This chapter explores a set of marginal characters of topmost importance: hats. The marginality of hat study is all too apparent; it smacks of esoteric trivia. I argue that such a commonsensical assumption is at odds with Conrad’s fictional hats: their variety, number and position in the texts. From the bowler to the Bersagliere, there are more than twenty-five types of hat in his fiction. They are used for fiddling, collecting nails, catching butterflies, transporting cakes, holding strips of beef, carrying secret messages, and saving a “homeless head from the dangers of the sun.” Conrad leaves us with the idea that while we may think that we wear hats, hats are clothed in meaning and may even wear us; there is no clear boundary between object and person; an everyday material object can be a key to understanding a complex individual and vice versa.

“Tragic Implication” looks at the links between the first and last essays in Must We Mean What We Say? Cavell’s concept of acknowledgment as it emerges in the last two essays in this collection has received a fair amount of attention. This essay, by contrast, looks at his work on and in ordinary language philosophy as it emerges in this first extension and radicalization of Austin’s work in the title essay, and shows the latency of tragedy in that early work, even as Cavell goes on to find Austin’s work unable to accommodate tragedy. It thus links Cavell’s earliest work on Austin, with his latest work in A Pitch of Philosophy, and returns to Cavell’s reading of Lear to show that it is King Lear that teaches him his differences with Austin.

In the eighteenth century, the Massachusetts House criminalized speech, and the general sessions courts prosecuted it, for being impolite as well as ungodly. Politeness became a core element of social order and elite white masculine identity. This study identified more than 1,600 criminal speech prosecutions in the records of justices and courts. These include any document that specified verbal threats or abuse; profane cursing or swearing; verbal noise; lying; false reports; defamatory speech; or perjury. Criminal procedure was simple and discretionary, and required widespread community participation in order to effectively prosecute impolite speech. Such prosecutions helped to define elite identity and status around matrices of sensibility, civility, and credibility. Sensibility was a moral and genteel quality not manifested by those prosecuted for noisy or abusive speech. Civility connoted pleasurable sociability that was undermined by contempt, cursing, and defamation. Credibility was the gentlemanly reputation for truthfulness, destroyed by lying, perjury, false news, and mumpers (pretended gentlemen). The Revolution replaced this regime with one based on respectability.

A polite social order emerged out of significant demographic, economic, and political changes in the early to mid-eighteenth century, and was established according to novel ideas about personal virtue, piety, and white masculinity. Members of an exclusive merchant elite embraced new models of personal deportment and constructed physical spaces, both public and domestic, in which to practice and display their gentility. Shared values, including an ethos of polite speech, united this elite and linked them with their English counterparts. Polite speech was explicated in conduct and courtesy books, in popular periodicals, in personal conversation with fellow gentlemen – and as distinct from vulgar speech, increasingly associated with particular types of people. Linguistic and social hierarchies proved to be mutually reinforcing, and, for the genteel, it was increasingly impolite (not ungodly or sinful) speech that posed the greater threat to good social order or “the peace.” That new social order would be enforced and enacted through law, the statutes, and procedures by which impolite speech was criminalized, prosecuted, and punished.

This chapter considers Defoe’s profound interest in the language and mores of popular culture. It illustrates the way that the Tour uses the speech and activity of the people to show how each region contributes to the diverse culture of the nation, as a means to evoking the variety of Britain. The “talk and activity” of the people, as G.A. Starr puts it in an important article, help to flesh out this evocation of Britain. Defoe had a special penchant for proverbs, which he used in the title of several works, and which are scattered through the text of his major books in both fiction and non-fiction. Proverbial usages reflect not just habits of mind among the population at large, but also the outlook of those who live in particular corners of the kingdom. The treatment owes much to his keen ear for speech patterns, evident in the dialogues found elsewhere in his oeuvre. Moreover, in a number of places within the Tour, Defoe cites local customs, often related to tales and legends, that he generally treats with obvious scepticism. Apart from all else, he was a pioneer in the literary use of folklore.

Drawing on the classical rhetorical tradition, I argue that we can normatively evaluate political communication by attending to the structure of rhetorical relationships. They are necessarily asymmetrical, but they can become more equitable when they involve both speaker and audience in vulnerability to risk: the audience assumes the risk of having its convictions transformed, while the speaker assumes the risk of public rejection or humiliation. This burden-sharing turns speech from a potential activity of domination into action in a common civic space. Today, this burden-sharing is threatened by routinized and data-driven practices that aim to shield elites from rhetorical risk, and by the demagogic rhetoric of “unfiltered” spontaneity that represents a backlash to these practices. I discuss these rhetorical pathologies in a survey of contemporary US rhetoric. We can recover an alternative in the rhetorical thought of antiquity: eloquence as “spontaneous decorum.” This notion of eloquence welcomes uncertainty as part of public deliberation. But it also has qualities associated with decorum, because it is avowedly artificial; it is conceived as inherently stylized and as set apart from ordinary speech. Eloquence, I argue, is an emergent property of sound rhetorical relationships – the audible sign, as it were, of the relationship’s health.

This chapter examines the oratorical tradition of the soapbox speech in Ellison's fiction and describes the similarities between prominent New York orators of the early twentieth century and aspects of the protagonist of Invisible Man.

Gadamer’s hermeneutics is concerned with the experience of understanding that takes place in living language. Living language is a matter of conversation and dialogue. Conversation and dialogue always take place in a living language within the historical context of a tradition. Gadamer’s hermeneutics challenges philosophy’s usual focus on the logic of statements. This is a profoundly Socratic-Platonic idea. The world is presented in language as a communicative event which is dialogical. The dialectic of the word in hermeneutics has a speculative structure.

The introduction shows the importance of the theme of the critique of language in the Renaissance and early-modern times, placing particular emphasis on its philosophical importance.

In this chapter two early critics of scholastic language are discussed: Petrarch and Leonardo Bruni. For Petrarch the revival of ancient Latin was an essential part of the moral, religious, and cultural reform of the late-medieval society in which he lived. As this chapter makes clear, this fundamentally humanist conviction also led to some tensions in Petrarch’s vision: Christian faith was difficult to combine with the pagan thought of Cicero, and even though Petrarch greatly admired the latter’s style, it was not always compatible with Petrarch’s own need for inner dialogue and meditation. Petrach’s rejection of scholastic language was further developed by Bruni in his criticisms of the medieval translation of Aristotle’s Ethics, and Bruni later developed his view in his treatise on the art of translation. The chapter analyzes the debate between Bruni and his critics, showing that both sides made valuable points about the use and abuse of philosophical language. As the debate makes clear, words such as “precise,” “exact,” and “faithful” as applied to translations are normative rather than descriptive terms, and there is no straightforward yardstick of fidelity. What is at stake is a discussion about the trade-off between popular accessibility and philosophical precision.

Aristotle wrote extensively about the character and behavior of non-human animals in his Historia Animalium. One aspect of character is cognitive abilities. The chapter sets out Aristotle’s views on the cognitive abilities of animals, evidenced also in other works such as the Metaphysics and De Anima. All animals perceive but many also have imagination, memory, and practical intelligence. For Aristotle nonhuman animals have a sort of practical intelligence suited to their particular ways of life. The considerable overlap in cognitive abilities between human and nonhuman animals allows Aristotle to establish a biological basis for many human traits. Many nonhuman animals not only manage to organize their lives and negotiate new challenges but also maintain relationships with each other over extended periods. Social relationships require complex communication and involve a very important type of intelligence which is perfected in the most political of animals, human beings. The chapter ends with an account of how human cognition differs from that which occurs in other animals.