Beyond Pluralism, Monism, Relativism, Realism etc.: 
		Reassessing Peter Winch  

	Introduction
	Peter Winch’s work has been hugely influential in the philosophy of the social sciences. But wait; is that actually true? Many sociologists and philosophers of the sciences etc. know Winch’s name, and if they know any more than that they are most likely to know of some of his work in the philosophy of the social sciences (rather than, say, his significant contributions to ethical thinking or to the study of Simone Weil)... but is what they know likely to represent what Winch actually thought? Or has his ‘influence’ mostly been, as arguably also in the case of, for instance, Thomas Kuhn, the spawning of some ‘followers’ who he would repudiate and of many ‘foes’ who actually fail to engage with (and thus in a key sense fail to disagree with) what he wrote and what he said? In short, has Winch unfortunately only been ‘influential’ in the philosophy of the social sciences in creating an argument between friends who are not his friends and foes who are not his foes?
	We ask, because for anyone who truly admires Peter Winch’s work, reading the secondary literature on him is an almost universally depressing experience. Over and over again, one encounters bowdlerised versions of what he thought, crude caricatures   -- and here we only mean to be talking about his would-be friends... With his would-be foes, the situation is sometimes much worse still. There too, one gets renditions of the ‘theses’ which Winch supposedly held, but theses which are then attacked with much analytic zeal; one gets people railing against Winch’s philosophical or political (!) ‘conservatism’ ... or against his ‘revisionism’ concerning the practice of social science; one gets almost-endless criticisms of Winch for being too slavish a follower of Wittgenstein -- and almost-endless criticisms of him for having failed to follow Wittgenstein at every point which matters. Above all, time after time, one gets tired and tedious assaults on Winch’s alleged ‘relativism’.
	Winch has been dead a decade now, and the process of reassessing his work is going on around the English-speaking philosophical world. The publication of Colin Lyas’s useful book, Peter Winch, was a genuine step forward in this process. Our hope is that there really will be a widespread reassessment, over the coming years. That people will try really reading Winch’s work again -- and not just the first presentation of it (in the first edition of The Idea of a Social Science and its relation to Philosophy, a work whose fiftieth anniversary will soon be upon us) either. We want to try to give impetus to that reassessment by undertaking an intertwined three-fold task: 
 (1) Illustrating what we take to be a genuinely Winchian method, in part by the non-standard (because contrastive) means of developing a -- rare -- example, that of sufferers from schizophrenia, where we think that Winch’s thought on understanding human action reaches a limit, an impasse;  
 (2) Illuminating what is vital, Winch’s (Wittgensteinian) conception of philosophy, which informs everything that he wrote;
 (3) Rebutting various misunderstandings of Winch, particularly those which have emerged in recent years, along the way.
	But before beginning these tasks, we need to outline some key elements of what we take to be present in any genuine understanding of Winch’s central work in the philosophy of the social sciences. We shall cite and quote fairly extensively as we do so, in an attempt to guarantee fidelity to Winch’s intentions in my reading of him. We try then to generate here a ‘picture’ of Winch that, even if the reader is not entirely convinced by it, will we hope at least work as a (polemical, therapeutic) corrective to the ‘standard model’ of Winch’s philosophy, the ‘received view’ of his work, the ‘picture’ of him that, generally, reigns.

	What is Winch’s ‘picture’ of the understanding of human action?
     A word of warning. This question already risks presupposing a great deal; too much. Does Winch have a picture of the understanding of human action? Or does he only guard against various natural/frequent misunderstandings of it? And: is there in fact an ‘it’, anyway? The social sciences are supposed to be about the explanation of ‘human action’, the understanding of ‘human behaviour’. But is there any such thing as these? Or are they mere -- misleading -- abstractions?
	We might note with profit, for example, the occasions on which an expression like ‘understanding other people’ is actually used in the language-games which are its home(s). This expression has a very specific set of uses, outside theoretical social science. It might be used, for example, by someone in distress at their lack of social integration; ‘I have trouble understanding other people.’ It is hard to imagine it being used in a positive sense, except by someone who would probably be heard as self-satisfied and self-aggrandizing: ‘I know how to understand other people. Let me tell ya what makes people tick…’. But this is what social theorists seem to want to provide a foundation for -- a general method for understanding people. And they don’t just mean by this the myriad techniques all members of human societies have for finding each other comprehensible: no, they mean something like a general, teachable method.
	In everyday discourse, much more often than invoking any supposed need for or realization of methods of general understanding, one speaks in much more specific ways still than those mentioned above; for example, ‘I understand you perfectly’, ‘I don’t understand why my mother always does that’, ‘Do you understand the game of Chess; can you teach me?’. We think that it would be best to give up the notion that there is an intelligible general thing, ‘the understanding of other people’. (Here, our idea is relevantly analogous to Michael Williams’s central idea, the positing and questioning of epistemological realism, that is, the notion that there is an intelligible general thing, ‘the knowledge of the world’, which it is epistemology’s task to investigate. We too would question the very idea of epistemology; and it is directly analogous to that question whether the very idea of social science or even social study as a generalised or generalisable task.)   If we are to talk of this at all, if we are to talk of enhancing our state of understanding of others, or indeed of ourselves, then I think that we must at least absolutely resist the temptation to over-generalize it, to ‘theorise’ it, and to fantasise a ‘method’ (‘social research method(s)’, and a ‘theory’ of society) for achieving it.
	What Winch argues in his little book, The idea of a social science and its relation to philosophy, is that the social sciences are programmatic, that they have been designed with philosophical purposes latently or blatantly in mind. They have been designed, in various different ways, on the model(s) of certain conceptions of natural science. They ask, ‘How can we bring human life under the heading, under the concept, of ‘science’?’ But, Winch asks: what are their problems, their puzzles? What problems do they actually have, ‘investigate’? And what possibly could be the justification for the assumption that human life in general can be effectively and profitably brought under the scientific concept?
	People do not take Winch’s title seriously enough. Just as Wittgenstein was a ‘complete Bolshevik’ in the philosophy of maths, so is Winch in the philosophy of the social sciences. People read Winch and thought/think that the issue now confronting them must be, ‘How should we do social science, after Winch?’ (or else ‘How can we rebut Winch?’). But Winch’s title might be paraphrased, ‘On the very idea of ‘social science’, and on how philosophy can dissolve it’. Winch isn’t saying: ‘Here’s how to do (and not to do) social science aright.’ He’s saying something much more like, ‘What are you trying to do, what genuine non-philosophical problems are you trying to solve? Do you have a clear idea of this? What is the point: why attempt to do ‘social science’ at all?’
	That this was the central nexus of Winch’s concerns is we think strikingly clear, perhaps especially in his post-1958 writings, to those readers who are ready to open their eyes, and are not blinded by what they see in front of them (i.e. social theory and theoreticistic philosophy) all the time.

	So now, having raised a concern that any attempt to extract a methodology for social science, or a theory of it, will be alien to Winch, we shall for the sake of argument nevertheless take the risk of outlining a tentative answer to the question raised above, the question of what ‘picture’ of human action we find in Winch. At least the in-principle limitations of any such answer will provide us to a surer clue about what is right in the paragraphs above.
	We shall begin by drawing attention to two distinctions present in Wittgenstein's writings, and drawn upon by Winch in The Idea of a Social Science and its relation to Philosophy. 

  (a) Between understanding and explaining.

	 Contra Donald Davidson & co., we take for granted in what follows what we all, arguably, know through and through: that understanding human action is about understanding reasons for action (ISS p.45), and understanding practices -- the language of causality is frequently  irrelevant to it. Describing and understanding human action, for Winch, is what -- at its best -- social study / human 'science' can do. 
	What is it to understand human action? Need it -- does it normally -- involve interpretation/explanation, or is this an overly intellectualistic starting-point? Can it instead simply involve description  and taken-for-granted understanding(s), understandings-in-practice? Winch writes:

	"Understanding is the goal of explanation and the end-product of successful explanation. But ... [u]nless there is a form of understanding that is not the result of explanation, no such thing as explanation would be possible. An explanation is called for only where there is, or is at least thought to be, a deficiency in understanding. But there has to be some standard against which such a deficiency is to be measured: and that standard can only be an understanding that we already have. Furthermore, the understanding we already have is expressed in the concepts which constitute that form of the subject matter we are concerned with. These concepts on the other hand also express certain espects of the life characteristic of those who apply them."  

This seems to us an important and clear passage. Where exactly are these lines drawn from in the work, however? They may surprise some readers, they may sound unfamiliar. If they do, that may be because you (the reader) are not familiar with the revised edition of Winch’s book -- and you would not be alone. Regrettably, few of Winch’s critics over the 15 years have taken full account of how different Winch’s book -- which, let us remember, was a the first book from the pen of an angry young man -- how different Winch’s book looks, when re-read in the light of the new ‘Preface’ which frames the new edition of The Idea of a Social Science. As we shall see, several of the most frequent criticisms of the book are either rebutted or in some sense conceded (and thus neutralised, in terms of not constituting criticisms of the mature Winch) in that ‘Preface’. Why, then, has this vital document been largely ignored by Winch’s recent critics? The obvious answer would be: laziness, or poor scholarship. The alternative answer we can think of is in a way even worse, and possibly even closer to the truth: that whatever most philosophers and social theorists read of Winch, they manage to misinterpret. In any case, as already stated, one of our aims in this paper, is to draw on the totality of Winch’s work on the philosophy of the social sciences, not just upon what he wrote on the subject up until the early 1960s... Any reckoning with the point of view of Winch on the philosophy of the social sciences must go by way of the 1990 Preface, which in turn should be placed in the broader context of Winch’s (deeply-Wittgensteinian, deeply-subtle, deeply-non-theoretical) later corpus as a whole. (For, after all, ISS was not only a young man’s book, and a polemical work; it was also a short book, which it is inadvised to take to task overly for omissions, or for concise statements susceptible of misinterpretation. Winch’s later comments thereon, and his broader corpus, provide invaluable bulwarks against such misinterpretation.)
	Back to the passage. What are its implications, so far as one is thinking, as we are, about understanding human beings?

	"[E]ven if it is legitimate to speak of one's understanding of a mode of social activity as consisting in a knowledge of regularities, the nature of this knowledge must be very different from the nature of knowledge of physical regularities... . If we are going to compare the social student to an engineer, we shall do better to compare him to an apprentice engineer... . His understanding of social phenomena is more like the engineer's understanding of his colleagues' activities than it is like the engineer's understanding of the mechanical systems which he studies... // I do not wish to maintain that we must stop at the unreflective kind of understanding of which I gave as an instance the engineer's understanding of the activities of his colleagues. But I do want to say that any more reflective understanding must necessarily presuppose, if it is to count as genuine understanding at all, the participant's unreflective understanding. And this in itself makes it misleading to compare it with the natural scientist's understanding of his scientific data."  

Again, the closing two sentences of the quote are crucial for our purposes. Winch is reminding us (i.e. those philosophers and social scientists in need of the reminder; probably, most of us, for much of the time) that, so long as one is not blinded by wrong-headed philosophical ideas (of, say, 'Relativist' -- or Scientific 'Rationalist' -- hues), social actors can gradually be understood in their actions, without imposition or irony. In the project of understanding human being(s) -- human minds in action, specific human practices -- one courts failure if one doesn't begin by engaging with the order inherent in those practices. Here Winch writes almost as if he had read Harold Garfinkel, and (of course) interpreted him (as the ‘Manchester school’ of ethnomethodology do) after Wittgenstein.
	Thus we can – extremely tentatively, for reasons given above -- suggest that, to do 'human science' well, one will normally need to begin (and, in a sense, end) by assembling a careful and un-imperialistic / un-impositional description of, roughly speaking, the self-understandings-in-action of the person or people in question. They largely understand themselves, they are evidently not enigmas to themselves, continually surprised and bemused by what they do and by what goes on in their cultural environs. We need to understand them, if that is what we want to do and we haven’t yet succeeded in doing so. One (and only one) useful way of doing this is to compare them with whatever helps us understand them. We don’t impose a standard on them from our own practices, but we look for comparisons which will help to get them right. Such comparisons need of course to be apt. Thus, Winch suggests, the advantages of comparing what the Azande do with their poison-oracles to what Christians do with prayer -- provided that one hasn’t already got a wrong-headed idea of what that is! We can also profitably compare and contrast their attitudes to their practices and ‘contradictions’ within those practices to those of our own philosophers and mathematicians. Or we can look at our ‘superstitious’ attitude toward certain pieces of metal and piece of paper (i.e. money). Or we can compare and contrast the Zande ‘witches’ with ‘witches’ as those are known to us from our own society and history -- Winch stresses that this comparison is particularly fraught with risk, and it may turn out to be unwise to use the same word, ‘witch’, for the two quite different cases. In sum, we can cast some positive light on others if we open-mindedly look for ways of coming to repair breaches in our understanding of them; and, more important still, when we look at the ‘game’ or ‘games’ which they play, we can and must note carefully what’s wrong with various appealing analogies we might want to make to help ‘interpret’ them, and thus we can see -- or learn to see -- how to avoid misunderstanding them.
 	This is arguably what nearly all ‘human science’ is, in fact -- like it or not --, unless it is straightforward ‘policy studies’ stuff, or simply misbegotten epistemology and metaphysics. We are not saying that Winch’s main role is as a methodologist; we are saying that he enables one to understand better what ‘the methodology of social study’ is and must be. In particular, that any instance of social study must be premised upon the existence of a puzzle, something where there is a deficit in our understanding or which tends to confuse us or others. Winch is thus ineluctably opposed to the vision of social study being founded upon social theory. (And, as already suggested, even to say only as much as what we have just said risks already making Winch sound more of a social theorist than he should be read as being.)
		
