Words without things: Toward a social phenomenology of language

Abstract

In prepredicative experience language is constitutive of the possibilities for meaning and action. Language as a tradition— meaningful prior to subjective existence—gives a "world" to things, thereby enabling things to acquire a particular nature and to exhibit possibilities for action to man. Communication and understanding are possible, not because words have unambiguous referents, but because speaking develops an interpretive stance in which the nature of things is disclosed.