International Journal of Philosophical Studies

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Wittgenstein and relativism

Paul O'Grady

To cite this article: Paul O'Grady (2004) Wittgenstein and relativism, International Journal of
Philosophical Studies, 12:3, 315-337, DOI: 10.1080/0967255042000243975
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International Journal of Philosophical Studies Vol. 12(3), 315–337

Wittgenstein and Relativism

International
10.1080/0967255042000243975
RIPH100257.sgm
0967-2559
Original
Taylor
302004
12
Pogrady@tcd.ie
PaulO’Grady
00000September
and
& Article
Francis
(print)/1466-4542
Francis
Journal
Ltd
2004
Ltdof Philosophical
(online) Studies
Paul O’Grady
Abstract
Wittgenstein is often associated with different forms of relativism. However,
there is ambiguity and controversy about whether he defended relativistic
views or not. This paper seeks to clarify this issue by disambiguating the
notion of relativism and examining Wittgenstein’s relevant texts in that light.
Keywords: Wittgenstein; relativism; logic; epistemology; rationality; Gaskin

1 Introduction
To what extent is Wittgenstein a relativist? It certainly seems as if he is
committed to strongly relativistic views in much of his later work. Yet
commentators have disagreed on this, some readily identifying him as a rela-
tivist, others defending him against the charge. In this paper I’d like to diag-
nose the source of this disagreement as deriving from two ambiguities. The
first is that relativism itself is a complex position, admitting of various posi-
tions significantly different from each other. The second is that Wittgen-
stein’s texts are themselves gnomic, pushing in different directions, aiding
both the relativistic and anti-relativistic readings. Some of the more relativ-
istic-sounding passages come out as non-relativistic under closer scrutiny.
However, there are general features in his later thought, particularly the
linked ideas of ‘language game’ and ‘form of life’, which obviously admit of
relativistic interpretations. Nevertheless, I want to argue that the scope for
relativism from these ideas is limited or mitigated by certain aspects of his
thought, which I shall call his ‘naturalism’. I shall argue that a useful way of
thinking about Wittgenstein on relativism is through the topic of the a priori.
The account of the a priori which can be gleaned from his work allows for a
certain amount of cognitive diversity, but is also constrained by features of
our physical make-up which contingently place limits on the range of possi-
ble options available.
But first, I want to put one quick response to the initial question posed
above to one side. Wittgenstein’s own position seems to have been that he
abjured systematic philosophy, adopting what is sometimes called ‘quiet-
ism’. He advanced no positions, defended no theses, left everything as it is.

International Journal of Philosophical Studies

ISSN 0967–2559 print 1466–4542 online © 2004 Taylor & Francis Ltd
http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals
DOI: 10.1080/0967255042000243975
 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES

Hence Wittgenstein cannot have been a relativist, as being a relativist means

holding to a philosophical position, and Wittgenstein just didn’t do that. In
response to this, one can first of all note that many other philosophers have
used ideas and insights from Wittgenstein to do systematic philosophy. In
the case of relativism one can think of the Wittgensteinian philosophers of
religion and Peter Winch’s views on primitive societies as cases where clear
philosophical claims are being made in Wittgensteinian vein, with specifi-
cally relativistic conclusions. Phillips held that religious language games are
sui generis and cannot be challenged appropriately from without.1 Winch
holds that primitive societies set up their own criteria of rationality and it is
inappropriate to challenge them from an external perspective.2 In both
cases there is a denial of some external vantage point from which different
views of the world can be judged. In this paper I explicitly want to examine
Wittgenstein’s views from the point of view of systematic philosophy (i.e.
involved in arguing, making claims, defending positions) rather than from a
therapeutic point of view. While this approach may not be true to one,
important, aspect of Wittgenstein’s thought, I think that a sizeable number
of philosophers bracket this aspect of Wittgenstein’s thought and use his
ideas within a systematic conception of philosophy which would not be
congenial to him. Placing myself without further argument in this camp, I
wish to deal with the question of Wittgenstein’s relativism in the following
way.
Section 2 presents the salient texts where Wittgenstein articulates appar-
ently strongly relativistic views. Section 3 examines the critical response,
noting sharply contrary interpretations. Section 4 threads through some of
the ambiguities of the notion of relativism, presenting a matrix of positions,
while section 5 revisits the Wittgensteinian texts, using this matrix to show
how they can be plausibly interpreted in ways which do not support strongly
relativistic readings. Section 6 offers a framework within which one might
usefully accommodate Wittgenstein’s views on diversity, while nevertheless
accepting curbs on our conceptual freedom. Section 7 addresses objections
made to such a framework, attempting a defence of the Wittgensteinian
position.

2 Wittgenstein’s Apparent Arch-Relativism

At first glance, Wittgenstein’s later work seems to brim over with ideas
which lead to strong forms of relativism. Having given a unified, transcen-
dental account of mind, language and world in the Tractatus, he went on to
offer a bewildering variety of alternatives in his later work, which self-
consciously defied systematization. His methodology there is avowedly
pluralistic and resists the tendency to generalize and unify, which he thinks
as a besetting vice of philosophers. Within the context of this method, one
can pick out many issues on which Wittgenstein seems clearly relativistic.
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In the Philosophical Investigations, two key ideas appear profoundly rela-

tivistic in their implications, namely language game and form of life. A
language game is a way of using language which is linked to certain kinds of
activity.

I shall call the whole, consisting of language and the actions into which
it is woven, the ‘Language-game’.3

Each language game has its own rules which govern the use of language
within it. There are no general language games, or overarching sets of rules.
Wittgenstein thinks that one of the basic philosophical errors is to attempt
to establish such overarching pictures, which distort our view of particulars.
He diagnoses this problem as follows:

A main source of our failure to understand is that we do not command

a clear view of the use of our words.4

Wittgenstein’s claim is that we need a perspicuous representation of that

use. Attention to particulars yields limited but genuine gain, in dispelling
certain kinds of confusion. Generalizing tends to create such confusions,
assimilating things which are really unlike each other. As he says in Zettel,

we want to replace wild conjectures and explanations by quiet weigh-

ing of linguistic facts.5

Focus on such facts leads Wittgenstein to want to emphasize differences. So

in relation to language,

There are countless kinds of sentences … And this multiplicity is not

something fixed, given once for all; but new types of language, new
language games, as we may say, come into existence, and others
become obsolete and get forgotten.6

