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Cavell and Kuhn

Brad Tabas, Paul Jenner

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Conversations 10

THE JOURNAL OF CAVELLIAN STUDIES
**Conversations: The Journal of Cavellian Studies**

**10**

**Date**

December 2022

**Editors**

Brad Tabas (ENSTA Bretagne)

Paul Jenner (Loughborough University)

**Contributors**

Ruochen Bo (University of Toronto)

Paul Jenner

Arya Mohan (The English and Foreign Languages University)

Toril Moi (Duke University)

Brad Tabas

Timur Uçan (Bordeaux Montaigne University)
**Managing Editors**

Sérgio Dias Branco (University of Coimbra): sdiasbranco@fl.uc.pt

Amir Khan (Hunan Normal University): amirazizkhan@hunnu.edu.cn

**Advisory Board**

Sarah Beckwith (Duke University)

Peter Dula (Eastern Mennonite University)

Richard Eldridge (Swarthmore College)

Peter S. Fosl (Transylvania University)

Adam Gonya (Katholieke Universiteit Leuven)

Larry Jackson (The New School)

Andrew Klevan (University of Oxford)

Stephen Mulhall (University of Oxford)

Sianne Ngai (Stanford University)

Andrew Norris (University of California, Santa Barbara)

Lawrence Rhu (University of South Carolina)

D. N. Rodowick (University of Chicago)

Miguel Tamen (University of Lisbon)

**Publisher**

uOttawa Open Access

Morisset Hall

65 University Private

Ottawa, ON K1N 6N5

Canada

**ISSN**

1929-6169

**Website**

https://uottawa.scholarsportal.info/ojs/index.php/conversations/index
# Table of Contents

Cavell and Kuhn 1

EDITORIAL COMMENT

1. The Question of the New: Wittgenstein, Kuhn, Cavell 7

TORIL MOI

2. The “New” in Science and Art: Explorations into the Two-Culture Divide through Kuhnian-Cavellian Thought 32

ARYA MOHAN

3. Autonomy, Constitutivity, Exemplars, Paradigms 52

TIMUR UÇAN

4. A Willingness for Crisis: Cavell and Kuhn 80

PAUL JENNER

5. From Automatism to Autonomy 98

RUOCHEN BO

6. The Claim of Reason in a Planetary Age: Martian Objects and Ordinary Language 128

BRAD TABAS
# Cavell and Kuhn

## EDITORIAL COMMENT

The tenth issue of *Conversations* takes as its starting point the mutually expressed importance of the intellectual relationship and friendship between Stanley Cavell and the historian of science Thomas Kuhn. Their dialogue is all the more striking given that both thinkers were as concerned with difficulties of communication as with its achievement. Yet there is no hint of a struggle with incommensurability in Kuhn's claim that Cavell was "the only person with whom I have been able to explore my ideas in incomplete sentences."<fnref n="1" /> Cavell likewise explained, in *The Claim of Reason*, that the work owed much to having been "at times almost in possession of the something you might call an intellectual community" while working with Kuhn at Berkeley.<fnref n="2" /> This issue springs from these conversations between Cavell and Kuhn, exploring and extending their encounters through readings which cross Cavell with Kuhn and Kuhn with Cavell, and in so doing extending our understanding of each, while also illustrating the ways in which their work can still provide inspiration for grappling with science, art, and philosophy.

There are compelling reasons that make this virtual reunion timely. New scholarship on Kuhn, and the publication of recent posthumous works by Kuhn, has cast his work in a fresh light, helping to redress an earlier phase of its reception – identified by Cavell as a time when the “fame” of *The Structure of Scientific Revolutions* “overshadowed its teaching (so that it is cited as in support of relativism and even irrationality).”<fnref n="3" /> What becomes clear is that Kuhn, or at least the late Kuhn, particularly when read with Cavell, was a New Realist *avant la lettre*, making his philosophy of

<footnote n="1">1. Thomas Kuhn, *The Structure of Scientific Revolutions* (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1997), xiii.</footnote>

<footnote n="2">2. Cavell, *The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy* (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), xix.</footnote>

<footnote n="3">3. Cavell, "Who Disappoints Whom?," *Critical Inquiry* 15 (1989): 608. For an excellent overview of new scholarship on Kuhn, see K. Brad Wray, ed., *Interpreting Kuhn* (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021). See also Kuhn, *The Last Writings of Thomas S. Kuhn: Incommensurability in Science* (Chicago, IL: The Chicago University Press, 2022).</footnote>
science, as well as, though somewhat differently, Cavell's work on language, literatu-
re, and the arts more generally, an inspiration for thinkers aiming to develop alterna-
tive approaches to the strongly anti-realist "theory" which has dominated many hu-
manistic and historical disciplines. One example of such path-breaking scholarship is
the work of Toril Moi, one of the contributors to this collection, whose Wittgenstein-
inspired critique of poststructuralist literary theory's failure to confront the contexts
and conditions of ordinary language has done so much to make available Cavell's tea-
chings to scholars of literature.<fnref n="4" /> Here, her focus is on Kuhn's uptake of Wittgenstein's
investigations into aspect-seeing, an exploration that at once helps us to mark ever
more clearly Kuhn's difference from the advocates of the strong program whose pro-
ject he is often read as endorsing or even underwriting. This work helps issue in a ri-
cher understanding of parts of Cavell most clearly owing a debt to his conversations
with Kuhn, for example his account of modernism, but also, and perhaps more im-
portantly, his distinctive reading of Wittgenstein.

That said, the essays collected here in no way hew to a party line, and one can
find divergences within their readings of our two protagonists. Arya Mohan, for
example, offers up a much more post-structuralist picture of Kuhn in a stimulating
essay which considers the prominent role that the concepts of convention and novelty
play in philosophical discussions of the arts and sciences over the second half of the
twentieth century. Reading both authors through a lens that could be qualified as Ni-
etzschean, Mohan finds an ironic if also tragic sensibility at work in Kuhn's account
of changes of convention within scientific development, a disciplined relinquishment
of self in paradigms lost or given up, which she contrasts with a comic sensibility in
Cavell, for whom changes in artistic convention are experienced as a form of conti-
nuity — a humanised epistemology of tradition and subjectivity preserved through
change. In bringing out these commonalities and differences, Mohan argues that Ca-
vell and Kuhn's work can contribute to overcoming the "two cultures" divide.

Similarly dwelling on the relationship between the arts and the sciences, Ti-
mur Uçan offers an intricate reading of Kuhn's signature concept, the "paradigm,"
which stresses the ways in it proposes an innovative solution to the problem of recon-

<footnote n="4">4. Toril Moi, *Revolution of the Ordinary: Literary Studies after Wittgenstein, Austin, and Cavell* (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2017).</footnote>
ciling freedom with determinism, and so also reconciles moral philosophy and aesthetics with natural science. As Kuhn noted, the fact that “science and art are both products of human behaviour is a truism, but not therefore inconsequential.”<fnref n="5" /> Uçan’s essay begins by considering Cavell and Kuhn’s efforts to inherit Wittgenstein, a philosopher whose attention to human practices is mindful of what Kuhn referred to as “the numerous prices we pay for ignoring the obvious.”<fnref n="6" /> Resemblances regarding the places of paradigms in the arts and sciences are then affirmed, in the essay’s first part, through their analysis in terms of contingency, freedom, and community. The essay’s second part then focuses upon autonomies, asymmetries, and diversities in order to consider the limits of these resemblances. Throughout, the essay underscores the communal, Wittgensteinian role of paradigms in mediating what Uçan terms “the unrestricted circle of the ordinary.”

Paul Jenner's essay also explores Kuhn's account of the role of paradigms within science. Drawing Kuhn towards Cavell, he shows how related notions of normal science, progress, and crisis, played a structuring and thematic role in Cavell's philosophical writing. As he makes clear, while many scientific disciplines congeal around novel normative paradigms, philosophy, at least on Cavell's Emersonian but also Wittgensteinian reading, is paradigmatically aversive, its norm is revolution and conservation, in the sense that every philosophy finds its paradigmatic belonging precisely because it provides an aversion, an alternate but also kindred version of what was previously counted as philosophical. Kuhn's account of normal science and its progress through an apparent ability to postpone fundamental debates over scientific methods and goals — until such debates become salient in extraordinary, revolutionary moments of disciplinary crisis — becomes transformed in Cavell's philosophical writing. This writing dramatizes how philosophy, in holding paradigms in abeyance, takes upon itself metaphilosophical questions that the possession of a paradigm would resolve as it were automatically and in advance, performatively echoing and resisting becoming what we would normally call a paradigm. Responsiveness to crisis thus becomes thematised as a normal part of Cavell's voicing of philosophical progress.

<footnote n="5">5. Kuhn, *The Essential Tension: Selected Studies in Scientific Tradition and Change* (Chicago, IL: The Chicago University Press, 1977), 351.</footnote>

<footnote n="6">6. Ibid.</footnote>
Not all the essays in the collection are in the strict sense readings of Cavell and Kuhn, and this is in an exemplary fashion the case in the contribution by Ruochen Bo, which teases out from Kuhn and Cavell novel understandings of automatism and autonomy, which she then employs in a moving reading of Robert Bresson's film, *Au Hasard Balthasar* (1966). Bo argues that Kuhn's theories of scientific development and Cavell's reflections on the ontology of cinema can help us to see that these two notions are not straightforwardly opposed, with automatism giving birth to a certain type of autonomy, and autonomy, in turn, requiring a certain degree of automatism. Thus the apparent heteronomy of “normal” science is the condition of possibility for the autonomy of “revolutionary” science, whilst the automatism of the scientific object becomes fundamental to paradigm change. Bo isolates comparable proximities between automatism and autonomy in *The World Viewed*, noting how Cavell’s “impulse” to understand an artistic medium as an automatism helps to articulate “the experience of the work of art as ‘happening of itself.’”<fnref n="7" /> Turning this entanglement of automatism and autonomy in an ethical direction, Bo shows how the radical non-anthropomorphism of Robert Bresson’s *Au Hasard Balthazar*, helps us to acknowledge, via the automatism of film, the autonomy of non-human creatures that — at least since Descartes — have often been imagined automata, with this term being understood not in the sense proposed by Bo, but rather, and precisely, as beings deprived of any capacity for autonomy and so also of any right to moral acknowledgment.

Brad Tabas’s essay is likewise a creative inheritance from Cavell and Kuhn, an
attempt to develop certain themes from their work in novel directions while simulta-
neously reading back through this work for guidance and inspiration. It takes as its
theme the exploration of the openness of ordinary language to the future, what Tabas
calls the “extraordinary ordinary” situation. Taking as its starting point the fact that
earthlings can now view objects on the surface of Mars televisually, this situation be-
comes paradigmatic for thinking about the problem of meaning what we say when we
have near consensus regarding the fact that we do not know, apriori, what we are tal-
king about. Tabas develops what he calls a critique of planetary reason, a critical awa-
reness of how our ordinary language and imaginable forms of life, even what we call

<footnote n="7">7. Cavell, *The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film*, enlarged ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), 107.</footnote>
reasoning itself, are planetary, caught up with the forms of life that prevailed as we Earthlings learned to speak. Developing an expressive ethics for encountering alien objects on screen, he suggests that our encounter with a Martian world viewed calls for a reconvening of our criteria, and so offers an occasion not only for education (or philosophy) but also for an education of philosophy, a new way of thinking about practicing ordinary language thinking.

Jostling for attention amidst the close readings of Cavell and of Kuhn found in these essays, readers will find mentions of as manifold a collection of figures as H. P. Lovecraft, Arthur Danto, Robert Bresson, Walt Whitman, Andy Weir, Clement Greisenberg, and David Foster Wallace. The editors hope that one of the accomplishments of this collection is to bring out not just the vitality of Kuhn and Cavell, but also the profound variance among existing interpretations of their work, and even the fecundity of their texts for thinking about the place of the humanities within an age in which scientific discoveries about the planetary system are having radical effects on our understanding of everyday life. Cavell, in a 1992 essay recently republished in his posthumous collection *Here and There*, entitled “In the Meantime,” observed of his own work that it contains an obsessive repetition of “certain textual fragments,” aligning these with past conversations, and describing these unforgotten phrases as akin to an undead coven “rebuking me for not being able to master them,” before finally suggesting that “the reasons for this persistence of conversational fragments evidently go beyond their manifest content, as though they contain some orientation for me that I cannot quite follow.”<fnref n="8" /> In the same way, it seems that we can say, the fragments of those conversations between Cavell and Kuhn haunt us in these essays, returning with an uncanny persistence. Cavell’s tone, which borrows certain tropes from psychoanalysis, may make it seem as if this haunting by philosophy is but a form of mourning or even of madness, though it is doubtful that any of the contributors to this volume find his obsessive interrogations expressions of delusions but rather what we call philosophy. But can the same be said of us in turn? And finally, “What’s the difference?” (as Cavell once commented, quoting none other than Archie Bunker).<fnref n="9" />

<footnote n="8">8. Cavell, *Here and There: Sites of Philosophy*, ed. Nancy Bauer, Alice Crary, and Sandra Laugier (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2022), 207.</footnote>

<footnote n="9">9. Cavell, *Themes Out of School: Effects and Causes* (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1984), 42.</footnote>
Cavell gives a characteristically aversive response in the closing of that essay, a reflection on the split within philosophy, on the relationship between philosophy and authority, and ultimately also on what it means to inherit philosophy: “what we have to say to one another must be said in the meantime.”<fnref n="10" /> We thus submit this collection of essays about conversations to the world, hoping that our return to Kuhn’s and Cavell’s encounters offers orientation beyond nostalgia.

BRAD TABAS AND PAUL JENNER

<footnote n="10">10. Cavell, *Here and There*, 209.</footnote>
# 1. The Question of the New:
Wittgenstein, Kuhn, Cavell

TORIL MOI

## Introduction

The editors of this special issue of the *Journal of Cavellian Studies* invited contributors to write on Stanley Cavell and Thomas Kuhn. Unfortunately, this paper will end with Kuhn. The reason is simple: I found that I couldn't begin writing anything on Cavell and the new before I had set up the literary and historical framework for the project, and before I had discussed Ludwig Wittgenstein's work on aspect-seeing and Kuhn's *The Structure of Scientific Revolutions* (1962).<fnref n="1" /> These are the parts of my work in progress that I'll share here.

This paper is an excerpt from my work in progress on the question of the new in literary history, a subject that has interested me ever since I first began to think seriously about Henrik Ibsen's revolution of modern theater.<fnref n="2" /> Literary history is built on claims about change, emergence, breaks, even revolutions. But such terms require the concept of the new. How does the new arise? What do we mean when we claim that something is new?

In my current project I first discuss the new as a problem for literary critics and historians by briefly looking at what Fredric Jameson and Michael North has to say about the matter. Then I turn to Wittgenstein, Kuhn, and Cavell to work out a better philosophy of the new. Finally, I investigate two concrete cases of the new, to see how far the new philosophical framework helps to understand literary historical change. The first case is the emergence of modernism in the 19th century. Examples include Ibsen, of

<footnote n="1">1. Thomas S. Kuhn, *The Structure of Scientific Revolutions*. 50th Anniversary ed. (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2012). Further references will be abbreviated to SSR.</footnote>

<footnote n="2">2. See Toril Moi, *Henrik Ibsen and the Birth of Modernism: Art, Theater, Philosophy* (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2006).</footnote>
course, but also Charles Baudelaire, Gustave Flaubert, Oscar Wilde, and Maurice Maeterlinck, just to mention a few. Then, in the final chapter, I ask whether the recent emergence of autofiction marks the beginning of something new in literary history. Here my major example will be Karl Ove Knausgaard's *My Struggle*, but I will also consider writers such as Serge Doubrovsky, G. W. Sebald, and Annie Ernaux.

The question of the new is profoundly interdisciplinary, for it is relevant to every historical and historicizing discipline. The subject of the new is situated at the intersection of history, philosophy and literary criticism. To ask about the new in literary history is also to ask about the new in the humanities. I am not, however, trying to work out an overarching theory of the new. Rather, my examples and analyses stand as an invitation to readers to look and see, to consider to what extent my analysis may be useful to their own efforts to think about change in history.

## About Wittgenstein, Kuhn, Cavell, and the New

Although Cavell never wrote an essay entitled “The New” or “On Change,” he did write about the (modernist) revolution in philosophy introduced by Wittgenstein and Austin, and about the advent of modernism in the arts, particularly in music. As Ingeborg Löfgren has shown, Cavell’s signature concern in his discussion of modernism in the arts is the question of fraudulence.<fnref n="3" /> By “fraudulence” Cavell means the way modernist art forces the reader or beholder to use her own judgment as to whether the work before her is art, as opposed to some kind of gimmick. In the history of literary modernism, a version of this question does in fact regularly arise, often in the negative, as when a critic declares that a new work is so awful that it doesn’t deserve to be called art at all. (This was, for example, a common response to Ibsen’s *Ghosts* when it first opened in 1881.)<fnref n="4" />

The theme of the new also emerges in Cavell’s elucidations of Wittgenstein’s vision of language. He writes beautifully, in many different texts, about the way in

<footnote n="3">3. See Ingeborg Löfgren, *Interpretive Skepticism: Stanley Cavell, New Criticism, and Literary Interpretation* (Uppsala: Litteraturvetenskapliga Institutionen, 2015.)</footnote>

<footnote n="4">4. Cavell examines the question of fraudulence most extensively in Cavell, “Music Discomposed,” in *Must We Mean What We Say?: A Book of Essays* (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 180-212.</footnote>
which we learn words in quite specific contexts, and then, miraculously, find our-
selves able to go on to use them — project them — in completely different contexts.
Sometimes our projections surprise and delight us with their power to show us
something new, something we didn't know until we put it in just that new way.
Whoever first said “I have to feed the meter,” or “He's gaslighting you” may have
felt that thrill. (This is why Cavell resists attempts to reduce Wittgenstein's vision of
language to a narrow understanding of “rule-following.”) It is also why a study of
the emergence of the new needs to spend some time asking about the role of
metaphors.)<fnref n="5" />

To understand Cavell's thinking about the new, it helps to have a clear view of Kuhn's thinking about the subject. Conversely, it helps to know Cavell and Wittgenstein if one is to see what Kuhn is doing. There are biographical reasons for this. Cavell and Kuhn forged a deep intellectual companionship when they both worked at Berkeley in the late 1950s and early 1960s, the period in which Kuhn was working on *The Structure of Scientific Revolutions*, and Cavell on his foundational essays “Must We Mean What We Say?” (1959) and “On the Availability of Wittgenstein’s Later Philosophy” (1962).<fnref n="6" /> Given that Wittgenstein’s *Philosophical Investigations* (PI) wasn’t published until 1953, the two men were reading it at a time when philosophers were still just beginning to work out what Wittgenstein was actually doing in the book.<fnref n="7" /> No wonder their conversations felt like a passionate discovery of a new way of thinking about philosophy and the world.<fnref n="8" />

As the example of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir shows, attempts
to reduce regular and ongoing conversations between two brilliant thinkers to a
one-directional influence running from a dominant to a receptive partner are rarely
convincing. I take Cavell's and Kuhn's intellectual relationship to have been one of
mutual illumination and inspiration. It doesn't follow that their understanding of

<footnote n="5">5. For more on projection of words, see ch. 7 in Cavell, *The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy* (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).</footnote>

<footnote n="6">6. Cavell, “Must We Mean What We Say?” and “The Availability of Wittgenstein’s Later Philosophy,” in *Must We Mean What We Say?*, 1-40 and 41-67.</footnote>

<footnote n="7">7. My references are to Ludwig Wittgenstein, *Philosophical Investigations: The German Text, with an English Translation*, 4th ed., trans. G. E. M. Anscombe, P. M. S. Hacker, and Joachim Schulte (Malden, MA and Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), abbreviated to PI.</footnote>

<footnote n="8">8. Anyone interested in a more detailed account should read Vasso Kindi's careful elucidation of their relationship, "Novelty and Revolution in Art and Science: The Connection between Kuhn and Cavell," *Perspectives on Science* 18, no. 3 (2010): 284310.</footnote>
Wittgenstein was identical in all respects.<fnref n="9" /> Nevertheless, both Kuhn and Cavell's work on the new only really becomes comprehensible when read in the light of Wittgenstein.<fnref n="10" /> While Kuhn leans more heavily than Cavell on the section on aspect-seeing in *Philosophy of Psychology - A Fragment* (PPF, previously known as “Part II” of *Philosophical Investigations*), both men are profoundly inspired by Wittgenstein's vision of language and his critique of the traditional notion of concepts.

