Wittgenstein and Education E-Book
21,99 €
Mehr erfahren.
- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Serie: Journal of Philosophy of Education
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
Wittgenstein and Education Wittgenstein's later writings are abundant with examples, and these return repeatedly to scenes of teaching and learning. Light is cast on language, belief, imagination, perception, illusion and obsession, by asking for each how it is acquired. How do we come into the practices that make up our lives? How, beyond the biological, do we become human beings? Wittgenstein wanted not to spare others the trouble of thinking but to stimulate readers to thoughts of their own. Yet so much in education today leads students (and their teachers) along clearly-planned direct routes to achievement, to success without the trouble of thinking. Knowledge and understanding are displaced by transferrable skills and competences, with teacher education reduced to priorities of classroom management skills and curriculum 'delivery'. In this climate there is a new growth of interest in the illumination Wittgenstein provides for enquiry into education. This collection, originating in the Annual Conference of the British Wittgenstein Society in 2018, celebrates this influence and demonstrates the range of Wittgenstein's importance for education.
Sie lesen das E-Book in den Legimi-Apps auf:
Seitenzahl: 704
Ähnliche
Table of Contents
Cover
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication Page
Notes on Contributors
Introduction
SECTION 1: Language, Science and the World
1 Wittgenstein, Educational Research and the Capture of Science
2 Teaching and Learning with Wittgenstein and Turing: Sailing the Seas of Social Media
INTRODUCTION
SEAS OF WORDS:
PHILOSOPHICAL INVESTIGATIONS
§194
SEARCHING
CONCLUSION
3 ‘A Psychological Regularity to Which
No
Physiological Regularity Corresponds?’: Some Remarks on Understanding and Learning
INTRODUCTION
SHARPENING OUR FOCUS
UNDERSTANDING, UNDERSTANDINGS AND OCCASIONS OF USE
USE
‘YOU'RE WELCOME TO THIS; JUST LOOK ABOUT YOU’: LEAVING EDUCATIONAL NEUROSCIENCE OF OUR OWN ACCORD
7
4 Science Education on the Tightrope Between Scientism and Relativism: A Wittgensteinian Balancing Act
INTRODUCTION
THE SLIPPERY SLOPE TO SCIENTISM
THE SLIPPERY SLOPE TO RELATIVISM
SCIENCE EDUCATION ON THE TIGHTROPE
THE WITTGENSTEINIAN ACT
5 Wittgenstein's Language‐Games of Education: Reading Higher and Lower Registers of ‘Learning’ in
On Certainty
INTRODUCTION: DEFLATIONARY REMARKS ON WITTGENSTEIN'S RELEVANCE TO EDUCATION
HIGHER AND LOWER REGISTERS OF ‘LEARNING’ IN
ON CERTAINTY
CONCLUSION: ASSAYING CLIMATE CHANGE EDUCATION AS SURVIVAL SCHOOL
SECTION 2: Teaching, Learning and Pedagogy
6 The Fragility of Learning
INTRODUCTION
AN OLD FAMILIAR NOTION OF FRAGILITY
EDUCATIONAL INTERLUDE
BEGIN AGAIN…
THE THINGS WE PASS ON
7 On ‘Directing the Child's Attention’: Wittgensteinian Considerations Concerning Joint Attentional Learning
INTRODUCTION
LUNTLEY'S WITTGENSTEIN ON ATTENTION AND THE POSSIBILITY OF LEARNING
ON ‘WHAT ONE DOES WHILE ONE DIRECTS ONE'S ATTENTION’
ON ‘NOTICING AN ASPECT’ AND ‘MASTERY OF A TECHNIQUE’
CONCLUSION
8 Pedagogical Influence in Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations: The ‘Following a Teacher’ Argument
FOLLOWING A TEACHER
A NOTE ON KANT
9 A Pedagogic Reading of Wittgenstein's Life and Later Works
ELEMENTS OF A PEDAGOGIC READING
ADVANTAGES OF A PEDAGOGIC READING
10 Wittgenstein, Problem‐based Learning and Higher Education
INTRODUCTION
THE CASE
MAKING IT REAL
DEMARCATION REVISITED
FINAL REMARKS
SECTION 3: Aesthetics, Ethics and the Spirit
11 Affectation in Dance Practice and the Picture of the Inner and the Outer: Awareness of Dance Instruction and the Use of the Mirror
AFFECTATION AND ITS RELATIONSHIP WITH THE PICTURE OF THE INNER AND THE OUTER
TOWARD AWARENESS IN DANCE INSTRUCTION
THE LOOKING GLASS AND THE INVENTION OF INTERIORITY
12 Possessions and Losses: Joyce, Wittgenstein and Pedagogical Foundations
13 Stories Well Told: Ethics Education Following Wittgenstein
WITTGENSTEIN’S STYLE
ETHICS IS A SENSE OF THE WORLD
IS ETHICS EDUCATION POSSIBLE?