The type of activity associated with a language game is called a form of

life. Language acquires meaning in the context of its form of life. Wittgenstein
also constantly emphasizes that the end of explanation is found in action, in
the form of life. He says,

If I have exhausted the justifications I have reached bedrock, and my

spade is turned. Then I am inclined to say ‘This is simply what I do.’7

Since language games have forms of life associated with them, and since
language games have a ‘countless multiplicity’, there must also be multiply
different forms of life. Since the terminus of explanation and justification
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rests in forms of life, there will be potentially countless alternative forms of

explanation and justification possible.
Wittgenstein’s later views on logic point to the possibility of a multiplicity
of different calculi, some of which reject the law of non-contradiction. In the
Tractatus, he had articulated an account of logic which clearly held to there
being one system of logic. There were no relativistic elements to the
account. Propositions mirrored facts in reality. Truth-functional connec-
tions between propositions were determined by the form of the facts being
pictured. All propositions of logic lack a sense – they do not picture anything
themselves. They are tautologies which structure the relations of proposi-
tions which have a sense. His account of the nature of logic rests on his
account of the nature of symbolism and on the atomistic metaphysics
expressed in the opening sections of the work.
As Wittgenstein came to dismantle that account of symbolism and its
associated metaphysics, his views on logic changed. The thrust of his later
philosophy is towards noting differences in what he had earlier assimilated
into one. Rather than thinking that language has an essence, he focusses on
the multiplicity present in language. His ‘family resemblance’ idea is a way
of attempting to hold similarities and differences together in fruitful tension.
So rather than focussing on a single system of logic, Wittgenstein begins to
explore the possibility that there may be quite different systems of logic.
Some of these systems seem quite extraordinary. He says:

I predict a time when there will be mathematical investigations of

calculi containing contradictions, and people will actually be proud of
having emancipated themselves even from consistency.8

He seems to castigate people who worry about contradictions, mentioning

the superstitious dread and veneration by mathematicians in face of

contradiction.9

Contradictions may indeed have uses:

Let us suppose that a contradiction in an order, e.g. produces astonish-

ment and indecision – and now we say: that is just the purpose of
contradiction in this language game.10

So Wittgenstein countenances the possibility of systems of logic which devi-

ate so far from standard logic that they allow contradictions. Insofar as this
is understood as allowing for competing systems of logic, it counts as relativ-
ism about logic.
In his discussion of doubt and certainty in his last writing, On Certainty,
he affirms that talk about doubt and certainty only take place within a context.
Doubt always has presuppositions. Knowledge in general has presupposi-
tions. These presuppositions do not rest on argument. He characterizes them
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as ‘hinge propositions’ around which others turn. In another image he thinks

of them as the river-bed, over which more fluid propositions flow.

It might be imagined that some propositions, of the form of empirical

propositions, were hardened and functioned as channels for such
empirical propositions as were not hardened but fluid; and that this
relation altered with time, in that fluid propositions hardened and
hard ones became fluid.

The mythology may change back into a state of flux, the river-bed of
thoughts may shift. But I distinguish between the movement of the
waters on the river-bed and the shift of the bed itself; though there is
not a sharp division of the one from the other.11

The important point to note, however, is that such propositions can change
– they are not immutably fixed. Insofar as they are fixed, they are fixed by
what he calls the form of representation. This is a system of grammatical
rules about the use of words. Such rules are not absolutely immutable: they
may change. Indeed, there may be more than one system of such rules. So
knowledge, certainty and doubt are relative to the context of presupposi-
tions and grammatical rules which form a framework containing them.
There may be many such contexts.
Again and again Wittgenstein refers to agents who seem to operate in a
way quite different from us. There are the animals, as in his famous statement,

if a lion could talk, we could not understand him.12

An obvious way of reading this is that the lion’s kind of mentality would be
so alien to ours that we wouldn’t make sense of it. This seems to point to the
existence of kinds of thought inaccessible to us. Then there are human
beings who might think differently, for example strange tribes:

Imagine that the people of a tribe were brought up from early youth
to give no expression of feeling of any kind. They find it childish,
something to be got rid of … I want to say: an education quite different
from ours might also be the foundation for quite different concepts.13

So animals, or humans brought up in a very strange culture, might well be

impossible to communicate with, or at least think in ways we would find very
strange. Such a position seems to endorse alternative systems of rationality
which are incommensurable with ours. They are cognitively inaccessible to us.
Wittgenstein discusses Frazer’s Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and
Religion, in which an anthropological account of various rites and rituals
found in different cultures is given, subtitled ‘A Study in Magic and Ritual’.
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Wittgenstein criticizes Frazer for his views of primitive peoples. Frazer’s

view is that western culture, with science and technology, has achieved a
fairly firm grasp of the nature of reality. The views discussed by Frazer are
at odds with this modern view, and hence the primitive view is thought to be
mistaken. Wittgenstein wants to defend the so-called primitive views against
Frazer.

Frazer’s account of the magical and religious views of mankind is

unsatisfactory: it makes these views look like errors.14

In a similar vein, in the forward to Philosophical Remarks, Wittgenstein

notes how much out of sympathy he is with the prevailing worldview of
western society:

This book is written for such men as are in sympathy with its spirit.
This spirit is different from the one which informs the vast stream of
European and American civilisation in which all of us stand.15

He refers again and again to the notion of ‘world view’, ‘weltanschauung’,

‘way of looking at things’,16 for example,

The concept of a perspicuous representation is of fundamental signif-

icance for us. It earmarks the form of account we give, the way we look
at things. (Is this a ‘Weltanschauung’?)17

The job of philosophy is to clarify one’s worldview, to get an overview of

one’s particular way of seeing things. The implication, however, is that there
is a multiplicity of such worldviews, since drawing attention to the notion of
a worldview always implicitly contrasts that with the possibility of a different
worldview.
So, through all these remarks, Wittgenstein emerges as a defender of rela-
tivistic views. Yet, in a way that might seem curious given such a wealth of
evidence for relativism, commentators are divided over whether he actually
is a relativist or not.

3 Divergent Readings
Hans-Johann Glock, in A Wittgenstein Dictionary, thinks that Wittgenstein
is clearly a relativist, expressing this view in the discussion of ‘Form of Life’.

