Stanley Cavell is one of Wittgenstein's major readers, in part because he has shown how to read Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations as unified around the task of responding to (while not refuting) scepticism in its various forms and guises. In Part IV of The Claim of Reason, Cavell attempts to explain why the other minds sceptic is less successful than the sceptic about our knowledge of the external world in producing a sense that our everyday beliefs (whatever exactly they amount to) are less well founded than we normally take them to be. Cavell thinks that the other minds sceptic's efforts nevertheless shed light on important features of our lives with others, including the way that the so-called common sense of the matter is to be conceived. Cavell's thought in this realm is, like Wittgenstein's, systematically elusive. There is imminent danger in trying to fix on a definite structuring of his argument as a whole. There are, on the other hand, advantages to be gained in trying to delineate the major aspects of Cavell's treatment as explicitly as possible, not the least of which lies in not allowing the rigour in his words to be obscured by the impression they make.
Something more about the demands made by Cavell's writing is worth adding at the outset. As Arnold Davidson has said, ‘Cavell writes not primarily to produce new theses or conclusions, nor to produce new arguments to old conclusions, but, as Kierkegaard and the later Wittgenstein did, to excavate and transform the reader's sensibility’ (Davidson 1989: 234). This kind of transformation is to be effected by descriptions of the philosophical position or outlook or (as Cavell will say) mood that is being addressed. Timothy Gould, elaborating on Davidson, points out that ‘a way of writing that aims to transform a reader's sensibility must seek out readers who are at least partly willing and ready to have their sensibilities transformed’ (Gould 1998: 34).1 What does this seeking out have to do in order to engage the reader? Efforts to transform a sensibility are liable to meet with resistance, and describing a philosophical sensibility by exploring its origins, motivations, and attractions is bound on some occasions to strike the sensibility being diagnosed as irrelevant. How will Cavell's writing, then, ‘give … his philosophical readers enough material to keep them coming back for more’? (Gould 1998: 35) What in his response to other minds scepticism in particular will reach the philosophical reader who is dubious about the need for a turning of his or her sensibilities? There is no way to approach these questions but to work carefully through the details of Cavell's response to scepticism in order to scrutinise at each moment whether and how it captures – accurately describes, and maintains the attention of – our philosophical (we might even say sceptical) sensibilities concerning other minds. In this chapter, I will attempt to clarify and develop three major themes emerging from Cavell's treatment of other minds scepticism. In reconstructing these themes, I aim to deepen our sense of their relations, to advance some considerations on their behalf, to bring the issues they raise into sharp focus, and to allow them to begin to work on our philosophical sensibilities.
The first theme can be labelled ‘the failure of scepticism’. Cavell follows Wittgenstein in re-enacting the sceptic's attempts to problematise our beliefs about others, only to find that the sceptic's radical questioning does not really get off the ground, at least not in a shape that reflects the sceptic's self-understanding. I shall defend this conclusion by criticising one, very abstract, sceptical argument that relies on little more than the logical independence of facts about behaviour and facts about minds, and then by trying to turn back some unsuccessful attempts to shore up this unconvincing argument through the introduction of ostensibly more particular reasons for doubting our beliefs about others.
Examining why the other minds sceptic cannot raise a general doubt about the mindedness of others leads to the recognition of what Cavell calls a ‘truth of scepticism’ (Cavell 1979: 241) – my second theme. I want to explain and render plausible the idea that the sceptic's efforts point, despite his failure, to something significant about our relations to others. In speaking of a truth of scepticism, Cavell is often taken, naturally enough, to mean that scepticism is more or less true. Marie McGinn, for example, writes:
We begin to approach the truth in scepticism, Cavell believes, when we see that I am forced to acknowledge that my judgements about others are surrounded by uncertainty, for whatever faith I have in the humanity of the other it is, in some important sense, at best mine; my judgements are less than certain because they have their roots in me, in my unreasoned identification with – or trust in – the other.
(McGinn 1998: 48)2
This is a definite misreading. Cavell is far from acquiescing in a sceptical conclusion. The truth of scepticism – the truth, that is, that scepticism makes available to us – is that ‘our relation to the world as a whole, or to others in general, is not one of knowing, where knowing construes itself as being certain’ (Cavell 1979: 45). ‘The human creature's basis in the world as a whole, its relation to the world as such, is not that of knowing, anyway not what we think of as knowing’ (ibid.: 45).3 This truth shifts away from the sceptic's preferred self-interpretation, which is (Cavell says) ‘that we do not know with certainty of the existence of the external world (or of other minds)’ (ibid.: 45). True, we cannot be said to know with certainty of the existence of the world or of other minds, but ‘it is also true that we do not fail to know such things’ (ibid.: 45). To see Cavell as accepting, in some fashion, the sceptic's doubts is to read him through sceptical lenses. It is to take for granted what he wants to contest, that the sceptic's conceptions of belief, evidence, certainty, and knowledge are directly applicable to our basic relations to the world and to others in general.
After we have worked through the failure and the truth of scepticism, it will come as a further revelation, Cavell thinks, that ‘(some dimension of) our lives with others, some frames of mind in which we view others, are to be characterised as sceptical, or rather, understood in terms forced upon us, or made available to us, in thinking through scepticism’ (ibid.: 448). This idea, that our lives may well be tinged with scepticism, makes up my third theme, which I want to motivate (in part by showing its connection to the other two). Cavell explores this theme under the provocative rubric ‘living our scepticism’.4 Living our scepticism is not to be confused with the truth of scepticism.5 The latter renders something that is supposed to be ‘undeniable’ (Cavell 1979: 45) and inevitable in the human condition; it comprises a conceptual or grammatical necessity. The former is a ‘surmise’ (Cavell 1988: 127) or ‘intuition’ (Cavell 1979: 448) which represents, by contrast, a particular, historical, contingent way we have of realising our condition. To put it differently, the real problem of the other here becomes an existential problem, an issue of our self-understanding and its embodiment in our lives. To view the problem as a mere theoretical puzzle about our cognitive powers, as the sceptic is prone to do, amounts to an avoidance and an intellectualisation of our actual predicament, which lies in our attitudes towards and responses to others (and, of course, theirs to us). I am myself responsible for my responsiveness to others, and this is a responsibility I may not always bear. In so far as I fail to live up to my responsibility, I may be said to live my scepticism, even to allow myself to do so. Cavell's writing charts the enigmatic and disturbing prospect that for the most part we do so fail, that we do live our scepticism with respect to other minds. It is here, naturally, that we begin to see most patently the connection that Cavell has long wanted to draw between scepticism and tragedy; scepticism is, one might say, a rationalised expression of a kind of deafness to the human world. Its attractions manifest our openness and vulnerability to the fear that others may on some occasions be blank to us and we to them.
