The ghost of Winch’s ghost: On primitive
misunderstandings of philosophers
The Idea
of a Social Science and its Relation to Philosophy is a polemical work. Peter Winch wrote it when he
was less than 30. It is the text of an angry young man -- of someone angry at
the potentially-dangerous perspective(s) on society dominant in his time ...
and still, I would suggest, dominant (albeit mostly in different guises) today.
A
sober assessment of Winch’s challenge and achievement in the philosophy of the
social sciences, after his death and at a distance of over 40 years from his
original text, will take seriously into account both what it was that he wished
polemically to question and challenge, and what it was that he himself actually
wanted to say. On the latter front especially, a serious effort to understand
Winch will take into account how he wished to be heard and read, in the light
of the ‘evidence’ which the totality of his later work provides.
In
particular, I think that one if one can must re-read The Idea of a Social Science in the light of the ‘Preface’ which
Winch added in 1990. If one can, because
an author suggesting how their own work should be understood cannot be
guaranteed to get it right, especially when writing much later. Authorship is
not a trump card; but it is, I think, a card to which attention should always
be closely paid. If one wants to understand a text, rather than reductively
misread it or fail to read it altogether, then one will want if possible to understand it as its
author understands it. (Where the text is simply confused, or where the author
is evidently revising the text rather than exegetically commenting on it, then
one will of course have to give up such a strategy.[1] )
Few
indeed of the many critiques of Winch written over, say, the last decade, take
Winch’s post-1964 [2] work at all seriously. The special issue of this
journal recently devoted to Winch’s work is no exception. This special issue
features ten papers, by some major names in the field. It features several
authors who would characterize themselves as ‘Wittgensteinians’ of one stripe
or another. It contains several papers which purport to involve a serious
effort at understanding Winch. Some of the papers in it are interesting, and
there is some good philosophical and intellectual work in them. But my own
opinion is that, regrettably, at most two of them actually succeeds in taking
up a Wittgensteinian stance upon the human and social sciences.[3] That at most the same two of them succeeds in
understanding Winch in a manner that Winch himself I think would find minimally
acceptable. In sum, that hardly any of them takes up the kind of
anti-theoreticist stance that I believe Winch followed Wittgenstein in taking.
Most
of the papers, of course, mean to criticise Winch in one or another fashion.
But I believe that they mostly fail even to do that. Because they do not evince
a sufficient level of understanding of what they are intending to criticise. So
the criticisms are largely directed against a ghost of Winch’s ghost, not
against his actual work or its actual spirit.
“But
what”, asks an interlocutor, “do you mean by ‘theory’ or ‘theoreticist’? You
say that we argue only against a ghostly unreal Winch; but what would it be to
take up a non-theoretical stance vis-a-vis the social sciences? Isn’t the
avoidance of theory itself merely an out-dated empiricist fantasy? And isn’t it
only Winch’s empiricist fantasy of natural science[4] that stands against what he calls ‘social study’
so as to provide a supposedly clear counter-class?”
It
is true that Winch’s 1958 presentation was marred by an empiricist rendering of
natural science. Here are Winch’s words on the topic from 1990:
[Insert Preface quote]
The
question as to what it would be to take up a non-theoretical stance in reflection
(e.g.) upon ‘the social sciences’ is a good question. But those asking it often
seem to think it a rhetorical question, a question that answer itself in the
following way: it is impossible for there to be any such stance. The claim that
a non-theoretical stance in philosophy is impossible is a claim that I must
question. I might ask, first, what is
it that is being said to be impossible here? Until that question is answered, my interlocutor’s own claim is moot -- what is being claimed?[5] It often seems that such a ‘claim’ is a product
of what Richard Rorty [6] has denominated ‘post-modern knowingness’.
According to such a ‘knowing’ stance, ‘everyone’ knows in advance that anyone
claiming to be able to
do without a theory is merely relying tacitly and
dishonestly on a (hidden) theory. Often, such ‘knowingness’ is in the service
not of a genuine anti-positivism, but of a elitist politicising theoreticism.
