Knowledge of language as self-knowledge

ABSTRACT

In ‘Must We Mean What We Say?’, Stanley Cavell defends the method of ordinary language philosophy while arguing that the special status of philosophical claims about language arises from the fact that these statements are expressions of self-knowledge. Recently, Nat Hansen (2017) has explored Cavell’s position in relation to empirical research on linguistic usage. This paper challenges Hansen’s reading of Cavell, and presents an alternative interpretation that withstands some of Hansen’s objections. For Cavell, claims about ‘what we say’ are claims about observable matters of fact, but nevertheless they are not, and cannot ever be, observation-based claims. The point of observing ordinary usage is to remind the philosopher of what is contained within the practical mastery that she already possesses.

KEYWORDS:

• language
• self-knowledge
• Stanley Cavell
• Ordinary language philosophy

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 See ‘Proceedings: Pacific Division’, in Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 31: 101–103. Both Mates and Cavell published their contributions to this symposium in the inaugural issue of Inquiry, which advertised its mission in interdisciplinary terms: see ‘An Editorial Statement’, Inquiry 1: 1–4. For more on this history, see Cavell (2002a, xviii–xix) and Hansen (2017, 785–787).

2 Ryle ([1949] 2009, 60). Here is the entire passage:

Very often we oppose things done voluntarily to things suffered under compulsion. Some soldiers are volunteers, others are conscripts; some yachtsmen go out to sea voluntarily, others are carried out to sea by the wind and tide. Here questions of inculpation and exculpation need not arise. In asking whether the soldier volunteered or was conscripted, we are asking whether he joined up because he wanted to do so, or whether he joined up because he had to do so, where “had to” entails “no matter what he wanted”.

Another point that is overlooked by Mates, which I and others called attention to in Zahorec et al. (forthcoming), is that Austin’s remark about joining the army or making a gift says only that these things can be done voluntarily, while the allegedly contrasting passage from Ryle is only about how the adjectives ‘voluntary’ and ‘involuntary’ are used.

3 For (9) and (10), compare an example from earlier in the text, where Anscombe writes that ‘a single utterance may function’ as both an expression of intention and a prediction of what is going to happen:

For example when a doctor says to a patient in the presence of a nurse “Nurse will take you to the operating theatre”, this may function both as an expression of his intention (if it is in it that his decision as to what shall happen gets expressed) and as an order, as well as being information to the patient … This example shows that the indicative (descriptive, informatory) character is not the distinctive mark of “predictions” as opposed to “expressions of intention”, as we might at first sight have been tempted to think. (Anscombe [1963] 2000, 3)

4 For further interpretation of Anscombe along these lines see Schwenkler (2019, 106–110) and Schwenkler (forthcoming).

5 See also his further discussion in Hansen (2021), which broaches the possibility that ordinary language philosophers can perform multiple speech acts in a single utterance, which would allow for a statement to be both rule-giving and descriptive at the same time.

6 Cavell has more to say on this topic in his [1965] 2002e.

7 For a related point see Bates and Cohen (1972, 3–4):

Cavell does not say that the dispute between Ryle and Austin is not empirical. Indeed, if empirical is taken as “concerned with a matter of fact” it is clear that he thinks the dispute is empirical and that Austin is correct and Ryle is wrong. What Cavell does claim is that it is not necessary to take a poll to discover who is right and who is wrong, and that the absence of a poll justifying our claims concerning correctness does not make those claims dogmatic or unempirical. Indeed, he says that Ryle could be expected to see that he was wrong, since he is a native speaker. What he is wrong about is a matter of fact—what it is that we mean when we say something. … [Cavell’s] major claim is that there are areas which we think of as being about matters of fact—hence, empirical—for which we do not need evidence.

8 On the ‘substantiality’ of self-knowledge, see Moran (2001).

9 As Anscombe says: ‘What is necessarily the rare exception is for a man’s performance in its more immediate descriptions not to be what he supposes ([1963] 2000, 87). There are some readings of Intention that have Anscombe flirting with an infallibilist view of these judgments; for a detailed critique of these readings see Schwenkler (forthcoming).

10 For this example, see Anscombe ([1963] 2000; 51).

11 Anscombe ([1963] 2000, 50–51 (‘the knowledge that a man has of his intentional actions’) and 57 (knowledge ‘in intention’)).

12 For further discussion of Anscombe’s position in relation to that of the Blue Book, see Wiseman (2017) and Schwenkler (2019, 26–28).

13 The argument of this paragraph mirrors that of Marcus and Schwenkler (2019).

14 For a related argument concerning aesthetic appreciation see Gorodeisky and Marcus (forthcoming).

15 Compare Austin’s description of his ‘linguistic phenomenology’:

When we examine what we should say when, what words we should use in what situations, we are looking again not merely at words (or “meanings”, whatever they may be) but also at the realities we use the words to talk about: we are using a sharpened awareness of words to sharpen our perception of, though not as the final arbiter of, the phenomena. (Austin [1956] 1957, 8)

16 Cavell ([1965] 2002d, 95; as quoted toward the end of Section III).

17 Cavell ([1958] 2002b, 19).

18 Cavell ([1958] 2002b, 8).

19 For these uses and many others, see Zahorec et al. (forthcoming).

20 Here I mean to use ‘reminder’ in the sense of Philosophical Investigations I, §127.

21 Wittgenstein ([1953] 2009, §18).

22 Indeed, Austin’s own commitment to a strictly a priori or ‘armchair’ methodology is not so straightforward, as in ‘A Plea for Excuses’ he recommends attention to ordinary language precisely as a superior alternative to what ‘you and I are likely to think up in our armchairs of an afternoon’ (Austin [1956] 1957, 8; emphasis added); and later in that essay he proposes using the dictionary, the law, and the empirical science of psychology, anthropology, and animal behavior as ‘systematic aids’ or ‘source-books’ for linguistic reflection (1956, 12–15). Ryle’s position in ‘Ordinary Language’ is more austere: for example, he writes that ‘Describing the mode of employment of an expression does not require and is not usually helped by information about the prevalence or unprevalence of this way of employment it’ (Ryle 1953, 177; emphasis added).

23 Compare Austin ([1956] 1957, 16; as quoted in Section II).

24 Here and in what follows I hope to have benefited from the argument of Travis [1991] 2008.

25 See Ryle ([1949] 2009, 60; as quoted in footnote 2 above).

26 As an illustration of how we can use ‘voluntarily’ with this meaning, consider: ‘Did you make breakfast this morning just to earn your allowance?’–‘No, I did it voluntarily’.

27 Likewise ‘voluntarily’, for example in another sentence from the BNC: ‘These patients are unable to defecate voluntarily and must therefore rely upon stimulation of bowel reflexes with or without manual evacuation to complete defecation’.

28 For an important discussion of the intersubjectivity of speech and hearing, see Moran (2018).

29 For a start, see the discussion in Laurence (2011), Rödl (2018), and Schwengerer (forthcoming).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by John Templeton Foundation; Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Study.