Wittgenstein among the Sciences

Wittgensteinian Investigations into the 'Scientific Method'

Rupert Read, Edited by Simon Summers

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781134770304
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Engaging with the question of the extent to which the so-called human, economic or social sciences are actually sciences, this book moves away from the search for a criterion or definition that will allow us to sharply distinguish the scientific from the non-scientific. Instead, the book favours the pursuit of clarity with regard to the various enterprises undertaken by human beings, with a view to dissolving the felt need for such a demarcation. In other words, Read pursues a 'therapeutic' approach to the issue of the status and nature of these subjects. Discussing the work of Kuhn, Winch and Wittgenstein in relation to fundamental question of methodology, 'Wittgenstein among the Sciences' undertakes an examination of the nature of (natural) science itself, in the light of which a series of successive cases of putatively scientific disciplines are analysed. A novel and significant contribution to social science methodology and the philosophy of science and 'the human sciences', this book will be of interest to social scientists and philosophers, as well as to psychiatrists, economists and cognitive scientists.

PART 1
Wittgenstein, Kuhn and Natural Science

Science: A Perspicuous Presentation

It is fundamental to [the concept of ‘necessary distance’] that it is what actually brings one into connection with that from which one is appropriately distanced; it is not a distancing that separates. Necessary distance is what makes empathy possible.

Iain McGilchrist, The Master and his Emissary: 282.

1.1 Is Kuhn the Wittgenstein of the Sciences?¹

To the different networks correspond different systems of describing the world. Mechanics determines a form of description by saying: All propositions in the description of the world must be obtained in a given way from a number of given propositions – the mechanical axioms.

Ludwig Wittgenstein, TL-P, 6.341.

In this Section, which is among other things an ‘introductory’ Section to and of this, Part 1, I remind the reader of the explicit presence in Kuhn of elements of a therapeutic understanding of the process of science itself, at times when science gets ‘ill’. I then offer a reading of the most controversial chapter of Structure of Scientific Revolutions² (on ‘world-changes’) highlighting the delicately therapeutic manner in which it is written, a manner of careful composition which draws the sting from the still-widespread uncharitable reading of that chapter as committing Kuhn to (what would be clearly un-Wittgensteinian) a substantive semantic relativism. If my reading is successful, it defeats the strongest textual evidence there is for a problematically relativist reading of Kuhn.

Thus 1.1 assembles crucial evidence for Kuhn as a therapeutic thinker in a more or less Wittgensteinian mold, and suggests some reason for thinking of Kuhn as a truly Wittgensteinian philosopher of science. This sets the scene for the remainder of Part 1, and to some extent for the book as a whole, insofar as what the book is concerned with is an assessment of the extent to which it is helpful to regard a variety of disciplines as ‘science(s)’.

This book is called Wittgenstein among the Sciences. In relation to the philosophy of (natural) science, I propose to take Kuhn as a kind of proxy for Wittgenstein. So, in making such a proposal reasonably initially-plausible, it is reasonable for the reader to expect me to have something at least to say about the following question: How was Kuhn influenced by Wittgenstein?

The evidence suggests that Kuhn learned a huge amount from the greatest Wittgensteinian philosopher of our time, and just possibly the greatest living philosopher, his own-time colleague, Stanley Cavell. Look for instance at page 297 of the interview with Kuhn in The Road since Structure: ‘extraordinarily important’ (emphasis in the original), is how Kuhn describes Cavell’s early influence on him, while they were both young bloods. (It’s true, Cavell was mostly ‘Austinian’ then, in those young days; but he was already understanding Austin in a fairly Wittgensteinian way (as we New Wittgensteinians, for example Crary (2002), believe Austin is best understood). Kuhn picked up on Wittgenstein from Cavell, from Hansen, from Feyerabend, and from the general intellectual zeitgeist of the time and place. One should bear in mind also the crucial moment when Kuhn cites Wittgenstein, a few chapters into SSR, in the section called ‘The priority of paradigms’. This is a really important influence, in itself: because of the utter centrality of paradigms to Kuhn’s philosophy of science. Kindi (1995) and Jean-Paul Narboux are among those who have rightly made a great deal of this connection. The point that Kindi and Narboux both make at length is not just about affinities. It is about how crucial that explicitly Wittgensteinian moment in SSR is for Kuhn’s whole – broadly Wittgensteinian – project.

