Book Reviews 355
realism. This chapter perhaps deals with the most current issues and is the
most problem-based of the book, but a central theme or thesis is resultantly
hardest to find. It appears as if structural realism may be the answer to the
problems so far presented, as it seems to break the impasse between the no
miracles argument and the pessimistic meta-induction argument. But Lady-
man accepts that structural realism is ambiguous between a metaphysical and
a purely epistemological interpretation and he does not explore or develop the
theory enough for us to be persuaded by it. No real reason for this absence is
given, so perhaps it is one area where the book could have been improved. I
would have been quite prepared to read another twenty pages to have seen
structural realism developed. Ladyman acts as an impartial arbiter of rival
claims throughout the book. This may be a virtue to some readers but a vice to
others. While impartiality may have a role in introducing a subject to a reader,
there can also be a role for taking a stance. There are times where we would like
to see the author reveal his hand a little more. The reader may feel that they
have been introduced to a number of philosophical problems but given no
answers, as typified by the dialogue that appears through the book intermit-
tently and which ends inconclusively. Nevertheless, readers might prefer Lady-
man s even-handedness, depending on their tastes.
Particularly impressive in this book is the effortless way that Ladyman
introduces the ideas of active, contemporary philosophers of science, such as
van Fraassan, Psillos, Laudan, Worrall, and many others. Few books of this
kind will contain ideas as up to date.
Department of Philosophy stephen mumford
University of Nottingham
Nottingham NG7 2RD
UK
Heidegger, Language, and World-Disclosure, by Cristina Lafont.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Pp. xxii + 298. H/b Ł42.50.
This work endeavours to give a systematic interpretation of Heidegger s philo-
sophy, both early and late, which locates it within the linguistic turn typically
associated with the analytic tradition in twentieth century philosophy. For
Lafont, Heidegger s work is at least as exemplary of that turn as anything in
analytic philosophy, and perhaps more so, as she argues that the role language
plays in Heidegger s philosophy has its roots in a longer German tradition, one
which Lafont labels, following Charles Taylor, the Hamann-Herder-Hum-
boldt tradition . This tradition emphatically rejects any instrumental concep-
tion of language, arguing instead that it is our grasp of language which
provides our primary access to the world. Though Heidegger in Being and
Time occasionally describes language in instrumental terms, Lafont argues
that a more constitutive conception of language is already at work in his early
356 Book Reviews
philosophy, albeit implicitly and inchoately, and it emerges in its full-blown
form in his later, post-Kehre writings. (Heidegger s pronouncement that lan-
guage is the house of being may be taken as illustrative.)
Lafont emphasizes throughout the combination of this constitutive concep-
tion of language with the de-transcendentalization characteristic of
Heidegger s hermeneutical method, and she argues that this combination leads
to disastrous results: the reification of language, relativism, and incommensu-
rability across theories and world-views. All of these nasty problems ultimately
arise from what is usually taken to be the cornerstone of Heidegger s philoso-
phy: the ontological difference, or the distinction between being and beings. If
being is determinative of entities, then, Lafont suggests, Heidegger s linguistic
turn entails that meaning determines reference , and this in turn entails that
changes in the understanding of being bring with it changes in the very entities
such understandings conceive. Hence relativism and incommensurability. To
avoid these problems, and in opposition to Heidegger s conceptions of both
language and ontology, Lafont in the later chapters of the book looks to more
recent work in the philosophy of language falling under the heading of direct
reference , namely, the work of Keith Donnellan and Hilary Putnam. On these
views, meaning does not determine reference, and so we refer to entities with-
out being committed to their having the properties we currently ascribe to
them. In this way, Lafont argues that we can conceive of ourselves as in touch
with, and as progressively learning more about, a language-independent
world.
Lafont thus takes a decidedly critical stance toward Heidegger s philosophy.
Though no one working on any philosopher is compelled to take a sympa-
thetic view of his or her work, and though Lafont is certainly to be admired for
the forthright nature of her criticisms of Heidegger and for the extent to which
she develops them, the success of any set of criticisms turns on whether the
philosopher in question s views have been properly interpreted. Let me try to
indicate some of the places in Lafont s account where her rendition of
Heidegger s philosophy strikes me as problematic. My suspicions concern not
so much matters of interpretative detail, but rather more global issues, ones
concerning very basic interpretative moves and glosses.
Starting in the preface, Lafont, without qualification, glosses Heidegger s
notion of the understanding of being as a conceptual scheme (see especially
p. xv, but also p. 111 and p. 143). The latter term is a term of art, and in many
circles a term of abuse, and so the equation is far from innocent. The principal
problem with the language of conceptual schemes is that it invites a particular
picture of our relation to the world, which construes us as in some way cut off,
or isolated from, the world, in need of access to it, and such access is provided
via some mediating scheme. Lafont, for her part, is quite happy with this train
of thought, as it is precisely such a picture that she makes the target of her crit-
icisms: as she reads Heidegger, human beings have a symbolically mediated
relation to the world, such that any relation to reality (to the referents of our
Book Reviews 357
symbols) is always indirect. But for Heidegger the understanding of being is
bound up with what he calls being-in-the-world . Part of what this means is
that the understanding of being is always already worldly: in this sense, the
understanding of being cannot be understood as a scheme through which we
encounter the world.
