I was just telling @Athena about Heidegger's view of technology the other day. Although that is not the topic under discussion here.

Your method reminds me of the social constructionist Ken Gergen. — Joshs

I'm not sure I appreciate words being put in my mouth (and my options prescribed to me) when I have already spoken, as if they are not taken seriously, or that they are easily understood, or we can skip over questions and clarifications to characterizations, and on your terms (not as a call to a different vantage point entirely). I think it is clear that you want to come to a theory to hang on to something internal--"I think what this approach leaves out is the contribution of the subjective dimension"--and that you see me denying that; which I would call, the possibility of the individual. If that is the case, you have an argument with Wittgenstein's observations, not with OLP's methods, and I would re-read (read?) Philosophical Investigations, perhaps putting yourself in the place of the interlocutor. There are a lot of people that "use" what they believe Wittgenstein is saying, theoretically--"But they do this by adapting Wittgenstein’s contribution..."--but that book is a process (they are not statements, but claims for you to see for yourself our ordinary criteria compared to our philosophical desire).

[I--me Tony--require we] relinquish the subjective in favor of a discursive idealization which denies a role to point of view." — Joshs

I deny (Witt denies) the picture (entirely) of the subjective (the "picturing" of it, its being turned into a theory) without denying everything it does for us except the philosophical need for it (in the picture/theory); thus, I don't "favor" another placeholder in the picture, nor are we "denied" a point of view. However, if you think "having" a view (saying it? getting it accepted?) is not hard, subject to suppression, mischaracterization as an easier generality, flat out denied, without power, etc., then perhaps examining the things we say might in these cases reassure you that our criteria are broader and more subtle and open, perhaps enough to give up retreating to grasping onto something within us**.

Both Husserl and Merleau-Ponty add that localized experiences of possibility presuppose a more-enveloping orientation, a sense of belonging to the world. — Joshs

It is this sense of belonging that OLP is trying to restore in each case. “Things are experienced as significant to us, as mattering to us, in various different ways, something that involves a sense of the possibilities they offer.” (as you quote Ratcliffe) And this is an exact description of our concepts; the criteria being the "things": what matters, is significant, important, their possibilities, etc., for us in our lives.

Skepticism is created by this lose of our sense of the world, it being dead to us, unreachable, unresponsive to us; the Other being unknowable--us losing sight of what matters, is significant, important, the hope of the world's possibilities. This loss of the world is not just a philosophical feeling: "Even as [words] are uttered, there is a sense or feeling of their inadequacy." (One way to look at this is our lose of control, and our vulnerability, once we express something; that our words are out there, for us to be read by, held to.) However, the next sentence (as you quote) shows the radical, world-entire, world-ending doubt where philosophy takes it to: "With this, there is also a more pervasive experience of lack or absence. Something that once seemed integral to the world, like bedrock, is experienced as missing, perhaps altogether [enduringly] lost." This ends our trust in our ordinary criteria of our concepts, and philosophy's recourse is to have its own criteria and standards, and take away the context of criteria.

I would say here that we can not cement us and the world together forever, or, as it were, to solve skepticism--to never loose faith again--but OLP shows us the ways of our world, making it again seem possible to operate with that threat, let's say, in the face of the possibility of the world's (or our) loss of interest in us, of the chance of our loss of our ability to participate.

"language’s failure is taken to be unavoidable and insurmountable." *** "how was one to rehabilitate and transform words betrayed and perverted[?]" - Weisel — Joshs

Here is the decisive step to avoid the ordinary criteria of language--language's impossibility to ever reach the world (or our experience)--right next to the call OLP is making: to look for the ways how one can rehabilitate and transform our words having been betrayed and perverted.

“the struggle for words is essentially the struggle to communicate the destruction of much of what in ‘ordinary life’ we take for granted” -- Kusch — Joshs

So this "struggle for words" is a moment--not, importantly, systemic, an ever-present "gulf". This struggle may be a political moment, a moral moment, an existential moment. Cavell will say it is (also) a philosophical moment. Witt will talk of taking down the house of cards that is representationalism, and sorting amongst the rumble for the ordinary concepts to build again. We do most times take concepts and actions and expressions as if they are granted to us without our responsibility to them, as if the life they embody is a given, and we are not necessary (answerable) to sometimes make them intelligible in new contexts, or re-intelligble in a destroyed, perverted time. As you say, to make sure words do not fall "flat" or "short"--that see that we make them fall.

**One way we work to voice the personal is through psychology: "The trauma is experienced as something that happened to ‘me’ - something to be endured alone, which is not to be understood by or shared with others." Therapy "finds" the words to express this pain; as if they are there but we have a desire to suppress them, not be expressed by them--enough to be adversarial to others, as if when we say "our" pain that somehow takes it away from being "mine" (other than the fact of it being in my body, not yours), but isn't this also part of therapy? to see, as a comfort, that they are not alone, the only one to have felt this pain.

Are you familiar with the work in the area of the problem of other minds, or the issue of empathy?
— Joshs

Yes, started with, Descartes I wanna say. I think my post of my reading of Witt's lion quote is to show what he discovered about the problem of the other. I
— Antony Nickles

I’m going to take that as a ‘no’. — Joshs

So, we are going to ignore the entire history of the problem of other minds, and start fresh. To say, we do not need to account for the past in order to move forward. I'm sensing that here again we are underestimating the ability for concepts to have an openness and possibility to move into new contexts, etc. That the concepts are instead fixed, closed, an "idea" as if like an "object" to which a word points, like "tree". And even then, don't we have criteria for differentiating a tree from, say, a bush? and then we can address outliers: is a hibiscus that is pruned to have a trunk a "tree"? or a violet grafted to the top of an apple tree? If these things mattered, isn't it possible to discuss and resolve these "new contexts"? Are the criteria of concepts closed, or are people (closing them)?

It may be that if your interests gravitate toward political theory or literature , the approach you are using may be suffice for for those purposes. — Joshs

And this is the move to banish poetry from the republic. To cast out certain subjects (ethics, aesthetics, etc.) from "philosophy" as the Tractatus does, or positivism, or representationalism, etc. Austin will fume over they idea that everything that is not a true/false statement is either irrational or emotion, etc. And here we see one satisfaction of OLP: to bring back our whole world, rather than arbitrarily slicing it in two (as Kant had to).

I sense a gap between the Wittgensteinian approach you are using and the fertile research currently taking place on self-consciousness and empathy. You’ll have to trust me when I say that scholars like Dan Zahavi and Shaun Gallagher have a thoroughgoing familiarity with Wittgenstein, and would claim to embrace his approach. I believe they would say there is more to say about the basis of intersubjectivty and its relation to subjectivity than what you are offering , but which is not at all incompatible with Wittgenstein. — Joshs

I'm getting the feeling here that we want to skip past (understanding) the method of OLP (the important bit), to get it to say a theory that we can then argue with/about (along philosophy's old methods). But we do not yet seem to understand or accept the method, which is, as it were: "the argument". There may be implications to OLP's observations, and even, after having looked at our concepts, (different) goals for philosophy's issues that Austin and Witt have (similarly though, getting philosophy to see that it is--and, with Witt, why it is--not seeing, accepting the variety of criteria and their validity in understanding philosophical issues. But this is not to say that there are not other areas where the method of OLP (investigating our criteria) is useful: science, film, literature, politics, etc.

And so I feel I am, reluctantly, having to recreate the entire Philosophical Investigations backwards, when the whole point is for you to see for yourself if the examples, of what we say when, lead you to the same understanding of the criteria for that concept. And, if not, what is wrong with the example, what is missing from the context, have we overlooked criteria, seen them too generally, etc.--to work out our disagreements along those lines, the conditions and possibilities of each, lets simply say, word.

That said, my guess is these guys [saying "there is more to say about the basis of intersubjectivty and its relation to subjectivity") are both ignoring Witt's constant examination of "subjectivity" (its picture) and his ability to otherwise account for it. Analyzing the picture of representationalism (of the "interior"), and seeing the ordinary ways the personal (the individual) matter and have effect, etc. The Grammar of "us" speaking--and our similarity to the Other (in our separateness)--for example, that an expression reveals who we are (our pain, our defiance, our cowardice). That what is at stake is our responsibility to our expressions as they reveal our character, our soul; that it is we who hide it, wish to remain unanswerable, or wish to be fully expressed, so we no longer have to have anything to do with our words. (Cavell)

“ In the experience of dialogue, there is constituted between the other person and myself a common ground; my thought and his are inter-woven into a single fabric, my words and those of my interlocutor are called forth by the state of the discussion, and they are inserted into a shared operation of which neither of us is the creator.”
- Merleau-Ponty — Joshs

And why can't the "fabric" be our concepts and the lives they are sculpted with, which are there before us (not created by us) but which is adequate for our needs. Does it ensure understanding? No. Are their times when we do not share the same lives, that our language is dead to us, pushed outside its criteria? Yes. But we have ordinary ways to address those failings rather than create a theory which side-steps all the contexts in which misunderstanding comes up.

