Prologue

Donald Davidson begins his landmark paper ‘Action, Reasons and Causes’ by contrasting his so-called causalist account of reason-giving explanations of action with the views of a large number of then-prominent philosophers, all of whom were writing from within a loosely Wittgensteinian tradition. These are dismissed in one fell swoop:

In a later essay, Davidson acknowledges Carl Hempel's deep influence on his views while re-affirming the contrast to the volumes in Holland's series:

The contrast is not imaginary, although we shall come to see in due course that it is subtler than Davidson lets on. As we shall see, numerous books in Holland's series defend the view that the relation between an agent's reason(s) and her action(s) should be understood not causally but logically, normatively, conceptually and/or hermeneutically. In this they are united by various forms of what might reasonably be termed anti-scientism. The books do not have a clearly articulated and specific target here – certainly no definition of scientism is ever provided – but there is a general suspicion of any philosophy that attempts to answer questions relating to human minds and actions by appeal to models stemming from natural science, such as physical mechanisms.

Prologue

Disclaimer: I have never been on safari with Professor Glock. His work on Wittgenstein, however, is the main reason I made the journey from the parklands of Oxford to the habitat of the Reading floodplains. I spent many – on some accounts, too many – happy years there as a graduate student in the University's philosophy department. Ever since those salad days, I have learned more from Hanjo than I could possibly express here; my gratitude to him is immense. Whatever criticism follows is intended to honour him, both as the author of some of my favourite philosophical texts and as the spirited conversationalist who can pull an argument apart while simultaneously scanning the restaurant table for any untouched desserts.

In 1996, my undergraduate self stepped into the basement of Blackwell's flagship bookshop on Broad St in Oxford and came out with a copy of Glock's A Wittgenstein Dictionary (1996a), priced at £10.99. It was within its pages that I first encountered the ideas I discuss in this essay. Towards the end of his entry for ‘form of life (Lebensform)’, Glock offers a brief exegesis of Wittgenstein's ‘puzzling remark’ that ‘if a lion could talk, we could not understand him’ (PI, 223). At the time, I assumed that Glock's treatment of it was an undisputable orthodoxy. This was a dictionary after all, and I intended to use it to get through my final examinations. Some years later, I read his masterful paper ‘On Safari with Wittgenstein, Quine and Davidson’ (1996b), which was published around the same time as the Dictionary. The paper is a model of what philosophical writing can and should be: learned yet original, resolute but judicious, significant while light-hearted, its insights always perspicuous and its reprovals constructive. Upon reading it, I also realized that far from being standard, Glock's account of Wittgenstein was novel and important, both as an act of Wittgensteinian exegesis and as a piece of contemporary philosophical criticism.

Prologue

We might, as I am doing now, employ the first-person plural ‘we’ to invite our readers to join us in a collective form of self-consciousness, thereby narrowing, or at least concealing, the distance between author and reader. But one may equally widen the distance by using impersonal pronouns instead. Wittgenstein does both in his writings, but the former approach predominates.

‘If a lion could speak’, Wittgenstein famously states, ‘we [wir] could not understand him’. But who are ‘we’ for Wittgenstein? It is commonplace to assume that he is referring to ‘us humans’ and, by the same token, that ‘a lion’ stands for all non-human animals. This assumption is often found in defences of Wittgenstein's remark such as those by Nancy E. Baker (2012, 63), John Dupré (2002, 232), Rami Gudovitch (2012, 147–48) and Vicki Hearne (1994, 160). Dupré, for example, writes that the thought behind Wittgenstein's remark is that

Numerous anti-Wittgensteinians share this thought that Wittgenstein's ‘we’ refers to all humans, in contrast to all lions or perhaps even all (other) animals:

Prologue

When Danièle Moyal-Sharrock had the idea that, for the British Wittgenstein Society's tenth anniversary conference, we should focus on Wittgenstein in the twenty-first century, we decided that we absolutely needed something on technology, and who better than Richard Harper on information communi-cation technology? In what follows, we discuss the in vivo use of categories in the design of communications and artificial intelligence (AI) technologies, as well as how this use needs to evolve to allow creative design to flourish. The conversation will be of interest to anyone concerned with our ever-evolving uses of technology in everyday interaction.

