Wittgenstein, Anti-foundationalism, Technoscience and Philosophy of Education

An Educational Philosophy and Theory Reader Volume VIII

Michael A. Peters

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780367861254
• eBook ISBN: 9781000028003
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This book is a collection of essays motivated by a "cultural" and biographical reading of Wittgenstein. It includes some new essays and some that were originally published in Educational Philosophy and Theory. The book focuses on the concept of "technoscience", and the relevance of Wittgenstein's work for philosophy of technology which amplifies Lyotard's reading and provides a critique of education as an increasingly technology-led enterprise. It includes a distinctive view on the ethics of reading Wittgenstein and the ethics of suicide that shaped him. It also examines the reception and engagement with Wittgenstein's work in French philosophy with a chapter on post-analytic philosophy of education as a choice between Richard Rorty and Jean-François Lyotard. Peters examines Wittgenstein's academic life at Cambridge University and his involvement as a student and faculty member in the Moral Sciences Club. Finally, the book provides an understanding of Wittgensteinian styles of reasoning and the concept of worldview. Is it possible to escape the picture that holds us captive? This constitutes a challenging introduction to Wittgenstein's work for academics, researchers and postgraduate students in the fields of education, technology and philosophy.

Chapter 1

Wittgenstein, Lyotard and the philosophy of technoscience

The truly apocalyptic view of the world is that things do not repeat themselves. It isn’t absurd, e.g., to believe that the age of science and technology is the beginning of the end for humanity; that the idea of great progress is a delusion, along with the idea that the truth will ultimately be known; that there is nothing good or desirable about scientific knowledge and that mankind, in seeking it, is falling into a trap. It is by no means obvious that this is not how things are.

– Ludwig Wittgenstein (1980), Culture and Value, p. 56e

An accidental reading: Wittgenstein–Lyotard

Sometimes decisions about what to read especially as a younger scholar are determining for one’s entire intellectual trajectory. Systematic approaches to courses and reading lists belie the accidental reading of a text that excites the imagination and somehow combines or blends with other interests to suggest new research directions. This is certainly the case for me. Immediately after completing a PhD thesis on a Wittgenstein and the problem of rationality (Peters 1984) I accidentally discovered Lyotard’s use of Wittgenstein’s concept of language games that I used to articulate the concept of the “postmodern condition” as a context for investigating fundamental changes to science and the role of the university (Peters 1989). Lyotard’s use of Wittgenstein “language games” was a major creative move in the reception of Wittgenstein’s thought in France, in the same way that Wittgenstein had influenced Habermas’s discourse theory in the 1980s. In my PhD I had argued that the loss of faith in science as the paradigm of rationality and in philosophy as the foundational discipline concerned to provide universal standards of rationality valid for all actual and possible claims to knowledge has forced a re-evaluation of the nature of rationality. I contrasted rationality construed as a mode or method which will lead to knowledge and truth and rationality construed as constitutive of any sustaining system of beliefs, the latter I argued was a notion that is closely allied to considerations such as intelligibility and the implicit norms of different realms of discourse. I wrote:

Of these two notions, the former can be seen as embodying the traditional and fundamental claim of philosophy to underwrite the rationality of knowledge and belief systems. It has been given a formal, algorithmic character and tends to be associated with absolutist [universal] and foundationalist conceptions of knowledge. Often it is seen to presuppose some version of the correspondence theory of truth. Typically, adherents of this view assume a justified true belief account of knowledge so that rationality is seen to consist in holding only those claims that are justifiable.

On the other hand, I argued that the constitutive notion is associated with anti-foundationist and fallibilist accounts of knowledge, especially those, which emphasize a theoretical or epistemological holism, and is associated with anti-foundationist and fallibilist accounts of knowledge, especially those, which emphasize a theoretical or epistemological holism, and is often seen to presuppose a coherentist or instrumentalist version of truth. As explained earlier, sometimes critics suggest that this notion is ‘relativist’ because there is no foundationalist absolute or independent standard to adjudicate between competing claims. Those who accept the constitutive notion of rationality notion often embrace an account of meaning and language that emphasise a form of coherentism or contextualism where beliefs are seen as part of a language-dependent system or web of belief. On this view there is no meta-language within which to resolve questions of rationality. Indeed, there is only language, according to Wittgenstein, which is an infinite set of ‘language-games’ embedded in social practices beyond which we cannot go in terms of the justification of belief. As a meta-interpretive or hermeneutical principle in general, I suggested that it was consistent to view Wittgenstein in his native Viennese context at the turn of the century and at the break-up of the Habsburg Empire, when the national independence movement reached its peak in the early twentieth century. I argued, following Janik and Toulmin’s (1973) path-breaking book Wittgenstein’s Vienna, that Wittgenstein needs to be understood in term of his native Vienna and the Austrian mind (Schorske 1980; Johnston 1983). The fin-de-siècle movement of Viennese Succession (based on Klimt, Moser, Hoffman, Wagner and others) provided the visual presentation of Vienna around 1900, contributed to an intellectual flowering inspiring such thinkers as Mach, Buber, Freud, Brentano, Husserl, Lucas and, of course, Wittgenstein, Kraus and Mauthner. It was a sociology of intellectual history that helped to contextualize “Wittgenstein’s Vienna” and to attest to an underlying anti-fundamentalist contextualist epistemology. Lyotard more so than any analytic philosophers I have read understood the importance of cultural and intellectual background of Wittgenstein. A big part of my academic life has been pretty well determined by this “accidental” reading of Wittgenstein and Lyotard. I have been crossing the boundaries between them ever since.

