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Baker is right by emphasizing that our critique of Kohut’s metaphysics (his doctrine of the bipolar self) shows up as a critique of Kohut’s theoretical language. But Baker trivializes our criticisms by suggesting that they boil down to Kohut’s faulty use of parts of speech—e.g., using a noun (the self) when he should be using a gerund (experiencing selfhood). What Baker misses is that our objections to Kohut’s theoretical language are objections to the sense of reality that his language conveys.
Philosophers of language have explicated two meta-theories of language, two semantic logics—the designative and the constitutive (Taylor, 2016). In the designative viewpoint, words acquire meaning by being attached to fully formed ideas about reality. In the constitutive viewpoint, by contrast, language alters reality by introducing new meanings into the world. Language co-creates the reality it names by allowing it to show up in experience as something intelligible. From the constitutive perspective language is inherently interpretive, not merely descriptive. Language transforms reality by introducing a new way of disclosing it, thereby introducing new ways of being. The meanings provided by language are always constitutive of experience and never merely designative.
Baker’s critique is sweeping, unconstrained by epistemic humility. His criticisms often seem designed to ridicule us and do not invite serious scholarly dialogue. We have decided not to respond to such criticism and to focus instead on his misunderstanding of the phenomenology of language. Specifically, it would appear that he is unaware of the distinction between designative and constitutive views of language and that he employs a designative perspective with regard to Kohut’s language, ours, and his own.
From a designative perspective, language plays little role in the constitution of one’s sense of the real; reality is already established and language merely names it. Such names are readily exchanged with other