Wittgenstein and the Politics of Persuasion
Abstract: I provide a long-form reading of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s notion of “rule-following,” the difference between “convincing” and “persuading,” and the concept of “doubt.” I further provide a reading of how to convert another viz. Wittgenstein’s “King Game” and relate this reading to some uptakes of Wittgenstein in contemporary political theory.
I. Harman and the Paradox of Belief
Late in his work Thought, Gilbert Harman invites the reader to confront a particularly slippery paradox of inference. Acting as both claimant and rejoinder, Harman designs what we might term a “game of belief.” Harman structures this game as follows:
‘If I know that h is true, I know that any evidence against h is evidence against something that is true; so I know that such evidence is misleading. So, once I know that h is true, I am in a position to disregard any future evidence that seems to tell against h.’ This is paradoxical, because I am never in a position simply to disregard any future evidence even though I do know a great many different things.[1]
Harman answers this paradox by assuming that it isn’t a paradox at all, that in fact what is in part wrong with supposing this problem is a denial of all the potential forms of evidence that may counteract or overturn my original belief. Though Harman will admit that “It is not at all clear what distinguishes evidence that undermines knowledge from evidence that does not,”[2] he nevertheless proposes a possible principle that, when applied, may offer an escape from this challenge. In Harman’s words, “One may infer a conclusion only if one also infers that there is no undermining evidence one does not possess.”[3] Pursuing this logic leads us into an infinite regress of certainty, such that before we can commit to inferring h, we would first have to establish the grounds—that is, establish that there is “no undermining evidence—for our grounds for inferring h, and then the grounds of these grounds, and so forth. To avoid this, Harman amends his principle by framing it within a greater concept—one that must take the inference of h and the grounds for h’s inference to be simultaneous operations co-extensive in the same conceptual system. As Harman notes,
we infer that there is not only no undermining evidence to h but also no undermining evidence to the whole conclusion. In other words, all legitimate inductive conclusions take the form of a self-referential conjunction whose first conjunct is h and whose second conjunct (usually left implicit) is the claim that there is no undermining evidence to the whole conjunction.[4]
In this framework, we are asked to commit ourselves to certain articulable principles that we can and ought to follow, and it supposes that it is in the careful introduction of certain reasons and examples of evidence that the capacity to alter something like a sedimented belief in h arises.
I am, in short, unconvinced of this particular “dream of Enlightenment,” and find that it lacks purchase when actually asked to “touch ground” amidst real political relations. I do not believe that it “works.”
Simply put, there exist systems of belief exceptionally resilient to contrary evidence. These systems are composed of structures of activity and are embedded in certain practices, against which the application of Harman’s principle becomes mute. I might say to the fundamentalist or dogmatist, for instance: “Your belief is an unacceptable form of inference; it does not sufficiently clothe itself in the kinds-of reasons by which both your commitment to certain beliefs (h) and your overall frame (let us say a belief in the will of God) would permit legitimate inference.”[5] “So be it,” responds the fundamentalist, “the Lord works in mysterious ways.” And so the argument rings around itself in endless concentric circles: one applying theoretical standards the other refuses to acknowledge as standards whatsoever, one operating by rules that remain opaque to the other’s world view, and so forth. Reasons give out, foundations reaffirm themselves, and the two opposing camps fade into a trench-warfare of the intellect. As Ludwig Wittgenstein says, “The confusions which occupy us arise when language is like an engine idling, not when it is doing work.”[6] Such are these moments between an atheist and a fundamentalist: they stand as an “engine idling,” going nowhere other than retreating deeper into their own sedimented beliefs.
I want to take Wittgenstein seriously on this point and ask what it may look like to alter someone’s system of belief—that is, what it may look like to convert a commitment to h into a commitment to x. I want to know how to turn an idling engine into an operative one, how to animate a force of change and further how to corral that force and drive it in particular direction. Harman simply does not offer viable resources in undertaking this change in commitment, and instead falls victim to Wittgenstein’s injunction that “A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably.”[7] This “picture” is, for Wittgenstein, the frame of reference brought about by the positivist mode of philosophy, and in particular how that philosophy conceives and analyzes the basic properties of linguistic phenomena. Under this conception, the “inexorable repetition” is nothing short of a kind-of prison, holding us “captive” to a way of looking at things that itself limits our functional ability to do and achieve various activities. It is in this way that Wittgenstein, and later Stanley Cavell, will call this response to the traditionalist/positivist mode a type of “therapeutic” activity; philosophy becomes a way of purging one’s view of the world of its illusions, and in so doing encourages new vistas of reality to emerge. It is a sort-of turning-toward reality as such, an exploration into the very practices that sustain our thought. If, as Benjamin Whorf suggests, “The mind is the great slayer of the real,”[8] and if this is precisely the self-induced captivity brought about by the mode of philosophizing that Harman stands charged of perpetrating, then the shift to ordinary language philosophy invites us to conceive of the “real” as it actually is, unencumbered by the perversions that our taxonomic representations of the world impose upon it.
There is thus something fundamentally askew in the mode of Harman’s inquiry; it fails to respond in basic human ways to basic human disagreements. It cannot provide us with an adequate way of responding to the problem it has itself sought to define, in part because its “image” of language—and its relation to use—suffers from the desire to “get outside of” the very “picture” of thought it paints. So let us not try to escape in this manner, but rather to readjust our frame of reference in order to cultivate novel resources (in the form of real strategies and activities) that enable us to more effectively challenge and persuade one another. There will of course be those who argue that such a change cannot be brought about consciously at all, and that even restating the problem in separate terms—say, in Wittgenstein’s ordinary language philosophy—would be a step in the wrong direction and a misreading of Wittgenstein’s project entirely. I would say: “so that is your version of belief in h—and I will try to show you how it could be otherwise.”
