or states of affairs, not of things, for things are meaningless
outside their surroundings and cannot be analysed in themselves.
Meaning emerges only through configurations or ensembles of
things. A representation of a state of affairs is a picture. Analo-
gously, language contains simple names (atoms which cannot be
analysed in themselves) and these names combine with others to
produce propositions. Propositions are made up of simple signs
whose meanings can only be elucidated in the actual use of
language. A name is not a tag attached to an object but rather an
element subject to rules of combination with other names. Names
only function in the context of propositions. Both states of affairs
and propositions are bipolar: they either obtain or do not; they
are either true or false. A proposition is a linguistic correlate of a
worldly state of affairs: if the state of affairs obtains, the proposi-
tion is accordingly true. Propositions must therefore be able to
picture facts or states of affairs. However, we must also be able to
picture to ourselves facts that are not realized but might have
been.

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