Recently Published Book Spotlight: Conventional Realism and Political Inquiry

This edition of the Recently Published Book Spotlight is an essay by author John Gunnell about his most recent work, Conventional Realism and Political Inquiry: Channeling Wittgenstein. Following the essay, the book’s table of contents is provided for those wishing to know more about the book’s structure.

The Case for Conventional Realism

This book is, most broadly, an exploration of the relationship between social science and philosophy, but, more specifically, my argument focuses on the impact of representational philosophy on the discipline of political science as well as on social inquiry in general. What I refer to as “representational philosophy” is the tradition that seeks to explain the foundations of knowledge and address the issue of how the mind accesses the world and how the world impacts the mind. It assumes, however, that mind and reality do not make direct contact and are mediated by representations. I offer a critique of this philosophical tradition and of what I refer to in general as forms of “mentalism” and “realism,” that is, the claims that thought precedes language and that our specific reality claims are reflections of, and grounded in, a transcendental reality.  

I argue that the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein constitutes the basis of a powerful challenge to this tradition and that this challenge was sustained in the work of Gilbert Ryle, John Austin, and Wilfrid Sellars as well as, in some respects, the work of contemporary philosophers such as Donald Davidson, Hilary Putnam, John McDowell, and Daniel Dennett. But some of these later philosophers, including, maybe most prominently, Richard Rorty (Philosophy and the Mirror” (1979), have found it difficult to extricate themselves fully from the dilemmas of representationalism. Although some such as John Searle and Charles Taylor, whose arguments might have been considered as a defense of representationalism, have begun to voice reservations about this persuasion, they have largely attempted to explain the problems away rather than confront the underlying assumptions.

Political scientists have typically focused on the problem of understanding social actors in terms of what is in their “mind,” but, just as in the case of philosophy, the “mind” has remained an elusive construct, along with the whole vocabulary of mental objects such as concepts, thoughts, and beliefs. Similarly, the concept of reality as a basis for understanding and judging social practices has remained both vague and contested. Drawing on Wittgenstein, I argue, however, that everything we designate as “real” is rendered conventionally, which entails a rejection of the widely accepted distinction between what is natural and what is conventional. We never confront nature other than as what at any particular time is conceived in the conventions of science, religion, commonsense, and various other human practices. While words such as “reality” and “mind” have many uses in our vocabulary, they do not refer to any particular thing. Principal voices in Western philosophy have, however, embraced the assumptions that language is the vehicle of thought and that reality claims are secondary representations of an ultimately unrepresentable reality. The beliefs in metaphysical reality and the priority of mind have ancient roots, but they were most systematically expressed, and handed down to us, in the work of sixteenth and seventeenth century philosophers such as Descartes, Locke, and Kant.

It is important to understand why and how mentalism and realism came to influence the theory and practice of political science and other social sciences. In the United States, the social sciences emerged from two main tributaries: the nineteenth century university curriculum in moral philosophy and civics; and social reform movements. These led to the creation of the American Social Science Association, which consisted of various supporters of everything from civil service reform to the eradication of hoof and mouth disease, and it included members of the clergy, business people, and academicians.  The ASSA eventually separated into distinct academic associations representing diverse fields of study, and this eventually contributed to the demise of the ASSA as an umbrella organization. The practical agenda of the ASSA had initially claimed authority on the basis of religious and moral grounds, but by the late nineteenth century, science had begun to emerge as a basis of social authority, and the social sciences gravitated to the academy in search of scientific status that would yield practical purchase. But there they were faced with conflicting demands: scholarship versus social reform. While the American Historical Association and the American Economics Association became increasingly conservative, the American Political Science Association retained a critical perspective and was formed (1903) to pursue a Progressive agenda. Because the APSA did not have any particular political standing, it claimed epistemic privilege on the basis of its claim to be a science. This, however, paradoxically moved it away from the audience to which it wished to speak but also reinforced its attempt to find a philosophical foundation for justifying its claim to science.

For most of the twentieth century, logical positivism/logical empiricism was the reigning philosophical account of science and consequently at the core of the evolution of political science. Positivism, however, was a philosophy of science and not necessarily a description of scientific practice. Most social scientists did not have any extensive direct knowledge of natural science, and consequently it was actually from the philosophy of science that they, as well their critics, drew methodological support.  As a consequence, debates in political science often run in tandem with debates in philosophy. Although I claim that social scientists have often been misled by their reliance on philosophy, philosophical reflection on social inquiry is important not only with respect to its epistemic relationship to its subject matter but its practical relationship. Unlike the case of natural science, in which natural facts are defined internally by scientific theories, social science studies autonomous human practices to which it also potentially has a practical relationship. Although this practical relationship obtains in the case all the social sciences, it has historically in the case of political science taken on an increased sense of urgency. Politics, unlike, for example, the study of culture by anthropologists, is a concrete social practice that has often resisted intellectual intervention.

Wittgenstein began his Philosophical Investigations with a critique of St. Augustine’s claim in the Confessions that, as a baby, he had thoughts but was unable to express them until he had learned language. Although this basic assumption about the relationship between thought and language has continued to persist in philosophy, a central argument in Wittgenstein’s work was that thought was basically the internalization of language and that when we acquire language, we acquire a conception of reality that is embedded in that language. I argue that rather than a mysterious source and repository of prelinguistic meaning, the “mind” is simply our linguistic capacities. Children first learn to talk and later learn to internalize speech. Most crudely put, we can say that thought is simply silent speech. The common assumption, even supported by the typical dictionary, is that “mind” refers to a place or space in which thinking takes place and where things such as motives, intentions, beliefs, and concepts reside. My argument is that there is no such “place” as the mind and the mental objects that are assumed to populate it and that there is no transcendental reality. In order to illustrate concretely the impact of representionalism on political science I focus on the mentalistic account of concepts, which I counter with the claim that concepts are actually forms of linguistic usage. Among the subfields of political science, students of international relations have most assiduously sought a realist ground of explanation and judgment, and I focus on the recent turn in this field to forms of metaphysical realism. 

