Introduction

What constitutes understanding another culture? Wittgenstein’s philosophy provides us with several tools to elucidate the question of intercultural understanding. Throughout his work, he emphasizes the activity of interactively engaging with an interlocutor (what I shall refer to as ‘interactional engagement’) as a philosophical resource for altering our philosophical practices, modifying our dispositional attitudes and potentially, more broadly, transforming our lives (Tejedor 2015, 158–160). In the Tractatus, this notion is supplemented with those of nonsense as self-stultification and clarity as dispositional attitude, and, in his later writings, with those of family resemblance, aspect seeing and perspicuous representation (Tejedor 2015, 156–166).

In this chapter, I argue that, although most of these Wittgensteinian tools can help elucidate the ethico-epistemic process of intercultural understanding, it is the former two – interactional engagement and nonsense as self-stultification – that are, in fact, most useful. In particular, I shall argue that privileging perspicuous representation, when this is understood as the unilateral, one-directional mapping of the concepts and practices of another culture, can actively distort the process of intercultural understanding.

In ‘Intercultural Understanding: Preliminary Considerations’, I present some preliminary considerations on the notions of culture, understanding and knowledge. In ‘Intercultural Understanding and Epistemic Interaction’, drawing partly on Miranda Fricker’s work on epistemic injustice and José Medina’s work on epistemic resistance, I argue that interactional engagement between epistemic subjects is central to the process of intercultural understanding. In ‘Polyphonic Cultures and Epistemic Resistance’, I revisit Medina’s notion of polyphonic culture and question the notion of oppositional epistemic resistance within the context of intercultural understanding.

Intercultural Understanding: Preliminary Considerations

The notions of culture and understanding are among Wittgenstein’s recurring preoccupations. As an initial, preliminary approximation, I shall take the term ‘culture’ to encompass linguistic and other collective practices, as well as collective habits and dispositions (affective, relational and behavioural), all of which are partly the result of training and therefore have a clear normative dimension. A culture both conditions and enables one’s life: it provides the framework within which one’s actions, bodily expressions and speech acts become imbued with standards for correctness and meaning (Sanfélix 2019). As I have argued elsewhere, for Wittgenstein, this notion of culture aligns itself with that of ‘form’, which, in the Tractatus, emerges as part of his discussion on representational and scientific principles, and, in Philosophical Investigations and On Certainty, develops into the notion of ‘form of life’ (Tejedor 2015b).