Many of the terms of our language, such as “jar”, are open-textured in the sense that their applicability to novel objects is not entirely determined by their past usage. Many others, such as the verbs “use” and “have”, are schematic in the sense that they have only a very general meaning although on any particular occasion of use they denote some more particular relation. The phenomena of open texture and schematicity constitute a sharp challenge to referential semantics, which assumes that every non-logical term has a definite extension. A different, non-referential approach to formal semantics defines truth as relative to a context and defines contexts as built up from exclusively linguistic entities. For any given utterance of a sentence, there will be one of these contexts that pertains to it. In this framework, open texture and schematicity can be understood as consequences of the complex nature of the pertaining relation between contexts and utterances.
How can thinking be effective in enabling us to meet our goals? If we answer this in terms of representation relations between thoughts and the world, then we are challenged to explain what representation is, which no one has been able to do. If we drop the appeal to representation, then it is hard to explain why certain inferences are good and others are not. This paper outlines a strategy for a nonrepresentationalist account of the way in which the structure of reality may drive cognition. It begins by restricting our attention to certain paradigm cases of linguistically-mediated cooperative exchange. Second, it introduces a kind of nonconceptual thinking -- thinking in mental images. Third, in terms of imagistic cognition, the nonnormative conditions under which sentences are asserted and accepted is explained. Fourth, in terms of these conditions, the possibility of successful linguistic exchange in the paradigm cases is to be explained. Fifth, the strategy calls for an explanation how a language can be internalized and become a medium of intrapersonal thought. Finally, the norms of discourse can be conceived as norms that supervise the processes of linguistic exchange so explained. In this paper only the first three steps of the overall strategy will be carried out in any detail. But a strategy for completing the last three steps will be sketched.
The object of this paper is to sketch an approach to propositions, meaning and names. The key ingredients are a Twin-Earth-inspired distinction between internal and external meaning, and a middle-Wittgenstein-inspired conception of internal meaning as role in language system. The focus here is not on working out all the details, but on outlining the approach and showing how it offers a promising solution to the problem of the meaning of proper names. This is a plea for a neglected way of thinking about these topics.
In this essay, I argue that Søren Kierkegaard’s oeuvre can be seen as a theater of ideas. This argument is developed in three steps. First, I will briefly introduce a theoretical framework for addressing the theatrical dimension of Kierkegaard’s works. This framework is based on a distinction between“performative writing strategies” and “categories of performativity.” As a second step, I will focus on Repetition: A Venture in Experimenting Psychology, by Constantin Constantius, one of the best examples of Kierkegaard’s innovative way of doing philosophy. This strange and elusive book introduces the difficult and counter-intuitive notion of repetition. Repetition is a category of performativity that aims to activate the subjectivity of the reader. This performative effect is achieved by confronting the reader with an “unresolved”existential problem that is not yet drawn into clarity but is staged in all its confusions and contradictions. Kierkegaard’s pseudonym Constantius relies here on a performative writing strategy that is animated by a dialectic of advance and withdrawal. In the last and third step, I will analyze Constantius’s own reflection on the performative dimension of his text. Constantius has left several clues behind, each of which suggests that he deliberately developed a performative writing strategy.
I present hitherto unexplored and unaccounted for uses of 'wants'. I call them advisory uses, on which information inaccessible to the desirer herself helps determine what it's true to say she wants. I show that extant theories by Stalnaker, Heim, and Levinson fail to predict it. I also show that they fail to predict true indicative conditionals with 'wants' in the consequent. These problems are related: intuitively valid reasoning with modus ponens on the basis of the conditionals in question results in unembedded advisory uses.
I consider two fixes, and end up endorsing a relativist semantics, according to which desire attributions express information-neutral propositions. The truth of a desire attribution depends on the state of information at the context of assessment. On this view, 'wants' functions as a precisification of 'ought', which exhibits similar unembedded and compositional behavior. I conclude by sketching a pragmatic account of the purpose of desire attributions, one that explains why it made sense for them to evolve in this way.
It is wholly uncontroversial that measurements-or, more properly, propositions that are measurement reports-are often paradigmatically good cases of propositions that serve the function of evidence. In normal cases it is also obvious that stating such a report is an utterly pedestrian case of successful assertion. So, for example, there is nothing controversial about the following claims: (1) that a proposition to the effect that a particular thermometer reads 104C when properly used to determine the temperature of a particular patient is evidence that the patient in question has a fever and (2) that there is nothing wrong with asserting the proposition that a particular thermometer reads 104C for appropriate reasons of communication, etc. when the thermometer has been properly used to determine the temperature of a particular patient. Here it will be shown that Timothy Williamson’s commitments to a number of principles about knowledge and assertion imply that a whole class of utterly ordinary statements like these that are used as evidence are not really evidence because they are not knowledge and so are (perversely) unassertable according to his principled commitments. This paper deals primarily with the second of these two problems and an alternative account of the norms of assertion is introduced which allows for the assertability of such measurement reports.
According to a widespread picture due to Kaplan, there are two levels of semantic value: character and content. Character is determined by the grammar, and it determines content with respect to context. In this chapter Recanati criticizes that picture on several grounds. He shows that we need more than two levels, and rejects the determination thesis: that linguistic meaning as determined by grammar determines content. Grammatical meaning does not determine assertoric content, he argues, but merely constrains it — speaker’s meaning necessarily comes into play. On the alternative picture he offers, there are four basic levels, only one of which is determined by the grammar. Pragmatics is what enables the transition from each level to the next.
