Wittgenstein and the Social Sciences. Robert Vinten

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¹⁸Wittgenstein, On Certainty.

¹⁹P. Hutchinson, R. Read, and W. Sharrock, There Is No Such Thing as a Social Science, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008.

²⁰J. Dupré, ‘Social Science: City Centre or Leafy Suburb’, in Philosophy of the Social Sciences, May 2016.

²¹Baghramian, Relativism.

²²H. J. Glock, ‘Relativism, Commensurability and Translatability’, in John Preston (ed.), Wittgenstein and Reason, Oxford: Blackwell, 2008.

²³C. Robin, The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011.

²⁴G. E. M. Anscombe, Intention, 2nd ed., Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000 [1957].

²⁵P. Winch, ‘Understanding a Primitive Society’, American Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 1, no. 4), pp. 307–24, 1964.

²⁶P. Winch, The Idea of a Social Science and Its Relation to Philosophy, 2nd ed., London: Routledge, 1990 [1958].

²⁷R. Gaita (ed.), Value & Understanding: Essays for Peter Winch, London: Routledge, 1990.

²⁸P. Hutchinson, R. Read, and W. Sharrock, There Is No Such Thing as a Social Science, Abingdon: Ashgate, 2008.

²⁹R. Teichmann, The Philosophy of Elizabeth Anscombe, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.

³⁰P. O’Connor, Morality and Our Complicated Form of Life: Feminist Wittgensteinian Metaethics, University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2008.

³¹C. Robinson, Wittgenstein and Political Theory: The View from Somewhere, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009.

³²M. Temelini, Wittgenstein and the Study of Politics, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015.

³³F. Douglass’s ‘What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?’ is available at https://www.thenation.com/article/what-slave-fourth-july-frederick-douglass/ (accessed 26 May 2018) and is discussed on pp. 132–36 of O’Connor’s Morality and Our Complicated Form of Life.

³⁴O’Connor, Morality and Our Complicated Form of Life, pp. 158–68.

³⁵V. Held, Feminist Morality: Transforming Culture, Society, and Politics, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993.

³⁶O’Connor recommends that we ‘create a moral epistemology that is consistent with much recent work in feminist epistemologies (resisting its reduction or assimilation to an overly scientistic model’ (Morality and Our Complicated Form of Life, p. 5).

³⁷L. Wittgenstein, The Blue and Brown Books, New York: Harper & Row, 1958, p. 18.

³⁸Held recommends that we should ‘proceed not solely on a case-by-case basis (requires some level of generality)’ (cited on p. 5 of Peg O’Connor’s Morality and Our Complicated Forms of Life).

³⁹O’Connor, Morality and Our Complicated Forms of Life, pp. 22–23. On p. 59 she says that ‘neither realism nor antirealism is tenable as a description of the world and their weaknesses trace back to a shared presupposition’.

⁴⁰O’Connor discusses moral epistemology in chapter 6 of Morality and Our Complicated Forms of Life (pp. 113–36) and it is on p. 117 that she says that she favours the expression ‘moral understandings’. For another account, see N. Venturinha, ‘Moral Epistemology, Interpersonal Indeterminacy and Enactivism’, in Jesús Padilla Gálvez (ed.), Action, Decision-Making and Forms of Life, Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2016, pp. 109–20.

⁴¹For example, A. J. Ayer claims that sentences expressing moral judgements ‘are pure expressions of feeling and as such do not come under the category of truth and falsehood. They are unverifiable for the same reason as a cry of pain or a word of command is unverifiable’ (Language, Truth, and Logic, New York: Dover, 1952, pp. 108–9), and John Mackie famously claimed that ‘value statements cannot be either true or false’ (Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong, New York: Penguin, 1977, p. 25).

⁴²See chapter 7 of Morality and Our Complicated Form of Life, pp. 137–68.

⁴³For my own take on J. L. Mackie’s antirealism see R. Vinten, ‘Mackie’s Error Theory: A Wittgensteinian Critique’, Kínesis, vol. 7, no. 13, 2015, pp. 30–47.

⁴⁴O’Connor, Morality and Our Complicated Form of Life, p. 146.