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Anthropology of Culture
Extimate Technology
Self-Formation in a Technological World
Ciano Aydin
Kevin M. Cahill
First published 2021
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Cahill, Kevin M. (Professor of Philosophy), author.
Title: Towards a philosophical anthropology of culture :
naturalism, relativism, and skepticism / Kevin M. Cahill.
Description: New York, NY : Routledge, 2021. | Series:
Routledge studies in contemporary philosophy | Includes
bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020045005 (print) | LCCN 2020045006
(ebook) | ISBN 9780367637156 (hardback) | ISBN
9781003120841 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Philosophical anthropology. | Wittgenstein,
Ludwig, 1889–1951. | Naturalism. | Skepticism. | Relativity. |
Social sciences—Philosophy. | Culture—Philosophy.
Classification: LCC BD450 .C2236 2021 (print) | LCC BD450
(ebook) | DDC 128—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020045005
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020045006
ISBN: 978-0-367-63715-6 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-12084-1 (ebk)
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To philosophy’s forgotten somewheres
Contents
Introduction 1
I. An Uneven Start
The impetus for this book comes from the last chapter of my disserta-
tion, The Moral Dimension of Wittgenstein’s Thought, defended at the
University of Virginia in August of 2001. In the fourth and final chapter,
called “The Disengaged View and ‘The Darkness of this Time’ ”, I argued,
based on both textual and extra-textual support, that the remarks on rule-
following in Philosophical Investigations constituted a kind of cultural
critique of modernity qua critique of what Charles Taylor has termed “the
disengaged view” of human practice.1 Part of my aim there was to make
plausible that Wittgenstein saw the problems of Western metaphysics in a
substantially historical light. Accordingly, my discussion involved a critique
of Stanley Cavell’s view that for Wittgenstein, the impulse to skepticism
(for Cavell synonymous with metaphysics) is part of the human condition.
Especially relevant for the chapter was Cavell’s essay “Declining Decline:
Wittgenstein as a Philosopher of Culture”, where he in effect claimed that
by concluding that Wittgenstein saw philosophical problems as primarily
rooted in our way of life, historicist oriented commentators such as G.H.
von Wright had given short shrift to universalist strains in Wittgenstein’s
anthropology. Von Wright had claimed that for Wittgenstein,
III. Naturalism
Shortly after my stumbling start with the anthropologists, I made a hope-
ful foray into the philosophy of the social sciences. Surely, these phi-
losophers hadn’t succumbed to French obsessions. While this was mostly
true, here again my philosophical starting point proved to be like relying
on an outdated edition of “Let’s Go Europe”. Once more, my sheltered
life in Wittgenstein scholarship had left me unprepared for the real world,
such as it was. In particular, after my earliest exposure to the Ameri-
can philosophy of social science community I had the distinct impres-
sion that the field had been colonized by a tight-knit cadre of reformed
and not so reformed Quineans. The self-assertive scientific naturalism
I encountered there, even in its pluralist guises, seemed (almost) as alien
to me as references to Deleuze. I was a bit shaken when arguments that
invoked the concept of “meaning” were liable to be met with accusations
of apriorism or provoke incredulous questions about the role “meaning
entities” were supposed to play in the causal structure of nature.9 I was
also wholly ignorant of the fact that, as a matter of philosophical soci-
ology, naturalism’s debate with the Verstehen tradition had long ago
4 Introduction
been relegated to side-show status. It was more unsettling still to dis-
cover how culture was routinely depicted in mainstream philosophy
of social science textbooks, as though it were a mysterious membrane
fabricated by romantic nationalists to envelope imagined islands of his-
tory that most likely never existed. It sometimes felt as though the very
concept of culture was regarded by mainstream naturalists as an obscu-
rantists’ postulate that explained nothing and excused everything. It did
no “work”.
A further point of frustration for me in this milieu was that any refer-
ence to Wittgenstein’s thought seemed only to provoke a knee-jerk reac-
tion to Peter Winch, as though nothing of relevance had happened in
Wittgenstein scholarship since the appearance of The Idea of Social Sci-
ence and its Relation to Philosophy in 1958. Further, to the extent that
Winch’s work was mentioned independently of Wittgenstein, it seemed to
serve mainly as a poster boy for what was wrongminded with the inter-
pretivist tradition. Despite finding many problems both with Winch’s
Wittgenstein interpretation and with some of his own arguments, I had
always believed that he had initiated a worthwhile conversation about
the relationship between science and the critique of culture. So, it was
dispiriting when my former advisor Cora Diamond published several
papers roundly attacking some of Winch’s most famous conclusions as
incoherent.10 Worse still, I realized that the substance of her attacks was
fundamentally sound.
The imagery invoked here must have been off-putting to many, because
being caught up in something like a web of symbols naturally calls for a
hermeneutic approach, with its unending “circle”. This makes our fini-
tude manifest in a way that is not only deeply at odds with a modern
sensibility, it may also have led to the charge that understanding a foreign
system of thought and life surely can’t be as easy as reading a text. Socie-
ties, so one line of criticism goes, operate primarily in terms of causal
concepts, and these cannot be “read off” of anything. They may have
to be teased out of the false consciousness of one’s informants, perhaps
tallied up if one goes in for that sort of thing, and, depending on one’s
ambitions for truth or fame, perhaps even set back into the explanatory
framework that motivated one’s data collection in the first place.
But as a preliminary response, take an example that will reappear in
the first essay: familiarity with what it is to go to church. I was a regular
churchgoer for much of my early life. When I see people out of my liv-
ing room window “on their way to church on Sunday morning” (while
I may well be settling into my favorite chair with my waffles and coffee
to watch a football game), I have a pretty good idea of what is going
on with them. I can read that much from the situation, less so, perhaps,
the further away from Catholicism their denomination(s) might be (and
there are such distances). Anyway, if I decide I want to understand these
more distant ones better, I might have to get up off the couch, go out
and talk to them, and even observe and participate in their lives. Possi-
bly for years. And yes, perhaps this may involve my forming hypotheses
that involve causal notions like power, repression, and education. But if
I want to apply the notion of “church goer” at all, or apply any concept
meant to catch some aspect of human agency, those causal concepts will
eventually have to be subsumed, or at the very least equilibrated, within
a broader context of these people qua human agents who are caught up
in webs of meaning that I must learn to read. And if my “account” is to
be an account, and not just a series of chirps and marks about some other
10 Introduction
set of chirps and marks, I must bring to bear in my account-giving activity
my own webs. For if I think I can so much as say anything about the
churchgoers through so much as talking with them without bringing my
own webs of significance into play, then I will have betrayed my own
false consciousness, my having confused (empiricist) gawking for genuine
learning.
This section has been largely taken up with defending the very legiti-
macy of the concept of a certain concept of culture. I now want to close
by distinguishing between two levels at which this and related terms
should be understood as operating in the three essays. (Perhaps this
means that I am proposing yet two more “referents”.) The fundamental
level is conceptual or logical. While the second level retains this con-
ceptual role, it also has the kind of identifiable empirical content one
normally associates with the word “culture”, both in its everyday uses
and in its social scientific contexts. To the extent we wish to describe
the actions of an individual language animal at all, culture plays the
logical or conceptual role as a holistic taken-for-granted background,
both for our own work of description and in those whom we wish to
describe. This is a point made by Hubert Dreyfus with his term “practi-
cal holism”, of which I make extensive use in the first essay. It goes by
other names: Bildung (Gadamer, McDowell) Second Nature (Aristo-
tle, McDowell), Weltbild and Lebensform (Wittgenstein): choose your
metaphor. If there is a “proof” that such a background is “necessary”,
it is the incoherence we fall into when we seek to talk of human action
without it. Where, on the other hand, we have not only the form but
also the content of this phenomenon more or less uniformly filled out
and predictably distributed over some population of humans, we have
culture both in the conceptual sense and in the sense that makes ethnog-
raphy possible. Where such roughly regular distribution is lacking, the
conceptual sense of practical holism will still be in play, to the degree
we are dealing with human agents at all.22 Not surprisingly the more
empirical level comes out most visibly in my use of relevant ethno-
graphic literature. In either case, culture is not some kind of logically
impenetrable meaning miasma surrounding certain populations. Nor,
as a critical concept, does it play an explanatory role here. Rather, as
the home of the concept of meaning, the two-level concept of culture
is rather a thread tying together the concept of the human in the three
essays of this volume.
Geertz writes “that culture, rather than being added on, so to speak, to
a finished or virtually finished animal, was ingredient, and centrally ingre-
dient, in the production of that animal itself.23 Geertz’s speaking here of
the production of an animal brings to light that thus far I have said a
good deal about the concept of culture, but nothing about why the essays
in this volume are contributions to philosophical anthropology. For one
thing, it should be obvious that I am not using the term “philosophical
Introduction 11
anthropology” in a manner restricted to the thought of classical German
philosophical anthropology in such figures as Scheler, Ghelen, or Pless-
ner. For another, despite the clear anti-scientistic thrust of these essays,
they are not the expression of just one more disgruntled anti-naturalist.
I mean, rather, the term “philosophical anthropology” to indicate a kind
of philosophical criticism that initiates its reflections on philosophical
problems from an unapologetically humanist perspective, a perspective
that is kept alive in the very structure of any inquiry into the human,
most notably and fruitfully from within the discipline of anthropology
itself. Finally, Towards a Philosophical Anthropology of Culture aims to
rejuvenate the interpretivist-hermeneutic tradition in the philosophy of
the social sciences on a firmer critical footing, without any relativist or
metaphysical baggage. That tradition has faced more than a generation
of misrepresentation, whether by post-structuralists or naturalists, which
it is high time to call out.
Notes
1. See for example, Charles Taylor, “Understanding and Explanation in the
‘Geisteswissenschaften’,” in Wittgenstein: To Follow a Rule, ed. S. H. Holtz-
man and C. M. Leich (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981), 191–210.
2. G. H. von Wright, “Wittgenstein in Relation to His Times,” in Wittgenstein
(Oxford: Blackwell, 1982), 216.
3. See Stanley Cavell, “Declining Decline,” in This New Yet Unapproachable
America: Lectures After Emerson After Wittgenstein (Albuquerque: Living
Batch Press, 1989), 41.
4. Ibid., 52–53.
5. See Chapter 6 of my The Fate of Wonder: Wittgenstein’s Critique of Meta-
physics and Modernity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011).
6. While “interpretivism” is frequently identified with Clifford Geertz, whose
work I cite especially in the essay on skepticism, I am not restricting my use
of the term to Geertz’s ideas. In addition to Geertz, I mean to include here
also such symbolic thinkers as Marshall Sahlins, Victor Turner, E. E. Evans-
Pritchard, Paul Ricoeur, Peter Winch, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, and of course
Taylor and Dreyfus. Despite differences, I believe these thinkers can all be
treated under the interpretivist rubric.
7. Other more senior practitioners were similarly hostile. A few years ago,
I attended a seminar by a world-renowned anthropologist, where he claimed
that according to Geertz, the Balinese cockfight merely unfolded according to
a self-enclosed and predetermined cultural logic supposedly immune to social
factors (read “power”). When I raised my hand and tried to say something
about the relevance of the hermeneutic circle in anthropology, the speaker
interrupted me and proclaimed loudly that “Anthropology is an empiri-
cal discipline!” No point in arguing, I thought (even though his response
appeared to presuppose that a hermeneutic approach was somehow a pri-
ori). Much more recently, I was present at a workshop when the very same
anthropologist pronounced, much to my surprise, that “social anthropology
has no data”.
8. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe
(Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), §124.
12 Introduction
9. On this, see my “Naturalism and the Friends of Understanding,” Philosophy
of the Social Sciences 44, no. 4 (2014): 460–77.
10. See Cora Diamond, “Criticising from ‘Outside’,” Philosophical Investiga-
tions 36 (2013): 114–32; Cora Diamond, “Putnam and Wittgensteinian Baby-
Throwing: Variations on a Theme,” in The Philosophy of Hilary Putnam, ed.
R. E. Auxier, D. R. Anderson, and L. E. Hahn (LaSalle: Open Court, 2015),
603–39; Cora Diamond, “The Skies of Dante and Our Skies: A Response to
Ilham Dilman,” Philosophical Investigations 35 (2012): 187–204.
11. Chapter One of my The Fate of Wonder contains a summary of how I under-
stood the status of that debate as it stood around 2010. Chapters Two and
Three are my own contributions to the development of the resolute reading of
the Tractatus as it pertains to ethics. For a concise presentation of my views
on those questions, see my “Tractarian Ethics,” in The Cambridge Compan-
ion to Wittgenstein, ed. Hans Sluga and David Stern, 2nd ed. (Cambridge:
Cambridge, 2018), 96–125.
12. The sketch draws on numerous works by Diamond and Conant. See Chapter
One, note 65 for references.
13. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. G. K. Ogden
(London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983). Henceforth TLP.
14. Ibid.
15. Ibid., 27. At Philosophical Investigations §374 Wittgenstein writes, “The
great difficulty here is not to represent the matter as if there were something
one couldn't do”. And at PI §500, we read “When a sentence is called sense-
less, it is not as it were its sense that is senseless. But a combination of words
is being excluded from the language, withdrawn from circulation”. There has
been a recent discussion as to whether such remarks warrant the use of “res-
olute” reading to the Investigations. See James Conant and Silver Bronzo,
“Resolute Readings of the Tractatus,” in A Companion to Wittgenstein, ed.
Hans-Johann Glock and John Hyman (Chichester: John Wiley and Sons,
2017), 175–94.
16. See Peter Winch, “Understanding a Primitive Society,” American Philosophi-
cal Quarterly 1 (1964): 307–24.
17. Ibid., 315. I am unsure whether Winch would have thought that every gram-
matical difference led to some degree of incommensurability and to what
degree incommensurability might be localized or be global.
18. As for the occasional references in footnotes to passages in Wittgensteinian
texts, these are intended for readers who might be interested in knowing
where I take myself to have found inspiration in his writings. They play no
logical role in my arguments.
19. “Religion as a Cultural System”. Reprinted in Clifford Geertz, The Interpre-
tation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 89.
20. W. V. O. Quine and J. S. Ullian, The Web of Belief (New York: Random
House, 1978), 81.
21. Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures, 5.
22. This raises difficult questions about just how much regularity is required for
the ethnographer to get a foothold. I doubt this question has a clear answer.
It also begs the question about what to say about the humanity of so-called
“feral children”. If such cases really do exist, then beyond relaying that
I would of course regard them as human, I don’t really know what else to
say. My only comfort there is that I don’t believe anyone else has any idea
about what to say about such cases.
23. Clifford Geertz, “The Impact of the Concept of Culture on the Concept of
Man,” in The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 47.
1 Lost in the Ancient City
Pluralist Naturalism and
the Philosophy of the Social
Sciences
Kevin M. Cahill
I
This essay deals with questions concerning naturalism and its relation
to the idea of philosophical anthropology. My way into these questions
will be to take up the threads of an old debate in the philosophy of the
social sciences, a debate many today would likely describe as quaint, and
probably mostly settled: this is the debate about the possible “demarca-
tion” between the Geisteswissenschaften and the Naturwissenschaften.
My half-ironic use of the antiquated terminology here signals my aware-
ness of how passé this discussion may appear to be, especially in light of
the confident ascendancy of various naturalisms that, to me at least, now
hardly seem to recognize that there was ever a time when their creden-
tials were respectably questioned. My route will be a bit circuitous and,
not surprisingly for an unreconstructed interpretivist and hermeneuticist
such as myself, begins with the question of language. Although many
of the pieces of my story have been shaped by the thinkers whose work
I rely on here, I have tried to rework and assemble them in a way that
I hope casts some new light on an old question.
My starting point is some recent claims by John Dupré that concern the
relationship between ordinary language and the language(s) of the social
sciences.1 For many years, Dupré has offered powerful arguments for an
anti-reductionist, pluralist naturalism in the Philosophy of Science.2 He
has supported his position by arguing that reductionist dogmas, most
notably physicalism, are simply unsupported by scientific practice and
findings. Dupré’s anti-reductionism runs deep indeed: he is not merely
a methodological pluralist, a now widespread view in the philosophy of
science, he is also an ontological pluralist. He thinks, rightly I believe,
that the sciences not only exhibit the legitimacy of different ways of stud-
ying nature, but that they also show that nature itself contains genuinely
different kinds of things to be studied.3
Dupré has recently taken his pluralist naturalism to cast doubt on an
apparent suggestion by Wittgenstein in Philosophical Investigations to
the effect that there is a philosophically relevant difference between the
14 Lost in the Ancient City
languages of the sciences and ordinary language. Dupré argues against
this idea that not only is there no discernible sharp difference between
the natural and the social sciences, but relatedly, there is no in-principle
difference between the languages of the natural and social sciences on
the one hand, and ordinary language on the other. Dupré has stated
previously that, “[O]ne point I share with all contemporary philoso-
phers who describe themselves as naturalists is that I assume that the
best ways of interrogating nature can be found by looking at the empir-
ical sciences”.4 I understand him here merely to be making the point
that the work of coming to know whatever it is we can know about
nature should involve our best tools, and those tools happen to be the
empirical sciences. There is nothing, or at least not much, to object to
there.5 Yet a key element of what I will say in response to Dupré’s posi-
tion rests on the point that intractable philosophical problems intrude
if we fail to recognize that human language users occupy one end of a
relation to the world not well described as “knowing”, but one that in
some sense can be said to undergird the knowing relation.6 By draw-
ing on important aspects of ordinary language that Dupré overlooks
or mischaracterizes, I will argue here that he misses a philosophically
crucial, even if not metaphysical, distinction between the natural and
social sciences, a distinction that goes directly to the issues of natural-
ism and philosophical anthropology.7
After sketching Dupré’s discussion of the relationship between ordi-
nary language and the languages of the sciences in Part II, I criticize
his account in Part III by calling on a distinction between “theoretical
holism” and “practical holism” that was introduced by and argued for
many years ago by Hubert Dreyfus. Working with this distinction, which
Dreyfus articulates by relying mainly on ideas taken from the early Hei-
degger but also from the later Wittgenstein and others, I try to show
that despite his frequent avowals of pluralist anti-reductionism, Dupré’s
treatment of the relevant passage by Wittgenstein, as well as some of his
remarks on Peter Winch’s work, betrays a subtle but deeply troublesome
form of reductionism. In short, while Dupré certainly recognizes differ-
ences between ordinary language, the languages of the social sciences,
and those of the natural sciences, I will argue that those acknowledged
differences don’t go deep enough. As I’ll make evident, in his discussion
of Wittgenstein and Winch, Dupré implicitly depicts, or at least allows
the image to stand of, ordinary language as a kind theory. As a result,
essential normative facets of the kinds of agents that human language
users are, become obscured and the twin results are a distorted view
of the social sciences and meaning skepticism. In Part IV, I go on to
show that despite their importance of bringing out a troubling aspect
in the kind of naturalism Dupré stands for, Drefyus’ own arguments are
marred by a dubious apriorism. In order to bring this point out, I refer
briefly to a tradition of reading Wittgenstein which can be traced back to
Lost in the Ancient City 15
Stanley Cavell, but has been brought into sharper focus by other writers
over roughly the last 30 years by writers like Cora Diamond and John
McDowell.8 While Dupré’s tacit treatment of ordinary language as a the-
ory blocks our view of the normativity of human conceptual life in one
way, in Part V, I look at the issue from a different vantage point, namely,
how or whether the kind of agents that human language users are can be
accommodated within a scientific naturalist worldview. I show that the
usual attempts to “naturalize” the normativity that characterizes us as
language users, what John McDowell has called our second nature, faces
a new version of the same problem that arose when from collapsing the
distinction between theoretical and practical holism. In Part VI, I try to
bring these considerations together in a way that folds the sort of natu-
ralism McDowell has defended into the overall theme of Philosophical
Anthropology.
II
Dupré states that “[t]he central thesis of this paper . . . [is] that social
science is not that different from much in the natural sciences.”9 In the
event that the point of arguing for such a thesis has become so obscure
in today’s philosophical climate that it might need pointing out, Dupré
is referring to an old question in the philosophy of the social sciences,
namely whether there is a philosophically interesting demarcation
between the natural and the social sciences. In former times this was
frequently cast as a debate between the supporters of Erklären (expla-
nation) and Verstehen (understanding) with those in the first camp
maintaining that the methods (or perhaps, “the method”) of the natural
sciences were entirely appropriate for gaining knowledge about human
social life, while those in the latter camp countering that the social sci-
ences required a distinctly humanistic, more literary approach appropri-
ate to their objects of study.10
Let’s start with a well-known remark from The Blue and the Brown
Books, cited by Dupré, where Wittgenstein suggests something like the
idea that assimilating philosophical to scientific contexts is centrally
implicated in generating metaphysical confusions:
Our craving for generality has another main source: our preoccupa-
tion with the method of science. I mean the method of reducing the
explanation of natural phenomena to the smallest possible number
of primitive natural laws; and, in mathematics, of unifying the treat-
ment of different topics by using a generalization. Philosophers con-
stantly see the method of science before their eyes, and are irresistibly
tempted to ask and answer questions in the way science does. This
tendency is the real source of metaphysics, and leads the philosopher
into complete darkness.11
16 Lost in the Ancient City
Dupré sympathizes with the main thrust of this remark, which points to
the lamentable consequences of philosophers’ tendency to treat different
kinds of problem in a one-size-fits-all manner, but at the same time he
strongly disagrees with what he takes to be Wittgenstein’s own simplistic
depiction of science here, something like a covering law view, perhaps sup-
plemented by the idea that chemistry and physics provide paradigmatic
examples of the sciences. As an avowed pluralist naturalist, Dupré resists
the idea that there is such a thing as “the method” of natural science, and
so only distortion can arise by contrasting philosophy, or anything else,
with a false monolith. Rather, Dupré rightly maintains that there are dif-
ferent sciences with distinct but overlapping methodologies, and so, not
surprisingly, one finds distinct but overlapping languages of science.
With Dupré’s view of the languages of the sciences in mind, we can
turn to his treatment of the following passage by Wittgenstein’s Philo-
sophical Investigations:
Thus far we have seen three critical terms, “ordinary language”, “natu-
ral science”, and “social science”. Yet the remark by Wittgenstein that
Dupré wants to criticize only seems to invoke the first two. But Dupré’s
main thesis is that the natural sciences and social sciences are not sub-
stantially different from one another and so it may not be clear what is
going on and where the questions lie. In a nutshell, one might say that
Dupré wants to criticize the following idea: since the social sciences aim
to study entities who happen to be ordinary language users, and since
ordinary language has some special characteristics, the languages and
methods of the social sciences will (of necessity?) be different from those
of the natural sciences. That is, at least, the idea that Dupré takes Witt-
genstein’s remark to support. And a bit later still, Dupré frames the main
issue by pointing to one of the special characteristics of human social life
that Wittgenstein is famous for foregrounding in his later writings on
language:
Judging from the general drift of his discussion and from his expressed
overall sympathy with Wittgenstein’s thought, Dupré seems to accept as
basically correct the view he ascribes to Wittgenstein, namely that rules
and norms are a central feature of ordinary language and therefore of
much in human social life.17 At any rate, he offers two examples of what
he thinks of as misguided arguments that purport to show that the study
of social phenomena is different in kind from the natural sciences. The
first comes from “normative linguistics” and involves the simple fact that
18 Lost in the Ancient City
some descriptions of English language sentence construction are true,
while others are false.
For his second example, Dupré discusses an idea he finds in Winch’s The
Idea of a Social Science, namely that while the natural scientist need only
heed the rules of her home discipline, the sociologist must in some sense
participate in two sets of rules, those of her home discipline and those of
her subjects. The passage that Dupré quotes from Winch reads as follows:
Though insisting on the continuity between the natural and social sci-
ences, Dupré makes clear that he is not asserting that there is no important
difference between them at all. That would belie his anti-reductionism.
He thus reassures us that he is “not, of course, suggesting that molecules
obey rules, or have meanings.”21 However, for Dupré, the recognition of
such a difference is best thought of as a result of a kind of empirical find-
ing, as though we discover through mere observation, say, normativity
or meaning when we observe human subjects; these are not understood
as constitutive features of social scientific investigation itself. Thus, the
social sciences don’t need to employ a special method or rely on any spe-
cial presuppositions different in kind from the natural sciences.
Both of Dupré’s examples, the one about English grammar and the
one about the churchgoers, would suffice for my purposes here. But since
Winch’s work has had so much historical importance for the philosophy
of the social sciences (not to mention for the reception of Wittgenstein’s
thought in this field of study), it seems more natural for me to follow
up the example concerning religion for pursuing my argument. Despite
his finding Winch’s argument “strange”, Dupré does think there is value
in an idea he finds in Winch, namely, that the findings of social science
should be rendered in ordinary language if they are to be of any use. And
this, in turn, requires that the sociologist’s descriptions of his subjects’
activities must be given in a thick language “in which central terms have
both descriptive and evaluative content”.22 Dupré then asks,
How deep a divide does this show between the natural and the
social sciences? I suggest that it shows a deep and familiar difference
between the subject matters, but no obvious systematic difference
between the epistemological standards that constitute these diverse
investigations as scientific.23
20 Lost in the Ancient City
Against this, I will argue in the next section that the thick description that
rightly characterizes much social science is already a mark of a significant
“epistemological” difference from the natural sciences, and that this is so
because of the distinct nature of the entities under investigation. In other
words, the epistemological difference belies an ontological, though not
metaphysical, one.
III
A
As a declared pluralist naturalist, Dupré is always careful to resist any
dogmatic insistence on the methodological or metaphysical unity of sci-
ence, since he wants to give proper due to the distinctness of various
scientific disciplines. Still, something in his confident declarations of
knowledge of the facts of normative linguistics and of his understanding
of churchgoing suggest to me that something is seriously wrong with his
overall argument that the social and natural sciences are fundamentally
on a continuum. In this section, I’ll try to bring out what I think the main
problem is by first imagining a case that touches on the churchgoers.
Imagine a little boy growing up in an English village in the 1950s. His
own family is secular, but many, or perhaps even most of the villagers still
participate in the rituals that regularly go on inside of the village church or
churches. (Which denomination they are doesn’t seem to be very impor-
tant for the example.) When he is very young, a particular building in the
village grabs his attention and he asks his parents “What’s that house?”
Perhaps they merely respond, “That’s a church”. Things are likely to
get more complicated rather quickly later when he asks what people are
doing on Sunday morning trudging up the hill to the church. Perhaps the
little boy’s parents, siblings, or neighbors will tell him things like “those
people are going to church because it’s Sunday”. Because his family is
secular, he may also hear things like “We don’t go to church, it’s all hocus
pocus”. When he is in kindergarten or grade school, he is likely to hear
things like “We have to go Christmas shopping soon”, “You’ll soon have
Christmas vacation”, “Shall we go to the Christmas fair?”, “There is an
Easter Egg hunt this Saturday”, “You get out of school early on Good
Friday this week”. Now all of this “knowledge” about the goings-on
inside and around a church might be imparted to him without his ever
having set foot inside of one. More to the point, it seems he will have
acquired this “knowledge” without having to form any hypotheses or
conduct any empirical testing in order to get a basic handle on an impres-
sive amount of church-related terminology and behavior. That is, long
before his secondary education has begun, a whole lot of what is meant
by words such as “God” and “worship” and other church-related vocab-
ulary will be “known” by the boy. Yet this “knowledge” will not really
amount to anything more than having acquired and mastered the terms
Lost in the Ancient City 21
that go into the language he speaks and the life he shares with many of
his co-villagers. Consequently, unless one believes it clarifies matters by,
for instance, introducing something like a distinction between knowing-
how and knowing-that, it seems like a mischaracterization simply to call
the little boy’s familiarity “knowledge” and to leave things at that.
Naturally, someone could object to my use of pejorative scare quotes
and point out that “knowledge” is an entirely appropriate expression for
the boy’s effortless ability to make “judgements of identity” regarding
what goes on in connection to the church, despite his never having been
inside one. This might be fine in an ordinary context, but in a philosophi-
cal context I would want to ask what, if any, evidence the little boy is
imagined to possess in having arrived at this supposed knowledge of the
various church words employed in the example. (How quickly one gets
back to Descartes’ predicament in the First Meditation: the “evidence” is
really pretty poor.) In fact, I think it’s difficult to conceive of the supposed
evidence as amounting to much more than the boy’s elders and others
having told him what a church is, what the Bible is, what worship is, etc.
And this hardly seems to count as evidence supporting any hypothesis at
all. In particular, just staying at the phenomenological level for now, it
seems, at the very least, rather far-fetched to assume that a child would
treat the utterances of those around him as evidence in support of his
“theory” of village religious life. Whether as part of his observing their
casual conversation or as part of their explicit teaching him English, the
boy would have had little reason to believe one way or the other that
his elders were or were not speaking truthfully or correctly when they
uttered words such as “church”, “Bible”, “worship”, etc. What can we
imagine the young boy doing when his elders point at a gray stone build-
ing and state “That’s a church, some people worship God there but it’s
all rubbish”? Do we imagine him processing this evidence, with the pos-
sibility this entails of his concluding they were perhaps mistaken about
the name of the structure or what goes on inside? What would evalua-
tion of evidence actually look like when the boy was learning to speak?
I want to say that such considerations of weighing evidence don’t even
get into the game at these early stages of learning language, and through
it, the social world, and that this is the main reason why Dupré’s claim to
know lots of things about the church-goers without participating much
in their practices strikes me as utterly misleading. The mere enculturation
of the child in my example will have involved him in a massive amount
of participant practices connected to their religion, even if he himself is
taught to, or comes to regard, religion as delusional. Dupré rightly notes
that the degree to which one’s participation in the actual practices of the
religion is rather thin, as in his own case, one likely lacks an intimate
understanding of some of the finer details of what the churchgoers are
up to. But the fact is that the boy in my example, budding atheist or no,
already participates rather massively in the way of life of the churchgo-
ers. And the same almost assuredly holds true of Dupré.
22 Lost in the Ancient City
I should stress that there is no inherent problem with Dupré’s use of
the word “knowledge” to describe his ability to understand what goes on
at church (or to understand elementary English grammar). My thought
example was meant to make such a use seem less compulsory or attractive
by showing that there need not be the slightest reason to regard such an
ability as the result of an activity involving the forming of hypotheses and
the collecting of data into a theory of church-going. Using “knowledge”
to describe what is learned in acquiring the basic concepts of church-
going provides no reason to see it as on any obvious sort of continuum
with the sorts of knowledge one hopes to acquire when one engages in
any form of scientific research. On the contrary, it seems to be signifi-
cantly discontinuous at precisely this point.
Still, even if such common sense considerations make it implausible
to conceive of the boy in my example as a kind of mini-epistemologist,
a philosopher could dig in his heels on this point because he may see no
alternative to casting his description of the boy’s relation to early facts of
language learning and social life in a substantially epistemological light.
But as I’ll argue later, doing so puts one on a very short path to skepti-
cism, not just about the existence of the “external world”, but about the
very intelligibility of both scientific and non-scientific discourses. Now
the insistence on a fundamentally epistemological relation might take dif-
ferent forms. Although it seems like a bizarre possibility, one could insist
on a kind of direct and infallible knowledge of linguistic and social facts,
on analogy with G.E. Moore’s claim to know of the existence of his two
hands as proof of an external world.24 I think that it is hugely unlikely
that Dupré would postulate this sociolinguistic variety of “Moorean
propositions” merely in order to salvage the use of “know” in the con-
text of his discussion. There seems something philosophically desperate
in characterizing our earliest relation to an unlimited number of obvious
linguistic and social facts in terms of epistemological success as Moore
understood this.25 I won’t pursue this particular avenue further.
Even if his paper is not explicit on this question, Dupré’s talk of conti-
nuity between ordinary language and the social sciences (and ultimately
the natural sciences) suggests an idea already contained in germ in my
discussion of the example of the little boy: that our primary relation to
culture and language is one of semantic interpretation, even if this is
not necessarily assumed to be the result of our conscious handling of
data and hypotheses. As we just saw, this second idea seemed implausibly
overly intellectualist, in large part I suspect, because of the way in which
it breaks so radically with common sense phenomenology. Instead, the
alternative, apparently more plausible, idea of interpretation here is that,
perhaps as a result of sub-personal psychological (or neurological, it
doesn’t really matter) processes, the child fits various uninterpreted (that
is to say meaningless) linguistic data into his overall theory of mean-
ing and truth.26 This idea, then, might provide the support for the sort
Lost in the Ancient City 23
of continuity between ordinary language, social scientific theories, and
natural scientific theories envisioned by Dupré.
B
In the precious section, I said that casting our description of the boy’s
relation to early facts of language learning and social life in a substan-
tially epistemological manner put us on a very short path to meaning
skepticism. To develop this idea in a direction that will make clearer what
I take to be misleading in Dupré’s discussion, I want to (re)introduce a
distinction made many years ago by Hubert Dreyfus between “theoreti-
cal holism” and “practical holism”.27 As Dreyfus explains it, theoretical
holism, made familiar by Quine, Davidson, and Føllesdal, among others
involves the idea that meaning is something we arrive at by translating
or interpreting otherwise preliminarily meaningless linguistic items, so
as to fit them into a semantic theory. The holism of our theory is one
consequence of the failure of various forms of linguistic reductionism or
meaning atomism traditionally favored by empiricists. As Quine explains
in his classic “Two Dogmas of Empiricism”,
The corporate body is construed as our overall theory of the world and it
is only our placing them into such a system that sentences or utterances
acquire meaning, gain their life, as it were. In The Web of Belief, Quine
writes in this vein,
If, as suggested earlier, the terms ‘reality and ‘evidence’ owe their
intelligibility to their applications in archaic common sense, why
24 Lost in the Ancient City
may we not then brush aside the presumptions of science? The rea-
son we may not is that science is itself a continuation of common
sense. The scientist is indistinguishable from the common man in his
sense of evidence, except that the scientist is more careful.30
[T]he important point for the natural sciences is that natural science
is successful precisely to the extent that these background practices
which make science possible can be taken for granted and ignored
by the science.42
In the study of human societies, on the other hand, taking practices for
granted is self-confounding:
Winch, at any rate, argued that a crucial difference between the social
and the natural sciences is that in the former, rules come in twice. The
natural scientist must learn the rules that concern the practice of her
science. She must learn, for example, when it is appropriate to say,
“there is an electron” or “that is a kinase”. More generally, scientists
28 Lost in the Ancient City
need to know when two situations are to be counted as belonging to
the same kind. But, according to Winch, the social scientist must also
have some kind of knowledge of the rules that govern the practice
she is investigating.44
C
I have tried to flesh out Dreyfus’ idea of practical holism in order to clarify
why a doctrine like theoretical holism obscures an important difference,
or discontinuity if you will, between the natural and the human sciences.
At the same time, I briefly alluded to the idea that failing to recognize this
difference by adopting theoretical holism is of a piece with succumbing to
a kind of meaning nihilism. When what is at stake is not just the nature
of the human sciences, but the intelligibility of language itself, the result
of treating ordinary language as just one more revisable theory represents
not merely a distorted view of science, but a fall into incoherence. What
accounts for both sides of this ruinous coin is a largely unquestioned
dogma in philosophy, namely that language consists primarily of, indeed
could only be, a set of normatively inert signs that require interpretation
to give them meaning: chirps and marks if you will that only receive the
breath of life through a theoretically sophisticated act of interpretation.46
It is in the scientific spirit of theoretical holism that my very act of
placing, say, an “acoustic blast” emanating from someone’s mouth into
a theory is always revisable in light of future evidence and so subject
to doubt.47 But in fact the doubtfulness here is of a much more radical
nature than might be assumed. This is so because doubt would have to
apply not only to justifying the semantic result of placing this or that
lexical item into my theory, but to something like the very (admittedly
Lost in the Ancient City 29
ungainly) concept: “evidence for placing an utterance into a semantic
theory”. Consequently, things would never get as far as weighing the
result of applying the theory of theoretical holism, since radical uncer-
tainty already creeps into the very idea of evidence itself, and so into the
very formulation of what it means for the theory to explain anything.
