"The Ethical and the Political in the Dilemma of Winch's Vere"

The last paper in the collection is by Lynette Reid. Melville's Billy Budd presents a tragic dilemma in which it can seem both that Billy Budd is essentially innocent and that he must be executed (because of the letter of the law and the danger of anything less than strict discipline in time of war). Vere, the captain of his ship, decides that he is to be hanged.

Reid's paper builds on work by Peter Winch, and is written as a response to Lilian Alweiss, who argues that Vere faces, not a moral dilemma, but a clash between a moral and a political duty. Reid explains that:

Winch gives Vere's choice as an example of a contradiction between the inner and the outer as such a contradiction may arise in the complexity of lives lived with the kinds of social concepts that create the possibility of "wearing two hats". Winch very briefly contrasts how he thinks about this kind of contradiction with how the contractarian approach would encompass it, with reference to Hobbes as a philosopher who, he says, attempts to collapse the distinction between the inner and the outer (meaning here, private conscience and political duty) (p. 271)     

Reid argues persuasively that Vere's dilemma is moral or at least normative in way that means Alweiss does not deprive Winch's argument of its force.

Winch on Understanding Other People

If you have access to the journal Philosophical Investigations you can read my forthcoming paper by following this link. I should be able to get access for other people soon, too. Stay tuned.

Winch on Understanding Other People

A revised version of the paper I was working on in the summer is now available here, for anyone interested. I haven't managed to take all suggestions into account, but I think it's at least an improvement on the previous version.

Winch on understanding other people

This paper needs quite a bit of work, but for anyone interested here is an only very slightly (so far) revised version of the paper I presented at the conference on Peter Winch last weekend in London.

Witchcraft among the Azande

If you're interested in Peter Winch on understanding others, you might be interested in this documentary. Perhaps it's well known, but I only just found it:

And here's one on Evans-Pritchard:

I haven't watched either one yet, so can't guarantee their quality. 

Truth in Politics and Metaphysics: Celebrating the Work of Peter Winch

I'm looking forward to this:

Winch and relativism, logic and life

I've discussed Peter Winch and relativism before (e.g., here and here). I concluded that, "Winch is probably only a relativist in trivial and misleadingly-called-'relativist' ways." Since then I've read more on the subject, by Winch, Cora Diamond, Jonas Ahlskog and Olli Lagerspetz. So perhaps it's time to revisit the issue.

One question that is relevant to the debate is the relation between logic and human behavior. Ahlskog and Lagerspetz say (in "Language-Games and Relativism: On Cora Diamond's Reading of Peter Winch," p. 294) that "a (or the) central motif in Winch's work" is the idea that, "in order to see what a proposition implies or excludes, we must look into how it enters the life of those who use it; for example, how speakers might react in face of challenges and complexities." 

This doesn't sound quite right if we think about propositions in a language we understand well. Obviously we don't have to look into anything in order to understand a proposition. That is, we might have to on some occasion, but sometimes I know quite well what you are implying without any further investigation. Perhaps that's not fair though. The words "in order to see" might imply a case in which one does not see, and so further investigation is required. The most obvious way to investigate would be to ask you what you are implying, which again does not involve looking at how speakers (plural) might (in general) react. Perhaps this still is not fair. Perhaps if I speak the language I have already done the necessary looking and seeing. This, we might think, is (at least in part) how I learned the language in the first place. But then this sounds uncomfortably like the so-called Augustinian picture of learning a language, as if I already had a language and then did some useful anthropological fieldwork among my elders. Still, I might be being unfair to Winch by treating other people's words as if they were his, and to Ahlskog and Lagerspetz by taking one sentence out of context and making a meal of it. I think there is a potential problem here though, even if I have hardly convicted anyone of anything so far.

One problem, or question apparently worth asking, is whether we should talk about "what a proposition implies or excludes" at all. That is, do propositions imply and exclude, or do people do this (in using propositions)? I think the answer is both. Say my daughter is driving on the Blue Ridge Parkway and, after a pause to watch the sunset, the van won't start. If I ask, "Did you leave the lights on?" then I might be implying that she is often careless and has negligently caused the battery to die. The proposition on its own does not imply this. It might be said, though, to imply that the van has lights that can be left on or not. [Perhaps this should be thought of as implying in a metaphorical sense. A sentence implies things in something like the way that Heidegger or Loos might see a vase as implying things about the lives of the people who use it.] If you don't know English or any language close enough to it to have reliably similar implications and exclusions then you might have to look into how speakers of this language use sentences such as "Did you leave the lights on?" Otherwise you don't, surely. Knowing a language means, in part, knowing the correct standard use of this kind of sentence. And we don't usually learn this kind of thing by doing anthropology. Talk about what propositions mean and how we know what they mean might encourage the adoption of an outside, anthropological, third-person perspective. And this could be problematic.

In "Can We Understand Ourselves?" (CWUO) Winch says that understanding another culture requires studying the behavior of members of the culture in question. And, according to him, we cannot start by finding out their beliefs and desires, because we see these for what they are (p. 197) “only through the behavior in which they are manifested.” He seems to suggest here that knowledge of behavior, or perhaps simply behavior, is somehow prior to psychology. I wonder whether they really come apart like this. That is, perhaps they should be thought of as two sides of the same coin, with no relation of priority or dependency between them. In The Idea of a Social Science he said that "the social relations between men and the ideas which men's actions embody are really the same thing considered from different points of view". That seems better to me. 

On the same page of CWUO on which he implies the contrary of the suggestion that we could understand others' actions by starting with their "internal 'desires and beliefs'," Winch says also that "neither words nor actions have per se any preeminent position." He also notes some peculiarities of the notion of understanding. An anthropologist might understand another culture, or some feature of it, quite well without being able to imagine (seriously or sincerely) engaging in its practices. On the other hand, there is a sense of understanding in which we do not understand people or what they do if we cannot relate to them in a more subjective way than this. If we cannot, that is, 'find ourselves in them,' whether they belong to our culture or another, then we cannot fully understand them. 

This sounds true, but does it amount to anything more than the assertion that we do not understand people that we do not understand? I don't see why, that is, one cannot come to understand liking music, or a certain kind of music, or football, to give some of Winch's examples. Although, of course, one might see nothing in any of these things. Doing so would involve seeing the point of, say, watching football, which involves something like seeing it as having a point, which is like (though perhaps not exactly the same as) wanting to watch football. It might not be possible to want to do everything, or to see every human activity as having a point. But of any given activity I see no reason why one could not come to see its point. One good thing, though, about Winch's emphasis on understanding others as finding oneself in them is that it points away from the kind of problematic third-person perspective that I identified (or gestured towards) above.          