  (b) Between acting-on-a-rule   and interpreting a rule.

	This is the key distinction made in para. 201 of Wittgenstein's 'Philosophical Investigations': "[T]here is a way of grasping a rule which is not an interpretation, but which is exhibited in what we call "obeying the rule" and "going against it" in actual cases."   When one acts on a rule, one normally does no interpreting.

	Thinking about (b) naturally connects with thinking about (a), above, in the following way:  If one is interested in accurately describing human behaviour – very roughly speaking, rule-following action -- then one will want, much as Wittgenstein says, to 'grasp' the rule actually being followed by the person(s) one is describing, and will manifest that grasp in (for example) how one goes on to see the rule being applied in new examples of that person's action(s) which one encounters. One will want to avoid interpreting the rule being followed in such action if that can be avoided, on pain of otherwise risking missing just exactly what rule truly was being followed -- acted upon, acted 'from' -- in any given instance. One will want rather just to look, and see it. And then probably to describe it. (This is what ethnomethodologists – and, in general, good ethnographers – typically do. Some of their work is an ‘existence proof’ of the possibility sometimes of doing what Wittgenstein invites us to do: roughly, simply looking and seeing, rather than always thinking.)
	This move contravenes the 'conventional (philosophical) wisdom' -- common, albeit under different guises, to philosophers as utterly different otherwise as Nietzsche, Gadamer, Habermas and D. Davidson, and just as common among a very wide spectrum of contemporary human scientists -- the dogma that it cannot be meaningful to speak of a description of some human behaviour which is not already an interpretation of that behaviour. The likes of Gadamer continually risk over-intellectualizing ordinary human action by means of investing it all within an interpretive horizon. The likes of Davidson assimilates 'understanding' of language to 'radical' intrepretation, which is in turn unfortunately not clearly distinguished from explanation. Such an approach is overly -- narrowly -- scientific and risks mechanizing (the) human being. 
	The 'non-interpretivism' which by contrast we are recommending here is not Positivistic, for it does not imagine description as an isolated and purely object-oriented / fact-gathering phenomenon. Rather, after Wittgenstein, J.L. Austin, and Harold Garfinkel – and, of course, after Winch --, it allows indeed that there is what we call description (which is not best assimilated to interpretation), and that it is important, but does not imagine that it prescinds from one's grasp, as a participant-observer in a practice, of that practice as a lived activity. (One can see here already what we will focus on later as a more general phenomenon: that in the philosophy of society / of the social sciences, one is always in the business of looking for judicious, perspicuous, modes of presentation ... of truisms. One is looking not for discoveries, but simply for ways of making perspicuous presentations of the terrain of what it makes sense for us to say.)
	  None of this implies that there is only ever one 'true description' available of any given piece of (e.g.) rule-following -- there can be several or even indefinitely many true descriptions of same. But it does preserve a role for the notion of descriptions which are not ipso facto interpretations. For example, as one writes, or reads, the description of one of the objects in front of one on one’s desk as ‘a glass’ is not an interpretation. And the description of the activity we are currently engaged in as ‘writing a paper’ is not an interpretation either. 
	If one not only avoids explaining but (more important) avoids interpreting, then one avoids a hermeneutic. One hopes to avoid adding anything to people's practices as they understand them (both explicitly -- if interpretation is actually called for, for example, and -- the usual case --'implicitly', in practice ). One hopes not to change, wittingly or unwittingly, the terms of the rules which they are following.
	Around now, perhaps an objection is floating to the top of the reader’s mind. The objection, frequently made against Winch over the years, runs roughly thus: ‘Why so much talk about rules? Surely it is absurd to think of human behaviour as literally rule-governed -- surely that removes its spontaneity, and over-intellectualises it, at one and the same time! That’s got to be un-Wittgensteinian -- Wittgenstein didn’t believe that human beings are profitably-described as rule-following animals -- and in any case it’s wrong-headed. Winch errs in centring his philosophical picture on rules. We would do better to focus, not on rules, but on norms, or on practices.’
	An initial response would be this: Insofar as Winch speaks of “rule-governedness”, then this is best heard, to avoid putting Winch in the undesirable position of mimicking the social theorizing that he (rightly) critiques in others, as a ‘picture’ that Winch himself employs, for the purpose of reorienting his readers in a non-scientistic way to their subject matter: the study (where such is called for) of society. The ‘objection’ we have just envisaged certainly touches on a crucial point (to do with item (3) of our self-set tasks in this paper) that we shall only go into full detail on later, but must at least mention now. Our worry about it, as should now be clear, it is that the objection assumes that Winch’s conception of philosophy is substantive and theoretical; in particular, that Winch is an advocate of a particular implicit (rule-centred) ‘social theory’. Whereas we should want to claim that Winch can be successfully read as having no social theory, and no substantive philosophical anthropology -- and that this is a good thing. So then, even to speak of Winch having a ‘picture’ of human action, as we did earlier is, as suggested there, already to court misunderstanding. Such a ‘picture’, we are now suggesting, will only be necessary, helpful and relevant if it is designed to prevent one from making particular kinds of mistakes, falling into the habit of generating particular kinds of misunderstanding. It will not be Winch’s place rather to give us a picture which aims to reflect the general metaphysical truth as to the nature of persons.
	Winch is not asserting, ‘Rule-following is the essence of human nature’. And even if he does say things a bit like that sometimes, they form no part of any theory of human nature, but merely function (hopefully) as ‘reminders’ or as prophylactics against particular forms of confusion. Winch is not a social theorist; we might suggest that the talk of rule-following is best-heard as an analogy. Learning about other people is like learning the rules of a game. (Cf. ISS p.xvii; We will exploit this analogy more fully below.)  The claim that Winch seems to make, that ‘meaningful action is rule-governed action’ is part of the elucidation, for the purposes of de-mythologizing (i.e. de-scientising) sociology, of the concept of a ‘form of life’, an ‘elucidation’ that Winch famously engages in on pp.42-3 of ISS. The point of this elucidation is a negative one: it is to reorient or ‘respecify’ sociology (insofar as it is “misbegotten epistemology”), towards philosophy -- as Wittgenstein understood philosophy. 

	Winch’s critics: The case of Ted Schatzki
Let us prosecute our case as to how to take Winch on rules etc. by dealing with the objections to Winch of one of his major ‘Wittgensteinian’ critics: Ted Schatzki. It is worth paying extensive attention to Schatzki, because he aims to be a Wittgensteinian, and because on some important issues we have no disagreement with him. He is not a crude misinterpreter of Winch, in the way that so many of Winch’s readers are; if he misinterprets, it is at least worth paying serious attention to where and why he does so.
    Schatzki refers extensively to Wittgenstein in an effort to support his case, but, in a pattern we are all-too-familiar with, fails to cite more than a minimum of Winch’s words to support his case. Schatzki argues as follows:  ‘In Winch’s account, understanding a practice requires a grasp of the usually nonexplicit rules governing it... . In Winch’s view...understanding a given surface phenomena (sic.) (a practice) requires a grasp of something below the surface which governs it (nonexplicit rules).’  
	The metaphor of surface and depth here is liable to mislead. As there is no direct quotation from Winch at this point in Schatzki’s paper, it is hard to know precisely where he gets it from; but it could not possibly be Winch’s account. For the ‘account’ Schatzki writes of is exactly the kind of picture that we find in (say) Chomsky, and that any Wittgensteinian who takes seriously that ‘nothing is hidden’ must get away from. 
	It is worth quoting extensively from Winch, to see what he actually says, at the point in his monograph to which Schatzki refers: 

    ‘In the course of his investigation the scientist applies and develops the concepts germane to his particular field of study. This application and modification are ‘influenced’ both by the phenomena to which they are applied and also by the fellow-workers in participation with whom they are applied. But the two kinds of ‘influence’ are different. Whereas it is on the basis of his observation of the phenomena...that he develops his concepts as he does, he is able to do this only in virtue of his participation in an established form of activity with his fellow-scientists. When I speak of ‘participation’ here I do not necessarily imply any direct communication between fellow-participants. What is important is that they are all taking part in the same general kind of activity, which they have learned in similar ways; that they are, therefore, capable of communicating with each other about what they are doing; that what any one of them is doing is in principle intelligible to the others...
	[I]f the position of the sociological investigator (in a broad sense) can be regarded as comparable, in its main logical outlines, with that of the natural scientist, the following must be the case. The concepts and criteria according the which the sociologist judges that, in two situations, the same thing has happened, or the same action performed, must be understood in relation to the rules governing sociological investigation. But here we run against a difficulty; for whereas in the case of the natural scientist we have to deal with only one set of rules, namely those governing the scientist’s investigation itself, here what the sociologist is studying, as well as his study of it, is a human activity and is therefore carried on according to rules. And it is these rules, rather than those which govern the sociologist’s investigation, which specify what is to count as ‘doing the same kind of thing’ in relation to that kind of activity.’ (ISS, pp.85-87)

	Winch is clearly here attempting to teach us differences. He is, we would suggest, onto the thought, much exploited by ethnomethodologists, that what ‘social scientists’ typically present to us as ‘data’ are already pre-digested; that the true data of social study ought to be, and in fact must be, typically what is observably present and observably being accomplished in interactions between persons. And he is surely not using the notion of ‘rules’ in any doctrinaire fashion. ‘Rules’, for Winch, function, we want to say, primarily just as a name for -- as a way of talking about -- ‘agreement’ in Wittgenstein’s sense, as a way of talking about ‘normativity’ ... of talking, in short, about what makes human interaction worth regarding in most contexts as distinctive from ‘interaction’ between non-human items, the kind of interaction that a (natural) scientist typically observes. This is the central difference that Winch is teaching.
	Schatzki is quite right insofar as what he is doing is suggesting that any ‘individualist’ or (more generally) theoreticistic attempt to render rules as a foundation for the explanation of human behaviour -- as they are for example in Chomskian linguistics, and in much of Cognitive Science -- is bound to fail. But this Wittgensteinian point is not appropriately directed against Winch.