CONCLUDING OBSERVATION
14 Rush Rhees on Education
THE CONCEPT OF EDUCATION
HIRST’S THEORY OF EDUCATION
AUTONOMY
MORAL EDUCATION AND AUTONOMY
THE TEACHER OF MORAL EDUCATION
EDUCATION AND LIFE IN GENERAL
GENERAL PRINCIPLES
15 Wittgenstein: Spiritual Practices
16 Wittgenstein and Learning as Self‐Education
INTRODUCTION
SEEKING THE MEANING OF LIFE
THE MEANING OF LIFE WHEN CONFRONTING FEAR AND SUFFERING
ST. AUGUSTINE
WITTGENSTEIN’S SECOND PERIOD AT CAMBRIDGE
SOME SUGGESTIONS ABOUT WITTGENSTEIN’S POSITION ON RELIGION
TEACHING RELIGION
SECTION 4: Concepts, Games and Forms of Life
17 Dredging and Sedimentation: Wittgenstein, Naturalism and Conceptual Change
18 Remarks on a Wittgensteinian Education to Ineducation
A DIFFERENT VISION
‘LIVING IS EASY WITH EYES CLOSED’
CHILDREN AND ARTISTS, OR THE ARTIST AS A CHILD
19 Language Games in the Ivory Tower: Comparing the
Philosophical Investigations
with Hermann Hesse’s
The Glass Bead Game
CONNECTING PLAY AND PEDAGOGY
CONNECTING LANGUAGE GAMES WITH INSTITUTIONS
HESSE’S GAME
DIALOGUE AND DISSENT WITHIN CASTALIA
HISTORICISING THE INSTITUTION: RETROSPECTIVE NARRATIVES AND LOOKING TO THE FUTURE
HISTORICISING INSTITUTIONS: HISTORICAL TESTIMONIES
CONCLUSION
20 ‘Education as Initiation into Practices’ Reconsidered
PRACTITIONER–PRACTICE RELATIONS
‘MAKING UP THE RULES AS WE GO ALONG’
SELF, PRACTICE AND NARRATIVISATION
CONCLUDING REMARKS
21 Teaching a Form of Life
I
II
III
IV
References
WORKS BY WITTGENSTEIN, WITH ABBREVIATIONS
OTHER WORKS
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover Page
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication Page
Notes on Contributors
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
References
Index
WILEY END USER LICENSE AGREEMENT
Pages
ii
iii
iv
v
x
xi
xii
xiii
xiv
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
78
79
80
81
82
83
84
85
86
87
88
89
90
91
92
93
95
96
97
98
99
100
101
102
103
104
105
106
107
108
109
110
111
112
113
114
115
116
117
118
119
120
121
122
123
124
125
126
127
128
129
130
131
132
133
134
135
136
137
138
139
140
141
142
143
144
145
146
147
148
149
150
151
152
153
154
155
156
157
158
159
160
161
163
165
166
167
168
169
170
171
172
173
174
175
176
177
178
179
180
181
182
183
184
185
186
187
188
189
190
191
192
193
194
195
196
197
198
199
200
201
202
203
204
205
206
207
208
209
210
211
212
213
214
215
216
217
218
219
220
221
222
223
224
225
226
227
228
229
230
231
232
233
234
235
236
237
238
239
240
241
242
243
244
245
246
247
248
249
251
252
253
254
255
256
257
258
259
260
261
262
263
264
265
266
267
268
269
270
271
272
273
274
275
276
277
278
279
280
281
282
283
284
285
286
287
288
289
290
291
292
293
294
295
296
297
298
299
300
301
302
303
304
305
306
307
308
309
310
311
312
313
314
315
316
317
318
319
320
321
322
323
324
325
326
327
328
329
330
331
332
333
334
335
336
337
338
339
340
341
The Journal of Philosophy of Education Book Series
The Journal of Philosophy of Education Book Series publishes titles that represent a wide variety of philosophical traditions. They vary from examination of fundamental philosophical issues in their connection with education, to detailed critical engagement with current educational practice or policy from a philosophical point of view. Books in this series promote rigorous thinking on educational matters and identify and criticise the ideological forces shaping education.
Titles in the series include:
Wittgenstein and Education: On Not Sparing Others the Trouble of ThinkingEdited by Adrian Skilbeck and Paul Standish
Poetics of Alterity: Education, Art, PoliticsSoyoung Lee
Interpreting Kant for Education: Dissolving Dualisms and Embodying MindSheila Webb
Educational Explanations: Philosophy in Empirical Educational ResearchChristopher Winch
Education and ExpertiseEdited by Mark Addis and Christopher Winch
Teachers’ Know‐How: A Philosophical InvestigationChristopher Winch
Citizenship for the Learning Society: Europe, Subjectivity, and Educational ResearchNaomi Hodgson
Philosophy East/West: Exploring Intersections between Educational and Contemplative PracticesEdited by Oren Ergas and Sharon Todd
The Ways We Think: From the Straits of Reason to the Possibilities of ThoughtEmma Williams
Philosophical Perspectives on Teacher EducationEdited by Ruth Heilbronn and Lorraine Foreman‐Peck
Re‐Imagining Relationships in Education: Ethics, Politics and PracticesEdited by Morwenna Griffiths, Marit Honerod Hoveid, Sharon Todd and Christine Winter
Vygotsky: Philosophy and EducationJan Derry
Education and the Growth of Knowledge: Perspectives from Social and Virtue EpistemologyEdited by Ben Kotzee
Education Policy: Philosophical CritiqueEdited by Richard Smith
Levinas, Subjectivity, Education: Towards an Ethics of Radical ResponsibilityAnna Strhan
Philosophy for Children in Transition: Problems and ProspectsEdited by Nancy Vansieleghem and David Kennedy
The Good Life of Teaching: An Ethics of Professional PracticeChris Higgins
Reading R. S. Peters Today: Analysis, Ethics, and the Aims of EducationEdited by Stefaan E. Cuypers and Christopher Martin
The Formation of ReasonDavid Bakhurst
What Do Philosophers of Education Do?: (And How Do They Do It?)Edited by Claudia Ruitenberg
Evidence‐Based Education Policy: What Evidence? What Basis? Whose Policy?Edited by David Bridges, Paul Smeyers and Richard Smith
New Philosophies of LearningEdited by Ruth Cigman and Andrew Davis
The Common School and the Comprehensive Ideal: A Defence by Richard Pring with Complementary EssaysEdited by Mark Halstead and Graham Haydon
Philosophy, Methodology and Educational ResearchEdited by David Bridges and Richard D. Smith
Philosophy of the TeacherNigel Tubbs
Conformism and Critique in Liberal SocietyEdited by Frieda Heyting and Christopher Winch
Retrieving Nature: Education for a PostHumanist AgeMichael Bonnett
Education and Practice: Upholding the Integrity of Teaching and LearningEdited by Joseph Dunne and Padraig Hogan
Educating Humanity: Bildung in PostmodernityEdited by Lars Lovlie, Klaus Peter Mortensen and Sven Erik Nordenbo
The Ethics of Educational ResearchEdited by Michael McNamee and David Bridges
In Defence of High CultureJohn Gingell and Ed Brandon
Enquiries at the Interface: Philosophical Problems of On‐Line EducationEdited by Paul Standish and Nigel Blake
The Limits of Educational AssessmentAndrew Davis
Illusory Freedoms: Liberalism, Education and the MarketEdited by Ruth Jonathan
Quality and EducationChristopher Winch
Wittgenstein and Education
On Not Sparing Others the Trouble of Thinking
Edited by
Adrian Skilbeck
Paul Standish
This edition first published 2023© 2023 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, except as permitted by law. Advice on how to obtain permission to reuse material from this title is available at http://www.wiley.com/go/permissions.
The right of Adrian Skilbeck and Paul Standish to be identified as authors of the editorial material in this work has been asserted in accordance with law.
Registered OfficesJohn Wiley & Sons, Inc., 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030, USAJohn Wiley & Sons Ltd, The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, UK
For details of our global editorial offices, customer services, and more information about Wiley products visit us at www.wiley.com.
Wiley also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats and by print‐on‐demand. Some content that appears in standard print versions of this book may not be available in other formats.
