WITTGENSTEIN AND POLITICAL SCIENCE
A PHILOSOPHICAL INQUIRY
by
TRAVIS RAY BILLINGS, B.A.
A THESIS
IN
POLITICAL SCIENCE
Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of Texas Tech University in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for
the Degree of
f4ASTER OF ARTS
Approved
May, 1982
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I wish to thank Professor Clarke Cochran for his
direction of this thesis and the other members of the
thesis committee, Professors Lawrence Mayer and John
Burnett, for their helpful criticism. I also wish to
thank my parents for their generous support.
11
CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ii
Chapter I. INTRODUCTION: TWO THEORIES OF LANGUAGE. . . . 1
II. THE EARLY PHILOSOPHY OF WITTGENSTEIN AND
THE LEGACY OF THE CORRESPONDENCE THEORY. . . . 21
III. THE LATER PHILOSOPHY OF WITTGENSTEIN 48
IV. CONTEMPORARY TRENDS IN WITTGENSTEINIAN SOCIAL AND POLITICAL THOUGHT 69
V. CONCLUSION 98
BIBLIOGRAPHY Ill
111
CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION: TWO THEORIES OF LANGUAGE
Two problems form the nucleus of this inquiry.
The first problem is connected with two theories of
language. One of these theories views language as
representational. That is, language is defined as a
kind of code which pictures a structured and pre-determined
reality. This theory might also be called the corre
spondence theory, for the meaning of language depends on
how well it corresponds with reality. The second theory
of language views it as an active force in organizing the
conceptual structures of reality. Here language is defined
as a tool which works an otherwise confusing world into
an organized body of meaningful concepts.
The second problem concerns the knowledge claims
of science and philosophy. Here we shall attempt to
answer the question of whether each of these disciplines
can make equally valid claims to knowledge. It may appear
that the second problem bears little resemblance to the
first. In fact, however, theories of language do have
much to suggest toward helping us find out if valid
knowledge claims can be made in both science and normative
philosophy.
The need for answering the question of what to do
about these knowledge claims is even more apparent now
that it is evident that no final verdict is in sight
which will resolve the tension between the scientific
and philosophical approaches to knowledge. The notion that
philosophy would give way under the weight of the natural
sciences has not been realized as our attention is still
called by many to the need for maintaining some positive
function for philosophy. Contemporary trends in analytic
philosophy, especially that growing out of the later
philosophy of Wittgenstein, have raised new possibilities
of restoring philosophy as an independent line of inquiry
having a sound epistemological basis of its own. At the
same time the frequently accepted supremacy of the natural
sciences as the model of fruitful inquiry in the study of
human society has been more and more called to account for
its shortcomings. Unfortunately, however, it is too often
the case that rhetoric rather than reason prevails on both
sides of the issue. Defenders of "science" and defenders
of "philosophy" have often shown a distressing tendency
to overlook possibilities for reconciliation between the
competing claims of each approach.
One of the central underpinnings of the debate
between science and philosophy is the role of language as
a foundation of epistemological claims. The two language
theories we have introduced each point toward a different
understanding of knowledge of reality. We want to compare
the two theories of language and what they suggest for
knowledge claims in science and philosophy, and we want to
see what difference it makes in holding a particular theory
of language. A central task here is to relate these
questions (and answers) to the study of political theory.
Even more specifically the study will seek to demonstrate
the relevance of Ludwig Wittgenstein's philosophies to the
questions at hand. We use the plural designation here
because there are two distinct periods of his philosophy.
In his earlier philosophy Wittgenstein actually gave the
designation "picture theory" to its central thesis. His
later efforts were aimed at correcting what he claimed to
be the inadequacies of that view. This effort helped
give birth to a new theory of language. Thus, Wittgenstein
is important because we have contrasting theories
represented by this one philosopher.
Much of what must be said in this study will only
become clearer after discussing the more stubborn conceptual
issues. It is important, nevertheless, to establish what
it is precisely that the thesis entails. The study shall
first of all establish an understanding of Wittgenstein's
contribution in the development of the correspondence theory
of language. Then we shall explore the conceptual links
or parallels between this view and certain views current
within the empirical school of political theory.
We shall also see that, with some minor qualifica
tions on the part of some contemporary empirical political
theorists, the correspondence theory remains an active
force present in contemporary political theory. The
importance of this fact will be apparent as I shall argue
that this theory is incomplete and inadequate as a theory
of language and, therefore, as a basis for political
understanding. I shall attempt to show that this view of
language is largely extraneous to the goal of improving
empirical theories of politics or to understanding the
claims of political philosophy.
Finally, the study will argue that Wittgenstein's
later philosophy offers a more adequate and comprehensive
view of language and a view more appropriate to empirical
political inquiry. It is a -theory of language that allows
for a fuller approach to the study of political questions
and can help create a climate of methodological pluralism
in a discipline often marked by a lack of communication
between competing methodologies. In effect, the later
philosophy, the second of our two views of language, seems
to have something to offer toward integrating normative
and empirical theory—if not in terms of aims, at least in
terms of mutual understanding. Wittgenstein can help us
to see that empirical and normative knowledge-claims are
perhaps closer than we imagine. The later philosophy helps
us to see that we need not pin our hopes on a single
model of inquiry. We see that the richness and variety of
language suggested in the later philosophy points toward
a need for a more open-ended and plural approach to social
understanding to fit the plural functions of language. In
other words, Wittgenstein suggests that we take fuller
account of the richness of language in justifying our
knowledge claims.
A word of caution must be interjected here so as
to avoid misunderstanding. We are seeking here to examine
two theories of language and their application to political
theory. It is not the purpose of the study to deny the
aims of scientific research as such. Much traditional
metaphysical philosophy also operates under the rubric of
the correspondence theory. In fact, the theory is an old
one which goes back long before modern science. The fact
that more examples of that view are chosen from empirical
writers is only because we are exploring problems in
contemporary political science. If this were a thesis in
traditional metaphysics, our emphasis would be different.
The importance of semantic precision cannot be
overstressed in any study of this type. "Political theory"
is, of course, one term which will be frequently employed
throughout the study. It is a term which can be confusing
if not properly understood. In this study two kinds of
theory will be discussed. Normative theory generally refers
to those political theories having to do with questions of
value such as the nature of "justice," "truth," "good,"
and "right." Empirical theory refers to those explanations
based on the principles of verification or falsification 2
by way of sensory phenomena. That is, an empirical theory
takes as the basis of its knowledge claim that a valid
theory must refer to something that can be checked by way
of sensory experience to determine the accuracy of its
truth-claim. Furthermore, an empirical theory always
specifies those conditions under which it can be falsified
so that any observer could theoretically make the necessary
checks.
The continuing debate in political science over
the relative merits of these two aspects of political theory
can entrap one in a web of semantic difficulties to the
point that a clear grasp of the issues might be missed.
Part of the problem is that the debate is sometimes framed
as one between science and theory, with "science" meaning
the mechanics of doing research and "theory" meaning the
articulation of a normative philosophy of politics. This
is misleading because any science, whether of politics or
or nature, is theoretical. There is no science without
theory. This study suggests that the understanding of
both normative and empirical theories will be enhanced by
looking closely at Wittgenstein's philosophies of language. With these preliminaries out of the way, let us
begin our inquiry into the two theories of language. Here,
of course, we shall concentrate on Wittgenstein's contri-3
butions beginning with the Tractatus. The Tractatus had
a significant impact on the modern philosophy of language.
The first identifiable group to draw upon the ideas in the
Tractatus was the Vienna Circle. Through most of the 19 30s
this group of Viennese academics developed a positivist
philosophy greatly, though not exclusively, influenced by 4
Wittgenstein. Their main doctrine was that all meaningful
statements could be directly related to sense-experience.
Included in this doctrine was a condemnation of metaphysics.
Here metaphysics was taken to be those non-tautological
statements which failed to represent a factual condition
but, on the contrary, stated truth claims based on a priori
suppositions. Such statements seemed to say something about
the relations of empirical properties, but, for lack of
empirically testable criteria, lacked any theoretical
substance.
The Tractatus was not conceived to be a new philo
sophy; rather, it was aimed at being a guide to the correct
view of philosophical language. Later, of course,
Wittgenstein seemed to have abandoned much of his earlier
thought in favor of a new philosophy. However, Wittgenstein's
later philosophy remained largely unknown outside the
Cambridge groups of analytic philosophers until after his
death in 1951. This left only the Tractatus as a work of
8
major influence during his lifetime.
The Tractatus appears relatively clear and concise
in its presentation, although the style is somewhat unusual.
Wittgenstein preferred to write concise sentences, each
sentence standing structurally independent of the others.
He seldom wrote in standard style. The first German
edition of the Tractatus appeared in 1921. and the first
English edition appeared the following year. Actually the
book had been written by Wittgenstein while he was serving
in the Austrain army during World War I. Perhaps no other
conflict since the French Revolution has had such an impact
on the philosophical climate of its day as the First World
War, and it is fitting that one of the major post-war
philosophies to be written was literally composed in the
trenches.
According to Janik and Toulmin the Tractatus was
a cornerstone in the development of mature positivism. In
order to appreciate fully this influence, we should be clear
about the basic linguistic stance of positivism. The
positivists believed that the Tractatus provided a method
for separating meaningful propositions from meaningless
ones. According to this program one could classify all
utterances as either empirical, logical, or something else.
This "something else" generally referred to metaphysical
propositions which the positivists denied as possessing a
factual content.
This system of delineation between meaningful and
meaningless propositions depended on an explicitly drawn
theory of language that clearly spelled out the difference
in statement-types. In the Tractatus Wittgenstein proposed
to show clearly that language must function as a type of
picture-code of reality if it is to be meaningful. In
doing so he hoped to free philosophy from its alleged
confusions. Wittgenstein considered metaphysics to be
beyond the scope of meaningful discourse and believed
that most traditional philosophy was imbued with metaphysics.
In paragraph 4.003 of the Tractatus Wittgenstein clearly
states that the main body of philsophy is written in lan
guage that is nonsense. It is not that traditional
philosophy is false; rather it poses questions that cannot
be answered.
Most of the propositions and questions to be found in philosophical works are not false be nonsensical. Consequently we cannot give any answer to questions of this kind, but can only point out that they are nonsensical.^
The cure for philosophical errors is not to be
found in trying to answer questions that cannot be properly
answered but in taking hold of our language and attempting
to understand its logic and function. For this we need to
get straight about the constitution of reality and how
language connects with it. At this stage in his philosophy,
Wittgenstein considered reality to be logically determinant
of and external to the language used to represent it.
10
However, Wittgenstein did not say that meaning derives
from the substance of the sensate world without intermediary
interpretation. The importance of this idea will be made
more apparent below.
It is useful at this juncture to look more closely
at Wittgenstein's ontological stance. For Wittgenstein the
world must be seen as composed of ultimately irreducible
objects. This is the essence of Wittgenstein's logical
atomism. That is, behind every meaningful statement there
exists a state of affairs that can be theoretically
unravelled to reveal the basic atomic parts of the world.
This is the logical scaffolding of Wittgenstein's
argument and is the core of his view that reality is known
unidimensionally, or, that is, has a pre-structured essence
that is reflected in our language. Wittgenstein did not
tell us what the atomic parts of our language are that
correspond to these atomic points of the world. He did not
feel compelled to try to unravel things himself. For the
"knower" the facts of the world are not the atomic points
themselves but their representation in statements of logical
contingency. The "facts" we talk about are complex facts;
that is, they are statements about the logical relationship
between a number of contingent facts. This atomic theory
could have many complex implications, but the essence of it
is this: we do not apprehend the facts of the world
directly. What we know are the representations of those
11
facts in our language. Yet, as our language is a mirror of
facts, we can know the proper logical relationship of those
representations. That is, it is possible in any language
to know precisely what can count as a representation of a
fact if we understand the invarible logic of language.
The next step in Wittgenstein's argument was to
try to show the empirical grounding of meaningful proposi
tions. Here we must understand exactly what separates
meaningful from meaningless statements. Most importantly
this distinction had nothing to do with whether a proposi
tion was strictly true or false. Wittgenstein did not say
that false statements are meaningless. A false statement
is meaningful if it contains the conditions for verification
or refutation. A meaningful statement, being contingent, 9
is always a hypothesis. We know what evidence counts
against it. For example, I might come up to someone and
say that Holden Hall had just fallen to the ground. To my
latest knowledge that is a false but meaningful statement.
It is false because it has not happened. It is meaningful
because the person I have spoken to knows what to do with
it. He can go over to the spot where Holden Hall is supposed
to be and see for himself. What we have said about Holden
Hall pictures a state of affairs. It is a fact-related
statement. Everyone is presumed to know what should count
toward its being refuted or verified. Our statement
provides a picture of a complex state of affairs, and this
12
is all that is needed. We do not need to know all the
possible atomic facts about Holden Hall in order to confirm
or deny the statement that it has fallen in a heap.
One may say that it is always wrong to lie. Some
people may believe this. But what is the basis for belief?
How can we determine an objective answer to such a question?
Wittgenstein would say that we must stop there. The mere
posing of such a question has led us straight out of
meaningful discourse and into the realm of metaphysics.
Wittgenstein's aim in the Tractatus was to show the way out
of philosophical problems and to do away with metaphysical
speculation altogether.
In considering the anti-metaphysical turn in
Wittgenstein's philosophy, it is important to differentiate
between his position and the view which denigrates the
possibility of metaphysical values altogether. Wittgenstein's
early thesis retained an allowance for ethics but not to
the point of allowing such statements to be counted as
meaningful. Derek Phillips has indicated in his study
that Wittgenstein's purpose was to show the limits of
language and to indicate that there are important things
one can only show but not speak about. Victor Kraft has
found that some positivists did take the extreme position
that there are no possibilities beyond sense-data but
indicates that this view arose from a distortion.
Before moving on to a discussion of Wittgenstein's
13
later philosophy, let us establish more firmly the notion
that Wittgenstein did not intend to brush aside metaphysics
altogether but only intended to root out metaphysical
speculation. It is vital to be clear on this point in order
to understand fully Wittgenstein's philosophy.
Wittgenstein remained cautious about the subject
of metaphysics through the whole course of his philosophy.
He never abandoned his censure of an absolutist metaphysics,
and this remains an important link between the two periods
of his work. However, we may interpret the later philoso
phy as opening up greater possibilities for some meaningful
discussion of ethics and metaphysics.
The evidence we have of Wittgenstein's early
position on ethical possibilities comes from the last few
entries in the Tractatus. Here he clearly explains that
ethics cannot be framed in meaningful propositions. However,
he does grant that a transcendental realm of metaphysics
may exist beyond the bounds of our language. In entries
6.42 and 6.421 of the Tractatus Wittgenstein explains his
meaning as follows:
So too it is impossible for there to be propositions of ethics.
