Wittgenstein Among the Sciences: Wittgensteinian Investigations into the 'Scientific Method'

247 Pages·2012·1.66 MB·English

by  Rupert Read

Wittgenstein among the sciences
Philosophy and method in the
social sciences
Series Editor: Phil hutchinson, manchester metropolitan University, UK
engaging with the recent resurgence of interest in methodological and
philosophical issues in the human and social sciences, this series provides an
outlet for work that demonstrates both the intellectual import of philosophical
and methodological debates within the social sciences and their direct relevance
to questions of politics, ethics or policy. Philosophy and method in the social
sciences welcomes work from sociologists, geographers, philosophers,
anthropologists, criminologists and political scientists with broad interest across
academic disciplines, that scrutinises contemporary perspectives within the
human and social sciences and explores their import for today’s social questions.
Wittgenstein among the sciences
Wittgensteinian investigations into the
‘Scientific Method’
RUPeRt Read
University of East Anglia, UK
Edited by
simon sUmmeRs
University of East Anglia, UK
© Rupert Read 2012
all rights reserved. no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system
or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording
or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher.
Rupert Read has asserted his right under the copyright, designs and Patents act, 1988, to be
identified as the author of this work.
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Read, Rupert J., 1966-
Wittgenstein among the sciences : Wittgensteinian
investigations into the ‘scientific method’. – (Philosophy
and method in the social sciences)
1. Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 1889-1951. 2. Kuhn, thomas s.
3. Science–Philosophy. 4. Social sciences–Philosophy.
5. Philosophy and science. 6. science and the humanities.
i. title ii. series iii. summers, simon.
501-dc23s
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Read, Rupert J., 1966-
Wittgenstein among the sciences : Wittgensteinian investigations into the
“scientific method” / by Rupert Read edited by Simon Summers.
p. cm. – (Philosophy and method in the social sciences)
includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4094-3054-4 (hardback) – ISBN 978-1-4094-3055-1 (ebook)
1. Social sciences–Methodology. 2. Social sciences–Philosophy.
3. Philosophy and social sciences. 4. Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 1889-1951. 5.
Kuhn, thomas s. 6. Winch, Peter. i. summers, simon. ii. title.
h61.15.R4293 2011
001.4'201--dc23
2011040601
ISBN 9781409430544 (hbk)
ISBN 9781409430551 (ebk)
V
Printed and bound in great Britain by the
mPg Books group, UK.
Contents
Preface vii
Acknowledgements xv
Introduction 1
Simon Summers
Lecture Transcripts: ‘Theories and Non-theories of the Human Sciences’ 7
Part 1: Wittgenstein, Kuhn and natural science
1.1 Is Kuhn the Wittgenstein of the Sciences? 31
1.2 Kuhn and Incommensurability: An Interpretation 43
1.3 Wittgenstein and Kuhn on Incommensurability –
The View From Inside 61
1.4 Values: Another Kind of Incommensurability?:
On Incommensurability of Values in Science 77
1.5 Does Kuhn Have a ‘Model’ of Science? 83
inter-section: an Outline
Wittgensteinian elicitation of criteria 91
Part 2: Wittgenstein, Winch and ‘human science’
2.1 The Ghost of Winch’s Ghost 97
2.2 The Hard Case of (Severe Cases of) Schizophrenia 111
2.3 Extreme Aversive Emotions 129
vi Wittgenstein among the Sciences
2.4 Wittgenstein contra Friedman 145
2.5 ‘Dissolving’ the Hard Problem of Consciousness Back into
Ordinary Life 161
A Concluding Summary 185
Rupert Read: Interviewed by Simon Summers 199
Bibliography 219
Index 227
Preface
[The very nature of philosophical investigation] requires us to travel over a wide
field of thought criss-cross in every direction.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, PI, Preface.
This book is a Wittgensteinian investigation of the concept of ‘science’, based
around exemplars and cases.
