Wittgenstein and the Social Sciences. Robert Vinten

in the chapter do not demonstrate that any broad ideological conclusions follow from Wittgenstein’s philosophical remarks.

      In Chapter 5 I look at the relationship between Wittgensteinian philosophy and Marxist philosophy, focusing on the work of two English Marxists: Perry Anderson and Alex Callinicos. Both of them have produced excellent work in political theory, cultural theory, and philosophy. However, they have both misinterpreted the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein. I argue that Wittgenstein’s conception of philosophy is not in tension with Marxist philosophy in the ways that they suggest and that Wittgenstein did not make the errors attributed to him by Anderson and Callinicos. Marxists would benefit from taking Wittgenstein’s work more seriously because it would help them to see the nature of epistemological and metaphysical problems more clearly and would complement and enrich their own accounts of philosophical confusion. One political implication of Wittgenstein’s philosophical remarks that I identify in the chapter is that we can get rid of philosophical problems by changing society, by making changes to our practical life.

The sixth chapter focuses on the work of another Marxist, the cultural theorist Terry Eagleton. The influence of Wittgenstein’s work on Eagleton’s oeuvre is clearer than in the case of Anderson and Callinicos. He wrote the script for a film about Wittgenstein’s life and work,¹³ wrote a novel which included Wittgenstein as a character,¹⁴ and his work in literary theory and cultural theory more generally is clearly indebted to Wittgenstein to at least some extent. His recent book Materialism combined insights from Marx and Wittgenstein (as well as the work of other philosophers, such as Nietzsche).¹⁵ In the chapter about Eagleton I look at his article ‘Wittgenstein’s Friends’ and argue that his account of Wittgenstein there is flawed. His criticisms of Wittgenstein do not hit their target. I then go on to look at his more recent book about materialism and suggest that Eagleton also misrepresents Wittgenstein’s work there.

      The final two chapters form the third part of the book and they look at applications of Wittgenstein’s philosophical remarks to particular problems that have arisen in the work of political philosophers: the problem of freedom of the will (including problems about self-control and responsibility) and problems concerning justice.

In the seventh chapter I argue that Wittgenstein’s grammatical remarks about psychological concepts as well as his remarks about philosophical methodology can help to dissolve conceptual problems that are clearly relevant to political philosophy. My focus in that chapter will be on Patricia Churchland and Christopher Suhler’s paper ‘Control: Conscious and Otherwise’,¹⁶ where they formulate what they think of as a neurobiological account of control. They do so in an attempt to tackle problems about the extent to which we ought to hold people responsible in cases where they are not conscious of the way in which circumstances affect their choices. Some philosophers and cognitive scientists have argued that empirical research shows that circumstances have such a large impact on people’s choices that we ought to say that a person’s control over what they do in many cases is very limited. Given the lack of control we ought not to hold people responsible for their actions to the extent that we do. This is known as the ‘Frail Control’ hypothesis and Churchland and Suhler think that their account of control undermines it.

      The debate clearly has implications concerning questions of justice in society – implications concerning the way in which we ought to hold people accountable for the things they do. It is also clearly a version of old problems about freedom of the will. Wittgenstein’s philosophical remarks can help clarify the terms in which the debate is conducted and to untangle some of the conceptual confusions involved. Churchland and Suhler are right to challenge the Frail Control hypothesis and some of their conclusions are correct. However, the arguments they use to get to their conclusions are confused in various ways. The aim of the seventh chapter is to suggest that Wittgenstein’s remarks can help us to dissolve confusions surrounding problems about freedom of the will – help us to achieve clarity. A better understanding of Wittgenstein’s philosophy can help us achieve a better understanding of political philosophy.

The eighth and final chapter is focused on the question of justice. In the first half of the chapter I look at ways in which we might get clearer about the concept ‘justice’ and I use insights gleaned from Hanna Pitkin’s Wittgenstein and Justice¹⁷ in doing that. In the second half of the chapter I look at whether Wittgenstein’s philosophical remarks imply that we should adopt a particular conception of justice and I argue that although his remarks do not imply that we should accept a particular conception of justice his remarks do nonetheless imply that we should reject certain conceptions of justice for making unwarranted assumptions or for having confused conceptions of practical rationality.

Within Chapter 8 I also look at some remarks that Wittgenstein made in On Certainty¹⁸ and I suggest that Wittgenstein has things to teach us about the form that political disagreements might take. Political disagreements may well not just involve conflicts of opinion; they might also involve disagreements in evidential standards, disagreements about concepts, or perhaps even a difference in worldview. I conclude that although Wittgenstein acknowledges that disagreement, contestation, or rebellion have a role to play throughout our normative practices, this does not imply that his philosophical remarks are suggestive of a particular form that society should take. In particular I do not think that Wittgenstein’s remarks provide support for the kind of pluralistic democracy favoured by Chantal Mouffe and José Medina. However, I think that the tools Wittgenstein provided us with can be used to help us to understand oppression and injustice and suggest ways in which that might be done.

      0.2How Is This Book Different to Other Books about Wittgenstein and Social Science?

There are already several book-length discussions of Wittgenstein’s relation to social and political theory. In this part of the introduction I would like to make clear where my own work differs from other book-length treatments of these questions. One obvious difference between the work in this book and earlier treatments of the topic, such as Hanna Pitkin’s Wittgenstein and Justice, John W. Danford’s Wittgenstein and Political Philosophy, and Susan Easton’s Humanist Marxism and Wittgensteinian Social Philosophy, is that much of the work discussed here has been written in the past two decades. For example, in the first chapter, about social science, I discuss recent work from Phil Hutchinson, Rupert Read, Wes Sharrock,¹⁹ and John Dupré.²⁰ In the second chapter I discuss recent work on relativism from Maria Baghramian²¹ and Hans-Johann Glock.²² In the third chapter I make use of Corey Robin’s recent book The Reactionary Mind²³ in defining conservatism. It should also be clear that the topics I focus on in this book differ from those earlier writers.

Other, hugely influential, figures I should mention from the (broadly speaking, Wittgensteinian) philosophy of social sciences and philosophy of action are G. E. M. Ancombe and Peter Winch, who both published highly influential works in the late 1950s, soon after the publication of the Philosophical Investigations. I have discussed their work in a few places within this book but I did not want to say more about them since there is already a very large literature discussing both philosopher’s work. I hope my indebtedness to their groundbreaking work is clear (as well as my disagreements with contemporary Winchians such as Hutchinson, Read, and Sharrock). I would recommend reading classic works like Ancombe’s Intention,²⁴