Propositions can express nothing that is higher.
It is clear that ethics cannot be put into words.
Ethics is transcendental.^2
In the very last entry in the Tractatus,
Wittgenstein proclaims his doctrine of silence: "What we
14
cannot speak about we must pass over in silence. "" ^
Anthony Kenny explains that Wittgenstein considered
ethical values and other metaphysical "truths" to be, if
they exist, absolute, not contingent. If they were con
tingent they could not be properly spoken of as having
transcendent value. But, by not being contingent, they
cannot be described in meaningful propositions.
Let us now turn to a discussion of Wittgenstein's
later philosophy of language. It will be helpful here to
get an idea of the events which took place following the
publication of the Tractatus.
Wittgenstein returned to Cambridge and to philos
ophy in 1929. He had been in self-imposed exile from
academia since 1919. He produced no philosophy during
those ten years and seems to have totally given up the
notion that he could ever again be productive. No one
really seems certain what happened, but something occurred
which gave him the idea of returning to philosophy. Thus
we have, beginning in 1929, the period encompassing the
"later" philosophy. The principle works of this period
are the Blue and Brown Books and the Philosophical
Investigations.
K. T. Fann has pointed out that we must be cautious
in making too much of Wittgenstein's return to Cambridge.
It was in no way the result of a sudden revelation.
Criticism of the Tractatus was only forming slowly in his
15
mind, so that, when he did return, he apparently still
subscribed to its main points. "^
The years between 1929 and 1932 were critical ones
17 for Wittgenstein. He appears to have given himself a
test as to whether he could "do" philosophy any longer.
What emerged from these inner struggles was the embryo of
a newly developed philosophy. In the Blue Book, which
forms a part of a preliminary study leading to the
Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein challenges the
notion of logical atomism by noting cases in which we do
not seem capable of analyzing a word into its atomic parts
He takes the word "not" as one example. Where, he asks,
18 are the atomic parts of this word? From this kind of
anomaly he concludes that the meaning of whole sentences
arises, not from a one-to-one correspondence with reality,
but with the use of words in language.
Here we see the importance of the new view of
language for the concept of meaning. Meaning is not seen
as something existing outside the fabric of language.
Rather, a sentence acquires its significance from the con
text of the sentence itself.
The sign (the sentence) gets its significance from the system of signs, from the language to which it belongs. Roughly: understanding a sentence means understanding a langauge.
As a part of the system of language, one may say, the sentence has life. But one is tempted to imagine that which gives the sentence life as something in an occult sphere, accompanying the sentence.19
16
Wittgenstein is in the process of developing some
new themes, although proceeding in his usual cryptic style.
In the first place he is once again, with his warning
about occult things, sounding the alarm against metaphysics-
just as he had done in the Tractatus. But there is a change
in the rest of what he says. He is shifting the definition
of meaning from a "pointing-to" focus to a "pointing-within"
focus. That is, he is starting to say that the meaning
of a sentence is its use within a language, not its
agreement with a fixed reality. Words by themselves
function more as signals rather than as labels. These
themes have important implications. Wittgenstein's point
that language does not operate in an "occult sphere"
indicates an important link between his two philosophical
periods. It tells us that Wittgenstein continued to be
cautious about what kind of sentences could be counted as
meaningful. Also, the shift in emphasis away from atomism
implies a new interpretation of reality. Reality is no
longer to be taken "as is," or as a thing equally manifest
to all. Instead, it is seen as a more subjective expe
rience, deeply colored by language uses.
It is obvious that how one views reality itself
has a considerable impact on what one will admit as a fact.
If one sees reality as a continuous flow of events operating
in a continuous chain and largely external to the mind of
the perceiver, then facts become singular instances that,
17
at least theoretically speaking, have only one correct
interpretation. Of course, it is possible to say that there
are no uninterpreted facts and still hold to the logic of
the correspondence theory. One may hope for the possibility
of a completely objective and representational fact-
language and still admit a certain subjectivity in our
usual representation of facts. However, in this instance
the subjectivity contained in language is seen as a
necessary inconvenience or as an obstacle to work against.
This is the view adopted in absolute metaphysical systems
and by some philosophers of science. It was also the view
Wittgenstein held in the Tractatus, although he believed
that only empiricists made correct use of this principle.
The net result of this principle is the rather thorough
separation of "fact language" from "value language."
In his later philosophy Wittgenstein offered a new
approach to the fact-value problem. He says that fact
languages and value languages are merely two different
language types and that neither is invalidated on the basis
of the other. In other words, neither empirical nor
normative theory is inherently better at articulating
constructs of reality. The thing that is so often wrong,
if we follow Wittgenstein correctly, is that followers of
different language traditions come to think of their own
interpretations as the one and only correct way to see
things.
18
The remainder of this study focuses on the
importance of the foregoing considerations for political
theory. Its aim, once again, is to show how Wittgenstein's
later philosophy can foster greater understanding and
tolerance in political science and can aid us in getting
away from extreme views. He helps us to see that such
questions as whether the study of politics should be either
more "scientific" or more "philosophical" are not very
meaningful. In the course of the discussion we shall focus
on some specific criticisms of the correspondence or picture
theory of language as it has been construed. In the final
analysis, of course, we shall focus on some possible uses
of Wittgenstein's later philosophy in political theory.
19
Notes
Richard J. Bernstein, The Restructuring of Social and Political Theory (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976) , p. xii.
2 Martin Landau, Political Theory and Political
Science (New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1972), p. 69. 3 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus,
trans. D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuiness (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1961) .
4 . Victor Kraft, The Vienna Circle (New York: Green
wood Press, 1969).
Ibid., p. 34.
Norman Malcolm, Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir, with a Biographical Sketch by George Henrik Von Wright (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1958), p. 7.
7 Allan Janik and Stephen Toulmin, Wittgenstein's
Vienna (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1973), p. 213. o
Wittgenstein, Tractatus, p. 19. 9 Ibid., p. 21.
Derek L. Phillips, Wittgenstein and Scientific Knowledge (London: The Macmillan Press, 1977), p. 6.
Kraft, The Vienna Circle, p. 166,
12 . Wittgenstein, Tractatus, p. 71.
13 Ibid. , p. 74.
14 Anthony Kenny, Wittgenstein (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1973), p. 100. Ludwig Wittgenstein, The Blue and Brown Books,
(New York: Harper & Row, 1965). 16 K. T. Fann, Wittgenstein's Conception of
Philosophy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), p. 41.
17 Ibid., p. 55.
18 Wittgenstein, The Blue Book, p. 1.
••^•mmm'
20 19 I b i d . , p . 5.
CHAPTER II
THE EARLY PHILOSOPHY OF WITTGENSTEIN AND THE LEGACY OF THE CORRESPONDENCE THEORY
Before considering in detail the legacy of the
Tractatus or the influence on social and political theory
of ideas similar to those developed in the Tractatus, we
shall discuss more fully some significant points about the
Tractatus itself and its overall philosophical significance.
Three main points shall be discussed here. First, we shall
discuss the importance of Wittgenstein's early philosophy
for the practice of philosophy current at the time. Second,
we shall discuss the meaning of the picture-theory of lan
guage. Third, we shall explore more fully the doctrine of
logical atomism.
Wittgenstein's Tractatus was either directly or
indirectly associated with two philosophical trends in the
early part of this century, particularly the decades of
the 1920s and 1930s. One philosophical group - the one
which received more indirect influence - was the group
known as the Vienna Circle. We have, of course, already
mentioned this group in the first chapter. The Vienna
Circle members developed a doctrine of neo-positivism which
bears resemblance to many ideas developed in the Tractatus.
21
22
In doing so they moved away from the stricter positivism
of the previous century. Most importantly they largely
abandoned the notion that all knowledge is derived directly
from experience. It is true that, according to their
program, all empirical statements must be validated by
experience. But the neo-positivists also noted a special
class of statements included in logic and mathematics.
These classes of statements by themselves did not form part
of the class of empirical propositions. Kraft explains
the distinction more fully:
. . . recognition of the a priori validity of logic and mathematics does not entail rationalism v/ith respect to factual knowledge, since neither of these sciences makes any factual assertions at all. In this way empiricism has been subjected to a thorough-going reform which provides it with a tenable foundation, hitherto lacking. In a sense the dualism of rationalism and empiricism remains: there are basically two classes of assertions, those which are necessary, valid independently of experience, and factual assertions, synthetic propositions, which are refutable and valid only on the basis of experience.1
Not included in the class of meaningful propositions,
nor in the special class of logical and mathematical
statements, are metaphysical propositions. While the
older, strict positivism had abandoned rationalism for the
most part, claiming that rationalism served no useful
purpose, the later positivists or neo-positivists claimed
that rationalism and empiricism could be combined. However,
as the neo-positivists were careful to point out, rationalism 2
"does not reveal a world beyond the empirical world."
23
There are many finer points that could be talked
about regarding the Vienna Circle positivists. However, a
complete discussion of these is beyond the scope of this
study. What is important here is that our discussion to
this point has indicated that Wittgenstein's philosophy
was akin to this new trend, not to the older positivism.
In the Tractatus Wittgenstein clearly separates the a priori
statements of mathematics and logic from the synthetic
empirical statements, and he likewise excludes from these
two categories synthetic-like metaphysical utterances
which must be considered to be without sense.
Wittgenstein's Tractatus had a more direct influence
on Anglo-American philosophy. Having spent the major
portion of his academic life at Cambridge, Wittgenstein
had more influence in Britain (and subsequently in the
United States) than on the Continent. One significant
writer to be influenced by the line of thought developed
in the Tractatus was A. J. Ayer, whose philosophy we shall
examine in detail somewhat later. Another whom we shall
also discuss is political theorist T. D. Weldon. Unlike
the Vienna Circle neo-positivists, who formed a rather
homogeneous group, the Anglo-American philosophers are a
very heterogeneous group, if one could call them really a
group at all. Therefore, what influences we shall trace
will be directed more at individual lines of inquiry rather
than at a "school" of thought. Since what we shall say
24
about Ayer and Weldon will answer some of the questions
about Wittgenstein's influence on Anglo-American philosophy,
let us proceed to a discussion of the picture-theory of
language and the doctrine of logical atomism.
As has been noted the picture-theory was aimed at
establishing the empirical basis of all meaningful
propositions. It was intended to show the contingency of
all meaningful statements so that the truth of any statement
could be established or refuted on the basis of its
agreement with a state Ox." affairs. According to Wittgenstein
any state of affairs on which we might wish to make an
observation is always a collection of related facts.
Theoretically, any meaningful statement can be broken down
to the point of revealing all the atomic facts of a state
ment. But Wittgenstein never gave the slightest hint at
what an atom.ic fact would look like, nor does he explain
his silence other than to offer the following observation:
My propositions serve as elucidations in the following way: anyone who understands me eventually recognizes them as nonsensical, when he has used them - as steps - to climb beyond them. (He must, so to speak, throw away the ladder after he has climbed up it.)
He must transcend these propositions, and then he will see the world ciright.4
Presumably, then, the grasping of what is entailed
in the atomic facts of the world is an act of vision. But
this in no way validates the attempt to provide a
description of transcendent metaphysics. Quite to the
contrary the doctrine of logical atomism leads us directly
25
to the conclusion that there are limits to our language.
The facts we possess, then, are the mirror-images of these
facts which we find in our language - hence, the picture-
theory. That is, we do not apprehend atomic facts, per se,
but we apprehend the reflection of those facts in our
language. This theory posits an epistemology quite
different from that of positivism, or, that is, the idea
that knowledge and meaning derive directly from sense
experience. Yet, according to the theory of the Tractatus,
language functions in a unidimensional way - as a picture
of facts. Thus it shares with positivism the belief in the
unidimensionality of reality, despite the difference between
logical atomism and positivism on the specific relationship
between fact and language. The unspecifiable nature of
the "atomic parts" of language became an uncomfortable
point for most of the later positivists because "atomic
parts" seemed too metaphysical. The positivists eventually
dropped most discussion of the idea and concentrated instead
on describing composite sensate propositions. Nevertheless,
they retained the rest of the Wittgensteinian position
that language corresponds directly with an independent
reality.
Grasping this entire theory is most important for
understanding the method Wittgenstein employs in philoso
phizing. The philosopher's method is not longer seen as
the articulation of truth as a whole. Instead, the
26
philosopher must concentrate on clarifying language in
order to separate meaningful statements from metaphysical
speculation. The traditional aims of metaphysical philoso
phy must be abandoned because they attempt to make meaning
ful non-logical, non-contingent statements, and this violates
the rule of meaningful discourse. It is useful here to
see just how Wittgenstein summarizes the proper role of
philosophy. The quotation is from entry 4.112 of the
Tractatus.
Philosophy aims at the logical clarification of thoughts.
Philosophy is not a body of doctrine but an activity.
A philosophical work consists essentially of elucidations.
Philosophy does not result in "philosophical propositions," but rather in the clarification of propositions.
Without philosophy thoughts are, as it were, cloudy and indistinct: its task is to make them clear and to give them sharp boundaries.5
Wittgenstein's intention here is quite clear. A
key word in the passage is "activity" from the second
sentence. Philosophy is now to be seen as an activity,
as an exercise in logical explication. The discovery of
facts is left to the sciences.
We may now offer a summary of the distinctive
features and important points about Wittgenstein's early
philosophy. First, it is close to some of the ideas of
the neo-positivists but differs from strict positivism in
its interpretation of facts and how they acquire meaning.
27
Second, it allows for the possibility of metaphysical truths
but denies our ability to speak meaningfully about them.
Third, it offers a new interpretation of the role of
philosophy.
There are some significant parallels between the
philosophical position of Wittgenstein's Tractatus and some
writings in empirical political theory. This is not to
suggest that these later theories necessarily draw directly
from Wittgenstein. They do, however, share some common
assumptions and, in some cases, reflect Wittgenstein's
influence. It is proper to direct our inquiry here because
the types of theories we shall discuss here all play a part
in the continuing bifurcation of normative and empirical
political theories. The core assumption of the theories
we shall discuss here is the assumption that certain
regions of language are beyond the pale of rational
discourse. These are generally seen as the languages of
the normative disciplines such as philosophy and theology.
The doctrine posits the language of science as a superior
model of langauge. In the remainder of this chapter, we
shall offer a discussion and critique of these arguments.
All the theories discussed bear resemblance to the doctrine
of logical atomism discussed above. We are already familiar
with this idea in the form of Wittgenstein's picture-theory.
One explanation of logical atomism and its impact is provided
by Botwinick.