Cavell and Kuhn both emphasize the mutuality of their intellectual exchanges. In his introduction to *Structure*, Kuhn expresses wonder at their intellectual compatibility: “That Cavell, a philosopher mainly concerned with ethics and aesthetics, should have reached conclusions quite so congruent to my own has been a constant source of stimulation and encouragement to me. He is, furthermore, the only person with whom I have ever been able to explore my ideas in incomplete sentences.”<fnref n="11" /> Cavell reciprocates by stressing how much he learned from conversations with Kuhn “about the nature of history and, in particular, about the relations between the histories of science and of philosophy.”<fnref n="12" /> Cavell was the first to tell Kuhn that many of the questions he was trying to think about had been illuminated by J. L. Austin and Wittgenstein. He also made Kuhn think hard about the question of “what causes conviction.”<fnref n="13" /> At the same time, Cavell stressed how much he learned from Kuhn in those early days: “It was my clear impression that I was learning more from our exchanges, gathering more food for thought, than Tom was, more material about how language is open to the world, or the future, how concepts change, why the openness of concepts to projection into strange contexts is what makes language possible [...].”<fnref n="14" /> Anyone

<footnote n="9">9. At least one passage in *Structure* reads like a parallel version of a passage in Cavell's 1962 essay. A closer examination of the differences and similarities might be quite illuminating for their different views. I briefly refer to these passages below.</footnote>

<footnote n="10">10. K. Brad Wray argues that Kuhn owes more to V. O. Quine than to Wittgenstein. See Wray, *Kuhn's Intellectual Path: Charting The Structure of Scientific Revolutions* (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021). I think there is a good case for modifying that argument in the light of Sandra Laugier's excellent account of what the later Wittgenstein and Quine have in common. See Laugier, *Why We Need Ordinary Language Philosophy*, trans. Daniela Ginsburg (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2013).</footnote>

<footnote n="11">11. SSR, xlv.</footnote>

<footnote n="12">12. Cavell, *Must We Mean What We Say?: A Book of Essays*, xiv.</footnote>

<footnote n="13">13. Cavell, *Little Did I Know: Excerpts From Memory* (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010), 355.</footnote>

<footnote n="14">14. Ibid.</footnote>
familiar with Cavell's philosophy will recognize that he is here expressing some of the cornerstones of his own mature thought.<fnref n="15" />

## Why Care About the New? Jameson and North

Why should we care about the new? For historians, the reason is obvious: without some kind of concept of newness, we can't really historicize anything. The concept of the new is grammatically connected (in Wittgenstein's sense of "grammar") not just to the old, but to a whole network of other terms: beginnings, endings, before, after, change, break, transition, transformation, and revolution. Without the concept of the new, it becomes impossible to periodize. But to periodize can be an uncomfortable activity. What was intended as a subtle analysis of a complex network of phenomena quickly gets reduced to a story about sharp boundaries and gives rise to talk about "breaks." Yet when we immerse ourselves in the historical evidence, actual breaks can be extremely difficult to find.<fnref n="16" /> The messy details of the historical record quickly make most boundary-drawing seem arbitrary. Yet, as Fredric Jameson puts it: if we are to think about history, "We cannot not periodize."<fnref n="17" />

There is no need to be a historian to realize why we need a workable understanding of what we do when we talk about the new. Existentially and politically the idea of the new is grammatically connected to hope. If we genuinely believed that nothing is ever new under the sun, what would sustain us in the struggle to change the world? The belief that modernity brought on the climate crisis, for example, relies heavily on the concept of the new. It posits a before and conjures up a vision of an af-

<footnote n="15">15. A final introductory note: Both Kuhn's "paradigm" and Cavell's "tradition" have been accused of being "conservative," usually in the sense that such critics believe that their models of newness can't in fact conceptualize change at all, and therefore only return the new to the old. To my mind, such claims tend to be based on a wrong-headed idea of what Kuhn means by "paradigm," which is then projected on to Cavell's "tradition." Although I think my section on Kuhn below begins to show why I think so, in my work-in-progress I only discuss such claims in relation to Cavell's "tradition," which means that this is yet another question I won't get to in this paper.</footnote>

<footnote n="16">16. Kuhn's account of the discovery of oxygen in the late 18th century is an excellent illustration. See SSR, 53-57.</footnote>

<footnote n="17">17. Fredric Jameson, *A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present* (London and New York: Verso, 2002), 29.</footnote>
ter. Without the idea of the new, words like transformation or revolution become meaningless.

All this may seem self-evident. Yet, strangely, claims about newness are often met with doubt and rejection. Literary historians know only too well how to debunk claims about change, transition, innovation, and revolution. Every time someone claims that a literary or cultural phenomenon begins with a particular work, author, or historical event, someone else will always point out that whatever case we put forward is far from the first, that someone somewhere did something very similar long before our exemplar turned up. Yet such counterexamples rarely settle the discussion. When did free indirect speech first turn up in literature? An expert on modernism might point to Flaubert. A Romanticist might retort that there are cases in Jane Austen too. And then the Medievalist trumps them both by proudly pointing to an example in Chaucer. Yet, in spite of all that, the Modernist usually still feels that *something* new is going on in Flaubert's use of the form. Is she wrong? How do we need to think about the new for her intuition to make sense?

In *A Singular Modernity* Fredric Jameson turns to the example of modernity itself. This immensely rich book should ideally be read in the light of Jameson's work on postmodernism, which, among other things, is an effort to historicize the present. Jameson's thinking about the new could easily be the subject of a separate essay. Here, however, I just want to set out a few brief remarks on how he frames the question of historical change in the book that has inspired my own understanding of literary modernism. When did modernity begin? Jameson points out that there are at least fourteen different answers to that question. For example, while the Enlightenment and the French Revolution still get the most votes, German historians think that the Protestant Reformation marks the watershed. Philosophers will mention Descartes; historians of science go with Galileo. If economists think that modernity begins with the emergence of capitalism, postcolonial theorists point to the conquest of the Americas, and Hegelians believe that modernity only emerged with historical consciousness itself.<fnref n="18" />

For Jameson, this multiplicity of stories is as good as it gets, for there will never be one, overarching, ultimate account of modernity. All we have, and will ever

<footnote n="18">18. Ibid., 31-32.</footnote>
have, are “narrative options and alternate storytelling possibilities.”<fnref n="19" /> Moreover, all
such theories are, and can only be, the product of hindsight. If we were to try to his-
toricize our own present moment, for example, Jameson writes, we will discover that
“the present cannot feel itself to be a historical period in its own right without this
gaze from the future.”<fnref n="20" />

For Jameson, there are only two ways at looking at the new: it's either “cycli-
cal” or “typological,” either recurrence — a coming round again of the old — or a ful-
filment or completion of a moment in the past.<fnref n="21" /> But, as Jameson is the first to ac-
knowledge, the two models quickly become difficult to keep apart. In *Novelty*,
Michael North also argues that Western culture has only ever had two basic models of
newness, namely “recurrence” (or “cycles”) and “recombination.” In the first model,
which seems to me to combine both of Jameson’s categories, the new is an effect of a
“cyclical revival,” in which the new is considered a restoration to a truer self or state
of affairs: a return of the old, but in a better, truer, more perfect state.<fnref n="22" /> In the sec-
ond, the new consists of a new blend of familiar ingredients. Both models, North ex-
plains, respond to the fundamental philosophical problem of the new, namely the fact
that the universe already contains all the elements (all the energy, all the matter) we’ll
ever have. On this view, the new can only arise through a remix, a new combination
of old elements. This explains why so many theorists like to exemplify the emergence
of the new by pointing to the power of language to create ever new meanings from a
limited number of elements, whether those elements are taken to be words, the let-
ters of the alphabet, or Saussure’s signifiers or phonemes.<fnref n="23" /> More recently, the re-
combinatory power of the building blocks of DNA have been invoked to make the
same point. North’s history culminates in his account of Darwin’s theory of evolution
as a kind of synthesis of the two views, in which “all novelty [...] is the hybrid off-
spring of recurrence and recombination.”<fnref n="24" />

<footnote n="19">19. Ibid., 32.</footnote>

<footnote n="20">20. Ibid., 26.</footnote>

<footnote n="21">21. Jameson invokes Robert Jauss. See ibid., 20.</footnote>

<footnote n="22">22. See Michael North, *Novelty: A History of the New* (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2013, Kindle ed.), ch. 2: “Two Traditions of the New: Cycles and Combinations.”</footnote>

<footnote n="23">23. Ordinary language philosophers will immediately note that such arguments assume that language is a finite structure, with boundaries. As such they stand in sharp contrast to Wittgenstein's and Cavell's vision of use as infinitely open-ended. I discuss these questions in the first four chapters of *Revolution of the Ordinary*.</footnote>

<footnote n="24">24. North, *Novelty*, 74.</footnote>
Jameson, who tends to exemplify newness by speaking of modernity (and by extension, of modernism), stresses that the search for the one, synthesizing, theoretical and historical account of modernity will always be futile. Although no thinker could be less Wittgensteinian than Jameson, this argument comes close to Wittgenstein's idea that most concepts don't have rigid boundaries, that to understand them, all we can do is to examine examples, and that the search for one overarching definition, or the one intrinsic essence of the concept at stake will always be futile. Like so many other concepts in history and the humanities, Jameson's "modernity" is a classic case of a "family resemblance" concept.<fnref n="25" /> This is why I think that Jameson's conclusion, namely that "Modernity is [...] a narrative category" fails to get it right.<fnref n="26" /> Jameson's formulation invokes concepts like "storytelling" or "narrative" as if they explained something. But all such concepts do is to restate the original claim: since we seem not to be able to agree on one general definition of modernity, we'll just call the different accounts "stories." This view opens up a kind of subjectivism — the new is in the eyes of the beholder — that runs counter to Jameson's Hegelian outlook on history. (In my view, however, Jameson himself does not take the step into subjectivism and relativism.) Jameson takes for granted that when a phenomenon — in this case: modernity — can't be brought under a concept with rigid boundaries, then it must reduce to a set of different "stories." This is why his account of the new is vulnerable to accusations of subjectivism.<fnref n="27" />

North's history of Western theories of the new is a treasure-trove of information. Nevertheless, his fundamental account of the new is less convincing than Jameson's. Right at the outset, North dismisses "relative novelty" — the idea that "everything is new to someone somewhere" — as completely uninteresting.<fnref n="28" /> The trouble with "relative novelty," according to North, is that it "makes novelty a routine fact of existence," and thus entirely fails to account for the grand drama of the new, for a "genuine novelty, in the sciences at any rate, is a major disturbance in the universe, a development like consciousness or life itself."<fnref n="29" /> In this way, North turns "the new"

<footnote n="25">25. See PI, §67.</footnote>

<footnote n="26">26. Jameson, *A Singular Modernity*, 40.</footnote>

<footnote n="27">27. Here, a close reading of Wittgenstein's analysis of concepts such as "game" would prove helpful. For more on this, see ch. 3 in *Revolution of the Ordinary*.</footnote>

<footnote n="28">28. North, *Novelty*, 5.</footnote>

<footnote n="29">29. Ibid.</footnote>
into something like an object existing independently of any specific observer. While he does stress both the “inherent impossibility of ever finding [the new] in a pure state,” and how difficult it is for scientists, philosophers, and scholars of the humanities to agree on what is to count as a new departure, he still casts the new as a an observer-independent phenomenon.<fnref n="30" /> Nevertheless, North’s picture of the new remains something like a new law of physics, or a new element, like oxygen. But, as Kuhn constantly stresses, even a law of physics or a new element must be perceived and formulated by someone. And that someone must be someone who already has a concept of the old, of the past, or the new would just not strike her as new. In other words: the new can only appear new to someone who is already situated within a tradition, a context, a practice. If we eradicate the perceiving subject understood as a historically situated human being from our account of the new, we will be left either with positivism or its postmodern negation.

The challenge then becomes how to get properly into focus both the idea that the new is something real, something “out there,” and the idea that any talk about the new fundamentally depends on human perception, or experience. A further challenge is how to preserve the sense that the new can be profoundly ordinary. After all, everyone knows what it’s like to have a new insight, see a new connection, to have an “Aha!” moment. In a psychoanalytic session, for example, the analysand may suddenly realize something she never realized before. The new insight may be banal, ordinary, commonplace — the analyst may have seen it coming for months — yet it is still new to her, and it may well change her life in profound ways. The difference between different flashes of insight isn’t the structure of the experience, but its significance in the world.

North’s distinction between insignificant and subjective (“new to me”) and world-historical and objective (“absolutely, radically new”) kinds of newness obscures the real distinction, namely the difference between asking what the experience of the new is (asking about its essence, definition, or grammar) and asking what makes a specific new insight or discovery important, historically transformative, world-changing (asking about its significance). As in the case of language, the ordinary shows us what the use is — the practices, the language-games, the grammar — without which

<footnote n="30">³⁰ Ibid., 161.</footnote>
we wouldn't even have any criteria for distinguishing between the usual and the unusual. What then is “ordinary newness”? I take Wittgenstein's account of aspect-seeing in *Philosophical Investigations* to provide a particularly compelling answer.

## Aspect-Seeing, or Discovering the New

Wittgenstein's discussion of aspect-seeing is, in large part, a discussion of the experience of seeing or thinking something new. The experience appears to be commonplace, for most of his examples, including the very first one, are simple and ordinary: “I observe a face, and then suddenly notice its likeness to another. I see that it has not changed; and yet I see it differently” (PPF, §113). I know it's your face, but now I see in it that “unmistakable Karamazov quality” that I never noticed before.<fnref n="31" /> The famous duck-rabbit shows that an aspect can remain hidden until it suddenly “lights up” [*au-fleuchten*] (see PPF, §118). (I only saw the duck, but now I see the rabbit!) Here too we see something new although nothing has changed.

<figure><img src="image_2.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 1: Duck-Rabbit.</figcaption></figure>

We should resist the temptation to turn the duck-rabbit into *the* exemplary case of aspect-seeing. Rather, as Avner Baz reminds us, in the case of the duck-rabbit one

<footnote n="31">31. I am echoing Cavell's formulation in *The Claim of Reason*, 187, which occurs in a discussion of Wittgenstein's understanding of essence as grammar.</footnote>
aspect *eclipses* the other.<fnref n="32" /> The case of the face, for example, is not like that: when I suddenly notice your likeness to your father, I don't cease seeing your face as your face.

Aspect seeing is not just seeing. To see an aspect is not the same thing as to attribute a concept to something, i.e. to realize what a thing is. I don't see my fork as a fork. I just see a fork: "One doesn't 'take' what one knows to be the cutlery at a meal for cutlery" (PPF, §123). Aspect-seeing always has a temporal dimension. Aspects dawn, but they can fade as well.<fnref n="33" /> To see an aspect is to experience a sudden dawning, a feeling of discovery: *Now* I see the likeness! *Now* I see the rabbit! Such exclamations are not just descriptions or reports, for they are, as it were, "forced from us" [*Er entringt sich uns*] (PPF, §138). Like expressions of pain, they *escape* us.

To see an aspect is not to place an interpretation on an object: "But how is it possible to see an object according to an *interpretation*?" (PPF, §164). Discussing the example of the chalice/two profiles illusion, Jan Zwicky explaines why seeing an aspect isn't an interpretation: "It makes no sense to say one is more basic than the other, nor to say that the drawing is "really" just splotches of paint that we can "interpret" as we choose."<fnref n="34" />

<figure><img src="image_3.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 2: Chalice/Profiles.</figcaption></figure>

<footnote n="32">32. Avner Baz, *Wittgenstein on Aspect Perception* (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 30. Baz short book has been invaluable to me in my attempts to understand Wittgenstein on aspect-seeing.</footnote>

<footnote n="33">33. Baz is particularly good on the reasons why aspects aren't continuous, or permanent. See *Wittgenstein on Aspect Perception*, 25-33.</footnote>

<footnote n="34">34. Jan Zwicky, *The Experience of Meaning* (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2019), 13.</footnote>
Interpretations are needed when we are in doubt about something and require further explanations. But we don't first get puzzled by the duck, in the sense that we wonder whether it really can be a duck instead of a goose or a swan, before after much consideration, we decide to interpret it as a rabbit. In the duck/rabbit case, and the chalice/profiles case, we first see one figure plainly. Zwicky calls it “an experience of direct perception: we see one of the figures immediately, and the second shortly afterward (especially if we've been told it's there).”<fnref n="35" />

For Wittgenstein, aspect-perception produces insight. When we give voice to the experience of aspect-seeing, we simultaneously express our own experience — the surprise, the delight, or the shock of the new insight — and describe or report on the insight. Wittgenstein writes that “the very expression which is also a report of what is seen is here a cry of recognition” (PPF, §144). The original term is *Erkennen*, which even more than the English “recognition” implies “cognition,” “knowledge,” “understanding,” “insight,” and so on. When the aspect dawns on us, we sometimes feel “as if an *idea* [*Vorstellung*] came into contact, and for a time remained in contact, with the visual impression” (PPF, §211). Aspect-seeing gives us new insight: “What forces itself on one is a *concept* [*Begriff*],” Wittgenstein writes (PPF, §191). The dawning of the aspect gives us a new concept. But “new” here doesn’t mean a concept that has been utterly unheard-of until this moment: In Wittgenstein’s examples it is just one we didn’t have in our minds *here*, in *this* situation, until the aspect “lit up.”<fnref n="36" /> Aspect-seeing fuses *seeing* and *thinking*: “the lighting up of an aspect seems half visual experience, half thought” (PPF, §140). “Is it a case of both seeing and thinking? Or a fusion of the two — as I would almost like to say?” (PPF, §144) Zwicky rightly calls aspect-seeing’s characteristic mix of perception and cognition by a simple name: “understanding.” Wittgenstein teaches us, she writes, that the “traditional distinction between sense perception and thought is empty.”<fnref n="37" /> When the aspect dawns, we understand something new.

