The Reaches of Words∗

Bibliographic Data

ID7430302
AuthorsAvner Baz (0000-0003-1042-3886, Tufts University, corresponding author)
Year2008
Volume16
Issue1
Pages31-56
Publication date2008-02-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueInternational Journal of Philosophical Studies (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0967-2559 • E-ISSN: 1466-4542
PublisherTaylor & Francis (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/09672550701809396
OpenAlexW2164430811
LanguageEN
References cited22

This paper compares and contrasts two ways of going on from Wittgenstein and, to a lesser extent, Austin. The first is Charles Travis’. The second is Stanley Cavell’s. Focusing on our concept of propositional knowledge (‘knowing that such and such’), I argue that Travis’ tendency to think of language and its concepts as essentially in the business of enabling us to represent (describe, think of) things as being one way or another and his consequent neglect of the question of what, in the Austinian sense, is being done with the words have led him to give an inaccurate account of the context sensitivity of ‘knowing that’. By contrast, Cavell’s treatment of the concept – while fully hospitable to Travis’ ‘occasion sensitivity’ – is attentive to the limitations of the representationalist conception, and takes the question of what is being done with the words, as it relates to the question of the intelligibility of the speaker, as primary. This fundamental difference between Travis and Cavell, I finally suggest, explains the stark contrast between the ways in which each has responded to what he calls ‘scepticism’. Keywords: TravisCavellWittgensteinpropositional knowledgescepticismrepresentation Notes ∗ I should like to thank Nancy Bauer, James Conant, Juliet Floyd, Warren Goldfarb, Kelly Jolley, Gary Kemp, Michael Kremer, Mark Richard, Thomas Ricketts, Peter Sullivan, two anonymous referees for this journal, and, especially, Charles Travis and Stanley Cavell, for helpful responses to earlier versions of this paper. Writing this paper was made possible in part by a Tufts Bernstein Faculty Fellowship, for which I am very grateful. 1 See Moore, Citation1997: p. 79. 2 I am thinking here in particular of Richard Rorty (Citation1979). 3 Pace David Lewis (Citation1983), who maintains, as many nowadays maintain, that performative utterances have truth conditions – and indeed that these are utterances that, when felicitously made, make themselves true. It should be clear that from the perspective of the second conception of concepts Lewis’ insistence is question begging, and is only supported by the superficial form of words that are uttered. Ultimately, however, I don’t wish to say that Lewis’ insistence is wrong, exactly. Rather, it seems to me to be, where not just idle, misleading with respect to our concepts and what possessing them involves and requires. For one thing, it is liable to make us overlook the fact that our beholdenness to the world takes an altogether different form when we apologize, say, from when we describe someone, or ourselves, as having apologized. 4 Putnam, Citation1999: pp. 86–7. 5 Cavell, Citation1979: p. 196. 6 Travis, Citation1991: p. 241. 7 Ibid., p. 242. 8 This is the gist of the argument of Travis, Citation2000. The same point is made in Travis, Citation2006 in terms of the inability of what Travis calls ‘disembodied representations’ actually to represent anything as being thus and so. 9 This point is made in Travis, Citation2006 in terms of the occasion sensitivity of our concept of ‘same‐saying’. 10 Indeed, as I said, I find it altogether striking that other contextualists have not found philosophically significant the possibility of nonsense that is implied by their view. 11 Travis, Citation1989: p. 35. See also Travis, Citation2006: pp. 6 and 152. 12 Travis, Citation1991: p. 246. 13 See Travis, Citation2005: pp. 305–6. 14 See Lewis, Citation1996 and Schaffer, Citation2004, Citation2005, Citation2006. 15 This is a brief summary of Travis’ account of the semantics of knowledge ascriptions and of his argument against scepticism in Travis, Citation1989: pp. 129–87. In Travis, Citation2005 we get an account that, so far as I can tell, is formally the same. It’s just that this time Travis does not speak in terms of conceivable doubts that should be divided into mere doubts on the one hand and real doubts on the other; rather, he talks in terms of a distinction between ways‐for‐p‐to‐turn‐out‐false‐despite‐all‐one‐knows that count as things that might (or may) be and ones that do not so count. Again the claim is that the determination of what might be is occasion sensitive. 16 Travis, Citation1997: p. 89. 17 See, for example, Wittgenstein, Citation1963: remark 117. 18 The second part of Travis’ example raises similar concerns. Who is this botanist friend? And why is he asking Pia if she has leaves suitable for his research? And suppose that it does somehow make sense for him to call her and ask her something like this, perhaps because of who he is, or because of the peculiarity of the circumstances in which he found himself, or because Pia is an old and trustworthy supplier of his, why then does Pia answer him in the way that she does, having just finished spraying the leaves with green paint? Is she joking? Is this her way of starting to tell him about her misery? In neither of those cases is it obvious that she would aptly be described as having ‘spoken falsehood’. Or is it that we actually are expected to be able to imagine Pia to be so naïve, or obtuse, or both, that she would be capable of thinking that her leaves were what her friend was looking for? But I find that in that case, the proper assessment of her words would be, not that she said something false, but that she misunderstood her friend. 