When Words Are Called For

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On when words are called for: Cavell, McDowell, and the wording of the worldAvner Baz a

a University of Chicago,

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To cite this Article Baz, Avner(2003)'On when words are called for: Cavell, McDowell, and the wording of the world',Inquiry,46:4,473 —500

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On When Words are Called for: Cavell,McDowell, and the Wording of the World

Avner BazUniversity of Chicago

In Mind and World and related works, John McDowell attempts to offer us anunderstanding of the relation between our experience of the world and our wording ofit. In arguing for this understanding, McDowell sees himself as engaged in aWittgensteinian exorcism of a philosophical puzzlement; and his aim is to recover forus a truly satisfying way of conceiving of the relation between our words and ourworld. Taking my bearing from Stanley Cavell’s reading of Wittgenstein, in which, asI argue, the notion of ‘thepoint of an utterance’ plays a central role, I develop acriticism of McDowell on two levels. First, I try to show that McDowell fails to leadhis words – ‘experience’, ‘seeing’, ‘judging’, ‘claiming’, and others – back from theirmetaphysical to their everyday use. His use of these words is still controlled by aparticular picture of our relation to the world, rather than by our everyday criteria.Second, I argue that the picture controlling McDowell’s account of our wording ofour world is one in which the question concerning thepoint of putting something intowords is being repressed. McDowell proposes that our experience ‘contains claims’,in the sense that it provides us with the very same content that a claim, or a judgment,might have. I argue that, given the philosophical work that McDowell intends suchformulations to perform, the ‘innocent’ understanding that he aims to recover for usbetokens a failure to attend to the conditions that allow our words to express, orotherwise carry, any determinate content.

Not: ‘How can I describe what I see?’ but ‘What does onecall “description of what isseen”’? (Wittgenstein).1

Introduction

One of the central teachings of Kant’s FirstCritique, and the heart of hiscriticism of empiricist conceptions of our relation to the world, lies in thethought that if that which encounters us in our experience is to become ours tograsp, and to comprehend, it needs to be found answering to our conceptions –to conditions of intelligibility whose ground could not merely have beenexperience itself. For any thinking that takes Kant to have pointed us in theright direction, the challenge is to preserve two essential elements of Kant’steaching that seem to be in tension with one another. The first is the idea that itis only asanswering to, or complying with our conceptions that something canbecome an object for us. The second is the idea that there is, nonetheless,something there that weencounter, which isn’t merely a reflection of ourconceptions and to which our words can be eitherfaithful or unfaithful.

One notable attempt to inherit Kant is to be found in some of the recentworks of John McDowell. Drawing on the work of Wilfrid Sellars, McDowell

Inquiry, 46, 473–500

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has in effect proposed that we model seeing, and experience more generally,on saying. Kant’s idea that ‘objects, or what is the same thing … theexperience in which alone, as given objects, they can be known, conform to… concepts’2 becomes, in the hands of McDowell, the idea that the objects ofour experience ‘speak to us’, and moreover speak to us in our language; or, alittle less metaphorically, it becomes the proposal that we think of ourexperiences as ‘containing claims’. The idea, roughly, is that the worldpresents itself to us speakers as already structured by the forms ofintelligibility embodied in language. McDowell thinks that we need somesuch idea if we are to be able to truly make sense of our wording of ourworld.3

The intelligibility of our experience of the world thus comes to be modeled,in McDowell, following Sellars, on the intelligibility characteristic of speech.But what is the intelligibility characteristic of speech? What makes alinguistic act – a claim, say, or a judgment –intelligible? How are we to thinkof the intelligibility of our experience of the world as dependent on theintelligibility of speech? And how, let us now add, are we to think intelligiblyof our experience of the world, given what the intelligibility of speechrequires?

No philosopher has done more to get us to think about these matters, and touncloud our thinking about them, than Ludwig Wittgenstein; and McDowelltakes himself to be following Wittgenstein, in method and in aspiration forphilosophy. In his treatment of what he takes to be a form of puzzlement thathas persistently plagued epistemology, McDowell seeks a Wittgensteinian‘exorcism’ of the puzzlement – a solution that would bring us peace.4

However, is McDowell’s proposed peace one in which we truly can findourselves? Having repeatedly and effectively alerted us to the danger ofwishing to think from without our everyday transactions with the world,McDowell, I find, has been less successful at giving us an idea of whatthinking from within might be like.

Essential to Wittgenstein’s philosophical therapy is a grammatical inquirythat works by the elicitation of criteria. If the worry is, for example, ‘How canI describe what I see?’, and the moment isnot one in which there is somespecific problem about how I can describethis or that, but rather one in whichour very capacity to word our world comes to seem utterly mysterious, thenWittgenstein, as my epigraph suggests, would have us ask ourselves what dowe call ‘description of what is seen?’ To be reminded of what wecall – thatis, of ourcriteria of – ‘description of what is seen’, is to be reminded of whatit is we are talking about when we talk of a description of what is seen, what itis we normally (are taken to) mean when we use that expression in particularcontexts. (And one thing Wittgenstein wishes us to see is that there aredifferent things we call – different things that we might mean by –‘description of what is seen’.5)

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What we are then supposed to discover isnot that there is no possiblequestion for us to express by ‘How can I describe what I see?’ There are anynumber of questions those words might be used to express.6 Rather, we aresupposed to discover thatwhat question exactly we raise with those words issomething that still needs to be made out. By themselves, the words cannotguarantee that an intelligible question has been asked. Raising a particularquestion, or more generally saying something in particular, has its conditions,as Stanley Cavell would say.7 And a recurrent source of confusion inphilosophy – I mean, in what Wittgenstein likes to refer to as ‘doingphilosophy’ (seePI, 11, 52, 131, 194…) – is that we are tempted to (try to) saysomething independently of such conditions. We strip our words of anycontext in which they might be used for saying something in particular, andwe nevertheless expect them to do precisely that.

The elicitation of criteria is meant to restore our attunement with ourwords, bring us back behind them, by reminding us what these wordsordinarily might be used for saying. By reminding us what ‘seeing’ (or ‘adescription of what one sees’, etc.) might mean, the grammatical investi-gation reminds us what it was, if anything, we were wishing to raise aquestion about. What it often helps us to realize is that we had formed forourselves a picture of (in the present case) what encountering and wording theworld are, and have been relying on that picture, unknowingly, to ensure thesense of our question. We have forsaken our criteria and allowed the pictureto control our speech in their stead: We have allowed our sense of what seeingmust be, hence of what wemust mean by ‘seeing’, to cloud our view of whatwedo, or might mean by ‘seeing’, hence of what seeing, for us anyway, is, ormight be. Once we see that – see, for example, that we have in fact failed toraise a clear question about the possibility of (anything that we might meanby) a description of what is seen – certain difficulties may disappear. And wewould be left with our real difficulties – difficulties that do not arise fromphilosophical confusion, and that no philosophy could therefore make goaway – such as, in the present case, the difficulty of making ourselves faithfulto our experience.8

Now in McDowell’s work, it can appear as if the disappearance of thephilosophical difficulty is presumed to be attainable without our having to goall the way to the everyday uses of our words. Instead, a certain philosophicaldialectics is enacted, a certain oscillation that is generated by two seeminglyincompatible, but equally compelling, intuitions. (The intuitions are, roughly,the ones at the end of my first paragraph that were said to belie a tension at theheart of the Kantian teaching.) And the solution is sought in an understandingof our relation to the world that would enable us to preserve both intuitions.For the intuitions by themselves, according to McDowell, are sound, oranyway ‘innocent’,9 and there is no reason for us to forsake either of them,once we find a way to keep them from appearing to clash with each other.

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And so, McDowell too takes himself to be restoring something for us – anunderstanding of our relation to the world that keeps our basic intuitionsintact, while curing us from a particular philosophical puzzlement. For heknows that to play only ‘rampant idealism’ and ‘the myth of the given’against each other to the point in which the different voices in the debate allseem hopelessly, and equally, lost – while it may very well lead us to despairof philosophy – is not going to make our puzzlement disappear.10

Exasperation is not peace of mind. If therapy is to truly help us let go ofcertain philosophical obsessions, it had better help us recover something intheir stead, and get us to see that nothing we truly care about has thereby beenlost.

In this paper, I will focus on McDowell’s various ways of articulating theunderstanding that he wishes to offer us of the relation between our words andour world – an understanding he takes himself to lead us back to. I will try toshow, first, that McDowell has not succeeded in leading his words ‘back fromtheir metaphysical to their everyday use’ (PI, 116). Key words in hisformulations – words like ‘judgment’, and ‘seeing’ or ‘experiencing’ – arestill metaphysically colored; they are still, for the most part, used outside oftheir normal contexts, without an alternative context having been made outfor them – a context into which they might be seen to be naturally projected.Instead there is a picture, a picture that McDowell in fact shares with most ofthose against whom he is arguing. The second thing I will try to show is thatthe picture controlling McDowell’s formulations falsifies both our relation toour world and our relation to our words, in that it covers up and makes usoverlook what I shall callthe question of the point of what we say.