Is the self a social construct?

I argue that the self is so multifaceted a phenomenon that various complementary accounts must be integrated if we are to do justice to its complexity. — Joshs

- DAN ZAHAVI

Not having read this, I still imagine I will not be able to present anything in a way that will matter to you. Nevertheless, I would argue that the self is as multifaceted as all the ways we can express it in all the various contexts we come across. Most things we say will not express us of course--most of our life is conformity, quite desperation, Emerson and Thoreau will say--as if we do not exist, are not ourselves, until there are moments that define us--our character, over our intellect ("our thoughts")--contexts with criteria that may split us down the middle, require as to be answerable for ourself.

I am interested in the article on Austin and Ryle, as may @Banno, as I have studied both (though Ryle has issues, and Austin has limitations). Perhaps we can swap articles. Mine would be: Cavell on reading Wittgenstein but if you are feeling serious, the explanation/example of OLP in Cavell's finding of a MUST in concepts does a much better job than I have been able to.

we misunderstand each other [in myriad ways], we misunderstand each other, talk past one another, fail to ‘ put ourselves in the other’s shoe’ I would say. — Joshs

That is literally an example of doing Ordinary Language Philosophy . So let's look and see. The next step after this is that, because of the possibility of misunderstanding "we are in desperate need of a way to understand each other better than we do". Then the "in myriad ways" would be to say so much that we are "desperate" to lesson their number, or have understanding work in one way.

And you go on to list ways in which we misunderstand each other. But if we look at them as examples, we can perhaps see in them the ways in which we can avoid, and work out, misunderstandings. When we say: "Talk past one another." We imply that we are "talking at" but missed; wait, no, we were talking at something behind ("past") the other; or maybe it is just that I talk past you, that is to say: your cares, your interests, your curiosity, your terms--the things that I should be talking at, or to. So the evidence of our pain becomes examples of the ordinary ways in which we can make understanding work, or get back to work, or at least work better. (This is the same move Austin makes, backwards: understanding moral action by studying how excuses work. @Banno) Now you can work through the next example of what we say about misunderstanding for its criteria for understanding. One question might be: it does seem we have control over where we go, and it would be better to go to the Other (maybe rather than try to bring them to me) and go to their shoes, in which they travel the world--as if to see where they go, or perhaps how they go--what will get them to move, how to get them to go, their motivations.

Now their will be other ways conversation breaks down, and now it would seem to be helpful to examine each of those through what we say when we have a misunderstanding. And OLP would say: imagine examples of when we say something about misunderstanding, and we can investigate the context and criteria and learn what it says about understanding better. Instead, we take our "guilt, hostility, and stress" (our desperate skepticism) out on our ordinary criteria, and abandon them. The step is made because the ordinary ways are subject to failure, and we want something--"a way to understand each other better than we do". Not to make ourselves better, but to start the way langauge works over from scratch and build from the criteria we want. But then we understand everything in one way, built to address or solve all our misunderstandings, at once (dispell or solve our skepticism). And this instead of seeing and learning about the many ways we have come up with over the life of our trying to understand, through what we say when we talk of our misunderstandings (even in idioms).

Another ‘uncommon’ use is to convinceonself that one is using ordinary language to talk about olp, only to find the readers are all over the place in interpreting the sense of those ‘ordinary’ words. Why do you think that is? — Joshs

My crap job of anticipating how philosphers would need to be warned about the misconceptions of OLP. That everyone looks for a weak point to characterize a claim so it may simply be dismissed with nothing learned.

I should have been clearer that OLP is not "using ordinary language". And, yes, it has terms: "concept", "sense", "grammar", "use", "family resemblances", "aspect", "attitude". OLP's work is not hypocrisy; all philosophy has terms. What Witt is using those terms for is explainable. It is a lot harder explaining how philosophy has used: know, intend, mean, see, appearance, etc.--as if every word were a term, with no context.

What OLP is doing is investigating the ordinary ways something like "intention" works (it's criteria) in different contexts. OLP investigates the ordinary criteria for concepts by looking at what is going on when we say "intend", what distinctions are made, what we care about with the concept, when it is not considered the concept, what counts in its judgments, etc.

Other "Concepts" would include: seeing, knowing, an accident, a game, calling, naming, essence, etc; maybe it's easiest to say a Concept is like a field of expression or action, only that it is not enough to say "these words" because these words blanket how things work in the world too. One of OLP's contentions is that words and the world are tied together--to investigate one is to learn about the other--though the skeptic is correct that that connection can be lost.

Are you familiar with the work in the area of the problem of other minds, or the issue of empathy? — Joshs

Yes, started with, Descartes I wanna say. I think my post of my reading of Witt's lion quote is to show what he discovered about the problem of the other. I found that the best overview of the arguments is in Cavell's "Knowing and Acknowledging" and his finding that "I know he is in pain" is not intelligible as a claim to certainty, nor that I infer their pain, but it is in the context where the use of knowledge is that "I acknowledge" he is in pain (I accept its claim on me, rather than deny the Other--I believe this is in the sense of a moral claim, as in, above, though of course not necessarily apart from, empathy), and that this shows us a lot about our relationship to the Other (that we are separate but answerable to each other).

...there is no purely internal any more than there a a purely public. — Joshs

Witt's claim is that there is a personal (separate person) and that language is public, but the relationship between the two is not theoretical and universal (singular), but that I attach myself to language (an "expression" Witt will say), and then I am responsible to that expression, the ways it is rational (along each concept's criteria); responsible to answer to you for clarification, justification, excusing it, drawing a line in defense of it, for having defied its rationality, etc.

consciousness is self-consciousness ; there is a minimal pre-reflective self-awareness that accompanies all experiences. I’m wondering what you take is on this, since it speaks to the subjective side of language. — Joshs

To say "experience" is to mean (this is the method of OLP)... "I had a great experience at Disneyland." One criteria would seem to be: for you/me to have an experience, we must be aware of it. But does this criteria say anything? It also appears we talk about experience related to one thing, rather than all things, because what context would there be to ask "How is your experience?" (a waiter perhaps) or "What are you experiencing? (a clinical psychologist during an experiment of weightlessness?). Also, can we ask about your--talk about my--experience of everything/anything? And here, try to provide a context where you can, and where you can not.

I think of OLP as therapeutic... I was impressed by the way the method employed in that kind of philosophy dissolved the traditional "problems of philosophy" as did the pragmatism of John Dewey (or so I thought, and still think). — Ciceronianus the White

Although a lot of traditional OLP takes it as solving skepticism (or other philosophical problems), I admire Stanley Cavell's reading of the nuance that Witt is using to point out (with "seeing aspects" and "following a series", etc.) that in reviving our ordinary criteria, we learn about ourselves and our philosophical concerns. So I believe it doesn't solve those issues, or unravel them (eternally), or cure us (forever), or make philosophy obsolete, as Rorty, Dewey, Austin, Hegel, etc. in some sense believe.

how does one convey an innovation in thought WITHOUT either using the common stock uncommonly or inventing neologisms? — Joshs

I'd be interested in some examples of instances where an innovation in thought was communicated by using common stock words uncommonly — Ciceronianus the White

One "uncommon" use is when philosophy stripes concepts of the criteria that account for their ordinary uses (possible senses) and significance (why those senses matter to us)--"knowledge" 'appearance" "difference", intention" etc. And, yes, this "creates problems", like when "thought" is imagined to be an internal thing that, to be special, new, innovative, needs to be "outside" of the ordinary criteria of our concepts, that those must be circumvented.

But by investigating our ordinary criteria for each concept and how they allow for change is to see that it sometimes changes with our (cultural, practical) lives, but also to see that the ordinary criteria of senses of a concept can be extended into new contexts. With the example above, "thought" is externalized (see late Heidegger, What is Called Thinking?) not as limited to/by language, but that our desire for its "originality" and change is a possibility of (within) our concepts because of their criteria and the ordinary ways in which their "conformity" can be broken or pushed against or revitalized (in degenerate times). I guess this is to say I am, "my" "thought" is, not special, so much as, if I want what I say to be special, I am responsible to make that intelligible (which is a possibility of/from our ordinary criteria).

I appreciate the responses and thank you for helping me see the crossed-wires and misconceptions (and I wish I was better at addressing those). Before going back to responding (I will), I thought I would try to gather the misconceptions we have discovered.

1.That OLP's subject is only language, rather than us, the world, communication, culture, politics, philosophy's issues in general...

2. By ordinary, OLP is using regular words, for ordinary ideas, (or anyone's opinion) compared to philosophy's complex problems;

3. "Concept", "ordinary", "grammar", "criteria", "context, "use", etc., can be assumed (presumed) to be understood at first glance or in an ordinary way or as other philosophy might, instead of as specific terminology.

4. That a "concept" is similar to an "idea" or other mental metaphysical "object" that corresponds to words or the world, instead of a general category of words that have criteria imbedded in them for the way they are used: generalizing, knowing, seeing, understanding, meaning, intending, i.e., the words philosophy appropriates and stripes of their criteria to create a picture of one theory of language.