Ecumenical Alethic Pluralism (EAP) is a novel kind of alethic pluralism. It is ecumenical in that it widens the scope of alethic pluralism by allowing for a normatively deflated truth property alongside a variety of normatively robust truth properties. We establish EAP by showing how Wright's Inflationary Arguments fail in the domain of taste, once a relativist treatment of the metaphysics and epistemology of that domain is endorsed. EAP is highly significant to current debates on the nature of truth insofar as it involves a reconfiguration of the dialectic between deflationists and pluralists.
Richard Rorty wrote The Linguistic Turn, a collection of essays that discusses the philosophical methods employed by both various empiricists during the war and the philosophers of “ordinary language” in pre- and post-war Oxford. A third linguistic turn is experienced in philosophy which originated from the thoughts of philosophers such as W. V. O. Quine and Noam Chomsky. This turn had a lighter impact than the first two turns, and it is perceived as having more sophistication and tentativeness, and being more responsive to the requirements of theory construction. P. H. Nowell-Smith's notion of “contextual implication” coincided with Paul Grice's idea of a “conversational implication”, and from this emerged the Gricean aspect of this said linguistic turn. This chapter attempts to discuss how Grice came up with such an idea and how this was incorporated into a philosophical language theory.
It is argued that the application of the Gricean notions helps describe irony ... as a phenomenon covert or overt from the hearer's perspective (see Dynel 2018
The foundational influence of Paul Grice on contemporary pragmatic theory has its roots in the combination of focus on intentions in their role of explanantia for meaning in discourse with the rigidity of the truth-conditional approach upon which his theory of communication is built. Forty years on, post-Gricean pragmatics is still the most influential, successful and methodologically most rigorous approach to utterance meaning. However, it has become necessary to ask what ‘being Gricean’ means in the current Anglo-American, truth-conditional contextualist paradigm: how much, and on what identifiable dimensions, one can depart from his program and still remain ‘post-Gricean’. In the past four decades, ‘being Gricean’ used to be associated with a well-focused, fairly unidirectional inquiry into meaning: neo-Gricean or post-Griceanstended to question the plausibility of the semantics/pragmatics boundary that emerges from his writings, progressing to questioning the need for semantic ambiguity, to begin with in the domain of negation captured in the Atlas-Kempson thesis, in support of semantic underdetermination and the associated intrusion of pragmatic information into the truth-conditional content. But the current state-of-the-art with ‘being Gricean’ appears to be very different. The term ‘Gricean pragmatics’ appears to have been diluted to such an extent that it is difficult to tell what criteria one ought to adopt to delimit this orientation.
The label has generated very different challenges on several new dimensions. First, the role of inferential meanings has been questioned in that communication has since been envisaged as mostly direct and non-inferential (Recanati). Next, the explanatory role of intentions has been denied in an attempt to reinstate the idea of multiple semantic ambiguities in lieu of the Gricean meaning-underdetermination, with the aim of supposedly aiding computational, formalizable accounts of discourse meaning (Lepore and Stone). This reopened the question as to what kind of content, and how much of it, is attributable to grammar, following up on an earlier proposal of the grammatical origin of some pragmatic meanings that were standardly classified as implicatures (Chierchia). Along yet another dimension, the cooperative interaction and proposition-based theorizing have been replaced with a focus on strategic communication and dialogue (Asher and Lascarides).
Most importantly, the Gricean cline of meaning construction (sometimes called ‘the pipeline picture of meaning’) has been questioned within situation and game-theoretic semantics (Lewis, Barwise and Perry) and recently in Equilibrium Semantics (Parikh). It has been argued that discourse meaning is not constructed following the steps from logical form (the output of syntactic processing) through modulations, to additional inferred meanings (implicatures) but rather follows the principles of interaction or a language game in which the players simply strive for an equilibrium. Default Semantics (DS, Jaszczolt) that belongs to the post-Gricean camp also questions the utility of this cline and opts for a conceptual representation that merges information from different sources, arrived at through different interacting processes, that is not constrained by the Gricean ‘pipeline picture’. This has already led to discussions as to whether DS is ‘still Gricean’. Next, the modular approach to meaning has been questioned and replaced with general cognitive mechanisms that are also allegedly responsible for implicatures (Goodman and Lassiter). Finally, there is also a U-turn in denying the truth-conditional status of pragmatic modifications in so-called semantic minimalism (Borg).
The metapragmatic question arises as to what qualitative and associated quantitative criteria current pragmatic theory has to fulfil in order to count as Gricean pragmatics. In this pilot project we begin by identifying the main, novel dimensions on which the Gricean program has recently been challenged (overtly or covertly) and attempt to assess the state-of-the-art of the post-Gricean, contextualist, truth-conditional approach to meaning. Next, we hypothesise that the ‘pipeline picture of meaning’, so central to Grice’s own approach, is not a necessary condition for being ‘Gricean’, while the truth-conditional method and the explanatory role of intentions are. The question arises, how the departure from the logical form-based underspecification can be reconciled with retaining the truth-conditional method and intentions as the explanans. Here we propose to include an empirical component in this largely theoretical project and conduct a pilot study, using the method of elicitation (judgement and autoreflection), on a carefully selected set of examples within a carefully selected range of semantic phenomena, to address the question as to whether the ‘non-pipeline’ picture of meaning is a feasible construct that can be supported with a formal theory qua a theory with predictive power that yields itself to algorithms for different semantic phenomena.