II. Ordinary Language Philosophy, Rule-Following and Persuasion
Edward Sapir sums up the shift from Harman’s mode of philosophy to something like ordinary language philosophy rather nicely. As opposed to the focus on the metaphysical and logical elements of grammar, this shift may be characterized as a profound—and yet still simple—move from treating language as a logical series of abstracted, interlocking rules and toward seeing language as a kind-of human, embodied practice prone to alteration. “Language exists only in so far as it is actually used—spoken and heard, written and read. What significant changes take place in it must exist, to begin with, as individual variations.”[9] The criticism of the traditionalist mode runs deeper than this, particularly in identifying its incapacity to account for the force of our grammatical rules. “As long as we think of understanding in the old intellectualist fashion, as residing in thoughts or representations,” writes Charles Taylor, “it is hard to explain how we can know how to follow a rule or in any way to behave rightful without having the thoughts which would justify this behavior as right.”[10] He offers a way out of this conundrum, suggesting that when we speak of “rules” in our language (and hence in the manner by which we come to understand and “know” the things we understand and “know”), we are already in the business of using the very rules we seek to address; to put it another way, “the ‘rule’ lies essentially in the practice. The rule is what is animating the practice at any given time, not some formulation behind it, inscribed in our thoughts or our brains or our genes or whatever.”[11]
And so we turn to the facticity of lived experience as the grounds for our grounds of rule-following. To invoke the possibility of a given “rule” is to already employ a kind-of rule in the invocation; it is to announce our position from a particular vantage point—that is, in our ability to announce any position at all. In this manner, “Thought, language, now appear to us as the unique correlate, picture, of the world. These concepts: proposition, languages, thought, world stand in line one behind the other, each equivalent to each.”[12] It does not suffice to pervert this “one behind the other” into the abstract thought-games of Harman, for it is in this particular framing of language as an autonomous system that the majority of our philosophical confusions arise. Wittgenstein continues:
What length is cannot be defined by the method of determining length.—To think like this is to make a mistake….What ‘determining the length’ means is not learned by learning what length and determining are; the meaning of the word ‘length’ is learnt by learning, among other things, what it is to determine length.[13]
To follow a rule is to already be engaged in a kind-of practice; it is to actively be pursuing a particular use, informed, as it were, by the innumerable other practices we are potentially capable of also pursuing. “And hence also ‘obeying a rule’ is a practice,” Wittgenstein observes, “And to think one is obeying a rule is not to obey a rule. Hence it is not possible to obey a rule ‘privately’: otherwise thinking one was obeying a rule would be the same thing as obeying it.”[14] Though I will not take up the problem of “private language” or “private rule following” here, it is essential to recognize rule following as an extant practice that is animated in its capacity to be shared: to follow a rule is to always and already co-implicate its expressivity within a shared domain.
Besides this requisite of shared activity, the rule is not something that strikes me “as a rule.” “When I obey a rule, I do not choose. I obey the rule blindly,”[15] suggests Wittgenstein. The moment of interpretation, augmented by theorists of foundationalism a la Derrida in his Force of Law essay, is a misinvocation of the actual practice of rule-following. It is not that I stand back from the rule, contemplate its use, and then decide upon what I will do next—there is, rather, something immediate about my apprehension, insofar as that apprehension is part of the very rule-following that I may try, wrongly, to decouple from my framing of the question in the first place. Embedded in the very way I go about the world are the rules that structure that way; to speak of a rule is to necessarily speak from the perspective of a given universe of interconnected rules. It is in this way that Wittgenstein collapses the traditionalist mode of “interpreting” language phenomena, and offers an alternative way of seeing co-extensive with our ability to “see” at all:
“If you demand a rule from which it follows that there can’t have been a miscalculation here, the answer is that we did not learn this through a rule, but by learning to calculate.”[16]
“We got to know the nature of calculating by learning to calculate.”[17]
We learn through use, and our very learning is a kind-of use in itself. But it is here, too, that the interconnectivity of rules should be stressed further. Our practices, and our learning of practices, are not separable, but “stand behind” one another in a total system of activity. Our rules do not stand in abstract abeyance, to be called forth and investigated at will. Rather, they exist as a part of a dense network of interconnected activities, uses, and thoughts; we cannot go about disentangling this web, for to do so would be to already employ a number of the rules we are supposedly committed to analyzing. Recasting Harman’s notion of the “self-referential conjunction” as a systematized web of mutually-informing practices, Wittgenstein offers a key observation:
All testing, all confirmation and disconfirmation of a hypothesis takes place already with a system. And this system is not a more or less arbitrary and doubtful point of departure for all our arguments: no, it belongs to the essence of what we call an argument. The system is not so much the point of departure, as the element in which arguments have their life.”[18]
As the “element in which arguments have their life,” this “system” is the dense interdependence of our rules and our rule-following. We play our “language-games” against the inherited backcloth of a full system of practice and meaning; “When we first to begin to believe anything, what we believe is not a single proposition, it is a whole system of propositions. (Light dawns gradually over the whole.)”[19] Wittgenstein continues: “It is not single axioms that strike me as obvious, it is a system in which consequences and premises give one another mutual support.”[20]
Attempts to separate propositions from this system—to hold them up to an autonomous analyticity—are attempts that forget the grounds for their very ability to attempt anything at all. David Cerbone reads Wittgenstein on this point:
the futility of trying to specify the facts independently of language is shown by the fact that we have to use language in any such specification. Insofar as we have adopted a point of view, or occupy a perspective, we have not moved beyond, or outside of, our concepts; we continue to employ them insofar as we have a point of view at all.[21]
To speak of rules at all is to utilize rules in the speaking of those rules. As we struggle to find some means of an “outside” by which we can draw a better vantage point as to what occurs “within” our language, this struggle is itself a measure of language responding to its own use. Rules, and our following of them, do not exist in a vacuum: “What stands fast does so, not because it is intrinsically obvious or convincing; it is rather held fast by what lies around it.”[22] To destabilize a concept entails destabilizing a whole way of seeing the world, a whole manner of approaching practice as such. This “as such” refers not only to the actuality of practices as they embed our capacities to reason and learn, but to the mode by which any proposition we make is a use of language dependent on a vast grid of mutually-supporting images of the world. “What I hold fast to is not one proposition but a nest of propositions.”[23] It is in admitting this that we begin to turn Harman’s notion of self-referential conjuncts into a real picture of lived activity; any assault on h is necessarily an assault on the various practices that inform and support h, starting, as it were, with the very foundational assumptions that enable any belief (let alone a belief in h) to emerge. To this end, something seemingly as disparate and unrelated as a belief in the existence of the world may inform our ability to conceptually assault—or, conversely, to conceptually defend—a belief in h: “The existence of the earth is rather part of the whole picture which forms the starting-point of belief for me.”[24]
Returning to the “starting point of belief” is not some intellectual slight-of hand aimed at reorienting our focus toward the grounds of reasoning, but constitutes an investigation into our ability to reason in this or that way at all. To this end, Wittgenstein is able to respond to his would-be interlocutor on the topic of how rules inform our notions of “what is true and what is false”: “‘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.”[25] An “agreement” in a “form of life”: behind our capacities to give and receive reasons, behind our abilities to use language to complete certain ends, behind our “rule following,” even, stands the tacit framework of pure existing-among—that is, a framework composed of sharing a way of living with others. It is this shared framework that constitutes the totalizing “system” that Wittgenstein sees as animating any propositional use.
