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

Abstract

Reviewed by: Conventional Realism and Political Inquiry: Channeling Wittgenstein by John G. Gunnell Tracy B. Strong GUNNELL, John G. Conventional Realism and Political Inquiry: Channeling Wittgenstein. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2020. 194 pp. Cloth, $40.00 John G. Gunnell has written extensively, dealing mostly with questions in the philosophy of science and its relevance to the practice of thought. In this book, he addresses inter alia Davidson, Sellars, Diamond, Dummett, Fodor, Freeden, Grice, Kripke, McDowell, Putnam, Ryle, Searle, Williams, Winch—and that is but a selection. He approaches them from a conceptual understanding grounded in a reading of Wittgenstein, Austin, and Kuhn. His target is "representational philosophy," which is for him the dominant mode of analytic philosophizing and is based on the claim that the "mind is the source and repository of meaning, while language is [End Page 816] primarily a vehicle of thought and a means of communication." Reality would thus lie "behind" our discursive practices. To this, he opposes "conventional realism" for which all "phenomena are conventional in that they are specified in language," thus "constituted by human agreement." These are "first-order practices," whereas philosophy and social science are "second-order practices." This is a serious and important book. For those not up to speed with contemporary analytic philosophy, it provides generally excellent if necessarily abbreviated accounts (not summaries) and cogent critiques of major analytical thinkers. Gunnell forcefully advances an account of how philosophers and social scientists should think about their business. For spatial concerns, I take two to whom he might be thought sympathetic. Hilary Putnam's final position rejected the assumptions of both realism and antirealism, claiming that "there is a way to do justice to our sense that knowledge claims are responsible to reality without recoiling into metaphysical fantasy." To counter the threat of relativism, Putnam argues for "direct realism" and "conceptual pluralism." Gunnell finds that Putnam wavers, however, between suggesting an identity of language and the world and at other times holding that "language attaches itself to a separate 'world'." Or John Searle: For Gunnell, Searle "assumed something that Austin had not. This was that speech acts are expressions of ontologically prior mental states and processes signified by such terms as 'purpose' and 'intention' and that conventional acts are ultimately based on what Searle referred to as non-conventional 'brute facts'." He suggests that this is in part due to Searle's fear of French-lace relativism. True statements must rather correspond to "a reality totally independent of us." Gunnell devotes a chapter to the "fear of relativism." Such is his general approach: Most considered are either expressly representationalists, privileging some conception of the mind as separate from "reality," or they are covertly (and sometimes unknowingly) so. I find his criticisms generally convincing. What then is "conventional realism"? Our conventional life, manifest in and as our language, is not to be understood as a "proper distinction … between nature and convention but rather between various conventions of linguistic usage and the character of the propositions involved." His argument relies heavily on a reading of Wittgenstein's On Certainty. Too briefly: All language-games rest on a class of propositions that are claims about what elements constitute the world but are not representational. (There is no such thing, therefore, as "the political.") They can thus change over time. "What Wittgenstein continually stressed was that this confluence of foundational and hypothetical propositions constituted a system within which judgments are made and into which people are initiated when they first acquire language as well as when they appropriate new forms of language and belief that at least temporarily become authoritative and excluded from doubt." Gunnell accepts that when two different systems of belief "clash there comes a point at which [End Page 817] there is an end to advancing reasons that might be plausible to both parties." What to make of this sympathetic and important no-holds-barred reading of Wittgenstein? Wittgenstein's word Abmachung is often translated as "convention." Abmachung does mean convention, but also arrangement, agreement, stipulation. Translation matters: A convention is something to which we are attached. An agreement is something that each of us does. "Agreement" places the emphasis more on...