Ethics and language in (and around) Philipp Wegener

In the logical-psychological-linguistic contributions of the German area between the nineteenth and the twentieth century, Philipp Wegener is the scholar who stresses the role of ethics as the precondition for the acquisition and use of language. His considerations are embedded in a theoretical framework that focuses on the concrete acts of speech in situations, as well as on the active interaction between speaker and hearer for the construction of meaning. Within this dialogical approach, sympathy should be considered as the “most fundamental prerequisite” for understanding speech (Wegener 1885: 68). Wegener’s view never gained unanimous coeval fame either in linguistics or in the psychology of language; nonetheless he was appreciated later by scholars of the caliber of Karl Bühler and Alan Gardiner. Our paper investigates the attention Wegener pays to the connection between language, speech, and ethics and considers how this concept may have paved the way for a social notion of language.