The availability of what we say

Abstract

In two recent articles, ‘Must We Mean What We Say?’ and ‘The Availability of Wittgenstein’s Later Philosophy’² (to which we shall refer as M and A, respectively), Professor Stanley Cavell has set forth his position on the relation between the claims Oxford philosophers make about ordinary-language and the methods and results of empirical investigations of ordinary language. These articles are important because they represent a viewpoint that is widely held by current philosophers—widely held but rarely made explicit. Cavell is surely right when he says that the conflict about the nature of our knowledge of ordinary language ‘is not a side issue in the general conflict between Wittgenstein (together with, at this point “ordinary language philosophy”) and traditional philosophy; it is itself an instance, an expression of that conflict’ (A, p. 184 above). The position Cavell advocates in M and A seems to us, however, to be mistaken in every significant respect and to be pernicious both for an adequate understanding of ordinary-language philosophy and for an adequate understanding of ordinary language. In the present paper, we seek to establish that this is in fact the case.