First, I Would Like To Thank the respondents for their thoughtful and generous response to my book. I have found myself challenged by their observations, I have learned from them, and I have been stimulated to new thoughts of my own. Second, I would like to make a more substantive point, which is intended to frame the remarks that follow. I would like to say that translation is not understood well if it is thought of simply as linguistic exchange. All the respondents have taken this on board, but it is worth reaffirming as it is so easily overlooked.Jim Garrison's inclination in response to my book is to defend Dewey specifically against my claim that there is an absence of existential disturbance or discord in Dewey's work. Dewey has an account of or expresses an experiential sense of existential discord. I appreciate the point, though I think it is overstated, and I continue to be an enthusiast for Dewey's work. But Cavell's idea of skepticism, which recurs so persistently in his writings, is addressed to something different than is found in Dewey's pragmatism, and an overly tenacious reading of Dewey may stand in the way of what I am referring to here; certainly, at one time, it stood in the way for me. Cavell's concern is with what I am inclined to think of as the invisible territory of human life, where the precarious relationship between the inner and the outer are realized in language.Like Steven Fesmire, Garrison casts doubt on what I have referred to as the asymmetrical relationship between the self and the other. He remarks: “I worry about the pretentiousness of thinking others are not our equal in assuming the burdensome sins of humankind or that they do not owe the same debt to us that we owe to them” (Garrison 102). Again, I appreciate this response, but the point I want to make in referring to the asymmetrical relation is that there is a need for release from our own ego. We should, Garrison claims, avoid “the mania of agnostic doubting” (Garrison 102). But Cavell's interest in skepticism does not make him an agnostic—if agnosticism means sharing in the skeptical epistemologist's doubt that anything can be known. It is a matter rather of his insistence that we must genuinely confront our own selves. This is consistent with Cavell's sense of Wittgenstein's later writings as dispelling the epistemologist's skepticism, in instance after instance, but showing how its spell is inclined to return in new guises, and of his more provocative claim that the Philosophical Investigations is in part to be seen as autobiographical—that is, obviously not as some kind of memoir but as a means for working on himself.Yet Wittgenstein, Garrison claims, is closer to Dewey than to Cavell. In Dewey, we are all engaged and involved in the social context of language games, and so there is no need to bother about skepticism in the way that Cavell does. On the contrary, we can learn about other minds and learn from them. How should I respond to this? Does this not make language games seem like sophisticated versions of the kind of communication that characterizes the behavior of the higher animals? For sure, there are some similarities. But it is a profoundly important aspect of human signs that they, unlike those of animals, are open to new association and connection, and that, because of this, they always stand in need of interpretation. For much of our interaction, the role of interpretation is not particularly obtrusive or even apparent as, in so many instances, we naturally learn how to respond. But the fact that human signs are open to new possibilities and new occasions of usage needs to be seen as the very element in which the imagination is at play, in which human creativity finds its source, and in which human understanding takes root. Children learning language are not like animals becoming habituated to their environment and, hence, picking up the signs that will enable them to survive therein: they are coming into a world. In a powerful passage in The Claim of Reason, Cavell describes his own daughter, at the age of about 2, picking up the word “kitty” and then projecting it into new contexts as she touches a dog, a fur rug, and perhaps a fox stole (Cavell 172). The child is “incorrect” in these extended usages, and in time, she will learn to align what she says with what the grown-ups say. At this stage, however, the adults will mostly be amused and pleased by the child's projections of the word, and these will be taken not so much as errors but as signs of intelligence and imagination. What the child is doing is learning how to go on, in the phrase that Wittgenstein uses repeatedly. And knowing how to go on is not just a matter of repeating an item in the series of usage without variation but includes the extension of the series in unforeseen ways—ways nevertheless, that are more or less intelligible to others. The language game is fluid and dynamic, and this is the source of its dynamism. This