At the end of CWUO Winch argues that "practical 'being in tune' with others lies right at the very centre of our understanding of other human beings" (p. 203). As Winch admits, his argument here is sketchy. For those who want a fuller treatment of the topic he recommends his paper "Eine Einstellung zur Seele." One thing he does in this paper is to question the philosophical notion (or at least David Wiggins' notion) of a person:

On this view [...] reacting to someone as a person is in the first instance classifying him as belonging to a certain natural kind and this in its turn involves having certain quasi-theoretical beliefs about him. Anything that is peculiar to our attitudes towards and treatment of persons flows from and is justified by the beliefs we hold about what properties persons essentially possess; and what justifies these beliefs is ultimately scientific investigation. [Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, New Series, Vol. 81 (1980 - 1981), pp. 1-15, p. 12]

One thing that Winch objects to is Wiggins' treatment of our reactions or attitudes towards other human beings as requiring justification. Another is that the justification in question is theoretical. I agree. But Winch still seems to want to explain this attitude toward a soul, referring to such things as "my general experience of human life" (p. 13). I think it's fine to try to explain what Wittgenstein means by an attitude (or orientation, perhaps) towards a soul. But explaining where it comes from seems somehow misguided. The explanation doesn't seem very informative, although what's good about it is that it is much less oriented towards theory and justification than Wiggins seems to be. Perhaps that is the main point that Winch wants to make.

Earlier in the paper he says that Wittgenstein wants:

to urge that if we want to be clear what a belief (e.g.) that someone is in pain comes to, we should not allow ourselves to be hypnotized by its verbal expression ("He is in pain"), but should look at the whole range of behaviour, demeanour, facial expression, etc. in which such verbal expressions are embedded, and with which they are continuous, which give the words their particular sense and by some of which indeed the words may often be replaced (p. 3)

This might be true if it means that Wittgenstein thinks it's a good idea to look at behavior (etc.) if one wants to be clear what a belief is and is tempted to think that it must be something purely verbal or intellectual. It seems dodgier if it means that Wittgenstein has an answer to the question 'What is a belief?' and that this answer is: "it's a whole range of behaviour, demeanour, facial expression, etc. in which such verbal expressions are embedded, and with which they are continuous, which give the words their particular sense and by some of which indeed the words may often be replaced." That would make Wittgenstein seem like a kind of behaviorist, and like someone who wanted to answer philosophical questions by putting forward theses.

A problem with Winch is that it is not always clear what he is or isn't saying. This is surely one reason for the very different readings of Winch by Diamond, who sees him, ultimately, as a kind of relativist, and by Ahlskog and Lagerspetz, who defend him against this charge. It is useful to have both readings. Even if Winch is not a relativist, Diamond's criticisms could be helpful discussions of problems that would arise if one were to take his work in a certain way. But it also seems worth trying to work out whether the non-relativist reading of Winch is tenable.

Diamond's Winch thinks like Ilham Dilman, who states that:

[W]hen Dante in his book talked of the spheres of the heavens and put the earth at the centre of the universe, he was not talking about the same universe, the universe of modern astronomy. […] The universe, as conceived of in [the] world [of the Mediaevals], was not the universe of astronomy; it was the universe of their religion. […] Thus the skies of Dante's The Divine Comedy and the sky and the stars of astronomy belong to different universes of discourse. (Wittgenstein's Copernican Revolution, 2002, pp. 48–49, quoted in Ahlskog and Lagerspetz, p. 302.)   

Ahlskog and Lagerspetz say of this (on p. 303):

It seems indeed perfectly proper to say that Dante and we, in an important sense, have been talking of the same object: “that bright thing in the sky”. Winch would hardly have quarrelled with that. [...] [A]ssuming it is agreed (in some sense) that we disagree with Dante about the heavens, it will not be clear that our disagreement translates into “criticism”. For instance, Dante is not someone we would feel the need to refute. 

They are quite right that we would feel no need to refute Dante, partly because he is dead and partly because there is little at stake. But in "Criticizing from 'Outside'," Diamond brings up the example of people being punished for alleged witchcraft, not just in the past but today. If someone is executed for allegedly harming others by supernatural means might we not be tempted to criticize this practice? We might then feel the need to refute belief in witchcraft of this kind. And even if persuasive refutation seems hopeless, we might still insist that any punishment in these cases is unjust because the accused cannot possibly be guilty. Witchcraft isn't real.

I don't think Winch would have quarrelled with that. But whether he could consistently avoid such quarrelling while maintaining everything else he wrote is another matter. Not one I can settle now though.    

Understanding human behavior

A question that came up prominently during the seminar in Mexico has been discussed recently also by Jon Cogburn at NewAPPS. The question is about what is involved or required for understanding human behavior.

Jon Cogburn says that:

One could say that given a set of discourse relevant norms held fixed, understanding in general just is the ability to make novel predictions. For Davidson/Dennett, we assume that human systems are largely rational according to belief/desire psychology and then this puts us in a position to make predictions about them. We make different normative assumptions about functional organization of organs, and different ones again about atoms. But once those are in place, understanding is just a matter or being better able to predict.

I'm writing this as a post of my own rather than as a comment at NewAPPS partly because I suspect it will be too long for a comment and partly because I don't know what all of this means and don't want to appear snarky or embarrassingly ignorant. I genuinely (non-snarkily) don't know what it means to hold fixed a set of discourse relevant norms, nor what it means to put normative assumptions in place. But what I take Cogburn to be saying is, in effect, that "understanding in general just is the ability to make novel predictions." 

Winch says that being able to predict what people are going to do does not mean that we really understand them or their activity. He cites Wittgenstein's wood-sellers, who buy and sell wood according to the area covered without regard to the height of each pile. We can describe their activity and perhaps predict their behavior but we don't, according to Winch, really understand it. He surely has a point. Here's a longish quote (from pp. 114-115 of the linked edition, pp. 107-108 of my copy):

       Some of Wittgenstein’s procedures in his philosophical elucidations reinforce this point. He is prone to draw our attention to certain features of our own concepts by comparing them with those of an imaginary society, in which our own familiar ways of thinking are subtly distorted. For instance, he asks us to suppose that such a society sold wood in the following way: They ‘piled the timber in heaps of arbitrary, varying height and then sold it at a price proportionate to the area covered by the piles. And what if they even justified this with the words: “Of course, if you buy more timber, you must pay more”?’ (38: Chapter I, p. 142–151.) The important question for us is: in what circumstances could one say that one had understood this sort of behaviour? As I have indicated, Weber often speaks as if the ultimate test were our ability to formulate statistical laws which would enable us to predict with fair accuracy what people would be likely to do in given circumstances. In line with this is his attempt to define a ‘social role’ in terms of the probability (Chance) of actions of a certain sort being performed in given circumstances. But with Wittgenstein’s example we might well be able to make predictions of great accuracy in this way and still not be able to claim any real understanding of what those people were doing. The difference is precisely analogous to that between being able to formulate statistical laws about the likely occurrences of words in a language and being able to understand what was being said by someone who spoke the language. The latter can never be reduced to the former; a man who understands Chinese is not a man who has a firm grasp of the statistical probabilities for the occurrence of the various words in the Chinese language. Indeed, he could have that without knowing that he was dealing with a language at all; and anyway, the knowledge that he was dealing with a language is not itself something that could be formulated statistically. ‘Understanding’, in situations like this, is grasping the point or meaning of what is being done or said. This is a notion far removed from the world of statistics and causal laws: it is closer to the realm of discourse and to the internal relations that link the parts of a realm of discourse.