28
The doctrine of logical atomism which is integral to Wittgenstein's argument in the Tractatus leads to the exclusion of certain regions of experience -the ethical, the esthetic, the religious and the philosophical - as falling outside the scope of rational resolution within language.6
A. J. Ayer's Language, Truth, and Logic is a
classic example of early Wittgensteinian philosophical
analysis. It is important to the present study for two
reasons. First, Ayer claims to derive some of his argument
directly from Wittgenstein. He writes:
The views which are put forward in this treatise derive from the doctrines of Bertrand Russell and Wittgenstein, which are themselves the logical outcome of the empiricism of Berkeley and David Hume.1
A second reason for studying Ayer is that he is considered
important reading in the philosophy of the social sciences.
We might also add that Language, Truth and Logic provides
a good example of points with which to evaluate and compare
later works. We can see some ways other works agree or
disagree with some of its assumptions. V7ith our under
standing of the Tractatus, we can also see how closely
Ayer parallels Wittgenstein.
Let us begin with Ayer's main thesis which contains
his basic views about science and philosophy and about lan
guage, meaning, and reality. Ayer states his views as
follows:
To test whether a sentence expresses a genuine empirical hypothesis, I adopt what may be called a modified verification principle. For I require of an empirical hypothesis, not indeed that it should
29
be conclusively verifiable, but that some possible sense-experience should be relevant to the determination of its truth or falsehood. If a putative proposition fails to satisfy this principle, and it is not a tautology, then I hold it is metaphysical, and that, being metaphysical, it is neither true nor false, but literally senseless. It will be found that much of what ordinarily passes for philosophy is metaphysical according to this critierion, and, in particular, that it can not be significantly asserted that there is a nonempirical world of values, or that men have immortal souls, or that there is a transcendent God.^
It appears that there are parallels between Ayer's
arguments and the position of Wittgenstein in the
Tractatus. We see that Ayer is using a "modified" veri
fication principle. This appears similar to the
Wittgensteinian position which is that meaning and absolute
verification are not the same. All that is required is
that the conditions for possible falsification be
established. This is, just because a statement is false
or is not verified, it does not mean that it is meaningless.
Ayer, like Wittgenstein, also attacked metaphysics,
or those propositions which fall outside the net of the
verification principle.
We may accordingly define a metaphysical sentence as a sentence which purports to express a genuine proposition, but does, in fact, express neither a tautology nor an empirical hypothesis. And as tautologies and empirical hypotheses form the entire class of significant propositions, we are justified in concluding that all metaphysical assertions are nonsensical.^
And, then, Ayer tells us what he sees as the error of
traditional philosophy.
The belief that it is the business of the philosopher to search for first principles is bound
30
up with the familiar conception of philosophy as the study of reality as a whole. . , .If it is taken to imply . . . that the philosopher somehow projects himself outside the world, and takes a bird's-eye view of it, then it is plainly a metaphysical conception. And it is also metaphysical to assert, as some do, that 'reality as a whole' is somehow generically different from the reality which is investigated piecemeal by the special sciences.1^
Ayer's point is no less than that the aims of philosophy
must be changed. His attack is not really on philosophy
per se; rather, it is an attack on traditional philosoph
ical practice. The question remains, however, as to what
would be left of philosophy once traditional pursuits had
been abandoned.
It would have been unwise for a philosopher to
propose the end of his craft without further specifying
a new craft. Ayer, like Wittgenstein, proposes a new role
for the philosopher. The philosopher must concentrate
his efforts on the improvement of our concepts through
clearing up our linguistic confusions. This logical
explication would be done as follows:
A complete philosophical elucidation of any language would consist, first, in enumerating the types of sentences that were significant in that language, and then in displaying the relations of equivalence that held between sentences of various types.11
Ayer attempts to show that the Wittgensteinian
perspective allows for some freedom to move about in
discussions of ethics and other normative regions. For
example, he maintains that we can engage in a description
31
of ethical practices and attempt to identify certain
ethical codes among peoples. What we are prevented from
doing is to make judgements regarding the moral justifi
cation of ethical beliefs. •'" To recognize a descriptive
ethics is a step toward the admission of possible ethical
principles and does not go so far as to deny that there
may be_ ethical truths.
We can see now the parallel between Ayer and
Wittgenstein. The essence of their approach to philosophy
is that meaningful language serves but one function and
that is to make clear the relations of sensory phenomena.
Reality as we present it in meaningful terms is ethically
neutral. Traditional philosophy is to be seen as, at best,
much inferior to the aims of logic and science.
In the remainder of this chapter we shall focus
on the logic of these arguments as they have been applied
in political theory. This will enable us to examine the
utility of these beliefs and to offer a critique.
A similar philosophical imprint to that found in
the Tractatus and Language, Truth, and Logic appears in T.
D. Weldon's The Vocabulary of Politics. Weldon was the
first to apply some of these principles of analytic
philosophy to political theory. One could perhaps say
that it remains the most complete application of
Wittgensteinian-Ayerian-type philosophizing to problems in
political theory. However, Weldon does not stand alone;
32
clear conceptual parallels are found in some other works.
Weldon argues that traditional political philosophy is
grounded in error in the same way that Wittgenstein and
Ayer attempted to show traditional philosophy as a whole
to be grounded in error. It was shown that both claimed
that most propositions of traditional philosophy are
senseless propositions. Weldon extends this line of
reasoning to his discussion of the concepts of normative
political theory. Early in his discussion he isolates
certain basic concepts of this traditional philosophy and
provides a critical examination of them. He says that
such philosophy is in trouble over a mistake about the
"implications of language," which he says
. . . arises from the primitive and generally unquestioned belief that words, and especially the words which normally occur in discussion about politics such as 'State', 'Citizen', 'Law', and 'Liberty', have intrinsic or essential meanings which it is the aim of political philosophy to discover and explain.13
Weldon argues that reification is characteristic
of virtually all political philosophy from Socrates to the
present. He sees the problem as one in which the nature
of thought itself has been misunderstood. That is,
traditional philosophy has placed too much emphasis on
the supposed sanctity of "pure" thought. Another way of
arguing the point would be to say that traditional
philosophy attempts too often to exist independently of
1^ 14 the world.
33
Weldon's argument represents a new direction for
political theory. He argues against the "unprofitable"
search for single, nuclear meaning in such ideas as justice.
Instead he urges us to focus on its use among people in
. ^ 15 society. In one way this anticipates something of what
we will say later on about Wittgenstein's conception of
language-as-use and how it applies to political theory.
The reason Weldon makes this point is that he is trying
to show how easy it is to fall into a metaphysical trap
of supposing that, just .because we can talk in a rational-
like way about "true" metaphysical meanings, there must
be immutable entities which correspond to our metaphysical
labels.
The important parallel between Weldon's point and
the point made by Wittgenstein in his later philosophy is
that we must be aware of the dangers of metaphysics. After
this, however, the parallel does not hold, and Weldon's
philosophy, for the most part, shows more kinship with the
early Wittgenstein. In fact, what Weldon is urging is that
we make a clear separation between "fact" or "scientific"
language and "philosophical" language, not just on the
basis of structure, but on the basis of utility. That is,
Weldon denies the knowledge claims of most traditional
philosophical activity. According to his interpretation
there is clearly a theoretically unambiguous way of
representing the "facts" in language, and other ways of
34
representing reality by way of philosophical discourse are
"superficial,"-^^
Weldon's observation on the dangers of metaphysics
is important. However, other parts of his argument contain
some real weaknesses. First, he does not really separate
the idea of political philosophy from that if ideology.
The postulates of an absolutist metaphysics or ideology
often do take the form of supposedly iron-clad laws. We
are, in fact, arguing against such extreme positions.
However, it is not apparent that Weldon's claim can hold
up against all political philosophy. The Socratic
dialogues, for example, always permit multiple interpre
tations and are hardly the types of extreme claims made
by ideologists.
Political philosophy, as distinct from crude
ideologies, can be seen as an activity that is highly open
to critical evaluations of its various claims. It makes
an attempt to articulate general truths about reality.
Yet, it is subject to strict scrutiny and can, by its
own admission, be challenged by rational opposing claims.
Ideological arguments accept no rational arguments against
their claims. Criticisms of ideological systems are
dismissed much on emotional grounds, such as that critics
are "enemies" rather than rational opponents. Weldon's
argument also contains seeds of the same type of error he
argues against. By arguing that the scientific mode of
35
discourse is much superior to that of philosophy, Weldon
is attempting narrowly to circumscribe reality and meaning
in somewhat the same manner as the ideologist,
Weldon also subscribes to a very narrow inter
pretation of the "everyday" function of normative language.
He sees normative arguments as essentially arbitrary
contructs that have no factual basis, •'• According to this
interpretation the rules for the proper use of normative
discourse are things we invent on the basis of supposing
that they agree with a set of facts. He says that "it is
grammatically impossible to infer a rule from any set of
18 facts." Here Weldon confuses normative standards with
the rules of normative discourse. What Weldon fails to
recognize are the ways in which rules make it possible for
us to engage intelligible conversation. We shall see that
Wittgenstein effectively argued against the kind of
interpretation of rules which Weldon makes. Indeed, we
shall argue that rules are tied very closely to the facts
of language use. Rules are not whimsical because not just
anything can count as a rule. Standards, on the other
hand, are modes of conduct that are made possible by there
being certain grammatical rules of discourse. As we shall
see rules, as we use the term here, form the common bond
between different regions of discourse. Standards are the
methods of conduct that make the unique features of the
different regions such as science and philosophy. Standards
36
are more properly thought of as prescriptions that are
created to define the boundaries of an activity. As such,
they are much more amenable to conscious change. Standards,
such as the standards of what are acceptable forms of
religious worhsip, are more subject to the influences of
culture and taste than are the rules of language which
make religious discourse possible. This is equally true
of such diverse activities as doing science or philosophy.
However, we shall discuss the nature of rules more fully
as we go along. The study shall now focus on some other
theorists in order to gain further insight into the rela
tionship between the correspondence theory of language and
political science.
Vernon Van Dyke's Political Science: A Philosophical
Analysis is a more recent work. It is, according to the
author, a defense of positivism. In his study Van Dyke
makes many direct references to what he calls "common-sense
positivism" and argues in support of its general assumptions
about language and reality. In other words, he is offering
us a philosophy of scepticism based on the notion that we
can only know what we can literally see. To Van Dyke's
way of thinking empiricism and positivism are the same
thing.
Given Van Dyke's emphasis, we might expect him to
follow the characteristic linguistic turn of positivism,
and, indeed, we do find this. He points out that there is
37
a definite philosophy of language implicit in the positivist
argument, whether of the strict or softer type, that
insists that normative and empirical statements be
2 n unambiguously separated.
Van Dyke argues that normative statements are merely
emotional, reflecting the choices or preferences of the
speaker. In order to avoid these errors, philosophy must
adopt a different approach. The remedy he offers is
something quite similar to that offered in Wittgenstein's
Tractatus and by Ayer and Weldon. Here is his explanation
of what should be the proper course of philosophy.
A person who takes a philosophical approach to a subject aims to enhance linguistic clarity and to reduce linguistic confusion; he assumes that the language used in description reflects conceptions of reality, and he wants to make conceptions of reality as clear, consistent, coherent, and helpful as possible,21
This is obviously an argument we have encountered before.
It has two familiar components. First, it says that lan
guage is ideally reflective of reality. Second, the
argument says, in effect, that philosophers have no
business attempting to express their own views of reality
but must assume the role of housekeeper of language.
The discovery of reality must be left to the scientist.
Van Dyke does lend some support to normative
claims. He does not say that they have no value, and he
does point out that scientists, being human like the rest
of the people, "hold many different beliefs about the
38
normative and the metaphysical."^^ We have now seen
several examples of this argument. Van Dyke's qualified
support is important as a description of the attitudes of
most scientists. However, the argument is positively
opposed to traditional philosophy. It does not seek to
evaluate specific philosophical arguments on their own
grounds or admit that they should be so evaluated. In
stead, it attempts to deny the knowledge claims of
philosophy on the grounds that it is not like science.
Van Dyke takes a similar position to that taken
by Weldon in his equation of philosophy with ideology
Van Dyke claims that the term "ideology" "applies to
23 almost any normative scheme." It is not being maintained
here that normative claims are derived in precisely the
same way as scientific claims. Yet, it is not at all
evident that normative claims must be based on the idea
that words "have unknown, foreordained meanings that remain
24 to be discovered." Apparently Van Dyke means that
philosophers always think that they may at last reach
the last word on something. Van Dyke does not seem aware
of the difference between good and bad philosophy - just
as there are undoubtedly those unaware of the difference
between good and bad science. An essential feature of
philosophical discourse is the role of judgment. This is
something which Van Dyke, Weldon, and Ayer largely ignore.
Where there is an ample exercise of judgment, as in all
39
good philosophy, there is always room for criticism, doubt,
discussion, and revision. To equate all philosophy with
the claim to absolute metaphysical meanings is, once again,
to confuse critical philosophy with crude ideologies or
even sorcery. Van Dyke is not wrong in his defense of the
internal validity of science nor in drawing some distinc
tions between science and philosophy. His chief error is
that he has badly stated his case against traditional
philosophy and has made no real effort to come to grips
with the possibilities of normative political theory.
Another work we should touch upon in this chapter
is David Easton's The Political System. Easton is impor
tant because of his concentration on the role of theory
in political research. His call for greater understanding
between moral and empirical aims of political theory is
somewhat unique among empirical theorists. Yet, there
are important consistencies between his position and
that occupied by the others discussed to this point.
According to Easton an adequate theory of politics
must provide some demarcation between fact and value. He
argues that the emotional encumbrance must be removed
from theory and that critics of the scientific method
might lead us toward a "revival of an emotional attachment
25
to high spiritual ideals." A good summary of Easton's
view of the fact-value questions is contained in the
following passage:
40
The factual aspect of a proposition refers to a part of reality; hence it can be treated by reference to the facts. In this way we check its truth. The moral aspect of a proposition, however, expresses only the emotional response of an individual to a state of real or presumed facts.2 6
There is nothing about this statement that really surprises
the reader. It argues for the logical separation of fact
statements from value statements and equates reality or
"real" knowledge solely with scientific statements.
Normative propositions are subsumed under the category of
emotional responses,
Easton does, however, take special care not to
underestimate the extent to which value positions influence
our choice of research problems. Speaking of justice, for
example, Easton offers the following observation:
When we talk about justice as a moral problem, we invariably refer to some factual condition just or otherwise. And when we describe a factual situation, our propositions invariably flow from some moral purpose that has led us to investigate these facts.27
For this reason Easton urges us to include moral theory
in political science education. Otherwise, he says,
. . . a research worker is unable to estimate the full extent to which his moral frame of reference might limit and distort his efforts towards the construction of systematic theory.2 8
In other words, our choice of research problems is in
itself largely derived from our own value decisions about
what is important. We must not assume, however, that this
value influence in any way affects the validity of our
empirical research. Easton says that validity is still
41
determined by how well our statements correspond with 29
reality. This last observation is nothing new or
different from what we have encountered before. What it
does show is that Easton, despite his recognition of
moral attitudes and their importance in scientific research,
still focuses on a unidimensional conception of language
and reality. This is all very proper as it fits into a
description of the scientific method. However, it does
not offer us a way of dealing with philosophical elucidations
of reality that may be different from those given by the
scientist. According to Easton's account moral problems
and the like are little more than inescapable inconve
niences that must be studied solely because we need to
minimize their influence on our quest for knowledge.