One way to look at this is to imagine a child’s “why?” game. Let us suppose there is a toddler who, on the verge of becoming annoying, responds to every injunction by an adult with “why?” So it begins: “go get your coat”—“why?”—“because if you don’t, you’ll catch a cold”—“why?”—“because it is cold outside”—“why?”—“because…” We can imagine this game getting to the point—rather quickly—where the adult’s answers fold back upon themselves, and he/she begins to respond to the child: “because that is how we understand it in our language” or “because that is the way we use our language.” We follow the thread of reasons down to the bottom of the well, and then seek to understand what the bottom might look like. We come to see that there is not just one bottom of one well, but a whole series of bottoms overlapping and informing one-another. After a while, our grounds of reason-giving seem to give way to something much more difficult to articulate, but which nonetheless makes our ability to articulate a feasible human activity. Wittgenstein posits this experience rather poetically: “If I have exhausted the justifications, I have reached bedrock and my spade is turned. Thus I am inclined to say: ‘This is simply what I do.’”[26] He offers a similar picture of foundations later in his work: “I have arrived at the rock bottom of my convictions. And one might almost say that these foundation-walls are carried by the whole house.”[27]
But to speak of the “whole house” is to hardly be able to speak of anything at all. That is, our foundations are not a series of propositions that yield themselves to articulable communication, nor are they grasped in the deployment of reasons and reason-giving. Wittgenstein’ sees reasons, then, as the fomented surface activity of an “inexpressible” frame of reference: “Perhaps what is inexpressible (what I find mysterious and am not able to express) is the background against which whatever I could express has its meaning.”[28] The grounds of our reason-giving are not reasons in and of themselves, but the ineffable content of a way of living, made expressible through no act of communication but rather in the immediate commitment to pursuing particular practices.
It is with this foundational use-value of language in tow, one that sees these “foundations” intrinsically connected to the structure of the whole “house,” that Wittgenstein is able to launch a response to Moore’s (in)famous proposition “I know these are my hands.” What is at stake in Moore’s utterance, and in Wittgenstein’s reading of Moore’s utterance, is the very nature of “certainty.” If beneath our reasons stand not reasons, but a shared “form of life,” opaque to the extent that it is total, ineffable to the extent that it is invoked in any moment of invocation writ large, then what would it mean to be “certain” about anything? What are the uses of the word “know,” and how do these uses correspond to certain undisclosed assumptions about our picture of the world? If our interlocutor were to confess a certainty in h, then how do we go about understanding and potentially reworking this certainty?
III. On Doubting: From Convincing to Persuading
Wittgenstein arrives at his overturning of Moore’s statement by way of doubt. He effectively asks: “under what conditions would me doubting that these are my hands carry any meaning? Under what conditions would this doubt ever be reasonable?” It is a “belief,” rather than a reason, that seems to lie at bedrock; to doubt that “these are my hands” is to doubt the validity of any number of potential language-games—it is to call into question the very fabric of our lived experience. “But I did not get my picture of the world by satisfying myself of its correctness,” argues Wittgenstein, “nor do I have it because I am satisfied of its correctness. No: it is the inherited background against which I distinguish between true and false.”[29] To question what it might mean to know that these are my hands becomes an effectively meaningless statement, if only because to doubt such a proposition would seemingly be to doubt the ability to make any convincing proposition whatsoever. This leads Wittgenstein to use the “doubting game” to establish certain boundaries—boundaries that may be alterable over time, and hence never fully “closed,” but boundaries that nevertheless stabilize any use of language therein. As such,
If you tried to doubt everything you would not get so far as doubting anything. The game of doubting itself presupposes certainty.[30]
If someone doubted whether the earth had existed a hundred years ago, I should not understand, for this reason: I would not know what such a person would still allow to be counted as evidence and what not.”[31]
To doubt that “these are my hands” is hollowed of all meaning precisely because it begs how exactly “meaning” is being used by the doubting party. If this is not a limit of certainty, then there is no clear picture as to what ever could be. There must be, in other words, a functional limit that one takes as given before “doubting” is a practicable activity. That is, if I can doubt that these are my hands, then the very nature of “evidence” (as used by both Harman and Wittgenstein) is itself called into question; we are asked to question the grounds of our grounds of questioning. “That is to say, the questions that we raise and our doubts depend on the fact that some propositions are exempt from doubt, are as it were like hinges on which those turn.”[32] To take this view of doubt seriously is to admit that certain propositions remain “undoubtable,” “exempt” from our philosophical therapy insofar as to doubt such propositions would be to rescind the tools of philosophy entirely. The simple counterfactual cannot be regarded as a feasible statement—at least, not in context of our “form of life” as it stands. Wittgenstein thus charges us to “Ask, not: ‘What goes on in us when we are certain that….?’—but: How is ‘the certainty that this is the case’ manifested in human action?”[33]
Certainty of this kind, Wittgenstein remarks, draws us out of validating propositions along autonomous truth-criteria and into something like a cultural context, an inherited framework in which one sees the world as one sees it, “as something that lies beyond being justified or unjustified; as it were, as something animal.”[34]
It is at this juncture that Wittgenstein drives a wedge between convincing and persuading. This divergence might also be called the difference between knowing and believing. Or, to put it otherwise, it would seem that knowing presupposes believing: “We know that the earth is round. We have definitely ascertained that it is round. We shall stick to this opinion, unless our whole way of seeing nature changes. ‘how do you know that?’—I believe it.”[35] I might say I “know” the earth to be round by pointing to a series of facts, to a number of measurements and calculations listed within the “scientific method” and its associated criteria for using the word “know.” But it is here that my faith in that method is what grounds the ability of those facts to act as vehicles of meaning at all. “Knowing” is a kind-of practice within a horizon of believing; it is in this way that “I say with passion “I know that this is a foot”—but what does it mean?”[36] It means that I am committed to a certain way of seeing the world, and that commitment engenders a sequence of possible uses for “knowing” that assume a use-value only within a given index of criteria and judgment. But what stands behind that index? A form of passion, a manner of going about practices that, in their systematic codependency, create the very grounds for the way I go about separating criteria for “truth” and “falsehood”—criteria that form the very practices that by and through which I measure these standards. In an exemplary passage, Wittgenstein illustrates the foundational role of believing, taken as a manner of living: “It strikes me that a religious belief could only be something like a passionate commitment to a system of reference. Hence, although it’s belief, it’s really a way of living, or a way of assessing life. It’s passionately seizing hold of this interpretation.”[37]
And so we might see both the atheist and the fundamentalist as exhibiting a similar system of belief that roots itself in two very different standard of use. Both may share a “form of life,” and certainly they must if they hope to communicate and understand each other at all, but this in no way necessitates an identical framing of propositions drawn from that form of life. Their sharing is cut, so to speak, by different criteria. “What I know, I believe,”[38] asserts Wittgenstein: “The truth of certain empirical propositions belongs to our frame of reference.”[39] In this sense, the tools of reason-giving and convincing, relied upon in the contemporary deliberative Utopias of John Rawls and Jürgen Habermas, for instance, neglect the true foundations of knowledge: that is, the ungrounded grounds of belief.
