Relativist and constructivist conceptions of knowledge have become orthodoxy in vast stretches of the academic world in recent times. This book critically examines such views and argues that they are fundamentally flawed. The book focuses on three different ways of reading the claim that knowledge is socially constructed, one about facts and two about justification. All three are rejected. The intuitive, common sense view is that there is a way things are that is independent of human opinion, and that we (...) are capable of arriving at belief about how things are that is objectively reasonable, and is binding on anyone capable of appreciating the relevant evidence, regardless of their social or cultural perspective. Difficult as these notions may be, it is a mistake to think that recent philosophy has uncovered powerful reasons for rejecting them. (shrink)

Editorial preface to the fourth edition and modified translation -- The text of the Philosophische Untersuchungen -- Philosophische untersuchungen = Philosophical investigations -- Philosophie der psychologie, ein fragment = Philosophy of psychology, a fragment.

Machine generated contents note: Essay 1.

First published in 1990. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

In the fiftieth anniversary of this book’s first release, Winch’s argument remains as crucial as ever. Originally published in 1958, _The Idea of a Social Science and Its Relation to Philosophy_ was a landmark exploration of the social sciences, written at a time when that field was still young and had not yet joined the Humanities and the Natural Sciences as the third great domain of the Academy. A passionate defender of the importance of philosophy to a full understanding of (...) 'society' against those who would deem it an irrelevant 'ivory towers' pursuit, Winch draws from the works of such thinkers as Ludwig Wittgenstein, J.S. Mill and Max Weber to make his case. In so doing he addresses the possibility and practice of a comprehensive 'science of society'. (shrink)

In the fiftieth anniversary of this book’s first release, Winch’s argument remains as crucial as ever. Originally published in 1958, _The Idea of a Social Science and Its Relation to Philosophy_ was a landmark exploration of the social sciences, written at a time when that field was still young and had not yet joined the Humanities and the Natural Sciences as the third great domain of the Academy. A passionate defender of the importance of philosophy to a full understanding of (...) 'society' against those who would deem it an irrelevant 'ivory towers' pursuit, Winch draws from the works of such thinkers as Ludwig Wittgenstein, J.S. Mill and Max Weber to make his case. In so doing he addresses the possibility and practice of a comprehensive 'science of society'. (shrink)

Zettel, an en face bilingual edition, collects fragments from Wittgenstein's work between 1929 and 1948 on issues of the mind, mathematics, and language.

Introduction It is by no means obvious that someone interested in politics and society needs to concern himself with philosophy; nor that, in particular, ...

Hanna Pitkin argues that Wittgenstein's later philosophy offers a revolutionary new conception of language, and hence a new and deeper understanding of ourselves and the world of human institutions and action.

Winch’s ‘Understanding a Primitive Society’ addressed the question of how to interpret apparently irrational alien beliefs and practices. Criticizing Evans-Pritchard’s study of Zande witchcraft, Winch argued that across cultures there are divergent conceptions of what is rational and real and that, where they diverge, it is mistaken to apply ‘our’ standards and conceptions to ‘their’ beliefs. Winch’s position is here re-examined in the light of the current debate about whether the Hawaiians thought Captain Cook was divine. Sahlins holds that they (...) did, asserting that different cultures have different rationalities. Obeyesekere disagrees, holding that these views are just further evidence of European myth-making about the natives’ savage mentality, and that ‘practical rationality’ is common to all cultures. In conclusion it is argued that Sahlins’s ‘Maussian’ interpretative strategy is preferable to Obeyesekere’s ‘Davidsonian’ approach, that Sahlins cannot sustain his Winchean claim about rationality and that denying it is a precondition for understanding a practice central to all cultures: that of trying to get the world right. (shrink)

This article takes up Peter Winch’s remarks concerning ‘the “fragility” of the conditions under which ethical conceptions can be active in social life’. It explores Winch’s discussion of political concepts and his account of the nature of politics. There are two related themes: a concern with the nature of political concepts; and a recognition (a reminder?) of the way in which disagreement belongs to our idea of politics.

This provocative, engaging and important book marks the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Peter Winch's seminal The Idea of a Social Science. The authors – the first two philosophers, the third a sociologist – have worked together in various permutations before. No-one familiar with their previous publications will be surprised that the dominant voice throughout is Wittgenstein's – that is, Wittgenstein as read ‘resolutely’ by ‘new Wittgensteinians’. They have three principal aims: first, to read Winch's own work in an (...) equally ‘resolute’ way; hence to read ISS as prophylactic and therapeutic in intention, and not as heralding a wonderful or not-so-wonderful new social theory; secondly, to defend Winch against certain persistent charges; and thirdly, to persuade social theorists and philosophers of ‘social science’ that Winch's therapeutic lessons have not yet been assimilated, with the possible exception of a handful of ethnographers and ethnomethodologists.Following a substantial introductory section, Chapters 1 and 2 – respectively, entitled ‘Beyond pluralism, monism, relativism, realism etc.: reassessing Peter Winch’ and ‘Winch and linguistic idealism’ – argue that Winch cannot be seen as an advocate of linguistic idealism or “any of the other ‘isms’ that have been reactively bandied about …. (shrink)

It has been notoriously difficult to link Ludwig Wittgenstein’s work to the agendas of academic political theory. While this is in part due to his style of writing and the absence of an explicit discussion of politics, his commitment to the irreducibility of conventions is difficult to reconcile with the search of many political theorists for both criteria of political essentiality and a basis of cognitive privilege that would underwrite a vision of critical and normative inquiry. Although political theory is (...) characteristically drawn toward the literature of philosophy in search of identity and images of epistemic authority, Wittgenstein’s work subverts the search for the universality of both politics and political inquiry. It is, however, possible to perceive in his work a positive valence for both a vision of political inquiry and criteria of democracy. (shrink)

Hanna Pitkin argues that Wittgenstein's later philosophy offers a revolutionary new conception of language, and hence a new and deeper understanding of ourselves and the world of human institutions and action.

In this insightful book, distinguished political scientist John G. Gunnell explores the relationship between social science and philosophy, and the range of problems that have attended this relationship. Gunnell argues that social science has turned to philosophy, especially to areas such as the philosophy of science and other sites of philosophical foundationalism, in search of cognitive identity and the grounds for normative and empirical judgment. Gunnell's emphasis is on political and social theory and the theoretical constitution of social phenomena. The (...) Orders of Discourse will be of interest to political theorists, political philosophers, and social scientists. (shrink)

The so-called "Big Typescript" is Wittgenstein's first attempt to publish in a book his collected thoughts since his return to Cambridge and to philosophical writing, thus correcting the "serious errors" (Wittgenstein) of his early work. Among the texts in Wittgenstein's estate, the "Big Typescript" is the one that, next to the "Logisch-Philosophische Abhandlung" (the "Tractatus") of 1918, appears to be the most "finished", with a table of contents structured in chapters and sections. It is, however, a fragment, without either title, (...) motto or conclusion. To Wittgenstein, it was important "that the thoughts in [the book] should progress from one subject to another in well-ordered consecutiveness." It is precisely this structure of the "Big Typescript", though ultimately rejected by Wittgenstein, which constitutes the immeasurable value of the text for the study of and as an introduction to Wittgenstein's thinking. (shrink)

In his 1992 book, The Apotheosis of Captain Cook, Gananath Obeyesekere used this very issue to attack Sahlins's decades of scholarship on Hawaii. Accusing Sahlins of elementary mistakes of fact and logic, even of intentional distortion, Obeyesekere portrayed Sahlins as accepting a naive, ethnocentric idea of superiority of the white man over "natives" - Hawaiian and otherwise.

Especially troublesome in this dispute is the status of the natural sciences, and this is where Hacking finds some of his most telling cases, from the conflict ...

Now in a new edition, this volume updates Davidson's exceptional Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation (1984), which set out his enormously influential philosophy of language. The original volume remains a central point of reference, and a focus of controversy, with its impact extending into linguistic theory, philosophy of mind, and epistemology. Addressing a central question--what it is for words to mean what they do--and featuring a previously uncollected, additional essay, this work will appeal to a wide audience of philosophers, linguists, (...) and psychologists. (shrink)

The Pirahã language challenges simplistic application of Hockett’s nearly universally accepted design features of human language by showing that some of these features may be culturally constrained. In particular, Pirahã culture constrains communication to nonabstract subjects which fall within the immediate experience of interlocutors. This constraint explains a number of very surprising features of Pirahã grammar and culture: the absence of numbers of any kind or a concept of counting and of any terms for quantification, the absence of color terms, (...) the absence of embedding, the simplest pronoun inventory known, the absence of "relative tenses," the simplest kinship system yet documented, the absence of creation myths and fiction, the absence of any individual or collective memory of more than two generations past, the absence of drawing or other art and one of the simplest material cultures documented, and the fact that the Pirahã are monolingual after more than 200 years of regular contact with Brazilians and the Tupi-Guarani-speaking Kawahiv. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to explore the problem of social ontology. The form that the exploration will take is a development of the argument that I presented in The Construction of Social Realty[2]. I will summarize some of the results of that book and then develop the ideas further.

John Searle began to discuss his recently published book `The Construction of Social Reality' with Anthony Freeman, and they ended up talking about God. The book itself and part of their conversation are introduced and briefly reflected upon by Anthony Freeman. Many familiar social facts -- like money and marriage and monarchy -- are only facts by human agreement. They exist only because we believe them to exist. That is the thesis, at once startling yet obvious, that philosopher John Searle (...) explores in The Construction of Social Reality. (shrink)