Winch talks elsewhere (see p. 89, e.g.) about what it takes for understanding to count as genuine understanding: reflective understanding of human activity must presuppose the participants' unreflective understanding. So the concepts that belong to the activity must be understood. Without such understanding all we will generate is (p. 88) "a rather puzzling external account of certain motions which certain people have been perceived to go through."
 
But does Winch get to say what counts as genuine understanding? This was a point we discussed when I was at the University of Veracruz. Several students there seemed to want less than what Winch would accept as true understanding of human behavior. They did not want to empathize. They wanted to identify patterns, and if they were able to do so well enough to be able to make accurate predictions then they would be very satisfied. A "rather puzzling external account of certain motions" is basically what they were hoping to produce, as long as it allowed them to make accurate predictions.

It looks to me as though Winch would resist or even reject such a desire, but can a desire be mistaken? And I don't know how to settle the apparent disagreement between Winch and others about what is and is not real understanding. Can we just say that as long as you see the facts you may say what you like? Or is that too easy?

The Ludwig Wittgenstein Chair at the University of Veracruz

I'm just about back and ready to catch up on emails, blogging, etc., having been in Mexico as a visiting professor at the University of Veracruz. Every 18 months or so they bring someone in for this position, and the purpose of this post is basically to describe what it involves. Robert Arrington was the first person to occupy the chair, and I was the second. In other words, it's pretty new, so who knows how the position might develop in future. What I can tell you is what I did.

My job was to give a public lecture on a Wittgenstein-related subject to an audience of roughly a hundred people and then to lead a seminar for two hours every day for a week, with between twenty and thirty people (mostly graduate students but also members of the faculty) in the seminar. All of this, apart from the last meeting of the seminar, was recorded, so perhaps it will be available online somewhere sometime. The subject of Winch's The Idea of a Social Science was suggested to me, so my lecture was directly about that book, and the seminar dealt with related topics: Wittgenstein's lecture on ethics (which perhaps is not all that relevant, in fact, but it seemed like a good idea at the time), the first part of the Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein's remarks on Frazer, selected parts of Winch's book, and Winch's "Understanding a Primitive Society."

I speak no Spanish, so language was an issue sometimes, but not a huge problem. More important, I think, was that most people in the audience at both the lecture and the seminar were not philosophers but psychologists and other social scientists. They were certainly interested in Wittgenstein, but particularly in how what he said might relate to social science. And for the most part their idea of the aims of social science is not the same as Winch's. More about this, perhaps, in another post.

What did I get out of it? A lot. It's a real joy to teach students who are genuinely interested in the subject and do not have to be manipulated with carrot and stick to read the assigned material and discuss it. It's also a pleasure to discuss philosophy with people who are more knowledgeable and sophisticated than the typical undergraduate. Not just a pleasure but an education too. I also had my expenses covered, so I got a plane ticket there and back, hotel, and meals, plus a car, driver, and interpreter to take me around during the day (the seminars were held in the late afternoon/early evening) to all the best sights in the area. The people there are extremely hospitable and gave me various gifts as well. In short, if you get the chance to do this I highly recommend it.

Sorry if this comes across as bragging but I think I may have been annoyingly obscure about what I've been up to, and I loved it, so it's hard not to talk about it.             

Is Winch a relativist or not?

You might have missed it, but David Levy provided a useful response to my post on what kind of relativist Peter Winch might have been. I replied, but I'm not very satisfied with my response, and re-reading the original post made me realize how unclear it is. So I'm returning to that territory now. 

Here's the unclear conclusion to my post:

In short, 'rational' can mean something like sane or intelligible, or it can mean useful in a narrow sense (getting a gun is useful if you want to rob a bank, but robbing banks is not a very useful thing to do), or good, or useful in a broader sense. Where a way of living has been identified as such, its characteristic forms of behavior will be rational in the first two of these senses, but not necessarily in the latter two.

I think I meant that so far as we can identify something as a way of living then it must be rational in the sense of being intelligible (and seeming sane) and the behaviors that belong to it must be largely effective as means to the people's ends. I'm not sure why I included that last part and I'm not sure it's right. Is going to church useful? Or burying the dead with solemn rites? I probably should have talked instead about non-irrationality instead. Funerals are not well understood if they are thought of purely in terms of means-end reasoning. So they aren't rational means to some end, but they aren't irrational either. But particular religious practices can be rejected as irrational in the sense that they are not (considered to be) good, and religion itself can be rejected as irrational. 

David writes:

The scare quotes around ‘rational’ were, I took, it Winch’s way of saying in a Wittgensteinian way that ‘rational’ and ‘irrational’ are just words, i.e. terms with an application in a linguistic practice. I did not take them, for instance, to express scepticism. So in that sense 'rationality' will always be relative in the sense of belonging to this or that linguistic practice. In chess, it will have one meaning. In military tactics, another.

I wouldn't use the "just words" formulation myself, but the point about rationality being different in different practices is a good one. Presumably there is some reason why we use the same word ('rationality') in these different cases, but rational chess play involves different behavior and abilities than are involved in developing rational military tactics. David continues:

Instead, perhaps we should see rational as being able to see the reasons for something, roughly comparable to finding it intelligible.

I agree with this, especially when it comes to understanding another society and its practices. He adds:

I suppose my worry is that rationality is to a certain extent obviously relativist insofar as I can recognise someone else's reasons as reasons for them, though they are not reasons for me. To be an anti-relativist about rationality then would imply that any reason for someone is also a reason for me, which seems daft.

I think I agree with this too, although there are surely dangers lurking in the area of reasons versus reasons for this or that person. For instance, we can say both that the drug dealer's reason for going to the park was that there were teenagers there and that getting an opportunity to sell drugs to teenagers is no reason (not just not a reason for me) to do anything. His reason was no reason in the sense that what motivated him or what he intended to do was irrational. Here 'irrational' is at least partly a moral judgment, although there are people who will insist that morality and rationality are so connected that they always go together. 

In my reply to David I said:

One other thing I was trying to get at is the multiple uses of the words 'rational' and 'irrational'. Both ends and means can be irrational. In the case of means 'irrational' means something like inefficacious (although there are degrees here, and not every inefficiency is properly called irrational). In the case of ends it means something like crazy. But 'crazy' can mean insane (in a way that can be more or less objective) or something like bad (in a much more subjective sense). Ways of doing things can be, and probably usually are, irrational in the sense that they are not optimally efficient. (This seems like a weird use, perhaps a misuse, of the word 'irrational', but I think people do use the word this way.) More relevantly, a culture might be called irrational if it has inconsistent goals or if its goals just seem bad. Cultures that are irrational in the sense of having inconsistent goals are likely to be unhappy, and perhaps to change or die out relatively quickly. Cultures that are just bad (deeply racist or sexist ones, say, or those based on slavery) might be called irrational but are certainly intelligible (up to a point, at least). So it seems to me that there are various senses in which a culture might reasonably be called irrational without this implying that it is unintelligible. 