Convincing thus yields to what Wittgenstein calls “persuasion”:
“I can imagine a man who had grown up in quite special circumstances and been taught that the earth came into being 50 years ago, and therefore believed this. We might instruct him: the earth has long…etc.—We should be trying to give him our picture of the world.
This would happen through a kind of persuasion.”[40]
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.”[41]
To “give him our picture of the world” after our “reasons” fall through must take the form of something other than reasons entirely. But how does one go about “persuading”? Is this to engage another on an emotional register, to “show” another enough alternative “pictures” that they cannot help but see the world differently, to invoke the “sublime” as a tool that may “shock” subjects into a different mode of acting?[42] Persuasion seems to run deeper than this, even, insofar as the practice of persuasion aims at undermining fundamental commitments to a given frame of reference. We need, that is, to cultivate a manner of behaving such that we may approach the man who says: “‘If I am wrong about this, I have no guarantee that anything I say is true,’”[43] or he who asserts: ““Nothing in the world will convince me of the opposite!” For me this fact is at the bottom of all knowledge. I shall give up other things but not this.”[44] With the tools of convincing, we act as miners armed with toothpicks chipping away at an adamantine base; it is only be means of persuasion, in the complete overhaul of a mode of seeing, that we might hope to split the bedrock and shake the foundation.
Wittgenstein continues, refashioning what I see to be the core of Harman’s paradox reformed in the soil of ordinary language philosophy:
However, we can ask: May someone have telling grounds for believing that the earth has only existed for a short time, say since his own birth?—Suppose he had always been told that,--Would he have any good reason to doubt it? Men have believed that they could make rain; why should not a king be brought up in the belief that the world began with him? And if Moore and this king were to meet and discuss, could Moore really prove his belief to be the right one? I do not say that Moore could not convert the king to his view, but it would be a conversion of a special kind; the king would be brought to look at the world in a different way.
Remember that one is sometimes convinced of the correctness of a view by its simplicity or symmetry, i.e., these are what induce one to go over to this point of view on then simply says something like: ‘That’s how it must be.’[45]
Here we have a king who believes that the world began with his birth—a belief, let us say, in h. The “conversion of a special kind” cannot be one of convincing—that is, one that goes about producing new reason-based evidence to the contrary. By definition, the king will reject this on the grounds of his passionate belief that h is a meaningful commitment. It is a matter, rather, of creating the space in which “Certain events would put him into a position in which he could not go on with the old language-game any further. In which he was torn away from the sureness of the game. Indeed, doesn’t it seem obvious that the possibility of a language-game is conditioned by certain facts?”[46] In this sense, “to have concepts is to live in particular ways,”[47] and to alter those concepts means altering the ways in which one lives; to alter those “certain facts” is to somehow tinker with the manner in which they present themselves as facts.
Wittgenstein acknowledges this:
Do I want to say, then, that certain facts are favorable to the formation of certain concepts; or again unfavorable? And does experience teach us this? It is a fact of experience that human beings alter their concepts, exchange them for others when they learn new facts; when in this way what was formerly important to them becomes unimportant, and vice versa.[48]
Is this to say that we go about changing our concepts when presented with new “facts”? But how, then, do “facts” and “evidence” differ? Aren’t “facts” embedded in a frame of reference, such that facts that run contrary to the system as it stands will still be disregarded as insufficient? While “experience teaches us” that “human beings alter their concepts” and “exchange” them, couldn’t we just as easily imagine someone who, presented with new “facts,” says: “these aren’t facts at all,” or “well, God works in mysterious ways…”? Wittgenstein continues:
The point is roughly this: that there is some anchorage of our concepts in ‘the facts’ does not preclude conceptual change, since ‘what the facts are’ is open to revision, alteration, and discovery. In saying this, I don’t mean to be endorsing any kind of relativism; rather, my aim is to emphasize the incompleteness of whatever facts there are, both in terms of what facts we know, but also in the sense that, we might say, ‘life goes on,’ and so that what facts there are forms an open-ended set.[49]
This property of “incompleteness”, apparently intrinsic to the very nature of the “facts”, seems to necessitate a certain openness toward experience by which the proposition “life goes on” stands as conceptual proxy for the notion that things can and will change. And yet, for the robustness of Wittgenstein’s overall philosophical arc, a sense of exactly how things “change,” or why when things “change” certain beliefs remain unaltered (this goes far beyond his division between a “mistake” and a “mental disturbance”), is comparatively limited. Wittgenstein will suggest again and again that alterations in a “form of life” may force alterations in one’s picture of the world, and he will admit that “If someone says that he will recognize no experience as proof of the opposite, that is after all a decision. It is possible that he will act against it.”[50]
This strikes me as an odd admission. On the one hand, the language Wittgenstein uses—“decision”—seems to indicate the possibility of a conscious commitment: a commitment that, if enough changes, one will have to reconsider. But doesn’t this land us squarely in the arena of convincing? To get someone to “act against” their decision would require them to undermine that decision with another decision; it is to provide enough evidence such that the alteration becomes a conscious effort. But with the right kind of alteration in a form of life, it seems that what occurs is less a conscious commitment/disavowal of a “decision” and more an incomparable assault on one’s ability to make conscious decisions in their bundled entirety. One can make a “decision” over matters of taste, for instance, but it would difficult to imagine a circumstance where one considers their relationship to God as built upon a “decision” (it is for this very reason that “decision” is replaced by “covenant,” etc.). If we take our “passionate commitment” as precisely that, and if it enters our picture of the world as merely a conscious image of a real way of living which in turn forms the basis of our ability to reject or admit certain experiences as “proof of the opposite,” then it is difficult to conceive how it is by way of a “decision” that one will modify the criteria by which “acceptable” and “unacceptable” facts are indexed. I would here ask how Wittgenstein means to use the word “decision,” and further how “decision” relates to persuasion.