	Schatzki’s other main argument against Winch opens as follows: ‘Winch begins from the assumption that each society has its own concept of (or rules for) the intelligibility of human proceedings.’ (p.318)  But where does Winch state this as a matter of metaphysical fact? Nowhere. He only claims that it will be useful when presented with a rendition of a ‘primitive’ society as essentially having the same concept of intelligibility as ours (as for example Frazer seems to think -- he appears to think, as Wittgnstein says, that those he is studying are essentially English parsons, only stupid ones ) to consider alternative ways of putting things. Provided we don’t think we are stating a metaphysical thesis when we do so, there will then be no harm in saying, e.g., ‘The Azande have a different concept of [say] ‘prediction’ (or ‘contradiction’) than we do.’  
	Schatzki goes on: ‘[Winch] then argues that cross-cultural understanding requires that the social anthropologist bring his concept of intelligibility into relation with that of the society under investigation in such a way as to create ‘a new unity for the concept of intelligibility’... . Hence, on Winch’s account, commonalities serve merely as a ground upon which more expansive ways of understanding are erected. Commonalities do not suffice to ensure understanding but only make adequate, non-ethnocentric understanding possible.’ (pp.318-9)
	There is much to be said about this; the waters of potential confusion run deep here. We take up the implicit account of what a Wittgensteinian conception of philosophy is more fully below. And we will turn shortly to addressing Schatzki’s strong claims regarding the crucial philosophical role of ‘commonalities’.
	But let us start by pointing out that Schatzki is in any case wrong when he says that, ‘For the most part, this account is clearly not Wittgenstein’s... . Only when the spirit [of a ‘foreign’ practice] is so incongruous with any sort of thinking the investigator knows of could there be room, in Wittgenstein’s scheme, for Winch’s Hegelianesque transformation of the investigator’s concept (or principles or rules) of intelligibility. It is significant, however, that although Wittgenstein considered (imaginary) cases of extremely opaque practices, he never suggested that we react to these practices by carrying out this sort of transformation. He suggested, instead, that we either renew our efforts to make sense of them using our old concept of intelligibility or abandon the effort and admit that we cannot understand them.’  For what, then, of major remarks in Wittgenstein such as the following: ‘I am not saying [in the sense of a hypothesis]: if such-and-such facts of nature were different [then] people would have different concepts... . But: if anyone believes that certain concepts are absolutely the right ones, and that having different ones would mean not realizing something that we realize -- then let him imagine certain very general facts of nature to be different from what we are used to, and the formation of concepts different from the usual ones will become intelligible to him.’   Does Schatzki, after those such as Frazer who Wittgenstein and Winch criticised, perhaps not realize this? For the parallel between what Wittgenstein is saying here and what Winch (and Kuhn) say elsewhere is close indeed. Thomas Kuhn, for example, is literally trying to get us to understand people (chiefly, past scientists) whose ‘life-world’ is such that such-and-such fundamental facts of nature were taken to be such that certain concepts which are hard for us even to understand were obvious to them, and vice versa. Wittgenstein recommends here what Kuhn (and Winch), by and large, both recommend and practice: the imaginative attempt to understand the formation of concepts different from ours. For sure, Schatzki is quite right, as we discuss below in connection with schizophrenia, to say that this undertaking has limits; but Schatzki quite erroneously suggests that the undertaking is for Wittgenstein in principle impossible.
	And what, furthermore, of Wittgenstein’s thought that ‘...[o]ur clear and simple language-games are not preparatory studies for a future regularization of language... .The language-games are rather set up as objects of comparison which are meant to throw light on the facts of our language by way not only of similarities, but also of dissimilarities... // We want to establish an order in our knowledge of the use of language: an order with a particular end in view; one out of many possible orders; not the order. To this end we shall constantly be giving prominence to distinctions which our ordinary forms of language easily make us overlook.’ (PI paras. 130 & 132; final emphasis added). This is the crucial sense in which, for Wittgenstein, looking at the radically different can make us much clearer about what we ourselves do, and are. And sometimes, such clarity will lead to personal or even societal change. For we may be unimpressed by our own (e.g.) superficiality, in relation to the words and practices of those who are (initially at least) strange to us. 
	This is a large part of Winch’s argument in his important paper, ‘Persuasion’, a paper seemingly unread by virtually all his critics. Here Winch draws extensively upon Wittgenstein’s writings, to argue that one must both realize the radical nature of Wittgenstein’s efforts to get one to question pictures that hold one captive, and simultaneously acknowledge that there is no such thing as finding a place outside all pictures from which to assess them apodictically or rationalistically. Nigel Pleasants puts the moral of Winch’s discussions of anthropology etc. strikingly similarly: ‘The central message of Winch...-- which has often been overlooked, or ignored -- is the suggestion that in studying a so-called ‘primitive society’ we might, if we engage in the task sensitively and imaginatively, learn something important about or own taken-for-granted form of life. I shall seek to follow Winch’s advice that the very point of trying to learn about some apparently incoherent way of life is just as much to do with striving for an enhanced conception of one’s own social conditions of existence, as it is with understanding that other way of life.’  And surely this is right. How could one really think of improving one’s understanding of others, working one’s way out of persistent ‘mythological’ modes of misunderstanding them, without allowing oneself to change?  Those who have thought deeply about these matters -- for example, Martin Buber and the traditions he has influenced and which have tried to work these matters out practically (e.g. Gestalt Therapy, with its concept of ‘contact’) -- have held that truly to meet someone is part of what must be involved in understanding them, and that this must involve a readiness to open oneself up. To open oneself up to the other, part of what it is to engage with another person, is to have at least a readiness to change in response to them, and to the encounter. To understand another, to treat another as a ‘thou’, is not to treat them as an isolated ego which one is inspecting and ‘interpreting’ -- contra Davidson and Cognitive Science alike. As any but the most scientistically deluded psychotherapists and travellers (e.g. field anthropologists) have long been aware, one cannot just study other people, if one would understand them. One must be ready to learn from them! To learn from them about them -- and also about oneself. To learn ‘the rules’ (both in a loose sense and in a tighter sense in specific instances) according to which they ‘work’, and order their lives. If we treat them as people at all, we use the unacknowledged resource of most sociology etc. -- that is, our easy grasp of most of what most fellow humans do. And then our ability where necessary to focus on making sense of those elements of their lives which are mysterious to us can come into play -- in a decidedly supplementary fashion.
	So, to take a diagnostic step back for a moment: there appears to be an interesting fantasy at work somewhere deep in Schatzki’s version of Wittgenstein, a fantasy which we suspect is widely shared among Anglo-American philosophers: a fantasy that one can learn all about the world and about other people without oneself changing, without changing oneself. Look again at Schatzki’s words; ‘To state Wittgenstein’s views baldly: there is either sufficient commonality and hence understanding or insufficient commonality and, as a result, no understanding.’ There is no place here for response to the other, for change. And yet Wittgenstein thought that the growth of one’s own understanding, and the overcoming of one’s ‘ignorance’ of one’s own language etc., in part through one’s grasp of the other, was absolutely of the most central importance. Thus witness his famous remark to Malcolm: ‘...what is the use of studying philosophy if all that it does for you is enable you to talk with some plausibility about some abstruse questions of logic, etc., and if it does not improve your thinking about the important questions of everyday life, if it does not make you more conscientious than any ... journalist in the use of DANGEROUS phrases [[Malcolm had used the expression, ‘the British ‘national character’’]] such people use for their own ends. // You see, I know that it’s difficult to think well about ‘certainty’, ‘probability’, ‘perception’, etc. . But it is, if possible, still more difficult to think...really honestly about your life and other people’s lives.’  Or consider Wittgenstein’s powerful thought, used as an epigraph by Winch for ‘Persuasion’, that ‘I ought to be no more than a mirror, in which my reader can see his own thinking with all its deformities so that, helped in this way, he can put it right.’ Winch, seemingly unlike Schatzki, and certainly unlike some of his other critics, such as Keita and Phillips, preserves and expands upon this role for ‘putting one’s thinking right’. Philosophy may be ‘uncommitted enquiry’ – but it is not without normative consequences.
	But perhaps the above is unfair to Schatzki. Perhaps he would accept that one can and sometimes does learn from others and transform oneself, in the encounter with other cultures, if one lets it be a genuine encounter, rather than being like the encounter of a biologist with a laboratory specimen. Let us move then on to what is more certainly a salient flaw in Schatzki’s approach. In the remarks from Schatzki that we have quoted, one can see that he makes it sound as if Wittgenstein thinks that it makes sense quite literally to assess -- to quantify -- the degree of commonality which human beings have with one another. Once again, here is his astonishing summation of Wittgenstein’s supposed position: ‘To state Wittgenstein’s views baldly: there is either sufficient commonality and hence understanding or insufficient commonality and, as a result, no understanding.’ (p.319)  But we shall go on to show more fully both that it is already usually a misunderstanding to speak of ‘understanding’ as if it were a positive state to be achieved -- and that it is already a misunderstanding ever to speak of Wittgenstein as having philosophical views at all. 
	Schatzki immediately goes on from the remark just quoted to say something which indicates that he appears to think that Wittgenstein’s ‘views’ are truth-evaluable, and are in fact true: ‘Wittgenstein’s claim about insufficient commonality is obvious.’! We shall shortly drastically query this notion, both exegetically and (more important) philosophically. Let us do so somewhat indirectly, by focussing first on a closely-related aspect of Schatzki’s argument, as it affects Winch.
	Schatzki’s assumption that Winch thinks that different human communities may as a matter of substantive fact have very few commonalities to them is quite unwarranted. Let us ask the following: 
How could we determine whether as a matter of fact two human communities have ‘many’ or ‘few’ commonalities? 
As soon as one asks the question, one realizes that it is, as things stand, a stupid question. There is no such thing as a substantive fact of the matter about whether two communities are deeply different from one another. Whether something is ‘deeply different’ is a matter of nuance, and of context. Someone can at one time find a strange novel practice of a faraway tribe very reasonable or understandable; and at another one can be quite bemused by what one oneself did five seconds ago.
	All we can do here (and all we need to do here) is assemble reminders. We can stop ourselves being confused. For example, as already mentioned (and this is discussed more fully below), sometimes it is useful to be reminded that what counts as a contradiction can be very different in different places in different times. This is part of what Wittgenstein meant when he famously remarked that philosophy leaves everything as it is (This remark is cited approvingly by Winch on p.103 of ISS.).  It is also part of what he meants in a remark that is at the very heart of his so-called ‘metaphilosophical’ discussions in PI, but a remark almost universally ignored: that ‘The civil status of a contradiction, or its status in civil life: there is the philosophical problem.’  And it is precisely this that Winch brings out with his discussion of the ‘contradictions’ which Western observers find in Azande practice. You have to look at the practice in context, says Winch, to see whether it is a good idea to say, ‘They have a different concept of ‘contradiction’ from us’, or ‘What looked like contradictions turn out on closer acquaintance not to be so’, or whatever. (Some such statements will be, at a given point in a particular ‘conversation’, much less liable to mislead than others.)
	And there is not even, of course, a substantive fact of the matter about how to individuate communities in the first place. Winch believes that ‘social sciences’ are somewhat (though only somewhat) less misleadingly described as social studies (This description must not be allowed to lead one to think that Winch is an armchair sociologist, competing with sociology on its own turf). Winch believes that, unless one is clear that a ‘social science’ is at best not just a science which happens to have as its subject-matter human society, but that the word ‘social’ decisively alters the character of the investigation in the study (studies) in question, one is very likely to become philosophically confused. (Of course, there is no substantive fact of the matter about these things either! Winch is not saying, ‘It’s a scientific fact that you cut up the universe wrong if you classify (e.g.) sociology as a science.’ That too would almost always be a very misleading thing to say. As we say, in a way, it doesn’t matter if the various social studies are grouped together under the heading of ‘social science’ -- so long as one keeps a clear view of what is being thus named, and what its character is. But that is almost impossible to do, even in the best of circumstances.)  Furthermore, he believes, with the ethnomethodologists and with Wittgenstein, that social study as a lay activity is ubiquitous, but, for that very reason, as a professional activity is only infrequently necessary.
	  Perhaps Schatzki himself, speaking in his own voice, would not disagree with what we have said above. But he follows the standard reading of Winch, in accusing the latter of having the idea that communities are cleanly separable entities. This idea, which is primarily the fruit of Malcolmian misinterpretation of Wittgenstein, not of Winch’s work, was suggested by some of Winch’s incautious formulations in the first edition of ISS. He very clearly distances himself from this interpretation of his work, in the 1990 Preface. (It is regrettable that, once again, Schatzki does not pay any attention to the those clear statements.)  Let us explain this important point further:
	Winch does not think that any ‘social scientist’ or ‘social theorist’ -- still less himself -- is in a position even to claim or argue that it is a matter of hard fact that the Azande is one community and our’s is a totally separate one. It’s rather that it will sometimes be ethnographically (or indeed philosophically) helpful to distinguish between communities of people which are of course to some significant extent self-identifying. That’s the important criterion, if a criterion we need: whatever one says about the social world must be responsible to social actors, in a manner having no parallel in the physical sciences. However, as just hinted, all this may have been somewhat obscured in Winch’s original presentation of ‘The Idea of a Social Science’, by his sometimes appearing to grant the notion that we can definitively identify communities, and indeed that they are definitively separate and homogenous. But (a) there is nowhere in ‘Understanding a Primitive Society’ where Winch makes any similarly potentially-misleading remarks;  and (b) those who criticise Winch for having left the door open for ‘relativism’ in ISS have failed to appreciate his clarificatory remarks in the new ‘Preface’ to ‘The Idea of a Social Science’. Here (especially on p.xiii), Winch specifically remarked that he had sometimes misleadingly expressed himself in the first edition of ISS on crucial issues connected with that nature of rules, and thus unnecessarily exposed himself to the kind of misunderstanding we see in (for instance) Schatzki. He goes on immediately to say that, if he had paid closer attention to passages such as para.s 81-82 (on rules) in PI, then he ‘...might have avoided the impression sometimes given in this book of social practices, traditions, institutions etc. as more or less self-contained and each going its own, fairly autonomous way. ... Again, and connectedly, the suggestion that modes of social life are autonomous with respect to each other was insufficiently counteracted by [the] qualifying remark...about ‘the overlapping character of different modes of social life.’ Different modes of social life do not merely ‘overlap’; they are frequently internally related in such a way that one cannot even be intelligibly conceived as existing in isolation from others.’ (ISS, xiv-xv)
	Winch here evidently regrets some of his phrasings and some more substantial aspects of his project in the first edition of ISS. It seems to us absurd for people writing since 1990 to ignore not only his many writings since 1958 which have taken greater care than was evident in the first edition of ISS over these questions but especially to ignore this revision to the book itself. Winch’s autocritique is enough; we don’t need others laying into him while ignoring his intelligent and honest autocritique.
	Winch is fundamentally interested in what it makes sense to say. But of course, self-evidently, things are always said by people, in contexts. Philosophers tend to ignore this simple ‘fact’, fail to remind themselves of it, at their absolute philosophic peril. So: What one says in one conversation, speaking as a philosopher with colleagues, may be very different from what one says in another conversation, speaking say with a foreigner from an extremely different background, or with an opinion pollster, or with a popularizing scientist. To one, one might say that the Azande are very different from us; to another, that they are much the same; to a third, that they practice a peculiar and unattractive form of magic; to a fourth, that they have a way of life whose categories are hard to mesh in any successful way with our own. There would be no contradiction in one’s saying all of these, and more, at different times and places, to different people. Winch is looking for ways of rendering helpfully the concept of ‘society’, and is reaching for formulations which will be least likely to confuse and most likely to productively assist his audience; he is not stating or trying to state once and for all The Truth about social life.
	To further back up our thought about the non-assertoric, non-constative nature of Winch’s thought hereabouts, note the use of the notion of ‘internal relation’ in the above quote. This term is explicated in the Tractatus, and, in the relatively rare contexts of use it has in Wittgenstein’s later work, it has much the same sense as it did there  (Winch emphasizes the continuities in Wittgenstein’s philosophy far more than is usually appreciated -- for some detail, see below). Contra Baker and Hacker, the term ‘internal relation’ cannot be used faithfully to Wittgenstein in a way which provides a generalistic account of ‘metaphysical glue’ between rule and application -- this idea does deserve the kind of criticism which Schatzki (inappropriately) levels against Winch on rules. 
	So, what sense does ‘internal relation’ have in Wittgenstein’s work? Well, crucial to it, as Winch was well aware, is that internal relations cannot, strictly speaking, be spoken of at all. They are not genuinely relations. Only ‘external’ relations are actually relations, between separate things. And there have to be separate things, if there are to be relations (between things). 
	It follows that when Winch speaks above of different ‘parts’ of social life, and similarly of social relations, as being ‘internal relations’, what he is really saying is usefully put as follows: that they are not relations at all. That characterizing them as relations can, riskily, lead to society being thought of in nonsensical atomistic ways. When we read Winch with a sensitivity to the non-assertoric, post-metaphysical nature of his philosophy, and when we attend to his attendance to the continuities in Wittgenstein’s philosophy (rather than, as is usual, reading in him only an alleged version of Wittgenstein’s (alleged) ‘later philosophy’), then profitable ways of understanding a multitude of his remarks in ISS open up for us. And unprofitable ways, contrariwise, are shut down. For example, when we pick up the notion of ‘internal relation’ for a while we see that, though it cannot be ultimately satisfactory, and though it can risk leading us to say things which sound awfully like (nonsensical) metaphysical ‘theses’ about the social world, it at least usefully closes down the unprofitable avenue of thinking of different practices as being (metaphysically) hermetically sealed off from one another, and furthermore suggests instead an alternative ‘picture’ which may help to point up the absurdity (not falsity) of the atomism and ontological individualism which have dominated much social theory. It suggests a sense in which we can usefully said to be part of one another (and also, part of our eco-physical world, not distinct therefrom).
	Having got somewhat clearer on Winch’s observations on the concept of ‘society’ and ‘social relations’, we are finally in a position to turn directly to the following question:

	Is there a genuine question concerning how strong the commonalities between persons must be in order for them to be mutually comprehensible?
  Our remarks about the rank absurdity of thinking that philosophers (or ‘social scientists’) are in a position proprietarily to individuate communities and pronounce upon their openness and closedness to one another lead naturally into a thought of even more importance for comprehending what Winch, after Wittgenstein, is up to in his philosophy of social science. We are thinking of the allegations of ‘relativism’ and ‘incommensurabilism’ made against Winch. Sometimes these are prosecuted by self-proclaimed rationalists (e.g. Martin Hollis) who think Winch is defeasible on quasi-empirical grounds -- we need, Hollis, argued, a ‘bridgehead’ of shared beliefs in order to comprehend people from other cultures, and that bridgehead is to be found in our shared human rationality. Sometimes, this idea becomes more explicitly quasi-Kantian in nature, as in Davidson, who at points suggests that his ultimate grounds for his notions of ‘charity’ and ‘humanity’ are ‘transcendental’. These ideas can seem related to Wittgenstein’s thoughts about ‘form of life’, especially to the famous passage in PI on ‘agreement’, para.s 240-2. 
	But Wittgenstein’s remarks there are not quasi-empirical, nor even about transcendental conditions of possibility. They are grammatical ‘reminders’, pointers away from certain specific philosophical confusions in which it is extremely easy to found oneself embroiled; confusions, as we may sometimes put it, of ‘the grammatical’ with ‘the empirical’, for example.
	And -- and this is the crucial point -- thoughts such as ‘We must presuppose massive agreement in order for there to be able to be disagreement at all’ are not truth-evaluable, are not quasi-empirical claims or even transcendental truths. Just as it is absurd to imagine that philosophers or their kin can individuate communities by means of determining the facts of the matter as to what communities there really are (irrespective of how people take themselves to be ‘communitied’), so it is absurd to imagine that philosophers can enunciate true statements, ‘assertions’, ‘theses’, which (would) settle the debate of ‘rationalism against relativism’, or decide whether incommensurabilism is true or not. It is absurd to suppose that there is a substantive philosophical or anthropological fact of the matter about whether the Azande are ‘really very different’ from us or not. Or even about whether they are incomprehensible in ‘our categories’ or not. 
	One rather cute way of putting this point is perhaps as follows: ‘incommensurability’ is itself not measurable. One can’t measure ‘loads of agreement’, ‘very different’, ‘necessarily partial understanding’, and so on. Thus if one stands by a thesis of incommensurability (or anti-incommensurability  ), one will be committing oneself to a nonsense. One will be committing oneself to something which sounds as if it is a definite assertion, as if it rules something in and something else out; but when one turns to unpack one’s ‘thesis’ one will be left only with conflicting intuitions, and emptiness. The only theses there can actually be hereabouts are sheer (empty) banalities and tautologies, such as perhaps: ‘When two scientific disciplinary matrices seem very different to one another, beware of conflating them and assuming that one can be put sensically in terms of the other.’ This Kuhnianish remark is pretty much tautologous, and thus harmless, and may sometimes be of ‘therapeutic’ use. It is, helpfully, phrased explicitly as a warning rather than as a statement. It should not be seen as a substantive claim -- that way lies only absurdity, and emptiness masquerading as substance.
	The whole debate of ‘rationality vs. relativism’, the whole debate of those who imagine themselves to be arguing for or against Kuhn and Winch, is absurd, a non-starter. There is nothing to be said on the ‘question’ supposedly at issue, the question in Kuhn’s case of whether as a matter of fact (say) pre-Einstienian physics is incommensurable with post-Einsteinian physics. Kuhn’s deep message is not ‘The truth is that there have been scientific revolutions which render scientists unable to understand each other, and us unable to understand old science/scientists’. His message is not well-put as the truth of a pluralised Kantianism, as Hoyningen-Huene has claimed it is, nor really as any kind of ‘relativism’. His message, rather, is something like, ‘If you’re really interested in the nature of the sciences, if you want (as any serious student of science should) to understand what the sciences are and how they work, then try looking at science differently from how Whig historians of science and formalistic philosophers of science have taught you to. Use my ‘new concepts’, such as ‘revolution’ and ‘paradigm’, if they help you  (Sometimes I, Kuhn, find them helpful). But be ready to abandon them instantly if they stand in the way of a sound grasp of the actual concretion of scientific practice in its historicity and in its contexts.’ His message is philosophical, in an important sense; but we think it is not helpfully-described as epistemological or metaphysical. Those words carry much too much baggage. (If we re-read Winch’s ISS in light of his later thought, I think we can see that Winch himself would have been less likely to have employed those words, in his own voice.)
	Likewise, there is simply nothing to be said about whether Azande thought is incommensurable with ours. Winch’s deepest message is something like, ‘If you’re really interested in the nature of lay and professional social inquiry, then try looking at culture(s) differently from how scientistic ‘social scientists’ and rationalistic philosophers have encouraged you to. Use Wittgenstein’s terms to do so, if those help free up your mental cramps.’
	Winch was (and became increasingly) well-aware of the risk that he would be read as saying something more substantive and theoretical than this. But he had/has no theory of how society is, of how humans are, nor even of how sociologists ought to conduct themselves. He investigated the concept of ‘society’, the concept of ‘social science’, and the concept of ‘philosophy’, and found that certain oft-made methodological and philosophical ‘mistakes’ were less likely to be fallen into if one attended to the results of such investigations. He had no theory -- any more than do Wittgenstein or those ethnomethodologists with a modicum of philosophical sophistication. 

	One way of seeing the logic of our argument, in Winch’s case, is as follows: try taking seriously the idea that there is a debate, a debate heavily constrained by and even settle-able by the invocation of facts, a debate which philosophy can hope then to have settled and to pronounce assertorically and definitively upon, a debate concerning how different the Zande are from us. If there is such a debate, then let us hear the evidence from the sides to it. Well, for example, we have Davidson opposing ‘conceptual scheme relativism’, a ‘relativism’ often associated (largely wrongly, I am suggesting) with Winch and Kuhn. One of Davidson’s key claims is that there must be massive agreement in order for there to be disagreement. That we must presuppose that anyone we are ‘interpreting’ shares a vast number of beliefs with us; otherwise, we cannot go so far -- we are not going so far -- as to treat them as a person or their language as a language.
	But has it ever been explained what this presupposition -- if heard as quasi-factual, rather than ‘merely’ as a situation-relative grammatical reminder -- amounts to?
	We can make perfectly good sense of the project of enumerating (say) the number of tigers alive in the wild in India. Or even of the project of enumerating the hairs on my head. Or even perhaps the number of grains of sand on a given beach.
	Matters become rather less clear when it comes to enumerating the number of dialects spoken in a country. Criteria for individuation of dialects are rather less clear, more purpose-relative, exposed to philosophical debate, beset by the special features of any of the objects of the ‘human sciences’. Similarly, enumerating the number of people one has truly loved is a project perhaps as intrinsically important as it is fuzzy and desperately difficult (and potentially life-changing), if taken seriously. 
	But when it comes to enumerating the number of beliefs one has, or the number of beliefs two people share, do we really have any idea how to begin the process? How are we to count beliefs whose referents are identified differently by the believer than by ourselves? How are we to count beliefs in the puzzle-cases of belief which philosophers are so fond of? And, crucially, all the different forms/cases of belief investigated for example by Wittgensteinian etc. philosophers, by philosophers of religion, indeed by philosophers of anthropology (e.g. ‘belief-that’ vs. ‘belief-in’; ‘belief’ as trust; belief-in-practice as discussed by Winch, Pleasants, etc.)? What about meta-beliefs? Concatenations of beliefs? ‘Unconscious beliefs’? What about degrees of belief, and gradations of belief (e.g. ‘I believe x with about 75 per cent probability’)? And so on -- the list could easily be extended.
	We suggest that one can have no clear notion of what it is to enumerate one’s beliefs, and that the idea of such, which appeared a way of introducing order to the interminable debates around relativism, debates in which Winch and Kuhn supposedly figure on the side of the relativists, is simply vacuous. One could of course invent some way of enumerating our beliefs -- religious authorities have occasionally attempted to do so in restricted contexts for purposes of establishing whether one is a heretic or not -- but how could something which one thus invented solve a philosophical problem?!