As regards linguistic practices, Wittgenstein embraces not a naturalis-

tic determinism, but a cultural relativism, which follows from the
conceptual relativism of the autonomy of language. The latter denies
merely that our forms of representation are subject to metaphysical
320
 WITTGENSTEIN AND RELATIVISM

standards, a putative essence of reality, not that they may be subject to

pragmatic standards.18

Glock holds that like other relativists, Wittgenstein ignores the charge that
his position is self-defeating. However, Glock maintains that given that
Wittgenstein’s remarks are grammatical reminders about language rather
than epistemic theses, Wittgenstein might evade the self-refutation charge.
Glock furthermore notes that Wittgenstein doesn’t advocate an ‘anything
goes’ relativism, but is concerned with the curbs on relativism imposed by
human action and behaviour.
Robert Kirk, in Relativism and Reality, agrees in identifying Wittgenstein
as a relativist and sees discussions of language games leading to anti-realism
and relativism.19 What he calls the ‘language game argument’ expresses the
view that rules are generated by communities, rules establish what we say
there is and rules vary across communities. Hence since what we say there
is varies across communities and there is no higher court of appeal on what
there is than rule-governed discussion in community, different communities
live in different worlds – they have different ontologies. Kirk thinks that this
argument is false and is susceptible to self-refutation. However, he thinks
that it can be found in Wittgenstein’s work and so Wittgenstein is clearly a
relativist.
Hilary Putnam, in Renewing Philosophy, focusses on the issue of primi-
tive societies and Wittgenstein’s apparent prohibition on criticisms of such
societies.20 Comments in OC (608–12) point towards not being able to criti-
cize those who use oracles.

[608] Is it wrong for me to be guided in my actions by the propositions

of physics? Am I to say I have no good ground for doing so? Isn’t
precisely this what we call a ‘good ground’?

[609] Supposing we met people who did not regard that as a telling
reason. Now how do we imagine this? Instead of the physicist, they
consult an oracle. (And for that we consider them primitive.) Is it
wrong for them to consult an oracle and be guided by it? – If we call
this ‘wrong’ aren’t we using our language game as a base from which
to combat theirs?

[610] And are we right or wrong to combat it? Of course there are all
sorts of slogans which will be used to support our proceedings.

[611] Where two principles really do meet which cannot be recon-

ciled with one another. Then each man declares the other a fool and
heretic.
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[612] I said I would ‘combat’ the other man, – but wouldn’t I give him
reasons? Certainly; but how far do they go? At the end of reasons
comes persuasion. (Think of what happens when missionaries convert
natives.)

We can’t reason with such people; we can only ‘persuade’ them. Putnam
says

this certainly sounds like relativism (I recall how dismayed I was when
I first encountered these paragraphs). But, on closer reading, the rela-
tivist interpretation came to seem less and less supportable.21

Putnam thinks that Wittgenstein’s remarks are more about how to conduct
a debate with someone of radically different views, avoiding phrases like
‘heretic’ and ‘fool’, and fostering a genuine exchange. They are also about
suggesting that such disputes are not to be resolved by appeal to sophisti-
cated metaphysical machinery, however they are to be resolved. So Putnam
interprets the apparent relativism as fairly innocuous comments on the rules
for debate, or problem-resolution methodology.
Cyril Barrett asks

Do language-games, forms of life, depth grammar, the rejection of the

Platonic and Aristotelian essentialist accounts of general terms and
other later ideas imply a relativist position?22

Barrett thinks not. Certainly he rejects any thought that there may be
incommensurability or impossibility in communication between language
games and downplays any relativistic interpretation of Wittgenstein:

As for other later notions, depth grammar and the rejection of the
Platonic notion of essence, these, though they have a relativistic
flavour, no more imply relativism than do the notions of language-
games and forms of life.23

Hence, somewhat surprisingly, reputable commentators on Wittgenstein

are divided on what seemed prima facie a clear case. The debate as to
whether Wittgenstein actually is a relativist or not is shrouded in ambiguity
for at least two reasons. The first is that relativism itself is, at best, an ambig-
uous notion and requires clarification. A number of heterogeneous posi-
tions are often given the same general label. Secondly, Wittgenstein’s texts
notoriously yield strikingly different interpretations. In what follows I shall
disambiguate different kinds of relativism, read the apparently relativistic
Wittgenstein texts in such a way that the relativism is muted, and then offer
a framework in which to think about Wittgenstein’s relativism.
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4 The Ambiguity in ‘Relativism’