One possible answer is introduced in Wittgenstein’s division between knowing and believing: “If someone believes something, we needn’t always be able to answer the question ‘why he believes it’; but if he knows something, then the question ‘how does he know?’ must be capable of being answered.”[51] It is perhaps here that the role of “decisions” coalesce with the use of the word “know”, for if we relate “decisions” to “knowing” then there ought to be some way by which we can articulate “proof” and answer the question “how do you know?” To put it in a different light: “One doubts on specific grounds. The question is this: how is doubt introduced into the language-game?”[52] Is this, then, to assume that “doubting” is strictly a conscious activity? Are there no doubts that relate rather to my “passionate commitment,” such that I may not be able to articulate my doubts, but am grasped by the human experience that something intangible is amiss or askew? Perhaps it is to this end that Wittgenstein will explicitly reject any single strategy for inducing doubt, and Cerbone will argue that “even though change is possible, it is not something we can bring about, in any robust sense.”[53]
IV. Persuading the King
I want to return to the case of the king and argue the opposite. It seems to me that there do exist certain tactics that one might rely upon to provoke transformation in another’s frame of reference. The way I see it, there are three ways to go about persuading the king. The first involves determining who the king might take as an “authority” on philosophical questions: we ought to ask who it was that first told this to the king, how many people there are who “play along” and reinforce it, what those people’s positions of power are in relation to the king, and so on. Wittgenstein will argue: “I learn an enormous amount and accepted it on human authority, and then I found some things confirmed or disconfirmed by my own experience.”[54] But “one’s own experience” can’t be decoupled from authority, as authority exists within one’s experience; certainly I may encounter events and phenomena that run contrary to experience, but this in no way explains the decidedly “closed” relationship between a devout believer and the “Holy Book,” the Pope, the Raj, etc. Even when encountering total contradictions, it is remarkable how resilient commitments can be; though it is a “fact” of human experience that people do alter their worldviews, it is another fact, equally as powerful, that others will follow their worldviews into death and beyond.
“But mightn’t a higher authority assure me that I don’t know the truth?” Wittgenstein begins, “So that I had to say ‘Teach me’? But then my eyes would have to be opened.”[55] There is here a preexisting will to have one’s eyes “open,” and requisite “openness” that asks to be taught. Certainly a “higher authority” can have an impact, but it is one that responds to a disposition already capable of accepting change. This is the case, for instance, in Ruth benedict’s Chrysanthemum and the Sword. Using her anthropological knowledge of Japanese socio-political structures, Benedict advised the US military engaged in WWII that, in order to alter the convictions of Japanese combatants willing to fight until the last man, it was simply a matter of forcing the emperor to admit defeat. Benedict perfectly located the central role of authority in the maintenance of certain fundamental commitments. “So is this it: I must recognize certain authorities in order to make judgments at all?”[56]—no doubt this is true, but there is nothing to suggest that an authority at the moment of one’s initial judgment will stand as equally as authoritative at a different point in time. Certainly Hirohito was in a rare position—one that our king would not have the luxury to respond to, in part because, being king, it is most likely that he sees himself as the locus of real authority.
The second mode we might pursue is mapping out the king’s system of belief. That is, we might ask: “what other things does the king believe that relate to the notion that the world began at his birth?” Does this king also believe that the alteration from day to night, night to day mirrors his own personal cycle of weariness/activity? Does he suppose that birds are insects with wings? Does he think that the bones he finds in the ground were placed there by some distant, wayward God? These might all sound silly, and certainly from the vantage point of most contemporary people they are; but we need to explore more fully what the system that suspends his belief in h actually looks like. He may reject evidence against h, but perhaps it is a matter then of tinkering with separate elements in his overall worldview, such that we may drill strategic holes in the dike of his picture and wait until enough pressure builds that it is washed away entirely.
Beside this, we ought to further inquire: “how are those various beliefs actually embedded in the king’s practice?” Does he celebrate his belief in h through rituals and ceremonies? Are there plays written by talented subjects that commend and reinforce h? Does he hold specific habits that are drawn specifically from this commitment? ‘To change one’s concepts means changing how one lives, what one takes to be important, what facts have priority. To change one’s concepts is to change the ‘flow’ of how one lives.”[57] To put it another way, “Political categories (and values) are a part of this all but inescapable web of ways of living, acting, and thinking, a network liable to change only as a result of radical changes in reality, or through dissociation from reality on the part of individuals, that is to say, madness.”[58] Barring madness, then, alterations in one’s form of life, in the practices of lived experience, seem to enable certain “hinges” to loosen, certain tangled beliefs to slowly become undone as the previous “picture” one had offers less and less practical value. Berlin continues:
If men or circumstances alter radically, or new empirical knowledge is gained which will revolutionize our conception of man, then certainly some of these edifices will cease to be relevant and will be forgotten like the ethics and metaphysics of the Egyptians or the Incas. But so long as men are as they are, the debate will continue in terms set b these visions and others like them: each will gain or lose in influence as events force this or that aspect of men into prominence.[59]
This is a long-term picture of intellectual change, no doubt, but one that fits well against the Wittgensteinian backdrop. Again, if we are to take changing the king’s belief in h seriously, then it is a matter of meticulously unveiling and systematically documenting the various elements that, in aggregate, constitute his worldview. Perhaps it becomes a matter of working around h, in addressing x, y and z first (depending on their variable significance, that is, whether they possess foundational value). And when I mean “addressing,” this is not to simply slip into modes of convincing, but to alter real practices and make certain habits no longer feasible.
