Wittgenstein’s hope

Even as we seem to speak the same language as our fellow citizens, often we do not: “[W]hile we might understand that there are many peoples speaking many different languages, we are fooled into thinking that everyone in our own tribe speaks the same language we do.” However, one of the insights from Third Wave studies of expertise and experience is that we do not have to become believing members of another community to learn its language: “[I]t is possible, given the right circumstances, for a competent human from any human group to understand the culture of any other human group without engaging in their practices.” Moreover, there is in Wittgenstein an optimism that it is possible for those who occupy a form of life to communicate with, and even persuade, those in a different form of life. The philosophical problem of relativism, however, arises in Wittgenstein’s account of forms of life—both cultural relativism due to differences between groups “with regards to social, moral and religious values and practices,” and cognitive relativism due to differences between groups as to their “different ways of ‘seeing the world’—that is, that there seems to be a plurality of different sets of categories under which experience is organized and the world understood.” If others live in a different world to me, or see the world differently than I do, how can I even talk about what is wrong and right about current events, appropriate values, or scientific knowledge? For Wittgenstein, however, we can “imagine situations and practices that are quite different from our own. … Outsiders can, as it were, achieve something of an insider’s perspective. … [D]ifferent ways of ‘seeing’ the world are not cognitively inaccessible to one another.” For example, Wittgenstein suggests that we should try to persuade a person who believed the earth to be only 50 years old: “We should be trying to give him our picture of the world.” It is never, however, merely “a matter of presenting cold facts about [his] false beliefs.” In Philip Toner’s formulation, “[d]ialogue, persuasion, self-awareness and humility are the order of the day for Wittgenstein.”