We focus on reference assignment, discourse relations, and varieties of non-literal meaning and we assess such phenomena on three dimensions:
(i) the role of pragmatics vis-Ã -vis syntax in the construction of meaning,
(ii) the status of alleged ambiguities, and
(iii) the role of intention and inference in linguistic interpretation.
We adopt the unit of analysis in the form of the so-called merger representationdeveloped within DS. The process of constructing such conceptual structures has not yet been attempted and constitutes an important challenge, especially in view of the foundational questions summarised above, which we propose to take up.
Cambridge Linguistics can boast strong research activity in the relevant areas that has already come to be known internationally as Cambridge Pragmatics. In the course of over twenty years, a group of scholars has been meeting to discuss cutting-edge questions in theoretical pragmatics currently under the name of the ‘Semantics, Pragmatics, and Philosophy’ (SPP) research group. This makes us uniquely well placed to address metapragmatic and foundational pragmatic issues. The proposed project poses questions that have not been attempted so far and demonstrates that they are of high priority for the future of pragmatics. Once we know what patterns the construction of utterance meaning follows when freed from the constraints of theoretical assumptions, we are free to construct a plausible unit, taking seriously the issue of systematicity and compositionality on the level above that of linguistic structures, and start building a formal theory that puts language in its rightful place with respect to other sources of information. This pilot project in metapragmatics will fit into this overall objective.
Benson Mates argued, in his ‘On the Verifiability of Statements about Ordinary Language’ (1958, 1964) just what the title suggests: how can any such claims be confirmed? This objection applies more seriously to the later Ordinary Language philosophical work, because that period focused on far more detailed analyses of the uses of expressions, and made rather more sweeping claims about ‘what we say’. Stanley Cavell (1958, 1964) responded to Mates that claims as to the ordinary uses of expressions are not empirically based, but are normative claims (that is, they are not, in general, claims about what people dosay, but what they can say, or ought to say, within the bounds of the meaning of the expression in question). Cavell also argued that the philosopher, as a member of a linguistic community, was at least as qualified as any other member of that community to make claims about what is, or can be, ordinarily said and meant; although it is always possible that any member of the linguistic community may be wrong in such a claim. The debate has continued, however, with similar objections (to Mates’) raised by Fodor and Katz (1963, 1971), to which Henson (1965) has responded.
The reason this objection applies less-so to the early Ordinary Language philosophers is that, for the Wittgensteinians, claims as to what is ‘ordinarily said’ applied in much more general ways. It applied, for example, to ‘what would ordinarily be said of, for example, a situation’ – for example, as we noted, cases of what we ordinarily call ‘seeing x’, or ‘doing x of her own free-will’, or ‘knowing “x” for certain’ and so forth (these kinds of cases were later argued to be paradigm cases – see below, section 3d, for a discussion of this important argument within early Ordinary Language philosophy). The Wittgensteinians were originally making their points against the kind of skeptical metaphysical views which had currency in their own time; the kinds of theories which suggested such things as ‘we do not know the truth of any material-thing statements’, ‘we are acquainted, in perception, only with sense-data and not external, independent objects’, ‘no sensory experience can be known for certain’ and so on. In such cases there is no question that the ordinary thing to say is, for example “I am certain this is a desk before me,” and “I see the fire-engine” and “It is true that I know that this is a desk” and so forth. In fact, in such disputes it was generally agreed that there was a certain ordinary way of describing such and such a situation. This would be how a situation is identified, so that the metaphysician or skeptical philosopher could proceed to suggest that this way of describing things is false.
The objection that was directed equally at the Wittgensteinians and the Oxford Ordinary Language philosophers was in regard to what was claimed to count as ‘misuses’ of expressions, particularly philosophical ‘misuses’. In particular, it was objected that presumably such uses must be bannedaccording to Ordinary Language philosophy (for example Rollins 1951). Sometimes, it was argued, the non-ordinary use of some expression is philosophically necessary since sometimes technical or more precise terms are needed.