If, in other words, one already has to have some unquestioned concepts
in order to articulate what theoretical holism amounts to, which is a
theory supposedly accounting for how we acquire all of our concepts, it
is entirely unclear how theoretical holism as a general theory accounts for
very much at all.48 It may help to make this point even clearer by refer-
ring to Sellars’ term of art “The Myth of the Given”. Sellars coined this
expression to denote the traditional empiricist assumption that the senses
passively take in information from the environment that arrives, mythi-
cally as it were, already suitable for entering into rational relations.49 In
the context of theoretical holism one can say the following: if, in order
to treat some kinds (which kinds?) of acoustical blasts as evidence for
possible interpretations or some kinds (which kinds?) of ink marks on
paper as evidence for possible interpretations, it seems that I must treat
these “inputs” as already suitably packaged as evidence, even if only of a
fairly indeterminate kind. Although distinct in some respects from what
Sellars so devastatingly critiqued, one could well describe what I am
drawing attention to as theoretical holism’s own version of the myth. As
Cavell once remarked in responding to a similar case of empiricist excess,
“What these remarks come to is this: it is not clear what such an activity
as my-finding-out-what-I-mean-by-a-word would be”.50 In the current
context, this is a polite way of saying that theoretical holism is, so far as
I can see, useless (and, can one say with a clean conscience in our current
philosophical environment: “meaningless”?) as a general theory. One
could, I suppose, try to avoid this outcome by stipulating that whatever
one does fits this concept of “evidence for placing an utterance” This
saves theoretical holism by rendering it vacuous, and so again, useless.
I cannot emphasize strongly enough how important it is that my tenta-
tive rehabilitation of terms such as “meaningless” and “vacuous” in my
analysis not be read in the wrong light. I am not drawing support from
an antecedently held a priori principle, something like a verificationist
theory of meaning, and then on this basis concluding that theoretical
holism makes no sense. When I stated that theoretical holism is, so far as
I can tell “meaningless”, that should only be taken as a provisional dec-
laration of, first, my own inability to make any sense of the theory (for
the reasons just given) and, second, my frank suspicion that no clearer
articulation is forthcoming from the usual philosophical suspects.51 At
any rate, on the view of our relation to language at the core of theoreti-
cal holism, there can be no genuine questions, let alone correct answers
to real questions about what oneself means or what others mean with a
sentence or an utterance. The theory builds a pernicious sort of general
30 Lost in the Ancient City
meaning skepticism or meaning nihilism into the very nature of language
use and social interaction.52
It bears noting that however different in context and motivation, the
unquestioned assumption at the bottom of theoretical holism, namely
that language users must first deal with meaningless signs, is in effect
identical with a key assumption that produces Saul Kripke’s famous (or
infamous) reading of Wittgenstein as acquiescing in a form of meaning
skepticism in the remarks on rule-following in Philosophical Investiga-
tions.53 Kripke takes Wittgenstein’s remarks concerning the “wayward
child” to entail that because any sign such as “+ 2” can always be vari-
ously interpreted, it can never genuinely guide our writing out the series.54
We then appear to be faced with a paradox that forces on us one of two
choices: the first, commonly referred to as “Platonism” in the literature,
requires a super intellectualist feat whereby one “grasps in a flash” the
potentially infinite extendibility of the rule, thus arriving at an interpreta-
tion of the rule that itself cannot be interpreted.55 But, because we have
“no model” for such a superlative fact, it can appear as though we are
forced to look elsewhere for a solution to the question of how a lifeless
sign such as “+2” can genuinely guide our actions at all.56 Kripke takes
Wittgenstein in turn to maintain that the sheer regularity of outcome we
observe with pupils is generated by our early arithmetic training, while
the community provides a sort of faux normativity by keeping individual
deviation in check. We are thus led to the view that “correctly” develop-
ing a simple arithmetic rule, and more generally correctly applying other
concepts, amounts to no more than our regular responses to the presenta-
tion of otherwise normatively inert signs, accompanied we may imagine,
by something like a crowd barking out its “agreement”.
The problem here, which Wittgenstein’s text eventually makes toler-
ably clear, yet which Kripke fails to notice, is that a) within the Krikpen-
steinian paradox of interpretation the very terms “accord” and “conflict”
would admit of any application and hence have no application, b) the
paradox described previously itself rests on a misunderstanding, or per-
haps better an oversight that, c) there is a way of understanding the
expression for a rule that does not require the interpretation of otherwise
lifeless signs.57 Having no model of the superlative act of interpretation
we took as a requirement for understanding the meaning of a rule should
not imply that there was ever a genuine requirement that we failed to
fulfill. It implied rather that both the imagined requirement and the sense
of failure that precipitated Kripke’s skeptical solution were illusory.
The previous paragraph was intended to make vivid that, whatever
their differences, the strategic deployment that Wittgenstein makes of
“rule”, “sign”, and related terms through the voice of his interlocutor
in the service of developing the dialectic of his remarks on rule-following
on the one hand, and various full-throated iterations of theoretical
holism made by other writers on the other, actually exhibit a common
Lost in the Ancient City 31
assumption, namely that meaning and understanding require an incred-
ible feat of mental prowess, whether of the mind or the brain seems not
to matter much. When subjected to a theoretical gaze in the hunt for the
“primary quality” through which we hope to explain our capacity for
meaning and understanding, meaning itself only recedes from view and
we are left with mere “signs”.58 We end up instead with the strange idea
that we never really knew what we meant, said, or intended. Understand-
ing the meaning of an utterance or of a written sign thus comes to be
regarded as analogous to the dominant understanding of perception since
the dawn of modern philosophy: the subjective projection of a secondary
quality on to the world, not as an activity involving a capacity to take in
something genuine from the world or from those around us.
I have on several occasions used the term “ordinary language” in tan-
dem with terms like “social world” or “every-day world”. The conjunc-
tion was always superfluous. If there is no good reason to regard ordinary
language as a theory, then there is equally no good reason to regard the
everyday world as a world represented by that theory. The two may be
notionally separable, but in fact always come as one. We learn one as we
learn the other. This was stated beautifully over 60 years ago by Cavell in
a passage I quote at length:
But what is troubling about this? If you feel that finding out what
something is must entail investigation of the world rather than of
language, perhaps you are imagining a situation like finding out what
somebody’s name and address are, or what the contents of a will
or a bottle are, or whether frogs eat butterflies. But now imagine
that you are in your armchair reading a book of reminiscences and
come across the word “umiak”. You reach for your dictionary and
look it up. Now what did you do? Find out what “umiak” means,
or find out what an umiak is? But how could we have discovered
something about the world by hunting in the dictionary? If this seems
surprising, perhaps it is because we forget that we learn language and
learn the world together, that they become elaborated and distorted
together, and in the same places. We may also be forgetting how
elaborate a process the learning is. We tend to take what a native
speaker does when he looks up a noun in a dictionary as the charac-
teristic process of learning language. (As, in what has become a less
forgivable tendency, we take naming as the fundamental source of
meaning.) But it is merely the end point in the process of learning
the word. When we turned to the dictionary for “umiak” we already
knew everything about the word, as it were, but its combination: we
knew what a noun is and how to name an object and how to look
up a word and what boats are and what an Eskimo is. We were all
prepared for that umiak. What seemed like finding the world in a
dictionary was really a case of bringing the world to the dictionary.
32 Lost in the Ancient City
We had the world with us all the time, in that armchair; but we felt
the weight of it only when we felt a lack in it. Sometimes we will need
to bring the dictionary to the world. That will happen when (say) we
run across a small boat in Alaska of a sort we have never seen and
wonder – what? What it is, or what it is called? In either case, the
learning is a question of aligning language and the world.59
IV
In the last section, I devoted considerable effort to putting Dreyfus’
concept of practical holism to work in arguing both why theoretical
holism, as a view of our primary relation to language and social life,
is profoundly unclear, and second, by implication, why Dupré’s claim
of the continuity between ordinary language, the social sciences, and
the natural sciences, resting as it does on theoretical holism, is equally
unclear. On a few occasions in the midst of that discussion, I also sig-
naled that I was not, or at least should not be taken as trying to, rely
on something like a general principle of meaning for the basis of my
imputation of emptiness to theoretical holism. In this section, I want
to go further in warding off such suspicions by briefly distinguishing
my own intended use of practical holism from that of Dreyfus himself,
whose use of this idea tends to be marred by an apriorism, similar in
kind to other recognizable attempts to delineate the bounds of the say-
able or thinkable.
What I mean by “apriorism” in Dreyfus’ thought can be detected
in a passage that I used previously in my explication of his account of
practical holism (see p. 25). The relevant part of the passage runs as
follows:
The Quinean theoretical circle results . . . from the fact that all veri-
fication takes place within a theory, and that there is no way out of
the circle of holistic hypotheses and evidence. The Heideggerian her-
meneutic circle, on the other hand, says that this whole theoretical
activity of framing and confirming hypotheses takes place not only
Lost in the Ancient City 33
on the background of explicit or implicit assumptions but also on a
background of practices . . . which need not and indeed cannot be
included as specific presuppositions of the theory, yet already define
what could count as confirmation.60
[I]n order to be able to assert a truth, the actual subject [i.e. the
embodied coper] must in the first place have a world or be in the
world, that is, sustain round about it a system of meanings whose
34 Lost in the Ancient City
reciprocities, relationships and involvements do not require to be
made explicit in order to be exploited.64
A
Where does this leave us with the question of naturalism, pluralist or
otherwise, in the social sciences? Dupré’s reflections on Wittgenstein were
my starting point and so my discussion has up to now accordingly preoc-
cupied itself with the relations between ordinary language, the languages
of the social sciences, and the languages of the natural sciences. In resist-
ing Dupré’s continuity claim, I have been putting considerable pressure
on a particular idea of ordinary language as well as on other related
ideas. Specifically, I have argued that we overlook an important differ-
ence between the social and natural sciences if we fail to appreciate the
nature of ordinary language and the everyday world that it brings in tow.
Yet, my focus on language and theory thus far may seem to reflect an
excessive concern with mainly epistemological or methodological issues,
and so leave unaddressed the more ontological side of things. That is,
to some it might seem that we are left with questions as to whether the
very existence of normativity immanent in ordinary language practices
is itself something that ought to be explained by the sciences, natural or
social. Does the fact of norm-carrying creatures like us call for such an
explanation?
In recent times, John McDowell’s Mind and World has offered the
most significant, even if not completely unproblematic, negative rejoin-
der to the explanatory impulse embodied in this question. McDowell
worked to preserve the idea that thought and belief must be rationally
responsive to nature, and so to avoid the kind of coherentism he finds
for instance in Donald Davidson, a view from which McDowell sees our
rational capacities remaining permanent aliens in the world. McDowell’s
way of attempting to find this balance is to argue that conceptual capaci-
ties are drawn into action in sensual perception.68 McDowell writes in his
introduction,
B
I have been portraying second-philosophical, “sideways on” ideas about
using the natural sciences to explain or assess the normativity immanent
in ordinary language(s) as rife with confusion. If, however, one is looking
for a discipline that might show promise for critiquing our set of concep-
tual commitments, that discipline does not come from the natural sci-
ences, but from the social sciences, in particular, from certain approaches
within social anthropology and sociology. At least as these used to be
38 Lost in the Ancient City
commonly practiced up until fairly recently, these have the potential
to provide us with a comparative view, all the while remaining clearly
within the space of normativity. If we imagine a form of human life as
an orientation of sense in the world that is always and inextricably a bio-
logical and cultural hylomorphism, then it seems to be the case that given
our common biology, there can be the promise of investigating how these
different orientations are expressed that respects both their diversity and
commonality. (This used to be called the “psychic unity of mankind”.)
Of course, empirical findings can lead us to revise the specific conceptual
structures and norms we find to be most constitutive of whatever con-
ceptual capacities are required for knowledge and rationality. But, on
pain of incoherence, such revision will be the result of starting from the
current critical faculties we already have confidence in. These findings,
moreover, will not speak for themselves. Finally, I should stress that see-
ing through the illusion of the demand for a “sideways on” perspective or
for second philosophy in no way entails a kind of conservatism whereby
we are forced to just settle for whatever conceptual commitments we find
manifested in our ordinary language activities. These commitments can
themselves be material for critical reflection on both everyday life and on
the findings of science in a way that doesn’t require us to imagine any-
thing like an extra-logical space.
Next, while my reference earlier to “lived experience” should certainly
be taken to mark the importance I attach to a first-person perspective
when thinking about normativity and the social sciences, it should not
be taken to suggest any affinity for subjectivism. Everything I have said
about our inculcation into the norms of ordinary language makes clear
that I regard the agent’s perspective as only notionally separate from
the public everyday world. The conception of world in which we begin
to philosophize is thus crucial for clarifying certain key confusions in
debates about naturalism in the social sciences. If this world is the ordi-
nary social world that we learn to navigate when we learn to speak and
act, there is no reason to think that it can be understood either through
the logical equivalent of chemical decomposition or in terms of formal
structures.78 In fact, it is precisely the kind of reductionism pervading
much naturalist thinking in the philosophy of mind that, for all of its
pretensions to modern materialism, is no less “Cartesian” than was the
master himself. Building up normativity bit by non-normative psycholo-
gistic bit seems fated to trying to understand the normative entirely on
the side of the subject, leaving the context of the world out of the picture.
Yet there is simply no good reason for believing that approaches which
try to make sense of normativity by ignoring context would have any
chance of working, when the only examples we have of understanding
when actions are correctly performed or expressions are correctly used
are shaped by the context of their performance or the occasions of their
use. Conversely, the idea of treating worldly context itself as a subject
Lost in the Ancient City 39
for the natural sciences, however pluralistically one conceives of them,
strikes me as downright oxymoronic.
In my earlier discussion of theoretical holism, I suggested that treat-
ing ordinary language and its practices as a kind of theory distorts their
nature and so blocks from view, from the top down as it were, the imme-
diacy of the normativity these instantiate. Theoretical holism over intel-
lectualizes background practices and ordinary language by viewing them
through theoretical lenses and the result is that their immanent norma-
tivity becomes too remote to recognize. Naturalizing projects, on the
other hand, when taken as providing anything like a full story, blot out
the very idea of normativity, including the rationality found in scien-
tific enterprises themselves. Such “bottom-up” strategies that attempt to
explain the very existence of such normative features of our lives in non-
normative natural-scientific terms make any notion we might have of
normativity, either theoretical or practical, equally unavailable to under-
standing by failing to accommodate the very idea of such a thing.79 If
theoretical holism starts with uninterpreted chirps, bald naturalism starts
and ends with brute chirping. Both invite the emptiness that comes with a
refusal to acknowledge “the natural phenomenon that is normal human
life is itself already shaped by meaning and understanding”.80
VI
In a recent introduction to the philosophy of the social sciences, we find
the following passage in the chapter devoted to the hotly contested issue
of norms:
Notes
1. See John Dupré, “Social Science: City Center or Leafy Suburb,” Philosophy
of the Social Sciences 46, no. 6 (2016): 548–64.
2. An early expression of John Dupré’s pluralism can be found in The Disorder
of Things: Metaphysical Foundations of the Disunity of Science (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1993). More recently, see John Dupré, Processes of
Life: Essays in the Philosophy of Biology (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2012).
44 Lost in the Ancient City
3. See for example John Dupré, “It Is Not Possible to Reduce Biological Expla-
nations to Explanations in Chemistry and/or Physics,” in Contemporary
Debates in Philosophy of Biology, ed. Francisco J. Ayala and Robert Arp
(Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2010), 32–47. See also with A. Powell, “From
Molecules to Sytems: The Importance of Looking Both Ways,” Studies in
History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 40, no. 1
(March 2009): 54–64.
4. John Dupré, “How to Be Naturalistic Without Being Simplistic in the Study
of Human Nature,” in Naturalism and Normativity, ed. Mario de Caro and
David Macarthur (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 289.
5. My hedging language is due to there being unobjectionable uses of “know”
that fall “in between” more dubious cases that philosophers are prone to mis-
characterize on the one hand, and less controversial cases on the other. The
dubious cases include, famously, “I know I have a hand”, where it requires
an effort to imagine a context in which such an utterance could be seriously
made. The uncontroversial cases include examples more evidently connected
to a theory, such as “I know that Carbon can form 4 SP3 bonding orbitals”.
As an intermediate case I have in mind a particular example of Dupré's to
which I will return later.
6. What I mean by “undergird” will become clearer later in the paper. It does
not mean “provide a foundation for”.
7. Another recent paper that I think also goes wrong, in large measure because
it fails to appreciate the significance of ordinary language, is Julie Zahle’s,
“Methodological Anti-Naturalism, Norms, and Participant Observation,” in
Normativity and Naturalism in the Philosophy of the Social Sciences, ed.
Mark Risjord (New York: Routledge, 2016), 78–95. Among Zahle’s argu-
ments against the idea that the social sciences make use of a unique and
ineliminable method, and so are relevantly distinct from the natural sciences,
is that ethological studies of higher mammals such as great apes may well
require forms of participant observation strikingly similar to those of the
social anthropologist. The example Zahle uses here is a fascinating one, but
she neglects to mention that a) there are many things we simply wouldn’t say
of a gorilla that we would routinely say of a human being, and b) there is no
possibility of learning the language of a gorilla, let alone interviewing one.
Ethnography and ethology are different.
8. Although Wittgenstein is clearly a key figure in the background for much of
my essay (hardly surprising since Dupré takes his own starting point from a
remark in the Philosophical Investigations), my main aim in referring to his
thought in Part IV and throughout the essay is not exegetical, but rather to
make more visible a way of reading his later work that, even if it has received
some attention in discussions of naturalism in philosophy more generally,
has not in my view been adequately brought to bear in disputes concerning
naturalism pertinent to the philosophy of the social sciences.
9. Dupré, “Social Science,” 557–58.
10. Even if I strongly disagree with his substantive conclusions, a nice discus-
sion to the background of this question can be found in Paul A. Roth, “The
Philosophy of Social Science in the Twentieth Century: Analytic Traditions:
Reflections on the Rationalitätstreit,” in The Sage Handbook of the Philos-
ophy of Social Sciences, ed. Ian Jarvie and Jesus Zamora-Bonilla, 103–18
(London: Sage, 2011). See also 2013 of Cahill, where I lay out some of my
disagreements with Roth.
11. Ludwig Wittgenstein, The Blue and Brown Books, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Black-
well, 1969), 18. Note that Wittgenstein does not claim that “our preoccu-
pation with the method of science” is the only source of our craving for
generality.
Lost in the Ancient City 45
12. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, ed. and trans. G. E. M.
Anscombe, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), §18. Henceforth PI. Quoted
by Dupré, “Social Science,” 1.
13. See for example PI §98, §108, §109, §116, §124, §132.
14. Dupré, “Social Science,” 549. Despite Dupré’s use of the pejorative sound-
ing “charming metaphor” to describe Wittgenstein’s remark, the tone of his
paper makes it evident that he is no anti-Wittgensteinian naturalist. Indeed,
Dupré has relied explicitly on insights taken from Wittgenstein to critique a
kind of Cartesianism that runs through much evolutionary psychology. See
his Human Nature and the Limits of Science (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2001), 31–36.
15. Dupré, “Social Science,” 553.
16. Ibid., 554.
17. Dupré doesn’t discuss practices in his paper. Depending on how one under-
stands the notion of rules in later Wittgenstein’s writing, this might already
suggest trouble. Contrary what seems to be a popularized view, Wittgenstein
never claims in Philosophical Investigations that rule-following is what is
fundamental to language use, let alone social life. If anything, he says that
many of our concepts are unbounded by rules (see PI § 68). And at PI §202
he writes that “ ‘obeying a rule’ is a practice”. This suggests that participating
in a practice, not rule-following per se, is the more important notion at work
in the remarks on rule-following.
18. Dupré, “Social Science,” 555–56.
19. Peter Winch, The Idea of a Social Science and Its Relation to Philosophy
(London: Routledge, 1958), 86–88. Cited in Dupré, “Social Science,” 557.
20. Dupré, “Social Science,” 557. Winch doesn’t use the notion of participation
in the quotation cited by Dupré. Instead he speaks of the need for the sociolo-
gist to have some kind of “religious feeling”. I won’t explore here the possible
significance of this discrepancy.
21. Dupré, “Social Science,” 558. This suggests a serious distance on Dupré’s
part from other naturalist pluralists such as Paul Roth, who, following
Quine, finds the very idea of meaning anathema. See Roth, “The Philosophy
of Social Science in the Twentieth Century.”
22. Dupré, “Social Science,” 558.
23. Ibid., 559.
24. See G. E. Moore, “Proof of an External World,” Proceedings of the British
Academy XXV (1939).
25. We read at On Certainty §32: It's not a matter of Moore’s knowing that
there’s a hand there, but rather we should not understand him if he were to
say “Of course I may be wrong about this”. We should ask “What is it like
to make such a mistake as that?” – e.g. what's it like to discover that it was
a mistake? Moore’s own example does not of course deal with the epistemic
status of our earliest enculturation, but there are in any case serious concep-
tual confusions in his approach to knowledge. See also Ludwig Wittgenstein,
On Certainty, ed. G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright, trans. Denis
Paul and G. E. M. Anscombe (New York: Harper, 1972), §93, §369–70.
26. Or, if it makes little sense to speak of the child “fitting” data at the beginning
of his interpretive exercise, one might use the passive and speak of the data
“getting” fit into an overall theory.
27. Hubert Dreyfus, “Holism and Hermeneutics,” The Review of Metaphysics
34, no. 1 (September 1980): 3–23. My choice of Dreyfus’ work in this area is
not only due to what I find profoundly right about it, but as will become clear
in the next section, also due to what I find instructively wrong with it.
28. See W. V. O. Quine, “Two Dogmas of Empiricism,” in From a Logical Point
of View (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1953), 41; See also Donald
46 Lost in the Ancient City
Davidson, “Radical Interpretation,” in Inquiries into Truth and Interpreta-
tion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 125–40. Of course, not all
semantic or theoretical holists are created equal. Quine thinks it’s intelligi-
ble to begin our epistemological enterprise with mere “surface irritations”,
while Davidson somewhat more plausibly maintains that our truth-theory
has to start with more readily observable objects, since he believes the notion
of “evidence” available to us on Quine’s understanding of the “Humean
condition” is simply too thin to support any robust conceptions of meaning
and truth. See W. V. O. Quine, “Epistemology Naturalized,” in Ontological
Relativity and Other Essays (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969),
69–90; Donald Davidson, “Meaning, Truth, and Evidence,” in Truth, Lan-
guage, and History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 47–62.
29. W. V. O. Quine and J. S. Ullian, The Web of Belief (New York: Random
House, 1970), 52–53. Quoted in Dreyfus, “Holism and Hermeneutics,” 6.
30. W. V. O. Quine, The Ways of Paradox and Other Essays (Cambridge: Har-
vard University Press, 1976), 233. Quoted in part in Dreyfus, “Holism and
Hermeneutics,” 6.
31. Dreyfus, “Holism and Hermeneutics,” 6.
32. My qualification comes from my wanting leave space for something like a
pre-cultural, biological dimension.
33. Thus, we see that practical holism pertains not only to practical activities
such as carpentry or dancing.
34. I am not claiming that “theoretical” = “sharply defined”, or that background
understanding is always semantically messy, so to speak. Dupré makes clear
for his part, moreover, that he thinks there is plenty of fuzziness even in the
more explicitly theoretical parts of scientific activity. See Dupré, “Social Sci-
ence,” 561.
35. Dreyfus, “Holism and Hermeneutics,” 7. Cf. Wittgenstein, On Certainty,
§94, §105, §162.
36. See Dupré, “Social Science,” 557–58. See also Wittgenstein, On Certainty,
§341, §344. This includes contexts in which we wish to engage our back-
ground understanding in order to critique it. I will say more about this
later. Dagfinn Føllesdal’s paper “Hermeneutics and Hypothetical-Deductive
Method” exhibits to my mind one of the starkest misunderstandings imagi-
nable of the difference between the sense of “interpretation” in the herme-
neutic tradition and that in the Quine-Davidson tradition, that is, between
practical and theoretical holism as Dreyfus describes these. In effect, Føllesdal
assumes that the features of our background relevant for understanding a
historically distant text (and so presumably a foreign culture) can be straight-
forwardly treated as hypotheses and so subjected to a method of falsification.
Føllesdal thus not only conflates theoretical and practical holism, he almost
seems to take a perverse pride in erasing what is distinctive of the hermeneu-
tic tradition in his treatment of historical pre-judgements (our background
understanding) as a set of theoretical hypotheses. See Dagfinn Føllesdal,
“Hermeneutics and the Hypothetical-Deductive Method,” in Readings in the
Philosophy of Social Science, ed. Michael Martin and Lee McIntyre (Cam-
bridge: MIT Press, 1994), 233–45.
37. Dreyfus, “Holism and Hermeneutics,” 9–10. There are two ideas contained
in this passage from which I would want to distance myself. One is the undue
prominence it seems to give to confirmation or verification for the under-
standing of science. This often goes with an uncritical willingness on the part
of interpretivists like Dreyfus, Winch, and Charles Taylor to accept something
like a covering model view of science, prevalent among positivists. Dupré
Lost in the Ancient City 47
suggests (see “Social Science,” 563) that Wittgenstein himself may have held
some such view. At any rate, this question is not directly relevant for my
purposes here and so I will not pursue it. Roth, “The Philosophy of Social
Science in the Twentieth Century” has a nice discussion of this question. The
second idea concerns Dreyfus’ apparently logical use of “cannot”. I will say
more about this later.
38. Dupré, “Social Science,” 549.
39. See Wittgenstein, On Certainty, §204–5. Insisting on the intelligibility of sci-
ence apart from ordinary practice in effect amounts to a form of metaphysical
realism, or, what amounts in my view to the same thing, a reintroduction of
a sharp dichotomy between the contexts of discovery and justification. What-
ever else other philosophers of science may think about such a step, I have my
doubts that Dupré has any interest in taking it.
40. This will presumably not be the case, however, for the philosopher or histo-
rian of natural science.
41. My way of putting things here is likely to encounter resistance from either
philosophers or ethologists who regard gorillas, for example, as exhibiting
behavior that calls for participant observation in order to understand them.
A point of enormous importance here, manifest in my frequent practice of
including “social world” along with “ordinary language”, is first that these
two are only notionally distinct ideas, and second that on my understanding
of what a social world is, a gorilla doesn’t have a language, and ipso facto any
background understanding.
42. Dreyfus, “Holism and Hermeneutics,” 16.
43. Ibid., 17.
44. Dupré, “Social Science,” 557.
45. Dreyfus, “Holism and Hermeneutics,” 20.
46. See PI §432.
47. The apt term “acoustic blast” is from John Searle, even though I am not
claiming that Searle is a theoretical holist. See John Searle, Speech Acts: An
Essay in the Philosophy of Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1969), 3.
48. See Wittgenstein, On Certainty, §114–15, §126.
49. Wilfrid Sellars, “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind,” in The Founda-
tions of Science and the Concepts of Psychoanalysis, Minnesota Studies in the
Philosophy of Science, ed. H. Feigl and M. Scriven (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 1956), 127–96.
50. Stanley Cavell, Must We Mean What We Say? A Book of Essays (New York:
Scribner, 1969), 39.
51. See Cora Diamond, “Criss-Cross Philosophy,” in Wittgenstein at Work:
Method in the Philosophical Investigations, ed. Erich Ammereller and Eugen
Fischer (London: Routledge, 2004), 201–20. Elsewhere, Diamond describes
this manner of philosophizing as “invitational” in the sense that any conclu-
sion one reaches regarding the emptiness of a philosophical thesis is always
provisional and only always following an invitation for one’s opponent to
clarify the meaning of the thesis. See Cora Diamond, “The Hardness of the
Soft: Wittgenstein’s Early Thought About Skepticism,” in Varieties of Skep-
ticism: Essays After Kant, Wittgenstein, and Cavell, ed. Andrea Kern and
James Conant (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2014), 145–82.
52. In Philosophical Foundations of the Social Sciences, Harold Kincaid raises
the question whether the theoretical holistic naturalized epistemology he
advocates in the social sciences rules out skepticism by “fiat”, but only to
drop the issue on the grounds that skepticism poses no greater problem for
48 Lost in the Ancient City
the social sciences than it does for the natural sciences. By “skepticism”, Kin-
caid clearly means at least “external world” skepticism; whether he would
also include other minds skepticism is less certain. At any rate, Kincaid refers
in passing to Barry Stroud’s paper “The Significance of Naturalized Episte-
mology,” Midwest Studies in Philosophy 6, no. 1 (1981). In a few footnotes
to that very illuminating paper, Barry Stroud comes tantalizingly close to
hitting on the same problem with theoretical holism that I am pressing here.
Stroud’s discussion does not touch on meaning, however, but on the status of
any notion of an external world that we might be able to make sense of on
Quine’s views. Stroud casts the issue in terms of two ways that Quine might
understand the “Humean predicament” in which each of us supposedly finds
himself. The first way, which is presumably Quine’s actual view, is that the
data of the senses gives us no deductively sufficient justification for our beliefs
about the external world. Scientific investigation remains fragile, but intelligi-
ble on this view. The second way to understand the “Humean predicament”,
what Stroud argues Hume believed himself to have actually shown, is that the
senses provide us with no evidence at all, deductive or inductive, for believing
in so much as the very idea of an external world. Had Stroud made more of
this question, it would, I think, have rightly pushed his discussion of Quine’s
project towards what James Conant has recently termed a “Kantian” version
of skepticism rather than a mere “Cartesian” version associated with the first
understanding of the “Humean predicament”. Read this way, Kant’s analysis
brings us to the brink of attributing meaning skepticism to Hume (and of
course to Quine as well). See Harold Kincaid, Philosophical Foundations of
the Social Sciences (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 22; Barry
Stroud, “The Significance of Naturalized Epistemology,” Midwest Studies in
Philosophy 6, no. 1 (1981): 455–72, especially footnotes 20, 31, 34. See also
James Conant, “Two Varieties of Skepticism,” in Rethinking Epistemology,
ed. Guenter Abel and James Conant, vol. 2 (Berlin: Walter De Gruyter, 2012),
1–73.
53. Saul A. Kripke, Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language: An Elementary
Exposition (Oxford: Blackwell, 1982).
54. See Warren Goldfarb, “Kripke on Wittgenstein on Rules,” Journal of Phi-
losophy, 82 (September 1985): 485.
55. See John McDowell, “Wittgenstein on Following a Rule,” in Essays on Witt-
genstein’s Later Philosophy, ed. Crispin Wright (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1984),
325–63.
56. PI §192.
57. Ibid., §201–2.
58. In fact, it’s not even obvious that we are left with mere signs. If a sign is really
only intelligible as what we are left with after we prescind from a full-blown
symbol of meaningful language, then the idea that we can make intelligi-
ble the notion of sign without first having some grasp of meaning is itself
dubious.
59. Cavell, Must We Mean What We Say?, 19–20.
60. Dreyfus, “Holism and Hermeneutics,” 9–10 (emphasis added).
61. Dreyfus, “Holism and Hermeneutics,” 16.
62. Ibid., 17. David Stern seems to follow Dreyfus here in two papers that explain
the significance of practical holism for the social sciences. See his “Practices,
Practical Holism, and Background Practices,” in Heidegger, Coping, and
Cognitive Science: Essays in Honor of Hubert L. Dreyfus, ed. Mark Wrathall
and Jeff Malpas (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000), 66 and “The Practical Turn,”
in The Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of the Social Sciences, ed. Stephen
Lost in the Ancient City 49
P. Turner and Paul Roth (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), 185–206. For a critique
of attempts to use practice theory as an a priori limit to thought and language
in Dreyfus, Pierre Bourdieu and Theodore Schatzki, see my “The Habitus,
Coping Practices and the Search for the Ground of Action,” Philosophy of
the Social Sciences 46, no. 5 (2016): 498–524.
63. Hubert Dreyfus, “Overcoming the Myth of the Mental: How Philosophers
Can Profit from the Phenomenology of Everyday Expertise (APA Pacific Divi-
sion Presidential Address 2005),” Proceedings and Addresses of the Amer-
ican Philosophical Association 79, no. 2 (November 2005): 14 (emphasis
added).
64. Hubert Dreyfus, “Return of the Myth of the Mental,” Inquiry 50, no. 4
(August 2007): 357 (brackets in original).
65. In his debate with Dreyfus, McDowell argued primarily for what he termed
the “situated specific” nature of concepts and rationality and, based on this,
claimed there was no need for a ground floor such as Dreyfus maintained.
He did not focus there on the very intelligibility of such a notion, but has
done so elsewhere. This exchange originally appeared in Inquiry 50, no. 4
(August 2007) as ‘What Myth?’ (McDowell), ‘Return of the Myth of the
Mental’ (Dreyfus), ‘Response to Dreyfus’ (McDowell), and ‘Response to
McDowell’ (Dreyfus).
66. The considerations I am rehearsing here draw openly on what I take to be
some of the most seminal writings on Wittgenstein from the last 30 years,
writing that constitutes much of what have come to be known alternately as
“resolute” approaches to the Tractatus or “quietist” approaches to his later
work. (I realize that these terms and their relations are themselves subjects
of dispute.) These writings include Cora Diamond, The Realistic Spirit: Witt-
genstein, Philosophy, and the Mind (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991); Cora
Diamond, “Ethics, Imagination and the Method of Wittgenstein's Tracta-
tus,” in The New Wittgenstein, ed. Alice and Rupert Read (London: Rout-
ledge, 2000), 149–73; Cora Diamond, “Rules: Looking in the Right Place,”
in Attention to Particulars: Essays in Honor of Rush Rhees, ed. D. Z. Phillips
and Peter Winch (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989), 12–34; Diamond,
“Criss-Cross Philosophy” (see note 51 for reference); James Conant, “The
Method of the Tractatus,” in From Frege to Wittgenstein: Perspectives on
Early Analytic Philosophy, ed. Erich Reck (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2002), 374–462; James Conant, “The Search for Logically Alien Thought:
Descartes, Kant, Frege, and the Tractatus,” Philosophical Topics 20, no. 1
(Fall 1991): 115–80; John McDowell, “Meaning and Intentionality in Witt-
genstein’s Later Philosophy,” in The Wittgenstein Legacy, ed. Peter A. French,
Theodore E. Uehling, and Howard K. Wettstein (Notre Dame: University of
Notre Dame Press, 1992), 40–52; John McDowell, Mind and World (Cam-
bridge: Harvard University Press, 1994); John McDowell, “Wittgensteinian
Quietism,” in Common Knowledge 15:3 (Durham: Duke University Press,
2009), 365–72. There is a large literature pertaining to the resolute reading of
the Tractatus. For a fairly recent overview, see Silver Bronzo, “The Resolute
Reading and Its Critics: An Introduction to the Literature,” Wittgenstein-
Studien 3 (2012): 45–80.
67. See Wittgenstein, On Certainty §99.
68. “The view I am recommending is that even though experience is passive, it
draws into operation capacities that genuinely belong to spontaneity”. John
McDowell, Mind and World (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994),
13. Henceforth MW.
69. MW, XX (emphasis in original).
50 Lost in the Ancient City
70. See Ibid., 77–78, 83–84, 88, 91–95, 109–10, 123–24, 176–78. “Rampant
Platonism” is McDowell’s expression for the idea that such normativity as
we typically find in humans must be regarded as non-natural, perhaps even as
other-worldly. Such a dualistic idea may no longer find many explicit adher-
ents, but the vision of rationality it embodies remains implicit in good deal of
mainstream philosophy nevertheless.