I think this is too neat and too condensed. So let me expand. The word 'rational' has multiple uses, or perhaps a family of uses rather than a number of really distinct ones. Many people in the Catholic tradition believe that what is good is rational and what is bad is irrational, at least when it comes to human behavior. Such a person might use the words 'rational', 'natural', and 'moral' interchangeably. And I think something like this way of thinking extends beyond the Catholic tradition. Kant, for instance, has a bit of this about him. [I might have this all wrong, so please correct me if that's the case.] Then again, someone from the same tradition might insist that it is not that 'rational' means the same thing as 'moral' but rather that reason turns out (or is made by God) to be a perfect guide (when used correctly) to what is moral. And then you have people like Hume who insist that reason is neither synonymous with nor a guide to morality. It's all about means, not ends. 'Rational' can also mean sane, or Spock-like, or efficient. So 'rational' and 'irrational' have a bunch of uses.

How does this connect with Winch, understanding other societies, and relativism? I think that Winch sees a problem in calling another society irrational in the sense that if it really has a way of living then it cannot be irrational in the sense of being unintelligible or without (at least potentially) graspable norms. A large number of simply irrational, unintelligible people cannot be said to constitute a culture or society with its own way of living. And a way of living implies norms. So in this sense another culture cannot be (rightly called) irrational. That might be thought of as a kind of relativism (and if so, so be it), but it does not mean that cultures cannot be criticized for being irrational in other senses. 

In short, I think that Winch is probably only a relativist in trivial and misleadingly-called-'relativist' ways. But that isn't the same as saying, as Colin Lyas does, that, "The whole thrust of his work is anti-relativist." 

What kind of relativist is Peter Winch?

Colin Lyas says of Winch that, "The whole thrust of his work is anti-relativist." (p. 92) That seems a little strong to me. It's true that Winch rejects "an extreme Protagorean relativism" ("Understanding a Primitive Society," p. 308), but that doesn't mean that he rejects all things that might be called relativism (nor even that he succeeds in avoiding the extreme kind of relativism that he says he wants to avoid). In Ethics and Action Winch says that that paper:

criticizes some forms of the idea that there is, or can be, a conception of 'a world' to be understood, which conception is independent of forms of social life and can provide us with criteria by reference to which we can criticize as 'irrational' certain ways in which men do live. I argue, rather, that any such conception of a world to be understood is intelligible only against the background of a way (or ways) in which men live together and understand each other. (pp. 2-3)

A little way down p. 3 he adds that the paper's:

argument is not, absurdly, that ways in which men live together can never be criticized, nor even that a way of living can never be characterized as in any sense 'irrational'; still less do I argue in it that men who belong to one culture can 'never understand' lives led in another culture.   

It is pretty clear to me that Winch does allow for both criticism (of some kind) of other cultures and that he accepts the possibility of understanding other cultures. Indeed he explains quite carefully how (and why he thinks one ought) to do this. It's the scare quotes around 'irrational' that are less clear and more bothersome.

Winch does seem to think that there is something the matter with calling a way in which people live 'irrational'. Look at the hedging: nor even that a way of living can never be characterized as in any sense [quote unquote] 'irrational'.

The problem with calling a way of living irrational is that for it to be a way of living (and not just some stuff that some people have done) it must have some regularity to it, some rules followed by the people whose way of living it is. And if there are rules then there is intelligibility, something that can rationally be understood, not just chaos.

Must a way of living be rational in the sense of being a means to people's ends? I'm not sure how much sense this question makes. A way of living goes at least some way towards setting those ends. Winch likes to quote Vico, who says that all nations practice some religion, solemn marriage, and burial of the dead. If we just take religion we could ask whether the Christian life, the Islamic life, the Buddhist life, etc. give Christians, Muslims,and Buddhists what they aim for. If by "what they aim for" we mean Heaven or Nirvana then at least sometimes the answer will be No. But so far as what a Christian, for instance, aims for is to live a Christian life then of course the answer is Yes. Any form of behavior that lasts is presumably satisfying to those who engage in it in some way or to some extent. If we regard it as failing to deliver we have probably misunderstood its point. But it is possible for people to find better ways of doing things or to discover problems in their traditional behaviors. So I don't think all customary forms of behavior are necessarily rational in this sense. It belongs to the very idea of a way of life that it is rational in the sense of being intelligible though.

In what sense then could a way of living be called irrational? I can think of two. One sense of 'irrational' is purely derogatory. We can, and I think Winch would allow this, call another way of living irrational in the sense simply that we reject it. Its rules are not ours and we want nothing to do with them. This is not a very careful use of 'irrational', but it is a possible use. Another would relate to things like marriage and burial. Winch emphasizes the universal human importance of birth, sex, and death. Any way of living that fails to recognize this importance, perhaps by insisting on universal celibacy or constant war, might be called irrational. It would not be absolutely irrational, in the sense of being shown by the world as it is in itself (the world as something independent of forms of social life that provides us with criteria of rationality) to be irrational, because even if the idea of the world as it is in itself makes sense and even if this world shows us something, it does not show us, for instance, that the gods do not require celibacy or war.  

So is Winch a relativist or not? He is, I think, a kind of relativist about rationality. So far as 'rational' means intelligible, what is rational in one culture will not be rational in another. This is not simply a matter of different cultures calling different forms of behavior rational. Of course they do that, just as they call different forms of behavior good. But what it makes sense to do actually is different in different cultures. Winch does not believe, though, that anything goes. Cultures or ways of living have their own rules, after all. Furthermore, for us to recognize something as a culture or way of living we have to be able to make some sense of it in terms of our own standards of rationality. If the behavior in question is puzzling enough then we won't be in a position to say even that it is part of a way of living.

In short, 'rational' can mean something like sane or intelligible, or it can mean useful in a narrow sense (getting a gun is useful if you want to rob a bank, but robbing banks is not a very useful thing to do), or good, or useful in a broader sense. Where a way of living has been identified as such, its characteristic forms of behavior will be rational in the first two of these senses, but not necessarily in the latter two. Or so it seems to me and, I think, to Winch.

Evans-Pritchard's mistake

Part I of Winch's "Understanding a Primitive Society" (American Philosophical Quarterly Volume I, Number 4, October 1964, pp. 307-324) raises "certain difficulties about Professor E. E. Evans-Pritchard's approach in his classic, Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande." What I want to do is to get clear on the nature of these difficulties.

In a critical tone, Winch notes that in Evans-Pritchard's work, "There is more than one remark to the effect that "obviously there are no witches"..." (p. 307). This might make Winch appear to be criticizing E-P simply for disagreeing with the Azande. But I don't think that's quite right.

On p. 308 Winch writes that:

Evans-Pritchard, although he emphasizes that a member of scientific culture has a different conception of reality from that of a Zande believer in magic, wants to go beyond merely registering this fact and making the differences explicit, and to say, finally, that the scientific conception agrees with what reality actually is like, whereas the magical conception does not.