In fact, it was never argued by the Ordinary Language philosophers that any term or use of an expression should be prohibited. The objection is not born out by the actual texts. It was not argued that non-ordinary uses of language in and of themselves were a cause of philosophical problems; the problem lay in, mostly implicitly, attempting to pass them off as ordinary uses. The non-ordinary use of some term or expression is not, merely, a more ‘technical’ or more ‘precise’ use of the term – it is to introduce, or even assume, a quite different meaning for the term. In this sense, a philosophical theory that uses some term or expression non-ordinarily is talking about something entirelydifferent to whatever the term or expression talks about in its ordinary use. Malcolm, for example, argues that the problem with philosophical uses of language is that they are often introduced into discussion without being duly notedas non-ordinary uses. Take, for example, the metaphysical claim that the content of assertions about experiences of an independent realm of material objects can never be certain. The argument (see Malcolm 1942b) is that this is an implicit suggestion that we stop applying the term ‘certain’ to empirical propositions, and reserve it for the propositions of logic or mathematics (which can be exhaustively proven to be true). It is a covert suggestion about how to reform the use of the term ‘certain’. But the suggested use is a ‘misuse’ of language, on the Ordinary Language view (that is, applying the term ‘certain’ only to mathematical or logical propositions). Moreover, the argument presents itself as an argument about the facts concerning the phenomenon of certainty, thus failing to ‘own up’ to being a suggestion about the use of the term ‘certain’ - leaving the assumption that it uses the term according to its ordinary meaning misleadingly in place. The issue, according to Ordinary Language philosophy, is that the two uses of ‘certain’ are distinct and the philosopher’s sense cannot replace the ordinary sense – though it can be introduced independently and with its own criteria, if that can be provided. Malcolm says, for example:
…if it gives the philosopher pleasure always to substitute the expression “I see some sense-data of my wife” for the expression “I see my wife,” etc.and so forth, then he is at liberty thus to express himself, provided he warns people beforehand, so that they will understand him. (1942a, pp. 15)
In an argument Malcolm elsewhere (1951) deals with, he suggests that it is not a ‘correct’ use of language to say, “I feel hot, but I am not certain of it.” But this is not to suggest that the expression must be banned from philosophical theorizing, nor that it is not possible that it might, at some point, become a perfectly correct use of language. What is crucial is that, for any use newly introduced to a language, how that expression is to be used must be explained, that is, criteria for its use must be provided. He says:
We have never learned a usage for a sentence of the sort “I thought that I felt hot but it turned out that I was mistaken.” In such matters we do not call anything “turning out that I was mistaken.” If someone were to insist that it is quite possible that I were mistaken when I say that I feel hot, then I should say to him: Give me a use for those words! I am perfectly willing to utter them, provided that you tell me under what conditions I should say that I was or was not mistaken. Those words are of no use to me at present. I do not know what to do with them…There is nothing we call “finding out whether I feel hot.” This we could term either a fact of logic or a fact of language. (1951, pp. 332)
Malcolm went so far as to suggest the laws of logic may well, one day, be different to what we accept now (1940, pp. 198), and that we may well reject some necessary statements, should we find a use for their negation, or for treating them as contingent(1940, pp. 201ff). Thus, the objection that, according to Ordinary Language philosophy, non-ordinary uses, or new, revised or technical uses of expressions are to be prohibited from philosophy is generally unfounded – though it is an interpretation of Ordinary Language philosophy that survives into the present day.
Benson Mates argued, in his ‘On the Verifiability of Statements about Ordinary Language’ (1958, 1964) just what the title suggests: how can any such claims be confirmed? This objection applies more seriously to the later Ordinary Language philosophical work, because that period focused on far more detailed analyses of the uses of expressions, and made rather more sweeping claims about ‘what we say’. Stanley Cavell (1958, 1964) responded to Mates that claims as to the ordinary uses of expressions are not empirically based, but are normative claims (that is, they are not, in general, claims about what people dosay, but what they can say, or ought to say, within the bounds of the meaning of the expression in question). Cavell also argued that the philosopher, as a member of a linguistic community, was at least as qualified as any other member of that community to make claims about what is, or can be, ordinarily said and meant; although it is always possible that any member of the linguistic community may be wrong in such a claim. The debate has continued, however, with similar objections (to Mates’) raised by Fodor and Katz (1963, 1971), to which Henson (1965) has responded.
The reason this objection applies less-so to the early Ordinary Language philosophers is that, for the Wittgensteinians, claims as to what is ‘ordinarily said’ applied in much more general ways. It applied, for example, to ‘what would ordinarily be said of, for example, a situation’ – for example, as we noted, cases of what we ordinarily call ‘seeing x’, or ‘doing x of her own free-will’, or ‘knowing “x” for certain’ and so forth (these kinds of cases were later argued to be paradigm cases – see below, section 3d, for a discussion of this important argument within early Ordinary Language philosophy). The Wittgensteinians were originally making their points against the kind of skeptical metaphysical views which had currency in their own time; the kinds of theories which suggested such things as ‘we do not know the truth of any material-thing statements’, ‘we are acquainted, in perception, only with sense-data and not external, independent objects’, ‘no sensory experience can be known for certain’ and so on. In such cases there is no question that the ordinary thing to say is, for example “I am certain this is a desk before me,” and “I see the fire-engine” and “It is true that I know that this is a desk” and so forth. In fact, in such disputes it was generally agreed that there was a certain ordinary way of describing such and such a situation. This would be how a situation is identified, so that the metaphysician or skeptical philosopher could proceed to suggest that this way of describing things is false.
The objection that was directed equally at the Wittgensteinians and the Oxford Ordinary Language philosophers was in regard to what was claimed to count as ‘misuses’ of expressions, particularly philosophical ‘misuses’. In particular, it was objected that presumably such uses must be bannedaccording to Ordinary Language philosophy (for example Rollins 1951). Sometimes, it was argued, the non-ordinary use of some expression is philosophically necessary since sometimes technical or more precise terms are needed.