71. See MW, 84, 87–88, 95, 123–25, 183. By employing “Bildung”, McDowell
flags an affiliation of his thought not only with that of Hans Georg Gadamer,
but by extension with that of Martin Heidegger. In broader historical terms,
this also connects McDowell’s strand of Analytic philosophy with the Ger-
man Romantic tradition, in particular with that tradition as represented by
Herder. Probably no one has written more eloquently on that tradition in
philosophy than Charles Taylor. Most recently, see his The Language Animal
(Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2016).
72. Some who agree with McDowell that both bald naturalism and the Myth of
the Given are to be rejected are nevertheless deeply critical of his account of
human perceptual capacities. Charles Travis is perhaps the most prominent
example of this type of critic. Others have pointed to an uncritical willingness
on McDowell’s part, at least in Mind and World, to take on more traditional
philosophical baggage than is warranted. For a critique of Mind and World
in this vein from the perspective of ordinary language philosophy, see Avner
Baz, “On When Words Are Called For – Cavell, McDowell, and the Wording
of Our World’,” Inquiry 46, no. 4 (December 2003): 473–500.
73. On these two criticisms, see Peter Godfrey-Smith, “Dewey, Continuity, and
McDowell,” in Naturalism and Normativity, ed. Mario de Caro and David
Macarthur (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 304–21.
74. See for example Dorit Bar-On, “Minding the Gap: In Defense of Mind-
Mind Continuity,” in Wittgenstein and Naturalism, ed. Kevin M. Cahill and
Thomas Raleigh (New York: Routledge, 2018), 177–2018. Bar-on’s paper
is primarily directed against Davidson, although she makes it clear that she
regards Brandom and McDowell as targets as well.
75. See for example Penelope Maddy, Second Philosophy: A Naturalistic
Method (Oxford University Press, 2007). Perhaps more surprising is that
McDowell’s work is also passed over in Maddy’s more recent book on
Wittgenstein, Penelope Maddy, The Logical Must: Wittgenstein on Logic
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). There isn’t space here to enter
into the lengthy discussion that the point deserves, so I will only say that
given my reading of McDowell and Wittgenstein as in substantive agree-
ment on the prospects for constructive philosophy, the violence that Mad-
dy’s book does to Wittgenstein’s thought on precisely this issue makes it
evident that she would not be amenable to McDowell’s (or my) standpoint
in the least.
76. On pp. 123–24 of Mind and World, McDowell makes it clear that he is aware
of the issue of emergence, understood as nature making possible creatures
with our cognitive equipment. But as he notes there, this is a long way from
calling for a “constructive philosophical account of meaning.”
77. Here it might be apt to repeat that the same reasoning applies mutatis mutan-
dis to practice theorists who try to ground normativity and meaning in prac-
tices. Practices and linguistic use may be carriers of normativity, as in where
we might look to see the meaning of an action or of an utterance (which
is a subspecies of action), but as soon as we look to practices as somehow
providing an ontological ground for meaning, we are asking for trouble. On
this see Denis McManus, “Rules, Regression and the ‘Background’: Dreyfus,
Lost in the Ancient City 51
Heidegger and McDowell,” European Journal of Philosophy 16, no. 3
(December 2008): 432–58.
78. Which is not to say that we ought to adopt some kind of metaphysical organi-
cism or functionalism.
79. Since this essay is devoted to the subject of naturalism in the social sciences,
I don’t have space to discuss the strikingly parallel sense in which similar
issues crop up in post-structuralist accounts of human life. On this see Mark
Bevir, “Situated Agency: A Post-Foundational Alternative to Autonomy,” in
Finite but Unbounded: New Approaches in Philosophical Anthropology, ed.
Kevin M. Cahill, Martin Gustafsson, and Thomas Schwarz-Wenzer, Berlin
Studies in Knowledge Research 12 (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2017), 47–66.
80. McDowell, “Meaning and Intentionality in Wittgenstein’s Later Philosophy,”
50–51. In Mind and World, McDowell is more apt to call second-philosophical
bridging operations unnecessary. But in some of his treatments of Wittgen-
stein on rule-following, where the deconstructive aspect of his thinking is
much more visible, he is more likely to call them empty or incoherent, which
of course also makes them unnecessary. See “Meaning and Intentionality”
(reference note 65) and “Wittgenstein on Following a Rule” (reference note
55). See also Stanley Cavell, “The Argument of the Ordinary,” in Conditions
Handsome and Unhandsome: The Constitution of Emersonian Perfectionism
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), esp. 67–68.
81. Mark Risjord, Philosophy of Social Science: A Contemporary Introduction
(New York: Routledge, 2014), 176.
82. Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (London: Duck-
worth, 1985), 83–84. In my earlier discussion of theoretical holism (see Part
III), the more overtly linguistic aspects of Quinean-inspired thought were
relevant, in particular, ideas such as evidence and meaning. In this passage,
MacIntyre is focusing on Quine’s ontology, in particular that which comes
out in his views about extensionality, and thus on intentional expressions that
purport to refer to things like beliefs and desires, entities that are anathema
to Quine’s metaphysics. Because Quine’s understanding of language is so self-
consciously austere, however, the two sides of his thought, what we might
ordinarily think of as semantic unit versus brute signal, are only notionally
separate.
83. Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books,
1973), 5.
84. Paul Roth, “Beyond Understanding: The Career of the Concept of Under-
standing in the Human Sciences,” in The Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy
of the Social Sciences, ed. Stephen P. Turner and Paul A. Roth (Oxford: Black-
well, 2003), 315.
85. Ibid.
86. Cora Diamond, “How Long Is the Standard Metre in Paris?,” in Wittgenstein
in America, ed. Timothy G. McCarthy and Sean C. Stidd (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 2001), 104–39, is a brilliant treatment of this kind of confusion. While
her paper is primarily concerned with Kripke’s view that units of measure-
ment refer to “chunks” of space or time in ways completely cut off from our
practices of measurement, her distinction between “transitive” and “intransi-
tive” employments of words also seems appropriate for deflating criticism of
“meaning” in Roth’s Quinean attacks on interpretivism and hermeneutics.
See “How Long Is the Standard Metre in Paris?” 104–39.
87. It is important not to confuse the emphasis that writers such as Taylor or
Geertz for example place on the need for interpretation in the social sci-
ences, with the role “interpretation” plays in the dialectic of Wittgenstein’s
52 Lost in the Ancient City
rule-following remarks. Paul Roth seems to equate the two when he labels
Taylor an “interpretivist” and then argues that Wittgenstein, as read by
Kripke, has shown the interpretivsit position to involve an impossible task,
finding the final interpretation that cannot itself be interpreted. But there is
nothing in Taylor’s use of “interpretation” that licenses the equating of their
use of this term with Wittgenstein’s ridicule of the same token. On the con-
trary, Wittgenstein explicitly makes space for an everyday use of “interpreta-
tion” of a rule at PI §201: “But we ought to restrict the term ‘interpretation’
to the substitution of one expression of the rule for another”. This is precisely
what the hermeneuticist does when she offers an interpretation of a text,
albeit in a much more complicated context. See Roth, “The Philosophy of
Social Science in the Twentieth Century: Analytic Traditions: Reflections on
the Rationalitätstreit,” 103–18.
88. This is of course a mainly descriptive enterprise. I have nothing to say here
about the various types of political activism that have come to dominate
much of the field. That would be a whole different essay.
89. This may sound like an echo of Heidegger’s call for fundamental ontology in
Being and Time, but it is not. Despite my sympathy with much of that book
(and for Heidegger’s work generally), much of his rejection of the significance
of anthropology in Being and Time is simply dogmatic. Worse, his later claim
that only the West had an evolving “understanding of Being” (Seinsverständ-
nis), even if the claim was shaped by his specific understanding of Europe’s
inheritance from the ancient Greeks, was silly, if not appalling.
90. In addition to works by Geertz, I am thinking of some of the classic work
in anthropology produced by Victor Turner, Mary Douglas, and Marshall
Sahlins as well as those in cultural psychology by Jerome Bruner and Rich-
ard Schweder. More recently, Mark Bevir and Jason Blakely have taken up
this mantle in political science. See their Interpretive Social Science: An Anti-
Naturalist Approach (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018).
91. Given the repeated and crashing failures of the micro-foundations program
in economics, as well as the results of U.S. foreign policy when it has relied
heavily on formal methods, it is depressing that this still needs saying.
2 The Grammar of Conflict
Kevin M. Cahill
“I am afraid we are not rid of God because we still have faith in grammar.”1
I
In what follows, I discuss some questions raised by recent work of Cora
Diamond in which she has criticized arguments made by Peter Winch that
try to show the logical limitations of what can be said about alien systems
of thought and practice.2 In Part II, I provide some brief historical back-
ground to my discussion. In Part III, I summarize Diamond’s main criti-
cisms against the Winchian sort of view. In Part IV, I examine Diamond’s
view and its implications for the kinds of questions we can ask about the
possibility of criticism between systems of thought with different gram-
mars. In particular, I look briefly at an intersection between her views and
those of Hilary Putnam’s on the question of realism. In Part V, I address
some issues and possible criticisms arising from my way of setting things
out in Part IV. In Part VI, I discuss two consequences of what I take to be
Diamond’s views, one pragmatic and the other historical.
II
In his now classic paper from 1964, “Understanding a Primitive Soci-
ety”, Peter Winch attacked E.E. Evans-Pritchard’s (by then already
classic) ethnographic work Witchcraft, Oracles, and Magic Among the
Azande.3 Evans-Pritchard had claimed to find a contradiction at the
heart of the Zande system of magic, a contradiction that arises from
the Zande view that witchcraft is an inherited substance.4 This view
entails that all members of a clan with one witch are themselves
witches, since the Zande clan is a group related biologically through
the male line.5 This would mean that the whole system of witchcraft
either was pointless, since asserting that someone was a witch would
in effect assert nothing more than clan membership. Or it would mean
that the thought that some people in the clan are witches while others
are not contradicts the underlying premise about witchcraft substance
54 The Grammar of Conflict
transmission. It is worth underlining that Evans-Pritchard is not at all
dismissive of Zande magical practices. He writes with great sensitivity
in helping the reader come to appreciate the role these practices played
in Zande life: “We have to see”, he says, “how the drive behind all acts
of witchcraft is to be looked for in emotions and sentiments common to
all men – malice, jealousy, greed, envy, backbiting, slander, and so on”.6
In the c oncluding chapter, moreover, we read
III
Before I turn to discussing the upshot of Diamond’s arguments, there
are two points that I want to make about her interpretation of Winch.
The first point is that she does not take his position to be merely an
expression of anti-scientism. Given the way Winch formulates his objec-
tion to Evans-Pritchard in the previous section, that would be an easy
conclusion to draw. Winch was anti-scientistic, and famously so, but as
56 The Grammar of Conflict
Diamond makes clear, his main point is also meant to cut a good deal
deeper. She writes,
I am suggesting that the issue for Winch was not specifically a mat-
ter of using scientific standards to criticise the Zande but of what he
takes to be the failure to recognise that there are two different con-
cepts of reality involved, in two different “languages.” What Winch
regards as illegitimate is taking one such concept to be the correct
one. And this is what he takes to be at stake if one says, after noting
the parallel position of the Europeans and the Zande, that the Euro-
peans are right and the Zande wrong.12
In other words, Diamond is pointing out how Winch thought it was inco-
herent to privilege in any absolute sense the idea of “reality” at work in
any discourse over the idea of “reality” at work in another discourse,
regardless of whether one of them was scientific. That is, Winch thought
in order to criticize a particular conceptual scheme, cultural system, or
domain of discourse, one must already be “moving within the system”.13
This is because he thought it was a logical requirement of such debates
that all parties are in agreement as to the meaning of (perhaps a weighted
portion of) their terms. Presumably, for example, Winch would have
found it as logically suspicious for someone to make pronouncements on
the reality of Zande magic from a Christian standpoint, as he found the
sort of assertions that Evans-Pritchard made. This is because, as the pre-
vious passages make clear, Winch found the idea of a discourse-neutral
conception of the meaning of the sign “reality” to be confused. This view
involves the idea that criticizing certain elements of social and intellectual
systems of thought and practice from the “outside” deprives these ele-
ments of the very identity and content they have only within the “inside”
of a particular social context. Because such criticism would violate the
purported boundaries of intelligible speech, someone who engaged in it
could be met with the response “you can’t say that”, i.e. criticism from
“outside” literally makes no sense.
The second preliminary point concerns the fact that it is Diamond’s
interpretation of Winch that is my primary focus in this chapter. This
accounts for why I move fairly quickly in the last section through the
details of Winch’s attack on Evans-Pritchard on to Diamond’s criticisms
of Winch’s position in this section. I am aware that there is a very large
and still growing literature both on Winch’s 1958 book on the social
sciences and his 1964 paper criticizing Evans-Pritchard; that literature
merits a substantially longer treatment than I can provide here. But my
interest is not in providing anything like a scholarly synopsis and analysis
of this material. My purpose, rather, is to investigate what I see as some
of the consequences of Diamond’s reading of Winch. I happen to believe,
as a matter of fact, that her interpretation and analysis rely on a faithful
The Grammar of Conflict 57
understanding of his actual arguments. But if that somehow turns out not
to be the case, that should not have much or any bearing on what I write
next when I examine the consequences of her views.
Diamond attacks Winch’s position on the grounds that it imposes a
dubious logical or metaphysical requirement on the conceptual resources
available to language users, and so unnecessarily restricts the possibility
of criticizing a system of thought such as an alien world view in which
one does not participate. The dubious requirement is, of course, the idea
that the content of terms like “reality” (and relatedly, “true”) must be
articulated only within the pre-given logical spaces provided by existing
discourses. At the time he wrote his paper, this may have seemed to Winch
like a bit of philosophical obviousness, made so by his way of reading
later Wittgenstein at the time. But quite apart from questions concerning
Wittgenstein interpretation, Diamond finds this view anything but obvi-
ous. She asks, “[W]hy should there have to be an ‘established universe of
discourse?’ Why can one not be making, giving articulation to, a kind of
thought about reality in thinking about the conflict?”14 She elaborates the
thought behind these questions in the following passages:
[W]e can take the situation here to be one in which what is real is
contested; and this idea of reality as contested is a different notion
of reality from that which is involved in either of the two forms of
thought themselves. If the conflict is understood in this way, the
space for the dispute between the two forms of thought is not given
in advance; it is not provided by either of the two modes of thought
that are in conflict. . . . There is thus an important sort of contrast
between the way the notion of real and unreal works in the dispute
and the way that notions of real and unreal work in the two systems
of thought that are at odds. . . . [I]n such systems of thought, there
are standards that operate independently of any particular move that
someone makes; but in the kind of conflict with which we are con-
cerned. . . , giving what one takes to be rational grounds for one’s
judgement is itself part of the articulation of the logical space here,
the space of reasons in this conflict.15
Further on we read,
Thus, against Winch, Diamond holds that making new conceptual and
linguistic moves, including new modes of evaluating other discourses,
can emerge as part of a conflict, so that indeed in many cases one can
intelligibly criticize another system. This means that one can, for exam-
ple, criticize another culture’s practices as confused or false, or in some
cases even delusional without invoking a traditional “view from side-
ways on” metaphysics of rationality that is unconnected to any linguistic
practice at all. This is not an invitation to linguistic imperialism. Our
criticism may be hasty, sloppy, or based on sheer ignorance or prejudice;
coming to understand the meaning of what people do and say may take
enormous effort. What Diamond is questioning, however, is that there is
a ready-made, a priori condition on meaning that rules out the very idea
of making new conceptual and linguistic moves, especially new modes of
evaluating other discourses with regard to questions of reality and truth.
Indeed, her view seems to be that the intelligibility of such an evaluative
practice is already internal to our grammar, just as we find it, so that one
can say “that”, except that “saying that” in such a case may have some
new, perhaps unpredictable features that no a priori argument about
meaning can preclude.
I should just briefly note here that exploring Wittgenstein’s relation
to the idea of what is supposedly logically out of bounds to thought
and thus to criticism has been utterly central to Diamond’s interpretative
work on Wittgenstein for the last 30 years. Much of this writing has been
devoted to developing the details of the so-called “resolute reading” of
the Tractatus. Greatly simplified, this way of reading that book involves
an attempt to draw out what Diamond takes to be the implications of the
thought expressed in this passage from the preface:
IV
I agree with Diamond’s main criticisms of the kind of view put forth by
Winch.18 In what follows, I discuss what I take to be some of the implica-
tions of her analysis, even though I am very unsure whether she would
regard them as genuine implications. I take Diamond at any rate to be
committed to something close to the following two claims: 1) systems of
thought may contain logical resources for making various types of criti-
cisms that go beyond what is clearly visible to their current participants
and 2) these conceptual resources can be developed, brought out, made
manifest, by, among perhaps other things, conflicts with other systems of
thought. I think that Diamond is certainly correct in claiming 1), while
I think 2) raises some complicated issues. In particular, it is unclear to me
whether Diamond thinks that the logical space that may be articulated in
the course of a conflict must be understood as a result of mutual features
of each conflicting system’s logical resources, or if it is enough for coher-
ent criticism that only one of those grammars has this potential openness
in its self-understanding of “reality”. As I will try to show, it is difficult
to argue that only the first possibility is permissible and allowing for the
second possibility reveals some interesting complications.
The main issue between Winch and Diamond here runs both deep
and broad in the history of 20th century philosophy. Its depth is a func-
tion of its importance, which I believe is great. By “broad”, I mean
that despite substantial philosophical differences among them, the list
of those who have held positions with strong affinities to the one Dia-
mond finds in Winch is a venerable one. Indeed, on the list of eminent
thinkers targeted in his “On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme”,
Donald Davidson includes, in addition to Winch, Quine, Kuhn, Fey-
erabend, Sapir/Whorf, and Strawson.19 Surprisingly absent from this
list, however, is the Rudolf Carnap, whose thought as much as any-
one’s proved a source for many of the central ideas in various iterations
of 20th century linguistic relativism. In particular, Carnap’s distinction
between questions that are “internal” and those that are “external” to a
linguistic framework, with his rejection of the latter as lacking cognitive
significance, bears more than a little resemblance to Winch’s insistence
that we can only ask questions about the meaning of words, “reality”
for example, in the language.20
60 The Grammar of Conflict
The kind of realist views Diamond defends in her dispute with Winch
are quite close to those represented by Hilary Putnam during the last
35 years or so of his philosophical life. During that span, Putnam pushed
back hard against the kind of anti-realism inherent in the Carnapian view
and what he sometimes referred to as the “tired pseudo-Wittgensteinian
philosophy of language” he found typical of many verificationist inter-
preters of Wittgenstein, especially Norman Malcolm.21 In light of these
connections, I want to begin my examination of Diamond’s arguments
against Winch with a passage from a paper by Warren Goldfarb, where
he is discussing Putnam’s attack on ideas that were central to the work of
Carnap in the early 1930s, in particular Carnap’s defense of a principle
of tolerance and its sanctioning of linguistic pluralism in The Logical
Syntax of Language.22
As Goldfarb has described it, the issue here concerns Putnam’s asser-
tion that the principle of tolerance already presupposes the (to Putnam,
at any rate, dubious) verification principle. If a prior commitment to veri-
ficationism (in Winch’s context this would be a use-theory of meaning)
cannot be justified, then Carnap cannot easily deflect “external” ques-
tions about how “the world truly is” merely by appealing to tolerance.23
While not endorsing Carnap’s verificationism per se, Goldfarb seems to
think that Putnam’s dismissal of it is a bit too quick. Goldfarb asks,
Assuming for the moment that Putnam was correct in rejecting Carnap’s
verificationism, then his rejection of the principle of tolerance and his
commensurate suspicions of Carnap’s rejection of “external” questions
concerning the meaning of terms outside of any linguistic framework may
seem well motivated and natural. But, as I take Goldfarb to be bringing
out, if we broaden our perspective from the narrow issue of verification-
ism per se to a much more ecumenical and non-theoretical understanding
of linguistic practice, so that our view of meaning is informed by the close
conceptual relation (even if not identification) between meaning and use,
The Grammar of Conflict 61
then the sort of dogmatic tone that Goldfarb is bringing out in Putnam’s
position vis-à-vis Carnap becomes far less attractive as a general view.
With Goldfarb’s point against Putnam in mind, we can return to Dia-
mond’s criticisms of Winch by posing an issue in the following way: While
it is unclear how Winch (or Carnap) can insist that no language can have
the grammatical resources for engaging questions about ‘reality” (or “the
world as it truly is”) in a manner not already given internally by the
grammar of the language itself, it seems equally unclear to me whether
such questions are always appropriate, and so whether there is any non-
dogmatic basis for insisting that every language must have such resources
for asking them. Previously, we saw Diamond ask, “why should there
have to be an ‘established universe of discourse’? Why can one not be
making, giving articulation to, a kind of thought about reality in thinking
about the conflict?” I am asking a different, perhaps symmetrical, ques-
tion: what if one of those conflicting systems has no such resources for
envisaging a conflict about reality outside its already established universe
of discourse? In other words, what if there were cases where the logical
space or spaces for resolving the conflict only came from one of the two
conflicting systems (for example, ours)? Is that something we can rule
out a priori? I think the idea that every discourse must be open to the
sort of conflict under discussion here is just as murky as Winch’s insist-
ence that no discourse can be. Is it legitimate, that is, simply to rule out
the possibility of a grammar in which “reality” (and perhaps other terms
like “truth”) only has meaning within the domain of the grammar itself?
What if, in other words, there were “natural born Carnapians”, or bet-
ter still, “natural born Winchians”? Judging by their indifferent reaction
as described by Evans-Pritchard when he pointed out a contradiction in
their system of magic, perhaps this is even an apt way to describe the
Azande.
A
There are three points relating to the last section that I want to address
before moving on. First, I have not made any specific demand that the
reader imagine a group of language users who cannot extend their sense
of reality based on the development of their own conceptual resources
or through their encounters with other forms of life. My point has not
been that any language, as a matter of logic, cannot so develop, but that
it is dubious business to insist, as a matter of logic, that each one must
be able to develop this way. How the anthropological and linguistic facts
play out is of course another matter. In making this point, moreover, I am
merely drawing some implications from what Diamond herself writes.
As we have seen, she asks why there should have to be an ‘established
62 The Grammar of Conflict
universe of discourse’ for the deployment of a concept like reality. This
question seems to leave completely in place the coherence of the idea
that while there might be such a practice, contra Winch and others, there
doesn’t have to be. I have not felt particularly obligated so far to give a
background story that describes what this might be like, precisely because
my point here relies on an argument based on symmetry: if it is dogmatic
to insist with Winch, that talk of reality always must be confined to an
established domain of discourse, then it is equally dogmatic to insist that
it never can be thus confined. If Diamond had wanted to argue that she
found it impossible to imagine such a language, she could have written
something very different from what she actually wrote.
B
Second, a critic might nevertheless object that the real point Diamond
could or should have made is that the idea of grammar that my symmetry
argument relies on, a grammar in which unlike our grammar there simply
is no talk of reality and related concepts without an established universe
of discourse, is absent more concrete detail or special explanation, not
something we can really imagine. This objection might draw inspira-
tion from a point made long ago by Stanley Cavell that projectability of
words into new contexts is something internal to language, because the
criteria by which we apply our concepts just have, qua criteria, this kind
of openness to them. Another way to put this point would be to note with
Cavell that criteria aren’t just self-applying in some general mechanical
sense. There must be a specific context for the employment of a concept,
and this requires a language user in the context who sees to it, and so
must take responsibility, that the criteria connected to certain words are
applied in that given context. Cavell’s wonderful example of the natural
extension of the word “feed” from “feed the kitty” to “feed the parking
meter” illustrates the point well.25 In short, someone could argue against
my story thus far that the projectability of grammatical criteria is essen-
tial to language, and that my symmetry argument requires that we imag-
ine language users for whom precisely such projectability is lacking.26
In responding to this Cavellian criticism from ordinary language,
I want first to note that if projectability of criteria is internal to a lan-
guage, then insisting that the concepts of any language must have this
feature makes as much sense as insisting that a triangle have three sides.
If we are talking about a language at all, then the criteria governing the
use of its concepts are projectable. More to the point, there is something
potentially misleading in the critic’s use here of Cavell’s original exam-
ple. The example of feeding the meter nicely shows what it means to say
that criteria are not closed by showing how they can be projected into a
novel context. But of course it is also true, for otherwise much of Cavell’s
diagnosis of external world skepticism in the Claim of Reason falls away,
The Grammar of Conflict 63
that everyday application of criteria governing everyday concepts also
requires relevant projection; even in the most mundane of circumstances
they are not self-applying.27 Even pointing at my cat and telling my son
to “feed the kitty” requires such projection of criteria and uptake on both
of our parts. Cavell’s diagnosis of skepticism relies on the idea that the
skeptic’s claim to know the existence of a generic object lacks any specific
context to make it coherent. There is no suggestion by him that providing
such a context would require Descartes to describe unusual contextual
features of his sitting in front of the fire. He just has to say something
that would make it relevant for him to remark that he is holding a piece
of wax. In effect, language users are condemned to projecting criteria in
context all the time; some examples like “feeding the meter” just make
this activity more apparent.
This makes it evident that the objection of my imagined critic is not
really about projectability per se. It is about the actual projection of par-
ticular concepts by actual language users into particular kinds of new
contexts. (One could equally characterize the dispute as being about cer-
tain facts being taken to stand in as representatives, schemata if you will,
of the legitimate projection of certain concepts into these new contexts.)
At any rate, projectability in a language per se and the actual projection
of particular concepts into new situations are not the same. In the cases
we are looking at here, not only will the ordinary language philosopher’s
appeal to the question “what do we say when?” not be of much use,
what “we” say and “when” is just what is at issue, in particular in light
of there not being an obvious “we”. If therefore, there is no disagreement
about the pertinence of the very notion of projectability for grammar,
but only about its extent, we seem to have a dispute about the grammar
of “grammar”. As we will see, symmetry considerations will come into
play here as well.28
As we have seen, there may be certain “new” contexts such as the
logical spaces between two already existing grammars of which Dia-
mond speaks, where one side finds itself ready to explore the projection
or extension of its concepts pertaining to the nature of reality, but where
members from the other group of language users do not accommodate
such an investigation. Of course, it’s obvious that we ourselves don’t cot-
ton on to just any projection of concepts; no one is claiming that criteria
can be extended willy-nilly. How then should we describe cases where
our own concepts are not extended? On some occasions, an attempt at
a new use may be almost universally perceived as so wrongheaded that
it just falls silently flat. Other times, perhaps in the case of “feeding the
meter”, the new use immediately catches on. Still, in other cases, we
end up in conflicts, where one side sees the point or correctness of the
new use, while another side does not. (Such cases seem to be everywhere
at the moment.) I think there is a strong temptation to describe such
cases, especially but not only those concerning morals and politics, as
64 The Grammar of Conflict
characterizable as cases in which the side for whom the new use does not
seem natural is “withholding” its assent, where “withholding” is taken
to refer to some sort of semi-conscious repression of something that, were
it not for some inculcated shame, resentment, or bigotry, the extension
might be gladly granted. Yet if, as Cavell made so forcefully clear many
years ago, “voluntary” and “involuntary” present us with a misleading
and inadequate set of options for thinking about action, so perhaps do
“assenting” understood as projecting and “withholding” understood as
“repressing” for thinking about extending grammar.29
A number of years ago Sabina Lovibond coined the term “transcen-
dental parochialism” to denote an ideal state of affairs where a soci-
ety’s critical resources for reform were fully extended, at their limits so
to speak, yet where the language or discourse so arrived at would still
be a recognizably human one. She contrasted this with what she called
“empirical parochialism”, which she characterized in effect as the paro-
chialism of repressive conservatism.30 One might wish that this pair of
concepts could be of some help in the context of our current discus-
sion about the nature of a possible extension of each of our two imag-
ined group’s grammars into uncharted logical space. The idea could be
that the side willing to explore the extension of its grammar into new
logical spaces would be overcoming empirical parochialism and striv-
ing towards a more enlightened transcendental parochialism, while the
other side would be seen as failing in such a task. Unless, however, one
wants to take on what I regard as some fairly substantial metaphysical
baggage about the nature of rationality, I don’t think this terminology
gets us any further. If we are not just dealing here with a self-righteous
and logically unmotivated call for permanent linguistic revolution, where
the aim seems to be change for the sake of change, we might wonder
how one ever knows whether one is being transcendentally parochial or
merely empirically parochial. How, relatedly, does one determine that
the other side is being empirically parochial? More to the present point,
where comes the certainty in the kind of conflict we are envisaging, that
either group is guilty of empirical parochialism, should the conflict about
whether to explore the new logical space go unresolved? Maybe there
could be any number of concrete conceptual logjams, stable configura-
tions of unresolved conflicts consistent with neither side’s being guilty of
“empirical parochialism”.
Is it always reasonable to suspect bigotry or ignorance if a group of
speakers simply does not respond to a particular “invitation” to extend
or change its practices? Does this always call for some special explana-
tion or justification in terms of something like repression that accounts
for their withholding an extension of their concepts? There is a difference
between, on the one hand, making the merely abstract grammatical point
that any given parochial view could, at least in theory, be extended at a
particular point, and on the other hand, saying that people must always
The Grammar of Conflict 65
push the limit at that point on pain of being an irrational reactionar-
ies. Prima facie, someone or some peoples not projecting some of their
concepts into new logical spaces no more needs a special explanation
than does our willingness (or is it now an insistence?) on doing so. If this
is true, then it may not always be clear whether lack of assent must be
regarded as a failure or refusal to project one’s concepts into new logical
spaces, so much as being regarded as something that just never seemed
apt to some people. Naturally, language users may sometimes actively
resist changes. And in such cases, there may well be some background
story which explains what happens: some ethical or social sensitivity
or hope or worry. But we don’t have to look at everything through the
lenses of a Weltanschauung that seduces us into regarding every such case
as a result of what some imagined clan of old, conservative elders forbids.
Allowing the projection of criteria implicates us no less than preventing
such projection implicates others. Both are equally signs of a value com-
mitment. We may call the new space a result of an appropriate extension
of the same grammar. They may not even have so much of an idea of this
space. To insist on attributing bad faith to those who resist exploring new
logical spaces, not to mention those to whom doing so doesn’t show up
as a live option, is just political metaphysics.
Grammar is embedded in practice, and without a practice, talking
about what grammar per se calls for or doesn’t call for is useless. Oth-
ers may not have our same practice(s) of extending particular concepts
beyond certain uses. If someone were to ask whether, as a matter of logic,
a group of language users must have this or that practice, how might
one answer? It is very unclear that we have anything like a pre-given
notion of what constellation of practices and concepts are necessary for
a grammar to be “complete”. Wittgenstein writes at On Certainty §611
and §612,
These passages can be, and most likely have been, read as expressing a
kind of relativist cum incommensurability thesis. As I made clear earlier
in her discussion of Winch, I agree with Diamond that there are deep
confusions with this type of view. Nor do I see any convincing reason
for attributing such a view to Wittgenstein, based on these or any other
passages. But more to the present point, these passages do not suggest
that there is any kind of guarantee in the nature of things such that all
empirical parochial views, or, even all transcendental parochial views, are
66 The Grammar of Conflict
harmonizable, either into one big overarching transcendental parochial
view or even into some more modest, transitional harmony. If anything,
Wittgenstein’s mention of “persuasion” and his subsequent reference
to what missionaries do does not strike me as though he was particu-
larly sanguine about the idea that, whatever eventual harmony might
arise between conflicting grammars or colliding forms of life, it must
be necessarily describable as a transcendental parochial view arrived at
through the mutual exploration and articulation of conceptual resources.
The symmetry idea comes in here again with the following considera-
tion: someone can indeed ask “why can’t there be a merging of empirical
parochial views into a larger empirical parochial view and finally into
something like Lovibond’s idea of a transcendental parochial view?” The
answer is that there is nothing like a knock-down philosophical argu-
ment showing why this question is out of bounds. But someone may ask
a different, symmetrical question: “Why must there be a harmonization
of empirical parochial views, tending to a harmonized transcendental
parochial view?” The answer here too is that there is nothing like a con-
clusive philosophical argument ruling this out as somehow illegitimate.
In effect, we are back to my symmetry-based question about Diamond’s
question about the nature of grammar and the contours of logical spaces
between conflicting grammars. We seem to be at an impasse.
C
Third and finally, before I turn to some of the consequences of Diamond’s
view, it is worth emphasizing that I don’t believe that her idea has to be
read as entailing that grammars containing the resources for a logical
space of conflict outside of themselves also contain the actual correctness
of some particular view or set of views held in spe by those who speak
a language with such a resourceful grammar. Rather, the grammars with
such resources may be understood to contain the bare concept that some
as yet unspecified view is correct. This is the idea of the sheer possibility
of getting things right in a way not yet fully intelligible from within any
of the discourses of the parties to a conflict. To arrive at some contentful
view of what is in fact right, much more in the way of various sorts of
practical and scientific resources from one (or both) of the conflicting dis-
courses will have to be brought into the picture. So, in an important sense,
I believe this concept of reality as being something to be worked out is
basically formal and empty of content (or at least empty of any clear
content). Individual claimants in a dispute might gain some solace from
the logical possibility that their currently held view may resemble what
turns out to be the right one at a later stage. In many cases, especially
where something like their views have prevailed in a given conflict, it may
even be reasonable for them to describe those views and their attendant
concepts as always having been the right ones all along and thus to share
a kind of organic lineage with prior established truths. But by itself the
The Grammar of Conflict 67
grammatical feature whose possibility Diamond and Putnam are pointing
to, while I believe intelligible, won’t support anything else in the way of
specific concrete or empirical claims. The grammatical possibility may
be important for maintaining a certain self-critical attitude towards epis-
temic practices, making clear that we can always do better, but the gram-
mar doesn’t really add any empirical content to the view we arrive at in
any given case. Once it is evident that the realism we are concerned with
here amounts to a kind of regulative idea, in effect a formal feature of our
grammar and perhaps the grammar of others, the insistence that “some-
where out there, there must be a way things really are” sounds more
like the making manifest one’s commitment to a historico-grammatical
artifact, however important this may be legally, ethically, or scientifically.
I thus take Diamond to have argued convincingly that such a gram-
matical artifact shows how criticism from “outside” can be entirely
in logical order. But the considerations I have brought out in the last
two paragraphs do, I believe, mean that such criticism may sometimes
have a quite particular, even peculiar shape and will depend on some
rather precarious facts. In what follows, I want to discuss two issues
in particular that may arise when two sorts of grammars, one with the
more “Putnamian” view of the “world as it truly is”, conflicts with the
more “Winchian” or “Carnapian” view where that phrase only has a
use within a framework.32 The first issue is mainly pragmatic, while the
second involves some deep philosophical questions concerning the nature
of intercultural conflict.
VI
In this section, I want to look briefly at two important consequences of
Diamond’s arguments. The first is pragmatic, the second is ethical and
historical. Diamond is correct to oppose the claim that the nature of real-
ity can in all cases only be debated from within a given system of thought.
Nevertheless, her argument leaves me uneasy in a certain pragmatic sense.
I can sum up my sense of what I find unsatisfying by merely pointing out
that her argument about what our grammar allows us to do in the way
of criticism licenses a conflation of the observer and participant points of
view in certain debates, making “us” as it were both judge and party to
the same dispute. For many people, these are roles that other important
practices that we hold strongly incline us to keep separate. Consider, in
this light, the following scheme for visualizing the two situations:
Case 1 Judge/Jury
Notes
1. Walter Kaufmann, ed., “Twilight of the Idols,” in The Portable Nietzsche
(New York: Viking, 1976), 483.