In an essay entitled “Philosophy and Education: ‘After’ Wittgenstein” (Peters 1995a) I developed an argument that suggested that Wittgenstein can be seen as embracing a Spenglerian view of philosophy as a form of cultural criticism and as exhibiting important precursor elements in his thinking which mark him out as a philosopher who anticipated central aspects of the current debate surrounding the re-evaluation of the culture of modernity. I emphasized the creative appropriation of Wittgenstein’s notion of language games by Jean-François Lyotard, in order to argue the case for the “postmodern condition.” I also suggested that Lyotard self-consciously sites his work as taking place “after” Wittgenstein. Lyotard’s creative appropriation of Wittgenstein, I argued, provides the starting-point for a philosophy of education that can seriously engage the analytic-Continental and the modernity-postmodernity divides. Later in various publications I argued that Wittgenstein and Lyotard developed their philosophies as a response to the question of nihilism, the legitimation of knowledge and the crisis of foundationalism and language (Peters & Marshall 1999; Peters 2006). I corresponded with Lyotard for a year – he always wrote in long-hand and in French – before he consented to write a brief Foreword to my edited collection Education and the Postmodern Condition (Peters 1995b). I had arranged to meet him through Bill Readings, who had translated Lyotard’s Political Writings which he asked me to review for his journal Surfaces. In the review I linked Lyotard to Wittgenstein’s anti-scientism:

In “Wittgenstein ‘After’” (Chapter 5) Lyotard acknowledges the way in which his thinking takes place “after,” and links up with Wittgenstein, clarifying the diversity and incommensurability of language games as Wittgenstein’s response to the general sense of nihilism and delegitimation characterizing European culture following the Second World War. The transition from “language games” to “phrase regimes” and their linkages, therefore, is Lyotard’s major innovation and response to the ethico-political demands following the loss of innocence in a time “diseased by language” and dominated by “industrial technoscience.”

(Peters 1995c)

Bill Readings had invited me to the University of Montreal to give a paper on Hermann Hesse’s Glass Bead Game as a prototype of the internet. It wasn’t to be because Bill Readings died in a small plane accident a couple of months before I was to arrive in Montreal.

Lyotard understood Wittgenstein’s anti-scientism and the claim that the scientific method is superior to all other means of learning or gaining knowledge. Wittgenstein negative cultural outlook was conditioned by Spengler’s The Decline of the West (1926), as von Wright has noted, and others like Beale and Kidd (2017) who suggest that Wittgenstein’s anti-scientism “sheds light upon and reveals connections between some of the central areas of his thinking” (p. 5). Wittgenstein held a negative attitude about the role of science in modern civilization and its overwhelming confidence that it can resolve all problems and that it is only a matter of time before it extends its frontiers to encompass the whole of life. Wittgenstein’s anti-scientism that characterizes his view of modern civilization is the cultural outlook that connects the broader issues of naturalism and empiricism. As Anna Boncompagni (2018) points out in a review of Beale and Kidd (2017), scientism for Wittgenstein also carries the corollaries:

science has the right, if not the duty, to extend its dominion into any territory; the scientific method is “the” method of inquiry par excellence; other disciplines, if they are to attain knowledge at all, ought to conform to the scientific method; any domain of human experience can and should be reduced to the natural, empirical domain of science

(https://ndpr.nd.edu/news/wittgenstein-and-scientism/)

Wittgenstein’s anti-scientism also conditions those that embrace his work in philosophy of science and interprets Wittgenstein’s skepticism as a broad reevaluation not only of logicism, the search for a pure language, but also a repudiation of the principles of logical positivism or empiricism that, ironically, the Tractatus had helped to inspire. Wittgenstein shied away from the scientific worldview that positivist like Schlick and Neurath had made central the manifestos of the Vienna Circle. Wittgenstein’s Tractatus as one of the origins of analytic philosophy had inclined members of the Circle to accept the correspondence theory of truth and also conditioned the search for a verificationist concept of meaning encapsulated in Wittgenstein’s dictum “What can be said at all, can be said clearly.” In this light Popper, on the fringe of the circle, sought a demarcation between metaphysical and scientific statements to arrive at the concept of falsification (based on a understanding of the problem of logic of induction). Even the Wittgenstein of the Tractatus displayed an antiscientism in suggesting that in that work he was concerned to seek a demarcation of ethics from the verifiable statements of natural science. Where Wittgenstein was interested in the “unsayable” and “ineffable” the positivists were exploring the ramifications of an empiricist theory of meaning. By the time that Wittgenstein was persuaded to rejoin the circle by Ramsey after giving up philosophy and teaching for seven years, Wittgenstein had returned to Cambridge and philosophy in 1929 and also had begun to question seriously his earlier doctrine and the fundamental tenets of logical positivism.

