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.

The revolutionary significance of Must We Mean What We Say?, Stanley Cavell’s first book and the best introduction to his thought, becomes increasingly evident fifty years after its publication, confronting us with newly relevant, transformative thinking about modernism, the idea of culture, ordinary language philosophy, the history of twentieth-century analytic philosophy, American philosophy, the 1960s, Wittgenstein, Rawls, Kant, Kierkegaard, Beckett, Shakespeare, and such eternal philosophical themes as truth, passion, utterance, self-knowledge, skepticism, and the value of criticism. Cavell’s intervention in ordinary language philosophy revolutionized its practice, overcoming its dogmas and challenging the analytic tradition from within, broadening its audiences. His focus on self-confrontation as central to philosophical practice, the shepherding of ordinary utterances into uses within forms of life, shows that the philosophical preconditions of democratic thinking lie in the embedding of meaning in everyday life, rooted in the ethical and aesthetic aspects of how we mean what we say.

INTRODUCTION

In what sense did Putnam invent the doctrine of semantic externalism? His causal treatment of reference, developed in the mid-1960s and most famously defended in “The Meaning of ‘Meaning’” (1975; hereafter MoM) was, inter alia, a response to the then popular idea that when our beliefs change (as when science progresses), so do the meanings and referents of our terms. Because of the influence of Carnap, Kuhn, and Malcolm, this relativist conception seemed viable at the time, and Putnam's response, accordingly, revolutionary. But surely, one might protest, the founding fathers of early analytic philosophy, Frege and Russell, were not tempted by any such relativism. What prevented them from adopting the relativist line of thinking that associated with different theories or criteria different meanings, different referents, even different worlds? Were they already semantic externalists? If not, why not?

These questions are anachronistic, but instructively so. They allow us to investigate in what ways Putnam's externalism constitutes a critique of Frege – as Putnam quite explicitly said that it did – and in what ways it constitutes an extension or interpretation of Frege. Similar questions may be asked about Russell and about various stages in his development, for Russell's conception(s) of analysis and doctrine(s) of immediate acquaintance appear on the surface to have lodged logical form (hence, objectivity and meaning) in the mind's immediate contact with extra-mental entities. But in what follows I shall largely focus, as does Putnam, on Frege.