But, more than these historical points, the affinities between Kuhn and his great predecessor Wittgenstein are, I want to say, evident. Take for instance the closing paragraph of ‘Reflections on my critics’ in Kuhn (2000):

What each participant in a communication breakdown has found is a way to translate the other’s theory into his own language and simultaneously to describe the world in which that theory or language applies. Without at least preliminary steps in that direction, there would be no process that one were even tempted to describe as theory choice. Arbitrary conversion (except that I doubt the existence of such a thing in any aspect of life) would be all that was involved. Note, however, that the possibility of translation does not make the term ‘conversion’ inappropriate. In the absence of a neutral language, the choice of a new theory is a decision to adopt a different native language and to deploy it in a correspondingly different world. That sort of transition is, however, not one which the terms ‘choice’ and ‘decision’ quite fit, though the reasons for wanting to apply them after the event are clear. Exploring an alternative theory., one is likely to find that one is already using it (as one suddenly notes that one is thinking in, not translating out of, a foreign language). At no point was one aware of having reached a decision, made a choice. That sort of change is, however, conversion, and the techniques which induce it may well be described as therapeutic, if only because, when they succeed, one learns one had been sick before. No wonder the techniques are resisted and the nature of the change disguised in later reports (Kuhn, 2000: 174).

This passage is exemplary of the concentrated brilliance of Kuhn’s writing, and of the depth of his own quite distinctive contributions to the philosophy of science (e.g. the explanation of why the history of science tends to read as if there have not been scientific revolutions). It also evidences something that will be important to us in the Sections to follow: Kuhn’s (sometimes slightly desperate) wish to make himself comprehensible (on their own terms) to the ‘Analytic’ philosophers by whom he was most harshly criticised.

The passage also makes visible a whole series of inheritances from or (at the least) deep parallels with/affinities to the philosophy of Wittgenstein:

• The emphasis on the real possibility of communication breakdown, but further the possibility that some such breakdowns are productive of a new understanding;

• the open willingness to entertain or utter words (phrases, sentences) that are provocative or even paradoxical, together with the repudiation of immodest, dogmatic readings of those words;

• the repudiation of objectivist fantasies and the permission of conceptual difference, without the commission of relativist theorising;

• great care over the words we do use, and over the words we want to use – and over their limits;

• the prioritisation of practice, even when what is being practiced is a theory, or theorisation;

• and lastly, and most strikingly of all, a metaphor of illness, an emphasis on the variety of methods by which one may try to cure oneself (or others), and an explicitly therapeutic conception of such cure.

The passage helps one to see the fundamental point that Sharrock and I were urging in our Wittgensteinian reading of Kuhn, in our book: that Wittgenstein can help one to understand that Kuhn doesn’t threaten the objectivity of science.

We should pause a moment, however, before proceeding to identify Kuhn and Wittgenstein too closely, and perhaps even calling Kuhn a ‘Wittgenstein of the sciences.’ For while Wittgenstein more or less identifies himself as a midwife of change in philosophy (in oneself), as a therapist (albeit one who, like Freud, has to cure himself as well as, or perhaps before, curing others), the analogous or parallel figure in the quotation just examined is not Kuhn, but rather the scientist at the point of crisis and transition. It is the scientist at a moment of extraordinary or revolutionary (conceptual) change who may describe his earlier self or his old paradigm as having been sick, monstrous, or an unhealthy or unholy mess.

This of course should not actually surprise us: Kuhn always made it clear that, if science ever resembled philosophy, it resembled it somewhat at the moments of crisis; whereas (for example) Popper wanted science to be like philosophy, in the sense of always starting from ground-zero, and always being revolutionary.

