Must we mean what we say?

… We tend to take what a native speaker does when he looks up a noun in a dictionary as the characteristic process of learning language. He was also something of a musical prodigy and like many prodigies his accomplishments struck him as a matter of fraud.
Munslow, Alun 2010. This revolt was, in its way, a sibling to the modernist movements that had swept the arts in the decades before—a demand that philosophy start over again from scratch and question every convention. Presented in a fresh twenty-first century series livery, and including a specially commissioned preface, written by Stephen Mulhall, illuminating its continuing importance and relevance to philosophical enquiry, this influential work is now available for a new generation of readers. Fortunately, half of his career has been taken up with the more practical concern of how to “reconstruct the everyday.” This he has done, with a success that can only be called stunning, through interpretations of literature and film. Note you can select to send to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to Email your librarian or administrator to recommend adding this book to your organisation's collection.In this classic collection of wide-ranging and interdisciplinary essays, Stanley Cavell explores a remarkably broad range of philosophical issues from politics and ethics to the arts and philosophy. .the finding of one’s habitation, of where it is one is at home”; in a pun, he calls this “one’s edification”; but the proof that one has found a home is that, as Thoreau himself showed, “you are free to leave it.” A home, a true self, is only that which you can freely leave behind for what comes next.Through this series of readings, Cavell arrived at a new name for the movement between current and next self, between ordinary and extraordinary, a movement he calls, again in something of a philosophical jest, “perfectionism.” His greatest achievement may be his identification of perfectionism as a central and largely ignored tradition in moral thinking. Now what did you do? Hence the force of Cavell’s at first glance profound but on closer inspection obscure question: “Must We Mean What We Say?” A philosopher who limits the meaning of her words to carefully set out definitions, attempting to root out all ambiguity, in effect says, “I say, and you should hear, only what I mean.” Cavell insists that language cannot be limited in this way. . The relatively advantaged thus act by rote, giving to charity, say, without becoming charitable human beings; and they do not consent to the political structure, because they are too cynical to take part in the political conversation, even if they vote. Such certainty was exactly what the logical positivists had been trying to achieve. . His philosophy of marriage may be the most surprising result of his study of skepticism, as well as his most accessible. This was the sense in which their philosophy was fraudulent, and why it so repelled the young Cavell. I understand the training and character and friendship Emerson requires for democracy as preparation to withstand not its rigors but its failures, character to keep the democratic hope alive in the face of disappointment with it.Thus Cavell’s early sense of personal fraudulence, which led to his engagement with skepticism and the ordinary, which led to the moral philosophy of perfectionism, becomes an argument for political engagement. A matter of meaning it; 9. on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Must we mean what we say? While important, it is rare that such questions arise—or when they do arise, for example Peter Singer’s question of why we would save a drowning child but won’t give up a night on the town to feed an impoverished family, we recognize the question’s force but fail to take action. After receiving a degree in music from Berkeley in 1948 and dropping out of Juilliard’s composition program after a single semester, he transferred to UCLA to pursue a second degree and to see if he might find some more legitimate way to live. This list is generated based on data provided by CrossRef. The availability of Wittgenstein's later philosophy; 3. Cavell, by insisting on the importance of perfectionism, refuses to take the consent of the relatively advantaged for granted. There, in his first course in philosophy, he caught a glimpse of the powerful new developments in logic that were then sweeping the field. The usefulness, not to say the authority, of appeals to what we should ordinarily say, as philosophical data, depends upon their being met in independence of any particular philosophical position or theory.

. Buy the print book Check if you have access via personal or institutional login. They are the right-thinking upper middle class whose conformity Emerson and Thoreau set out to shame, not in order to make them yet more cynical, but that through that new shame they might become what Cavell calls “ashamed of their shame,” so disgusted with their conformity that they aspire to something new, their next self.This is the heart of Cavell’s argument for perfectionism as a distinct “dimension of moral thought,” not about determining what we “ought” to do, but releasing us from the cynicism that makes us feel we oughtn’t concern ourselves with words like “ought” at all. We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. ISBN-13: 978-0521821889. …What seemed like finding the world in a dictionary was really a case of bringing the world to the dictionary.Cavell’s larger argument is this: If we must bring the world with us to understand a definition, then we cannot define away the ambiguity in words, for the world we bring with us is already hopelessly ambiguous. But what exactly happens, Cavell asks, when you look up a word in such a dictionary, or hunt its definition down in the text? The same movement lies behind his understanding of remarriage, where fidelity is achieved by permitting oneself to doubt one’s marriage, if only to return again. (This is, I take it, what the phrase “ordinary language” meant to its Oxford coiners: a view of words free of philosophical preoccupation.)
. There he observes that many of his peers seemed to have abstracted their work further and further from everyday language. The task of the book is “the building of a house,.

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