The
point of much of the best work on and after Wittgenstein in the last generation
has been to dispute such assumptions. More specifically, there is a ‘school’ of
Wittgensteinians (loosely associated with the heritage of Winch, more closely
with that of Cavell and Diamond,[7] gathered
most conveniently in my collection, The
New Wittgenstein), who believe that Wittgenstein can be understood, after his own word, as no purveyor of theories,
or of any philosophical assertions or theses barring those which elicit no
disagreement. The scholars in this ‘school’ dispute that the ‘return to the
everyday’ need be conservative politically;[8] they dispute that it need be naive
philosophically;[9] and they ask (again) whether the very various
philosophical and social theoretic opponents of the everyday have in fact
succeeded in saying anything at all, when they say that such a return is
‘impossible’.
Martin
Stone’s essay “Wittgenstein and Deconstruction” examples the last of these
points particularly well. Stone notes the deep similarities of influential
currents in recent English-speaking philosophy -- for example Saul Kripke’s
work on ‘rule-scepticism’ -- to the influential current in Continental
philosophy explicitly known as ‘Deconstruction’. (‘Deconstructive’ writing
typically suggests that there is no escape from the ‘trap’ of language, that
one should be anti-metaphysical but yet that there is no escape from
metaphysics, that everything is political -- examples of the spirit of
‘Post-Modern knowingness’.) Stone then tries to understand what Derrida can be
trying to say in his ‘Deconstructive’ writings (N.B. Stone here practices what
this school preaches -- namely, an attempt to understand, rather than to
dismiss as more ‘positivistic’ readers of Wittgenstein have tended to do.[10] ). Stone notes carefully Derrida’s own
painstaking efforts to avoid the clichés of Post-Modern knowingness. But he
reluctantly concludes, even so, that he cannot find a successful way of
understanding what Derrida is trying to say, and in particular that Derrida has
not shown that there does not exist a way of dealing with philosophical perplexities
which refrains from giving a philosophical account or theory, or making
philosophical claims (see Stone, p.106). In short, Stone argues (on p.84) that
“a central aim of Wittgenstein’s discussion [of rules] is to suggest that if
(1) a certain metaphyiscal idea of meaning and (2) the deconstruction of that
idea seem to exhaust the philosophical options, that is owing to our failure to
see another possibility -- namely, a return to the ordinary or everyday: “What
we do [i.e. in contrast to other philosophers
-- Stone’s note] is to bring words back from their metaphysical to their
everyday use.” [PI para.116]
Wittgenstein identifies philosophy’s metaphysical voice as his critical
target. But this alone would hardly distinguish him from any number of other
philosophers within the huge Kantian wake of philosophy’s self-criticism. So it
would be a mistake to infer, from such a common metaphysical target, that the
contrast Wittgenstein wishes to draw (between himself and others) should not
embrace -- or even refer most especially to -- those philosophers who [like
Derrida] set their face against
metaphysics. “We bring words back`’ -- Wittgenstein is to be read as saying --
“in contrast to the way other philosophers criticize metaphysics; in their form
of criticism, words remain metaphysically astray.””
So:
the school of ‘New Wittgensteinians’ associated particularly with Cavell and
Diamond holds, as we have argued now in some considerable detail elsewhere,
that it is possible to interpret Wittgenstein as austerely non-theoretical, and
as resolutely therapeutic in his
philosophical aims and methods. We take seriously moments in Wittgenstein such
as the following (and we regard these moments not as naive retreats into
‘common-sense philosophy’ or empiricism, but as reminders of a possibility
undreampt of in Analytic or empiricist or Post-Modernist philosophies):
“We may not advance any kind of theory. There must
not be anything hypothetical in our conisderations. We must do away with all
explanation, and description alone must take its place.” [11]
I believe that the main currents in Winch’s
thought are consonant with the ‘New Wittgenstein’ interpretation. That is why
this ‘detour’ into Wittgenstein’s thought was necessary -- it is no detour.[12] After Winch, after Wittgenstein, I am against
anything probably worth calling ‘theory’ in the social studies in most cases
for the following reasons:
1) ‘Theory’ in the social studies tends to occlude
the very phenomena it deals with, substituting for them simplified ‘dummy’ versions;
2) Part of this process is an abstraction from
participants’ own understandings which, when it is deep or complete,[13] fails to deal with those participants as humans
or social actors at all.
3) Explanatory theories distract us from the real
task of assembling therapeutically-motivated descriptions of certain social
phenomena which DO puzzle us.
The
last of these was especially Winch’s concern.