What do we know about what other people think, feel, and experience? In the mouth of a sceptical philosopher, this question stands at the beginning of a radical exercise in self-criticism that calls for either a general explanation of how it is possible for us to know anything about others or a grudging admission that we don't, not really. That it raises a demand for an account of the very possibility of knowledge may in the long run raise suspicions about whether the sceptic's investigation is the illegitimate outgrowth of a surreptitious metaphysical construction of the relation between the inner and the outer. At the outset, however, we seem to understand his concerns without excessive theoretical prompting, they seem natural and important enough. Understanding what is radical in the sceptic's enterprise will help to fix some ideas that prove critical to evaluating his progress.
The sceptic's challenge is, first of all, global. The general character of his doubt – the feature that makes us want to label it distinctively philosophical – is notoriously hard to characterise, but it seems safe to say that it is connected to the aforementioned idea of a suitably general explanation of the possibility of knowledge in a given area.6 Such an explanation would, by making no use of any beliefs about that area, presume nothing about our accomplishments in it, and so would show not only how, but that, knowledge with respect to this domain is possible. The sceptic is not interested in showing on a case by case basis that we are less certain or more prone to error about all the particulars than we tend to think. Instead he reveals, if his doubts are genuine and if they generalise from his preferred cases in the way he anticipates, that we lack any basis for a whole class of beliefs. He questions, for example, whether behaviour gives us any reason for believing anything about other minds. On the sceptic's view, then, we have no access to facts about an entire aspect of human experience, no idea of the actual layout of a, for all we know, wholly fantastical realm. Our loss is somehow more than a diminishment of the information about the world we have at our disposal; the picture of our condition with which the sceptic leaves us is one not of chronic intellectual carelessness, but, rather, of perpetual cognitive confinement. Our sloppiness about what we should believe, whatever its extent, is a fact of life that we can hope, if not exactly to rectify, to manage. The sceptic, on the other hand, takes himself to discover something both earthshaking and irremediable about our unreflective confidence in our ability to acquire any well-founded beliefs in the first place.
Its capacity to deliver a shock is dependent on a second, and crucial, feature of scepticism – its dialectical character. The sceptic, if he is to dislodge common sense, must start from within, employing only beliefs, commitments and principles that we recognise as our own. Not only the sceptic's vaunted intellectual scrupulousness but, more importantly, his very claim to rationality require that he employs standards and procedures that are implicit in our everyday practices of assessing our beliefs. After all, if his standards came from a particular theory of knowledge with no plausible claim to represent our everyday proceedings, the sceptic could be accused of changing the subject by setting the standard of knowledge too high or by imposing standards appropriate to one domain as the measure of our successes in another. His ‘shock’ would then be at best a reason for rejecting an analysis of knowledge that led to an unacceptable conclusion, not a threat to our access to the world of his, and our, concern. Scepticism is gripping; it makes a respectable claim on our attention, because it starts from where we are.
Now, it is also true that at the end of his dialectical progress, taking himself to have undermined the viability of the ordinary standards and procedures he has employed, the sceptic typically wants to offer a sort of consolation in exchange for his theoretical victory. Reason shows that we don't know, but we can reconcile ourselves to our failure by noting that we return to our natural beliefs when we leave our studies. Alternately, a dream-world of appearances sensuously indistinguishable from the real one could, for all practical purposes, be treated as if real. Or so the sceptic, now in a conciliatory mood, may propose.
Here Cavell sees an important asymmetry: the conclusion of other minds scepticism delivers less of a surprise than its counterpart in the material object case. Unreflective common sense on the matter of others does not begin with quite the same confidence in our capacities. We are not as prone to begin by taking it that we have a G.E. Moore-type certainty about a wide array of supposedly paradigmatic individual cases. Before other minds scepticism can work its philosophical mischief, we are already prepared for disappointment. Our everyday attitudes, having already comprehended the most natural of the doubts on which other minds scepticism trades for its plausibility, are cushioned against the rude awakening with which scepticism was to greet them. When we consider the question of our knowledge of others, rather than proceeding fairly quickly to something disturbing about our theoretical credentials, we remain focused on the felt reality of particular doubts about particular others. At this level, further, our doubts are both as real and as practical as can be; they are accordingly harder to accommodate or ignore as the product of a merely abstract and theoretical enquiry. In the long run, the apparent ease with which we are sometimes willing to say on reflection, ‘OK, so I can't really know what anyone else is thinking,’ comes to strike Cavell as anything but the aftermath of a dispassionate assessment of common sense. Rather, the persistence of a sceptical outlook in the realm of other minds, its insistence, our willingness to remain open to it, all will indicate a definite orientation within the world of our everyday concerns.
Suppose that beliefs about subject matter A are thought to be justified by (independently and purportedly better justified) beliefs about subject matter B, so that beliefs about B are ultimately to provide whatever rational basis we have for beliefs about A. The sceptic entertains a very broad question: are beliefs about A adequately supported by beliefs about B?7 Now let ‘A’ stand for other minds and ‘B’ for behaviour . Behaviour, widely construed to include non-verbal noises such as crying and laughing, gestures, facial expressions, physical movements (shrinking back in fear), physical appearances (a cut, tearing) and verbal expressions or reports, seems to be what we go on when we make judgements about others. It is prima facie plausible to suppose that all manifestations of behaviour can exist independently of any particular mental items they might be thought to evidence, and that an individual mental item might find a range of different manifestations, if any. Further, it may seem, any sort of behavioural manifestation can be known or recognised independently of a definite commitment to the existence of any particular mental items. In this sense, beliefs about behaviour can be said to be epistemically prior to beliefs about other minds. It may now seem to be a short step to the conclusion that we could have complete knowledge of someone's behaviour without having any knowledge of what is going on in his or her mind. Given the epistemic priority of behaviour and its logical independence from the mental items that it is supposed to evidence, the sceptic's question seems apposite: does behaviour supply us with a good enough basis for our beliefs about other minds, including our very commitment to their existence? Is the logical gap between behaviour and mind epistemically significant, and if so, can it be bridged? Can we get past someone's behaviour to his or her inner life?
