Meaning, Action and Explanation
Ian’s discussion of Winch in the first edition of our book is a sympathetic one - he accepts the importance of Winch’s insistence on the necessity for students of social life to struggle to understand the social meanings of those they study, rather than moving (too quickly?) on to interpreting them in the categories of their favoured social science theory or tradition.
Although some of Winch's arguments have seemed to some readers to imply that there could be no such thing as cross-cultural understanding, and, even, no possibility of reasonably grounded social or political criticism of established ‘practices' or ‘forms of life', Winch himself never countenanced such conclusions. Hutchinson et al. are surely right about this. Winch uses the ideas of ‘rules' and ‘language games' to show that the meaning and identity of social actions must, first and foremost, be understood in terms given by their context of use. Ian acknowledges this point, but he goes on to argue that ‘understanding the meaning' of an action is not the only thing that social scientists do. We might want to know who made the rules, how different people are situated in relation to the rules and so on. Moreover, there is an implication in Winch that there is something ‘transparent' about meanings as they are embedded in everyday social life, whereas even getting clear about the meanings of actions can be a major challenge. As Ian put it: ‘all sorts of things happen to us which we struggle to understand, and for which our ideas often seem inadequate' (Winch 1958: 100).As I return to it, it seems to me that Ian's reading of Winch falls foul of few, if any, of the misunderstandings listed by Hutchinson et al., but he still makes out a case for a more ambitious programme for the social sciences than they will allow. As I would want to go much further than Ian in advocacy of a (non-reductive) naturalistic programme for the social sciences, I'll take the argument on from where Ian left it.
Neither Winch nor Hutchinson et al. provides a serious account of natural science. It has been suggested that Winch himself was aware of the limitations of his account of the natural sciences (Lyas 1999: 52). However, since Hutchinson et al. appear to reject all generalizing theoretical approaches in the social studies, they may not need to stray far into the territory of philosophy of the natural sciences. Habermas, Bhaskar, Giddens, Bourdieu and, in general, post-modernists are all repeatedly lined up for dismissal, though none of them is subjected to any specific critical attention.
Central to the argument developed by Hutchinson et al. is Winch's insistence on the priority, in characterizing social actions, of grasping the meanings present in the practices to which they belong. Sometimes, it seems that they are committed to the strong thesis that this - perspicuous presentation of the meanings of social actions or practices - is all that social studies can justifiably do. So, for example, Hutchinson, Read and Sharrock (2008) on p. 95: ‘Understanding what people are doing obviates the need for a why question, or put another way, means that the description of their action answers any bona fide why question.' This clearly implies that Ian's points about further questions we might, as social researchers, ask about a practice cannot be ‘bona fide’ questions.
However, elsewhere they seem to take a less restrictive position. Sometimes they seem to accept that asking questions about the origins or conditions for practices may be acceptable, so long as we do not ‘presuppose some general, unifying theory', and so long as this does not ‘displace' the practice itself as explaining someone's action under it (p. 82). But this is potentially quite a large concession. If we can ask questions about origins and conditions of practices that go beyond simply displaying the meanings that are embedded in them, then, surely, something further needs to be said about what kind of answers might legitimately be given, how they might be checked and discussed and so on.
And, though a general theory might not be presupposed, might it not emerge from further investigations of other practices? How can they know, a priori, that this would be something ‘absurd’? No good reason is given either by Winch or by his latter- day defenders why accounts of social actions in terms of the meanings available to participants in the social practices to which they belong should not be able to coexist with understandings and explanations which begin there but probe deeper, make links with other sorts of practice and even give rise to modest generalizations. Maybe the authors would concede this in their less polemical moments, but it renders their position much more moderate than their prose-style (and title!) leads the reader to suppose, and it opens up the possibility of a substantive dialogue with other approaches in the social sciences which they dismiss out of hand.But, as Ian fully acknowledges, even if the Winchian claim about the priority of participants’ understanding is accepted, it does not at all follow that this settles the question how to grasp and present that understanding. Ian’s point about Winch’s assumption of the ‘transparency’ of social practices and forms of life could be developed further. First, there is a gap between understanding a rule in the sense of ‘knowing how to go on’, and being able to give an explicit account of it. Wittgenstein’s conception of philosophy as ‘a battle against the bewitchment of the intelligence by means of language’ draws attention to this - and social scientists (as well as critically oriented citizens) are often engaged in related battles (Wittgenstein 1958, 1997: para 109 (p. 47)). Part of the problem is that social practices and the meanings embedded in them may have a misleading superficial form (this is what Wittgenstein had in mind), but also the meanings of many social practices are contested by the participants themselves: there is no single set of meanings that can count authoritatively as ‘participants’ understanding’.