If E-P goes wrong it is not, according to Winch, simply for rejecting Zande belief in witches, oracles, and magic but for doing so on the grounds that such belief supposedly fails to agree with reality. One apparent problem here is that it is hard to see a difference between saying, as I surely may, "I do not believe in witches etc." and saying, as Winch finds problematic, "belief in witches etc. does not agree with reality." Surely (at least sometimes) belief that p = belief that p is true = belief that p agrees with reality. Winch sounds as though he is saying that it is a mistake to go beyond saying "I believe this and you believe that" to saying "I am right and you are wrong." But that can't be right. It can't simply by definition be wrong to think oneself right. If 'right' and 'wrong' mean anything then it is possible that I am right and others with different beliefs are wrong. And if 'right' and 'wrong' mean nothing then it is meaningless to say that I am wrong to say that I am right (or wrong).

Presumably Winch is not making that mistake. He is not talking about what anyone might say but about what Evans-Pritchard says. The mistake, whatever it might turn out to be, is a mistake given Evans-Pritchard's particular goals and commitments. And what it will turn out to be has to do with his making certain claims finally and beyond certain other claims. That is, as a kind of justification. Winch would not object, I take it, to a Zande person assuring us that he believes in magic, nor to a European insisting that he believes in science. Nor would he object, I believe, to these assurances being made in the idiom of agreement with reality. The problem he sees is with trying to claim in a non-circular way that one's preferred conception of reality is justified by reality itself.

     Evans-Pritchard [...] is trying to work with a conception of reality which is not determined by its actual use in language. He wants something against which that use can itself be appraised. But this is not possible; and no more possible in the case of scientific discourse than it is in any other. (p. 309)

Here is another problem. What is not possible? If this allegedly impossible thing is conceivable then don't we need proof, rather than mere assertion, that it really is impossible? And if, as I suspect, Winch means that it is not really conceivable because it is incoherent, then what is the 'it' that Evans-Pritchard wants but cannot have? What is the 'it' that we cannot conceive? It seems a little uncharitable to attribute such incoherence to Evans-Pritchard. But then I suppose it would be equally uncharitable of me to attribute it to Winch. Let's say for now that Winch seems to see in Evans-Pritchard an apparent confusion. We get onto firmer footing very soon, thankfully.

On p. 310 Winch quotes a series of definitions that E-P provides of terms such as 'mystical,' 'scientific,' and 'ritual'. It is clear enough, at least with the help of Winch's italics, that E-P has built pro-science and anti-mysticism, anti-ritual bias into the definitions. If we define the relevant terms in such a way then it is not reality that will justify our preference for science over magic but simply our own uses of language. And that is no justification of such uses at all.

Does consulting oracles make sense? Winch considers this question starting on p. 311. Azande do not treat oracular pronouncements as hypotheses but as guides to action. Is it possible to make decisions about what to do in this way? Yes. Does it make sense to do so? To those who do so, yes. To us, probably not. The disagreement between Winch and E-P arises because:

it is clear from other remarks in the book to which I have alluded, that at the time of writing it he would have wished to add: and the European is right and the Zande wrong. This addition I regard as illegitimate and my reasons for so thinking take us to the heart of the matter. (p. 313)

So here we are, at the heart of the matter:

Evans-Pritchard is not content with elucidating the differences in the two concepts of reality involved [in the language of the Azande and in our language]; he wants to go further and say: our concept of reality is the correct one, the Azande are mistaken. But the difficulty is to see what "correct" and "mistaken" can mean in this context. (p. 313)

Another difficulty might be to see what "illegitimate" can mean in the context of the previous quotation from p. 313. I don't think Winch can really mean that E-P has no right to prefer the European 'language' to the Zande one. The mistake that Winch has in mind is that of thinking that one language can be more correct than another in a purely objective, value- and preference-free way. Or at least that the European, scientific language is more correct in this kind of way than the Zande language. Perhaps some possible language would be riddled with problems, but the Azande got along with theirs for a very long time (apparently they have moved over to ways of thinking more like ours now, but that's beside the point). In what sense could their language and way of life be (not immoral or ugly or unpleasant but) incorrect or mistaken?

One way that Winch considers would be if it involved contradiction. But merely possible hypothetical contradictions are not a real problem, and it is not irrational to ignore them. Apparent contradictions that do arise must be dealt with in some way, but if there is a way to deal with them then the system as a whole, including this method for dealing with what might otherwise be a problem, is not irrational. Theoretical contradictions matter for theoretical systems, but not everything that might look like such a system really is one. This is Winch's claim about Zande ideas about the inheritance of witchcraft. If witchcraft is inherited, as the Zande (used to) say, then if one member of a clan biologically-related through the male line is a witch the whole clan must be, and if one is not then none can be. There is a post-mortem test that shows whether a person really was "a witch" or not, though, so this could seemingly be used either to show that everyone or no one is a witch. One positive result here or there need not brand the whole clan as witches because the witch might have been illegitimate or swapped at birth or whatever, but enough results one way or the other would surely clear the matter up. Is it irrational, or less rational, of the Azande not to carry out the relevant tests? Winch thinks not. They simply are not interested in knowing about global witch-statuses. This is not a mistake. It is a mistake, though, if we think that they somehow ought (in some supposedly absolute sense) to have such an interest.

This, I gather, is what Winch takes Evans-Pritchard's mistake to be. He wants our standards of rationality, the norms that govern our assessment of ways of thinking and behaving, to justify themselves and delegitimate those that differ from them. He wants, as it were, a kind of neutral or non-evaluative judgment of value. This is incoherent. That's one problem.

Another problem, it seems to me, is that E-P wants to understand the Azande but goes about it in a way that will not work. Later in the paper (p. 319) Winch writes:

Since it is we who want to understand the Zande category [of magic], it appears that the onus is on us to extend our understanding so as to make room for the Zande category, rather than to insist on seeing it in terms of our own ready-made distinction between science and non-science.

The issue here is not what makes sense or what is in some sense legitimate but simply what will get us what we want. We will not understand those whose concepts are very different from ours if we insist on an overly simple application of our concepts to theirs or translation of their concepts to ours. Of course we do need to relate their concepts to ours in some way, but we are not stuck, as Winch points out, with a fixed stock of concepts or expressions. We can add to what we have, and part of the point of studying other cultures is to grow in this way.

In the end, then, Winch appears to have identified two errors in Evans-Pritchard's thinking: a pragmatic one and a logical one. The logical one is to try to use your own concepts (or way of life) to justify themselves (or itself). The pragmatic one is to try to understand the behavior of another people without the necessary flexibility and open-mindedness, and, indeed, from a starting point that defines that behavior as irrational.

Examples of social science

I've revised my Winch lecture in response to Matt's comments yesterday. Among other things I've cut out the part I was least happy with and added what follows. I wonder whether it would be better if I cut out the second example and replaced it with an expanded discussion of what Winch says about the Azande. Anyway, here it is:

A couple of examples might be useful to show how Winch’s ideas connect with actual work in the social sciences or social studies. I will give two examples, one that Winch discusses and one much more recent one. In his 1964 essay “Understanding a Primitive Society,” Winch responds to the work of E. E. Evans-Pritchard on witchcraft, magic, and the Zande people (who in the plural are referred to as the Azande).[1] Traditional Zande beliefs include belief in witchcraft and occult powers. Winch says of such beliefs and their related practices that “we cannot possibly share”[2] them, but he also wants to avoid both abandoning “the idea that men’s ideas and beliefs must be checkable by reference to something independent—some reality”[3] (thereby falling into an extreme relativism) and mistakenly thinking that our scientific beliefs and practices are more in accord with objective reality than the Azande’s. In other words, he wants to avoid treating our rejection of Zande beliefs and practices as something justified by reality itself, while also wanting to avoid relativism. And he wants to be able to understand Zande beliefs and practices without sharing or adopting them. Can this be done?