There is a definite oversight and inaccuracy in
Easton's argument at the point where he equates moral
propositions with superficial emotional responses. Is a
moral position the same as the emotional responses of
anger, fear, or sadness? Is there a difference between an
emotion-laden moral response and a moral choice? Choices
and responses are quite different, yet Easton fails to
take the argument further and explore the logic of his
own word uses. We should wonder if moral judgments are
without any rational component in Easton's view. It is
this curious failure to deal with the rational knowledge
claims of philosophy that gives a hollow ring to the
42
arguments of Easton, Ayer, Van Dyke, and Weldon. It is
the position of this study that these arguments fail to
adequately take account of the uses of language.
What has been offered so far is a look at some
representative approaches to a particular theory of
language and epistemology and implications for political
theory. It is, of course, obvious that the selection does
not offer an exhaustive treatment. Although we seem to
have travelled a bit beyond Wittgenstein, we can still see
the relevance of his early philosophy of language for the
political theories that we have covered.
One basic feature of the arguments arising from the
correspondence theory of language and included in
positivistic epistemology is that most, if not all,
traditional philosophy is seen as mere opinion, with no
knowledge imparting features of its own. Even more than
that, as we have seen, it is often equated with irrational
responses of emotion. Victor Kraft's view of poetic lan
guage illustrates the denial of knowledge claims for non-
empirical language.
Imaginative conceptual poetry is surely more interesting for the average person, and the v/isdom of a great personality surely has more significance for human life. Yet, they are subjective matters of opinion, unverifiable. Lacking universal validity, they are matters of personal conviction, but do not represent knowledge,-^^
Van Dyke, speaking specifically from the viewpoint of
empirical theory in politics, has emphasized the need for
43
recognizing that value statements stem from our "will and
31 emotion."
We need not overemphasize the point. Examples such
as these could be given tenfold. The important thing is
that there are serious weaknesses in the structure of
these arguments. Much of the positivistic argument falls
by virtue of its own misunderstanding of language. Too
often we see normative claims dismissed without being
challenged on a substantive basis. It simply will not do
to just declare normative propositions grammatically
meaningless. It is true that they may at times be quite
unstructured when compared with empirical propositions,
but it may be the case that they have an internal signifi
cance of their own that needs further study. What must
be made clear are the rules of normative discourse. We
must seek to understand the nature of the descriptions
of reality articulated by philosophers. We need to compare
the results of their observations with the standards set
by their own region of discourse. This is not to suggest
that this must be the end of our inquiry as some such
as Winch might suggest. The point is that we must begin
any inquiry with an understanding of the internal rules
of a given region of discourse such as philosophy.
Furthermore, as has been previously suggested, some
further clarification must be made about what kind of
emotion is involved in normative propositions. Van Dyke,
44
for example, is on shaky ground in equating "will" and
"emotion" without some further explanation. Is he saying
there is no rational basis to the will? Or, is he saying
that will and emotion are always the same? There are
numerous questions one could ask about this confused
position taken by Van Dyke, and, it would appear, by some
defenders of contemporary positivism. From the standpoint
of this study, it appears that the use of "emotive" or
"emotion" to describe the main body of normative philosophy
is more an exercise in censure than an exercise in scholarly
inquiry. If we judge these positivistic arguments by
their own standards, then we must take account of the fact
that they also make use of opinion and emotion.
Nothing short of the recognition of the theoretical
equality of different regions of discourse will ensure
the preservation of balanced judgment between the aims of
science and normative philosophy. Where once it was
medieval scholasticism which stood in the way of more open
inquiry and the challenges of science, now it is frequently
positivistic science that attempts to shut off rival claims
to knowledge. Much of this effort has been butressed by
the picture or correspondence theory of language and its
accompanying epistemology.
Wittgenstein's later philosophy effectively under
mines the picture-theory and, therefore, the denial of
meaning to normative discourse. This later philosophy
45
offers a theory of language and epistemological suggestions
that appear to bear great relevance for social and political
theory. Its effect is to offer a view of langauge based
on fuller acceptance of different modes of discourse and
different concepts of reality.
In the next chapter we shall focus on
Wittgenstein's concepts of "language games" and "forms of
life." It will be shown that it is important that we
discuss the merits of different modes of discourse on the
basis of their own interxial rules. We shall also see,
however, that fully developed language games or language
regions are very concrete things and can be grasped across
the boundaries of other language games. Wittgenstein's
language regions are not incommensurate among themselves
32
as we might expect from a Kuhnian model. In the later
philosophy Wittgenstein shows how language can be con
ventional without being arbitrary or whimsical. Thus, it
will be shown that not all explanations must be accepted
as equally valid. This will become more evident as we
discuss "Wittgensteinian empiricism."
46
Notes
Kraft, The Vienna Circle, p. 24.
^Ibid.
3 . Wittgenstein, Tractatus, pp. 46-47, 4 Ibid., p. 74.
5 Ibid., p. 25.
Aryeh Botwinick, Wittgenstein and Historical Understanding (Washington: University Press of America, 1981), p, 7.
7 Alfred Jules Ayer, Language, Truth, and Logic
(New York: Dover, 1952), p, 31,
^Ibid,
9 Ibid,, p. 41.
•^°Ibid. , p. 47.
Ibid., p. 62.
•^^Ibid,, p. 105,
13 T. D. Weldon, The Vocabulary of Politics (New
York: Penguin Books, 1953; reprint ed., New York: Johnson Reprint Corporation, 1975), p. 12.
•'•^Ibid, , p, 19.
"^^Ibid. , pp. 22-23.
-'• Ibid. , p. 142.
-'• Ibid. , p. 191.
^^Ibid.
•^^Vernon Van Dyke, Political Science: A Philosophical Analysis (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1960), p. 9.
Ibid.
•'•Ibid. , p. 129.
47 22
23
24
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
25^ . David
Alfred A. Knopf
Ibid, 27
28
29
30
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Kraft
p. 192.
p, 173,
p, 66,
Easton, The Political System (New York: 1966), p, 19,
p, 221.
p. 224.
p, 254,
pp. 225-26.
The Vienna Circle, pp. 192-93.
31
32
Van Dyke, Political Science, p. 9.
Thomas S, Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2nd ed. , Foundations of the Unity of Science, Vol. II, no. 2 (Chicago! University of Chicago Press, 1970).
CHAPTER III
THE LATER PHILOSOPHY OF WITTGENSTEIN
Two facts must be made clear about Wittgenstein's
later philosophy. First, he never abandoned caution
about the dangers of reification in doing philosophy. He
argued that meaning derives from the context in which
words are used in language games. Second, Wittgenstein
abandoned the notion of logical atomism.
In the Tractatus Wittgenstein argued that language
functions uniformly to point to_ things as they are, that
it provides ostensive definitions. In the later philosophy
Wittgenstein argued that language, and, therefore, meaning,
is highly context bound. It is composed of overlapping
structures of language games and is intimately bound up
with specific social practices. Wittgenstein maintained
that people are born into a language game and that grasp
ing the practices of language games precedes our under
standing of "facts."
The epistemological implications of this philosophy
are far-reaching as well. Our knowledge is seen as
limited to the explanations provided within our language
structures. No one can arbitrarily invent private languages
48
49
or private meanings. These depend on rules, and rules
are social, not private. Language games are "played" in
real, concrete circumstances, but the word-meanings
associated with them do not depend on raw, direct sense-
data. Therefore, the later philosophy is empirical but not
of the positivistic^bent. Knowledge is communicable,
but it may be filtered through several layers of inter
pretation and never arrives untouched by the variations
given it by social contexts.
This, then, is the bare outline of Wittgenstein's
later philosophy. Obviously he has introduced some quite
novel ideas that must be explored in some detail. One
reason for giving greater attention to the later phase
in Wittgenstein's philosophy is that more use has been made
of it by recent political philosophers. However, another
reason is that the later philosophy is fuller and more
extensive. It requires more effort to get at its meaning.
In the Tractatus Wittgenstein had said that words
stand for objects and that there is an unbroken progression
from facts toward a descriptive language. Conversely,
when we are presented a descriptive statement, we are
theoretically capable of reducing it to its finite atomic
components. This is the doctrine of logical atomism, and,
although Wittgenstein never provided an example of an
atomic particle of language, the notion had considerable
impact.
50
In the Blue Book Wittgenstein takes issue with
this whole idea of atomism. As we have seen previously,
he takes a simple word such as "not" as a word which has
no atomic parts. The anomaly presented by these kinds of
words led Wittgenstein to formulate his theory of meaning-
as-use. That is, meaning is not something existing out
side the fabric of language as we might commonly assume.
"We are looking for the use of a sign, but we look for it
as though it were an object co-existing with the sign."
How, then, does a sentence acquire significance? We
reintroduce two main ideas:
The sign (the sentence) gets its significance from the system of signs, from the language to which it belongs. Roughly: understanding a sentence means understanding a language.
As part of the system of language, one may say, the sentence has life. But one is tempted to imagine that which gives the sentence life as something in an occult sphere, accompanying the sentence.2
Wittgenstein is in the process of developing some
significant themes. In the first place, he is once again
sounding the alarm against the idea that meanings can
arise outside the world of human experience. This is left
over from the Tractatus, This is important because it
forms the significant link between his two philosophies.
There is a change, however, in the rest of what he says.
He is shifting his definition of meaning; he is saying
that the meaning of a sentence is its use within a lan
guage, not its agreement with an independent reality.
51
Wittgenstein is not attempting to restore the idea
that language takes its meaning from a kind of dictionary
located in some far ethereal realm. However, he is
pointing toward a new understanding of the concrete, sensate
world. This will become more apparent as we proceed
further. Nevertheless, the essence of it is that the
world we live in does not come to us baldly, but is largely
unintelligible or even largely unnoticed until it is
interpreted within a system of language. These may be the
natural languages of our birth or special languages we
acquire later on. Where systems of language differ, we
find various shades of interpretation of reality, with
none inherently superior. The only thing that remains
constant, if we follow Wittgenstein, is that there are no
exact and perfect regions of language, whether normative
. . T 3 or empirical.
The later philosophy leans more toward a theory
of language as a social instrument. It views language
less as a structure superimposed on society like print on
a fabric; instead language is seen more as the very threads
of the fabric. David Pears sees this new emphasis as
4 Wittgenstein's shift toward anthropocentrism. This is
the new emphasis on man as an active agent in the struc
turing of language meanings. In the early philosophy
Wittgenstein had viewed langauge as a kind of disembodied
entity that could be exposed and study quite apart from the
52
human agents actually using it in every day life.
Wittgenstein's new focus is away from this idea of
language. It is first suggested in the Blue Book by one
of two new concepts - the concept of a language game.
The importance of this new idea has been briefly suggested
above. Now we shall take a closer look as we see how
Wittgenstein introduces the idea,
I shall in the future again and again draw your attention to what I shall call language games. These are ways of using signs simpler than those in which we use the signs of our highly com.plicated everyday language. Language games are the forms of language with which a child begins to make use of words. The study of language games is the study of primitive languages. If we want to study the problems of truth and falsehood, of the agreement and disagreement of propositions with reality, of the nature of assertion, assumption, and question, we shall with great advantage look at primitive forms of language in which these forms of thinking appear without the confusing background of highly complicated forms of thought.^
When Wittgenstein speaks here of primitive language
games, he refers to something quite different from the
language of a primitive tribe or culture. This can be
misleading at first glance as Wittgenstein sometimes used
examples of imaginary tribes to illustrate his point. In
the Philosophical Investigations he sometimes asks the
reader to imagine a tribe which speaks only in commands or
something of the same sort. What Wittgenstein usually
means by "primitive" is something like "basic" or "primary."
Language games are the building blocks of our everyday
languages.
53
Wittgenstein is trying to direct our attention
away from the conception of langauge learning that we
usually adhere to; that is, he is pointing us away from
the idea that we learn the meanings of our language by
ostensive definition. It is not suggested that we do not
learn in this way at times. What is suggested is that the
"pointing-to", method is incomplete and more applicable
to the way we learn something such as "tree" than to more
subtle words and concepts. It ignores the numerous
instances in our language in which use of a word is the
sole determinant of meaning.
Hardwick notes that the idea of language games
presents an important point of comparison with the
Tractatus. He says that, unlike the atomic propositions
found there, language games "are not composed of anything
else. Language games are uses of language in which the 7
meanings of words are clearly understood." In other
words, it is not necessary to reduce the words of our
language to the skeleton of atomic structure in order to
know exactly what they mean. As Hardwick explains further.
In his early work Wittgenstein had sought a crystalline clarity in the logical form of language; in his later work he finds clarity in the ordinary uses of words in everyday situations.8
In developing this idea of language in the later philosophy,
Wittgenstein was moving away from the notion that there
is a meta-world "behind" our language. He was also moving
54
away from the idea that language points to an independent
reality that can only be fully ascertained by stripping
language down from its everyday uses.
In one important passage from the Blue Book we are
urged not to look for "real" meanings as we will be
disappointed.
But let's not forget that a word hasn't got (sic.) a meaning given to it, as it were, by a power independent of us, so that there could be a kind of scientific investigation into what the word really means. A word has the meaning someone has given to it.^
This statement tells us as much as any about the direction
of V7ittgenstein's later philosophy. It shows both a con
tinued distrust of metaphysically absolute meanings and a
rejection of the idea that meaning is innate in the raw
data of the sensate world.
We have seen many references to the idea of "use"
in language. Let us draw together the implications of
this idea. Perhaps more than any other single term, this
is the key to Wittgenstein's later thought. "Use" suggests
the presence of activity and that, in turn, suggests
something empirical. We can, in fact, interpret the later
philosophy as an empirical one. However, it is empirical
in a different way than we are accustomed to. The main
difference is that we search for our facts in the language
itself. When we perceive facts, what we perceive is not
a set of conditions "out there" but a particular use "in
here" in the uses of our language. Good illustrations of
55
this point were made by Wittgenstein in his observations
about colors. For example, note the following observation
from Remarks on Colour:
If you are not clear about the role of logic in colour concepts, begin with the simple case of, e.g. a yellowish red. This exists, no one doubts that. How do I learn the use of the word "yellowish"? Through language-games in which, for example, things are put in a certain order.
