What sort of difficulty is this? Why is it so difficult for us to know“when and
how to stop philosophizing”? To unpack what this phrase means seems critical to
the understanding of Cavell’s notion of ordinary language philosophy. So let me
take it as a starting-point for our enquiry. I think this difficulty has deep connections
with what Cavell describes below as ordinary language philosophy:
there[in ordinary language philosophy] the problem is also raised of determining data from
which philosophy proceeds and to which it appeals, and specifically the issue is one of
placing the words and experiences with which philosophers have always begun in align-
ment with human beings in particular circumstances who can be imagined to be having
those experiences and saying and meaning those words. This is all that“ordinary”in the
phrase“ordinary language philosophy”means, or ought to mean...It reminds us that
whatever words are said and meant are said and meant by particular men, and that to
understand what they (the words) mean you must understand what they (whoever is using
them) mean, and that sometimes men do not see what they mean, that usually they cannot
say what they mean, that for various reasons they may not know what they mean, that when
they are forced to recognize this they feel they do not, perhaps cannot, mean anything, and
they are struck dumb. (Cavell 1976 , p. 270)The passage above points to the two distinctive features of the practice of ordinary
language philosophy. First, ordinary language philosophy is usually triggered by
something we are tempted to say about particular persons in particular circum-
stances, the meaning of which can be brought out by appealing to widely shared, or
easily imaginable, circumstances. This means that the ordinary language philoso-
pher claims to know only what an ordinary human being can know and that this is
what“ordinary”means in“ordinary language philosophy.”Second, the ordinary
language philosopher seems to take seriously the fact that, sometimes when asked,
the speaker of an utterance does not know how to“place”the ordinary words and
experiences in relation to her own particular circumstance, even when she is the
one who has uttered the words. For we ourselves sometimes do not seem to know,
when we are asked, what we meant when we said the words. This is exactly
the state that the ordinary language philosopher intends to throw us into, i.e., the
state of“being struck dumb”when faced by the question“What do you mean
by what you said?”^6 But, how is it that we can say words without knowing what we
mean by them? We have to ask, then, what sort of meaning the ordinary
language philosopher is concerned with in asking the speaker what she means by
her words.
According to Cavell, in asking what the speaker means by her words, the
ordinary language philosopher does not expect her toexplainorparaphrasethe
(^6) Now it may be objected that this is a slight variation on the formulation of words with which
ordinary language philosophy is most commonly associated, which is“When we say...,we
mean...”And indeed Cavell makes much of the importance of this being bothfirst person and
plural, indicatingfirst that we are required to say how things seemto us, and second that in so
doing we are trying to speak for others too, making an appealto community. But it is this very
point that legitimates my expressing this in the second person: in doing ordinary language phi-
losophy with others (and how else could it be done?), I must take the other’sfirst person
expression as at the same time an address to me, to see if this is what I mean by the words I use.
74 D.-J. Kwak