Weinberg collaborates with Ed Witten. He becomes the youngest member of the Saturday Club of Boston. Weinberg signs up to write The Discovery of Subatomic Particles. After their continued separation due to teaching, Weinberg grows to like Austin more and more, with its social scene that crossed from academia into the public sphere. He negotiates with the Universioty of Texas for a position in Austin as the Josey Regental Chair in Science beginning in 1982. He joins the Headliners Club in Austin. Weinberg helps found the Jerusalem Winter School in Theoretical Physics. He begins exploring physical theories in higher dimensions. He attends the Shelter Island Conference in 1983. He is elected to the Philosophical Society of Texas and joined the Town and Gown Club in Austin, but quits the latter over its male-only stance, to help form a rival, the Tuesday Club (of Austin). In mid-1980s, he becomes seriously interested in string theory.

Chapter 4 illustrates and discusses in detail the steps taken to evaluate the research questions. It first clarifies the methodological approach and then introduces the study design. The declared aim is to create a study that combines the larger number of tokens per speaker created by an experimental framework with the sample diversity and natural environment needed for sociolinguistic analyses. Further sections deal with the sample and the procedure. In this study, seventy-nine speakers with various gender, ethnicity, and age profiles were asked to complete naming tasks, a reading task, a re-narration and a free interview with a meta commentary section.

In this chapter, we think about the different things that we do when we produce utterances. Communication is not only about the exchange of information. We also perform acts and, in some cases, change the world when we speak, sign, or write. Speech act theory emerged as a means of understanding and analysing the things we do when we use language. We track the development of speech act theory, focusing on the work of two influential thinkers in the field: Austin and Searle. We begin by looking at what Austin called performatives and discuss how their meaning can be understood in terms of felicity conditions. We then move on to explore Austin’s distinction between locutionary acts, illocutionary acts, and perlocutionary acts. John R. Searle’s work responds to and develops the work of Austin. He identifies four categories of felicity condition and uses these to propose a classification system for illocutionary acts. We consider Searle’s discussion of indirect speech acts as a key contribution to speech act theory and pragmatics more widely. The chapter ends with a brief overview of how speech act theory has been applied and developed since the work of Austin and Searle.

Must We Mean What We Say? is the first and only work in contemporary thought to carry the project of ordinary language philosophy through to its end. It thereby confronts and overcomes the harsh criticisms of ordinary language philosophy that began with Gellner’s attack in 1959, belying repeated claims that the tradition is “dead.” MWM shows that ordinary language philosophy is more than ever alive and relevant. Cavell’s emphasis on the “voice of the ordinary” responds to the risk of skepticism, that loss of or distancing from the world that film also explores (see The World Viewed). In Must We Mean What We Say?, Cavell offers us new ways to explore the relation between an individual speaker and her community, the possibility of revolution in philosophy, and the sense in which our relation to our own words figures our relations to ourselves: the question of self-knowledge and voice.

Instead of taking the impossibility of certain knowledge in experience as an intellectual problem, Cavell understands it as an existential condition. Philosophers have traditionally disavowed that condition by turning skepticism into an intellectual problem. The pathology behind that disavowal becomes the center of what Krebs calls Cavell’s “clinical turn.” The philosophical criticism resulting from that turn involves a radical change in attitude, where thinking is – as Cavell puts it – a mode of praise. This essay argues that thinking as praise makes receptiveness paramount, and requires a reconnection with feeling and passion that brings the body back into philosophy.

An exploration of what made Cavell’s debut with Wittgenstein so revolutionary, not only at the time he wrote it, but in relation to themes that have continued to rise tenaciously to prominence within philosophy, especially philosophy of language and epistemology, since 1969. Rule-following and skepticism; truth, conventionalism, necessity, and creativity in meaning; the New Wittgenstein and Cavell’s overcoming of the idea of Wittgenstein as an end-of-philosophy or conservative philosopher; the transformation of Wittgenstein into a radically reformist philosopher. These are strewn throughout Must We Mean What We Say? through Cavell’s radically new redeployment of Wittgenstein in and for ordinary language philosophy conceived as a liberatory tradition, a tradition whose significance has lasted into our time.

Cavell’s notion of an “elaborative utterance” (explicitly introduced only in The Claim of Reason) provides a clue to the thematic unity of Must We Mean What We Say? Elaboratives are called for when the very description of what one has done is at issue, and so calls for being acknowledged (confessed, admitted to) or denied. Cavell takes up from Austin’s “Excuses” to emphasize the importance of finding, inventing, and projecting appropriate descriptions of actions as part of the very possibility of action – and indeed human passion, human response, as such. Moral arguments can always break down: this is due to the indispensability of elaboratives, the embedding of actions with words in life in ways that always allow us to “go on,” refuse to go on, or to divert our attention. The fact that there are always elaborations to be made shows the impossibility of building a “best case” of moral knowledge or action immune to dispute or recasting. But Cavell’s work does not show that there is no knowledge at all of morality: he resists a skeptical conclusion. Instead, he sharpens our sense of the importance of our ability to settle on limits of responsibility in a human world.

England’s commercial expansion in the late 17th and 18th centuries was based on its navigation laws that reserved maritime carrying trade to British operators. Massive use of privateers and imposition of rules of neutrality in maritime war effectively destroyed the ability of Britain’s enemies (Spain, Netherlands and France) to profit from their colonies or long-distance trade. The union of private interest and sovereign policies that underlay Britain’s rise was theorised by David Hume and Adam Smith: private actors knew best where sources of profit could be found in a theory of commercial society that recast the state as facilitator of private investment. Benthamite utilitarianism proposed to do away with the view that modern government had anything to do with natural rights or other abstractions. Empiricism, the predominance of political economy and the authoritarianism of British government in the 1830s were summarised in John Austin’s theory of sovereignty and relegation of international law into private morality. Until the mid-19th century, there was virtually no space in the British world for imaginative thinking about the law of nations.

This chapter considers two arguments for international legal skepticism, both of which appeal to an alleged analytical connection between law and coercive enforcement.The first is the legal philosopher John Austin’s characterization of law as the command of a sovereign, or in H.L.A. Hart’s apt phrase, as orders backed by threats.The second treats the mode of enforcement found in the modern state as a necessary condition for the existence of law.If true, each of these conceptual claims provides a sound basis for international legal skepticism.There are compelling reasons to reject them both, however.