But
it is worth issuing provisos such as that it is perhaps only ‘in most cases’
that theory-talk is to be avoided in (the philosophy of) social study, because
my position here is not dogmatic. I do not say that there cannot be uses of the
word ‘theory’ in relation to activities of social study which are intelligible
and helpful; I say that the word has a bad history in this context, and is
probably best avoided. I do not say that whether or not one calls what one is
doing the production of a theory or not is the key issue; on the contrary, it
is at most a marker of more fundamental issues concerning the character of
one’s intellectual work. I say that most intellectual work which pretends to
the production of or the realisation of something like what has been
traditionally called a social theory (whether an ‘old’ social theory (e.g.
‘Scientific Socialist’ class-analysis) or a ‘critical social theory’ (e.g.
Giddens’s or Bhaskar’s)) is highly likely to be vulnerable to the criticisms
that I have mentioned and that Winch was the first to explore in detail.
Nigel
Pleasants’s book Wittgenstein and the
idea of a critical social theory buttresses the last of my claims here.
Pleasants’s allusion to Winch in his title is to the point: the point of
Pleasants’s book is to argue that would-be ‘post-positivist’ leading lights of
contemporary social theory -- especially, Bhaskar, Giddens, and Habermas -- are
actually still falling into the same traps of scientism and misbegotten
epistemology as their positivist predecessors.[14] Moreover, Pleasants lays out in effective detail
what I have had space here only to sketch the barest outlines of: namely,
Wittgenstein’s antipathy to ‘theory’ in inappropriate places, and how this can
be spelt out in relation to ‘social science’.[15] (Unfortunately, as I shall discuss shortly, even
Pleasants fails to be sufficiently sympathetic to Winch’s own perspective on
these matters -- Pleasants characterizes Winch [16] as a (more or less unwitting) fomentor of and
participant in ‘critical social theory’.)
Winch,
I am urging, can and should be read as rejecting a place for ‘theory’ in
accounts of social reality, if by ‘theory’ we mean anything much like the
various things that the likes of Durkheim, Friedman, Bhaskar, or Bourdieu
appear to mean by it.
“But”,
an interlocutor may interrupt, “how can this be? For, whether or not you are
right about Wittgenstein, clearly Winch
at least does have a theory, one centred around the notion of a rule.”
Does
Winch have a rule-based social theory? Many have thought so, based on their
reading(s) of ISS. A major contemporary ‘Wittgensteinian’ author who has
critiqued Winch repeatedly on these grounds is Ted Schatzki. A striking but not
unusual fact about Schatzki’s interpretation of Winch is that it pays no
attention whatsoever to the 1990 Preface.
In
fact, it is I think Winch who is the authentic Wittgensteinian here, not
Schatzki. Because Winch, unlike Schatzki, is undogmatic. Schatzki insists that
the term “rule” must be eschewed. But, as I acknowledged above, in connection
with the term ‘theory’, no term is though and through flawed or misleading. To
think otheriwse is to fall back into the grip of an Augustinian misapprehension
of the functioning of language. It is words
in use which mean something or other, not single words in isolation.[17] So, the way in which Winch uses the term ‘rule’
may be at times ill-advised or risky -- as he himself admitted in 1990 -- but
it is a similar mistake to that of verificationism/positivism to claim that we
can rule out in advance [18] the possibility of Winchian rule-talk being
helpful in our philosophical inquiries. But Winch never insisted on the term,
nor for that matter against other terms. The maxim which he seems to be
following is more like “I’ll settle for whatever way works to convey a certain
contrast (e.g. between the social and the natural) which is therapeutically useful
when people are prone to scientism and ‘ontological monism’”, than like “Let’s
look for the one term -- it could for instance turn out to be ‘rule’, or
‘norm’, or ‘tradition’ -- which is theoretically correct and may solve all our
problems.” The latter alternative, the search for the magic (quasi-scientific)
word, is roughly Schatzki’s -- and this is perhaps not surprising, when placed
in the broader context of the fact that Schatzki has his own
(‘practice-theoretic’) account of social reality. He wants to follow
Wittgenstein -- but ends up doing so, it seems, much less than Winch.
I
have picked on Schatzki because he evidently wants to be a Wittgensteinian, and
because there are moments in his work when he is tantalisingly close to
Wittgenstein’s vision.[19] Nor is he alone among the recent writers on Winch
in HHS; Pleasants takes Winch to be a
‘Kantian’
87-8 pl.