19 See, for example, Travis, Citation2006: pp. 119–29. 20 In ‘Who Knows?’ (forthcoming), I argue that contemporary contextualists and anti‐contextualists have proceeded on the basis of ‘examples’ of utterances of words of the form ‘N knows that such and such’ that would at best be extremely odd if made in the ‘contexts’ in which they are said to be made. 21 In Austin, Citation1999. 22 Wittgenstein, Citation1963: remark 16. 23 For an insightful elaboration of this point see Brandom, Citation1994: p. 632 and p. 715, n. 28. 24 Contrast Wittgenstein, Citation1963: remark 304, who recommends that we make ‘a radical break with the idea that language always functions in one way, always serves the same purpose: to convey thoughts’. 25 See, for example, Travis, Citation2006: pp. 32–3. 26 Compare DeRose, Citation2005: p. 174, who glosses all that we may do with sentences of the form ‘N knows that such and such’ in terms of ‘describing situations’. 27 See Travis, Citation2000: pp. 231–2 and Citation2006: pp. 30–3. 28 Though there is still going to be a question about the ‘truth conditions’ of the utterance. Travis’ anti‐contextualist detractors are likely to charge that he is confusing the question of truth and falsity and the question of pragmatic felicity, as it were. I do not say that Travis has no good arguments with which to reply. 29 Travis, Citation2005: p. 299. 30 Travis, Citation1997: p. 97; see also Travis, Citation1989: p. 151 and Travis, Citation1991: p. 243. 31 In Travis, Citation2006: p. 116 he does discuss what he there calls ‘personal meaning’, and speaks of it as referring to ‘how someone meant her words’. But he cashes that out in terms of ‘meaning one’s words to represent, in some specific way, things as being some specific way’ (p. 119). So his notion of ‘how someone means her words’ is narrow in precisely the way that I complain about in this paper. 32 This is the gist of Travis’ contention in Travis, Citation1996. 33 It seems to me clear that in accusing ordinary‐language philosophers of conflating meaning and use and therefore committing the ‘assertion fallacy’ Searle is actually begging their question. He relies on the very conception of ‘(word or sentence) meaning’ that they were challenging. Ordinary‐language philosophy, at its best moments, begins with the sense that some philosophical question or assertion makes no sense – not merely in the sense that the act of producing it makes no sense, but in the sense that its content – what is being asked or asserted – is unclear. To say in response, as Searle in effect does, ‘Forget the oddness. Just answer the question or say whether the assertion is true or false’ would be to miss the point entirely. See Glock, Citation1996 for a good discussion. Travis himself (Citation1991: pp. 238–9) makes a similar point against Grice (Citation1989). In a way, my only complaint against Travis is that in trying to show philosophers like Searle and Grice that what they wish to think of as pertaining to meaning cannot be separated from use in the way they assume, he has worked with a notion of ‘use’ that is too narrow. 34 Cavell, Citation1979: p. 205. 35 Ibid., p. 206. 36 Ibid., pp. 206–7 and 215. 37 Ibid., pp. 206–7. 38 Ibid., pp. 208 and 214. To show that this does not mean that Cavell’s concerns lie with the ‘merely pragmatic’ dimension of speech is the burden of the remainder of this paper. 39 Ibid., pp. 210–11. Contrast Grice, Citation1989: pp. 18–20, who proposes that while asserting may indeed be a rather special speech act that requires, for its felicitous performance, quite special conditions, remarking requires no comparable conditions and may felicitously be performed even where ‘pointless’. 40 What Wittgenstein, Citation1969: remark 482 calls ‘knowing with a metaphysical emphasis’. 41 See Barry Stroud (Citation2000). 42 That would appear to be the gist of Cavell’s concluding pages of the second part of Cavell, Citation1979. Unlike many other readers of Cavell, I am inclined to take very seriously his disclaimer that what he offers is not any final and generally applicable response to any form that scepticism might take, but rather is ‘no more than a schema for a potential overthrowing or undercutting of skepticism’ (p. 220, my italics). For one thing, Cavell’s diagnosis is particularly tailored to a very particular way of putting the sceptical claim: one offered by a philosopher (call him Thompson Clark) who wishes to argue against the Austinian ‘ordinary‐language’ response to scepticism – an attempt to dismiss the sceptic by appealing to our everyday practices of advancing and assessing knowledge claims – that the sceptical argument can be made to fit rather strikingly the everyday practice as Austin describes it. In ‘Knowing and Acknowledging’ (in Cavell, 1969), for example, Cavell’s response to scepticism takes a different form from the one it takes in The Claim of Reason. 43 See, for example, Cavell, Citation1989: p. 57; and consider in this connection Wittgenstein, Citation1963: remark 90. If I’m right, then the irony in Stroud’s objection to Cavell on behalf of scepticism is that his very objection betokens what Cavell would call ‘scepticism’. 