We inherit from metaphysics the possibility of replacing any word, phrase, gesture, or movement with a declarative sentence, or a string of declarative sentences, and then replacing the words in those sentences with strings of declarative sentences, and then doing the same with the very process of carrying out all of these replacements, and so on. Having declarative reframing at our disposal serves the purposes of deferral, which can in this way be organized in disciplinary spaces, which enable us to reframe accounts of events in new registers. The most minimal act of attention can thereby be spread out into a structure and history of practices limited only by the question prompting the inquiry, and the continual modulation of that question. We start with an event or utterance (but we only know events through utterances, and utterances are always an event), and at a certain point we will say we have determined what something means. Wierzbicka’s analysis of words into the primes is an exemplary model for such post- metaphysical work within the declarative order, and I would hereby deem her thinking to be part of anthropomorphics. Still there is an interesting aporia in Wierzbicka’s primes: there is, it seems, no prime word for “God,” or “divine,” or “sacred” or any related terms. This is certainly not due to any hostility or hesitation regarding the sacred on the part of Wierzbicka, who has written at least two books that translate Christian scripture into the primes. My assumption is that words for God and gods are too singularized, and it would be impossible, using Wierzbicka’s exacting standards of identification, to claim that there are words in all languages referring to gods or the sacred that are the “same.” Gods are always named, and names can’t be in the primes. Wierzbicka, at any rate, never claims that the prime words are the earliest words, even if they are all certainly pre-literate. We can take them, I would suggest, as belonging to declarative language, leaving at least portions of the ostensive-imperative world untouched.
Wierzbicka’s claim, which, again, I have no reason to contest, is that one way of identifying and verifying the primes is that they are words that cannot be paraphrased by other words without those other words having to be paraphrased, and so on, until we ultimately find our way back at the prime word. So, any attempt to paraphrase “think” would, if sufficiently thorough and rigorous, have to include the word itself in that paraphrase; this is not the case for a non-prime word like, say, “understand.” The primes, then, are words that are understood or, to stick with the primes, known, intuitively; or, to put it in a way with less philosophical baggage, knowing how to use (or when to say) these words is simply part of being able to speak a language. In originary disciplinary spaces, though, things don’t end there, because being able to gesture ostensively and
issue and obey imperatives are also part of what it means to be able to speak a language. So, we can have non-tautological ways of saying what it means to “think,” “know,” “say,” “want” and so on: they represent interactions at the center, which we iterate on the margin. The primes themselves are practices and this can be shown in a way that would be in principle available to Wierzbicka, even if to my knowledge she has never adopted it, and that is understanding the words in relation to each other. This will enable us to defend Wierzbicka’s position while recognizing, for example, that the word “think,” when someone says “I think,” might mean something different than “think” is the question, “what do you think?”
Does “think” mean the same thing when someone, in response to a question of whether he’d like to go somewhere, says, “yes, I think so,” as when someone says “if you think about it, you will agree with me”? The person who says “yes, I think so” is expressing a desire while simultaneously indicating some hesitation (there are other possibilities, of course), while the person saying “if you think about it...” is encouraging the other to engage in a cogitative process, to carry out a mental activity (but also, perhaps, reminding the other of consequences of “disagreeing”). We can make the meaning of “think” seem as different from each other in the respective cases as we like, but what I think vindicates Wierzbicka’s model is that in both cases one _thinks_ when one doesn’t _know_ , and one _thinks_ before one _says_. And we can make the relations between the words even more precise if we consider when we would use one in an imperative rather than the other, or the limitations imposed upon using these words as imperatives. When do you command someone to think? When a decision has to be made, or a conclusion reached, and the person who has to make or reach it seems unprepared to do so. Which is a way of saying “think before you say you know,” or “think before you do.” Someone is commanded to “say something” when there has been ample time, or there is now no time, to “think.” Of course, we have E.M. Forster’s question, much beloved of writing instructors, “how do I know what I think until I see what I say,” which suggests the simultaneity of thinking and saying. Even here, though, it seems that the saying does not so much coincide with as reveal the thinking which still, presumably, in some sense antedated it. At the very least, the saying can’t precede any thinking, even if we speak about people speaking and acting before they have thought. When we accuse someone thus, we’re limiting what we’re willing to consider “genuine” thinking in this case, that is, using “thinking” in a restrictive way, while still preserving its priority over saying and doing (no one tells another he speaks or acts before he thinks as a compliment, even if one might advise another not to think “too much” before speaking or acting —which, again, presupposes the priority of thinking of these acts).
However such intra-prime analyses work out (is it meaningful to command or demand that someone _want_ or _know_ something? If not, what do we mean when we do so, as we all probably do on occasion?), I put these models of analysis forward as a contribution to the ongoing (it seems to be taking longer than it should) dismantling of the metaphysical reification of the declarative sentence, not in order to devalue (absurdly) the declarative sentence but to liberate its real “vocation.” Wierzbicka’s primes help free us from the metalanguage of literacy, but they also need to be freed from it. It can still be very difficult to resist the tendency, when hearing the words “think” or “know,” to immediately convert that into a question like “what is real thinking/
knowing,” which in turn, as Wittgenstein knew, leads us to construct a “picture” of “thinking” and “knowing.” Once we are drawing pictures of these activities, we invite arguments over their “thoroughness,” or the “correctness” of this or that “detail.” We try to “prove” that this or that “faculty” is an essential part of the “thought process,” or that we haven’t really “known” something until all the items on a checklist of what counts as “knowing” have been checked off. Do I need to convince you of how deeply rooted these habits of thought remain? The appropriation of Wierzbicka’s primes by originary thinking allow us to maintain all the precision regarding determining the meaning of words that the most demanding analytical philosopher would insist upon, and as penetrating an analysis of the practices comprising any intellectual activity as any cognitive psychologist would hope for, without the kinds of pointless paradoxes that have been with us since Socrates wondered whether acts are good because the gods command them, or the gods command them because they are good. “Limiting” ourselves to the modest questioning of how the most minimally meaningful words are used in relation to each other will help generate a post-metaphysical human science.
We can remain with the declarative order for as long as we like, and there are substantial rewards for doing so: the purest form of the declarative order is mathematics, and when we are thinking genuinely scientifically, we are within the declarative. However delayed, though, the declarative must come home to the ostensive—even the most complex physics experiment carried out with the most intricate machinery must give the scientist something to see and point to—even if it’s just a reading on a meter that is very distantly related to anything we might actually be able to engage with our senses. Moreover, science begins with a question, and a question is an extended imperative, and the imperative is extended because it turned out to be “inappropriate”—to not, in fact, have had the needed ostensive backing. The grounding of the declarative order in the ostensive-imperative world can also only be discussed (as anything can only be “discussed”) in the declarative order, but nothing in the declarative order would ever impel its participants to initiate such discussions—which is why the metalanguage of literacy has ruled for so long. As Heidegger and Wittgenstein realized, it is mistakenness that opens up the declarative order to an inquiry into its ostensive and imperative roots. All of the paradoxes, aporias and anomalies with which the declarative order is rife, and which the metalanguage of literacy strives to hide from view, lead us back to the ostensive, and the only real paradox: that we name as already possessing the characteristics implicit in that name something that is only that thing because we have named it. _We_ , not _I_ ; on a _scene_ , not in a _mind_. A discovery, scientific or otherwise, has been made once participants on a disciplinary scene see something that is simultaneously real and a product of the scene of inquiry (and all the modified practices and traditions of inquiry of which the scene is composed) that made it available to us.