Social Inquiry and the Pursuit of Reality

1. The Quest for the Real and the Fear of Relativism

Social scientists have typically, and appropriately, been intent on providing an account of what is “really” going on in various forms of social interaction. Many social theorists, however, have attempted to ground these accounts on a universal sense of what is real and true, which would, they claim, both allow objective epistemic access to social practices and establish a privileged basis for rational critical judgment. They have often turned to philosophy in a search of such authority, but here they have encountered what some philosophers have designated as their archenemy. The exact identity of this foe is difficult to specify, but it is typically ascribed to those whom they classify as relativists, and Wittgenstein and individuals such as Peter Winch and Thomas Kuhn have often been treated as exemplars. The work of the social theorist Steven Lukes is a paradigm case of the attempt, in his words, to put “relativism in its place” by finding a form of realism that would validate the efforts of social science to interpret and judge such objects of inquiry as power.

Lukes’s (1970) response to what he took to be the relativistic implications of Peter Winch’s (1964) essay on “Understanding a Primitive Society” was to claim that the transcendental assumption of universally applicable logical criteria of rationality is necessary for both understanding and assessing social beliefs. More than a decade later, he was still intent on joining what he pejoratively characterized as the debate between “rationality and relativism” (Lukes 1982), and resisting what he perceived as Wittgenstein and Winch’s challenges to critical reason and even to communication between cultures. At this point, however, he claimed to have found philosophical validation in the philosophy of Donald Davidson. What Lukes extrapolated from Davidson’s work was the conclusion that both interpreting and judging alien cultures are possible because of the existence of a “bridgehead” of beliefs, which are common to all rational human beings, and which enable both an understanding of such cultures and a basis for sorting out truth and error.

In a symposium on Winch’s work, Lukes analyzed a controversy in anthropology about how to explain why the Hawaiians killed Captain James Cook (whether they became disillusioned after deciding he was not a god or whether they simply became irritated by his presence and took the next instrumentally rational step). Lukes did not relinquish his basic claim that “assessing the rationality of the beliefs and practices of other cultures is always both possible and necessary,” but he concluded that he had been wrong in attempting to derive from Davidson’s work “methodological prescriptions for success in anthropology” (2000, 16). Although he was now dubious about assuming that “philosopher’s precepts should guide anthropological practice,” he remained convinced that he had, from the beginning, been on the “right track.” He claimed that “all cultures . . . engage in the cognitive enterprise of reasoning and face the common human predicament of trying to get the world right: of understanding, predicting and controlling their environment, natural and social.” Consequently, he argued, we can always ask whether they have performed effectively and well, and we can do so on the basis of “criteria that must be independent of any particular culture” (15-16). What exactly constituted such criteria was, however, still blowing in the wind.

By the turn of the century, Lukes saw new challenges emerging in the growing sensitivity to social diversity and multiculturalism, which he believed tended to create skepticism about rational “universalism” and the possibility of authoritative external judgment. He claimed that there is a “common human nature,” a sense of “universal reason,” and a “cosmopolitan vision of humanity” that function as a “bridgehead” and allow “mutual interpretation” across cultures (Lukes 2003, 13-14). He offered his former colleague Martin Hollis’s aphorism of “liberalism for the liberals and cannibalism for the cannibals” as a warning against the “slide into relativism” inherent in what he claimed was Wittgenstein’s image of forms of life as constituting “unbridgeable differences” (27, 104).

Lukes’s search for a realist foundation for a critical social science resurfaced in a symposium he edited on the relevance for anthropology of John Searle’s philosophy. Searle’s goal had been to provide a “general theory of the ontology of social facts and social institutions” (Searle 1995, xii). Despite his detailed analysis of “institutional” facts, which he claimed exist as a matter of human “agreement,” he maintained that there are “no institutional facts without brute facts” and that such facts constitute an “ontologically objective reality” (56, 191). He also embraced a correspondence theory of truth and the “realist” position that we must act on the basis of the background presupposition that there is an observer-independent world that is the basis of claims to objective truth about the way that things are.

In the symposium, Searle reiterated his basic account of institutional facts (2006a), but his claims about brute facts raised questions about how this could be reconciled with the manner in which the criteria for specifying what is real and true may differ among various cultures. Searle nevertheless insisted that “one massive constraint on truth cuts through all forms of life” and that it is necessary to presuppose the “background assumption” of “external realism.” He contended that “truths about the real world,” which were “absolute and universal across all cultures,” had been discovered by science and become “public property,” whether or not they were acknowledged by all cultures. He noted that although people might act on the basis of “massive falsehoods,” which have “status functions” in some society, there are, for example, “no witches and there never have been any” (2006b, 113, 115). Lukes found solace in Searle’s realism, which he saw as a basis for exposing the manner in which the “brute realities of social life” and the existence of “brute interests” and “brute power” distorted social life (2006, 8).