	The only tenable thing to say is as follows. It may sometimes, for certain ‘practical’ philosophical purposes, be useful to say: 
i) ‘We must share loads of things -- e.g. beliefs -- in common with others in order to be even treating them as human beings, as susceptible of understanding, at all.’ 
And it may sometimes be useful, for the same kind of purposes, but in different local circumstances, where the discourse in one’s area has taken a different kind of illusionary turning, to say: 
ii) ‘People can have different world-views/paradigms, which make them partially impenetrable to one another. One has to be ready to see others as deeply different from oneself.’  
But neither ‘saying’ should be heard as an assertion of any kind.
	Winch and Kuhn had cause to say the latter kind of thing ((ii)) more often than the former ((i)), because they were largely combatting inherited traditions of ‘Whiggism’, ‘rationalism’, and ‘Realism’. But we should not thus fall into the trap of thinking that they believed the latter, and disbelieved the former, simply and assertorically, permanently. No. They did not wish to hold, to argue for, the theses often attributed to them by Davidsonians and others; they only wished to remind us all of how we might best avoid saying nonsensical things about the history of science, about the understanding of persons and cultures, etc. .
	They had, they have, no views, they make no assertions. Winch is no more a pluralist (as Lerner wishes he was, and Phillips thinks he might actually be) than a monist (as Lerner thinks he is). He just isn’t in that kind of game.
	To be fair to Schatzki, his line of thought is subtler than that of (e.g.) Hollis, in that Schatzki does not only emphasise that commonality is needed in beliefs, but also in emotions, needs, physical environment, primitive reactions, interests, and so on (See p.316 of his essay). There needs to be, says Schatzki, ‘agreement’ in much of the whole warp and weft of form of life (and compare Investigations section 206). And there is of course something right about this. But the same argument that we ran above could be applied to each of these in turn: there can be no such thing as quantifying the degree of commonality; there is no fact of the matter as to how much commonality is required; and the claims about the need for a ‘shared form of life’ do not in the end amount to assertions. They are not claims that could be contradicted, or theses that are controversial. They are – they can only be -- efforts to return us all to our actual life with language, no longer deluded by nonsenses that masquerade as scientific-ish claims.

	Why then, given the above, are Kuhn and Winch so misunderstood?
We have already indicated that the answer to this question is multiple. But it must be said that it is only certain incautious remarks that Kuhn made that gave his interpreters any genuine reason for foisting this issue onto him. Winch was if anything slightly more careful and circumspect than Kuhn, and more cautiously faithful to Wittgenstein in his approach; but as mentioned above, certain incautious remarks in the first edition of The idea of a social science did unfortunately nevertheless make it easier than it might have been for those who wanted to disagree with him. (We give a slightly fuller account toward the end of this paper as to why Winch has been as badly misunderstood as he has.)

	We have discussed Kuhn’s incautious moments elsewhere. And We do not wish to dwell on some of Winch’s unhappy early formulations: as we have made clear, we think that others have dwelt on them too much already, and that Winch himself has given us a perfectly clear ‘corrected’ version of how he actually wants to have been heard, how he wants to be read, in his writings of the last forty years, since 1958 (and especially in his 1990 ‘Preface’ to the revised edition of ISS). We prefer to get back to the instructive implications of his text. One way of understanding our task in this paper as a whole is as offering a reading of a virtual text that Winch never actually wrote: his Idea of a Social Science, re-read in the light of his later work and in particular of its new Preface. That ‘virtual text’ has a nature and a significance for philosophers (and practitioners) of ‘social science’ that Winch’s interpreters and critics systematically miss.

	Against interpretation
To recap: If we are to risk generalizing at all hereabouts, we shall say that the production of descriptions or presentations of human action/behaviour which are not interpretations, let alone explanations, is the only way to avoid grossly failing to 'capture' that behaviour, given that such rule-following etc. behaviour is utterly unlike what we call the 'behaviour' of inanimate objects, is active, deedlike -- though, again, largely in a non-interpretative fashion. Most human behaviour is not interpretive, so its understanding need not normally be interpretive either. Contra the claims of Charles Taylor and other critics of Winch, even self-understanding or self-description need not be self-interpretation. It is an interpretivist (or post-modernist) dogma, a piece of ‘theoryism’, to claim that linguistic articulation of wordless self-understandings is necessarily interpretive. (When we ask someone what they are doing, sometimes they simply tell us. Or: sometimes we can simply see, even without being told. That such seeing is defeasible does not infer that it never happens.)  'Self-understanding' etc. is, again, vital to understanding humans as human animals rather than as material objects or even as (non-human) animals -- but it is not (necessarily) interpretation. One needs to think, not of someone treating themselves as another and speculating on why they themselves have done something (a very unusual case), but rather of someone having the capability to alter what they are doing in response to social circumstances, say in response to a failure to make themselves understood, or in response to a surprising change in the physical environment (usual cases). Then perhaps one will have the chance to see clearly how human action is, and what 'self-understanding' ( when understood in a properly non-intellectualist sense) amounts to.

	Of course, the terms used in all this are not in themselves crucial  (i.e.: So long as one understands "explain" or "interpret" in a sound non-scientistic fashion, etc. etc., then one can happily use terms like "explaining / interpreting human action" -- as Winch on occasion does. And similarly: if the word “description” seems somewhat forced, as we are employing it, then we will happily shift to another word that seems to you more felicitous, such as perhaps “presentation”.). We are decidedly not seeking to reify any of these words we have been discussing and using into 'technical terms', nor encouraging others to do so.
	 But distinctions at least along the lines that we have made are we think usefully correlated with the words (describing, understanding,  explaining;  acting-on-a-rule,  interpreting a rule) discussed in (a) and (b), towards the start of the paper -- in common and intuitively useful senses (uses) of those words. Thus we take it that (to take perhaps an easier example) it is useful to say that Winch hopes in his great paper on "Understanding a primitive society" -- his critique of the great anthropologist, Evans-Pritchard -- to be pointing the way toward a description or presentation of Azande practices which will not impose upon them. And imposition will, he thinks, result from (and amount to) interpreting them or (worse) 'explaining' them. Instead, Winch invites us to look at the language-game the Azande are actually playing:

	"It might...appear as though we had clear grounds for speaking of the superior rationality of European over Zande thought, in so far as the latter involves a contradiction [over criteria for the attribution of 'witch-hood'] which it makes no attempt to remove and does not even recognize: one, however, which is recognizable as such in the context of European ways of thinking. But does Zande thought on this matter really involve a contradiction? It appears from Evans-Pritchard's  account that the Azande do not press their ways of thinking about witches to a point at which they would be involved in contradictions. // Someone may now want to say that the irrationality of the Azande in relation to witchcraft shows itself in the fact that they do not press their thought about it 'to its logical conclusion'. To appraise this point we must consider whether the conclusion we are trying to force on them is indeed a logical one; or perhaps better, whether someone who does press this conclusion is being more rational than the Azande, who do not. Some light is thrown on this question by Wittgenstein's discussion of a game..."  

Winch goes on to suggest that the Azande are 'playing a different game': 

	"It is noteworthy...that the Azande, when the possibility of this contradiction about the inheritance of witchcraft is pointed out to them, do not come to regard their old beliefs in witchcraft as obsolete. [According to Evans-Pritchard himself:]'They have no theoretical interest in the subject.' This suggests strongly that the context from which the suggestion about the contradiction is made, the context of our scientific culture, is not on the same level as the context in which the beliefs about witchcraft operate. Zande notions of witchcraft do not constitute a theoretical system in terms of which Azande try to gain a quasi-scientific understanding of the world. This in turn suggests that it is the European, obsessed with pressing Zande thought where it would not go -- to a contradiction -- who is guilty of misunderstanding, not the Zande."  

	Winch's primary concern is to avoid misunderstanding  a radically different society (or misunderstanding religion; or art; etc.). He is not asserting, 'Here is the truth on what these 'aliens' are', nor 'Here is how to enter into the positive 'empathic' state of understanding them'. (This is very important, and constitutes another aspect of Winch’s practice signally neglected by most of his ‘friends’ and ‘foes’. Winch, to say it again, is trying to put us in a better position to avoid misunderstanding something -- that’s all. A bit like with Kuhn’s recasting of scientific progress in terms of progress only away from past insoluble puzzles (‘anomalies’), there is no teleological vision in Winch hereabouts; and he is not setting up a rival methodology to that employed by field anthropologists either.)  
	Here we arguably have an outline example and given what of someone -- Winch -- being able quite successfully to 'follow along with' -- to make something of -- an 'alien' discourse without imposing on it or interpreting it  in terms other than its own. Paraphrasing a Wittgensteinian ‘slogan’, then, one might try simplifying my line here as follows: Don't look for the interpretation, look for an adequate description. A description that will not evince/evoke failures to 'meet 'those one is encountering as they are.
	Again, we must stress that our remarks above too are ‘grammatical reminders’ (see PI para. 127). They are not gestures at ineffable truths, or general contributions to a theory of society, or any such. Winch, like Wittgenstein, gives us reminders, not a theory. (Sorry to have to keep reminding you of this!)  He tries to judge the mythologicalish errors we are likely to fall into, in part by looking at errors (e.g. Evans-Pritchard’s, or similarly Frazer’s, Pareto’s, or Levy-Bruhl’s) that actually have been influentially fallen into. (Take for instance the following disastrous confusion of perspectives within one sentence, to be found on p.43 of the abridged (Oxford: Clarendon, 1976) edition of Evans-Pritchard’s classic text; “We must remember that since witchcraft has no real existence a man does not know that he has bewitched another, even if he is aware that he bears him ill will”.)
	And it is perhaps important to reiterate that my reading of Winch resists assimilating his view to that of most 'Verstehen' theorists of the social sciences, and Weber. Our view, based upon the letter of the kind of quotations from Winch given above, is that Winch's thought is falsified if one fails to recognize the difference he finds between descriptions on the one hand and interpretations  / explanations on the other. Winch had a lot of time and sympathy for the Idealist tradition, for the work of Dilthey and Collingwood for example. He felt that they essentially grasped certain important philosophical points which eluded their Positivist foes then and now. Likewise, Winch can be drawn close at various points to certain schools of conventional sociology, such as the verstehenlich moments in Weber, and some classical Social Interactionism. But I want to insist again that in the main Winch resolutely refused to take up a position -- to have a view -- on debates in social theory. He is not advocating a particular ‘picture’ of the human being, or of (the) human society   -- except insofar as he sometimes recommends certain pictures for certain prophylactic purposes. He is not, for example, asserting the truth of a picture of human beings as rule-following animals. He rather follows Wittgenstein in pointing out how easy it is to be confused in attempting to understand other human beings who are perhaps strange to us if instead of taking account of their practices as already having an order, we rather interpret them merely ‘positivistically’, as merely acting in accord with rules; or if we fail to understand how different (say) their understanding of the effects of an alleged contradiction within their practices is to what we might have expected. Thus we think it unwise and unhelpful to try to read Winch as (say) a philosophical social interactionist, with a particular theory of what human interaction is and of how important it is. If we are to associate Winch with any sociological ‘school’, it would have then to be, as already suggested, with the non-scientistic, Wittgensteinish and resolutely non-theoreticised, resolutely local practices of ‘ethnomethodology’. If Winch has an ally in sociology, it can we think only be Garfinkel and his followers, who do not advocate a substantive theory of society. We might then think of ethnomethodological practice, in the work of Garfinkel, Livingston, the early Sacks, Heritage, Michael Lynch, Wes Sharrock, Rod Watson and more besides, as being a fine-grained ethnographically-oriented non-fictional version of what Winch and Wittgenstein are up to with their examples, prophylactics and reminders. (See for instance Sharrock and Watson’s “Autonomy among social theories”, which makes clear just how different the task of ethmethodology (and, by extension, of Winch) is from that of mainstream sociology or social theory.)
	If Winch were aiming to describe a positive state of understanding, then he would be an Idealist or a Verstehen-theorist. For all his affinities with these, he is neither. If it be responded, “Well then, if he is not aiming to describe a positive state of understanding, then why is the crucial section of ISS entitled “Understanding social institutions”, and why is his great essay entitled “Understanding a primitive society?”, the answer is threefold:
I)	The “understanding” in Winch’s titles is better heard as a process, or an activity, not as a state! He is interested in how to go about understanding others.
II)	Furthermore, Winch is writing about this process or activity, and not, except in the most schematic and exemplificational of ways, actually undertaking it. He isn’t to more than a very limited degree engaging in the activity himself; he is not an anthropologist, or a practicising ethnographer. This should be obvious.
III)	 Finally, the activity he is talking about is one he is least likely to mislead, to encourage a wrong assimilation with philosophical approaches or with methodologies that were not his, if we put his endeavour in negative terms. He was chiefly concerned to remove misunderstandings, for the sake of better pursuit of the activity intimated in (I) and (II), above. …He wants those engaging in the activity to appreciate better the extent to which their fieldwork needs to be informed by philosophy or at least analogous in certain respects to philosophy, rather than analogised to science. This should be clear, in the case in which Winch goes into most detail: that of Evans-Pritchard. Winch offers tools for avoiding misunderstanding what Evans-Pritchard has actually given us, by way of an insight into the Azande; and these in turn yield conceptual tools which may be to other anthropologists’ benefit. In short: while  ISS’s point could be signalled more clearly by shifting to a title such as ‘The very idea of a social science’, “Understanding a primitive society” could be perspicuously retitled as “Avoiding misunderstandings of primitive societies”, or “On primitive misunderstandings of ‘primitive’ societies”.

