Languaging and Practices: Intimations of a Singular Ontology

Abstract

Abstract The paper rejects both mentalism and reduction of the trait of Language (capital L) to linguistic phenomena. What is termed lingualism is replaced by tracing wordings to practices that unite metabolism, coordinative activity and linguistic history. Like other partly cultural, partly natural traits (e.g. grazing), languaging enacts modelling (Sebeok 1988). In Yu’s (2021) terms, it extends how supersession informs morphogenesis, agency, sensing and acting. Having challenged lingualism, one deflates reports of experience. Appeal to practices and ontologies (not ontology) posit linguistic ‘objects’ or, in Sellars’s terms, versions of the Myth of the Given. With Sellars, therefore, I rethink the analytic/synthetic divide around the normative power of languaging. On such a view, practices, nonhumans and humans co-evolve with manifest and scientific modes of acting that are constituted by unknowable singular ontology. Knowing is inextricable from languaging and how the resources of cultural modelling are rendered and grasped by using the (simplexifying) powers of living human beings.