I
stress that Schatzki and Pleasants are, as it were, notionally right: if Winch
did hold the kind of thesis about the absolute centrality to social life
attributed to him by them, then he would indeed be guilty of a ‘metaphysical
error’. But I have argued that, especially when we understand Winch as he asks
us to understand him, we find him making no such error, or at worst using
formulations at times that are uncomfortably similar to what someone would say
who was making such an error.
Illustrative
of the difference in temperament between Winch and some of his critics is his
distinctive reaction to the challenge presented by Kripke’s ‘rule-scepticism’.
Many ‘Wittgensteinians’ have sought to refute Kripke, to answer him in one way
or another. Most notable here perhaps are Baker and Hacker, in their polemical Scepticism, Rules and Language.Baker
and Hacker rely on the concept of ‘internal relations’ to bind together rule
and applcation. They do come awfully close to having a rule-centred (though
individualist) ‘social’ philosophic theory.[20] A minority of ‘Wittgensteinians’ have instead
embraced Kripke’s rule-scepticism as helping us to found a true social theory.
Most notable here is David Bloor, in his Wittgenstein:
A social theory of knowledge.[21] But some Wittgensteinians have refused altogether
to take part in the debate on these terms. They have not tried to refute
Kripke, but rather, to understand what is important and tenable in the human
and linguistic roots of the challenge he tries to issue, and to deflate that
purported challenge by means of issuing an invitation to the philosopher caught
up in a Kripkean problematic to return to the everyday employments of the terms
(e.g. ‘rule’, ‘interpretation’) which are at the heart of the matter. It is
striking that Winch (1987) proceeds more or less explicitly in this manner, as
more recently have done Cavell (1990) and Diamond (1989).[22]
Schatzki
and Pleasants do not go as far as Bloor, they appear to disagree only at the
margin with his Kripkean belief in ‘undermining’ or criticising the concept of
‘rule’. For the likes of Bloor, ‘rules’ are a flawed element of a would-be
social theory. For the likes of Baker and Hacker, ‘rules’ offer the tools to
successfully rebut Kripkean scepticism. It is only Winch & co. who bypass
this debate, out of the conviction that ‘rule’ is at base just another word of
the English language, no more exceptional than ‘game’ or ‘chair’ or
‘microscope’.[23]
Winch’s
discussion of ‘rules’ and ‘internal relations’ in ISS etc. is then best read
much differently from Baker and Hacker’s in their critique of Kripke.
Winch
is building on the Tractatus
understanding of ‘internal relation’, which arguably persists into
Wittgenstein’s later work [24] -- as
something strictly unsayable, a notion of transitional value at best. To
further back up my thought about the non-assertoric, non-constative,
therapeutic nature of Winch’s thought hereabouts, note the use of the notion of
‘internal relation’ on pp.xiv-xv of ISS:
. Contra
Baker and Hacker, the term “internal relation” cannot be used faithfully to
Wittgenstein in a way which provides a generalistic account of ‘metaphysical
glue’ between rule and application -- this idea does deserve the kind of criticism which Schatzki (inappropriately)
levels against Winch on rules.[25]
‘Internal
relations’, for Winch as for Wittgenstein, are not genuinely relations. Only ‘external’ relations are actually
relations, between separate things. And there have to be separate things, if
there are to be relations (between things).
It
follows that when Winch speaks above of different ‘parts’ of social life, and
similarly of social relations, as being ‘internal relations’, what he is really
saying is usefully put as follows: that they
are not relations at all. That characterizing them as relations can,
riskily, lead to society being thought of in nonsensical atomistic ways. When
we read Winch with a sensitivity to the non-assertoric, post-metaphysical
nature of his philosophy, and when we attend to his attendance to the
continuities in Wittgenstein’s philosophy (rather than, as is usual, reading in
him at best only an alleged version of Wittgenstein’s (alleged) ‘later
philosophy’), then profitable ways of understanding a multitude of his remarks
in ISS open up for us. And
unprofitable ways, contrariwise, are shut down. For example, when we pick up
the notion of ‘internal relation’ for a while we see that, though it cannot be
ultimately satisfactory, and though it can risk leading us to say things which
sound awfully like (nonsensical) metaphysical ‘theses’ about the social world,
it at least usefully closes down the unprofitable avenue of thinking of
different practices as being (metaphysically) hermetically sealed off from one
another; and furthermore suggests instead an alternative ‘picture’ which may
help to point up the absurdity (not
falsity) of the atomism and ontological individualism which have dominated much
social theory.