2. See Cora Diamond, “The Skies of Dante and Our Skies: A Response to Ilham
Dilman,” Philosophical Investigations 35 (2012); Cora Diamond, “Criticis-
ing from ‘Outside’,” Criticising from ‘Outside’,” Philosophical Investigations
36 (2013); Cora Diamond, “Putnam and Wittgensteinian Baby-Throwing:
Variations on a Theme,” in The Philosophy of Hilary Putnam, ed. R. E.
Auxier, D. R. Anderson, and L. E. Hahn (LaSalle: Open Court, 2015). (see
Introduction for references.) I do not address Diamond’s criticisms of Dil-
man’s, Wittgenstein’s Copernican Revolution: The Question of Linguistic
Idealism (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002) or her brief discussions of some later
work by Winch (see Cora Diamond, “Unfolding Truth and Reading Wittgen-
stein,” Sats – Nordic Journal of Philosophy 4, no. 1 (2003), as these do not
really concern my main points. See also Cora Diamond, “How Old Are These
Bones? Wittgenstein, Putnam and Verification,” Proceedings of the Aristote-
lian Society 73 (1999): 99–134, where she criticizes a related, verificationist
style argument in Richard Rorty. Clearly, issues about how to read the later
Wittgenstein are in the background of my paper, but I do not directly address
those.
3. Peter Winch, “Understanding a Primitive Society.”American Philosophical
Quarterly 1 (1964), (see Introduction, note 15 for reference). Winch’s The
Idea of a Social Science and Its Relation to Philosophy (see Chapter 1, note
19 for reference) is of course also in the background for Diamond’s work and
for my discussion, although I do not refer to it here. See also E. E. Evans-
Pritchard, Witchcraft, Oracles, and Magic Among the Azande (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1937).
4. Although for the purposes of my discussion I do not distinguish magic, witch-
craft, and the use of oracles, I don’t believe that this has any serious philo-
sophical consequences.
5. Evans-Pritchard, Witchcraft, 3. In fact, Evans-Pritchard claims to have found
a second contradiction, or near contradiction, in the following Zande ideas.
Since all death is due to witchcraft, and therefore not by vengeance magic,
knowing the names of victims of vengeance magic would make the latter
activity futile, because it would mean that such victims were both the vic-
tims of magic and witchcraft. Most people are of course not privy to the
names of victims of vengeance, so for them the contradiction is not apparent.
However, princes are thought to know such details. When Evans-Pritchard
pointed this out to a prince, “he smiled and admitted that all was not well
with the present-day witchcraft system”. Ibid., 5–7.
6. Evans-Pritchard, Witchcraft, 82.
7. Ibid., 221–22. What Evans-Pritchard describes in this passage anticipates a
central part of Pierre Bourdieu’s critique of structuralism. See Pierre Bourdieu,
Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1977) 9, 37, 171.
8. Evans-Pritchard, Witchcraft, 18.
9. Ibid., 43.
10. Winch, “Understanding,” 309 (emphasis in original).
The Grammar of Conflict 71
11. Ibid., 314–15. See Evans-Pritchard, Witchcraft, 4 for the passage quoted by
Winch here.
12. Diamond, “Criticising from ‘Outside’,” 118 (emphasis in original).
13. See G. E. M. Anscombe, “The Question of Linguistic Idealism,” in From
Parmenides to Wittgenstein (Oxford: Blackwell, 1981), 131. Quoted in Dia-
mond, “Baby-Throwing: Variations on a Theme,” 629.
14. Diamond, “Criticising from ‘Outside’,” 119 (emphasis in original).
15. Ibid. (emphasis in original). Diamond’s and Elizabeth Anscombe’s ways of
reading Wittgenstein, especially some of his remarks in On Certainty, are
very much in the background of her discussion, and so I will leave them
mostly in the background for my own discussion. The remarks from On
Certainty she refers to in particular are §147 and § 608–12. She gives them a
more realist inflection than I think they bear in context.
16. Diamond, “Criticising from ‘Outside’,” 121.
17. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-philosophicus, ed. D. F. Pears and B.
F. McGuinness (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974), 3. See Chapter 1,
note 65 for references.
18. Because it is not a given that everyone agrees with Diamond’s reading of
Winch’s work, I should make it clear that for the purpose of my argument
here I am simply assuming the correctness of her interpretation.
19. Donald Davidson, “On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme,” Proceedings
and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 47 (1973–1974):
5–20. Whether Davidson’s way of taking each of the mentioned authors is
fair is an open question, as is of course Davidson’s own position.
20. See Rudolf Carnap, “Replies and Systematic Expositions,” in The Philosophy
of Rudolf Carnap, ed. Paul Schilpp (La Salle: Open Court, 1963), 859–1013.
Of course, this should not be taken to minimalize the enormous differences
between Winch and Carnap.
21. Much of Putnam’s explicit ire was directed at verificationist and anti-realist
strains in the work of Richard Rorty. On this, see Cora Diamond, “How Old
Are These Bones? Wittgenstein, Putnam and Verification.” See note 2 for
reference. James Conant argues that, in fact, some well-known commenta-
tors ascribe views about language to Wittgenstein that are more accurately
attributable to the Carnap of the early 1930s. See “Two Conceptions of
Die Überwindung der Metaphysik,” in Wittgenstein in America, ed. Timo-
thy McCarthy and Sean C. Stidd (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001),
13–61.
22. Rudolf Carnap, The Logical Syntax of Language (London: Routledge and
Kegan Paul, 1937).
23. Warren Goldfarb, “Semantics in Carnap: A Rejoinder to Alberto Coffa,”
Philosophical Topics 25, no. 3 (1997): 60. Goldfarb cites Hilary Putnam,
“Philosophers and Human Understanding,” in Realism and Reason: Philo-
sophical Papers, 3 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 191.
24. Goldfarb, “Semantics in Carnap,” 60.
25. Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality and
Tragedy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), 181. Henceforth CR.
26. I am grateful to Reshef Agam-Segal for raising the question addressed here.
27. See CR, 216–20.
28. My use of “symmetry” here borrows from and is meant to allude to Dia-
mond’s discussion of a dispute between David Wiggins and Bernard Williams
about the conditions for ethical judgement, in particular in making judge-
ments concerning slavery. See “Truth in Ethics: Williams and Wiggins,” in
her Reading Wittgenstein with Anscombe, Going on to Ethics (Cambridge:
72 The Grammar of Conflict
Harvard University Press, 2019). I make so presumption, however, that Dia-
mond would sanction my use of the idea of symmetry here.
29. See the title essay in Stanley Cavell, Must We Mean What We Say? A Book of
Essays (New York: Scribner, 1969).
30. Sabina Lovibond, Realism and Imagination in Ethics (Oxford: Basil Black-
well, 1983), 214.
31. Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty, ed. G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von
Wright, trans. Denis Paul and G. E. M. Anscombe (New York: Harper, 1972),
§611 & §612 (emphasis original).
32. In “Criticising from ‘Outside’ ” Diamond’s arguments against Winch and
Dilman are made from a position she describes as “Anscombian”. I believe
Diamond’s Anscombian position is very close to what here I am referring to
as “Putnamian” and that this is borne out by the way Putnam’s and Ans-
combes views intertwine in “Putnam and Wittgensteinian Baby-Throwing”.
See Introduction, note 10 for reference.
33. “Criticising from ‘Outside’,” 124. In “Truth: Defenders, Debunkers, Despis-
ers”, Diamond argues against Richard Rorty’s epistemological behaviorism
by recounting the way in which Primo Levi’s training as a pharmaceutical
chemist, and his believing in the objective truth of the periodic table of the
elements, was crucial for his spiritual and psychological survival in Nazi con-
centration camps. Diamond brings out well the significance which this knowl-
edge of an independent objective truth had for Levi during his experience
with the worst consequences of Nazi lies. See “Truth: Defenders, Debunk-
ers, Despisers,” in Commitment in Reflection, ed. Leona Toker (New York:
Garland, 1994), 195–222. In defense of Rorty, it’s worth pointing out that,
to my knowledge at least, he never suggests that our best epistemic practices
amount to accepting whatever the political authorities say, and in any case
the Nazis were a long way from adhering to these practices. And of course,
we should recall that this historical example of the value of what I have called
a grammatical artifact, in this case concerning “truth” instead of “reality”,
does not by itself provide any empirical content. What we call “truth” in any
given case is closely connected to what we are going to agree upon after tak-
ing account of our (hopefully) best epistemic practices, and this will surely
capture, extensionally at least, Levi’s periodic table. Unless we believe in the
idea of a finished science and that chemistry was already one of them during
the Second World War, we will have to agree that Levi’s belief in the truth of
the periodic table was at most in line with the best epistemic practices of his
time.
34. On the question of religious truth, see the Appendix.
3 Skepticism and the Human
Condition
Kevin M. Cahill
I
I take it that one of the most significant characteristics of the concep-
tual and ideological revolutions that ushered in the modern period in
the West is the way the new theological, scientific, and economic regimes
portrayed themselves as representing a kind of genuine natural order
over what they saw as the social and theological institutions of the Mid-
dle Ages (which, I don’t doubt, understood themselves as embodying a
natural order too).2 This exemplifies a general moral: during periods of
great change, it will often be useful for furthering one’s agenda to frame
the debate so that it will seem as though one’s new conceptions of sci-
ence, commerce, religion, or the subject of epistemology, are not just new
and better, but were already latent in the older and dominant regimes,
and that this fact would have been clearly seen by earlier generations if
only they had managed to cast off the artificial social barriers, traditions,
and superstitions of precisely those older systems. That is to say, the new
order will usually find it advantageous to present itself as having made
a set of discoveries about certain fundamental factors, the nature, say,
of human beings, and not as having reorganized our interpretations of
those factors. With regard to Western modernity’s more or less uncritical
acceptance of its own accepted individualistic notions of political, moral,
and epistemological agency, both in its relation both to medieval Europe
and to other cultures, Charles Taylor refers to such an interpretation as a
“subtraction story”.3 At the broadest level, this essay addresses questions
connected to conceptual and/or cultural difference and change, specifi-
cally the intersection of certain questions that concern modernity, human
nature, and the concept of the self.4 More specifically, I want to look at
a nest of connected questions in philosophical anthropology or perhaps
better yet, the anthropology of the self in the Western epistemological
74 Skepticism and the Human Condition
tradition after Descartes as that tradition is represented in the work of
Stanley Cavell.
In his insightful treatment of skepticism about the external world,
Unnatural Doubts: Epistemological Realism and the Basis of Skepticism,
Michael Williams was principally concerned to establish the credentials
of a contextualist approach to epistemology.5 According to the position
which Williams defends there, external world skepticism arises out of
the traditional epistemologist’s demand for a context invariant account
of the conditions of knowledge in general.6 Williams’ term for the guid-
ing belief that such an account is available is “epistemological realism”.
He describes this view as the assumption there is a kind of thing called
“knowledge of the external world”, which the epistemologist tends to
assimilate to natural kinds talk among realists in metaphysics and the
philosophy of science.
Williams believes that once we have accepted the demand for an
entirely general, context invariant account of knowledge, our canvassing
of the various sources of knowledge will almost invariably land us with
something close to a sense-data theory, what Williams terms the “pri-
ority of experiential knowledge”. Williams holds further that the thesis
of the priority of experiential knowledge is essential to epistemological
realism qua foundationalism.7 Yet the epistemologist’s acquiescing in the
demand for absolute generality not only leads to the priority of experi-
ential knowledge, it has immediate and familiar skeptical consequences
since, while perhaps context invariant (assuming for the moment we
allow such talk to go unchallenged), sense data are notoriously unsuit-
able for establishing any secure epistemological foothold in the world
outside of the mind.
Williams describes his approach as providing a “theoretical diagnosis”
of external world skepticism, which aims to show that epistemological
realism is a false doctrine, or at least a poorly supported one, based on
the dubious assumption that knowledge exhibits the kind of essential
structural unity supposedly characteristic of natural kind concepts.8 Wil-
liams argues in turn for the truth of his own contextualist epistemol-
ogy, which rejects the foundationalist idea that the supposedly context
invariant deliverances of the senses are the only source of knowledge. In
rejecting epistemological realism as a dubious doctrine, Williams believes
he can also show that there are good reasons for regarding his own con-
textualist account as convincing, and so for regarding skepticism as false.
Although most of his energy is devoted to the diagnosis and critique of
epistemological realism, Williams also has much to say about so-called
“therapeutic diagnoses” of skepticism. As Williams understands it, a
therapeutic diagnosis of skepticism seeks to locate and display something
that is fundamentally amiss with the meaning of one or more of the skep-
tic’s premises, so that the skeptic’s conclusions are not so much shown
to be false, as they are revealed to be confused or incoherent.9 Although
Skepticism and the Human Condition 75
in some places Williams appears sympathetic to the main representa-
tives of this approach, whom he uncontroversially takes to be Austin,
Wittgenstein, and Cavell, he finds their assessments often based on an
under appreciation or misunderstanding of the strength of the skeptic’s
arguments.10 Yet, setting aside Williams’ treatment of Austin and Witt-
genstein, there is something very misleading in Williams’ presentation
of Cavell’s thought about the nature of external world skepticism. In
particular, Williams’ claim that Cavell regards himself as having provided
a therapeutic diagnosis that yields a definitive refutation of skepticism
flies directly in the face of Cavell’s own stated views that not only is
skepticism irrefutable, but that trying to refute it is itself an expression
of skepticism.11 How Williams might have missed this feature of Cavell’s
thought, or as is perhaps more likely, why he chose to disregard it, is
difficult to say. This point may become clearer once Cavell’s account has
been laid out.
Cavell has claimed that attempts to give a philosophical refutation of
skepticism are misguided because they tend to obscure or suppress what
he terms the “truth of skepticism”.12 By this, Cavell does not mean to sug-
gest that it is the coherence of the philosophical thesis of skepticism itself
that dooms such attempts to failure, but rather something such attempts
at refutation cover up, namely the fact that “Our relations to the world
as a whole, or to others in general, is not one of knowing, where knowing
construes itself as being certain”.13 Cavell does not endorse the philo-
sophical thesis of skepticism. Indeed, he thinks there is something wrong
with the skeptic’s conclusions. But he thinks that because the skeptic is
on to something, the philosopher who tries to refute skepticism is, in an
important sense, as misguided as the skeptic himself. He thus suggests
that we might think of both parties as subject to what Kant calls a “dia-
lectical illusion” in the Antinomies of Pure Reason:
I hope it will not seem perverse that I lump views in such a way, tak-
ing the very raising of the question of knowledge in a certain form,
or spirit, to constitute skepticism, regardless of whether a philosophy
takes itself to have answered the question affirmatively or negatively.
It is a perspective from which skepticism and (what Kant calls) dog-
matism are made in one another’s image, leaving nothing for choice.14
Human reason has this peculiar fate that in one species of its knowl-
edge it is burdened by questions which, as prescribed by the very
nature of reason itself, it is not able to ignore, but which, as tran-
scending all its powers, it is also not able to answer.24
Nevertheless, while for thinkers like Kant, Barry Stroud, and Thomas
Nagel, the problems of metaphysics are intuitive intellectual problems,
for Cavell, the sources of skepticism lie not only or even primarily in our
intellect but first and foremost in our affective nature.
At any rate, we can begin to see where Cavell’s interpretation of skep-
ticism diverges substantially from Heidegger. For although Heidegger
does not offer a theoretical response to skepticism, it would nevertheless
make little sense for him to term a “scandal” what we have seen Cavell
characterize as our “inescapable fate” (unless Heidegger thought there
was something inherently scandalous about being human, something
Cavell might well have thought, but I doubt Heidegger would ever put
things this way). Cavell is right in thinking that there is something pro-
foundly dubious about the attempt to give a philosophical refutation of
skepticism. I also have much sympathy for the importance he attaches to
what he terms “the truth of skepticism”. Nevertheless, I will show how
his failure to consider significant alternatives undermine his claim that
some kind of engagement with skepticism is itself part of what it is to be
human.
Can we think of the “truth of skepticism” as merely one way of pre-
senting what I take to be the facts to which it refers, that is, certain facts
of human finitude? To put it another way: must an engagement with
these facts be mediated by epistemological concerns to the degree Cavell
assumes is compulsory? Or are there other ways of being in touch with
78 Skepticism and the Human Condition
the concrete reality of this truth, ways which are not mediated by the
concerns with knowledge that we find in the exclusively modern works
of philosophy, literature, and film that Cavell discusses? I believe there
are and I will argue that Cavell’s conception of the human arises from the
inadequate consideration he gives to the possibility that humans within
different historical cultures may have sufficiently different conceptions
of the self than the one he takes for granted. Attention to the possibility
of such differences makes it unrealistic to assume that the problems that
Cavell locates in the sphere of the human must inevitably arise (or inevi-
tably be repressed, which is in effect the same). To put this another way
by borrowing a phrase from William James, Cavell does not account for
the very real possibility that there can be people for whom skepticism is
not a “live option”.
This essay will involve an investigation of precisely this last aspect of
Cavell’s understanding of skepticism. In particular, as opposed to Wil-
liams’ theoretical diagnosis and Cavell’s version of a therapeutic diag-
nosis, I will argue for a historical or cultural-anthropological diagnosis
of skepticism. My approach is rooted in the suspicion that largely moti-
vating much of what Cavell says about skepticism, not so much about
its irrefutability, but about its chronic recurrence, is a picture of what
it means to be a human being, specifically what a human self is. And
I further suspect that it is a picture that fundamentally fails to appreciate
the depth or logical significance of historical practices for our intelligibly
talking about the self in the ways Cavell wants to do.
Two reasons why I believe Cavell’s work is worthy of serious attention
is my belief that he has provided us with the “best case” for thinking
that skepticism is a natural part of human life and because this claim
is intimately connected to his taking for granted a more or less modern
conception of the self.25 Overturning these ideas, then, is likely to have
important and interesting consequences. I will show that at the root of
Cavell’s portrait of the human lies an ahistorical dogmatic ontology of
the self that suffers from its assumption that certain features characteris-
tic of the modern individual are universal. Therefore, whereas Cavell has
primarily intended to provide a kind of ethology of the human animal,
he has instead succeeded in providing an ethnography: a compelling eth-
nography, but an ethnography nonetheless.
In Part II, I clarify how I intend to deal with three features of Cavell’s
thought on skepticism that might be thought to present obstacles for my
way of laying out and criticizing his work. These are first, the asymmetry
of Cavell’s understanding between external world (or material object)
skepticism and other-minds skepticism, second, the occasional explora-
tion of the relationship between skepticism and sex or gender in Cavell’s
writing, and third, the relationship between history, especially the his-
tory of modernity, and skepticism as Cavell understands it.26 In Part III,
I give a brief synopsis of Cavell’s analysis of external world skepticism,
Skepticism and the Human Condition 79
with emphasis on why Cavell thinks the skeptic’s procedures lead to a
kind of incoherence. In Part IV, I discuss why Cavell nevertheless insists
that the argument laid out in Part III does not constitute a refutation
of skepticism, and, more importantly, why he believes that for human
language users skepticism is in a certain sense natural and unavoidable.
The key idea in this section is that a particular interpretation of the self
is utterly central to Cavell’s claim that a relation to skepticism is inevi-
table for creatures with language and thought. In Part V, I provide an
overview of work by Charles Taylor where he presents a portrait or the
modern Western self that is substantially more historical and stands in
fairly stark contrast to what I regard as Cavell’s mainly ahistorical pic-
ture. In Part VI, I turn to some anthropological literature that further
challenges the picture of selfhood that lies at the heart of Cavell’s under-
standing of skepticism. In Part VII, I draw out some of the philosophical
consequences of my analysis. I argue that Cavell’s claim that skepticism
is an inevitable expression of the human condition is at best underdeter-
mined; seen less charitably, it is hard even to make sense of the claim.
In Part VIII, I address questions connected to my use of historical and
ethnographic material in my analysis of skepticism. In Part IX, I show
that there is no reason to believe that the self as Cavell understands it is
somehow necessary to linguistic agency. Part X addresses some remain-
ing issues concerning modernity and the modern self. I argue that even
when taking into account what signs there are of hermeneutic, historical
understanding in Cavell’s account, these are not enough to avoid the con-
clusion that a kind of essentializing (even to the point of fetishizing) of
the modern conception of the self pervades his thought and that this seri-
ously undermines his claim about the universality of the human relation
to skepticism. Finally, In Part XI, I briefly address a few of the practical,
ethical, and political dimensions of the contingency of skepticism in light
of the contingency of the correlative modern notion of selfhood.
II
In this Part, I deal with issues that some might feel pose important chal-
lenges for my own presentation and analysis. These issues concern my
way of handling three features of Cavell’s thought about skepticism:
the asymmetry between his treatment of external world (or “material
object”) skepticism and other-minds skepticism, the relation between
skepticism and gender, and lastly the question of the role that history
plays in his account of skepticism. My reason for dealing with these
issues in a preliminary way here, rather than in a systematic way later, is
that the second option would, I think, unnecessarily complicate my story.
It would draw me off in all sorts of directions without in the end adding
anything substantial to my discussion. Someone might think that if these
issues are worth mentioning at all, then they are surely worth handling
80 Skepticism and the Human Condition
in the body of this essay. I disagree and my reasons for disagreeing will
hopefully emerge and be convincing by the end of this essay. Yet I feel
I should say something about these issues, if only to ward off possible
unwarranted attacks to the effect that I have ignored or distorted crucial
aspects of Cavell’s thought altogether. Whether or not this is actually the
case can only be evaluated for each issue individually, and then only after
my narrative is completed.
A
In Part III, I will sketch the salient features of Cavell’s understanding of
skepticism including the part of his view that I go on to examine in the
remaining sections of this essay, namely, the anthropology of the self that
I believe runs through his authorship. Yet my sketch of Cavell’s diagnosis
of the skeptic’s procedures in philosophy, and my conjoining it to my
own description of his portrait of the human in Part IV that relies on
this sketch, might seem to be incongruous in one troubling respect. For
while the sketch of Cavell’s account of philosophical skepticism draws
mainly from Part II of The Claim of Reason, which deals primarily with
external world (material object) skepticism, my description draws not
only from some of Cavell’s works where that variant of skepticism is
at stake, for example from those works devoted to Romanticism or to
American Transcendentalism.27 It also draws from his numerous discus-
sions in which other-minds skepticism is in focus, for example from some
of his works that address themselves to film and to Shakespeare.28 The
possible problem with my presentation stems from the fact that while
there is a crucial asymmetry in Cavell’s diagnoses of external world and
other-minds skepticism respectively, this asymmetry of his analyses plays
no role in my critique of his anthropology of the self.
The asymmetry itself is rooted in Cavell’s view that external world skep-
ticism and other- minds skepticism have somewhat different logics and eti-
ologies, and thus that their diagnoses call for somewhat different concepts
and responses. With external world skepticism, Cavell believes that my fail-
ure to have knowledge of a generic object in a best possible case threatens
to ramify to my knowledge as a whole, thus generating a global skepticism
about material objects.29 But he also believes that to try to live this kind of
skepticism would be next to impossible as it would involve renouncing my
ability to lead a normal human life. Fortunately, as with Hume’s famous
description of the change that came over him upon leaving his study for the
billiard parlor, this version of skepticism dissipates when we return to the
world of our practical engagement with things. Cavell says,
This is what Cavell means, that with material object skepticism, I have
to (and usually can) “forget my skepticism”, that is, I can forget the les-
son of my failed best case of knowledge of a generic object and become
reabsorbed with objects in the everyday world.31
But Cavell also thinks that the role of the key terms in which he frames
external world skepticism, in particular the idea of a best case of knowl-
edge of a generic object, become more obscure when it comes to other-
minds skepticism. In particular, with other-minds skepticism it is far less
clear that I need or can have a best case for knowing a generic object. (I
took you to be content with me when in fact you were angry and only
feigning contentment.) The nature of the “objects” we want to know, so
to speak, are the individual “mind-states” (love, fidelity, hatred, envy) of
individual humans. Because there are no relevantly generic minds, failure
in the one case need not ramify.32 We read in a late essay,
In the case of other minds I find that instances of the other do not
generalize; or rather, where objects are singled out on the model of
the Cartesian format of supplying a basis for a claim to know and
grounds for doubting the basis, the format does not express my inter-
est. At the place with material objects where I object to your claim
to know by saying, for example, that “you don’t see the back half
of the object,” I say in the case of other minds that you don’t know
what’s going on in the other, who might, say, be feigning what you
say she feels, or feeling something quite different. The difference is
that the case of the material object is argumentative; I am apt to feel
bullied by it and if I accept it confess a shock or realization. Whereas
the case of the other is too trivial to mention. Who doesn’t know
that what I go on in knowing others is their outward behavior – or
is it their conduct, or the subtler movements of the body, especially
the face, and, as documentary filmmakers insist upon, the hands? In
any event, what is inside the other is not transparent to me. This is
no news, and accordingly it suggests that the problem of the other
is not discovered the way the problem of the knowledge of objects
is discovered.33
I take that his saying that with other-minds skepticism I have to remem-
ber the possibility of skepticism means that acknowledgement of oth-
ers requires a specific form of attention, that I have to be more active
in applying criteria, that I have perhaps to remember to resist my own
temptations to overlook or deny others. Cavell sums up the asymmetry
between the two variants of skepticism this way:
Cavell describes here his “contrary intuitions” about the positionality of the
self in relation to its object. Yet while his expression of a sense of reversed
relationality is no doubt interesting, given my interests here, it makes sense
to ignore it. This is because my focus on the anthropology of the self in
Cavell’s work is concerned with the unquestioned status of the modern
self’s image of itself as thus “sealable” in the first place. Whether sealed in
as with material object skepticism or sealed out as with other-minds skepti-
cism, we are surely dealing here with the same “punctual” self.38
B
This section concerns the way in which I handle a possible different
asymmetry in Cavell’s understanding of skepticism, an asymmetry that,
though he clearly came to believe it to be significant, never received a
worked out articulation in his thought, and thus in my view can’t really
be said to have anything like Cavell’s imprimatur. This is the asymmetry
in the way skepticism may be inflected by sex and/or gender.
The category pairs of male/female and feminine/masculine seem to play
minimal, or at least very subterranean, roles in Cavell’s thinking about skep-
ticism from the time of Must We Mean What We Say, through the Claim of
Reason, and on into the mid-1980s. In his analysis of remarriage comedies,
Pursuits of Happiness, Cavell does begin to broach gender-related issues
such as the way the creation of what he calls the “new woman” made these
comedies possible, but there is as of yet no suggestion that skepticism itself
may be more intimately connected to sex and/or gender.39
The possibly deeper connections that Cavell was to explore only a few
years later in his analysis of Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale might thus
be read as marking a significant shift in the position that he had by then
already been advocating for nearly two decades, namely, that a relation
to skepticism was something inherently human that each of us bore sim-
ply in virtue of being language users. In the introduction to his collec-
tion of essays on Shakespeare, however, Cavell writes that while he had
harbored a suspicion for some time that the impulse to skepticism was
somehow deeply connected to sex and gender,
Cavell is of course not suggesting that the fall into skepticism is a singu-
larly masculine temptation. In fact, it is precisely the lack of any clear-cut
correspondence to sex that leads him to introduce gender concepts into
his account. He thus notes, “I know some women for whom I do not
doubt that the skeptical issue does arise. One might here speak not of
men and women but of masculine and feminine aspects of human charac-
ter generally”42 As to what might prompt a corresponding feminine flight
from finitude, he speculates a bit later,
Yet, despite what may be a fruitful line of exploration, there are several
reasons for why I opt not to examine the question of how issues of gender
may, as Cavell puts it, “inflect” the issue of skepticism.
My first reason for not making Cavell’s speculations about skepticism’s
relation to sex and gender central to my essay concerns what I hope to
accomplish by the historicist and cultural anthropological thrust of my
argument. I will argue that a fundamentally essentialist, because ahistori-
cal, conception of the self permeates Cavell’s work on skepticism. If it
should turn out that by Cavell’s own lights much of his authorship per-
tains primarily to men instead of to all of humanity, that still leaves him
Skepticism and the Human Condition 85
by my lights making questionable claims about an awful lot of human-
ity. Second, even if it is plausible that, as Cavell speculates, the feminine
existential issue is not a catastrophic doubt pertaining to knowledge but
a catastrophic fanaticism pertaining to love, it could well be that my
approach applies just as well to the self of such fanaticism as it does to
the self of skepticism. Both ideas seem to take for granted a radicalized
sense of the punctual sealed off/sealed in self that I find equally non-
compulsory. Finally, however, my third and main reason for not dealing
with the issues of how sex and gender play out in Cavell’s work is simply
that this provisional asymmetry in his analysis of skepticism receives so
much less attention than do his much broader claims about the relation
of skepticism to humanity as a whole. Indeed, only a few pages after sug-
gesting that feminine fanaticism about love is exactly measurable with
masculine skepticism about knowledge, we find Cavell back to making
the more typical sort of universalist claim I find suspect:
C
In the case of the asymmetry Cavell finds between other-minds skepticism
and external world skepticism, and in the case of the question he raises
of the relation between sex/gender and skepticism, my previous discus-
sions will have to suffice: for the reasons given, I won’t revisit either of
those issues later in the essay. In the case of the third issue I deal with
in the present section, that of the history of modernity and its relation
86 Skepticism and the Human Condition
to skepticism, the situation is more complicated. After my presentation
in the next section of Cavell’s diagnosis of skepticism, my critique of his
views of the self that are internal to that diagnosis will be fundamentally
historical and anthropological in its orientation. I will argue that Cavell
in effect relies on an ahistorical essentialist picture of the modern self.
What makes things complicated for my mode of presentation, however,
is that it could give the reader the false impression that history is entirely
absent from Cavell’s writings. Understandably, this could give rise to
some head shaking on the part of impatient readers, especially those sym-
pathetic to Cavell, because historical context is in fact not absent from
Cavell’s numerous discussions. On the contrary, references to the histori-
cal context of the advent of both skepticism and the modern notion of the
self are abundant in his writings. A few examples make this clear.
While noting his previous neglect of Macbeth in the preface to his col-
lection of essays on Shakespeare, Cavell states that,
Again, in “Night and Day: Heidegger and Thoreau” from 2000 Cavell
refers to the historical situation in which modern skepticism broke
through as “the cultural cataclysm represented by the advent and instal-
lation of the new science in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries”.49
Skepticism and the Human Condition 87
Finally, in 2004, Cavell expresses his wish “to leave open the idea that
a Cartesian ‘privacy’ bears on what is felt as Shakespeare’s marking of a
new stage in human – Western? – Subjectivity”.50
Rather than arguing, then, that Cavell simply ignores history in his
account of modern skepticism, my complaint will be that the lack of phil-
osophical weight that he attributes to historical context is troubling. It
is, moreover, this fact that I think justifies the way I will present Cavell’s
account of the self. I will ascribe to Cavell a largely ahistorical view of
the nature of the self that lies at the basis of his account of modern skep-
ticism. After this ahistorical and essentialist view is on the table, I will
explicitly take into account the kinds of considerations that Cavell raises
about historical context in order to see if these contradict or amelio-
rate this criticism. Not only will I show that they do not, citing Cavell’s
own remarks about historical context actually allows me to bring out
even more clearly how his consistently strong claims about skepticism
and human nature reveal that he must either adhere to something like a
metaphysical developmental story about the modern conception of the
self, or, as I suspect is more likely, land him in some sort of subtraction
story.51 Neither option will turn out to be tenable. Both exhibit a disre-
gard for what I believe to be a more compelling hermeneutic approach to
historical-cultural considerations.
III
In the previous section, we saw Williams wrongly attribute to Cavell the
ambition of providing a therapeutic diagnosis of skepticism that would
amount to a definitive refutation. Yet more important than citing autho-
rial disclaimers by Cavell that undermine William’s claim is getting into
a position to see precisely why Cavell thinks any project of definitive
refutation of skepticism misses its mark so widely. This is what my brief
sketch of Cavell’s analysis of material object (external world) skepticism
aims to do.52
Cavell argues against Austin that criteria, the marks by which we cor-
rectly apply our concepts, do not provide the materials for a convincing
rejection of the skeptic.53 To see why, consider Austin’s anti-skeptical
arguments that make use of knowledge of specialized criteria. Suppose
for example I call out, “Look at that gorgeous ’65 Mustang right there!”
A friend might challenge me with the question, “How do you know that’s
a ’65?” If we assume for a moment that the challenge is directed to the
specific claims implicit in my call, then it could well be taken as asking
how I know that there is a 1965 Mustang as opposed to a 1966 Mustang,
given that the two editions are very close in appearance and are easily
mistaken for one another. Austin’s use of specific criteria was supposed to
show how I could meet this type of challenge by using my special knowl-
edge of Mustangs to give a response such as “Because of the grille”. (To
88 Skepticism and the Human Condition
someone familiar with these editions, the grille on the two different years’
models can be distinguished, even from a considerable distance, and was
one of two main differences in outer appearance (the other being the
quarter ornaments)). By Austin’s lights, if my friend persisted by asking
how I really know the year of the car, this could reveal him to be either
ignorant or confused about just what it would be to know the difference
between a 1965 and 1966 Mustang based on their outer appearance.54
If my companion were simply interested in challenging things like
my ability to distinguish between two early editions of a popular 1960s
American car, then my response might satisfy him. But as Cavell makes
clear, the Cartesian skeptic’s doubt is intended to have a much wider and
more destructive scope; it is meant to force me to admit that, my feeling
of certainty notwithstanding, the “car” parked on the street might for all
I know be a fiberglass replica (my “stuffed goldfinch”, as it were), and no
amount of complaining about common sense and “what is true for pre-
sent intents and purposes” can make this possibility just disappear. This
point shows how, as Cavell argues, Austin’s kind of anti-skeptical argu-
ment is useless if, instead of relying on examples that make use of spe-
cial knowledge of concepts and of one’s abilities to discriminate specific
objects, the skeptic actually makes his point with reference to grammati-
cal criteria that govern our use of words, referring to what Cavell calls
a “generic object”, i.e. a car, a tomato, a bird, a piece of wax, a tree.55
Once we take into account that not only does the skeptical challenge
operate with a generic object (a car) and not a specific object (a ’65 Mus-
tang), but a generic object perceived under ideal conditions (right there
in the street under bright sunshine), his line of questioning can be fatal
to our claims to perceptual knowledge. If I am wrong about the Mustang
being a ’65, either because I didn’t know the difference between its grille
and that of a ’66, or perhaps because I was careless in my reporting,
I may see no great threat to knowledge in admitting, that, after all, it was
a ’66 Mustang and not a ’65.56 My error is localized and need not have
any broader epistemic reverberations. But if, however, I am standing five
feet away with ample light and normal eyesight, the potential effects of
mistaking a fake car for a real one are not so easily contained. This is
why in Cavell view, Austin’s examples are unsuited to refute skepticism:
the skeptic operates with criteria for generic objects that describe the best
possible occasions of our correct our use of general concept words under
ideal circumstances.57 The depressing conclusion to these reflections on
the attempt to refute skepticism by the notion of criteria is that
Criteria are “criteria for something’s being so”, not in the sense that
they tell us of a thing’s existence, but of something like its identity,
not of its being so, but of its being so. Criteria do not determine the
certainty of statements, but the application of the concepts employed
in statements.58
Skepticism and the Human Condition 89
Criteria pertain to those occasions when it is appropriate or justified to
claim something about the world, but not necessarily to when one is cor-
rect in doing so.
Cavell thus thinks that refutations of skepticism that rely on cri-
teria fail. But he does not worry that this failure makes the truth of
the skeptical thesis more likely. In fact, he thinks that considerations
from criteria do play a key role in showing what is fundamentally
amiss with the skeptic’s procedure; it is just not the role sometimes
assigned to them. To see what Cavell finds suspect in the skeptic’s
apparently impeccable line of reasoning, consider the following sche-
matized exchange:59
Cavell notes that as far as he is aware, the usual efforts to stanch the
skeptical movement of this recital concentrate on either the Request for
a Basis (2) or the Ground for Doubt (3).60 His own unorthodox line of
inquiry, on the other hand, will focus on the Claim itself.
