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St. Leon: A Tale of the Sixteenth Century (1799) offers an intriguing discussion of friendship and paternity. This chapter focuses on Godwin’s depictions of sincerity and the sanguineous relationship between St. Leon and his son Charles, and demonstrates that while Godwin states the necessity of sincerity in friendship, he does so through its absence in the relationship between the father and the son. This chapter shows that while St. Leon can convincingly articulate and outline principles of friendship, the novel documents St. Leon’s ultimately failed efforts to appropriately identify his son as his friend.

Donating money anonymously is often perceived as an act of altruism in Western culture and a similar concept of ‘ikhlas’ (sincerity) in Indonesia. Yet, this prosocial behavior can also be utilized to cope with unpleasant feelings associated with such donations (e.g., fear of social judgment, guilt) making it otherwise a rather self-serving act. In that regard, we analyzed 20,000 individual donation transactions made for COVID-19 campaigns on two popular fundraising platforms: GoFundMe in the United States and Kitabisa in Indonesia. We found that GoFundMe donors tended to self-identify (33.18% opted for anonymity) while Kitabisa donors tended to conceal their identities (73.89% opted for anonymity). Adjusting the donations to the fractions of GDPs, we further found that anonymous donors on Kitabisa donated significantly less amounts of money (M = .11, SD = .54) in contrast to their self-identified counterparts (M = .26, SD = 3.63), who donated even higher amounts of money than anonymous donors on GoFundMe (M = .16, SD = .66). Even though the amount of money may not always entail the rate of altruism nor ikhlas, the significant findings bring the cultural belief associated with such anonymous donations into questions.

Online tools like Doodle polls are frequently used for meeting coordination and other decentralized cooperative decision-making. Since Doodle polls are a form of approval voting, theoretical results from voting theory often underpin work in this area. Sincerity, where a voter never says yes to a less-preferred option without saying yes to all more preferable choices, is a common assumption in approval voting. However, that does not take into account cooperative behavior sometimes exhibited by users when others’ responses are known. We conduct a user study investigating the extent to which college-student participants in Doodle-style polls were sincere, reporting on responses from one institution.

An athlete scandal has the potential to impact, either directly or indirectly, consumer attitudes toward the athlete and the associated brands. This study sought to identify the effects of athlete endorser scandal attributions associated with endorsed brand attitude and the moderating effect of consumers’ perceived sincerity of the endorsed brand. An experimental study using a series of 2 (attribution styles: ability attribution vs. morality attribution) \(\times \)2 (perceived sincerity of the endorsed brand: low vs. high) between-subjects designs was conducted. The results showed that compared with the ability attribution of the athlete endorser scandal, endorsed brand attitude declined more due to the impact of the morality attribution of the athlete endorser scandal. In addition, the moderating role of consumers’ perceived sincerity was identified.

In recent times, significant progress has been made in our understanding of what appears to be the best way to articulate unfamiliar cultural knowledge migrants and language learners should ideally internalise if they wish to successfully interact with native speakers of their new language, who either take such knowledge for granted or are at least aware of it. Instead of relying on ‘cultural scripts’, which reflect the insider perspective of native speakers and have traditionally been written in Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM), of which Minimal English is an offshoot, several authors have proposed to rewrite the same information in the form of so-called pedagogical scripts, using Minimal English as a more user-friendly alternative to NSM. This chapter uses pedagogical scripts written in Minimal English to familiarise migrants and language learners with the importance of Russian iskrennost' (roughly, ‘sincerity’) and French prise de position (roughly, ‘taking a stand’).

The essay traces the origins, outlines the contents, and parses the meanings of Cheng Chung-Ying’s onto-generative hermeneutics as a systematic philosophy of interpretation and understanding that purposefully seeks to enrich and challenge the ancestral European version of the hermeneutic enterprise. It shows how Cheng, using his own creative and critical reading of the Yijing as the principal instrument of analysis and intervention, constructs an architectonic theory of interpretation that integrates ontology, epistemology, and ethics. To the extent that Cheng has consciously forged clear connections between his onto-hermeneutics and morality, via his redefinition of the Confucian notion of cheng (sincerity/earnestness/truthfulness) as an epistemic virtue, the essay ponders the implication and significance of such a theoretical stance as the point of departure for a philosophy of inculturality, wherein the self and the other must interpret and get to know each other.