5. That OLP is saying or showing that language is simple, or works simply, dismissing or not interested in, or applicable to, philosophy's honest concerns (skepticism, the problem of other, identity, etc.),

6. That OLP is simply an empirical popularity contest of what most people say or that OLP is merely pointing out what makes people act in certain ways, or is conservatively limiting what can be said philosophically, or dismissing philosophy with “common sense”.

7. That Witt blames philosophy's problems on language, rather than on:
a) philosophy's desire/need for language to meet its standard;
b). the possibility in language to allow us to bewitch ourselves in that way, its ability to seem uprooted (isolated words) and so appearing to need roots; and
c) ordinary criteria's inability to defend itself.

8. That OLP has a theory of langauge, meaning, rationality etc., (and one overarching all) rather than being a method for insight (that the process is the "argument"), yet also a style and attitude, in that it is not telling us so much as asking us if we see too, requiring us to look differently (thus includes philosophers such as Socrates, Nietszche, Emerson, Thoreau, later Heidegger, and a new wave interested in OLP's involvement in and lessons from: literature, film, education, politics...

9. That representation, etc. is wrong (and OLP right, on the same terms), rather than us being confused, blind to ourselves (the entire picture ignoring our real needs/desires);

10. That OLP is making statements about how language works, rather than claims which only need to be fleshed out better, finding a context where the criteria might be something more apt, i.e., I have an equal right as the philosopher.

Of course , properly speaking.... — Joshs

"Properly" speaking....... Was I speaking... Improperly?

...nowhere do we have evidence that the background that I draw from and the background that you draw from are the ‘same’ background. — Joshs

This reminds me of Witt's (and Cavell's) examination of philosophy's obsession with knowing whether the pain I have is the same as yours. Unless there is a need to address a confusion, there is no need to talk of difference--what evidence would prove that? All OLP has is examples of "confusion" and what a "difference" is in "our" "background". Sometimes communication fails fundamentally--that's not a reason to restructure everything as if it always does or could whenever, unless maybe you have a reason to, say, attack logocentrism to allow for different voices--shift power to the individual.

"there is no situation of communicating with another, such as what you and I are doing now , where you wouldn’t be in a better position to understand me by assuming that every word I use is not just the mark of a history of sedimented cultural contexts , but my own integral interpretation of that history of contexts as I interpreted them, just as you own contextual background is unique to your history." — Joshs

That sounds exhausting; most of the time we don't need to be that special, nor intentional (if at all), but, yes, some times it is appropriate to be deliberate (a speech), or to "speak your (individual) truth" as it were. Emerson will talk of aversion to conformity (as Thourea civilly disobeys), and of breathing life into words--making a specific distinction, or even pointing out something new, or taking a concept into a new or broader context. All of the discrete, specific examples of, say, excuses, are evidence of the expansive ways language falls apart, rights itself, expands, and is used by us in the ways it allows (or against them).

"I mean every word that I use in relation to that larger personal system of understanding that is unique to me" — Joshs

You "meaning" every word is the same as you "intending" every action. Maybe the example about accidents helps. We are not that powerful--we don't set meaning, nor mitigate understanding; again, we abandon ourselves to our words.

Antony Nickles ...and what is it I am looking for in these? — Banno

Solid question. The one on Witt might allow you to see him in a larger context, and the other one I thought you might just enjoy as a good defense/example of OLP--I particuarly think the MUST of meaning something said is something Austin would enjoy. Also, as evidence that, with Cavell, Cora Diamond, others, OLP is still relevant and has more to say.

If ordinary dialogue does not reflect ordinary content then I don't know what else would. This sounds like a discontinuity between means and ends.

Anyway, clearly this is a "special technical" usage which doesn't carry the force of meaning of "ordinary dialogue" as it really exists, so I'll leave it at that. Perhaps it should be called "Strawson's method" or "Wittgenstein's way" or the "epoche". — Pantagruel

Well, clearly I suck at explaining things--to the examples!! (I forgot actually that's the whole gig.) So the "dialogue" we would have is coming up with (seeing and describing Wiit says), and agreeing on, circumstances (the contexts) when we say, as an example (from Malcolm): "I know" and what those instances imply about our various criteria for knowledge (what we ordinarily imply (mean) when we say, here: I know).

One option ("sense" Witt says) is that I am certain: "I know when the sun will rise today"; the criteria for this might be that I can give evidence of that certainty, etc. This appears to be philosophy's one and only use and preoccupation. Second, we can say "I know New York", as in: I know my way around; I can show you; Third, I know (knew) that, as in to confirm or agree with what you said; and Fourth, I know, as in to sympathize with you. Cavell uses this last sense to shed light on our knowledge of another's pain--we don't "know it" in the first sense, we acknowledge it, recognize and accept the claim their expression of pain makes on me.

Witt uses OLP to figure out the reason (spoiler: certainty in the face of skepticism) that metaphysics and positivism remove any context and replace our ordinary criteria. He does this by putting their claims/terms back into a context of when we say: "doubt" or "mean" or "mental picture". His other goal (and Austin's) is to show the variety of criteria for different concepts (the different ways concepts are meaningful, how differently they judge, what matters to us in their distinctions), and that each concept has their own ways they work (as opposed to word=world as Witt's nemesis, and that every statement is true/false for Austin).

So, to try this again, we are not using an ordinary dialogue or talking about ordinary (non-philosophical) content; that's fine it's just not analytical philosophy. We are examining what the ordinary criteria and context are when we say such-and-such philosophical claim. With "ordinary" maybe not as, conventional, so much as opposed to metaphysical abstract (absent) contexts and pre-determined criteria (the irony that Ordinary Language Philosophy has a weird version of ordinary is not lost on me--they didn't pick the name). Any "force of meaning" here is that if we can agree on the examples and the criteria, you might see what I see--see for yourself.

And from this is raised the question...how can the hidden, unexamined, unconscious criteria be called ordinary? If some embodiment is unavailable for examination, how can it be said to be ordinary? And if ordinary just stands for “not made up”, how is that not self-contradictory, if words are exactly that....made up in order to properly represent the objects to which they are meant to relate? — Mww

I hope the example above illustrates the criteria of different senses of a concept are not "hidden" nor "unavailable for examination". To examine them is exactly the point. Witt says something like: they are simply not usually examined--like, walking. And metaphysics makes up the criteria (for common words), though I would point out that the picture of meaning as: words represent objects (ideas, etc) is exactly the kind of thing that looking at examples (of representation) might help clarify why philosophers want to frame it this way (this is basically the main thrust of Witt's Philosophical Invetsigations). Maybe it helps to examine the disparities between your framing and Austin's above.

I accept there is a certain unconscious part of the system from which words arise, but I reject the words themselves can arise from unconscious criteria, or that they necessarily embody such unconscious criteria. Case in point....phenomena have no names, but subsequently cognized objects derived from them, do. — Mww

Edit: Witt gets into a lot of examples when the word and the world are not separate (see my mention of "accident" above)--say, that there is no space between my pain and its expression for knowledge. And "unconsious" is simply one way to put it. Another might be: most of the time we don't discuss criteria because they are wrapped up in everything we are already doing--we don't have to mean it, or intend it, or justify it, "think" about it, etc. The context is clear, the expression is uncontroversial--none of that comes up; though I could explain all that with the context: which sense based on what was pointed out, etc.--thus, the universality of the claim (you could make those claims, anyone could), and its powerlessness if I can't get you to see what I do.

Kant's... criteria is by no means hidden or unexamined, insofar as both concepts and the words which represent them in objective manifestation, arising from perceptions or from pure thought, are entirely present to conscious mental activity**. — Mww

This the philosopher's dream of power. As if they, or some rational process, created or perceives the (at its worst, singular) association of words with the world, and that they (and not "us") are privy to the whole landscape of our rationale so what they say actually matters (as judgment, etc.)--the difference may be clearer in that anyone can give examples of what we mean when we say "accident", but do we actually use the categorical imperative to decide what to do?

From here, it is nothing but the domain of general employment given by common experiences, which sustains the notion of “ordinary”, and somehow or another this became sufficient causality for language philosophers to simply assign a different connotation to “ordinary”, but with insufficient explanatory methodology for doing so. — Mww

And this is exactly philosophy's dismissal of our ordinary criteria, as "common experience" (not phislosophy's special insight) and "general employment" (compared to philosophy's rarified uses). OLP does not claim a "causality" or a special place or "connotation" (though, yes, the method needs explaining, badly it appears). What it is trying to do is put the human, say, voice, back into the philosophical discussion by bringing up the contexts in which our concepts live.