dynamic nature of language is what is at the heart of the idea of philosophy as translation that I discussed in the book.It is a marked feature of the Philosophical Investigations that Wittgenstein uses his own characteristic version of dialogical form. The dynamic quality to the paragraphs of the text itself serves to unsettle the reader, unsettling ideas that might otherwise be taken for granted. The voice of the skeptic is heard and then stilled. A kind of peace is achieved. But the disturbance comes back again and again.Let me say clearly, then, that I do not see Cavell as a skeptic, and I believe it would be wrong to do so. Cavell's response to skepticism is that it is there as a human condition. Skepticism's prominence in epistemology is a manifestation in philosophy of a more general disturbance in the human condition. My claim is that Dewey does not register this disturbance. An important indicator of this is the nature of Dewey's prose, with its tendency to be relatively flat and even homeostatic: it maintains or repeatedly returns to a steadiness in substance and style. In Cavell and Wittgenstein, in style and substance, the registering of this disturbance is crucial.I thank Vincent Colapietro for his thought-provoking response to my book. Here, I find my main point of contention is with his interpretation of my position as a call for “intralinguistic” translation. I wonder also whether his foregrounding of my discussion of William Deresiewicz's Excellent Sheep (2014) gives the impression that I am more taken with that book than I am.Colapietro broadens the concept of translation into intersemiotic translation, and I feel he is pressing interesting, perhaps complementary, but certainly different points from those that are my concern. Moreover, the emphasis on intersemiotic translation seems potentially to apply to everything—to Cavell, Rorty, West . . . Translation in my account, however, is not a matter of juxtaposition or of the identification of different strands of thought.In cautionary remarks on Deresiewicz's adoption of ideas from the transcendentalists, Colapietro writes: “Emerson's words however cut deeper than this contemporary commentator on elite universities in the United States appreciates. The juxtaposition between epigram and section is rather jarring” (Colapietro 106). I am in many respects in agreement with this criticism, and I think it is certainly true that Excellent Sheep's engagement with Emerson is relatively slight. Colapietro criticizes me, perhaps for related reasons, over my highlighting of the anxiety of inclusion: I do not deal sufficiently, he suggests, with the inner death and nihilism that Emerson talks about. But I am not simply talking about inclusion in the more or less familiar, predominantly sociopolitical terms in which the contrast is now commonly raised: I am concerned rather with our existential and psychological condition, and this is deeply related to inner death and nihilism. Colapietro is right that the sense of this is there in Rorty and West in ways that, without a doubt, go well beyond Deresiewicz. But I think Excellent Sheep is a valuable book and that it needs to be understood on its own terms, not as any kind of developed philosophical engagement with the philosophy to which it makes mostly passing reference.It would, I think, be a matter of culpable intellectual looseness if I were to use translation simply as a metaphor for transformation. I believe I do not do this, but I accept that Colapietro is worried that I do.Steven Fesmire also has raised an impressive list of criticisms, and I welcome these, just as I acknowledge my appreciation for his generous reception of the book. I shall respond to his queries centering on the following four themes.The first concerns how far I am trying to make curricular recommendations. Fesmire raises a practical question concerning whether I am recommending that language education should be the leading priority in faculty hires and curriculum development. One response here is that I have not, in the book, endeavored to make specific recommendations regarding university appointments. But the more important response is that what I mean by language education does not refer to an independent subject called “language.” I am thinking instead of a relation to language and sensitization that should permeate all curricula including philosophy. The recommendation is, in this sense, cross-curricular: it involves the way we are engaged in teaching and learning, and extends to matters concerning curriculum content. This does have a practical bearing, but this would not take the form of some new kind of intervention: it would involve, especially, a reconsideration of the forms that assessment now takes, for this has its effects retroactively, as it were, on the ways that content is selected, and teaching and learning understood. This would require a more general change of outlook.Second, Fesmire raises the question