Although Lukes was eventually willing to countenance a certain degree of cognitive relativism, he remained concerned about how a “journey down the road to moral relativism begins from the observation of the fact of diversity” in society. He asked “how in a postmetaphysical and foundationless world, can one justify subscribing to universal norms and values” (2008, 129, 133). He worried that assuming the existence of fundamental differences in belief and moral norms would entail the assumption that there is no “right” to criticize another person or culture. He claimed, however, that there was still a way forward “without accepting a notion of cultures so sealed off from one another that we have to accept abstention-denial of ‘our right’ to judge the beliefs and practices of others” (151).

The philosopher Jerry Fodor (1985, 5) once said, “I hate relativism more than anything, excepting, maybe, fiberglass powerboats.” This tells us a great deal about what is often construed as relativism. Like many objects of hatred, it is often an aesthetic construction of the hater. It is difficult to find a self-identified relativist, and it is less what individuals such as Wittgenstein, Winch, and Kuhn said that has led critics to label them as relativists than what they did not say about universal reason. What has been called the “specter” of relativism is, indeed, a phantom, but one that, for the most part, seems to evoke fear only among philosophers, social theorists, and a few others who have taken onto themselves the burden of this philosophical anxiety. ¹ Natural scientists are actually seldom visited by this apparition, which is primarily an image of the abyss that supposedly would follow the demise of metaphysical realism. Just as some philosophers seriously imagine zombies, others imagine relativism, but both are versions of the walking dead rather than actual objects of analysis.

The resurgence of attempts to establish a realist identity for social inquiry is in part a consequence of what many see as the danger that Wittgenstein’s work somehow not only involves a denial of the possibility of cross-cultural communication but also a prohibition against external criticism. This is not only a mythical image of Wittgenstein but also one based on the assumption that somehow practical judgment and the right and capacity to criticize rest on a philosophical warrant. There is, however, no need for a philosophical “rider” attached to claims and judgments about what is right, true, and real. Natural science long ago left such codicils behind, but many philosophers continue to suggest, even in the case of natural science, that they can provide such endorsements—and social theorists continue to believe them.

What increasingly defined Wittgenstein’s work after 1930 was his conception of philosophy as a form of social inquiry (Gunnell 2014). This work consisted of an investigation of both the nature of conventional phenomena and what is involved in interpreting and representing such phenomena. When he said that philosophy “leaves everything as it is,” the implication was that it is not the role of philosophy to provide foundations for either science or ethics, but this does not mean that there is any reason to attribute to him some version of extreme philosophical quietism. Philosophy, properly conceived, is a representational and interpretive practice, which confronts an autonomous discursive subject matter to which it has potentially a practical but contingent relationship. Even though he was not particularly optimistic about his ability even to change the taste of his students, he did not refrain from critically analyzing either philosophy itself or other practices such as mathematics, natural science, anthropology, psychology, and everyday forms of speech and action. Although he claimed to reject theory and explanation in favor of description and clarification, what he was nearly always referring to as theories were either metaphysical claims or the typical causal empirical propositions of natural science. His image of philosophy, however, has been worrisome to many social theorists because it did not provide a philosophical answer to the practical relationship between inquiry and its subject matter, and, for many, this signified relativism.

Although it is easy to understand the concerns of social theorists who are seeking the kind of intellectual authority that would yield practical purchase, what seems “passing strange,” in the sense that Shakespeare’s Desdemona used the phrase, and what I want principally to explore in this essay, is why a philosopher such as Cora Diamond, who is a champion of Wittgenstein and a sensitive reader of his work, believes it is necessary to save him from himself by interpreting him as vouchsafing some special capacity and authority for making critical judgments about what is true and real in social practices. Her characterization of the “realistic spirit” in Wittgenstein’s work (Diamond 1991) may have seemed to suggest the absence of such authority, but, in the end, she could not let go of what would seem to be the vestiges of traditional philosophical realism.

2. The Problem of Criticizing from “Outside”

Diamond (2013) posed the questions of “whether we can have rational grounds for criticizing practices and beliefs very different from our own, and whether Wittgenstein held that we could not” (1). The content of what she referred to as “rational” was not initially specified, but it implied more than making coherent arguments. She claimed that “our understanding of what is real cannot be adequately elucidated if we consider only its role within language-games” (1), and she maintained that, contrary to what many have assumed, Wittgenstein provided support for such a position. She framed her discussion by describing what she claimed was “a disagreement between Elizabeth Anscombe, on the one hand, and Peter Winch and Ilham Dilman, on the other, about whether it is legitimate to call something an error that counts as knowledge within some system of belief” (1). It is, however, important to be clear from the outset that there was less any actual “disagreement” about the issue Diamond raised than what she suggested might hypothetically be construed as a disagreement. Her purpose was to use these individuals as a foil for exploring “what Wittgenstein’s view” of this matter may have been. She acknowledged that although Anscombe had raised the question of whether Wittgenstein’s philosophy allowed for outside criticism, she had not given a definite response and answer. Diamond maintained, however, that Anscombe’s “implicit response” to what might seem to have been his denial of this possibility, especially in On Certainty, was “Don’t be too sure!” and that her “implicit answer” was that he did affirm a basis for such criticism (115).

