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Stanley Cavell's Wittgenstein WITTGENSTEIN Stanley Cavell’s Wittgenstein By James Conant HE AIM OF THIS PAPER IS TO PROVIDE AN OVERVIEW OF ONE ASPECT OF Stanley Cavell’s reading of Wittgenstein: his interpretation of Wittgenstein’s teaching concerning the relation between meaning Tand use. After furnishing a rough overview of this aspect of Cavell’s reading of Wittgenstein, I shall attempt to bring into focus what is most distinctive and elusive about it by illustrating, by means of some examples drawn from commentators on Cavell’s work, how easy it can be to miss Cavell’s and— if Cavell is right about who Wittgenstein is—Wittgenstein’s point. Now Wittgenstein has become quite famous in recent years for putting forward something that gets called a “use-theory of meaning.” Wittgenstein writes: For a large class of cases—though not for all—in which we employ the word “meaning” it can be defined thus: the meaning of a word is its use in the language.1 If you look at commentaries on Wittgenstein’s work, you will find that commentators have wildly different understandings of what Wittgenstein is saying in this passage. Here is what Cavell says: “The meaning is the use” calls attention to the fact that what an expression means is a function of what it is used to mean or to say on specific occasions by human beings. [T]o trace the intellectual history of philosophy’s concentration on the meaning of particular words and sentences, in isolation from a systematic attention to their concrete uses would be a worthwhile undertaking. A fitting title for this history would be: Philosophy and the Rejection of the Human. Wittgenstein’s motive . is to put the human animal back into language and therewith back into philosophy. He undertook, as I read him, to trace the James Conant is professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago. He received both his BA (1982) and PhD (1990) from Harvard University. He taught for nine years at the University of Pittsburgh before moving to Chicago in 1999. He has published articles in philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, aesthetics, among other areas, and on philosophers such as Wittgenstein, Kant, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, William James, Frege, Carnap, Putnam, Cavell, Rorty, and McDowell, among others. He is currently working on three projects: a monograph on skepticism, a co-authored work (with Cora Diamond) on Wittgenstein, and a forthcoming collection of essays. He has edited two volumes of Hilary Putnam's papers and co-edited (with John Haugeland) one volume of Thomas Kuhn's papers. vol.XIII no.1 2005 THE HARVARD REVIEW OF PHILOSOPHY 52 James Conant mechanisms of this rejection in the ways in which in investigating ourselves, we are led to speak “outside language games,” consider expressions apart from, and in opposition to, the natural forms of life which give those expressions the force they have. What is left out of an expression if it is used “outside its ordinary language game” is not necessarily what the words mean (they may mean what they always did, what a good dictionary says they mean), but what we mean in using them when and where we do. The point of saying them is lost. How great a loss is that? To show how great is a dominant motive of the Investigations. What we lose is not the meaning of our words—hence, definitions to secure or explain their meaning will not replace our loss. What we lose is a full realization of what we are saying; we no longer know what we mean.2 I want to draw attention to four topics that are touched upon in this passage: (1) philosophy’s usual way of asking after the meaning of an expression—“philosophy’s concentration on the meaning of particular words and sentences, in isolation from a systematic attention to their concrete uses”; (2) Wittgenstein’s contrasting way of asking after the meaning of an expression— which takes it to be “a function of what it is used to mean or to say on specific occasions by human beings”; (3) where the first way leads us—when we engage in the philosopher’s usual way of employing language, we are led to speak “outside language games”; and (4) what the second way hopes to show us—that, when we are led to speak thus, “we no longer know what we mean.” Let’s start with (1) and (2). A contrast is drawn here between two ways of asking after the meaning of an expression: (1) asking after its meaning in isolation from a systematic attention to concrete uses (asking after what the word or sentence means); (2) asking after its meaning through a consideration of its concrete uses (asking after what the word or sentence is used to mean on specific occasions by human beings). Readers of