The Derivativist Reading of Heidegger’s Remarks about Language in Being and Time: A Critique

ABSTRACT Heidegger’s remarks about language in Being and Time do not constitute a comprehensive theory of language. Hubert Dreyfus, William Blattner and Mark Wrathall each propose a derivativist reading of these remarks. Derivativism is the theory that language is derivative of a pre-linguistically articulated experience of the world – but derivativism is not quite right. It does not account adequately for the relationship between the disclosedness of being-in-the-world and what Heidegger calls discourse [Rede]. I claim that although language has its ontological foundation in the constitution of disclosedness, this does not mean that language is prefigured by a way of being-in-the-world that is existentially prelinguistic. Finally, I develop Wrathall’s claims about disclosedness into a more palatable account of the relationship between discourse and language, which I test against Heidegger’s claims about the relationship between discourse and language in Being and Time.