In fact, it was never argued by the Ordinary Language philosophers that any term or use of an expression should be prohibited. The objection is not born out by the actual texts. It was not argued that non-ordinary uses of language in and of themselves were a cause of philosophical problems; the problem lay in, mostly implicitly, attempting to pass them off as ordinary uses. The non-ordinary use of some term or expression is not, merely, a more ‘technical’ or more ‘precise’ use of the term – it is to introduce, or even assume, a quite different meaning for the term. In this sense, a philosophical theory that uses some term or expression non-ordinarily is talking about something entirelydifferent to whatever the term or expression talks about in its ordinary use. Malcolm, for example, argues that the problem with philosophical uses of language is that they are often introduced into discussion without being duly notedas non-ordinary uses. Take, for example, the metaphysical claim that the content of assertions about experiences of an independent realm of material objects can never be certain. The argument (see Malcolm 1942b) is that this is an implicit suggestion that we stop applying the term ‘certain’ to empirical propositions, and reserve it for the propositions of logic or mathematics (which can be exhaustively proven to be true). It is a covert suggestion about how to reform the use of the term ‘certain’. But the suggested use is a ‘misuse’ of language, on the Ordinary Language view (that is, applying the term ‘certain’ only to mathematical or logical propositions). Moreover, the argument presents itself as an argument about the facts concerning the phenomenon of certainty, thus failing to ‘own up’ to being a suggestion about the use of the term ‘certain’ - leaving the assumption that it uses the term according to its ordinary meaning misleadingly in place. The issue, according to Ordinary Language philosophy, is that the two uses of ‘certain’ are distinct and the philosopher’s sense cannot replace the ordinary sense – though it can be introduced independently and with its own criteria, if that can be provided. Malcolm says, for example:
…if it gives the philosopher pleasure always to substitute the expression “I see some sense-data of my wife” for the expression “I see my wife,” etc.and so forth, then he is at liberty thus to express himself, provided he warns people beforehand, so that they will understand him. (1942a, pp. 15)
In an argument Malcolm elsewhere (1951) deals with, he suggests that it is not a ‘correct’ use of language to say, “I feel hot, but I am not certain of it.” But this is not to suggest that the expression must be banned from philosophical theorizing, nor that it is not possible that it might, at some point, become a perfectly correct use of language. What is crucial is that, for any use newly introduced to a language, how that expression is to be used must be explained, that is, criteria for its use must be provided. He says:
We have never learned a usage for a sentence of the sort “I thought that I felt hot but it turned out that I was mistaken.” In such matters we do not call anything “turning out that I was mistaken.” If someone were to insist that it is quite possible that I were mistaken when I say that I feel hot, then I should say to him: Give me a use for those words! I am perfectly willing to utter them, provided that you tell me under what conditions I should say that I was or was not mistaken. Those words are of no use to me at present. I do not know what to do with them…There is nothing we call “finding out whether I feel hot.” This we could term either a fact of logic or a fact of language. (1951, pp. 332)
Malcolm went so far as to suggest the laws of logic may well, one day, be different to what we accept now (1940, pp. 198), and that we may well reject some necessary statements, should we find a use for their negation, or for treating them as contingent(1940, pp. 201ff). Thus, the objection that, according to Ordinary Language philosophy, non-ordinary uses, or new, revised or technical uses of expressions are to be prohibited from philosophy is generally unfounded – though it is an interpretation of Ordinary Language philosophy that survives into the present day.
Movies magnify, so when pictures began talking they magnified words. Somehow, as in the case of opera’s magnification of words, this made their words mostly ignorable, like the ground, as if the industrialised human species had been looking for a good excuse to get away from its words, or looking for an explanation of the fact that we do get away, even must. The attractive publication, briefly and informatively introduced, of the scripts of several Marx Brothers films … is a sublime invitation to stop and think about our swings of convulsiveness and weariness in the face of these films; to sense that it is essential to the Brothers’ sublimity that they are thinking about words, to the end of words, in every word – or, in Harpo’s emphatic case, in every absence of words.
Stanley Cavell calls himself an amateur, which is modest, considering the celebrity of his Shakespeare essays, of which one, the long meditation on King Lear, has been on reading lists for twenty years. However, he is by vocation a philosopher, of distinctive orientation since he has close dealings with Emerson and William James as well as with Wittgenstein, and with Hollywood comedies as well as with Thoreau; and he often turns to Shakespeare for contributions to philosophical issues, confident that he explores ‘the depth of the philosophical preoccupations of his culture’. Thus he likes to work, as John Hollander once remarked, in the buffer-zone between poetry and philosophy.
The ordinary slips away from us. If we ignore it, we lose it. If we look at it closely, it becomes extraordinary, the way words or names become strange if we keep staring at them. The very notion turns into a baffling riddle. Shall we say that the ordinary doesn’t exist, or that it exists only when we don’t look at it closely? Stanley Louis Cavell has been thinking about the ordinary (although not only about that) for the whole of his philosophical career, and he knows the riddle inside out. But the riddle is not where his interest lies. He doesn’t mind if the world goes strange on us, as long as we keep looking at it, and he is happy to assert ‘the extraordinariness of what we accept as the ordinary’. The question for him is not a linguistic one, and beyond the simple, slippery word is a whole range of human practices crying out for, but not often getting, our attention.
Stanley Louis Cavell was, like Grice was, a philosopher with style.
It’s no insult to tStanley Cavell that he was the rare philosopher who was read as much for his prose as for his ideas.
Although Cavell had all the right academic credentials -- he taught at Harvard for many years and was a distinguished advocate for the “ordinary language philosophy” of J.L. Austin and H. P. Grice -- his essays were written with an eccentric, sometimes maddening, elan.
Cavell’s sentences were alive with allusions in hectic smart-alecky self-mocking prose that seem closer in spirit to a Marx Brothers movie than a philosophic tome.