So we arrive at: to whom is OLP actually directed, and why does to whomever it is directed, need it? — Mww

OLP was (initially) directed at traditional analytical philosophy and the metaphysics, representationalism, positivism, and descriptive falacy, etc., of philosophical theories or statements that, among other things: communication/rationality works in one universal or specific way, or towards a particular standard, that it is dependent more on individuals, and that we have more control in how it works. It's necessity is to breath new life into a tradition which has removed us from its considerations. We fear skepticism and ambiguity, so we mechanize our world and language and relations. The place of philosophy is now bright and shiny and hollow and no one is allowed to live there.

From his first book of essays (rather short):
Cavell on Witt's Phil. Inv.

On the categorical Must of concepts

...our common stock of words embodies all the distinctions men have found worth drawing, and the connexions they have found worth marking, in the lifetimes of many generations: these surely are likely to be more numerous, more sound, since they have stood up to the long test of the survival of the fittest, and more subtle, at least in all ordinary and reasonably practical matters, than any that you or I are likely to think up in our arm-chairs of an afternoon-the most favoured alternative method.
— Austin [care of @Banno]

Sounds like a recipe for mediocrity. I wonder how much of that ‘common stock of words’ would remain if we removed the contributions of writers in innumerable fields of culture who thought them up in their armchairs(Plato, Freud, Shakespeare,etc). — Joshs

I believe Austin's point is the richness of what we ordinarily mean by what we say is the distinctions between one concept and another that are imbedded in their criteria for OLP to find that reflect what is worthy about that concept for us--what is meaningful about it to us: why it matters to draw that distinction, what counts for inclusion, why we would assume a connection to something else or between us, etc.

The important part here is not that they are common (ordinary) words (@Pantagruel); the point of OLP is that words "embody" the unconscious, unexamined ordinary criteria (not made-up, or philosophically-important criteria)--all of the richness that is buried in them of all the different ways we live.

He wants us to imagine the subtlety in how our ways of living are distinguished (not separate from the words, as Witt says too), and now compare this to Descartes. The armchair is a dead giveaway, but also he imagines his way into massive skeptical doubt and will only be satisfied with a standard of criteria he set by/for himself right then--neither subtle, nor connected to, nor worth anything but satisfying his fear.

I wouldn't say Austin understands skepticism (or cares about it) as Wittgenstein does (or Cavell), but he does qualify our entire reliance on "our common stock of words" to "all ordinary and reasonably practical matters" and so leaves it open that we might run out of words (what then?), or have to think more subtley, or because they are not always "sound"--though maybe just not as a start before looking at the richness of our existing concepts.

I'll just reserve "ordinary language philosophy" for those who were at Oxford in the twenty years from 1945, and place an emphasis on analysis of common word use. — Banno

I'll let the idea drop that the conflict, between what we ordinarily mean by what we say and what we'd like to mean philosophically, has not been happening since Socrates started asking random people questions on the street, if you'll check out Must We Mean What We Say by Cavell (a student of Austin) some time, and consider OLP didn't die in '65 and that it's reach might stretch a little further (and leave off that it came out in '58--the guy just died!).

Is a context a kind of frame within which events happen? Do things take place WITHIN a context? Do two people interact within a single context? Can i hold onto an intention over time within a single context? — Joshs

This is a lot, and, as Cavell says in the Abbrogation of Voice (the reading of Derrida reading Austin I mentioned), not much touches. I will only attempt to paraphrase his points. He says "context" does much more and "intention" does much less than Derrida wants. I also think the idea of time is getting in the way. As Witt's builders show: a lot of the context is already there ("written" Derrida might say)--our understanding of money, a transaction, private ownership, a question, on and on--for both of us to know, when I say to a grocer "Can I get that Apple?", that I want to buy it. The context also allows for concurrent misunderstanding (or inconclusive understanding), say, for the grocer to ask, "Just the one, or a pound?" Context can be shared, past and present (into the future), but we may find different parts significant (identity, capitalism) in running down any confusion.

Now how much of all the things that could be brought to bear, actually need to be, is determined by the possibilities in the concept and what questions if any remain. An "intention" can only be what it is in light of a concept, say an offense: "Did you intend to slight your mother-in-law by not serving her a drink? Or did you forget?" "I" have far less to do with this than Derrida, or positivism, would like. Intention is not the cause of action (or meaning); not every action is intended; nor does intention create or influence the context, nor affect the criteria of a concept (unless the concept allows for that). My "perspective" may only, if at all, come in (at the end, as it were) if there is a problem. Concepts already (before and outside of me) have significance, I only say them; and that "mark" doesn't secure or set the context (or the meaning). I give myself over to that expression (fate myself, Emerson says, to the concept). There are only certain ways to qualify it or excuse it--one of which might not be to say, "that's not what I intended!" (except as an expression of the desire to take back having said something). Derrida says I don't have to imagine my death to see the non-presence of context make my meaning already other then what I say (or intended), but I do not die. As Austin says, I am tethered to my words, which are my bond, to which I am shackled. Now I can understand Derrida politically wanting to get out from under the tyranny of our concepts, but he has sold out our responsibility to what we say in the process.

So I'm just, as always, not sure what to do with Derrida. The idea of a concept repeating through different contexts, or iterability, is in the same vain for me as a word tied to a meaning (stripped of any need for context), or a representation being true or false about the world (the bogeymen Austin takes on). I know they are meant to be different, but it's as if Derrida doesn't want his cake but still wants to eat it.

“Austin's procedure is rather remarkable and typical of that philosophical tradition with which he would like to have so few ties. It consists in recognizing that the possibility of the negative (in this case, of infelicities) is in fact a structural possibility, that failure is an essential risk of the operations under consideration; then, in a move which is almost immediately simultaneous, in the name of a kind of ideal regulation, it excludes that risk as accidental, exterior, one which teaches us nothing about the linguistic phenomenon being considered. This is all the more curious-and, strictly speaking, untenable-in view of Austin's ironic denunciation of the 'fet­ishized' opposition: valuelfact."
-Derrida (my emphasis)

In addition to the questions posed by a notion as historically sedimented as "convention," it should be noted at this point:

1) that Austin, at this juncture, appears to consider solely the conventionality constituting the circumstance of the utterance [monce], its contextual surround­ings, and not a certain conventionality intrinsic to what constitutes the speech act [locution] itself... — Joshs

My understanding is that Derrida confuses Austin as excluding the frailty of our concepts, but Austin was only setting it aside in the essay Derrida read because he had written a whole other essay about "Excuses" (to show how some speech acts fail)--so infelicity is not exterior or accidental. The Austin/Derrida/Searle interplay seems to fly by each other. As discussed above, Austin's whole point is to show that there is no "intrinsic" "constitution" of (every) speech act. To desire this is to fall prey to the same generality which created metaphysics, but to take it in a different direction.

Also, to call our criteria of concepts "conventions" is to give the false impression that they are the outcome of our agreement or that we somehow control them; we are not discussing "conventional" (nor "ordinary") language, but the anti-thesis of metaphysical criteria for our concepts to shed light on philosophical issues.

Moore skips over scepticism? No, he confronts it directly. — Banno

Yes, of course (poorly said). What I meant is that Moore ends up believing that he has solved skepticism, or shown it to be absurd, or incapable of being "thought" (my Moore is ancient). But only to contrast this with Wittgenstein and Cavell, who leave skepticism as an open threat, that there is a truth to it as Cavell says (our separateness, and responsibility for that). Austin will worry about identifying a Goldfinch, and show how it can be fake (thus what "real" is)--but he does not explicitly delve deeper into why we are tempted to worry whether the world is real, or whether you are (or I).

While Austin looks to set out the relations between concepts already found in our everyday language, Wittgenstein looks to set out the deeper logic found when that same discourse goes astray. * * *

These are not contrary methods, but complimentary. And certainly they are distinct. — Banno

I'll grant you that they work in different ways, on different material, for different goals, but I would say Wittgenstein (pushing against metaphysics and positivism) does not have a dissimilar "method" to Austin (pushing against the descriptive fallacy)--drawing out the ordinary criteria and grammar of a concept to show their variety in the face of a monopolizing singular theory of meaning (they have that much in common; I would say that's enough). Yes, Witt does go farther, though I would say it is still a contrast of ordinary criteria against philosophical ones, only that he asks why we want to do that (get ourselves into that pickle/picture).

Of course maybe it is less important to argue about who is practicing OLP, than to agree that OLP is relevant (to modern philosophy) and a sound (rigorous) methodology, and how it works (and what it is not--which still seems to be an issue in many of these other threads).

There must be both "poor" and "good" ordinary usages. You can't do such an analysis without some kind of normative dimension. — Pantagruel

Again, not about the "use" of language--especially whether it is used "well" or "poorly". The idea of "normative" is not the goal at all; OLP does not want to normalize language or what people are saying, or what problems philosophy should have. Now, this might be confusing because our criteria do have a sense of structure; or concepts a sense of exclusion/inclusion, and the idea of felicity does evoke the idea of the normative. But normative is a way of describing philosophy or language or rationality's constraint on our norms--but "we" do not have that power. To say the Grammar of an apology is normative for apologizing is not a function of the description of the criteria, it is the act (or failure) to apologize; i.e., there is no space for philosophy or language (ordinary or otherwise) to be "normative". Our concepts are our lives, which are our norms (among other criteria).