As the schema illustrates, the skeptic’s procedure requires that a
claim be made about a generic object such as a car, a piece of wax, or
a hand when presented under ideal perceptual circumstances. Further,
because the case is a best case, if doubt can be raised about my claim
to knowledge here, it can be generalized so as to call into question
all of my knowledge of material objects. This then seems to threaten
to yield a skeptical conclusion. Yet at this point Cavell thinks he can
bring to bear a crucial point that he has argued for earlier, namely,
that the criteria governing words are not self-applying. The words
I utter may have a general semantic meaning, but in a particular con-
text unless I mean something by them, they may mean anything at all,
which is really to say nothing at all: without my input, “criteria are
dead”.61 This allows Cavell to broach the surprising idea that “what
can comprehensibly be said is what is found to be worth saying”.62
Because criteria are not self-applying, we have to apply them with
some purpose or other when we speak. So if the initial Claim (1) is
to provide the skeptic the platform he needs to launch his attack, the
Claim itself must be uttered for some specific reason, given an actual
use, that makes it worth saying in that context. In the case of the
skeptical recital of traditional epistemology, this possibility prompts
Cavell to ask, “Is the example the philosopher produces imaginable as
an example of a particular claim to knowledge? What are his examples
examples of?”63
90 Skepticism and the Human Condition
Now the epistemologist may naturally assume that it is sufficient for
him to have made a genuine knowledge claim even if the only unusual
thing about his utterance is that in ordinary circumstances its truth would
be so “flamingly obvious”.64 Yet just proclaiming out of the blue “Here
is a hand”, with no context for saying so (and as Cavell provocatively
underscores “because it’s true” does not on its own provide such a con-
text), could mean anything, and consequently nothing.65 There are cer-
tainly contexts in which words such as these can be sensibly uttered; it’s
just that the epistemological non-context isn’t one of them. Saying some-
thing, even something flamingly obvious, has its conditions, but the epis-
temologist, “wants to speak without the commitments speech exacts”.66
As there is no claim context, no context in which we understand why the
skeptic says what he says and so for our understanding what he says in
saying it, no concrete claim is made.67
With these considerations in the background, Cavell maintains that
in so far as there is an incoherence at the very beginning of the skeptic’s
procedure, the very knowledge claim that is supposed to generate the
generalized doubt in the first place cannot not be coherently entered.
Cavell sums up his reading of the skeptic’s predicament as a dilemma:
The reason we cannot say what the thing is in itself is not that there
is something we do not in fact know, but that we have deprived
ourselves of the conditions for saying anything in particular. There
is nothing we cannot say. That doesn’t mean that we can say every-
thing, there is no “everything” to be said. There is nothing we can-
not know. That does not mean we can know everything: there is no
everything, no totality of facts or things to be known. To say we do
not (cannot) know things-in-themselves is as much a Transcendental
Illusion as to say we do.69
All that Cavell’s argument amounts to thus far is the idea that we don’t
understand what the skeptic says, along with the implied suspicion that
neither does the skeptic. Arriving at a place where a purported claim
turns up as empty is not a refutation of anything. Nor is it a demonstra-
tion that, as a matter of general philosophical principle, one can’t say
what the skeptic is trying to say. This is enough to make clear that there is
something seriously wrong with the idea that Cavell believes he has given
a conclusive therapeutic refutation of skepticism.
IV
We see, then, that Cavell thinks one reason why material object (exter-
nal world) skepticism “cannot” be refuted is quite simply that it doesn’t
really provide anything to refute. One could, I suppose, construe this as a
kind of logical or philosophical sense in which he imagines anti-skeptical
arguments as missing their targets. Yet according to Cavell, this is hardly
the only or even the deepest sense in which such arguments are unsatis-
factory. To see this, consider that one could well wonder why it is that
skepticism arises in the first place. Or better, once having been exposed
as incoherent by a diagnosis of the type Cavell offers, one could well ask
why skepticism doesn’t merely evaporate or disappear, as certain illu-
sions or bad ideas sometimes do, never to return. Cavell holds, on the
other hand, that skepticism is a pervasive problem in everyday life and
an accordingly a recurring theme in philosophy, film, and drama. What,
in his view, accounts for this phenomenon?
We first need to note that since skepticism as Cavell understands it
is inherently tied to the constant vulnerability of our criteria to failure
and rejection, it would never arise for a creature without language.
Without meaning to imply that he would ever suggest that a creature-
with-language could be intelligibly factored into parts in anything but a
nominal sense, Cavell would I believe allow for one or the other aspect
of this unified whole to be emphasized in a given case, especially if
92 Skepticism and the Human Condition
doing so permitted one to make a salient point. In the present case we
can say that for Cavell, skepticism is not only part and parcel of our
being creatures-with-language (and minds), but perhaps more perti-
nently creatures-with-language and minds.70 This makes clearer why he
regards theoretical attacks intended to refute skepticism as even more
profoundly mis-calibrated than we have seen thus far; they fail to take
into account how deeply skepticism pertains to our affective nature
as language users, however much it can appear in philosophy to be a
primarily if not wholly speculative problem. At the most basic level in
his thinking, therefore, Cavell holds that attempts to refute skepticism
misfire because the impulse to skepticism is, qua impulse, not at root
an intellectual position and so not a “suitable object of refutation”.
Skepticism’s manifestation as a philosophical problem is more aptly
seen for him as a kind of (as we’ll see in a moment, motivated) distor-
tion or sublimation of the genuine vulnerabilities of an animal with
language into an inflated intellectual problem. In The Claim of Reason,
Cavell is referring precisely to such covering up of the affective roots
of philosophical skepticism when he recalls “what I have throughout
kept arriving at as the cause of skepticism – the attempt to convert the
human condition, the condition of humanity, into an intellectual dif-
ficulty, a riddle.”71
The idea that human speakers face a permanent susceptibility to skep-
ticism traces out a remarkably consistent Leitfaden running through
Cavell’s authorship over more than 40 years. Consider first this famous
passage from his ground-breaking essay on Wittgenstein from 1962:
Some years later, in an essay from the mid-1980s, Cavell describes the
possibilities of skepticism as “natural to the human being; parts of the
nature or fate of a creature complex enough for, or fated to, language.74
Skepticism and the Human Condition 93
In works from the mid and late 1990s, Cavell asserts for example that the
ordinary language philosopher’s
Finally, in a late essay from the 2000s, Cavell is still articulating this per-
spective, for instance in maintaining that
the question of what I might call skepticism’s necessity and its pos-
sibility, to its paradoxical presence within our very possession of lan-
guage, glimpsed when Descartes asserts that we are misled by the
ordinary word “see” into supposing that we really as it were see
things of the world.77
Because criteria don’t just apply themselves on their own, but require our
involvement, nothing guarantees that we will make the effort to apply
them, let alone that we will apply them correctly and successfully. As
we shall see shortly, moreover, Cavell believes there is much that mili-
tates against our willingness to own up to precisely these possibilities. In
fact, after The Claim of Reason, it was the investigation of this theme in
philosophy and various art forms that came to dominate Cavell’s energy
even more than it had before that watershed publication.
Now we saw earlier that Cavell wants to say that there is a “truth of
skepticism” to which the skeptic has latched on, even if not always in
a very perspicuous manner. As Cavell puts it, this truth was that “Our
relations to the world as a whole, or to others in general, is not one of
knowing, where knowing construes itself as being certain”.90 The basis
for what I think of as Cavell’s “anthropology” resides precisely in what
he finds to be our human inability, both in our relations to the world
and to each other, to live with the conditions that underlie this truth.91
96 Skepticism and the Human Condition
In Cavell’s various numerous elaborations of skepticism, it is clear that
he believes that we find living with this truth to be an almost unbearable
task. Hence, his repeated claims that it is human to deny the human
condition. But why do we find facing this condition so hard? Why is
the contingency internal to criteria so terrifying that Cavell finds we are
driven almost of necessity to deny their very existence?
Consider in this vein two long quotations taken from the same stretch
of The Claim of Reason that vividly portray the core of a Cavellian
response to these questions.
The experience of knowing nothing about the real world at all is of course
the experience of the total failure of our criteria to make actual contact
with it. A bit further on we find the following:
I can here only attest to my having had such experiences and, though
struggling against them intellectually, have had to wait for them to
dissipate in their own time. It seems to me that I relive such experi-
ences when I ask my students, as habitually at the beginning of a
course in which epistemology is discussed, whether they have ever
had such thoughts as, for example, that they might, when for all
the world awake, be dreaming; or that if our senses, for example
our eyes, had differently evolved, we would sense, i.e., see, things
other than as we see them now, so that the way we see them now
is almost accidental, anyway at least as dependent on our constitu-
tion as on the constitution of the world itself; or that the things of
the world would seem just as they now do to us if there were noth-
ing in it but some power large enough either to keep us in a sort of
hypnotic spell, or to arrange the world for our actions as a kind of
endless stage-set, whose workings we can never get behind, for after
all consider how little of anything, or any situation, we really see.
I know well enough, intellectually as it were, that these suppositions
Skepticism and the Human Condition 97
may be nonsense, seem absurd, when raised as scruples about par-
ticular claims to knowledge. But if these experiences have worked in
the initial motivation of particular claims, then the attempt to prove
intellectually that they have no sense is apt to weaken one’s faith in
intellectuality. . . . [W]hen the experience created by such thoughts
is there, it is something that presents itself to me as one, as I have
wished to express it, of being sealed off from the world, enclosed
within my own endless succession of experiences. It is an experience
for which there must be a psychological explanation; but no such
explanation would or should prove its epistemological insignificance.
And I know of no philosophical criticism which proves that either.93
There is a lot one could say about these passages.94 Here I want to focus
on how the experience of the possible failure of our criteria described in
the first passage gets elaborated by Cavell in the second as an experience
whose content, though admittedly bordering on the absurd, is neverthe-
less impervious to rational criticism: the experience reveals something
“true”, even if not exactly the truth of a thesis. First, recall that irrefu-
tability, even in the face of nonsensicality, is one of the hallmarks of
skepticism according to Cavell. But second, and more significant, note
that even if the language that Cavell uses to describe this experience may
strike some as “poetic” or “non-philosophical” (and anything like a
sharp distinction between the force of poetry and philosophy is likely to
be a distinction Cavell would question anyway), when he writes that this
experience presents itself to him as a sense of “being sealed off from the
world” in his own “endless succession of experiences”, Cavell takes the
experience to reveal something genuine, let’s say true, about his condi-
tion: that in some sense he really is separate, cut off from the world.
The very presentiment, however much lacking in rational grounds,
that the criteria on which our lives and sanity as speakers depend may
completely fail us, exacerbates the underlying “metaphysical fact” that
we are utterly alone with this real or potential failure. Variations on this
threat of isolation are pervasive in Cavell’s work. Nearly all of his writ-
ing, both prior and subsequent to The Claim of Reason, and whether
in philosophy, film, or literature, is dedicated to showing that the “best
case” of himself as revealed in the previous passages is representative of
the universal human struggle to live with the horror of our separateness.
Indeed, the persistent motif of chronic horror at our separateness and
the resulting flight from this fact is as consistently sounded in Cavell’s
writings as is the correlative theme of the connection between our being
criteriological creatures and skepticism itself: “[T]ragedy is the working
out of a response to skepticism – as I now like to put the matter, that
tragedy is an interpretation of what skepticism itself is an interpretation
of. . . .”95 What they are both an interpretation of is our separateness. If
anything, it is the repressed fact that each of us is our “own haecceity”
98 Skepticism and the Human Condition
that is the real truth of skepticism, a truth we flee and that underlies the
essential connection between language and skepticism.96 We see, then,
that Cavell’s account of skepticism has several strands, which though
in any given work can seem more or less related, in fact make up one
philosophical fabric. The following, from 1988’s In Quest of the Ordi-
nary: Lines of Skepticism and Romanticism, weaves them together in one
stretch.
The truth here is that we are separate, but not necessarily separated
(by something); that we are, each of us, bodies, i.e. embodied; each
is this one and not that, each here and not there, each now and not
then. If something separates us, comes between us, that can only be
a particular aspect or stance of the mind itself, a particular way in
which we relate, or are related (by birth, by law, by force, in love)
to one another – our positions, our attitudes, with reference to one
another. Call this our history. It is our present.98
V
By referring in the previous section to Cavell’s “anthropology”, I did not
intend anything unusual by this use of the term, even if Cavell is not an
anthropologist, or at least not one of the usual sort. I merely meant to flag
my view that a fairly definite picture of the human being runs through his
authorship. Of course, “anthropology” is more typically used to denote
a social scientific discipline with its own institutional moorings in uni-
versities. Fronting this more usual sense of the word makes it natural to
ask about the sources of Cavell’s data. A short answer is that I suppose
Cavell takes his observations about the human mainly from philosophy,
everyday life, and not the least art forms such as film, drama (especially
Shakespearean tragedy), poetry, etc. If I am roughly correct, however,
that there is an ontology of the human running through Cavell’s thought,
then this short answer might seem to set this ontology up for easy ridi-
cule, since surely (he, and I, must both know that) ethnographies are one
thing, films or plays quite another. Yet while Cavell surely realizes that,
for example, reading Descartes’ Meditations or watching Cary Grant
and Katherine Hepburn’s banter on the big screen are importantly differ-
ent activities from observing Berber cooking rituals, he would, I believe,
reject any strong conclusion that only the second observational setting
can provide genuine facts about the goings on of a human culture. Elabo-
rating this point sufficiently would require an explanation and perhaps
defense of an essential feature of Cavell’s views that, for example, art can
teach us something about the “real world”. Bringing Cavell’s work into
closer contact with the fields of history and anthropology as I do next
also requires that I make a point explicit: the narratives that histories and
ethnographies provide do not rely on or consist of “direct observational
data”. Thus, while historical and ethnographic accounts are certainly dif-
ferent from works of art, they are not incommensurable as sources of evi-
dence. Because I think these points should be obvious at this time point
in intellectual history, I take them for granted in what follows.
100 Skepticism and the Human Condition
Having just defended Cavell’s bona fides for speaking about the
human without having conducted field work, my discussions in this
part and the next nevertheless take a more empirical (though certainly
not empiricist) turn. Having shown previously how Cavell believes that
skepticism is an ineradicable feature of human life with language, it may
seem natural for me to pursue a project of comparative epistemology
and to ask whether in fact disciplines such as social or cultural anthro-
pology or history provided any good reasons for thinking that skepti-
cism is actually a universally observed phenomenon. I can imagine that
such a project has its own intrinsic interest and that it could well be
complementary to my work here. Since, however, I have also claimed
that underlying Cavell’s sense of the essential connection between lan-
guage and skepticism is our often repressed sense of ourselves as sepa-
rate, what I described as the real “truth of skepticism” we flee, I will
pursue a different avenue here.
Recall Cavell’s claim that the experience of feeling sealed off from the
world in his own endless succession of experience is a major motiva-
tion for the skeptic’s originating question. This connects to his taking
the experience to reveal something about his genuine predicament, a pre-
dicament the honest awareness of which we are driven to flee. Yet if a
tendency to flee this kind of experience is one of the ways in which Cavell
understands our shared humanity, then presumably something like the
experience that sets us fleeing is also shared. Now Cavell says he realizes
that the suppositions of the experience may seem nonsensical or absurd;
perhaps we could say the same of the thoughts and reactions of Lear,
Othello, and other figures who serve to illustrate skepticism’s insanity
throughout Cavell’s authorship. Still, there is no suggestion on his part
that the descriptions he offers of his own experiences or those descrip-
tions of these other representatives of humanity are unintelligible gibber-
ish. If, on the other hand, these descriptions had been offered outside of
any imaginative or projective context, then we would be hard pressed to
do anything with them at all. Yet many of us in fact are able to connect
our understanding to Cavell’s words, or to Lear’s words, or to Othello’s
words, etc. What I am driving at is that descriptions such as Cavell’s
don’t just perform their figurative work out of the blue.100 Rather, they
give expression to experiences of hyperbolic separateness capable of seiz-
ing the intellect for beings who already can interpret themselves as iso-
lated and cut-off. For me this raises two related questions: 1) What if the
having of such experiences not only makes skepticism seem inevitable,
but if their very description already in some way goes with, or arises
out of, a prior background ontology of the person? 2) What would it
be like to imagine the descriptions of these experiences doing the work
Cavell requires them to do without some prior context for imagining that
ontology?
Skepticism and the Human Condition 101
I begin my critique of Cavell’s anthropology of the self with a remark
from anthropologist Clifford Geertz’s “From the Natives’ Point of
View”:
I will consider this passage more fully in Part VIII. For now I want to
note that although, as usual, Geertz is mostly right on the money, he
moves too hastily here from briefly referencing various cultures’ con-
ceptions of the person to an elucidation of the “the Western conception
of the person”. In this present context, the other cultural interpreta-
tions to which he refers are, I think, more properly contrasted with
the “modern Western conception of the person” than they are with the
mere “Western conception”. This is because the “modern Western con-
ception of the person” can also be relevantly contrasted with the “pre-
modern Western conception of the person”, or as I will from now on
put it, the “pre-modern Western conception of the self”.102 Writing in
1974, Geertz can perhaps be forgiven for not having made much of
this, as much of the intellectual heavy lifting in this area had yet to be
102 Skepticism and the Human Condition
done. That all changed with Charles Taylor’s monumental Sources of
the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity published in 1989. While
Taylor’s book by no means appeared on the scene de novo, its synthesis
of historical and philosophical analysis constituted an enormous and
original intellectual achievement.103 Its themes also came to define Tay-
lor’s intellectual agenda for the next 20 years, exploring the significance
of the central interweaving strands of European modernity, culminat-
ing in the magisterial A Secular Age from 2007.104 Much of this work,
especially as it traces the interplay of historical and intellectual changes
that produced modern understandings of selfhood are directly relevant
for evaluating the ontological underpinnings of Cavell’s interpretation
of skepticism. In what follows, I give a brief sketch of Taylor’s descrip-
tion of the contrast between what he calls the dominant understanding
of the self in the modern West and a very different understanding char-
acteristic of pre-modern Europe.
According to Taylor, the understanding of the nature of what a self is
that is taken for granted by most modern Westerners (and probably also
by many people living in cultures or sub-cultures that have been deeply
shaped by the by the dominant culture of modern Europe and North
America) is the idea of a center of consciousness and motivation that is
bounded or “buffered”. By “buffered”, Taylor means a sharp distinction
between on the one hand what is taken to be “inside” the mind, charac-
terized as subjective feeling, thought, evaluations, secondary sense quali-
ties, etc. and on the other hand what is regarded as the world “outside”
the mind, interpreted as non-mental, spatial, and value neutral.105 A key
argument in Taylor’s account is that the modern understanding of such
a sharp boundary has a history, and that this history is tied to the emer-
gence of certain historical practices of what he calls “disengagement”.
He writes, “For the modern, buffered self, the possibility exists of tak-
ing a distance from, disengaging from everything outside the mind”.106
By “disengagement” Taylor means among other things, certain spiritual
and moral forms of self-understanding achieved through discipline, espe-
cially pertaining to salvation, that became prevalent around the time of
the Protestant Reformation. Somewhat later, these ideas morphed into
conceptions of political autonomy, rights, and obligations internal to
early iterations of liberalism. Taylor also frequently speaks of practices
of “disengaged rationality”. This term signifies an agent’s ability to adopt
a stance of theoretical reflection, in which she “disengages” from her
immediate practical, instinctual, or emotional engagement with the envi-
ronment as she experiences and interacts with it. Disengaged rationality
thus denotes an objectivizing stance toward the world often paradigmati-
cally associated with the explanatory power of natural sciences such as
physics and chemistry, but also with instrumental forms of reasoning
connected to economic behavior and to developing technology. Although
I list them separately here, in fact all of these aspects of disengagement
Skepticism and the Human Condition 103
are only so many threads in the ongoing creation of one historical tapes-
try that comprise Taylor’s account of modernity.
Now we clearly don’t spend all or even most of our time in the vari-
ous kinds of stances made possible through the disciplines of disen-
gagement. Yet for a myriad of reasons, some of them connected to the
status accorded to the activities that disengagement makes possible, the
“buffered” understanding of ourselves has, as Geertz writes, become so
“incorrigible” for us that it is an “an outlook which has to some extent
colonized the common sense of our civilization”.107 Taylor’s reference to
common sense here underscores a crucial point: as with any conception
at or near the “bottom” of our worldview, the buffered self is not a theo-
retical entity.108 Moderns (especially perhaps educated ones) just tend to
assume that the sense of a sharp boundary or buffer between the self and
world that disengagement both creates and reinforces merely reflects a
gulf that is there anyway, and that consequently thought, reason, mean-
ing, emotion, everything mental, must obviously be inside our heads or
souls. Nevertheless, against this ahistorical common-sense view Taylor
argues that
By definition for the porous self, the source of its most powerful and
important emotions are outside the “mind”: or better put, the very
notion that there is a clear boundary allowing us to define an inner
base area, grounded in which we can disengage from the rest, makes
no sense.110
As in the case of the self as buffered, Taylor’s point is not that the sense
of the self as porous was a well-supported theory based on evidence. Its
place in the pre-modern “conceptual scheme” was more basic and “has
to be seen as a fact of experience, not a matter of ‘theory’, or ‘belief’ ”.111
We should instead imagine this as
The point I am trying to make here is that in earlier societies, this
inability to imagine the self outside of a particular context extended
to membership of that society in its essential order.115
The buffered self is the agent who no longer fears demons, spirits,
magic forces. More radically, these no longer impinge: they don’t
exist for him: whatever threat or other meaning they proffer doesn’t
“get to” him.116
Taylor is also not the first to point out that what he calls the “Great Dis-
embedding”, the change from an enchanted to a disenchanted outlook,
has had far-reaching implications for how we live our relations not only
to the world but to ourselves and to one another as well.117
In fact, Taylor believes that the change has been so profound, that most
moderns must “find the idea of spirits, moral forces, causal powers with
a purposive bent, close to incomprehensible”.119
At this point we seem to be left with a discontinuous story, according
to which in the space of a few hundred years major populations of Europe
underwent profound conceptual and cultural changes, in particular in the
way they came to understand the very notion of the human self. Yet while
there will presumably never be a final story of the changes wrought by
modernity, this does not imply that just any old narrative will do. While
no doubt many people today realize that we are very different from those
strange medievals, what we actually know firsthand may not amount
to much more than a familiarity with a few hysterical caricatures in a
Monty Python sketch. Taylor glosses this somewhat lamentable state of
affairs: “In this sense, modern self-consciousness has a historical dimen-
sion, even for those – who are, alas, many today – who know next to
nothing about history”.120 In addition, while he thinks we can all agree
that one of “the central features of Western modernity . . . is the pro-
gress of disenchantment, the eclipse of the world of magic forces and
spirits”,121 he also believes we are too easily led into accepting a “drasti-
cally overly simplified Entstehungsgeschichte of exclusive humanism”,122
one that distorts our understanding of our relations to the past as well
as to the present. On Taylor’s view, one of the most widespread of such
accounts of the genesis of the modern self is what he calls “subtraction”
106 Skepticism and the Human Condition
stories.123 Resisting such metanarratives is a key goal of Taylor’s overall
project, which he explains this way:
VI
As we just saw, Taylor contrasts the modern “buffered” self with a more
“porous” understanding, which he suggests went hand in hand with a
more enchanted European world before the Reformation, and especially
before the intellectual upheavals in science, politics, and commerce of the
17th century. In this part, I want to turn to some ethnographic material
that covers much of the same conceptual ground. In addition to allowing
me to bring to bear perspectives from disciplines different from intel-
lectual history and philosophy, this will broaden my focus before I turn
back to interrogating Cavell’s views of the self of modern skepticism in
the next part of this essay.
Note first, however, that while the various understandings of the self
on view in the material discussed next would certainly seem to fall out-
side of what Taylor includes under the concept of a “buffered” self,
it is not obvious that they satisfy Taylor’s concept of a “porous” self.
This suggests that there is more conceptual space outside of “buffered”
than is covered by “porous”. As we have seen, “porous self” denotes
something like a psycho-spiritual entity that is more or less locatable in
the body but is nevertheless in contact with the “outside” world both
108 Skepticism and the Human Condition
causally and semantically. This is what I take Taylor to mean when he
writes that black bile did not symbolize melancholia, and did not just,
as a contingent matter of fact, cause melancholia, it was itself melan-
cholia. So that, odd as it sounds to us, for the mind to be in contact
with this substance was to be in direct contact with the state of mind of
melancholia itself, not merely with a brute cause of an internal mental
state. Presumably, similar considerations would apply to other states of
mind and other discreet states of affairs. If Taylor is right, this seems to
have been internal to what living in the “enchanted world” of medieval
Europe came to, at least for many. Yet, it is unclear to me that, which-
ever similarities with other societies this particular fact about medieval
Europe may indicate, this particular conception of porosity is manifest
in the understandings summarized next. And of course, particulars mat-
ter. Accordingly, the reader should not infer that I believe that these
understandings necessarily fall under the term “porous” self in Taylor’s
sense. Instead, it is preferable for now to take them as simply falling
under the contradictory of “buffered”, i.e. “non-buffered”. I will say a
bit more about this later.
The initial focus of my discussion is Rane Willerslev’s Soul Hunters:
Hunting, Animism, and Personhood among the Siberian Yukaghirs from
2007.131 The Yukaghirs are a people of the Upper Kolyma River in north-
eastern Siberia, and Willerslev’s book is an exploration of aspects of
the hunting practices of Yukaghir culture, in particular of the Yukaghir
understanding of the nature and role of the self in these practices. Will-
erslev’s book is a richly illustrative work on a perplexing topic in its own
right. Moreover, its discussion of the Yukaghir understanding of person-
hood suggests fruitful comparisons with other ethnographic material that
I will mention, if only cursorily.
There are several key ideas that make up Willerslev’s portrait of the
Yukaghirs. The first is animism, which he introduces into his discussion
with some caution. As Willerslev makes clear, ideas such as animism
have fallen out of favor among contemporary anthropologists as ana-
lytical concepts because they are frequently associated with the colonial
period when the field was taking shape. During this time, there was
a tendency to assume either that indigenous declarations of animist
practices and beliefs were either a sign of “primitive mentality” or of
“the natives’ ” propensity to deceive Westerners about what they were
really up to.132 I will return later to this tendency, not restricted to Vic-
torian anthropologists, whereby beliefs and practices such as animism
are dismissed out of hand on the grounds that it is simply not possi-
ble for anyone to hold such views. For now, it is enough to note that
Willerslev quite sensibly maintains against this kind of dogmatism that
one cannot even get so far so as a critique of a people’s practices and
concepts unless one takes the time to understand what those practices
and concepts entail. Naturally, this begins, at the very least, with taking
Skepticism and the Human Condition 109
seriously their self-interpretations when it comes to their own lives.133
As Willerslev puts it,
However, grasping the content of these ideas still may not be adequate.
Any meaningful comparison between systems of thought further requires
that one correctly see, even if one does not accept, the role that these
ideational structures play in the lives one wishes to understand. And, as
Willerslev underscores in this regard, animism among the Yukaghirs is
not an explicitly articulated doctrinal system.135 Instead, “[t]he person-
hood of animals and things is, as we shall see, something that emerges in
particular contexts of close practical involvement, such as during hunt-
ing”.136 Consequently, for the Yukaghirs,
The Yukaghir hunter not only understands himself as taking on the per-
spective of the person who is his prey, but also as a reincarnation of a
deceased relative:
The heart, head, and shadow are among its favorite locations, which
is why people tend to talk about three souls, the head-ayibii, the
heart-ayibii, and the shadow. However, the ayibii can, in principle,
reside in all body parts and organs. Diffused throughout the body in
this way, the ayibii becomes individualized into different agents or
“persons” (Rus, lyudi), as he [Nikolai Likhachev] called them, each
of which takes its specific character from the body part or organ it
inhabits. . . . Thus, each of these animated body parts or organs is
understood to be a kind of person within the person. However, as
he emphasized, the ayibii is originally only one, and it can therefore
gather itself into wholeness and act as a single person.147
When writing later that one “of the best known Melansian axioms must
be that appearances deceive”, she adds that “the unitary identity sets
the stage for the revelation that it covers or contains within itself other
identities”.160
Strathern goes on to show how this Melanesian imagining of the per-
son as a social microcosm breaks profoundly with a dominant Western
understanding of each person’s relations to her body, her actions, her
114 Skepticism and the Human Condition
property, and others. According to Strathern, on the latter conception,
these relations are construed on the model of ownership. She thus writes,
Naturally, such a view entails that other persons, let alone external
objects, are conceptually extraneous to one’s identity. While this may be
common sense for many of us, Strathern counters that
the Western notion that people own what they do to the exclusion
of others seems hardly borne out by the evidence on how claims
and ceremonial duties in such non-Western societies are often struc-
tured. . . . To assume that one can take as an analytical base a con-
dition in which people control themselves and their labor, without
reference to social others, is to introduce a neoclassical economism
when one least expects it.162
VII
There is no getting around the fact that the descriptions of the people
recounted in the previous section are puzzling (even though they are
often the very stuff of which much history and ethnography is made).
One perhaps all too human response to this perplexity is to try to explain
it away. Willerslev notes for instance an aversion in some quarters to
ascribing even self-proclaimed animist views to peoples on the grounds
that it smacks of “primitivism”. Some writers have actually preferred to
treat certain paradoxical statements made by informants as deceptions
offered up in order to conceal the real nature of their activities from
overly inquisitive Western investigators.171 I completely agree with Mar-
shall Sahlin’s assessment that this option fails miserably as an attempt to
show respect to indigenous cultures. Rather, it does “symbolic violence”
to them and sacrifices huge portions of ethnography to a “moral shake-
down” imposed by a misguided political agenda.172 It simply strains cre-
dulity to believe that the Yukaghir hunters with whom Willerslev lived,
and the informants of countless other ethnographers who have similarly
investigated other cultures, were putting on an elaborate show to satisfy
his need to project a Eurocentric fantasy onto an exotic “other”. This is
just political humbug. At any rate, my main conclusion is that there is no
good reason for attributing to these people an essential relation to skepti-
cism as Cavell conceives of it. In fact I find it difficult, to put it mildly,
to accommodate Cavell’s vision of skepticism, tied as it is to the experi-
ence of the locked-in/locked-out self, within the contexts of these other
cultures. On the contrary, in the cultural-historical worldviews we have
been looking at, there seems to be little or no place for the very experi-
ence of a fundamental predicament of separateness. Indeed, the ideas
of “acknowledging the other” or “accepting the world” seem forced in
these contexts, since the others and the world are already very much
woven into the fabric of the self.
Of course it’s important to keep in mind that on Cavell’s view, that each
of us is his “own haecceity” is not a conclusion we arrive at through phil-
osophical argumentation, in the manner in which, for example, Descartes
seeks to establish this kind of proposition after his First Meditation. Even
if he seems to think that Descartes was on to something significant, for
Cavell the philosophical doctrine of our isolation only seems to result if
we follow the misguided assumption that our fundamental relation to
the world might have been one of knowing with certainty. If, as I think
Cavell rightly argues, there is something fundamentally illusory with this
assumption anyway, then this fact or proposition, if those are the right
Skepticism and the Human Condition 117
words, is not something we could ever really know. Instead, the “experi-
ence” leading to the “philosopher’s originating question”, an experience
Cavell thinks we usually respond to by fleeing into various obsessions,
including various epistemological projects, is supposed to be a revealing
mood that uncovers our true predicament of separateness, even if that
revelation is not construed by Cavell as a cognitive operation and that
separateness is at least temporarily remediable in a way that philosophi-
cal solipsism never could be. Our condition of separateness has to be
lived with and faced up to, not just cognized, if we are to attain the only
genuine relations to others and the world of which we are capable, the
relations of acknowledgement and acceptance.
Still, even during those brief respites when the dust of our panic set-
tles and we are perhaps able, however fleetingly, to accept the world and
to acknowledge others before we once again succumb to our mania for
domination through knowledge, Cavell’s view is that our fundamental
existential condition must remain that of separateness. In the context of
these other systems of thought, however, the for us apparently redeeming
concepts of acknowledgement and acceptance seem frankly redundant
and out of place. In fact, not only does it become difficult to talk about
any possible edifying lesson to be had through having the experiences
of separateness described so vividly by Cavell, I think it is completely
opaque how, for instance, we can realistically entertain the question as
to what it would be like for the Yukaghir to undergo such an experience.
Yet according to Cavell, it was the essence of our very humanity to be
vulnerable precisely to the feeling of the world’s withdrawal, if only long
enough to repress it. I don’t buy it.
It could be argued that I am defending an extremely implausible
form of psychological relativism, to be denying the “psychic unity of
mankind”, by implying that all emotional experience is determined by
language, and, where there seem to be different grammars of such expe-
rience, concluding that there we have logically incompatible emotional
possibilities. Nothing is further from the case. I take it as given that joy,
fear, grief, anger, and expectation are part of our common natural inher-
itance and are found universally in all cultures. But experiences such
as that of “being sealed off from the world, enclosed within my own
endless succession of experiences”173 or of oneself being under threat of
metamorphosing into a moose seem to me only possible for a creature
burdened with a language. And it seems further to me to be not only the
case that certain things are simply not given expression in the context of
certain forms of life, but entirely unclear how to conceive of their sensibly
being given such expression.
At this point, I might be accused of trying to get away with a logical
sleight of hand. That is, one might try to show that my argument against
Cavell’s claim for the universality of the human condition of separate-
ness relies on nothing more than a shopworn and now generally rejected
118 Skepticism and the Human Condition
argument from incommensurability of the kind commonly associated
with figures such as Thomas Kuhn, Peter Winch, and others.174 In the
examples from history and ethnography I have discussed, so this coun-
terargument could go, certain words such as “self”, “person”, “agent”,
“soul”, “mind”, “individual”, “I”, “body”, and “world” appear in very
different linguistic contexts and seem to be employed in very different
ways than those ways to which most of us in the modern West are famil-
iar. If, moreover, these lexical items, these signs, have whatever particular
meaning they have in those very different contexts, how, it can be asked,
can I pretend to locate in these other contexts of use what Cavell means
by the same expressions in the contexts of use in which he employs these
terms? This would require that I understand what Cavell means by them
in his context, and then, when turning my attention to the appearance of
these expressions in ethnographic contexts, I am somehow able to recog-
nize that Cavell’s meaning can’t be meant or said in these other systems of
thought: that his meaning won’t “fit” those contexts as a matter of logic.
The sleight of hand amounts to imagining that after one has extracted a
sign out of one context of use, that the sign somehow magically retains
its meaning, and then discovering that, lo and behold, it can’t retain
this original meaning in a substantially different context of use. Such
a maneuver could tempt us to conclude something like “the Yukaghir
understanding of self is incommensurable with the Western understand-
ing”. But that would involve overlooking that as soon as a lexical item
is removed from the original context of use and left in limbo as a bare
sign, there was no more “meaning” remaining for to fit or not to fit into
the new and supposedly incommensurable context. The same signs in the
new context may mean whatever they mean, and this may indeed be dif-
ferent from what those signs mean in the first context. But this is not the
same as the first meaning not fitting into the slot occupied by the second
meaning. All I am doing, so this potential criticism goes, is identifying
some superficial syntactical or lexical similarities, the occurrences of the
same signs in different contexts, and drawing tendentious philosophical
conclusions about what can and cannot be thought in those contexts.
