Charles Taylor's designative vs. constitutive
Charles Taylor, in The Language Animal, distinguishes two meta-theories of language: the designative view and the constitutive view.
The designative view, roughly speaking, conceives of the mind as ontologically separate from a self-standing external reality, and it comes into contact with it by creating concepts that “refer” to or “represent” objects contained within it, and language therefore has the primary function of encoding and communicating information about this extra-linguistic reality.
We can see that what Taylor calls the designative view of language is roughly “representationalism” I've written about extensively on this blog.
The constitutive view, on the other hand, is radically different. According to the constitutive view, a language is first and foremost a form of life (Wittgenstein), offering a new kind of consciousness. A language transforms our world, the world of our engagements; a language offers new possibilities of behaviors, new purposes, new ways of feeling, new ways of reacting to things, new meanings, new social games, new ways of inhabiting the world, new ways of being, etc.
The constitutive view goes so far as to reject the idea of a “self-standing extra-linguistic external reality”, since an expression is constitutive of what it expresses, and one cannot be detached from the other (correlationism?) as one detaches a concept from its “referent”.
We can see that what Taylor calls the constitutive view is part of the “anti-representationalist cluster” I've been talking about extensively on this blog.
And I think it's important to draw attention to these two different views of language, and especially to criticize the designative view in favor of the constitutive view.
In a previous post, I criticized placement problems, in another, I criticized a lines-centered view of philosophy, in another, I put a lot of emphasis on DZ's idea of religious minimalism while presenting Ramsey's view of religion so that it wouldn't be mistaken for non-cognitivism, etc.
Opposition to the designative view can be connected to all these posts. The designative view is becoming increasingly widespread, and one consequence of this is a misunderstanding, impoverishment and destruction of forms of life.
Morality and religion are perfect examples. When the designative view becomes deeply rooted in the mind, the forms of life of morality and religion begin to become strange, suspicious, unintelligible.
One begins to want to “naturalize” morality; either by making a non-cognitivist analysis of it, or by making a naturalist realist analysis of it, or... Sometimes, this leads to its outright elimination. In any case, it leads to the corruption and impoverishment of its form of life.
Same thing for religion, it seems that most philosophers today adopt a “face value” interpretation of religious language, which completely misrepresents what religion is, leads to absurd philosophical debates about an “omniGod”, and ultimately, as DZ says, gives a very idolatrous and pathetic image of religion. Sometimes they adopt non-cognitivism, which is perhaps even worse as an impoverishment of the religious form of life.
They reframe one form of life in terms of another, import the norms of the other, and in the end there's almost nothing left of the original which has been absorbed into the other.
Even though science is obviously a form of life like any other, for various reasons, it is intimately connected to the designative view. As a result, science begins to be seen as “the only true language”, and all other forms of life must either find a way to “attach” themselves to science, or accept being seen as “decorative”.