Trademarks: Wiley and the Wiley logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of John Wiley & Sons, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the United States and other countries and may not be used without written permission. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners. John Wiley & Sons, Inc. is not associated with any product or vendor mentioned in this book.
Limit of Liability/Disclaimer of WarrantyWhile the publisher and authors have used their best efforts in preparing this work, they make no representations or warranties with respect to the accuracy or completeness of the contents of this work and specifically disclaim all warranties, including without limitation any implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. No warranty may be created or extended by sales representatives, written sales materials or promotional statements for this work. This work is sold with the understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering professional services. The advice and strategies contained herein may not be suitable for your situation. You should consult with a specialist where appropriate. The fact that an organization, website, or product is referred to in this work as a citation and/or potential source of further information does not mean that the publisher and authors endorse the information or services the organization, website, or product may provide or recommendations it may make. Further, readers should be aware that websites listed in this work may have changed or disappeared between when this work was written and when it is read. Neither the publisher nor authors shall be liable for any loss of profit or any other commercial damages, including but not limited to special, incidental, consequential, or other damages.
Library of Congress Cataloging‐in‐Publication Data applied for:Paperback ISBN 9781119912255
Cover Design: WileyCover Image: Line art modified from the works of Ludwig Wittgenstein, courtesy of Ludwig Wittgenstein
In memory of Ieuan Lloyd—truly a teacher, inspired by Wittgenstein
Notes on Contributors
Christopher Joseph An is currently a PhD candidate in the School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences at the University of Edinburgh. His research focuses on the origins of normative cognition. He has published papers in the areas of philosophy of mind and cognitive science, moral psychology and philosophical anthropology. He also has a teaching appointment at the Ateneo de Manila University in the Philippines, which is also where he was born and raised.
Gordon C.F. Bearn is a Professor and Chair of the Philosophy Department at Lehigh University. His published work has concerned a Cavell‐inspired tradition of Wittgenstein interpretation, a Deleuze‐inspired tradition of Existential Aesthetics and a Foucault‐inspired philosophy of language. He would like to write a book drawing these latest ideas into a book taking off equally from Wittgenstein and Foucault.
Stephen Burwood teaches philosophy at the University of Hull, UK. His recent publications include, ‘A Spontaneous Following: Wittgenstein, Education and the Limits of Trust’, in Michael A. Peters and Jeff Stickney (eds), A Companion to Wittgenstein on Education: Pedagogical Investigations (Springer, 2017), pp. 161–177 and ‘Karl Jaspers: Truth, Academic Freedom and Student Autonomy’, in Ron Barnett and Amanda Fulford (eds), Philosophers on the University (Springer, 2020), pp.137–148.
Carla Carmona joined the University of Seville in 2017. She is currently teaching Theory of Dialogue and Interculturality, East Asian Aesthetics, and Epistemology. She has specialised in the application of the philosophy of Wittgenstein to domains as varied as cinema, dance, epistemic injustice, intercultural understanding, or the intellectual and artistic atmosphere of fin‐de‐siècle Vienna. With experience as a dancer and a dance critic, she is a close collaborator with professional choreographers.
Leon Culbertson is a Reader in Philosophy and Dean of the Graduate School at Edge Hill University. He mainly works on a set of problems at the intersection of the philosophy of mind, language, logic and psychology. One day he may even get round to publishing some of that work. He has a long‐standing interest in the philosophy of Wittgenstein.
Georgina Edwards is a DPhil candidate in German at Worcester College, University of Oxford. Her research is supported by the AHRC Doctoral Training Partnership and examines the analogy between games and learning in the work of Wittgenstein and Hesse. Her other research interests include the philosophy of Heidegger, interactions between philosophy and literature, and translation studies.
Juliet Floyd teaches Philosophy at Boston University, researching American philosophy, philosophy of logic, mathematics, language, symbolism and new media. Her recent books include Wittgenstein's Philosophy of Mathematics (Cambridge, 2021) and the co‐edited volumes Philosophy of Emerging Media (with James E. Katz, Oxford, 2016), Philosophical Explorations of the Legacy of Alan Turing (with A. Bokulich, Springer, 2017) and Stanley Cavell's Must We Mean What We Say? at Fifty (with Greg Chase and Sandra Laugier, Cambridge, 2021).
Renia Gasparatou is an Associate Professor at the University of Patras. She teaches and researches in epistemology, philosophy of education, and philosophy of science education. She studied philosophy at the Universities of Athens, Crete and Pittsburgh. She has twice been awarded the State Scholarship Foundation, once for her PhD dissertation and once for post‐doctoral research. Throughout her career she has been centrally concerned with the work of Wittgenstein and J.L. Austin.
Edward Guetti is currently an Associate and Postdoctoral Researcher, with, respectively, the Centro Brasileiro de Pesquisa (São Paulo) and the Centre Marc Bloch (Berlin). He holds a PhD in Philosophy from The New School for Social Research. He has written articles on Wittgenstein's philosophy, film aesthetics, the work of Stanley Cavell, and Critical Theory in the context of climate change.
Kenny Siu Sing Huen taught at primary and secondary schools before working successively at the Hong Kong Institute of Education (now the Education University of Hong Kong), Universiti Brunei Darussalam, and Fiji National University. His research is focused on Wittgenstein's insights into such matters as rule‐following, practices, normativity and forms of life, which he endeavours to compare with, or to bring into creative exchange with, the related thoughts of such thinkers as Chomsky, Heidegger, Korsgaard, and Lipman.
D. Ieuan Lloyd (1934–2020) taught philosophy of education at Stockwell College of Education, London, and later Birmingham University. Following early retirement, he taught philosophy for many years in the department at University College Swansea. A lifelong friend of D.Z. Phillips, he completed his doctorate under the supervision of Rush Rhees. Like his publications, his teaching reflected both the desire to speak accessibly and sensitively to the philosophical problems that confront educators and the strong influence of Swansea Wittgensteinianism.
Michael Luntley is Professor of Philosophy at Warwick University. His main interests are in Wittgenstein, the metaphysics of thought and reasons, and perceptual knowledge, especially in expert performance. He is the author of Wittgenstein: Opening Investigations (Wiley, 2015) and Wittgenstein: meaning and judgement (Blackwell, 2003). He directed the AHRB project ‘Attention and the knowledge bases of expertise’, which studied the cognitive skills that underpin the competences of class teachers.
Nimrod Matan is a Lecturer in the Faculty of Arts at Beit Berl College, Israel. His research interests include Wittgenstein's ethics and the philosophy of education.