Wittgenstein's aspect-seeing challenges traditional philosophy's belief that the pursuit of truth requires us to begin with atoms, fragments, parts, the smallest possible units (as if that were even always an option). As Zwicky sees it, the point of

<footnote n="35">35. Ibid.</footnote>

<footnote n="36">36. Unlike some philosophers, Wittgenstein didn't think the task of philosophy was to reach "unheard-of" insights, let alone to create unheard-of concepts to express them. See PI, §133.</footnote>

<footnote n="37">37. Zwicky, *The Experience of Meaning*, 14.</footnote>
Gestalt-theory is to show that a crucial part of human perception and human thinking happens because we grasp wholes (shapes, forms) *before* we grasp their internal parts. Atomizing, analyzing, taking apart is often (but not in every case) something we can do because we have *already* grasped the whole.<fnref n="38" />

To my mind, Wittgenstein's vision of language already has a kind of Gestalt "feel" to it, for he insists, over and over again, that we can't begin our quest for meaning with individual words, or even individual sentences. To understand a word, we need to grasp the language-game in which it occurs, which again means having a sense of the grammar of the utterance, which means understanding the particular ways in which a group of speakers live their lives in language. The particular word only gains meaning in the context of the whole.<fnref n="39" />

As usual, Wittgenstein is drawing our attention to something we already know but tend to forget.<fnref n="40" /> In philosophy, for example, Frege's logical analysis of sentences presupposes, as it must, that we can't do the analysis unless we already know what the sentences mean, for otherwise we just couldn't tell what function specific words have in the whole.<fnref n="41" /> Ferdinand de Saussure, who unlike Wittgenstein, did assume that individual words taken in isolation were bearers of meaning, also took for granted that we can't determine the simplest linguistic units of a language unless we already know the meaning of the words they occur in: "Meaning justifies the delimitation," he writes.<fnref n="42" /> In other words: to determine that English has phonemes like /k/, /m/ and /r/, we need to already know the difference between "cat," "mat," and "rat." The building blocks emerge as a result of the analysis of the whole.<fnref n="43" />

<footnote n="38">38. Zwicky mentions a "bag of marbles" as an example of exceptions to this rule. See Zwicky, *The Experience of Meaning*, p. 5.</footnote>

<footnote n="39">39. When I write "grammar" and "grammatically" in this paper, I mean "grammar" in Wittgenstein's sense of rules for how we use language, rules arising from "shared human behavior" (PI, §206). Or as Rush Rhees puts it: "The rules of grammar are rules of the lives in which there is language." Cora Dia mond, "Rules: Looking in the Right Place," in *Wittgenstein: Attention to Particulars. Essays in Honour of Rush Rhees (1905-89)*, ed. D. Z. Phillips and Peter Winch (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1989), 12.</footnote>

<footnote n="40">40. This should not surprise us, for his aim in philosophy is to make us notice "the aspects of things that are most important for us [but which] are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity" (PI, §129).</footnote>

<footnote n="41">41. See for example James Conant's analysis of the different function of "Vienna" in "Trieste is no Vi enna," as opposed to "Vienna is the capital of Austria," in "Wittgenstein on Meaning and Use." *Philosopical Investigations* 21, no. 3 (1998): 235.</footnote>

<footnote n="42">42. Ferdinand de Saussure, *Course in General Linguistics*, trans. Wade Baskin (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 105.</footnote>

<footnote n="43">43. Many followers of Saussure appear to forget this. They argue as if we somehow recognize "empty signifiers" or "marks" as free-floating linguistic units in search of a meaning (the "signified"), although it is obvious that we only recognize signifiers as signifiers because we already know the language, they are part of, as it were. See ch. 5 and 6 in RO.</footnote>
Wittgenstein compares aspect-seeing to certain children’s games, as when children “say of a chest, for example, that it is now a house; and thereupon it is interpreted as a house in every detail” (PPF, §205). This is why he insists that aspect-seeing “demands imagination [Vorstellungskraft]” (PPF, §217): “The concept of an aspect is related to the concept of imagination” (PPF, §254). I take this to mean that the dawning of an aspect is grammatically connected to the imagination. But if aspect-seeing mobilizes the imagination, then aspect-seeing is also grammatically connected to freedom. Linda Zerilli reminds us that Hannah Arendt defined freedom as “the human capacity to begin anew.”<fnref n="44" /> Seeing or creating the new is an act of freedom.

Baz also considers aspect-seeing to be a manifestation of freedom. He reaches that conclusion through a discussion of Wittgenstein's idea of aspect-blindness: “Could there be human beings lacking the ability to see something as something — and what would that be like? [...] We will call it “aspect-blindness” (PPF, §257). To be “aspect-blind” is to be in some peculiar way incapable of making imaginative leaps, of moving one's mind beyond the confine of the actual. The aspect-blind person can only see facts. Such a person could recognize a black cross, but he couldn't say “Now it's a black cross on a white ground!” (PPF, §257).

Baz draws a parallel to Maurice Merleau-Ponty's discussion of the famous Schneider case, first published in 1918 by Kurt Goldstein and Adhémar Gelb. Schneider suffered a brain injury in World War I, and as a result became unable to make any kind of imaginative leap. He couldn't, for example, project himself into the future, or understand himself as part of a concrete, meaningful situation. His injury made him relate to the world exclusively as an agglomeration of disparate facts. Schneider lives in a “ready-made or congealed” world, Merleau-Ponty writes, he is “tied to actuality,” and “lacks liberty.”<fnref n="45" /> For Baz, Schneider is aspect-blind in the sense that he lacks the “capacity to project sense creatively, playfully — to perceive given things and situations otherwise than how ‘one’ would perceive them, or other-

<footnote n="44">44. Zerilli's formulation. Zerilli also rightly connects freedom and imagination to Kant's understanding of aesthetic judgment in the *Third Critique*, which I'll discuss below.</footnote>

<footnote n="45">45. “[R]eady-made or congealed world,” *Phenomenology of Perception*, p. 112 [“un monde tout fait ou figé,” *Phénoménologie de la perception* (130)]; “tied to actuality,” “lacks liberty” (135) [“lié à l’actuel,” “manque de liberté” (158)].</footnote>
wise than what [he] objectively knows them to be.”<fnref n="46" /> An aspect-blind person is incapable of “seeing things anew.”<fnref n="47" />

Another way of putting this is to say that aspect-blind people can't create new *internal relations* between objects. This capacity is crucial to aspect seeing: “What I perceive in the lighting up of an aspect is not a property of the object, but an internal relation between it and other objects” (PPF, §247). In Gestalt-theory, which Wittgenstein invokes repeatedly in the aspect seeing chapter, two objects have an internal relation if you can't change the one without changing the other. Certain figure/ground relationships, such as the chalice/profiles illusion, exemplify the point with particular acuity. When an aspect dawns, we suddenly see an object against a new background: we place it in a new context or, to use Wittgenstein's habitual word for context: a new *Zusammenhang*, which means that we give it a place in a new sequence of events, come to see it as part of a new story.<fnref n="48" /> To establish an “internal relation” between one object and another is to transform our understanding of both.

Wittgenstein's examples of aspect-seeing quite often concern sudden perceptions of likeness (and therefore also differences), as in the case of seeing the chest as a house, or suddenly noticing your resemblance to your father. But if aspect-seeing makes us see likenesses, requires imagination, and gives us new insight, then it is akin to the capacity to see analogies and similarities, and to make metaphors. Zwicky draws the same conclusion: “The relevance of this figure for poetry is obvious — it is an example of metaphor in action, of seeing one thing (two faces in profile) as another (a chalice) on the basis of profound, inalienable, shared structure.”<fnref n="49" /> At this point, Wittgenstein reminds me powerfully of Aristotle, who considered the capacity to see likenesses in different things to be crucial for poets,

<footnote n="46">46. Baz, *Wittgenstein on Aspect Perception*, 44.</footnote>

<footnote n="47">47. Ibid., 45. — After World War II powerful critics, including Carl Jung, voiced their skepticism of Goldstein and Gelb's account of the Schneider case. Georg Goldenberg claims that their “enthusiasm” for a holistic understanding of human nature “induced [them] to fabricate” the case, and that “Schneider was willing to assume his part in that scenario.” Goldenberg, “Goldstein and Gelb’s Case Schn.: A Classic Case in Neuropsychology?,” in *Classic Cases in Neuropsychology, Volume II*, ed. Chris Code, Claus-W. Wallesch, Yves Joanette, and André Roch Lecours (Hove and New York: Psychology Press, 2003), 298. J. J. Marotta and M. Behrmann take a more nuanced position, pointing out, among other things, that other patients exhibited similar behaviors. See Marotta and Behrmann, “Patient Schn: has Goldstein and Gelb’s case withstood the test of time?,” *Neuropsychologia* 42 (2004): 633-38.</footnote>

<footnote n="48">48. I am struck by the likeness to Zwicky's remark that “Gestalt comprehension is insight into how things hang together.” *The Experience of Meaning*, 5.</footnote>

<footnote n="49">49. Zwicky, *The Experience of Meaning*, 13.</footnote>
and also as something that cannot be taught: "The greatest thing by far is to have a command of metaphor. This alone cannot be imparted by another; it is the mark of genius, for to make good metaphors implies an eye for resemblances."<fnref n="50" /> Wittgenstein's understanding of aspect-seeing undoes the usual demarcation between perception and knowledge. It also transcends the traditional barriers between poetry (literature, the art of writing) and philosophy by showing that the power of metaphor is not just aesthetic but cognitive, and that both poets and philosophers need imagination to see (and create) the new.

In the moment the aspect dawns, I discover neither a purely subjective entity, nor a purely objective feature of the object or event. When I see the chest as a house, for example, I still see the chest: I would surely draw it in the same way both before and after I realized that children could play house with it. Nevertheless, my perception of the chest as a house is not private or subjective in the sense that only I can see it, for I can explain to you what's going on with the chest-house game, and you can come to see it too. In a discussion of "aesthetic matters," Wittgenstein notes that in a conversation about music someone might say: "You have to hear these bars as an introduction" (PPF, §178). If you try to do that, maybe the point will dawn on you. Or not.

In this respect, aspect-seeing is like the experience of beauty, according to Kant: My experience of beauty is subjective, in the sense that it is internal to me: nobody else can experience beauty on my behalf. But at the same time it is an experience, a perception of an object, of something in the world. Baz puts it well: "Like beauty as characterized by Kant, an aspect as characterized by Wittgenstein hangs somewhere between the subject and the object: it is not a property of the object, and yet we call upon others to see it as if it were."<fnref n="51" /> Baz rightly stresses the difference between Kant's invocation of judgment as part of his metaphysical universalism and Wittgenstein's emphasis on judgment emerging as agreement in our words. Although the experience of beauty can neither be outsourced nor delegated, it is sharable. I can

<footnote n="50">50. Ch. 22 in Aristotle, *The Poetics*, S. H. Butler's 1895 translation (online, Project Gutenberg). Cf. James Hutton's translation: "but most important by far is to have an aptitude for metaphor. This alone cannot be had from another but is a sign of natural endowment, since being good at making metaphors is equivalent to being perceptive of resemblances." *Aristotle's Poetics*, trans. Hutton (New York: Norton, 1982), 71.</footnote>

<footnote n="51">51. Baz, "The Sound of Bedrock: Lines of Grammar between Kant, Wittgenstein, and Cavell," *European Journal of Philosophy* 24, no. 3 (2015): 611.</footnote>
explain to you what it is about this landscape, this painting, this piece of music that makes it beautiful. And then you may come to hear or see it the way I do. Or not. Unlike the grasping of rational arguments, the perception of beauty — the judgment that this is beautiful — is a perception grounded in freedom, not in necessity. Yet it still responds to something in the object. Kant writes in §32: "For the judgment of taste consists precisely in the fact that it calls a thing beautiful only in accordance with that quality in it by means of which it corresponds with our way of receiving it."<fnref n="52" />

Wittgenstein's account of aspect-seeing is an account of the experience of seeing the new in all kinds of contexts. It is an account of what it is to experience a “Eureka!” moment. Wittgenstein's understanding of aspect-seeing offers a phenomenology of the experience of having new ideas, and shows that it requires freedom, creativity, and imagination. The capacity to see “likenesses”— new connections—as when we make up metaphors is part of the experience of aspect-seeing. At the same time, the dawning of the new aspect is perfectly ordinary, and can arise in any activity or practice. It is as relevant for scientists as it is for artists, writers, and humanists.

To see an aspect, then, is to experience a sudden flash of insight, to have an experience which is at once an act of judgment and imagination, and a response to the world. This gets us to Kuhn, who argues that paradigm changes arise precisely through (Wittgensteinian) flashes of insight. In normal science, he writes, crises are terminated “by a relatively sudden and unstructured event like the gestalt switch. Scientists then often speak of the ‘scales falling from the eyes’ or of the ‘lightning flash’ that ‘inundates’ a previously obscure puzzle, enabling its components to be seen in a new way that for the first time permits its solution.”<fnref n="53" />

Just like Wittgenstein, Kuhn insists that the dawning of an aspect is not an interpretation: “No ordinary sense of the term ‘interpretation’ fits these flashes of intuition through which a new paradigm is born.”<fnref n="54" /> To grasp Kuhn’s *Structure of Scientific Revolutions* we need to read it in the light of Wittgenstein’s philosophy of aspect-seeing. Once we do, Kuhn’s project emerges as far more useful for humanists than

<footnote n="52">52. Immanuel Kant, *Critique of the Power of Judgment*, trans. Paul Guyer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), §32, 162.</footnote>

<footnote n="53">53. SSR, 122.</footnote>

<footnote n="54">54. SSR, 123.</footnote>
ally paradigm wars. Or, in Britain, the “Ibsen wars” of the 1890s. What exactly is a paradigm, then?

Paradigms and the World They Reveal

*Paradigm* and *paradigm change* are Kuhn's most famous concepts. Ever since the first edition of *The Structure of Scientific Revolutions* was published in 1962, scholars have debated the meaning of these terms. Faced with what he took to be a barrage of misunderstandings, Kuhn himself also set out to explain and nuance his concepts. I will attempt no overview. Instead, I will simply zoom in on the aspects that matter the most to me in the concept of paradigm, namely (1) Kuhn's idea that the “lightning flash” that signals a paradigm change represents a Gestalt-switch, a change in internal relationship between a figure and a (back)ground, and (2) Kuhn's use of the term “world,” as when he talks about scientists' working in a different world after a paradigm change. (I have already stressed his fundamental commitment to the idea that science is carried out by human subjects, so I won't return to that here.)

In his excellent introduction to the 50th anniversary edition of *Structure*, Ian Hacking points out that for Kuhn, the first, fundamental meaning of “paradigm” is “shared example” or “standard example,” of the kind one can find in physics textbooks, for example. The Greek *paradeigma* was used by Aristotle to signal an *exemplar*, an exemplary case nobody could dispute, a case one could appeal to in other, similar cases. In Latin, *paradeigma* became *exemplum*. Hacking stresses that the term had been little used in modern philosophy before Kuhn. The only exceptions were some passages in Wittgenstein's *Philosophical Investigations*, and in the work of the (positivist) Vienna Circle.<fnref n="57" /> Kuhn himself felt that “paradigm” was the least understood of his concepts. In his 1969 postscript he writes that: “The paradigm as shared example is the central element of what I now take to be the most novel and least understood aspect of this book.”<fnref n="58" />

<footnote n="57">57. See Ian Hacking, "Introductory Essay," in SSR, xvii-xxv.</footnote>

<footnote n="58">58. SSR, 186.</footnote>
While he always insisted that “shared example” was the original, and only fully
meaningful use, he acknowledged that many of his readers had turned this original,
“local” meaning of paradigm into a much more all-encompassing or “global” affair. I
agree with Hacking that whatever the problems readers in the 1960s and 1970s had
with the concept, it is time for us to “happily restore [paradigm as a shared example]
to prominence.”<fnref n="59" />

A paradigm, in the sense of an exemplary case, is not so much a theory (al-
though theories may be developed from the paradigm) as an instantiation or embod-
iment of the right sort of scientific practice. Textbooks teach such practices by focus-
ing on specific exemplary cases, which scientists are trained in, and which they rely
on when they think about how to resolve new problems. The paradigm case stands for
a way of working which relies on an array of shared assumptions, working practices
and specific laboratory equipment. A paradigm is “knowledge embedded in shared
exemplars,” as Kuhn put it in his 1969 postscript.<fnref n="60" />

A paradigm shouldn't be construed as a large, over-arching structure — a kind
of closed box — that holds its practitioners in a vice-like grip. A paradigm can pertain
to quite small, local areas of scientific inquiry. Kuhn writes that “paradigms need not
be common to a very broad scientific group.”<fnref n="61" /> He also stresses that some paradigm
changes “need be revolutionary only for the members of a particular professional
subspecialty.”<fnref n="62" /> In so far as such members remain in conversation with colleagues in
other subspecialties, they will not even be wholly immersed in their own local par-
adigm.

If a paradigm is a shared example, or a set of shared examples, as presented
in textbooks of science, then there clearly are paradigms in the arts and humanities.
In literary studies, for example, larger or smaller groups of critics share a sense of
what the essential works — literary or theoretical — in a field are. Their “exemplars”
are the works the practitioners in the group think everyone in the field should
know, the works they regularly teach their students. The set of exemplars — the
paradigm — gives rise to characteristic questions, ways of reading, assessment of

<footnote n="59">59. Hacking, “Introductory Essay,” SSR, p. xviii.</footnote>

<footnote n="60">60. SSR, 192.</footnote>

<footnote n="61">61. Ibid., 49.</footnote>

<footnote n="62">62. Ibid., 50.</footnote>
what counts as interesting, and so on. In the humanities, many different paradigms
are simultaneously at work. When they clash, conflicts arise. But they don't always
clash, for they don't all compete to give an account of the same phenomena. Be-
cause “culture wars” or “canon wars” express a conflict between paradigms they of-
ten signal what Kuhn would call a moment of “crisis,” and point to a pending par-
adigm shift.<fnref n="63" />

Kuhn uses the term “world” about reality as revealed by the paradigm. Here are some examples: “The very ease and rapidity with which astronomers saw new things when looking at old objects with old instruments may make us wish to say that, after Copernicus, astronomers lived in a different world. In any case, their research responded as though that were the case.”<fnref n="64" /> “After discovering oxygen Lavoisier worked in a different world.”<fnref n="65" /> Discussing the famous “incommensurability” of paradigms, he writes:

> In a sense that I am unable to explicate further, the proponents of competing paradigms practice their trades in different worlds. . . . Practicing in different worlds, the two groups of scientists see different things when they look from the same point in the same direction. Again, that is not to say that they can see anything they please. Both are looking at the world, and what they look at has not changed.<fnref n="66" />

In this passage, Wittgensteinian aspect-seeing is at work. Although the actual lines on
the paper have not altered, I see the duck, you see the rabbit. To "live in a different
world" means having different understanding of what it is we are seeing when we
look at the same thing. (I'll return to this.) This is not skepticism, nor relativism. It is
a deep-going acknowledgment of the imbrication of world and word, of the way our
ways of talking about things affect our way of being in the world. Just as Kuhn's "par-
adigm" isn't a closed box, Kuhn's "world" isn't a closed, all-encompassing structure:
"At times of revolution [...] [the scientist] must learn to see a new gestalt. After he has
done so the world of his research will seem, here and there, incommensurable."<fnref n="67" />

<footnote n="63">63. I return to culture wars in the literary-historical parts of my project.</footnote>

<footnote n="64">64. SSR, 117.</footnote>

<footnote n="65">65. Ibid., 118.</footnote>

<footnote n="66">66. Ibid., 150.</footnote>

<footnote n="67">67. Ibid., 112.</footnote>
Note the “here and there”: this corresponds to the sense of paradigm as a series of ex-
emplars, not as a self-enclosed “global” structure.

Kuhn’s way of talking about “world” arises from his Wittgensteinian under-
standing of language. At times, Kuhn on language sounds much like Cavell:

The child who transfers the word “mama” from all humans to all females and
then to his mother is not just learning what “mama” means or who his mother
is. Simultaneously he is learning some of the differences between males and
females as well as something about the ways in which all but one female will
behave towards him. His reactions, expectations, and beliefs — indeed, much
of his perceived world — change accordingly.<fnref n="68" />

Compare this to Cavell’s exquisite summary of how children learn language: “In ‘learning language’ you learn not merely what the names of things are, but what a name is; not merely what the form of expression is for expressing a wish, but what expressing a wish is; not merely what the word for ‘father’ is, but what a father is; not merely what the word for ‘love’ is, but what love is.”<fnref n="69" /> While there clearly are significant differences between these two passages, they share an underlying vision of language as intertwined with the world.<fnref n="70" />

In the same year as Kuhn published *Structure*, Cavell published his magnifi-
cent essay “Availability of Wittgenstein’s Later Philosophy.” In this essay, Cavell con-
veys Wittgenstein’s vision of the intertwinement of world and word by saying that
when we learn language, we learn how to share “routes of interest and feeling, modes
of response, senses of humor and of significance and of fulfillment, of what is outra-
geous, of what is similar to what else, what a rebuke, what forgiveness, of when an
utterance is an assertion, when an appeal, when an explanation — all the whirl of or-
ganism Wittgenstein calls “forms of life.””<fnref n="71" /> To share a world is to share some (but not

<footnote n="68">68. Ibid., 128.</footnote>

<footnote n="69">69. Cavell, *The Claim of Reason*, 177.</footnote>

<footnote n="70">70. Kuhn’s idea of a “transfer” of the word “mama” from all humans to all females (etc.) strikes me as strange. What child begins by calling all humans “mama” and ends by discovering her own mother? Cavell would say that we learn a word in a specific context, and then learn to project it in new contexts. Cavell also insists that when we learn how to talk about things and practices, we learn what they are. This is in keeping with Wittgenstein’s reminder that “*Essence* is expressed in grammar” (PI, §371).</footnote>

<footnote n="71">71. Cavell, “The Availability of Wittgenstein’s Later Philosophy,” 52.</footnote>
all) such routes: to enjoy the same movies, laugh at the same jokes, understand why you take offense, and what it would take to be forgiven. To learn a language as a child is to be initiated into the ways of a particular world. In the same way, when Kuhn's scientists learn to speak the language of their specialties, they are, as it were, initiated into a world which takes some cases to be paradigmatic for its activities.