An initial distinction which must be made is between cognitive and moral

relativism. Moral relativism is well known as a position. It holds that
there are no absolute values; rather they are relative to a culture or soci-
ety. The Romans have one set of values, the Athenians another. Neither
is absolutely right or wrong, but when in Rome one does as the Romans,
when in Athens, accordingly. This can also apply to questions of aesthet-
ics. One culture has a certain view of beauty, another a very different
view. Aquinas had defined the beautiful as what pleases the eye – but it is
a fact of cultural anthropology that many different and contradictory
features of people and things are valued by different societies. Hence,
according to the relativist, attributions of beauty are culturally relative, as
are attributions of right or wrong. This kind of relativism is well known
and has quite a long history.
Cognitive relativism as an intellectual phenomenon came to prominence
in the twentieth century. Briefly and uninformatively it means relativism not
included in moral relativism. Somewhat more useful is distinguishing a
number of different topics within the scope of cognitive relativism. Some are
uncontroversial, in that everyone accepts that relativism is appropriate for
certain topics. Perceptual relativism is an example – each of us perceives
from a particular perspective, with varying powers of perception. Anti-rela-
tivists can hold that this relativity is compatible with making objective judge-
ments about reality. Another example is indexical statements, which are
true or false relative to context – ‘this is red’ depends on what ‘this’ refers to.
There are, however, more controversial forms of cognitive relativism. An
important point is that these are generally independent of each other. One
may coherently accept some forms and reject others. A problem with many
treatments of relativism is that it is presented as a monolithic position, that
there is something which can be usefully picked out by ‘relativism’ in
general, rather than distinctive kinds. Here are five distinct kinds of cogni-
tive relativism.24
1 Logical relativism: Up to the early nineteenth century, Aristotle’s logic
was regarded as the last word in the field. Logic was a completed science.
However, Frege’s and Russell’s revolution at the end of the century led to a
renewal in logic and philosophy of logic. While their intended goal was to
show the derivation of mathematics from logic, their actual goal was to
mathematicize logic. Logicians began to develop a great number of calculi
for purely formal purposes. However, some of these discarded the tradi-
tional laws of logic, namely excluded middle and non-contradiction. The
question arose – are these merely formalistic curiosities or genuine new
logics? Those who think that such formal systems are not just extensions of
classical logic but genuine competitors of it, and that a multiplicity of such
systems exists, defend relativism about logic.
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2 Alethic relativism: This is the view that truth is relative. Given that there
are contradictory beliefs about reality, the obvious conclusion to make is
that some of the beliefs must be false: they can’t all be true, because they
contradict. The relativist about truth suggests that contradictions do not
occur, and the avoidance of such contradictions is the motiviation for rela-
tivizing truth. Hence the truth predicate in apparently contradictory beliefs
is relativized. To use a crude example, ‘P’ is true-for-me and ‘Not-P’ is true-
for-you. A contradiction does not occur because of the relativization of the
truth predicate to ‘true-for-me’ and ‘true-for-you’. Various more sophisti-
cated attempts have been made to work out this position, by Margolis,
Swoyer, Hacking, and on some interpretations, Tarski.25
3 Ontological relativism: Kant’s Copernican Revolution pointed to the
constructive power of human cognition in structuring our knowledge of the
world. In Kant’s account, there is, however, a single process of construction
which all humans follow. The forms of cognition we have are common to all
and so we have a unified, common view of reality, based on the psychologi-
cal categories of our cognition. The categories are fixed and necessary, tran-
scendental presuppositions of having a world. Yet doubts fell on such
presuppositions, among which were Aristotelian Logic, Euclidean Geome-
try and Newtonian Science. All three fell foul of developments in the
century after Kant. As the focus of philosophy turned from psychology to
language, the possibility of there being multiple ways of characterizing the
world arose. Instead of psychological categories by which the world is
conceptualized, there are linguistic structures which systematize our
thought about the world. The way reference is fixed is determined by other
factors in the language (sense-determining reference). So as philosophers
use different linguistic frameworks (Carnap), analytical hypotheses (Quine)
or rules of grammar (Wittgenstein), they conceptualize the world differ-
ently. However, there is no access to an unconceptualized reality, so ontol-
ogy, what we say exists, will vary with the linguistic presuppositions of the
philosopher. These presuppositions are not fixed or determinate, but vary
pragmatically with interests. Hence ontology is relative to language and
interests.
4 Epistemological relativism: In talking of the understanding of the
linguistic preconditions of talk about the world, philosophers came to
believe that they had come up with a new account of a priori knowledge.
Such knowledge is prior to experience, consisting of presuppositions which
structure the nature of experiential knowledge. Such knowledge could
perhaps be explained by appeal to grammatical rules, or linguistic frame-
works, or forms of representation. To accept such a diversity is to be an epis-
temological relativist. Another way of being an epistemological relativist is
to accept contextualism: ascriptions of knowledge are relative to context. To
say that I know that there is a glass of water in front of me is fine in normal
contexts, but in contexts where I have good reason to suspect poisoning, or
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deception, I may not be justified in believing my normal ways of determin-

ing facts. Further checking would be appropriate. Now, contextualism may
accept that there are general norms which govern all contexts, or make the
more radical claim that there are incommensurable contexts, which require
different accounts of rationality. To make the latter claim is to be a relativist
about rationality. The distinction between epistemological relativism and
relativism about rationality is one of scope. Epistemological relativists can
still accept that some standards and criteria are universal, while accepting
plurality under those constraints. Relativists about rationality deny that
there are such standards.
5 Relativism about rationality holds that individual cultures supply the
cognitive standards by which one establishes the truth. Societies set up
different standards. There is no transcendental position from which to
critique them. They have their own ‘paradigms’ or ‘forms of life’ and may be
‘incommensurable’, that is unintelligible from without. It holds that there
are irreducibly different contexts, sealed off from each other, and these
contexts give rise to alternative systems of rationality. To be a relativist
about rationality one must accept that there are genuinely competing
accounts of rationality which are equally correct in different contexts. It is
what can be called a cognitivist position, as distinct from an expressivist
position. Expressivists accept widely different and conflicting claims about
the world, but interpret these as expressing an attitude rather than making
a truth claim. Hence viewing the world in widely different ways raises no
conflict for expressivism. It issues merely in a proliferation of different
expressions. Cognitivists, however, hold that they make genuine claims
about the world, dealing with truth, falsity and reasonableness. The cogni-
tive position of relativism about rationality holds that there are genuinely
different systems of rationality which exist in incommensurable contexts.
A basic point of this section is that cognitive relativism is not a package
deal. Someone may hold one of these and reject the others, or hold a
number of them, or all of them. Furthermore, the arguments for each kind
of relativism differ from each other. Crucially, the attempted refutations
also differ. So to convict a certain kind of cognitive relativism as self-refuting
may still leave other forms unscathed. This is one source of the disagree-
ment as to whether Wittgenstein is a relativist or not.

5 The Wittgenstein Texts

The other source is Wittgenstein’s gnomic texts. As we have seen, many of
Wittgenstein’s comments point towards prima facie relativism. Now we are
in a position to question whether they support logical, alethic, ontological,
epistemological or rationality relativism. My contention in this section is
that on closer examination Wittgenstein dilutes the apparently relativistic
statement in his other comments to something philosophically unimportant,
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or else that seen in context the position is less radical than appears to be the
case. I shall discuss the texts within the matrix of the five main kinds of rela-
tivism distinguished within cognitive relativism.
(1) Logical relativism: Does Wittgenstein endorse the use of alternative
calculi which dispense with the law of non-contradiction? In response to this
very question, he says with typical obliqueness,

Then you are in favour of contradiction? Not at all; any more than of
soft rulers.26