In order to clarify what I take the question of the point to amount to, andwhat I take its significance to be, I will take a little detour through StanleyCavell’s Wittgensteinian ‘vision of language’. Central to Cavell’s reading ofWittgenstein is the idea that making ourselves intelligible with our words is amatter of saying things found to beworth saying. The idea, as I understand it,is thatwhat we say cannot be specified independently ofwhy we say it. I takethe importance of this idea of Cavell’s to lie first and foremost in itsreminding us that our words are only meaningful insofar as they are vehiclesof our care – whatever meaning they carry, it must be discoverable as what thespeakercould, here and now,mean.11

Now if Cavell is correct in his recurrent reminders to the effect that theintelligibility of our words is a matter of their being found to be worth saying– here and now and in this way – then whoever wishes to understand ourexperience of the world on the model of saying something about the world, asMcDowell does, would have to take into account the question of whatcallsfor the words with which we give voice to our experience of the world. I willtry to show that McDowell either does not take this question into account, orelse isassuming an overly simplistic answer to it. In either case, the question

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of what makes our words called for is notoperative, for him, in our wordingof our world; I mean: not operative as alive question.

McDowell, we shall see, wants the world to speak to us usingour words.But whatour words say on any particular occasion is whatwe, temporarilyand contingently placed human beings, are saying,meaning, by means ofthem. Words are only meaningful insofar as we use them to make specificpoints. And that seems to me something that McDowell is insufficientlyattentive to. Going back to the Kantian insight about our having to bringsomething to our encounter with the world for the world to become ours tomake sense of, it would be possible to put my complaint against McDowell bysaying that he (like Kant) still presents our purchase of the world as costing usless than what it actually costs. And the fact that even a philosopher such asMcDowell – a philosopher, that is, who elsewhere has shown himself to beattentive to a link between intelligibility and value – can find himself avoidingthe question of the point of an utterance, while giving an account of ourwording of our world, shows just how difficult it is for this question to find ahearing in philosophy.

McDowell’s Golden Path

The philosophical landscape within which McDowell attempts to articulatehis position, inMind and World, is one that he takes to be controlled by anoscillation between two conflicting, but ultimately equally unsatisfying viewsof how our words (thoughts, beliefs, judgments…) relate to the world. On theone hand there is what he calls, after Sellars, ‘the myth of the given’, which hedescribes as the idea that our words come to somehow normatively relate tosomething that is essentially foreign to them – an unarticulated this or that thatconfronts us, a bare given. The presence of the appropriate, pre-linguisticallyidentified given then becomes what ultimately is supposed to justify orwarrant our judgments, beliefs, or thoughts about the world. On the otherhand there is an extreme version of idealism, which McDowell describes asthe idea that our judgments, beliefs and thoughts are not in fact answerable toanything other than further judgments, beliefs and thoughts. If according tothe myth of the given human thought is confronted by and is answerable tosomething altogether external and foreign to it, the opposing view presents itas confronted by and answerable to nothing; nothing, that is, that is not justfurther thought.

McDowell finds both views unsatisfactory. He finds what he calls the mythof the given unsatisfactory because justification by an appeal to anunarticulated something is, as he says, no justification at all, but rather, atbest, ‘an exculpation’ (MW, pp. 7–9). The unarticulated something,McDowell argues, drops out of consideration as irrelevant, just like



Wittgenstein’s ‘private object’, and can make no contribution to theintelligibility (McDowell will typically say ‘rationality’) of our thoughts(judgments, beliefs) (MW, pp. 18–21). The opposing view, which McDowelllikes to say conceives of our thoughts as ‘frictionlessly spinning in the void’,leaves our thoughts empty, answerable to nothing, and so not in any sensethoughtsof the world. Thoughts, judgments, beliefs, only become thoughts,judgments, or beliefs in virtue of presenting themselves asfaithful tosomething. And while the extreme idealist position leaves our words withnothing to be faithfulto (with nothing for them to beof or about), the myth ofthe given leaves them with something they mayattach themselves to, but notwith something they can befaithful or unfaithful to (and so again not withanything they can beof or about).

In Kant, McDowell finds a golden path – a way of preserving what is rightin each of the two conflicting views that does not at the same time commititself to what is unsatisfactory about them. From the idealist positionMcDowell keeps the idea that if what is given to us in experience is to besomething to which our judgments and thoughts can be answerable, it needsto be structured in some way by the same forms of intelligibility that structureand inform our judgments and thoughts. What this idealist position comes toin McDowell is the idea that the content of our experience must be the contentof what we might say (claim). From the myth of the given he takes the idea ofsomething nevertheless beinggiven to us in experience – in the sense that weare ‘passive’ with respect to it. What we experience, he will elsewhere say, is‘imposed or impressed’ on us.12 Our experience is structured by ourconceptions, but is not created by our thoughts. In experience, McDowell willsay, ‘conceptual capacities are being drawn into operation’ without it beingup to uswhich capacities are activated at any given moment.Which capacitiesare activatedtells us what we see, and are at the same timeforced on us bywhat we see.

Later I will suggest that the fateful mistake, the ‘decisive movement in theconjuring trick’ (PI, 308), is to attempt to say something (philosophical)aboutwhat must be happening in us when we see (or otherwise experience)one thing or another (to be so and so); for that is an almost sure recipe forletting our words become controlled by a picture. Still, perhaps it is possibleto take talk such as the above – of our experience as containing claims or ofthe activation in experience of conceptual capacities – as doing no more thanreminding us of what we cannot fail to know. That the content of ourexperience cannot be specified independently of the conditions of intelligiblespeech, may very well be something worth reminding the proponent of ‘themyth of the given’. Similarly, it may very well be worth reminding thecoherentist that what we experience is not, or anyway not wholly, ‘up to us’(MW, p. 10, fn. 8). And to either of those two it may be worth reminding, with

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a different emphasis in each case, that we (typically? normally?) are able toput our experience of the world into words –say, for example, what wesee.

McDowell, however, says more than this. That he says more than thisresults, I think, from his wish to overcome the irrational leap that according tohim plagues ‘the myth of the given’. So it is in his attempt to overcome whathe takes to be the shortcomings of ‘the myth of the given’ that McDowellcomes to say that our experience is not only something that wecan anddo putinto words, but that it is somehowalready worded, articulated; that ourjudgments simplyendorse a content that isalready somehow possessed by(us in) our experience prior to, and independently of, actual judgments. It is atthis point in his argument, I will argue, that McDowell can no longerplausibly be taken to remind us of what we cannot help but already know.And my concern in this paper is both with the philosophical forces andprocedures that lead McDowell to insist on something like this, and with aparticular conception of language, and of our relation to the world – aconception, so it seems to me, apart from which it would not seem that there issomething clear here for McDowell to insist on.

By way of anticipation, let me put my contention like this: In McDowell, asin Sellars, there is a conception of language in which justifying what one saysis a matter of nothing more than establishing its status as ‘warranted’ or‘correct’, wherethat is a matter of establishing its entitlement to the label‘true’. This is the reciprocal of a falsified conception of human experiencewhich makes our basic attitude to the world one of untamed curiosity: anattitude not even of keepers of truth, which we may indeedsometimes findourselves called upon to become, but of, as I shall prefer to call it, registrars oftruth – something that, I shall propose, we cannot become without losingourselves. But in order to be able to say more clearly what it is exactly that Ifind McDowell’s conception of our wording of our world to be repressing, Ineed at this point to pause my examination of his views and turn to StanleyCavell.

Cavell’s Vision of Language

A good way into Cavell’s reading of Wittgenstein is to see how important thenotion of the point of an utterance is to it; important both methodologically, asdirecting philosophical criticism, and substantively, as capturing somethingthat lies at the heart of our use of words. The notion of ‘the point’ of what wesay, as I understand it, ties the question of the content of an utterance to thequestion of its value – not by reducing the one to the other, but rather bycapturing their interdependence. To understand what someone is saying is tobe able to see her point. And that means to see her reason for saying thewords; but only insofar as that reason can be recognized as presented,



embodied,in the words uttered in that context. There can be many reasons forsaying something; but if the reason is to be constitutive of the point of theutterance, it should beinternal to what is said.

Thus, someone can exclaim that something is beautiful in order to impressyou with his good taste. His reason for thus exclaiming (“exclaiming”) mayjust be to impress you. But to understandwhat he says (thatthe thing isbeautiful!) you need to be able to see the point ofwhat he says (otherwise youare not likely to be impressed). You need to know what reason for sayingsomething (exclaiming) is constituted by a thing’s being found beautiful. Andthat reason could not consist merely in the speaker’s wish to impress you.Similarly, I can give you advice simply because I wish to encourage yourdependency on me. But you are not going to understand my words (myadvice), unless you are able to recognize them as advice – what wecall‘advice’. You might also be able to recognize them as meant to encourageyour dependency on me; but only by virtue of their presenting themselves asadvice, with the kind of point appropriate to advice. To utter words that havethe form of what might in a suitable context have been advice, but to do sowhere no advice is asked or called for, is not to give advice.