The other minds sceptic is puzzled to find no obvious way to answer these questions. His story is familiar. ‘Bridge principles’ that would license transitions from behaviour to mental states involve the correlation of items from both categories. To provide empirical support for such principles, either I must have some prior knowledge of other minds (in the form of ‘certain types of beliefs about behaviour provide good evidence for certain types of beliefs about other minds’), or I must turn to my own case and extrapolate from whatever experiential correlations between mental states and behaviour it supplies. In the former case, obviously, I have not genuinely bridged the gap, but have helped myself to some of the knowledge I am trying to justify. In the latter, it is notoriously unclear what licenses the contention that my own case provides an adequate empirical basis on which to generalise about others. Nor does an a priori justification of our bridge principles, which would in effect treat them as meaning postulates, seem viable. To point, for example, to a range of behaviours as paradigmatic of what we call ‘pain’ (‘This is what we mean by “pain”’) appears wrongheaded. As long as the significance of the simple facts the sceptic deploys in setting up his division of our beliefs into the independent domains of behaviour and mind – that any behaviour can be exhibited in the absence of any particular underlying mental state, and that any particular mental state might have all kinds of behavioural expressions, or none – remains unchallenged, he will take himself to have ample reason to reject such an appeal to meaning. In particular, he will think that the presence of the behavioural criteria taken to be definitive of pain leaves open the question of whether the pain itself is really there; perhaps, after all, the other is just pretending to be in pain, for all I know.8 The sceptic seems to bank on little besides our willingness to admit that there is more to other minds than behaviour, more to particular mental states than the behaviour normally taken to be expressive of them. To deny that a doubt about how we can know about others arises at this point, the sceptic feels, amounts either to a dogmatic assertion that insists on minds as the only possible explanation of the behavioural phenomena or to a behaviourist reduction that relinquishes the genuine and substantial presence of minds in the world. As the matter stands, the inner seems to be intrinsically cloaked by bodily expression.
The sceptic's problem has been constructed so that we could have complete knowledge of the behaviour of others without having any knowledge of their minds. On the other hand, the terms of the problem dictate that any knowledge that would license inferences beyond behaviour to other minds would presuppose some of the knowledge we are trying to justify. It is not altogether surprising that, under these conditions, the sceptic has proved difficult to answer. The sceptic's set-up is, however, less innocuous than it appears. It involves substantive and questionable assumptions. In particular, its presumption of the coherence and epistemic importance of a sharp divide between beliefs about other minds and beliefs about behaviour demands careful scrutiny.
Of course it is a commonplace that any particular behaviour could occur in the absence of the mental condition with which it is typically associated. The significance of such possibilities is less clear. The sceptic thinks of mental states as lying behind behaviour, as opposed to being embodied in it. Consider a smile or a wince. It is much more natural to say that we see bemusement in someone's smile and that we see pain in that wince than to say that we infer bemusement from the smile or pain from the wince. The ways in which we talk about behaviour are infused with the idea that in many circumstances, we see people in the relevant states of mind. We recognise, sort and classify kinds of behaviour with reference to the kinds of mental states of which they are expressive. As Wittgenstein points out (PI 285), when we see a piece of behaviour as a smile, we are doing more than picking out and labelling a category of geometrical configurations appearing against a oval background.
Without a doubt, the sceptic's idea of ‘behind’ reflects an extremely important facet of our lives with others – that people can and will keep themselves hidden. Moreover, there are circumstances in which we say that behaviour does manifest something hidden inside, but these moments are very particular. Sometimes, for example, our words or looks betray a hidden emotion or belief, whatever efforts at concealment (conscious or unconscious) we may have made. The conditions in which we may be hiding something are not exceptional. One might well wonder, however, why they should serve as paradigms for our knowledge of other minds. In any case, understanding the variety of ways in which behaviour may fail to connect up with what is hidden deep within someone involves substantial familiarity with other minds. Knowing our way about in this domain draws on an appreciation of the various vicissitudes of successful self-expression and of our considerable resources for self-concealment. Grasping the possibilities requires genuine psychological insight.
Neither the logical independence of mental states and instances of behaviour nor the picture of mind as lying behind behaviour adequately motivates the idea of an epistemologically significant gap between these domains. To put the point more bluntly, the question of whether the sceptic has advanced a completely general question about the possibility of knowledge of other minds is begged if, as begins to seem to be the case, a metaphysically loaded picture of mind and behaviour as hermetically sealed realms has been smuggled in from the outset. I hope it is clear that pointing to the interdependence of different realms here is not meant to demonstrate the existence of other minds. Nor is the reference to what we say meant to establish the falsity of the sceptic's picture. Both of these appeals, rather, are meant to get us to scrutinise whether, given that the basis that we do have for particular claims about minds (physical damage, winces, groans, utterances) is only grasped against a backdrop which takes access to both realms for granted, there is any genuine perspective from which to raise a prior question about our reasons for taking there to be minds. They are meant to highlight the dialectical stakes: The sceptic must motivate his demand for such general reasons, explain for what he is looking. He should be required to do so without first importing an unsupported view of mental states as hidden, inner objects.
If the sceptic's employment of the independence of behaviour and mind has been rendered questionable, so has his demand that we justify taking behaviour to provide adequate evidence for the mental condition of others. A particular wince may not be a certain indication of pain, and behavioural expressions may be ambiguous or illegible in untold ways. In any given case, deception or misinterpretation will be conceivable. To say that it is therefore always doubtful whether another is enjoying a particular mental state is clearly to overgeneralise. Does the possibility of error or doubt in circumstances similar to my present ones imply that right now I have no idea what is going on in that other person's mind? Only, it seems clear, in certain contexts, where I am groping in the dark with respect to that other. The sceptical picture, we might say, portrays our relations to particular others as beginning in unfamiliarity, in isolation from any sociable background. Consider your mother or your significant other or your best friend. Can those tears or shrugs of the shoulders (let alone all those words) really be connected to a mind in the most unanticipated of ways or not at all? What would an affirmative answer show? Even if a person's expressions are phony, this phoniness involves the other in a very particular relation to us and is indicative of some underlying quality of mind. In our anxiety about the genuineness of his or her gestures, we are already relating ourselves in a quite specific way to a mind, a human being. We find ourselves in a relation which is, however vexed or unravelled, quite unlike our relation to a cauliflower or a moss (as Sartre might say9).