To “share a world” does not mean to be locked up together in an impermeable prison-like structure. Worlds are open-ended and imbricated in other worlds. My world and yours may overlap significantly yet be different. If we are lucky, we get to educate our experience, learn to grow into new modes of feeling and thinking throughout our life. These are the kinds of changes Kuhn has in mind when he talks about scientists no longer sharing a world after a paradigm shift. He doesn’t mean that they have nothing in common, or that nothing they did before the paradigm shift makes sense after. On the contrary, he stresses how old ways of measuring and gathering data may be roped into supporting the new paradigm. Yet, on some points, communication will no longer be possible. On certain points, the adherents of the new paradigm will feel that they have reached bedrock, as Wittgenstein describes it: “Once I have exhausted the justifications, I have reached bedrock, and my spade is turned. Then I am inclined to say: “This is simply what I do” (PI, §217). I have sometimes felt like this when I have tried to convey ordinary language philosophy to colleagues trained in the poststructuralist paradigms. It is as if we, in some crucial areas, no longer make sense to one another.<fnref n="72" /> Yet in others, we still communicate just fine. Regardless of our professional orientation, we often — but not always — agree perfectly on things like who the top candidates for admission are, or on whether exam candidates performed admirably or abysmally.

Aspect-dawning can't be forced. Someone stuck with the duck, can't simply will the rabbit into existence. This is why Kuhn talks about “conversion experiences” in relation to paradigms. Conversion doesn't replace reason. The point is not that there are no rational arguments to be made in favor of the new paradigm. It's rather that however rational the arguments for the new paradigm might be, they still violate the norms of the old paradigm, to the point that masters of the old paradigm might

<footnote n="72">72. See my discussion of the relationship between Derrida, Cavell and Wittgenstein in *Revolution of the Ordinary*, ch. 3.</footnote>
exhibit life-long resistance to the new one. If some scientists come round it is often because the new paradigm solves some problems important to them. But it is also because the old guard has died off, or because of differences in sensibilities, generational differences, different needs and projects: in short, because of the complex interweaving of their lives and their science. It follows that someone who feels at home in one paradigm may simply never be persuaded that the new one is either important or useful. To my mind, the question of theoretical, philosophical, and literary "conversions" — a genuine change of mind — is particularly complicated, and particularly pressing in the humanities.<fnref n="73" />

Kuhn insists that to change one paradigm for another isn't the same thing as to get closer to the truth about nature, as if the language of the old paradigm somehow was more distant from the world than the language of the new. His point is *not* that science doesn't uncover what we rightfully want to call truths about the world. On the contrary: the new paradigm clearly solves problems the old one couldn't explain. The point is, rather, that it makes no sense to think of language, or science, as either closer or further away from the world. That's the wrong picture. World and word, world and scientific practices, are intertwined from the start. It's because world and word meet in *us*, the users of language, that Kuhn denies that there can ever be a "pure observation-language," a language stripped of every trace of the speaking subject and her investments in her world.<fnref n="74" /> Kuhn, like Wittgenstein and Cavell, stands opposed to positivism, empiricism, and scientism.

Finally: the paradigm doesn't just enable “normal science.” It is the condition of possibility for revolutions, for without a paradigm we would never perceive the anomalies that one day may lead to a paradigm shift. The relationship between paradigm and anomaly is “grammatical” in Wittgenstein's sense of the word, for without a notion of the old, we would never be able to discern the new. When Kuhn writes that “Anomaly appears only against the background provided by the paradigm,” the paradigm becomes the indispensable background that allows the anomaly to be perceived.<fnref n="75" /> To perceive the new, we need to see it against the right background, the right paradigm. In literary history, it's easy to make mistakes here. In my own work on Ib-

<footnote n="73">73. I will discuss such cases in the literary part of my project.</footnote>

<footnote n="74">74. SSR, 126.</footnote>

<footnote n="75">75. SSR, 65.</footnote>
sen, for example, I didn't really understand what made his theater so radical until I began to see it not against the background of realism, which had been the common move, but against the background of aesthetic idealism, the belief that art should uplift us by showing us the true, the good, and the beautiful. The question of background is a question of paradigm, and so of tradition. We have arrived at Cavell.
2. The “New” in Science and Art:
Explorations into the Two-Culture Divide
through Kuhnian-Cavellian Thought

ARYA MOHAN

Conventionality and novelty — these two concepts came to occupy a prominent role
in the philosophical discussions on both sciences and the arts in the second half of
the twentieth century. These domains had established themselves as two autonomous
and very different expressions of human creativity. Though they represent two ways
of interpreting the world, the two cultures getting polarized to the extent of denying
any imbrications is an unpleasant scenario. Discourses addressing the growing divor-
ce between the sciences and the arts began to take shape in the 1950s. In the science
world, methodological pluralism and a consequent multiplicity of truth(s) shattered
the positivist view of scientific progress as an advancement towards a single, unchan-
ging, worldview. With “progress” in science itself becoming a dubious concept, the
status of science as a progressive discourse began to look like an exaggerated claim.<fnref n="1" />
The absence of ahistorical, atemporal truth foregrounds conventions as the decisive
factor for the knowledge claims constituting the body of science, as exemplified by
Thomas Kuhn’s idea of the *paradigm*. Around this time, when the conventionality of
knowledge was coming to prominence, similar ideas emphasizing the conventionality
of art appeared in philosophical discourse. Danto’s essay, “The Artworld,” talks about
the “artworld” in a way which can be compared with Kuhn’s paradigms. The claim is
that for something to be recognized as art, it must make sense in “an atmosphere of

<footnote n="1">1. The idea of progress conceived as proximity to an objective truth, discovered by a rational methodology, was so crucial to the epistemological superiority of science as a discourse synonymous with knowledge that the historian of science, George Sarton argued that “the acquisition and systematization of positive knowledge are the only human activities which are truly cumulative and progressive,” and “progress has no definite and unquestionable meaning in other fields than the field of science.” See George Sarton, *The Study of the History of Mathematics and the Study of the History of Science* (New York: Dover Publications, 1936), 5.</footnote>
artistic theory, a knowledge of the history of art: an artworld.”<fnref n="2" /> The parallel between Kuhn’s paradigm and Danto’s artworld could be briefly presented like this: a particular construction makes sense as science or knowledge only in the context of a paradigm conducive to that; something is recognized as art only in the context of the artworld. Along with these discussions on conventions, the philosophical discourses pertaining to both science and the arts stressed “novelty” as central to understanding progress. Thomas Kuhn’s notion of “paradigm-shift” redefined the advancement of science in terms of the revolutionary changes brought to the domain, challenging the received view of science as a linearly progressive.<fnref n="3" /> The epistemic merit of paradigm-shifts lies in the liberation it brings forth from the set ways of interpreting the world in order to open “new” epistemological possibilities or to conceive the hitherto inconceivable.<fnref n="4" /> Thus, in a way, positivist truth is replaced by “novelty” as a decisive element in the scientific epistemology. Similarly, in the art world, “make[ing] it new,” sloganeered by Ezra Pound and almost synonymous with modernism, served as the touchstone for measuring artistic progress.

Thus, it is in the context of the conceptual pair of conventionality and novelty that I seek to understand the philosophical similarities and differences between Cavell and Kuhn. I am interested in how each of them engages with the role of conventions and how they conceive novelty within the disciplines. At the first glance, they do seem to share certain similarities. For example, In *Must We Mean What We Say?*, Cavell observes that minimalists and pop artists who defy the paradigm so much so that it is not informed by a commitment to the tradition are not doing art.<fnref n="5" /> This is reminiscent of Kuhn who stated that there could be scientists but no science outside a paradigm.<fnref n="6" /> Delving into their texts may reveal how far their philosophies are compatible with each other and if they, combined or individually, provide cues on to overcome the “two cultures” divide.

<footnote n="2">2. Arthur Danto, “The Artworld,” *The Journal of Philosophy* 61, no. 19 (1964): 580.</footnote>

<footnote n="3">3. Thomas Kuhn. *The Structure of Scientific Revolutions* (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1962), 66.</footnote>

<footnote n="4">4. Arya Mohan S, “The Sciences and the Humanities: Building a Bridge between the ‘Two Cultures’ through Rhetoric,” *New Literaria* 3, no. 2 (2022): 38-44.</footnote>

<footnote n="5">5. Cavell, *Must We Mean What We Say?: A Book of Essays* (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), 221-22.</footnote>

<footnote n="6">6. Caroline A. Jones, “The Modernist Paradigm: The Artworld and Thomas Kuhn,” *Critical Inquiry* 26, no. 3 (2000): 507.</footnote>
# 1. Essence Reconciled with Conventionality in Cavell's Theory of Knowledge and Art

Modernism, as theorized by Greenberg, insisted on medium specificity.<fnref n="7" /> The notion underlying formalism was that each art or medium has an essence which should not be contaminated by its traffic with another medium. For Greenberg, modernism is a self-critical activity that prompts each art to dispel everything unnecessary so that it can exist in its pure form.<fnref n="8" /> The search for the “unique and irreducible” core must entice us with an artistic catharsis whereby the medium purges itself of everything it shares with other media.<fnref n="9" /> But it’s hard to brush aside the irony of emphasizing an imperishable core to art at a period when stability and coherence of everything else is being questioned and shattered. An atemporal essence specific to each artform is a venturous claim in such an epoch. Michael Fried, Greenberg’s early follower, later questioned the idea of timeless essences while maintaining that each art form within each period has an individual essence.<fnref n="10" /> Essence is reconceptualized as a product of conventions, susceptible to change. Fried cites Wittgenstein directly in support of this understanding of essence as historically contingent and subject to change, “I say [...]: if you talk about essence —, you are merely noting a convention [...]. But what if I reply: to the depth that we see in the essence there corresponds the deep need for the convention.”<fnref n="11" /> The depth of essence directly reflects the depth of the need for conventions, the innate human need to make an order of things. What we can mean, say, and understand is determined by the shared conventions to the point that the conventional becomes our *natural*. Thus, Cavell writes, “underlying the tyranny of convention is the tyranny of nature.”<fnref n="12" />

Thus, the foundations of art or knowledge or being are not in a pre-existing essence or reality, but in the conventions. Not only an apriori truth and a deterministic universe of the positivist science are re-articulated as the residuum of an or-

<footnote n="7">7. See Diarmuid Costello, “On the Very Idea of a ‘Specific’ Medium: Michael Fried and Stanley Cavell on Painting and Photography as Arts,” *Critical Inquiry* 34, no. 2 (2008): 274-312.</footnote>

<footnote n="8">8. Greenberg, “Modernist Painting” in *Modern Art and Modernism: A Critical Anthology*, ed. by Francis Frascina and Charles Harrison (New York: Harper & Row, 1982), 5-10.</footnote>

<footnote n="9">9. Ibid., 5.</footnote>

<footnote n="10">10. Costello, “On the Very Idea of a ‘Specific’ Medium,” 26.</footnote>

<footnote n="11">11. Ludwig Wittgenstein, *Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics* (Oxford: Blackwell, 1956), 65.</footnote>

<footnote n="12">12. Cavell, *The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy* (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 123.</footnote>
der-seeking pathos but even rationality is understood as the product of a precondi-
tioning that Foucault called epistemes.<fnref n="13" /> Resembling the Foucauldian perspective
on rationality as subject to the generative principles of particular epochs, Kuhn
points out in the introduction to the *The Structure of Scientific Revolutions* that
those points of view which are discarded as myths or errors, say Aristotelian dyna-
mics, phlogistic chemistry, or caloric thermodynamics, were produced by the “same
sort of methods” we rely on for the production of knowledge claims currently accep-
ted as science.<fnref n="14" /> If we accept those discarded views as science, then we have to ac-
cept that science consists of frameworks inconsistent with the notions of rationality
relevant in the modern times. The body of scientific knowledge constructed across
time would then have different modes of rationality incomparable with each other.
Hence, in systems of thought, anything that has come to perform like an objective
entity has always been a contingent construct, be it positivist truth or apriori essen-
ce or an intact logic.

Echoing the Kuhnian emphasis on the conventionality of knowledge, Cavell
writes in *The Claim of Reason*, reminding us of how he used to finish Kuhn’s sen-
tences in Berkeley, that conventions — “grammar, codes, territorialities, myths, ru-
les, standards, criteria” — are all that we have.<fnref n="15" /> Conventions and the consensus
they generate reflect values, for they express what counts as what matters. This ge-
neral claim takes a systematic, methodical shape in Kuhn’s analysis of scientific
discourse. Based on the incommensurabilities made manifest past occurrences of
revolutionary change in the history of scientific development where the advance-
ment from one episode to another, say from Newtonian mechanics to Einsteinian
relativity, Kuhn proposed “paradigm shift” as the mark of scientific transformati-
ons. Despite some twenty-three meanings of the word “paradigm” that Masterman
identifies, the word can be understood as expressing the idea that “universally re-
cognized scientific achievements that for a time provide model problems and solu-

<footnote n="13">13. By “episteme,” Foucault meant the set of unconscious rules that govern all serious scientific dis-
course in a certain society and time period and determine what does and what does not get taken seri-
ously by that scientific community. Thus, episteme is the generative principle of knowledge or the or-
dering principle in a certain time. See Michel Foucault, *The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the
Human Sciences* (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1966), 34.</footnote>

<footnote n="14">14. Kuhn, *The Structure of Scientific Revolutions*, 2.</footnote>

<footnote n="15">15. Ibid., xiii. Kuhn quotes how Cavell and he could communicate in incomplete sentences. Charles Bernstein, “Reading Cavell Reading Wittgenstein,” *boundary* 2 9, no. 2 (1981): 299.</footnote>
tions to a community of practitioners.”<fnref n="16" /> Nothing outside the paradigm is relevant to science. Hence, without the paradigm, there could be scientists but little science. Since each paradigm is self-justifying, there is no objective means of comparison between two successive paradigms. With the rival paradigms being incommensurable, scientific judgments on their relative merits are not just a matter of applying rules that could prove one paradigm superior to another. Consequently, when a proposition disrupts an existing paradigm (what Kuhns calls “revolutionary science”) needs to be evaluated, an appeal to factors not part of the ontological apparatus of the frameworks becomes imperative. And that criterion is the consensus among the scientific community. Given that scientists are specifically trained to make fair and informed judgments of this sort, Kuhn asks, “What better criterion than the decision of the scientific group could there be?”<fnref n="17" /> This emphasis on the scientific community’s judgment as the ultimate source of science’s rational authority is the most fundamental feature of his account of science.

While Kuhn’s inquiry was restricted to the construction of scientific knowledge, Cavell was concerned with the structures that engender shared constraints on what can and what cannot be articulated metaphysically, aesthetically, scientifically, and philosophically. Cavell’s early works probed into the analytical tradition that advocated a “scientific conception of the world,” which, with its famous verifiability theory, rendered metaphysical and subjective statements meaningless.<fnref n="18" /> Verifiability became the very condition of intelligibility in the analytical discourse. In “Existentialism and Analytical Philosophy,” Cavell pointed out that the first revolution in the analytical tradition grew out of the development of new logic or mathematical logic in the nineteenth century, as embraced by Russell and the early Wittgenstein.<fnref n="19" /> It held that the linguistic expression of a proposition is a distortion of its real logical form. Thus, the early analytical philosophers tried to lay bare the logical structure of expressions to find statements’ meanings rather than relying on the linguistic utterances themselves. In refusing to take ordinary language, which is influenced by the context and social processes of arti-

<footnote n="16">16. Margaret Masterman, “The Nature of a Paradigm,” in ed. Lakatos and Musgrave *Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge* (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 59-89. Kuhn, *The Structure of Scientific Revolutions*, xiii.</footnote>

<footnote n="17">17. Ibid., 170.</footnote>

<footnote n="18">18. Cavell, “Existentialism and Analytical Philosophy,” *Daedalus* 93 no. 3 (1964): 950.</footnote>

<footnote n="19">19. Ibid., 949.</footnote>
culation, as the structures generating the intelligibility of the utterances, the human art-
ticulator is removed from the everyday. Thus, Cavell, following Austin and the late
Wittgenstein, sought to subvert the analytical tradition with “ordinary language philo-
sophy” by emphasizing that *we must mean what we say* without having to abstract a
logical form underlying it. In OLP (which Cavell paradoxically identified as the latest
phase in the analytical tradition), the focus is on how meaning is generated through the
subjective utterances in everyday situations. Thus, language is brought closer to ordi-
nary life. This method of bringing language or “words back” to the everyday is an at-
tempt at humanizing language philosophy.<fnref n="20" /> While the analytical aspiration for a logi-
cal reformulation of everyday language distances the human from his/her language,
OLP brings the human back into discourse. Thus, Cavell’s interest in the “logic” of the
ordinary language is part of the background to *The Claim of Reason*, a book in which
he sought to humanize epistemology by bringing the human back into all the shared
structures that constitute the fabric of human experiences. Hence, he delves into the
logical depths of human experiences, including something as simple as identifying a
toothache, in his discussions of criteria.

