In Chapter 7, I argued that it was appropriate for us to ascribe understanding to young children and computers, as their behavior meets the criteria of correctness and intersubjectivity. What they cannot yet do, I argued, is ascribe understanding – that is, claim or attribute understanding – to themselves or others. Why does that matter?

In Chapter 4, I suggested that young children may experience a feeling of understanding, namely that something makes sense, before they acquire a concept of understanding. However, that subjective feeling may not meet an appropriate level of truth or correctness. Young children may feel they understand, when in fact they misunderstand. Adults recognize the possibility of misunderstanding. Thus, one of the identity conditions for understanding is that of truth or correctness.

Conrad eloquently wrote about his inability to write; he stuttered his way through his texts with nonlexical grunts, snarls, howls, murmurs, gurgles, snorts and hems; and he sought to stay true to “the stammerings of his conscience” (xliii), a working method alluded to in the Preface of The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ (1897). In this chapter, I argue that distraction – usually a writer’s enemy – is another one of these unexpected features that Conrad used to propel his writing; his seemingly rambling digressions are part of a quest for verbal precision. Although he is frequently conceived of as a methodical and philosophical writer, distraction was a fundamental and serious part of his literary enterprise. By allowing distraction, inattentiveness and absent-mindedness to become part of his fiction, he was able to stay productive, steal the reader’s attention and add a level of everyday realism to his texts. Conrad, I maintain, writes in medias distractionis and consistently pays attention to those who do not pay attention.

“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.

This chapter tackles questions such as how to differentiate a word from a nonword and what features should be ascribed to a word.

This chapter looks at the inner structure of words, the intricate networks of their senses.

This chapter looks into the issues of the links between the words in the lexicon and how words cross from one language to another.

This chapter is an examination of the various ways senses of place have been changed by the development of electronic media since the invention of the telegraph, with particular attention to developments since the invention of the World Wide Web in 1990. Impacts of electronic communications on five aspects of sense of place are considered. Neurological and ontological aspects are largely immune, but individual, social and public aspects are affected in ways that have been variously interpreted as diminishing sense of place by distracting us from our surroundings, or alternatively as enhancing it with rich data about places and increased global awareness. However, as electronic media have become increasingly pervasive, concerns have been raised about their role as agents of corporate power and their role in surveillance of places.

Reference is a phenomenon both of experience and thinking. It happens when a focal point for meaning is selected by the meaning-maker from the infinities of the world. The meaning – taking form as a mental representation, an act or object of communication, or an interpretation – “stands for” something in the world. Reference involves the specification of particular instances and general concepts, their circumstances as entities or actions, and their properties as qualities or quantities. Things in the world might be identified as entities or actions, though, by transposition actions may be construed as entities, and entities as actions. Entities and actions can be particular – a single instance – or multiple, defined in their generality as concepts. By transposition, by way of conceptualization, instances can be connected to the general. This connection of the instance to the general is by means of generalizable properties, including qualities and quantities.