            Winch suggests that the main reason why it is likely to seem impossible is because we are so impressed by science and its methods. When we think of what reality is and how we can know it we are likely to think in terms of reality as described by science. But it is not by scientific means that we know (if we know it) the reality of God. The conception of God’s reality, Winch says, has its place within the religious use of language. It is not that God or the reality of God exists only within such language, but the idea of God belongs within such language, within a particular kind of thinking, talking, writing, painting, and so on. We show a misunderstanding of this idea if we treat it as belonging to scientific discourse and try, for instance, to test its validity using scientific means. This does not mean that the idea of God is immune from criticism. It does mean, though, that it is immune from a certain kind of criticism. The existence of evil might disprove the existence of God. Looking through a telescope cannot do so (unless the god in question is of a very unusual kind). Scientific, religious, ethical, and aesthetic discourse can influence and interact with each other, but they are not the same. And we often best avoid confusion if we keep their differences in mind. Nor does this commit us to relativism. If God has any reality at all then within religious language we cannot just say whatever we like. If anything goes then such language has no meaning at all.

            An obvious problem with this example is that many of us do not believe in God. The following are not Winch’s examples, but I think that he might accept belief in beauty or moral goodness as parallels to belief in God. If we believe in the genuine goodness of Nelson Mandela or Mahatma Ghandi, or the beauty of the Mona Lisa or Mozart’s third violin concerto, then we accept a kind of truth and a kind of reality that are not those of science. Science does not tell us that apartheid is wrong. But it is wrong. And the fact that this is not a scientific truth does not mean that you or I can say just whatever we like about it, regardless of reality. The reality is that it is wrong.

            But reality does not force us to think this way. It is possible to support apartheid. It is also possible to think or speak in completely different terms, so that questions of justice and injustice or beauty and ugliness simply do not, cannot, arise. If we only ever used the terms of scientific discourse, for instance, then such matters would be outside all our thoughts. Winch wants to say of the Azande that they have their own form of discourse, different from our scientific discourse. He does not say that it is just as good. But he does seem to think both that judging whether their discourse is good or bad is not the business of science and that making such judgments is likely to get in the way of trying to understand their way of living and thinking. Instead of asking why they do what they do, we start asking why they are so stupid. This is not only condescending. It is also a different kind of question. It is a question about causes, namely the causes of ignorance, superstition, irrationality, and so on. The question about why a certain group of people think and behave as they do, however, is about their reasons, about the rules that guide their behaviour. As Winch says on the first page of his essay:

            An anthropologist studying such a people wishes to make those beliefs and practices intelligible to himself and his readers. This means presenting an account of them that will somehow satisfy the criteria of rationality demanded by the culture to which he and his readers belong: …[4]     

It is not possible to make beliefs and practices intelligible if the beliefs and practices in question are taken to be irrational. The existence and persistence of irrationality can perhaps be explained, but the irrational itself, by definition, cannot be made intelligible. So the anthropologist cannot do what he (or she) wants to do if he makes the mistake that Winch attributes to Evans-Pritchard. If we want to understand practices then we must treat them as intelligible, as making sense. We will never succeed if we start with the belief that they are irrational.

            Another mistake here is a philosophical one. Reality itself no more justifies science than it justifies ethics or religion. I said earlier that apartheid really is wrong. That is true. But if anyone denies it then I cannot prove myself right by pointing to reality. What reality would I point to? The unhappy victims of apartheid, perhaps, but when I say that apartheid is unjust I do not mean that it makes people unhappy. Some injustices leave no unhappy survivors. Similarly, the best proof we have that science is true is that it works so well. But ‘true’ no more means ‘works well’ than ‘just’ means ‘makes people happy’. Not to mention the fact that science may yet lead to results that we do not consider useful at all.

            More relevant is the fact that science is a kind of procedure, a methodology, a practice, more than it is a body of knowledge. As a kind of enterprise it can be neither true nor false. It cannot agree or disagree with reality. In that sense, objectively speaking, it is neither good nor bad. And the same can be said of witchcraft. Zande witchcraft, Winch is suggesting, is best regarded as a kind of language, or at least better regarded as a kind of language than as a quasi-scientific theoretical system. Not a language that we ought to try to speak (indeed Winch rules that out as a possibility for us), but not one that can in any straightforward sense be judged to be right or wrong. The job of the anthropologist—that is, not the job that Winch thinks anthropologists ought to do but rather the job that the anthropologist sets for himself—is to make sense of this language. That cannot be done if we assume that it makes no sense to begin with. It can be done, or so it appears from all that is good in, for instance, Evans-Pritchard’s work, if we study carefully how the language, the nest of beliefs and practices, is used by those who engage in it.

            Now for my second example, which I have chosen almost at random. Sociology, Winch understandably says, has a special place in the social sciences. One of the leading journals in sociology is the American Journal of Sociology. When I was writing this the most recent issue of the journal available online was Volume 119, No. 4 (the January 2014 issue). One paper from this issue was available free, so I chose that as my example of recent work in social studies. The paper is “Job Displacement among Single Mothers: Effects on Children’s Outcomes in Young Adulthood” by Jennie E. Brand and Juli Simon Thomas. The paper finds “significant negative effects of job displacement among single mothers on children’s educational attainment and social-psychological well-being in young adulthood.” That is, the authors carefully confirm just what one might expect, that children of single mothers suffer when their mothers lose their jobs because of operating decisions by employers (such as downsizing, rather than when the individual employee is fired or quits), and they provide details of the nature and scope of this harm.

            Winch does not say that this kind of work cannot be done, nor that it should not be done. But it is doubtful that people who do such work would do it more successfully if they modelled themselves more closely on physicists. The paper involves sophisticated mathematics, but its primary interest is in children. Its key finding is that: “Children whose mothers were displaced have lower educational attainment and higher levels of depressive symptoms than children whose mothers were not displaced.”[5] Should it need saying, there is nothing wrong with gathering and analysing data in order to confirm such unsurprising but still deniable truths, if only because they sometimes are denied or at least ignored. But the nature of the authors’ project is more interesting than this. On the one hand, they describe their work as capitalizing “on a scientific opportunity provided by extreme economic change.”[6] On the other hand, the paper’s final paragraph is far from what one might expect in a stereotypical scientific work. Here it is in full:     

