ABSTRACT PETER WINCH

LANGUAGE, BELIEF AND RELATIVISM.

ð Trigg comments that while a language certainly ‘expresses a comunity’s beliefs about reality’, reality nevertheless exists apart from peoples beliefs.

ð Winch goes even more deeper in the subjectivism of realities and says; relations between language and reality is not a relation between a set of descriptions and what is described

ð Stresses the importance of distinguishing between what belongs to theory expression and what belongs to theory of belief.

ð Languages two meanings e.g. Speaking French and the language of morality, of religions, etc…

o They are different but also overlapping in some points.

o Language as rules for expressing commands and language as way to understand science.

ð To learn a language is not simply to learn how to command something, but also learn new knowledges.

o Quotes the learning of mathematics language, which is an exaggerated example of how learning a language is also about learning content. Also shows that knowledge is not translatable.

§ Quotes that explaining Zandes witch through English language would be impossible because the reality one and other refer by the same word is completely different.

§ It’s not a matter of greater or lesser understanding degrees, but rather a matter of different forms.

ð Perception is a matter of the application we give to the figured out reality. So, if we can’t apply thinks the same way as the Azandes, we also can’t understand its real meaning.

o We have no use or possibility of use of witchcraft in our lifes.

ð Quotes our interpretation of Azandes consultation with oracle as useless because we just don’t understand even the act of asking something if it is not expecting to exist a right or wrong answer.

ð Culture sets limits to what an individual can intelligibly be said to be doing.

ð The case among Europeans and the Azandes is not strictly a case of mutual exclusion, but rather a case of unlinked realities.

o It’s not a case of conflict contradiction, but of conflict for lack of links as a hole. Even contradiction would be a link.

ð States that when we try to understand some Azandes characteristics we may run into incoherences, however, he points that it is not enough to deduce that theirselfs are also being incoherent. Becouse their background may not settle their perception of coherence in the same way.

ð Criticizes Evans Pritchard for not attempting that the European perception of magic depends on our own scientific background.

ð Quotes the case of sticking mother’s photo and feeling gilt for injuring her

o It’s a link between future possibilities and present acts, not a fisiological language like ours.

§ They refer actually to the possibility of ever being catch injuring the photo by his mom and, in such case, to heartbreak her.

ð Quotes the case of the Oracle showing they don’t have the right or wrong expectation, neither relate the oracle to the future in the same way as us. Mostly because their construction of time is different.

ð Similar words doesn’t account to similar languages, or similarities among them. For there is no such thing. Each reality is a very particular settlement of beliefs which could only be understandable through engagement. The codes created by one such reality can just be apprehended according to the patterns of believe of this reality.

ð He doesn’t account to avoid judgments over different realities, however, he remembers, judging patterns are diverse and, for so, “to judge is to be judged”.

UNDERSTANDING PRIMITIVE society

ð Highlights Evan Pritchard’s efforts to step ahead a generation of Eropean biased anthropologists with positivist behaves. However, criticizes him for distinguishing between logical and scientific and defining scientific as what is according to scientific reality.

o For Pritchard, logical would be a way of ordering and linking causes and consequences.

o Science, however would refer to the objective evidences which allows one to trust in the link traced between the income and the outcome.

§ Opposes objective science to supra-sensible forces resourcing.

o CRITICS ON PRITCHARD:

1. THE CHECK OF INDEPENDENTLY REAL IS NOT PECULIAR TO SCIENCE.

ð Doesn’t criticize him based in Protagorean extreme relativism over what is reality, but, instead, points that non-scientific perceptions are also stated regarding empirical observation. However, he notes that the observation perspective is radically different.

o Claims that the reality verification landscape sometimes is a product of initial beginnings e.g. religious institutions only exist after the belief.

ð Says that we have a trend to measure any other kind of reality verification of speculations regarding science as the higher standard.

2. REALITY IS DETERMINED BY LANGUAGE, AND NOT THE OPPOSITE.

ð Denies even the reality of scientific experiments, by just clamming that a non-scientific public would understand the experience results completely different.

ð Acknowledge Pritchards effort to recognize science as just one more language, however, criticizes him to implicitly say that there is something other than the languages, some kind of unquestionable reality. And most of all, criticizes the indirect appraisal of science over the others since he defines science as closer to that reality.

ð Shows the empirical bases of Azande magics and explain that, however it may not be understandable and logically able to link with the facts if we look for it as efforts to know HOW things happen, it is perfectly reasonable to see it as an explanation of WHY things are like they are.

o Recovers his argument in the last text that comprehension demands application. Here the application is not a HOW, but a WHY application.