In
sum, careful attention to Winch’s text and to its Wittgensteinian backdrop
starts to show quite clearly how he resists being boxed into any ‘position’ in
the conventional spectrum of social theories/philosophies -- whether
‘individualistic’ (e.g. Baker and Hacker) or
‘wholistic’ (e.g. Bloor).
“You
might have a point”, my interlocutor may say, “in arguing that Winch does not
hold the “rules thesis” attributed to him by Pettit,[26] or the (very similar) rule-ubiquity theses
attributed to him by Pleasants and Schatzki. Perhaps these ‘theses’ are at most
truisms for Winch, not controversial and fruitful social-theoretic claims. But
in that case, how do you account for Winch’s remarks about metaphysics, and
social philosophy?”
[Reply]
Perhaps now the interlocutor interrupts
impatiently, “But what do ‘different’ and ‘same’ mean, for Winch? How, for
example, is the notion of ‘same community’ or ‘different community’
operationalised in the first place?”
To
answer the second question first: it is not. To answer the first question:
These terms mean nothing at all for Winch -- as parts of a theory.Of course, they can mean everything in the
rich and sometimes conflicting lives of real people from (or not from) real
particular communities (see the closing paragraphs of the Preface to ISS [ and
Lassman?]). Why think that we need philosophers / social theorists to
individuate communities or otherwise, when people are so busy already doing it
for themselves? What could such a theoretical individuation be, other than an
attempted imposition of a simplified dummy reality on our complexand conflicted
world?
“But
this is ridiculous! Every time you are pressed to clarify ehat you mean by a
term, or what one of Winch’s notions amounts to, you say “It doesn’t mean
anything.”!
Right!
It doesn’t mean anything -- as part of a theory. Roughly: only insofar as a
theory were being put forward would one’s claims be truth-evaluable, would what
one says turn out to be true or false. But there is no good reason to think
that this is what Winch is doing.
‘But
isn’t it true that the Azande are
(were) a relatively homogenous culture relative to our’s, and that their
culture is (was) relatively isolated
from others, from other communities?”
Now
we have rapidly moved from an exclusively philosophic terrain to a question
which is at least partly a simple matter of fact, or at least of empirical
social description. The answer to your question is ‘Yes’, probably -- at least,
for all I know, it is. The real question is: What philosophic or
social-theoretic weight can be put on this ‘Yes’? What interesting consequences
follow from this historical / common-sensical point for philosophy of mind or
language, or for the validity or otherwise of (e.g.) Giddens’s picture of the
human agent? Surely, none at all. The problem of other communities is simply a
contemporary version of the old problem of other minds.[27] It can be just as phenomenologically real -- but
to someone in its grip, either notionally or really,[28] theory is an irrelevance. Therapy is called for,
instead.
Winch, like certain other recent philosophers (I
have in mind particularly Thomas Kuhn), has been almost endlessly and more or
less tragically misunderstood. Admittedly, the way he wrote, and some of his
polemical and thought-provocative formulations, like Kuhn’s, gave away hostages
to fortune. Thereafter the hostages were murdered over and over again, and
therefore their ghosts still, regrettably, walk among us. If Winch’s ghost is
to have peace, then the ghost of his ghost, the phantasm of those hostages,
must be laid to rest. This will require philosophers and theorists of the
social sciences to find a way no longer to hear Winch himself as a fantasist,
with incoherent mumblings of a Relativistic or Idealistic nature forever behind
his lips. Winch never meant to be a social theorist or a philosopher with a
metaphysical message. I have tried to suggest here how he can be read otherwise
than as that. But it requires an effort of will to follow my suggestions.
Wittgenstein
once suggested that philosophers confronted with our own -- their own --
ordinary lives and words are like primitive peoples confronted with the
artifacts of modern civilizations. Philosophers (e.g. of the social sciences)
typically lose their concepts,[29] lose their footing in their everyday practices,
when they reflect on those practices. Ditto ‘social scientists’. And so both
tend to substitute for those practices, in all their vast complexity and
subtlety, crude two-dimensional substitutes.
Winch
once skected a way of avoiding doing this in connection with an influential
example, that of (Evans-Pritchard’s) Azande. How ‘ironic’ that most of the way
Winch has been treated in the ‘literature’ involves just the kind of primitive
misunderstanding -- both of his topic and of his text -- that he himself warned
against.[30] The misunderstandings of him which have
predominated among philosophers and others can be alleviated -- but not by any
theory, and not by any reader unwilling to do the work for themselves.
