what she sees could be also seen or shared by others, even if this is not something
that could ever be a matter of objective proof or certainty of knowing.
5.3 The Educational Aspiration of Cavell’s Ordinary
Language Philosophy
We may now wonder: if ordinary language philosophy is a matter of seeing,
“Seeing exactly what?”In fact, Cavell gives us a short response to this in the
passage above, when he says that ordinary language philosophy is not about lan-
guage, nor about the world, but“about whatever ordinary language is about.”This
means that ordinary language philosophy is about the way we ordinarily use lan-
guage to mean what we say—i.e., about our“language games,”in Wittgenstein’s
terms. And Wittgenstein describes what the ordinary language philosopher does as
“the grammatical investigation”of the language game, which means unpacking the
grammar of the way we ordinarily use language. This indicates that there is a
special grammar or pattern in the ways we ordinarily use language, which ordinary
language philosophers are supposed to make stand out for us. To make this
grammar or pattern stand out for ourselves, we need the form of account that
ordinary language philosophers provide. What form would that be? In fact,
describing ordinary language philosophers’job as“the grammatical investigation”
of the way we use language gives us the impression that this project attempts to do
something similar to what“transcendental argument”attempts to do.^9 But, fol-
lowing Wittgenstein, Cavell clearly denies this view. To get a clearer understanding
of what is meant by“grammatical investigation,”let me quote Wittgenstein’s words
directly:
A main source of our failure to understand [our use of language] is that we do not command
a clear view of the use of our words.—our grammar is lacking in this sort of perspicuity.
A perspicuous representation produces just that understanding which consists of‘seeing
connexions’. Hence the importance offinding and inventing intermediate cases.
The concept of a perspicuous representation is of fundamental significance for us. It ear-
marks the form of account we give, the way we look at things. (Is this a
‘Weltanschauung’?) (Wittgenstein 1958 , #122)From the passage above we can say that Wittgenstein does not presume that his
grammatical investigation can provide a transcendental account of the grammar of
(^9) ‘Transcendental argument’refers to a kind of philosophical inquiry that seeks to spell out all the
presuppositions that are necessary to make sense of experience, or all the objective conditions that
are necessary to make our experience at all. Thefirst technical distinction between the terms
‘transcendent’and‘transcendental’was made by Kant. Kant reserved the term‘transcendent’for
entities such as God and soul that are said to be beyond human experience and to be unknowable.
The term‘transcendental’Kant reserved to signify prior thought forms: the innate principles that
give the mind the ability to formulate its perceptions and to make experience intelligible.
5 A Role of Doing Philosophy in a Humanistic Approach to Teacher... 79