Wittgenstein and the Social Sciences. Robert Vinten

²²‘Scientific Reduction’, http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/scientific-reduction/, accessed 29 August 2016.

²³F. Crick, The Astonishing Hypothesis, London: Touchstone, 1995, p. 3.

²⁴Ibid., p. 7.

²⁵This is what is known as ‘classical reductionism’, and the classic formulation of it is Paul Oppenheim and Hilary Putnam’s ‘The Unity of Science as a Working Hypothesis’, in H. Feigl et al. (eds), Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol. 2, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1958.

²⁶See, e.g. C. Blakemore, The Mind Machine, London: BBC Publications, 1988, pp. 270–72.

²⁷However, it is worth noting that one can be a materialist without being a reductionist and one can be a reductionist without being a materialist. Berkeley, an idealist, thought that everything reduces to minds and ideas.

²⁸This will be discussed in the following section.

²⁹Bennett and Hacker Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience, p. 358.

³⁰Bennett and Hacker’s discussion of materialism leans on John Dupré’s discussion of materialism in The Disorder of Things. Dupré discusses and rejects several versions of materialism in his chapter on reduction and materialism (J. Dupré, The Disorder of Things, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993, pp. 89–94).

³¹See Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, §149.

³²Ibid., §150.

³³Bennett and Hacker, Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience, pp. 360–61.

³⁴See Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, §281: ‘Only of a living human being and what resembles (behaves like) a living human being can one say: it has sensations; it sees; is blind; hears; is deaf; is conscious or unconscious.’

³⁵Dupré, The Disorder of Things, 107–20.

³⁶Ibid., pp. 121–45.

³⁷Wittgenstein, Blue and Brown Books, p. 18.

³⁸Ibid.

³⁹P. Winch, The Idea of a Social Science and Its Relation to Philosophy, London: Routledge, p. 60.

⁴⁰Ibid., p. 62.

⁴¹D. Davidson, ‘Actions, Reasons, and Causes’, Journal of Philosophy, vol. 60, no. 23, 1963, pp. 685–700.

⁴²See, e.g. G. D’Oro and C. Sandis, Reasons and Causes: Causalism and Anti-Causalism in the Philosophy of Action, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013; and J. Tanney, Rules, Reason, and Self-Knowledge, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013.

⁴³Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, §225.

⁴⁴Winch, Idea of a Social Science, p. 84.

⁴⁵Ibid., p. 87.

⁴⁶Ibid., p. 88.

⁴⁷Davidson, ‘Actions, Reasons, and Causes’, p. 685.

⁴⁸Ibid., p. 691.

⁴⁹Ibid., p. 691.

⁵⁰Ibid., p. 692.

⁵¹Ibid.

⁵²Tanney, Rules, Reason, and Self-Knowledge.

⁵³The article forms chapter 5 of Rules, Reason, and Self-Knowledge, pp. 103–32.

⁵⁴Tanney, Rules, Reason, and Self-Knowledge, p. 109.

⁵⁵This paper was originally published in C. Sandis (ed.), New Essays on the Explanation of Action, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009, pp. 94–111, and was reprinted as chapter 7 of Rules, Reason, and Self-Knowledge, pp. 149–70.

⁵⁶Tanney, Rules, Reason, and Self-Knowledge, p. 154.

⁵⁷Ibid., pp. 156–57.

⁵⁸As I mentioned in the introduction, Peg O’Connor objects to metaethical theories for their scientism with regard to the role that they give to causation. She notes that within metaethics ‘there is a tendency to assimilate reasons to causes … Reasons and causes, however, have very different aims and play very different roles in our lives’. See her Morality and Our Complicated Form of Life, University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, pp. 115–17.

⁵⁹Neurath, ‘Physicalism’, p. 50.

⁶⁰See