The reference to soft rulers relates to his discussion of measurement,

where he considers the possibility of people measuring with rulers which
expand and contract. They would have a quite different system of
measurement from ours. Concepts will change when the physical context
in which they operate changes. Similarly he spoke of people calculating
the amount of wood in a pile by taking the amount of ground it covers,
rather than by using more orthodox means. His point is that measure-
ment is determined by certain contingent facts of our physical make-up,
the physical world and what we want to do. So we could use soft rulers,
or measure piles by the amount of ground they cover. There is no meta-
physical prohibition against doing so. So what he says in relation to
contradiction is that he is no more in favour of contradiction than he of
soft rulers. One could build a calculus with contradiction built in, if one
had a purpose which could be fulfilled by so doing. His example of such a
purpose is to produce astonishment. Now to use a contradiction in this
manner is to perform an illocutionary act, which doesn’t affect the mean-
ing of the utterance; the speech-act itself is what produces the astonish-
ment. So he doesn’t give an example of using a contradiction in a
genuinely cognitive fashion.
Furthermore, many of his comments about contradiction and consistency
deal with the problem of hidden contradictions. This is an issue which exer-
cised Hilbert’s formalist programme in mathematics. Hilbert believed that
one had to produce consistency proofs in advance of using a calculus, to
ensure that there were no hidden contradictions lurking within it. Wittgen-
stein rejects this view and says that the calculus is fine in normal use until
some contradiction is found in it. One can refuse to draw the contradiction,
or try to limit them by some device. So many of his negative comments
about contradiction are actually directed towards the excessive fear of
contradiction of formalists in the Hilbertian programme. So while Wittgen-
stein makes comments which, at face value, favour relativism, on closer
inspection it is not at all clear that he advocates logical relativism.
(2) Alethic relativism: In Wittgenstein’s later thought it seems that he
advances a redundancy account of truth. Abandoning the correspondence
account of the Tractatus, he gives an account where the truth predicate plays
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no substantive role in inquiry, certainly having no metaphysical role and not

even being a genuine property. He says ‘“p is true”’ = p (PI 136). With such
a minimalist account of truth, it wouldn’t be possible to generate the kind of
relativism required for alethic relativism, where the truth predicates
substantively differ from each other. Furthermore, he distinguishes clearly
between issues about the nature of truth and the ascription of truth. In On
Certainty he discusses questions about grounds for beliefs, certainty and the
appropriate kinds of justification for a belief. Although he entertains
contextualism there (that ascriptions of knowledge will vary with circum-
stances) and even considers the view that what counts as reasonable may
change over time,27 none of this involves a relativized notion of truth. What-
ever relativism there may be must be explained by a different kind of cogni-
tive relativism.
(3) Ontological relativism: Wittgenstein does seem to endorse ontological
relativism wholeheartedly. The world does not come pre-conceptualized to
us. We apply systems of categories to reality to make it intelligible. There is
a genuine diversity of such systems. Such diversity of conceptual systems
allows for the postulation of alternative ontologies, differing ways of
construing reality. His use of the notions of language game and form of life
most readily fit this kind of relativism. The rules of grammar of a language
game, for example the use of colour-terms, license the ascription of claims
about reality. These reality-claims are relative to the system of concepts
deployed. Wittgenstein didn’t think it made sense to ask whether the
concepts ‘really’ applied to reality or not.

We have a colour system as we have a number system. Do the systems

reside in our nature or the nature of things? How do we put it, not in
the nature of numbers or colours.28

Concepts are tools used in mediating reality to us. There is an interaction

between us and the world – and for Wittgenstein there is no access to an
unconceptualized world, free of the contamination of concepts. What is
important to note about this kind of relativism is that it doesn’t entail any
views about relativism about truth, epistemology or rationality. One can
have absolute views about each of these while still accepting this kind of
ontological relativism. In consequence of this, many of the powerful anti-
relativistic arguments, addressing issues of self-refutation, do not connect
with such ontological relativism, since they rely on incoherences generated
by relativism about truth.
(4) Epistemological relativism: The discussion of frameworks in On
Certainty does not support a strongly relativistic interpretation.
Wittgenstein distinguishes there between empirical propositions and
framework propositions which ‘house’ them, or give them a context. He
accepts that there may be different such frameworks. Yet it seems possible
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to argue for the utility of one framework over another in a given context.
There is no question that it is just arbitrary which framework one chooses.
For example, there is the framework of Newtonian physics versus that of
Einsteinian physics. Empirical propositions can be understood in either
framework. In some ways the Newtonian system is easier, especially in
terrestrial contexts. The Einsteinian gives a better account of stellar
contexts and also provides a way of making sense of the Newtonain frame-
work. A case can be made for the appropriateness of use in different
contexts, and the relationships of the frameworks to each other can be
understood. Yet Wittgenstein does make remarks where he apparently
endorses some from of relativism about rationality, hence expanding epis-
temological relativism into relativism about rationality.
(5) Relativism about rationality: Wittgenstein’s famous comment ‘if a
lion could talk, we could not understand him’29 is expressed in conditional
mode. Lions do not talk. Were they to, we would find it impossible to
understand them since their form of life is so different from ours.
However, with human beings we share a common ‘natural history’. There
are basic physical, emotional and intellectual features which we share
with all humans. Nevertheless, cultural conditioning will express these
features in multiply different ways, which can lead to communication
problems. Thus Wittgenstein’s point about the tribe who don’t express
feelings is that such people would be strange to us. Yet presumably there
would be other aspects of their ‘natural history’ which would allow us to
communicate with them, and perhaps even to interpret their hidden
emotional life systematically. Wittgenstein is pointing to difficulties which
arise from different kinds of action, different forms of life. Yet there are
sufficient basic similarities which allow for bridgeheads of communica-
tion to occur. Wittgenstein observes,

‘So you are saying that human agreement decides what is true and
what is false?’ – It is what human beings say that is true and false; and
they agree in the language they use. That is not agreement in opinions
but in form of life.30

Agreement in action is the basis of the capacity to understand. In passing

one might note further evidence here for the rejection of alethic relativism
– truth is not relative. This passage also allows an interpretation of the
comment about the lion which rather than being relativist is, in fact, anti-
relativist. We couldn’t understand the lion if he could speak, because we
don’t share a form of life with him. And anticipating later discussions by
Quine and Davidson, he says

The common behaviour of mankind is the system of reference by

means of which we interpret an unknown language.31
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Therefore the possibility of there being alternative rationalities among

humans does not seem possible for Wittgenstein. There may be differences
in thinking which strain our imaginations in attempting to come to grips with
them. But the kinds of imcommensurabilities beloved of later relativists
such as Feyerabend and radical Kuhnians don’t fit into his picture. To use
most un-Wittgensteinian terminology, the Many (in the form of different
uses of language, different systems of concepts, different frameworks of
grammatical rules) are unified into One by the basic human form of life,
shared by us all despite cultural differences. So while Wittgenstein is an
advocate of attention to difference, in which these passages he does not
emerge as the arch-relativist the initial survey of his texts suggested.
But what of his defence of primitive societies? He rejected Frazer’s view
that they are mistaken and in so doing appears to endorse alternative ratio-
nalities. However, Wittgenstein goes on to say:

Was Augustine in error then when he called upon God on every page
of the Confessions?