Cavell makes a distinction between criteria and standards. Criteria are the
principles by which we decide if a particular thing is of a particular kind whereas
standards refer to the degree to which that candidate meets the criterion.<fnref n="21" /> Rationa-
lity, consistency, objectivity, non-arbitrariness — qualities that have traditionally
been thought to distinguish the sciences from the arts — are ensured by formulating
criteria which we all agree to, although always open to repudiation. Cavell emphasiz-
es criteria as crucial to the intelligibility of utterances. And it is criteria that decide
what could even amount as counting as relevant proof, though even criterion can-
not satisfy our demand for proof. Cavell considers a variety of experiences, like so-
meone being in pain, waiting for something, expecting something, claiming that it
is raining, as prompting the question “but by what criterion do we know that?” The
precedence Cavell attributes to criteria, a *man-made* framework, over evidence, an
*impersonal* correlation between two distinct items, in generating the system of re-
lations that matter in the knowability of anything, I feel, is Cavell’s cogent contribu-

<footnote n="20">20. Wittgenstein, *Philosophical Investigations*, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1958), 116.</footnote>

<footnote n="21">21. Cavell, *The Claim of Reason*, 11.</footnote>
tion to the discourse surrounding the textuality of knowledge. Cavell reads Wittgenstein,

Wittgenstein's insight, or implied claim, seems to be something like this, that all our knowledge, everything we assert or question (or doubt or wonder about...) is governed not merely by what we understand as "evidence" or "truth conditions," but by criteria. ("Not merely" suggests a misleading emphasis. Criteria are not alternatives or additions to evidence. Without the control of criteria in applying concepts, we would not know what counts as evidence for any claim, nor for what claims evidence is needed).<fnref n="22" />

Mutually agreed upon criteria are indispensable for human life, whether this is for the production of scientific knowledge or for the creation of art or for living in a society by already entering into a “social contract” to be governed politically by a system.<fnref n="23" /> In the context of mutual disagreement on an underlying criterion, no knowledge is possible. Language is shared and so is everything. All the structures that we use in order to know something, say pain or depression or expectation or being of an opinion, is dependent on human-made forms, “a background of pervasive and systematic agreements among us which we had not realized or had not known we realize” that Wittgenstein sometimes calls “conventions” or “rules.”<fnref n="24" />

Cavell surely does destabilize the concept of a pre-existing, objective reality but his tone is positive. He looks at conventions as the generative structures that make knowledge possible rather than absurd networks of thought rendering false perceptions faulty. For him, there is stability despite the instability, essence despite the arbitrariness of conventions. Later when he discusses skepticism, even as he subverts the certainty of these very conventions which construe the matrix of all human experience, he steers clear of epistemological despair. Quoting the Malcolm-Albritton example, Cavell describes that pain gets manifested in different ways physically and mentally.<fnref n="25" /> Mapping the changes in the brain activities could reveal that a physical

<footnote n="22">22. Ibid., 14.</footnote>

<footnote n="23">23. Ibid., 23.</footnote>

<footnote n="24">24. Ibid., 30.</footnote>

<footnote n="25">25. Ibid., 38.</footnote>
criterion for the experience of pain is met, but the absence of this does not suffice to
rule out the existence of pain. Meeting a criterion doesn't imply the certainty of its
being, it only implies the "near certainty" of an event.<fnref n="26" /> A criterion is something who-
se presence could be used to show the existence of a thing, but its absence doesn't
guarantee the unreality of the thing. Hence there is a gap between "the (seeming)
presence of a criterion and its satisfaction."<fnref n="27" /> This gap creates the room for skepti-
cism. In the absence of an unfailing criteria, it is a question of deep importance how
we could even judge if we are using language correctly. When criteria are not univer-
sally applicable, this becomes an irresolvable problem and there is always an uncer-
tainty if we have communicated ourselves correctly or understood the other correctly.
We cannot know other minds and the external world. In that epistemological gap,
uncertainty fills in. Skepticism is the human disappointment with the limitation of
human knowledge.<fnref n="28" />

Thus, the relation between certainty and criterion is severed and the ontological
status of criteria itself is disturbed, for Cavell asks, quoting Wittgenstein, "what are cri-
teria criteria of?"<fnref n="29" /> But Cavell doesn't leave us in an abyss with respect to the unreliabi-
lity of our criteria. He equips us to settle with the "threat of skepticism" by talking us
down from our disappointment with criteria, since criteria function as criteria "in cer-
tain circumstances" as Wittgenstein and Malcolm repeatedly emphasize.<fnref n="30" /> In the ins-
tance of someone groaning, it could either be because the person is in pain or because
he is feigning pain for a rehearsal. Neither scenario disturbs the equation between gro-
aning and pain, for in both scenarios, groaning remains as a pain behavior. A person's
groaning as part of a rehearsal is an instance of pretending to groan in pain. Hence, cri-
teria dictate the conditions for something to be like something or for something's being
so, even when things are not necessarily thus and so.<fnref n="31" /> And, in certain circumstances,
the satisfaction of the criteria seems fully concomitant with certitude. About how Witt-
genstein's work circumvents the pathos associated with skepticism, Cavell says, "while
at the same time this work seems to give the impression and often seems to some to as-

<footnote n="26">26. Ibid., 39.</footnote>

<footnote n="27">27. Ibid., 41.</footnote>

<footnote n="28">28. Ibid., 42.</footnote>

<footnote n="29">29. Ibid.</footnote>

<footnote n="30">30. Ibid., 7 and 39.</footnote>

<footnote n="31">31. Ibid., 42.</footnote>
sert, that nothing at all is wrong with the human capacity for knowledge, that there is
no cause for disappointment, that our lives, and the everyday assertions sketched by
them, are in order as they are.”<sup>32</sup> The longing for a balance in “the struggle of despair
and hope” that he identifies in Wittgenstein’s works reflects the arbitrariness of criteria
and simultaneously preserves the apparent stability and meaning that they enable.<sup>33</sup>

Though our criteria do not provide an infallible condition of agreement, they
do provide the set of conditions necessary for disagreement. We do not really need to
know for sure if another person is in pain. We only need an accessible association
between pain and pain behaviour to keep the conversation going. Thus, conventions
are the dependable structures generating the possibility of agreements (and disagre-
ements). These conventions that we agree *in* and not on — which Wittgenstein calls
the “forms of life” — are the reliable apparatus in our apprehensions of the world.<sup>34</sup>
Everything is a product of conventions. Knowability itself is a possibility generated by
conventions. The domains segregated as sciences and arts are the consequences of
conventions woven differently for each. But here is a key to building a bridge between
the discourses of the sciences and arts. When Cavell writes about the dependence of
every human formation on conventions that, “human speech and activity, sanity and
community, rest upon nothing more, but nothing less, than this,” he exposes their
common foundations, and the epistemological distinctions between arts and sciences
begin to blur.<sup>35</sup> Cavell’s theory of knowledge and art are the same. In knowledge and
art, conventions are what we have; meaning in essence their outcomes. Just as a mu-
tually agreed upon criteria meet certitude under certain circumstances, mutually
agreed upon conventions in a particular time construct the essence of art. Thus, in “A
Matter of Meaning It,” Cavell writes, “it is not clear a priori what counts, or will
count, as a painting, or sculpture or musical composition. [...] We haven’t got clear
criteria for determining whether a given object is or is not a painting, a sculpture. [...]
The task of the modernist artist, as of the contemporary critic, is to find what it is his
art finally depends upon.”<sup>36</sup> The essence of the art is not in some definitively fixed fe-
atures internal to the art but in the relevant conventions that arose in response to the

<footnote n="32">32. Ibid., 44.</footnote>

<footnote n="33">33. Ibid.</footnote>

<footnote n="34">34. Cavell, *Must We Mean What We Say?*, 52.</footnote>

<footnote n="35">35. Ibid., 52.</footnote>

<footnote n="36">36. Ibid., 219.</footnote>
historical pressures and what deviates from the conventions falls into a void. Here is
a “historicisation of essence,” the encasement of certainty to certain circumstances.<fnref n="37" />
Thus, in Cavell’s theorization, it is conventions that formulate the criteria decisive in
the knowability of the world; it is conventions that engender the medium for concei-
ving art. Just as criteria make intelligibility possible, artistic conventions and adhe-
rence to the medium make something recognizable as art. Therefore, Cavell would
have a problem with the pop and minimal artists who would alter their art to the
point that no common standard of judgement is possible. Such productions are inter-
medial and therefore not art related. The essence that Cavell and Greenberg emphasis-
ed is not a timeless quality but what the conventions at a particular period are capa-
ble of articulating. Essence is reconciled with arbitrariness, and stability is reconciled
with the precariousness that characterizes life.

## 2. The Pathos of Epistemological Loss:
Departure between Kuhn and Cavell

Cavell embraces the conditional certainty and conditional essence afforded by con-
ventions, without despairing about the ineliminable human wish for certainty. Skep-
ticism pervades life and it is in attempts to get past uncertainties that knowledge is
constructed. Thus, absolute certainty could be the end of knowledge. In his later
work, *On Certainty* (which did not really form the basis of Cavell’s work in *The
Claim*), Wittgenstein segregates certainty from knowledge by saying that self-evident
statements that do not elicit doubt foreclose investigations into them and do not
amount to knowledge-claims. They are rather instances of certainty. Hence, to state-
ments of indisputable conviction fashioned after G. E. Moore’s famous “here is one
hand” argument, Wittgenstein says, “I am familiar with it as a certainty.”<fnref n="38" /> Only those
statements qualify as knowledge claims if there is a scope for disagreement and
doubt. The divorce between certainty and knowledge that Wittgenstein proposes re-

<footnote n="37">37. Diarmuid Costello, “On the Very Idea of a ‘Specific’ Medium: Michael Fried and Stanley Cavell on Painting and Photography as Art,” *Critical Inquiry* 34, no. 2 (2008): 292.</footnote>

<footnote n="38">38. G. E. Moore, *Philosophical Papers* (New York: Collier Books, 1959), 144. Wittgenstein, *On Certainty* (Oxford: Blackwell, 1974), 272.</footnote>
sonates with Cavell's explication of the skeptical thesis as: "our relation to the world as a whole, or to others in general, is not one of knowing, where knowing construes itself as being certain."<fnref n="39" /> Thus, Cavell's theory of knowledge involves rethinking certainty from the center of epistemological discourse.

Distancing certainty from epistemology would re-consider the place of objectivity with respect to knowledge. Traditionally, only ahistorical, and objective knowledge that entailed certainty was considered authentic. Certainty is associated with an objective criterion of judgement, uninfluenced by any personal, prejudiced elements. This conception of knowledge that emphasized objectivity removed the human subject from the discourse. However, when Cavell embraces skepticism, he makes room for uncertainties, and, in a way for the subjective, the sacrifice of which ensures objectivity. Thus, in this paper, I juxtapose Cavell's views on epistemology that accommodate the subjective with his perspectives on artistic innovation, in order to interpret his explication of novelty in terms of adherence to tradition as a corollary of his humanized epistemology. Perhaps, this would be an opportune moment to also clarify the subtle difference between Kuhn and Cavell in their attitudes to convention-changes in science and arts respectively, where the former embodies a tragic sense of giving up the paradigm and the latter embodies a comic way of preserving the tradition. But, before I get into this analysis, I beg pardon for lingering on a few details from the history of science to emphasize the equation between authentic knowledge and the "giving up" of the self in scientific epistemology. After all, the postmodernist, post-positivist discourses on science have emphasized that the content of science is not separate from its history and philosophy. This could be the reason Kuhn himself was "often at a loss for response" when trying to decide on whether *The Structure* belonged to the works on the history or philosophy of science.<fnref n="40" /> Hence, I feel that placing Kuhn's thesis in the context of the notion that reliable knowledge comes from detachment would benefit us in understanding the ethos underlying his concept of paradigm-shift.

A major aspect of Kuhn's work is the foregrounding of the communal nature of scientific discourse that challenged the long-standing positivist projection of science

<footnote n="39">39. Cavell, *The Claim of Reason*, 48.</footnote>

<footnote n="40">40. Karl Hufbauer, "From Student of Physics to Historian of Science: T. S. Kuhn's Education and Early Career," *Physics in Perspective* 14 (2012): 459.</footnote>
as consisting of contributions from individual geniuses, recounted in history as linearly progressing events. In Kuhn's theorisation, the paradigm itself is inseparably linked to the community of practitioners and its consensus. Hence, the ethos which evolves along with the development of a scientific community is important for understanding the modern muddle of objectivity, reason, impartiality, morality and self-effacement that forms the background to my analysis of Kuhn's concept of paradigm shift. Even though science had been a collaborative activity since the seventeenth century, it was in the nineteenth century that it began to get professionalised in the modern sense and an "idealized impartiality" emerged as a characteristic of the scientific domain.<fnref n="41" /> Subjective passions and positions were thought to result in perspectival distortions. "Transcendence of individual viewpoints," Lorraine Daston observes, "seemed to some nineteenth century philosophers a precondition for a coherent scientific community."<fnref n="42" /> With the professionalization of science, communication across borders increased and a common viewpoint had to adopted. Daston rewrites the uniformity in nature as the result of the homogeneity maintained in the communication among scientists in order to keep it a collaborative activity rather than the uniformity in nature enabling homogeneity in scientific communication. The self and the subjective must be lost in the scientific activity, either for the "collective good" or for "collective comprehension." Objectivity manifested as "empirical reliability," "procedural correctness," and "emotional detachment" comes from losing some aspect of the self, and critical distance has to be maintained in scientifically knowing something.<fnref n="43" />

Sociological studies of science reveal that the ideal of self-sacrifice of a scientist has been a crucial element in the institutionalization of science as an objective discourse. For example, scholars in the seventeenth century dedicated their work to the sovereign or a person in power to whom the work is addressed.<fnref n="44" /> Inherent in this rhetoric of dedication is the feigned indifference to material rewards and personal ambitions on the part of the scientist. The trope of reluctant authorship enhanced the credibility of a theory since no economic benefits were to be reaped from the pu-

<footnote n="41">41. Lorraine Daston, "Objective and the Escape from Perspective," *Social Studies of Science* 22, no. 4 (1992): 604.</footnote>

<footnote n="42">42. Ibid., 607.</footnote>

<footnote n="43">43. Daston and Peter Galison, "The Image of Objectivity," *Representations* 40 (1992): 82.</footnote>

<footnote n="44">44. Roger Chartier, "Foucault's Chiasmus: Authorship between Science and Literature in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries," in *Scientific Authorship: Credit and Intellectual Property in Science*, ed. Mario Biagioli and Peter Galison (New York: Routledge, 2002), 13-33.</footnote>
blished knowledge claims. A perfect example of this is Galileo's dedication of the *Sicarius Nuncius* to the prince Cosimo de' Medici which transferred the authorship to the prince and thereby earned him credit for his contribution.45 Though the practice of giving up the authorship claims declined with an increase in priority disputes following the professionalization of science, the self-effacing qualities of the scientists were emphasized in other aspects of their practice of science. For example, about the nineteenth century botanist Joseph Hooker's ideals of a professional man of science, Richard Bellon notes that Hooker valued a commitment to the "good of science" rather than to one's personal satisfaction as the central characteristic of a good scientist.46 Hooker had clear demarcations between love of science and love for science.47 A man of science working to quench his personal desire or to realize his passion, according to Huxley, is still engaging in a selfish pursuit. His disdain for knowledge produced from one's passion for science comes from the difficulty of relying or trusting knowledge that originates from (and hence contaminated by) desire. In the construction of science as the domain of reliable knowledge, the knower has to detach himself from what he seeks to know. The details considered so far could be summed up to make the following assertion: certainty, in traditional epistemology, derives from objectivity that demands a sacrifice of subjectivity, a giving up of the personal. Self-abnegation and some form of "giving up" has always been a condition for attaining objective knowledge.

In my unpacking of Kuhn's idea of paradigm shift in the following paragraphs, I will show that Kuhn's theory retains an element of loss (in concordance with the rhetoric of self-sacrifice central to the positivist scientific epistemology), despite the sense of jocundity deriving from the epistemological liberation towards the "new" during a scientific progress. It is in the underlying pathos of Kuhn's perspective which is absent in Cavell's that, I feel, Cavell and Kuhn part ways. While scientific advancement in Kuhnian terms necessitates giving up the existing, constrictive conventions, Cavell insists on preserving tradition, manifested in his ideal of the conservation of conventions in an artistic innovation. I understand the Cavellian emphasis on preser-

<footnote n="45">45. Ibid., 22.</footnote>

<footnote n="46">46. Richard Bellon, "Joseph Dalton Hooker's Ideals for a Professional Man of Science," *Journal of the History of Biology* 34, no. 1 (2001): 52.</footnote>

<footnote n="47">47. Ibid., 51.</footnote>
vation of conventions while modernizing an art as an extension of his views on skepticism. It would be instructive to recall that this section began with how Cavellian acceptance of skepticism sidelines certainty from knowledge. Since Cavell does not regard certainty and objectivity as conditions of knowledge, he does not demand relinquishment of the subjective either. Thus, as he humanizes epistemology by putting the human and subjectivity back into the discourse, he minimizes the “critical distance” (the source of objectivity) by insisting on a view of innovation construed in terms of resemblance to the convention, and thereby subtly differs from the Kuhnian rhetoric of letting go of one’s personal convictions in the existing paradigm, an instance of distancing from the self. This inclination towards preservation reflects in the way he conceives the “new,” i.e., in terms of the extension of the old, as will be explained shortly. But before that, I will explain how the rhetoric of the loss of the self or the subjective echoes in Kuhn’s idea of paradigm shifts.

The replacement of an existing paradigm by a new paradigm, which marks scientific progress for Kuhn, is a sacrifice no less than self-abnegation, for the practitioners have boundless commitment to the paradigm, something Kuhn’s predecessor Michael Polanyi called “intellectual passion.”<fnref n="48" /> Their commitment to the existing framework is so strong that they don’t feel compelled to reject the paradigm in order to explain the anomalous detail. Instead, they reserve such details inconsistent with the paradigm in the hopes that the existing framework would someday be able to either account for them or just explain them as illusory. Polanyi quotes how the French Academy of Science refused to admit the proof for the fall of meteorites throughout the eighteenth century despite its great obviousness just because it disturbed the traditional superstitious theories regarding heavenly bodies.<fnref n="49" /> About the resistance to the new paradigm, Kuhn writes, “The source of resistance is the assurance that the older paradigm will ultimately solve all its problems, that nature can be shunned into the box the paradigm provides.”<fnref n="50" /> The idea of convention here is as a restrictive framework that suppresses a different logic or a different way of seeing “nature,” slightly different from Cavell’s perspective of conventions as enabling forms which

<footnote n="48">48. Michael Polanyi, *Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy* (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1958), 143.</footnote>

<footnote n="49">49. Ibid., 138.</footnote>

<footnote n="50">50. Kuhn, *The Structure of Scientific Revolutions*, 150.</footnote>
In addition to the scientists' emotional commitment to conventions that tyrannize an alternative framework, the theory-ladenness of the ontological clusters of an existing paradigm always already constrains the possibility of conceiving conceptual fabrics inconsistent with the existing one.<fnref n="52" /> Since the conception of alternative ways of perception is impossible within the same interpretive framework, one paradigm has to be given up for another. Without a loss of conviction in the already existing paradigm, no revolutionary change would be possible. Hence, scientific advancement, understood in terms of paradigm shifts, would not be possible without departing from the existing conventions. The painful separation from the paradigm which they felt intellectually committed to is a form of self-sacrifice, as required of an objective discourse aspiring for certainty.

What impedes progress has to be given up, what enables it has to be preserved. It is because Cavell looks at conventions as enabling that he presents the disruption of conventions in preservationist terms. When artistic conventions are modified — when there is a change — that change itself is enabled by these very conventions and by artists who seek to preserve the conventions. Thus, he writes, “it is because certain human beings crave the conservation of their art that they seek to discover how, under altered circumstances, paintings and pieces of music can still be made, and hence revolutionize their art beyond the recognition of many.”<fnref n="53" /> Here,

<footnote n="51">51. Paul Feyerabend, *Against Method: Outline of an Anarchistic Theory* (London: Verso: 1993), 12.</footnote>

<footnote n="52">52. Feyerabend, *Problems of Empiricism, Philosophical Papers* (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 45.</footnote>

<footnote n="53">53. Cavell, *The Claim of Reason*, 121.</footnote>
I’m reminded of the skeptic who does not obsess over certainty and objectivity, and hence resists giving up the “self” which is expressed as his/her conviction in the conventions — conviction not enough to be certain, but sufficient to generate agreement. Thus, I understand the Cavellian interpretation of artistic change as an extension of that which already exists, juxtaposing it with his views on skepticism. Skepticism, as previously stated, involves an epistemological gap where you cannot know for sure if you have understood the other correctly or if you have communicated yourself correctly. One person’s utterances do not have anything in common with another person’s utterances, if they mean different things. Still, they must agree in language or (in criteria in general) in order to be speaking at all. Hence, the utterances have something in common despite having no meaning in common. Cavell’s interpretation of change as an extension of the already existing is an instance of finding something in common between the two articulations, where for the differences to be noticed, there should be something in common. For two things to be different, they should be sufficiently similar. A change counts as relevant only in its relationship to the previous paradigm. The change has to be from within. Thus, in changing the convention, the artist does not really depart from it. Cavell disregards pop, minimalism and conceptual art as irrelevant because they diverge from the tradition to the point that it no longer resembles the tradition, making it impossible to comprehend them as anything meaningful. Greenberg blankets them under “novelty art,” rhetorically equating it with the low-grade commodities that were branded “new” for marketing purposes.<fnref n="54" /> Only “reluctant revolutionaries” who in their later career were drawn back to the tradition they were modifying are considered as genuine innovators.<fnref n="55" /> Greenberg too minimizes the sacrifice involved in an artistic progress when he discusses Cézanne who despite his impressionistic inclinations didn’t fully give up the conventions. Greenberg writes, “It was almost precisely because of his greater reluctance to ‘sacrifice’ to innovation that Cézanne’s newness turned out to be more lasting and also more radical than that of other post-Impressionists.”<fnref n="56" /> Even the act of changing the paradigm which, for Kuhn, is a relinquish-

<footnote n="54">54. North, *Novelty*, 175.</footnote>

<footnote n="55">55. See the debate with Greenberg in Thierry de Duve, *Clement Greenberg Between the Lines* (Paris: Dis Voir: 1996), 125.</footnote>

<footnote n="56">56. Greenberg, “Conventions and Innovations,” in *Homemade Esthetics: Observations on Art and Taste* (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 54.</footnote>
ment of the same, Greenberg calls an act of possessing. He says that in order to re-
volutionize a convention, one must “possess” it first.<fnref n="57" /> Thus, the extent of change is
re-articulated as an extent of possession; change is presented as fuller possession,
downplaying the sense of abandonment.