Thus I can learn, in agreement with other people, to recognize yellowish and still more yellowish red, green, brown and white.
In the course of this I learn to proceed independently just' as I do in arithmetic. One person may react to the order to find a yellowish blue by producing a blue-green, another may not understand the order. What does this depend upon?10
While it is a fact that color exists, what can count in
any particular instance as a color-fact depends in large
part on there being an agreement in language among people.
As far as human beings are practically concerned there is
no "fact" about a yellow-red or blue-green unless the
concepts are incorporated in a language game, and, where
language games differ, the "facts" about color will differ.
To put it another way, when we look at the world,
we are looking at a definition. Syntax, as Anthony Kenny
has pointed out, is empirical. When we go about the
business of finding, organizing, and interpreting facts,
what we do is lay out the features of our language. This
is a fact-related activity to be sure, but it is quite
different from the standard conception of an empirical
enterprise.
56
The Brown Book is a continuation of what the Blue
BQQ^ introduces. The Brown Book goes deeper in dismantling
the picture-theory. Many of its ideas relate directly to
the Philosophical Investigations or are almost entirely
reproduced in that work. We shall briefly look at some
of the themes of the Brown Book. This will serve as an
introduction to the Philosophical Investigations which we
shall examine in more detail.
Wittgenstein says that it is easy to assume that
pointing and naming are always the same or similar
activities and that it is possible to be strictly clear
about intentions and meanings. But, in the development
of his later philosophy, Wittgenstein is lending a new
interpretation to how language acquires meaning. In one
example he shows what happens when we try to point out
colors and shapes.
But suppose I point with my hand to a blue jersey. How does pointing to its color differ from pointing to its shape? We are inclined to say the difference is that we mean something different in the two cases. And 'meaning' here is to be some sort of process taking place while we point.12
The problem is a perplexing one, but Wittgenstein says we
can only begin to know what is going on when we take the
whole context of the situation into account. Again, we
have to look at the uses of language.
We have only a rough idea of what it means to concentrate one's attention on the color as opposed to the shape, or vice versa. The difference, one might say, does not lie in the act of demonstration, but
57
rather in the surrounding of that act in the use of language. 1-
Wittgenstein makes frequent use of these common
place examples to get across the point that our entire
perception of the world is influenced by how our language
is used. He shows that the "facts" impinge on each other,
so that it is not clear how we go about separating the
relevant facts in any case. And we can ask ourselves
about the facts of color and the facts of shape over and
over, and we find it difficult to enumerate all the facts
relevant to the various uses of color-words and shape-
words. We can look outside of Wittgenstein's philosophical
point and find examples of word uses that tie together
facts in a very different way from English uses. Here, for
example, is a way in which the color concept "whiteness"
can be seen in a unique fact-related way: the sentence,
"It is a dripping spring," when said in Apache, becomes
14 "Whiteness moves downward". The point here is that a
word can have different ways of indicating a fact. The
"facts" about "water" and "white" in one language can be
seen as quite different in another language. In other
words, how one employs words in a language can have a
tremendous impact on what will be counted as significant
facts of a situation.
The cross-cultural example provided by B. L. Whorf
is clear enough, but Wittgenstein shows us that we can even
be fooled by our own language. He says, for example, that
58
we cannot be sure of the "exact" meaning of a word such as
"exactness,"
Is it real exactness if you are supposed to come to tea at 4:30 and come when a good clock strikes 4:30? Or would it only be exactness if you began to open the door at the moment the clock began to strike? But how is this moment to be defined and how is •beginning to open the door' to be defined? Would it be correct to say, 'It is difficult to say what real exactness is, for all we know is only rough approximations'?15
Wittgenstein's intention is to show the inadequacy of
logical atomism,, V7e see that the search for "real"
definitions or "the" facts can lead us into all sorts of
difficulties.
The Philosophical Investigations is the best known
of Wittgenstein's later works. It represents the maturity
of his philosophical activity. It has gained in influence
among the English-speaking philosophical community in
spite of the fact that many still associate Wittgenstein
almost solely with his earlier ideas.
In the Philosophical Investigations Wittgenstein
introduces his "form of life" concept. This is a loosely
defined but important idea which helps us make sense out
of language games. Hanna Pitkin has accurately pointed
out the ambiguous but illuminating quality of the concept.
She says that, although forms of life are not clearly
spelled out by Wittgenstein, the "idea is clearly related
to the idea of a language game, and more generally to
16 Wittgenstein's action-oriented view of language." Here
59
is Wittgenstein's introduction of the concept:
It is easy to imagine a language consisting only of orders and reports in battle. Or of a language consisting only of questions and expressions for answering yes and no. And innumerable others. - And to imagine a language game means to imagine a form of life,17
In another passage he shows that language games
are part of the concept of "forms of life," that is, that
the speaking of language is part of this activity, " We
should not be misled by Wittgenstein's asking us to imagine
these things. This is only part of his philosophical
exercise, A closer interpretation shov/s that language
games and forms of life are tied in with concrete human
activities. They are empirically grounded and have meaning
only within the regular patterns of living. Pitkin's
summary of the idea of forms of life in helpful.
That notion is never explicitly defined, and we should not try to force more precision from it than its rich suggestiveness will bear. But its general significance is clear enough: human life as we live and observe it is not just a random, continuous flow, but displays recurrent patterns, regularities, characteristic ways of doing and being, of feeling and acting, of speaking and interacting.19
Although the concept of forms of life is not really
defined formally, we may nevertheless clarify its meaning.
Forms of life are the core elements of human life that
make it possible to transcend different regions of
discourse, that make it possible to understand different
ways of speaking and meaning. Forms of life may be seen
as the practices we observe or follow in learning a
60
language game. Something like this is suggested by
Phillips and Mounce who suggest that "it is the form of
life which makes it intelligible to hold particular
opinions."
Forms of life are not like cultural practices, or
at least they are not identical with cultural practices.
It is more accurate to say that specific cultural
practices fall within a form of life. Forms of life are
not, for example, the ways of doing things differently
that separate urban Americans from Somali herdsmen or
Amazon River tribes. Practices may differ within forms
of life. But the kinds of activities making up forms
of life, such as learning, questioning, helping, and even
talking are conventions which cut across cultural lines
21 and enable us to identify each other as human beings.
Forms of life are like adhesives that bind together the
diversities of different practices and language games.
At the same time they are conventional, but they are not
so consciously conventional in the way that formal regu-
22
lations and opinions are. Forms of life are conventional
because they could be imagined to be different.
Wittgenstein is always giving an example of a fictitious
tribe that is quite like groups of other people except
for one unusual trait, such as having only commands in
their language. It could be the case that all people were
accustomed to speak only in commands, but then the form of
61
human life would be quite different.
Forms of life are essential to an understanding
of language games because it is the presence of such forms
which keeps language games bound to the realm of
experience. Language games may be different, but they
are never totally arbitrary or completely untranslatable
into the discourse of 6ther language regions. Forms of
life are the forms of common behavior that make human
life intelligible, even though some extreme difficulty
may be involved in translations. "The common behavior
of mankind is the system of reference by means of v/hich
23 we interpret an unknown language."
Another concept which is germane to grasping the
basic "accessibility" of language is the concept of rules.
The concept of rules developed in the later philosophy by
Wittgenstein further suggests the importance of his
philosophy for political science. The question of rules
is most fruitfully approached through the question of
whether a private language is possible.
The idea of a private language, or more accurately,
the argument against it, is closely bound up with the 24 . • notion of obeying rules. According to Wittgenstein
playing a language game involves following rules. These
are not to be seen as strictly formal or written rules.
These types of rules may play a part, but they do not
form the entire picture. Most of the rules to which
62
Wittgenstein refers are those we follow but cannot
specify. Actually they are more akin to techniques and
are social, not private. Wittgenstein gives an example
of what can and cannot be a rule.
It is not possible that there should have been only one occasion on which someone obeyed a rule. It is not possible that there should have been only one occasion on which a report was made, an order given or understood; and so on. - To obey a rule, to make a report, to give an order, to play a game of chess, are customs (uses, institutions).
To understand a sentence means to understand a language. To understand a language means to be master of a technique.26
Learning a language is learning a specific and
meaningful activity, Wittgenstein continues his argument,
saying that following a rule is not an interpretation but
a practice; and it is this which argues against private
27 languages and private rule-following. If this were not
the case, then one could merely think one was following a
rule, when, in fact, no rule was being followed. A
private language would have no concept of mistakes, but
then it would have no idea of correctness either. The
presence of a correct procedure inherently implies the
possibility of mistakes. In other words, the idea of a
private language is a contradiction.
One of the main points of the preceeding argument
is that language is not a whimsical activity. There are
correct and incorrect ways of following any language
activity. As we shall see more clearly later, this argues
63
very powerfully against the idea that norm.ative types of
discourse are nothing more than utterances of unfounded
opinion. When the idea of rule-following is taken into
account, it becomes quite evident that, even in the most
subjective ways of speaking, there are some things that
will not do.
As a final entry in our discussion of the Philo
sophical Investigations, let us take a look at what
Wittgenstein has to say regarding the ideas of causes and
motives. This will give us a good look at a specific
application of Wittgenstein's later thought and will help
us clarify similarities and differences between a more
"empirical" concept (cause) and a more "normative" one
(motive), The two concepts are frequently seen as quite
different, causes being associated with events which follow
each other due to impersonal influences. When we look
for causes, we generally do not ask for reasons. And,
indeed, it is the idea of reasons which separates causes
and motives. Unlike causes, motives are accompanied by
reasons, or we are at least correct in asking for reasons.
It is easy to see another way that causes and
motives are different or appear to be different. It would
seem to make sense that one could invent a motive but not
a cause. Peter Winch has suggested that motives and
causes are so much different that they are totally
incompatible. To Wittgenstein, however, motives appeared
64
similar to causes in that they must be understood as
falling within a regular pattern of meaning. Thus to
suggest that motives can be purely private and subjective
is a mistake.
"He alone knows his motives" - that is an expression of the fact that we ask him what his motives are. If he is sincere he will tell us them; but I need more than sincerity to guess his motives. This is where there is kinship with the case of knowing.29
What Wittgenstein is telling us is that not just anything
will count as a motive. We can ask someone his motive
for doing something; he may tell us, or he may lie and
conceal his motive. But the answers that he can sensibly
give us are limited. Some "motives" are not really
motives at all, and no one would believe them. Judging
motives is itself a complex procedure, and we do not
proceed to do so in just any fashion.
There is such a question as: "Is this a reliable way of judging people's motives?" But in order to be able to ask this we must know what "judging a motive" means, and we do not learn this by being told what 'motive' is and what 'judging' is.- ^
In seeking to discover the meaning behind social events,
it is never enough to just look for causes. It is also
important to understand the reasons given for activities
by the actors themselves. As we see, however, it is
also not enough to rely solely on the latter.
The importance of these distinctions has been
noted by Abraham Kaplan in his Conduct of Inquiry. Kaplan
65
calls our attention to two levels of interpretation which
he designates as "act meaning" and "action meaning." An
act contrasts with an action in the following way:
An act (as contrasted with an action) is a succession of biophysical events whose meaning lies in the actor's purposes, or in the goal to which the act is directed . . . An action is an act considered in the perspective in which it has meaning for the actor; the biophysical process here has psychological and social dimensions.31
Acts are immediate, being accomplished in successions of
movements. We rarely observe these Kaplan notes. What
we generally observe are actions, the observation of
which "rests on inferences and reconstructions." Roughly
speaking we say that act meanings are "subjective",
33 whereas action meanings are "objective."
It will become more apparent that Kaplan's use
of "act" is somewhat like the use of "action" by Winch
and Pitkin particularly. The chief difference, and one
that is vitally important, is that those following
Wittgenstein give more attention to the linguistic
regularities of actions. A Wittgensteinian interpretation
of subjective meanings urges us to look for consistencies
and patterns, not so much in the mechanics of language,
but in meaning. That is, we v/ant to know what it means
grammatically and contextually to use certain subjective
or normative designations. This is neither a search for
metaphysical absolutes nor a search for statistically
66
significant regularities of usage as we would do in
linguistic science. Rather, it is a different kind of
activity than either.
The next chapter will focus on some specific
examples of attemtps to develop approaches to political
theory based on Wittgenstein's later philosophy. The
examples we will look at have been chosen because each
attempts to use a discussion about Wittgenstein's
philosophy to offer suggestions toward a new understanding
of the tension between science and philosophy in the
study of politics. It will be apparent that these
represent some distinctly new ways of looking at social
and political events, and, like most new ideas, are
filled with both promise and problems. We shall attempt
to clarify and provide a critical estimate of these
arguments.
82
67
Notes
Wittgenstein, The Blue Book, p. 5.
^Ibid.
3„ ^^^^' Wittgenstein's Conception of Philosophy,
4 David Pears, Ludwig Wittgenstein (New York: The
Vikmg Press, 1969), p. 180.
Wittgenstein, The Blue Book, p. 17.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 3rd ed., trans. G.E.M. Anscombe (New York: Macmillan, n.d.), p. 20.
7 Charles S. Hardwick, Language Learning in
VJittgenstein's Later Philosophy (The Hague: Mouton, 1971), p, 27,
^Ibid,, p. 29.
9 . Wittgenstein, The Blue Book, p. 28.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Remarks on Colour, ed. G.E.M. Anscombe, trans. Linda L, McAlister and Margarete Schattle (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), p. 31.
Kenny, Wittgenstein, p. 109.
12 . Wittgenstein, The Brown Book, p, 80. Ibid.
14 Benjamin Lee Whorf, Language, Thought, and
Reality, ed. John B. Carroll, with a Foreword by Stuart Chase (Cambridge: The M.I.T. Press, 1956), p. 241.
15 . Wittgenstein, The Brown Book, p. 81.
16 Hanna Pitkin, Wittgenstein and Justice (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1972), p. 132.
Wittgenstein, Investigations, p. 8.
• Ibid. , p. 11, 19 Pitkin, Wittgenstein and Justice, p. 132.
68 20 D. Z. Phillips and H. 0. Mounce, Moral Practices,
Studies in Ethics and the Philosophy of Religion (New York: Schocken Books, 1970), p, 65,
21 . Pitkm, Wittgenstein and Justice, p, 133,
22 Wittgenstein, Investigations, p, 88, • Ibid, , p, 82, 24 Ibid,, p, 81.
25 Rush Rhees, "Can There Be a Private Language?"
in Wittgenstein: The Philosophical Investigations, ed.: George Pitcher. Amelie Rorty, gen. ed., Modern Studies in Philosophy (Notre Dame: Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1968) , p. 270.
2 6 Wittgenstein, Investigations, p. 81.
