Mutual Misunderstanding: Scepticism and the Theorizing of Language and Interpretation

by Talbot J. Taylor

Do others understand what we say or write? Do we understand them? Theorists of language and interpretation claim to be more concerned with questions about "what" we understand and "how" we understand, rather than with the logically prior question "whether" we understand each other. An affirmative answer to the latter question is apparently taken for granted. However, in Mutual Misunderstanding , Talbot J. Taylor shows that the sceptical doubts about communicational understanding do in fact have a profoundly important, if as yet unacknowledged, function in the construction of theories of language and interpretation.
Mutual Misundertanding thus presents a strikingly original analysis of the rhetorical patterns underlying Western linguistic thought, as exemplified in the works of John Locke, Jacques Derrida, Gottlob Frege, Jonathan Culler, Noam Chomsky, Ferdinand de Saussure, H. Paul Grice, Michael Dummet, Stanley Fish, Alfred Schutz, Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Harold Garfinkel, and others.
This analysis reveals how, by the combined effect of appeals to "commonsense" and anxieties about implications of relativism, scepticism has a determining role in the discursive development of a number of the intellectual disciplines making up the "human sciences" today, including critical theory, literary hermeneutics, philosophy of language and logic, communication theory, discourse and conversation analysis, pragmatics, stylistics, and linguistics. Consequently, this provocative study will be of value to readers from a wide variety of disciplinary backgrounds.

Genres: Language, Communication, Philosophy

320 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1992

Reviews

[Tim · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is a bit of a mess, imo, but still well worth reading and quite original. I just googled TJT, I see he has been a prof at William & Mary for a good while and not particularly prolific as a writer. Also what he has written since this one, which came fairly early in his scholarly life and career, doesn't look like a development of the ideas offered here. In short, it didn't launch him on a path he's since been developing ever since; instead, he teaches history of English and other standard curriculum courses, and most of his students are pretty fond of him.
He's not a great writer, either, imo - not all that clear, not a great pleasure to read... His accounts of the writings of others are often questionable - and these form a big chunk of the central part of the book. And his explanation of his own classification of them is not always clear either.
His overall insight, though, which he tries to argue for via a systematic and somewhat reductive reading of various greats in (loosely) philosophy of language (chronologically speaking) from Locke to Derrida, is that there is no one 'right' answer to the question 'do we understand each other?' - or other fundamental questions in 'theories of language', though he pursues this one as a compelling example at least. His take could be expressed as 'that is not the *wrong* question to ask, but it is definitely not *the* right one, and it carries a lot of baggage that can be unhelpful'. (I don't do him justice, I'm sure, but hopefully this gives some idea of the territory.)
Without ever explicitly admitting it, he is clearly hugely under the spell of non-early Wittgenstein.
I think it's a shame this early work didn't propel him to prestige, fame, etc. - he shows a lot of potential here, and more, and while his students may be glad to have him, he could have taken this thinking further, and worked on his style and lucidity a bit, had things gone otherwise, and that would have been good. Ludwig got lucky, Talbot didn't. He coulda bin a contender.