Hence, there is continuity, rather than a loss of it. For Cavell, while the “rele-
vant change” is always already a part of the tradition, for Kuhn, revolutionary chan-
ge, is undeniably incommensurable with the conventions.<fnref n="58" /> The result is a rupture,
a discontinuity. There is no “entailment, inclusion, contradiction, disjunction” and
the two paradigms are completely independent.<fnref n="59" /> Science is re-articulated as a pro-
gressive but discontinuous discourse in post-positivist philosophy whereas each
new tradition in art is a part of the old for Cavell. One recalls the age-old ambiguity
surrounding the “new.” Since the “new” exists only in relation to the old, it always
carries the past with it which makes novelty an ontological absurdity.<fnref n="60" /> Novelty is a
problematic concept for any system since novelty might disrupt the static funda-
mentals of that very system. According to the mechanical view of the world which
holds that the world runs according to a set of natural laws, “the end is foreseeable
in the beginning, the end is contained in the beginning.”<fnref n="61" /> Novelty undermines this
contribution of science. In fact, novelty is very disruptive to science, since science
depends on the reproducibility of results and on the anticipation of results from a
cause.

But Kuhn attaches “progress,” a very prized concept in science, to the “new”
when he locates scientific progress in paradigm shifts as it brings a liberation from
the old. Kuhn looks at the traditions as delaying the truly novel for a very long time.
For novelty to be an actual ontological possibility, there must be a break with the tra-
dition so that what comes after is unanticipated. Thus, Kuhn writes in an anti-teleo-
logical tone, “the entire process may have occurred, as we now suppose biological
evolution did, without benefit of a set goal, a permanent fixed scientific truth, of

<footnote n="57">57. Ibid., 52.</footnote>

<footnote n="58">58. Cavell, *Must We Mean What We Say?* 253.</footnote>

<footnote n="59">59. Struan Jacobs, “Michael Polanyi and Thomas Kuhn: Priority and Credit,” 30, http://polanyisoci-ety.org/TAD%20WEB%20ARCHIVE/TAD33-2/TAD33-2-fnl-pg25-36-pdf.pdf.</footnote>

<footnote n="60">60. North, *Novelty*, 17.</footnote>

<footnote n="61">61. Richard Boyle, *Natural Novelty: The Newness Manifest in Existence* (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2016), 23.</footnote>
which each stage in the development of scientific knowledge is a better exemplar.”<fnref n="62" /> Cavell takes the exactly opposite perspective on novelty. He articulates a version of novelty that might kill novelty, since, for him, traditions determine and enable novelty. Even in the abstract sense, novelty makes sense only in relation to a past that didn’t contain it. Cavell focuses on that invisible and inextricable link between the old and the new when he writes, “the modernist is incomprehensible apart from his questioning of specific traditions, the traditions that have produced him. The modernizer is merely blind to the power of tradition, mocking his chains.”<fnref n="63" /> The modernizer is not a threat to artistic essence for the conventions that construct the essence is not entirely sacrificed. There is no conflict between the old and the new; nor is there any loss incurred by a sacrifice of one’s convictions in conventions since the same conventions beget innovations. This resonates with a humanized epistemology that does not demand a relinquishment of the subjective, manifested even in the form of strongly held beliefs, to ensure objectivity.

### 3. Concluding Thoughts:

#### Kuhn and Cavell's Comments on “Science and Art”

In this paper, I have attempted to decipher Cavell's philosophy of artistic progress by exploring its intersections with his speculations on skepticism and knowledge, and I have compared this philosophy with Kuhn's ideas on scientific revolution. Cavell can construe a version of innovation that does not really part from conventions or does not require losing one's conviction in conventions. I read this articulation of innovation in terms of preservation of traditions as comparable with his philosophy of skepticism. Cavell's exposition of skepticism prepares us to settle for the perpetual condition of uncertainty in the knowability of anything. It would then re-think the aspirations for objectivity and the need to sacrifice the subjective, expressed here as one's personal convictions in conventions. Thus, the preservational undertones of Cavell's account of artistic innovation, are, for me, a corollaries of his views on a humanized

<footnote n="62">62. Kuhn, *The Structure of Scientific Revolutions*, 172-73.</footnote>

<footnote n="63">63. Cavell, *The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Films*, enlarged ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), 15.</footnote>
epistemology. But why would I read Cavell's philosophy of the arts in terms of his vi-
ews on epistemology? I am inspired to attempt this juxtaposition by Cavell's own
bringing together of the two discourses of arts and sciences in his thoughts on the
asymmetry in their relationship. Addressing the "inner loss" of the scientific discipli-
ne where young scientists go remote from the body of work that exerts its own inspi-
ration, Cavell suggests that instead of introducing science students to art, they should
engage in science as art and that they should "in short, become artists, to care
whether their art is going to survive."<fnref n="64" />

Preservation is characteristic of arts, which is fundamentally creative in spi-
rit, since art embodies the human wish to leave behind some remnants and hence
beat the process of having to finally give up. Through art, life surpasses death. As
Greenberg put it, "Art, is among other things, continuity."<fnref n="65" /> Of life. Kuhn realizes
this aspect about the art domain and notes that artistic outputs of a previous era
remain vital parts of the contemporary artistic scene despite the altered
sensibility.<fnref n="66" /> For Kuhn, the differences between science and art become the most
pronounced in the relevance the past traditions hold in the artistic sensibilities of
the era that succeeds it. He points out that archival structures like museum would
be important for art, but not so much for science, in formulating public taste or
inspiring novices to the field.<fnref n="67" /> This resonates with the Cavellian version of innova-
tion that arise in arts while keeping the bond with the past intact. Kuhn observes
that the scientist's goal is to find the best solution to a problem, hence the trajectory
followed in its discovery and the account of idiosyncrasies of the scientists are an
unnecessary liability for science.<fnref n="68" /> He also points out that within the same tradition
of styles, earlier sketches of a work of art would lead to its fuller appreciation by
enabling the derivations of different meanings from the work's past shapes. Com-
menting on the impossibility of such an appreciation in science, he concludes rather
affirmatively that "unlike art, science destroys its past."<fnref n="69" /> However, Cavell unders-
tands this preservational aspect to be common to both science and art, as he writes,

<footnote n="64">64. Cavell, "Observations on Art and Science," *Daedalus* 115, no. 3 (1986): 174.</footnote>

<footnote n="65">65. Greenberg, "Modernist Painting," 10.</footnote>

<footnote n="66">66. Kuhn, “[The New Reality in Art and Science]: Comment,” *Comparative Studies in Society and History* 11, no. 4 (1969): 407.</footnote>

<footnote n="67">67. Ibid.</footnote>

<footnote n="68">68. Ibid., 408.</footnote>

<footnote n="69">69. Ibid., 407.</footnote>
"the wish to make something, to *counter destructiveness*, to leave the world marginally better than you found it, to mend it, is at the heart of both the arts and the sciences."<sup>70</sup> Thus, while Kuhn detaches and gives up traditions, Cavell possesses, preserves and sometimes obsesses about them.

<footnote n="70">70. Cavell, "Observations on Art and Science," 174.</footnote>
3. Autonomy, Constitutivity,
Exemplars, Paradigms

TIMUR UÇAN

**Introduction**

This paper proposes an exploration of relationships and exchanges between the
philosophies of Cavell and Kuhn by the study of aspects of the philosophy of
Wittgenstein.<fnref n="1" /> Although the notions of language games and family resemblances used
by Kuhn in the *Structure of Scientific Revolutions* have been elaborated by
Wittgenstein, Cavell's reading of Wittgenstein inspired that of Kuhn. I will attempt to
show that against this background, Cavell's conception of the relations of arts, works
of arts, and artists, can be relevantly compared to Kuhn's conception of the relations
of sciences, scientific successes, and scientific practitioners. Three ways of elucidating
the mutual exchanges between Cavell and Kuhn may be distinguished: One consists
in clarifying the ways in which Cavell and Kuhn *explicitly* mutually inspired each
other. Another one consists in clarifying that Cavell's Wittgenstein inspired Kuhn.
And a third one consists in clarifying that Wittgenstein inspired both Kuhn and
Cavell and the ways in which he inspired them. This third way is not exclusive of the
first two and even contributes to these by rendering explicit their stakes. For at stake
is not only the restitution of the truth of an exegetical mediation: that Kuhn's
Wittgenstein cannot be truly understood without accounting for Cavell's
Wittgenstein. Rather the transitive character of the mediation implied by
interpretation does not substitute for the intransitive character of a thoroughly
philosophical inheritance. It is not the case that because Kuhn was inspired by Cavell
who was inspired by Wittgenstein, that Kuhn could be inspired only by Cavell's

<footnote n="1">1. I thank the editors and reviewers of this special issue of *Conversations*, and also Donald Cornell, for their helpful remarks, comments and suggestions on earlier versions of this text.</footnote>
Wittgenstein, and not by Wittgenstein. Further, the question is not only philological but philosophical if we take into account the methods and the philosophy of Wittgenstein. To use an image: that a path was indicated by someone to someone else could not have implied that what was indicated by a person to another was oneself; this much was already known to us with the old fable of the moon, the finger and the sage. With this paper I will thus first seek to establish the relevance of the comparison of Cavell's conception of the relations of arts, works of arts, and artists with Kuhn's conception of the relations of sciences, scientific successes, and scientific practitioners. Then I will attempt to render explicit the unrestricted limits of this comparison both to account for the mutual exchanges between Cavell and Kuhn and consider or bring out some symmetries and asymmetries concerning the place of paradigms in sciences and arts.

# I. The Relevance of the Comparison of the Place of Paradigms in Arts and Sciences

Could someone be interested and become absorbed in a pin, or a crumpled handkerchief? Suppose someone did. Shall we say, “It’s a matter of taste”? We might dismiss him as mad (or suppose he is pretending), or, alternatively, ask ourselves what he can possibly be *seeing in* it. That these *are* our alternatives is what I wish to emphasize. The situation demands an explanation, the way watching someone listening intently to Mozart, or working a puzzle, or, for that matter, watching a game of baseball does not. The forced choice between the two responses — “He’s mad” (or pretending, or on some drug, etc.) or else “What’s in it?” — are the imperative choices we have when confronted with a new development in art. (A revolutionary development in science is different: not because the new move can initially be proved valid — perhaps it can’t, in the way we suppose that happens — but because it’s easier, for the professional community, to spot cranks and frauds in science than in art; and because if what the innovator does is valid, then it is *eo ipso* valid for the rest of the professional community, *in their own work*, and as it stands, as well.) But objects of art not
merely interest and absorb, they move us; we are not merely involved with them, but concerned with them, and care about them; we treat them in special ways, invest them with a value which normal people otherwise reserve only for other people — *and* with the same kind of scorn and outrage. They *mean* something to us, not just the ways statements do but the way people do.<fnref n="2" />

[T]he act of judgment that leads scientists to reject a previously accepted theory is always based upon more than a comparison of that theory with the world. The decision to reject one paradigm is always simultaneously the decision to accept another, and the judgment leading to that decision involves the comparison of both paradigms with nature and with each other.<fnref n="3" />

[...] I have been concerned to emphasize the similarity of the evolutionary lines of the two disciplines [art and science]. In both the historian can discover periods during which practice conforms to a tradition based upon one or another stable constellation of values, techniques, and models. In both he is also able to isolate periods of relatively rapid change in which one tradition and one set of values and models gives way to another. That much, however, can probably be said about the development of any human enterprise. [...] Recognizing that fundamental resemblance can therefore be no more than a first step. Having made it, one must also be prepared to discover a number of revealing differences in developmental fine structure.<fnref n="4" />

That the place of paradigms in arts and sciences can be limitedly but relevantly compared is quite clear both for Cavell and Kuhn in the passages quoted above.<fnref n="5" /> In both disciplines, practices, new moves and innovations do involve the reappraisals of

<footnote n="2">2. Cavell, "Music Discomposed," in *Must We Mean What We Say?: A Book of Essays* (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 197-98.</footnote>

<footnote n="3">3. Thomas Kuhn, *The Structure of Scientific Revolutions*, 3rd ed. (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1996), 77.</footnote>

<footnote n="4">4. Kuhn, *The Essential Tension: Selected Studies in Scientific Tradition and Change* (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1977), 349.</footnote>

<footnote n="5">5. These passages ought to be read with passages from Clarence Irving Lewis, "A Pragmatic Conception of the A Priori," *The Journal of Philosophy* 20, no. 7 (1923): 169, https://doi.org/10.2307/2939833 and *Mind and the World Order: Outline of a Theory of Knowledge* (New York: Dover Publications, 1991), 232-33, 256, 304, 306-7, and 385. These works deeply inspired both Kuhn's and Cavell's approaches to periods of transition.</footnote>
past achievements with new ones and inversely, to evaluate the present of a practice,
open to further developments. However, exegetical debates concerning the mutual
contributions of Kuhn and Cavell, and especially concerning Kuhn's notion of
incommensurability have rendered difficult, if not unintelligible, the achievability,
and eventually, the relevance, of this comparison. Jones' formulation of
incommensurability as "the idea that possessors of different paradigms could not
even be said to possess the same language" could eventually provide us with a
condensed expression of this difficulty.<fnref n="6" /> For, might it be the case that possession of
both paradigms and languages would be required for a paradigm change or shift to be
conceivable, it would be at best unclear that the conception of a new paradigm and
eventually the occurrence of a paradigm change would be conceivable at all. Kuhn
does surely consider that relations of possession do hold between paradigms and
persons.<fnref n="7" /> However, could this have implied that relations of possession could have
held, and could even have been constitutive of relations of persons and languages?<fnref n="8" />
That this second question could be at best rhetorical is a possibility whose vividity
needs to be clarified. Jones' formulation of the notion of incommensurability, as
innocuous as it may seem, does also convey several myths about the relations or
quasi-relations of persons, paradigms and languages. It involves a myth that
Wittgenstein, among other philosophers, relentlessly criticized: that of a private
language, of the pseudo-idea of a basic relation of possession (by contrast with
appropriation, in an eventually moral yet not moralistic sense) between languages
and persons.<fnref n="9" /> The mediation by the notion of possession could be ineluctably implied
to envisage any relation or quasi-relation between persons, languages and paradigms.

<footnote n="6">6. Caroline A. Jones, "The Modernist Paradigm: The Artworld and Thomas Kuhn," *Critical Inquiry* 26, no. 3 (2000): 488-528 and 501, https://doi.org/10.1086/448976.</footnote>

<footnote n="7">7. Kuhn, *The Structure of Scientific Revolutions*, xi, 47, and 168.</footnote>

<footnote n="8">8. Even when Kuhn considers the case in which the outcome of a shift of paradigm is the appropriation of a different lexicon (Kuhn, "Commensurability, Comparability, Communicability," *PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association* 1982, no. 2: 668-88, 683, https://doi.org/10.1086/psaprocbienmeetp.1982.2.192452), Kuhn does not consider the hypothesis of the relevance of the constitutivity of the ownership relation between languages and persons. The derivative and metaphoric character of such passages is clear when considered against the background of the negation of the existence of a language into which paradigm-relative-languages, considered as sets of propositions containing coordinated translations of each of their sub-components, could be translated. Kuhn thereby calls into question the coherence of the idea of an all-comprehensive language conceived in a set-theoretical manner.</footnote>

<footnote n="9">9. On this see Timur Uçan, *The Issue of Solipsism in the Early Works of Sartre and Wittgenstein* (2016), 116, https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/62314/1/2016UcanTUPhD_%282%29.pdf.</footnote>
The relation of possession could be the paradigm of the relations between persons and paradigms.<fnref n="10" /> And surely if it is the case that relations of persons and languages could basically be relations of possession, then it could be the case that relations of persons and paradigms could also basically be relations of possession. Practitioners could thus *per se* be confined by the very paradigms of their own practices. However, from the outset, lost would be that the limited comparison between arts and sciences made both by Cavell and Kuhn is not only unproblematic but also relevant, and that making such comparison could not presuppose the holding of a (constitutive) relation of possession between persons, languages, and paradigms. To this extent, the task of the establishment of the relevance of this comparison, or, facing the charge of anachronism, of the reestablishment of the relevance of this comparison, remains to be achieved. It is at best unclear that all we use within our lives, all that we need to live our lives, could need to be all that we possess; and this could especially matter with respect to our consideration of our (quasi-)relations with language.

To begin, I propose two remarks. The first is that no more than according to Kuhn normal science could have existed without paradigms, could arts and genres have existed without paradigms according to Cavell. It might be said that such consideration is not (even) compatible with the diversity of the meanings of the very term “paradigm,” according to Kuhn himself. However, that the supposedly irreducible diversity of meanings that the term “paradigm” can contextually come to receive is not compatible with the unity presented by the notion of paradigm, the exemplary paradigm, the successfulness of the success, alluded to by Hacking is also a point explicitly made by Kuhn himself.<fnref n="11" /> In this apparently rather weak sense, that paradigms are constitutive can be rendered explicit without transcendentalism or metaphysics. For, non-reversible relations hold between *that* which realized paradigms render intelligible and possible, and the practices and communities of persons who understand and realize against the background of the internalization of at least aspects of paradigms. The recourse to the notion of background does not necessarily imply

<footnote n="10">10. On this see Cavell, *The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy* (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), 125.</footnote>

<footnote n="11">11. Ian Hacking, *Representing and Intervening: Introductory Topics in the Philosophy of Natural Science* (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 10. Kuhn, *The Essential Tension*, 351.</footnote>
background *syntheses* to render possible the thought that paradigms are constitutive — the transcendental could not be unavoidable, and it is, in spite of the pretense that goes together with such projects, a mistake to suppose its ineluctability as *propaedeutics*.<fnref n="12" /> The second remark is that the realization of a philosophical study of the relations of the philosophies of Cavell and Kuhn implies to distinguish what we nevertheless need to study relationally, that is to say, exactly in the relations in which we find, discover, live, experiment; and this involves the distinct consideration of two triplets: the first is that of arts, artworks and artists, and the second is that of sciences, discoveries and scientists. The compared artistic or scientific products of the enactments of hexises or dispositions could not be achieved without their *distinct* considerations. We could not have come to compare these if it was not entirely obvious that the consideration of limit-cases, eventually more complicated cases, are *secondary* in and to our world-conceptions. That is to say, the consideration of some cases can rightly or wrongly lead us to think that a shift of paradigm (not in the sense of the paradigmatic example, but in the sense of a world-conception, ideological or not) occurred, imposed itself, or should occur, etc. (consider, for example, the recent success of a production realized by Jason Allen with the mediation of an artificial intelligence at an art competition and which gave rise to many questions with respect to the future of art, about the significance of human creativity, and about the excesses of the markets of art). However, considerations of such limit-cases, are secondary within the practices whose evolutions are analyzed by Kuhn and Cavell. Such practices are secondary in the sense that, if we want to use the form-background distinction to render explicit the stakes, it is against backgrounds of regularity, conventionality, conformity, that irregularity, unconventionality, unconformity appear as such. And both philosophers immensely contributed to understand and account for such backgrounds.

Then let us ask: could one be bound to make either the apology of modernism or the post-modernist claim that the swan song of modernism has already occurred?<fnref n="13" />

<footnote n="12">12. This point matters both to integrate and differentiate Cavell's approach of phenomenology from attempts by classical or traditional phenomenologists to account for worldliness and for relations between perception and action. See on this part II.1 of this text.</footnote>

<footnote n="13">13. For, from the outset, if it can (circumstancially and enormously) matter to argue in favor of an earlier or a later paradigm, it is nevertheless rather unclear that arguing in favor or against a paradigm could be *unavoidable* at all. Further, it is the depth of the involvements of our lives with several paradigms that can come to be thereby neglected, an aspect whose explanation is attempted in the second part of this paper.</footnote>
Let us remark that the consideration of such an alternative goes together with a tension that is characteristic of the transition periods considered by Cavell and Kuhn and that they in fact have shown not to be problematic, a tension between the compatibility of the contingent existences of a plurality of paradigms and the incompatibility and sometimes the inadequacy of some paradigms given some means and ends. The use of the limited comparison of the place of paradigms within arts and sciences eases mutual contributions and exchanges among practices as it contributes to a better distinction of their mutually independent evolutions and achievements.