Cavell, as it happens, loved the Marx Brothers, as he generally did Golden Age Hollywood, particular in its screwball mode.
In one of his most accessible books, Pursuit of Happiness, Cavell analyzed the ditzy rom-coms of the 1930s and 1940s as “comedies of remarriage” that showed that love isn’t just a one time starburst moment but a matter of learning to live with other people over time.
Writing in the London Review of Books, Cavell made the case for the philosophical resonance of the Marx Brothers:
Intention, or the desperate demand for interpretation, is gaudily acknowledged in such turns as Chico’s selling Groucho a tip on a horse by selling him a code book, then a master code book to explain the code book, then a guide required by the master code, then a sub-guide supplementary to the guide – a scrupulous union, or onion, of semantic and monetary exchanges and deferrals to warm the coldest contemporary theorist of signs; or as acted out in Chico’s chain of guesses when Harpo, with mounting urgency, charades his message that a woman is going to frame Groucho (both turns in A Day at the Races)
The strange echo-y effect of “union, or onion” is a characteristic Cavell touch.
Cavell once defended Witters's stylistic eccentricity in terms that easily be used for Cavell himself.
“So some of Wittgenstein’s readers are made impatient, as though the fluctuating humility and arrogance of his prose were a matter of style, and style were a matter of pose, so these poses repudiate, not to say undermine, each other,” Cavell wrote in The Claim of Reason.
"To me this fluctuation reads as a continuous effort at balance, or longing for it, as to leave a tightrope; it seems an expression of that struggle of despair and hope that I can understand as a motivation to philosophical writing.”
Style, in other words, is the very grunting and groaning of the philosopher wrestling with his or her own thoughts and therefore inseparable from the philosophical act: style is the mind.
In a wonderfully lucid New Republicreview of Cavell’s In Quest of the Ordinary, Richard Rorty paid tribute to Cavell’s as an oddball who had the courage of his eccentricty:
“Cavell is among professors of philosophy what Harold Bloom is among the professors of English: the least defended, the gutsiest, the most vulnerable. He sticks his neck out farther than any of the rest of us. Who touches this book touches a fleshly, ambitious, anxious, self-involved, self-doubting mortal.”
Cavell’s voice, now stilled, will live on his books, which will continue to be read not just by philosophers but anyone who hungers for a human voice. In time, he might be remembered not just as the heir to Witters and Grice and J.L. Austin, but part of the tradition of daring misfits, the line of Thoreau, Emerson, Emily Dickinson, Marianne Moore, and Wallace Stevens.
It’s no insult to the late Stanley Cavell, whose death at age 91 was announced on Tuesday, that he was the rare philosopher who was read as much for his prose as for his ideas. Although Cavell had all the right academic credentials -- he taught at Harvard for many years and was a distinguished advocate for the “ordinary language philosophy” of J.L. Austin -- his books were written with an eccentric, sometimes maddening, elan. Cavell’s sentences were alive with allusions in hectic smart-alecky self-mocking prose that seem closer in spirit to a Marx Brothers movie than a philosophic tome.
Cavell, as it happens, loved the Marx Brothers, as he generally did Golden Age Hollywood, particular in its screwball mode. In one of his most accessible books, Pursuit of Happiness (1981), Cavell analyzed the ditzy rom-coms of the 1930s and 1940s as “comedies of remarriage” that showed that love isn’t just a one time starburst moment but a matter of learning to live with other people over time.
Writing in 1994 in the London Review of Books, Cavell made the casefor the philosophical resonance of the Marx Brothers:
Intention, or the desperate demand for interpretation, is gaudily acknowledged in such turns as Chico’s selling Groucho a tip on a horse by selling him a code book, then a master code book to explain the code book, then a guide required by the master code, then a sub-guide supplementary to the guide – a scrupulous union, or onion, of semantic and monetary exchanges and deferrals to warm the coldest contemporary theorist of signs; or as acted out in Chico’s chain of guesses when Harpo, with mounting urgency, charades his message that a woman is going to frame Groucho (both turns in A Day at the Races)
The strange echo-y effect of “union, or onion” is a characteristic Cavell touch.
Cavell once defended Ludwig Wittgenstein’s stylistic eccentricity in terms that easily be used for Cavell himself. “So some of Wittgenstein’s readers are made impatient, as though the fluctuating humility and arrogance of his prose were a matter of style, and style were a matter of pose, so these poses repudiate, not to say undermine, each other,” Cavell wrote in The Claim of Reason (1989). “To me this fluctuation reads as a continuous effort at balance, or longing for it, as to leave a tightrope; it seems an expression of that struggle of despair and hope that I can understand as a motivation to philosophical writing.”
Style, in other words, is the very grunting and groaning of the philosopher wrestling with his or her own thoughts and therefore inseparable from the philosophical act: style is the mind.
In a wonderfully lucid 1989 New Republicreview of Cavell’s In Quest of the Ordinary, Richard Rorty paid tribute to Cavell’s as an oddball who had the courage of his eccentricty: “Cavell is among professors of philosophy what Harold Bloom is among the professors of English: the least defended, the gutsiest, the most vulnerable. He sticks his neck out farther than any of the rest of us. Who touches this book touches a fleshly, ambitious, anxious, self-involved, self-doubting mortal.”