Diamond claimed that Anscombe’s implicit answer had been “disputed by Dilman,” whom Diamond interpreted as maintaining that in the case of conflict between different systems of belief, “we cannot here speak of right or wrong.” And she maintained that Winch, in his essay on “Understanding a Primitive Society,” had gone even further, and said that an outside observer does not have the “right” to judge another society or system of beliefs as wrong and that it is “illegitimate” to do so (Diamond 2013, 118). Diamond’s basic concern was to counter the positions she ascribed to Dilman and Winch, and to make Anscombe’s implicit answer explicit. As the “disagreement” in question was a construction by Diamond, it is important to clarify exactly what her dramatis personae actually said and the context in which they said it.

In Anscombe’s (1981) work, the issue had emerged somewhat tangentially in the course of discussing “The Question of Linguistic Idealism” and how this question might relate to Wittgenstein. She suggested that certain things that he had said about how our concepts might not be the only possible ones and how essence is a function of grammar might imply linguistic idealism. She insisted that “what we want to be assured of is that what we realize actually exists and is not a mere projection of the forms of our thinking upon reality,” but she was ambivalent about the extent to which Wittgenstein provided such assurance (133). She maintained that although certain grammars might bypass what we happen to “realize,” we must “avoid the falsehoods of idealism” as well as the “stupidities of empiricist realism,” which, at least in the case of Locke, implied that concepts were creations of the mind rather than direct specifications of things in the world (114-16). Although she interpreted Wittgenstein as saying that the sense of expressions is dependent on language, she suggested that it was less evident that he believed that the “human possession of concepts is so dependent.” She doubted that he would have maintained that things such as horses, the color red, the number 2, and shapes were products of linguistic practice, even if rules, rights, and promises were and even if “the metaphysical necessities belonging to the nature of such things . . . seem to be regarded by him as ‘grammatical rules’” (121). In the end, however, she felt forced to conclude that in some respects, Wittgenstein “was a linguistic idealist” or, at best, a “partial idealist” (118, 122).

Anscombe was even more ambivalent when she considered “another way of raising the question of a sort of idealism,” which was prompted by Wittgenstein’s question about whether language and human agreement decide what is true or false (Wittgenstein [1953] 2009, 241). She interpreted his answer as recognizing that we are always operating within language, but she maintained that the implication was not “that he never sees grounds for criticism.” She claimed that his work allowed for immanent criticism, such as pointing out unsatisfied criteria of correctness or even a more serious “reproach” involving a “superstition” created by a “grammatical illusion.” The crux of the matter was reached when she asked whether his position would preclude someone saying that another person’s picture of the world was simply wrong. Although she concluded that it would not preclude simply making such a claim, she asked “does it preclude having grounds, being right?” She suggested that

in his work up through On Certainty we might think we could discern a straightforward thesis: there can be no such thing as “rational grounds” for our criticizing practices and beliefs that are so different from our own. These alien practices and language games are simply there. They are not ours, we cannot move in them (125).

So “isn’t it as if Wittgenstein were saying: there isn’t a right or wrong—but only the conflict, or persuasion, or decision?” (132).

Anscombe basically left the matter at that point. She concluded that in this respect, his ultimate position was “not an idealistic one” because “that someone knows something is not guaranteed by the language-game” but instead, as he had noted in On Certainty, is a “favour of nature” (133). She claimed that in this respect, he had succeeded in his difficult enterprise and “achieved ‘realism without empiricism.’” She maintained that for Wittgenstein, “the ‘language-game’ of assertion, which for humans is so important a part of the whole business of knowing and being certain, depends for its character on a ‘general fact of nature’”(133). This was, I suggest, a dubious interpretation of On Certainty, but exactly how her reading of his work would sustain the authority of outside criticism or make it possible to adjudicate a conflict between beliefs remained, in her own words, an “unfinished business” (133).