This loosely-argued manifesto contains some suggestions regarding what the philosophy of religion might become in the twenty-first century. It was written for a brainstorming workshop over a decade ago, and some of the recommendations and predictions it contains have already been partly actualized (that’s why it is now a bit “untimely”). The goal is to sketch three aspects of a salutary “liturgical turn” in philosophy of religion. (Note: “liturgy” here refers very broadly to communal religious service and experience generally, not anything specifically “high church.”) The first involves the attitudes that characterize what I call the “liturgical stance” towards various doctrines. The second focuses on the “vested” propositional objects of those attitudes. The third looks at how those doctrines are represented, evoked, and embodied in liturgical contexts. My untimely rallying-cry is that younger philosophers of religion might do well to set aside debates regarding knowledge and justified belief, just as their elders set aside debates regarding religious language. When we set aside knowledge in this way, we make room for discussions of faith that in turn shed light on neglected but philosophically-interesting aspects of lived religious practice.

To undertake a serious investigation of violence calls for a discrete amount of courage and sincerity: as human beings we can wishfully ignore our own violence, thanks to a kind of “embubblement” I am illustrating in this article. I would also like to offer to the attention of researchers in sociology, psychology, and psychiatry the main features of the situations in which the awareness of human violent acts is in question, as indicated in the subtitle “Violent and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own Violence Lead to Disregard the Inflicted Harm”. In these cases a process of what can be called “autoimmunity” is at play. I contend the concept of moral bubble can provide an integrated and unified perspective able to interpret in a novel way many situations in which morality and violence are intertwined.

Having shown that the means to evade angst do in fact exist, and are at play, both in the most common and exceptional situations of our lives, there is still a further problem. Principally, with regards to the latter case, how can these methods succeed, given they seem to involve awareness of the thing to be evaded? This chapter addresses this question then of how the self-deception involved in angst-evasion is possible. I do this by first examining the problem of self-deception in general. This is the problem of how consciousness can be aware of telling a lie, while at the same time believing said lie to be true. Examining other theories of self-deception, including Freudian and deflationary accounts, I find that they are unable to explain the immediate self-deception required for successful angst-evasion. Consequently, I next explore Sartre’s account of bad faith, something he takes to underpin self-deception. This is done by looking at his example of the coquette and the connection to a facticity and transcendence relation there. Building on this I then examine the sincere waiter, finding that it is residual awareness of our perverse non-being which allows for such projects of sincerity. Finally, I show how it is this non-being, revealed there, applied to belief which then grounds the possibility of immediate self-deception. With this I complete the picture of Sartre’s non-humanist phenomenological existentialism.

The focus here is that if one wants to reduce school shootings, one has to address the causes of the problem, rather than merely pass laws to keep the causes from spiraling out of control. The shooters are usually people who are known as people who lack love and character. They are individuals who have not learned to control their anger, hold grudges, and have not learned to forgive others. In the weeks and months leading up to the shootings the assailants often display behavior that is threatening and frightening. Often the shooters have experienced a trauma in their lives. Character education is based on the notion that there are certain character qualities that almost every person around the world values such as love, compassion, honesty, sincerity, and respect that can from the foundation of character instruction. One does not have to examine the controversial areas, but rather focus on the common values that virtually every person has. The chapter points out that an emphasis on the primacy of character in schooling has been replaced with an emphasis on standardized tests. This has yielded a population that is reasonably intelligent but often lacks the qualities of love, kindness, and civility that are necessary for society to truly work. A meta-analysis is conducted that helps assess the efficacy of character education programs overall. The results of the meta-analysis indicate that character education was also related to higher levels of expressions of love, integrity, compassion, and self-discipline. Overall, character education had somewhat greater effects for children in high school rather than those who were in elementary school.