I said that the notion of the point of an utterance is central to Cavell’sappropriation of Wittgenstein. In Cavell, and in Cavell’s Wittgenstein, thework of bringing (leading) words back from their metaphysical to theireveryday use begins with the requirement that they have a point, wherehaving a point has both its conditions and its commitments. And the idea isthat theintelligibility of what we sayrequires that our words carry a point,and thatthat can never simply be a matter of our words’ ‘saying somethingtrue’:

…Are you suggesting that one sometimes cannot say what is true?’ What I amsuggesting is that ‘Because it is true’ is not areason or basis for saying anything, itdoes not constitute the point of your saying something; and I am suggesting that theremust, in grammar, be reasons for what you say, or be point in your saying ofsomething, if what you say is to be comprehensible. We can understand what thewords mean apart from understanding why you say them; but apart fromunderstanding the point of your saying them we cannot understand whatyou mean(CR, p. 206).

What is Cavell’s answer to the question that at the opening of this passage heimagines thrown at him (in philosophical outrage)? Let me say, by way ofanticipation, that I understand his implied answer to the question to runsomething like this: If, in the heat of a philosophical argument, you findyourself insisting on the aptness of a form of words, where that aptness issupposed to be established just by the words ‘saying something true’, thenyour situation is not one of having produced words that say something, whichwe for some odd reason are barred from saying. Because apart from a point,apart from a particular reason, there is (as yet) nothing clear – there is no clear

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‘ it’ – for you, or for anyone, to mean with those words, nothing clear that theysay. In particular, apart from such a point or reason there is (as yet) nothingsaid by these words that iseven a candidate for being true or false.

It is an important fact about us that our natural reaction to a pointing fingeris to look in the direction of the line from wrist to finger-tip (seePI, 185).Take the pointing finger, not just as an important instrument in the teachingand in the use of language, but as an allegory of communication in general:our ability to follow, and to follow up on, each other’s and our own meanings,worded and unworded. Then the significance of the idea of the point might bebrought out by reminding ourselves that if we looked in the direction of theline from wrist to fingertip, but could not find something there that isworthpointing out, and find thesame thing that we weremeant to find, then thenatural, at some point even automatic, reaction would not have been of muchhelp to us on our way to self- and mutual intelligibility. And we may very wellcome to the point where much of what we do withwords is similarlyautomatic – second nature to us, if you will. But intelligibility, to ourselvesand to others, requires something more: it requires that our utterances beshown, or be showable, as deserving of care – our own care, and the care ofthose whose care we assume, or call for, in speaking.

‘Language,’ Cavell says, ‘could not function as it does without mutual andcommon agreement aboutwhat is being named or pointed to. And thisdepends on our sharing a sense of what is remarkable, or on our attentionbeing drawn in similar directions by similar occurrences’ (CR, p. 211). I thinkmany readers of Wittgenstein would readily grant that our sharing a sense ofwhat is worth remarking, or worth our attention, is a pre-condition of humanlanguage’s functioning as it does. But the tendency would be to take it forgranted that wedo share this sense, and to suppose that the meaning of ourwords issecured in virtue of their registering the forms of our care and thethings that these forms lead us to isolate as the objects of our attention. Cavell,by contrast, while not denying the fact, and the significance, of what he callsthe ‘background of pervasive and systematic agreements among us’ (CR, p.30), presents the extent and nature of our agreement as something whosepresence can never be insured in advance, and hence as something to befoundevery time we open our mouths to speak.

Unlike most other readers of Wittgenstein, Cavell is everywhere alive andhis thought responsive to the possibility that we mightnot agree on what isworth sayinghere and now and what isn’t – that we mightnot be able to seeeach other’s, or even our own, point, and hence be, to various extents,incomprehensible to one another, or to ourselves (seeCR, p. 211). In Cavell’sWittgenstein, the possibility that we might find ourselves strangers toourselves or to others, alienated from our own words or from the words ofothers, unable to see the point of these words, is just as much a condition ofhuman speech as the background of pervasive and systematic agreements



among us.13 Language, he reminds us, ‘is an endless field of possibility …that cannot dictate what is saidnow, can no more assure the sense of what issaid, its depth, its helpfulness, its accuracy, its wit, than it can insure its truthto the world’ (CR, p. 189). And the point is not the trivial one that thegrammar of our language – the intricate weave of agreements between us thatholds the meaning of our words – cannot prevent us from lying, or from beingmean or shallow or imprecise; for all of those presuppose and hence affirm thegrammar of our language just as truthfulness and helpfulness and profundityand preciseness do. The point is rather that what human beings (find they)take to be ‘deep’, or ‘helpful’, or ‘witty’, or otherwise worth saying, is just asconstitutive of the grammar of their language as what they take to be ‘true tothe world’.14

Now I do not want to make it sound as if the capacity to see the point ofwhat people say is some sort of rare talent, a practice which requiresuncommon powers of sensitivity and attention. Seeing the point of whatpeople say is what we do every time we understand what they say. As Cavellsays: ‘…to know what a person has said you have to know that he or she hasasserted something, and know what he or she has asserted. What difficulty isthere in that? No difficulty, nothing is easier. But what is easy, then, is tounderstand the point of his words…’ (CR, p. 208).

All of what I have said so far about the point of an utterance leaves open thequestion of what it might mean to understandthe words, as opposed to andindependently of understanding the point of saying them, here and now. Oneway of understanding the distinction between what the words mean and whatsomeone means by them is to take the string of words, the sentence, to have adeterminate meaning, a perfectly clear sense, on its own, (perhaps with the aidof determinants such as the time and place of the utterance, and the identity ofthe speaker, but)apart from any context ofsignificant use. The question ofthe point of a concrete utterance is then taken to be anadditional concern,which, while perhaps no less essential to the intelligibility of what we say,presupposes the sentence’s determinate meaning. So the idea is that thesentence, by itself, says something clear, and that it is then a further questionwhether what the sentence says is alsoworth saying, whether it makes senseto sayit (what the sentence says), under the concrete circumstances in whichit (the sentence) is uttered.15

This picture of meaning – the picture, as Wittgenstein puts it, which treatsmeaning as if it were ‘an atmosphere accompanying the word, which itcarried with it into every kind of application’ (PI, 117) – is precisely whatboth Wittgenstein and Cavell are at pains to contest. As opposed to thispicture, they urge us to think of the meaning of words as a function of theusethat the words are put to, or may be put to – thework that the words perform,or are fit to perform – inparticular circumstances, byconcrete human beings.And it is of the essence of language that the same words, or strings of words,

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may be put to indeterminately many uses – though, just as importantly, not tojust any use. It follows that words in isolation, since they say nothing inparticular,say, in effect, nothing. ‘The sentence,’ says Wittgenstein, ‘has nosense outside the language-game’.16

This is not to deny that we could still more or less understand the wordsin isolation, or without seeing their point. After all, itmay sometimes makesense to say something like ‘I understand what you’re saying, but I can’tsee your point (the point, say, of saying itnow, or of saying it tome, or ofsaying it like that); that is to say, I can’t quite understandyou’. I take itthat this possibility is what Cavell’s distinction, in the opening quotation ofthis section, between what the words mean and what someone means bythem, is meant to leave room for. In cases like this, it seems, it is exactlyour ability to understand the words that allows us to competently raise aquestion about their point. But none of this implies that the words have adeterminate sense apart from some specific use we put them to, or may putthem to; that is, apart from some specific point. It only means that to be amaster of a language is to be able to anticipate the uses its words are fitfor, and the points they may serve to make when put to use. The mistake,as James Conant puts it, ‘is to think that the words themselves possess ameaning apart from their capacity to have a meaning when called upon invarious contexts of use’.17 And to the traditional epistemologist’santicipated claim that it makes sense to say someone knows somethingeven if saying it would have no point Cavell responds: ‘Certainly it makessense. And that just means that we can easily imagine circumstances inwhich it would make sense to say it. It does not mean thatapart from thosecircumstances it makes (clear) sense’ (CR, p. 215).18

If, despite all that, we find that we still wish to insist that the pointlesswords may nevertheless ‘say something true’, there is not much harm in that,as long as we remember that this just means that the words are capable ofbeing put to use; and thatwhen put to some particular use – whenmeant insome intelligible way – they may very well serve to tell, or point out, orreveal, or admit, or confess, or teach … a truth. What we must not be temptedto think is that the relation of our words to the world they mean is a relation inwhose continual maintenancewe (need to) play no part.