Let us review where we are. To take behaviour as a separable domain from that which it expresses – mind – is to make a metaphysical assumption, the epistemological significance of which has so far been supported only by the sceptic's assertion that all the facts about behaviour can be completely known independently of any knowledge of minds.10 This assertion is at odds with the idea that the behaviour we actually go on cannot be characterised or brought into focus without a commitment to the existence of minds. For the sceptic's purposes, it must be, but has not been, shown that there is a behavioural substratum, characterisable as a merely physical, potentially inexpressive, residue, that provides the only possible source of real evidence for other minds. I am not denying, nor do I take Cavell or Wittgenstein to need to deny, that it may be possible for some purposes to separate bodily behaviour as sheer physicality from mind or from acting or from ‘meaningful’ behaviour. Nor am I saying that if we were to make this separation and, further, grant that bodily behaviour as physical movement is all we have to go on, we would then face the sort of gap that the sceptic takes to have epistemologically fateful significance. I am questioning whether we should find it inevitable or rational or evident that we should begin with a gap of the sort the sceptic finds so salient,11 and trying to highlight that there ought to be a good question why we find it natural to do so.
Now, again, the fact that we do not generally speaking make sense of behaviour, and therefore of behavioural evidence, and in particular of failures of evidence to support particular claims, without carrying a commitment to the existence of minds does not demonstrate that we do know anything about them. Rather, the sceptic has not established a foothold against every claim about minds we take ourselves to have reason to make. On the other hand, the sceptic's progress and its failure have suggested, it seems, the futility of seeking evidence or justification for the overarching claim that minds exist. As far as we have seen, the whole idea of evidence or justification in the realm of other minds works in contexts in which the existence of minds is a foregone conclusion, something we hold fast.12 Another way to put this is to say that behaviour will carry justificatory weight only given a backdrop that takes minds for granted; its status as evidence is underwritten by our more general commitment. Our practice of relying on behaviour for our access to minds is not, and for all we know need not be, based on some prior knowledge that justifies the practice.
Here we are in the vicinity where Cavell discerns a truth in scepticism: our relation to others in general is not a matter of knowledge. This truth, to repeat, is not what the sceptic thought of himself as demonstrating. It represents no failure on our part, and suggests that our confinement from others, where real, is not the inevitable metaphysical consequence of our limited capacities as knowers.
We may, if we wish, speak here of a framework or background commitment to the existence of minds. Is this framework up for justification? To think so is to treat the commitment as something that, on Cavell's view as well as Wittgenstein's, it is not – an epistemic item about which a single, well-understood justificatory question could be asked. The framework lacks this kind of unity, it has no existence independent of what it is supposed to underwrite. All the commitment to the framework amounts to, that is, is contained in our piecemeal commitments to whatever attitudes and endorsements are expressed in the relevant practices, our ways of responding to others and of expressing our attitudes towards them, our claims about and on them and our routines for assessing and defending these claims. These responses show that and what we believe. Our commitments may, of course, be up for piecemeal justification, but there is no framework standing there as a target for wholesale questioning. But what about the practices themselves? Are they candidates for attempts at justification, and if not, do they nevertheless somehow need justification? To follow Wittgenstein in declaring ‘This is simply what I do’ (PI 217) is to maintain otherwise. Is this because the practices are constitutive of our sense of what minds are, inform our attitudes with content? I take it, no: to suppose that there is a constitutive question about what in general makes it possible for our beliefs about minds to have the content they do is already to adopt an external standpoint on the practices, it is in effect to treat the commitment to minds as hypothetical. What lies in our commitment to our practices is not a theoretical stance but rather a willingness to continue to talk (to make sense of others and ourselves) in the particular ways we have at hand, to be responsible to and for this manner of speaking.
I have questioned the realism of a picture on which the existence of a logical gap between behaviour and mind would lead directly to a sceptical moral. It would be premature to dismiss the sceptic at this juncture, but we can give his investigation a more definite shape. Rather than relying on the gap alone, he needs to bring forward specific reasons for doubt in each case of putative knowledge of other minds or at least show how systematically to generate such doubts. This is what we should have expected, given the dialectical character of his enquiry. The sceptic seeks, that is, to produce particular considerations that would move us away from our common-sense beliefs about other minds. These reasons would take the form of possibilities which, if actualised, would show that what we take to be going on ‘inside’, behind some instance of behaviour, is not really present. We would lack sufficient reason to discount such possibilities, and, importantly, the resultant doubts would generalise to all cases. Can the sceptic adduce such specific reasons, and will they support his separation of behaviour and mind into independent domains and a consequent suspension of judgement about other minds?
Cavell sets up a schematic dialogue to put the sceptic's efforts to move from querying ordinary claims to drawing a general sceptical moral on exhibit. The schema, adapted from J.L. Austin, is supposed to model the procedures we use for assessing and defending ordinary assertion. We are to keep in mind that dialectically speaking, the sceptic's claim to rationality is bound up with his matching those procedures sufficiently well; it is from them that we have gleaned our original sense of what constitutes rationality in the domain in question.
One striking feature of this exchange is this: before I conclude that I do not know anything about others on the basis of a particular case, I will want some indication as to why I have to take a particular ground for doubt seriously. I need to be shown what reason I have to think, on this occasion, here and now, that I might be reading his expressions wrong, or that he might be pretending, or that it might not be anger he is feeling but rather something else. These specific reasons will normally leave me face to face with another mind, although perhaps one odder and more unfamiliar than I had anticipated. Is the sceptic's claim that everyone turns out to be more of a stranger to me than I had thought? Further, each of my grounds for doubt in a given case will be applicable to this person in this situation. If he might be pretending, does that show me that you might be pretending as well? You might be; but his case does not show this, and so far I am not disposed to think that the mere possibility of pretence means I have no way of finding out. The sceptic's grounds for doubt, once specified, seem not to generalise in the way his sceptical moral demands. He has not yet uncovered a best case – an exemplar where if we know anything, we know this. He needs such a case if he is to speak to the fate of our knowledge of others as a whole.
This rather quick route with the sceptic's argument is likely to prompt the following response: ‘After all, he might be pretending. If he is, you don't know. And if you don't know about him, even if that doesn't raise an immediate doubt about others, aren't you just being stubborn, resisting a generalisation simply to avoid the inevitable need to confront the sceptic's conclusion head on? Can't we go through a process by which we single out each other, one by one, and raise doubts anew about each in turn? It's not as though he's the Great Pretender or something; there's nothing special or peculiar or untypical about his case.’ My stubbornness remains. I find myself wanting to say that, in reviewing each case, I will be looking at what my orientation towards each other is to be, what weight I am to allow each other's expressions. At worst, I have something to figure out every time. Where particular doubts involve pretence or mistakes about what an expression is an expression of – say, where it is not anger, but tiredness, that I see in another's face – I continue, with apparent impunity, to operate with a presumption of the other's mindedness and undiminished though hardly unlimited confidence in my own ability to get it right. Unless I can make sense of the dubious idea that all behaviour could be pretence or that every reading of an expression might involve a misapprehension of what is expressed, I have no reason to question all my beliefs here. Now, there are certainly exceptional cases in which there really is nothing going on behind what I take to be expressive behaviour, that is, nothing being expressed. I may, for example, take what is just the physical set of a person's jaw to be impatience. Here no particular state of mind enters into the explanation of what is really going on with the other when I erroneously judge him or her to be impatient.15 Could it always be this way? The stubborn reaction still maintains that I make sense of my mistake here through a contrast to a normal range of sincere or natural expressions of inner feelings, that I still have no reason to deploy this possibility against the competence of all behavioural evidence.
