A doll has occasions.  I am thinking of a rag doll.  It can be happy or sad,
fed or punished.  In repose it has aspects, for example it can be seen as
sleeping or dead or sun-bathing.  But only if you do not know which is true. --
There is only one who knows which is true, the one whose doll it is.  And that
one cannot strictly be said to _know_ it at all, except as a joke, or perhaps
as a fiction. -- Why not?  Because he cannot be in doubt about the doll's (inner)
state?  Of course he can be in doubt.  He might take her to a psychiatrist.
You might think he could not be in doubt, or be mistaken, because anything _he_
says about the doll _must_ be true.  But he might be lying about the doll's mood,
either to test the genuineness of my interest, or to deprive me of a relationship
with the doll.  -- No, but the point is that anything he _knows_ about the doll
must be true, whether he says what he knows or not, and whether he knows by
observation or not. -- But isn't that merely what is means to know?  And the
question remains whether he knows, or at all times knows.

There are criteria in terms of which I settle judgments about the (other's) doll.
To know whether a concept applies I have to look - at the doll.  I have to
determine whether I can see it in this way, get that occasion for it to dawn
for me.  Otherwise I am only humoring the one whose doll it is.  Perhaps I am
tired, or have a headache; I cannot in any case experience the meaning of the
words about the doll.  The doll seems rags.  I still know what a doll is; but
at the moment I am doll-blind.  Generally, if I care, I will have to justify my
concept by continuing the doll's history : ``I don't think she's really hungry.
She just got into the cookie jar earlier.  See how sneaky she looks.''  I may
scatter some crumbs on her dress to prove it, if there is something at hand I
can use for crumbs.  If I say, ``See.  Now she's comfortable,'' something must
have changed, or I must have done something, put a pillow under her head, or
rearranged her so that she is no longer sitting on her foot.  If the other,
the one whose doll it is, tells me that she likes sitting on her foot -- say
because it makes her sit taller -- and puts her back in her former attitude,
then perhaps that is the end of the matter.  At some point my say comes to an end.
I defer to the one whose doll it is.  If I do not, what then?  Perhaps the doll
becomes our scapegoat; cursed, and cast out.

When I defer to the one whose doll it is, do I defer to his greater power?
Power to do what?  I respect his relationship to the doll, its being his.  This
need not be a matter of recognizing his ownership of it.  (I recognize his
ownership by, for example, not taking the doll from him, not without due process.)
I recognize his authority over the doll, his having the last word over it; hence
I hold him responsible for it.  The most this demands is that the doll be
(regarded as) his to play with, for a while, in a particular place.  Even if
he owns it, his authority is not unlimited; there are still rules in this house.
Whether it is better for him to own a doll, to have it for always rather than for
a specified while, or until he decides to give it up, or whether it is better
for him or for anyone to own anything for always, are empirical questions, or
ought to be.  (We seem to give children an idea that someone owns their bodies.
How, otherwise, shall we explain their having the extraordinary idea of feeling
guilty for hurting themselves, even when the game they were playing was not,
apparently, forbidden; guilty even for becoming ill?  It would then strike them
as a declaration of their freedom to say that they own their _own_ bodies.  But this
would merely be an escape from one conceptual cell; or from a dungeon into an
enclosed yard.  Some are told that their body is a temple.  That seems to
rule out ownership, except perhaps by a congregation.  But it is otherwise
a dangerously open idea, especially concerning questions for admission.)

Do I respect the doll?  I may respect its feelings, lay it comfortably in a
nice box before storing it for another generation.  But it has no say, for
example, about whether it _is_ comfortable.  It has no voice in its own history.
It exists in limbo.  --  What is the doll? (I would like to answer that question
because I feel I know absolutely everything about dolls.  But I would like not to
answer it since of course I know absolutely nothing about dolls that others do not
know.  So there is nothing to tell.  But there may yet be something to say.)  The
doll is certainly not the form of the rags.  Which form would it be?  And if I say
that the doll is the life of the rags, that must also be a remark about us, those
of us who have a voice in its history.  For me to be part if its life, I have
to enter into its history, achieve the spirit in which concepts of life are
applied to it.

Stanley Cavell, _The Claim of Reason_ pp. 401-403