The primary concern of Dilman’s (2002) book on Wittgenstein was also with the issue of linguistic idealism, and although he did criticize Anscombe, his argument was that, with respect to idealism, she had been “unable to give Wittgenstein a completely clean bill of health” (14). Dilman did, however, have reservations about what appeared to be her attempt to ground linguistic meaning on objects in the world. He argued that Wittgenstein had managed to solve the problem of the relationship between “language and reality without embracing linguistic realism and without courting any form of linguistic idealism.” Although Dilman noted that Wittgenstein “at times sails close to the wind” as far as avoiding idealism, he maintained that a rejection of linguistic idealism was the core of Wittgenstein’s “Copernican Revolution” (7). He pointed out that Wittgenstein’s basic answer to the question of the relationship between language and the world was that when we acquire language, we acquire the objects in the world toward which language is directed. Although he agreed with Anscombe that language is in various ways conditioned by certain facts independent of our language, he claimed that what counts as real “has evolved hand in glove with the life human beings live,” which is a “life lived with language” (5).

In a chapter on Diamond, Dilman (2002) basically applauded what she had referred to as the “realistic spirit” in Wittgenstein and his attention to the “particular case,” and the actual use of language. He also agreed with Anscombe and Diamond that Wittgenstein had achieved “realism without empiricism.” He did, however, disagree with Anscombe’s interpretation of Wittgenstein as saying that essence is not created, but rather only expressed, by grammar. He argued that what Wittgenstein meant, when he said that grammar tells us what an object is, was not, for example, what specific biological object an animal such as a horse is but the grammatical or logical category to which it belongs. Although Dilman agreed that it might sense to say that there were horses before language, he claimed that this was actually “irrelevant to the question of linguistic idealism” (112). In the case of Anscombe’s claim about the color red existing before language, he agreed that this might be true in some respect but not in the case of what two different people might use as a paradigm of redness. He also argued that Anscombe’s distinction between 2 as a reference to something outside of language and the convention of 2 × 2 was mistaken. He noted that we could say that there were two horses on a field before the language of mathematics, but the numeral 2 and the convention 2 × 2 are both part of that language.

He also stressed that Anscombe’s worry about the possibility that Wittgenstein’s work might imply that people were trapped in language was misplaced because Wittgenstein did not view language as static and immutable. The language-games of one culture might change, for example, by contact with other cultures, and Dilman (2002, 116) argued that when Wittgenstein “depreciates thinking that people with different concepts must be missing something that we realize, he doesn’t mean that they could not be supposed to miss something we realize.” But such “supposing” takes place in our language and with our concepts. Dilman agreed with Anscombe that truth is not a matter of human agreement, not even in the case of moral issues, but the criteria for applying the word “truth” is a matter of such agreement.

When it came to the crucial problem of how On Certainty bore on the question of criticizing beliefs and practices in alien cultures, Dilman’s response cut a little closer to the bone. He noted that Anscombe had asked if this was not parallel to Wittgenstein’s claim that it is not interpretation but practice that determines the meaning of a rule. Anscombe had resisted on the ground that this would imply that Wittgenstein was an idealist and denied that there are external grounds of judgment. But Dilman noted that if interpretations required making judgments about what was considered true and real in the practices that were interpreted, it raised the question of how one should approach an issue such as Winch had broached in his disagreement with Alasdair MacIntyre about how to understand a society such as the Zande. MacIntyre had argued that to interpret an alien culture, it is necessary to judge the extent to which its beliefs are logically and substantively rational, and that whereas rational beliefs are understandable and self-explanatory, irrational beliefs must be causally explained. And MacIntyre’s standard of rationality was formal logic and natural science. Anscombe had exempted Wittgenstein from reducing conflict resolution to a matter of persuasion and decision because, she claimed, he conceived of most of our judgments as less functions of our language-games than of general facts of nature and life. But Dilman asked how, even if this were the case, it related to an issue such as disagreement between cultures. He concluded that “it is not a disagreement that could be resolved by appealing to mutually acceptable criteria. It is a conflict in which there is no agreed method for settling it” (Dilman 2002, 126). He insisted that Wittgenstein recognized that there are “incommensurabilities” both within and between cultures (126). Dilman maintained that this did not entail the impossibility of understanding people who hold different beliefs and that such understanding might even lead to broadening one’s own beliefs. He argued that although Wittgenstein acknowledged that our reasons for holding our beliefs may run out, there is “nothing in Wittgenstein to suggest, that these limits cannot be transcended” or “extended” (127-28). He noted, however, that it was the notion of incommensurability with respect to conceptions of what is real and true that made Anscombe “nervous.”

