Winch Way Forward? | Mises Institute

[The Idea of a Social Science and its Relation to Philosophy by Peter Winch (Routledge, 2008 [1958]; xxix  +136pp.)]

Peter Winch was an influential philosopher who wrote in the years following World War II until his death in the 1990s. He was one of a group of followers of Wittgenstein who stressed a hardline interpretation of the famous “private language argument” in Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, and the book’s main theme is the application of this argument to criticize attempts by the social sciences to imitate the methods of the physical sciences. Though this was not what Winch had in mind when he wrote the book, his approach can be used to defend the distinctive a priori methodology of Austrian economics, and Friedrich Hayek, probably for that reason, thought highly of the book, as he mentioned in his lectures on the philosophy of the social sciences given at UCLA in 1969.

Probably the most common criticism of praxeological reasoning is that you cannot deduce the truth about the world just by thinking about it. Ludwig von Mises’s main mistake, in this view, was to neglect the fact that deductive accounts of the world need to be tested empirically before they can be accepted as true.

Winch’s reply to this is that the criticism of praxeology just given ignores the distinction between the physical sciences and the social sciences. In the physical sciences, the aim is to gain knowledge of causal connections between events, where a causal connection is taken to be a regularity between independent physical events. This way of looking at causation, as Winch points out, stems mainly from David Hume.

But the social world is altogether different. In it, people act according to their own understanding of what they are doing. That isn’t to say that they are aware of all the consequences of what they do or that they don’t make mistakes, but they do operate in terms of what is intelligible to them.

The parallel with Mises is apparent. He too locates the basic difference between the physical and social sciences as one of external causation versus understanding. For example, he says in Theory and History (Yale, 1957),

Epistemologically the distinctive mark of what we call nature is to be seen in the ascertainable and inevitable regularity in the concatenation and sequence of phenomena. On the other hand, the distinctive mark of what we call the human sphere or history or, better, the realm of human action is the absence of such a universally prevailing regularity. Under identical conditions stones always react to the same stimuli in the same way. . . Leaving aside for the present any reference to the problem of the human will or free will, we may say: Nonhuman entities react according to regular patterns; man chooses. Man chooses first ultimate ends and then the means to attain them. These acts of choosing are determined by thoughts and ideas about which, at least for the time being, the natural sciences do not know how to give us any information.

There is an important difference between Mises and Winch, and this is where the private language argument enters the scene. In Winch’s account of this argument, people can refer to objects, including their own thoughts, only if they have a criterion for identifying something as the same thing on more than one occasion. Doing this requires a public language which is embedded in a social practice. Why is this so? Winch’s answer is that relying on an ostensive definition of something won’t work.

An example of such an ostensive definition would be someone pointing to Mount Everest and saying, “That’s Everest.” Winch says about this,

Suppose that the word “Everest” has been ostensibly defined to me. It might be thought that I could settle at the outset what is to count as the correct use of this word in the future by making a conscious decision to the effect: “I will use only this word to refer only to this mountain.” And that, of course, in the context of the language which we all speak and understand, is perfectly intelligible. But just because it presupposes the settled institution of the language we all speak and understand, this does not throw any light on the philosophical difficulty. Obviously, we are not permitted to presuppose that whose very possibility we are investigating. It is just as difficult to give any account of what is meant by “acting in accordance with my decision” as it was to give an account of what it was to “act in accordance with the ostensive definition” in the first place. However emphatically I point at the mountain here before me and however emphatically I utter the words “this mountain”, my decision still has to be applied in the future, and it is precisely what is involved in such an application that is here in question.

I am not sure if the private language argument is correct but suppose that it is correct. Couldn’t  someone who wants to account for human behavior try to come up with causal laws that bypass human action altogether? Mises is cautious about this, saying that, at least for the foreseeable future, people are not likely to discover such causal laws. He calls this view “methodological dualism.” In Theory and History, he says,

Mortal man does not know how the universe and all that it contains may appear to be a superhuman intelligence. Perhaps such an exalted mind is in a position to elaborate a coherent and comprehensive monistic interpretation of all phenomena. Man—up to now, at least—has always gone lamentably amiss in his attempts to bridge the gulf that he sees yawning between mind and matter, between the rider and the horse, between the mason and the stone. It would be preposterous to view this failure as a sufficient demonstration of the soundness of a dualistic philosophy. All that we can infer from it is that science—at least for the time being—must adopt a dualistic approach, less as a philosophical explanation than as a methodological device. Methodological dualism refrains from any proposition concerning essences and metaphysical constructs. It merely takes into account the fact that we do not know how external events—physical, chemical, and physiological—affect human thoughts, ideas, and judgments of value. This ignorance splits the realm of knowledge into two separate fields, the realm of external events, commonly called nature, and the realm of human thought and action.

Winch goes further, arguing that the physical sciences themselves depend on human practices and can never supersede them. I shall leave it to readers to examine his intriguing and provocative argument.