§ “He doesn’t see a physical flame igniting thatch, but an ordinary lighted bundle of straw. His perception of how events occur is as clear as our own”.

ð Criticizes Pritchards notion that magical language may be senseless in cases where they run in contradiction.

o Points that the contradiction only emerges because in some moment of the analysis we take some of our criterias where they would punctuate the effects due to their own criterias and beliefs.

o Sometimes they just purpousely evade from facing paradoxes because they are not seeking a quasi-scientific understanding of the world but, instead, they are following their own motivations which, differently from science, does not involve competition for exclusivity among the possible languages.

§ Quotes the case of the exams on deads to see if they are witches and the widspreading effects of the judgment over the family. Pointing thet different bodies of a same family may lead to different statements and, for that, they don’t really push such practice neither bother about explanatory excuses, like saying is a bastard, etc…

§ Quotes the case of the chickens, where contradictions are interpreted as any failure in the ritual procedure.

ð Says that there is suspicious, of course, however, the very way those suspicious expresses is through their own language.

ð Wittgenstein and Pritchard are both concerned about the relation of reality and language. However the first endorses that every language has a same kind of link with reality and the second praises the advantage of some ever others.

ð The concept of reality is indispensable to any understanding of societies, however, it can’t be explaned like Pritchard does, searching science revelations of the truth. The conception of reality must already be presupposed before we can make any sense of the expression… just like observed in the case of the scientific itself.

MacIntyre x Evans-Pritchard’s x Winch

ð Points that MacIntyre defends exactly the posture he criticizes, of facing his own language perception of reality as the existingly one and see the others regarding his own standpoint

ð Pritchard is in the middle of the way, recognizing the pluralities of languages and their particular ways to deal reality, however, Winch says that he still has too much of MacIntyre, and makes this in a way which clearly privileges the European scientific perception of reality.

ð Points out a similarity between him and MacIntyre; both them recognize the importance of possibilities of description for the concept of human action.

o The changes in human action are thus ultimately linked to the threat of rational criticism in human history.

ð Criticizes MacIntyre when he says that the quest of the anthropologist is to make intelligible to his society fellows why members of other societies think that certain of their practices are intelligible to them, when in fact, he says, they are not.

o Winch point graphically differentiate both uses of the word intelligible to highlight that the notion of intelligence is relative since they both associate their perceptions according to their own sense derived from their particular sets of beliefs.

o Winch stresses that the simple fact that to say that a society has a language is already to say it has a concept of rationality.

§ Language is rationality for being a way to set up beliefs in a way which creates sense to its community

§ For this, Winch says that the notion of rationality must exist in any language, for being the base for the idea of language itself.

ð Criticizes MacIntyre for saying that what he considers to be the reality is nothing but a ‘stock of available descriptios’, provided by his own language, as well as other languages have their own stocks and, for that, their own realities.

ð Points an incoherence of MacIntyre when he criticizes Winch for not regarding the history of criterias, however, he didn’t pay attention to the history of those institutions he claims to be real but, according to their histories, are only a product of a particular history.

ð Takes a part of MacIntyre work where he says that Azandes have a magical thought and also a underdeveloped scientific one. However, he points, the case is not of an underdeveloped scientific thought, but much more of a technical field which is of their own and, for that, shall not be reduced to our own patterns.

ð We shall not reduce every inductive relation to the category of science.

ð The language distinctions is not only bound to different perceptions over facts, but also to different perception of the relations they have with each other.

ð Presents the way by which Zande magic differ from our religion by stating that it is not an effort to control life, but just a recognition that one’s life is subject to contingencies.

ð The purpose of looking to other cultures is to discover possibilities of different activities which could lead to a contemplation of life.

o Points that MacIntyre can’t see this for looking to life by looking to productive structures and patterns.

ð Language and language significations are ways to drive comprehensions of life to a meaningfull collective code of reality creation.

ð Points out that the birth, copulation and death are conceptions which are always limitating humans conceptions about life. However, he punctuates, we are not like beasts and we don’t just live this, but we create conceptions about it and about life as a whole.

ð Compares the lost of the stick of life with the lost of wedding ring (ring of love, commmitment).

ð Accepts the axiom that ‘uniform ideas, born among peoples unknown to each other, must have a common ground of truth’ and, for that, states that birth, copulation and death are the first principle of this Science (referring to the Science of understanding different cultures).