If you read Philosophical Investigations, it is full of open-ended questions
— Antony Nickles

You see, I don't think of those as rhetorical questions. — Ciceronianus the White

What I meant to say I guess was questions not answered (directly--"Imagine..." "Why do we wish to say..."; and open-ended claims (to the Grammar of something), for us to consider (rather than the statements people take them as).

And again, the claim of OLP is hyperbolic
— Antony Nickles

You mean it's exaggerated? Beyond reasonable? I think we're operating with different definitions. Also with "strident." I see nothing in OLP as being harsh, grating or unpleasantly forceful. The same with "extravagant." In what sense can OLP be described as lacking in restraint or absurd? — Ciceronianus the White

By "hyperbolic" I meant that it is claiming to speak for all of us, that it is submitting itself to acceptance (assent Kant says) for what it sees. If you don't see the moral urgency of Wittgenstein, or even Austin, I might try to look for some quotes, but I'm not sure it is important enough--perhaps you may see it now that you know to look for it? And "extravagant" was only meant to refer to the absurdity of the imaginary scenarios/contexts which they sometimes employ to flesh out what philosophy means in what it says (robots, Corsican brothers, etc.)--as if they needed to match philosophy's absurdities (appearances, impressions, etc.).

we are explicating and opening and expanding our ordinary criteria
— Antony Nickles

So, making them less ordinary? — Pantagruel

No, just brought out into the open, applied to various contexts (even new ones). Witt talks about how you know how to walk, but it's hard to explain. Criteria are not something people ordinarily get into, or see--the unconscious framework of our concepts.

The key characteristic of Austin's approach is the seeking of wisdom within our everyday language. — Banno

I put Austin in the analytic tradition squarely against positivism/representationalism--showing the variety of ways in which statements can have rational value without being true/false. If this is wisdom, it is not "everyday" wisdom.

Wittgenstein, in contrast, disdained how language misleads us into philosophical knots that are to be undone by careful and more formal analysis. — Banno

Disdain is a strong word; I would say he unravels the picture which language allows, only to show the desire (for certainty, universality, etc.) which leads us to picture language that way (singularly). Now Witt takes skepticism (the cause of the desire) seriously, i.e., he does not try to 'solve" it, while Austin (and Moore) either skip over it as nonsense or insignificant.

That they have different conclusions, goals, whatever, does not make the method different. They are not creating theories, just showing us ourselves.

but it's not style that counts here; it's method — Banno

Cavell makes an argument that the "style" of the Investigations (confession, the Interlocutor, the obfuscation) is as much a part of the method. Not to drag Nietzsche into it, but I would argue that he too could not make his point (get you to see what he sees) without saying it in the way he does.

Nietzsche renders the list too irregular — Banno

I concede, begrudgingly, just to stop talking about him (and let's not take up Socrates, etc. when we are still stuck on OLP being merely normal language use).

I will not budge, however, from the claim that Wittgenstein is fundamental to OLP.

...an ordinary langauge treatment of ethics; but too much Kant for him to be central or OLP — Banno

Not sure "him" is, but I will just throw out that Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations is ultimately an examination of ethics through (the epistemology of) OLP. And that Kant's "categories" are comparable to Witt's Concepts, just that each has it's own category, possibilities, conditions, etc.

I re-read Signature-Event-Context today, and my take on it is this. Derrida zeros in on the concept(s) of context, which is central to the argument of olp. He claims that Austin believes one can exhaustively determine a context of word uses such that no remainder is left over. — Joshs

Again, Derrida is jumping to conclusions maybe for his own reasons (if context is closed than the only option is difference?). A context only needs to be fleshed out to clarify any distinctions which are necessary for you and I to have no more concerns. If a concept is used generally, than the need for criteria and any context are simple to resolve. To quote myself from Emotions Matter: "The sky is blue." "Do you mean: we should go surfing? It's not going to rain? or are you just remarking on the brilliant color?" All these concerns of course may not need a much larger, more-detailed drawing out of a context to resolve (either to the Other or myself), but the context is endless if the need for distinctions remain. Context is not a means of (all) communication, it is a means of investigating our criteria of our concepts. One question would be: what context gives us an idea of the criteria a philosopher is relying on when saying "Surely I must know what I feel!" (Witt)

So what is ordinary then? — Pantagruel

Creating a context that shows us the ordinary criteria for a concept, not (regular, common) words

So does ordinary usage mean resolving more expansive universes of discourse down to less expansive, but therefore more universal, ones? — Pantagruel

We're not talking about ordinary "usage" (see above). We are not resolving, nor reducing--when we ask what we say when..., we are explicating and opening and expanding our ordinary criteria (though, yes, the claim is that these are universal, though not in there application to all contexts, but to every one of us).

From Derrida: “Austin was obliged to free the analysis of the performative from the author­ity of the truth value, from the true/false opposition, at least in its classical form, and to substitute for it at times the value of force, of difference of force (illocutio­nary or perlocutionary force). In this line of thought, which is nothing less than Nietzschean, this in particular strikes me as moving in the direction of Nietzsche himself, who often acknowledged a certain affinity for a vein of English thought.” — Joshs

I just read this last night. I would say taking Nietzsche as substituting truth for force (presumably, the will to power), is to miss his desire to insert the human (emphatically, which may be his downfall) back into the moral realm--in the history of, and after the limitations of, the moral; to give us that "power" (a place, as it were, "over"). @Ciceronianus the White

Also, my understanding is that Derrida misconstrues Austin's peripheral reference to "force" in one particular category (perlocutionary) to apply it as Austin's entire goal, and overlooks that Austin more generally is still claiming truth value (adequation to the world), but calls it "felicity" (aptness) to the criteria of a concept--if an apology is done correctly, it is not true, but felicitous (apt), rather than infelicitous (botched, I think is Austin's way of putting it once). This is not a "force" more than a rationality.

I look on OLP and analytic and linguistic philosophy (largely) as being a kind of tonic, serving to restore rigor to philosophical thought by disposing of faux problems arising from misuse of language... serving to purge philosophy of its extravagance. — Ciceronianus the White

Again, it's not that philosophy is "misusing" language, and OLP is arguing that it is using it correctly. The "rigor" of OLP is its attention to its examples and fleshing out of the context, but the point is not right/wrong but to shed light on what philosophy means by what it is saying, not in contrast to normal words, but in light of ordinary criteria (and their context)--not cure, but diagnose maybe. This is not to dispose of problems like skepticism, identity, justice, etc. but to expose what we actually (still) want from philosophy's questions. Sometimes finding the criteria for philosophical claims involves creating wildly fantastic scenarios; you want extravagance, you can't go further than Wittgenstein or Cavell, or Nietzsche. Austin, of course, is British, so he scaled it down a bit.

Nietzsche with his hyperbolic claims, often ending in exclamation points, mixed with rhetorical questions, and brimming with certainty, is more a philosophical rabble-rouser than physician. — Ciceronianus the White

If you read Philosophical Investigations, it is full of open-ended questions, and confusing statements to make you turn upon yourself to verify. This is due to OLP's call to have you answer for yourself whether the criteria is described clearly, fully enough. Cavell is so aggravating in this regard it's almost as if I'm supposed to write the other half of the book (he means for us to follow our own voice, our further interest). Emerson appropriates analytical philosophy into other contexts, and is on his tiptoes encouraging us to find what (criteria) matters to us in the sea of unexamined, universalized (conformed) concepts.

And again, the claim of OLP is hyperbolic, it is voiced to include everyone (though impossible), as if to move past resorting only to the individual and approaching a sense of the universal without erasing the context of the particular--Nietzsche will appear righteous and unabashedly anarchistic; Austin, contemptuous or condescending; and Wittgenstein, enigmatic, curt, presumptuous (as I've said elsewhere, the lion quote is used as an uncontested fact). These OLP claims can be strident (See what I see!!) because there is a moral urgency to bringing the human "voice", in a sense, back to our criteria, rather than lost to the inhuman, sterile theories that attempt to leapfrog our responsibility to our words.

I thought OLP was all about what words actually mean in everyday use. As opposed to artificially constructed types of contexts which create the problems which they then try to solve. — Pantagruel

Trying to unpack this a little, OLP is not trying to solve (all) the "problems" philosophy has (skepticism, moral disagreement, etc.), but, yes, one point is to show the constructed criteria (striped of context). Philosophy is not, however, being "opposed" to "what words actually mean" (my emphasis)--this idea of "meaning" as an independent thing (that could be "actual") is even one target of OLP. As part of their Grammar concepts have multiple (public) senses in which they can be meant; imagining a context clarifies which sense is being used (which criteria come into play--or even how concepts are extended), but the idea is not that words used in ordinary circumstances have a meaning which is a solution for (or normalizes) philosophy.