The notion certainly made Diamond nervous. Her anxiety led not only to misleading interpretations of Dilman and Winch but also to some actual misstatements about what they had said. For example, Dilman never stated, nor attributed to Wittgenstein, the view that, in the case of conflicting beliefs, “we cannot speak of right or wrong.” Dilman, like Diamond, was addressing a situation in which beliefs come into conflict, and the issue was whether either a party to the conflict or an outside critic could call upon decisive and neutral grounds of adjudication that could, in both principle and practice, resolve the matter. Although Dilman had only briefly mentioned Winch, Diamond implicated Winch in the “disagreement” by noting that his essay was “complex and not easy to understand” and that it was “hard to sort out what his criticisms are of both Evans-Pritchard and MacIntyre” (2013, 117). But she nevertheless claimed that he had maintained that it was “illegitimate” to judge the Zande as wrong and the European as right, and that he insisted that someone from one culture has no “right” to make such judgments about another culture or assert that a particular concept is the “correct” one (117-18). Winch, however, had never said that it was illegitimate to call the Zande wrong or that one did not have the right to judge another society and to deny the correctness of their beliefs. What he actually said was that it was “illegitimate” to use the anthropologist or the philosopher’s worldview as a paradigm for “understanding” the Zande. He was only concerned with judging with respect to the issue of whether it was necessary to judge to understand. This was the basis of his clearly specified disagreement with Evans-Pritchard and MacIntyre.

3. Diamond’s Answer

Diamond’s extrapolation of “a possible Anscombean view” of how to resolve a conflict that arises when “two principles really meet, principles that cannot be reconciled with each other,” was, at least in this article, quite far removed from Anscombe’s suggestion that rational grounds for adjudication might be based on certain general facts of nature (Diamond 2013, 119). And Diamond was not clear about the locality and identity of an outside critic, and to whom the frequently used pronouns “we,” “us,” and “you” referred. She seemed to choose the perspective of a philosopher or social theorist observing a conflict, and her basic argument was that in the process of observing, describing, and analyzing a conflict, “we”

are giving a logical shape to the conflict; we are making a conception of reality, of what is real, that is not internal to either of the two forms of thought that provide the initial understanding of the conflict-situation. That is we take the situation here to be one in which what is real is contested; and this idea of reality as contested is a different notion of reality from that involved in either of the two forms of thought themselves. If the conflict is understood in this way, the space for the dispute between the two forms of thought is not given in advance; it is not provided by either of the two modes of thought that are in conflict. (119)

Diamond interpreted Winch’s mention of conflicting modes of thought as “established” to mean that they could not be disestablished. She asked why we should necessarily view them in this manner and “why can one not be making, giving articulation to, a kind of thought about reality in thinking about the conflict?” (2013, 119). Diamond analogized what she characterized as “the disagreement between Anscombe and Winch” as the difference between proving a theorem in mathematics when there is an accepted method and standard of validity for such a proof as opposed to a case of solving a mathematical problem by a new method of proof when the standard emerges in the course of the reasoning itself, that is, “we” are creating a new understanding of what is real and unreal (120).

It was unclear exactly how this analogy applied to Anscombe’s question, but Diamond claimed that, contrary to her construal of Winch’s position, it is not “illegitimate to appeal to the standards of science,” and that “our understanding of what is real and what is unreal can be in part shaped by how we take such conflicts and by how we reason in response to them” (2013, 120). Neither Dilman nor Winch had denied that an observer of a conflict could conjure up an image of a third world of rationality, but this was not an answer to the practical problem of criticizing from outside and being able to claim that in some objectively rational manner this assessment was right. The unanswered question was still how the outside contribution of a third party, such as a social theorist or philosopher, could resolve a conflict between incommensurable beliefs within a practice, between practices such as science and religion, or between different cultural pictures of the world. But Diamond argued that “we” cannot assume that, because there may be a lack of agreement on what is persuasive to both parties, there are no “rational grounds for judging that the people’s system of thought involves pervasive error” (120).

At times, it appeared as if Diamond’s outsider was formulating standards of judgment that surpassed, or were at least an alternative to, those of the parties to a conflict. At other times, the outsider appeared to be acting as a sort of mediator who would aid the parties in finding a common space of reasons. With respect to the Zande, who were described as believing in witches, Diamond claimed that both approaches were at once possible. She went to great length to urge how “we” might find rational grounds arising out of the conflict, which would allow us to not only hold the Zande in error but also “persuade” them to think differently. This, however, would seem to present exactly the dilemma that Diamond attributed to Anscombe and Dilman, that is, whether it is possible to go beyond persuasion to something more universally demonstrable in claiming that a belief is in error or in achieving a resolution of conflicts between incommensurable principles. When Wittgenstein talked about persuasion, he was not talking about something that was necessarily an alternative to giving reasons. It did not imply a lapse into intimidation and meaningless rhetoric. Although persuasion can take many forms, reasons are already a means of persuasion, and when one’s stock of reasons has been exhausted, persuasion becomes a matter of attempting to convince others to accept those reasons. It is difficult to understand why Diamond tended to pose “persuasion” and “reason” as mutually exclusive.

