partly because they are important and so worthy of the title.
Another consideration in favour of calling social disciplines ‘sciences’ is that practitioners within these disciplines, for the most part, consider what they are doing to be science of sorts. In his recent book The Puzzle of Modern Economics: Science or Ideology? Roger Backhouse defends the idea that economics is a science despite recognizing that economics differs from natural sciences in many ways.83 Similarly, the economist Ha-Joon Chang considers his discipline to be a science despite recognizing that ‘economics can never be a science in the sense that physics or chemistry is’.84 Psychologists also very often talk about their discipline as a science. Recent introductions to psychology include Thinking about Psychology: The Science of Mind and Behaviour85 and Understanding Psychology as a Science.86 Universities throughout the world have faculties of social science incorporating departments of anthropology, economics, business, politics, psychology, sociology, and human geography (and, less often, departments of history and/or philosophy). It is fair to say that calling social disciplines ‘sciences’ is the way that we ordinarily talk about them. A divergence from ordinary use requires more than just showing that social disciplines differ from natural sciences in significant ways, since this is recognized by many of those who quite happily talk about social sciences.87
So, I conclude that social sciences deserve to be called sciences because they are empirical, knowledge-producing disciplines which, done properly, involve analytical rigour and responsiveness to evidence. Here I take social sciences to include economics, sociology, anthropology, human geography, politics, linguistics, and sociology.
However, there are some disciplines which do not fit easily into either the natural or social sciences. Philosophy is one of them. As Wittgenstein pointed out, many of the problems of philosophy are the upshot of confusion about concepts and the way to tackle those problems is not to look at empirical evidence but to get clear about the problematic concepts. Literature and literary studies are also disciplines which are of great value but which do not fit comfortably in either of those categories. There is such a thing as a social science but we should be careful to keep an eye on differences between the various scientific disciplines and not assimilate them in ways that lead to confusion.88
In this chapter my intention was to establish that philosophy, as understood by Wittgenstein, is a discipline which undertakes grammatical investigations in order to dissolve philosophical problems and to distinguish it from social and natural sciences. In the next chapter I will discuss another topic which has particularly vexed social and political philosophers, the problem of relativism. Getting clear about this problem helps to get clearer about Wittgenstein’s relation to social and political philosophy and also helps us to see that Wittgenstein’s philosophy has some implications for the way that political philosophers should understand their work. I will ask whether Wittgenstein himself was a relativist and also ask whether some form of relativism is credible.
1L. Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, trans. Peter Winch, Oxford: Blackwell, 1980, p. 7.
2L. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, revised 4th edition by P. M. S. Hacker and Joachim Schulte, translated by G. E. M. Anscombe, P. M. S. Hacker, and Joachim Schulte, Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009, §7.
3Ibid., see, e.g. §33, §36.
4Ibid., §193.
5Ibid., see, e.g. §211.
6Wittgenstein’s ‘private language argument’ provides a good example of his thinking about language and action but action and language are discussed throughout the Philosophical Investigations. See, e.g. §243, §556.
7Ibid., see, e.g. §330, §490.
8Ibid., §459–60, §487, §493, §505, §519.
9Ibid., §§611–28. In a recent collection of articles on the philosophy of action edited by Constantine Sandis and Jonathan Dancy the editors place this selection of remarks from Wittgenstein at the front of the book because ‘the work of Wittgenstein has been seminal in this change [the move towards having graduate classes devoted entirely to the philosophy of action]’ (‘preface’ to J. Dancy and C. Sandis (eds), Philosophy of Action: An Anthology, Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2015, p. x).
10For example, in the Blue Book Wittgenstein says that ‘philosophers constantly see the method of science before their eyes, and are irresistibly tempted to ask and answer questions in the way science does. This tendency is the real source of metaphysics and leads the philosopher into complete darkness’ (L. Wittgenstein, The Blue and Brown Books, New York: Harper & Row, 1958, p. 18). See also §81, §89, §109, PPF 365, and PPF 371 in Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations.
11P. Hutchinson, R. Read, and W. Sharrock (eds), There is No Such Thing as a Social Science: In Defence of Peter Winch, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008, p. 51.
12A video of the talk John Dupré gave can be found here: http://www.british wittgensteinsociety.org/news/annual-conference/conference-videos. The paper he delivered has since been published as ‘Social Science: City Centre or Leafy Suburb’ in Philosophy of the Social Sciences, May 2016.
13Social sciences are usually thought to include economics, sociology, anthropology, human geography, politics, and sociology: disciplines which aim at knowledge of the various relationships between individuals and the societies they belong to. There is more disagreement about whether philosophy and history are to be counted among the social sciences.
14E.g., Otto Neurath (of the Vienna Circle) claims that it is not tenable to separate cultural sciences from natural ones by saying that each employ special methods (O. Neurath, ‘Physicalism: The Philosophy of the Viennese Circle’, in Philosophical Papers 1913–1946 (Vienna Circle Collection) Vol. 16, edited and translated by Robert S. Cohen and Marie Neurath, Dordrecht: D. Reidel, p. 50).
15There is an excellent recent book on the topic of theorizing in social sciences written from a critical Wittgensteinian perspective that I will not discuss here. Leonidas Tsilipakos’s Clarity and Confusion in Social Theory (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015) discusses problems with trying to import
