Philosophy - Pragmatism, Language, and Chinese Philosophy

I'm currently working on pragmatic models of language and pragmatic aesthetics of feeling. This is part of my response to Chad Hansen's interpretation of Chinese philosophy, and his arguments concerning the relationship between models of language and models of consciousness.

I'm mostly concerned that Hansen's idea of a "pragmatic" model of language is too simple. He provides a basic model of meaning in a pragmatic model of language, but he doesn't acknowledge that, even in pragmatic models of language, there are many different ways words can be used.

In other words, pragmatic models of language are concerned with more than just meaning as a course of direction. I'm thinking in particular of Wittgenstein and the idea of language games. Under this model, which is a pragmatic model, there can be many different ways of using language. This means there can be different ways of using language to create transformation within an environment.

Hansen describes only one of these methods (in the context of Classical Chinese), the basic use of 明 "ming" to direct human activity. I contend that the Zhuangzi contains depictions of these kinds of basic interactions, but also recognizes several other ways that language can be used. In effect, the Zhuangzi recognizes conventional uses of language, while at the same time proposing its own rules for a new game, a game of therapeutically treating problems caused by the conventional usage. The genius of the Inner Chapters is that the author is capable of shifting between these two games effortlessly, using linguistic strategies of the conventional approach even while deploying new strategies to demonstrate the limitations of those conventions.