Habermas says that our communicative actions derive from a massively shared lifeworld (lebenswelt). This is a background set of assumptions so fundamental that they resist analysis. His observations on specialized languages are that the value of special theoretical domains can only be measured to the extent that they manage to re-integrate themselves into the universal community. Therefore, they must eventually find a way to communicate in everyday language. In fact, Habermas says that everyday language is the best meta-language. I'd agree. — Pantagruel

One point of OLP is that we are able to individually examine our concepts because they each have their own ways of being meaningful, so that one over-arching theory need not explain meaning universally, such as a representational theory or a pragmatic explanation of how language is used.

I think it is important to point out again that OLP is not investigating norms, nor arguing for what is normal (language). The goal is not to re-integrate philosophical language (they are, as @Banno points out, the same words) so much as see it in relief to ordinary criteria and the context in which they work, to provide a larger picture and reflect the context and criteria philosophy has perhaps created or abandoned; not that normal language is better or necessary for communicating philosophy--it is the criteria which are ordinary, given voice in a context to differentiate them.

[A.J Ayer's book] was a book I loved to hate — Wayfarer

Well you'll be happy to read Sense and Sensibilia. Austin basically just punches him in the face repeatedly. Logical positivism and the principal that only emperically-verifiable statements have the value of truth bear the brunt of Austin's wrath and they serve as the Interloctor in the later Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations, so basically he is talking to himself--the earlier author of the Tractatus--who set up the path to positivism.

I had taken one of the starting-points for this approach to be Moore's 'Refutation of Idealism', and the subsequent tendency to reduce philosophy to what can always be rendered in crisp propositions. — Wayfarer

All of us at OLP deeply apologize for Moore's over-enthusiasm. Austin also did not take skepticism seriously enough, among other fallouts he just brushed over--"What's the point of all these examples again?"--though he is the best at stunning you with criterial distinctions: why do we ordinarily ask "how" you know something, but not usually "why" you know it?

one consequence often seems to me to try and cast every idea in philosophy in terms of what can easily be spoken or written, leaving aside the larger issue that philosophy often has to plumb difficult questions about the limits of language or of reason and the nature of truth. — Wayfarer

Again, as discussed above, easy is not the point. At times it will almost seems Austin or Wittgenstein are belaboring something instead of just telling us--this comes from OLP trying to get us to see the same thing from a different angle, the point being to reflect how you got to the old viewpoint in the first place (whew! Did I say not easy?) And OLP isn't avoiding the difficult questions, just trying to make it clearer what we are actually asking ourselves (and why).

And thank you for the encouragement. If you ever venture another try, may I suggest any of the essays by J.L. Austin, especially Sense and Sensibilia (along with reading Ayer's Truth, Language, and Logic), or any essay from Stanley Cavell's first set, Must We Mean What We Say (though maybe start with the one about later Wittgenstein).

I'm puzzled by your inclusion of the Great Moustache, — Banno

Nietzsche brought a historical (in that sense, a contextual) view to morality. He was investigating the metaphysical version of morals (deontology) and finding the place for the human voice. His aphorisms are not statements of fact or opinion (where people run into trouble believing they understand him), but claims to, or examples of, the actual workings of our moral concepts, to reflect against the single "ought" of moralism. It's also funny that OLP provides relief from Hegel, as I count Hegel as important to its development. He, like Nietzsche, brought historicity and context to philosophy, in tearing apart manufactured dichotomies with a method of investigating our concepts. He of course had the answers all worked out ahead of time rather than only seeking clarity from the evidence, but you take the good with the bad with most philosophers.

I think it is critical though to say (via-a-vis Hegel) that it is not important for OLP to be written in simple ("ordinary") language without terms (Cavell is fill-in-the-blank cryptic, Nietzsche openly defies understanding, and Wittgenstein has so many special terms it's all anyone believes he meant--only Austin is readable, but few remember what the point was because he hardly ever says it).

I also should say this is hardcore analytical philosophy, not meant for "ordinary" readers (like continental philosophy can be). It is strictly written in contrast to, or at least with a good understanding of, traditional analytic philosophy. Not that studying philosophy can't be useful to anyone, but just that this isn't a dumbed-down version to be understood with a quick glance, nor does getting the point stand apart from seeing its relation to the tradition.

The general theme was that ordinary language was both a blessing and a curse; on one side it brought clarity and perspective (Austin); on the other, many if not all philosophical problems derive from ordinary language's ambiguous structure (Wittgenstein). — Banno

The first trip-up I think is skepticism's desire (for certainty)--the seeming gap between us and the world--then (yes) language gives us the sense of an intellectual lack, then we (philosophers) try to fix language by removing its context and stripping its ordinary criteria (replaced with certainty, universalism, etc), and then we have to put those back to see the mess we got into. Unfortunately this is a desire created by our human condition so it happens over and over (eternally recurring as it were).

whatever your philosophical inclination, you will eventually have to make a place for ordinary language. — Banno

Just to be clear, this isn't to say: "you must listen to what OLP says is ordinary usage!" Wittgenstein says "Look at the use!" to get people to see how ordinary use reflects on philosophical issues. Nor is it to say that traditional philosophical concerns are nonsense or not important or not valid (well, some).

Neat Austin references in the OP, by the way - I wonder who saw them. — Banno

No one. No one saw them.

The only thing I would quibble with here is your characterization of Derrida as a relativist and/or a skeptic. — Joshs

Ah, the dangers of categorization (I suppose Hume is more of a skeptic). And my knowledge of Derrida is not even being able to get through his attempt to read Austin (in Signature Event Context); though I have read an account of it. My only grounds then for calling him relativistic/skeptical is his contrasting metaphysics with difference, as if we couldn't have a separate (ordinary) voice, but only a related one. As if we could tear down the old forms of philosophy, yet have the same satisfactions (maybe not seeing our part). Again, I don't say this out of an experience with reading Derrida so much as maybe holding a grudge from the effort of fending him off in literary theory class trying to hang on to structuralism (perhaps a more rigid equivalent of how Wittgenstein sees the ordinary criteria of our concepts). OLP has the sense of bringing the human voice back to philosophy without all the gymnastics, but I know Derrida is pretty spikey so I concede all ground.

I appreciate your resolve, but I believe I have addressed these concerns already. My point in all this was to shed light on the possibility of discussing art in a rational way. I have (Kant has) shown that there is more "objectivity" in aesthetics than most people would grant. Whatever you believe is excluded or constrained, I would only suggest that there is nothing left of that concept except the desire for the type of conclusions which created it.

Well, I could only make the case for the broader analytical implications because that's what I'm trained in. And, though Stanley Cavell is both a philosopher and an art critic, notably film and Shakespeare, he is not an artist. I don't know if reading art critiques at that level "enhance artistic creation"' however.

It is (human) reason itself that serves as the limitation. And it is our capacity to recognise and own this subjectivity that enables us to develop and refine rational y structures of relation to more closely approximate reality. * * * This is not, as I think Antony Nickles suggests, wanting to keep one’s own opinion (a passionate plea for individuality), but rather recognising that we only arbitrarily isolate both the artwork and aesthetic judgement from our subjective relation to it. In my view, it is awareness of the variability in our qualitative relation to knowledge such as criteria of the Form that orients it in the possibility of a rational ontological structure which could make claims to objectivity, and from which we can restructure and refine a more accurate epistemology. — Possibility

As this is not directed at me, it feels odd to cast in, but I believe focusing on my (Witt's) conjecture/speculation as to the motivation to hang on to any rational "subjective relation" to art and our aesthetic judgement, detracts from my greater point. Basically, I think maybe the disagreement comes down to a confusion in terms. I suggest that "human reason itself" is different than the rationality inherent in the forms of art. Cavell would call the Forms the structure of support of aesthetic claims--their rationality is not "arbitrarily isolate[d]" by us; they are categorically independent from us, wrapped up in the means of art; free, if not from our opinion, from our control (our "meaning"), from our arbitrariness, and our falling into taste or mere experience. Whatever the reason you want/need to maintain a "subjective relation" (not captured in the Pleasant and the Sublime) we do not have a "variable" "relation" to knowledge of the forms of art. When I speak of possibilities of the forms, it is not a possibility to be rational, it is the open-ended possibilities of their rationality. The possibility is for you to see for yourself the rationality I shine a light on, or not. And, again, this is not an "ontological" structure; there is no "object" in relation to the Beautiful (Witt's analogous "concepts" are not of a metaphysical or "objective" world). We do not make claims to "objectivity", we can make claims about art because of the rationality in their forms, claims that would speak for all of us, not just my reasons/relation--you seeing it on your own. A main point of mine is that there is rationality without the idea of "objectivity". In concert, our epistemology does not have to be more "accurate" (of/to something) so much as realize that knowledge in aesthetics does not ensure agreement, certainty, universality, etc. (what we philosophically have wanted from knowledge). This does not eat away at its sense of rationality as much as leave those things in our hands, up to our skills to evoke that rationality for all to see. Again, maybe this comes down to a misunderstanding that the rationality of the forms of art should not be confused with the critic giving us "reasons"--evidence, perspective, connections, etc.--to see the rationality inherent in the forms of art in the example of a work. We do not vary the structure, we vary in our capability or desire to discuss art in relation to its rational, formal structure.

p.s. @Jack Cummins obviously does not understand/value the desire for the aesthetic discussion, which is fine--everyone has their interests (philosophy is also powerless to prove its relevance); only to say, Cavell picks a point with Hume that if you presume taste you should have the discipline to account for it. I would, in trying to tempt anyone--controversially!--point out that the Forms of art are similar to Wittgenstein's Concepts, with their categorical identity and possibilities, the rationality of their criteria--their Grammar. And these concepts include ones that affect our moral moments; thus the "irrational", "emotional", "subjective" presumed about aesthetics is related to our dismissal of the rationality of our moral relation to each Other and our actions, etc. Also, the methodology of making a claim about the rationality of a form of art is structurely similar to the kind of claim used in Ordinary Langauge Philosophy in investigating what is said when..., or what we ordinarily say and do, as philosophical data.