In Cavell’s Wittgenstein, the philosophical work of leading words back totheir everyday uses is a constant struggle against the temptation to think, orfantasize, that the words might somehowspeak for us, over our heads as itwere, independently of ourinvesting them with meaning. Cavell describesthat fantasy as the idea that ‘I must empty outmy contribution to words, sothat language itself, as if beyond me, exclusively takes over the responsibilityfor meaning’.19 This human tendency to renounce our responsibility to themeaningfulness of our words, which is the tendency to reject theconditionsunder which our words can be meaningful – and hence, in particular, be in



touch with reality – Cavell often presents as (an allegory for) the humantendency to renounce, or reject, the human.20

Saying What We See

Cavell’s recurrent insistence that the intelligibility of what we say, includingwhat we say philosophically, requires that it be found to have a point, is notlikely to be met without suspicion and resistance. The idea of ‘the point’,implying as it does the responsibility we each bear for the meaningfulness ofour words; and hence implying that the fit or harmony between words andworld is something that we do not just occasion, butenact, or fail to enact,goes against the grain of a tradition of philosophy informed by the assumptionthat the question of meaning and truth can be fruitfully thought of, and evenought to be thought of, without involving the question of the point of ajudgment, or an utterance. Philosophy has in general concerned itself with thetruth of judgments, not with their point; or concerned itself with propositionsand their truth, where judgment was taken to be the endorsement of aproposition. And what better, nobler, point can the endorsement of aproposition have than its truth?21

In various formulations of thephilosophical problem, as it were, of howwhatwords say can at all relate to the world, philosophy has for the most parttended to bypass the everyday,human problem I should like to say, ofbringing whatwe say into contact with reality. The considerations I raised inthe previous section, however, suggest that any account of the first problemthat overlooks the second is bound to falsify the very thing it attempts toexplain. For if what the words say is a matter of whatwe say by means ofthem, andthat, in turn, is a matter of our reasons for saying the words; if whatour words seek to capture or to express, call it an intuition, or call it a fact, isnot capturable,identifiable, apart from what makes itworth capturing, orworth being faithful to; then no serious account of the relation between wordsand world can afford to leave aside our various reasons for saying what wesay about the world. And yet it is tempting, when we do philosophy, to helpourselves to the linguistic expression of judgments, or of perceptions moregenerally, without taking into account the conditions required for turning thestring of words into a meaningful and intelligibleexpression.

McDowell, as we saw, takes the key to the resolution of the philosophicalpuzzlement he identifies in the tradition to lie in the idea thatwhat weexperience is the very same thing that we may also endorse in judgment, or,I suppose, otherwise linguistically commit ourselves to. A judgment ofexperience, he says, ‘does not introduce a new kind of content, but simplyendorses the conceptual content, or some of it, that is already possessed by theexperience on which it is grounded’ (MW, p. 49). ‘[An] ostensible seeing that

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there is a red cube in front of one,’ he writes in a more recent work, ‘would bean actualization of thesame conceptual capacities that would be exercised injudging that there is a red cube in front of one, with thesame togetherness.This captures the fact that such an ostensible seeing would ‘contain’ a claimwhose content would be the same as that of the corresponding judgment’(HWV, p. 458; see also pp. 461 and 476).

So, on the one hand, there is the idea, insisted on against the coherentist,that our experience requires ‘no cognitive work’, and that it presents us with‘mere synthesis [that] just happens … [and is] not our doing’ (HWV, p. 462).In experience, McDowell will say, we are ‘saddled with content’ (MW, p. 10).But, on the other hand, there is also the insistence that the content we aresaddled with isthe very same content that our judgments and claims mighthave:

[Judgment and ostensible seeing] differonly in the way in which the relevantconceptual capacities are actualized. In the judgment, there would be a freeresponsible exercise of the conceptual capacities; in the ostensible seeing, they wouldbe involuntarily drawn into operation under ostensible necessitation from anostensibly seen object (HWV, p. 458, my emphasis).

We are invited by McDowell to think of the content of our experience22 as thevery same content that judgments or claims might have. But what is it exactlythat we are invited to think? In what sense, for example, can my experience,as I sit here looking at a red cube (or at my computer), be said to have, or toprovide me with, thesame content that a judgment that there is a red cube (ora computer) in front me might have? For McDowell, it appears, it’s the words,and the way they hang together in a sentence, that are supposed to capture that(sameness of) content:

In experience one takes in, for instance sees,that things are thus and so. That is thesort of thing one can also, for instance, judge (MW, p. 9).

…what one takes in isthat things are thus and so. That things are thus and so is thecontent of the experience, and it can also be the content of a judgment: it becomes thecontent of a judgment if the subject decides to take the experience at face value (MW,p. 26).

[In an ostensible seeing that there is a red cube in front of me] a conceptual capacitycorresponding to ‘red’ and a conceptual capacity corresponding to ‘cube’ have to beexercised with a togetherness corresponding to the togetherness of ‘red’ and ‘cube’ in‘There is a red cube in front of me’ (HWV, pp. 458–9).

In beginning to assess these statements, let us ask ourselves what do wecall ‘ajudgment (that things are thus and so)’. For we might thereby learn somethingabout what determinesthe content of a judgment; and hence about what itmight mean for that content to bethe same as the content of an experience.McDowell at some point glosses the notion of ‘judgment’ as ‘making up our



mind what to think’ (HWV, p. 434). But I think it would be more precise, andmore to McDowell’s point, to say that to judge is to make up our mind whatwe are going tocall something, what we are going to count somethingas (anobject in front of us as a red cube; a surface as smooth; a government asstable).

Already at this point we might begin to feel uncomfortable with the ideathat ‘a judgment of experiencesimply endorses the conceptual content, orsome of it, that isalready possessed by the experience on which it isgrounded’ (MW, p. 49, my emphases). For it is not clear what room thisformulation leaves forfaithfulness or unfaithfulness to our experience – and Imean this not primarily in the sense of telling or hiding the truth about it, orbeing right or wrong about it, but rather in the sense ofbeing true to it, orfailing to. If we press this worry too soon, however, we run the risk ofremaining within the grip of the picture that underlies such formulations. Andthen we might end up stillthinking (that we know what ‘judgment’ means,what judgment is, what faithfulness to the world requires) instead oflooking(at what goes into our use of the word ‘judgment’, at whatwe, in actual cases,call ‘judgment’, at what faithfulness to the world requires).

So let us go more slowly and note, first, that in judgments, such as the oneabove, what we decide to call the thing, and what wemean in calling it this orthat, is inseparable from the nature of our interest in that thing – from thatwhich leads us to ask ourselves what we want to count it as. Whether or notwe decide, for example, to call a surface ‘smooth’ would depend on the natureof our specific interest in that surface. If you came to me and asked me, out ofthe blue, whether my desk, or face, was smooth, I would not know what tosay. I would need for you to tell me what you meant;unless I could see, or wassomehow able to guess,why you were asking me that – what the nature of theinterest you were expressing with your words was. Similarly, if you asked me,under whatever circumstances, whether there was, whether Iwould say(judge) that there was, a red cube in front of me, I would not knowwhat youwere asking, unless I were able to see the point of your question.

Here it is extremely tempting tothink that we can and do know what isbeing asked by ‘Is there a red cube in front of you?’, even in cases in which wecannot see the point of any such question. It is tempting to form for ourselvesa more or less vivid image of a red cube, to say ‘Why, the question is whetherthere is a red cube in front of you, of course!’, and to imagine that we havethereby done enough in order to specify the content of a clear question, or acorresponding judgment or claim. Now, of course we can look around whenaddressed with words such as these, the point of which we cannot see; and wecan form for ourselves a more or less vague idea of what might have beenmeant by means of those words, and respond to them as best we can. Still,what is important, and hard, is to see that thewords– ‘There is a red cube infront of me (you)’ –by themselves are idle, and that, apart from some specific

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point, the most that an image will do is to enable us toimagine that we orothers have meant something clear by means of them.

For suppose you say23 ‘There is a red cube in front of me’; I look, and seewhat for all the world is a green cube. Do I knowwhat you said? Have you,for example, said something false? Will forming for myself an image of a redcube, or staring hard at the cube in front of you, or both, help me find out? Thenext thing you do is to scratch the green paint to show me that underneath thegreen paint there is red paint. Do Inow understand what you said? Has itturned out that what you originally said was true? But then, shouldn’t yousimply have said that underneath the green paint there was red paint? I’m stillpuzzled: What judgment (or claim), if any, did you express with your words?But suppose you now add: ‘Those idiots thought they could fool me and getaway with it. Everybody knows that their green cubes are far superior to theirred cubes. But I could tell (judge) immediately, just by holding it in my hand,that that wasn’t a green cube’. Now I finally understand you and know whatjudgment or claim you made: you weren’t just trying to be clever; and itwasn’t really the color of the cube you were concerned about, but its quality.Given what turned out to be the context of your utterance (judgment), whatyou said was true, and scratching the red paint until the bare wood is revealedis not going to count as a reason for you to retract your earlier judgment andsay (judge) that the cube wasn’t red either.Of course it is wood underneath!This is what they make in their factory and what you sell in your store:wooden cubes. But note further: if I wanted to teach my son what ‘green’meant and pointed to the cube on your desk, it would show a certain lack ofcompetence on your part (unless you meant it as a joke) to say that I shouldn’thave pointed tothat cube if I wanted to teach my son what ‘green’ meant.

