to the words I use and, thereby, a new relation to myself, as well as to the world
around me. Cavell describes above the meaning involved here as akin to the
meaning that poetry is usually concerned with.
Let me further elaborate on this point. One way of understanding“making my
meaning”may be that I can say now that the words, whose meaning I already knew
before, come to me in a new light, concrete and alive:“Now I know what the words
meantome, which is the same as what I knew beforeobjectively, but not exactly
the samesubjectively.”To put it another way, the same ordinary meaning of the
words has come alive for me, and I can see now what the ordinary meaning of the
words exactly means: now I am living through the words. I think this is exactly
what Cavell means when he says above:“What they mean, and whether they mean
anything, depends solely upon whether I am using them so as to make my
meaning.”Echoing the words of Michael Oakeshott that“Philosophical reflection is
recognized here as the adventure of one who seeks to understand in other terms
what he already understands and in which the understanding sought is a disclosure
of the conditions of the understanding enjoyed and not a substitute for it”
(Oakeshott 1975, p. vii), Cavell concludes,“their (ordinary philosophers’) philo-
sophical procedure is designed to bring us to aconsciousnessof the worlds we must
have and hence of the lives we have”(Cavell 1976, p. xxv). In other words,
ordinary language philosophy“strikes us dumb”only to lead us to become aware of
what we already know through ourlived experienceof it.
To explore further the nature of this awareness that ordinary language
philosophers try to realize for us, let me quote more of Cavell’s words:
The philosophy of ordinary language is not about language, anyway not in any sense in
which it is not also about the world. Ordinary language philosophy is about whatever
ordinary language is about.
The philosopher appealing to everyday language turns to the reader not to convince him
without proof but to get him to prove something, test something, against himself. He is
saying: Look andfind out whether you can see what I see, wish to say what I wish to say.
(Cavell 1976 , pp. 95–96)From the passage above we may draw out three distinctive features about what
ordinary language philosophy is about. First, we can confirm that ordinary language
philosophy is about understanding the ordinary meaning of the language we use,
but only in relation tooneself. In other words, it may be said that it is about the
understanding of what we already know, but only todeepenits meaning in relation
to oneself. Thus, we can say that ordinary language philosophy is,first and fore-
most, directed to one’s self-knowledge as thefirst-person knowledge of one’s inner
experience. Second, the kind of self-knowledge that ordinary language philosophy
is concerned with is, given the passage above, not a matter of knowing, but a matter
ofseeing:“Look, andfind out whether you canseewhat I cansee.”I think this
indicates a crucial aspect of what Cavell’s ordinary language philosophy aspires to,
which has to do with its primary concern withfirst-person self-knowledge, since
seeing is exclusively afirst-person activity. Third, Cavell’s ordinary language
philosopher seems to have a wish to subscribe to a kind of realism: she assumes that
78 D.-J. Kwak