There is a definite history of the concepts of mind and thought. While Plato said that thought was the soul having a conversation with itself, which would seem to equate thought with language, Aristotle said that everyone has the same pre-linguistic thoughts even if expressed in different languages.  Descartes viewed the mind as an immaterial substance containing ideas that were secondary reflections of a deeper but inaccessible reality, and Locke claimed that the mind was a blank slate filled in with sensations or simple ideas produced by exposure to the material world; George Berkeley drew what might seem the idealist logical conclusion of this line of argument and claimed that the mind was where reality resided. Kant, however, in his attempt to bridge empiricism and idealism, argued that the mind contained organizing intuitions that ordered impressions imposed by an external but, in itself, unknowable, reality.  

I assume that my challenge to realism and mentalism will evoke significant opposition among both philosophers and social scientists, but I also assume that it cuts against the grain of everyday assumptions about mind and reality. Despite the growing criticism of representationalism, it is still defended by philosophers such as Jerry Fodor and others such as Noam Chomsky and Steven Pinker who embrace a form of traditional realism and posit what they refer to as “mentalese” or a language of thought that precedes our acquisition of natural languages.

People are led astray when they believe that things such as motive and intent are mental events that explain what people say and do and when they assume that reality is something more than what at any particular point is accepted as knowledge in various human practices. For at least two decades, there has been a strong argument, advanced by many cognitive scientists, claiming that the mind is actually the brain, but this work is misleading because it has simply transferred the functions once associated with the mind to the brain and left the problems associated with the traditional view of the mind as mysterious as ever. Searle, a strong proponent of the traditional view, has conceded that the brain precedes the mind, but he claims that the mind is an emergent nonmaterial property of the brain. I argue that It is neither the mind nor the brain that thinks but a human being as a whole and that this is manifest especially in the faculty of speech.

Some readers may interpret my argument as a form of linguistic idealism and as a denial of reality which together are an invitation to relativism. My argument, however, is not that language creates reality but rather that it is only in the conventions of language that reality is manifest. As Wittgenstein said, we cannot use language to get outside language.

The last chapter of my book deals in detail with an essay by the philosopher Cora Diamond. In 1951, she published the Realistic Spirit: Wittgenstein, Philosophy, and the Mind in which she appeared to be distinguishing his work from traditional forms of realism. But subsequently she appeared to move steadily toward reinterpreting him as embracing a form of realism that provided a basis for what she referred to as “Criticizing from the Outside” and that would ground critical judgment and overcome relativism. But this interpretation seemed to go against Wittgenstein’s claim that “philosophy leaves everything as it is.” I do not interpret his claim as a relinquishment of philosophy as a critical endeavor, but it was a rejection of philosophy as a super-science that can exceed reality claims  in a variety of human practices. This is what led me in my 2014 book to argue that philosophy and social science are both second-order endeavors devoted to understanding and interpreting social practices and therefore both are forms of social inquiry rather than adventures in epistemology and metaphysics.      

Although the original impetus for undertaking this book was to address certain problems in the field of political science, I began to realize in the course of writing and revising the manuscript that  my fundamental concern was less with political science than the conversation of philosophy and with challenging what arguably was still the dominance of various forms of representationalism. By my argument for conventional realism, I hope to provide a distinctive counter to that philosophical tradition and draw out the implications of Wittgenstein’s image of philosophical inquiry, which seems to have been increasingly diminished in the contemporary philosophical literature and curriculum.

Table of Contents

1. Representational Philosophy and Conventional Realism

2. Mentalism and the Problem of Concepts

3. The Realistic Imagination in Political Inquiry: The Case of International Relations

4. The Challenge to Representational Philosophy: Wittgenstein, Ryle, and Austin

5. Contemporary Anti-representationalism: Sellars, Davidson, Putnam, McDowell, and Dennett

6. Presentation and Representation in Social Inquiry

7. Conventional Realism

8. The Quest for the Real and the Fear of Relativism

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The purpose of the Recently Published Book Spotlight is to disseminate information about new scholarship to the field, explore the motivations for authors’ projects, and discuss the potential implications of the books. Our goal is to cover research from a broad array of philosophical areas and perspectives, reflecting the variety of work being done by APA members. If you have a suggestion for the series, please contact us here.

John Gunnell

John G. Gunnell is Distinguished Professor Emeritus, State University of New York at Albany. Recent books include Conventional Realism and Political Inquiry: Channeling Wittgenstein (University of Chicago Press, 2020); History, Discourses, and Disciplines, (Routledge Series on Innovators in Political Theory, 2016); Social Inquiry After Wittgenstein and Kuhn: Leaving Everything As It Is (Columbia University Press, 2014); Conventional Realism and Political Inquiry: Channeling Wittgenstein (Chicago University Press, 2020).

His early work was in the history of political philosophy (e.g., Political Philosophy and Time: Plato and the Origins of Political Vision, 1968, 1987), but he subsequently specialized in the philosophy and history of social science (e.g., The Descent of Political Theory: The Genealogy of an American Vocation (University of Chicago Press, 1993); Imagining the American Polity: The Orders of Discourse: Philosophy, Social Science, and Politics (Rowman and Littlefield,1998); Political Science and the Discourse of Democracy (Penn State University Press 2004).