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Chapter 2

WITTGENSTEIN AND RELATIVISM

2.1Introduction

Ludwig Wittgenstein has been accused of being a relativist by various philosophers. In this chapter I will focus particularly on accusations of cognitive relativism levelled at Wittgenstein by Roger Trigg. Accusations of relativism, of various sorts, have been thought to undermine Wittgenstein’s philosophical approach.¹ However, there are some philosophers, such as Robert Arrington, Natalie Alana Ashton, Gordon Baker, Hans-Johann Glock, Peter Hacker, and Martin Kusch, who have found relativism in Wittgenstein’s work and thought that it is a benign or even a positive feature of his philosophy.² Still others argue that Wittgenstein is not a relativist at all.³ In this chapter I will start by looking at the various forms of relativism and then go on to consider whether Wittgenstein can be placed in one or another of the relativistic camps and throughout the chapter I will look at the credibility of various forms of relativism.

There are, I think, good reasons for thinking that Wittgenstein was a certain kind of relativist, although he certainly did not think that ‘anything goes’ in the moral, religious, epistemic, or conceptual spheres or that all positions staked out in these spheres were of equal value. What kind of reasons are there for thinking that Wittgenstein was a relativist? For one thing it is clear that Wittgenstein rejected certain kinds of realist positions within philosophy. Realists who set themselves up in opposition to idealism in philosophy are subject to the same kinds of confusions as idealists, according to Wittgenstein. So, for example, in the Blue Book Wittgenstein says that ‘the trouble with the realist is always that he does not solve but skip the difficulties which his adversaries see, though they too don’t succeed in solving them’,⁴ and in On Certainty Wittgenstein argues that the ‘claim’ that ‘there are physical objects’ is nonsense.⁵ Wittgenstein rejected the idea that our concepts are somehow imposed on us by reality and he acknowledges the possibility that our concepts might be very different if the world were different in certain ways.⁶ It seems clear that Wittgenstein rejects the idea that there is a single best way to divide up the world with concepts and the idea that a certain conceptual scheme might be absolutely correct. He also rejected the idea that we can achieve a neutral ‘view from nowhere’ was opposed to science intruding upon spheres where it did not belong, and argued that people might have different hinge commitments. But where does that leave us? Does someone opposed to realism, scientism, and the idea that we can achieve a view from nowhere necessarily end up being a relativist? If so, what kind of relativist was Wittgenstein? Was he an alethic relativist (a relativist about truth), an ontological relativist (a relativist about what exists), a cognitive relativist (a relativist about rationality or about what we know), or a conceptual relativist?

2.2Varieties of Relativism

In her masterly critical overview of varieties of relativism Maria Baghramian distinguishes three broad categories of ‘cognitive, moral and aesthetic relativism’. Within cognitive relativism she distinguishes between alethic relativism (relativism about truth), relativism about rationality, and relativism about knowledge-claims (epistemic relativism).⁷ She then makes further distinctions, between subjective, social/cultural, and conceptual relativism, according to what it is that the cognitive, moral, or aesthetic values are being relativized to (psychological states of individual agents, social and cultural conditions, and conceptual schemes, respectively).⁸ So, for example, there might be a form of alethic relativism in which truth is relativized to individuals or one where truth is relativized to a social group. In fact, this is the way in which Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont have defined relativism – as the claim that ‘the truth or falsity of a statement is relative to an individual or social group’.⁹

Baghramian’s taxonomy suggests that Sokal and Bricmont’s definition is far too narrow in excluding other forms of relativism¹⁰ and, as Hans-Johann Glock has suggested, Sokal and Bricmont’s definition excludes more credible forms of relativism.¹¹ Alethic relativism lacks credibility because it leads to ontological relativism, the idea that what is real or what exists is relative. Glock explains why this is so in his ‘Relativism, Commensurability and Translatability’ where he presents

two truisms about truth and falsehood:

(i) That witches exist is true ↔ witches exist

(ii) That witches exist is false ↔ witches do not exist

Given the truth of these truisms and the (alethic) relativist’s claim that what is true is true relative to a society it would have to be that witches exist for one society ‘A’ (a society that accepts or believes that witches exist) but not for another ‘B’ (a society that does not accept or believe that witches exist). If that were the case then the two societies must inhabit different worlds but, as Glock comments, this ‘is surely absurd. Among other things, it makes it difficult to explain how members of B-type societies could have been so successful at exploiting, oppressing and killing members of A-type societies. Are we to suppose, for example, that the bullets which colonial troops fired […] managed to traverse an ontological gap before they hit their targets’.¹² But the fact that alethic and ontological relativism lack credibility does not mean that other forms of relativism are not credible, since excluding these options still leaves cognitive and conceptual relativism concerning various kinds of values available.

2.3Wittgenstein and Relativism

2.3.1Wittgenstein and Cognitive Relativism