Bibliography
Gordon
Baker and Peter Hacker, Scepticism, Rules and Language (Oxford:
Blackwell, 1984).
Roy
Bhaskar, The possibility of naturalism (Brighton: Harvester, 1979).
David
Bloor, Wittgenstein: A social theory of knowledge (London: Macmillan, 1983).
“ “ , “The question of linguistic idealism
revisited”, in Sluga and Stern (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Wittgenstein
(Cambridge: C.U.P., 1996).
Stanley
Cavell, “The argument of the ordinary: Scenes of Instruction in Wittgenstein
and in Kripke”, in his Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome (Chicago:
U.Chicago Pr., 1990).
Alice
Crary & Rupert Read (eds.), The New Wittgenstein (London: Routledge,
2000).
Alice
Crary, “Wittgenstein and political philosophy
Cora
Diamond, “Losing your concepts”, Ethics 98
(January 1988), pp.255-277.
“ “ “
, “Rules: Looking in the right place”, in Phillips and Winch (eds.), Wittgenstein:
Attention to particulars (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989).
James Guetti and Rupert Read, “Acting from Rules”,
International Studies in Philosophy XXVIII:
2 (1996).
Richard Hamilton, “Understanding Winch,
Understanding Ourselves” (unpublished).
Colin
Lyas, Peter Winch (Teddington, Mx: Acumen, 1999).
Nigel
Pleasants, Wittgenstein and the idea of a critical social theory
(London: Routledge, 1999).
“ “ “ , “Winch and Wittgenstein on understanding
ourselves critically: descriptive, not metaphysical” (forthcoming).
Rupert
Read, "The Unstatability of Kripkian Scepticisms", in Philosophical Papers XXIV: 1 (1995).
“ “ , "The career of 'internal
relations' in Wittgenstein's thought", in Wittgenstein Studies 2 (1997).
“ “ , “What “There can be no such thing as
meaning anything by any word” could possibly mean”, in Crary and Read (2000).
“ “ , “Is there a legitimate way to raise
doubts about the immediate future 'from the perspective of' a doubted immediate
past? : The case of Kripke”, in Wittgenstein
Studies.(in press).
Lynette
Reid, “Wittgenstein’s Ladder: The Tractatus
and Nonsense”, Phil. Investigations
21 (1988), pp.97-151.
Louis
Sass, The Paradoxes of Delusion (Ithaca: Cornell, 1994).
Ted
Schatzki, “Wittgenstein and the social context of an individual life”, History
of the Human Sciences 13:1 (2000), pp.93-107.
“ “ , “The Prescription is Description”,
in Mitchell and Rosen (eds.), The need for interpretation (London:
Athlone, 1983).
“ “ , “Elements of a Wittgensteinian
Philosophy of the Social Sciences”, Synthese 87 (1991), pp.311-329.
Peter
Winch, “The Unity of Wittgenstein’s Philosophy”, in his edited collection, Studies
in the Philosophy of Wittgenstein (London: Routledge, 1969).
Ludwig
Wittgenstein, Culture and Value (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980).
“ “ “ “
, Philosophical Investigations (London: Macmillan, 1958).
[1]
As will become evident, I believe that almost all of the 1990 Preface can be
read as explicating the 1958 text, rather than revising it. Winch frequently
refers to the unfortunate way he put things in the first edition of ISS; he
rarely suggests that it needs to be substantively revised. On the single
occasion where he does, I think, suggest substantive revision (see below), I
personally would be inclined to accept the revision (while conceding, of
course, that it is a revision).
[2]
The publication date of “Understanding a Primitive Society.” Most critics do
give this paper some attention -- even though few of them seem to understand
it, and few seem to use Winch’s later work to help themselves do so.
[3]
The two exceptions to the general rule, in my opinion, are Lynch and (perhaps)
Lassman. !!??????
[4]
For detail, see for instance Bhaskar’s (1979).
[5]
For further explication and exemplification of the ‘logical method’ I am
employing here, see p.102f. f Stone’s (2000).