Cavell’s voice, now stilled, will live on his books, which will continue to be read not just by philosophers but anyone who hungers for a human voice. In time, he might be remembered not just as the heir to Ludwig Wittgenstein and J.L. Austin, but part of the American tradition of daring misfits, the line of Thoreau, Emerson, Emily Dickinson, Marianne Moore, and Wallace Stevens.
Cavell was a jazz musician before he was a philosopher. And Grice was a Ravelian pianist before he was a footballer!
An air of improvisation and fun hung over everything he did.
Pauline Kael was lecturing at Harvard, and I saw him standing on the Cambridge Common, shortly before the lecture was to begin, looking bewildered. “Are you lost?” I asked jokingly.
“This is Mass. Ave., and that over there is Garden Street.” “I know what street I’m on,” he said, as though he’d stepped out of one of the screwball comedies he so loved.
“But what town am I in?”
Cavell didn’t prepare a syllabus.
He didn’t order books for his courses.
He was casual with student papers.
According to the awful assessment measures of our awful times, he was probably a lousy teacher, and yet he was the most exciting classroom presence I’ve ever experienced.
He brought an extraordinary range of passions—for jazz and Shakespeare (in his famous essay on Lear, for example), for film comedies (in Pursuits of Happiness, perhaps his best book), for “ordinary language” philosophy, for the unexpected philosophical richness of Thoreau (The Senses of Walden) and Emerson—to everything he had to say.
One had the impression that he was making up the course as he went along.
He didn’t have a clear plan, and yet, like a saxophone player armed with a “fake book,” he knew the tune.
At the first class meeting of his aesthetics seminar at Harvard, he began scrawling titles on the blackboard: Of Grammatology, The Anxiety of Influence, A Map of Misreading, Blindness and Insight.
Of course, we could read a few pages of Kant’s Critique of Judgment instead, he said.
But since the most provocative current work in aesthetics was being done in English departments and comparative literature departments, why not take a look?
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Martha Nussbaum, an assistant professor dividing her time between the Classics and Philosophy departments, was one of the people crammed around the seminar table.
So was the philosopher Norton Batkin, who would become Cavell’s son-in-law.
There were film people from the Carpenter Center and comp lit students like Liliane Weissberg.
The music producer Billy Ruane, an indescribable, fidgety, bohemian presence, was there.
Arnold Davidson, who later edited Critical Inquiry, was there.
People dropped in from the bookstore across the street, Ã l’improviste, as the French say.
None of us spoke, or did so only rarely.
We all mainly listened as Cavell thought aloud, worried a passage, fired off rhetorical questions without waiting for an answer, sulked, and raved.
But Cavell could also be impatient to the point of anger.
How did Derrida get off thinking that Peirce’s claims were self-evident, when philosophers for a hundred years had found them all but impenetrable?
Over Harold Bloom, Cavell was particularly exercised.
How exactly was Bloom’s method of identifying sources different from a book like John Livingston Lowes’s The Road to Xanadu, with its relentless tracking down of the literary sources of Coleridge’s supposed opium dream?
Did we really believe Bloom’s claim that Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind,” since it mentions dead leaves, somehow haunts Leaves of Grass?
What could possibly count as evidence?
And why did Bloom steer clear of close reading? Was it that he was no good at it?
This was at the height of the importation—or invasion, as some thought—of theory into humanities departments.
At Harvard, in particular, anxiety was high.
Yale was all in and Harvard was resisting.
I remember Derek Bok, president of the university at the time, announcing to a gathering of English Department professors that “Jacques Derrida will never teach at Harvard!”
Everyone cheered.
But Cavell knew that there was something going on, some intellectual ferment worth gauging, and engaging.
So, he engaged Derrida on J.L. Austin and H. P. Grice and “parasitic” speech acts, picked a fight with de Man on a line from Yeats.
Like a hundred critics before him, de Man had misquoted the concluding line of “Among School Children” as “How can we tell the dancer from the dance?” It was clearly a rhetorical question, according to de Man, a perfect fusion of form and content.
We can’t tell the difference between the dancer and the dance.
Cavell pointed out that the wording of the line was actually “How can we know the dancer from the dance?”
Furthermore, it wasn’t at all clear that the question was rhetorical.
On the contrary, Yeats appeared to be asking, as had Wittgenstein and other philosophers exploring the so-called Problem of Other Minds, how we make sense of other people via their bodies, their gestures, their expressions, their words. There are ways in which we can know the dancer from—and by means of—the dance.
It was exhilarating to be present for such performances. Close reading seemed suddenly electrifying, a game with very high stakes.
For years, I took my intellectual bearings from Cavell.
I found in Emily Dickinson some of the themes—skepticism, nearness, the problem of others—that he had discovered in Thoreau and Emerson.
I invited him to come to the club to lecture about Wallace Stevens, mainly because I knew that he loved Stevens and had written almost nothing about him.
I wanted to hear that improvisatory brilliance aimed at Stevens.
From Stevens’s vast corpus, Cavell teased out the notion of “earliness,” of our thirst for a relation to the world that precedes preconceptions, assumptions, conventions.
It was a kindred earliness, a freshness of response, that Cavell himself aimed for in his own writing and thinking.