To claim therefore that Cavell can’t articulate his skepticism within the
logical parameters provided by the logic of affect that each of these other
cultures exhibit, is not just a bold metaphysical claim, it is downright
incoherent. Claiming that “Cavell can’t say that” logically only works if
I can provide some story about what “that” is supposed to be. And, as we
have just seen, it is in the very nature of this trick as I’ve described it that
no such story is being told. My attempt to show that Cavellian skepticism
cannot be formulated by drawing the limits around what can be said in
these other thought systems, so this line of criticism might go, is simply
unintelligible.175
But in fact, I am not relying on anything like an incommensurabil-
ity thesis and I am not claiming that Cavellian skepticism cannot, as a
Skepticism and the Human Condition 119
matter of logic, be formulated within these other “conceptual schemes”
or systems of thought. I am only claiming that I, for one, cannot make
sense of what it would mean for the Yukaghirs to sense (or repress) the
“brute metaphysical fact” of their separateness given what Willerslev
reports. But I am also claiming that I doubt anyone else can make sense
of this either.176 There is nothing logically amiss here. More importantly,
it is essential to reject an assumption on which the accusation of my
relying on an incommensurability thesis may rest in the first place. This
assumption is that I am treating these accounts as though they consisted
of uninterpreted strings of signs and then drawing my conclusion. This
is false. On the contrary, I take the ethnographies and histories in which
these accounts appear to contain careful translations, not merely unusual
strings of signs. I take it that historians and ethnographers (and hopefully
their attentive readers) actually have some measure of comprehension
of these strange pronouncements, even if they do not sit easily with our
ordinary understanding. Addressing this issue, Strathern writes,
At the same time we may not be justified in assuming that such trans-
lations are based on scant evidence, on mere individual occurrences of
expressions taken out of context, so that a more extensive comparison
would surely remove for us any oddity. Strathern writes in this vein,
“Comparative analysis does not in the end turn on the applicability of
single concepts but on the comparison of whole systems”.178
Consider in this light the following passage from J. Prytz Johansen’s
work in New Zealand:
VIII
Even if my arguments in the previous section should allay certain logical
suspicions about my historicist-oriented critique of Cavellian skepticism,
there are further concerns that I need to address. These pertain to my use
of historical and anthropological texts in my critique of Cavell.
First, it might be argued that I have framed the issue wrong and have
distorted the nature of Cavell’s main claim about what works such as
Othello are meant to reveal about the human condition. At the begin-
ning of Part V, I provided a defense of my attributing to Cavell a kind
of anthropology. This was directed in the first instance at those with an
Skepticism and the Human Condition 121
empirical bent of mind who might resist or even resent this word being
used to describe a thinker whose conclusions were primarily drawn from
the arts. I can imagine, however, howls of protest coming from other
quarters to the effect that my critique of Cavell, drawing as it does on
history and anthropology, completely misses its mark precisely because it
construes him as making something like a universal empirical claim. The
complaint might run like this: What you are in effect accusing Cavell of
doing is making a hasty generalization. You are, that is, saying that he
draws a false empirical generalization about the human condition from
an inadequate data set. But that is not at all the kind of reasoning in
which Cavell is engaged. He is taking himself and characters such as
Lear and Othello as representatives of humanity, in the way in which an
ethologist might say “the Canada lynx has long ear tufts, flared facial
ruff, and short, bobbed tail with a completely black tip. It has unusually
large paws that act like snowshoes in very deep snow, thick fur and long
legs and feeds primarily on the snowshoe hare”. It would hardly be to
the point, this line of counter-argument would continue, for you to assert
that this statement was false because I had found a Canada lynx who
didn’t eat meat. That would misunderstand the nature of the statement,
which describes what is typical or representative of the Canada lynx. My
attempt to refute the statement by pointing to our supposed vegetarian
would merely reveal that I did not understand the grammar of such state-
ments in the first place.182 If this were so, then I would be in full agree-
ment with this argument. In fact, Geertz makes this very same point:
He soon adds,
While Spiro does not accuse those social scientists whom he thinks traffic
merely in cultural conceptions of the person as conducting their research
entirely from the comfort of their libraries, and while he does not imply
that the cultural conception of the person (or any other ideal type) is
without some social scientific value, he thinks that to settle for such a
generality for one’s understanding of the self is to settle far too cheaply.
It is difficult to clarify the next idea, self-presentation, without already
drawing on ideas from the cultural conception, because through lan-
guage self-presentation already interfaces with the cultural conception.
In a rough sense, we can say that according to Spiro, self-presentation is
something like an individual’s conscious, conceptual take on herself as
well as the self-articulation that she more or less consciously presents to
others. If the social scientist bothers at all to conduct one on one inter-
views, then Spiro would likely say that it is the self-presentation she is
likely to encounter, a kind of presentation that is usually deceptively shot
through with the expected cultural generalities characteristic of the cul-
tural conception. The true self, in such cases, is obscured.
Spiro doesn’t provide much independent description in his paper about
the level he terms “self-representation” (naturally), but it is clear that it is
at this fundamentally individual bio-psychological, affective, and largely
unconscious level where the real investigative work ought to focus. Suf-
fice to say, he thinks this all-important level escapes the likes of Geertz
and his co-interpretivists, stuck as they are at the levels of the purely
symbolic. He complains that
[h]aving learned the hard way that one cannot validly infer actors’
conception of the self, let alone their mental representations of
their own self, from the normative cultural conception, it is not
surprising that I was rather skeptical of Geertz’s claim that from
a study of symbolic cultural forms alone, one can validly infer
the manner in which people “actually represent themselves to
themselves.”195
Based on the distinctions between the cultural conception of the self (more
or less identical with the concept of a person for Spiro), self-presentation,
and self-representation, Spiro is able to lay out some specific objections
against “wholesale cultural determinism”. With regard to Markus and
Kitayama, Spiro maintains that their
[I]f for Markus and Kitayama the term “self” denotes (as I think is
most likely the case) some psychological entity (an ego, a soul, an “I”)
within the person, and “others” denotes such an entity within other
persons, then non-Western peoples, for whom “others” are allegedly
included within the boundaries of the self, would be characterized
by little, if any, self-other differentiation, and like William James and
A. I. Hallowell, I find such a notion very difficult to comprehend.
Thus, both James and Hallowell, respectively the preeminent psycho-
logical and anthropological (cross-cultural) theorists of the self (in
my view at any rate), construe self-other differentiation—the sense
that one’s self, or one’s own person, is bounded, or separate from
all other persons—as a distinguishing feature of the very notion of
human nature.197
Skepticism and the Human Condition 127
On this point, Spiro thus concludes as follows:
The various “village chiefs” and “folk priests” on the Sudra level,
and, on the Triwangas, the hosts of “kings,” “princes,” “lords,” and
“high priests” do not merely occupy a role. They become, in the eyes
of themselves and those around them, absorbed into it. They are
truly public men, men for whom other aspects of personhood – indi-
vidual character, birth order, kinship relations, procreative status,
and prestige rank take, symbolically at least, a secondary position.
We, focusing upon psychological traits as the heart of personal iden-
tity, would say they have sacrificed their true selves to their role;
they, focusing on social position, say that their role is of the essence
of their true selves.200
Geertz sums up his interpretation with the terse assertion: “The illumi-
nating paradox of Balinese formulations of personhood is that they are –
in our terms anyway – depersonalizing”.202
According to Spiro, Wikan’s work shows that the Balinese, pace Geertz,
are not merely or even primarily concerned with a cultural conception
of the person or in the public personae the cultural conception extracts
from them in their self-presentation, but instead are centrally occupied
with their individual emotional states in a way that indicates they experi-
ence their inner lives as every bit as much of a bounded, unique, more
or less integrated motivational and cognitive universe as does the typical
Westerner. Spiro claims that Wikan’s more psychologically focused inves-
tigations reveal that
He adds later,
IX
The main reason for my extended discussions of historical and ethno-
graphic material was to make it more plausible that Cavell’s view of our
essential human condition as one of separateness is in effect an ethno-
centric dogma, albeit perhaps a tacit one. In addition, however, my dis-
cussion also touches indirectly on a closely related issue that goes to the
heart of Cavell’s vision of language. I will briefly take this up now.
As we saw earlier, Cavell treats the possibility of skepticism as essen-
tially tied to his insight that criteria are not self-applying, that they need
to be projected into a context of use. This point is at the center of his
argument that the skeptic’s procedure, which is launched by claims such
as “here is a hand” or “here is a piece of wax”, involves the assumption
that these utterances have specific significance despite their being uttered
in a “non-claim” context. In other words, the criteria guiding the use of
these expressions are taken by the skeptic to be magically self-applying,
an idea Cavell rightly finds unintelligible. In order to be projected into
a context, language thus requires the correlative concept of a language
user, a particular kind of agent. This requirement for projection in a con-
text, moreover, is internal to the contingency of language, in particular to
its teaching and learning, but also to the inevitable failures and mistakes
in our projections. It is the intrinsic difficulty we humans experience liv-
ing with this essential contingency that generates skepticism. The very
idea of the consequences of such failures, let alone their actual occasions,
exacerbate our latent sense of being locked out that these failures make
manifest. Given that the criteria we project are our distinctly human way
of reaching the world and reaching each other, it seems understandable
that the naked isolation that such failure reveals, especially in a best-case
scenario, could prove terrifying.
132 Skepticism and the Human Condition
But this issue of linguistic agency may appear to raise a serious prob-
lem for my claims that there are no compelling reasons for thinking that
Cavell’s understanding of the self is universally valid. If his specific ontol-
ogy is actually necessary for the very concept of linguistic agency, we would
be faced with some unattractive options in light of the anthropological
material I have discussed. In other words, we would be faced with a ques-
tion as to how, given what many ethnographers report, their informants’
statements could be the expressions of language users at all. “Logically”,
I suppose, we could infer that, lacking the required agency, these people
are not language users at all. But not only is this option absurd, it is belied
by the fact that self-descriptions indicating a non-buffered self pervade the
historical and anthropological record. One could perhaps hold that eth-
nographic and historical data on the self might be highly misleading for
thinking about the nature of informants’ actual relationship to language
use. That is, if the notion of “self” that Cavell takes for granted is taken to
be identical with the underlying essential nature of language users, then it
looks like from the Cavellian perspective the cultures I have described pre-
viously must be massively deluded about their language and lives. In effect,
they are not the kind of creatures with language they think they are. I will
return to this idea later. For now, I want to explore another possibility.
Putting what I just called the “absurd” option schematically might be
useful.
When moderns read of, say, shamanistic cultures where they are
alleged to believe that the human person has three souls and that one
Skepticism and the Human Condition 133
of them can travel outside and even remain there for a time, they find
it hard to know what to make of this information. Does it mean that
these people don’t share our sense of the unity of the person or the
link/identity of a person with his or her body, that they don’t count
persons in the same way as we do? We can probably be confident
that on one level human beings of all times and places have shared a
very similar sense of ‘me’ and ‘mine’. In those days when a Palaeo-
lithic hunting group was closing in on a mammoth, when the plan
went awry and the beast was lunging towards hunter A, something
similar to the thought ‘Now I’m for it’ crossed A’s mind. And when at
the last moment, the terrifying animal lurched to the left and crushed
B’s head instead, a sense of relief mingled with grief for poor B was
what A experienced. In other words, the members of the group must
have had very much the same sense that we would in their place: here
is one person, and there is another, and which one survives/flourished
depends on which person/body is run over by that mammoth.210
That there must be some sort of linguistic agent is one thing; whether we
have to construe the language user in the manner in which Cavell does,
taking for granted the metaphysical picture of an isolated self that we
have seen is far from universal, is quite another.
Naturally, Cavell never denies the “social embeddedness” of language.
But for all that his picture of language and language users is a highly indi-
vidualistic one. In fact, there is something Sartrean about Cavell’s under-
standing of our individual responsibility for the application of criteria. It
is reminiscent of Sartre’s description of the responsibility one constantly
exercises for “choosing not to jump” from a steep precipice as one trav-
erses a narrow mountain path. One wants to say, “Okay okay, I get the
point, I’m choosing with every step not to jump”. But just because you
may succeed in convincing me of this sort of intentionalistic story after
the fact doesn’t mean that this reveals the true nature of agency.212 To
say “I use the word blindly”, leaving in place as it does the fact that my
134 Skepticism and the Human Condition
training into a practice can in many cases just do its work transparently,
in no way detracts from the fact that it is still a case of my speaking. That
meaning doesn’t just “take care of itself”, doesn’t imply that I am (or
even could be) consciously or unconsciously obsessively involved with
my every act of meaning. Indeed, the Cavellian self may appear to be a
requirement for language use exactly because of the skeptical contexts
that emerge in his depictions, where the horror of isolation resulting from
the possible failure of criteria is at the forefront. Yet what if the self-
interpretation precedes, and even precipitates, the horror, rather than the
horror revealing the true nature of the self?
Cavell writes in the The Claim of Reason
A
It is now time for me to make good on a promise I made in Part II C,
namely, that I would eventually address some of Cavell’s remarks that
Skepticism and the Human Condition 135
concern the historical context of modern skepticism, remarks which
prima facie may not seem to fit comfortably with my claim that his story
is fundamentally ahistorical. First, it is worth pointing out that there are
places throughout his corpus where Cavell not only shows sensitivity to
historical context, but actually exhibits historicist sensibilities. For exam-
ple, in the early essay “A Matter of Meaning It”, Cavell expresses clear
opposition to the idea that modernism simply revealed essential facts
about the nature of art that were waiting fully intact to be discovered.
To say that the modern “lays bare” may suggest that there was some-
thing concealed in traditional art which hadn’t, for some reason, been
noticed, or that what the modern throws over—tonality, perspective,
narration, the absent fourth wall, etc.—was something inessential to
music, painting, poetry, and theater in earlier periods. These would
be false suggestions. For it is not that now we finally know the true
condition of art; it is only that someone who does not question that
condition has nothing, or not the essential thing, to go on in address-
ing the art of our period.215
In similar fashion, I have already cited passages where Cavell could easily
be interpreted as holding that he actually believes skepticism’s conceptual
connection with modernity to be closer than my subsequent discussion
would suggest.216 Remarks with an historical bent that touch on skepti-
cism are scattered throughout Cavell’s work. In The Claim of Reason
we read that “It should be considered also that an initiating form for the
achievement of privacy would be the convulsion of sensibility we call
the rise of Protestantism”.217 In the introduction to Disowning Knowl-
edge from 1987, Cavell writes of “the historical trauma that sets the
scene for skepticism (or for which skepticism sets the place), the scene in
which modern philosophy finds itself”.218 In “The Uncanniness of the
Ordinary” from 1986, he refers to the acknowledgement of otherness in
certain works of film and literature as a “datable event in the unfolding
of philosophical skepticism in the West”.219 Finally, in “Something Out
of the Ordinary” from 1997 he asks “can the great literature of the West
not have responded to whatever in history has caused this convulsion in
the conditions of human existence?”220
Cavell says what he says about modernism presumably because he
understands that an attempt to account for the changes in the ontol-
ogy of art that is conceptually divorced from the practices through
which we articulate our understanding of those changes is tantamount
to metaphysical realism about “the real nature of art”. It is incoherent
because it requires that we strip ourselves of the very resources we rely
on to articulate what it is we want to say and think. Unfortunately, he
does not extend the same consideration to the modern understanding of
the self. While Cavell acknowledges a relation between modernity and
his understanding of skepticism, the nature of this relation is seriously
136 Skepticism and the Human Condition
underdeveloped in his writings. Interpreted charitably, one could say that
there is simply a fundamental tension in Cavell’s thought as to whether
the possibility of skepticism is an essential part of the human condition
or more historical in nature. But in the end, not only in terms of the
sheer numbers of countervailing remarks, but more importantly in terms
of their trenchant rhetoric and logical role in his overall presentations,
the weight of the textual evidence strongly mitigates against anything on
Cavell’s part like a consistent and robust historical understanding of the
nature of skepticism.
I find little indication of an appreciation in Cavell’s work of the his-
torical horizon of skepticism, as a phenomenon caught up in a dialectic
between, on the one hand, circumstances beyond human control, and
on the other, historically particular forms of agency and articulations of
valuations, which together shaped social reality. Lacking an acknowl-
edgement of the logical depth of practices for making sense of what it
means to be a self, talk of our fundamental condition as being one of sep-
arateness and isolation is naïve at best, dogmatic at worst. While Cavell
frequently mentions modernity as the period during which the Western
understanding of selfhood underwent a fundamental shift, he seems to
construe that shift as a case where certain budding intellectual and psy-
chological techniques for uncovering an entity already lying beneath
the veil of traditional culture dovetailed with the social conditions that
permitted those techniques’ successive refinement and application. The
reception of the “results” were registered with approval (by the right
people) in a way that reinforced the idea of a sharp separation between
the contexts of discovery and justification, if you will, of what had been
“found”. We thus read in The World Viewed:
B
We have seen not only that the ethnographic record reveals peoples for
whom Cavell’s understanding of the self is alien, but also that there is
no compelling philosophical reason for thinking that they are (or were)
somehow wrong about the facts. In particular, in my analysis of Spiro’s
criticisms of Geertz, I tried to undercut the idea that there was any
obvious basis for believing that a Cavellian-like take on metaphysical
separateness could be grounded in the facts of our bodily separation.222
Moreover, it is actually very far from obvious that a conceptual or inter-
pretative system with that particular self-understanding is somehow
“truer to the facts” than are other systems that embody a different self-
understanding. In dealing with Cavell’s occasional references to history,
I have also touched on the possibility that he regards a certain constella-
tion of modern cultural institutions such as Protestantism, science, and
liberalism which emerged coevally with the modern self-understanding,
as somehow most revealing and expressive of the human condition. Now
Cavell would certainly be right to resist the suggestion that we could sim-
ply shrug off our modern understanding of the self (whether precisely his
own or some related iteration), even if there were weighty considerations
for wanting to do so. It might be held, for instance, that once the historic-
ity of our concept of the self (or any concept, for that matter) becomes
known, then merely by agreeing to speak differently we could loosen its
grip. This is naïve and unrealistic. The centrality in our thought of our
concept what it is to be a self runs much deeper than can be accounted
for by any mere agreements we could drop or adopt. Nevertheless, we
are only required to regard skepticism as rooted in our biological nature
if our conception of the role that historical ideas and practices, especially
linguistic practices, play in shaping our self-understanding is a superfi-
cial and passive one. According to one such thin interpretation, before
modernity took hold in the West, and still to this day in many societies,
a metaphysically separate subject labors under the weight of arbitrary
cultural baggage.
I mean to press hard here on a very real, even if implicit, difficulty at
the heart of Cavell’s work, a difficulty which I can put in two questions:
Should our modern understanding of the self be taken to represent a kind
of uncovering of something already there? Or is it better understood as a
historical phenomenon that inevitably developed out of the very logic of
human thought? This is not a dilemma in the sense that these two ques-
tions comprise two mutually exclusive logical possibilities. (There is at
least one even less plausible option remaining with which I will deal at
the end of this part.) I believe, however, that the respective metaphysical
138 Skepticism and the Human Condition
and epistemological thrusts of these two questions are most likely to
capture the philosophical space in which Cavell operates. Consequently,
negative answers to both questions reveal that there is a profound prob-
lem with Cavell’s view of skepticism. I will first address the ontologically
inflected notion of the modern self as discovery because that expresses
the assumption to which I suspect Cavell is actually committed.
What should we say about peoples for whom skepticism, as Cavell
understands it, simply does not manifest, whether in art, music, philoso-
phy, or literature? We could reject the premise of the question, dig in our
heels, and simply insist that the basis for skepticism must be found in all
peoples in all times: separateness is, after all, supposed to be the human
condition. On the other hand, we might accept that while it appears as
though skepticism as Cavell understands it is not a ubiquitous anthropo-
logical phenomenon, all language users have a relation to the possibility
of skepticism. The right response to this is to say, “yes and no”. In a
purely formal sense, of course, all language users can be said to have such
a relation, if only because, as I have already maintained in agreement
with Cavell, no incommensurability thesis is forthcoming that would
show that it is theoretically “impossible” to formulate skepticism within
some mode of thought in which, as of yet, skepticism does not presently
arise. There is, moreover, no logical guarantee that given enough time,
we might also get them to be troubled by philosophical skepticism, in
particular through arguing for (or “persuading” them of) the correct-
ness of the modern model of our epistemological predicament, and of the
generally Cartesian understanding of selfhood implicit in that model. But
what should we say about the fact that, as of now, many people do not
seem to fall into epistemological quandaries of the sort characteristic of
skepticism? Do we want to rest our whole case for universality on such
a thin notion, that they have a relation to skepticism as a merely formal
possibility (which really amounts to a lack of a formal impossibility)?
Should we say that “their” possibility of skepticism is just like “ours”,
but that we really do succumb to it on occasion, whereas it just so hap-
pens, as a matter of fact, that they don’t? Isn’t this difference significant?
We could try to explain this difference by saying that the reason they
don’t worry about the catastrophic failure of knowledge is that knowl-
edge is not important to them. That seems wrong to me. Maybe it would
be better to say that their relationship to knowledge is a very different
one from ours. But then how might we try to account for this? By view-
ing them as primitive, child-like, superstitious, or repressed because they
do not act like we do and have difficulty understanding how and why
someone could worry about such things? Strathern writes aptly here that
[A] disjunction between the ideal and the real or between ideology
and practice is in the first place a disjunction between different types
of data within the anthropological narrative. This differentiation is
Skepticism and the Human Condition 139
taken as evidence for what might be judged as concealed or revealed
in the culture. But again we have to be clear that we are talking
about what the outsider would regard as concealed, and not about
the relationships and structures that the actors deliberately conceal
from themselves. To repeat on observation made earlier, people can-
not conceal from themselves what they do not know.223
But I can already hear the objection: “Fair enough, but whether they
know it (and repress it, or not) the human condition is as it is: sepa-
rate”. Such a dogmatic response would come close to maintaining that,
the historical and ethnographic work be damned, the human self is just
“there” like a natural kind, and our use of “I” has always referred to it,
rigidly, as it were; as a group, we moderns just happened to be the first
to catch on to this fact. How exactly we pulled off this miraculous feat
of insight de novo, where others before and after had failed (or fled), is,
well, pretty miraculous. Yet if we allow that historically specific prac-
tices were constitutive of what we are talking about when we speak of
a self as we have commonly come to do, as a psychological entity logi-
cally walled off from the world, if, that is, we allow in the present case
that ontological categories track cultural ones,224 then this self starts to
look like a historically emergent entity (my avoidance of “socially con-
structed” is intentional).
Cavell’s thought seems merely to recapitulate the idea that there is
an inevitable connection between the arrangements of modernity and
human nature itself. For all of his brilliance and originality, he seems
to be another in a long line of adherents to the implausible outlook that
Taylor calls a “subtraction story”, whereby “we naturally come to think
that we have selves the way we have heads or arms, and inner depths
the way we have hearts or livers, as a matter of hard, interpretation-
free, fact”.225 Anticipating Taylor by several years, Geertz remarks on
this widespread tendency to take for granted a common denominator of
self-understanding:
C
Given the stark contrast between Taylor’s historical sensibility and what
I take to be Cavell’s basically ahistorical attitude, it may be surprising to
note that in one respect at least, Cavell’s view of the self may in fact be
close to a position that Taylor has advocated in some of his earlier work
on relativism in the social sciences. Taylor has criticized Peter Winch’s
argument that the religious and magical practices of cultures such as that
of the Azande are immune to external criticism, especially modern sci-
entific criticism. Winch accused those who would make such external
critiques of committing a logical blunder rooted in ethnocentricity, by
which he meant in part that religious and magical practices and scientific
practices are conceptually heterogeneous.227
It should be clear by now that I have little sympathy for this sort of
maneuver. Yet Taylor points out that Winch’s attempt to avoid ethnocen-
tricity betrays its own type of ahistorical thinking. Taylor contends that
Winch’s taking for granted a purely expressivist symbolic view of religion
and magic is in fact alien to the very cultures whose traditions he seeks to
shield from scientific criticism. Winch’s point was that because religion
and magic are purely expressive activities on the one hand, while science is
in the business of getting things right about nature on the other, to attack
the former by employing standards taken from the latter is to commit a
category mistake.228 Taylor rightly objects to this move on the grounds
that Winch’s own position actually depends on the anachronistic imposi-
tion of a modern sharp fact-value distinction onto systems of thought
where the factual and expressive were not clearly distinguished.229
Taylor does not stop there, however. He goes on to claim that modern
science can score “objective points” against the Azande or the Renais-
sance magus, since the modern scientist can clearly provide a superior
account of disenchanted nature. I find it strange for Taylor to make this
argument just here, since it involves a move that at least looks structurally
identical to the one for which he criticizes Winch. This is because making
the judgement that the modern scientific descriptions of nature are better
simpliciter involves a prior commitment to the overall legitimacy of a fact
Skepticism and the Human Condition 141
value distinction. Obviously, once that prior distinction is accepted, then
certainly modern science can be judged to be superior to the enchanted
understanding. In general, if one wishes to compare two substantially dif-
ferent conceptual systems in some respect, the more discontinuity that one
can disregard, the easier it becomes to imagine the comparison between
them as being truth apt; it is easier to articulate continuity and com-
mensurability if there already is some taken-for-granted continuity and
commensurability.230 Yet as Taylor himself argues, fact and value were
not understood as sharply separated before the modern period, and so
his claim that modern science explains the world more successfully than
could the Renaissance magician, while true, seems to presume that we
can already see the disenchanted understanding of nature as implicit in
and continuous with the renaissance worldview. And this in turn requires
that we are able to see the two aspects for ourselves as already factored
even before they became factorized for us. But this is in essence precisely
what Taylor rejects in his criticism of Winch’s argument from incommen-
surability. More peculiar still, Taylor explicitly denies the very idea of the
overall “global superiority” of the modern fact/value distinction over the
pre-modern integrated view, which is precisely what assuming the objec-
tive superiority of the results of disenchantment would seem to require.231
The upshot is that connecting Taylor’s articulation of realism in thinking
about natural kinds across conceptual and historical differences won’t
make the case for realism about the self in Cavell’s work any stronger.
Someone might object that my criticisms of Taylor on this point serve
only to bring out that I am neglecting a relevant difference between the
kind of cases he is addressing, which concern natural kinds in the “exter-
nal world”, and the present case of the emergence of the understanding
of the modern punctual self. That is, someone might feel that the ques-
tion of continuity vs. discontinuity in our thinking about the modern self
is somehow of a different order from the intelligibility of a purported
natural kind claim made before and after a conceptual change, and that
the significance of this difference in turn might undermine my problema-
tizing the presumption of continuity. After all, it might be argued, we
are not merely discussing how to understand the conceptual relations
between systems of statements made before and after Copernicus that
refer to the heavens. Rather, we are discussing an indispensable condition
of the possibility of modern scientific discourse at all: the punctual self of
modern epistemology. Well, maybe. But I hardly think an indispensabil-
ity argument will help with this debate over the historical emergence of
the modern self in a way that will aid a Cavellian articulation for realism
here. Perhaps it’s true that the unity (separateness) of the Kantian (Cavel-
lian) self is a condition of the possibility for our scientific talk about
natural kinds. (After all, “what is more obvious than that a [metaphysi-
cally separate] subject is related to [a scientifically intelligible] object and
vice versa?”)232 Yet since realism of the type defended by Taylor against
142 Skepticism and the Human Condition
Winch already depends on the inherently precarious status of modal
claims about “what we would say or think” about some object in con-
texts like the one described in Hilary Putman’s “Twin Earth” thought
experiment, I think we should be doubly careful if instead we are discuss-
ing something akin to an epistemological condition of the possibility of
making statements about such natural kinds.233 Employing an indispen-
sability argument for maintaining realism about the self of (scientific)
epistemology, involves trying to bolster one sort of modal claim, what
we should say about the nature of the self, with the purported fact that it
allows us to make another sort of modal claim, what we would say about
natural kinds in science. It seems to me that the right response here is call
for more caution, not less.234
I have been focusing thus far on a metaphysical interpretation of the
modern self, as something understood on the order of a natural kind that
was eventually uncovered. However implausible I believe this view is, it
is the one that I think best captures Cavell’s actual commitments based
on what he writes. Nevertheless, there are alternatives, which, though
they actually have less textual basis, need to be addressed, particularly as
they represent interpretations that I suspect many of Cavell’s sympathiz-
ers draw from his writings. That is, someone might take me to task and
assert that my treatment of Cavell’s numerous pronouncements about
separateness is ham-fisted. What look like Cavell’s conclusions are not
really intended as full-throated quasi-empirical statements about what
is the case with regard to our concept of the self, but are instead meant
to change our perspective, to advocate for a certain grammar for talking
about the human. This advocacy depends not so much on our appre-
hending the changeover from the porous self to the buffered self as a
smoothly continuous and perhaps even inevitable process, so much as it
relies on our coming to regard it as such. In this vein, consider this pas-
sage from the introduction to the Claim of Reason,
Given the centrality in his thought of the idea that criteria are never self-
applying, it’s unclear to me to what exactly Cavell means with “merely
applying existent law”. Setting that issue aside, however, this passage
might suggest that I have narrowed the possible space for articulation far
too drastically. That is, Cavell’s description of the dynamics of a judge’s
decision could be taken to indicate a way of seeing the change from
Skepticism and the Human Condition 143
porous to buffered as neither a determinate process (“merely applying
existent law”), nor as an arbitrary exercise of will (“simply making new
law”). The point would be that with the right articulation we might come
to regard the emergence of the modern separate self of skepticism as, in
some sense at least, always having been part of the human condition (the
“guiding myth”), and not as a fundamentally contingent, historical, and
discontinuous phenomenon.
I see two ways that one might try to defend this view. Neither are
convincing. First, Cavell (or Cavellians) may readily grant that the meta-
physical realist picture of the modern self as involving a type of discov-
ery is indeed far-fetched. That is, they could try to persuade critics that,
while it is true that we lose our grip on the very idea of there being a
separate self if we insist on regarding it as a practice independent onto-
logical matter of fact, the cultural development that has made talk of the
emergence of the modern self comprehensible for us was itself somehow
inevitable, and was not an historical turn that things happened to take in
the modern West. The evolution of the idea of the self as buffered is built
into the grammar of our language. Presumably this view also requires
us to believe that the same is true, or will be true, if we just wait long
enough for other societies who appear to be lagging behind us in interi-
ority. There are familiar and insurmountable epistemological problems
with this Whiggish idea of inevitable development. Of course there was a
change in the Western conception of the self. This is not in dispute. What
is in dispute is what basis there could be for claiming we can discern an
inevitable law of historical development from porous to buffered (or any
other supposedly necessary historical development, for that matter).
The second interpretation is that Cavell’s real purpose is to shift our
moral and aesthetic perspective; reasonable people simply should come
to regard the emergence of the modern self as continuous with their more
porous past (and perhaps to see that conception of the self as implicit in
the non-buffered present of other present-day societies). In this case, there
would be no pretense that Cavell provides an articulation such that, as
some kind of independent matter of fact, it is continuous. Unfortunately,
this charitable interpretation, a narrative in which Cavell attempts to
foster a Gestalt-switch, is belied by most of his actual rhetoric. When he
speaks about the genuine human predicament being one of metaphysi-
cal isolation, he doesn’t hedge his bets on subtle issues of “seeing-as”.
One finds many more flat-out assertions in his corpus about separateness
being the human condition per se, than one finds pleas for seeing this
condition in one way rather than another. Now someone could propose
that the explanation for why Cavell never makes his real strategy explicit
is that his goal is to change his readers’ perspectives, not to announce
that he is trying to do so; being open about this might be ineffective in
convincing the recalcitrantly porous in the West and elsewhere, those
many millions who still haven’t gotten the message that secular liberalism
144 Skepticism and the Human Condition
née New England Unitarianism just obviously is the view of the human
condition acceptable in polite company. But since most of these great
unwashed are probably beyond hope anyway, it may also be the case that
Cavell is neither trying to nor needs to change their perspective. What
then? Well, I assume there will always be enough right-minded folks in
respectable humanities departments who never tire of hearing their com-
mon sense views repeated back to them, even when, or perhaps, precisely
when, the recounting takes the often convoluted guise of Cavell’s prose.
Traversing these circuitous pathways may serve to reinforce the impres-
sion in the reader that he has actually discovered something (all over
again). There is no harm in this per se, I suppose, but it could suggest an
unflattering picture of Cavell as a kind of clever propagandist.236 When
I imagine someone confidently asserting, “We can thus come to see that
the modern self was, so to speak, continuous with the pre-modern past,
even if not as a self-evident matter of fact”, I want to ask: Who is this
“we”? What if some of us, me, don’t quite manage to see this continuity?
What should we say then? Perhaps my inability to see the punctual self
as continuous with the porous past could be taken as evidence of poor
intellectual pedigree. I guess I should have held on to my 66’ Mustang
and Aerosmith tapes after all. (Is this a Weltanschauung?)
XI
On Cavell’s picture, most of the ontological stage-setting for the tragedy
of skepticism is already in place long before the philosopher, or actually
any human agent, steps onto the scene of conscious life. The epistemolo-
gist’s elaborate theories are merely one intellectual form of evasion or
diversion from the real problem, which is our finitude. As we have seen,
moreover, Cavell believes that our finitude is coextensive with our intol-
erable separateness, our human condition of “metaphysical isolation”.
Since I have gone to great lengths to undermine the universality of Cavell’s
portrait of the human self, it might therefore seem as though I were deny-
ing that there is anything like a human condition at all or that there are
genuine problems of human finitude. In truth, I am merely questioning
whether a certain subset of these problems ought to be ascribed to the
human condition. Although many modern Westerners and others
whose formation has been substantially marked by Western modernity
may respond to finitude by fleeing into skepticisms of various stripes,
there is more than one manner of responding to human finitude. This, in
fact, is one of the most important and fascinating lessons that studying
the world’s cultures, especially their religions, teaches. It is simply not given
that this includes living with a relationship to skepticism in anything but
the thinnest of senses. Human finitude, I want to say, reaches deeper
into the human than the possibility of skepticism. As I see it, it’s bet-
ter to think of “finitude” as working more like a proper name, whereas
Skepticism and the Human Condition 145
“separateness” works only like a contingently associated description that
indicates one mode of presentation for how finitude gets worked out or
experienced, i.e. in the modern West and its cultural satellites.
If reflection on history and ethnography supports the idea that the self
of skepticism is not part of our facticity, but rather one relatively recent
interpretation of the human condition, then we are faced with a nor-
mative question about how we should relate to this interpretation. Yet
this way of putting the matter makes it sound as though the key issue is
whether we want to choose another such relation. Some no doubt would
assume that if the self of epistemology is not necessary, then it must be
a merely arbitrary social construct, which we can simply dispense with
through an act of will, for example, by changing our vocabulary. But
framing things in terms of choice makes our predicament appear far
simpler than it is. Bringing to light that our modern self-understanding
is fundamentally historical, and so in a certain sense conventional, cer-
tainly implies that we are not locked into this interpretation as a fact of
nature, but it in no way implies that we collectively or individually could
easily dispense with this interpretation. It lies too deep in our mode of
thought for any philosophical or psychological act of cosmetic surgery
to be credible.