The suspicion may arise that my still dismissive reaction is a result of starting with too everyday a case, with too much knowledge already built into the setting of my doubts. Let us ask what happens if we try to use some more outré possibilities, those involving automata and their ilk, in an effort to bracket those features of context that already involve minds. Will such scenarios generalise without requiring a case-by-case assessment of my particular relations to each individual in turn? Will they force a re-examination of my presumption that there is mindedness around? Suppose along your daily route you watch as the seemingly perfectly ordinary person walking in front of you, with whom you had just exchanged pleasantries, loses his or her head with a ‘sproing’, revealing a lot of electronics where flesh and blood and bone should have been. (i) Would this tell you anything about how you should have been responding to and treating him or her all along? (ii) Does it tell you anything about how you should respond to and treat everyone else? (iii) Suppose the same kind of thing happens repeatedly; are you going to suspend judgement about all these ‘human’ ‘bodies’ around you and treat everyone with suspicion? What kind of suspicion? Will your concerns and interests here be focused on whether you know, as opposed to the details of the situation and your means for dealing with your conceptual and practical disorientation?16
These questions are not meant to be rhetorical. We may not know how to measure our responses, how to determine what we should say in these circumstances. I am inclined to think that all we are entitled to draw by way of a general conclusion is that we don't know what to say. Our conceptual resources need not be designed to ensure that we can assess the epistemic significance of extreme sceptical possibilities in isolation from our actual responses to and imaginings of others. How we would or should respond to the prospect of inhabiting a world populated by life-imitating zombies or life-simulating robots ultimately depends on the details. More revealing are cases in which we find whole groups of others opaque. If we were consistently to misread the facial expressions and gestures of the members of a group, we would not be forced to the conclusion that we just could not come to understand them. More time, further and more patient study, greater absorption in their lives, cleverer conceptual innovation, all may contribute to our overcoming our inability to read them. Cavell asks, ‘how much is enough when it comes to knowing and acknowledging the humanity of another?’ (Cavell 1979: 438) At what point, that is, do we read our failings as ‘the recognition of a universal human condition’ (ibid.: 438) of ignorance and isolation rather than as a fact about our ways of existing in that condition? It is not an insurmountable shortcoming of our conceptual tools that they do not anticipate determinate and conclusive responses to these questions. Before we draw a sceptical conclusion about our knowledge of and relatedness to others, we had better have a clearer understanding than the sceptic has provided of just what the possibilities and their saliencies are.
What we have been noting is the failure of the other minds sceptic's initial doubts, where real, to generalise in the way they would have to were they legitimately to call for a sweeping, global questioning of our capacities as knowers in the domain of other minds. This failure can be explained as the defeat of our efforts to find a best case of knowledge of the other. The sceptic needs a best case if its failure to constitute knowledge is to speak to the fate of knowledge of others as a whole. Unfortunately for the sceptic, we lack reason to think that any particular encounter is in this sense representative of our potential as knowers in these matters. As soon as a candidate best case is put forward and called into doubt, its own particularities reveal themselves, and the focus remains on this case, not our overall abilities.17
Cavell's uncovering of a truth in scepticism – that our relation to others in general is not one of knowing – is meant to effect a shift in how we conceive our stake in the problem of other minds. Our relation to persons in general rests in our capacity to acknowledge them18 and in what Wittgenstein invites us to call our ‘attitude towards a soul’ (PI 178). To acknowledge another person is to express a recognition of, an identification with, and an offer of attention or response to him or her. We have been prepared for the crucial shift to acknowledgement and attitude by several moments in our consideration of the sceptic's case: by the suggestion that the sceptic almost seems to posit the exemplary other as a stranger, by the idea that when the other is specified, my orientation towards his or her particular expressions comes to the forefront of my attention, and by questions about the differences the discovery of life-like automata would make to my actual responses to (as well as my theoretical beliefs about) others. Now we can ask: are my special attitudes towards others justified – justified, that is, as attitudes towards souls or minds?
Wittgenstein writes, ‘“I believe that he is not an automaton”, just like that, so far makes no sense. My attitude [Einstellung] towards him is an attitude towards a soul. I am not of the opinion that he has a soul’ (PI 178). Here Wittgenstein wants to remind us that our concepts of the mental are inseparable from expressive behaviour. To be a competent user of the word ‘pain’ is, among other things, to be able to apply it appropriately to a range of behaviours that express pain. On many occasions we do apply the concept on the basis of seeing pain in the behaviour presented (or so we say). Being able to see certain actions, gestures, and facial expressions as expressive of pain is part of our grasp of the concept. In emphasising attitude, Wittgenstein is noting that seeing behaviour as expressive of pain and, more generally, understanding what pain is, involve being prepared to respond appropriately to another person – out of pity, or in anger, or with respect. Sometimes our attitude will be one of disbelief. We may neglect the demands and wishes of others, ignore them, turn our backs on them. When was the last time you turned your back on a cauliflower? Did this change your relationship to the cauliflower? Can you give your full attention to your cauliflower's needs? Where there can be doubt as to state of mind, there will be room for particular attitudes and a capacity for response. This capacity will constitute the content of the conviction that it is that particular state of mind to which one is responding.