But-one might say – if he was not in error, surely the Buddhist holy
man was – or anyone else – whose religion gives expression to
completely different views. But none of them was in error, except
when he set forth a theory.32

The views are not in error when they are expressing an attitude to life. But
they are in error if they espouse a theory. To put it another way, Wittgen-
stein is advancing an expressivist and non-cognitivist account of religious
and magical language. It doesn’t make a claim about reality: it expresses an
attitude. Therefore one may accept a multiplicity of such views without
committing oneself to relativism about rationality. As noted above, relativ-
ism about rationality necessitates a cognitive interpretation of the position
held. Wittgenstein eschews such an interpretation and indicts Frazer both
for taking a cognitive interpretation and furthermore for criticizing the
views.
As for Wittgenstein’s use of ‘worldview’, it only has strong relativistic
connotations if associated with the doctrine of incommensurability, or of
variance in epistemic standards across worldviews. We have seen that
Wittgenstein holds proto-Davidsonian views which cut across an incom-
mensurability interpretation. Likewise, alternative epistemic frameworks
may support some limited contextualism, or at most a relativized account of
the a priori – but doesn’t support, for example, global alternative logics or
any notion of alternative rationalities. Differences are certainly emphasized,
but not differences which would support any significant form of cognitive
relativism. It is true that the notion of form of representation does lend itself
to conceptual relativism (the possession of alternative systems of concepts),
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and this can lead on to ontological relativism (the postulation of parallel,

alternative accounts of the nature of reality). Yet this latter position doesn’t
succumb to self-refutation, isn’t obviously incoherent and doesn’t yield any
form of incommensurability.

6 Wittgenstein and Naturalism

Wittgenstein’s discussion of rules and rule-following initially arose from
dissatisfaction with the Tractarian account of propositions. One of the
main planks of the Tractatus was the view that elementary propositions are
independent of each other – the truth value of one such proposition
doesn’t affect the truth value of any other. The only propositions exhibit-
ing such kinds of connections are propositions which lack sense – tautolo-
gies, the truths of logic. So there is no natural or metaphysical necessity;
the only kind of necessity is logical, exhibited in the framework of tautolo-
gies, which is logic. The problem with this picture is that is does seem to be
the case that some propositions affect the truth values of others in ways
which cannot be reduced to the interaction of tautologies. A classical prob-
lem is the colour exclusion problem. If something is red all over, it cannot
simultaneously be green all over. Why not? Well, internal to the meaning
of the colour words is the thought that they exclude each other in the
required sense. This is not simply a logical contradiction, but something
more, deriving from the meaning of the colour terms themselves. Wittgen-
stein was led initially to consider what he called proposition-systems, calcu-
lus-like sets of propositions, and eventually to the notion of language
games, constituted by linguistic rules.
The rules of a language game establish the meanings of the concepts used
in the game. What fixes such rules? The apparent answer is nothing. That is
what is so radical about Wittgenstein’s position. Such rules are fixed neither
by the nature of objects in the world nor by the nature of the mind of the
user of those concepts. The world doesn’t fix the meaning of the concepts by
which we think about it. Neither do our minds fix the meaning of those
concepts. So in this respect the rules of a language game are arbitrary – we
are free to form them in a wide variety of ways. Yet there are curbs on our
usage, and this is emphasized by the notion of form of life. We use concepts
instrumentally to achieve certain aims and goals. They are the way in which
we represent our environment to ourselves. Given that we can do this in a
variety of ways, there is a desire to use the concepts which best facilitate the
carrying out of our aims, desires, goals, plans. Perhaps no single set of
concepts uniquely fulfils the task of maximizing these goals – hence there
can be variety in language games. At a simple level there are different
systems of measurement – e.g., imperial and metric. At a more complex
level one might point to scientific advances and explain the development
between theories as the development of newer forms of conceptualization,
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the replacement of older concepts with more effective ones. Yet crucially
the claim is that the new concepts are not fixed by reality-in-itself, but are
creations by us which help represent the world-in-itself to us. We never
achieve immediate unconceptualized access to this world-in-itself, but
always have to use concepts to access it. Growth in knowledge is growth in
sophistication in our concepts.
Wittgenstein seems to have believed that justification is relative to such
frameworks of rules, or grammar, but that such grammars themselves are
not justifiable – so there are remarks in On Certainty about the groundless-
ness of belief and the unjustifiability of ‘hinge beliefs’. Yet this position
seems needlessly restrictive. One could attempt a justification of such rules
precisely because of their usefulness and the fact that they integrate into our
conceptual scheme – Wittgenstein himself notes ‘So I am trying to say some-
thing that sounds like pragmatism.’33
Following this hint, one might constructively think of it as a pragmatist
account of the a priori. Such rules count as basic, normative, regulative
elements in our thought and language. We hold them because they serve
such purposes, and that they do so counts as their justification. Were our
purposes to change and/or the rules failed to fulfil those purposes, we would
jettison them. Wittgenstein maintains a constant distinction in his work
between the conceptual and the empirical. There is the conceptual realm,
what has to do with the ‘form of representation’, the way we think about the
world, and the applied or empirical realm, putting concepts to use. One of
the main sources of intellectual puzzlement, he claims, is our tendency to
posit of reality features which actually belong to the form of representation,
‘something whose form makes it look like an empirical proposition, but
which is really a grammatical one’.34 So deep connections between concepts
which appear to display deep features of reality are really signifying connec-
tions of rules in our language games, conventions for the use of terms. In
speaking of their arbitrariness, Wittgenstein appears to endorse the view
that they always could be different from the way they are. Yet he also speaks
again and again of the limitations placed on us by our human form of life.
That we act in the world in such and such ways is the bedrock of explanation
– ‘the spade is turned’.35 This bedrock seems to be interpreted by Wittgen-
stein as part of the natural history of humankind, and seems to be construed
by Wittgenstein as something pre-linguistic, basic and uncontroversial. Any
facet of it which might be thought of as controversial can be shed. Qua
human beings we have distinctive basic needs, modes of acting, and
responses. These are fundamental to the very process of making sense of
ourselves and others (for example that we assent and dissent, that we gener-
ally shun pain and seek pleasure, etc). Without such basic understanding no
understanding at all would be possible. It doesn’t mean that there cannot be
occasional deviation from this (for example lying, masochism, etc.) – but
these are exceptions rather than the rule.
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Hence, Wittgenstein’s comments on forms of life and language games can

