1. Whether the goal of first-year composition (FYC) is an introduction to academic writing (i.e., academic discourse); “realistic and useful conceptions of writing” (Downs and Wardle); metacognitive understanding of various rhetorical situations, writerly moves, and generic conventions; or multimodal communication in the workplace, the project will not get very far until one considers the limits presented by the relation between language, culture, and meaning. These limits or obstacles are felt with the international student in FYC (note: “international” is not the same thing as ESL). U.S. writing administrators and instructors have begun to recognize that the influx of international students requires a new approach to FYC. Consider, for example, Wittgenstein’s understanding of rules: “The application of the concept of ‘following a rule’ presupposes a custom.“ This grounding of rule-following in culture is not so much new essentialism as it is a deeper understanding of the relation between language, culture, and meaning.  

2. When Kant suggests that the base unit of understanding is the judgment he lifts language from its ancillary epistemological role (of, say, clothing or mirroring an objective reality with words): If knowledge is sourced in perception (sense experiences), then perception is already shaped by epistemic structure, forms of judgment expressed via logical grammar. That is to say, there is never sense experience without a specific grammar shaping the experience. The line is further developed by Wilfred Sellars’s “Myth of the Given”: 

“[W]e can easily take for granted that the process of teaching a child to use a language is that of teaching it to discriminate elements within a logical space of particulars, universals, facts, etc., of which it is already undiscriminatingly aware, and to associate these discriminated elements with verbal symbols. And this mistake is in principle the same whether the logical space of which the child is supposed to have this undiscriminating awareness is conceived by us to be that of physical objects or of private sense contents.” (Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind, my emphasis) 

According to John McDowell, “Sellars’s dictum implies that it is a form of the Myth to think sensibility by itself, without any involvement of capacities that belong to our rationality, can make things available for our cognition. That coincides with a basic doctrine of Kant” (”Avoiding the Myth of the Given”).

3. Wittgenstein, the late in particular, makes this epistemic structure a pragmatic phenomenon (”meaning as use”) of rule following specific to one’s life world, one’s culture, i.e., language games and family resemblance. Hence this is one reason why Wittgenstein suggests “To imagine a language is to imagine a form of life” and why the grammar shaping sense experience is culturally bound. The U.S. writing instructor, for example, often finds that argumentative writing is difficult for the new Chinese student, who is unfamiliar with the individualism and competitiveness underwriting “argument.”  

4. Therefore the “international” suggests logical grammars and other games and resemblances alien to native learning environments (e.g., local grammars specific to those cultures or life-forms) that require a new approach to FYC.

Thinking out loud here, no pun intended. It seems to me that a close look at the commonalities between Bakhtin’s and Wittgenstein’s philosophy of language can help bring greater clarity to information, meaning, and understanding, and potentially answer the following three questions posed by Luciano Floridi’s Philosophy of Information:

1. Can an informational approach solve the mind-body problem?
2. Could epistemology be based on a theory of information?
3. What is the ontological status of information?

40. Upon “I know that there is my hand” there may follow the question “How do you know?” and the answer to that presupposes that this can be known in that way. So, instead of “I know that here is my hand”, one might say “Here is my hand”, and then add how one knows.