So: Is the new, radical, (non-)philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein to be found, ‘in disguise’, in Kuhn’s philosophy of the sciences? That is the overarching question of this Section.

Kuhn’s primary reputation is as the great leveler, reducing natural science to the level of all other disciplines. And, in other words: as the great relativist, holding that whatever view of the world works for a given discipline at a given time is the truth. Kuhn has certainly gone down in sociological and post-modern circles in roughly this way³ and so, very often, has Wittgenstein, such that it might well seem that Kuhn is indeed a Wittgenstein of the sciences. My argument is that there is at least some good reason to hold the italicised thesis to be the case – but absolutely not for the reason so far sketched in this paragraph.

Kuhn is a very different figure from the almost cartoon-character that his ‘foes’ and ‘fans’ both depict.⁴ In my understanding, Kuhn’s fundamental task was simply to understand – or rather, better, to find a mode of presentation that would ultimately avoid misunderstanding – the nature of science, including, of course, scientific change both minor and major. He wanted, if you like, to return us to science, (yet) to leave science as it actually is;⁵ science as we are returned to it is probably not science as we ever succeeded in seeing it before reading Kuhn. Yet it is science as it (actually) is. Kuhn, for the first time ever, offers us successfully, I believe, a historically-valid picture of the whole of science. Not just a formalistic caricature of normal science (as with Positivism), nor a formalistic caricature of revolutionary science (as with Falsificationism). Rather, a non-caricatural, historically based, philosophically subtle and modest account of (the totality of the concept of) science.

The main thing I want to address here – in this Section, and in the remainder of Part One of this book – is the issue which, to many readers, has appeared to be the biggest problem with the attribution to Kuhn of a modest, properly ‘Wittgensteinian’, approach, of a leaving of science ‘as it is’, of a refraining from substantive metaphysical or even epistemological commitments. That big problem is encapsulated in the famous moments in SSR when Kuhn has appeared most strongly to violate such a counsel of modesty: namely, in his discussion of ‘world changes’. For many of his readers, in talking of the world changing when science changes – through ‘scientific revolution,’ – Kuhn has fallen into some kind of metaphysical relativism, or pluralistic idealism.

Most of what I suggest below is in fact very elementary. I am simply going to read some of the most troubling passages in SSR, (Section X), Revolutions as changes of world view. The reader may find it helpful to have the book open in front of them, at the relevant pages. I shall attempt to see if whether those passages can be understood in the modest way I have suggested, without committing Kuhn to a form of metaphysical relativism or such like.⁶

Let us begin with pages 110–111 of SSR. This is where Kuhn first starts to say things that have sounded very strange to many: ‘I have so far argued only that paradigms are constitutive of science. Now I wish to display a sense in which they are constitutive of nature as well’ (Emphasis added).

Note what Kuhn does not say here. He does not say, for instance, ‘Now I wish to explain that paradigms constitute nature, as well.’ He says he wishes to get at a sense in which paradigms may be said to constitute nature. And he wishes not to set that sense in stone, but to display it to his readers, so that it is temporarily figurai and so does not get completely missed. I think that if we fail to attend to the niceties of Kuhn’s linguistic expression, then that will be in the end only to our own disadvantage. When read carefully, Kuhn’s aim here already sounds more modest than has usually been allowed. He goes on: ‘Examining the record of past research from the vantage of contemporary historiography, the historian of science may be tempted to exclaim that when paradigms change, the world itself changes with them.’ (SSR: 111, Emphasis added).

When a temptation comes along – for instance, when one is offered illegal drugs – one doesn’t necessarily immediately give right in. (And if one does, one may come to regret doing so before too long!) In other words: Kuhn is not simply urging us here to exclaim that t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Lecture Transcripts: ‘Theories and Non-theories of the Human Sciences’
• Part 1: Wittgenstein, Kuhn and Natural Science
• Inter-Section: An Outline Wittgensteinian Elicitation of Criteria
• Part 2: Wittgenstein, Winch and ‘Human Science’
• A Concluding Summary
• Rupert Read: Interviewed by Simon Summers
• Bibliography
• Index