Cassirer and Prescriptive Language

Cassirer's account of the evolution of Language has a significant gap, one that is indicative of a shortcoming in his neo-Kantianism. One important transition in that account is from presentational to representational language, epitomized by the transition from a name as incarnating a god to a name as a label. Another way to characterize that contrast is between language as animate versus language as inanimate, in which the decisive difference is that at the earlier phase, e. g. Myth, words are taken as having causal efficacy, e. g. as when an utterance is expected to bring rain. But, though his explanation of the transition from presentation to representation does not account for a transition from efficacy to inefficacy, causal efficacy disappears from Cassirer's genealogy as a feature of Language. The real flaw in the account is not that it fails to explain the latter transition, but that it, like most Philosophies of Language, fails to recognize efficacy as a still extant feature of Language. For, that extant prescriptive language is causally efficacious, though mediated, is obscured by its general subsumption under descriptive categories. In contrast, the previous discussions here of Preception attempt to free prescription from description by according it a distinct set of categories--Precept vs. Proposition, Signal vs. Sign, Conception vs. Concept. Furthermore, that Cassirer offers no explanation of the reduction of presciptive to descriptive language is a reflection of his interpretation of Kant--its relative neglect of the Critique of Practical Reason. He thereby misses the centrality to Kant's System of the Fundamental Principle of Pure Practical Reason, especially that in it, both Reason is linguistic, and prescriptive Reason is accorded priority over descriptive Reason. Hence, Cassirer's theory of Language reflects a neglect of one of the pivotal innovations of Kantianism.