But if it’s premature to talk about realizing concrete possibilities for
change, it is still important to ask whether our assumed condition of
necessary isolation comes at a price. Since I am enough of a traditionalist
to believe that there is an inherent value in being clear about the truth of
one’s predicament, whether or not there is anything obvious that can or
should be done about it (and no, nothing I have said deprives me of the
right to use “truth” here), anything that obstructs such clarity is already
too high a price to pay. I believe the widespread uncritical acceptance of
an interpretation of ourselves as metaphysically separate certainly satis-
fies that criterion. When it comes to professional philosophy, moreover,
the sad fact is that the epistemological present remains so colonized by a
buffered picture of the mind-world relationship, a sophisticated variant
of which lies at the heart of Cavell’s work, that the effect of encountering
an alternative articulation even remotely smacking of its rejection tends
to elicit at best a polite smile of the sort one gives to a crazy person on the
bus. Maybe one ought not be surprised if attempts to explicate the mean-
ing of a pronouncement such as “being-in-the-world is a unitary phe-
nomenon” are met with a certain amount of amused condescension.237
But such reactions are not limited to the likes of Heidegger. Consider the
following passage from the introduction to Mind and World:
Given how entrenched the picture of the buffered self is in the intellec-
tual life of the West, it’s hardly surprising when words like these are met
with a suspicion like that which modern philosophers once reserved for
medieval obfuscation. There is also no doubt that some of the details of
McDowell’s view as laid out in in Mind and World are disputable. But
if we resist naturalist dogma while granting some demands for revisions
in his story, what is the principled reason for excluding out of hand the
idea that nature is not radically heterogeneous with the mind? I think
the tenacity of the traditional picture at our stage of intellectual history
ought to be at least as questionable, given that it has led to one intellec-
tual cul-de-sac after another.
The next downside of our general lack of historical perspective on
the modern understanding of the self relates to the socio-political plane.
I complained previously that Cavell, in practice at least, endorses the
validity of a subtraction story according to which the modern buff-
ered self was always (and still is) there, if only we could strip away the
inconvenient and usually illiberal camouflage of culture, religion, and
history that smother it. Another way I put this view is to say that he
takes secularity for the human condition. By now it should be clear that
I consider such a position to be blatantly ahistorical and without any
adequate backing. Against this, the historian and anthropologist Louis
Dumont argued that Western secular modernity is uniquely characterized
by the collapsing of an ancient distinction. Up through much of the Mid-
dle Ages, a person was understood in terms of two distinct hierarchies,
or levels, of value: the divine and the mundane. At the divine level, all
persons were equal individuals in the eyes of God. Dumont describes
the person here as the “outwordly individual”. At the social level, how-
ever, persons were understood as fundamentally defined by their worldly
relations and duties.239 According to the traditional hierarchy, therefore,
while in everyday life a person was unintelligible apart from his or her
nexus of social relations, the outworldly individual was conceived of as a
singular spiritual entity in relation to God alone.
On Dumont’s account, however, what characterizes secular moder-
nity is that, while the divine level in the two-tiered value hierarchy is
abandoned for a single-level plane of everyday life, the conception of the
individual that formerly was valid only at that sacred level is retained
and now comes to occupy the center stage of the now disenchanted
world. The older mundane view of the person as constituted by social
relations either fades to the background or disappears altogether.240
Secularism is thus the view that there is only one world, consisting of
“in-the-world” individuals. It is not my aim here to evaluate the relative
merits of secular modernity, but I do think that the uncritical adoption
Skepticism and the Human Condition 147
of this picture, however commonsensical for many, is not only intel-
lectually dubious, but practically disastrous when it gets unconsciously
(or at this point is it willfully?) imposed on people who are not quite
the buffered in-the-world individuals one takes them for. This confu-
sion often ends up either in self-flagellation on the one hand, blaming
ourselves when “they” don’t display the common sense habits of good
buffered moderns, or demonization on the other, viewing “them” as
somehow inherently defective. It seems to me that no small amount
of our current political strife is due to the inability or refusal to take
culture seriously.
I have been using Taylor’s expressions “buffered self” or “punctual self”
in ways that are meant to encompass Cavell’s conception of “separate-
ness”. In one way this could be misleading if only because Taylor usually
has in mind perspectives inspired by rationalists like Descartes, Locke,
and Kant and not those embodied by figures like Tracy Lord or Nora
Helmer. Yet however different in complexity and motivational structure
these dramatic characters are from the wooden notions of human
agency on offer from the philosophers, the metaphysical-epistemological
predicaments of these two groupings remain fundamentally c omparable.
I mention this because undoubtedly much of the difficulty with seriously
contemplating the possibility of allowing a loosening of the grip that
the buffered, separate picture exerts on our lives stems more from lived
ethical rather than abstract metaphysical concerns; anyone who has
read extensively in Cavell’s works recognizes in them a constant worry
about the possibility of social and political oppression. He often seems
less concerned with private language than with privacy. But while any
fair assessment of what I have been arguing will conclude that its sole
logical implications are the deflation of the metaphysical individualism
we’ve inherited from our tradition, the usual intertwining of the ethico-
politico with the ontological may leave some readers with an uneasy feel-
ing that I’ve paved a short path from release from metaphysical isolation
to denying village atheists their rights. Well, perhaps there is a noticeable
tendency toward intolerance and oppression among peoples where the
dominant self-understanding is decidedly non-porous. But can we be so
certain that any way of coming to terms with human finitude that does
not foster a genuine relation to the possibility of skepticism is a recipe
for oppression? What do we really know here? If it seems obvious that
history suggests we should err on the side of caution, we should at least
ask if that caution comes at a price. Refusing even to ask is the ethics of
resignation.
Many years ago, I described the idea for this essay in a long e-mail
to an acquaintance who is both philosopher and anthropologist. As
I recall, she wrote back that the basic conception struck her as gener-
ally coherent, but she finished her response with a remark that made
me uncertain. It ran something along the lines of, “It’s important to
148 Skepticism and the Human Condition
remember, though, that the individual is very important for intimacy
in relationships”. I think one reason for my uncertainty was that the
remark jumped ahead of anything I had actually said when I described
the plan of the essay. In particular, nothing in my outline directly
entailed any normative conclusion to the effect that the modern (Cavel-
lian) understanding of the self ought to be jettisoned once its contin-
gency had been uncovered. It is entirely possible that I had expressed
my conclusions with such enthusiasm that it was natural for her infer
that I thought that the historical contingency of the self of skepticism
somehow entailed that we should dispense with that conception. People
do sometimes argue that way. However it was that my acquaintance
came to ascribe such a view to me, if indeed that is what she did, I hope
that I have made it clear both that dispensing with the modern concep-
tion of the self is not something that can be achieved by an act of will-
power and that the normative questions surrounding how we ought to
relate to its contingency are complex.
But undoubtedly what took me most by surprise in my acquaint-
ance’s remark was its confident declaration of a positive correlation
between separateness and intimacy. It struck me as counterintuitive
that intimacy and separateness should be complementary or mutually
supporting phenomena, since on the surface at least the two seemed to
be opposing forces. How can you be intimate with a metaphysically
separate other? Yet, at the same time, part of me (the buried Roman-
tic?) also had a vague sense that there was something correct in the
suggestion that intimacy and isolation were mutually reinforcing vec-
tors. It is only recently, when writing this essay, that I believe I grasped
the significance of what my acquaintance wrote. If isolation is typi-
cal for our modern condition, then intimacy typically arises against a
certain social imaginary, where separate souls sometimes find them-
selves drawn across an abyss to share their isolation. This Romantic
pre-understanding allows for the emotional tectonics many have come
to see as essential for genuine intimacy. In other words, I regard “The
individual is important for intimacy in relationships” as a grammati-
cal remark characteristic of the culture of Western modernity. The
remark simply recounts (for many at least) part of what is meant by
“intimacy”. I suspect there are still others, people whose sensibilities
resonate with the likes of Young Werther or Holden Caulfield, who
might insist that one can only be intimate with a metaphysically sepa-
rate other. However that may be, I am confident that I have shown
that the Cavellian view of the human condition is only conditionally
valid. I have not, however, addressed the more important question as
to whether our quasi-addiction to its charms has become corrosive of
other relations. Am I gesturing at a culture with no romantics? Heaven
forbid. But better that than a culture dominated by politicized neurot-
ics. I guess that is a Weltanschauung.
Skepticism and the Human Condition 149
Notes
1. Franz Boas, Race, Language, and Culture (Chicago: University of Chi-
cago Press, 1940), 636.
2. See Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 3rd ed. (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1996); Paul Feyerabend, Against Method, 3rd
ed. (London: Verso, 1993). See also C. B. MacPherson, The Political Theory
of Possessive Individualism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964).
3. See for example, Charles Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries (Durham: Duke
University Press, 2004), 18, 62, 147.
4. I see the distinction between conceptual and cultural change as an important
one to make, both because I see conceptual change as one form of cultural
change, and because I want to hold open the possibility of cultural change at
a level that can give rise to conceptual change.
5. Michael Williams, Unnatural Doubts: Epistemological Realism and the Basis
of Skepticism (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1996).
6. Two of the main defenders of the epistemological tradition, whom Williams
called the “New Humeans”, are Barry Stroud and Thomas Nagel. See Wil-
liams, Unnatural Doubts, xiii–xiv. Stroud in particular, defended the cogency
of the traditional epistemological requirement for a justification in general
for our knowledge. See Barry Stroud, “Understanding Human Knowledge in
General,” in Knowledge and Skepticism, ed. Marjorie Clay and Keith Lehrer
(Boulder: Westview Press, 1989), 31–50; Thomas Nagel, The View from
Nowhere (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986).
7. Williams, Unnatural Doubts, 73–79, 218.
8. Ibid., 31–32, 40–45, 108.
9. Ibid.
10. A small irony here is that Williams does not realize that Cavell’s discussion
of the sort of context-free claim that Descartes wants to enter about a generic
object, a piece of wax, comes very close to attributing epistemological realism
to Descartes. This is because on Cavell’s view, the idea that there is such a
context for a knowledge claim about the existence of the piece of wax relies
on the idea of self-applying criteria, and this, it seems to me, comes very
close to Williams’ description of the conditions of epistemological realism,
viz. that knowledge is a natural kind, and thus the kind of thing with a struc-
ture whose description presupposes nothing about us. Barry Stroud, The Sig-
nificance of Philosophical Scepticism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), 262
makes a claim against Cavell similar to Williams’ objection, but I think the
same thing can be said regarding epistemological realism and self-applying
criteria in relation to Stroud. See Williams, Unnatural Doubts, 151–55.
11. Williams, Unnatural Doubts, 32. See Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), 45–46. Henceforth “CR”. See
also Stanley Cavell, This New Yet Unapproachable America: Lectures After
Emerson After Wittgenstein (Albuquerque: Living Batch Press, 1989), 43;
Stanley Cavell, Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome: The Constitution of
Emersonian Perfectionism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 35.
12. CR, 241.
13. Ibid., 45. Later in the essay I will give this “truth” a different formulation.
14. CR, 46. See also Cavell, Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome, 77.
15. CR, 45.
16. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (New
York: St. Martin’s Press, 1965), 34.
17. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward
Robinson (New York: Harper and Row, 1962), 249.
150 Skepticism and the Human Condition
8. CR, 456.
1
19. Stanley Cavell, Disowning Knowledge: In Six Plays of Shakespeare (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 3. I share some of Anthony Palm-
er’s suspicion that Cavell’s bold claim here is somewhat anachronistic, but
that is not a point I will explore. See Denis McManus, ed., “Scepticism and
Tragedy: Crossing Shakespeare with Descartes,” in Wittgenstein and Scepti-
cism (London: Routledge, 2004), 260–77. Cavell responds to Palmer in the
same volume. See Stanley Cavell, “Reply to Four Chapters,” in Wittgenstein
and Scepticism, ed. Denis McManus, 278–91 (London: Routledge, 2004).
20. Stanley Cavell, Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remar-
riage (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981), 109.
21. Cavell, This New Yet Unapproachable America, 54.
22. Ibid.
23. Ibid., 57.
24. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 7.
25. I should say at the outset that I while I clearly take issue with Cavell’s diagno-
sis of what underlies skepticism, for the purposes of this essay I am assuming
the basic correctness of his identification of the phenomenon of skepticism
itself, which in his hands takes on a distinctively Cartesian tenor. This is not
something, however, that one ought simply to accept uncritically in all con-
texts. On this, see James Conant, “Two Varieties of Skepticism,” in Rethink-
ing Epistemology, ed. Guenter Abel and James Conant, vol. 2 (Berlin: Walter
De Gruyter, 2012), 1–73.
26. Cavell sometimes mockingly refers to “external world” skepticism, preferring
instead the term “material object” skepticism. I have no preference one way
or the other and will use them interchangeably.
27. See for example, Stanley Cavell, In Quest of the Ordinary: Lines of Skepti-
cism and Romanticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988); Cavell,
This New Yet Unapproachable America; Cavell, Conditions Handsome and
Unhandsome.
28. Cavell’s, Must We Mean What We Say? A Book of Essays (Reference Chap-
ter 1, note 50), Pursuits of Happiness, Disowning Knowledge; Stanley Cavell,
Contesting Tears: The Hollywood Melodrama of the Unknown Woman (Chi-
cago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).
29. CR, 133–35.
30. Ibid. See also Cavell, Wittgenstein and Scepticism, 279.
31. CR, 439.
32. Ibid., 353.
33. Stanley Cavell, “What Is the Scandal of Skepticism?,” in Philosophy the Day
After Tomorrow (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2006), 149–50.
34. CR, 439.
35. Ibid., 432 (emphasis in original).
36. Ibid., 437. See also CR, 453, Cavell, Wittgenstein and Scepticism, 287 and
In Quest of the Ordinary, 127. In the same work (cf. 55) Cavell also briefly
raises the question about the relation between the two kinds of skepticism
and whether one of them is perhaps more fundamental than the other. Based
on various statements he has made over many years, I am frankly uncertain
whether Cavell believes there is something like a best case for knowledge (or
acknowledgement) of others’ minds. But my uncertainty could merely reflect
Cavell’s own ambivalence about the question. (Cf. Stephen Mulhall, ed., The
Cavell Reader (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1996), 137) And this alone may be his
way of conveying that the concept of a best case of acknowledging another
(generic?) mind is so unclear as to be unusable in a diagnosis of other-minds
Skepticism and the Human Condition 151
skepticism. Perhaps the line of reasoning runs as follows: We are normally
interested in individual mental states (e.g. love, anger, resentment) of indi-
viduals and not in some general issue of mentality (although Cavell’s occa-
sional talk of automata suggests we might be interested in that too). Since it
is unclear what the best case of a generic mental object might even be with
regard to a phenomenon that seems to be inherently particular, I can coher-
ently live my skepticism about individuals without it generalizing to every-
one. So, while I find it hard to discern what his position would be regarding
the livability of a global other-minds skepticism, Cavell evidently does believe
that in individual cases we find it quite possible, even easy in many instances,
to behave towards other individuals as if the obscurity of their particular
mindedness were of no great matter to us. At any rate, the kind of skepticism
of other minds I can or do live presumably is not one of a world of zombies
but of individual cases.
37. CR, xxi. See also CR, 144.
38. I have the term “punctual self” from Charles Taylor. See his Sources of the
Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1989), 49, 171.
39. Cavell, Pursuits of Happiness, 58–59. At the risk of wading into current ran-
corous debates about the relations between sex and gender, for my brief dis-
cussion here I will retain the two concept pairs of male/female and feminine/
masculine. It seems to me that Cavell’s own discussion often navigates a bit
ambiguously between these two pairs of concepts, one of the pair being more
biological the other being more social. Although he certainly gives the social
its due, in other places a more biological emphasis is apparent. See for exam-
ple Contesting Tears, 98 where he writes of the possible “role of the human
body in the sceptical so-called problem of other minds”.
40. Cavell, Disowning Knowledge, 15–16. This passage reflects well the ambigu-
ity I mention in footnote 39. See also Conditions Handsome and Unhand-
some, 119 where Cavell reiterates the consideration that skepticism may be
inflected by gender. See also Contesting Tears, 100.
41. Cavell, In Quest of the Ordinary, x.
42. Cavell, Disowning Knowledge, 16. See also Cavell, Contesting Tears, 101.
43. Cavell, Disowning Knowledge, 17.
44. Ibid., 29 (emphasis in original).
45. Ibid., 230.
46. Ibid., iii.
47. Ibid., 224. Later in the same essay Cavell ponders his “general sense of these
plays as history plays about a break in history, as turns in the history of pri-
vacy, or say skepticism, hence in the history of marriage, hence in the history
of legitimacy and succession” Disowning Knowledge, 245.
48. Cavell, In Quest of the Ordinary, 128.
49. Stanley Cavell, Appropriating Heidegger, eds. James E. Faulconer and Mark
A. Wrathall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 34.
50. Cavell, Wittgenstein and Scepticism, 281. In 2006 while considering the pos-
sible postmodern disappearance of skepticism, Cavell recalls “an older ques-
tion of mine, namely whether skepticism requires historical conditions or
whether the fate of possessing language, pursuing the life form of talkers . . .
is condition enough”. Stanley Cavell, “What Is the Scandal of Skepticism?” in
Philosophy the Day After Tomorrow (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2006), 140.
51. In contrast to Taylor, a “Cavellian” subtraction story will not be one which
terminates with some kind of Chicago School economist. The self in Cavell’s
writing is always less Game Theorist, more Lear, more Gregor Samsa.
152 Skepticism and the Human Condition
52. Most of my summary here draws on the first two parts of the Claim of Rea-
son, where the main topic is material object (external world) skepticism.
I do not discuss Cavell’s criticisms of the kind of view represented by Rogers
Albritton or Norman Malcolm, but focus instead on Cavell’s criticisms of
J. L. Austin. For a nice overview of this material see Chapters 1–2 in Espen
Hammer, Stanley Cavell: Skepticism, Subjectivity, and the Ordinary (Cam-
bridge: Polity, 2002).
53. Cavell is responding to Austin’s paper “Other Minds”. See Philosophical
Papers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), 76–116. For Cavell’s cri-
tique, See CR, especially 65–77, 132–37.
54. The instrument clusters on the dashboard were also quite different and the
gas caps were slightly different as well.
55. CR, 52–53.
56. Of course, it is not unthinkable, either, that someone has fitted a ‘66 Mustang
with the grille and quarter panels of a ‘65.
57. CR, 133, 135. Elsewhere he writes, “The logic of skepticism requires two
things chiefly: that knowledge be discovered to fail in the best cases – in know-
ing, for example, that I am seated before my fire, or that two plus three is five;
and that this failure be discovered in ways open to any normal human being,
not something knowable only by experts.” Stanley Cavell, “What Becomes of
Things on Film?” Philosophy and Literature 2, no. 2 (Fall 1978): 251.
58. CR, 45. This passage comes from Cavell’s arguments against Albritton and
Malcolm, but I think they are entirely appropriate in the present context as
well (emphasis in original).
59. This is adapted from the schema provided by Cavell on CR, 132. There,
of course, he is discussing Austin’s goldfinch example. The references to the
senses and the dream/hallucination possibility are mentioned at CR, 135.
60. CR, 135.
61. Ibid., 84. The original context for this phrase concerns other-minds, but
I take it to hold generally for Cavell.
62. CR, 94. This point is utterly central to Cavell’s entire project. Here I can only
present it in its barest aspect.
63. CR, 205.
64. Ibid., 211.
65. Ibid., 206.
66. Ibid., 215.
67. Ibid., 217.
68. Ibid., 220.
69. Ibid., 239 (emphasis in original). Compare this passage with the following
one from a decade earlier: “One wants to say: What it envisions is unintelligi-
ble. But what is envisioned which is unintelligible? It looks as if to make out
that it is unintelligible you have to do exactly what the person who claims to
envision it has to do – say what is envisioned. But it is exactly your point that
this cannot be done.” “Knowing and Acknowledging” in Cavell, Must We
Mean, 249. In each of these passages one can hear clear anticipations of what
has come to be known commonly as the “resolute” reading of Wittgenstein.
70. See Stanley Cavell, “Declining Decline,” in This New Yet Unapproachable
America: Lectures After Emerson After Wittgenstein (Albuquerque: Living
Batch Press, 1989), 41. In this essay, Cavell broaches two ways of taking Witt-
genstein’s term of art “form of life” (Lebensform) as that term is employed
in the Philosophical Investigations. What he says there about “ethnological”
and “biological” senses of Lebensform suggests to me that he would resist a
clean factorization of what I refer to here as the linguistic and the creaturely.
Skepticism and the Human Condition 153
At the same time, I think Cavell’s description of the ethnological dimension of
form of life in this essay as “conventionalistic” and so merely “horizontal”,
as opposed to the “biological” and so “vertical” dimension of that unified
whole is deeply misleading. In fact, it was my encounter many years ago with
the claims made by Cavell in that essay that set me on the course to write the
present work. My point here, however, is merely that there is some textual
basis for believing Cavell would not object to my handling of the neologism
“creature-with-language”.
71. CR, 493. A decade prior to The Claim of Reason we see the same sentiment
expressed: “(M)y powerlessness presents itself as ignorance – a metaphysical
finitude as an intellectual lack.” Knowledge and Acknowledging in Cavell,
Must We Mean, 263.
72. The Availability of the Later Wittgenstein in Cavell, Must We Mean, 61–62.
73. CR, 47.
74. The Skeptical and the Metaphorical. Cavell, In Quest of the Ordinary, 148.
75. Stanley Cavell, “Something Out of the Ordinary,” Proceedings and Addresses
of the American Philosophical Association 71, no. 2 (1997): 28.
76. Stanley Cavell, “Benjamin and Wittgenstein: Signals and Affinities,” Critical
Inquiry 25, no. 2 (1999): 237.
77. Cavell, “What Is the Scandal of Skepticism?,” 133 (emphasis in original).
78. Stanley Cavell, The Senses of Walden (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1992), 146–47.
79. CR, 109.
80. Cavell, Disowning Knowledge, 11, See also Cavell, Disowning Knowledge,
242.
81. Cavell, In Quest of the Ordinary, 88. See also Cavell, In Quest of the Ordi-
nary, 4, 138.
82. Cavell, This New Yet Unapproachable America, 38.
83. Cavell, Contesting Tears, 94. In 2004 we read “it is human to wish to reject
the human.” Cavell, Wittgenstein and Scepticism, 283.
84. Cavell, This New Yet Unapproachable America, 54.
85. Ibid., 57.
86. Cavell, In Quest of the Ordinary, 138.
87. The Argument from the Ordinary in Cavell, Conditions Handsome and
Unhandsome, 92.
88. Of course, Cavell doesn’t just think we will suffer sudden onsets of skeptical
insanity. He also believes that skepticism might teach us some lessons about
better ways to relate to the world and to each other. He writes that “Whereas
skepticism suggests that since we cannot know the world exists, its present-
ness to us cannot be a function of knowing. The world is to be accepted;
as the presentness of other minds is not to be known, but acknowledged.”
“The Avoidance of Love” in Stanley Cavell, Must We Mean What We Say?
A Book of Essays (New York: Scribner, 1969), 324. This passage touches on
ideas that are central to Cavell’s views on how we might accommodate and
cope with the threat of skepticism. But as they are posterior to the underlying
ontology of skepticism that I want to examine here, they are not my focus.
89. “The Availability of the Later Wittgenstein” in Cavell, Must We Mean, 52.
90. CR, 45.
91. On the unending problem of first coming to grips with the reality of this truth
Cavell writes elsewhere that, “The answer does not consist in denying the
conclusion of skepticism but in reconceiving its truth.” Cavell, The Senses of
Walden, 133.
92. CR, 140.
154 Skepticism and the Human Condition
3. Ibid., 141–42.
9
94. At the time he wrote The Claim of Reason, Cavell quite possibly interpreted
his experience of “being sealed off” from the world as close to Heidegger’s
descriptions of anxiety in Being and Time. Later in the book we read, “It is
as though the philosopher, having begun in wonder, a modern wonder I char-
acterized as a feeling of being sealed off from the world . . . is left only with
his eyes, or generally, the ability to sense.” CR, 224. And still later, “Why Is
There Anything at All?”– the recording, again, of an experience I confess hav-
ing had, and which seems to me related to, even to express, the sense of the
philosopher’s question “How do we know at all that anything exists?” CR,
241. Now it is true that Heidegger connects anxiety and wonder in Being and
Time and in the 1929 lecture “What Is Metaphysics” he explicitly connects
both of these to the question “Why is there something instead of nothing?”
But to insinuate any connection with Heidegger in the way I suspect Cavell
is doing in these passages is just wrongheaded (or worse). Heidegger may
say such things as that anxiety “individualizes” Dasein and thus reveals the
world as offering nothing to Dasein, but this is precisely his way of bringing
out how in anxiety what he calls the “worldhood-of-the-world” obtrudes
itself. That is to say, in anxiety Dasein sees that it is in a world of publicly
interpreted equipment and practices and that none of these can provide it
with meaning for its own life. There is no question there of being “sealed
in” or “sealed off”: “drowning” is perhaps more apt. Giving a Cartesian
inflection to “anxiety” by speaking of “modern wonder” as Cavell does may
elicit genuine affinities with early Sartre, but connecting it to Heidegger (or
Wittgenstein for that matter) borders on philosophical malpractice. See Hei-
degger, Being and Time, 231. See also Martin Heidegger, “What Is Meta-
physics,” in Heidegger: Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell (New York:
Harper & Row, 1977), esp. 104–12.
95. Cavell, Disowning Knowledge, 5–6.
96. Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film (New
York: Viking, 1971), 117. Although Cavell’s perennial interest in modern-
ism is not a major topic for me here, the following groupings of quotation-
couplings also display that for him separateness is not merely a function of
the content of the art forms on which he wrote, but also a subject of their
very form. In The World Viewed, Cavell writes not only of “the ontological
facts of our separateness” as themes for film, but also directs our attention
to the way the very viewing of a film brings to light our separation: “the
condition of privacy, of unknownness, of being viewed – the human condi-
tion – is itself the condition of martyrdom” (World Viewed, 144, 205–6).
In his early essay on Beckett’s Endgame, we read how the play teaches not
only that “the uniqueness of the human soul, held to be its greatest value,
is its greatest curse. We are alone, separate”, but also that this message is
conveyed by the very act of watching the play: “Theater becomes the brute
metaphysical fact of separateness” (“Ending the Waiting Game” in Cavell,
Must We Mean, 154, 160). Finally, in his breathtaking essay on King Lear,
Cavell reveals the same sort of modernist sensibilities regarding form and
content: “Lear and Gloucester are not tragic because they are isolated, sin-
gled out for suffering, but because they had covered their true isolation (the
identity of their condition with the condition of other men) within hidden-
ness, silence, and position; the way people do.” “The Avoidance of Love”
in Cavell, Must We Mean, 351. In another work, “what is revealed (in
Shakespearean tragedy) is my separateness from what is happening to them;
that I am I, and here, It is only in this perception of them as separate from
Skepticism and the Human Condition 155
me that I make them present.” “The Avoidance of Love” in Cavell, Must
We Mean, 338. Naturally, these points about separateness are sometimes
made independently of one another. In the Senses of Walden (54) Cavell
writes that “the realization of our ‘infinite relations,’ our kinships, is an
endless realization of our separateness”, while this next passage, taken
from an essay on aesthetics from the late 1960s, makes no reference to the
content of any particular work of art: a modern work of art “asks of us,
not exactly more in the way of response, but one which is more personal.
It promises us, not the re-assembly of community, but personal relation-
ship unsponsored by that community; not the overcoming of our isolation,
but the sharing of that isolation” “A Matter of Meaning It” in Cavell,
Must We Mean, 229.
97. Cavell, In Quest of the Ordinary, 5.
98. CR, 369 (emphasis in original).
99. Ibid.
100. Although I am trying hard to avoid vexed issues in Wittgenstein interpreta-
tion, because I am on the subject of nonsense, I will say that while Cavell’s
words are surely in some sense “elucidatory”, there is no hint as far as I can
gather that we are to “throw away his sentences”, or those of Hamlet or
Spencer Tracy for that matter, once we see that they have instructed us by
drawing us into an utter illusion. And while there may be no claim context
for Cavell to assert that he “knows” he (we) is (are) separate, he certainly
asserts it often enough: Perhaps it “stands fast” for him.
101. Clifford Geertz, “ ‘From the Native’s Point of View’: On the Nature of
Anthropological Understanding,” Bulletin of the American Academy of
Arts and Sciences 28, no. 1 (October 1974): 30–31.
102. Geertz writes of the concept of the person here, whereas I speak primarily
of the concept of the self. If by “person” we think mainly of a social identity
as reflected in social status or in social roles, then my use here of the Geertz
quote might seem questionable. I think, however, that the context of the
quotation makes clear that in contemporary parlance what is at issue is the
self, considered as an entity and not as a nexus of social factors. Whatever
the case, I would be suspicious of any claim that “person” and “self” can be
understood in sharp separation from each other.
103. See Taylor, Sources of the Self (Reference note 38). I should also mention
here the ground-breaking work of Louis Dumont. See his Essays on Indi-
vidualism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983).
104. Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
2007). See also his The Ethics of Authenticity (Cambridge: Harvard Univer-
sity Press, 1991); Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries (Reference note 3).
105. More properties could be added on each side of the divide.
106. Taylor, A Secular Age, 38.
107. Charles Taylor, “Lichtung or Lebensform,” in Philosophical Arguments
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995), 63.
108. This does not entail, naturally, that such conceptions are immune to revi-
sion brought about in part by theoretical considerations.
109. Taylor, Sources of the Self, 111.
110. Taylor, A Secular Age, 38.
111. Ibid., 39.
112. Ibid., 36.
113. Ibid., 27.
114. Ibid., 42.
115. Ibid., 149. See also Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries, 55.
156 Skepticism and the Human Condition
116. Taylor, A Secular Age, 135. Taylor adds, “This agent is in a sense super-
buffered. He is not only not ‘got at’ by demons and spirits: he is also utterly
unmoved by the aura of desire. In a mechanistic universe, and in a field of
functionally understood passions, there is no more ontological room for
such an aura.” Taylor, A Secular Age, 136. This may be true of what Taylor
calls Locke’s “punctual self”, but it hardly fits Cavell’s modern neurotic. The
difference is of course that for Cavell the demons are in us. See also Taylor,
Sources of the Self, 171.
117. See Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries, 65.
118. Taylor, A Secular Age, 136–37. Taylor mentions the work of Norbert Elias
in this regard.
119. Taylor, A Secular Age, 539.
120. Ibid., 301.
121. Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries, 49.
122. Taylor, A Secular Age, 26.
123. Ibid.
124. Ibid., 22. See also Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries, 64.
125. Taylor, Sources of the Self, 106.
126. Ibid., 3.
127. Taylor, A Secular Age, 105.
128. Ibid., 262.
129. This is of course a reference to Philosophical Investigations §122, a remark
that Wittgenstein carried over from his Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough
in which he attacks Sir James Frazer’s vulgar descriptions of magic as noth-
ing more than poor science.
130. I am aware that I employ terms like “Western” and “modern” in ways that
might offend certain sensibilities, in part because I have not circumscribed
them with an essence by providing a definition. We all can admit that defini-
tions are of course sometimes useful. But I have in mind here a much more
juvenile demand (arising from an equally juvenile political agenda) whereby
failure to provide an essence-giving definition is thought to produce the
“Gotcha!” moment in which the benighted writer, me in this case, is revealed
as having missed something “complex” or “problematic” with (his?) use of
the terms themselves. I suppose this strategy is preparatory for some sort of
demonstration of “undecidability”, “play of signifiers”, or more likely in
our current confusion, hidden “power relations” that the undefined terms
are suspected to cloak. In response, I would first remark that Taylor is well
aware of the dangers of an uncritical use of blanket terms such as “moder-
nity” as shown in passages like this one: “Modern social imaginaries have
been differently refracted in the divergent media of the respective national
histories, even in the West. This warns us against expecting a simple repeti-
tion of Western forms when these imaginaries are imposed on or adopted in
other civilizations.” He also insists on our being open to the idea of “mul-
tiple modernities”. See Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries, 154, 195. But
second, and more importantly, as long as one is aware of what one is doing,
there is no harm in using a term at one stage of a discourse in a way that can,
if needed, be made more precise at a later stage. If one insists on defining
everything at the outset of speech (or on defining everything at any stage,
actually) one is reduced to either silence or jibberish, which I take to be a
reductio ad absurdum of the demand itself.
131. Rane Willerslev, Soul Hunters: Hunting, Animism, and Personhood Among
the Siberian Yukaghirs (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007).
132. Willerslev, Soul Hunters, 2, 8.
Skepticism and the Human Condition 157
33. Ibid., 3.
1
134. Ibid., 2.
135. Ibid., 9.
136. Ibid.
137. Ibid., 19–20. This theme is familiar in the work of Evans-Pritchard, Witch-
craft, 222; Bourdieu, Outline, 9, 37, 171. See Chapter 2, notes 3, 7 for
references.
138. Willerslev, Soul Hunters, 11.
139. Ibid. He adds later, “the very nature of hunting requires that the hunter
identify with his prey and attempt to ascertain its mode of perception and
action by imitating its bodily movements and smell”. Willerslev, Soul Hunt-
ers, 84.
140. Willerslev, Soul Hunters, 26.
141. Ibid., 50.
142. Ibid., 55.
143. Ibid., 55.
144. Ibid., 57.
145. Ibid., 57.
146. Ibid., 58.
147. Ibid., 60.
148. Ibid., 58.
149. This is reminiscent of something Evans-Pritchard claims about the Azande,
namely that he found they had little or no theoretical interest in the ques-
tion whether the traveling “soul of witchcraft”, the “fireflies” that are the
actual agents that afflict the victim, are emanations of, or identical with,
the soul of the witch, or whether they are emanations from the witchcraft
substance that inheres in the witch’s body. On this and related questions,
Evans-Pritchard wrote “Zande have no theoretical interest in the subject,
and those situations in which they express their beliefs in witchcraft do not
force the problem upon them.” See Evans-Pritchard, Witchcraft, Oracles,
and Magic Among the Azande (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1937), 4.
150. Willerslev, Soul Hunters, 25.
151. Ibid., 53–54.
152. Ibid., 87. See Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, “Cosmological Deixis and Amer-
indian Perspectivism,” The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute
4, no. 3 (September 1998): 469.
153. Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, “Exchanging Perspectives: The Transforma-
tion of Objects into Subjects in Amerindian Ontologies,” Common Knowl-
edge 10, no. 3 (Fall 2004): 468–69.
154. Ibid.
155. Ibid., 466, 474.
156. Willerslev, Soul Hunters, 12.
157. Viveiros de Castro, “The Transformation of Objects,” 476.
158. Willerslev, Soul Hunters, 63. See Marilyn Strathern, The Gender of the Gift
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988). Strathern’s main focus here
is on the Hagen in the Western Highlands Province of Papua New Guinea.
159. Strathern, Gender of the Gift, 13.
160. Ibid., 122.
161. Ibid., 157.
162. Ibid., 141. She adds later, “The Western concept of exploitation rests ulti-
mately on the idea that violence can be done to a supposed intrinsic relation
between the self as subject and its realization in the objects of its activities.
I have stressed that this entails a view of agents as single entities, as singular
158 Skepticism and the Human Condition
authors of what they make and do. The partibility of persons under the
regime of a gift economy is very different from the positive or negative,
but either way “unnatural”, dividing of the “whole” self in a commodity
regime.” Strathern, Gender of the Gift, 162.
163. Strathern, Gender of the Gift, 131.
164. Ibid., 165.
165. Ibid., 273.
166. Ibid.
167. Ibid., 294.
168. Ibid., 269.
169. For an interesting comparison with Strathern, see Alan Rumsey, “The Per-
sonification of Social Totalities in the Pacific,” Journal of Pacific Studies 23,
no. 1 (1999): 48–70. What Rumsey terms the “segmentary person” of the
Ku Waru region of the New Guinea Highlands resembles Strathern’s “divid-
ual” in some respects, yet designates multiple identities across long spans of
history. Nor is it restricted for use only by chiefs, as in Sahlins’ account of
“heroic history” among Maori and Hawaiians.