Wittgenstein's description of how attributions of behaviour support claims about other minds challenges the ease with which the sceptical interpretation of the relation between behaviour and mind gets off the ground. He is well aware that, from the sceptic's point of view, he will seem to be advocating a rather dogmatic behaviourism: as one of his interlocutors asks, ‘But doesn't what you say come to this: that there is no pain, for example, without pain-behaviour?’ His reaction is brusque: ‘– It comes to this: only of a living human being and what resembles (behaves like) a living human being can one say: it has sensations; it sees; is blind; hears; is deaf; is conscious or unconscious’ (PI 281). This may appear to be a strange response to the charge of behaviourism. Restricting attributions of mental states to a particular range of bodies seems merely to stipulate limits on the range of behaviours or movement to which the mental concepts in question can be meaningfully applied. Wittgenstein means, however, not to produce a general account of the relation between behaviour and mind, but to resist the terms in which the demand for such an account is posed. Only in certain contexts can we find a hook for mental concepts. These contexts are constituted in part by the actual involvement of certain, typically human, faces, bodies and movements. We cannot describe what these contexts are in isolation from our ability and willingness to read behaviour as expressive of mind. The circumstances in which expressive behaviour appears are always already tinged with mindedness, if you will; these are circumstances in which we make sense of faces, bodies and movements as expressive and in so doing display a repertoire of responses appropriate to mindedness.19 In contrast, it is not clear what it would be to wonder whether a stone or a moss was minded, what we are supposed to imagine here.20 If we bracket our ability to make sense of behaviour as expressive of mind, we alter the context with which we are dealing. And only by doing so do we create the need for a general account of the kind that Wittgenstein resists.
These considerations put Wittgenstein in a position to hint that the sceptic has begun with a conception of the other's body as stone-like. That this is the sceptic's philosophical imposition is suggested by Wittgenstein's unsuccessful efforts to conceive of situations in which others were treated like stones or stones like others. The sceptic needs to produce circumstances in which his doubts cannot be ignored and in which they force the general question of how behaviour justifies talk of minds on us. He can only succeed, however, by bracketing the background attitudes that inform our responses to others (and which, generally speaking, partially constitute the circumstances in which we and the others are involved). Of course, whether our particular attitudes are appropriate to a given circumstance may be a live question, but we need more reason than that to entertain the possibility of a wholesale suspicion, let alone suspension, of our attitudes towards others in general.
It is almost inevitable that the sceptic will hear a significant concession in Wittgenstein's talk of attitudes. He will take it to mean that our commitments are non-cognitive, and while it is misleading to seize upon the notion of attitude in the way the sceptic does here, we may feel hard-pressed to say exactly how it is wrong. But the response has already been anticipated: ‘Einstellung’ conveys the idea of an orientation towards others, an attunement to the possibilities present in the physiognomy of a given human situation. It seems doubtful that the sceptic has broached a question of justification with respect to our orientation to others that is not dependent on a picture of a gap between expression and what it expresses; further, on this picture, the possibility of a lack of such responsiveness is presumed to be implicit in our ordinary position, accurately described. The sceptic has simply imposed his own standards of accuracy here, and we have still not been apprised of a question about whether all such attitudes are tainted with arbitrariness. Behaviour has been rendered inanimate before the game begins. In cases where behaviour and mind will not line up, there will be specific stories to tell about the minds involved. The possibility that others might turn out to be mindless automata, in substance more stone-like than human, does not yet pose a threat to all of those stories.
Where does the shift to questions about our attitudes and relations towards others leave the sceptic's case? The turn to acknowledgement and attitude makes our capacity for response the crux of the matter. I may or may not be willing and able to provide aid or comfort or sympathy in the face of the other's pain, but my recognition of the demands that his or her expressions put on me and my sense of what counts as an appropriate reaction are inseparable from my understanding of what pain is.21 What accounts for the relevance of my responses to the issue of the other is not an underlying certainty that the other is human but rather my openness to his or her expressions of humanity.
Recall that Cavell diagnoses the sceptic's failure as the failure to find a best case of knowledge of the other, a situation in which the other on whom we are focused is representative of all our best opportunities for knowing. In any given case, our attention will be drawn to this other; by singling him or her out, we render this particular person, or this particular relationship, the issue. In Cavell's view, this shifting of our concern shows that our doubts and limitations are contingent parts of our daily lives, not the distressing upshot of reflection on our cognitive powers. In other words, I am already to some extent prepared for it to turn out (shocking though it would be) that my mother or my significant other is quite different from the one I expected, quite unknown to me; I am not ready to discover that this is not a hand. Our everyday attitudes may well have incorporated the worst the sceptic can imagine befalling us. As Cavell puts it:
There is nothing about other minds that satisfies me for all (practical) purposes; I already know everything scepticism concludes, that my ignorance of the existence of others is not the fate of my natural condition as a human knower, but my way of inhabiting that condition; that I cannot close my eyes to my doubts of others and to their doubts and denials of me, that my relations with others are restricted, that I cannot trust them blindly.
(Cavell 1979: 432)
The implication is that my failures to know others, to overcome my doubts, may well be my problem and, to the best of my knowledge, my responsibility.
Now we are ready to place Cavell's speculation that we live our scepticism. What is it to do so? The idea receives no fixed, canonical formulation, but emerges repeatedly as an ‘intuition’ that strikes Cavell as he ponders the asymmetries between external world and other minds scepticism:
In the sense in which we can arrive at scepticism with respect to the external world we cannot arrive at scepticism with respect to other minds; or rather… with respect to the external world, an initial sanity requires recognising that I cannot live my scepticism, whereas with respect to others a final sanity requires recognising that I can. I do.
(Cavell 1979: 451)
Here, Cavell deliberately courts an air of paradox which forces us to work back through the relations between doubt and sanity. That I can arrive at scepticism with respect to the external world requires that I cannot live it? Yes, because what this scepticism would have me believe is that I have no rational ground on which to stand with respect to where, everyday, I live. Life and reflection are (shockingly) at odds. But then, in a sense, life will always provide a sane-sounding ‘route of exit from the mood’ of loss that sceptical reflection prompts, ‘an alternative to this mood’ in ‘the joining again of the healthy, everyday world’ (Cavell 1979: 447). A strict line between sanity and rationality is requisite to the sceptic's case here, because without a definite claim to rationality he has no case. On the other hand, the sound of craziness (‘This is as a dream’) is not incidental to the significance of his sense of loss. Whereas the failure of other minds scepticism to get in the same sense off the ground reflects that we are already apprised of the difficulties of knowing others, that the everyday sense of the matter does not even appear to provide assurances of the comforts of home (home is not necessarily so comfortable). To suppose otherwise indulges in a (sometimes sweet, sometimes terrifying) fantasy of a kind of intimacy as our natural state from which we have fallen. That is to say:
My intuition that, on the contrary, I can live my scepticism with respect to other minds, is an intuition that there is no comparable, general alternative to the radical doubt of the existence of others; that we may already be as outside, in community, as we can be; that, accordingly, such a doubt does not bear the same relation to the idea of lunacy.