A significant problem with Diamond’s essay was that the individuals with whom she chose to argue simply, in many instances, did not exemplify the position that she wished to criticize. Winch, for example, was only saying that there was a certain logic and form of rationality peculiar to the Zande vision of the world, and although it might not be perfectly coherent, this would also be the case in a less “primitive” society. What Diamond wanted to demonstrate was that we are not imprisoned in our “language-games,” but neither Dilman nor Winch subscribed to such a position. It was actually Diamond who treated Wittgenstein’s signature reference to language-games as if they inherently presented such a problem. For Wittgenstein, language-game did not refer to a specific object or element of social practice. It was a term of art, a tool of interpretation, and a “perspicuous representation.” It was an ideal typification that referred to a kind or class of things. Language-games were a category for specifying “regions of language,” of various types and scope, and Wittgenstein also offered them as modes of representation devised for talking about such regions. In neither case was there an implication that they were fossilized. Some might be more bounded than others, but they did not designate isolated provinces with settled perimeters. Various language-games were quite different in character and were, congenitally and historically, susceptible to invasion, internal transformation, and even revolution. Wittgenstein (1969, 256) in fact specifically said that “a language-game does change with time.”

4. The Elusive Spirit of Realism

Although Diamond’s argument was neither adequately responsive to Dilman and Winch nor, in any obvious manner, beholden to Wittgenstein, it was an attempt to complete Anscombe’s unfinished business. From the outset, however, the problem, for both Anscombe and Diamond, was actually Wittgenstein himself. They both worried that his philosophy was potentially vulnerable to the charges that it did not allow communication across language-games and that it not only failed to provide grounds for external rational criticism but also blocked the possibility. Diamond believed that his work required remedial circumvention or supplementation. This was the actual “unfinished business.”

In her 1991 book, Diamond had been determined, like Dilman and Winch, to demonstrate that Wittgenstein was not an antirealist, but she also insisted, again like Dilman and Winch, that he did not subscribe to any form of traditional philosophical realism, which, she noted, had largely been an attempt to establish a transcendental position analogous to “elementary realism,” that is, the facts of a matter as opposed to what is said or accepted by convention. What she instead famously attributed to Wittgenstein was a “realistic spirit,” which, she claimed, sustained his wish to achieve realism without empiricism. Much of what identified this spirit was what it rejected, which included not only the reductionism of empiricism but also attempts to lay down philosophical conditions such as a “logical must,” specify “determinative sense,” and posit “real generals in nature.” On the more positive side, it involved giving up metaphysics and philosophical theories and instead paying attention to what people say and do, and focusing on how things really are in practice and on how the realities of a particular situation might lead us to revise our typical ways of thinking. Notwithstanding the presence of this spirit, she worried that, paradoxically, remnants of the Tractarian “myth” of determinate sense had carried over into his later work and implied the “changelessness” of thought, that rationality is limited to operating “inside a system,” and that “movement to a new system” is only possible through “persuasion or conversion” rather than by a “genuine exercise of thought or reason” (Diamond 1991, 7). It was still unclear exactly what would constitute such as “genuine” exercise, but she believed that there remained in Wittgenstein’s work a definite “‘verificationist’ element,” which tied the meaning of language and the content of truth claims to available methods of investigation and systems of belief. And she wanted to rescue Wittgenstein from this problem.

In 1996, she had continued to urge “resisting the attractions” of traditional realism, but in the course of a critique of Sabina Lovibond’s version of moral realism, she insisted that we can do so and still find it “possible to speak of ‘responsibility to reality’ in the case of linguistic resources” (249). She maintained that this would be “different from what is the case of ordinary experimental propositions” but she asked if “the world, and our nature makes the resource in question one that we should want and need?” (249). The implication seemed affirmative. She pursued this theme more fully in a 1999 article in which she posed the problem of how we could acknowledge the existence of a verificationist element in Wittgenstein’s philosophy, and still insist on the possibility of communication between people with different beliefs and of those engaging in rational outside criticism. In answering this question, she took a cue from Hilary Putnam’s opposition to what he characterized as “tired pseudo” interpretations of Wittgenstein, which had implied the impossibility of compatibility between truth claims in languages belonging to different historical periods. Although Diamond did not directly attempt to appropriate what was, at that point, Putnam’s answer to this problem, she claimed that it was possible to reject metaphysical realism, and still not give way to the kind of relativism that Putnam and others had attributed to Richard Rorty.