Why People Communicate

CS: Professor Harper has led research groups at Xerox Europarc as well as Microsoft Research in Cambridge for many years. He founded and directed the Digital World Research Centre at the University of Surrey. He is now the co-director of the Institute for Social Futures at Lancaster University. So maybe he could talk about the twenty-second century as well! He is also a partner in Social Shaping Research, which he may tell you about a little later if you ask him. You are probably all asking what this has to do with Wittgenstein (or maybe not…), and so I thought I would begin by asking Richard how he ended up here. With this kind of background, what brings you to our Wittgenstein Society? Why are you here, Richard?

RH: As an undergraduate in the late seventies, I did sociology, amongst other courses, at Manchester University, and there we were introduced to Wittgenstein. His philosophy was viewed as an integral part of understanding social science. Winch in particular was our mode of introduction to his philosophy – in his The Idea of a Social Science. There was a main course for every social scientist which was called Mind and Society, taught by Professors Wes Sharrock and John Lee; some of you here will have met them. They are sociologists and were interested in Wittgenstein and Winch for two or three reasons, one to do with the possibility that one would need to be careful about the categories used to explain things in the social sciences.

Prologue

Is it an accident that one of the most frequently quoted remarks by Wittgenstein is also one of the least understood? I do not propose to answer this question by conducting an investigation into our reasons for quoting, although such a study would not be irrelevant to certain aspects of the one below. My focus will instead be on the contrast between the original philosophical context of § 327 of the typescript previously known as Part II of Philosophical Investigations (hereinafter PPF, § 327) and some of the conditions surrounding its incredibly muddled reception.

The published version of the remark in question is:

In her otherwise influential English translation of what became known as Philosophical Investigations (hereinafter PI), Parts I and II, Elizabeth Anscombe renders the claim as follows:

On the face of it, the remark seems absurd, and commentators have obligingly voiced numerous complaints against it. These frequently revolve around the thought that Wittgenstein did not know the first thing about animals:

Prologue

‘I could only stare in wonder at Shakespeare; never do anything with him’, writes Wittgenstein in Culture and Value (CV, 84e). This is not because he understands Shakespeare but has no instrumental use for him. Rather, Shakespeare does not speak to him any more than a talking lion would (see Chapters 1 and 4.) Whatever is happening in Shakespeare, Wittgenstein claims to not really get it. The confession is not a criticism of either Shakespeare or himself but a statement of aesthetic alienation:

The study of Shakespeare and his cultural milieu has progressed significantly since Wittgenstein's time, but to the modern Austrian philosopher the Elizabethan playwright was nothing less than an enigma. The failure to understand Shakespeare qua artist is akin (but by no means identical) to the failure to understand him qua person. Mutatis mutandis, the failure to understand an artist's works is akin to the failure to understand a person's actions. This is not because artworks are actions but because both are things that we produce intentionally, with varying degrees of success.

What – if anything at all – is it to understand a play, a symphony, a sculpture or (pace Barr 2016) an event? What does getting it or not getting it amount to? The failure to grasp something is not a matter of being left out of knowing some kind of secret fact (phenomenological or otherwise), as in Wrede's The Messianic Secret (Wrede 1901). Rather, it is like the tortoise's failure to understand what it is for one thing to logically follow another. ‘Whatever Logic is good enough to tell me is worth writing down’, says the Tortoise to Achilles (Carroll 1895). Yet, his understanding of whatever Achilles writes down falls perilously short of understanding what is going on when he does so.

Prologue

If the past is a foreign country, then it is plausible to expect the conditions for understanding contemporary cultures that seem alien to us to parallel those of historical understanding. R. G. Collingwood famously suggests that such understanding involves ‘the re-enactment of past thought in the historian's own mind’ (Collingwood 1946, 216–17, 301). This view finds recent expression in Bettina Stangneth's proclamation that ‘to understand someone like Eichmann, you have to sit down and think with him. And that's a philosopher's job’ (Schuessler 2014, x). Such thinking with does not imply any agreement of opinion. Its task is to see things from within a system of concepts and values that is alien to one's own.

This essay attempts to illustrate the thesis that intercultural understanding requires a parallel sharing of thought processes. It does so through an exploration of recent attempts to make sense of the ghost narratives that emerged in the aftermath of the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami. With a little help from Wittgenstein and Geertz, I suggest that understanding the thoughts of another culture is not a question of mind-reading but rather one of conceptual immersion.

