Familiar Words in Unfamiliar Surroundings: Davidson’s Malapropisms, Cavell’s Projections

[L]et’s look at the concept of a language I opposed. It was this: in learning a language, a person acquires the ability to operate in accord with a precise and specifiable set of syntactic and semantic rules; verbal communication depends on speaker and hearer sharing such an ability, and it requires no more than this. I argued that sharing such a previously mastered ability was neither necessary nor sufficient for successful linguistic communication. I held (and hold) that the linguistic skills people typically bring to conversational occasions can and do differ considerably, but mutual understanding is achieved through the exercise of imagination, appeal to general knowledge of the world, and awareness of human interests and attitudes. (Davidson 2005, 110) The second passage is an often quoted paragraph from Stanley Cavell’s 1962 paper, “The Availability of Wittgenstein’s Later Philosophy”: