It Occurs to me that we've discussed issues very similar to this before, so see John Mariana's posting from 03/04/06 called "On Language, Liguisticality, and the Practice of Philosophy." You can scroll down to the bottom of our main tribe webpage or click on this link:
philosophy-in-la.tribe.net/thre...050be

Oh, come to think of it, I'll just reprint his entry right here, since it's so relevant and interesting:
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John Wrote:


To clarify “linguisticality” for all of us Gadamerian neophytes, I have pasted below an excerpt from the on-line Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry titled "Hans-Georg Gadamer," written by Jeff Malpas, who is an academic (i.e. professional) philosopher, and the head of the School of Philosophy at the University of Tasmania. Malpas has written a book on Gadamer, two books on Heidegger, and one book on Husserl.

Note, in particular, what Malpas has to say about the relationship between linguisiticality (the capacity and the conditions for the possibility of meaningful expression) and language. He says:

"Gadamer's commitment to the linguisticality of understanding also commits him to a view of understanding as essentially a matter of conceptual articulation. This does not rule out the possibility of other modes of understanding, but it does give primacy to language and conceptuality in hermeneutic experience. Indeed, Gadamer takes language to be, not merely some instrument by means of which we are able to engage with the world, but as instead the very medium for such engagement. We are ‘in’ the world through being ‘in’ language."

So, of course, it was inaccurate for anyone to suggest that our discussion of language as such simply was not addressing the notion of linguisticality, or was somehow failing to engage Gadamer's position. (It was also condescending for anyone to suggest this.) Natural languages (and conceptual schemes, and symbolic representation schemes, and so on) are, of course, concrete manifestations of linguisitcality as expressed within a particular group of communicating beings.

Thus, if it can be argued that reality is prior to language, then linguisticality is nothing to the point, and it would be quite simply irrelevant whether there are identifiable preconditions of, and constraints upon, meaningfulness (which there almost certainly are). If my saying this tempts anyone to think that I simply do not understand Gadamer, or hermeneutics, or linguisitcality, they would do well to remember that one can understand, and yet disagree with, eminent dead philosophers.

While I'm at it, I would add the following, paraphrased again from Bryan Magee:

"Most philosophers since Bertrand Russell have credited language with an absurdly disproportionate importance in human life and experience. Of himself Russell wrote: 'I had thought of language as transparent--that is to say, as a medium which could be employed without paying attention to it.' That, I am sure, is what nearly all the great philosophers of the past had supposed. When Socrates asked 'What is justice?' 'What is courage?', and so on, he did not think of himself as asking for the definitions of the words [or for analyses of the concepts], he thought he was probing into the true nature of phenomena that existed independently of language [and concepts]."

Thus, if hermeneutics is proposing a reinterpretation of what philosophers do, and of what philosophers have always done (and it is indeed proposing such a reinterpretation), then somebody ought to have offered one of the standard arguments that has generally been given for the view that twenty centuries of the finest minds the world has ever known were fundamentally mistaken about the nature of what it was they were doing.

The real problem, however, was not that hermeneutics was inadequately defended, or even that reference was made to philosophers whose work had not been read by everyone. The problem was that hermeneutics was not offered as a contribution to the discussion, but was offered as removing the need for further discussion, and philosophers such as Gadamer were simply cited as authorities. We don’t need academic philosophers (myself included!) to explain to us what we don’t understand; that is, we have no use for authorities. We will achieve understanding through dialogue. That’s how philosophy works. (Or have the other academic philosophers in our midst forgotten how they themselves first learned to philosophize?) In an informal philosophical discussion, only ideas have authority, and ideas must be clarified and defended, not cited. One of the problems, in fact, with professional philosophy generally is that professional philosophers seem to think that citing another philosopher can strengthen their arguments.

Here is what Malpas has to say about "The Linguisticality of Understanding:"

"The basic model of understanding that Gadamer finally arrives at in Truth and Method is that of conversation. A conversation involves an exchange between conversational partners that seeks agreement about some matter at issue; consequently, such an exchange is never completely under the control of either conversational partner, but is rather determined by the matter at issue. Conversation always takes place in language and similarly Gadamer views understanding as always linguistically mediated. Since both conversation and understanding involve coming to an agreement, so Gadamer argues that all understanding involves something like a common language, albeit a common language that is itself formed in the process of understanding itself. In this sense, all understanding is, according to Gadamer, interpretative, and, insofar as all interpretation involves the exchange between the familiar and the alien, so all interpretation is also translative. Gadamer's commitment to the linguisticality of understanding also commits him to a view of understanding as essentially a matter of conceptual articulation. This does not rule out the possibility of other modes of understanding, but it does give primacy to language and conceptuality in hermeneutic experience. Indeed, Gadamer takes language to be, not merely some instrument by means of which we are able to engage with the world, but as instead the very medium for such engagement. We are ‘in’ the world through being ‘in’ language. This emphasis on the linguisticality of understanding does not, however, lead Gadamer into any form of linguistic relativism. Just as we are not held inescapably captive within the circle of our prejudices, or within the effects of our history, neither are we held captive within language. Language is that within which anything that is intelligible can be comprehended, it is also that within which we encounter ourselves and others. In this respect, language is itself understood as essentially dialogue or conversation. Like Wittgenstein, as well as Davidson, Gadamer thus rejects the idea of such a thing as a ‘private language’ -- language always involves others, just as it always involves the world.

"Gadamer claims that language is the universal horizon of hermeneutic experience; he also claims that the hermeneutic experience is itself universal. This is not merely in the sense that the experience of understanding is familiar or ubiquitous. The universality of hermeneutics derives from the existential claim for hermeneutics that Heidegger advanced in the 1920s and that Gadamer made into a central idea in his own thinking. Hermeneutics concerns our fundamental mode of being in the world and understanding is thus the basic phenomenon in our existence. We cannot go back ‘behind’ understanding, since to do so would be to suppose that there was a mode of intelligibility that was prior to understanding. Hermeneutics thus turns out to be universal, not merely in regard to knowledge, whether in the ‘human sciences' or elsewhere, but to all understanding and, indeed, to philosophy itself. Philosophy is, in its essence, hermeneutics. Gadamer's claim for the universality of hermeneutics was one of the explicit points at issue in the debate between Gadamer and Habermas (see Ormiston and Schrift [eds.], 1990); it can also be seen as, in a certain sense, underlying the engagement between Gadamer and Derrida (see Michelfelder and Palmer [eds.], 1989), although in Derrida's case this consisted in a denial of the primacy of understanding, and the possibility of agreement, on which hermeneutics itself rests."