Nevertheless, there is something inherently paradoxical about writing a book
with the ambition of the present work. The paradox is of the same general nature
as that that faced Wittgenstein, and that led him in his later period to not finish any
work. The problem is that there is something reificatory, dangerous, about writing
a book when one believes, as I do, that the book can have no ‘positive’ task.
‘Negative theology’ offers a kind of model here, but not perhaps a 100 percent
happy one: My, resolutely/steadfastly-therapeutically Wittgensteinian approach
(see e.g. my Applying Wittgenstein) similarly cannot exactly seek to rectify
the many defects I think may be present in the many instances of philosophy/
methodology/would-be-science that I aim to interrogate in the present work. That
is: I cannot put them right by affirming/saying what the right theory is, or what
the right answer is. I not only cannot tell you what God is really like, but not
even what science etc. is really like … ‘All’ I can do is offer warnings, questions,
perspectives, alternative possibilities. That is of the nature of the Wittgensteinian
‘methodology’. And moreover, all I can do is offer these in the knowledge that
different readers will differ in their need for them, in their desire for them, in their
familiarity with them, etc. The Socratic and Platonic difficulty with the adequacy
of writing as a vehicle for philosophising or for methodological reflection is writ
large in Wittgenstein; and, I fear, and hope, in the present work, if such it is.
This puts a strain on the reader. I am sorry for this; but then again, it is
unavoidable. What am I saying, in the present work? Well, nothing. That follows
directly from my ‘New Wittgensteinian’ approach. (See for this Crary and Read’s
(2000) collection, The New Wittgenstein. Cf. also the later Gordon Baker’s (2004)
approach to philosophy.)1
So this book is constantly critical, in a way that might weary some readers, and
may be seen by them or by others as wearily ‘evasive’ or merely allusive in terms
of what it is positively putting forward. ‘Guilty’ as charged. To do justice to the
subject-matter, to be true to Wittgenstein, there is no alternative. It’s not clear what
is being defended in this book: because nothing is. There is no positive doctrine
1 Cf. Also Duncan Richter’s (2009). Richter sees clearly the radically therapeutic/
liberatory aim of my writing.
viii Wittgenstein among the Sciences
(cf. PI 126–8),2 no theory to defend. I spend much of my time fending off possible
misunderstandings: because they are so ‘natural’ and because that is one of the
main things that there is still to do.
To make things possibly even worse: this is a sketchbook, criss-cross-style, of
varia. It is a gathered collection of writings and papers of mine, that myself and
my Editor have more or less unified, we hope, around the themes that I will shortly
endeavour to explicate. For this reason, added to what I have already said, it is
perhaps very important to give the potential reader as much freedom as possible:
Please feel free to skip Sections that don’t seem central to you/that don’t interest
you.3 ‘Dip’ in and out. Similarly, feel very free to ignore the footnotes, many of
which contain rebuttals or asides which may be tangential to your concerns. Try
to find within this book the book that works for you. That is all a philosophy book
can be, after all, after Wittgenstein: a set of exercises whose therapeutic value will
differ depending on where one is at, as compared to and contrasted with others.
(This book has, I believe, a fairly strongly unified thrust, and I hope you will read
it from start to finish; but I would far rather you read parts of it and profited from
it than that you read all of it and were, ultimately, bored by it.)
Moreover; please don’t expect this book to be something that it patently isn’t
(but which the main title might possibly have led you to think it is). This book is
not an exegetical examination of Wittgenstein’s remarks on science or the specific
sciences, and nor is it even an examination of his brilliant and peculiar relationship
to the scientific ideal or image. Still less does it consider Wittgenstein’s own
scientific heritage and scientific and engineering investigations.
What this book is for is above all for you and me to get in view some important
putative differences between what we call natural and human sciences. (Part 2
of the book focuses on philosophical and social/human thought and action, in
the broadest sense of those words.) This book employs Wittgenstein’s and
Wittgensteinian ‘methodology’ to wonder around the sciences with. And it relies
quite heavily, in the course of doing so, on a pair of key ‘surrogates’ for Wittgenstein
on whom I have previously published book-length works: Thomas Kuhn and Peter
Winch, on my ‘charitable’ (broadly Wittgensteinian) interpretations of them.