It is in some combination of these first two methods that we arrive at something like Aletta Norval’s notion of “aspect dawning.” By “rearranging elements” in a worldview, elements that are already there and already operationalized, we may, suggests Norval, alter the grammatical “surview” of a given subject. She argues:
Wittgenstein does not bring new evidence to bear, since ‘facts’ are not what is at stake here. What matters is the frame within which something may count as a fact. Hence the emphasis on the (re)arrangement of elements, which simultaneously allows us to see something in a different light. In particular, it should be noted here that the elements do not change for Wittgenstein; what changes is the way we see them.[60]
And she continues: “Thus, a change in grammar may come about through a rearrangement of elements, such that it provides us with a surview, which, in turn, allows us to notice some aspect of things that has hitherto gone unnoticed.”[61] But what might it mean to “rearrange the elements” that already captivate the king? Is this to disrupt certain rituals, to start wearing red-robes instead of blue ones, to begin to conduct certain ceremonies in reverse? By focusing not on single objects and their role in one’s world-picture, but relations between objects, Norvall seeks to “rule out understanding aspect change on the basis of a cognitive model of the acquisition and accumulation of facts. Rather, aspect change is a shift in perspective that establishes different relations between objects….Evidence is not what is at stake here; instead, evidence follows rather than precedes such change.”[62]
What is at “stake” in Norvall’s account is a subject’s ability to “identify” with a “moment of subjective assent,” an experience of identification that “escapes the linguistic reductionism and excessively rational, disembodied account of much deliberative democratic theory” and acts as “the embodied act of a subject passionately involved in an activity that structures her political life and participation in a certain way.”[63] For Norvall, this would include the principle manner by which a subject may see themselves and rightfully declare “I am a democrat!”—a form of identification that surfaces precisely when one’s view is punctured by an encounter with fundamental difference.
While Norvall’s account is theoretically attractive, I think it is difficult to link it up with real practices. How does one go about “rearranging elements” such that the king’s commitment to h no longer suffices? We can of course try to eliminate practices and rituals that relate to h, but this doesn’t guarantee that this will have any impact on actually eliminating h at all (let us imagine the Roman empire under Diocletian from 303-311 AD, where Christian practices where outlawed and punishable by death—certainly, there was an attempt to eliminate the practices that sustained the Christian worldview, but the entire strategy backfired, pushed the movement “underground,” and witnessed a massive resurgence in the proceeding generations). In similar fashion, the king may “retreat” deeper into his commitment, seeing the removal of practices and the “rearrangement of elements” mere sacrilege and proof that he is really “unto something.”
Following Wittgenstein’s notion of rule-following, Norvall contends that “the moment of the subject emerges when ‘I do not know how to go on,’ when existing practices no longer make sense, when we are perplexed and puzzled by something, and when new articulations are called for.”[64] Does this mean that my beliefs ought to fade in turn, or can this “moment of the subject” simply reaffirm my commitment? That I am forced to make a decision, no longer supported as I once was by the host of activities that seemingly animated my previous picture of the world, does not necessarily mean that I will make this decision against h—after all, how could I? Depending on the “bedrock” status of h, then it is only against the backdrop of h that I may seemingly make any decision whatsoever. Norvall will claim that “Where aspect change occurs, what becomes visible is not just the presence of a different understanding of things, but an awareness of the multiplicity of grammars. One is freed when one comes to see a picture as a picture.”[65] But what would it be to see h as a picture?
I want to say that the first two methods of persuading the king are fairly weak, and that it is this last quote of Norvall’s that begins to point us in the proper direction—that is, toward the third method of persuasion. It seems to me that the first two methods, along with more general means of trying to convince others through the use and showing of evidence, are all attempts to remove or substitute certain elements of one’s “surview” for others. We knock down certain practices, we triangulate a series of interrelated beliefs, and we go about trying to show how they are incorrect. We may do this in the traditionalist mode by pointing to a criteria of inference, and then pointing to all sorts of examples where that criteria works out (Harman), or we may do this by not doing much of anything specifically at all, by letting life unwind its forces through the slow degradation of time, the decay of practices and the collapse of institutions that carry those practices (Wittgenstein, Berlin). Either way, we go about adding certain images in the hopes of subtracting others, or in eradicating the grounds for certain images by removing the feasibility of their lived embodiment. I want to turn this method on its ear, and ask what it might look like not to “rearrange the elements,” but to simply flood a worldview with newer practices—to inundate it with its own image, so to speak.
What I imagine is this: those who are committed to altering the king’s belief in h, and who retain the proper authority (that is, authority to see the ritual come into existence), design a brand new ritual to stand alongside the multiform activities that already sustain h. This ritual would simply be that of having the king visit a school for young children and toddlers just learning how to read, write, etc. Part of the curriculum, however, is repeatedly telling the children that the world began when they were born. What might this image induce in the king? Perhaps he would ask the teachers to stop at once, that this is unreasonable and couldn’t possibly be correct; perhaps he bans the practice, and punishes those who once participated in it. Either way, let us imagine a small child who, in the classroom with the king at the moment of his encounter, naïve to the man he is addressing, began to play the “why” game listed above. What now is our king to do? How ought he to respond, not to some authoritative court mage, not to Moore, but to this child who has been told exactly what the king must have thought was his privilege alone.
Norvall reasons: “A change in political identification involves a change in understanding one’s self and one’s place in relation to others and to a set of wider practices.”[66] This is, I think, exactly what this third method accomplishes. It induces in the king a sense of his own “picture,” and situates that picture alongside others. It suggests that “being able to see different perspectives depends crucially on becoming alerted to the broader background against which they are or become intelligible.”[67] It takes the principle assumption of h—that, for it to be correct, there must be a specific uniqueness to it—and distributes that assumption elsewhere. In so doing, it betrays that uniqueness in such a way that its grounds as a worldview become something of a shadow; a new picture arises, but does not try to undermine previous images but rather assaults the entire system as somehow constructed. The king may be certain that he existed before these children—but what reasons ought he to give to show that this is true? It is difficult to imagine the king walking away purely unphased. Certainly, more work ought to be done, and there is still the risk that the king will commit to his “passionate frame of reference” in even deeper ways. But I think one would be hard-pressed to legitimately find that no criteria, no rules were upset; that the “moment of the subject” didn’t demand a new, perhaps even subconscious, response. It is in designing ways to provoke and further cultivate this response—what William Connolly might call the rupture in the moment of experiencing radical difference—that seems to provide the most effective manner of going about changing the king’s commitment to h.