By the turn of the century, however, it was difficult to determine exactly how far apart Rorty and Putnam were. Rorty claimed that the label “relativism” did not signify anything more than a rejection of metaphysical realism, and Putnam had turned away from his previous “faces” of realism, including both metaphysical and internal, as well as from his original version of semantic externalism and a causal theory of reference. He claimed nevertheless that “there is a way to do justice to our sense that knowledge claims are responsible to reality without recoiling into metaphysical fantasy” (Putnam 1999, 94). He argued that although the world is autonomous and independent of our descriptions and interests, our beliefs and the language in which they are expressed are shaped by our concepts. He insisted on the unintelligibility of theories that base responsibility to reality on finding an interface between us and the world. He explicitly embraced what he referred to as Wittgenstein’s “pragmatic,” “commonsense,” or “direct” realism, which assumed an unmediated relationship between language and the world. All this closely resembled Rorty’s (1979) critique of representational philosophy. Putnam maintained that there are simply many language-games and uses of words such as “reality” and “truth,” which entailed “conceptual relativity,” “conceptual pluralism,” and incommensurable “optional languages” and ontologies (Putnam 2002, 16-17, 21, 43).

Diamond’s own answer to the problem of incommensurability was that at least in principle, there is no such problem. Although Anscombe had worried that Wittgenstein’s rejection of interpretation as the arbiter of meaning might imply the impossibility of external criticism, Diamond insisted that in the case of a conflict between beliefs, it is in fact our interpretation of the situation that can ultimately “fix” or determine meaning. She maintained that criteria of meaning are not limited to the grammar of the particular language-games that we might observe. Meaning can emerge when we raise a question for which we have no set method of answering. It is this question that guides our search for a meaning that is different from that of the existing grammars. This argument adumbrated her 2013 article, but the problem left hanging was still how such inventive third-party critical interpretation could effectively be brought to bear on what it criticized as well as resolve conflicts between beliefs.

Diamond also, much like Anscombe, worried that Wittgenstein’s conception of grammar as showing what we are talking about could lead to reading him as a linguistic idealist and relativist. Diamond argued, however, that we can get beyond this worry by recognizing that there is a natural propensity to ascribe to others the same beliefs as ours, even if their language is different. This, as she had implied in 1996, is simply a “human phenomenon. It is one of the characteristic features of our relation to the thought of other people” (118). She did not really explain this kind of claim, which has been advanced on various grounds, but she argued that this assumption allows us to find a degree of sameness of meaning between the beliefs of different cultures and historical periods as well as between levels of meaning in the same culture. She suggested that “if there is incommensurability between the languages, it is a matter of refusal to accept conventions allowing translation” (125). Although she rejected the idea of being “imprisoned in our forms of life and language,” she allowed that there was “room for a kind of incommensurability” that might arise from a resolute refusal to see sameness of belief and meaning. But she claimed that “such a view does not remove objectivity from our practice of translation, any more than Wittgenstein’s treatment of mathematics removes objectivity from our practices of proof,” (125) by which she presumably meant that Wittgenstein’s rejection of logical foundations of mathematics did not destroy the standard of objectivity that was internal to the practice of mathematics. But pointing to such internal standards of objectivity did not speak to the issue in question.

This all sounded a great deal like Donald Davidson’s claim about the existence of “massive agreement” in beliefs, and the need, when interpreting others, to apply the principle of “charity” and assume congruity, but Diamond was wary of directly enlisting Davidson’s support. This may have been because his concern was with how we can interpret others rather than how we can judge them. He had rejected not only traditional realism but also the assumption that there is a universal truth in terms of which particular claims to truth are either confirmed or falsified, and he denied that “philosophers are in charge of a special sort of truth” (Davidson 1994, 44). Although in his early work Davidson had been circumspect about his relationship to Wittgenstein, his later work explicitly noted many similarities. Like Wittgenstein, Putnam, J. L. Austin, John McDowell, and others, he rejected representational philosophy, and the problem of finding an interface between language and the world. Although he rejected traditional theories of truth such as coherence and correspondence, he did not deny the usefulness of the concept of truth. He argued that although traditional theories of truth and the idea of truth as a “thing” were not viable, there were important uses for the “term” truth as well as formal similarities between truth claims. Particular claims to truth, however, were dependent on the activities of speakers. He dismissed the issue of relativism, and saw it as a problem arising from what he referred to as the “scheme/content” dualism that had been characteristic of both empiricism and idealism (Davidson 2001, 2005)

