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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 January 2010
Most of us, at one time or another, will have been struck by a thought that we might wish to express in the following words: ‘I could have been born in a different time and place, my position in life and all my personal characteristics could have been completely different from what they are; how amazing then that it should have fallen to my lot to live my life, the only life I shall ever live, as this particular individual rather than any other.’ This thought need not derive from a sense that there is anything unusual about one's life; what it expresses, rather, may be the sense that there is something gratuitous or contingent about one's being any particular individual at all. This sense of contingency might be connected with a feeling of gratitude, perhaps of responsibility towards others less fortunate in life; or it might be bound up with envy, or pride, or self-pity, etc.
1 The capacity in question here, I would suggest, is, in fact, closely connected with what Raimond Gaita, in his contribution to the present collection, calls the possession of sense: ‘the capacity for sound judgement of what is seriously possible and what is not [which] conditions the intelligible application of such modalities even in the most radical inquiries’ (p. 159).
2 Wilkes, Kathleen V., Real People. Personal Identity without Thought Experiments (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988).Google Scholar
3 For a perceptive discussion of these issues, see Beardsmore, R. W., ‘The Limits of Imagination’, The British Journal of Aesthetics 20, no. 2 (Spring 1980), 99–114.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
4 In this connection, consider the discussion between R. F. Holland and Peter Winch on whether it would be intelligible for someone to report an event which flies in the face of what is generally agreed to be empirically possible. See Holland, R. F., ‘The Miraculous’Google Scholar, in Holland, R. F., Against Empiricism (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1980)Google Scholar; and Winch, Peter, ‘Ceasing to Exist’, in Winch, Peter, Trying to Make Sense (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987).Google Scholar
5 I owe this point to David Cockburn.
6 The line of argument in the section to follow is inspired by Diamond, Cora's paper ‘Rules: Looking in the Right Place’, in Phillips, D. Z. and Winch, Peter (eds), Wittgenstein: Attention to Particulars (Houndmills and London: Macmillan, 1989).Google Scholar
7 What lies behind this idea might be the thought that there must be some such explanation of how it is that people are very often able to agree in their use of words in new situations. However, on the one hand it should be clear that people will not always agree (so the suggested theory explains too much), and on the other hand, the agreement can be most simply understood as due to the fact that people will naturally tend to respond in similar ways to the same instruction. In this respect, the agreement there is in extraordinary situations is no different in principle from the agreement there is in ordinary situations; the latter needs no more of a special explanation than the former.
8 I wish to thank David Cockburn for a number of very helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper.