Acknowledging acknowledgement: significados y funciones de una categoría cavelliana

Relying on the seminal works by Stanley Cavell, I intend to offer a grammatical account of what is possibly meant with the notion of acknowledgment. My starting point is Cavells’ readings of Wittgenstein, with special reference to the philosophical problem of ”other minds” – one of the places were Cavell introduces the notion of acknowledgement. By reflecting on that very notion, I draw attention to three different ways one can understand the concept (and the practice of) recognition, respectively identification, recognition and acknowledgement. Identification is a cognitive operation performed in order to recognize someone as someone. As Cavell has pointed out, though, if it makes sense to speak of seeing somebody as - say - a human being, it is because we can imagine individuals who lack or lose such a capacity. Seeing aspects reflects our manner of relating to what we see (our identification criteria operate only in conjunction with a will to imply ourselves in what we see), hence a failure of acknowledgement should not be mistaken for a failure of knowledge (or with a failure of criteria as such). Recognition is an operation which, according to most of the literature on the concept, has a normative dimension ( “how should we recognize?”) and implies that some «identity good» may or must be supplied to the recognized. Although Cavell does speak of acknowledgement in connection to something we do (display, reveal) in the light of what we know, acknowledgement - I argue - is not something one bestows upon someone, nor does it aim at recognizing someone’s identity, but is rather “a category in terms of which a given response be evaluated” (KA, pp. 263-4). Acknowledgement, I claim, is also something one performs reflexivly in relation to his/her situation. I may acknowledge the fact that I am late, or that I have avoided greeting you. I may even acknowledge the more general circumstance that actions can go wrong, that intentions can be misunderstood, that criteria require a will to acknowledge to become operative . If this way of «reading» the concept of acknowledgment is plausible, the concept gains a therapeutic import: it invites us to undertake the never ending attempt to accept the conditions of human action.