A judgment (or claim), I argue, requires a particular context in which it iscalled for. Without such a context, it would notbe a judgment (or claim), norhave any determinate content. Now what about an experience? Isn’t it clearlydifferent in that respect? It would appear that unlike a judgment or claim anexperience does not need to be called for; or anyway not in the same way. Itjust happens to us, as we saw McDowell saying, whether we want it to or not.Whereas a judgment requires a reason if it is to be a judgment, with anintelligible content, it would seem absurd to say that you need a reason inorder for you to see this or that that lies in front of your eyes – wouldn’t it?But then, what might be the relation between what we experience and whatwe might say?

Let me try to sharpen the point of my concern by means of a passage fromSellars. InScience and Metaphysics he asks us, as a way of understandinghuman perception, or what he there calls ‘conceptual representings’, toimagine a community of people who ‘[perceptually] take-out-loud’. Hepresents this ‘taking-out-loud’ as ‘spontaneous’ and as something that isneither ‘an action’ nor done ‘on purpose’ (just like the mental acts which the



utterances are meant to stand for).24 The expression of perception is taken, inthis hypothetical case, to be simply something through which the typicallyunexpressed mental occurrences can be reached. So we are asked here tothink of our encounter with the world in terms of some kind of a speech act.But what exactly are we asked to imagine? Whatwould those people actuallybe saying? After all, there are indefinitely many ‘true things’ they might be ina position to say, in light of what they see, at any given moment. We might, ofcourse, imagine their words as remarks, or reports, or claims, or exclamations.That would be to imagine those people as no different from us: their wordswould be used to give voice to what they see, but only insofar as they arefound to in some way be worth saying.

If I understand Sellars’s reason for inviting us to imagine this communityof takers-out-loud, however, that way of taking his invitation would not havesatisfied him. For the whole purpose of asking us to imagine this oddcommunity was to enable us to learn something aboutperception, not aboutour different ways of giving it expression. It seems to me, however, that theonly other way of taking Sellars’s invitation would be to imagine thosepeople’s words as somehow mechanically drawn out of them. But if this ishow we imagine those people, what will determine which words they wouldutter? What will their words reveal about their experience? Whatwill theirexperiencebe (like)? Will they becommunicating anything with their words?Will they be, would we want to say that they are,telling us (or anyone else)what theysee? When the alarm goes off, ‘Burglar! Burglar!’, is itsaying whatits detectorsees (or experiences)? This series of questions is meant to conveymy sense of having lost my grip on those creatures: I do not know how toapply our concepts of experience to them. But if it turns out that we cannotconceive of their words as used forsaying something, what will their wordsteach us about human perception? Sellars’s problem, as I wish to put it, is thathe wants to be ableboth to rely on something like human speech, in order tosay something about (the content of) human experience,and at the same timeto bypass the conditions of intelligible speech in order to get at the experience‘as it is in itself’, as it were.

Something similar, I think, is happening to McDowell. For wherein exactlylies the ‘correspondence’ that he is speaking of between a judgment and anexperience (HWV, p. 458)? What is it for an experience to ‘possess content’,and what does it mean to say that the content of our experience ‘[becomes] thecontent of a judgment…[if we decide] to take the experience at face value’(MW, p. 26)? How can the content of what we passively ‘take in’, ‘by a sort ofdefault’ (HWV, p. 439), bethe same as the content of a judgment or a claim,when the latter cannot be determined apart from a reason and the former issomething that is supposed to ‘just happen to us’ and be ‘not of our doing’?

Let’s go back to where I said that if you asked me whether (I would say,judge, that) there was a red cube in front of me I would not know what you

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meant, hence would not be able to give a meaningful answer to your question– an answer I couldmean – unless I saw, or were able to guess, what the pointof your question was. Someone might protest: ‘Why be so difficult? If a redcube is lying on your desk in front of you, and I ask you whether there is a redcube in front of you, isn’t it clear that you should simply say ‘Yes’? You areright that this would not be the (expression of a)judgment that there is a redcube in front of you, nor aclaim that there is a red cube in front of you (nor,for that matter, aremark, or anobservation, or a report, etc.). But it wouldnevertheless be an expression of yourseeing that there is a red cube in front ofyou; andthat there is a red cube in front of you would be part of the content ofyour visual experience.’

But now it seems that both the question and my answer, which we’vealready said were lacking a clear sense (as we’ve imagined them), are in factalso idle from the point of view of my interlocutor’s argument. At most, ourlittle imaginary exchange is meant to make sure that I’m looking at the cube.What my interlocutor really wants to say is that the fact that there is a red cubein front of me, and that I’m looking right at it, and perhaps also that I can tellcolors and shapes, justifies him in saying that I’m seeing a red cube in front ofme and ensures not only the sense, but also the truth, of his words. But is thattrue? Is this what wecall ‘seeing that this or that is such and such’? Is thiswhat we normally mean when we say of someone that he sees this or that (tobe the case)? Whatdoes determine –how do we tell– what someone sees?

Here is a tree and there is Jones walking in its direction. And let us evenassume that the color of the tree is of some significance to Jones, or ought tobe; let us assume that we told him to wait for us by the tree whose leaves haveturned red. Does Jones see that the tree is green?25 It is easy enough toimagine a case in which it would make perfect sense for me to say that hedoes. However, if I choose to say of Jones that he sees that the tree is green,my reason for saying the words would determine their – that is,my – exactmeaning. Perhaps I mean to explain to you why, having walked determinedlyin the direction of the tree, he suddenly stops and looks around inbewilderment, (in which case I would be saying something like: He hasjust noticed that the leaves are not red.) Or perhaps I mean to reassure you thatJones is not going to wait for us bythat tree, even though he certainly appearsto be heading determinedly in its direction, (in which case I would be sayingsomething like: Hecouldn’t have missed the fact that the leaves of that treehave not yet turned red.) Or perhaps I mean to say that his having just stoppedin bewilderment shows that his color blindness is not as bad as you feared itwas, (in which case I would be saying something like: See? Hecan tell thecolor of this tree.) In such cases, my words identify a complex fact composedof what Jones sees and of his seeing it. But my words only do so within someparticular context within which they can be found to express some particularinterest that I have in Jones and something that he can be said to see. Had I, for



example, used those words (‘He sees that the tree is green’) in order tocomplain that he should have known better than to wait for us by that tree, as Ispecifically told him to wait by the tree whose leaves have turned red, (inwhich case I would be saying something like: Heought to haveseen that theleaves have not yet turned red); or had you used those words in order to mockme and my earlier claim that Jones could tell red from green; thenneither ofus would havesaid that Jones was seeing that the tree was green. ‘Sayingthat’, Cavell reminds us, has its conditions;26 and I’ve been urging, followingCavell, that crucial to the conditions of someone’ssaying that Jones sees thisor that particular fact is thatthere be reason for that person to say that Jonessees this or that particular fact.

It might be said, ‘But aren’t you confusing the issue ofyour reason forsaying that Jones sees this or that with the question of whether or nothe seesit? Granted thatyou need to make some specific point if you are to saysomething intelligible about what Jones sees; but this has nothing to do withhis seeing what he sees. Go back to your example above of Jones approachingthe tree and then stopping in bewilderment and looking around. At thatmomenthe sees that the tree is green, and if this is true then it is trueregardless of whether or notyou have any reason whatsoever to attend to thatfact and put it into words’. But we already saw that what you’ve just said ofJones (‘He sees that the tree is green’) can have more than one sense,depending on the specific point of saying it, and is not even obviously a‘saying that he sees that the tree is green’. (Becausewanting to say that, orthinking that this is what we do, is not a sufficient condition for actuallysaying that.) So let me ask: In what does Jones’s seeing some particular factconsist, beyond the fact that, given the appropriate circumstances, it wouldmake sense for us to say of him, or for him to say of himself, that he sees thatfact? How do you determine, how can you tell, what exactly Jones sees andwhether or not he sees it? What is your criterion for his seeing, for example,that the tree is green?

Perhaps you would say that if you asked Jones what color the tree was hewould be able to give you the right answer, and even without having to lookone more time at the tree.27 I will not deny the likelihood that Jones would beable to give you a correct answer. But it is also true that if you asked him whatcolor the tree was, his answer, and what exactly he wouldmean, or would becapable of meaning, in giving it to you, would depend upon his understandingof the point of your question. The question would play a crucial role in theconstitution of the context within which his response would assume itsparticular sense. So how is what hethen would, presumably, say the verysame thing that henow, in the absence of that context, sees? And differentquestions would make for different contexts and therefore for different thingsfor him to be able to say on the basis of what faces him. Shall we therefore saythat he sees all of those indefinitely many things? I suppose nothing bars us

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from saying this, but what would be the point of insisting on some such thing?After all, what someone isin a position to say,within the appropriate context,is surely not the same as what he (or anyone) actually does say; and it is noteven something that hecan say apart from such context.

Of course, your question to Jones (or better, your string of words whichsounds like a question) may have no point, or he may fail to see your point,even if there is one; and he may nevertheless find himself compelled toanswer you with a bewildered ‘green’ (‘green?…’). But if you wanted to takethis to show that he saw that the tree was green, then I would ask you to goback to my ‘red cube’ example, or to construct for yourself a ‘green tree’example, in order to remind you that you haven’t yet specified, or he hasn’t,any determinate fact that he has seen.28

But perhaps, alternatively, your criterion for what Jones sees is not hisverbal representation of what he sees, but rather other things that he says anddoes. Even so, there would have to be a reason that would enableyou toidentify the fact you say he sees; and what he says and does – e.g., heapproaches the tree, and then suddenly stops and turns to look for a differenttree – would then have to show, within the context of your conversation (andgiven what you’d better be ready to establish ashis relevant circumstances),that that is something he can be said to see, or to have seen. Once again wearrive at the conclusion that there is no way for our words to pick up adeterminate fact for Jones to see, without there being a reason for picking upthat fact. A determination of (the content of) what we see cannot be hadindependently of the point of such determination.

Here I turn to another – and for us, here, final – objection:29 ‘Your wholeargument seems to boil down to the claim that neither words by themselves,nor the world by itself, can suffice to determine the content of what we orothers see. There needs to be some specific context within which someparticular fact (and someone’s seeing it) can be found to be of some particularsignificance, you argued. But aren’t we – as embodied creatures who haveneeds, desires and interests – always already in some such context in whichthings single themselves out as worthy in one way or another of our attention?Isn’t this sort of context all that is ‘missing’ from McDowell’s story? Andisn’t it likely that he simply takes the presence of such a context for grantedwhen he talks of our ‘seeing, or taking in,that (for example)there is a redcube in front of us’, and that he relies on that context to determine the sense of(for example) those words and ensure that there is indeed a determinate fact towhich they refer?’

I think there is an important truth in this objection. When we say ofsomeone that she sees this or that to be the case, part of what we do is to say ofthe perceiver that sheattends, in one way or another, to what we say she sees.However, the general ‘context of needs, desires, and interests’ spoken ofabove, whatever exactly it amounts to, is not the same as what I meant



throughout when I spoke of the context within which our words can be foundto pick out or refer to some particular fact. For even in the case of the storemanager facing the cube, or in the case of Jones facing the tree, differentoccasions for saying what they see at any given moment would make fordifferent (correct) determinations of the content of what they then see.30 Eventhe perceiver himself can find himself offering different specifications of whathe sees, or saw, given different possible occasions, or reasons, for him toattend to that matter. And so, given that most of what encounters us neveractually gets articulated –even if it is something that we clearly do need inone way or another to attend to (say, where we step, or where we placesomething, or how someone has responded to something that we did or said);and given that different contexts of articulation will make for differentspecifications of the content of what we see, or saw;31 what might it mean toinsist, as McDowell does, that what we take in in experience has the verysame content that a judgment or claim might have?

One rather uncontentious way of interpreting the idea that the content ofour experience is the content of what we might say would be to say, in thelight of our foregoing grammatical investigation, is that it simply registers thethought – which has the form of a truism, but may nevertheless be ratherilluminating – thatwhat it makes sense to say that someone sees must besomething that it makes sense to say that he sees. In particular, when we say ofsomeonethat he sees that so and so is such and such, what we say about himcan only make sense if the fact we say he sees –that so and so is such andsuch– is itself found to be of some particular significance. To present others orourselves as standing in a particular relation to a particular state of affairs,including the relation of seeing it (but equally the relation of wishing it, ordreading it, or ignoring it…), requires, in part, that we be able to present thefact itself as worthy of a particular kind of attention, or care. This would beone way of understanding the idea that the content of the human experience ofthe world is subject to the conditions of human speech.

That, however, is likely to leave the philosopher (in Wittgenstein’s‘negative’ sense) unsatisfied, feeling that his worry has not even beenaddressed, let alone answered.32 For we started out wanting to say somethingabout the content of human experience, as a way of getting clearer on therelation between our mind and our world; and now it seems that instead wehave merely been talking about theconditions of speaking about humanexperience. What’s the point of all these grammatical reminders about‘judging’ and ‘claiming’ and ‘seeing’ this or that, when what we wanted toknow is, precisely,how all these are at all possible!

And so we may be tempted to pursue another understanding of the ideathat our experience of the world is to be understood on the model ofspeech – the idea that our experience contains claims (‘contains’ ‘claims’).Suppose we want this idea, as McDowell wants it, to do more than simply

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register the grammatical truth that insofar as it makes sense for us to saythat someone (including oneself) sees something,what we say she seesshould itself fall under the conditions of intelligible speech, and be, as itwere, sayable. Suppose we want to be able to say something aboutwhatmust be happening in or to us when we see this or that. Suppose we wantto insist, in response to philosophical pressures of the kind expressed in theprevious paragraph, that what a competent speaker sees when she opensher eyeshas the very same content as what she might say; that ourexperience presents us with content, in virtue of our being competentspeakers whose senses are functioning, and that all that is then left for usto do is to endorsethat very same content in judgment, or to expressit inan utterance. Then, I’m afraid, we may find ourselves having to rely onwords, those things ordinarily used forsaying things, to be drawn intooperation and capture – by themselves, as it were – the content of ourexperience,apart from some specific context in which there would besomething in particular for them to mean.

And then we will be proposing that what we experience is somehowalready articulated (by us? for us?), and that all that is left for our judgmentsto do is simply to ‘select from among a rich supply of already conceptualcontent’ (MW, p. 49, fn. 6). ‘If one has occasion to say what one sees to be thecase,’ McDowell writes, ‘one has to select among the open-ended manifold ofthings that the scene entitles one to say’.33 I think we should by now be able tosee that this cannot ultimately be made sense of. For if the meaning of whatwe say cannot be determined apart from our reason to enter our words, hereand now; if meaning our words in some determinate way requires a particularcontext within which the words can be found to be called for; then how are weto make sense of this idea of a rich supply of conceptual content, wherethatcontent is taken to bethe same as the content of what we might say? Are we toimagine that together with the open-ended manifold of things to say that thescene provides us with, it also provides us with an open-ended manifold ofcontexts – the specific contexts apart from which there would be nothing clearfor us to say about or in response to the scene?

When McDowell speaks of judgment as selecting from a rich supply ofalready conceptual content, when he speaks of the open-ended manifold ofthings that the scene entitles us to say, he is avoiding the question of the pointof what we say. He makes it seem, in such moments, as if the mere presenceof things in our visual field were reason enough to put them into words; as iftheir ‘being there’ were enough to give them the sort of identity that would berequiredif they were to feature in anactual judgment or claim. He speaks ofthe (endlessly many) things thatthe scene entitles us to say – the scene, asopposed to some concrete inter-subjective context within which we can befound to be in a position to make some specific point with respect to this orthat. And he speaks – metaphorically, no doubt, but his metaphor is telling –



of the objects we encounter as typically, ordinarily,speaking to us, simply invirtue of our being ‘initiates of language’ whose senses are functioning:

A seen object as it were invites one to take it to be as it visibly is. It speaks to one; if itspeaks to one’s understanding, that is just what its speaking to one comes to. ‘See meas I am,’ it (so to speak) says to one; ‘namely, as characterized bythese properties’ –and it displays them (HWV, p. 469).

McDowell corrects Sellars, who speaks about a claim beingevoked or wrungfrom the perceiver by the object perceived.34 For that suggests that theperceiver actuallymakes the claim his experience contains. And that is surelynot what we would want to say. (But why not exactly? Because of what‘experience’ means? Because of what ‘a claim contained in an experience’means?) McDowell proposes that we think instead of the claim as being‘imposed or impressed’ on the perceiver (HWV, p. 440). So now we seem tohave a claim that nobody actually makes. It is now the world that is makingthe claim, imposing it on us, speaking to us. We find ourselves ‘saddled withcontent’ (MW, p. 10), but the content is supposed to be captured in words thatno one, necessarily, isthere and then in a position tomean in some particularway. We strip the words of the patterns of care within which the criteriainforming their employment can be articulated; we suspend their power ofexpressing our interests and desiresin particular contexts; and we still wantthem to be able to represent our world.

One recurrent metaphor in McDowell is that of ‘our space of reasons’. Andwhat I’ve said so far seems to me to suggest that if that metaphor is to be trulyhelpful to us for understanding our wording of our world, then we would needto think of our space of reasons as including reasons, not just for ‘holding abelief’ or for ‘taking something to be true’, but also for noting, or remarking,or claiming, or otherwisesaying something about something, here and now.We would need to think of that space as including the kind of reasons that canbe constitutive of the point of an utterance. If we added all that, and added,besides, that the space of reasons is not somethinggiven to us as we come intolanguage, but rather something bequeathed to us to discover, and to findourselves within, as we word our world and share it with others, then maybethere would be no harm in the idea that what our experience presents us withis already structured or informed by the space of reasons.

In the story McDowell tells of perception, however, this is not the way inwhich ‘reasons’ comes into play. The reasons composing what McDowellcalls ‘the space of reasons’ – and what virtually everyone McDowell engageswith in Mind and World speaks of when he speaks of ‘reasons’ – are reasonsthat would support ‘such and such is the case’,should the question of its trutharise; they arenot reasons foractually claiming, remarking, or even justnoting (hence judging) that such and such is the case. Sellars, from whom thephrase ‘space of reasons’ originates, speaks of this space as the space ‘of

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justifying and being able to justify what one says’35 without ever recognizingthat justifying what one says is at least in part a matter of justifying one’sactually saying it, here and now, to oneself or to others.

In McDowell, ‘being at home in the space of reasons’ seems to involve nomore than ‘the standing potential for a reflective stance at which the questionarises whether one ought to find this or thatpersuasive’ (MW, p. 125, myemphasis). (And why not ‘a reflective stance at which the question ariseswhether one ought to find this or that helpful, or insightful, or amusing, orotherwise worth saying’?) McDowell portrays the intelligibility of humanperception as a matter of ‘adjusting one’s world view in response toexperience’ (MW, p. 40; see also p. 47). What distinguishes human perceptionfrom animal perception, according to McDowell, is that humans are‘continually reshaping a world-view in rational response to the deliverancesof experience’ (MW, p. 114).

The idea of the world as speaking to us in words whose sense is somehowassured by their ‘being true’ is thus accommodated by the idea that everythingis somehow worth noting for us, either as fitting within our world view or asrequiring that we adjust it. As if our basic and typical relation to the worldwere – as if itcould humanly and rationallybe– what Sellarstried to captureby ‘a “what do we have here?” frame of mind’.36 This is what I meant to beinvoking when I spoke earlier of the picture of human beings as registrars oftruth.

McDowell, as a way of acknowledging the purposefulness of humanperception, says at one point that one can, ‘of course’, ‘decide where to placeoneself [and] at what pitch to tune one’s attention, and so forth’, but then hegoes on to ‘insist’ that ‘it is not up to one what, having done all that, one willexperience’ (MW, p. 10, fn. 8). I find that this portrays our basic and generalrelation to the world as something like eavesdropping on a conversation. I saythis not simply in order to point out that ‘deciding where to place oneself, andat what pitch to tune one’s attention, and so forth’ only makes sense undervery particular conditions, and is quite inapt as a description of most everydaycases in which someone can be said to see or hear something. I say thisbecause the fact that McDowell finds himself drawn to use such formulations– the fact thatthis is his way of fending off the worry that our wording of ourworld comes outtoo passive in his account – seems to me to attest to hisinability, from within his perspective inMind and World and other relatedworks, to do justice to the way in which we are implicated in the ways weword our world.

It is as if we are allowed some leeway with respect to our experience, whichis not essentially different from the leeway we have when we decide where toplace our seismograph and how to tune it, and beyond this limited freedomlanguage (practice, custom, tradition, (second) nature, theory…) and theworld are supposed to take over and determine for us the content of our



experience. As if we were continually eavesdropping ontheir conversation.(Except that even when one is eavesdropping on a conversation – that is,when one’s experience actuallydoes contain words that are being spoken –what one hears would still depend on the point of the specification, and wouldnot always be faithfully expressed simply by citing the words one hears.) AndI’m not saying that it never happens that custom, say, comes to take over andcontrol our experience of the world and the way we put it into words. I’m onlysaying that if this happens, thenwe let it happen.

Faced with a philosophical anxiety concerning our capacity for articulatingour world, McDowell has responded by, in effect, relegating the respon-sibility for particular articulations to the world itself. I should like to say thatthe objects of our experience end up speaking, in his story, not only to us, butfor us. In trying to get us not to worry about one thing (call it the problem ofhow words are responsive to the world), McDowell has ended up appearing todeny, or at any rate avoiding, the reality of quite another thing (call it theproblem of how to makeourselves andour words responsive to the world).

McDowell makes it sound as if nothing is easier than to have the worldspeak to us; orinvite us, as he says, to see it one way or another.37 He makes itsound as if we, speakers, cannot help but have something that we face speakto us (and have it say pretty much thesame list of things to basically anyone).But in reality only few and special things actuallyspeak to us – I mean, call onus and invite us to lend them our voice, without our having anticipated theircall. Andwhen one of those rare occasions does occur, and something speaksto us, what speaks to us isnever simply those objective properties that anyonewho speaks the language and has eyes in her or his head can see. Whatspeaksto us in things always goes beyond, comes from beyond of, what anyone canjust plainly see.These would be the moments in which it might make sensefor us to give expression to what we see, for no other reason butthat it is true.What we then would say might perhaps be unwarranted – there would be noobvious way for convincing others of its truth, or for fitting it into a world-view. But in spite of that, and in fact precisely by virtue of that, it would be anexpression of our faithfulness to what we see.38,39

NOTES

1 Wittgenstein (1980a), remark 981.2 Kant (1965), B xvii.3 McDowell, just like Sellars, is also very much aware, as we shall see, of the danger that such

an idea may collapse, either into an extreme form of idealism, in which our beholdenness tothe world is altogether sacrificed and nothing remains for our thoughts to beof, or into anextreme form of empiricism, in which experience is taken to be able by itself to dictate itsterms of intelligibility.

4 This is expressed most clearly and explicitly in the Postscript to Lecture V, pp. 175–80 ofMcDowell (1994). All further references to McDowell (1994) are made parenthetically inthe text by means ofMW and the appropriate page number.

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5 See Wittgenstein (1953), p. 200a. All future references to Wittgenstein (1953) will be madein the text by means ofPI, followed by the appropriate remark number, or a page number anda letter indicating the paragraph, if the reference is to the second part of the book.

6 How can I describe what I see when the sight is so moving, or so horrible, or so special, or soordinary; or when there ismuch that I see, and I haven’t yet figured out what it is you werecurious about; or when I don’t know the first thing about such instruments; or when you keepinterrupting me, or keep blocking the thing from view … Of course, the question may alsobe: How can my words, those airy creatures, speak ofthis (pointing roughly to the bulk of theworld)? But if that is my question, and if it is asked in a philosophical mood, then I shouldask myself why an answer consisting of a careful description of some of the different ways inwhich we give expression to our experience of the world, and respond to such expressions, orfail to express our experience, or fail to respond…–why such an answer would not satisfyme. Whatdid I wish to know?

7 Cavell (1979), p. 215. All Further references to Cavell (1979) are made parenthetically in thetext by means ofCR and the page number.

8 All of what I say here, about what I understand a Wittgensteinian grammatical investigationto consist in and to be aiming at, should be taken as a promissory note, to be cashed later inthe paper.

9 See McDowell (1998a), p. 404.10 This is essentially what McDowell takes to distinguish his idea of philosophical therapy

from Rorty’s. What he offers, he claims, ‘is a recipe for a potentially satisfying exorcism ofphilosophical anxiety, because [unlike Rorty’s] it fully acknowledges the thought thatgenerates the anxiety’ (McDowell (1994), p. 184). See also McDowell (1994), p. 151; andMcDowell’s response to Rorty’s criticism ofMind and World in McDowell (1998a), pp.419–25.

11 And the other thing of which both Wittgenstein and Cavell repeatedly remind us, is that it isnot up to us todecide what we could mean with our words. This, of course, is one of the keyideas of Cavell’s ‘Must We Mean What We Say?’ (Cavell, 1969).

12 McDowell (1998b), p. 440. All further references to McDowell (1998b) are madeparenthetically in the text by means ofHWV and the appropriate page number.

13 ‘Disagreement about our criteria, or the possibility of disagreement, is as fundamental atopic in Wittgenstein as the eliciting of criteria itself is’ (CR, p. 18).

14 For an early formulation of this idea, see Cavell (1969), p. 12.15 I don’t know that many of my readers would find themselves attracted to such a conception

of meaning, especially if it were offered to them thus abstractly. Nevertheless, bothWittgenstein and Cavell have shown the extent to which such a conception underlies manyphilosophical confusions. I will later try to show that such a conception is operative in, andeven essential to, some of McDowell’s key formulations.

