ABSTRACT

This chapter clarifies the aspect of Cavell's work, to elaborate upon his suggestions, and it offers fresh observations. Cavell calls attention to a certain way in which, for Wittgenstein, everyday uses of words, inside their proper language games, connect importantly with what is shared within a community. For Wittgenstein, the uses of words in language games are governed by criteria for their application that are common to the community of language users who engage in those language games. Cavell represents Wittgenstein as a writer who sought both to illuminate philosophical mistakes and also convey his Spenglerian sense of a culture in decline. For Cavell, Wittgenstein's accounts of philosophers' misuses of language connect with cultural decline in two ways: Wittgenstein represents those misuses in such a way as to show that they themselves constitute a form of cultural decline; and Cavell claims that Wittgenstein's account of those misuses functions in the Investigations as an 'interpretation' or a 'homologous form'.