both during and after the talk. Carlota Sánchez Garcia translated my paper into Spanish before the talk so that those who wanted to read it in Spanish could read it. It is her translation that appeared in Análisis. I am very grateful to her. I am would also like to thank Simon Glendinning for comments on an earlier draft of that chapter as well as to two anonymous referees at the journal Teorema. A revised version of that paper appears within this book as Chapter 4.
Various people have commented on my published work during the course of the past six years. I would like to thank participants in the Dimensões da Epistemologia conference, held at Universidade Nova de Lisboa on 6 September 2016, for their comments on an earlier draft of the first chapter of this book. Modesto Gómez-Alonso gave me very helpful comments after the event, which helped me in redrafting my work. I am grateful to Wayne Blackledge, António Caeiro, Philip Cartwright, Pedro Karczmarczyk, Gavin Kitching, Nigel Pleasants, Constantine Sandis, and George Wrisley for their comments on my papers ‘Leave Everything as it is’ and ‘Eagleton’s Wittgenstein’. Their comments on those papers prompted me to make changes to the criticisms that I made of Anderson, Callinicos, and Eagleton in Chapters 5 and 6 of this book. I would also like to thank participants at the MLAG conference in Porto for comments on an earlier version of Chapter 7. Javier Cumpa, Manuel de Pinedo, Nils Kurbis, Carla Carmona, and Neftalí Villanueva all gave me very valuable feedback on an earlier draft of Chapter 8 at the University of Granada. At the same conference there was also a discussion of epistemic injustice (featuring Manuel Almagro, Carla Carmona, María José Frápolli, Alba Moreno, Llanos Navarro, Jesús Navarro, Eduardo Pérez, Nuno Venturinha, and Neftalí Villanueva) which was useful in thinking about the issues in Chapter 8.
Constantine Sandis deserves special thanks as the editor of this series and also as someone who has produced great work in philosophy that has influenced my own. Constantine has read a lot of my work over the years and has given me sage advice.
I would like to thank my parents, Janet Szpakowski, Michael Szpakowski, and David Vinten for their support throughout the writing of this book (and for reading various parts of it). My brother and sister, Jack Vinten and Anna Szpakowska, have also been supportive and Jack has produced the cover for this book. I’m grateful to him for that.
Finally, I want to thank Gabriela Ferreira for her support as I have worked on this book. She has been incredible!
1The Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT), the Portuguese national funding agency. My PhD (2014–18) was funded by a PhD grant (SFRH/BD/94166/2013) and my current position as a research fellow is funded by the project Epistemology of Religious Belief: Wittgenstein, Grammar, and the Contemporary World (PTDC/FER-FIL/32203/2017).
This book aims at exploring the implications of Wittgenstein’s philosophy for social philosophy and the social sciences. I should make clear at the outset that I will be particularly concerned with Wittgenstein’s later philosophical work – his work from the 1930s until his death in 1951. When I talk about ‘Wittgenstein’s philosophy’ I will primarily be talking about the mature philosophy of the Philosophical Investigations1
According to Wittgenstein (throughout his career) philosophy is a discipline that is not based on observation and experiment. It is not an empirical discipline and, more particularly, philosophy is not a science.4 This book defends the later Wittgenstein’s take on philosophy and attempts to show its usefulness for social philosophy and social science. So, this book is not a work of social science and it will not rely on empirical data about our current or past social and political circumstances. I will not be attempting to formulate prescriptions for, say, politicians, social workers, or political activists based on evidence drawn from observations, questionnaires, medical records, interviews, or crime statistics. The aim is not to provide advice about policy or information that might help social scientists to solve particular concrete problems that concern them. Rather, this is a book that is primarily concerned, as Wittgenstein was, with conceptual matters. The focus will be on examining conceptual matters in social philosophy and the social sciences with an eye to showing that Wittgenstein’s philosophy can be helpful in overcoming confusions.
However, although this work is primarily focused on conceptual matters and is not a work in social science, I take it that it is of relevance to social science and that social scientists have something to learn from Wittgenstein. We cannot make a neat separation between the conceptual cartography engaged in by philosophers and the practices of social scientists. In order to produce good work in social science we must achieve some clarity about the concepts we are using. To say something true about social phenomena we must make sense. The kinds of confusions that Wittgenstein was so skilled in identifying in his philosophical work are confusions that are still rife among social scientists.
Of course, social philosophy is an incredibly broad area and I cannot possibly hope to get rid of all confusion in it within this book. Indeed, it is not clear that it is possible to entirely get rid of all conceptual confusions within social philosophy. New developments in society will undoubtedly lead to new frameworks for understanding society and there is always potential for confusion as new attempts at understanding are made. Furthermore, there are some areas of recent social philosophy that I barely touch upon. For example, I say relatively little about religion within the book, although Section 6.5.6. is dedicated to a critical engagement with Terry Eagleton’s discussion of Marx, Wittgenstein, and religion. What I will do in this book is take a look at some of the issues in social philosophy that I take to be central – (i) issues about the nature of social sciences, whether they can be properly called scientific; (ii) the issue of reductionism, whether social sciences can be explained in terms of the (perhaps more fundamental) natural sciences; (iii) the issue of the proper form of explanation in the social sciences (if indeed there is a proper form of explanation in the social sciences); (iv) the issue of relativism, whether social scientists should contemplate some form of relativism about truth, justification, knowledge, existence, or concepts; (v) the issue of ideology – whether Wittgensteinian philosophy favours a particular ideological standpoint; (vi) the issues of freedom of the will and responsibility; and, finally, (vii) the issue of justice.
However, as mentioned above, in dealing with these issues I will not be making arguments based on observational or statistical evidence. This book is a work in philosophy rather than a scientific or empirical work. Its negative aim will be to clear away confusions about the nature of philosophy, the nature of social sciences, and to clear up some confusions that arise in contemplating particular problems within the philosophy of social science such as freedom of the will, control, responsibility, and justice. Its positive aims will be to enrich our understanding of those areas and to show that Wittgenstein’s philosophy can be very useful for philosophers of social science, as well as for social scientists.
In order to fulfil those aims I will use methods particularly suited to philosophy as conceived by Wittgenstein. In the first place I will take care in reading the work of philosophers working in social philosophy as well as the work of social scientists and attempt to diagnose cases of conceptual confusion as well as cases of failure in interpretation (e.g. in interpreting Wittgenstein’s work). So, this book will to some extent be a work in exegesis and interpretative criticism. In trying to achieve my positive aims of producing clarity and understanding in social philosophy I will attempt to follow Wittgenstein’s