What unifies the book above all is the sensibility which it aims to inherit and
manifest. A sensibility that ‘reads into’ Wittgenstein’s brilliant ‘surrogates’, Winch
and Kuhn, the realistic spirit4 of the therapeutic (‘New’,5 and later-Bakerian)
Wittgenstein. The book also at times employs some of the method (of paying
attention in detail to unaware narrow projections of metaphor, and of developing
a thoroughly ‘embodied’, non-metaphysical ‘realism’) of Lakoff and Johnson’s
2 Henceforth PI indicates Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations.
3 For example: just skip 1.2, if you are not in the grip of nor interested in standard
readings of Kuhn.
4 Diamond’s (1991) term, following Wittgenstein himself.
5 See Crary and Read (2000).
Preface ix
(1999) and some of the sensibility of Iain McGilchrist.6 McGilchrist’s (2009) is
especially relevant, in that it beautifully offers, implicitly (and at times I draw this
out somewhat, in what follows in the present work), a way of hearing a difference
between two profoundly-valid ways of hearing the world: roughly, those of normal
science (viz. the left hemisphere of the brain), and those of the synoptic human
being (the right hemisphere). And crucially, it suggests, in a way utterly respectful
of science itself (and indeed deeply based in contemporary neuroscience) that and
how it is literally disastrous to attempt to reduce the latter to the former, as most
visions of ‘social science’ or of ‘les sciences humaines’ tacitly or explicitly do.
(This is one grave example of what McGilchrist describes as happening right across
Western culture, in modern times: the displacement of the holistic and human
approach of the brain acting as nature intended by a more limited atomised model
which, quintessentially, models7 what it sees.8)
The present work has the following overarching structure:
In Part 1 I remind (cf. PI 89, 127) the reader of our paradigms of science: natural
sciences. I outline briefly, that is, some key features of a broadly Wittgensteinian
(Kuhnian, on my reading of Kuhn)9 perspicuous presentation of science, and
attempt to eliminate some key misunderstandings of that presentation and of natural
science. Crucially, I show in some detail that and how ‘Incommensurabilism’ is
not tantamount to Relativism; it is rather about understanding the depth of the
difference between the two cultures being compared, and understanding thus how
easy it is to fail to see one, through seeing it only through the eyes of the other
culture. (This is a lesson that is of crucial import when one comes to subjects
6 I do not here offer any defence (or indeed any significant explication) of Lakoff and
Johnson, or of McGilchrist, as I do offer these of Kuhn and Winch. I simply assume their
general usefulness, and I accentuate the positive in their work for my purposes. If you are
someone who doesn’t find their work reliable, then you can just treat the moments when I
refer to them here as themselves ‘just’ the developing of an appealing and possibly-useful
metaphor(s). Such moments are not a substantive part of my argument in this book. They
are intended as illustrative. (For my own critique of McGilchrist, see my Review of his
(2009), forthcoming in Phenomenology and Cognitive Science.)
7 Cf. my argument in 1.5, below.
8 See especially the final chapter of McGilchrist (2009), which is entitled “The
master betrayed”. (The ‘master’ is the right hemisphere, who has been suborned by his
‘emissary’, the left hemisphere.)
9 See Sharrock and Read (2002, 2003). The latter is reprinted with some updating
as Section 1.5, below. In any case, in the final analysis the question of whether or not
my Wittgensteinian interpretation of Kuhn is right is less important than the substantive
philosophy-of-the-sciences question of the methodological use to which my Kuhn,
this new Wittgensteinian Kuhn, can be and is below put. In the end, philosophy and
methodology always trump exegesis, unless one is content to be merely a scholar. (See
also the close of this Preface, below, and the Concluding Summary to the book, for
development of this point.)