how we use language because“we do not command a clear view of the use of our
words.”Hefinds that we cannot ground or justify the grammar, nor explain itfor
certain. The grammar underlying the way we use language cannot afford the form
of account his grammatical investigation requires. So, for Wittgenstein, the best
thing we can do is to give an“intermediate case”that enable us toseethe con-
nections between things, for this will be the best means of attaining“a perspicuous
representation,”not of the whole but of that segment of reality, of the language
game, that is under scrutiny. Thus, the offering of careful descriptions of inter-
mediate cases that guide us to see connections would be the form of account that
Wittgenstein or ordinary language philosophers would give in such grammatical
investigations.
What should be noted here is that Wittgenstein says of his“form of account”that
it is“the way we look at things”in the passage above. What does this mean? How
should we understand it? One way of understanding it may be that his form of
account (of the way we use language)—namely, the perspicuous representation—
reveals(or shows) the way we look at things. Wittgenstein then asks himself in
parenthesis at the end of the passage above, whether it (the way we look at things
revealed here) is aWeltanschauung, a German word usually translated into English
as“world view,”referring to a comprehensive framework of ideas and beliefs
through which we as individuals interpret the world and interact with it. Cavell’s
answer to this question of Wittgenstein’s is insightful:“The answer to that question
is, I take it, not No. Not, perhaps, Yes; because it is not a special, or competing,
way of looking at things. But not No; because its mark of success is that the world
seem—be—different”(Cavell 1976 , p. 86).
Cavell characterizes“the way we look at things,”revealed by Wittgenstein’s
form of account of the way we use language, as twofold. First, his answer is“not
Yes”; this means that“the way we look at things” cannot be said to be a
Weltanschauung because it is not a particular—i.e., Christian or Muslim, etc.—way
of looking at things, which is what Weltanschauung usually means. Now looking at
the term in a different way, Cavell’s“the way we look at things”might be taken to
refer to the human’s way of looking at things, as opposed to, for example, the bird’s
way of looking at things, if this can be called a Weltanschauung at all. Second,
Cavell’s answer is“not No”because“the way we look at things”can be changed as
a result of our grammatical investigation, not because we are now allowed to
choose another way of looking at things—indeed we are not—but because things
now seem different, the world becomes different. But what do all these points add
up to? What do they mean? Cavell seems to say: we come to live in the (same)
world in a different spirit (Cavell 1976 , p. 86).
Thus, we may conclude that, when ordinary language philosophers ask us“What
do you mean by the words you use?,”they do not mean to test out empirically the
extent of our agreement; nor are they setting out to strike us dumb. They mean
rather to exert a certain pressure on us to make us see“the way we look at things.”
In other words, ordinary language philosophers try to challenge our very condition
in using language as a whole, or our power to use language at all, by making us
confront the gap between the words we say and what we mean by them, only to
80 D.-J. Kwak