best be thought of in the context of a pragmatic account of the a priori –
constrained by the cognitive limitations of human beings relating to their
environment. Humans are constituted in a certain way. We are animals, with
physical inclinations, dispositions, limitations, desires, goals, projects, tasks.
To achieve the latter successfully means limiting the range of concepts used
and truths believed. Wittgenstein is not simply espousing biological deter-
minism here, as the role of culture is important for him. Our needs and
beliefs are partly shaped by our culture. Yet all thought is grounded in activ-
ities which are pre-rational.

Giving grounds, however, justifying the evidence comes to an end –

but the end is not certain propositions’ striking us immediately as true,
i.e. it is not a kind of seeing on our part; it is our acting, which lies at
the bottom of the language-game.36

He uses the term ‘natural history’ to get at this facet of the relationship of
thought and action. He thinks of his project as a way of giving a natural
history of thought.

What we are supplying are really remarks on the natural history of

man: not curiosities however, but rather observations on facts which
no one has doubted and which have only gone unremarked because
they are always before our eyes.37

This natural history provides a basis which is the terminus of explanation

and the end of all justification.

The agreement of humans that is a presupposition of logic is not an

agreement in opinions, much less in opinions on questions of logic.38

This basis of thought in shared action is something which precisely cuts across
radical forms of relativism. So this operates as a curb on the multiplicity of
language games and forms of life. Forms of life are limited by certain uncon-
troversial features of human existence, our need for food, shelter, warmth,
love, co-operation etc. Our perceptual, intellectual and emotional capacities,
while differing from each other, operate within a limited range set by our
physical constitution. There is no defence of alethic relativism here – truth
is not a relativized notion. Logical relativism doesn’t enter much here either.
It may be useful from time to time to relax one of the logical laws, but there
is a pre-eminence given to logical systems containing the laws of non-contra-
diction. There is clearly an acceptance of ontological relativism – that the
possession of differing concepts will allow the constitution of different ontol-
ogies. Yet such a relativism is not self-refuting and does not entail any notion
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of incommensurability. There may be limited epistemological relativism, but

Wittgenstein seems to preclude relativism about rationality precisely by
appealing to our shared ‘natural history’.
On the basis of this natural history, we develop conceptual schemes in
order to think about the world. Much of this conceptualization is implicit,
latent rather than patent, and one of the main tasks of philosophy is to make
it obvious. The relationship of this to relativism should be apparent. There
may be different possible systems of conceptualization. This is conceptual
relativity and such conceptual relativity leads to ontological relativity – that
we posit different kinds of existents depending on the conceptual scheme by
which we think about the world. Yet this does not involve relativism about
truth. Given these concepts, such and such claims are true or false in an
absolute sense. It is also possible that different notions of evidence may be
used in different contexts, and so there may be localized notions of justifica-
tion possible which are not assimilable to each other. Yet, for Wittgenstein,
the natural history of humankind allows for a basic notion of rationality
based on common make-up, needs, desires, etc., which disallows complete
cognitive difference and crucially rules out incommensurability. The reli-
ance on this bedrock of shared human activities is what I am calling Wittgen-
stein’s naturalism. It is possible that there could be other intelligent species
with different forms of life who think in a radically different way to us. It is
possible that humans might evolve in such a way that our future forms of life
might differ so much from our present ones that we would find it very hard
to understand the associated language games. The crucial point for Wittgen-
stein is that primitive, pre-conceptual shared actions lie at the bottom of all
efforts at reasoning and understanding.

I want to regard man here as an animal; as a primitive being to which

one grants instinct but not ratiocination. As a creature in a primitive
state. Any logic good enough for a primitive means of communication
needs no apology from us. Language did not emerge from some kind
of ratiocination.39

Yet is such a view sustainable – that rules of grammar are arbitrary, that
language games rest on forms of life, that forms of life may differ and that
there may be different systems of the a priori? Let’s examine a strong objec-
tion to this view, advanced by Richard Gaskin.

7 Gaskin’s Objection
Gaskin claims that we find Wittgenstein is committed to two plausible
principles.40 The first is the negation principle – that the negation of a
meaningful proposition is also meaningful. The second is what can be
called the meaningfulness principle – that meaning is wholly constituted
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by linguistic rules – it is not antecedent to them. Gaskin’s argument holds

that these principles, when applied to Wittgenstein’s views about the arbi-
trary nature of rules, yield a contradiction and so refute Wittgenstein’s
views. Gaskin’s argument is as follows.
A good way of explaining what Wittgenstein means by the arbitrariness
of rules is that the rules of language cannot be justified. Take this as the
negation of the view that the rules of grammar can be justified. By the nega-
tion principle, the view that the rules of grammar cannot be justified is
meaningful. However, this contradicts the finding of the second principle,
which holds that such a position is meaningless. This is so because the rules
of grammar specify the extent of meaningfulness. That which falls outside
them is meaningless – there is no logical space, as it were, for meaning
outside what the rules of grammar specify. Therefore the negation of those
very rules is meaningless. Hence Wittgenstein’s position is that the arbitrari-
ness of the rules of grammar entails that the negation of those rules is both
meaningful and meaningless, which is an unsustainable position.
Gaskin’s argument fails to indict Wittgenstein on this charge as it begs the
question against him. One can accept the negation principle and the mean-
ingfulness principle without the contradiction arising. The key issue is the
interpretation of the meaningfulness principle. For Gaskin the rules of
grammar are fixed and specify the logical space of meaning in which we
actually exist. There cannot be alternatives to them and they are not arbi-
trary. A general justification for such rules, offered by Gaskin, is that there
is literally nothing else to think. They exhaust the logical space. He uses two
examples from category theory to support this contention. Once one makes
a specification within a particular category, then it is fixed; it excludes other
specifications in that same category of the same thing. Similarly across cate-
gories: once they are fixed, there are patterns of propriety to be observed.
What is predicated in the category of substance cannot be appropriately
predicated in the category of quality, for example. One can agree with this
– given a fixed set of categories. However, it is not an argument against
change in the categories, an argument denying that different specifications
can be made relative to a different set. Likewise, the claim that the rules of
grammar exhaust logical space doesn’t work as an argument against the
view that there may be different systems of grammatical rules constituting
different logical spaces. They constitute the space of meaning, but that
doesn’t mean that the space of meaning is unchanged and fixed. Gaskin has
to assume that it is in order to draw the contradiction – but that assumes as
a premise the very conclusion he is seeking to defend. The situation is anal-
ogous to a famous fallacious argument in Aquinas about the fixity of the
past.41 Aquinas holds that to deny the fixity of the past is to commit oneself
to a contradiction. To say that the Battle of Clontarf didn’t happen in 1014
but in 1013 is to assert p and not-p, since the Battle of Clontarf happened in
1014 and also on whatever the new date is. However, this assumes still that
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the past is indeed fixed, taking as a premise that which is the conclusion.
Gaskin commits the same error in this argument.
Furthermore, it seems exegetically incorrect to read Wittgenstein as
endorsing a view that meaning is fixed, that rules of grammar cannot
change. He says