[6]
Unfortunately, Rorty sometimes fails into a trap somewhat analogous to that
which he has delineated in the work of Jameson and others. I.e. He writes as if
it must be obvious to anyone with a modicum of intelligence that such and such
a position (e.g. advocacy of ‘liberal democracy’) is now uncontestable, or that
such and such a theory (e.g. Darwinism) has inevitable philosophical or ethical
consequences.
[7]
The ‘Winchians’ tend to be sceptical of the ‘Diamondians’ claim that
Wittgenstein’s early work can be
resolutely interpreted in this fashion (see for instance Reid’s 1998). There is
more agreement on the later work, and thus on Wittgenstien’s enduring legacy.
[8]
See for instance the close of Crary’s 2000. Cf. also Nigel Pleasants’s recent
work, and Gavin Kitching’s .
[9]
See especially Cavell’s 1990 and Stone’s 2000.
[10]
For examples, see Witherspoon’s (2000) critique of tendencies in the thought of
renowned Wittgenstein scholars Marie McGinn and Peter Hacker.
[11]
PI para. 109. Wittgenstein goes on: “And this description gets its light, that
is to say its purpose, from the philosophical problems. These are, of course,
not empirical problems; they are solved, rather, by looking into the workings
of our language, and that in such a way as to make us recognize those workings:
in despite of an urge to misunderstand them. the problems are solved, not by
giving new informattion, but by arranging what we have always known. Philosophy
is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language.”
For more on Wittgenstein’s understanding of theory, and his antipathy to theory
in philosophy, see especially his (1980), p.28, 32, & 44. For more on the
sense in which Winch does (and does not) oppose the giving of explanatory
theories, see p.82 of Pleasants’s (2000).
[12]
See the opening chapters of Colin Lyas’s Peter Winch ( ).
[13]
See ISS p .
[14]
Moreover, that their politicised ‘knowingness’ is more or less necessarily
coupled with actual political impotence, and is thus a counter-productive use
of time and energy, for anyone serious about changing their society. Pleasants
believes that on this score, Winch -- often derided as a ‘conservative’ Swansea
Wittgensteinian -- has a more genuine ‘critical’ edge to his philosophisizing
than these self-consciously leftist contemporary academics. See for instance
his recent paper in HHS, and his
(forthcoming).
[15]
See the first two chapters of his (1999). The reader is strongly advised to
consult these, if dissatisfied with my own far-too-summary critique of theory
in philosophy and related domains.
[16]
See Chapter 3 of his (1999).
[17]
A full discussion of this point would require a detailed rendition of the New
Wittgensteinian take on the importance of Frege’s “Context Principle” in
Wittgenstein’s thought. A brief primer on this can be found in my (2000).
[18]
As for instance Carnap famously rules out that Heidegger’s “The nothing itself
nothings” can be possibly mean anything. For disscussion, see p.318f. of
Witherspoon’s (2000).
[19]
Cf. especially p.137 of his (1983), p.104 of his HHS paper, and perhaps p.319 of his (1991).
[20]
My own arguments detailing why any follower of Diamond will question and reject
their position are to be found in my (1996; jointly written with James Guetti)
and my (1997).
[21]
1983. At the recent BSA/HHS
‘Peter Winch’ Conference in Bristol, Bloor evinced surprise that Winch too had
not embraced Kripke. This surprise stems, I believe, from Bloor’s total lack of
comprehension of the idea of a non-theoreticist philosophy, of a philosophy
wherein words are truly brought back from metaphysical holiday to their
everyday employments. See also p.378 of Bloor’s (1996).
[22]
Diamond’s paper is in a collection co-edited by Winch. Other ‘New
Wittgensteinian’ critiques of Kripke include Stone (2000), and Read (1995 and
in press).
[23]
Cf. PI para.s 116-121.
[24]
See again my 1996 (joint with Guetti) and 1997.
Winch of course emphasized the continuities in Wittgenstein’s philosophy
much more than is usually appreciated -- he ‘pioneered’ the ‘New Wittgenstein’
interpretation of the continuity of the Tractatus
with the Investigations, in his
(1969).
[25]
See again my “Acting from rules” for detail as to where Baker and Hacker go
wrong.
[26]
See p.64f. of his (2000).
[27]
This point is expanded on beautifully by Richard Hamilton in his (unpublished).
[28]
I have in mind Louis Sass’s portrait of some sufferers from schizophrenia as
would-be real-life solipsists -- see his 1994.
[29]
In Cavell’s sense -- for explication, see Cora Diamond’s 1988.