of how far pragmatism and transcendentalism, respectively, are genuinely open to difference. He expresses doubt that the Cavellian asymmetrical relationship I try to describe is more receptive to marginalized voices than is the transactive Deweyan view that Garrison advances: Dewey's pragmatism has the capacity to accommodate the voices of those on the margins of society, and it is sensitive to unconsulted and unheard tensions. This is a familiar defense of Dewey, in response to which I would like to refer to the case I discuss in the book. In his visit to Japan in 1919, Dewey found a limit to his receptiveness to different voices, and perhaps there were some that he could not hear at all. In encountering what he came to regard as the impenetrability and inscrutability of Japanese culture, his principle of sympathetic imagination toward the different was severely strained. Dewey's visit to Japan proved to be a test case in which he was caught out by a real gap in cross-cultural communication—in a foreign place where the English word “democracy” was untranslatable. By contrast, in Cavell (and in Emerson and Thoreau), there is a hospitality to what is beyond one's comprehension. And this I believe is attributable, in Cavell's case, to his take on skepticism (his acceptance of the sense of disturbance and disequilibrium in the human condition) and to his idea of the need for acknowledgment of the voice of the other. There are elements of Eastern thought in Cavell's thinking, as there are in Emerson and Thoreau—an attunement to diversity and to time, and perhaps to ways of thinking that have origins in something other than monotheism.Fesmire's third point is related to the idea of separateness that emerges in my discussion of bi-directionality and translation. With these words, I am seeking to identify something different in Cavell from the ideas of community, commonality, and cooperation that are to the fore in Dewey. In defending Dewey's “rooted cosmopolitanism,” Fesmire casts doubt on the idea of rootless cosmopolitanism, which he takes to be a product of my Cavellian reading of cosmopolitanism. My intention is not to advocate rootless as opposed to rooted cosmopolitanism. What I try to do, in my recurrent reference to anti-foundationalist perfectionism, is to go beyond the dichotomy between the rooted and the rootless, in a move toward something closer to Emerson's finding as founding, to the founding of one's way in the ongoing process of finding. (This is echoed in Cavell's thought on immigrancy.) What is at stake in translation is the sense of a gap, of a foundationlessness or bottomlessness that is to be experienced in communication. And this relates to the sense of an unbridgeable gap, which is crucial to the idea of separateness in Cavell. It is a disturbing of the naturalness of connection. To understand the human being as the Other is to realize separateness. It is through this very separateness that we attain reunion with the world. Dewey's language and thought, directed as it is to connection and communion, seems to lack this subtle sense of separation and reunion.Finally, Fesmire draws attention to the distance of Cavell from naturalistic kinds of philosophy, with which Dewey might be more readily aligned. “But [Saito's] critique of Dewey's rooted cosmopolitanism could be clarified to explore whether Cavellian anarchic perfectionist education—steeped in ‘perfection with a strong sense of imperfection’ (Saito 121–22)—can help students and their teachers relate to the natural world in a more meaningful, value-rich, and ethically appropriate way” (Fesmire 116). Behind this statement lies Fesmire's belief that “[w]e exist, and our lives are imbued with meaning, by grace of infinite natural relations that precede us and are affected by us” (Fesmire 116). I just want to highlight the way Cavell inherits the idea that our nature is convention. Human being is cultural, it is invested in language, and language changes. We cannot be human beings without being embedded in a particular language and culture. Language depends upon convention, and yet it is open, as I emphasized above, to new associations. Every word we say, the conventions we live by, our world—all are open to new possibilities, and this is essential to their nature. Language is in us, creating us as human beings. In every word we say, we are open to change. If there is any “appropriate” way of initiating students into better ways of living with the natural world, it is always in an intersection involving the cultural and the linguistic.But let me conclude by emphasizing one thing. The position I have tried to describe is not to be seen as a refinement of or addition to Dewey's insights. It is the acknowledgment of aspects of the human condition about which we are habitually in denial.I thank the contributors for helping me to think better about these matters and the editors of The Pluralist for giving this attention to my book.