Patrick Quinn is Tutor and Lecturer in Philosophy at University College, Dublin and the Lumen Dominican Centre, Sion Hill Campus, Blackrock, County Dublin, and was formerly Head of Department of Philosophy, All Hallows College, Dublin (1994–2016), with publications in philosophy and education and a series of programmes on these topics on RTE and television, author of Philosophy of Religion A–Z (Edinburgh Press, 2005) and Wittgenstein on Thinking, Learning and Teaching (Peter Lang, 2015).
Matteo Rivetti is a philosophy teacher in high schools. After studying at the University of Bologna, he graduated from the University of Padova with a dissertation on Wittgenstein's thought in its relation to creative practices in aesthetics and politics. He has worked with primary education departments in developing philosophy and creative writing classes for children.
Adrian Skilbeck is a Lecturer in Education Studies at the University of Winchester, where he co‐convenes the Centre for Philosophy of Education. He contributed to A Companion to Wittgenstein on education: Pedagogical investigations (Springer, 2017) and co‐edited with Jeff Stickney the special issue, Climate Crisis: Education, Environment, Sustainability (Journal of Philosophy of Education, 2020, 54.4). He is author of Stanley Cavell and the Human Voice in Education: Serious Words for Serious Subjects (Springer, 2022).
Richard Smith is an Emeritus Professor of Education at the University of Durham, UK. He was for ten years Editor of the Journal of Philosophy of Education. He founded the journal Ethics and Education in 2006 and edited it for several years. His latest book is (jointly edited with Amanda Fulford and Grace Lockrobin) Philosophy and Community: Theories, Practices and Possibilities (Bloomsbury, 2020). His current interests include unknowing and the dialogues of Plato.
Paul Standish is a Professor of Philosophy of Education at UCL IOE, where he leads its Centre for Philosophy of Education, and President of the Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain. His most recent books are Stanley Cavell and Philosophy as Translation (Rowman & Littlefield, 2017) and Democracy and Education from Dewey to Cavell (Wiley, 2022), respectively co‐edited and co‐authored with Naoko Saito. He is Co‐Editor (and was Editor, 2001–2011) of the Journal of Philosophy of Education.
Jeff Stickney co‐edited, with Michael Peters, A Companion to Wittgenstein on education: Pedagogical investigations (Springer, 2017) and co‐authored with Peters Wittgenstein's education: A picture held us captive (2018), and ‘Wittgenstein at Cambridge: Philosophy as a way of life’ (Educational Philosophy and Theory, 2019). Stickney teaches part‐time at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto. He co‐edited with Adrian Skilbeck the special issue, Climate Crisis: Education, Environment, Sustainability (Journal of Philosophy of Education, 2020, 54.4).
Patrik Kjærsdam Telléus is an Associate Professor at the Department of Health Science and Technology, Aalborg University, Denmark. He wrote his doctoral thesis on conceptual deliberation in applied ethics based on Wittgenstein's philosophy. Apart from ethics, his research interests also include the philosophy of learning and epistemology, especially within the contexts of medical education, research and professionalism. He is Editor‐in‐Chief of the Journal of Problem‐based Learning in Higher Education.
Désirée Weber is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at the College of Wooster. She researches and writes about political theory and the impact of language on politics with a special focus on Ludwig Wittgenstein. She is working on a forthcoming book about the role of teaching and learning in Wittgenstein's biography and later work – and its implications for understanding our capacity to make meaning and form judgments about meaning.
Introduction
Adrian Skilbeck1 and Paul Standish2
1University of Winchester
2UCL IOE
I should not like my writing to spare other people the trouble of thinking. But if possible, to stimulate someone to thoughts of his own.
—Wittgenstein, Preface to the Philosophical Investigations
Wittgenstein is an equivocal figure in philosophy today. Philosophers in the mainstream often shy away from his work – perhaps in part because of its inherent difficulty, but perhaps more because his approach to philosophy resists the categories and compartmentalisation in which the subject has become institutionalised: this is ethics, that epistemology, this is moral and that political philosophy, and that is the philosophy of education. Wittgenstein’s work defies such clear distinctions, and the nature of his philosophy reaches into questions that all these sub‐disciplines must address, as well as challenging prevalent assumptions of a more metaphysical kind – assumptions about the very nature of human being.
But, if Wittgenstein is not read, he is referred to, and in fact his influence penetrates far more fully than these remarks might suggest. In a poll conducted in North America in the 1990s, philosophers were asked to name the five most important books in philosophy in the twentieth century (Lackey 1999).Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico‐Philosophicus, first published in the early1920s, came fourth – which carries a certain irony, given that, by the time it was published, Wittgenstein had withdrawn from academic philosophy. Apart from one surprising exception, Wittgenstein was not to publish any other book during his life‐time. But, following his return to Cambridge in 1929, he worked for the best part of two decades on a text that was published only posthumously, in 1953, the Philosophical Investigations. In the poll this came first, by a very clear margin. Now, some two decades after the poll – not such a long time in terms of major philosophical trends – we find signs of new interest in his work. A conference held in 2018 at Oxford University under the heading ‘Culture and Value after Wittgenstein’ was a sell‐out, while at the annual meeting of the British Wittgenstein Society in that same year, the conference theme attracted its largest audience yet: that theme was Wittgenstein and Education, and the text that follows presents a selection of work inspired by the occasion.
Over the past 60 years, Wittgenstein has indeed had significant influence in the philosophy of education, influence that has run through the development of the discipline in its modern form, and there is every reason to insist on his continuing relevance and increasing importance (see Standish 2018). The publication in 2017 of A Companion to Wittgenstein on Education: Philosophical Investigations Pedagogical Investigations, edited by Michael Peters and Jeff Stickney, is a landmark in recent contributions to the field. It is evident from this wide‐ranging compendium that both established and early‐career scholars have been engaging with Wittgenstein’s thought with renewed vigour and finding fresh insights in pursuing Wittgensteinian‐inflected approaches to educational questions. Part of the significance of Wittgenstein specifically for education arises from recognition of the shift in his work, stylistically and substantively between the two major books mentioned above. It is surely of interest, furthermore, that for six years in the 1920s, during the period of his withdrawal from academic philosophy, he worked as a teacher in an elementary school. It was during this period that Wittgenstein wrote the Wörterbuch für Volksschulen. An English version was published in 2020, translated and introduced by Désirée Weber, who discusses this period of Wittgenstein’s life in her contribution to this volume.