	And so now we are justified in venturing that a key ‘mistake’ which Schatzki makes -- and Phillips and Lerner after him -- is to treat Winch as a social theorist, who put us in the alleged position of possessing an understanding either of particular societies or of society in general. Thus Schatzki in fact covertly  treats Wittgenstein as a social theorist too. When we see clearly how the Winch/Wittgenstein approach eviscerates generalistic abstract questions such as for instance ‘How great do the commonalities between persons need to be for understanding between them to be possible?’ of content, we see, among other things, how futile the debates over Winch have tended to be.
	It is worth adding that salient and we think sensible support for distinguishing for prophylactical etc. purposes, as we have done above, after Winch, not just between description and explanation, but between description (and understanding) on the one hand and interpretation on the other, can be found in the etnomethodologist Jeff Coulter's paper, "Is contextualizing necessarily interpretive?": "It is undoubtedly true that some readings of texts...are best construed as 'interpretive', as (involving) the making of 'interpretations', but this is not true for each and every facet of a reading of -- or of reading-and-understanding -- a text[, for example] a psychiatric clinic record."  If the reader continues to require further detail concerning how it is that it is ‘possible’ for there to be plain (self- etc.) description (ore ‘presentation’), and how interpretation is not ubiquitous, then the place to go is to ethnomethodologists’ concept of the “accounting” and “accountability” of human practices/actions. Winch is much closer to ethnomethodology than to ‘symbolic interactionism’, ‘Verstehen’-theory or philosophical Idealism, in this vital regard.
	In sum, rather than as usual assimilating interpretation to the description side of Wittgenstein's famous opposition between description and explanation, thus risking concealing the important disanalogies between description and interpretation, we might usefully try out assimilating it rather to the explanation side instead, and notice the similarities there. This is, we think, the main moral of thinking through oppositions (a) and (b), with which we began the paper, above. (Again, the terms themselves are not vital -- and all these concepts are of course ‘family-resemblance concepts’, there being for example many ‘kinds’ of description   -- but the points we are trying to make here, therapeutic and prophylactical, are we think sound.)
	If this is right, then the best one can do, one might say, is present (rather, one might say, than re-present) the thought and language of an 'alien'. But, if it 'hangs together', in the way Winch suggested Azande thought in the final analysis does; if it can be made sense of without being imposed upon; if its character is such that one can come to describe it accurately, in important part through understanding it as they understand it:then one need not thereby falsify it -- and then one really can present it. (And need not necessarily interpret it.)

	An’ example’: hard cases of schizophrenia
  Let us now take a ‘case’ with which to test our presentation of Winch, an example drawn from the work of the philosophically-inclined clinical psychologist Louis Sass, from his bold recent attempt to provide an interpretation of something very alien, namely (hard cases of) schizophrenia. (We take this example for the sake of argument; there is no space here to argue conclusively over whether Sass’s line on schizophrenia is basically correct or not.)  Sass argues that, far from being a disease of primitivity or cognitive deficit, much of schizophrenia is a ‘disease’ of hyper-reflexivity, even hyper-rationality, and alienation. His critique of traditional scientistic (and psycho-analytical) accounts of the nature of schizophrenia, which we invite the reader to consult for themselves, is, arguably, highly-effective. He argues that we can understand schizophrenia, if we follow Wittgenstein’s diagnosis of solipsism as a disease of the intellect, a disease of hyper-thinking in which the consistent solipsist moves seamlessly from thinking of themselves as the centre of everything, to thinking of themselves as nothing at all, to the pragmatic absurdity of thinking of themselves as requiring the existence of another mind, and so on, interminably back around this merry-go-round of philosophical ‘positions’. We can interpret the severe schizophrenic, e.g. Daniel P. Schreber, as strictly analogous to such a solipsist, Sass claims. And thus we can understand schizophrenia, understand why it is like it is and what it is like.

	We want to ask, of what Sass re-presents for us: 
(i) Is his account, as he wants it to be, likely to be Wittgensteinian?;  and
(ii) If not, could Winch offer an alternative and efficacious ‘account’ (i.e. an orientation of how not to misunderstand) of the phenomena under investigation here, as we have claimed he can essay of (e.g.) the Azande?

	Here is an example of what issues from Sass’s ‘hermeneutic’, his account of schizophrenia. He writes, of the famous paranoid schizophrenic, Schreber:

	"Schreber's dream is that spirits should be drawn down toward him and perish therein. For example, he sometimes hears the spirit of his wife saying (more precisely, he hears it "represented as saying") "Let me" -- words which he knew to mean let me "dissolve in my husband's body". Since the spirits of Schreber's cosmos represent potentially rivalrous conscious centres, their perishing in him can be interpreted as a conceding of defeat in the competition of consciousness."     (P.120 of Paradoxes, underlining our’s)

Well, indeed, it can be interpreted that way, a way consistent with Sass’s ‘hermeneutic’ for schizophrenia, of a rigorously-pursued analogy with consistent solipsism, and the inevitable confusions concerning the nature of consciousness which solipsism (according to Wittgenstein) involves. Other at least somewhat plausible interpretations are available: e.g. that the wish of the spirit of Schreber's wife to dissolve in him is actually an expression of his wish to have her (womanly) 'voluptuousness' literally become a part of him. But... why ought we to be interpreting here at all? Oughtn't we to start with Schreber's experience simpliciter, with his experience in his/its own terms? Within those terms, that frame, nothing represents anything unless Schreber takes it to do so  (As he does evidently take certain words (a little bizarrely) to symbolize certain sentences, as in this example; and he experiences this symbolisation pretty much passively.). In Schreber's experience (N.B.: "dream", again, is a prejudicial word), spirits are drawn down toward him. (No matter that it is hard to see how we can begin to take this remotely seriously. We have nevertheless to (try to) see what, if anything, it means. )
	One might argue then that Sass's turn of phrase here betrays that he is palpably offering an interpretation of Schreber's experience, rather than trying as hard as he (Sass) might to 'let that experience speak for itself'; as for instance it might be argued to get a chance to so speak (so to speak) not only in Schreber’s Memoirs, but also in his various other writings etc. . And one might again take as a partial and comparatively-useful analogy here an anthropologist trying to let (the experiences of) a very different people speak for themselves. Thus compare (and contrast...) Wittgenstein's attitude, in his "Remarks on Frazer's Golden Bough" (or similarly Peter Winch's approach vis-a-vis the Azande's quasi-'doublebookkeeping', in his "Understanding a Primitve Society"). Apparently deeply-bizarre and/or contradictory beliefs can proceed perfectly happily in tandem with a practical workaday attitude toward growing crops, etc. etc. . 
	A salient contrast to Sass is: Winch, after Wittgenstein, does not aim to say, for example, what the Azande are 'really' doing -- 'behind' the appearances -- when they use their poison-oracles etc.  . Not at all. Except of course in the (vital) sense that Winch aims at a description which would reasonably well satisfy the Azande (were they to be interested in one's activity of describing them). Winch holds that wherever social study is carried out, it must aim to give a version, an account, that could in principle satisfy the criterion of being accepted by those being 'accounted for'. A very important difference of nuance here from the case of schizophrenics now suggests itself: without, we hope, giving offence, one can I think say that, often tragically, there is a serious question as to whether in serious cases of schizophrenia there can be any question of taking seriously any affirmation which a schizophrenic were to make of one's interpretation of their condition/feelings or whatever. Because their schizophrenia (launching them as it does, according to Sass himself, on a hyperrational/ hyperreflexive journey which issues in nothing consistent) deprives them of the position of being able to be taken seriously in any such affirmation (or denial); unlike, surely, the Azande. This raises a general question about what the criteria of correctness of interpretation could possibly be, in the case of anyone attempting to hermeneuticise schizophrenia, and ought to make us worry about whether an 'interpretation' could possibly be what we ought to look for. 
	If one is 'hovering', or flip-flopping, between alternative ways of expressing oneself, or between different ways of being understood which one is being invited to assent to or deny, there will normally be a resolution to such hovering available. Typically, one will settle on some form or forms of words. There is a qualitative difference between 'hovering' when at least in principle a resolution of the hovering is available in one of these forms -- and when it isn't. In the latter kind of case -- as, arguably, in much severe schizophrenia -- we lack a basis for rendering the humans in question genuinely intelligible. 
	Perhaps, the locus of the difference between Sass and Winch is in fact then largely this: that the Azande way of life, strange to us as it is, and its strangeness needs emphasizing as Winch emphasizes it (this strangeness being, Winch thinks, underplayed even by Evans-Pritchard, as he characterizes the Azande as irrational -- for Winch thinks that the true strangeness of the Azande is that they may be doing and saying just the very odd things that they apparently do and say and yet not be accurately and without interpretive violence fitted into boxes marked by us with the labels "irrational" or "mistaken"); that this way of life nevertheless can in principle be understood.  While the severe schizophrenic cannot. Because while the form of the former can be comprehended provided one takes on board Wittgensteinian lessons about the context-relativity of the meaning of 'logical contradiction' etc., and about this game (of language, of life) being collectively played, the form of the latter goes ‘beyond’ what can strictly be comprehended, and into what can only (again, after Wittgenstein) at best be diagnosed. While there is, perhaps, something one can call a Zande ‘‘belief’-system’  in action, albeit by our lights a pretty peculiar 'system', there is often in schizophrenics only the illusion of a system -- almost invariably with no like-minded community to sustain it -- and a ‘system’ furthermore within which one can find no real resting-place. And while the Zande do not press their thinking to what others try to impose on them as its 'logical conclusion', Schreber et al do so press their thinking (whether deliberately or non-voluntarily, it is hard to say -- even perhaps in principle impossible, and this too is an important fact). Thus it is that Schreber continually finds himself in a continually-puzzling circular paralyzing paradoxicality. In an absence of self-understanding, in spite (indeed, perhaps because) of all his efforts at reflection.
	All this would have the implication that, in the cases which most puzzle us, there could not be a successful interpretation of schizophrenia, for the simple but deep reason given just above: that there simply aren't any true self-understandings available, in this case. That such sufferers from schizophrenia do not at key moments exhibit the understanding-in-practice of their own talk, the kind of everyday ‘rule-governedness’ in that talk and action, which in everyday human contexts we can and normally must take for granted. We might even say that there cannot, logically, be true self-understandings in severe schizophrenics (to facilitate criteria for accurately understanding their words and actions). And without those, there can be no production of descriptions which could be the basis for interpretation(s). 
	"But isn't there a huge tension here between what follows from a Wittgensteinian/Winchian/Ethnomethodological approach on the one hand, and Sass's version of schizophrenia and solipsism on the other. For the former emphasizes the importance of the deed, of practice, while the latter involves a perhaps-excessive interpretivism. The schizophrenic interprets everything, according to Sass -- that's hardly Wittgensteinian!" This 'objection' is to the point. But Sass is describing the exception which tests the rule -- it may well be that, contra the 'interpretivists', Wittgenstein et al are quite right on human beings in general, but that, contra traditional understandings of schizophrenia, sufferers from this complaint (somewhat like most philosophers?!) precisely intellectualize and interpret in the manner which the interpretivists wrongly take to be the norm for humans in general! And we may follow Heidegger in suspecting that the reason philosophers are prone to misunderstand human being is that they are precisely those people prone to over-intellectualize, to think that what is happening is only mentation where actually something rather different -- typically, involving other forms of doing -- is going on instead. 
	So, in thinking through the 'objection', just offered, a question we may well want to ask is: Just exactly how appropriate is Sass's hermeneutic for the special case (of schizophrenia, analogized to solipsistic etc. philosophy) under consideration? Does Sass still perhaps over-interpret? Does he thereby, for instance, blind us to aspects of 'schizophrenic' life and talk -- and there are typically many -- which are perfectly ordinary and normal? An important possibility. Or, very differently, and equally importantly: Does he risk interpreting into sense something which is in the final analysis such an apotheosized and sublimed transmogrification of the interpretive aspects of our mental life that it can be 'successfully' interpreted into terms which we can comprehend only at the cost of radically and violently falsifying it? We might even, then, pose the following question: In Sass's effort to comprehend schizophrenia, is there not a real danger that he goes too far in the opposite direction to the orthodoxy (that schizophrenia, insofar as it is comprehensible at all, is only so as primitivity, or as regression, or as mental deficit, etc.) which he is overturning -- that he makes schizophrenia hang together / make rational sense more than it in fact does?

