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Ordinary Language Philosophy & Literary Studies Online

Cavell's criteria and the practice of literary interpretation

Stanley Cavell's philosophy returns to a question: what does it mean to share criteria with one another? Inherited from Wittgenstein, the question animates his work on Shakespeare, film, and the ordinary, yet remains underused in literary interpretation, where meaning is framed through intention, evidence, or cultural context. Returning to criteria offers a way to rethink what is at stake when we say we understand a text.

Ordinary language philosophy treats concepts as embedded in what we say and do. To grasp a concept is to master the criteria for its application, not to catalogue empirical regularities. This shift, drawn from Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations, replaces knowledge as correspondence with understanding as practical capacity. For the literary critic, meaning is not hidden behind a text but acknowledged in our dealings with language.

In Australia this philosophical strand has been quietly productive. Scholars at the University of Sydney, the University of Melbourne, and the Australian National University engage with Cavell through the Australasian Association of Philosophy and the Australasian Journal of Philosophy. The bridge to literary studies, however, remains underdeveloped compared with North America, despite Australia's rich letters.

This article examines what Cavell's criteria contribute to reading, and how they might enter conversation with Australian literary traditions. The aim is to recover questions about acknowledgment and the ordinary that interpretation has bracketed away.

From symptoms to criteria

Cavell's account grows from a distinction in Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations. A symptom is empirically correlated with a phenomenon; a criterion is constitutive of the concept itself. We do not infer that someone is in pain from their behaviour; the behaviour is part of what we have learned as the grammar of "pain." Cavell seizes on this because it challenges the empiricist assumption that all knowledge is inferential.

If criteria are learned and embedded in practices, understanding a word is participating in a form of life. Cavell extends this to other minds: treating criteria as symptoms generates scepticism, for we doubt whether others really feel or mean what they say because we forget that criteria are the ground of intelligibility. For interpretation this matters: grief, irony, or doubt are not symptoms but the texture of a language we enter.

Acknowledgment rather than knowledge

Cavell's most persistent claim is that criteria belong to the order of acknowledgment rather than knowledge. When we acknowledge someone as a friend, a colleague, or a person in pain, we are not assembling evidence; we are recognising a relation. Cavell borrows the term from ordinary usage and gives it philosophical weight: acknowledgment is what we do when we let another's words or actions count for us in a particular way.

This reshapes the interpretive encounter. To interpret a literary text is to acknowledge its claims, including those that resist our prior categories. A Patrick White novel depicting misanthropy asks the reader to acknowledge experience that sits uneasily with ordinary sympathies. Reading sustains acknowledgment through attention to language and form rather than resolving discomfort into knowledge. Australian scholarship on dispossession and migration has been drawn to this ethical dimension, even without naming it.

Skepticism and the reading of texts

In The Claim of Reason Cavell treats scepticism as a human possibility rather than a logical puzzle. The sceptic about other minds has lost, or refuses, a relation to criteria. Scepticism is a posture toward the ordinary, an evasion of acknowledgment. The reframing has implications for literary interpretation, where the sceptic's question often resurfaces as a worry about authorial intention or textual determinacy.

When a reader asks whether an author "really" meant a particular reading, they may repeat the sceptic's gesture, treating the text as symptoms from which a hidden meaning might be inferred. Cavell responds not by asserting determinacy but by pointing out that we already share criteria with the text. Meaning, when settled, is settled through acknowledgment. In Australian universities, shaped by the Australian Curriculum and the Australian Research Council's priorities, this framing integrates philosophical rigour with textual sensitivity.

Forms of life and Australian letters

Cavell frequently appeals to "form of life," borrowed from Wittgenstein, to underline that criteria are embedded in shared practices. A form of life is a way of going on, and it is in such going on that criteria have their sense. Applied to literature, this suggests that texts participate in a way of life, speaking to and from particular practices even when they strain against them.

Australian letters offer rich material. The fiction of Elizabeth Harrower, the essays of David Malouf, the novels of Tim Winton, and the work of Alexis Wright all engage with what counts as an ordinary life. Harrower's Sydney apartments and Malouf's Brisbane riverbank are not merely settings but localised forms of life in which criteria are contested. The criticism surrounding these works stands to gain from more explicit engagement with Cavell, as does the publishing work of houses such as Text Publishing and Giramondo in Melbourne and Sydney.

Teaching criteria in Australia

Pedagogy is the final test of a philosophical concept. In Australian literature departments, where curricula respond to the Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency, the question of how to teach interpretation is perennial. Cavell's account offers a way to teach reading as acknowledgment rather than technique.

In the classroom this might mean resisting interpretation as a method for extracting meaning. Students attend to what a text says and what it asks of them. The work of criticism is to articulate that attendance, not to circumvent it. This aligns with the longstanding strength of Australian literary studies in close reading, giving it a philosophical foundation.

Key distinctions in Cavell's account of criteria:

Australian resources for Cavellian literary studies:

The concept of criteria, as Cavell develops it, does not offer a method for reading but a way of understanding what reading is. It returns us to the ordinary, where language is shared and acknowledgment is the form understanding takes. For scholars in Australia and elsewhere, that return is a resource worth sustained attention. Visit OLP & Literary Studies Online for the bibliography on Cavell, Wittgenstein, and ordinary language criticism, and consider submitting proposals for the site's reading groups and forthcoming symposia.