The nature and the extent of the shift between his early and his later work is the subject of much debate. One thing that clearly distinguishes the later writings, however, is the abundance of the examples, examples in which, again and again, Wittgenstein comes back to questions of teaching and learning. Light is cast on language, belief, imagination, perception, illusion and obsession, by asking for each how it is acquired. How do we come into the practices that make up our lives? This shows, if demonstration is needed, that education is not exactly an external factor to philosophy, to which philosophy should be ‘applied’: rather it is the case that questions of teaching and learning are already there in philosophy in its most central concerns. Philosophy enquires not just into the nature of the good life but into how it is that we come into this, not just about the nature of knowledge but about how it is that we come to know – and, that is, how, beyond the biological, we come to be human beings. In the absence of these questions, we can scarcely begin to think of how our world is constituted.
The British Wittgenstein Society1 2018 Conference was hosted by the Centre for Philosophy of Education at UCL, in collaboration with the Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain. With ‘Wittgenstein and Education’ as its title, the aim was in part to bring together scholars from different backgrounds, people who might not normally encounter each other in the general run of academic life. The philosophical and educational space that was created made it possible for new conversations to emerge, and more familiar conversations to be given a fresh twist, and the audience for Wittgensteinian scholarship and philosophy of education broadened.
That Wittgenstein’s work resists categories and compartmentalisation makes organising a collected volume of responses to it a hazardous task. Nonetheless, a number of themes emerged at the 2018 conference and are reflected here. The first section, ‘Language, Science and the World’ brings together the work of philosophers from both education and the wider field in reflecting upon Wittgenstein’s troubled relationship with science. Richard Smith argues that educational research, understood as social science, is, to paraphrase Wittgenstein, held captive by a picture that is as much a mind‐set as it is a set of clearly articulated beliefs. Juliet Floyd’s discussion of Wittgenstein and Alan Turing brings Wittgenstein into dialogue with the massive effects of technological change in our contemporary world, resisting the traditional picture of the rivalry between a humanistic Wittgenstein and the mechanist Turing to show how they both influenced and learned from each other. Leon Culbertson draws on Wittgenstein to suggest ways in which we might leave behind the picture of learning forced on us by neuroscience and neuroeducation, resisting determinant concepts of learning to allow a greater role for the context in which learning takes place and the occasions when it happens. Renia Gasparatou invites us to rethink our understanding of science education, away from a fixed representation of what science is and towards a conception of science education rooted in the overlapping, diverse criteria governing scientific practices. Jeff Stickney’s wide‐ranging contribution provides a bridge between this first section, with its focus on science and language and the world, and the second section, with its focus on teaching, learning and pedagogy. Teaching, he argues, is central to how we come to acquire a shared world‐view, part of a process of learning which is not simple and clear‐cut but complex and muddied, and where changes require shifts in the ‘riverbanks’ that channel out thoughts.
Michael Luntley’s discussion of learning as pattern‐forming regularity opens the second section, ‘Teaching, Learning and Pedagogy’. The general tenor of Luntley’s work on the pedagogical relationship is an influence an important influence on Christopher An’s discussion. This resists an individualistic understanding of the young child’s capacity to attend to its world in favour of an emphasis on the significance of the mutual and sustained interactions between the adult and the responsive child. Nimrod Matan also works with the concept of following but redirects its meaning: rule‐following gives way to following the teacher, where what is learnt is not content but exemplarity. This manifests itself in the idea of the teacher as someone who is capable of being an exemplar, stimulating learners to thoughts of their own and, by extension, of the possibility of their own exemplarity. Désirée Weber offers a ‘pedagogic’ reading of Wittgenstein’s later works, which she presents as an alternative both to the focus on rule‐following and to the analogy between philosophy and therapy, a connection that some have seen as characterising Wittgenstein’s work. In so doing, she highlights the significance of biography in understanding Wittgenstein’s development and the progression of his thought. The section closes with Patrik Telléus’ Wittgensteinian‐informed approach to the problem‐based learning and skills development that is characteristic of new universities, particularly those with students from less traditional backgrounds.
The range of Wittgenstein’s interests is reflected in the third section, ‘Aesthetics, Ethics and the Spirit’. Carla Carmona considers affectation in dance through engagement with Wittgensteinian notions of the inner and the outer. The correctness rather than beauty of a movement is captured in Wittgenstein’s notion of aesthetic satisfaction as the moment when something clicks – i.e. both feels right and is free of affectation. Edward Guetti draws parallels between scenes of education in James Joyce’s novel Ulysses and Wittgenstein’s own work to identify ways in which we become strangers to ourselves through our philosophical presumptions. Stories more generally are an important feature of Ruth Heilbronn’s discussion of ethics education. Beginning with Wittgenstein’s own use of stories in the opening of the Philosophical Investigations, Heilbronn argues that narrative is essential to understanding Wittgenstein’s idea of showing, not telling, and that exposure to literature can enhance our ethical imagination. We are grateful to have the opportunity to include the late Ieuan Lloyd’s reflections on discussions he held in the 1970s with Rush Rhees on philosophy and education, which have a particular critical focus on the influential ideas of the ‘London School’ of philosophy of education, as it has come to be known, most notably their views on moral education. In a different vein, Gordon Bearn finds in Wittgenstein’s work a possible reanimation of the idea of life‐changing education. His ‘Wittgenstein: Spiritual Practices’ achieves this by holding onto the possibility of educational experiences that change everything whilst seemingly leaving everything the same. What has changed is our perception, the way we see things. It is a change ‘down to our toes’. Section 3 concludes with Patrick Quinn’s discussion of Wittgenstein’s religious beliefs, his struggles to live a life free of the self‐deceit and vanity for which he excoriated himself. Quinn reflects on the influence of religiously inflected texts like Tolstoy’s Gospel and Augustine’s Confessions.
Section 4, entitled ‘Concepts, Games and Forms of Life’, begins with a chapter by Stephen Burwood. This returns us to Wittgenstein’s metaphor of the riverbed and the nature of world pictures. How are we to conceive of the relationship between our lives and the conceptual landscape with which we inhabit the world, such that our practices are both intelligible and, when facts about the world change, themselves open to change? Matteo Rivetti, in speaking of an education to ‘ineducation’, looks to Wittgenstein to describe how we might come to see things differently, from a fresh point of view. To do so requires us to work on ourselves. In Culture and Value (p. 38) Wittgenstein observed that a teacher’s success must be judged not solely on the results that his pupils achieve with him, but by whether they can continue to work at the same level without him – that is, think for themselves. Wittgenstein may have been reflecting on his own impact and influence when he wrote these words. The question of whether there is a place in the modern university for the legacy of Wittgenstein’ deeply personal philosophical practice guides Georgina Edwards’ contribution. Mediating themes of play, culture and pedagogy, through the concept of games in Wittgenstein and Hermann Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game, Edwards ponders the ways in which the kind of thinking Wittgenstein both practised and sought to provoke are possible in the contemporary institutional setting, where ideas of teaching, learning and research are profoundly distorted by the scientism of performativity and accountability. In Kenny Huen’s reconsideration of education as an initiation into practices, self‐narration is to be viewed as part of an individual’s critical and reflective response to their own practices, for example to their experience of teaching. Finally, Rebeca Pérez León seeks to clarify the aims of global citizenship education through the idea of the form of life, whereby educators model new ways of thinking about what it means to be a citizen through Wittgensteinian modes of showing.
