This chapter begins with more historical discussion, in which we sketch the prehistory of the study of the pragmatics and trace a route in the development of expressive meaning from the eighteenth to the twenty-first century. Following an expression coined by Nerlich and Clark, we use the term ‘proto-pragmatics’ to refer to those thinkers who were the first to take the role of context and emotion in language use seriously. The point of so doing is to show that our attempt to introduce affect into the centre of theories of utterance interpretation is actually an act of reintroduction, rather than an original move. The sidelining of affect by theories of communication has not happened in the absence of opposition. We also suggest parallels between the work of Charles Bally of the Geneva school and the work of those involved in the so-called ‘Ordinary Language Approach to Philosophy’ going on in the 1940s at Oxford, whose adherents committed themselves to the study of natural language use rather than the logical formulae of formal languages

Chapter 1, “Austen and Austin,” presents the details of the book’s central proposition that Jane Austen’s novels are not conduct books sharing preset values but philosophical studies of conduct more in the J.L. Austinian sense. The chapter claims that Austen – in common with the grouping of ordinary language philosophers I engage in this book: Austin, Wittgenstein, and Cavell (most of all) – does not view perception itself as a philosophical problem of major interest. My approach departs from the widespread view that Austen’s fiction reflects the mitigated skepticism of eighteenth-century empiricists and anticipates modernist literary impressionism. In the words of her Victorian critic G.H. Lewes, Austen’s epistemological project includes her cultivation of a prose style not visually hyper-realized, but “content to make us know” through the testing and textures of dialogue and character.

The purpose of this chapter is to show that the concept of voice is a significant feature not only of Cavell's autobiographical writings but also of his ordinary language philosophy as a whole and, especially, that it is incipient in his earliest work, Must We Mean What We Say? This theme is sustained and “permeates” the early to the later writings of Cavell, foregrounded in his later autobiographical writings. As Veena Das has put this, the repression of voice, confession, and autobiography in philosophy is an abiding theme of Cavell’s work; the banishing of the human voice in philosophy is a suspicion of all that is ordinary, enacting a fantasy of a purified medium outside of language. We explain how this theme was and remained central for Cavell.

Cavell proposed that the ordinary language philosopher’s appeals to “what we say when” are to be modeled on aesthetic judgments in Kant’s sense. Both judgments express what Kant called “a universal voice.” However, both also share another feature that stands in tension with their universal purport in being open to seemingly intractable disagreement. Cavell’s insistence – following Kant – that there are judgments with such a logical form is significant, for the idea that there are judgments with this logical form cuts against a prevailing assumption: if a judgment does not enjoy the objectivity of a theoretical judgment, its content must be understood to be constrained by, or be an expression of, psychological or sociological fact.

These claims are essentially first-personal, not transferrable by testimony, are claims“in which” one’s community with others, or lack thereof, can be established, as opposed to claims that are made “about” a community, whether aesthetic or linguistic, from a third-person, anthropological point of view. Blindness to the existence of judgments with this pair of logical features is a form of psychologism about judgment, a failure fully to recognize the irreducibility of the first person, in both its singular and plural forms, in our relation to the world.

Stoppard’s fascination with philosophy spans his whole career, from early pieces like Jumpers and Dogg’s Hamlet to Darkside and The Hard Problem. Though he was extraordinarily conversant in the disciplinary questions of British analytic philosophy, even striking up correspondences with some of its leading figures, Stoppard also always harboured reservations as to philosophy’s utility and insight, finding it in many cases insufficient compared to the depth of human exploration available in the theatre.