16 Wittgenstein (1980a), remark 488; see also remark 42.17 Conant (1998), p. 241.18 What we have here, I wish to suggest, is not just an understanding of what it is for words to

have meaning, i.e., to be capable of saying something, but also anexplanation, if onlypartial, for the temptation to conceive of the meaning of words otherwise – that is, toconceive of it as graspable, even specifiable, apart from contexts of significant use. Theexplanation is that our capacity for anticipating such contexts for the words goes unnoticedby us; we fail to see how this capacity is essential to our sense that we can still understandwhat the words say even in the absence of such a context. It is this explanation that I find inWittgenstein: “‘I know that there’s a sick man lying here”, used in anunsuitable situation[that is, when it has no point, A.B.], seems not to be nonsense but rather seems matter-of-course, only because one can fairly easily imagine a situation to fit it…’ (Wittgenstein, 1969,remark 10).

19 Cavell (1989), p. 57.20 See, for example,CR, pp. 109, 207 and 355.21 I realize, of course, that I am making here a rather sweeping, even outrageous, claim about

the history of western philosophy – a claim which couldn’t possibly be validated within thespace of this paper. Beyond expressing my conviction that the claimcan be validated, andbeyond reporting here of confirmations of it that I’ve received from some whose knowledge



and judgment I trust, let me just say that I hope to be able to substantiate my claim, in thispaper, in the case of Sellars and McDowell, and also, to the extent that their placing ofthemselves in the tradition of western philosophy is apt, in the case of that tradition astheyare responding to it. In another paper of mine, entitled ‘Kant’s Principle of Purposiveness,and the Missing Point of (Aesthetic) Judgments’ forthcoming in theKantian Review, Idevelop a detailed reading of Kant’s thirdCritique, which aims at substantiating a similarclaim with respect to his understanding of judgment.

22 Here I should note that the word ‘experience’, as it features in McDowell, is problematic. Forwe don’t typicallyexperience that things are thus and so. We can seethat the door was leftopen, but we don’t normally experience such things. (What we can, grammatically, do is toexperience discomfort due to the door’s having been left open in the middle of winter, orexperience anger because of it; but what would it be forthose things to become the content ofjudgments or claims?) I suppose this is why McDowell likes to use the ‘in experience wetake in that things are thus and so’ construction. But there is no easy telling of how far wehave already gone, and in which direction if any, in choosing to solve the difficulty in thisway. Whatis experience? What do wecall ‘experience’? In order to avoid confusion, andunnatural constructions, I will from now on restrict myself as much as I can to ‘seeing’.

23 The following procedure follows the kind of analysis that is central to Charles Travis’sargument for the contextuality of semantics (see for example Travis (1997)). I wasintroduced to Travis’s work in the course of writing this paper. Anyone who knows that workwill recognize immediately its relevance to what I am trying here to do. However, attemptingto do justice to that relevance within the scope of the present paper would have meantlengthening an already rather long paper. I am currently working on a manuscript in which Iseek to compare and contrast Cavell and Travis as inheritors of Wittgenstein (and Austin).

24 Sellars (1968), pp. 74–5.25 See Sellars (1997), p. 39.26 “‘Saying that” (or “thinking that”) has its conditions’ (CR, p. 215).27 Here we come to, but cannot afford to even touch upon, the very complex concept of

‘remembering what we saw’, and the very confusing issue of what constitutes the (identity ofa) fact that we remember.

28 In such moments, having realized that the words by themselves cannot be relied on to specifya determinate fact, we may find ourselves wanting to be able to rely on the world – in thepresent case, onthe tree – to determine the content of what Jones sees. We want to point tothe tree and say: ‘Well, forget the words.This is what he sees.This is the content of what hesees.’ This shows just how powerful a temptation, or an intuition, empiricism is. But here Ithink McDowell is absolutely right: if what interests us is the bearing our experience has on(the rationality, or intelligibility, of) our words, then empiricism will, or should, never trulysatisfy us. You can’t, outside of appropriate circumstances, specify the content of what onesees, especially not if you’re looking to specify the sort of content that a judgment or claimmight have, just by pointing at what he or she looks at.

29 I thank an anonymous referee forInquiry for having raised this important objection.30 Even in cases in which the words used would be the same.31 And given that sometimes the things that we find to be the most important, and the hardest, to

articulate, are things that we have no obvious or clearneed to articulate. See the concludingparagraph of this paper.

32 For one thing, the proposed way of interpreting, or trying to save, the idea that ourexperience ‘contains claims’ has what for McDowell would be an unwelcome implication: Itsuggests that what, for example, dogs see, also ‘contains claims’. After all, there are factssuch that it makes perfect sense to say of dogs that they see them. For example, it can makesense to say of a dog that he sees that his master is getting ready to go for a walk. Shall wesay that the dog’s experience contains the claim that his master is getting ready to go for awalk? I have benefited here from Travis’s unpublished manuscript ‘The Face of Perception’.

33 McDowell (1998a), p. 413.34 Sellars (1997), p. 40.35 Sellars (1997), p. 76.

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36 Sellars (1968), p. 13. Sellars forgets, not only how special and rather uncommon a ‘what dowe have here?’ frame of mind is, but also that even the most clueless detective would not bemaking sense (nor, for that matter, much progress in his investigation) if he were to try tonote justany thing he sees.

37 Of course McDowell means these expressions only metaphorically (SeeHWV, p. 470). ButI’m suggesting that this is atelling metaphor. It reveals something true of his thinking. Tosay of someone that he only means something as a metaphor isnot to say that he doesn’tmean it; nor to qualify his meaning in any determinate way. That the objects we seeordinarilyspeak to us, invite us to see them as they are, I might say,is what McDowell has,ineffect, been saying even in his less metaphorical moments. This is what his avoidance of thequestion of the point comes to.

38 This final paragraph contains, in a highly condensed manner, the gist of an understanding ofbeauty that I try to articulate and motivate, in response to Kant’s aesthetics, in ‘What’s thePoint of Calling Out Beauty?’ (forthcoming in theBritish Journal of Aesthetics).

39 In writing this paper I was helped by many. First and foremost I wish to thank James Conant,who often seemed to me to know better than I did the difficulties I was facing in my writing,and whose generosity in helping me went far beyond anything that I could reasonably expectfrom him, or from anyone. David Finkelstein pressed me, together with Conant, to make mycriticism of McDowell more precise, and I’m grateful to him for that. Special thanks areowed to Stanley Cavell, for some very helpful specific comments, but also for his inspiration,most importantly in exemplifying what philosophical criticism might, and should, aspire tobe. Others who have helped me with this paper are Peter Hylton, Marya Schechtman, TonyLaden, Jean-Philippe Narboux, Martin Gustafsson, Lisa Van Alstyne, Rupert Read, KellyJolley, Joseph Schear, and the members of the University of Chicago Wittgenstein workshopheaded by Leonard Linsky and James Conant.

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Cavell, S. 1969. ‘Must We Mean What We Say?’ InMust We Mean What We Say? Cambridge:Cambridge University Press.

Cavell, S. 1979.The Claim of Reason. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press.Cavell, S. 1988.In Quest of the Ordinary. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Cavell, S. 1989.This New Yet Unapproachable America. Albuquerque: Living Batch Press.Conant, J. 1998. ‘Wittgenstein on Meaning and Use.’Philosophical Investigations 21, 222–50.Kant, I. 1965.Critique of Pure Reason. N. Kemp Smith (trans.). New York: St. Martin’s Press.McDowell, J. 1994.Mind and World. Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press.McDowell, J. 1998. ‘Pre´cis of Mind and World and Reply to Commentators.’Philosophy and

Phenomenological Research Vol. LVIII (No. 2), 365–431.McDowell, J. 1998. ‘Having the World in View: Sellars, Kant, and Intentionality.’The Journal

of Philosophy 95 (9), 431–91.Sellars, W. 1997.Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind. Cambridge and London: Harvard

University Press.Sellars, W. 1968.Science and Metaphysics. New York: Humanities Press.Travis, C. 1997. ‘Pragmatics.’ in C. Wright and B. Dale (eds.),A Companion to the Philosophy

of Language. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.Wittgenstein, L. 1953.Philosophical Investigations. G. E. M. Anscombe and R. Rhees (eds.);

G. E. M. Anscombe (trans.). Oxford: Basil Blackwell.Wittgenstein, L. 1969.On Certainty. G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright (eds.), Denis

Paul and G. E. M. Anscombe (trans.). New York: Harper & Row.



Wittgenstein, L. 1980.Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology. G. E. M. Anscombe and G.H. von Wright (eds.); G. E. M. Anscombe (trans.). Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

Received 8 August 2003

Avner Baz, Department of Philosophy, University of Chicago, 1010 E. 59th Street, Chicago,IL 60637, USA. E-mail: [email protected]

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