What Can We Do with Winch?

Winch takes us to the heart of some central problems in social science. Whether we are sociologists, anthropologists, historians or psychologists, our work must involve understanding the meaning that our subjects give to the world.

As we have pointed out before, however, to say that the social sciences have to be interpretive does not mean that they are only interpretive. For Winch and for others we will encounter later, there is a basic ontological and epistemological commitment to idealism - the things that exist in the social world are defined by our culture, our language. There is, if you like, an essential transparency to social life: if we can understand the language games of those we study then we can understand their social life. Associated with this there is what Taylor (1985) calls the ‘incorrigibility thesis', namely that we cannot criticize other cultures from the point of view of our own, that there is no neutral language.

There are two points to be made here: first, that Winch's account only gives us part of the task of social science, and second, following the work of Taylor, we can recognize the force of the incorrigibility thesis without, as it were, swallowing it whole.

The first point is that our social life is not that transparent; all sorts of things happen to us which we struggle to understand, and for which our ideas often seem inadequate. If the social sciences were only a matter of interpreting meaning, then, one can't help feeling, life would be much easier. This can be coupled with an interesting absence in Winch's list of ‘life problems' with which all cultures have to find some way of dealing.

One route into understanding other cultures, then, is though grasping the social systems within which they produce goods. This takes us towards Marxism, but we do not necessarily have to go all the way, nor do we have to give Western science - instrumental reason - priority. This is where Taylor's argument comes in (Taylor 1985). He argues that for Winch we are faced with an either/or choice: either we see the Azande culture from the point of view of our own culture, as working with a primitive or inadequate scientific method, or we understand them from their own point of view, as achieving an integration of meaning in tribal and individual life. Taylor suggests that it is possible to develop a language of ‘perspicuous contrast'. The dictionary definition of ‘perspicuous' is ‘having mental penetration', and such a language would be one in which

we could formulate both their way and ours as alternative possibilities in relation to some human constants at work in both. It would be a language in which the possible human variations would be so formulated that both our form of life and theirs could be perspicuously described as alternative such variations. Such a language of contrast might show their language of understanding to be distorted or inadequate in some respects or it might show ours to be so (in which case we might find that understanding them leads to an alteration of our self-understanding and hence our form of life... ) or it might show both to be so.

(Taylor 1985: 125-26)

In other words, the Azande might be good at providing coherent meaning to their lives, while we might be better at producing knowledge of nature.

This seems an eminently sensible position and one that is perfectly compatible with Winch's argument, at least when he is talking about the connections between cultures which might enable understanding. These points of contact enable Winch to avoid a strong relativism as far as understanding is concerned, although it might be more difficult to move to moral arguments about other cultures.

We can, then, maintain the value of Winch's arguments for the social sciences but also engage in other types of social analysis. It is also clear from more recent work by other philosophers that this cultural/linguistic level of analysis can be deepened beyond the comprehension of the rules that people follow.