As an example, consider Heidegger s remark in Being and Time (New York:
Harper and Row, 1962) that the less we just stare at the hammer-Thing, and
the more we seize hold of it and use it, the more primordial does our relation-
ship to it become, and the more unveiledly is it encountered as that which it
is as equipment (p. 98). There appears to be little room here for the idea of
mediation, for the idea that our relationship to an entity can be only an indi-
rect one a relationship mediated by a meaning (p. 216). Lafont at many
points acknowledges Heidegger s hostility to the philosophy of consciousness
enshrined in Husserl s phenomenology, where a conception of human beings
as observers is paramount, but it seems that she does not take the lessons of
Heidegger s critique sufficiently to heart. For example, if the understanding of
being really were, for Heidegger, a mediating scheme, it would be unclear why
he rejects Husserl s idea of a phenomenological reduction. That the items we
take hold of and put to use must figure into an understanding of ourselves as
beings who understand suggests that we go wrong if we think about our rela-
tion to the world and its denizens in terms of access via a scheme.
Part and parcel of Lafont s reading of the understanding of being as a con-
ceptual scheme is the imagery of determination, that is, that the understanding
of being as world-disclosure concretely determines what we encounter in the
world (p. 110). When, however, Heidegger does talk in terms of determination,
it is often in the context of characterizing everyday Dasein s inauthenticity. The
distinction between authenticity and inauthenticity finds no place in Lafont s
account. Indeed, all of the existential themes of Division II are passed over in
her interpretation, but they are important to assessing the reading of
Heidegger she wants to give: in Being and Time, Heidegger often does charac-
terize everyday existence in straitjacket-like terms, but he also holds out the
possibility of Dasein s realizing its freedom, of its taking over the ground of its
being. On Lafont s account of the determinative effect of our prior under-
standing of being , there is no room for such a possibility. Early on in Being and
Time, Heidegger says that when Dasein s own being is thus interpreted pre-
ontologically in the way which lies closest , he cautions that this interpretation
cannot be taken over as an appropriate clue, as if this way of understanding
being is what must emerge when one s ownmost state of being is considered as
an ontological theme (p. 36). On Lafont s account of the determinative power
of the meaning pre-given in an understanding of being (p. 180), this caution-
ary remark on Heidegger s part makes no sense, since there is nothing else that
could be revealed apart from, or beyond, our pre-ontological way of under-
standing being .
I have tried to give voice to a number of worries concerning Lafont s orien-
358 Book Reviews
tation toward Being and Time. I want to enter one all-too-brief complaint con-
cerning her treatment of the later Heidegger. As mentioned, the idea that for
Heidegger meaning determines reference is perhaps the central interpretive
move Lafont makes. I find it difficult to map this idea onto Heidegger s later
remarks about language, and for more than one reason. First, the source of the
idea is technical philosophy of language, which is about as far from
Heidegger s approach to language as one can get: in applying such ideas and
distinctions to his philosophy, questions concerning the legitimacy of such an
imposition naturally arise. Second, and not unrelatedly, as Lafont repeatedly
acknowledges but never really tries to explain, Heidegger says in his later work
that the essence of language is poetry. This identification suggests that what-
ever referential functions belong to language are not of central importance:
poetic language calls the thing into nearness, but calling is not, or not obvi-
ously anyway, referring. Finally, Lafont at one point claims that if one wants to
do justice to [Heidegger s later] conception of language, the task it entails will
turn out to be impossible, namely, bringing language to language as language ,
as the later Heidegger puts it. This impossibility could be paraphrased, in con-
temporary terms, as the impossibility of constructing a theory of meaning (p.
89). But if this is so, if this impossibility is something Heidegger himself rec-
ognizes and accepts, in what sense can he be making, or even be committed to,
the theoretical claim that meaning determines reference ?
Lafont s book raises difficult and important questions, both for understand-
ing Heidegger and for general issues in the philosophy of language and
epistemology, and she is to be applauded for attempting to bring Heidegger
into conversation with contemporary Anglo-American philosophy. However,
the extent to which she has succeeded in adequately framing that conversation
is certainly open to dispute.
Department of Philosophy david r. cerbone
West Virginia University
PO Box 6312
Morgantown, WV 26506-6312
USA
Freud Among the Philosophers: The Psychoanalytic Unconscious
and Its Philosophical Critics, by Donald Levy. New Haven, CT: Yale Uni-
versity Press, 1996. Pp. 200. H/b $35.00.
Professor Levy defends Freud s theory of the unconscious against the argu-
ments of four leading critics: Ludwig Wittgenstein, William James, Alasdair
MacIntyre, and Adolf Grnbaum.
In chapter one, he takes on Wittgenstein, who held that psychoanalysis is
not a science but a mythology (p. 10). According to Levy, one reason that Witt-
genstein says this is that the sole criterion for the correctness of psychoanalytic
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