Cinemagoers might have heard of the departure of the last German POWs from the newsreels covering the story in mid-July 1948. The last group of 546 was shown boarding a ship, ready to make their way home. British Movietone News commented, perhaps a little optimistically, that ‘for the most part they’re friendly men who’ve at least discovered there’s no hatred in the hearts of the people of Britain towards the people of Germany’. The POWs who were leaving were considered different from those who arrived earlier in the war. Overlooking the reports from earlier in the war which depicted cordial relations between captor and captive in late 1939, in contrast to those who were ‘imbued as they were with the principals of Nazism in the day of Hitler’s glory’, there were ‘similes and handshakes and in some cases a real warmth of sincerity’ from the POWs as they walked up the gangplank. Otto Jager, the last POWs to board, had become fond of Britain and even spoke of visiting for a holiday in the future. The reportage of the return of German POWs emphasised that their time in Britain had not been wasted and that it had contributed to furthering Anglo-German understanding and challenging perceptions of former enemies after the devastation of war.

Despite the popularity of online service recovery, little is known about the ways in which a retailer’s management responses to negative reviews shape prospective consumers’ perceptions of retailer complaint-handling. This study investigates the impacts of recovery management response strategies from a perspective of prospective consumers. Specifically, we investigate how two types of recovery messages, namely, warmth- and competence-oriented responses influence prospective consumers’ service recovery perceptions (i.e., perceived diagnosticity, perceived sincerity, and perceived fairness) and attitudes toward retailer. Warm-oriented responses emphasize retailers’ friendliness and kindness in service interactions, and competence-oriented responses emphasize retailers’ efficiency, and knowledgeability of their service/products (Kirmani et al. 2017).

Civilization faces the challenge of reconciling growth with biophysical limits, whilst avoiding devastating geo-political conflict. Radical demands for ‘degrowth’ are often juxtaposed with realist ‘eco-modernist’ scenarios. Elias’s theory of civilizing processes and his concept of the triad of controls provide an invaluable framework for evaluating the reality-congruence of both trajectories. An Eliasian understanding of ecological conscience formation is synthesized with insights from Ernest Gellner (on exo-education), Walter Ong (on literacy and individuation) and Owen Barfield (on the history of consciousness). Successful navigation of the politics of the Anthropocene implies societal solutions and arrangements that exist in the barely conceivable ‘adjacent possible.’ Eliasian concepts are invaluable in the exploration of such possibilities, but his rationalism and commitment to greater ‘detachment’ make him blind to the simultaneous requirement for selectively higher degrees of ‘involvement’ in the process of both ecological conscience formation and the consolidation of ‘imagined community’. Adam Seligman’s theory of ritual and sincerity provides a complement to Elias’s rationalism. Elias underplays the possibility that more detached scientific and economistic processes of model making and orientation might co-exist with patterns of conscious, creative, cognitive dissonance: modalities of ‘paradox’, enchantment and participation associated with more relational and reciprocal forms of ‘livelihood’ economy.

Religious believers and atheists seeking mutual understanding have an opportunity to form a coalition of the reasonable against both dogmatic believers and unbelievers. Reasons for seeking this include the following: (1) The mutual respect required for a harmonious society is stronger if we can come to understand what we have in common. (2) It is important to challenge the logic of inclusion and exclusion, which creates an unbridgeable gulf between people with different beliefs. (3) Our identities are multiple and complex, and that “atheist” and “religious believer” are not the only or always the most important ones. (4) The search for truth is inherently ethical in that it demands a respect for anyone who strives for sincerity and accuracy, even when they seem very wrong.

Hope is one of the most important comforts a healthcare worker can provide to patients and their families. Providing hope when the prognosis is bleak and despair is the initial emotion is a difficult challenge. A patient who is given an unexpected poor prognosis or a grieving family may not be able to understand all necessary information in one sitting. The physician must learn appropriate techniques for conveying heart-breaking news as the words of comfort and actions at this time will be remembered by patients and family, often more clearly than the actual details. Delivering and receiving unexpected news, while always done in a highly emotional setting, can be facilitated if the healthcare team leader is prepared to answer questions, focus attention, and has reviewed what words of comfort work and words and phrases to avoid. Experience has taught healthcare professionals how to do this in a manner that conveys information about outcomes that cannot be changed, yet leaves room for hope for what can be done. Here we present one effective method for doing that. The SPIKES protocol for delivering bad news is reviewed and we suggest ideas for communicating information, including education about the disease, results of testing, planned therapy, or palliative care.