Since the occasion of the conference, much work has been undertaken to revise papers that were presented, and the selection included here is intended to provide a broad sample of the work that is flourishing in the field as well as, we hope, to stimulate readers to thoughts of their own.
We are grateful to Danièle Moyal‐Sharrock and Ian Ground, President and Vice‐President of the British Wittgenstein Society, for the invitation to organise the 2018 Conference, as well as to the Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain and UCL for generous contributions to funding. We also thank all those who participated and made the conference a memorable one.
Note
1
See:
https://www.britishwittgensteinsociety.org/
.
SECTION 1Language, Science and the World
1Wittgenstein, Educational Research and the Capture of Science
Richard Smith
Durham University, Durham, UK
This article is rooted in my puzzlement that in the field of the philosophy of education and in the philosophy of social science more widely, there has been very little use of the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein, and in my belief that he has much to offer as philosophers of education and academic educationalists more broadly. I will begin with a short description of the academic journey in which these thoughts took root and have strengthened over time.
In the university study of education, undergraduate students in the United Kingdom are usually required to write a dissertation in their final year. This may contribute as much as 40% of their final year marks. Yet some 30 years ago in my own university – and we were not alone in this – there was little in their first‐and second‐year modules to prepare them in any systematic way for the writing of a dissertation. The result was that they either pulled together elements of the taught modules they had taken – typically in the history, psychology and sociology, and philosophy of education – or fell back on some longstanding personal interest, for example in the injustices of the UK education system, the importance of outdoor education, the education of the emotions, the education significance of the films of Walt Disney. These did not necessarily result in bad dissertations, but the weaker ones tended to be characterised by superficiality and the recourse to empirical evidence, usually in the form of simplistic questionnaires sent to friends, family and practising school teachers, in place of sustained argument and in‐depth reading of relevant theoretical literature.
Accordingly a second‐year research methods module was introduced in order to repair these deficiencies. Yet this brought with it problems that were in many ways just as bad as what it was meant to remedy. Every academic in the education department, it seemed, insisted that student's particular method should be represented in the module. The result was that students were presented with a bewildering array of research methods and approaches: randomised control trials, ethnomethodology, critical theory, action research, participant observation, grounded theory, and many more – so many, in fact, that few of the 22 lectures in the module could be devoted to more than a single, relatively topic as rival researchers jostled for space to draw attention to the importance of their particular approach. The students, unsurprisingly, tended to opt for the first method that they could understand and then cast around for an educational issue or problem to which they could apply it – instead of what all the teachers of the module agreed was the more appropriate approach: to start with an interesting issue or problem and then think about how to investigate it. (I was tentatively asked if I would like to give a lecture on philosophical approaches: I fear I may have caused offence by explaining that you can't teach anyone to be even the most rudimentary philosopher in a 50 minutes session.) The department boasts of the ‘diverse expertise’ of its researchers, correctly pointing out that it stands ‘5th in the field of education nationally and joint 1st in the UK for world‐leading research impact’. Clearly it is doing something right, and I like and admire my colleagues. I am only concerned to point out that there never seems to be any coherent vision of educational research as a whole, with little awareness of its roots in four centuries of the growth of science and the veneration of its methods, and next to no interest in how this has affected the ways in which educational research is conceived and practised today.
I return to these points below, after I have said a little more about my own academic journey. Around 25 years ago I was asked to take on the role of Director of Combined Social Sciences at my university. This was and still is an undergraduate programme which students put together for themselves from the various departments of the Social Science Faculty, with the option to take up to two modules from other faculties. As I moved into my new role I was struck by two things. One was the high quality of the students, who in addition to their academic prowess came to university with an independence of spirit that this kind of degree appealed to. The second was that they had no core module or modules to hold their programme together and from which they could survey their field of study and reflect on the idea of ‘social science’ which was what, at least nominally, they were students of. Accordingly I launched a new compulsory first‐year module, ‘The discipline of social science’, which examined the aspiration of the study of the social world to be some kind of science. We traced it from the scientific revolution of the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, through the Enlightenment and on to Darwin, Marx and Freud. I wanted above all for them to see how odd it was for the study of education, crime, social deprivation and so on to be thought of as a science: for the university departments in which they studied to be called social sciences. And I wanted them to develop a keen sense of the oddities and distortions that followed from these generally accepted conventions.
The module proved popular and the students asked for this ‘core’ of the Combined Social Sciences degree, now increasingly taken as an option by students from other degree programmes, to be continued into their second and third years. I thought this was a splendid opportunity to help them think further about the idea of social science research, and in particular to understand the limitations of the various ‘research methods’ modules that they were required to take in the various social sciences departments (Politics, Anthropology, Sociology, Geography and so on) – modules that often suffered from the same limitations and distortions that were so evident in my own department's Educational Research Methods module. So ‘The philosophy of social science’ came into being, a module whose topics included how we can understand ourselves and others, interpretation and hermeneutics, the narrative turn, and the claims of sociobiology – and, in particular, the module focused on how we investigate such topics and questions, challenging students' regular assumption that empirical research would be at the heart of our answers.