	One possible promising project then, which Sass pursues to some extent but unfortunately tends to drop when he is endeavouring to draw conclusions or generalize from Schreber's case, would be this: To find the points where Schreber is self-consciously puzzled by his bizarre world and 'dialogically' engage them... . Such points may be of crucial importance in testing critically whether any sense can be made of Schreber's 'world'.
	An interlocutor might counter-object against me here: "Do we have then to take Schreber's 'beliefs' at face value? Can we not re-present them / ironize them in the slightest? You will find avoiding doing so difficult to carry off, to say the least!"  Undoubtedly true, and we will not pretend thus far or in what follows to have succeeded, or even to have tried to as completely as we might.  "Well then, how can you object to Sass's methods?!?"  Well; we will at least make an effort on this count. In particular, we claim that we must take Schreber's beliefs at face-value if we can. We must at least present his sentences and paragraphs, make a serious Winch-style effort with regard to them, and then ask ourselves honestly whether we can understand them. We must try to do so -- and then perhaps recognize that in this case we simply can't succeed, and that we'd be wasting our time were we to just press on endlessly, regardless. Our worry is this: that 'interpretation' of them is a dubious half-way house here between the claim to understand and the admittance of incomprehension. It gives the illusion of understanding, while changing the subject.
	Let us take another example to illustrate our controversial point here. This is the famous schizophrenic patient, 'Renee':

	"...I [complained] bitterly that things were tricking me and [of] how I suffered because of it. // As a matter of fact, these "things" weren't doing anything special; they didn't speak, nor attack me... It was their very presence that made me complain... When...I looked at a chair or a jug, I thought not of their use or function -- a jug not as something to hold water and milk, a chair not as something to sit in -- but as having lost their names, their functions and meaning; they became things and began to take on life, to exist.
	This existence accounted for my great fear. In the unreal scene, in the murky quiet of my perception, suddenly "the thing" sprang up. The stone jar, decorated with blue flowers, was there facing me, defying me with its presence, with its existence. To conquer my fear I looked away. My eyes met a chair, then a table; they were alive, too, asserting their presence. I attempted to escape their hold by calling out their names. I said, "chair, jug, table, it is a chair." But the words echoed hollowly, deprived of all meaning: it had left the object...so much so that on the one hand it was a living mocking thing, on the other, a name, robbed of sense, an envelope emptied of content. Nor was I able to bring the two together, but stood there rooted before them, filled with fear and impotence."  

Up to this point in Renee’s discourse, it is perhaps very tempting to offer an interpretation of what Renee is saying, to try to give sense to what is evidently scaring and confusing her. One might even see what she says next as hardening -- firming up -- such an interpretation: "When I protested, "Things are tricking me; I am afraid," and people asked specifically, "Do you see the jug and chair as alive?" I answered, "Yes, they are alive." "
	But one should be very wary. For the kicker is that Renee goes on immediately to undercut our interpretation or understanding: "And they, the doctors, too, thought I saw these things as humans whom I heard speak. But it was not that. Their life consisted uniquely in the fact that they were there, in their existence itself."  
	This, it seems to us, stops one in one's tracks. The chance one seemingly had of coming to understand Renee's strange world (via the concept of 'personification', etc.) finally disappears fairly precisely at this moment. She has specifically ruled it out. Any way that she has of expressing her experience is 'inadequate', and so it goes without saying that she is 'not understood'. Her confusion is irredeemable, irrevocable. For there just isn't anything it can be for the life of objects to consist uniquely in their existence. This inchoate notion is stranger than anything in (say) Zande practices. For sure, one can and must look for context to ground one's understanding of something strange -- but we defy anyone to find a context in Renee's text or life for this remark. By which we mean: a context which results in its being able to be made sense of. We don't see how there is anything left which one can hear her as saying with those words...
	And let us not be under the illusion that we empathically understand Renee's state here by virtue of being ‘systematically’ confused, like she evidently was. For while I have maintained it is certainly the case that we need to understand understanding as normally nested in a taken-for-granted intersubjectivity (and not as the interaction of two or more essentially isolated entities), and while it may be true that sometimes the closest we can get to intersubjectively understanding a sufferer from schizophrenia is in the 'counter-transference', in noting how they make us feel and so on, this latter is yet very much a second-best ‘understanding’ (at best). For confusion is not a mode of understanding. Or, more precisely, a thoroughly confused understanding is not an understanding of thorough confusion...
	In answer to the questions we raised at the opening of this section concerning Sass, then, we can then say the following:
i) Sass’s account is not as effectively Wittgensteinian as it might appear at first sight. This becomes evident, when we see how interpretivistic, and thus non-Winchian, his account is.
ii) However, it may not follow that even someone who understands Winch will be able to offer anything worth calling a Winchian account of serious cases of schizophrenia. 
	We will now explore these two points a little more fully, in order to reach a judgement on exactly what lessons we should take from the example of schizophrenia with regard to our fundamental concern, the reassessment of the achievement of Peter Winch in the philosophy of ‘the human sciences’.

	A provisional conclusion
To reiterate: like Winch, like any good Wittgensteinian (or indeed any good 'human scientist'), we are keen indeed to not misunderstand other human beings; we are interested in understanding what they say, in making sense of it insofar as it's possible to do so. Like Winch, and many others, we are convinced that it is often the case that insufficient effort is taken by philosophers and psychiatrists and historians of science (and so on) to understand the strange. (And, rather like Sass, we are impressed by the lucidity and (in a certain sense) logicality of the patterns of life and language we sometimes find even in the midst of the floridity etc. of people with (e.g.) schizophrenia.)  But sometimes, after much trying, one ends up judging that it's not possible to do what Winch et al would want us to; in which case one ends up instead noting the patterns in a discourse but concluding that nevertheless there is an irrevocable incoherence in that discourse. An incoherence that, of course, cannot be understood -- for there is nothing to understand in incoherence, in nonsense.
	When there is nothing to understand, then the Winchian project of avoiding theoretistic misunderstandings is not open to one. We might try putting this point as follows: there's no such thing as succeeding in not misunderstanding nonsense. (The likes of this, as is we hope becoming clear to the reader, is itself ‘only’ a grammatical remark -- a transitional remark -- itself highly-susceptible of misunderstanding. We are not for example asserting, as part of a philosophical theory, ‘Schizophrenics’ sentences, because of how they are put together, are as a matter of fact nonsense.’ We are simply suggesting that one attend closely to the features of the discourse of many sufferers from severe schizophrenia which, their superficial appearance notwithstanding, are usefully seen as quite deeply different from ordinary purposive sentences in context. This seeing-as, as J. Koethe has argued in his The continuity of Wittgenstein’s thought, is normally best strictly distinguished from the seeing of facts.)

	So, we have argued that Winch’s philosophical suggestions, his hints and reminders, are extremely effective. The limits of Winch’s reach -- the case we have briefly laid out for saying that there are cases where Winch’s thought as found in his major works will not significantly assist us in avoiding misunderstanding (a small minority of) human actions and words -- only throws into clearer relief how very subtle and useful his thought is in the great majority of cases, and in particular in cases of significant difference which are liable to lead to philosophical puzzlement. The exception really does test the rule – and confirms it.
	We see no grounds whatsoever for thinking that Winch’s committments hereabouts -- the committments that have informed our discussions here -- involve any relativism. No more, though, do they involve any of the other ‘isms’ that have been bandied about by Winch’s ‘interpreters’. 

	A taxonomy of ‘interpretive options’
[A cautionary note: We use the word ‘interpretive’ here only for lack of a better and more obvious one -- some of the ‘options’ which follow, we want to say, do not actually involve interpretation as that word is often used in philosophy.]  
	Let us take stock. Let us lay out what have emerged as the 'interpretive options' facing the would-be social student of the strange; say, the reader of Schreber. The options may be taxonomised roughly as follows:

	0) Non-interpretation, and explanation simpliciter.
	At one extreme end of the spectrum of available options, here, we have schizophrenics’ utterances construed simply as word-salad, and the suggestion is that any apparent order here is utterly illusory, and that only scientific explanation based on there being a deficit, a brain malfunction etc., can help us to give any kind of account of the phenomena in question. [There is a respect in which our own view on these matters, as sketched above, bears some relation to (0), while avoiding its obvious and crude reductionism and its abject refusal to try looking at and hearing the actions and words of people with schizophrenia. The originality of our approach, in any case, lies in our claiming that much schizophrenia is uninterpretable even from a Wittgensteinian -- that is, radically non-scientistic  -- perspective.]

	 1) Literalist 'interpretation'. Taking the patient at his/her word.
	This approach [which is potentially attractive on the grounds of its endeavours to avoid (over-)interpretation] splits into two further options, which, while very much opposed, are in fact crude mirror-images of one another, sharing as they do a certain 'literalistic' approach to (in this case) 'schizophrenic language':
i) 'Massive Error.'  The classic version of the account of schizophrenics as exhibiting 'poor-reality-testing'; Schreber is simply making massive and horrible mistakes in his reasoning all over the place. [Again, Sass has shown effectively the massive limitations of this option, which usually shades into (0), above. The analogous option in cultural anthropology is that of Frazer and his ‘descendants’.]
ii) 'Credulousness toward the strange (towards, in this case, the patient)'. In which again no ironizing of Schreber's words is undertaken, but at the drastic cost of our being committed to believing in what Schreber believes in. He doesn't make errors because, incredibly, what he says may well be true! [Something like this is often attributed to Winch. But, Winch no more thinks that ‘There simply really are witches, if they say there are’ than he thinks ‘If they say there are witches, then there simply really are witches, for them’. (It is worth noting that ‘relativism’ hereabouts is normally systematically ambiguous between these two, is itself drastically unstable!)]  Winch thinks that the general mistake in (1) is that one assumes that one knows what they -- those who are an enigma to one -- are saying: but the whole point of social study, for Winch, is to find out what we can intelligibly say (about what) they are saying.

	2) The apparently-strange is actually not (in this case: the patient is not insane)….And is merely engaging in acting out, etc. . One has to say nonsensical things to appear to be a good patient, etc.	
	This perhaps-Goffmanian 'interpretation' appeals to some who are Anti-Psychiatriacally inclined, and has some affinities with (1(ii)), above. Both can seem humane -- both run severe risks of romanticising and of failing to acknowledge the real depth of the problem, in severe cases. [There may be some truth in option (2) (as indeed with all of these options); but it is extremely implausible that (2) could be anything like a complete account, in many cases. To say that it was would indeed be ‘monistic’, would indeed be taking ‘charity’ too far.]

	3) (Strong) Interpretation.  As manifested prototypically by psychoanalytic approaches, but also by various other psychodynamical and psychological readings (see e.g. some Anti-Psychiatry).  [Sass usually takes his main opponents to be following either option (0), option (1(i)), or (perhaps most ubiquitously) this option ((3)), that of interpretation proper. But we have suggested above that Sass himself does not escape from engaging in just such (impositional) interpretation. And a substantial part of that argument has involved setting out our worry that, if Sass is roughly right, as we suspect he may well be, in taking the word 'delusion' if applied to many cases of schizophrenia to be possessed of a grammar quite unlike that of 'mistake', then the problem -- as we saw earlier, in the course of discussing the complete and troubling absence usually, vis-a-vis schizophrenic psychoses, of a criterion like that of the person agreeing with the diagnosis, a criterion present in the Wittgensteinian approach to philosophy, in some non-authoritarian psychodynamic etc. accounts of neuroses etc., and in methodologically-sound anthropology etc. -- the problem is that there is no longer a criterion available to distinguish an adequate interpretation of such language and action from an inadequate one. If we can't know when someone is making a mistake (because they could plausibly be 'delusional' in any given instance, (and) in their reflexive accounting of it), we simply cannot be meaningfully said to understand them.]

	4) Winchian description.  One attempts to avoid interpretation, so as to avoid imposing, and avoid making the patient appear either just like oneself after all, or so radically different that imposition upon them will be unavoidable if one is to say anything about at all them. One attempts, that is, to understand a strange system or practice by understanding it as a strange and different system (unlike (1) or (2), above), but not one so different that it simply cannot be understood, and, in an important sense, simply understood (and this is where (4) differs from (3)). One might then attempt (e.g.) to avoid ironizing (ironizing via talk of solipsism, etc.) Schreber's talk of the supernatural, but not through credulousness ((1(ii)), above); rather one would not assume too quickly that one understands what 'the supernatural' is, and would attempt to find out through understanding-in-process the rules of the language-game being played.  [We have argued that this is genuinely the most attractive option, for most apparently-strange practices, and that it works very well for the cases which have dominated the philosophical literature (most notably, the Azande); but we have suggested reasons why Winchian description and understanding does not do for us with regard to some 'schizophrenic language' what it does for us with regard to much other apparently 'alien' language and life (such as that of the Azande, who at least engage in dialogue, and have a shared world; or, to give another example which would be interesting to explore, that of completely outmoded sciences or scientists, who at least had something like a 'research tradition', to use Kuhn's valuable term.).]

	5) It's nonsense. 
...Thus one is reluctantly pushed, having worked through the options listed above, toward this one, (5), toward the surprising and at first very unattractive view that the upshot of a careful consideration of Sass et al is that sometimes we will simply have to conclude that certain central strange -- genuinely 'alien' -- phenomena are in the end only in appearance interpretable; and that describing them does not issue in understanding. That sometimes (one should not say too often -- (5) is an option of last resort, not only for philosophical but also, certainly, for ethical and socio-political reasons) Schreber et al exhibit language which, in spite of its having a kind of systematicity, is (latently) nonsense, is (ultimately) plain nonsense. This is our provisional conclusion, on the issue of whether there can be exceptions to the Winchian rule. 