The Universe of Human Discourse

Does one enter the mind of another culture, past or present? How could one? It has become popular to use the expression ‘mind-reading’ as a shorthand for understanding another person's thoughts. This is not a harmless figure of speech but a misleading portrait of communication that has its contemporary roots in John Locke's theory of human understanding, which considers all thoughts to be private in that they ‘cannot be laid open to the immediate view of another’ (Locke 1689, Book IV, Chapter XXI, § 4). Accordingly, ‘to communicate our Thoughts to one another, as well as record them for our own use, Signs of our Ideas are also necessary’ (ibid.).

Locke believed that human understanding requires the translation of inner thoughts into a shared language. This enables communication with recipients, whose minds, in turn, translate our words into their own hidden thoughts.

Human migration is defined here as a comprehensive process of a movement of people within and between geographic spaces. The background, direction, depth and result of this process encompass factors within the regions of origin and destination as well as regions crossed during the movement from origin to destination. Like integration of immigrants, as defined above, it is usually a complex, long-term and multidimensional process, which occurs throughout history.

Migration

Detailed definitions of ‘migration’ are provided by dictionaries and other lexical resources, such as The Historical Thesaurus of English. The Thesaurus charts the development of use and meaning in the huge and varied vocabulary of English. It aims to include almost every word in English recorded from early medieval times to the present day, arranged in detailed hierarchies of meaning. It records ‘migration’ as a noun under ‘Society’ (‘Furnishing with inhabitants’). With this meaning ‘migration’ was used since 1527. A later meaning occurs from 1611: change of place of a thing. ‘Migration’ can have the sense of ‘movement’, which itself is listed since the fourteenth century, with ‘transmigration’ listed since the seventeenth century.

The Online Etymology Dictionary defines ‘migration’ as a change of residence or habitat, removal or transit from one locality to another, especially over a distance. The English word came from the Latin migrationem (a removal, change of abode). ‘Migration’ is a noun of action from the past participle stem of migrare (to move from one place to another).

The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) lists ‘migration’ as: 1. the action or an act of moving from one place to another and 2. the migrating of a person or a people from one country or place of residence to settle in another, or an instance of this. According to the OED, ‘migration’ can also involve animals, plant distribution or the random movement from one place to another by a cell, atom, molecule and so forth. All these meanings appear neutral. Similarly neutral are the definitions of ‘migration’ of humans in Merriam-Webster Dictionary – the act, process or an instance of migrating – and Collins English Dictionary – the act or an instance of migrating. However, Cambridge Dictionary7 defines ‘migration’ also as the process of people travelling to a new place to live, usually in large numbers.

After 1991, the direction, pace and scale of immigration into Britain changed. From less than 2 million in 1991, the foreign-born population in Britain as registered in the census rose to just under 10 million in 2021. The growth was uneven; between 1991 and 2001 it was over 1 million, sped up towards the end of the 1990s, reached almost 3 million between 2001 and 2011 and continued its upward trend. The proportion of people born abroad in the total UK population also increased, from just over 6 per cent in 1991, 8 in 2001, just over 12 in 2011 and 15 in 2021. In that year one in six residents of England and Wales was born outside the UK. Over half of the increase in the total population of England and Wales, from 56.1 million 2011 to 59.6 million in 2021, was the result of positive net migration – the number of people arriving in the UK minus the people leaving.

In terms of immigration Britain did not stand out internationally. Davies has stated that the 2001 proportion mentioned above was ‘a rather lower percentage’ compared to other European countries, such as France or Germany. And not all foreign-born individuals registered in the UK census can be regarded as immigrants who settled permanently in Britain. Many of them were students and short-term contract workers, who were expected to leave after their studies and contracts were finished or terminated earlier, although many of these individuals stayed in Britain, often with their families who had come over.

Nevertheless, the number of immigrants in Britain expanded dramatically between 1991 and 2021. The increasing proportional presence of immigrants appeared as emigration from Britain declined. The Times in 1962 mentioned a report from the Economist Intelligence Unit which stated that between 1951 and 1960 ‘net immigration into Britain was almost exactly balanced by the net outflow of United Kingdom citizens’. In 1964, 60,000 more people left the country than arrived here. Nine years later, the figure was 41,000. During the next 15 years an average of 5,000 more people per year emigrated from Britain than came here.