Although Diamond’s assumptions about commonality of belief might seem to have lent support to her concerns about how to achieve communication among language-games, it is less clear how they could sustain her claims about outside criticism. In a 1999 interview, she admitted that, after all, there is, in practice, “no short way with the kinds of clashes that arise between people who think in different ways.” She maintained, however, that this does not mean that “you cannot contradict” one of these ways or that you “cannot get a genuine clash” such as in the case of Jewish and Christian views of the Messiah (73). Although she acknowledged that Winch (1964) had said “that you can’t say because they’re playing different language-games there isn’t a genuine conflict of view,” she still maintained, but without specification, that he had “said some things which lead into grave difficulties about truth and how it is established in various language-games,” which would seem to question how we can think of truth as “one thing” (79-80). Winch might as well have questioned thinking of truth as one thing, but it would be difficult to point in his work to anything that suggested the impossibility of making connections between language-games or the denial of genuine disagreement. Diamond maintained that simply because “two people have different circumstances in which they make assertions,” such as the conflict between intelligent design and the theory of evolution, this “does not mean that they are making statements that do not, in some sense or other, clash” (80). But this was neither Winch’s nor Dilman’s position, and it would be difficult to point to anyone who held such a position. What worried Diamond, however, was that we might “lose this notion of, let’s put a heavy philosophical word here, ‘objective reality’—the reason all truths are compatible is because of reality” (81). In this statement, it seems that the less than fully articulated assumption that hovered over her arguments was finally expressed. She claimed that we can put aside Platonism and still hold on to “notions of truth as one” (81). It is difficult to see how this argument was compatible with Wittgenstein. He had no difficulty criticizing without claiming access to either transcendental criteria or a privileged vantage point. But, whatever the merits of her argument, neither Dilman nor Winch had suggested that communication across different systems of belief was impossible, that there could not be significant clashes, or that someone outside a system could not object to the beliefs of another system and claim that they were wrong.

5. Conclusion

The questions of exactly who Diamond could be interpreted as arguing against and what her specific position involved were ultimately left unanswered. What does seem clear is that she was struggling toward at least a functional substitute for the very thing for which she had praised Wittgenstein’s “realistic spirit” as rejecting, that is, traditional forms of philosophical realism. But what she offered was less a substantive alternative than an image of the outsider as occupying a more objective and privileged position, which would allow either somewhat neutral grounds for external critical judgments or at least insights that might aid compromise between contending parties.

What Anscombe worried might be interpreted as the “straightforward thesis” of On Certainty, that is, that there is no philosophical answer for how to resolve a conflict between different systems of belief was actually exactly what Wittgenstein was saying. He said that when “two principles really do meet which cannot be reconciled with one another,” the respective proponents declare “the other a fool and a heretic,” and although each may give reasons, “at the end of reasons comes persuasion. (Think what happens when missionaries convert natives)” (Wittgenstein 1969, 612). Such principles might not necessarily clash, or even meet, but when they do, there comes a point at which there is an end to advancing reasons that might be plausible to both parties. This is particularly the case when the contenders, such as in the case of the theory of evolution, are not really talking about the same concept, even when they both use a word such as “human being.” It is a matter of persuading one party to change its view of how things are, but such persuasion does not, despite Anscombe and Diamond’s implication, simply entail, or result in, a lapse into irrationality and decisionism. The problem that Diamond was seeking to answer was that of how to make outside criticism credible and effective, but it is not a problem for which there is a philosophical answer. What seems to lurk behind this whole controversy is, as noted in the beginning, what would appear to be the bizarre assumption that criticism requires, and must be grounded upon, some sort of philosophical authorization and that just as a philosopher such as Winch can be construed as withholding it, others can be interpreted as stepping in to issue it. Wittgenstein’s “view” of criticizing from outside seems quite straightforward, whether it is a case of a social theorist judging a social practice, one practice coming into conflict with another, or even one scientific theory clashing with another theory. Such criticism is always possible, but it cannot be philosophically vouchsafed. It is something that takes place with great frequency and in a variety of venues. Neither its possibility nor success depends on philosophical guarantees. It is easy to view the history of philosophy as a continuous search for an ultimate ground of what is real and true, but it is important to recognize, from at least Plato to Marx, the practical and rhetorical contexts in which most of those claims were advanced, which were very different from the rarified academic universe in which the dislocated discursive residue of that search remains.

In the end, it was Diamond who could not resist the attractions of realism and the attempt to elevate words such as “truth” and “reality” to the level of what Wittgenstein ([1953] 2009, 97) referred to as a “super-order” of “super-concepts,” when in fact such words, he said, have only a variety of more “humble” uses. They are what Austin referred to as “substantive hungry” and what Stephen Toulmin (1958) described as modal signifiers that have a general semantic force but diverse criteria of application. Wittgenstein, as well as Putnam and Davidson, recognized that the terms reality and truth are not the names of things. Although Wittgenstein noted that a word such as “truth” may, through usage, take on a certain general “face,” it is a face capable of many, and sometimes incompatible, expressions.

Finally, it is worth noting that Wittgenstein ([1980] 1998, 11) once said that when someone discerns a certain spirit in a book, there is “a great temptation to want to make the spirit explicit.” There is a realistic spirit in his work, much like that Diamond had described 25 years ago, but she nevertheless remained captured by a picture of the transubstantiation or embodiment of that spirit.