Yet, the relevance and mutually explicative character of the comparison of the place of paradigms in arts and sciences according to both Kuhn and Cavell is to be unfolded and explained. According to Kuhn's own terms, it is nothing but a first step, a first step inspired from Wittgenstein, towards a better understanding of differences.<fnref n="14" /> But that it is a first step, came to be lost. To recover its obviousness involves the explicitation of a common philosophical background. I shall argue that the relevance and mutually explicative character of this comparison is dependent upon a threefold point, the contingency, the freedom, and the relationality of paradigms.

# 1. The Contingency of Paradigms

We shall first start by considering the contingency of paradigms, that works of art and scientific successes necessarily contingently are part of nature, a probably non-informative triviality, yet to render explicit, as its place within our world-conceptions is not superficial. We furthermore owe to ourselves such explicitation as the affirmation of the contingency of paradigms gave rise to many puzzles some of which were expressed by Kripke in Naming and Necessity.<fnref n="15" /> For, what could have seemed to override any conception, is that necessary relations (some of which could be a priori, if we recall the treatment proposed by Kripke of mathematical statements; and probably some others a posteriori, if we think the fact of history, rather than historicality or historicity as an essentialized feature of consciousness) may hold

<footnote n="14">14. Kuhn, *The Essential Tension*, 349.</footnote>

<footnote n="15">15. Saul A. Kripke, *Naming and Necessity* (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003).</footnote>
among elements which are not so — whose non-existence could not have been inconceivable. How could constitutive relations — necessary in some sense — (may) hold between paradigmatic exemplars if all the parts of all the elements involved by such relations are contingent? It was one of the major advances made by Wittgenstein with the *Tractatus*, radicalized in the *Investigations*, to dispel the specter, to dissolve the illusion of an incompatibility between the modalities of the existence of elements and relations. Both Cavell and Kuhn, I argue, have fully integrated what could have seemed an unimportant point within their accounts of the place of paradigms within arts and sciences. Both the attention provided by Cavell to the grammatical, with his substitutive account of learning inspired by the philosophy of later Wittgenstein (as our forms of life are achievements realized by substitution of expressions to others), and that of Kuhn to the quasi-internal relations between paradigms and anomalies are two ways that are relatively autonomous, independent and distinct to thoroughly think and account for the *contingency of paradigms* without thereby calling into question in any sense whatsoever both, the historical character of relations and the necessity of some of them, and, the certainty of the knowledge and of the practices that paradigms render possible or, at least, contribute to render possible.<fnref n="16" /> The achievement of this task involves on Kuhn’s approach to have established that paradigms are constitutive not only with respect to science but also with respect to nature:

> Like the issue of competing standards, that question of values can be answered only in terms of criteria that lie outside of normal science altogether, and it is that recourse to external criteria that most obviously makes paradigm debates revolutionary. Something even more fundamental than standards and values is, however, also at stake. I have so far argued only that paradigms are constitutive of science. Now I wish to display a sense in which they are constitutive of nature as well.<fnref n="17" />

Thereby, Kuhn asks us to philosophically acknowledge both the immanence and inherency of paradigms to nature, which is not a triviality inasmuch as at stake is not,

<footnote n="16">16. Cavell, *The Claim of Reason*, ch. VII. Kuhn, *The Structure of Scientific Revolutions*, ch. 5.</footnote>

<footnote n="17">17. Ibid., 110.</footnote>
or at least not only, the successfulness of the inclusion of paradigmatic elements within the set of all, but to account for structuring relations between paradigmatic parts and whole without which there would not be notions of whole, world and nature. For if it is the case that paradigms are constitutive not only of science but also of nature, then this does imply that although contingent, paradigms contribute to shape not only our understanding of reality, but reality throughout, contrary to Platonist assumptions. The intelligibility of the kind of revolutionary and transitory situations considered by Kuhn in the tenth chapter of the *Structure*, when the question can, at times, even come to seem relevant whether the world prior to a research is commensurable at all with the world after its achievement, precisely implies that the contribution of paradigms to the structuration of reality could not remain confined to contexts that are internal to scientific practices.<fnref n="18" /> This much could nowadays seem a void philosophical demand, yet a stake was the realization of the rupture from Platonism which implied to grant the eventuality of the relevance of a radical separation of sense from its conditions, and more generally the criticism of what Cavell came to characterize, after C. I. Lewis and in accordance with T. Clarke, as traditional epistemology.<fnref n="19" />

> Let us now ask: What are we imagining when we think of this as merely "in fact" the case about our world, in the way it is merely in fact the case that the flowers in this garden have not been sufficiently watered, or that there are six white houses with rose gardens on this street? It is my feeling that such things could present themselves to us as just more facts about our world were we to (when we) look upon the whole world as one object, or as one complete set of objects: that is another way of characterizing that experience I have called "seeing ourselves as outside the world as a whole," looking in at it, as we now look at some objects from a position among others. This experience I have found to be fundamental in classical epistemology (and, indeed, moral philosophy). It sometimes presents itself to me as a sense of powerlessness to know the world, or to act upon it; I think it is also working in the existentialist's (or, say,

<footnote n="18">18. Ibid., 111.</footnote>

<footnote n="19">19. Thompson Clarke, "The Legacy of Skepticism," *The Journal of Philosophy* 69, no. 20 (1972): 754-69. See Lewis, *Mind and the World Order*.</footnote>
Santayana's) sense of the precariousness and arbitrariness of existence, the utter contingency in the fact that things are as they are. (Wittgenstein shares this knowledge of the depth of contingency. His distinction in this matter is to describe it better, to live its details better. I would like to say: to remove its theatricality.)<fnref n="20" />

Cavell diagnoses the acknowledgment of contingency as a difficulty basic to philosophy. And he does make a liberatory use of a quasi-image to solve it. The would-be image is that of the world as an object, which thereby implies that we can exactly as an object, look at it from the outside. Now, the obvious difficulty is that such would-be representation tends to force two opposite demands on our conception of our worldliness: that of the acknowledgement of the contingency of our situation, for we do conceive the eventuality of its nonexistence, and that of the acknowledgement of the necessity of our situation, for even the nonexistence of our conception would result from its termination. The unfreeing use of the analogy is ultimately deceptive and misled in that it tends to lead us to represent the world as a room, as a place, whose exteriority would thus unquestionably be certain. But given that the sort of exteriority that we should be able to have needed for the analogy to be conclusive is not unquestionable as such, its inconclusiveness leaves us with the acknowledgement and the knowledge of contingency as a task.<fnref n="21" />

## 2. The Freedom of Paradigms

The consideration of the contingency of paradigms, to this extent, leaves us before that of their *freedom*, both according to Cavell and Kuhn. It is, I argue, the second relevant aspect of the limited comparison of the place of paradigms in arts and sciences: there are no such things as criteria predetermining what could count as a successful work of art or science. Such negation can seem to be peremptory and

<footnote n="20">20. Cavell, *The Claim of Reason*, 236.</footnote>

<footnote n="21">21. This reading and proposal of mine is not a departure from Cavell's thought, but an attempt to underscore, extend, and radicalize the point he made. Indeed, according to Cavell, but also according to Sartre and Wittgenstein, realization of one's own "finitude" by oneself could not imply that one could be "bounded" or "restricted" by such realization. Such that the difficulty does not prove to be lying in an attempt by a person to represent something to oneself, but in a confusion by a person of imaginary and real relations.</footnote>
gratuitous, as not only can it come to seem at odds with claims of Cavell and Kuhn, but also perfectly incompatible with these:

To think of a human activity as governed throughout by mere conventions, or as having conventions which may as well be changed as not, depending upon some individual or other's taste or decision, is to think of a set of conventions as tyrannical. It is worth saying that conventions can be changed because it is essential to a convention that it be in service of some project, and you do not know a priori which set of procedures is better than others for that project. That is, it is internal to a convention that it be open to change in convention, in the convening of those subject to it, in whose behavior it lives. [...] The internal tyranny of convention is that only a slave of it can know how it may be changed for the better, or know why it should be eradicated. Only masters of a game, perfect slaves to that project, are in a position to establish conventions which better serve its essence. This is why deep revolutionary changes can result from attempts to conserve a project, to take it back to its idea, keep it in touch with its history. [...] It is because certain human beings crave the conservation of their art that they seek to discover how, under altered circumstances, paintings and pieces of music can still be made, and hence revolutionize their art beyond the reception of many. This is how, in my illiteracy, I read Thomas Kuhn's *The Structure of Scientific Revolutions*: that only a master of the science can accept a revolutionary change as a natural extension of that science; and that he accepts it, or proposes it, in order to maintain touch with the idea of that science, with its internal canons of comprehensibility and comprehensiveness, as if against the vision that, under altered circumstances, the normal progress of explanation and exception no longer seem to him to be science.<fnref n="22" />

To the extent, as significant as it is incomplete, that two scientific schools disagree about what is a problem and what a solution, they will inevitably talk through each other when debating the relative merits of their respective paradigms. In the partially circular arguments that regularly result, each

<footnote n="22">22. Cavell, *The Claim of Reason*, 120-21.</footnote>
paradigm will be shown to satisfy more or less the criteria that it dictates for
itself and to fall short of a few of those dictated by its opponent.<fnref n="23" />

Recognition of the existence of a uniquely competent professional group and acceptance of its role as the exclusive arbiter of professional achievement has further implications. The group's members, as individuals and by virtue of their shared training and experience must be seen as the sole possessors of the rules of the game or of some equivalent basis for unequivocal judgments.<fnref n="24" />

Both Cavell and Kuhn acknowledge and philosophically demand from us the acknowledgment of the place and importance of conventions, competences, trainings, educations, rules and games *in order to* think of innovation and of the evolution of practices with them — these are important to us. That is to say, in accordance with insights of Wittgenstein, and eventually radicalizing these insights, both Cavell and Kuhn brought out that relations between paradigms and language-users are internal: strictly speaking there could not be such a thing as a paradigm without relevant groups of persons whose circumstantiated interactions contribute to constitute the background against which paradigms can count and function as such, so as to enable or contribute to applications, appreciations, evaluations and actions (as we shall see in the next part, although less obvious, the truth of the opposite relation between persons and paradigms is also relevant to our understanding of the places of paradigms in our lives). However, Cavell's characterization of relations between conventions — some of which essentially are dependent upon paradigms — as measurement systems — and practitioners as possibly tyrannical, and Kuhn's characterization of relations between paradigms and criteria as dictatorial, can eventually raise concerns with respect to the freedom both of paradigms and of our dealings with these. For thusly characterized, everything would be as if, necessarily constrained by paradigms, we could be bound to claim the freedom of paradigms only at our expenses, at the expense of our own freedom. To avoid such a counter sense, partly invited by the social and collective images of a lack of freedom (by contrast

<footnote n="23">23. Kuhn, *The Structure of Scientific Revolutions*, 109-10.</footnote>

<footnote n="24">24. Ibid., 168.</footnote>
with unproblematic cases of circumstantial absences of determinate freedoms) used to characterize human relations thematically involving paradigms, the utter incompatibility of the thoughts of Cavell and Kuhn with conventionalism and apriorism (two tendencies which often go together) needs to be rendered explicit. The tension can be explained as rising from the rejection (and eventually the denial) of the uninformative character of the absence of conceivable recoil between some paradigms and some actions rendered possible by their internalization or appropriation — among which centrally, linguistic ones (as, for example, expressing one's puzzlement with respect to a scientific or artistic innovation). Because one could have lacked a margin of action during the internalization of at least one aspect of a paradigm, one could not but be bound, constrained, or forced, in one's actions not only by the internalized aspect of a paradigm but also by the consequences of its internalization; conventionalism, and probably apriorism as well, would thus be unavoidable. Not only that a production that would satisfy established criteria and standards of a relevant community could count as an artistic or scientific achievement, but also, could count as a production *only* such a production. Now, this is a (would-be) conception whose relevance is deeply challenged both by Kuhn and Cavell, inasmuch as it either is incompatible with the intelligibility of novelty or prescinds the evaluation of change and novelty from any relevant continuity, thereby rendering difficult or impossible its evaluation and its appreciation as such. To be sure, such criticism does not imply neglecting one legitimate range of concerns that can be had, and to which both Cavell and Kuhn call our attention. For a relevant contestation or revocation of the artistic or scientific character of a production can rightly be grounded by the criteria and standards of a group. The very possibilities of fraudulence, of scam, of counterfeiting hardly could have been without conceivable relations with scientific or artistic practices, and part of the activities of some members of relevant groups is to verify that such possibilities do not actually hold.<fnref n="25" /> To claim the contrary could amount to depriving ourselves until the idea of a scientific or artistic community, and not because we would have thereby somehow misidentified an entity, but inasmuch as the purposes of activities, notably that of verification would without relevant contrasts remain unavailable to us as such

<footnote n="25">25. Cavell, *Must We Mean What We Say?*, ch. VII.</footnote>
(verificationism could nevertheless not be invited by such remark). Now, such a range of cases, not only can be contrasted with cases of artistic or scientific successes, but also with cases in which our very notions of success are relevantly challenged by artistic or scientific productions. This is, in fact, the range of cases to which Cavell draws our attention when characterizing the achievements of Kuhn with respect to the history and the philosophy of science in the previously quoted passage. In such cases of innovation, of radical and eventually revolutionary novelty, precedent criteria of established relevant groups do not or fail to constitute grounds for rejection or revocation; strictly speaking it is unclear that in such cases criteria should have had to be applied, or have functioned in any such way. Now, as mentioned by Cavell and Kuhn, there are differences, divergences, and also asymmetries between the occurrences of such cases within art and science, and that we shall render explicit in the second part of this paper. Yet, the sense in which the recognition of a fundamental resemblance between the place of paradigms within arts and science, the sense in which the limited comparison of their place is relevant and significant, with respect to our practices, has been recovered. The affirmation of the freedom of paradigms is neither false nor misled if conceived as a reminder of a requirement internal to scientific and artistic practices, that of the necessity of the intelligibility of novelty, of creativity, of openness of art and science as such for any such activity. The consideration of the prospective eventuality of such cases surely does not deliver ways and dimensions in which our criteria, experiences could be overridden, new actions and experiences rendered intelligible and possible by these and their appropriation. But paradigms are both expressive of freedom as products and expanders of freedom as means and ends. How could paradigms have had us deceived in such ways anyway?

### 3. Paradigms and Community

If a paradigm, with the necessary connexions it constitutes or that it at least helps to institute, implies nothing less but nothing more than contingent existence, and that the practices within which it has a place and contribution necessarily are open-ended, at which level of generality will we be able to characterize the contribution of paradigms to the structuration of reality? The related notions of community and of
forms of life are pertinent for an answer to such concern, and, it is at this level of
generality that Kuhn and Cavell place themselves. The affirmation that paradigms are
constitutive, that these are exemplary successes which contribute to shape reality, is,
I shall argue, manifest straight from the community or form of life these constitute or
at least help to institute. Thereby, I do not mean that the bulk of paradigms is to
provide us with occasions to gather, although it can eventually happen that a
gathering becomes paradigmatic, especially if we consider that some paradigms,
notably some artistic paradigms, as some happenings, are not dissociable from, or
distinct of, the gatherings at the occasion of which these happen or are produced. In
such cases, there is no such thing as a conceivable abstraction, dissociation or
separation of the constitutive element from the circumstances within which an event
can come to present itself as paradigmatic: on such occasions, it is the successful
realization of the event, rather than the existence of an element or sample that comes
to present paradigmatic dimensions. However, such cases are rare, and are not
significant of the place of paradigms as such. For our involvements with paradigms
do not involve in most cases any encounter whatsoever with the members of a
community or communities who nevertheless engage in similar or equivalent
activities. And that the basic range of our relations or quasi-relations with paradigms
can gain from such encounters but is relatively independent from those — as when we
learn a technique of calculus, a grammatical form of a foreign language, or learn to
appreciate abstract expressionism — is not secondary. For it is the very possibility of
education and of transmission that is grounded upon such possibilities. To this
extent, the pertinence of the comparison of the place of paradigms within science and
art turns out to be intelligible in practical terms. It is firstly *practices* that are under-
determined by paradigms. Independently from practices, only “theoretically,” it is
unclear that we could even have had any idea of a paradigm whatsoever. This leaves
us before what I earlier called the *relationality of paradigms*: the successfulness of
works of arts and sciences manifests itself by their inherent capacity to make
community, that is, to constitute or contribute to conditions that are necessary to the
life of a scientific or artistic community. In the previous part, I have argued both that
Cavell and Kuhn have brought out after Wittgenstein the internal character of the
relations between paradigms and relevant groups. However, if it is quite trivial that
there is no such thing as a paradigm without relevant groups of persons, the opposite, that there is no such thing as relevant groups of persons without a paradigm, might seem less obvious, given that it can seem to be incompatible with the very conceivability of paradigmatization. Nevertheless, this stronger realization is also involved by the thoughts of both Cavell and Kuhn, who engage with this problem in distinct yet compatible ways. Cavell addresses the issue of the constitution of human forms of life as a shared achievement unthinkable without paradigms, notably in the linguistic and grammatical sense:

> In speaking of the vision of language underlying ordinary language procedures in philosophy, I had in mind something I have suggested in discussing Wittgenstein's relation of grammar and criteria to "forms of life," and in emphasizing the sense in which human convention is not arbitrary but constitutive of significant speech and activity; in which mutual understanding, and hence language, depends upon nothing more and nothing less than shared forms of life, call it our mutual attunement or agreement in our criteria.<fnref n="26" />

> Instead, then, of saying either that we *tell* beginners what words mean, or that we *teach* them what objects are, I will say: We initiate them, into the relevant forms of life held in language and gathered around the objects and persons of our world. For that to be possible, we must make ourselves exemplary and take responsibility for that assumption of authority; and the initiate must be able to follow us, in however rudimentary a way, *naturally* [...].<fnref n="27" />

> You cannot use words to do what we do with them until you are initiate of the forms of life which give those words the point and shape they have in our lives.<fnref n="28" />

Kuhn addresses the issue of the collective choice of a paradigm as adequate for the life of a community that is characteristic of periods of transition:

<footnote n="26">26. Cavell, *The Claim of Reason*, 169.</footnote>

<footnote n="27">27. Ibid., 178.</footnote>

<footnote n="28">28. Ibid., 185.</footnote>
The transition from a paradigm in crises to a new one from which a new tradition of normal science can emerge is far from a cumulative process, one achieved by an articulation or extension of the old paradigm. Rather it is a reconstruction of the field from new fundamentals, a reconstruction that changes some of the field's most elementary theoretical generalizations as well as many of its paradigm methods and applications. During the transition period there will be a large but never complete overlap between the problems that can be solved by the old and by the new paradigm. But there will also be a decisive difference in the modes of solution. When the transition is complete, the profession will have changed its view of the fields, its methods, and its goals.<fnref n="29" />

Like the choice between two competing political institutions, that between competing paradigms proves to be a choice between incompatible modes of community life. Because it has that character, the choice is not and cannot be determined merely by the evaluative procedures characteristic of normal science, for these depend in part upon a particular paradigm, and that paradigm is at issue. When paradigms enter, as they must, into a debate about paradigm choice, their role is necessarily circular. Each group uses its own paradigm to argue in that paradigm's defense.<fnref n="30" />

Both Cavell and Kuhn draw our attention to relations between *relevance* and *paradigms*, and to their individual and collective significances. In the same way that a paradigmatic use of words can relevantly be made for educative purposes during an initiation and for an individual, such that it can — for an individual — become constitutive of future uses, paradigms can relevantly be presented for institutional purposes during a debate, such that it can — for a community — become constitutive of future research. In both cases, the paradigmatic character of a use, of a usage, of a sample, of a production is rendered manifest by its ability to provide to one or several

<footnote n="29">29. Kuhn, *The Structure of Scientific Revolutions*, 85.</footnote>

<footnote n="30">30. Ibid., 94.</footnote>
individuals possibilities, inspirations, resolutions, solutions to earlier problems, and
problems of interest. Ways in which individuals can render available to individuals
ways *in* forms of life and communities, and ways in which individuals independently
or together can render available to communities and forms of life ways *out* of
difficulties, are mutually compatible. The mutual contributions of such practices is
manifest if we consider that most of our criteria of relevance are themselves
paradigmatically established, that is to say, established by means of paradigms, an
aspect of which at least has been internalized by us. So far, we thusly not only
recovered the sense in which the limited comparison between the place of paradigms
within art and science is relevant, but the sense in which its significance is vivid. Not
only that the places of paradigms in arts and sciences are similar, as in both,
paradigms freely at least contribute to the constitution, or even in some cases
thoroughly constitute, artistic or scientific communities that are unthinkable without
*some* paradigms, but also, paradigms could not have ceased to have such places in
our lives due to their under-determinative places in our practices that are
linguistically mediated.