	So, we have concluded that approach (5) may on occasion be the right one. Sometimes, Schatzki says, Wittgenstein thought that others would remain a complete enigma to one -- here is a set of real cases where arguably he was quite evidently right to do so. There is no good reason to think that every single human/social phenomenon must be comprehensible, or indeed intelligibly interpretable.
	But taking approach (4) above whenever it is necessary and possible to do so seems to me, again, rather plainly to overcome the various ‘isms’ mentioned in the title of my paper, and more besides. Normally, if some social study is required, it will be able to issue in some useful description and the avoidance of certain misunderstandings. This is Winch’s way. And so we can state there is an additional reason, which we will come to in a moment, why Winch has so often been misunderstood, beside those already mentioned.
 We have already mentioned the following:
> the ignoring of his ‘recent’ work, by which is meant in this context, unfortunately, all or all bar one of his papers and books since 1958 (including notably the ‘Preface’ to the revised edition of his ‘seminal’ book), 
> the ill-advised assimilation of him to ‘interpretivist’ and ‘hermeneuticist’ approaches, 
> the failure to emphasize that his task is primarily negative (i.e. his task is the avoidance of ‘philosophically’-engendered (thinking of the word ‘philosophically now in a very broad sense) misunderstanding, nothing more – for, after all, to have done more would have taken much more space than was present in the short book he wrote!), 
> the frequent lack of understanding of the work and conception of philosophy of Wittgenstein which usually gives the ‘rule’ that Winch is following (and in particular a lack of understanding of the very great extent to which Winch tends to follow Wittgenstein’s work understood fairly resolutely (and) as a whole, and not only a certain problematic rendition of his ‘later’ philosophy),   and
> a failure sometimes to differentiate carefully between different cases to which Winch’s particular interventions in the philosophy of the social sciences to a greater or lesser extent can be analogously applied (i.e. a failure for instance to see not just the similarities but also the differences between understanding a local sub-culture, understanding a ‘primitive’ society and ‘understanding’ a serious case of schizophrenic).
	The additional reason that Winch has, we contend, been misunderstood, is this:
> that readers think that, because he writes in more ordinary prose and with more ordinary discursive structures than Wittgenstein, therefore it is less dangerous with him (Winch) to ‘translate’ what he says into the lingo of ‘analytic’ theoreticistic philosophy.  In short, even most of those (still, regrettably, the minority) who are leery of telling us what the ‘theses’ are which Wittgenstein advocates have no such caution or compunction when it comes to Winch. They assume that he can be read as having a theory, as putting forward various theses ... they fail to see what his methods in philosophy are, and what his conception of the subject is. How it is, we have suggested, truly a Wittgensteinian ‘methodology’ that he follows -- such that it is more helpful to say of Winch that he is not asserting anything at all than to say that he asserts various ‘controversial’ philosophical theses (e.g. ‘pluralism’, ‘monism’, ‘relativism’, or whatever). Winch doesn’t say anything at all, in the sense that he merely tries to offer a cure to his readers, be they professional philosophers or professional social scientists or whosoever, a cure of intellectual diseases which they may be suffering from. And a ‘cure’, a set of targeted hints, questions, provocations and so on, is no set of assertions at all.

	To recapitulate briefly, then, our take on Winch’s approach to ‘social study’: We have noted that in the first instance we understand only the 'ordinary' or 'everyday' things that others do (i.e. nearly everything). Unusual, 'extraordinary' things -- perhaps some of what happened in the Holocaust, or in Milgram's experiments, and certainly much religion, and much of what is done and thought in 'primitive' societies -- can, if we try and are fortunate, be understood through instances of social or socio-historical study ((4), in the taxonomy above). There is no task for a general social science here, merely particular tasks of repairing breaches in our ability to 'grasp' or meet others. The utterly bizarre, the irreparably Other, the residuum which unfortunately cannot be understood at all, there are arbitrarily many ways we can describe (or 'interpret') -- and thus, unmisleadingly, none  (This is (5), in the taxonomy above). In fact -- as we explain in slightly greater detail below -- when we really understand this, we may well find it most useful, least misleading, least confusing, to say: There's nothing there to understand. We are faced with nonsense.
	What Sass analogises to schizophrenia is thus crucially different from what Winch analogises (and disanalogises) to the Azande. Solipsism, unlike (say) Christian prayer, or science, is sheer nonsense, a restless and relentless failure to mean. So we’re not primarily in the business of denying that Sass’s analogy works -- though we are suspicious of it, as explained above; and we are suspicious of his mode of presentation of it, as a successful interpretation, rather than simply as a comparison (see PI para. 130), a comparison which may lessen our misunderstanding of something deeply strange. What we are primarily in the business of is suggesting that even if the Sassian analogy ‘works’, even if schizophrenia can be said to be analogous to solipsism, still the analogy is no good to us in a central respect. For it has no positive analogical content. (Nonsense has no content. So the idea that we understand solipsism as a doctrine, with a distinctive and determinable phenomenology, is an illusion.) This breach, unlike the breaches dividing us from people we find odd, such as perhaps Christians, or football fans, or ‘primitive’ peoples, is irreparable.
	At the heart of Winch’s conception, as we have seen, is the idea of looking at the game, and looking for both what is helpful and what is wrong with possible analogies for it. Not looking for the analogy which ‘gets it dead right’ -- which ‘successfully interprets’ it. Insofar as someone claims, ‘Here’s how to understand x fully!’, where x is a society (or a practice, or a person), one ought to be very wary. Especially if involved in the claim is something which can arguably not be rendered effectively as anything other than nonsense!
	Where Winch casts light on some object of social study, he does it to help repair a particular breach. That’s all. He has no ‘grander’ quasi-scientific (‘social scientific’), epistemic or metaphysical task in the philosophy of the social sciences. If it looks otherwise, that is because of certain ill-advised formulations in the 1958 edition of ISS … and because commentators forget that Winch throughout his work presupposes Wittgenstein’s conception of philosophy, and enacts it. That is what we have tried to bring about in this paper: recognition of the Wittgensteinianism latent throughout Winch’s corpus.

A final objection, based on Winch’s own text
	An objection must be dealt with here, an objection which if valid would apply to quite a lot of what we have argued in this paper. The objection comes from the thought, which some readers of ISS may have, that it cannot be right to say that Winch is truly post-metaphysical and against theses in philosophy, because he begins ISS with a kind of defence of metaphysics (and epistemology) against the ‘underlabourer’ conception of philosophy, the conception according to which philosophy gets all its problems from other disciplines. 
	But if one actually looks at the conception which, against both the ‘underlabourer’ and ‘master-scientist’ conceptions, Winch favours, one finds it once again to be pretty resolutely Wittgensteinian. Winch thinks that Wittgensteinian thought inherits the mantle formerly possessed by metaphysics:
	‘To ask whether reality is intelligible is to ask about the relation between thought and reality.’ So far, so ‘metaphysical’, perhaps one might think. But one needs to note how Winch goes on: ‘In considering the nature of thought one is led also to consider the nature of language. Inseparably bound up with the question whether reality is intelligible, therefore, is the question of how language is connected with reality, of what it is to say something. In fact the philosopher’s interest in language lies not so much in the solution of particular linguistic confusions for their own sakes, as in the solution of confusions about the nature of language in general.’ (ISS pp.11-12)  Confusions which lead one to mistake what it is to say something, and what it makes sense to say. And what it makes sense to say is something which there is no such thing as literally saying or in any way theorizing -- the logic of our language must ultimately take care of itself.
	Winch goes on to explain that in Wittgenstein, early and late, there is a studied antipathy to the notion that philosophical problems are specifically and narrowly about the nature of reality (‘metaphysics’) or specifically and narrowly about the nature of language (‘philosophy of language’). The very idea of saying a rigorous philosophic distinction between language and world (and then worrying about their connection) is bankrupt: ‘We cannot say then...that the problems of philosophy arise out of language rather than out of the world, because in discussing language philosophically we are in fact discussing what counts as belonging to the world. Our idea of what belongs to the realm of reality is given for us in the language that we use... . It may be worth reminding ourselves of the truism that when we speak of the world we are speaking of what we in fact mean by the expression ‘the world’: there is no way of getting outside the concepts in terms of which we think of the world.’ (ISS pp.14-15 )  There is no such thing as getting outside of our concepts. This is not a relativistic or Idealist thesis; this is a truism. Which means: it says nothing; it tells us nothing. (We can only be reminded of it usefully on an occasion (if and) when we are liable to be mired in nonsense, as Winch thinks we almost continually are, in thinking about society. It is to be employed ‘against’ the fantasy of the viewing the world ‘from sideways on’.)
	Perhaps some readers laugh at the idea that a philosopher would be praised, as we are praising Winch, for not asserting anything. Such readers have completely failed to understand the thrust of Wittgenstein’s work. It does indeed take a certain amount of nerve actually to stick with Wittgenstein’s approach to philosophy. It takes nerve truly to come out from behind the scientificish facade of having a theory, a systematic account of some kind or another, as almost all philosophy to date has done, and to admit rather that one has no theory to offer, that one cannot underpin one’s assertions with facts -- that, in fact, one is not even making any assertions. We think that Winch very largely managed to keep his nerve. This is a key reason why he has been misunderstood; but also a key reason why he can hope to have an enduring legacy.
	We hold that Winch’s approach, (centred around (4), above), is innocent of the calumnies that have been heaped upon it, that it is ‘properly Wittgensteinian’, and that it is in addition about the most helpful idea ever dreamed up by someone in an armchair concerning happenings out in the field -- but that it has, as we should expect, limits. As the reassessment of Winch goes on, we hope that the exploration of those limits -- limits which Winch himself explored in his later work, and limits such as we have seen are probably encountered in hard cases of schizophrenia -- will be furthered. That seems to me a much more interesting activity than the kind of Winch-rubbishing and Winch-’interpretation’ which have hitherto largely dominated the literature. 

	Conclusion
  We have here sketched a reading of Peter Winch’s mature philosophy of the social sciences, according to which Winch is surprisingly congenial to Wittgenstein (on a resolutely therapeutic reading of the latter, even), and to much ethnomethodology (on a Wittgensteinian reading of latter, following ‘the Manchester school’ of ethnomethodology, particularly).
  Those who would read ethnomethodology as advancing lots of positive theses about society and about structure/action, as having for instance a particular, controversial stance on the spectrum laid out in the standard ‘structure vs. agency’ debate, will likely be unsympathetic. As will those who would read the later Wittgenstein ‘irresolutely’  -- as having substantial things to say about the form of (bits of) language, etc. . But any such readers need we think to reckon with the exegetical and substantive argument that we have been making. An argument which attributes to Wittgenstein no theses or theories whatsoever, and which suggests that followers of Wittgenstein such as Winch have been cruelly used by those who have taken them to have implicit social theories, philosophical anthropologies of the human, etc. . There is no substance to the ‘idea’ that human beings are all essentially the same; nor to the ‘idea’ that they are fundamentally different, community by community. Winch would not be caught dead suggesting that communities are as a matter of fact ‘cognitively closed’ to one another -- which makes the commonplace attribution of such a view to him, a dead man, and so unable to reply, himself, all the more disappointing. (Nor of course would Winch suggest that as a happy happenstance of metaphysical fact there is enough commonality between communities for communication to be possible, etc.). These kinds of ‘Kantian’ games -- they are what are, or should be, dead. 
	‘Rationalism’, metaphysical realism, relativism, Davidsonianism, even Kantianism -- the trouble with these is not that they are ‘false’. The trouble, to say it once more, is that they exhibit a loss of nerve. Yes, even Kantianism, Transcendentalism, and possibly Wittgenstein’s Tractatus -- at any rate, according to the dominant ineffabilist interpretation of it (an interpretation which Winch was the very first to point us beyond, in his Studies in the Philosophy of Wittgenstein ) -- exhibit a loss of nerve, in that they still say things about what they themselves proclaim there is nothing to say anything about. They fail to shut up, or at least to point a way to our being able to be satisfied in shutting up.
	To keep one’s nerve; to keep, despite the insults and the incomprehensions of others, to philosophy’s task of not, absurdly, saying anything -- this, we suggest, was the heart of Peter Winch’s tremendous and partially-completed task. Until this is recognized in the philosophy of the social sciences, we will all be the poorer for it. And, even if the interpretation we have offered of Winch here seems to you partial, it will at least, we hope, make a (later) Winchian perspective on the philosophy of the social sciences possible, by displacing or at least seriously complicating the ‘received view’ of Winch’s alleged ‘position’ on ‘social study/theory/science’. If it has only that much effect, it will have been worth writing.