Language, Games and Rules

Winch thinks of himself as making an epistemological argument, but it is important to remember that, at least when we consider the objects of the social sciences, he is not talking about what ‘really exists but how we decide, through our use of language, what we think really exists.

One of the intriguing things about our use of language, shown up for example in Garfinkels ethnomethodological studies (Garfinkel 1967), is that we are constantly involved in interpretative processes when we talk, but we can never arrive at some final, definite interpretation. If you keep asking somebody what they mean by a particular word or phrase, you get a lot of anger and frustration but no conclusive answer. The word ‘course' presents us with a good example. There is no final, dictionary-type definition of the word. Most of the people who read this book will be taking an academic course in a particular subject; while you read it, the chances are that somewhere in the world of horses will be racing around courses; journalists will be reporting on the course of events in many different places; dogs will be engaging in hare coursing; radars will be tracking the course of many thousands of aircraft; a doctor and a patient will be speculating on the course that a cancer is likely to take and whether a course of chemotherapy or radiotherapy is the best way to treat it; and millions of people will use the phrase ‘of course' in many different contexts. And, of course, in the course of preparing this manuscript I might come across a new idea that knocks me completely off course. I might comfort myself by going out for a three-course meal...

All these can be considered ‘correct' ways of using the word; we can also identify incorrect ways of using it: it would not make sense to talk about a ‘football course' rather than a football pitch, or to talk about the course followed by my house, or of the university offering a course in walking around corridors, although we might plot various courses of action as we walk around them.

The point of all this - before we get carried away completely - is that there is no single, clear definition of the word. We have already come across this idea in the last chapter, and Winch's interpretation of Wittgenstein has also played a part in the development of ethnomethodology. Winch argues that we know whether ‘course' is being used in the right or the wrong way because we know - implicitly at least - the rules that govern the use of the term. The rules enable us to understand what the word means. But from here we go in a very different direction from that taken by ethnomethodology. Being a philosopher, Winch is concerned with the concept of a rule and what it is to follow a rule, and we return to the issue of reasons and causal explanations.

The first point is that if we can identify the right way of following a rule, then we can also identify a wrong way, we can make mistakes. Winch argues that:

... the notion of following a rule is logically in seperable from the notion of making a mistake. If it is possible to say of someone that he is following a rule that means that one can ask whether he is doing what he does correctly or not.

(Winch 1958: 32)

So far I have developed the argument using language as an example, but we can think of the whole of our social life as language use - we give meaning to what we do, and therefore our life, our language and our social world can be seen as rule-following. If we can follow a rule in at least two ways, a wrong way and a right way, it means that we cannot offer causal explanations in the social sciences, and that our understanding of reasons is always evaluative: we ask whether a rule is being applied in a right way or a wrong way. Causal explanations are not evaluations but statements of (putative) fact. Therefore social sciences cannot predict, for there is no guarantee that a rule will always be followed in the same way.

A second implication of rule-following is that all action is social, for if action is meaningful, or rule-following, there must be somebody to evaluate how the rule has been followed - otherwise I could do what I like with no check.

The social scientist (who is not a scientist but a philosopher) is concerned with explicating the rules of social life, what Wittgenstein called ‘forms of life' or ‘language games' - the social rules that are implicit in meaningful behaviour. This implies a relativism: different societies, different cultures have their own forms of life and there is no overarching form of life or language which is neutral and into which other languages can be translated. The distinction from positivism here is that, as we saw, the latter implies a neutral observation language, a ‘scientific' language.

Winch then takes us beyond even the moderate notions of cause, objectivity and value freedom that we find in Weber's work. What exists in the social world and people's ideas of what exists are one and the same thing; there is no privileged access to an external reality. We understand cultures, and presumably subcultures, by elaborating on the rules that people use in their understanding of their relationships. For the sociologist there are certain questions that spring to mind immediately, such as ‘Who makes the rules?' and ‘How do we look at different relationships to the rules?' (see, for example, MacIntyre 1974), but these objections seem to assume that rules are ‘external’, out there between people. Winch is not talking about an object that we study, but about the way in which we create our sense of there being an object to study; not about whether there are differential relationships to rules but what rules are applied in the recognition of differential relationships.