Roger Trigg in Reason
and Commitment ascribes to Peter Winch (“Understanding a Primitive Culture”)
the view that “a language expresses a community's beliefs about reality,” which
“certainly refuses to separate reality from language, so that language actually
seems to determine what is real. . . reality is made relative to language.” That is Whorf-Sapir, not Winch. Winch
responds basically with the obvious fact that it is not language, but people
using that language who conceptualize, judge what is real or not. From the
wisest and best to the shallowest conformist, people confront reality and
reality reveals it in what people say, write, think, judge, imagine. There are
deep hinges we all accept: the world existed before I was born, plants die
without water, etc. There are thoughts that press against the limits of human
thought: the Good is transcendent, love reveals being, etc. There is a real
hierarchy of being. The higher levels are no less real, but exceed our grasp or
complete grasp, like Sappho's apple. The difference between Trigg and Winch is
ontological and epistemological. Relativism is a limit of intelligibility, as
is the mind as a perfect mirror of nature or world.
I want to connect that little thought with
the aspects of knowing/being from the last entry about the latter Wittgenstein
as pre-logical, logic, and metaphysics as a deeper aspect of the same whole. Winch
is operating with the first aspect, whereas Trigg only wants to see the second to
make space for the third. To recall, there is the pre-logical (later
Wittgenstein), the aspect of lived understanding: practices, forms of life,
hinges, what “goes without saying.” Here meaning is not yet formulated in
propositions but is already operative in how we act, speak, and respond to the
world. Then there is the factual, logical, and scientific, where we make
inferences (All men are mortal, thus Socratesis mortal) and articulate judgments (“The cat is on the mat”).
Clarity depends on stable terms or well-formed propositions that can be
assessed as true or false. And then the Metaphysical (deeper level of being and
intelligibility), what must be the case for either of the above to be possible:
reality as such, the hierarchy of being, the intelligibility of things, and the
relation between mind and world.
Winch is thinking primarily within the
first aspect, the pre-logical. He is concerned with how meaning arises within a
form of life, how concepts are embedded in practices, how what counts as “real”
is inseparable from the human activities in which that concept functions. The
problem of relativism cannot arise at that level of thought. His point against
Trigg is not that reality is created by language, but that our access to
reality is always already shaped by shared practices of understanding. Not talking
about language as an abstract system, but people using language within a form
of life. Trigg resists this because he wants to secure the second (and
implicitly third) level. He fears that if we stay at Winch’s level, we lose any
firm distinction between what is believed and what is actually the case, so he
emphasizes that reality must be independent of linguistic or cultural
frameworks, otherwise truth collapses into relativism. Winch is protecting the
first level against an overly abstract conception of reason whereas Trigg is
protecting the second (and gesturing toward the third) against collapse into
relativism. (For me any position that implies either relativism or its twin, ‘mind
as mirror,’ both count as reductions to absurdity.) The tension arises because
each is guarding something real, but each risks reduction. If we absolutize
Winch’s emphasis, reality seems dissolved into practices (relativism risk); if
we absolutize Trigg’s level, we forget that all judgment presupposes lived
understanding (abstraction risk).
For Winch, reality reveals itself in what
people say, write, think, judge…. Reality is not reducible to language (against
Trigg’s crude reading of Winch).
Reality is only
encountered through human acts of understanding. Language neither creates nor
mirrors reality. Aquinas might say, it participates in the intelligibility of
reality. Winch is right that meaning and judgment arise within lived practices
(pre-logical level). Trigg is right that truth cannot be reduced to those
practices (logical + metaphysical levels), though I am sure Winch would agree
with that. Both are incomplete unless we see that human understanding is a
finite participation in a reality that exceeds it. Truth is neither
construction nor mirroring, but a translation of reality into human
understanding, always partial, always situated, yet genuinely answerable to
what is.
. . .
It seems the
tendency to make Wittgenstein, Winch, and others following Wittgenstein into
relativists results from failing to distinguish between these aspects. I am claiming
that there are distinct aspects of understanding. There is a level of lived
intelligibility (Wittgenstein/Winch), articulated judgment and inference
(logic), and being and its intelligibility as such (metaphysics). Confusion
arises when one level is taken to exhaust the others.
For many it is like this. If meaning is
embedded in forms of life (Wittgenstein, Winch), then truth is internal to
those forms. Therefore there is no objective reality. Thus relativism. This
argument slides between levels or aspects. What Wittgenstein and Winch actually
show is that at the first level, our criteria for sense, justification, and
even doubt are rooted in shared practices (“hinges,” forms of life). But the
critic then assumes that if justification is practice-bound, then reality
itself must be practice-bound. That move is just assumed. My distinction
exposes this as a category mistake: from a claim about conditions of
intelligibility (level 1) to a claim about the constitution of reality (level
3). That is where the relativist reading is generated.
In On Certainty Wittgenstein writes
that some things stand fast (“The world existed before I was born”). These are
not conclusions of reasoning but conditions of meaningful doubt and judgment. These
are not propositions in the ordinary logical sense, nor metaphysical theses.