V. Conclusion: The Politics of Skepticism and Persuasion
I make no attempt to hide the fact that my commitment to altering the king’s commitment disagrees with some popular readings of Wittgenstein. Gaile Pohlhaus and John Wright, for instance, see “the therapeutic work of philosophical activity” as contributing to an effort that aims “to build a relationship of intelligibility with the skeptic by situating her questions into particular (and sometimes newly imagined) situations where they might be answered. One might say that Wittgenstein attempts a charitable relation with the skeptic—seeking to understand what the skeptic might mean.”[68] On this reading of Wittgenstein, they would certainly see any attempt to radically alter another’s passionate commitment as an attempt to silence the skeptic, and so too to silence our own abilities to foster intellectual growth qua building new and imaginative ways to answer the skeptic’s continuous challenges. They continue, arguing, as William James might say, to “leave the door open” for the skeptic and to provide an open invitation for the skeptic to return again and again:
In taking the skeptic seriously and remaining open to the possibility of alienation from what ‘we’ say, Wittgenstein’s work recognizes the heterogeneity of the ‘we’ who engage in the practice through which our language takes on meaning. Through pointing to our potential for imaginative discourse, Wittgenstein’s philosophical strategies reveal spaces for political dissent from any society that does not allow for the intelligibility of some (and thereby all) of its members….Wittgenstein brings us clearly before the human demands that must be met if we are to understand the deepest challenges to our present society.[69]
It seems to me that this reading of Wittgenstein, as attractive as it may be to a committed liberal, is nevertheless a misinvocation of his work. Firstly, it seems to assume every “skeptic” is on equal footing; that we ought to respond to the racist, the homophobe, the xenophobe, etc. just as we would respond to Moore’s philosophical injunctions. There are, no doubt, forms of skepticism far more amenable to the liberal project—or that may be carried far better within the liberal ethos—than others. In inviting the skeptic back, we run the risk of validating certain forms of oppression that are antithetical to the very pluralistic foundation of the liberal order. Ironically, Pohlhaus and Wright also argue that we can never “close off” certain topics from public discourse, and that “the cognitive responsibility that commits us to answer to such claims in a conversation of justice is itself not historically contingent, though our capacity to recognize that responsibility certainly is.”[70]
No doubt the maintenance of our liberalism is an ongoing effort, one that requires diligence in identifying and mending points of injustice and vigilance toward ensuring injustices are not committed in the first place. And yet, we also cannot ignore the hard-reality of political life: “If men were angels, no government would be necessary.”[71] But men are not angels, and the irony of Pohlhaus and Wright’s commitment to the skeptic emerges when we realize that the skeptic may often be a wolf parading in sheep’s clothes. It is necessary that our liberal vigilance, while retaining a certain openness, is also closed in fundamental ways. A more valuable discussion, perhaps, would be one that identifies this shaky ground and cultivates techniques to help us navigate between the open sea of legitimate liberal discourse and the rocky shoals of prejudice. “Taking the skeptical ‘threat’ seriously,” they contend, “is part of maintaining a commitment to a genuinely open-ended ‘we’ as a ground to mutual intelligibility, because not doing so would be to set limits, in advance, on who we will regard as a competent speaker.”[72] But it is essential to set certain limits in advance—not to disenfranchise entire sets of peoples, but to ensure entire sets of peoples are enfranchised to begin with. To ignore this fact is to reduce the reality of liberal politics into the uselessness of some deliberative, Utopian dream.
The second problem with this rendering is that I simply do not see the resources for this political action in Wittgenstein’s texts (as silent as they are regarding any robust notion of “power”). There is hardly any discussion of politics at all, and his notion of ethics he explicates as such: “What is good is also divine. Queer as it sounds, that sums up my ethics. Only something supernatural can express the Supernatural.”[73] I do not profess to have a conclusive reading of this statement (though I believe it is fundamentally connected to his injunction: “God grant the philosopher insight into what lies in front of everyone’s eyes.”[74]), though it seems like a rather serious perversion to mold this ethical position into the kind-of open-endedness of Pohlhaus and Wright. To even suggest philosophy as a “therapy” is to implicate a kind-of affliction by which one seeks treatment; a healthy philosophy needs no therapy at all. And certainly, there are some skeptics—e.g. Moore—whose picture of the world Wittgenstein wants to disenthrall us from entirely. This is not to say that new problems do not arise as soon as we have satisfied previous ones—but it is to reject the loose political portrait Pohlhaus and Wright want to paint of Wittgenstein.
The final problem is that this commitment to the skeptic might become a form of oppression in itself. Not only may it fail to employ effective tools in identifying and addressing forms of oppression as they arise, but this seems to charge Wittgenstein with the very conservatism he denies. It opens the stage for endless circles of debate (in the vein of Georg Sorel and Carl Schmitt) to replace action when and where action is called for. Again, we cannot ignore the “who” and “why” behind the skeptic; it is a wonderful commitment in theory that seems to constrain our political relationships to an open-ended “we” that, though it certainly ought to remain “open-ended,” nevertheless fails to have recourse to forms of real action when that recourse is most needed. There are, in short, certain skeptics that we ought to challenge in the proper manner and, if needed, act against; deciding what this may look like, however, may only come about in the actual activities we participate in.
To this end, Pohlhaus and Wright incorporate Wittgenstein into a uniquely liberal picture of the world. It is a powerful picture, namely because it stands as our picture, but it exists among many other possible appropriations and uses of Wittgenstein’s work. They turn Wittgenstein’s thought into a “seed,” and plant it in liberal soil—even while Wittgenstein himself will muse that “I believe my originality (if that is the right word) is an originality belonging to the soil rather than to the seed. (Perhaps I have no seed of my own.) Sow a seed in my soil and it will grow differently than it would in any other soil.”[75] It seems that the reverse is needed—to skeptically inquire into the functions and nature of liberal rules and criteria, rather than merely using Wittgenstein as a reinforcement of a preexisting ethos.