The meaning of life simply exists: it is just a matter of finding it. — Rafaella Leon

I loved that book in school, and I enjoyed reading this; it made me think of the ways in which I understand these same (similar) things now. The approach reminds me of Emerson in that it is not synonymous with typical analytic philosophy, but it is relevant. If we say that a person exists if they find the meaning of their life, then others have not yet, in a sense, come to "exist". Without interest in, or attraction to, the world--if nothing is meaningful to them--there is nothing that would endure. When the means of the production of ourselves is forced upon us, we are alienated from our ability to find ourselves, Marx would say.

No man invents the meaning of his life: each one is, so to speak, surrounded and cornered by the meaning of his own life. — Rafaella Leon

Here I am reminded of Stanley Cavell's observation that the "will" is not active, but actually passive; not, say, that I am in perfect control of my body, but that I am in the perfect control of my body, even, as it were, the god within me. The world draws me if I would let it, Heiddeger would say, but in grasping for certainty/knowledge, I loose sight of what is meaningful to me.

But if the individual acts solely on the basis of an end, he is acting precisely on the inexistence of a world around him. With or without the world, he would act the same way. Acts then acquire a supra-temporal, supra-historical meaning, that is, eternally man should do so before the world exists or when it ceases to exist. Here action is taken as the direct expression of a divine quality that acts without the existence of the world. — Rafaella Leon

To say there is no world is maybe a way to say we should not be acting towards a goal or end--the Hindu idea of detachment from the fruits of our actions. Our actions being the expression of something higher in us is another way of saying our actions create us, complete us.

the meaning of the individual’s life, of the individual before his ultimate moral responsibility, something that is above the character, something that Humanity itself does not know. — Rafaella Leon

I have tried to explain (not as eloquently)--in my contributions to the post Freedom and Duty, and in my post on Wittgenstein's lion-quote--that responsibility, answerability, and duty, are beyond knowledge and above our "selves" (our ego, as it were). In that moral realm we are defined by our acts; we are responsible for the existence and composition of who we are either reflecting our interests and what is meaningful to us, or living in, as Emerson would say, conformity.

Well said.

the first being that I don’t mean to negate your contention regarding objectivity, but to challenge the limitations of your perspective, and work towards a synthesis. It seems natural in moments of disagreement to consolidate perspectives, but I’ve never been very good at debates. — Possibility

Well, I am not making a claim to "objectivity"--only rationality--as Kant's term is an out-dated concept (as is "subjectivity"--instead of the personal); and, again, I believe there is everything here that is desired in the idea of "objectivity" except the "object" and that there is no "approximation" of our personal opinions to the unknowable yet certain "thing-in-itself". And I will admit to "limitations", namely, that this is not to encapsulate the Sublime experience (immediately), or is not subject to degradation into mere opinion (taste) and personal experience (the Pleasant), and most importantly, that it is open and vulnerable to the discussion coming to an end. Though this is not a "synthesis" of, say, (beginning) perspectives--points-of-"view" (viewpoints); it is the rational distinction of one claim from another; that a claim is incorrect or wrong, subject to evidence and rational resolution or disagreement. Again, we are not "consolidating perspectives" because we are discussing something public based on the overt and explicit ways (criteria of the form) in which art makes its point, what methods are inherent in it, etc. You attribute this as well to our philosophical discussion, but, apart from getting clear about terms, realizing we simply have difference interests, or are talking about different (not-overlapping) points, etc. one of us can be wrong--that is rationality in the sense I am discussing; one of us must learn something correct from the other--we are not just swapping opinions. This, again, is not to say the conversation can not be cut short, frustrated, relinquished, not conceded, etc. As Cavell says, we are separate, but nothing separates us, so we are answerable for everything that comes between us.

sometimes we are just going to disagree: perhaps I feel you are wrong in your reading of the disowning of love in the opening scene of King Lear. You feel you have tried all you'd like to point to the text, tie it to other occurances in the play that echo it, etc. — Antony Nickles

This disagreement you’ve offered as an example is not a rational relation: it is a perception of difference from a centralised position, and a challenge to that position from a dissenting perspective. Each participant believes themselves wholly rational, and yet both judge this as a dead-end based on feeling. They are faced with the limitations of their own rationality, an event horizon beyond which all is deemed irrational, illogical, emotional. — Possibility

The use of the word "feeling" is misleading here. You skip over the rational claims that they have asserted; there I am only making the point that, at some point, I "feel" I have done all I can; though this endpoint/giving up is always my call, the reasons I have claimed are not my call (subject to my "feelings"). Witt's teacher hits bedrock with the student, but most people miss that the teacher is only "inclined" to shut the door on more discussion--this does not change our obligation to be answerable to the Other and ourselves, nor does it change the nature of the discussion. The two people in a sense meet on the same ground of the concept of the form of art; they don't "believe themselves wholly rational"; the Form is the rationality--we can, as I have said, make arguments not on that field (option, taste). The "event horizon" is a construction of Kant's to try to separate what is certain, universal, etc. from that which he believes can not be. Positivists (think Witt's first book) and others took this to the extreme to throw out everything else, including the aesthetic, and call it "irrational", "emotional". There are human reasons for this that I go over in my post on Wittgenstein's lion-quote.

Now, let’s say that one of them recognises this limitation, and humbly entertains the possibility that they might be disconnected from, or even ignorant of, certain qualitative aspects of the text which may be apparent to the other, perhaps owing to their personal experiences of love. Now we’re exploring an aspect of existence beyond what either would consider ‘rational’ from their limited perspective. There’s no rational criteria with which to navigate this relational ‘space’, and yet the difference is undeniable. — Possibility

The "distance" is manufactured by one's desire to have an "internal" experience that could also be "explored". Now, if someone wants to have a feeling or experience of love, of course that is fine; this is the experience of the Pleasant (or Sublime) in terms of the aesthetic. Why do we keep confusing the other categories and imagining that they somehow affect the rational discussion of the form of the Beautiful? Maybe it helps to point out that the expression of an inner experience is different than the desire for "knowledge" of it, and that the "space" between us is fundamentally (unless manufactured) between our separate bodies, so the difference is a moral moment defining one to the other--bridgeable in our reaction to the Other (again, I take this up in that other post).

As in my discussion with Joshs, this can lead us to a rational idea that we inaccurately perceive our own viewpoint as central to a normative understanding. — Possibility

Well, here, I will leave it to you and @Joshs; I take this mostly as a separate discussion. In relation to my point, we do not create the rational (our "ideas" are not--"perceived" to be: rational or just feelings); what is rational is the external criteria of the Form (from the method of the art). Also, the idea of "normative" is muddled and based on this misunderstanding of our own place and power (lack thereof) in and over language. The misconception of "reality" (say, Plato's forms, the "objective") leads to a sense of "qualitative relativity" when, if we remove ourselves from rationality and "meaning" (as if we create that, or that "words" are tied to "meanings"), how things relate to each other is much less swirled together (as if there was one problem of relativity, instead of each concept having its on world of criteria, which in each context, involves an ordinary rational discussion). Again, this is to confuse a discussion of coming to terms in each form of art, with imagining some abstract overarching rift and thus believing that everybody has their own starting point (them)--which I simply take as one wanting to keep their own opinion (making it unassailable, or unique), when that is simply a refusal to participate in the forms of rationality. As I have said, you MAY do this, but that refusal is your call, not a comment on the possibility of the rational discussion of our claims about the aesthetic.

