Wittgenstein and the Social Sciences. Robert Vinten

⁶¹Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, §109.

⁶²Ibid., §246, §§250–51, §253.

⁶³S. Zeki, ‘Splendours and Miseries of the Brain’, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, vol. 354, 1999, pp. 2053–65.

⁶⁴P. M. Churchland, ‘Folk Psychology’, in S. Guttenplan (ed.), A Companion to the Philosophy of Mind, Oxford: Blackwell, 1994, pp. 310–11.

⁶⁵Hawking made these claims at Google’s Zeitgeist conference in 2011. See ‘Stephen Hawking Tells Google “Philosophy Is Dead”’, in The Telegraph, 17 May 2011, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/google/8520033/Stephen-Hawking-tells-Google-philosophy-is-dead.html (accessed 24 October 2016).

⁶⁶L. Wittgenstein, Big Typescript, pp. 423–24 (page 312e of The Big Typescript: TS 213, German-English Scholars’ edition, edited and translated by C. Grant Luckhardt and Maximilian A. E. Aue, Oxford: Blackwell, 2005).

⁶⁷Ibid., 220, §111.

⁶⁸Wittgenstein, Blue and Brown Books, p. 26.

⁶⁹Wittgenstein, On Certainty.

⁷⁰See, e.g. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, §246.

⁷¹Ibid., p. 404.

⁷²In Chapter 7 I will look in more depth at problems with eliminativism – the philosophical approach of Paul Churchland and Patricia Churchland.

⁷³See Bennett and Hacker, Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience, pp. 376–77, where they develop this criticism of Churchland and present other similar criticisms. There are detailed objections to both Zeki and Churchland on pp. 366–77 and 396–407 of Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience.

⁷⁴See Bennett and Hacker, Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience, p. 373, for a discussion of progress in psychology.

⁷⁵See chapter 2 of W. Köhler, Gestalt Psychology, Liveright: New York, 1929.

⁷⁶L. Wittgenstein, ‘Philosophy of Psychology – A Fragment’, in Philosophical Investigations, 4th edition, §371.

⁷⁷L. Wittgenstein, Last Writings on the Philosophy of Psychology, vol. 1, edited by G. H. Von Wright and H. Nyman, translated by C. G. Luckhardt and M. A. E. Aue, Blackwell: Oxford, 1982, §767.

⁷⁸L. Wittgenstein, Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology, vol. 1, edited by G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. Von Wright, translated by G. E. M. Anscombe, Blackwell: Oxford, 1980, §1066–68.

⁷⁹Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, §246.

⁸⁰J. Dupré, ‘Social Science: City Center or Leafy Suburb’, Philosophy of the Social Sciences, May 2016, pp. 8–9. Dupré asks, ‘Is there […] anything in principle unscientific about the delineation of the rules that exist in a particular society?’ and answers, ‘I cannot see why. Language is profoundly normative, but this does not make the science of linguistics impossible.’

⁸¹See, e.g. ‘The War against Humanities at Britain’s Universities’, in The Guardian, 29 March 2015, https://www.theguardian.com/education/2015/mar/29/war-against-humanities-at-britains-universities (accessed 26 September 2016).

⁸²F. R. Leavis, ‘Two Cultures? The Significance of C. P. Snow (1962)’, in Two Cultures? The Significance of C. P. Snow with an introduction by Stefan Collini, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 73–74.

⁸³R. Backhouse, The Puzzle of Modern Economics: Science or Ideology?, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010.

⁸⁴H-J Chang, Economics: The User’s Guide, London: Pelican Books, 2014, p. 5.

⁸⁵C. T. Blair-Broeker, R. M. Ernst, and D. G. Myers, Thinking about Psychology: The Science of Mind and Behavior, New York: Worth Publishers, 2007.

⁸⁶Z Dienes, Understanding Psychology as a Science: An Introduction to Scientific and Statistical Inference, Basingstoke: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2008.

⁸⁷The British Wittgenstein conference at which John Dupré presented the paper I have mentioned was given the title ‘Wittgenstein and the Social Sciences’ (see http://www.britishwittgensteinsociety.org/news/annual-conference/20–2, accessed 22 October 2016).

⁸⁸Interestingly, even Hutchinson, Read, and Sharrock suggest that it doesn’t matter whether social studies get called social sciences ‘so long as one keeps a clear view of what is thus named, and what its character is’, ibid., p. 51.

       Chapter 2

       WITTGENSTEIN AND RELATIVISM

      2.1Introduction

      Ludwig Wittgenstein has been accused of being a relativist by various philosophers. In this chapter I will focus particularly on accusations of cognitive relativism levelled at Wittgenstein by Roger Trigg. Accusations of relativism, of various sorts, have been thought to undermine Wittgenstein’s philosophical approach.¹ However, there are some philosophers, such as Robert Arrington, Natalie Alana Ashton, Gordon