An incident that occurred during a workshop called to discuss the relationship between Wittgenstein’s philosophy and Marxism will serve to illustrate this point and another. The event took place in King’s College, Cambridge, and there was a certain irony, given the topic (not to mention the political views of a good proportion of the attendees), in the performance of the required mealtime rituals of the College: to stand as the fellows arrived and took their places, to remain standing while a Latin grace was read and, after the meal, to rise again till the fellows had departed. Interestingly, all but one of us meekly complied. Bar one, we all participated in a practice, thus confirming in action the social relations between ourselves as guests and the fellows of the college. Subsequent reflection revealed that this common participation ‘expressed’ a number of quite different ideas. Some, perhaps, were expressing a desire to be accepted into a community for which they had sincere respect. Others understood themselves to be guests, and thus under an obligation to conform to the expectations of their hosts; yet others conformed so as to avoid embarrassing the college servants who had issued us with our instructions. Others had performed a calculation and considered that the issue was too insignificant for it to be worth making what would be seen as a protest action. Others, no doubt, rose to their feet in time with the others, absent-mindedly staring at the large portraits adorning the walls of the great hall, and with no particular ideas in their heads at all. Ideas, then, are not identical to social actions or relations, and one and the same action or practice can be performed consistently with participating agents expressing, or concealing, a whole range of different ideas about what they are doing - or perhaps having no particular ideas about it at all.
However, Winch would have taken this to be too simple-minded as a response to his argument. The ideas he refers to are not the contents of the heads of participant agents, but, rather, the established social meanings assigned to institutional practices and relations: ideas which have a life, independently of what any particular individual happens to be thinking at some particular moment, in the cultural traditions to which they belong.
But there are problems with this, too. What are the ideas ‘expressed’ by the college mealtime rituals, and the social relations they confirm? Winch’s case depends very much on the implied analogy between the meanings of such practices and relations, on the one hand, and the meanings of linguistic performances, on the other. In some cases, non-verbal actions have a more or less satisfactory verbal equivalent. In such cases, the extension of Wittgenstein’s treatment of linguistic meaning to them is more or less unproblematic. However, in cases such as the mealtime ritual, meaning is better understood not by analogy with linguistic practice, but, rather, by reference to a range of forms of interaction through which hierarchical relations of power and subordination or higher and lower status are symbolically acknowledged and confirmed. In interpreting such rituals, we might be involved in more than providing a perspicuous account of the rules being followed. We might be interested in the genealogy of the ritual forms adopted - why just these, and not others, and when did they come together in this particular assemblage, all at once or over an extended period of time, how did the social distinctions being marked and affirmed arise, what patterns of command over what sorts of economic or cultural resources, or what sorts of patronage enabled this particular hierarchical form of relations to emerge and confirm itself in this particular setting? The answers to these questions might or might not be of interest to the participants, and they would almost certainly constitute information or discoveries about their practices, rather than mere ‘reminders’ of what was already tacitly understood through the practice of participation itself. Indeed, becoming informed in this way might irreversibly alter the attitudes of participants, even to the point where they no longer felt able to continue the practice.Yet another of Ian’s points is worth developing here. When he says ‘all sorts of things happen to us which we struggle to understand’, he is hinting at his long-running engagement with depth psychology, and his related sense that the participation of individuals in social life is not a smooth, uncomplicated process of learning to ‘follow the rules’ (Craib 1989, 1994).
