Calibrating the child for language: Meredith Williams on a Wittgensteinian approach to language socialization

This paper addresses the normative and reflexive foundations of language socialization. In several publications Meredith Williams makes a strong case for placing Wittgenstein's discussions of the normative character of social learning at the heart of an account of the child's development of language and mind. This paper examines Williams' argument, concluding that it needs to be complemented by an account of the child's scaffolded socialization into the community's metadiscursive practices. It is by means of the child's increasing metadiscursive competence that the child comes to measure the phenomena and experiences of language as 'we' do in 'our' community's linguistic-cultural world.