27 ^'ibid,
Peter Winch, The Idea of a Social Science, ed. by R. F. Holland (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1958), p. 75.
? 9
Wittgenstein, Investigations, p. 224.
^^Ibid.
^-^Abraham Kaplan, The Conduct of Inquiry (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1964), p. 139.
32 •^^Ibid.
• Ibid, , p, 141.
CHAPTER IV
CONTEMPORARY TRENDS IN WITTGENSTEINIAN SOCIAL AND POLITICAL THOUGHT
Our task at this juncture is to look closely at
how the later philosophy of Wittgenstein bears upon social
and political theory. Already there have been several
attempts at doing social and political theory from a
later Wittgensteinian perspective. The present chapter
offers an analysis and critique of some important works
which derive their impetus from the later Wittgenstein.
The studies to be examined here are Peter Winch's The
Idea of a Social Science, Hanna Pitkin's Wittgenstein
and Justice, and John Danford's Wittgenstein and Political
Philosophy. These are the major works to date which
attempt to relate Wittgenstein's later philosophy
directly to problems m social and political theory.
Winch's book, which was published first in 1958,
antedates the two other works by more than ten years. So
the Wittgensteinian movement has been around for more
than a short while. Winch's effort is a counterpart to
the works of Ayer and Weldon, being the first to have the
later philosophy as its starting point.
69
70
Winch bases his argument on the concept of social
action. He says there is a problem in social science
theory which stems from a common failure to recognize the
existence of two logically incompatible concepts. These
are what we might call action concepts and causal concepts.
Winch argues that human beings must be understood in terms
of the activities in which they engage, and this requires
an understanding of the social context in which the
participants speak and act. Basically, Winch's argument
runs as follows: we must understand people's social actions
in terms of how they explain what they do. It is on the
basis of this argument that action and causal explanations
are seen as incompatible. This study shall show that
Winch is mistaken, having misunderstood a key point in
Wittgenstein's philosophy of language.
Winch argues that social science, in generally
failing to appreciate the active nature of language,
forms too narrow a view of what is socially meaningful.
Insufficient attention is given to the creative aspects
of human enterprise. The result is a denigration of the
importance of subjective modes of understanding. According
to Winch the denigration of the subjective or the
normative modes of understanding arises from the "under-
laborer" conception of philosophy, which sees its role as
that of a language referee. The early Wittgenstein, Ayer,
and, indeed, the whole corpus of positivist philosophy
71
argued this view, winch is very critical of this kind
of philosophy because it has made philosophy passive.
That is, it says that philosophy has nothing new of its
own to offer; it articulates no truths. The sole function
of philosophy, according to the positivist program, is to
warn us when we go astray in our language, such as when
we drift into metaphysics.^
Winch counters the positivist view of philosophy
by arguing that it is a mistake to take a piecemeal
approach to philosophy. Philosophy, he argues, must be
seen as essentially a different way of articulating the
truths of the world. It is, if approached correctly,
the articulation of a vision of the whole of reality.
The difference between the respective aims of the scientist and the philosopher might be expressed as follows. Whereas the scientist investigates the nature, causes and effects of particular real things and processes, the philosopher is concerned with the nature of reality as such and in general.^
In other words the meaning of something can be more than,
or at least different from, a summation of its atomic
functions.
Winch also argues that the criticism of philosophy
which sees it as unable to prove anything empirically is
mistaken. He points out that "the issue in philosophy is
not to prove or disprove the existence of a world of
external objects but rather to elucidate the concept of
externality,""^ That is, the role of philosophy is to
72
define a concept of total reality. This is really an
argument against the reductionist logic of atomism which
says that no phenomenon has meaning greater than the sum
of its various components. Winch's point is that philosophy
tells us something very different from what we get by
"reducing" a phenomenon to its constituent parts,
V7inch's arguments show a definite Wittgensteinian
flavor. By extending the logic of the argument ourselves,
we would say that it is a mistake to argue against the
knowledge claims of philosophy (normative theory) on the
basis that it is not conducted "scientifically" because
that is to confuse the logic of language of two very
different disciplines. Those who insist that all
meaningful language be modelled after the language of
science make this mistake. All that is required is for
one to set up the model of science as the ultimate
standard of all legitimate conceptualizing, then, proceed
to dismiss everything falling outside this scope as really
so much careless speculation.
Winch points out that, within our various pursuits
of knowledge, we are each trying to articulate a view of
reality. A mistake occurs, however, when someone insists
that all efforts at understanding reality are different
ways of doing the same thing and that one is a better way 5
than all the rest. This is an important and correct
application of Wittgenstein's later thoughts.
73
Let us now turn to Winch's thoughts on the nature
of rules and rule-governed activities. We recall the
central importance of rules in Wittgenstein's later
philosophy. Indeed, the whole concept marks one of the
significant turning points in the development of that
philosophy. Rules make our language intelligible. When
we acquire a language game, we acquire the understanding
of a set of rules of how the game is played. The rules
are, in fact, necessary for making the game what it is.
Winch maintains that all meaningful activities
are rule-governed. Furthermore, any rule-governed
activity is one in which there are correct and incorrect
ways of doing things. Winch says, for example, that even
the anarchist follows a rule of sorts. This may seem to
be stretching the point, but, if we examine things closely,
we can see why Winch is correct. For example, we would not
say that a madman going about shooting people at random
is an anarchist. Because of his complete insanity, he
probably would not even understand the term as we do; he
would not be following the rules which separate anarchists
from irrationally insane people. We assume that, in order
to be a true anarchist, one must believe in the general
"rule" that there should be no organized form of govern
ment or social authority. The point is that in studying
human activities it is never enough only to explore causal
factors, of an activity or the factors that come into play
74
in shaping a course of events outside the awareness and
intent of the actor. it is also necessary to define the
internal rules of that activity as they have meaning for
the actor himself, winch argues that people do not just
do socially significant things without some forms of rule-
related choices entering into the picture. Here again we
have the example of the anarchist.
The anarchist has reasons for acting as he does; he makes a point of not being governed by explicit, rigid norms. Although he retains his freedom of choice, yet they are still significant choices that he makes: they are guided by considerations, and he may have good reasons for choosing one course rather than another. And these notions, which are essential in describing the anarchists mode of behavior, presuppose the notion of a rule.*
In his emphasis on the way language functions to
shape reality. Winch correctly appreciates a critical turn
in Wittgenstein's later philosophy. However, he argues,
we must not be misled by the idea that language precedes
the social organization in which it functions. He says
that social psychologists generally fail to understand
"how the very existence of concepts depends on group g
life." The force of Winch's argument is just this: the
generalizations we make about reality do not come to us
out of simple, attentive observation alone. Instead, what
is to count as reality is largely determined by the
circumstances of our language structures, or, that is, by
the social groups and language games into which we have
been "initiated," In other words, knowledge is subjective.
75
And especially with regard to knowledge of social phenomena.
Winch maintains, we cannot seek scientific prediction with
success. The reason, he says, is that social action,
being rule-governed, is dependent on the consciousness
of choice; and choice is independent of antecedent or 9
causal determination.
It is unfortunate that Winch has let his argument
drift in this direction. If he had said that reality of
social occurrences can be equally and adequately under
stood according to different conceptual schemes or that
certain meanings are best understood in philosophical
language and others best understood in scientific language,
his argument would have rested on more solid ground. But
his argument says that everything significant in human
social life is connected with conscious rules of choice
and, being so, can only be understood on the basis of the
internal meanings of social acts. His point is that, in
order for an explanation to be socially significant, it
must be framed in terms of decisions and choices, not in
terms of causal forces.
Winch appears to have done nothing more than
invert the positivist argument to suit his own argument.
He is claiming that normative interpretations, because they
better explain some activities or the meaning of some
activities, are now to be judged as exclusively superior.
Winch has drifted into the old argument that we must rely
76
on uniform explanations for everything. it seems correct
to suggest that the interpretation and meaning of social
actions is heavily laden with subjective rules, but the
conditions giving rise to the particular social matrices
themselves are certainly within the purview of causal
explanation. Winch's development of this facet of his
argument shows a misunderstanding of Wittgenstein's later
philosophy. This will become more evident as we go on.
It would not be correct to say of Winch that he
believes social actioiis, to the extent that they are con
sciously or subjectively understood, are without regular,
predictive possibilities. His argument, though it is
incomplete on what is predictable in human society, does
anticipate our notion of Wittgensteinian empiricism. Winch
says that we can predict people's decisions to a limited
degree if we know the rules which specify what is accept
able as a decision.
To understand the nature of the decisions confronting N, O must be aware of the rules which provide the criteria specifying for N the relevant features of his situation. If one knows the rule which someone is following one can, in a large number of cases, predict what he will do in given circumstances. 1"
Winch is correct to say chat even the most subjective
meanings have a regularity and are not just a random
collection of private whims. Where he errs is in not
giving attention to other factors that might impinge on
choices and decisions.
77
Wittgenstein pointed out that we can understand a
human activity by watching it being practiced, and we do
not have to understand the subjective interpretation of
those rules to form judgments about them. He argues as
follows:
But we say that it [a language game] is played according to such-and-such rules because an observer can read these rules off from the practice of the game - like a natural law governing the play. -But how does the observer distinguish in this case between players' mistakes and correct play? -There are characteristic signs of it in the player's behavior. Think of the behavior characteristic of correcting a slip of the tongue. It would be possible to recognize that someone was doing so even without knowing the game.H
The foregoing observation is important because it shows
Winch's mistake in supposing that the boundaries of lan
guage regions are more exact than Wittgenstein intended.
When Winch applies his brand of Wittgensteinian analysis
to social studies, the result is an interpretation which
is difficult to accept. The basis of his argument is
that regularities in the different forms of human activity
can only be properly understood within the subjective rules
of that activity. This suggests that there can be no
12 external criteria for interpreting social action.
However, Wittgenstein's point that we can discover mis
takes in an alien language game shows that he did not
imply this.
Let us now briefly summarize Winch's contribution
to social science theory. It is a valuable effort at
78
applying a later Wittgensteinian analysis to this body
of theory. The refining of the concepts of rules and
actions is important because it goes a way toward
articulating the conditions for locating the rules in
normative discourse. An outline of Winch's theory might
be offered along the following lines. He develops a two-
level theory to include normative philosophy within the
purview of scientific theory. In the first instance he
argues that philosophy, in its aim to articulate the
meaning of the whole of reality, aims at something
different from the aims of natural science. Therefore,
it should not be invalidated on the basis that it does
not follow the methods of science. However, a theorist
can, in his articulation of the meaning of normative
rules in decisions and choices, arrive at some generaliza
tions. He does this by taking account of the rules of a
given setting and attempting to predict someone's actions
on the basis of the appropriate choices available within
those rules. For example, we might predict a president's
decision in a crisis by limiting ourselves to the choices
available within the rules of being president. These
may be general moral rules or more formal, legal rules.
The second application that Winch makes of
Wittgenstein's philosophy concerns the possibility of a
science of alien cultures. Winch applies a very rigid
interpretation of Wittgenstein's language games here. He
79
says that alien cultures must be understood according to
the explanations given by the actors themselves and that
scientific understanding is incompatible with this aim." "
In developing his theories Winch provides only a
partial understanding of Wittgenstein's view. First, his
observation that normative discourse follows relatively
prescribed rules is correct. His error comes in saying
that a philosophical approach to social knowledge is the
only valid approach. This embodies the same kind of
ideological framework that Wittgenstein argued against.
Second, his ideas on understanding alien cultures is
correct to the extent that it says we must take account of
the actors' own explanations. He is wrong in saying that
it is as far as we should go--or that scientific explana
tions are out of place here. He fails to take proper
account of the way we can learn and make predictive
generalizations about events by observing the practices
which accompany the rules of an activity. He fails to
account for instances when people follow rules out of
habit rather than conscious choice.
Although Winch published his work before Kuhn,
his philosophy does have some affinities with that mode
of analysis. It is in this way that Winch most severely
misunderstands the Wittgensteinian approach to epistemology.
Although a full comparison between Kuhnian and
Wittgensteinian epistemolgoy is beyond the scope of this
80
study, it is useful to interject a brief comparison here
to show how Winch is more like Kuhn than Wittgesntein in
his approach to social knowledge.
In his work The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
Kuhn develops the concept of scientific reserach paradigms
to explain the changes in scientific problems over the
years. Briefly put, his theory is that scientific knowl
edge changes, not by the adoption, testing, and con
firmation (or rejection) of theories, but by paradigm
shifts. That is, science is an activity that is marked by
long periods of routine puzzle solving interrupted from time
to time by conceptual crisis and revolution. At the end
of such a revolution, which occurs whenever a scientific
problem becomes a crisis that cannot be ignored, there
emerges a new mode of scientific thought that is completely
15 incompatible with the "old" way of doing science. Thus,
because paradigms cannot be intersubjectively tested,
accumulation of progressive scientific knowledge is
impossible. This is completely contrary to the accepted
notion of science as a body of progressively accumulated
knowledge.
The linguistic implications of Kuhn's argument can
be briefly stated as follows: the language meanings of
an "older" scientific community are incommensurate with
the language meanings of a "newer" scientific community.
This is somewhat similar to Winch's understanding of
81
language structures. However, in Winch's view it is
possible to understand but not translate an alien language
structure. In Kuhn's view language structures can become
so totally different that understanding is impossible
across the boundaries of alien structures. The purpose
in suggesting a comparison here is to show that the
possibility of intersubjectivity completely breaks down
whenever the possiblity of understanding and meaning is
confined to "tight" compartments such as Kuhnian paradigms
and Winch's rigid interpretation of language regions. If
what Kuhn suggests were the case, there would be virtually
no communication through successive scientific generations.
Winch would leave as with a situation in which each of us
could understand other people only with extreme difficulty.
The world we experience just does not offer evidence of
this extreme kind of language blockage. Neither Kuhn
nor Winch offers a critical perspective from which to
evaluate competing claims to knowledge. We must not force
too much comparison here because Kuhn limits his discussion
to the language of scientific paradigms as they affect the
members of that community specifically. But the comparison
has merit because the views represented are quite dissimilar
to a Wittgensteinian view of the common nature of language
structures.
Having looked at Winch's work, let us now take a
look at Pitkin's Wittgenstein and Justice. Her contribution
82
to political theory takes a different approach from that
of Winch, Her arguments are more detailed and based more
on grammatical points. In part it is an attempt actually
to apply language analysis to certain terms and concepts
of political discourse, especially that of justice.
Pitkin first attempts to isolate the essential
characteristics of Wittgenstein's two philosophies of
language. Second, she shows the relevance of the later
philosophy for a new understanding of social and political
theory. In her discussion of the Tractatus Pitkin gives
an account of some of the major ideas of the early
philosophy. She focuses on the picture theory of lan
guage and Wittgenstein's classification of statements
into one of three categories: true propositions, 17
tautologies, and pseudo or metaphysical propositions.