Wittgenstein assume that what must be at issue in his invocation of “use” is the importance of asking the second of these questions over and above merely asking the first; or, to put the point in more fashionable—and therefore more dangerous—terms: that what must be at issue is the importance of supplementing our syntactic and semantic theory of language with a third layer, a theory of the pragmatics of natural language or a theory of speech-acts. Cavell takes Wittgenstein to want to urge something potentially far more threatening to traditional analytic philosophy of language than any such mere call for supplementation; namely, that “for a large class of cases” there isn’t anything which can count as asking the first question (asking what a sentence means) apart from a prior consideration of the second question (apart, that is, from asking: when might it be said? where? by whom? to whom?). Let us now turn for a moment to (4). Wittgenstein, according to Cavell, goes on to claim something which has proved even harder for the analytic THE HARVARD REVIEW OF PHILOSOPHY vol.XIII no.1 2005 Stanley Cavell’s Wittgenstein 53 philosophical tradition to hear: namely, that when, under the pressure of philosophy, meaning and use come apart, then we are subject not just to some degree of ignorance or perplexity as to what we mean; rather, we are subject to something (which is apt to strike us as) far more paradoxical: we are subject to an illusion of meaning. The way Cavell puts this is to say that, when the philosopher reaches such a crossroads in his philosophizing, he is subject to a “hallucination of meaning”: [H]e imagines himself to be saying something when he is not, to have discovered something when he has not. Someone in these particular straits may be described as hallucinating what he or she means, or as having the illusion of meaning something.3 This is paradoxical insofar as it challenges the deeply rooted intuition that in the realm of meaning esse est percipe: if I seem to mean something by my words then, by golly, I do. Wittgenstein himself concedes what he takes to be sound in this intuition when he writes: “one feature of our concept of a proposition is sounding like a proposition.”4 But it is only one feature of our concept of a proposition, and it is central to Cavell’s and Wittgenstein’s teachings that possession of this feature, though a necessary condition on something’s counting as a proposition, is by no means a sufficient one. This takes us to Wittgenstein’s numerous thought-experiments, such as his famous invitation to his reader to try to imagine a private language.5 According to Cavell, Wittgenstein offers these carefully constructed invitations to the reader to imagine such-and-such, in order to lead the reader up a dialectical ladder. When the reader has reached the top of the ladder, he is to throw the ladder away: he is supposed to come to see that he had, all along, only been under the illusion of imagining something.6 More specifically, according to Cavell, what Wittgenstein wants us to come to see about such cases is that such a hallucination of meaning arises because we imagine we transfer the meaning of an expression where we have failed to transfer the use. Wittgenstein describes the sort of awkward relation we occupy with respect to our words in such cases as one in which we are led “to speak outside language games.” This takes us back to (3). Cavell’s most sustained discussion of a Wittgensteinian example of how the philosopher is led to speak “outside language games” is his discussion of epistemological skepticism. The skeptic wants to examine the integrity of our claims to knowledge; but not any sort of claim will suit the purposes of his investigation. It has to, for the skeptic’s purposes, be (what Cavell calls) “a best case of knowledge”— the sort of case which, if a ground for doubt can be adduced, will thereby cast doubt over the possibility of knowledge as such.7 On Cavell’s reading, Wittgenstein’s aim is to show the skeptic that he hovers between the horns of a dilemma. Here is how Cavell summarizes the dilemma: If the epistemologist were not imagining a claim to have been made, his procedure would be as out of the ordinary as the ordinary language philosopher finds it to be. But, on the other hand, if he were investing a claim of the sort the coherence vol.XIII no.1 2005 THE HARVARD REVIEW OF PHILOSOPHY 54 James Conant of his procedures require . then his conclusion would not have the generality it seems to have.8 Either (this is the first horn of the dilemma) the claim that the skeptic adduces will not be a (proper) claim or (this is the second horn) the claim is a (proper) claim to knowledge.
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