Hutchinson et al. seem to regard occasions when we need to resort to reflective ‘interpretation’ as the exception, compared with the more typical ‘unreflective’ routine, taken-for-granted practical understanding involved in everyday participation in social practices. However, in complex societies (probably, all societies!), individuals have to meet an immense variety of challenges as they negotiate their way through life, dealing with other family members, the complex demands of schooling, finding work, engaging in relationships with sexual partners, forming households, becoming parents or carers and so on. Much of this entails acquiring and testing a stock of ‘rule-of-thumb’ causal knowledge - often not fully articulated, but nevertheless deployed, often with great skill. At key moments, however, when we face major ethical dilemmas, confront the break-up of a central relationship or face the death of a loved one, we are impelled to question the tacit underpinnings of our lives. At such moments, we are lay ‘social theorists’, engaging in just the sort of generalizing and causal thinking about our social lives that Hutchinson et al. dismiss as a legitimate activity when conducted by those whose profession it is. This is something that the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci (indirectly, through his association with Piero Sraffa, a significant influence on Wittgenstein (see, for example, Monk 1990: 260; Davis 2002)) expressed in the aphorism ‘Everyone is a philosopher’ (Gramsci 1971).The essential point here is that if we are to bind our work as students of society closely to the forms of understanding of the participants in the social practices we study, as Hutchinson et al. advocate, then this is not nearly so restrictive as they suggest. An example might make this clearer. In a university in the south of England, in the early days of computerization, the management let it be known that in future their communication with employees would be via email. One of the manual employees responded thus to the ‘house magazine’:
May I point out that a large proportion of university staff have no access to computer terminals nor email. These include electricians, plumbers, fitters, carpenters, cleaners, porters, technicians, gardeners, groundsmen and me. Are we, the manual brigade, being marginalised by an elitist computerised administration who consider us a lower caste not worthy of information or an opinion?... we may be light on computer skills, but we do have real skills, which include the skill to pull the plug.
The distinction between a managerial elite and the ‘manual brigade’, with the former exercising an exclusive power on the basis of differential access to their favoured means of communication, but with the latter possessing a reciprocal power through their performance of tasks on which the former are dependent, condenses a sophisticated causal account of the university’s social structure and the role of technology and access to means of communication in it. And yet, this is still an example of ‘participants’ understanding’ - it seems that in their everyday interpretations of their social lives, at least some participants are able to develop causal generalizations and theoretical ideas that Hutchinson et al. would deny to social scientists.
It might be that Hutchinson et al. would respond to this by simply rejecting my interpretation of the above statement as embodying causal knowledge-claims. Their argument against the possibility of causal knowledge in the social studies follows that of Winch. It relies on a contrast between the normative regularities involved in human social rule-following and the event-regularities which form the basis of scientific causal laws. However, this contrast, and its frequent use by Hutchinson et al., relies on a concept of scientific laws as ‘constant conjunctions’ that has long been subjected to strong criticism in newer philosophies of science such as critical realism (see Chapters 2-4 and 8 in this work). But my own justification for thinking of the above-quoted email as embodying causal knowledge is much simpler than this. It relies on tacit recognition of a ‘common sense, generic concept of ‘cause’ as whatever makes the difference between something happening and not happening. My argument here is that this is just an example of the ways in which everyday social participation necessarily presupposes a stock of causal knowledge, in this sense, as well as a complex set of normative orientations. This causal knowledge and the associated normative orientations do, indeed, presuppose that we first ‘understand the meanings’ embedded in the social practices we engage in. They do not ‘displace’ it, but neither can they be reduced to it. Rather, they enable us to act with a degree of coherence and autonomy, securing, where appropriate, a degree of critical distance and a capacity to bring about change. True, Hutchinson et al. do defend Winch (and Wittgenstein) from the misunderstanding that their philosophies are necessarily conservative - but they fail to show more positively how deliberate strategies for change might emerge and be reasonably grounded.