44 Or, in the language of Travis’ more recent account (Citation2005), a possibility that, given the philosopher’s concerns, strikes him as something that might very well be. 45 See Travis, Citation1989: p. 176. 46 Wittgenstein, Citation1963: remark 156. 47 The allusion to Kant is intended. It should be clear that I am using the notion of ‘language‐game’ here differently from the way that Travis is using it in Travis, Citation1989 and Citation2006. Travis speaks of language‐games as ‘objects of comparison’, as indeed the primitive language‐games from the early part of the Investigations ought to be taken. I, on the other hand, am using the term in the way that Wittgenstein is using it in, for example, remarks 24, 116, 249, 363, and on pp. 184 and 190 of the second part of the Investigations. Language‐games, thus understood, are not objects of comparison, but rather are strands of significant and structured activity involving speech in which we engage in the course of everyday life, and which competent speakers can be brought to, and typically do in practice, recognize. 48 Cavell, Citation1979: p. 212. 49 See Stroud, Citation1984 and Moore, Citation1993. 50 Travis, Citation1989: pp. 157–8. 51 Of course, he is concerned with the connection between our concept of (propositional) knowledge and our concepts of certainty and doubt. But this is because he is responding to philosophers, either imagined or (in Moore’s case) actual, who wish to mean their ‘know’ as in the business of expressing certainty and ruling out doubt, and to do so apart from the conditions in which the word could thus be meant. 52 Wittgenstein, Citation1963: part II, section xi, p. 221. 53 See Travis, Citation1997: p. 100. 54 That ‘I know’ is not (normally) ‘a descriptive phrase’ is a point that Austin makes in Austin, Citation1979: pp. 98–103. 55 The only exception I’m aware of is Warnock (Citation1983). Warnock, however, takes the fact that assertoric sentences featuring ‘know’ and cognates are used in the performance of a great variety of speech acts, including those of charging someone with having known something and of admitting or confessing to having known something, as an indication that we should distinguish the question of ‘what to know something is, what “knowing” means’ (p. 49) from the question of ‘whether possession of a given item of putative knowledge is, on this or that occasion, claimed or disclosed, admitted or avowed, presupposed or advertised ...’ (ibid.). But as I go on to argue, an item of knowledge, unlike, perhaps, an item of clothing, is not something whose nature, and whose possession by someone, may philosophically safely be determined regardless of the specific point of the determination. Like Searle and Grice and many others, Warnock relies on a representational notion of word or sentence meaning that, at least in the case of ‘knowing that’, is importantly misleading. 56 The person charged with having known some fact may defend himself by appealing to doubts he had at the time. But in that case ‘doubt’ would mean something quite different from what it means in Travis, for whom ‘doubts (as to p)’ means pretty much what ‘possibilities in which not‐p’ means for Lewis (Citation1996). And the person would be saying, or implying, that he did not take it that the fact obtained; and if that indeed is the case, then he did not know – occasion insensitively – though perhaps he should have known. 57 I discuss the notion of knowledge as a liability, and argue in far more detail that it belies Travis’ account of the occasion sensitivity of ‘knowing that’, in ‘Knowing Knowing (That P)’ (forthcoming). 58 Outside of philosophy, this type of use of ‘I know that such and such’ is in fact quite rare, and for the very good reason that if the other is not satisfied that you are in a position to give her assurance as to the obtaining of such and such, then your claiming to be in that position is unlikely to help. The ‘new plunge’ (Austin, Citation1979: pp. 99–100) one normally takes in saying ‘I know’ in such contexts is therefore not epistemological, but personal. 59 The sort of cases broached, for example, in Keith DeRose’s (Citation1992) ‘bank’ example and Stewart Cohen’s (Citation1999) ‘airport’ example. 60 I argue this point in much more detail in ‘Who Knows?’ 61 There are, of course, possible contexts of significant use of ‘know that’ and its cognates other than the ones I discussed. Most of these contexts lie even farther away from the tradition’s preoccupations, and fit its picture of knowledge even less well than the ones I discussed. Think, for example, of utterances of ‘I know that such and such’ that express acknowledgment, or moral conviction, or faith. 62 Travis, Citation1989: p. 54. In Travis, Citation2005: p. 290, he sums up this idea of semantic‐non‐transparency by saying that ‘we are not masters in our own house’, a claim that he says he draws from Austin and Putnam. 63 Travis, Citation1989: pp. 145–7. 64 Ibid., p. 173. 65 Ibid., p. 141. 66 See ibid., p. 168; and Travis, Citation1991: p. 245. 67 See Cavell, Citation1979: p. 38. 68 Ibid., p. 44. 69 Ibid., p. 215. 70 In Travis, Citation2004 and Citation2007

Intelligibility (philosophy · Skepticism · Epistemology, Ethics, and Metaphysics · Philosophy and Theoretical Science · Wittgensteinian philosophy and applications

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