Introduction

We move on now to a very different notion of rationality and a different conception of what is involved in understanding human action, a conception which gives more prominence than does Weber to the culture in which the social actor is situated and to the nature of language itself.

The starting point here is the discussion in the previous chapter about whether reasons can be understood as causes. It was suggested there that these arguments employ concepts that are too simple and static to enable us to understand the complexities of human action. We begin to move into the complexity when we look at the other side of the argument: that reasons are not and cannot be causes of action. This argument has been important in Anglo-Saxon philosophy, which has been dominated by the originally Austrian Ludwig Wittgenstein (Wittgenstein 1958, 1997), a leading figure in the linguistic turn. The conventional interpretation of Wittgenstein’s work turned into what was referred to earlier as the ‘underlabourer’ conception of the relationship between philosophy and science: science, as it were, delivers the goods and the philosopher is only important if the scientist runs into difficulties. The difficulties are linguistic and the job of the philosopher is to unravel the knots in the conceptual wool so the scientist can go on knitting.

This view was contested in a radical manner in the late 1950s in a book called The Idea of a Social Science by Peter Winch (1958). We will see that Winch uses Wittgenstein’s ideas to raise a number of questions not only about the possibility of a social science but also about the possibility of understanding cultures other than our own and the issue of relativism. We will concentrate on Winch’s work and its implications in the first part of this chapter; we will then turn to the more recent work of Alasdair MacIntyre (1981) and then to a major figure in continental European philosophy, Hans-Georg Gadamer (1989). Although they do not explicitly develop each other’s work, their ideas can be situated in the same broad family.