Logical Order Quotes

“The sign for Wittgenstein partakes of a logical dimension that cannot simply be taken in through an act of Hilbertian immediate perceptual apprehension that is prior to all thought or language. To put this dimension of Wittgenstein's teaching in our earlier Kantian idiom: an employment of language in which no symbol is to be recognized in the sign - so that we're confronted with the occurrence of a mere sign - involved a kind of exercise of our linguistic capacity whose very possibility presupposes the prior capacity successfully to employ signs as the sensibly perceptible aspects of symbols. In this area of philosophy - as in some of the others explored earlier in these replies - contemporary philosophers are prone to assume that the order of logical priority must be the other way around. They are inclined, with Hilbert, to regard the (to borrow Kant's term) problematic mode of occurrence of the sign as the logically simpler phenomenon and the comparatively less problematic case as the product of an enhancement of the 'mere sign' - an enhancement that breathes life into a sort of something that is, regarded in and of itself, logically mute and inert.”
― James Conant, The Logical Alien: Conant and His Critics