I find a page of my notes from a Cavell class, tucked into my copy of Philosophical Investigations. It is a record of Cavell thinking, and we hung on every word: "Wittgenstein is on Austin’s mind, but he tries to forget him. Wittgenstein says, there are infinite uses of language. Austin says, there are about 10,000. Metaphors can’t be listed in a dictionary; idioms can. Metaphors aren’t false, they’re wildly false, crazily, madly false. I.A. Richards and de Man seem to be forcing the word metaphor into dead metaphors. What are metaphors for, anyway? Is it possible that someone never learned to use metaphor?"
He was a jazz musician before he was a philosopher. An air of improvisation and fun hung over everything he did. Pauline Kael was lecturing at Harvard, and I saw him standing on the Cambridge Common, shortly before the lecture was to begin, looking bewildered. “Are you lost?” I asked jokingly. “This is Mass. Ave., and that over there is Garden Street.” “I know what street I’m on,” he said, as though he’d stepped out of one of the screwball comedies he so loved. “But what town am I in?”
He didn’t prepare a syllabus. He didn’t order books for his courses. He was casual with student papers. According to the awful assessment measures of our awful times, he was probably a lousy teacher, and yet he was the most exciting classroom presence I’ve ever experienced. He brought an extraordinary range of passions—for jazz and Shakespeare (in his famous essay on Lear, for example), for American film comedies (in Pursuits of Happiness, perhaps his best book), for “ordinary language” philosophy, for the unexpected philosophical richness of Thoreau (The Senses of Walden) and Emerson—to everything he had to say.
One had the impression that he was making up the course as he went along. He didn’t have a clear plan, and yet, like a saxophone player armed with a “fake book,” he knew the tune. At the first class meeting of his aesthetics seminar at Harvard, during the spring of 1978, he began scrawling titles on the blackboard: Of Grammatology, The Anxiety of Influence, A Map of Misreading, Blindness and Insight. Of course, we could read a few pages of Kant’s Critique of Judgment instead, he said. But since the most provocative current work in aesthetics was being done in English departments and comparative literature departments, why not take a look?
ADVERTISING
Martha Nussbaum, an assistant professor dividing her time between the Classics and Philosophy departments, was one of the people crammed around the seminar table. So was the philosopher Norton Batkin, who would later become Cavell’s son-in-law. There were film people from the Carpenter Center and comp lit students like me and my pal Liliane Weissberg. The music producer Billy Ruane, an indescribable, fidgety, bohemian presence, was there. Arnold Davidson, who later edited Critical Inquiry, was there. People dropped in from the bookstore across the street, Ã l’improviste, as the French say.
Over Harold Bloom, Cavell was particularly exercised. How exactly was Bloom’s method of identifying sources different from a book like John Livingston Lowes’s The Road to Xanadu, with its relentless tracking down of the literary sources of Coleridge’s supposed opium dream? Did we really believe Bloom’s claim that Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind,” since it mentions dead leaves, somehow haunts Leaves of Grass? What could possibly count as evidence? And why did Bloom steer clear of close reading? Was it that he was no good at it?
This was in 1978, at the height of the importation—or invasion, as some thought—of theory into American humanities departments. At Harvard, in particular, anxiety was high. Yale was all in and Harvard was resisting. I remember Derek Bok, president of the university at the time, announcing to a gathering of English Department professors that “Jacques Derrida will never teach at Harvard!” Everyone cheered. But Cavell knew that there was something going on, some intellectual ferment worth gauging, and engaging. So, he engaged Derrida on J.L. Austin and “parasitic” speech acts, picked a fight with de Man on a line from Yeats.
Like a hundred critics before him, de Man had misquoted the concluding line of “Among School Children” as “How can we tell the dancer from the dance?” It was clearly a rhetorical question, according to de Man, a perfect fusion of form and content. We can’t tell the difference between the dancer and the dance. Cavell pointed out that the wording of the line was actually “How can we know the dancer from the dance?” Furthermore, it wasn’t at all clear that the question was rhetorical. On the contrary, Yeats appeared to be asking, as had Wittgenstein and other philosophers exploring the so-called Problem of Other Minds, how we make sense of other people via their bodies, their gestures, their expressions, their words. There are ways in which we can know the dancer from—and by means of—the dance.
It was exhilarating to be present for such performances. Close reading seemed suddenly electrifying, a game with very high stakes. For years, I took my intellectual bearings from Cavell. In my first book, I found in Emily Dickinson some of the themes—skepticism, nearness, the problem of others—that he had discovered in Thoreau and Emerson. I invited him to come to Mount Holyoke to lecture about Wallace Stevens, mainly because I knew that he loved Stevens and had written almost nothing about him. I wanted to hear that improvisatory brilliance aimed at Stevens. From Stevens’s vast corpus, Cavell teased out the notion of “earliness,” of our thirst for a relation to the world that precedes preconceptions, assumptions, conventions. It was a kindred earliness, a freshness of response, that Cavell himself aimed for in his own writing and thinking.
I find a page of my notes from a Cavell class, tucked into my copy of Philosophical Investigations. It is a record of Cavell thinking, and we hung on every word:
Wittgenstein is on Austin’s mind, but he tries to forget him. Wittgenstein says, there are infinite uses of language. Austin says, there are about 10,000. Metaphors can’t be listed in a dictionary; idioms can. Metaphors aren’t false, they’re wildly false, crazily, madly false. I.A. Richards and de Man seem to be forcing the word metaphor into dead metaphors. What are metaphors for, anyway? Is it possible that someone never learned to use metaphor?
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