However, I do not think Pohlhaus and Wright are absolutely correct in rendering Wittgenstein’s work as offering a host of new “resources”: “In drawing our attention to the human basis of skeptical questions,” they contend, “a Wittgensteinian approach challenges us to make use of a whole range of resources that have been left behind by the skeptic and those who attempt a definite answer to skeptical questions. It is this way in which philosophy actively does something.”[76] I want to further explore this “doing something,” and to cultivate those neglected resources in such a way that we answer the skeptic not simply be re-inviting their skepticism, but in challenging and potentially changing their worldview. We all have a belief in h, whatever h might stand to represent. It is my contention that part of the liberal project exists in amicably assaulting each other’s passionate commitments to h—and in developing techniques, strategies and methods to do so more effectively each time. I agree wholeheartedly that there is something “inherently political” about Wittgenstein’s work, but would add that politics is not necessarily of the liberal type, and that politics, so defined, is principally a manner of convincing others to do and believe certain things—and when convincing fails, in refining tools that may enable us to go about peacefully persuading our interlocutor. It is here that I think a real commitment to justice emerges: to design real means that open oneself and others to the difficult business of changing frames.
[1] Gilbert Harman, Thought. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1973. p. 148
[2] Gilbert Harman, Thought, p. 150
[3] Gilbert Harman, Thought, p. 151
[4] Gilbert Harman, Thought, pp. 153-154
[5] This constitutes, too, the beginnings of my critique of Habermas.
[6] Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations: 50th Anniversary Edition. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2001. pp. 43e-44e ¶132
[7] Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, p. 41e ¶115
[8] Benjamin Whorf, Language, Mind, and Reality. In Language, Thought and Reality. Ed. John Carroll. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1956. p. 253
[9] Edward Sapir, Language: An Introduction to the Study of Speech. New York, NY: Harcourt Brace & Co., 1949. pp. 154-155
[10] Charles Taylor, To Follow a Rule… In Bourdieu: Critical Perspectives. Ed. Craig Calhoun, Edward LiPuma, and Moishe Postone. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1993. p. 53
[11] Charles Taylor, To Follow a Rule…, p. 58
[12] Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, p. 38e ¶96
[13] Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, p. 191e
[14] Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, p. 69e ¶202
[15] Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, p. 72e ¶219
[16] Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty. In Major Works: Selected Philosophical Writings. New York, NY: HarperCollins, 2009. p. 328 ¶44
[17] Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty, p. 328 ¶45
[18] Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty, p. 338 ¶105
[19] Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty, p. 345 ¶141
[20] Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty, p. 345 ¶142
[21] David Cerbone, The Limits of Conservatism. In The Grammar of Politics: Wittgenstein and Political Philosophy. Ed. Cressida Heyes. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003. p. 56
[22] Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty, p. 345 ¶144
[23] Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty, p. 357 ¶225
[24] Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty, p. 355 ¶209
[25] Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, p. 75e ¶241
[26] Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, p. 72e ¶217
[27] Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty, p. 361 ¶248
[28] Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value. Ed. G. H. Von Wright. Trans. Peter Winch. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press,1984. p. 16e
[29] Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty, pp. 336-337 ¶94
[30] Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty, p. 340 ¶115
[31] Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty, p. 358 ¶231
[32] Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty, p. 376 ¶341
[33] Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, p. 191e
[34] Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty, p. 380 ¶359
[35] Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty, p. 368 ¶291
[36] Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty, p. 383 ¶379
[37] Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, p. 64e
[38] Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty, p. 351 ¶177
[39] Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty, p. 333 ¶83
[40] Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty, p. 363 ¶262
[41] Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty, p. 427 ¶612
[42] See, for a substantial discussion on this possibility, Jason Frank, “Delightful Horror”: Edmund Burke and the Aesthetics of Democratic Revolution; Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful; Longinus, On the Sublime
[43] Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty, p. 332 ¶69
[44] Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty, p. 383 ¶380
[45] Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty, p. 336 ¶92
[46] Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty, p. 428 ¶617
[47] David Cerbone, The Limits of Conservatism, p. 59
[48] Ludwig Wittgenstein, Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology: Volume II. Ed. G. H. Von Wright. Trans. C. G. Luckhardt and M. A. E. Aue. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1980. p. 120e ¶727; Zettel. Ed. By G. H. Von Wright and G. E. M. Anscombe. Trans. G. E. M. Anscombe. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1970. pp. 64e-65e ¶352
[49] David Cerbone, The Limits of Conservatism, p. 57
[50] Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty, p. 381 ¶368
[51] Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty, p. 415 ¶550
[52] Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty, p. 398 ¶458
[53] David Cerbone, The Limits of Conservatism, p. 58
[54] Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty, p. 348 ¶161
[55] Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty, p. 420 ¶578
[56] Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty, p. 405 ¶493
[57] David Cerbone, The Limits of Conservatism, p. 59
[58] Isaiah Berlin, Does Political Theory Still Exist? In The Proper Study of Mankind: An Anthology of Essays. Ed. Henry Hardy and Roger Hausheer. New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000. p. 83
[59] Isaiah Berlin, Does Political Theory Still Exist?, p. 87
[60] Aletta Norval, Democratic Identification. In Political Theory, Vol. 34, No. 2 (April, 2006), pp. 229-255. p. 233
[61] Aletta Norval, Democratic Identification, p. 234
[62] Aletta Norval, Democratic Identification, p. 236
[63] Aletta Norval, Democratic Identification, p. 241
[64] Aletta Norval, Democratic Identification, p. 245
[65] Aletta Norval, Democratic Identification, p. 242
[66] Aletta Norval, Democratic Identification, p. 243
[67] Aletta Norval, Democratic Identification, p. 244
[68] Gaile Pohlhaus and John Wright, Using Wittgenstein Critically: A Political Approach to Philosophy. In Political Theory, Vol. 30. No. 6 (December, 2002), pp. 800-827. p. 807
[69] Gaile Pohlhaus and John Wright, Using Wittgenstein Critically, pp. 823-824
[70] Gaile Pohlhaus and John Wright, Using Wittgenstein Critically, p. 819
[71] James Madison, The Federalist Papers, #51
[72] Gaile Pohlhaus and John Wright, Using Wittgenstein Critically, p. 813
[73] Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, p. 3e
[74] Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, p. 63e
[75] Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, p. 36e
[76] Gaile Pohlhaus and John Wright, Using Wittgenstein Critically, p. 807