The Ordinary Global

In this paper, I confront various conceptions of meaning and articulate them to anthropological styles of thought: W.V. Quine’s thesis of the indeterminacy of translation, Wittgenstein’s conception of meaning as use, Cavell’s philosophy of ordinary language, of ‘what we say’; Barbara Cassin’s Dictionary of Untranslatables where I approached English terms as inherently untranslatable; attention to details and to human vulnerability through the ‘textures of the ordinary’ Veena Das teaches us to observe. All these approaches to meaning as agency, vs. meaning as a determined entity shared and expressed by different languages, lead to renew our concept of the global.

Cite this article: Laugier, S. The Ordinary Global. SOPHIA 62, 515–531 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-023-00962-3