            As at least half of all children will spend some portion of their childhood raised by a single mother, the socioeconomic well-being of such families is a fundamental concern. We should protect disadvantaged children because they have not made the choices that have resulted in their socioeconomic conditions, or so goes the rhetoric on social class disparities in children’s resources. Such discourse implicitly assumes mothers have made such choices. But women are also subject to structural conditions largely beyond their control. Debates about social assistance should acknowledge that job separation among single mothers is at times involuntary and that such involuntary events are associated with long-term unemployment, socioeconomic and social-psychological decline, and significant intergenerational effects. We should restrict assistance neither to the most disadvantaged mothers nor to those mothers only displaced in economic contractions, as particularly deleterious maternal displacement effects on life trajectories of children may accrue among otherwise more advantaged single-parent families.[7]     

            

            We have moved from ‘is’ to ‘ought’ here, and are clearly very close to the domain of philosophy, particularly moral and political philosophy. The precise nature of well-being is a topic that has been discussed by philosophers since at least Aristotle, whose work informs contemporary debates about human capability. Whether we should protect disadvantaged children is a moral and political question, and the connection between this and whether or not these children need help because of choices they have made is an equally philosophical matter. The same goes for questions about what debates should or should not acknowledge, questions about what is voluntary and what involuntary, and questions about how the voluntariness (or otherwise) of actions affects what ought to be done. In short, there is nothing wrong with this kind of sociology, it seems to me, but it is not science in the sense of being like physics, and it is importantly related to philosophy. Winch’s major claim is that the social sciences ought not to try to be more like physics and other natural sciences, but should instead recognize their closeness to philosophy. It seems to me that this paper by Brand and Thomas supports this view.

---

[1] Peter Winch, “Understanding a Primitive Society,” American Philosophical Quarterly, Volume 1, Number 4, October 1964, pp. 307-324.

[2] Winch, p. 307.

[3] Winch, p. 308

[4] Winch, p. 307.

[5] Brand and Thomas, p. 972.

[6] Ibid., p. 987.

[7][7] Ibid., pp. 989-990. 

The possibility of a social science

I'm not completely happy with this yet, but I need to have a final version by the end of the week. So if I'm ever going to ask for comments, it's now or never. I've been asked to give a public lecture on Winch's ideas about social science. Here's what I've come up with so far.

Comments welcome.

Winch's 1990 preface

The second edition of The Idea of a Social Science has a preface in which Winch outlines what he did and did not mean to say, and gives some indication of how the book might be different if he were to re-write it. He acknowledges that "many things have changed both in philosophy and in the social sciences" (p. ix) between 1958 and 1990, but says also that, "It is not that I think the deep-seated errors and confusions which I tried to expose are no longer active" (p. ix). Helpfully, he also says that, "The central core of the argument is really stated in Chapter III, Sections 5 and 6." So, back to those sections.

What really seems crucial here is section 6, which begins with this paragraph:

On Mill's account, understanding a social institution consists in observing regularities in the behaviour of its participants and expressing these regularities in the form of generalizations. Now if the position of the sociological investigator (in a broad sense) can be regarded as comparable, in its main logical outlines, with that of the natural scientist, the following must be the case. The concepts and criteria according to which the sociologist judges that, in two situations, the same thing has happened, or the same action performed, must be understood in relation to the rules governing sociological investigation. But here we run against a difficulty; for whereas in the case of the natural scientist we have to deal with only one set of rules, namely those governing the scientist's investigation itself, here what the sociologist is studying, as well as his study of it, is a human activity and is therefore carried on according to rules. And it is these rules, rather than those which govern the sociologist's investigation, which specify what is to count as "doing the same kind of thing" in relation to that activity.

The last sentence need not be true. The sociologist can choose to count as the same thing any two things at all. Winch's point is that what actually interests us (presumably and for the most part) is activities as they are understood by those who engage in them. If we want to we can study mere hand-washing, but chances are if we are interested in "understanding human behavior" or "understanding a society" then what we mean is that we want to understand the rules that the people we study are following. And a Muslim who washes before prayer is not following the same rules as a surgeon who washes before getting to work. The criteria for performing the action correctly are (or at least may be) different. In a sense one must already understand what people are doing before one studies their behavior.

Is this a problem? I don't think it has to be. Understanding what something is need not answer all our questions about why it happens. For instance, we might want to know whether hooliganism increases or decreases when unemployment goes up. To answer a question like this we need to know what does and does not count as hooliganism, but then there is nothing to stop our counting instances and comparing them with unemployment rates. The main problem with an inquiry of this kind, I think, would be knowing whether any pattern discerned was a case of causation or mere correlation. Another problem would be knowing exactly what was meant by 'causation' in a case like this. Let's say unemployment tends to increase hooliganism. Still, not all hooligans are unemployed and not all unemployed people are hooligans. And unemployment is unlikely to cause hooliganism in the way that it might (be said to) cause attempts to get a job. A job applicant can explain that he is applying for a job because he is unemployed. A hooligan who sincerely blames his behavior on unemployment is (almost certainly) hypothesizing in a way that the job applicant is not.

I'm not sure what to say about this, but I think that correlations like this could be found and might be quite suggestive. The question that people like Winch and Read might ask is whether finding such patterns really counts as doing science. As long as we see the difference between this kind of case and what physicists do then it probably doesn't matter. But the difference is large. Big enough not only to leave room for doubt about the underlying or true cause, but big enough also for the related but not identical phenomenon of moral disagreement. The moral sciences are not the same as the natural sciences. If atoms or bodies in motion do this or that then there is no room for moral evaluation of their behaving in this way. If violent crime increases when income inequality increases (as I expect it does) this can be appealed to as an excuse or mitigating circumstance, but it does not remove the intelligibility, the possibility, of blaming the criminal. If there is causation here it is not of the same kind as the billiard ball kind. This itself is a fact about how we use the concepts relevant to making moral judgments, a fact about human behavior.

Although here things get complicated and/or confusingly meta. One person might insist that if there is enough evidence of a correlation between inequality and violence then we have no option but to accept that the former causes the latter, and that anyone who denies this is speaking nonsense, is simply unintelligible. Another person might disagree and say that there is room for reasonable people to take various views on the matter. In other words, simply describing uses of language without getting involved in the debate is not simple, and is perhaps not possible in every case. There is not always an undisputed fact about what makes sense and what does not. But often there is. And even when the space of possible meanings is disputed territory, diplomatic negotiations might still be possible. Not necessarily with a view to resolving the moral or political disagreement (although that might be possible too), but simply with a view to reaching agreement about who is saying something, however laughable or repugnant, and who is not. The possibility that attempts at description will get personal and/or evaluative does not rule out the possibility of (impersonal, neutral) description. This goes for both philosophy and social science. But it does mean that in an important sense we are not doing science in the way that physicists are doing science.

There is no such thing as a social science

Phil Hutchinson, Rupert Read, and Wes Sharrock (HRS) offer a nice defence of Peter Winch in their provocatively titled book. A lot of the book is aimed at critics of Winch, arguing that he is not a relativist, not an idealist, not conservative, and so on. There's also a chapter on the strengths and weaknesses of ethnography and ethnomethodology. I'm more interested in their reconstruction of Winch's argument.

On page one they make the point that they do not oppose either analytical rigour or "a programme of social inquiry which accords a deal of importance to the revision of its claims in light of further (relevant) observations". What they oppose is two things: methodological reductionism and substantive reductionism. The former is the claim that (p. 2):

There is an identifiable scientific method and this ought to be employed if one intends to make a claim to do something scientific.

