‘Limiting notions', Human Nature and Social Science Naturalism
In UPS, Winch avoids the relativism implied by notions of incommensurability between radically different cultures by advocating a creative process of re-evaluation of one’s own culture in the light of the encounter with the other: ‘Seriously to study another way of life is necessarily to seek to extend our own’ (Winch 1974: 99).
But even this seems to beg the question: what if there are no points in common for us to begin this creative process? At first, Winch seems to accept MacIntyre’s argument that all cultures have language, and thus some form of rationality. But this, too, begs the question whether their version of rationality is fundamentally incommensurable with ours. In the final, tantalizing pages of UPS, Winch finally gets down to presenting his own version of the ‘bridgehead’. This is made up of a trio of what he calls ‘limiting notions’: birth, sex and death. These are ‘inescapably involved in the life of all known human societies in a way which gives us a clue where to look, if we are puzzled about the point of an alien system of institutions’ (Winch 1974: 107). Winch here seem to be offering us an empirical generalization about human societies - oddly, one that Hutchinson et al. don’t seem to have noticed.Winch is not entirely clear what he means by ‘limiting notions’. He says they refer not to ‘events in life’, but rather mark life’s outer limits or boundaries. This applies fairly straightforwardly in the case of birth and death, but what about ‘sex’? It becomes clear that what Winch means by sex is what we might now call ‘gender’. His handling of gender as a ‘limiting’ notion reads as somewhat traditionalist by the standards of our own culture, as he tells us ‘The life of a man is a man’s life and the life of a woman is a woman’s life: the masculinity and the femininity are not just components in the life, they are its mode’ (Winch 1974: 110).
What, I wonder would he have made of the slogan ‘A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle’?Though this is an intriguing step for Winch to have taken, it has some fairly obvious problems. One is that it risks being read as a form of biological reductionism: most unwelcome given Winch's anti-scientism. However, if we take birth, death and sex/gender as ‘notions' that are present in all societies in the sense that they are the source or locus of shared cultural meanings in each society, then the problem of mutual intelligibility arises yet again: ‘gender' is lived in all societies and provides ways of giving meaning and experience in people's lives, but it is ‘done' differently in different societies (and, often, differently by different groups within each society). To put it in a way that might appeal to Hutchinson et al., what is the context, and where are the criteria by which we can identify practices in different cultures as each doing ‘gender'?
If we are to use the ‘limiting notions' as a means of rendering intelligible puzzling aspects of other cultures (and, of course, our own!), it seems that we need to be able both to identify birth, death and sex as ‘brute', observable, ‘natural' facts about us, as well as to recognize that human cultures surround and make sense of these brute facts in very different, but still potentially traceable ways. In other words, we need to be able to make links between, rather than a dogmatic gulf between, natural facts of life, on the one hand, and the distinctive ways in which they are lived and given meaning by people who inherit and engage with different cultural traditions, on the other.
But, to go some way towards both Winch and Hutchinson et al., there is no need to identify ‘natural facts' with what a biologist might tell us (let alone an ultra-Darwinian ideologue: Hutchinson et al. deal effectively with the pretensions of evolutionary psychology as a would-be social science). It is true that humanity can rightly be characterized as an evolved primate.
However, no more and no less than other primates, we have our own species-specific attributes. Winch and those who think like him put the focus on language use, and there is much to be said for this, but the peculiar modes of social bonding through which humans reproduce themselves, and the immensely flexible and variable forms of social cooperation through which they interact with the rest of nature in meeting their material and cultural needs also form the context in which we can understand the evolution of language itself and the significance it acquires. These, too, are facts of life, but this is not to concede that biology (or the ‘life sciences' generally) has a uniquely authoritative perspective on them.Having got this far, I can't resist the temptation to push on to a still more provocative naturalism. Considered as ‘facts of life', Winch's trio - and some others, too - are not only ‘inescapably involved in the life of all known human societies', but are equally inescapably involved in the life of most non-human animal species (sexually reproducing ones, at any rate). In addition to enabling us to make other cultures intelligible, perhaps Winch's ‘limiting notions', understood as I've just suggested, might provide ‘bridgeheads' through which we make intelligible the modes of life of the other species with which we share the planet. Perhaps their modes of life, like ours, can be understood as so many different (evolved) ways of resolving the problems of sustaining life in the face of ecological exigencies. And, perhaps, too, the effort of engaging with them might cause us to re-evaluate our own (historically emergent) modes of sociocultural life in the light of their unique modes of life, so extending our horizons and coming to acknowledge a ‘responsibility’ to them just as Hutchinson et al. acknowledge a responsibility to other (human) social actors? Perhaps the natural sciences could be (as they sometimes are) more like a Winchian practice of the social studies than either Winch or his adherents recognize.
A naturalism of this sort is not, after all, so far removed from some of the arguments of Winch’s mentor Wittgenstein. In the Philosophical Investigations (1958, 1997), Wittgenstein asks how one could understand various activities in an unknown country with a strange language. His answer is: ‘The common behaviour of mankind is the system of reference by means of which we interpret an unknown language’ (Wittgenstein 1958, 1997: para 206). Elsewhere, he refers to linguistic activities such as ‘commanding, questioning, recounting, chatting’ as being ‘as much a part of our natural history as walking, eating, drinking, playing’ (para 25). Indeed, the central claim of Wittgenstein’s later philosophy of mental life is that the language in which we talk about our ‘inner’ mental lives could not be taught or learned if there were no natural outward expressions. As Wittgenstein put it: ‘If things were quite different from what they actually are - if there were for instance no characteristic expression of pain, of fear, of joy; if rule became exception and exception rule; or if both became phenomena of roughly equal frequency - this would make our normal language games lose their point’ (para 142).
There are places where Wittgenstein countenances just the sort of cross-species naturalism that I indicated above. In explanation of his point about the necessity of natural expressions of pain for us to have a language to talk about pain, Wittgenstein says: ‘And now look at a wriggling fly and at once these difficulties vanish and pain seems to be able to get a foothold here’ (Wittgenstein 1958, 1997: para 284). And, again, for the concept of intention: ‘What is the natural expression of intention? - Look at a cat when it stalks a bird; or a beast when it wants to escape’ (para 647). The value of such an orientation for the social sciences might be new ways of looking at what we share with other species as a setting for new ways of thinking about those traits that mark us out as different. It might also further the process of taking more fully into our account of human social life its necessary embedding in and dependence on the rest of nature - living and non-living (for further discussion of this and related arguments, see Benton 1993; Moog and Stones 2009).