It was here, I felt, that Wittgenstein might prove particularly helpful. The students, and many of the lecturers they met, had not been persuaded, by any explicit arguments, that social science research ought to follow the model of the hard or physical sciences. Rather they were, to echo Wittgenstein's way of putting it, captured by a picture (PIa §115: ‘a picture held us captive’). It is the ‘scientific’ picture – science here including geometry and mathematics – that he has in mind. In his later and arguably more influential writing, Wittgenstein is astute (albeit sometimes cryptically) about the fundamental confusions at the heart of many elements of the ‘scientific turn’ that had captivated him in his earlier work, particularly the Tractatus, and he offers us well‐judged ways of dissolving the pseudo‐scientific myths that enthral and mislead many who regard themselves as members of the social science community. He is exceptionally and, it is sometimes tempting to say, uniquely helpful to us as we resist scientism, which is faith in science and excessive respect for science – particularly the expectation that every question is susceptible to scientific solutions and that scientific knowledge should be taken as the model for all knowledge. This of course is not to reject or even to denigrate science itself, though Wittgenstein, who was knowledgeable about science, having trained as an engineer and having worked as an aeronautical scientist in Manchester and elsewhere, often expresses extreme hostility to science in his later writings:
It isn't absurd, e.g., to believe that the age of science and technology is the beginning of the end for humanity; that the idea of great progress is a delusion, along with the idea that the truth will ultimately be known; that there is nothing good or desirable about scientific knowledge and mankind, in seeking it, is falling into a trap.
(CV, p. 56)
It is usual to connect this with Wittgenstein's feelings about the way science and technology had contributed to the horrors of two world wars (he had witnessed these with his own eyes as a front‐line soldier from 1914 to 1918), especially through the development of the atomic bomb, and with his apocalyptic phrase ‘the darkness of this time’ in his Preface to the Philosophical Investigations. A deeper scepticism however is evident in such remarks as the following, also from Culture and Value (p. 40):
What a curious attitude scientists have –: ‘We still don't know that; but it is knowable and it is only a matter of time before we get to know it!’ As if that went without saying. –
This is a telling example of the naïve scientism that Wittgenstein would have us guard against.
It is important to emphasise that in teaching undergraduate and postgraduate students the task here, as often, is to shift their mind‐set – to become sceptical of an entire intellectual framework – and not simply to offer them rational arguments against the idea that social science research has to be ‘scientific’. Mind‐sets, after all, can survive rational arguments with remarkable persistence. It was helpful too, I found, that in making his criticisms of scientism Wittgenstein does not speak – does not speak down – to his readers with any sense of superiority, as if it was the easiest thing in the world to see through the veneration of science and scientific language and assumptions. Far from that, Wittgenstein is at pains to make clear that in his early philosophical work he himself was ‘captured’ by scientific models and ideas that were making a major impact at the time. It is very salutary for students to realise that philosophical ideas do not move in some abstract and timeless realm but are strongly affected by (and we would like to think that they themselves affect) other ideas and movements of their time. Thus it was important for students to know that shortly before Wittgenstein's writing of the Tractatus (published in 1922), Albert Einstein, for instance, did important work in atomic theory, culminating in the publication of his ‘General Theory of Relativity’ in 1916; that J.J. Thomson was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1906 for his work in identifying subatomic particles in cathode rays; that Ernest Rutherford, Niels Bohr and Gilbert Lewis made important discoveries about the structure of atoms between 1909 and 1916; that Rutherford famously ‘split the atom’ in 1919.
From this perspective it is not surprising that a trained scientist and engineer such as Wittgenstein, who had been fascinated by the philosophy of mathematics and corresponded with Gottlob Frege, perhaps the most eminent thinker in this field at the time, should be influenced by scientific and logico‐mathematical ‘pictures’. Essentially the Tractatus is a work of analysis dedicated to discovering elementary propositions, understood as the basic building blocks of language. Because those elementary propositions are analogous to the place of atoms in the world that the physical sciences investigate, Wittgenstein's theory in the Tractatus is often described as logical atomism. Wittgenstein did not use this phrase himself, but the word Sachverhalte that he uses in the Tractatus and is usually translated as ‘states of affairs’ is translated by some as ‘atomic facts’ (Hunnings 1988). Furthermore Bertrand Russell, who was a major influence on Wittgenstein and acknowledged the influence Wittgenstein had on him in turn, was happy to call himself a logical atomist (Klement 2004).
In continuing to try to free himself, and us, from being captives of the picture of science, Wittgenstein sets about developing new ideas about language, meaning and knowledge. In his early Tractatus he was driven by the search for a perfect language, pure and crystalline like the language of logic and science (or, we might say, the fantasy of such a language, and the mirage of all science as essentially the same). The radical difference between his earlier and later work is registered in the title of his two major publications. Tractatus is best glossed as ‘treatise’, meaning a formal and systematic text. The full title that Wittgenstein gave this work was Logisch‐philosophische Abhandlung (literally Logical‐Philosophical Treatise). He adopted the Latin title for the English translation on the suggestion of the philosopher G.E. Moore, who was struck by the Spinozian flavour of the last part of the Tractatus: Spinoza's great work of moral philosophy had been titled Tractatus Theologico‐Politicus (Moore had published his own work on moral philosophy in 1903 as Principia Ethica). Perhaps in the Latinate title of the Tractatus there is also an allusion to Whitehead's and Russell's Principia Mathematica, published in 1910, which itself pays homage to Isaac Newton's Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (‘The mathematical principles of natural science’, what we now call ‘science’ being known as ‘natural philosophy’ in Newton's time). These allusions suggest an austere and abstract text, which is what the reader encounters.
His later work, published after his death in 1953, is called, in English, Philosophical Investigations (Philosophische Untersuchungen in German). It is worth dwelling on the title for a moment. Logical‐Philosophical has dropped the Logical, suggesting an approach that is less narrow and austere than the earlier Tractatus. Latin has been replaced by plain German (and, in turn, by plain English). Now Wittgenstein offers us less in the way of solutions and a fully developed theory than ‘investigations’ – Untersuchungen could equally be translated as ‘study’ or ‘enquiry’. The reader is invited to accompany him on a journey, with no promise of a conclusion. The Tractatus was set out in carefully numbered statements, e.g. 4.1272, 4.12721, 4.1273, in a hierarchy such that every lower level proposition expands on or comments on the proposition directly above it in the hierarchy, and there is a sense that the removal of any one statement could bring the whole structure crashing down. The Investigations also consists of numbered paragraphs, but these are very different: they are allusive and thought‐provoking, and are so far from being carefully sequential that the connections between them are often far from clear and there is sometimes a sense that they could be shuffled around without any great loss to the work as a whole.
One of Wittgenstein's most significant remarks in the Philosophical Investigations PI is as follows:
every sentence in our language is in order as it is. That is to say, we are not striving after an ideal, as if our ordinary vague sentences had not yet got a quite unexceptionable sense, and a perfect language awaited construction by us.