170. Perhaps Evans-Pritchard’s descriptions of the Azande encompass both
aspects of the non-buffered self. On the one hand, witchcraft substance acti-
vated by evil thoughts harbored by the witch seems to be able to discreetly
impact at a distance the soul of the victim with some malady. On the other
hand, Evans-Pritchard also writes that witchcraft substance, like the ayibii,
has a certain kind of independent physicality in that it can travel at night
to attack its victims directly. Evans-Pritchard also notes in this regard that
there is a lack of theoretical clarity as to whether this evil force, “the soul
of witchcraft”, is the essence of the substance or the essence of the witch
himself, in whom the substance resides. See Evans-Pritchard, Witchcraft,
10–11 and note 149 (see Chapter 2, note 3 for reference). Some of the con-
ceptual relations between Taylor’s “porous self” and Strathern’s “dividual”
are discussed in Karl Smith, “From Dividual and Individual Selves to Porous
Subjects,” The Australian Journal of Anthropology 23 (2012): 50–64.
171. Willerslev, Soul Hunters, 2. This was in essence the heart of the dispute
several years ago between Gananath Obeyeskere and Marshall Sahlins. In
effect, Obeyesekere claimed that Sahlins’ interpretation of the events leading
up to the death of Captain James Cook, an account which relied on reading
Cook’s death as unfolding out of the internal logic of Hawaiian culture and
religion, as amounting both to a denial of rationality to the Hawaiians and
as based on a Western fetish for exoticism. See Gananath Obeyesekere, The
Apotheosis of Captain Cook (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992).
Sahlins completely dismantled Obeyeskere’s charge in his How “Natives”
Think: About Captain Cook, for Example (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1996).
172. Sahlins, How “Natives” Think, 118.
173. CR, 144.
174. “Incommensurability” is Thomas Kuhn’s term. See his The Structures of
Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), 148–
49. Peter Winch employs the term “category mistake” in his argument. See
“Understanding a Primitive Society,” American Philosophical Quarterly 1
(1964): 314–15.
175. Some readers will at once recognize that my discussion here touches on the
so-called “New Wittgenstein Debate” that has taken place over the last few
decades While I have some fairly strong ideas about that debate, they are
not relevant in the present context. My discussion should not be taken as a
Skepticism and the Human Condition 159
contribution to that debate, but rather as an application of the philosophy
I believe to have learned from engaging in it. If such philosophy is not true
to what Wittgenstein actually thought, that should have no consequence for
my arguments here. For references, see Chapter 1, note 65.
176. I will address the issue of repression next.
177. Strathern, Gender of the Gift, 12.
178. Ibid., 143.
179. J. Prytz Johansen, The Maori and His Religion in Its Non-Ritualistic Aspects
(Munksgaard: Copenhagen, 1954), 36. Quoted in Rumsey, “The Personi-
fication of Social Totalities,” 49 and in Marshall Sahlins, Historical Meta-
phors and Mythical Realities (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press,
1981), 13–14.
180. Ibid.
181. While some of the considerations advanced in this last paragraph derive
from my way of reading Wittgenstein’s famous remarks on the “wood-
sellers”, it is not my intention to enter into a scholarly debate here. See Lud-
wig Wittgenstein, Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics, ed. G. H.
von Wright, R. Rhees and G. E. M. Anscombe, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe
(Oxford: B. Blackwell, 1956), §147–§50. Cavell discusses this example
from Wittgenstein on CR, 115.
182. I would like to thank Kristin Boyce for bringing this issue to my attention.
183. Clifford Geertz, “The Impact of the Concept of Culture on the Concept of
Man,” in The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 44.
184. Willerslev, Soul Hunters, 70.
185. Melford E. Spiro, “Is the Western Conception of the Self ‘Peculiar’ Within
the Context of the World Cultures?,” Ethos 21, no. 2 (1993): 107–53. Inter-
estingly, we just saw Willerslev, publishing in 2007, speaking of the litera-
ture being “crammed” with such typologies, whereas Spiro writing in 1993,
writes that little work has been done on the anthropology of the person or
self outside of a few societies. Perhaps this discrepancy can be explained if
much work was done on the subject in the intervening period.
186. See Hazel Rose Markus and Shinobu Kitayama, “Culture and the Self: Impli-
cations for Cognition, Emotion, and Motivation,” Psychological Review
98, no. 2 (1991): 224–53. Spiro also criticizes similar work by interpretivist
social scientists Shweder and Bourne. See Richard Shweder and Edmund J.
Bourne, “Does the Concept of a Person Vary Cross-Culturally,” in Culture
Theory, ed. Richard A. Shweder and Robert A. Levine (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1984), 158–95.
187. Spiro, “Is the Western Conception of the Self ‘Peculiar’?,” 107.
188. Ibid., 108.
189. But see Willerslev’s previous assertion that the literature is “crammed with
typologies of this kind”.
190. Spiro, “Is the Western Conception of the Self ‘Peculiar’?,” 117.
191. Ibid., 114.
192. Ibid., 117.
193. Ibid.
194. Ibid., 118–19.
195. Ibid., 120.
196. Ibid., 109.
197. Ibid., 10.
198. Ibid., 122.
199. Geertz, “From the Native’s Point of View,” 35. Quoted in Spiro, “Is the
Western Conception of the Self ‘Peculiar’?,”121.
160 Skepticism and the Human Condition
200. Clifford Geertz, “Person, Time, and Conduct in Bali,” in The Interpretation
of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 386.
201. Ibid., 388–89.
202. Ibid., 390.
203. Spiro, “Is the Western Conception of the Self ‘Peculiar’?,” 127–28. See
Unni Wikan, “Managing the Heart to Brighten Face and Soul: Emotions in
Balinese Morality and Health Care,” American Ethnologist 16 (1989): 294,
298, 300. See also Unni Wikan, “Public Grace and Private Fears: Gaiety,
Offense, and Sorcery in Northern Bali,” Ethos 15 (1987): 337–65.
204. Spiro, “Is the Western Conception of the Self ‘Peculiar’?,” 130.
205. Ibid., 136.
206. Ibid., 144–45.
207. Sahlins writes, “ ‘Strange’ should be the beginning of anthropological wis-
dom rather than a way of putting an end to it.” How “Natives” Think, 62.
208. Willerslev hints (Soul Hunters, 71) that many modern Westerners might in
fact sense themselves as being less buffered than can be gleaned from the
“ideal type” or cultural conception. He claims that the way in which we
often speak of pain or stress as “getting” to us is an example that gives the
lie to a universal commitment to a buffered self-understanding. In support
of this one might add that many Westerners still fully embrace various self-
understandings where the “buffered self” seems remote. These are people
who embrace various forms of traditional Christianity and more recently
those embracing some Eastern forms of spirituality or New Age religions.
209. I set aside here its partial diffusion since the colonial period.
210. Taylor, Sources of the Self, 112.
211. Ibid., 111. Taylor addresses this issue both more generally and in the con-
text of Bruno Snell’s writing on the Homeric understanding of agency. See
Sources of the Self, 118.
212. See Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (New
York: Washington Square Press, 1956), 66–69.
213. CR, 119.
214. Elsewhere, Cavell writes, “It is perfectly true that English might have devel-
oped differently than it has and therefore have imposed different categories
on the world than it does; and if so, it would have enabled us to assert,
describe, question, define, promise, appeal, etc., in ways other than we do.”
Cavell, Must We Mean, 33. Apparently, these considerations do not apply
to the cogito.
215. Cavell, Must We Mean, 219–20. Cavell explains in the Acknowledgements
to Must We Mean that this essay is a rejoinder to comments he received
to “Music Discomposed”. See especially 188–89, where Cavell states that
“modernism only makes explicit and bare what has always been true of
art”. The passage from “A Matter of Meaning It” quoted previous is, I take
it, intended precisely to clarify the earlier confusing statement.
216. See Part II, C, pp. 122–124 for references.
217. CR, 470.
218. Cavell, Disowning Knowledge, 11.
219. Cavell, In Quest of the Ordinary, 158.
220. Cavell, “Something Out of the Ordinary,” 26.
221. Cavell, World Viewed, 21 (emphasis added).
222. One could say that Cavell and Spiro have ignored the difference between
beings (in this case our embodiment) and Being (our ability to make sense of
that fact).
223. Strathern, Gender of the Gift, 326.
Skepticism and the Human Condition 161
224. I am paraphrasing something claimed many years ago by Thomas Ricketts
said about Frege: “Frege’s ontological categories track his logical ones –
I believe that this is the import of his context principle”.
225. Taylor, Sources of the Self, 112.
226. Geertz, “The Impact of the Concept of Culture,” 51. See also p. 38. Dumont
also invokes the idea of subtraction. See Dumont, Essays on Individualism,
87.
227. Winch, “Understanding a Primitive Society.” See Introduction, note 15 for
reference.
228. Winch, “Understanding a Primitive Society,” 314–15.
229. Charles Taylor, “Understanding and Ethnocentricity,” in Philosophy and
the Human Sciences (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 128.
Stanley J. Tambiah has an interesting discussion of Wittgenstein’s trenchant
criticisms of Frazer that touches on many of the same questions as I am
addressing here. See his Magic, Science, Religion, and the Scope of Rational-
ity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
230. In “How Old Are These Bones?” Diamond argues that the overall develop-
ment of a culture’s scientific practices are relevant for assessing the meaning
of assertions made by members of that culture who may not yet have the
actual ability to investigate their truth. See Chapter 2, note 2 for reference.
231. Charles Taylor, “Rationality,” in Philosophy and the Human Sciences
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 149.
232. Cf. Heidegger, Being and Time, 59. Full reference in note 17.
233. Hilary Putnam, “Meaning and Reference,” Journal of Philosophy 70
(1973): 699–711.
234. In fact, rather than accepting the Cartesian cogito of (scientific) epistemol-
ogy as an indication of the nature of the “real self” underlying such activ-
ity, there are reasons for regarding it as a phenomenological modification
brought about in us by reflection.
235. CR, 13.
236. Wittgenstein, by contrast, does not seem to have concealed this aspect of
his work. Lecture notes taken in 1938 record him as stating openly that
he was in a certain sense “making propaganda for one style of thinking
as opposed to another.” Perhaps another crucial difference is that whereas
Cavell may be making propaganda for the adoption of a specific, modern
grammar of the self, the style of thinking for which Wittgenstein seems to
be “making propaganda” is one wherein we acknowledge the possibility
of grammatical differences, so as to resist the pull of particular grammars,
such as those of natural science, that may blind us to important alterna-
tives. Seen this way, Cavell and Wittgenstein would be making propaganda
with two entirely different purposes. See Ludwig Wittgenstein, Lectures &
Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology, and Religious Belief, ed. Cyril
Barrett (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966), 28. In Philosophi-
cal Investigations, he speaks of getting someone to “regard a case differ-
ently”. See PI, §144.
237. Heidegger, Being and Time, 78.
238. John McDowell, Mind and World (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1994), XX. Unfortunately, McDowell himself exhibits the untoward influ-
ence of Cavell on his thinking when he maintains that we know there will
be recurrences of the philosophical impulse. There is an enormous difference
between correctly pointing out that no final theoretical refutation of meta-
physics is forthcoming and claiming that we are inevitably subject to fits of
metaphysical confusion. The latter is a philosophical claim about human
162 Skepticism and the Human Condition
nature. It has been one of the main aims of this entire essay to question how
in the world such a thing could be known.
239. This is a summary of Dumont’s essay “The Christian Beginnings: From
the Outwordly Individual to the Individual-in-the-World,” in his Essays
on Individualism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 23–59.
Dumont connects his ideas in this essay to his earlier work on the caste sys-
tem of India. See his Homo Hierarchicus (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1981).
240. One of Dumont’s other arguments is that the social view returns every so
often in the monstrous guise of totalitarianism.
Appendix
Wittgenstein’s Paganism
Kevin M. Cahill
I
Religion was a subject of great philosophical and personal significance
for Wittgenstein, yet his relation to it is difficult to pin down. The ambi-
guity of the place of religion in Wittgenstein’s thought and his ambivalent
attitude towards it comes out nowhere more succinctly than in Maurice
O’Connor Drury’s oft discussed recounting of Wittgenstein’s telling him
that “I am not a religious man but I cannot help seeing every problem
from a religious point of view”.1 This appendix concerns Wittgenstein’s
well-known respect for and tolerance of different religious traditions as
well as his reticence, even revulsion, to render judgments of religious
systems.
In her essay “Putnam and Wittgensteinian Baby-Throwing: Variations
on a Theme,”2 Cora Diamond discusses a 1931 passage from Wittgen-
stein’s “Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough,” where his idea seems to
be that the very idea of criticizing religions as containing errors at all is
basically irrelevant or confused since they are not a theory.
One might wonder whether these remarks fundamentally bear the stamp
of this (very turbulent) phase of Wittgenstein’s philosophical develop-
ment. But even after his understanding of philosophy had undergone
substantial revision, when he returned to commenting on Frazer several
years later (Rhees writes that this second set of remarks on Frazer are
from “not earlier than 1936 and probably after 1948”) we find passages
that seem to strike the same chord.7
The nonsense here is that Frazer represents these people as if they had
a completely false (even insane) idea of the course of nature, whereas
they only possess a peculiar interpretation of the phenomena. That
is, if they were to write it down, their knowledge of nature would not
differ fundamentally from ours. Only their magic is different.
As simple as it sounds: the distinction between magic and science
can be expressed by saying that in science there is progress, but in
magic there isn’t. Magic has no tendency within itself to develop.8
II
While Diamond is correct about the consequences of Wittgenstein’s views
on religion with regard to the possibility of criticism, providing a wider
context for this issue will bring out that, while not exemplifying a gen-
eral philosophical position concerning the possibility of such criticism,
behind his views lay an intellectual and spiritual framework that I think
deserves to be described as broadly philosophical. There may be nothing
like a general a priori argument about what is or is not philosophically
confused with criticizing forms of religious life, but there is much at stake
in how we think about these questions. At the very least, a fuller pic-
ture will help to make the case for thinking that Wittgenstein’s attitude
towards religion formed an important part of the background for his
philosophizing and so for understanding its full significance.
I have argued elsewhere that a fundamental thread running through
Wittgenstein’s work and thought is a critique of modernity, in particular
a critique of the pretensions of modern scientism and naturalism.19 His
work attempts to engage the self-understanding of a reader who is likely
to come to philosophy with a certain cast of mind that includes unex-
amined commitments from a particular cultural context. I have argued
further that at least one, perhaps the most important, intended outcome
of this critique is an enabling of a sense of humility and wonder at the
fit between word and world, a fostering of a sense of reverence for how
deeply language is interwoven with what is special about human life.
So, while Wittgenstein’s views on religion were not derivable from his
views on philosophy, they were of a piece with those views, as both were
168 Appendix
fundamentally interwoven with his views on mind and world, on human
life in the world and nature. The importance of wonder for understand-
ing Wittgenstein’s thought accounts for a great deal of what I take to be
the relevance of his use of a “religious point of view” in his statement to
Drury.20
This is why Wittgenstein believed that religion in its essence was not
concerned with claims to historical truth or about the “furniture of real-
ity”. The religious impulse as he understood it is instead concerned with
the mystery of there being an intelligible world at all, and he thought that
this impulse finds its fullest expression when a religious symbol system
becomes the grammar of one’s experience of the world.21
Apart from whether this correctly describes the way things look to par-
ticipants from within a religious practice, Wittgenstein saw religions as
essentially grammars of wonder, and so as holding out the promise of
sustaining an openness to wonder, not least by providing a vehicle for its
expression. Religions were “systems of coordinates” for giving direction
to a life fundamentally characterized previously all by reverence, which
Wittgenstein felt was the highest kind of human life to lead.
III
On the question of the possibility of criticism of other religions, we are
in one way still “just where we were,” as Diamond put it. But with the
discussion of the prior section as background, I can now try to bring out
more fully what I think is the philosophical significance of Wittgenstein’s
attitude towards religion. I want to do this by discussing a particular case
which Diamond mentions, that of a statement by Elizabeth Anscombe in
a letter to Rush Rhees. Anscombe wrote,
There are two issues that the context of this letter does not make clear;
I will take up each of them in turn.
First, the letter does not make clear in what capacity or from what
standpoint Anscombe is stating her preference for Russell over Durga
worship. In an earlier paper, “Wittgenstein on Religious Belief: The Gulfs
Between Us,” Diamond discusses a remark made by Wittgenstein in the
third lecture on religious belief in the notes published as Lectures and
Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology, and Religious Belief.24 Witt-
genstein said there that in a given case of religious belief, a person may
place the whole weight of his belief in a particular picture, for example
in certain phrases expressing the idea of resurrection after death.25 Given
certain well-known remarks Wittgenstein makes elsewhere about pictures
in philosophy, it is perhaps easy to read him making a pejorative remark
in the lecture about the relation between the use of a picture and the
nature of religious belief.26 But Diamond makes clear that Wittgenstein
isn’t using the idea of a picture pejoratively here at all. If I read her cor-
rectly, she thinks Wittgenstein’s point in the lecture is not that the use of
a picture in this or that situation is automatically a reason for suspicion;
it may in fact be essential. His point is simply that we need to be clear
about different ways in which such pictures are used. Ignoring these dif-
ferences might lead, for example to our assuming that the sense of a form
of words used in a religious context can simply be read off of the logic of
everyday non-religious uses of the same form, without our paying atten-
tion to these particular contexts. Diamond suggests that Wittgenstein is
trying to avoid an “overly strong” sense of the essentiality of a picture in
which the sense and the context must go together, while at the same time
he is trying to make space for a kind of essentiality that is robust enough
to do justice to religious (and presumably other) contexts.27
Diamond discusses in some detail different ways in which there can
be “detachable” or purportedly inessential uses of a picture in religious
thinking as well as “non-detachable” uses.28 In the case of a detachable
use, the picture may be thought to serve an important heuristic function
for conveying a religious idea, but the same idea could at least in theory
be paraphrased or conveyed without the picture. One of her main points
is that although philosophers might assume that the use of a religious
picture is in order only if it is used in the detachable sense, there is in fact
no compelling reason for thinking this. According to Diamond (and on
her interpretation of Wittgenstein here), there is nothing philosophically
fishy if a person lets a religious picture be at the “bottom of all of her
170 Appendix
thought” without being able to paraphrase her thought in a manner that
is detachable, that is independently characterizable, of that very same
picture. The demand for such a non-circular description of a religious
picture simply begs the question about the legitimacy of its use.
At the same time, Diamond contends that there is no automatically
given logical compartmentalization or “walling off” of language games
irrespective of particular cases. What someone means with a particular
expression drawn from religion might be shown in how she allows it to
shape her thought and speech in certain contexts, but not in others. How
someone else understands the same given expression might be shown
in how it shapes her thought in a much more global sense. In this vein,
Diamond claims that, for example, the idea of God intervening in his-
tory may be at the bottom of a person’s thought when she is engaged in
more ostensibly secular activities, such as political philosophy, and not
only when thinking about or discussing religion per se.29 This seems to
make room for the idea of being a religious philosopher in a particularly
strong sort of way. So as I understand her, Diamond could argue that the
fact that a particular religious picture may lay at the basis of Anscombe’s
judgment about Russell and Durga, a picture, furthermore the use of
which as we just saw does not require any non-circular defense, provides
no automatic philosophical argument for doubting that such a judgment
is a perfectly intelligible example of religious criticism.
Assuming, then, that Anscombe was speaking as a Catholic philoso-
pher in the letter to Rhees, the second issue that the context of her remark
does not make clear is what she means when she writes that she is sure
that Wittgenstein would “have me up” for criticizing Durga worship.
She may be indicating that Wittgenstein would think she is making a
philosophical error in rendering her judgment. Alternatively, she may
imagine that Wittgenstein would simply disagree with her because of his
“pagan” tolerant attitude. Since, as I have already said, I basically agree
with Diamond’s reading of Wittgenstein, according to which he did not
find any philosophical arguments available that would ban such judg-
ments, I assume here that Anscombe too imagines him to be reacting out
of a pagan responsiveness to religiosity. In this event, does Wittgenstein’s
statement that all the world’s religions are wonderful simply gainsay a
position like Anscombe’s?30 Is all of the weight being in a particular reli-
gious picture compatible with seeing all the world’s religions as wonder-
ful?31 Or are we still just where we were? This leads to my final question.
Even if there is no argument showing how Anscombe’s criticism of
Durga worship can be rejected on some kind of “supergrammatical”
grounds that demonstrates its logical confusion, Wittgenstein could have
regarded her remark to Rhees as having missed something important
anyway.32 A response to Anscombe’s statement about Russell being bet-
ter than Durga worship is that she might have been right in one way and
wrong in another. To explain what I mean, I want to bring in an idea of
Appendix 171
anthropologist Louis Dumont’s to which I have already referred to in
Chapter 3 (see p. 146). This is the idea of “hierarchical encompassment”.
Dumont employs this idea to make sense of certain binary oppositions
found in ethnographic and historical data that at first glance might
appear to occupy the kind of simple one-dimensional horizontal oppo-
sition in relation to one another such as that of odd and even natural
numbers. Dumont argues that this flattened out picture obscures how
such binaries are sometimes not simply opposed to one another, but
rather are often opposed along different hierarchical axes, which are
crucial for understanding the different contexts where certain judgments
are made.
Recall Dumont’s way of analyzing a binary aspect of medieval culture,
the relationship between the sacred and the secular. In the sacred dimen-
sion, what Dumont calls the “outwordly individual” is equal to all oth-
ers in his or her standing before God. The “individual-in-the-world” on
the other hand is bound up in a network of hierarchical social roles and
identities. Yet a simple binary opposition between “equal” and “une-
qual” conceals the social fact that a sacred axis of comparison was itself
regarded as superior in value to the secular one. This is shown by the
relative positions of priest to king. “Priests are superior, for they are only
inferior on an inferior level”.33
It will help to bring out an important point if we now consider Ans-
combe’s remark about Russell and Durga worship in terms of the schema
provided by Dumont. Although I take it to be pretty unlikely, consider
first the possibility that was Anscombe’s intention merely to compare
Russell’s thought to Durga worship along an axis we could perhaps
describe as modern common sense secular ethics. I don’t see any reason
for Wittgenstein to have thought that this judgement would have posed
any special philosophical difficulties. Things become more interesting,
however, if we consider the possibility that Anscombe intended to com-
pare Russell and Durga worship as two religious systems. It may strike
us as odd to even consider Russell’s thought on the religious plane. How-
ever that might be, it may seem fair to assume that this comparison too
would strike Wittgenstein as posing no special logical problems, just as
was the case with the comparison of Russell and Durga on the secular
axis. After all, Wittgenstein never says anything to the effect that all reli-
gions are equally wonderful, only that they are all wonderful. But reading
Anscombe’s remark this way would imply that she herself believed that
Durga worship was so spiritually depraved that even the thought of a self-
consciously irreligious man like Russell was religiously superior. I think
Wittgenstein would take Anscombe to have missed something impor-
tant here, but before I elaborate what that is, someone might preempt
me by observing that whatever trouble I may imagine with Anscombe’s
remark is probably just an artifact of my having imposed Dumont’s
hierarchical schema on it in the first place. I have in fact provided no
172 Appendix
reason for thinking that she would accept the conceptual regimentation
that that schema imposes. It is moreover entirely plausible that even had
Anscombe been made aware of the Dumontian schema, she would have
insisted on the legitimacy of making her comparison across the two axes
of the sacred and the secular anyway, which in effect demolishes the
point of the schema itself. And there would be nothing logically prevent-
ing her from doing that. But in fact what I just described as Anscombe’s
arriving at the judgement that Russell is superior to Durga worship by
her crossing of the secular and sacred evaluative axes, or what I described
previously as her judging Russell to be superior to Durga worship on the
religious axis alone, really amount to the same thing. The first is asserting
that Durga worship is so evil or depraved that even a system pertaining to
a self-consciously non-religious order of value is preferable. The second
amounts to claiming that Durga worship is so awful that Russell’s ethical
thought defeats Durga worship as a religion, i.e. on Durga worship’s own
home turf, so to speak. These two distinct claims are not really different.
Interestingly, after recounting Anscombe’s letter, Rhees’ recollection
continues:
I think Rhees’ reaction here is on the right track. I will now try to explain
why and what it is I think Anscombe has failed to recognize. As I just
described, along an axis of what I termed “secular common sense ethics”
Wittgenstein might have regarded men like Russell as superior to Durga
worshipers (although given his assessments of Russell, one wonders). But
along a religious axis of comparison, I believe he would have regarded
Durga worship as superior to Russell precisely because of a connection
between significance itself and the phenomenon of wonder. What is this
connection? I said previously that one intended outcome of Wittgen-
stein’s work was a (re)enabling of a sense of humility and wonder at the
fit between word and world, a fostering of a sense of reverence for this
uniqueness that typifies the human being. (Here I think is the connection
between logic and ethics.) The element of humility implicit in wonder is
a way of acknowledging that our being minded creatures is not a feature
of life that we can fully objectify or control. We must rather accept that
we are not only agents of the world’s intelligibility and significance, we
are its creations.
With this goes the idea that for there to be an experience of something
genuinely and authoritatively important, there must be some acknowl-
edgement of this affective dimension to experience. People and actions
Appendix 173
must show up for us as significant, and not merely as made intelligi-
ble by us or as grasped by us as objects for manipulation. What I am
trying to get at here concerns the hierarchical distinction between there
being significance per se and the relative worth of different systems. Won-
der is important because it is a psychological “condition of the possibil-
ity” of there being an experience of genuine significance at all. And so
Durga worship, though not necessarily equal or better than any other
religion in particular, is, qua grammar of wonder, better than none at
all. Culture and Value contains the following brief remark from 1929:
“What is good is also divine. Queer as it sounds, that sums up my ethics.
Only something supernatural can express the Supernatural”.35 As much
as many of us may insist today on hearing this remark as a paean to what
is independently identifiable by us as good, something which only then
deserves our reverence, this idea was alien to Wittgenstein.36 Durga wor-
ship is better than Russell because, at a higher level, something is better
than nothing. Views like Russell’s are ultimately nihilistic, destructive of
significance itself.
I think a strong case can be made that a genuine understanding of
what it means to be committed to one’s own particular religious picture
requires a high degree of respect and tolerance for other traditions. Sup-
pose, however, that someone insisted that the only genuine value can be
found in her specific tradition, and, moreover, that this value is essen-
tially located in the exclusively true character of the claims made in this
tradition. She might claim, then, that the particular features of Durga
worship, even though it is a religion, make it crucially at odds with the
kind of truth claims of her picture, in fact even more at odds with these
truths than Russell’s wholly anti-religious attitude. She might think this
because she regards Durga worship and systems like it as blocking the
spiritual routes to the truths of her own religious tradition, and doing so
in ways that Russell’s outlook does not undermine, or at least does not
undermine as badly. At any rate, there would be no violation of any sup-
posed conditions of meaningful speech in standing by such a comparative
claim.37 “Paganism” as I’ve been calling it here cannot claim superiority
as a general critical position over this dogmatic view. But I am suggest-
ing nevertheless that we see the difference between the dogmatic view
just described and Wittgenstein’s view as constituting a deep issue. The
meaning of our words is bound up with the point we want to make with
them. And so, the meaning of Wittgenstein’s teaching should be a point
beyond the purely diagnostic and critical tools he employs to dismantle
metaphysics. Quite possibly part of that point was intellectual clarity for
its own sake. But that alone doesn’t seem to me to be an adequate moti-
vation for his work, the philosophy behind the philosophizing as it were.
Wittgenstein thought that our culture’s obsession with progress left in its
wake nothing more than an “unimposing spectacle” where “the strength
of the individual is wasted through overcoming of opposing forces and
174 Appendix
frictional resistances”.38 His views on religion ran along similar tracks.
He was certainly neither the first nor the only thinker to regard a par-
ticular kind of obsession with truth, whether in religion or philosophy,
as ultimately inimical to significance (including perhaps the significance
of truth). This observation alone does not definitively answer whether he
was right. But does it leave us just where we were?
Notes
1. Rush Rhees, ed., Recollections of Wittgenstein (Totowa, NJ: Rowman and
Littlefield, 1981), 94. This ambivalence is noted by many who knew Wittgen-
stein well. See for example G. H. von Wright in Norman Malcolm, Ludwig
Wittgenstein, a Memoir (London: Oxford University Press, 1962), 19, 72.
2. Cora Diamond, “Putnam and Wittgensteinian Baby-Throwing: Variations
on a Theme,” in The Philosophy of Hilary Putnam, ed. R. E. Auxier, D. R.
Anderson, and L. E. Hahn (LaSalle: Open Court, 2015), 603–39. See Intro-
duction, note 10 for reference.
3. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Occasions, 1912–1951, ed. J. C. Klagge
and A. Normann (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1993), 119.
4. Diamond, “Putnam and Wittgensteinian Baby-Throwing,” 632.
5. Friedrich Waismann, Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle, ed. B. McGuinness,
trans. J. Schulte and B. McGuinness (Oxford: Blackwell, 1979), 117. Taylor
notes in Sources of the Self that the idea that the religious language of so-
called primitive religions was a kind of ritual had wide currency in modernist
circles. See Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern
Identity, 493. See Chapter 3, note 38 for reference.
6. Rush Rhees, ed., Recollections of Wittgenstein (Totowa, NJ: Rowman and
Littlefield, 1981), 117.
7. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Occasions, 115.
8. Ibid., 141. In fact, one finds remarks expressing these and similar ideas over
the span of many years. See for example Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and
Value, ed. G. H. von Wright, trans. Peter Winch, rev. 2nd ed. (Oxford: Black-
well, 1998), 37–38, 96–97.
9. Diamond, “Putnam and Wittgensteinian Baby-Throwing,” 630–31. What
she says about respecting Augustine’s self-understanding strikes me as some-
what at odds with her own interpretative practice in the paper when other
cases of self-understanding are at issue. But perhaps there is a principled dif-
ference between different cases that I’m missing.
10. Diamond, “Putnam and Wittgensteinian Baby-Throwing,” 632.
11. Diamond acknowledges this way of taking this remark as a possibility, but
I don’t believe she gives it its proper weight.
12. What often appear to be his anti-Western, anti-modern sentiments concern
his repulsion at the near complete taking over of the cosmological at the
expense of the expressive dimension.
13. See Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty, ed. G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H.
von Wright (New York: Harper, 1972), §239. See also Wittgenstein, Culture
and Value, 32–33.
14. A journal entry from 1937 suggests that Wittgenstein may have been open to
a sense of truth (and error) in religion that was detached from the nature of
things and centered instead on the experience of happiness or courage in the
religious participant. See Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, 32.
Appendix 175
5. I am thinking here particularly of certain interpretations of Zen Buddhism.
1
16. Of course, this by no means implies that one can never say that these prac-
tices lead to falsehood unless we are “moving on the inside of them”. That
would be to accept the very kind of Winch-Dilman view that Diamond is at
pains to reject. See Cora Diamond, “Wittgenstein on Religious Belief: The
Gulfs Between Us,” in Religion and Wittgenstein’s Legacy, eds. D. Z. Phillips,
M. Von Der Ruhr, and R. Rhees (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), 99–137 for her
discussion of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s, Lectures and Conversations on Aesthet-
ics, Psychology, and Religious Belief (Los Angeles: University of California
Press, 1966).
17. Diamond, “Putnam and Wittgensteinian Baby-Throwing,” 627.
18. Ibid., 23.
19. See Kevin M. Cahill, The Fate of Wonder: Wittgenstein’s Critique of Meta-
physics and Modernity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011).
20. Norman Malcolm reports his belief that “that a certain feeling of amaze-
ment that anything should exist at all, was sometimes experienced by
Wittgenstein, not only during the Tractatus period, but also when I knew
him”. Norman Malcolm, Ludwig Wittgenstein, a Memoir (London:
Oxford University Press, 1962), 70–71. Malcolm stresses that the sense
of wonder he means to ascribe to Wittgenstein was strictly separate from
cosmological questions about a first cause and that “any cosmological
conception of a Deity, derived from the notions of cause or of infinity,
would be repugnant to him”. I take Wittgenstein to be making this very
point in the following remark from 1950: “If the believer in God looks
around & asks ‘Where does everything I see come from?’ ‘Where does
all that come from?’, what he hankers after is not a (causal) explanation;
and the point of his question is that it is the expression of this hankering.
He is expressing, then, a stance towards all explanations”. Wittgenstein,
Culture and Value, 96–97.
21. “The way you use the word ‘God’ does not show whom you mean, but what you
mean”. Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, 58. See also Culture and Value, 97.
22. Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, 73. See also Culture and Value, 61, where
Wittgenstein writes of being seized by a symbol system.
23. Rush Rhees, “Picking and Choosing,” in Religion and Philosophy, ed. D. Z.
Phillips (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 309. Quoted in Dia-
mond, “Baby-Throwing: Variations on a Theme,” 633. Here and throughout
I use “Durga” instead of “Dourga”.
24. See Chapter 3, note 236 for reference.
25. Wittgenstein, Lectures and Conversations, 72. “Picture” here is being used in
a very general way. It may refer literally to something like a painting. But it
can just as easily refer to certain language forms or rituals.
26. Cf. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, §115.
27. It is this overly strong, or perhaps better “naively strong” sense of essentiality
that Diamond suggests may lie at the heart of Wittgenstein’s disagreement
with Yorick Smythies in the lecture. The “Smythies” position strikes me as a
core feature of fundamentalism.
28. See especially Diamond, “The Gulfs Between Us,” 118–23.
29. Ibid., 130.
30. I see no inherent conflict between Wittgenstein’s pointing in the lecture to the
irreplaceability of a religious picture in a given case and my claim that he saw
wonder as the essence of religion. To think that wonder forms the psychologi-
cal basis of religion does not imply that it must be detachable or abstractable
from any or all particular constellations of pictures. This point concerns what
176 Appendix
I said previously about how ontic views can form the riverbed of a religious
form of life.
31. Cf. John Paul II, “Redemptor Hominis,” paragraphs 11–12, accessed July 21,
2020. www.vatican.va/holy_father/john_paul_ii/encyclicals/documents/
hf_jp-ii_enc_04031979_redemptor-hominis_en.html.
32. I am borrowing the expression “supergrammatical” from an early draft of
Diamond’s paper “Criticising from ‘Outside’ ”.
33. Dumont, “The Christian Beginnings: From Outwordly Individual to the Indi-
vidual-in-the-World,” in his Essays on Individualism (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1983), especially 31 and 46. See Chapter 3, note 239 for
reference.
34. Rush Rhees, Religion and Philosophy, ed. D. Z. Phillips (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1997), 309.
35. Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, 5.
36. We find the following entry in Waismann’s notes for Wednesday, 17 Decem-
ber 1930: “Schlick says that in theological ethics there used to be two con-
ceptions of the essence of the good: according to the shallower interpretation
the good is good because it is what God wants; according to the profounder
interpretation God wants the good because it is good. I think that the first
interpretation is the profounder one: what God commands, that is good. For
it cuts off the way to any explanation ‘why’ it is good, while the second inter-
pretation is the shallow, rationalist one, which proceeds 'as if' you could give
reasons for what is good”. “The first conception says clearly that the essence
of the good has nothing to do with facts and hence cannot be explained
by any proposition. If there is any proposition expressing precisely what
I think, it is the proposition ‘What God commands, that is good’ ”. Friedrich
Waismann, Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle, ed. B. McGuinness, trans. J.
Schulte and B. McGuinness (Oxford: Blackwell, 1979), 115. See also TLP
6.372.
37. I am doubtful, however, that merely exercising one’s conceptual right to make
religious claims deserves to be called a philosophical speech-act. If philoso-
phizing out of a particular religious perspective is to be more than mere phe-
nomenological description, apologetics, or proselytizing, then the point of
this philosophizing, its value, should reach beyond the ethical and doctrinal
confines of the particular position. The picture or pictures don’t play exactly
the same overt role in philosophy as they do in other more overtly confes-
sional contexts. This is why the hierarchical distinction between value per se
(and thus wonder) and the relative ethical worth of positions such as Durga
and Russell must be kept in view. Taylor’s work is exemplary in this regard.
38. Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, 8–9.
Bibliography