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Summary Winch - The Idea of a Social Science
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Notes on Winch's 'The Idea of a Social Science'
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Peter Winch - The Idea of a Social ScienceChapter Two - The Nature of Meaningful Behaviour
Philosophy and Sociology
● there is a distinction between peripheral branches of philosophy and epistemology
○ philosophy of science, art, history etc is concerned with the particular
nature of those forms of life
○ epistemology is concerned with what is involved in the notion of a form
of life as such
■ Wittgenstein’s concept of following a rule and its
corollary form of interpersonal agreement are contributions to this debate
■ this debate is played out in the social sciences: should
sociology synthesise all social studies, or be one among many?
● The central problem of sociology - giving an account of social phenomena - belongs to
epistemology, though it has been misconstrued as a scientific problem
● Often the crucial ingredient of sociology - language - is barely touched upon
○ the notion of having a language, and things such as meaning are often
taken for granted
○ in fact categories of meaning are logically dependent for their sense on
social interaction between men
■ ‘it is only by virtue of their possession of concepts that
they are able to make generalizations at all’
Meaningful Behaviour
● Forms of interactions that have meaning or symbolic character all depend on following a
rule, as in language
● People usually perform actions for reasons, whether explicit or implicit
○ a necessary condition of a reason constituting a reason for an action (i.e.
forming part of an explanation) is that the concepts involved in the reason make sense to
the agent
● Sometimes people behave without having reasons for doing so
○ e.g. habit - a person may understand what they are doing, and hence is
actually casting a vote, but does not have a reason: he simply does it because his father
did
● An act that looks like exchange is only economic if it has a sense, if the agents ‘carry
with them..a regulation of their future behaviour’
○ placing a slip of paper between pages is only using a bookmark if it is
done with the idea of using the slip to determine where to start reading later
○ we can only be committed in the future if our acts are the application of
a rule
● So it only makes sense to say that N votes if:
○ the political institutions of his society allow for voting
○ N is familiar with those institutions, and the symbolic act of voting
■ thus N applies a rule in a context in which application is
possible
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