They belong to the first level. But he does not say: “The world exists because
our language-game says so.” He merely points out that our language-games
presuppose such things. Therefore, he is not advocating some metaphysical
thesis like relativism or naïve realism at all. He is explicating something
like a groundedness in a shared human stance toward reality. He is not thinking
philosophically at all in the traditional sense. Perhaps it is ambiguous or
confusing to think of him as a philosopher at all, great thinker though he was.
Against Trigg’s possible reduction, he
would say that logical clarity does not ground itself. It presupposes a
background of lived understanding. Against relativist readings of Winch, Winch
might say that that background is not arbitrary but is already a way of being
in contact with reality. At the metaphysical level,reality exceeds any
particular articulation but is not cut off from it.
A critic might say that I am reintroducing
metaphysics behind Wittgenstein’s back. He dissolves such distinctions rather
than layering them. In other words, Wittgenstein is not describing a “first
level” beneath logic but reorienting philosophy away from levels altogether. I
am not saying levels are part of Wittgenstein. But his investigations uncover a
stratum of understanding that is prior to formal justification. Once that is
granted, it is legitimate to ask what the relation of this stratum has to truth
and to reality as such. That question goes beyond Wittgenstein, but it is not inconsistent
with his thought.
The aspects or levels I think of as a diagnostic
tool to prevent conflations because it explains to my current satisfaction why
Wittgenstein/Winch are read as relativists without requiring that they are
relativists. It gives me a framework in which pre-logical understanding, logical
articulation, and metaphysical depth are not competitors, but ordered moments
of one act of understanding reality.
. . .
Perhaps Richard Rorty, an open relativist, would
be a good test case. Rorty rejects the idea that the mind mirrors reality (agreed)
and that truth is correspondence to “the way things are in themselves” (depends
on what that means). He argues that truth is what our community lets us get
away with saying (disagree); that justification is always internal to a
vocabulary or practice (agreed); and that there is no standpoint outside
language from which to compare language with reality (agreed). Now much of this
sounds very close to Wittgenstein or Winch.
Coming back to the three aspects, Rorty
accepts and radicalizes something like the first level, i.e., meaning arises
within practices, there is no neutral, external standpoint, language is
inseparable from human activity. But then Rorty takes what is true at the first
level and extends it to the next two. In other words, because justification is
practice-bound, truth is nothing beyond justification. Because we cannot step
outside language, there is no sense in speaking of reality “independent” of our
vocabularies. This is precisely the move my distinction is designed to detect.
For Rorty – a better target for Trigg’s
criticism than Winch – two things are lost. First, the independence of the
logical level is lost. Truth becomes not something we aim at but something we
agree on. i.e., the difference between “we believe p” and “p is the case” –
fundamental to thinking as such – is weakened or dissolved. And, secondly, the metaphysical
level is lost, i.e. the idea that reality might exceed our grasp or correct our
conceptual schemes. The third level is rendered irrelevant. Wittgenstein and
Winch show that understanding is embedded in practices (level 1) but do not
conclude that reality is constituted by those practices. They leave open (and
in many ways presuppose) that our practices are ways of being in contact with
reality. Rorty, by contrast, treats “contact with reality” as a dispensable
metaphor.
. . .
So my position,
briefly stated is that all understanding is rooted in shared human practices
(Wittgenstein/Winch). There is no view from nowhere. As knowers we are finite
and fallible. However, within those practices, we make claims that purport to
be true or false that are not reducible to mere agreement. And reality is not
exhausted by our practices or judgments. It is what our thinking is about, and
what can exceed or correct it. The fact that our access to reality is always
mediated by human practices does not entail that reality is constituted by
those practices. It shows only that truth is always approached from within a
form of life, not that it is reducible to it.
The levels are not stacked like layers; they
are aspects of one act of understanding. I am not reintroducing a three-tiered
metaphysics. All I am saying, following (I think) Wittgenstein, is that the
pre-logical is the lived ground, the logical is its articulation, and the
metaphysical is what both are about. The first level is not merely prior to
logic, but normative for it, i.e., our practices set the conditions under which
something counts as a reason, a mistake, or a correction. Logic doesn’t float
free. It also doesn’t collapse into mere agreement. The pre-logical level
already contains a lived sense of truth, error, and reality, though not yet in
explicit form. I think this is what Aquinas thought.
If the pre-logical level is already
normative, then it already contains a primitive sense of truth. Not as explicit
correspondence (level 2), or metaphysical adequation (level 3), but truth as
something like “getting it right” within a shared way of living and responding
to the world. Wittgenstein uncovers the root form of truth, before it becomes
theory.
A child learns
that “this is red,” “that hurts,” “the plant died because it had no water” – responses
to how things are, stabilized within a form of life. Thus the importance of “hinges.”
Rorty says, in effect, truth is nothing but what our community justifies. But I
would reply that even our practices of justification presuppose a more basic
sense of answerability to reality. Otherwise, correction and learning would
make no sense, and error would collapse into mere disagreement. The normativity
of our practices shows that they are not self-enclosed. They are already
oriented toward reality, even before that orientation is made explicit in
judgments or theories of truth.
Not everything people say reveals reality.
But the possibility of saying something correct or incorrect already
presupposes that reality can show itself through our words. That is the bridge from
Wittgenstein (use, practice, form of life) to a non-relativist account of truth
without reverting to a crude “mirror of nature” picture.
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