Wittgenstein’s anti-scientism also elucidates new work on Wittgenstein and technology as the editors of a special issue of Techné: Research in Philosophy and Technology indicate in a recent call for papers:

Few philosophers of technology enlist Wittgenstein’s work when thinking about technology, and scholars of Wittgenstein pay scant attention to remarks about technology in his work. This double neglect of (aspects of) Wittgenstein’s work is symptomatic of a more general gap between philosophy of language and philosophy of technology. This special issue of Techné: Research in Philosophy of Technology, entitled “Wittgenstein and Philosophy of Technology,” aims to close these gaps with innovative research papers that use Wittgenstein to conceptually develop existing investigations in philosophy of technology and/or to better understand and evaluate technologies in the 21st century.

(https://funkmichael.com/cfp-techne-special-issue-wittgenstein-and-philosophy-of-technology/)

Wittgenstein and philosophy of technology gave a kind of basis for an interpretation of technoscience. Don Ihde (2009), the distinguished philosopher of technology, uses the concept “technoscience” to argue for the relativity of knowledge to technologies, a view of the entanglement of science and technology now widely accepted in philosophy of science. Ihde (2009), influenced by Wittgenstein, wants to examine scientific practices historically and the ways in which these construct the knowledge. He describes his approach to technology as “empirical” by which he means that he attends to the history of actual technologies and he contrasts his empirical approach with previous accounts of technology that tended to be transcendental with a focus on technology as though it were a single, reified thing. Such a position allows him to contrast industrial technology with the way electronic communication and information technologies seem to differ by through a focus on users in connection with one another.

Ihde and Evan Selinger (2003) edited the collection Chasing Technoscience: Matrix for Materiality, focusing on the work of Bruno Latour, Donna Harraway, Andrew Pickering and Don Ihde who provides an introduction to the development of the philosophy of technology in the 1980s with the publications of his own Technics and Praxis (Ihde 1979) and Latour and Woolgar’s (1979) Laboratory Life. The use of the term “technoscience” focused on political interventions and their relations to social movements charting the rise of philosophy of technology, radical science, the sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK), and more recently, the growth of Open Science. This convergence share the assumption influenced strongly by Wittgenstein that the scholars should study of actual production of scientific knowledge in practice. SSK was built on the basis of Wittgenstein’s work developed further by Mary Douglas, Mary Hesse and Thomas Kuhn. The “strong programme” was developed by David Bloor and Barry Barnes at the University of Edinburgh in the 1970s as a post-Kuhnian, Wittgenstein-inspired program (Barnes, Bloor, & Henry 1996; Bloor 1997) and Harry Collins at Bath. This convergence of shared assumptions of materiality, actual practice and the importance of historical studies were further enhanced by the anthropology and ethnomethodology of science and the feminist studies of science by Sandra Harding and Donna Harraway. Ihde singles out Steven Sharpin and Simon Schafer’s (1985) Leviathan and the Air Pump: Hobbes, Boyle and the Experimental Life as the strategic text that was among the first to examine the social formation of science.

The history of technoscience suggests a shift away from a theory of applied science model to one where new digital technologies blur the boundaries with science. Channell (2017) claims that science and technology are indistinguishable from each other partly because they are symbiotic and interdependent rather than one being dependent of the other. However, some scholars argue that in the second half of the twentieth century in the shift from industrial to digital technologies, science has become subsumed by technology (Forman 2007). It’s not my pu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Previously published chapters
• Introduction: truth, value and the philosopher as cultural physician
• 1. Wittgenstein, Lyotard and the philosophy of technoscience
• 2. The ethics of reading Wittgenstein
• 3. Wittgenstein as exile: a philosophical topography
• 4. Wittgenstein and the ethics of suicide: homosexuality and Jewish self-hatred in fin de siècle Vienna
• 5. Wittgenstein and post-analytic philosophy of education: Rorty or Lyotard?
• 6. Wittgenstein at Cambridge: philosophy as a way of life
• 7. “A picture holds us captive”: Wittgenstein and the German tradition of Weltanschuung
• 8. Philosophy as pedagogy: Wittgenstein’s styles of thinking
• 9. Kinds of thinking, styles of reasoning
• Postscript: Wittgenstein’s anti-philosophy
• Index