I arrived in Iakutsk and stayed with my close friend, Petr I. Shchukin. Before I was put into prison, we had always treated each other with warmth and sincerity. When the arrests began, he was arrested and put into jail as well. He was not liable for military duty, but he was arrested for his trip to Ordagan, where eight Doukhobors including his brother Larion were doing military service. A week after his visit there, all eight Doukhobors in Ordagan turned in their guns. The interrogation and questioning started, and some other soldiers reported that a week ago there was one Doukhobor visitor who spoke with the soldiers. He was arrested for this as the principal criminal and thrown into jail.

Our study focuses on a specific strategy for firms and consumers to do good, known as cause marketing (CM). CM consists of “marketing activities that are characterized by an offer from the firm to contribute a specified amount to a designated philanthropic cause” (Varadarajan and Menon 1988, p. 60). CM seems a promising marketing strategy (Nielsen 2015). But is it effective irrespective of firm size? And what roles do perceived sincerity and feelings of gratitude play? The current research addresses both issues.

Emmanuel Levinas is known for his idea of ethics as first philosophy. In Totality and Infinity (1961), he expresses this concept with the phrase “truth presupposes justice”. Levinas’ ethical thought has been much discussed in previous literature. However, its implications for contemporary theories of truth have not been discussed at length. This paper aims to investigate how far Levinas’ reinterpretation of truth ranges from a phenomenological point of view. In the first section, by reading closely the first section of Totality and Infinity I disclose some peculiarities of Levinas’ concept of truth: (1) the “I” as a knowing subject is separated from the world. (2) truth is accomplished by discourse towards the other person. (3) to attain to the truth, the “I” needs to justify not only the fact that he or she describes but also himself or herself. By putting these three points in relation to Husserl’s analysis of communication and that of B. Williams in his Truth and Truthfulness, the second section shows that Levinas’ concept of truth, which may seem bizarre to some, can contribute to contemporary theories of truth insofar as it reinterprets the concept of truth from the perspective of a “personal” relation to the other person to whom the “I” speaks.

The paper reports ongoing research toward the design of multimodal affective pedagogical agents that are effective for different types of learners and applications. In particular, the work reported in the paper investigated the extent to which the type of character design (realistic versus stylized) affects students’ perception of an animated agent’s facial emotions, and whether the effects are moderated by learner characteristics (e.g. gender). Eighty-two participants viewed 10 animation clips featuring a stylized character exhibiting 5 different emotions, e.g. happiness, sadness, fear, surprise and anger (2 clips per emotion), and 10 clips featuring a realistic character portraying the same emotional states. The participants were asked to name the emotions and rate their sincerity, intensity, and typicality. The results indicated that for recognition, participants were slightly more likely to recognize the emotions displayed by the stylized agent, although the difference was not statistically significant. The stylized agent was on average rated significantly higher for facial emotion intensity, whereas the differences in ratings for typicality and sincerity across all emotions were not statistically significant. A significant difference in ratings was shown in regard to sadness (within typicality), happiness (within sincerity), fear, anger, sadness and happiness (within intensity) with the stylized agent rated higher. Gender was not a significant correlate across all emotions or for individual emotions.

Emotions can signal moral character because emotions can be linked to morality in three ways: one by being intrinsically moral themselves, another by arising from moral judgments of oneself or of another, and a third by being morally appropriate or inappropriate in the context in which they occur. An emotion’s morality rests on the moral appropriateness of its appraisal, motivation, feeling, expression, and regulation. The emotions that a person does not have can be as informative about their morality as do emotions that actually occur. Emotions express character better than mere beliefs because emotions convey conviction, prioritization, and resolve. The uncontrollability of some emotions can convey sincerity and reliability, but even voluntary verbal expressions are speech acts that constitute a public commitment to a moral position. The full range of human emotionality can provide information about moral character.

Lou Reed’s “Walk on the Wild Side” has become a symbol of sexual openness in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Even so, it is easy to feel that Reed’s engagement with matters of gender and sexuality is inadequate to the complexities of his subject matter. Set against a backdrop of musical irony and camp disavowal, the song all-too glibly presents the difficulties experienced by LGBTQ people, women, and people of colour. In this chapter, I argue that the song inherits its contradictory mix of sincerity and flippancy from Stonewall era representations of New York’s LGBTQ community. Reed provides a musical depiction of what the novelist John Rechy calls the City of Night, the nocturnal queer community hiding in the City that Never Sleeps. In this spirit, the record captures both a sensibility of freedom, the possibility and experimentation offered by the shadows, but also the darkened affect of a world experienced in terms of secrecy, defensiveness and shame. For better and worse, then, “Walk on the Wild Side” embodies the doubled hopefulness and despair of the City of Night.