(PIa §98)
It is an idea that is repeated elsewhere in the Philosophical Investigations, for example at §§123–124 where we read ‘A philosophical problem has the form: “I don't know my way about” … It [ie philosophy] leaves everything as it is’. This needs some clarification, not least because it appears to limit the role of philosophy so severely as to make it effectively useless. What then are we to make of Wittgenstein's insistence that ‘every sentence in our language is in order as it is’? Surely we come across sentences from time to time, which strike us as not quite right, as not being in order. Here are some: ‘Social science, as the word “science” implies, is a precise discipline’. ‘Learning phonics skills is the first important step in learning to read’. ‘Depression is an illness like any other’. ‘Education should stream children on the basis of their natural ability’. Wittgenstein's apparent endorsement of ‘every sentence in our language’ seems to suggest that each of the four sentences above is beyond reproach. Indeed, each of them might seem to some people at least to express simple common sense: to the lecturer in a Social Science Research Methods module, whose students reported her words to me with glee; to the writer of a UK Department for Education (2013) leaflet, Learning to read through phonics: Information for parents; to the doctor who spoke these words to a colleague of mine as he typed the prescription for antidepressants; to the student who recorded her faith in the idea of ‘natural ability’ in an undergraduate essay.
What then is not quite right, not in order in these sentences? The first sentence shows that the speaker holds a remarkably naïve theory about science as well as about social science: in particular one that shows no awareness of the way that the term ‘social science’ came into being as theorists and researchers sought in the nineteenth century to dignify the new discipline with the aura of the physical sciences (see above, and Smeyers and Smith 2014). The second is questionable. Phonics as a reading ‘method’ is contentious (you would not know this from the Department for Education's leaflet). Depression may often be better understood as a response to difficult circumstances in a person's life and to call it an illness immediately assumes that a medical doctor is the appropriate person to ‘treat’ it as she would tonsillitis or gout, that is through medication. The idea that there is such a thing as ‘natural ability’, a kind of stable attribute of the individual, perhaps expressed in terms of IQ, ignores the possibility that ability may be acquired, for instance through practice or good teaching. It is linked with the discredited theories of psychologists such as Cyril Burt. The important point here is that the challenge that can be made is essentially that the writer is in the grip of a theory.
The idea that ‘our language is in order as it is’, then, is one more warning that in our ordinary lives, there is a danger in looking for an ideal or perfect language: particularly one strongly coloured by theories, scientific or otherwise. When we are engaged in science, mathematics, logic or any highly specialised activity things are of course different: then we need specialised language in which words, symbols and phrases have carefully defined meanings. But our ordinary language, for the most part, does not need to be replaced by something more ‘scientific’. We can talk of the weather ‘not knowing what it’s trying to do’ and those to whom we are speaking will understand us well enough and not query the implication that the weather possesses cognition and volition. We can enjoy the distinctive smell of what we call the good sea air even if a biologist correctly informs us that much of that smell comes from dimethyl sulphide released by bacteria eating dying photoplankton. We can say we are standing on solid floor even if ‘we have been told by popular scientists that the floor on which we stand is not solid, as it appears to common sense, as it has been discovered that the wood consists of particles filling space so thinly that it can almost be called empty’ (BBB, p. 45). It is worth quoting this passage further. Wittgenstein continues:
This is liable to perplex us, for in a way of course we know that the floor is solid, or that, if it isn't solid, this may be due to the floor being rotten but not to its being composed of electrons. To say, on this latter ground, that the floor is not solid is to misuse language. For even if the particles were as big as grains of sand, and as close together as these are in a sandheap, the floor would not be solid if it were composed of them in the sense in which a sandheap is composed of grains. Our perplexity was based on a misunderstanding; the picture of the thinly filled space had been wrongly applied. For this picture of the structure of matter was meant to explain the very phenomenon of solidity.
That is to say: the scientist who tells us that the floor is not ‘really’ solid, since it is composed of electrons, ‘misuses language’: he in fact assumed the common meaning of ‘solidity’, which he now wants to replace, in his explanation of it. Or we might put it like this: he offered to explain solidity to us, but now he is trying to explain it away.
Perhaps I can illustrate Wittgenstein's insistence on the way that our ordinary language is ‘in order’ with the help of Clare, a 14‐year‐old girl in Penelope Lively's novel The House in Norham Gardens (Lively 1974). Clare's teacher, Mrs Cramp, is criticising – not unkindly – Clare's essay for containing phrases like ‘sort of’ and ‘or anything’, and generally being ‘messy’: ‘So what I really wanted to say was that you must remember that language is an instrument, Clare. An instrument to be used precisely’.
Later the same day Clare is back at home. Her friend Liz has come to tea. Clare reflects on her conversation with Mrs Cramp:
‘Language’, said Clare to Liz, ‘is an instrument. You have to use it precisely. Like a screwdriver or something. Not just bash around vaguely?’
‘What are you on about?’
‘But the trouble is that people don't. They say things like “quite” and “rather” and “ever so many” and “by and large” and “much of a muchness” and “quite a few”. Now what do you suppose a person means when he says “quite a few”?’
Liz said, ‘It would depend what he meant quite a few of. Bananas, or miles, or people living in Manchester’.
‘Years’.
‘Then it could mean anything’.
‘Quite’, said Clare.
(pp. 60–62)
There are three other major elements in Wittgenstein's dissatisfaction with the influence of the scientific ‘picture’. The first is what he calls ‘our craving for generality’ (BBB, p. 18). We might think here of the widespread tendency these days to suppose that explanations will be found ‘in the genes’ for a wide range of aspects of human behaviour, from attention‐deficit hyperactive disorder (ADHD) to criminality. Or we might think of the way that some people are excited by the expectation that neuroscience will supply the universal key to our understanding of human learning – and thus in the end to our understanding of education. Wittgenstein writes that by ‘our craving for generality’ he means:
The method of reducing the explanation of natural phenomena to the smallest possible number of primitive natural laws … 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. I want to say here that it can never be our job to reduce anything to anything, or to explain anything.
(BBB, p. 18)
The idea that it is not our job (as philosophers) to explain anything may sound strange, but this is a second aspect of Wittgenstein's escape from the capture of science. It is a matter of doing justice to the fact that not all understanding and knowing comes down to explaining. In science it often does. We explain someone's slurred speech: he suffers from a particular condition (perhaps he has had a stroke) of which this is a symptom. We explain the distinctive flora and fauna of Australasia: that continent became separated from the great land‐mass that we call Pangaea at an early stage when that land‐mass began to divide, and so Australasia had a long time over which its particular flora and fauna could evolve. But in social science our understanding and knowledge typically take a different form. When we seek to understand puzzling behaviour in a strange culture (the way children dress up on the last day of October and go round houses demanding treats and threatening ‘tricks’, say) we are not asking what caused the behaviour: we are asking what it means
