Firth and Wittgenstein via Malinowski : a shared influence leading to differences
Résumé
In the first half of the twentieth century, John Rupert Firth (1890–1960) and Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) contributed to the spread of a pragmatic Weltanschauung in the study of language. Although Firth and Wittgenstein did not directly influence each other, since the linguistic contextualism and functionalism developed at the London School was disconnected from Cambridge and Oxford -- which respectively profited from ideas found in Tractatus and Philosophical Investigations -- the fact remains that Malinowski’s conception of meaning constituted a source of inspiration for both Firth and Wittgenstein. Though this point is well known with regard to Firth, Wittgenstein read Malinowski’s seminal article entitled “The Problem of Meaning in Primitive Languages” (1923), published as a supplement in Ogden & Richards’ book The Meaning of Meaning, thus allowing Firth to write that this 1923 paper “finds echoes in Wittgenstein, who would have probably endorsed Malinowski’s views on meaning” (1957:94).
The aim of this communication is double. First, I would like to retrace the common intellectual inheritance of Firth and Wittgenstein by stressing the natural language concepts and approach that caught their attention in Malinowski’s work. To do this, I’ll also point out the various one-sided influences that contributed to strengthening Firth and Wittgenstein’s interest in a contextualist and functionalist idea of meaning. The link between William James and Wittgenstein–Malinowski will thus be explored, as well as the connections between Philipp Wegener, Sir Richard Temple, … and Firth–Malinowski. Then, I’ll show how Firth and Wittgenstein differed on some main concepts set out in the work of the anthropologist Malinowski (such as “context of situation”, “meaning”…) by giving them very different interpretations that obviously induce two pragmatic approaches to natural languages.