(Cavell 1979: 447)
At any juncture, we may experience others as strangers to us or ourselves as strangers to them. Doubt here has less of an initial ring of craziness, but the possible isolating effects of doubt – particularly where it is in service of my sense of my own unknownness, where I come to doubt that I can ever be known – are pervasive.
At another point, Cavell finds himself prompted to say ‘we have not permitted ourselves a best case’ (Cavell 1979: 439), again emphasising our responsibility in the matter: we have not allowed ourselves to know or be known. Cavell wants to stress that each moment with others contains the prospect of both doubt and (if I let myself be open to the other, and the other to me) its overcoming. Given this, it becomes important to ask what motivates the sceptic to try to universalise our everyday doubts and anxieties about others, to deny the very possibility of coming over to the other, to construct a philosophical problem out of the everyday phenomena, even to erect a metaphysical barrier between minds. Cavell's claim that we live our scepticism is meant to provide a diagnosis of the sceptic's motives here.
The idea is that we are liable to seek out ways to avoid the difficulties with which the ‘project’ of understanding others may present us. We take the sceptic seriously despite his proneness to overgeneralisation because his denial of knowledge expresses an intelligible, even a prevailing, wish to rationalise the rigours of our relations with others as a disappointment with knowledge as such. In an evocative but complex moment, Cavell writes:
In saying that we live our scepticism, I mean to register … ignorance about our everyday position toward others – not that we positively know that we are never, or not ordinarily, in best cases for knowing of the existence of other, but that we are rather disappointed in our occasions for knowing, as though we have, or have lost, some picture of what knowing another, or being known by another, would really come to – a harmony, a concord, a union, a transparence, a governance, a power – against which our actual successes at knowing, and being known, are poor things.
(Cavell 1979: 440)
Even here, where Cavell is remarking the vagaries of our everyday interactions with others, he is suggesting that our concerns are experienced as a ‘disappointment’ most naturally expressed by a picture the sceptic provides, in terms of which our genuine accomplishments will be found wanting.22 Implicit here is a tendency to want to find comfort in the philosophical idea that we simply could not know others where all we are entitled to conclude is that as yet, ‘we cannot find our feet with them’ (PI p. 223). To live our scepticism is to read our ignorance of others, our failures of intimacy and understanding, as out of our hands.
Wittgenstein notes that ‘we … say of some people that they are transparent to us. It is, however, important as regards this observation that one human being can be a complete enigma to another.’ (PI p. 223) Part of acknowledging the other as other is to grant that nothing guarantees that he or she will not remain an enigma, forever beyond the grasp of the concepts we have available. This is to allow the other a kind of separateness, we might say autonomy. While the barriers between us may not be simply of our own making, they are not metaphysically indestructible or impenetrable. On the other hand, there is always the other, capable of erecting new walls or tearing them down in unanticipated ways. Letting the other be the other requires both a capacity for resolute attentiveness to his or her particularity and a willingness to wait for the other to reveal him- or herself. Here Cavell sees the everyday matter of relating to others as ‘an exceptional’ – and we might say spiritual – ‘achievement’ (Cavell 1979: 463).
Achievements in this sphere are, we might think, attended with counterpart possibilities of failure. Everyday but exceptional achievement is likely to face the possibility of failures both dramatic and familiar. Indeed, this is how Cavell characterises our actual situation: ‘The surmise that we have become unable to count one another, to count for one another, is philosophically a surmise that we have lost the capacity to think, that we are stupefied. I call this condition living our scepticism’ (Cavell 1988: 127). Why does Cavell choose this (perhaps theatrical) label for a present, if typically unheeded and unnoticed, danger of spiritual failure? Scepticism about other minds has conceived of itself as a form of intellectual scrupulousness driven by a desire to understand our cognitive limits and to rein in our intellectual pretensions. Cavell proposes that the motivation and attraction behind scepticism can better be analysed as symptomatic of a very real wish to deny a potentially tragic dimension in our relation to others. ‘Tragedy’, he goes so far as to say, ‘is an interpretation of what scepticism is itself an interpretation of’ (Cavell 1987: 6).23 What is this tragic dimension? Again, it will be something unexceptional and unexceptionable (so much so as to be likely to remain unnoticed) if also potentially crushing in its consequences. What is it but that, simply put, that we are separate from other people, and that our separateness creates barriers between us; further, that overcoming barriers is a matter of our finding the means to express ourselves and of allowing others to do so? These plain aspects of human life need be neither sceptical nor tragic; you might count yourself fortunate that you can never be me. Cavell is concerned that we are prone to make them so: we are prone to want to shirk the responsibilities the plain facts of separateness bring in tow, and scepticism promises a metaphysical consolation for the anxieties with which the prospect of responding to others and making ourselves understood are fraught. It transmutes the fact of separateness and the lack of a guarantee that I shall be capable of responding to the other into a hyperbolic wish to know the other by feeling his or her pain. That wish is, naturally and necessarily, doomed to disappointment. For the sceptic, then, the knowledge we want proves impossible, and accepting our limitations appears to be the better part of wisdom. This interpretation of our separateness represents an ‘attempt to convert the human condition, the condition of humanity, into an intellectual difficulty’, Cavell (1979: 493) says; the sceptic takes ‘a metaphysical finitude as an intellectual lack’ (Cavell 1976: 263). The sceptic has numbed himself to the possibilities and pleasures attending the acknowledgement of genuine otherness.
It is hard to deny that this turning away is the stuff of tragedy. Othello's precipitous doubts about Desdemona are set off by the merest of ‘reasons’; his determination to heed them is a failure to see that he must accept Desdemona's acknowledgement of him as separate, an acceptance that demands that he in turn acknowledge her. Cavell is explicit about not taking each of us to be an Othello, but he does claim that we see how tragedies figure our lives: ‘There is no human alternative to the possibility of tragedy’ (Cavell 1979: 453). The sceptic in us will try to use a picture that measures our access to others in terms of knowledge and that results in putting others inevitably beyond reach in order to limit the possibility of tragedy. In doing so, however, our scepticism contributes to the ongoing realisation of the possibility of tragedy by distancing, even deadening, the other.
I have said more about what the problem of the other is not than about what it is. While the terms in which the sceptic conceptualises the problem ultimately disfigure it, inviting answers where there are no questions, we should nevertheless prize the sceptic's challenge for pointing us towards an understanding of how knowledge of others comes to be, humanly or existentially speaking, at issue.24
1 Gould's book does much to show how to think about crucial issues concerning Cavell's writing, his development, and his relations to ‘traditional’ and ‘analytic’ philosophy (as well as to Austin and Wittgenstein). The need to work systematically through the relation between the fate of the sceptic's arguments, the truth of scepticism, and the thought of living our scepticism became more apparent to me in reading Gould (1996), a presentation at an American Philosophical Association Eastern Division session, on which I commented.