Future sustainability of the gold and silver industry is highly dependent on how mining companies, communities, governments, and nongovernment organizations work together in an ecosystem that promotes well-being of all stakeholders. Mining companies must be proactive and demonstrate their sincerity in resolving various conflicting interests to earn the “license to operate” reward so-to-speak.

The concluding chapter of the book looks forward to what kind of literature can be presented in light of postmodernism. The chapter looks at types of literature often posited as coming after postmodernism and discusses how those genres (Postpostmodernism, Neo-Victorian, and Post-Ironic and New Sincerity) can be read in light of the postmodern structure of consciousness. The chapter further presents three potential ‘outs’ of postmodernism, ways in which literature could be written in relation to this concept of postmodernism, including looking at optimistic ways to consider the legacy of literary postmodernism, and its continued influence on both literary and theoretical frameworks in the twenty-first century.

The paper recalls the importance of consciousness in business and management. It refers to Steve Jobs of Apple as an embodiment of the spiritual principle that one person can change the world. This case also illustrates the spiritual power behind the aspiration of the human spirit for freedom, empowerment, and mastery. Jobs perceived the powerful stirrings of a deep evolutionary social movement, and Apple delivered creative, new products to meet this. Apple’s collective accomplishments, like those of Leonardo da Vinci and the Italian Renaissance, exemplify the virtually infinite potential for innovation and creativity. The paper emphasizes the value of values because values determine the ultimate level of accomplishment. Values are an expression of what we regard as valuable. The power of values depends on the intensity and sincerity with which we value them. Values embrace all aspects of life and encompass the subjective as well as the objective dimension. But, aside from their specific individual relevance, they always reflect on and refer back to a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts, for the implementation of any value necessarily requires the implementation of many others.

An increasing number of people are changing their way of thinking by reading news headlines. The interactivity and sincerity present in online news headlines are becoming influential to society. Apart from that, news websites build efficient policies to catch people’s awareness and attract their clicks. In that case, it is a must to identify the sentiment polarity of the news headlines for avoiding misconception. In this paper, we analyze 3383 news headlines generated by five major global newspapers during a minimum of four consecutive months. In order to identify the sentiment polarity (or sentiment orientation) of news headlines, we use 7 machine learning algorithms and compare those results to find the better ones. Among those Bernoulli Naive Bayes technique achieves higher accuracy than others. This study will help the public to make any decision based on news headlines by avoiding misconception against any leader or governance and will help to identify the most neutral newspaper or news blogs.

The judges of the French Court of Asylum, in charge of examining the cases of asylum seekers rejected by the French Office for the Protection of Refugees and Stateless Persons, affirm that there are very few technical legal aspects involved in asylum proceedings. They argue that the case law is not consistent and that the domestic law provides a vague definition of who is a refugee. Aside from these legal points, judges examine the “sincerity” of the applicant’s narrative as well as his or her attitude during the hearing. Judges agree to say that the rulings ultimately rely on their intime conviction (inner belief). Drawing on ethnographic data, the chapter explores the emotions and moral values involved in the construction of this inner belief.

This chapter discusses the consequences of US President Donald Trump for our understanding of media and politics. It sets out by discussing the mediatisation of politics, highlighting the importance of political conditions and the development of celebrity politics. The chapter highlights the aftermath of the 2007 economic crash and the consequent rise of anti-government populism. In Trump’s exploitation of these anti-establishment sentiments, the chapter stresses the stigmatisation of specialist knowledge allied to developments in media affordances. The chapter also argues that Trump’s use of subjective discourses against expertise relates to developments around authenticity and sincerity. The chapter concludes that Trump’s media-centred politics amounts to a “pseudo-presidency”, which confounds orthodox forms of political accountability.

Since the late nineteenth century, two trends have characterized court cases about the right to practise minority religions in the United States. First, white adherents are usually the subject of the most pivotal cases about the freedom to engage in minority religious practices. Second, appellate courts frequently rule against these litigants, for a variety of reasons ranging from the preservation of European norms to doubts about the sincerity of the practitioner’s beliefs. Through the examination of cases about religious drug use, animal sacrifice, and religious head-coverings, this chapter explores the relationship between race and the right to practise minority religions in the United States and the subtext about the boundaries of whiteness embedded in these free exercise cases.