## II. The (Unrestrictive) Limits of the Comparison of the Place of Paradigms in Arts and Sciences

That we can affirm that paradigms are constitutive implies, I argue, that their limits
necessarily (by contrast with metaphysically, with unavoidably) could not be
restrictive. For, that a grammatical paradigm renders possible the forming of a
proposition, that an artistic paradigm opens up a new form of life, that a scientific
paradigm renders *practically* possible a new form of calculus, forecast, valuation,
could not have implied the *equivalence of that* which is rendered thinkable and
possible by different paradigms. And that one may envisage complicated and
secondary cases in which restrictive uses can be made of paradigms to limit *that*
which is rendered possible by another one, could not have implied that such cases
could have been basic in any sense whatsoever. At stake is nothing less than the limits
of the comparison between the place of paradigms in arts and sciences, points at
which analogies do not help anymore and can even become obstacles to
understanding. So far, we made this comparison to affirm that paradigms are
*contingent, free, and relational*, that paradigms cannot really informatively be
abstracted from their places within our communities and forms of life, as — I argued
— has been rendered clear and distinct in related ways both by Cavell and Kuhn, after
Wittgenstein. Now, we owe to ourselves to bring out the limits of this comparison in
order not to render inoperative and unintelligible its helpfulness. As remarked by
Kuhn, ultimately it does only amount to a first step, eventually a first step inspired
from Wittgenstein towards a better understanding of differences.<fnref n="31" /> I shall argue that
the unrestricted limits of the comparison of the place of paradigms in arts and
sciences, the intersections from which their understanding does contribute to the
explicitation of both scientific and artistic practices, are threefold. These limits lie in
the autonomies, the asymmetries, and the diversities of the paradigms of arts and
sciences.

# 1. The Autonomies of Arts and Sciences

Universalism, conjunctivist universalism or universalistic conjunctivism — as
criticized by Cavell, Kuhn and Wittgenstein, should not make us forget that to affirm
that autonomy is common to arts and sciences does not imply to negate their mutual
and relative autonomies.<fnref n="32" /> Requirements internal to the very practices of arts and
sciences, although constitutive, could not be equivalent. That is to say, that
paradigms do have constitutive places within sciences and arts could not have
implied the equivalence of their constitutivities: bluntly put, the homogeneity of the
constraints within fields that they contribute to and shape.

This first limit has to do with the internal character of the relations between
paradigms and practices.<fnref n="33" /> To speak of requisites, of demands exerted by

<footnote n="31">31. Kuhn, *The Essential Tension*, 349.</footnote>

<footnote n="32">32. Cavell, *The Claim of Reason*, 109, 180, and 186-92. Kuhn, *The Structure of Scientific Revolutions*, 43-51. Ludwig Wittgenstein, *Philosophical Investigations*, 4th ed., ed. P. M. S. Hacker and Joachim Schulte, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe, P. M. S. Hacker, and Joachim Schulte (Oxford: Blackwell, 2009). To affirm the autonomies of sciences and arts is first to account for the relative independence of practices (the practice of an art or a science is not necessarily dependent at each occasion on another practice of another art or science) which nevertheless can mutually contribute to each other (some artistic or scientific practices contribute to the realization of other artistic or scientific practices).</footnote>

<footnote n="33">33. On this, see Jean-Paul Sartre, *Critique of Dialectical Reason*, vol.2, ed. Arlette Elkaïm-Sartre, trans. Quintin Hoare (London: Verso, 1991), 117-18.</footnote>
paradigms on practitioners and which are internal to the fields that these render partially or wholly possible could *not* have implied their indistinctness. This affirmation faces at least two opposite objections. The first is that it amounts to an all-too-obvious truism, obvious to the point that it is of no significance to recall it, that it is implicit to practices to the point that it presents no interest to be reminded of it. The second is that it amounts to an all-too-heavy claim about the nature of paradigms to expect from these to be able to be prescriptive of procedures without presenting some sort of undifferentiable commonality. However, that is a major aspect of the philosophical projects of both Cavell and Kuhn, after that of Wittgenstein: not to grant and presuppose that particularities, and with them particularism, could have pierced logical space, the space of possibilities, in a way that only universals, and with them universalism, could have been able to stitch up. That is to say, both the neglect and the overestimation of the problem of the independence of the ways in which relevance comes to be contextually learned, sometimes at its own expense, tends to prevent the intelligibility of differences. The confusion of literality with literalism, most probably, has much to do with this oscillation. Also, such differences came to be less palpable due to attempts at intertwining aspects of arts and sciences (as for example in recent controversies that arose following the success at an art concourse of a work produced by means of artificial intelligence), and considerations concerning the correction, interest, originality and successfulness of such attempts put aside. For example, that the cognitive dimension is not prevalent for artistic practices is not secondary. It is not the case that theorizing necessarily precedes the realization of a new artistic paradigm, and this much is in fact also true of sciences. Feyerabend brought out, as Kuhn, but also as Monod, that hazard, chance, can effectively contribute to the constitution of what shall turn out to be paradigmatic, and which is such even while we do not — yet — think that it is the case. It is no more secondary that, conversely, the artistic dimension is not prevalent in scientific practices.

Even if innovations, contributions to sciences did happen following experiments whose results and consequences have turned out to exceed or differ from what was then attempted and expected, internalized conceptualisations do belong to the background of such practices. And it would not be entirely wrong to affirm that
this is also what happens in the arts, for experimenting in art also can have for
background past internalizations of precedent practices. At this level the thoughts of
Cavell about the relation of the innovator with one's production completely hold. And
to an extent, to think the relations of the innovator and one's innovations does
contribute to think both the relations of the artist with one's artworks and that of the
scientist with one's discoveries. However, such characterization is not, as it stands,
exclusive of or incompatible with the affirmation of the indistinctness of what is
delivered in the background. One could wonder whether such expectation, and such
way of progressing, does not imply to ring the knell of phenomenology. Yet, when the
indistinctness of what is delivered in backgrounds is thematized as such by
phenomenologists and their best critics, such as Sartre, in philosophical attempts to
express or word perception in its relation to our actions, indistinctness is opposed to
(synthetic) unification, and their philosophical concern is first that of accounting for
the possible unity of aspects of objects relatively to ends which are thematized as
such, or not, by the agent. But when we think with Kuhn and Cavell after
Wittgenstein, our approach really is different from any such of the mentioned: the
sociological dimension of Kuhn's thought, and the linguistic — in the broad sense —
dimension of Cavell's thought, does not presuppose such indistinctness, or such type
of indistinctness, and this point does matter for thinking ways in which paradigms
really contribute to the structuration of reality.<fnref n="34" /> Neither astonishment nor revulsion
before an artistic or scientific production could happen without prior internalization
of paradigms. But the possibilities that paradigms shape are not *whichever*, and
could not be such: some actions are rendered possible by a paradigm rather than
others. The connexity of logical space does not presuppose the indistinctness of
possibilities that are under-determined by paradigms.<fnref n="35" />

But how is such connexion manifest within the works of Kuhn and Cavell? In
Kuhn, this distinction manifests itself with the thought of the internal character of the
relations between anomalies and paradigms: anomalies appear as such against the
background of the past internalization of a paradigm.<fnref n="36" /> Strictly speaking, without any

<footnote n="34">34. Pace the reconstructions of William James, and despite what Kuhn himself writes about these, following C. I. Lewis, *Mind and the World Order*, 320-21.</footnote>

<footnote n="35">35. See Wittgenstein, "University of Iowa Tractatus Map," 2.01-2.02, http://tractatus.lib.uiowa.edu/.</footnote>

<footnote n="36">36. Kuhn *The Structure of Scientific Revolutions*, ch. 5.</footnote>
such prior internalization, there is no such thing as a conceivable anomaly. In Cavell, this distinction manifests itself with the thought of the internal character of the relations of expressions and failures of education: failures of learning happen subsequently to attempts of sharing the practical knowledge of the use of a paradigm.<fnref n="37" /> Strictly speaking, without any such attempt, there is no such thing as a failure. In both cases, that a situation is apprehended as normal or abnormal presuppose — without the implication by the relation of presupposition of any ontology of the a priori whatsoever — the past interiorization of paradigms: although the connexions of events do involve only contingent elements, such connexions are nevertheless necessary.

## 2. The Asymmetries of Artistic and Scientific Paradigms

The first limit of the comparison of the place of paradigms in arts and sciences proceeds from the autonomies of the practices within paradigms and with which paradigms can come to have structuring places. Not only do Cavell and Kuhn agree on the fact that paradigms shape or contribute to shape practices and fields in distinct manners, but they also agree on the fact that divergences and incompatibilities among practices within the same or different fields are intelligible as such only if we acknowledge that these manners are not only distinct but mutually autonomous. Practitioners of such practices not only do not follow the same procedures and do not adopt the same means, but they also have aims, goals, objectives that could not be mutually dependent. This practically involves that the relations between paradigms, scientific or artistic, and requisites, obligations, imperatives, consequences, although all internal, are nevertheless different, differently constituted, and differently prescriptive, given the autonomies of the ends which are those of the considered fields, practices and practitioners. This point is manifest in Cavell's analysis of the ways in which some objects can see themselves provided the attention that usually is provided to persons, while in Kuhn, it is manifest in his attention to the obsolete, to obsolete paradigms which yet were not or are not inoperative, both "theoretically" and practically.<fnref n="38" /> Such inversions may

<footnote n="37">37. Cavell, *The Claim of Reason*, 114-15.</footnote>

<footnote n="38">38. See Kuhn, "Commensurability, Comparability, Communicability" and *The Structure of Scientific Revolutions*, ch. 5. Cavell, *Must We Mean What We Say?*, 197-98.</footnote>
surprise us — for the reasons for thinking “the normal” through “the abnormal” and inversely, are not obvious as such, and especially if we were holding on to oversimplifications of art as a space devoid of conceivable rules and of science as a space devoid of conceivable freedom. But such preconceptions are two sides of similar “mental cramps,” of science as the neutral unveiling of the preestablished and of art as the engaged rejection of the (pre)established. By contrast, I argue that a pertinent analysis owes to itself to restitute the primacy of considered prevalent dimensions internal to considered practices. To this extent, the symmetry of the relations of the place of paradigms in arts and sciences has a philosophically relevant counterpart. The cognitive dimension that is not prevalent for the artistic practices, is prevalent for scientific practices; while the creative dimension that is not prevalent for scientific practices, is prevalent for artistic ones.<fnref n="39" /> For, if we want to use the shape-background distinction both to characterize the relations of our practices and to account for the unification of practical fields according to *independent* means and goals, then we need not only to integrate the distinctness but also the *structuredness* of the dimensions that are prevalent to the considered practices. At stake is the eventuality of the relevance of a comparison among practices; for, without such eventuality, it is at best unclear that we could think of the space of practices in its relations to possibilities, *our* possibilities. For example and notably, that we can relevantly consider that a practice is more creative or innovative than its part or than another (for example, drawing a building and buying material to make a drawing) does *not* imply that *such* aspect of a practice is essential to its realization. This is a sense in which, I argue, the consideration of the dimensions of our practices does matter, if we are both to think these as instances of practices and as shaped by mutually independent procedures, criteria, samples, examplars, and paradigms. If we are to be able to account for the internal character of relations between paradigms and consequences without thereby granting the eventual relevance of consequentialism, according to which when innovating, we could not but have to start from consequences (by contrast with taking into account consequences). A central asymmetry between artistic and scientific paradigms whose obviousness

<footnote n="39">39. To be sure, such negations could not imply that practices from different fields cannot have common dimensions. As it shall soon be considered, scientific practice can present creative dimensions, and an artistic practice can present scientific dimensions.</footnote>
needs to be rendered explicit thus is that strictly speaking artistic innovations do not
and are not meant to render obsolete prior forms of arts as do scientific innovations.
Kuhn expresses this point as follows: "unlike art, science destroys its past."<sup>40</sup> Artistic
innovations strictly speaking do not render and are not meant to render obsolete
previous artistic forms of art, even when their productions involve new technologies.
A good example of this is that of photography, which, contrary to (past and arguably
misled) expectations, neither rendered obsolete painting, nor was rendered obsolete
by cinema. Retrospectively, technological innovations contributed to the
autonomization of each of these arts, rather than the contrary. By contrast, scientific
innovations, new scientific paradigms, do render obsolete prior ones. The inadequacy
of the suppositions of the existence of elements, such as that of diaphane to account
for light, or that of phlogiston to account for combustion, or that of aether to account
for the applicability of Newtonian physics, were proved to be both misleading and
misled by subsequent developments in physics: strictly speaking, such elements did
not exist. Maintaining the claim of the existence of such elements surely did seem
attractive and relevant during periods of transition. For even if a paradigm is
obsolete, it can sometimes yet provide good grounds for accurate forecasts, as the
Ptolemaic model did even after the Copernican revolution.<sup>41</sup> However such a remark
does not imply that successful forecasts made on the basis of obsolete paradigms
were successful for relevant reasons. It only stresses that the erroneous character of
some assumptions can, for practical purposes, be neglected, as long as the
redevelopment of normal science with a new paradigm has not yet provided results
that meet with the standards and the expectations of the practitioners of the
considered field, results better than the ones which were obtained with the earlier
paradigm. The consideration of such asymmetry between artistic and scientific
paradigms also renders clear that responsibilities, consequences and paradigms are
closely intertwined, that strictly speaking, these cannot be relevantly abstracted from
each other. To be sure, fraudulence, counterfeit, scam, could not have been features
of arts or sciences. But the morphology of scandals that can cross such mutually
independent fields are nevertheless distinct. Involved responsibilities and their

<footnote n="40">40. Kuhn, *The Essential Tension*, 345.</footnote>

<footnote n="41">41. Kuhn, *The Structure of Scientific Revolutions*, 75.</footnote>
consequences also differ relatively to the considered fields and practices. This asymmetry is further rendered manifest by the fact that the claim of authorship is not a necessary condition for artistic production and for the integration of artworks into the markets of art, while on the contrary scientific innovation, or at least, applications of scientific innovations tend to be further controlled. Kuhn considers, in a way that is compatible with Cavell's approach, that such asymmetry is explainable in terms of a difference of the responses and of the relations of the public with arts and science such that "Art is an intrinsically other-directed enterprise in ways and to an extent which science is not."<fnref n="42" /> Indeed, if, as practices, arts and sciences whose products are shared and present collective significance are both practices that are directed to others, neither the relations of the artistic and scientific practitioners to their works, nor the relations of these works with their public could be equivalent. Peculiarly, the realization of an (artistic) happening does imply the presence of a public in a way in which the realization of a scientific discovery does not. While the success of the first sort of event is not even thinkable without the presence of a public, the same does not hold of the second sort of event.

### 3. The Diversities of Paradigms

How then can the constitutivity of paradigms yet be thought, now that we have exposed some central limits to the comparison of the place of paradigms within arts and sciences, so as to render manifest that the autonomy of arts and sciences among and between themselves has been much underestimated? The difficulty might seem to be resolvable by means of the consideration that dyadic relations hold between paradigms and members of communities, and can suffice both to account for the occurrences of events whose intelligibility implies the availability of given paradigms, and for the development of hexises on the basis of contextually significant acquaintances. That would hold indivisible or non-breaking relations between paradigms and persons considered in isolation could suffice to account for the constitutivity of paradigms yet without unduly renouncing to any idea of necessity whatsoever. However, such consideration would imply arguing in favor of a monadic

<footnote n="42">42. Kuhn, *The Essential Tension*, 344.</footnote>
conception of necessity whose misleadingness I hope, with and after Kuhn, Cavell
and Wittgenstein, to have rendered manifest. For such hypothesis would more be a
restatement of the problem rather than its solution: it provides elements of an
explanation of the ways in which paradigmatically structured or structuring events
can occur within personal lives, but it does so only at the expense of the socially
structured character of the ways in which the diversity of paradigms are available to
us and of our relations with them. The difficulty is, I suggest, that of accounting for
the holding of differently structured and necessary relations between necessarily
contingently existing paradigms and the inherently relational character of the
existences of members of communities. The problem thus can be conceived as that of
the necessity of *common* mediation to providing an account for the availability of
diversities of paradigms *to* us. Let us then account for the constitutivity of paradigms
in a way that is truthful to the irreducibility: of arts and sciences within and among
themselves, of practices among themselves, of ways in which paradigms can come to
have a place and be expressive of the demands, constraints, consequences,
responsibilities these paradigms may exert in mutually independent and autonomous
fields. Then we both have to be able to account for the internal character of the
relations of these paradigms with practical possibilities that these under-determine,
and for the external character of the relations at the occasions of which we can come
to be initiated into a practice or provided a way out of practical and theoretical
difficulties. Now, it can seem that we almost do contradict ourselves in
acknowledging these apparently mutually incompatible demands. For how could
relations of paradigms with practices and us both could be internal and external at
the same time? But such relations really are not simultaneously external and internal
inasmuch as they are external or internal at different occasions, in different
situations, in different circumstances. This is, I argue, an aspect that is common to
the thoughts of Kuhn and Cavell. Relations between paradigms and us are not
simultaneously both internal and external, they rather are sometimes internal
sometimes external. The obviousness of this remark appears if we distinguish the
contexts of the occasions at which we come to be acquainted with paradigms, and the
paradigmatic dimensions that are prevalent in each one of these.<fnref n="43" /> The situations in which a beginner comes to be acquainted with a paradigm by a more advanced practitioner, the situations in which a more advanced practitioner presents the insufficiencies of a paradigm to argue in favor of a new one to the experts of a field are situations whose intelligibility do involve a different partitioning and distribution of roles, responsibilities and consequences. Such that our question ultimately amounts to the following: is the mediation by community necessary to us to account for the availability of diversities of paradigms or not? Where are we to situate necessary relations in our lives?

For in an unproblematic sense, the successfulness of the success, the autonomy of the intelligibility that a new paradigm may provide does precede its acknowledgement as such by a relevant community. The answer I want to argue for, is that neither according to Kuhn nor according to Cavell, does it make sense to suppose that the mediation by community is superfluous or secondary in order to account for the availability to us of diversities of paradigms, despite conformism. And such affirmation does not amount to downplay the differences of their approaches or to neglect traditional demands concerning intelligibility. It really does amount to a both philosophical and critical inheritance. For none of us are relations with paradigms restricted to the ways in which traditional philosophy has assumed these could be. Nor could we have had the sort of margin of action that traditional philosophy supposed we could. But this is no call to renunciation and could not be such, for, whenever required, the analyses of ordinary situations do remand to past interiorizations of paradigms so as to render intelligible the circumstantiated limits of intelligibility as such. That one can enjoy the applications of paradigms that one does not understand, while one does contribute to the development of a paradigm that a few or even no one else yet understands, is no impossible situation. The kind of tension that Kuhn called that of dislocated worlds, and that Cavell expressed as the counterpart of the cohabitation of several histories within one single and only breast, situations in which individuals come, so to speak, to have one foot outside and one foot within the unrestricted circle of the ordinary are parts of natural history as

<footnote n="43">43. Wittgenstein, *Philosophical Investigations*, §6.</footnote>