Peter Winch and Hermeneutics
A large section of Ian’s contribution to Chapter 6 (Rationality as rule-following) is rightly devoted to an engagement with the philosophical arguments of the late Peter Winch. Ian centres his discussion on Winch’s iconic book The Idea of a Social Science (TISS) (Winch 1958) and his classic paper ‘Understanding a primitive society’ (UPS) (Winch 1974), together with comments on Winch by Charles Taylor, Alasdair MacIntyre and others.
Winch offered some comments of his own in his introduction to the second edition of The Idea (1990), and Raimond Gaita added an insightful introduction to a 50th anniversary edition in 2007. Following Winch’s death in 1997, there was a renewal of interest in his work, and a particularly valuable outcome of this was Colin Lyas’s book, simply titled Peter Winch (1999). More recently, the explosive force of Winch’s initial foray into the world of social science has been re-ignited by a brief but trenchantly iconoclastic defence of Winch’s arguments against the possibility of a ‘science’ of social life (Hutchinson, Read and Sharrock 2008). Their strongly expressed hostility to overeager generalization, ‘theoreticism’, ‘scientism’ and ‘intellectualism’ among would-be social scientists is supported by their reading of Winch (and his philosophical mentor, Ludwig Wittgenstein). On their interpretation of Winch, most commentators on his work seem to have been guilty of serious misreadings. I have some reservations both about their own reading of Winch and also about their very sweeping rejection of almost everything that others who see themselves as social scientists have done. However, the sheer force of Winch’s critical thinking about the possibility of social science and the depth of his questioning of the possibilities of mutual understanding across wide cultural differences are uniquely challenging. Winch’s thought deserves to be encountered by every generation of apprentices to the social sciences. So, despite my reservations about it, this new book is to be welcomed in reminding us of the great challenge posed by Winch’s arguments.
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