John G. Gunnell - Conventional Realism and Political Inquiry: Channeling Wittgenstein

JOHN G. GUNNELL

The University of Chicago Press

CHICAGO & LONDON

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

2020 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637.

Published 2020

Printed in the United States of America

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ISBN -13: 978-0-226-66127-8 (cloth)

ISBN -13: 978-0-226-66130-8 (e-book)

DOI : https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226661308.001.0001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Gunnell, John G., author.

Title: Conventional realism and political inquiry : channeling Wittgenstein / John G. Gunnell.

Description: Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019038474 | ISBN 9780226661278 (cloth) | ISBN 9780226661308 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH : Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 18891951. | Political sciencePhilosophy.

Classification: LCC JA 71 . G 865 2020 | DDC 320.01dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019038474

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z 39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

This book, in its most general sense, consists of an exploration of the relationship between philosophy and political inquiry as well as an assessment of what that relationship has been, currently is, and what it should be. My purpose is to explain certain dimensions of how political science and political theory have understood and deployed philosophy. When, however, social scientists and social theorists turn to the work of philosophers for intellectual authority or when they criticize certain philosophers, what they extract is often selective and in the service of some prior agenda. The philosophers whose work I discuss have all in various degrees been objects of the conversation of political theory, but close acquaintance with that work is often limited and derivative. My goal is to initiate a more genuine conversation with certain philosophers and political theorists, including those with whom I agree as well as those with whom I disagree.

I have, for many years, been deeply involved with Ludwig Wittgensteins texts, but what I speak of as channeling Wittgenstein is neither a rhetorical strategy nor simply a case of philosophical fealty. What I have found in his work is inspiration and, what I believe to be, insight. My more detailed analysis of his work and my argument about its general implications for thinking about social inquiry were presented in my 2014 book Social Inquiry after Wittgenstein and Kuhn: Leaving Everything as It Is. I argued that for Wittgenstein philosophy was, in effect, a form of social inquiry and that his work contained the basis of a theoretical account of social phenomena and the epistemological and methodological implications of such a theory. I also argued that Thomas Kuhns Structure of Scientific Revolutions exemplified Wittgensteins image of philosophy as an interpretive endeavor, and I discussed how Kuhn, in his later work, reflectively addressed this hermeneutical approach and its epistemological and practical entailments. Kuhn, who began his career as a physicist but became a historian and philosopher of science, acutely understood what I will stress as the difference between the perspective of a participant in a practice and that of an interpreter of a practice.

Although I am, by job description, a political theorist, my 2014 book was conceived and published as primarily a contribution to the philosophy of social science and did not specifically discuss political inquiry. The present volume is devoted to significantly extending and elaborating my philosophical argument but in the context of applying it to some specific issues in the study of politics. I am committed to my interpretation of Wittgenstein, but my argument stands on its own, whether or not a reader might conclude that it conforms to his work. The consolidating thesis that defines this book is what I refer to, oxymoronically some may believe, as conventional realism. This phrase should not be confused with what, in the philosophy of science, is sometimes referred to as theoretical conventionalism and the claim that scientific theories are heuristic constructs rather than, themselves, reality claims. Although I have referred to conventional realism in previous work, it was part of an argument for the autonomy and logical parity of conventional phenomena, but it is now an argument for what might be characterized as conventional universalism or the proposition that everything we designate as real, whether natural or social, is both rendered and accessed conventionally. I reject what has been, and continues to be, the widely accepted distinction between what is natural and what is conventional as a way of demarcating natural science and social science, which is a distinction that has touched all dimensions of political inquiry. Although I had once subscribed to this distinction, I now argue that it always partakes of some form of what Wilfrid Sellars dubbed the myth of the given. I maintain that all phenomena are conventional in that they are specified in language, constituted by human agreement, and located in what I refer to as first-order practices. These practices give content and meaning to what we tend to speak about abstractly and summarily as reality or the world and, in their various manifestations, are the basic subject matter of interpretive second-order discourses such as social science and philosophy.

My oppositional emphasis is directed toward what is often referred to as representational philosophy, which is rooted in the work of individuals such as Descartes and Locke but, in various forms and degrees, perpetuated by many contemporary philosophers. Despite the criticisms that have been directed toward this genre of philosophy, the residue of its assumptions has persistently informed not only our everyday folk psychology but the theory and practices of social science. I focus particularly on what I will speak of generically as mentalism and traditional forms of realism, which claim that the mind is the source and repository of meaning, that language is primarily a vehicle of thought and a means of communication, and that reality resides in some physical or metaphysical realm that stands behind our discursive practices. A basic question being posed in this volume is why and how so many philosophers, political theorists, and political scientists have come to believe that the criteria of truth, reality, objectivity, and meaning are to be found outside rather than within our practices. My argument is that the foundations of knowledge reside within our practices. What we refer to as the mind is basically our linguistic abilities and learned linguistic conventions, rather than an invisible receptacle containing mysterious pre-linguistic mental objects and processes, and the terms reality and world have no meaning outside the contexts of substantive theoretical claims and assumptions about what exists and how it behaves. It is only in language, and therefore conventions, that the terms world and reality become objects. What this entails in part is that there is no presumptively authoritative external philosophical basis for judging the validity of claims about what is real and true.