2 Stephen Mulhall is correct to point out that ‘as Cavell puts it, the truth in scepticism is not exactly a truth’ (Mulhall 1994: 106).
3 At this point in The Claim of Reason we are referred back to the earlier essay ‘The Avoidance of Love’ (in Cavell 1976: 324): ‘We think scepticism must mean that we cannot know the world exists … Whereas what scepticism suggests is that since we cannot know the world exists, its presentness to us cannot be a function of knowing. The world is to be accepted; as the presentness of other minds is not to be known, but acknowledged.’
4 The phrase ‘I live my scepticism’ first appears in Cavell (1979) on p. 437; variants recur on pp. 440, 447–9 and 451–2.
5 As, it seems, in McGinn (1998), especially p. 45, which suggests that for Cavell talk of living one's scepticism is tantamount to finding a ‘germ of truth’ in other minds scepticism, a germ not present in the external world case. See also Eldridge (1997: 108), where ‘pointing to the truth of scepticism’ is identified with ‘saying that we live our scepticism’. See also Fleming (1993, e.g. pp. 141–2); Fleming is criticised in Gould 1996. Mulhall, again correctly, writes that the sceptic ‘invokes’ a possibility (that we may fail to acknowledge, to face, others) that is, correctly understood, ‘integral to the texture of ordinary life’ (Mulhall 1994: 137). It must be made clear that this possibility is just that, a possibility, and that living with that possibility is very different from embracing it as a condition of our lives with others. That there is something confused in running these two themes together is suggested by the fact that Cavell takes the truth of scepticism to apply equally to the problem of the external world, where we are said not to live our scepticism (see Cavell 1979: 451). My view is that in the other minds case, seeing how the truth of scepticism emerges (through the failure of the sceptic's problem, as he understands it, to get off the ground) helps us further to appreciate that the attraction of scepticism lies in specific aspects of our ordinary relations to others that leave open the possibility that we live our scepticism.
6 On some of the difficulties involved, see Stroud 1989, and the mapping of the relation between the plain and the philosophical in Clarke 1972. How to characterise the philosophical and whether, and for what reasons, to claim it as one's own are questions central to Cavell's enterprise.
7 This general set-up is explored in Stroud 1989, in the process of trying to articulate the distinctive nature of the traditional epistemologist's questions about the possibility of knowledge.
8 On the sceptic's very effective response to the appeal to behavioural criteria as a direct answer to his questioning (or a direct refutation of his position), see Cavell 1979 Ch. 2.
9 See Sartre 1993: 36.
10 The sceptic will be tempted to provide further support for his case by appealing to the thought that his knowledge of his own mind is prior to any knowledge of behaviour or of others. The crux of the matter here will be whether one can have conceptions of the particular mental states we ascribe to others from one's own case alone, shorn of connections to anything external. Part of an answer would involve scrutinising our motivations for seeking such stripped-down conceptions and asking why we would have any reason to take them to be the same as, or relevantly connected to, the concepts we actually do ascribe both to ourselves and to others. A full response would require looking at the details of Wittgenstein's private language argument and Cavell's reading of it. See PI 243–315, and Cavell 1979: 329–54.
11 I take John McDowell to make a similar point in his ‘Criteria, Defeasibility, and Knowledge’ (in 1998a: 384–5).
12 See OC 341–4. The general ‘belief’ in other minds should be viewed, not as an assumption, but as what Wittgenstein here calls a hinge proposition. There is nothing it would be, in context, to question the hinge: ‘the questions that we raise and our doubts depend on the fact that some propositions are exempt from doubt, are as it were like hinges on which those turn.’ (OC 341).
13 Only in very particular circumstances would we offer these words. More often we would specify the behaviour exhibited. This behaviour could range from his calmly uttering the words, ‘I am very, very angry’, to his yelling and stomping around to his displaying a certain tension or a particular glint in his eyes or other signs which only an intimate of his would be able to appreciate.
14 See Cavell 1979: 161–2.
15 An analogous case was suggested to me by Tom Senor.
16 On automata and their kin, see Cavell 1979: 403–16.
17 Here there is an important difference from the case of the external world, where best cases are available, but (as it were) something happens to them when they are singled out. With the external world, the rationality of doubting in the particular instance of putative knowing would have to be secured by implicitly introducing something special and specific into the case. With others, the claim is, there is always already something particular, specific to the individual case at hand, so that doubts that arise there do not automatically generalise in the way that best cases are supposed to.
18 See Cavell's ‘Knowing and Acknowledging’ (in his 1976), as well as the quote from Cavell 1976: 324, in note 3. It would be misleading to call acknowledgement an alternative to knowledge, as though the two were uniform and competing relations to the same thing. Acknowledgement approaches the particulars directly, variously, and without theoretical foundation.
19 On the importance of the face, and more on the dangers of construing behaviour narrowly as bodily movements or intentional bodily movements, see Cockburn 1985.
20 See PI 284, 288.
21 See Cavell 1976: 263.
22 See Mulhall 1994: 137: ‘The doubt and ignorance which the sceptic is prone to express in purely cognitive terms is seen by Cavell as integral to the texture of ordinary life when it is understood in terms of acknowledgement.’ A double caution is called for here: first, what is integral to the texture of everyday life is that acknowledgement may always present an issue, one that knowledge will not settle for us; second, in expressing the aspect of the texture of ordinary life in which a best case is not or is not known to be available by using the notions of doubt and ignorance, we are not getting behind or beyond, but are using, the sceptic's ‘purely cognitive terms’. These terms, however distorting, are apparently providing our most readily available ways of voicing our limitations (actually, our disappointed reactions to them).
23 Cavell's exploration of the connections between scepticism and tragedy begins with ‘The Avoidance of Love’ (in Cavell 1976) and continues in the reading of Othello with which Part IV of The Claim of Reason culminates (Cavell 1979: 481–96), and in the readings of Shakespeare collected in Disowning Knowledge (Cavell 1987). (Both ‘The Avoidance of Love’ and the treatment of Othello (‘Othello and the Stake of the Other’) appear in the latter volume.]
24 I would like to thank Daniel Brudney, David Cerbone and Richard Moran for discussion and comments, Randall Havas for continued conversations and Diana Nagel for valuable reactions.