Meta-ordinary language

The confusing thing about ordinary language is this: the perspective from which it is done itself repudiates (to the degree that they can be repudiated) many philosophical problems. That is, if you have a view of language that places utterances in the context of human activities, aims, motivations, etc. and holds that what we say has consequences for what we are "committed" to both personally and theoretically.... then you have "rich" experience.

But you have to go on to find the source of the mistaken picture in some particular uses of words; show that those words can't mean, for the philosopher who says them, what he thinks they do. Why go on?

The answer has to be: because the only way to bring someone to a new or different picture is either to teach him new concepts altogether (through teaching him new activities), or to remind him of the commitments already present in his language--to show him what it would be to carry them through (which is just to show him what the concepts he's using actually are); and that then the picture is different, the question seems unmotivated. Is it just luck that this is the case? Or does carrying our verbal commitments through by its nature dispense with a stark picture of the world?

Today

Talked to professor about coteaching existentialism. Horrible realization that none of the stuff I like is "proper" existentialism. And that my Sartre book is hidden behind some old yearbooks on a bottom shelf in Georgia. I need to look at Sartre again anyway: he has things to say about self-deception.

Catered Kant: celery & peanut butter, rosemary toast slices (in bag, imported), hummus (made, topped with irrelevant basil from window), roasted garlic (leftover from hummus, untouched), pumpkin prune oatmeal cookies, 2 bottles Lurisia mineral water.

Had "moment" re: transcendental arguments. Kant's works, or is supposed to work, because he starts not from a picture opposite Hume's but from a small point that Hume would concede--that we have experience of objects. (Similarly, SW says his starting point is that we have experience as of objects.) And this is why transcendental arguments are not prefutation. And it's also why we have to go on (see previous entry) in ordinary language philosophy; that is, the distinctions in language we can get others to see are the small points everyone agrees upon on which the argument (against whatever it is) is based.