The latter is the claim that (p. 2):

Social scientific findings are reducible to the findings of the natural sciences.

This second claim strikes me as obviously false. If there are laws about the relation between inflation and unemployment, for instance, then these are not going to be about atoms or chemicals in the brain. Indeed if there is to be a social science then such reduction surely has to be impossible, otherwise the alleged social science will really be just one or more of the natural sciences after all. The idea of a social science is that there is something distinct at the social level to be studied. Or so I would have thought.

Methodological reductionism is much more plausible.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines the scientific method as: "a method or procedure that has characterized natural science since the 17th century, consisting in systematic observation, measurement, and experiment, and the formulation, testing, and modification of hypotheses." 

Why couldn't psychologists and economists, for instance, observe, measure, experiment, and hypothesize in this way? HRS grant that social scientists can observe and revise their claims in the light of observations. If they can observe they can presumably measure. (Perhaps it's dangerous to presume too much, but I don't think anyone would deny that psychologists could, say, count the number of people who cheat or lie or help someone in such-and-such circumstances, and that is surely a kind of measurement.)

One problem is with the idea of experimenting in social studies. There are many problems with this. There is, for instance, the ethical aspect. We can't just play around with an economy or culture the way we might with inanimate objects or mice in labs to see what happens. Another issue is the problem of ecological validity, discussed by McManus. How can we be sure that what happens in a controlled, laboratory environment also applies in the real world? And if we don't control the environment but just study the real world itself, how can we be sure that the results we observe are caused by the factors we hypothesize as the cause and not others? The obvious thing to do would be to repeat the 'experiment' as many times as possible, but in the real world we cannot make this happen and there are always going to be potentially complicating factors. So we can hypothesize, observe, measure, and modify our hypotheses, but it is doubtful that we can really experiment in a useful way, i.e. a way that will tell us anything we really want to know.

Another problem is that the OED model of the scientific method is not very specific. What counts as systematic? What should be measured? How? What kinds of hypotheses should we be formulating? We can't just take what physicists do and then "do the same" with human beings. Or rather we could, but if we really do the same then we will just be doing physics with a foolish and probably unethical choice of equipment. If we decide to do the same thing but different, then the same how? and different how? These questions require decisions about what we want to do and how we choose to do it. The answers are not given by the scientific method or by the phenomena to be studied. We don't yet know, have not yet decided, what these are. It is not the case that there is an identifiable scientific method that can simply, without doing anything else significant, be employed or applied.

Two other points that HRS emphasize are the question of the identity of action and the nature of understanding. If we want to find laws of human behavior then we need to identify cases of the same thing being done. As Anscombe has pointed out, a man who is moving his arm up and down while holding a pump might be described as doing several different things: playing a tune with some squeaky machinery, exercising his arm, pumping water, poisoning people (if the water supply is poisoned), and so on. If we want to understand him then we need to know what he takes himself to be doing. He isn't murdering anybody if he doesn't know there is poison in the water. We could, I suppose, study his movements just as physical movements, but a) it will make a difference whether we study the movements of, say, atoms, muscles, or the air around his body (which science we are engaged in depends on this kind of thing), and b) we won't be doing social science in that case. If we care about his behavior as action then we need to know his intention. This is a complicated matter, as Anscombe's work shows, but it has to do with the man's conception of his action (what he takes himself to be doing, which depends on the concepts he has) and his reasons for acting in this way (why he is doing--or at least takes himself to be doing--what he is doing). We can think of reasons as a kind of causes, but they are very different from paradigmatic causes. Reasons can be good or bad, for instance. The same wind that causes me to lose my footing can similarly cause leaves to fly around, but nothing like my reason for taking a walk will ever move the leaves. Reasons only ever motivate rational beings (this is not a matter of chance) and can be evaluated. They belong to a different domain, as Paul Johnston puts it, from that of causes. If scientific explanation is causal (in the billiard ball sense of causal) then human action, qua human action, cannot be understood scientifically.

This brings us to the last point, the nature of understanding. To say that human action cannot be understood scientifically is not to say that it cannot be understood. We understand it (and fail to do so) all the time. It is usually obvious what someone is doing. If it isn't, we can ask them. And they usually tell the truth intelligibly. If we still don't understand then we might need to look around more. What is the context in which this behavior is taking place? Is it part of a game, or a religious ritual, or a play, or a way to frighten animals away, or what? It helps, as HRS point out, if we can relate the behavior to something similar that we do. If we can't then it might remain somewhat mysterious: Well, it's music of some kind, but what they see in it I'll never understand. There is no guarantee that we will always be able to make full sense of other people's behavior, but there's no guarantee either that they are bound to be and remain closed books to us. We have to look and see. That's something that of course we can do, but it isn't science in any significant sense of the word.

Winch on social science again

After last time I think I should probably not focus too much on The Idea of a Social Science when talking about whether there can really be a social science (I'm going to be giving a lecture on this). I will talk about that book but also some of Winch's later work, maybe Colin Lyas' book on Winch (which I see Berel Dov Lerner recommends highly), and certainly Rupert Read's Wittgenstein Among the Sciences, and There is No Such Thing as a Social Science by Phil Hutchinson, Rupert Read, and Wes Sharrock. (Is there anything else that I shouldn't miss?)

To start with, here are some of the main points I take Winch to be making:

• he attacks the idea that social studies should "follow the methods of natural science rather than those of philosophy" (p. 1)
• "social relations are expressions of ideas about reality" (p. 23)
• the aim of epistemology is to understand "the nature of social phenomena in general," i.e. to understand what is involved in a "form of life" (p. 42)
• this, though, is the central aim of sociology (p. 43), a subject with a special place in social studies
• "I want to say that the test of whether a man's actions are the application of a rule is not whether he can formulate it but whether it makes sense to distinguish between a right and a wrong way of doing things in connection with what he does.Where that makes sense, then it must also make sense to say that he is applying a criterion in what he does even though he does not, and perhaps cannot, formulate that criterion." (p. 58)
• human behavior is not only different in degree (more complex) than other kinds of events in the world, it is different in kind (p. 73), even if this difference arises from what appear to be differences in degree
• scientists seek regularities, but "criteria of identity are necessarily relative to some rule" (p. 83) (and on this point see also this and this)
• the relevant rules in question are those of the scientist in the natural sciences but those of the people being studied in the social sciences (p. 87)
• to understand what people do with regard to art or religion we must understand what art or religion is (pp. 88-89)
• historical development is like the development of a conversation (in part it literally is just this, it seems to me), and such things cannot be predicted (pp. 93-94): to predict the future of a poem is to write the poem, to predict the future of music is to intervene in the process by which this future is determined (is that right?)
• "the social relations between men and the ideas which men's actions embody are really the same thing considered from different points of view" (p. 121)
• "To give an account of the meaning of a word is to describe how it is used; and to describe how it is used is to describe the social intercourse into which it enters." (p. 123)

This all sounds about right to me. The main point I might disagree with concerns the goal of sociology, which I think these days is more like describing and elucidating inequalities.