There are countless kinds of sentences … And this multiplicity is not

something fixed, given once for all; but new types of language, new
language games, as we may say, come into existence, and others
become obsolete and get forgotten.42

Such a dynamic picture of language must assume that rules change, that the
logical space changes. Yet Gaskin has used the compelling example of
something being incapable of being red and green all over, given what we
mean by red and green. He notes that attempts by Waissmann to explain the
possibility of this just seem to fail and that it is a test-case of the intelligibility
of Wittgenstein’s position. One might agree that given the current meanings
of red and green it doesn’t make sense, but there is no prohibition on those
meanings changing – perhaps in response to the physical circumstances of
the world. Hacker, discussing this example, says,

It is unthinkable, we rightly say, that something should be red and

green all over simultaneously, and we think wrongly here that we have
a necessary fact of nature. But in a world in which everything was
iridescent and opalescent, shimmering and ‘changing colour’ (as we
would say) every moment and from every angle of vision, our colour
grammar would be useless. [The] grammar [of the inhabitants of such
a world] would not be correct or incorrect any more than ours is. But
it would, in those circumstances, be more useful than ours.43

I have disagreed, somewhat, with Hacker’s approach in suggesting that such

grammar could be justified as a pragmatic account of the a priori, but agree
with him against Gaskin in countenancing such a possibility.

8 Conclusion
Wittgenstein seems to endorse a large number of relativistic theses in his
later thought. Many think of him in this manner and use him to champion
relativistic positions. However, when one distinguishes the different kinds
of relativistic positions and examines his texts, his views do not emerge as
radically relativistic. He allows for conceptual diversity and for the possibil-
ity of expressing alternative (but non-contradictory) ontologies. There is a
multiplicity possible in the conceptual systems by which we think about real-
ity – but there isn’t relativism about truth, incommensurability, or radical
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relativism about rationality. Wittgenstein has offered a genuinely novel way

of thinking about the relation of concepts to reality and the nature of a priori
knowledge. However, given the excessive ways in which such ideas have
been developed in the latter part of the twentieth century, it is useful to
recall the motto Wittgenstein gave to the Philosophical Investigations, taken
from Nestroy:

It is in the nature of every advance, that it appears much greater than

it actually is.44

Trinity College Dublin, Ireland

Notes
1 See, for example, D. Z. Phillips, Faith and Philosophical Inquiry (London: Rout-
ledge, 1970) for an initial statement, and for a later reconsideration of his views,
‘Religious Beliefs and Language-Games’, in Wittgenstein and Religion (London:
Macmillan, 1993).
2 Peter Winch, ‘Understanding a Primitive Society’, in Bryan R. Wilson (ed.)
Rationality (Oxford: Blackwell, 1974).
3 PI 7.
4 PI 122.
5 Z 447.
6 PI 23.
7 PI 217.
8 PR, p. 332.
9 RFM, p. 122.
10 RFM, p. 255.
11 OC 96–7.
12 PI II, p. 223.
13 Z 383, 387.
14 RFGB, p. 119.
15 PR, p. 7.
16 e.g. NB 83, PR, Foreword, PI 109, 144.
17 PI 122.
18 Hans Johann Glock, Wittgenstein Dictionary (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), p. 126.
19 Robert Kirk, Relativism and Reality (London: Routledge, 1999).
20 Hilary Putnam, Renewing Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1992).
21 Ibid., p. 172.
22 Cyril Barrett, Wittgenstein on Ethics and Religious Belief (Oxford: Blackwell,
1991).
23 Ibid., p. 157.
24 I draw here on the analysis of cognitive relativism given in Paul O’Grady, Rela-
tivism (Chesham: Acumen, 2002).
25 See ibid., section 2.1 for more details.
26 RFM, p. 377.
27 OC 336.
28 Z 357.

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29 PI II, p. 223.
30 PI 241.
31 PI 206.
32 RFGB, p. 119.
33 OC 422.
34 PI 251.
35 PI 217.
36 OC 204.
37 RFM, p. 92.
38 RFM, p. 353.
39 OC 475.
40 Richard Gaskin, ‘Nonsense and Necessity in Wittgenstein’s Mature Philosophy’,
in R. Gaskin (ed.) Grammar in Early Twentieth Century Philosophy (London:
Routledge, 2001).
41 Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, Ia, q.25, a.4, ‘Can God make what had
been not to have been?’
42 PI 23.
43 Insight and Illusion, revised edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), pp.
189–90.
44 PI, p. viii.

Abbreviations of Wittgenstein’s works

NB Notebooks 1914–1916, 2nd edn, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1979
OC On Certainty, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1969
PI Philosophical Investigations, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1953
PR Philosophical Remarks, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1975
RFGB ‘Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough’, in J. Klagge and A. Nord-
mann (eds) Ludwig Wittgenstein: Philosophical Occasions 1912–
1951, Indianapolis: Hackett, 1993
RFM Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics, 3rd edn, Oxford:
Basil Blackwell, 1978
TLP Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, London: Routledge, 1974
Z Zettel, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1967

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