...consider an alternative perspective... perceiving the relational structure in which an ‘event’ (itself consisting of relational structure) is open to variability. — Possibility

I am doing my best here to understand what you are saying (perhaps not well) but also, I'm not sure how you think this needs to negate my contention about the actual OP about "objectivity"--our how aesthetics holds any sense of "rationality" for Kant at all. In the end, I believe it appears we are talking about two different things, and then I would not deny that the Sublime has a separate relation to aesthetics (nature, awe, bigness, respect, etc.) and that it, along with the Beautiful, has a relation without an object—I would even grant it is a “faculty” though I don’t know what the implications of that are other than an ability to have that experience. However, "categorically" Kant says (Gramatically Witt would say) that relation is not a rational relation—it is without a concept/form (there is no “structure” in that sense) as similarly, with Taste and the Pleasant. And, as much as Witt's term "Concept" is similar to the idea of Kant's "Form", those two are both, "open to variability" (though I'm not sure of this as a term), even rationally (if only eventually). I brought up the continuation of the series to focus on the conceptual jump that can be made between teacher and student--outside of numbers--they are not "consolidating the concept"--it can be moved to a new context, broadened.

I feel I have connected the Beautiful to the Sublime in its role to creativity and inspiration but this is not a rational connection. The judgment of the Beautiful and the Form of art work together extend it into further possibilities (from itself) and, I believe, covers all the ground you need to have everything you want of the Sublime. Though I may not have pegged your claims correctly, I feel as if you are not allowing my claim all the consequences of its open-ended relation to art. So I feel an impasse that I believe is unnecessary—what is the fear that I am denying anything? Why must there be a separate rational relationship to aesthetics? Why and how is “variability” different/necessary? (I believe this would be a different post but I wonder if we aren’t floating into Derrida’s creation of “Metaphysical Presence” instead of addressing Logocentrism head on and in denying a concept's actual flexibility—“variability” being an excuse to open a separate door, or a justification to politically attack the whole idea of tradition, concepts, form, and language itself.)

[“Possibility;486311"]...this consolidated ‘touchstone’ is arbitrary - it is the viewer/critic who determines the ‘launching point’, not the art or artist.[/quote]

The clarification in your second paragraph is also well taken, thank you. I only point out that Forms (concepts) are not arbitrary, although, as you say, this is no constraint on the art or artist (when is painting not painting is also an open question for art—though still intelligible in contrast to the structure of the Form). To say that the possibility of misunderstanding is cause to assume individual “perspective” is to misunderstand that the forms of art are public. No one is reasoning from outside (completely apart) of the forms and context (without debasing the discussion to taste or personal experience). It feels like a desire for individuality; art can be a private language, however, until we find a way to discuss it in relation to how art works, it is simply the expression of the pleasant or sublime experience, or is valuable or not. Thus why art is close to madness sometimes.

I agree with the brief third, and the fourth, paragraphs. I think just after that when you discuss "misunderstanding"... "at the level of meaning", here I would say is an example of trying to step out of the rationality by imagining something individual. If you misunderstand what I meant, then you ask, "Did you mean the trope, or its analogous nature?" In other words, there are rational ways of clarifiying disagreement: collecting more evidence, clearing up terms, and sure I guess "increasing awareness, connection, and collaboration", but in none of this is a "broader relational structure" necessary (if even possible)--sometimes we are just going to disagree: perhaps I feel you are wrong in your reading of the disowning of love in the opening scene of King Lear. You feel you have tried all you'd like to point to the text, tie it to other occurances in the play that echo it, etc. This is not a "variability in... rational relation"--this a conversation coming to a dead-end. These aren't different "perspectives", they are different rational claims about the art; the "possibility of agreement" is not in "perspectives"; that is not rational, as is a reading connected to the Form, which can be "wrong", say, being simply conjecture, personal opinon (taste), lacking evidence, not accounting for history at all, etc. These things don't have anything to do with one's "perspective". And I would agree that we can have a non-judgemental relation to art; but would we call it rational (would Kant?). You can have your opinion and hold your words to yourself as a perspective, say, an observation, but no one can disagree with you in the way possible through the Form (concept). There is no "language" to use together, and we are left "talking at cross purposes", because your "purpose"--your perspective--is more important than being answerable to me and responsive (responsible) to the text (art).

I am notifying the following participants (and others that may have an interest), in the hope of rounding out @darthbarracuda 's PO with any other concerns: I would bring up again that my contention (in a nutshell but stated more accurately and clarified over this whole thread) is that all the qualities of "objectivity", including right and wrong, are possible in aesthetics apart from an "object", except agreement on a claim of judgement. @Moliere @Hanover @Thorongil @Tom1352 @Banno @Number2018

Here and above, @Possibility and I are having a discussion I would characterize as: the play between art (and our relation to it) and the judgement (rationality) of aesthetics; the possibility and totality of rationality without something other than (say, an idea), or beyond (say, a place), Kant's "forms" of aesthetics.

You say that 'modern art expands and re-examines its own rational criteria in the making of art' - how do you think it does this, without pointing to an aspect that exists in a relational "space" beyond the criteria of the form? — Possibility

The evolution of art is an appropriate topic and this is well taken; in pushing too hard on the fact of rational judgement at all, I only peripherally addressed the way art changes, and thus changes its rationale. Wittgenstein would, roughly, refer to this as projecting a concept into a wider or new context (perhaps akin to your "space", without an aspect), and with the process of "continuing a series", there, with a student (see PI Index "Series - of numbers).

I would first point out that extenuation or expansion presupposes the actuality of the workings of art (reflected in the criteria of its form). The criteria of the form express (Witt's term) the means of art, are the launching point or touchstone; there is no "beyond" or "aspect" that they are pointing "to"; the form moves itself ahead drawing out, and on, the means of the work, without an end. "Purposefulness" is not to a purpose, but only to say that art has rational but open-ended ways of being meaningful. This is not capturing, or transcending to, an "aesthetic idea"; it is, as it were, on a path (cubism comes from portraiture) but without destination. Emerson says (roughly) we must live fuzzy in front (Wittgenstein talks of concepts with "blurred edges" #71). The context here is the painter, say, with their canvas blank and the means at their disposal; but are we denying history (even in revolutionizing)? And of course this is acknowledging that, if anywhere, art may break or defy or abandon any of its methods of meaning; ahead of its time, waiting to be explicated--yet to find its words, or voice, or audience.

This is how the work draws us in - through transcendence. A discussion which acknowledges this transcendence also acknowledges the nature of its approximation within the criteria of the form.... Those who do not allow for broader systems and structures of rationality (such as aesthetics) limit their ability to engage with the work, in the same way that “a discussion of the form of art does not require or allow for... different rationality than: criteria of a form.” — Possibility

I would, again, argue there is no "other" rationality in the judgement of aesthetics, no "broader systems and structures of rationality"; again, the discussion is not an "approximation", not (as that is defined by Webster's) "nearly" correct, as if the Sublime (or transcendent) were an eventual or separate correct destination to which we have a different rational relation.

For the rest of us, art actively draws us in (through transcendence) to a ‘space’ that challenges our capacity to rationally discuss what we perceive. — Possibility

And here I absolutely agree. I believe this is Kant's experience of the Sublime (though I believe in the value of trying to, and the ability to, meet that "challenge"). Though I am left with the impression you feel the need to defend that there is something more, greater, that you feel I am taking away, or denying. Maybe it helps to say, the rationality of the judgement of art does not take away from the transcendent experience or creation of art. This fear of denial reminds me of Wittgenstein's consolation to the metaphysical skeptic (my italics):

PI #305. But you surely cannot deny that, for example, in remembering, an inner process takes place." -- What gives the impression that we want to deny anything?... The impression that we wanted to deny something arises from our setting our faces against the picture of the 'inner process'. What we deny is that the picture of the inner process gives us the correct idea of....

And here I want to end this quote instead with: the extension of the form (instead of "the use of the word remembering"). Witt talks of this picture (there, an inner process; here, an "aesthetic idea") getting in the way of seeing the use of the word "remembering" as it is (here, the rationality and progression of art's forms with the workings of the art, and their change). All this is to say, the desire to have a special access to aesthetics (say, to some idea of it) gets in the way of beginning a conversation. The fear that it might constrain, say, a desire to have some connection with art that is special, ineffable, is not to say discussion is not possible (however threatening, subject to philistines). Another way to look at it, again, is the fact we might end without agreement is not proof that we have no way to try (that art is unintelligible), or that there is some better way, or that the attempt is structurally flawed.

Would creative genius be content with inspiring critical assent? — Possibility

The work of criticism is separate but rooted in ("dependent" on), and in the service of, art (not parasitic to it, or indistinguishable thus irrational, as Derrida suggests); the artist, with hope, works for the art, and its creation--in and for its possibilities. Is art only that which criticism says it is? Of course not. But are we not discussing the rational judgment of aesthetics? The agreement (assent) is not between the artist and critic, but the critic and anyone who wishes to see more in art than their own feelings and their valuation/opinion, though the critic can be as degenerate as the viewer. Nevertheless, without the critic (or them within us), we (the viewers) are ignorant in a sense, blind, or at least without depth perception; unable to access the richness and fullness of the awe and wonder of art. Here I would suggest Stanley Cavell's essay Aesthetic Problems in Modern Philosophy. In truth most of this is in that work, including the Kant. He starts by justifying the ability to paraphrase poetry, so you'll have something to chew on.

I thank you for your diligence and consideration.