In the course of the discussion, Professor Quine pinpoints the difficulties involved in translation, brings to light the anomalies and conflicts implicit in our ...

The death of Peter Winch in 1997 sparked a revived interest in his work with this book arguing his work suffered misrepresentation in both recent literature and in contemporary critiques of his writing. Debates in philosophy and sociology about foundational questions of social ontology and methodology often claim to have adequately incorporated and moved beyond Winch's concerns. Re-establishing a Winchian voice, the authors examine how such contentions involve a failure to understand central themes in Winch's writings and that the issues (...) which occupied him in his Idea of a Social Science and its Relation to Philosophy and later papers remain central to social studies. The volume offers a careful reading of the text in alliance with Wittgensteinian insights and alongside a focus on the nature and results of social thought and inquiry. It draws parallels with other movements in the social studies, notably ethnomethodology, to demonstrate how Winch's central claim is both more significant and more difficult to transcend than sociologists and philosophers have hitherto imagined. (shrink)

James Bohman has succeeded in reinvigorating the old debate over explanation and understanding by situating it within contemporary discussions about sociological indeterminacy and complexity. I argue that Bohman's preference for a paradigm based on Habermas's theory of communicative action is justifiable given the explanatory deficiencies of ethnomethodological, rational choice, rule-based, and functionalist methodologies. Yet I do not share his belief that the paradigm is preferable to less formalized models of interpretation.

Roth contends that the controversy in the philosophy of the social sciences over the canons of rationality is the product of the mistaken belief in methodological exclusivism. Drawing on work in contemporary epistemology by W.V.O. Quine, Richard Rorty and Paul Feyerabend, he argues that no single theory of human behavior has methodological priority. He demonstrates how rejecting the notion of universal norms of social inquiry neither reduces epistemology to empirical psychology nor entails epistemological nihilism. He also traces the false presupposition (...) that modeling the social science on the natural sciences is the best method for inquiring into human affairs, examines and rejects specific formulations of methodological exclusivism; and advocates methodological pluralism, which incorporates both a type of methodological anarchism and a commitment to Quinean-style holism and empiricism. ISBN 0-8014-1941-7: $26.95. (shrink)

James Bohman has succeeded in reinvigorating the old debate over explanation and understanding by situating it within contemporary discussions about sociological indeterminacy and complexity. I argue that Bohman's preference for a paradigm based on Habermas's theory of communicative action is justifiable given the explanatory deficiencies of ethnomethodological, rational choice, rule-based, and functionalist methodologies. Yet I do not share his belief that the paradigm is preferable to less formalized models of interpretation.

This paper presents an 'internal' criticism of Winch's seminal 'Understanding a Primitive Society'. It distinguishes between two contrasting approaches to critical social understanding: (1) the metaphysical approach, central to the whole tradition of critical philosophy and critical social theory from Kant, through Marx to the Frankfurt School and contemporary theorists such as Habermas and Searle; (2) the descriptive approach, advocated by Winch, and which derives from Wittgenstein's critique of philosophical theory. It is argued, against a long tradition of 'critical theory' (...) depicting Wittgenstein's philosophy as irredeemably 'conservative', that the descriptive approach is perfectly apt for generating a critical understanding of central Western institutions. Rather than seeking to provide an explanatory theory through which to discern what allegedly is imperceptible to theoretically unaided perception (i.e. the metaphysical approach), the descriptive approach aims for a 'perspicuous presentation' of our everyday practices and institutions in such a way as to see their 'irrational' and 'alienating' dimensions. Winch's basic position in 'Understanding a Primitive Society' is endorsed, but it is argued that ultimately he fails in his descriptive intent. In place of the Christian prayer analogy that Winch invokes in order to make sense of Zande witchcraft, it is proposed that Western commodity production and exchange provide a more appropriate, instructive, and critical comparison. (shrink)

The ‘cultural turn’ in social thought, and the rise of interpretive modes of social analysis, have raised the issue of how social criticism can legitimately be undertaken given the central role of actors’ understandings in constituting social reality. In this article I examine this issue by exploring debates around Winch’s interpretive approach. I suggest that Winch’s arguments usefully identify problems with external criticism, that is, criticism that attempts to contrast actors’ beliefs with the social world as it really is. However, (...) I also argue that Winch’s Wittgensteinian account of rule-following, on a plausible interpretation, places excessively strong restrictions on the possibility of internal criticism. In order to show the problems with such restrictions, I critically appraise two accounts of social criticism that are compatible with Winch’s arguments, those of Pleasants and Giddens, arguing that neither offers a satisfactory analysis. I then argue that if a viable notion of internal criticism is to be established Winch’s account of rule-following needs to be rejected. Having briefly offered an alternative, I suggest that it allows a more convincing conception of internal criticism, in which the understandings of actors can be criticized on the basis of their internal contradictions. The article then attempts to meet a possible objection to this position: that the logical judgements of contradiction and coherence required for immanent critique are not cross-culturally valid. I claim that such judgements are generally valid, and develop an argument for this position based on a critique of Lukes’s arguments. (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)

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

The received understanding of Winch’s critique of social science is that he propounded a radically relativist, anti-explanatory and a-critical conception of the legitimate task of ‘social studies’. This conception is presumed to be predicated upon an extension of Wittgenstein’s critique of philosophy. I argue, against this view, that Winch reads Wittgenstein through a Kantian framework, and that in fact he advanced a rigorously essentialist and universalist picture of ‘social phenomena’. It is Winch’s underlying Kantian metaphysics that has made his ideas (...) attractive to contemporary architects of critical social theory, such as Giddens and Habermas. However, in opposition to the latter, and in spite of his Kantianism, I discern in Winch a genuinely critical attitude towards social understanding. (shrink)

Here I challenge the philosophical consensus that we use folk psychology for the purposes of metarepresentation. The paper intends to show that folk psychology should not be conceived on par with fact-stating discourses in spite of what its surface semantics may suggest. I argue that folk-psychological discourse is organised in a way and has conceptual characteristics such that it cannot fulfill a fact-stating function. To support this claim I develop an open question argument for psychological interpretations, and I draw attention (...) to the central role of rationality, the conceptual connections, and the essential evaluative content inherent in folk psychological ascriptions. As a conclusion I propose that a fictionalist account of the discourse would fit its characteristics better than a factualist-realist interpretation. (shrink)