These ideas are directly related with the ideas of logical
positivism. Accordingly, as she sees it, there has been
an unnecessary truncation of language to exclude the
18 normative discourses of philosophy. Pitkin argues that
positivism has driven a wedge between philosophy and
science.
Pitkin's discussion of Wittgenstein's later
philosophy focuses on several relevant points that we
have already introduced. Foremost among these is a dis
cussion of language-as-activity. Earlier in this study
we saw the contrast between language-as-activity and
83
language-as-reference, Pitkin's discussion shows that
this contrast has much meaning for social science and
political theory. She argues that it is through use that
langauge terms and concepts derive their meanings. It
is the context of a word's use—the situation—which often
determines how it is meant rather than the strict
identification of a word with some one thing being
19 referred to. The issue becomes one of identifying
meaning with the kinds of activities that take place in
conjunction with its use. In this way, although she does
not use this term, anthropocentric reality diverges sharply
from the idea of reality as existing independently of the
subjective constructions of the knower.
If one assumes that words are labels, and language primarily our means of referring to things in the world, then language and world are obviously separate, though correlated. That assumption corresponds with the conventional wisdom of our time, with its positivistic roots. It teaches that things in the world are what they are no matter how we think about them, no matter what we call them . . . But if many words are wholly or partly signals rather than labels, if their grammar is often internally inconsistent in its implications, then the matter of "what they refer to" becomes seriously problematical.20
Pitkin's argument calls to mind a similar argument
advanced by Karl Mannheim in his classic work Ideology and
21 Utopia, Mannheim's problem, which is known as Mannheim's
Paradox, maintains that detached observation of any given
phenomenon is impossible because everyone is so greatly
conditioned by the forces of society and culture that
84
detachment from the subjectivity of the group is beyond the
22 individual's means. It is, says Mannheim, an "alarming
fact that the same world can appear differently to
23 different observers," For this reason Mannheim believed
we should be more flexible in what we might admit within
the realm of science. Mannheim clearly indicates this
epistemological possibility as follows:
, , , it is above all our duty to inquire into the nature of these still unformulated types of knowledge [the "pre-scientific," "intuitive," etc.] and then to learn whether the horizons and conceptions of science cannot be so extended as to include these ostensibly pre-scientific areas of knowledge.24
Pitkin urges the adoption of a similarly open approach so
that we may be more "aware [of] what our presuppositions
are, permitting them to make contact with each other and
25 with the rest of our ideas, perceptions, and knowledge."
A survey of Pitkin's critique of Winch will make
her position clearer. She says that the thesis that
actions can only be understood in the actor's own terms,
that scientific explanations are incompatible with actions
is false.^^ She addresses examples in which it is obvious
that there is more to someone's actions than he is perhaps
capable of explaining. She says that someone may be
acting neurotically, or callously, or simple-mindedly and
that, because of these attendant conditions, he is unable
to see what he is really doing. An outside observer might
be able to spot these conditions right off. In fact, cases
85
of this sort are so common that no further documentation 27 IS needed.
Pitkin argues that it largely depends on the kinds
of activities involved whether or not we can or must rely
on an actor's subjective understanding of his actions.
For example, she notes the different conditions surround
ing such everyday events as promising and offending.
Thus we might agree that one cannot promise without intending to promise (though we could argue even this point), but who would want to maintain that one cannot offend without intending to offend? That one cannot disappoint without intending to disappoint? One may have to intend to lie in order to lie, but one need not intend to deceive in order to deceive. With actions as with crimes in our legal system: some are contingent on the relevant intention, while others hinge on the objective consequences.2°
Pitkin's observation is important and says much about
the need for careful examination of the context of usage
of words and descriptions. And the last observation about
actions clearly indicates that the Wittgensteinian con
ception of them is not "anti-science." Pitkin's argument
also makes clear another point central to an understand
ing of science and language: the correspondence or
picture-theory is extraneous to the methods of scientific
observation. All that theory does is to limit our under
standing of language. It does nothing to strengthen the
scientific approach.
Let us now consider the leading item in Pitkin's
work, the concept of justice. This is obviously an
86
important concept to consider as it is central to Western
political theory. It will provide an opportunity to see
directly what understanding a key "normative" term means
in Wittgensteinian terms.
Evidently justice is subject to at least three
interpretations. In the first place, we might look for a
metaphysical understanding of the term. That is, we might
seek to inquire about the a priori meaning or true essence
of the term. This might involve inquiry into a divine
meaning, or it might involve the search for an ethical
standard that exists by itself as a pure idea.
On the other hand, we might say that the term
has an assigned meaning. Thus we would probably say that
any statement regarding the meaning of justice is merely
an expression of the speaker's emotions or subjective
preferences. Since we cannot specifically point out what
justice is, we must assume that any such statement about
it is only a pseudo-proposition. If we follow the
tradition of the Tractatus, we would not be bound to say
that justice is nonexistent, only that it is essentially
beyond the reach of any meaningful discourse.
However, if we follow Wittgenstein's argument in
the Philosophical Investigations, we see that we are not
bound to accept either of the two previous arguments.
Here we would say that justice has meaning within the
context of specific human activities. Justice is meaningful
87
if we know something of the rules by which it is applied.
In this view justice is both objective and subjective.
It is objective in that anyone could observe the various
conditions associated with it and record these for further
objective comparison. It is subjective in that there
may be strict internal rules and meanings that may not
appear readily to an outside observer. If someone is
seeking a philosophical understanding of justice within
one's own culture, one would go about finding the ordinary
ways people use the term as well as the ways in which it
is never used.
Pitkin seeks to establish a better understanding
of the last of these three interpretations. Of course,
our present concern is not with finding out what justice
really is or how we could go about making a more just
society. We are interested in justice as an example of
an important theoretical term. That is, we want to know
how Pitkin understands the logic of language to apply to
such a case as this. Pitkin introduces her subject with
remarks about Socrates' and Thrasymachus' discussion of
justice in Plato's Republic.
Socrates and Thrasymachus understand the question "What is justice?" in different ways. Each of them would insist that his understanding has to do with what "justice" itself really is, as distinct from mere verbal conventions or people's ordinary thoughtless assumptions. Yet one could accurately characterize the difference between them this way: Socrates answers the question as if it were about the meaning of the
88
word "justice", . . .This is not true of Thrasymachus' answer. He is not formulating a phrase more or less synonymous with the word "justice," but making a kind of sociological observation about the things people call "just" or "unjust."29
The key point in the foregoing comment is that
each of the combatants is insisting on his own viewpoint
and not fully regarding ways in which both can be right.
Besides the fact that they argue from different premises,
Socrates and Thrasymachus reflect a kind of attitudinal
problem, Socrates is trying to establish the existence
of a standard of justice that has formal a priori meaning.
Thrasymachus is saying that justice can mean nothing more
than how specific acts are described as just. As long as
each takes the attitude that only he correctly understands
the facts, any other opr.ion will be overlooked.
But we may see the issue as not one of facts but
about the use of granomar. According to Pitkin the lan
guage regions surrounding such terms are diverse enough
to admit multiple understandings. The important point is
that a Wittgensteinian approach allows us both kinds of
definitions. The task is not to determine which one is
30 right but how to get clear about what we want to say.
The idea of linguistic pluralism is at the heart
of Pitkin's central thesis. We are presented with a
critique of one-sided views of language and meaning, be
they positivistic or metaphysical. Because of her stress
on the plurality of language, Pitkin understands
89
Wittgenstein's theory better than Winch, winch fails
particularly to grasp the full implications of the theory
of linguistic pluarlism, and it is this that really spells
trouble for his argument, Pitkin attempts to show that
conflicting interpretations can each contain a grain of
truth. It is, indeed, a very good argument for method
ological toleration.
All of this could become rather slippery. There
fore, we must ask ourselves what all of this might suggest
for political theory generally. Pitkin contends that a
Wittgensteinian approach to political theory cannot offer,
at least yet, a specific program or methodology. But it
is at least a freash approach. It would stress looking at
each particular case and seeking to balance rival inter
pretations and would avoid the sweeping generalizations
31 of lumping everything under one kind of explanation.
A more recent contribution is John Danford's
Wittgenstein and Political Philosophy. Danford, a former
student of Pitkin, introduces some new ideas into the
topic of Wittgensteinian political theory. Whereas Winch
and Pitkin showed more concern with questions surrounding
the logic and use of language in science and philosophy,
Danford has taken a more historical approach. He attempts
to show that the common-sense view of meaning runs through
out the bulk of political theory and has become particularly
emphasized since the time of Hobbes and Locke. Danford
90
sees the correspondence theory, not as something invented
by modern day positivists, but as an old idea, deeply
rooted in a variety of human traditions, that has been
over-refined and over-extended by modern philosophers from
the seventeenth century on. The result has been the
unnecessary neglect and even denigration of traditional
modes of philosophical discourse.
Danford agrees in principle with Pitkin and Winch
that modern science is practiced under the rubric of the
32 correspondence theory of language. Danford also argues
that modern scientific method spells doom for philosophy,
because it insists on the elimination of rival claims
to knowledge and emphasizes one method over a plurality of
33 methods. This scientific method is what Danford labels
the "resolutive-composite" method. It has been an
essential feature of political science from Hobbes to the
present and is based on the idea that an unambiguous line
runs theoretically from the things sensed in the world,
to their clear description, to a true scienctific
T ^ 34 knowledge,
Danford says that this method is grounded in the
scientific method prevalent since the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries. In the early development of modern
political science, it is foremost and chiefly represented
by Hobbes. In the Hobbesian system, according to Danford,
language serves as a kind of code which represents our
91
conception of things in the world. Note that it is not
seen to represent the things of the world in themselves
35 but the impression of these things in our mind. This
idea is quite similar to that developed by modern
positivism; yet, as we shall see shortly, there is a
difference.
Following Hobbes is Locke, for whom, according to
Danford, the conventions of human society are amenable
to scientific theory. Danford points out that the ideas
developed by Hobbes and Locke suggest the possibility of
a true science of ethics. This science of ethics was
based on the supposition that men could only know with
certainty that which they had created. Hence, ethics
being a codification of human reason, we should be able
scientifically to resolve ethical problems. Danford
points out that the quest for scientific ethics failed.
Therefore, since the quest for a natural meaning of ethics
had been abandoned, post-Hobbesian thinkers were left with
a vacuum that could not be filled. In looking for
unambiguous definitions, modern theorists had been left
with no standards at all; and modern ethics came to be
seen as "merely" subjective.
But that is not the end of the story. Modern
positivism, having abandoned the methaphysics of Hobbes and
Locke, has moved toward a material theory of language,
whereby there is direct correspondence between the language
92
code and material reality. However, the logic is basically
the same as developed in Hobbes' thought. Only the
metaphysics has been pruned.
According to Danford the later philosophy of
Wittgenstein offers a correction of the picture-theory of
language and provides a kind of theoretical antidote,
3 6 Pitkin calls Wittgenstein "a philosopher twice-born,"
Danford agrees with this characterization. He sees
Wittgenstein as having made a real break with his older
way of looking at things.
In his treatment of the Tractatus, Danford repeats
the point made earlier that its view of language is simple
and clear-cut, Danford says that Wittgenstein corrected
this view in pointing out the importance of context in
the meaning of language. As Wittgenstein says in the
Philosophical Investigations, words are like tools in a
tool-box.
Think of the tools in a tool-box: there is a hammer, pliers, a saw, a screw-driver, a rule, a glue-pot, glue, nails and screws. The functions of words are as diverse as the functions of these objects, (And in both cases there are similarities,)37
Danford emphasizes the point that we must be aware of the
various uses of language, not just the signification of
words. Language is not only part of an activity but is,
3 8 in fact, an activity in and of itself.
These observations lead to the conclusion that
93
meaning is plural in nature and that general descriptions
of reality are no better than understanding the meaning of
particular cases. But even these activities, in order to
be properly understood, must be seen to fit into the
fabric of concrete human activities. Therefore, meaning
is to be taken as neither purely subjective nor objective.
Meaning is both diverse, or multiple, and it is bounded by
certain necessary conditions of life, although these are
not specified. In his discussion of Wittgenstein's form
of life, Danford tells us that this concept shows that
3 9 "activities are not reducible to something simpler,"
Strictly speaking, then, language is not grounded
in an essential form. It is, however, part of a pattern
of empirically accessible activities. The important point
to keep before us is that even knowledge of particular
events and meanings is important. Danford concludes that
Wittgenstein's greatest contribution to political under
standing is in urging us to focus on the significance and
meaning of unique events. Danford says, for example,
that there is a "need to be aware of the possibility that
what is the same in all methods of political socializa
tion may be less important and less interesting than what
is different." Danford would have left his argument in
better shape had he omitted "less important" and "less
interesting" from his remark. It would have been truer to
the Wittgensteinian approach had he said that we need to
94
be aware of all possibilities and left the matter there.
In this particular instance he seems to have drifted
toward an anti-scientific approach - a move which could
imply the premature and unnecessary cutting off of a
valuable region of discourse. He seems to imply that one
of the main reasons for applying scientific methods to
the study of politics, namely the postulation and testing
of generalized statements about political phenomena, is
something we could safely lay aside in the pursuit of
knowledge. But trying to establish hierarchies about
what is generally more "interesting" in the pursuit of
knowledge does not help us to find a solid theoretical
base for evaluating the knowledge claims of science and
philosophy.
On the whole, however, Danford's presentation is
a good interpretation of Wittgensteinian philosophy. He
avoids some of the pitfalls of reading into Wittgenstein
what he did not intend, an error all too common among
those who took his ideas about meaning the wrong way.
Norman Malcolm points out that many have mistakenly
assumed that Wittgenstein's point that words have no fixed
meanings was a signal that precision in philosophy could
41 . . . . be ignored, Danford says that there are definite limits
to meaningful discourse,
Danford appears to be leaning toward a unification
of the normative with the empirical in his conclusion that
95
"goals or ends are not less empirical than laws or corrupt 42
leaders," He does not elaborate here other than to
suggest that we trust our common, everyday knowledge of
political matters to give us insights as legitimate as
those obtained by the more accepted procedures of scien
tific inquiry. Or, as we might add, a shift in the way
we see language and reality, could help to get us away
from the hyperfactual bias of positivistic materialism.
The considerations we have given to the works of
Winch, Pitkin, and Danford have helped to establish a
foundation for understanding the significance of
Wittgenstein's philosophy for political theory. We have
seen how Wittgenstein's notions of language games and
rules are especially appropriate to a theory of action.
