Peter Winch: Philosophy and Social Science

On the flyleaf of his book, Winch quotes the German philosopher Lessing:

It may indeed be true that moral actions are always the same in themselves, however different may be the time and however different the societies in which they occur; but still, the same actions do not always have the same names, and it is unjust to give any action a different name from that which it used to bear in its own times and amongst its own people.

(Winch 1958) Winch's argument can be seen as a meditation on this quotation. He coined the term ‘underlabourer' to describe the conception of philosophy he was criticizing. His own position can perhaps best be summed up with a point he makes about the relationship between philosophy and science. When philosophers ask questions about the existence of the outside world, they are not asking for a reply that can be ‘proved' in some scientific sense, but rather are asking what it is we mean by the notion of externality. How do we, in our particular culture, decide what is external? As we will see, different cultures have different outside worlds. The philosopher is concerned not with particular linguistic confusions but with the nature of language itself and its relationship to reality. We cannot have access to any external reality without language, and Winch goes one step further: ‘The concepts we have settle for us the form of the experience we have of the world' (Winch 1958: 15).

Thus different languages define different realities. We might say that different cultures are different realities. We can gain an intuitive sense of what Winch means when we think what happens when we adopt a new set of beliefs about the world. If, for example, I convert to Christianity, I do not see the world as I saw it before: whereas before I might have seen people who were miserable, I now see people who refuse to allow Jesus to touch them; whereas I would once have avoided such people I now believe it is my duty to bring the Word to them.

Each language, each way of looking at the world, is a different way of trying to make the world intelligible, and the work of the philosopher is to explore the way in which different languages - religious, scientific, social scientific, literary and so on - try to do this. In the case of social science, however, something remarkable happens; philosophy and social science merge:

A man's social relations with his fellows are permeated with his ideas about reality. Indeed ‘permeated' is hardy a strong enough word: social relations are expressions of ideas about reality.

(Winch 1958: 23)

The statement may suggest the reason why Winch's book was for many years ignored by social scientists - it would put them out of business! However, his ideas are worth taking seriously. What he is saying is in effect very similar to the approaches discussed in the previous chapter: that the task of the social sciences is to understand the meanings that people give to their social world. But for Winch this is also the job of philosophy.