Introduction

To say that concepts need to be understood through reference to their use in action is something of a truism. Such reference can help clarify and untie knots that may have emerged when concepts have been used without their everyday anchors. This is one view on what philosophy entails – famously described by some commentators on Wittgenstein as a kind of therapy (Fischer, 2018). Often this therapy is for philosophers themselves whose mode of enquiry can lead them away from everyday life. The view also presupposes that these concepts are stable, somewhere already settled in everyday use. Philosophers need to revisit these contexts. Other disciplines have a different interest in how the meaning of concepts is found in use. For one thing, these contexts – and hence the usages to be found in them – may be unfamiliar, the practices of another culture, say. It may be that contexts are changing, and as they do so, altering the meanings of terms used in those contexts. For these disciplines, these concerns are essentially empirical; anthropologists, certain sociologists (others too no doubt), seek to define context and then get to meaning. Whether there are conceptual muddles that might require therapy is a second-order concern, perhaps not even one at all.

Take the concept of the ‘user’ in human–computer interaction (HCI). This is surely to be understood with regard to its use, in relation to the contexts in which persons and computers do things together. It is these doings that make ‘a user’ a real phenomenon, a concept with pragmatic consequences, and it is these consequences that get expressed in the grammar of use for the term, ‘user’. In this grammar, the ‘user’ partly expresses something about machines and partly the humans that use them, or perhaps more accurately, expresses something about the interaction the two engage in (Agre, 2008). The grammar doesn't say what that interaction might be, but somehow what is implied is a complex phenomenon, tacitly encompassing both flesh and silicon, expressing agencies of moral intention and those of machinic calculation. The way I am using the term grammar echoes Wittgenstein's thinking about the same term in his Philosophical Investigations (1953).