The net effect of this discussion has been to enable us
to see possibilities for restoring a balance between
normative and empirical theory. This might be accomplished
by taking a closer look at the uses of language. By
pointing out the ways in which the correspondence theory
of language is actually extraneous to the aim of science,
we can show that we need not depend on it in seeking
objective understanding. This chapter has advanced the
idea that, carried to its full extent, Wittgenstein's
later philosophy helps us to appreciate the possibility
of plural meanings in social and political activity.
96
Notes
"Winch
Ibid,
Ibid,
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid,
Ibid,
8 Ibid,
Ibid,
10 Ibid
Idea, p, 89,
p, 5,
p, 8,
p, 10.
p, 19.
pp. 52-53,
p. 58.
p. 44,
pp, 92-93,
11
12
Wittgenstein, Investigations, p, 27.
Winch, Idea, pp. 83-84.
13 A useful discussion of patterns of meaning in
ethics is in Marcus G. Singer. Generalization in Ethics (New York: Atheneum, 19 71).
14
66-91.
56,
15
16
17
18
19
20
Winch, Idea, p. 90.
Kuhn, Structure of Scientific Revolutions, pp.
Landau, Political Theory and Political Science,
Pitkin, Wittgenstein and Justice, p. 29.
Ibid,, p. 30.
Ibid., p, 71.
Ibid,, p. 99.
21 . • Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia, trans. Louis
Wirth and Edward Shils (New York: Harcourt Brace Javanovich, 1936),
97 22 A detailed discussion of Mannheim's influence on
social science may be found in Landau Political Theory and Political Science, pp. 34-42. '
23 Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia, p. 6.
24 Ibid,, p, 165,
25 Pitkin, Wittgenstein and Justice, p, 22,
^^Ibid,, p, 254,
27 ^Ibid,
^^Ibid., p. 255.
29
Ibid., p. 170,
^^Ibid,, p, 187,
Ibid, 32 John W, Danford, Wittgenstein and Political
Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), p, 34,
- • Ibid, , p, 19, 34
Ibid,, p, 46, 35
Ibid,, p. 25. 3 6
Pitkin, Wittgenstein and Justice, p. 24. 37 Wittgenstein, Investigations, p. 6.
86
p. 203
38 Danford, Wittgenstein and Political Philosophy,
-^^Ibid. , p. 119.
^°Ibid,, p, 205,
41 Malcolm, Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir, p. 63.
Danford, Wittgenstein and Political Philosophy,
CHAPTER V
CONCLUSION
Up to this point our study has brought us to an
awareness of new ways of looking at language and meaning,
A new way of looking at reality and understanding has
been suggested. What this study has provided is a com
parison between two views of language and reality as
they have been developed by Wittgenstein in his philosophy.
In addition we have seen how these two views have either
made their way into political theory directly, or have
paralleled that development closely enough to be offered
as conceptual examples. Even where Wittgenstein has not
directly contributed to political theory, his ideas often
remain germane to crucial problems within it. Winch,
Pitkin, and Danford developed themes around Wittgenstein's
philosophy of language-as-activity and have attemtped to
show how new understandings can be drawn from this
philosophy that point toward a middle ground between
normative and empirical theorizing.
However, we are left with a problem. Our topic has
suggested that we might come away with a more definite
Wittgensteinian political theory, something of a new model.
But none of the theorists we have discussed so far has
98
99
really offered that. Certainly Winch does not. However,
we might have expected Pitkin to do so. She has suggested
a pluralism of methodology, and this is important. But in
the end she seems uncertain of the viability of
Wittgenstein's later philosophy for theory construction.
Her reason for this is that she sees Wittgenstein as
perhaps anti-theoretical.
This study started out posing the problem of the
two views of language that are by now quite familiar.
It was suggested that the older of these two views, the
picture or correspondence theory, is incomplete and often
inadequate. Throughout the study it has been argued that
the elements of this theory are evident in contemporary
political science and contribute to the continued
bifurcation of empirical and normative theory within the
discipline. Now we must ask if there is a way of narrowing
this gap. This is a leading question of our concluding
chapter.
The second question, however, is more directly
relevant to our thesis. The question is: can we incor
porate empirical and normative concerns, as they have been
presented here under the rubric of Wittgenstein's later
philosophy and come out with some suggestion of a possible
theory? Thus far we have seen the possibility of a truce
in political theory based on mutual recognition and
tolerance. But this is not a full integration. The
100
possibilities for dealing with unification are perhaps
limitless, and we are specifically interested in
Wittgenstein's potential contribution to these possibil
ities.
There are already some important suggestions for
an answer to the first question. An im portant first step
is the recognition by some supporters of the more empirical
position that the correspondence theory has certain obvious
defects. One of these defects is that it may have a
tendency result in careless and unexamined acceptance of
2 too many theories as necessary models of reality.
Furthermore, there seems to be a more thorough acceptance
of the pervasiveness of normative or value positions in
empirical inquiry. This is not tantamount to accepting
the equality of knov/ledge claims for normative philosophy.
Note here the following position stated by Kaplan:
I agree with the proponents of value-free science in this basic respect, that either values (as appraisals) must be rigorously excluded from science, or else they must themselves be given an objective ground. It is this second alternative which seems to me methodologically sounder. For I do not see how values can be excluded.3
Thus .it might be said that the presence of
intuition, insight, and value is more easily seen as a
necessary accompaniment to empirical research. But the
focus of this type of argument is still that normative
positions are appendages to knowledge, something like
necessary evils that we would do away with if_ we could.
101
It does not answer the question: What can we do to
investigate the validity of knowledge claims made within
normative philosophy? It is the position of this study
that political scientists have been particularly lacking
in this regard. Landau, for example, leaves little doubt
that he believes that scientific language is better for
understanding than ordinary language. With regard to
ordinary or non-scientific language. Landau suggests that
it is too ambiguous.
Our lexical vocabulary is not only ambiguous— perhaps a necessary condition for communication in the common-sense world—but it contains a host of unconscious assumptions about nature, society, behavior, and so forth. The language of ordinary life reflects the approved relevance system of the linguistic group.^
Of course Landau is right in that we must be on
guard against unfounded superstitutions. However, he
ignores the fact that much that happens in the world is
ambiguous in meaning and that all the tightening up of
our langauge we wish to do will not change the situation.
He seeks to bolster his position by claiming that
scientific language is over and above natural language
and is not subject to its limitations. Speaking of the
difference between pre-scientific, metaphorical language
and actual scientific language. Landau stresses the
intersubjective superiority of the latter.
The logic or program of a metaphor is pre-scientif ic: it retains the relative ambiguity of the natural language in which it is stated. The transformation of a metaphor into a scientific model requires the elimination of this ambiguity.
102
the formulation of an ordered set of rules, and the clarification of its basic properties and relationships: the movement here is from a natural to a scientific language.5
This argument errs in two respects. First, there
would be no scientific language without natural language.
When a person is first given explanation of a scientific
concept, it is in terms of one's natural language not in
the terms of another scientific language. Second, it is
doubtful that natural language is as lacking in precision
and intersubjective possibilities as Landau suggests. It
seems that it is worth the effort to exam.ine ways in
which natural languages, are intersubjectively grounded.
We must look at what it means to speak these languages and
if they can, indeed, impart knowledge of their own.
Wittgenstein's forms of life concept indicates that the
common experiential ground of natural languages is worth
further consideration for intersubjective, knowledge-
imparting possibilities. Careful attention must be paid
to the regularized and precise usages of natural Ian-
gauges .
Landau's defense of standard scientific language
as the only appropriately intersubjective vehicle of
knowledge ultimately rests on a poorly grounded argument.
He defends his attack of less precise modes of under
standing on the grounds that to do otherwise does not
preserve the integrity of the scientific program.
103
Certainly we must agree that clarity of meanings is
essential. Knowledge is never served by confusion. But
neither is it served by eliminating vocabularies merely
because they do not fit a specific program! Landau's
remarks clearly indicate that much ground needs to be
covered in order to reach some measure of reconciliation
between normative and empirical knowledge claims.
It is essential to the aims of science to seek
precision. The argument here is not against that.
Rather, the claim is that viewpoints such as that offered
by Landau limit the possibilities for understanding in
arguing that scientific discourse is inherently more
intersubjective and knowledge-relevant than, for example,
traditional political philosophy. This ignores the
experiential claims of philosophy and unnecessarily
discourages us from looking at them as concrete knowledge
claims. The observation by Brodbeck, that social science
is not "exact" like physical science, is important but
fails to go far enough in telling how to deal v/ith
normative theories. Nor is it simply enough to rest
with the observation that ethics, for example, is not a
science. We should like to know more about what it is
than what it is not. We should like to know more about
the use of ethical language.
The answer to the question of whether there is
anything in the standard social science arguments to
104
suggest a serious attempt to integrate normative theory
within the discipline must be mainly answered negatively.
There is little to support the contention that the com
plete denigration of ethical positions and the like is
continued by contemporary empirically oriented political
theorists. It would be strange if this were the case;
the strict positivist position was abandoned long ago.
But the weak support given to normative claims, while not
unimportant, appears as little more than reluctant
tolerance. There seems little tolerance still for the
idea that normative regions of discourse may have
something positive and unique to contribute to political
understanding.
Wittgenstein's twin concepts of forms of life and
language games might be of considerable help in getting
us past this very sticky problem. His philosophy suggests
that there are regularized and experientially grounded
regions of discourse. These are separable yet accessible
to each other. Grounded in the concrete experiences of
life, these regions of discourse or language games
affect or color our views of reality. They form the
ordinary ways we have of speaking about and perceiving
reality, but in no case, not even in the case of science,
is total objectivity possible. Yet, Wittgenstein main
tained, we cannot trust our meanings to transcendent
metaphysics either as that is an attempt to find meaning
105
independently of the experience of life.
If we accept the theoretical equality of
different regions of discourse (e.g. scientific,
philosophical, religious) the appropriate question
becomes, not which is the more useful, precise, or
knowledge-relevant, but which is the most appropriate
for any given circumstance and question. Thus we might
see, for example, that philosophy is not less inter
subjective than science, but that is is the appropriate
approach for differently stated questions—namely questions
regarding normative implications of our total experience
of reality. Furthermore, we may find, in studying
various modes of philosphical discourse, that there are
experientially grounded uses of language that are uni
versally constant. For example, it might be found that
there are some uses of ethical terms, such as those
associated with promising, that are very much the same
regardless of the places and times associated with their
use. It might also be found that there are certain ways
in which "promise" is never used or ways in which a
certain use is never counted as an act of promising.
Again, the suggestion is not that we abandon
science. Nor is it suggested that one must not study
politics using scientific methods. If we did that we
would be right back to Winch's unsupportable claims. We
do not have to do this. What we must do is take a long
106
look at the limits of our language as well as all its
possibilities. We must take more care to discover when
scientific descriptions are possible-and appropriate and
when non-scientific language is more suitable. In a very
subjective and value-laden activity such as politics it
seems that, the more open the possible lines of inquiry,
the more apt we are to get better explanations. This, it
seems, is all that Wittgenstein ever really demands that
we do—to recognize the limits of our language. Much
political science has been inadequate in helping to show
how very important the context of language is in deter
mining meaning. There may be many important facets of
political life, particularly in non-Western societies,
that are overlooked because they are too slippery to be
caught in the web of our dominant scientific concepts.
We turn now to the problem raised by Pitkin that
Wittgenstein is really anti-theoretical. This may have
been the case as far as his private feelings on the
matter went. Wittgenstein was often quite skeptical
about the potential impact of his ideas. But we can
suggest that he offers more.
Since one of our central problems is recognizing
the knowledge claims of philosophy, we can suggest a way
in which a Wittgensteinian approach might help us here.
His theory of meaning-as-use suggests that we look for
the meaning and significance of philosophical concepts
107
in the way that activity is conducted. We would want to
know what it means to conduct a philosophical inquiry.
What general patterns of language usage form the basis of
a philosophical inquiry? What kinds of concrete
experiences do we base our philosophical inquiries on as
opposed to scientific inquiries? An approach such as this
would provide us with fuller choices on what to accept
or reject.
Theorizing must be an eclectic activity. To say
that Wittgenstein's philosophy is anti-theoretical is
inaccurate. For embedded in the Philosophical Investi
gations is a very definite theory of language. It is a
theory which suggests that ordinary and "pre-scientific"
languages are not only more experientially grounded than
is often suggested but are more precisely rule-governed
than they appear. The impact of his philosophical message
is that there is much more to language than we realize
and much more that we need to know about its use and
function.
Wittgenstein's philosophy, which forms the basis
of the idea of language-as-activity, is more adequate for
theory than the correspondence theory of language because
the latter is prone to the error of assuming that a special
language (in this case the language of science) is free
from the constraints of natural language. It assumes that
we can create a language "uncontaminated" by the day-to-day
108
contexts of language use. But no language is free from the
confines of natural language. It is true, as Landau says,
that one is not born into the language of science. But,
then, neither is one born into the mystical language of a
Buddhist monastery. It is, as well, a special language
for those initiates of the faith. Now we should ask
ourselves which language is the least natural. The answer
is that both are necessarily grounded in a natural lan
guage, and neither is immune from "contamination."
Wittgenstein's later philosophy is important in
helping to overcome the dangerous belief in our own
omnipotence. But it is very practical in that it urges us
to look at the world as we see it and to look at language
as we use it. Wittgensteinian empiricism is just this:
language is grounded in space and time, and it is bounded
by rules that serve as a basis for determining when a
meaning is or is not acceptable. Language is a practice.
Yet, because we are so immediately grounded in the practice,
it may never be possible to see all the ways we may miss
the point about something. That is why it is important
to accept diverse ways of looking at things.
Wittgenstein's philosophy also holds a vital
lesson for us as researchers. In light of some of his
observations it no longer seems supportable that empiricism
must supplant philosophy or, on the other hand, that the
language and methods of science cannot be of use in studying
109
politics. These regions of discourse may be seen as both
different yet commonly grounded. They base their claims
to knowledge differently, but they are not incommensurate
in Kuhnian fashion. In fact, Wittgenstein's later
philosophy provides a theoretical counter-example to
Kuhn's basic language assumption. Careful analysis of
the later philosophy may, indeed, point us in even newer
directions. At least we must not prematurely abandon the
possibilities it suggests. The best thing that we can do
to serve the interest of knowledge is continuously to
scrutinize our most firmly held assumptions.
110
Notes
Pitkin, Wittgenstein and Justice, p. 325.
2 Kaplan, Conduct of Inquiry, p. 265.
^Ibid., p. 387.
4 . . . . . Landau, Political Theory and Political Science,
Ibid., p. 222. g May Brodbeck, ed. "Explanation, Prediction, and
'Imperfect' Knowledge," in Readings in the Philosophy of the Social Sciences (New York: Macmillan, 1968), p. 375.
205.
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