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May 10, 2002. Surely any untrained philosopher would be puzzled by the exchange of letters between and ( J. Amer. Psychoanal. Assn. 50/1) in which they claim to agree with one another while (to me) seeming to do no such thing. Cavell tells us that one may feel certainty, but that it is merely subjective. One may also have knowledge that may be taken as true, but then this knowledge may turn out to be mistaken. We can assume, I would think, that these statements can be made about her own positive theses. Friedman tells us that both he and Cavell know that there is an object out there, while stating that what haunts philosophy is a thoroughly indeterminate world. We can probably assume that that worry certainly does not belong to Friedman. He has possibly forgotten that Cavell told us that his certitude is merely subjective.
I would like to disagree with the both of them. They belong to the group of thinkers much influenced by the analytic tradition of a spectator view of the world. This is a picture of someone looking out at and then representing (or characterizing) the world. In order to allow for one's personal beliefs coloring the world, they rely on some third point of view (Friedman, p. 327) to gain accuracy. This subtly introduces a “view from nowhere.” Alas, that is arguable if not dispensable. Rather we should recognize that we are always in the world, and we cannot disengage from it. Of course this is merely an alternative way to think about things, since I also can make no claim to certitude. I claim only that one's relating to the world makes true what we attribute to the world.
Think of it this way. There is no single way the world is. That is not to say that we invent the world or that it exists only in our minds. It is to say that our ways of seeing things often outstrip our language for describing them, and that the same words can describe the world in entirely different ways. Davidson, much quoted in the above exchange, wr