The uprising that erupted at the end of 2010 and spread to most of the Arab countries did not bring spring to the Middle East and North Africa region, as it was hoped at the beginning. International, regional, and local powers have all been tested in their sincerity of supporting the will of the people, their social and political demands and choices vis-a-vis their own national and global interests. After eight years, there is no actor or institution that is able to bring spring to the region; however, history records all the efforts or sets put up by all the actors. Despite the fact that its reputation falls behind some of its members and also that it suffers from internal crisis, the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) as a subregional intergovernmental organization started to play more and more of a significant role diplomatically and economically in the region, especially after the Arab Spring. Nevertheless, in view of the challenges posed by regional unrest and the history of the organization, it is unlikely the organization will play a more active role. This study attempts to make a critical assessment of the GCC’s performance as a subregional organization during the regional turmoil and afterwards.

This study investigates Jean Calvin’s reform of the scholastic psychology of the mind by the biblical law of the heart. It interprets his personal seal, the cloven heart in hand, for all hearts as divided between hypocrisy and sincerity. Calvin condemned the philosophical faculties of the soul residing in the heart as disabled toward salvation by original sin. The heart was a stony deformity until the Spirit extracted it and implanted a soft healthy heart imprinted with his own seal. It fleshes out Calvin’s portrait by revealing him on the soulful affects in cardiac physiology and humoral theory. It discloses his basis in Aristotelian physics for the Spirit’s intrinsic movement in recreating the fallen heart to sanctification by recreating its natural intrinsic movement to evil.

This chapter discusses Romantic understandings of sensibility in Smith’s early novel, Ethelinde. Drawing on Arlie Hoschild’s twentieth-century analysis of the commodification of emotions, Morrissey breaks down the Romantic association of sincerity of feeling with virtue by illustrating how the text’s eponymous heroine uses authentic emotions for self-interested purposes. The chapter also unpacks Smith’s presentation of the female heiress, elucidating a double bind in which propertied women are not obligated to develop refined feelings to placate men, but become vulnerable to fortune-hunters because of the resulting lack of emotional intelligence. The chapter nuances the view that equates technical excellence in the long eighteenth-century novel with free indirect discourse, by arguing that the absence of free indirect discourse in Smith’s novel makes possible her social critique.

The use of ayahuasca has been spreading rapidly worldwide; however, no current statistics are available to provide a comprehensive understanding of the scope or pace of this expansion. In the United States, the expansion has included the appearance of the Brazilian ayahuasca religions Santo Daime and Uniao do Vegetal (UDV), underground ceremonial circles, workshops with itinerant Amazonian shamans, and spiritual retreat centers. This trend has included the recent emergence of groups and organizations that publicly advertise “legal” ayahuasca ceremonies and retreats. This chapter maps the existence of a series of organizations and actors who have controversially claimed legal protection through incorporation as “branches” of the Native American Church (NAC). The legality, religious character, and sincerity of these churches are reviewed in light of governing law, such as the First Amendment of the US Constitution, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), the Controlled Substances Act (CSA), and pertinent court cases involving the UDV and the Santo Daime, as well as ethnographic accounts of the historical Native American Church. Finally, it examines a petition for a religious exemption from the CSA from Ayahuasca Healings and speculates on the possibilities of the future of ayahuasca legality in the United States.

Cavell writes about opera as a medium in which the sceptical threat to the meaning of what we say is rescued by music. Curiously, despite passing references to Don Giovanni and Le nozze di Figaro, Cosi fan tutte escaped his direct attention. Yet of all the three Mozart/Da Ponte collaborations, it is Cosi which most intricately examines Cavellian themes of scepticism, sincerity and alienation as well as, notoriously, deploying incongruities between voice, action and music in pursuit of its ethical purpose. Moreover, the opera features a philosopher in active pursuit of a project to “epistemologize” human relationships and, in more recent years, has attracted direct philosophical inquiry. In this essay, I argue that Cosi fan tutte is the most Cavellian of operas and a fitting arena in which to test Cavell’s thought against rival accounts of his central themes.