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attempt to escape the problems of modemist thought, and of positivism in particular, it

has not actually escaped either. This is a conclusion reached by Susan Hekman in her

assessment of this particular "post-positivist" claimant

While acknowledging Scientific

Realism's general sophistication Hekman has maintained that it has "little affinity to the

anti-foundationalist position

Instead, she proposed, Scientific Realists do not reject

the "sacredness" of modem science and its methods, as they claim, but seek to redefine

science in order to claim more territory for its domain

Accordingly, there are at least

^Bhaskar, The Possibility of Naturalism. Chapter 1. 49Ibid, pp.45-83.

5^See Bhaskar, "Scientific Realism and Human Emancipation", p.27. 5 iSee Hekman, Hermeneutics and the Sociology of Knowledge. 52Ibid, p.39.

three major continuities between Scientific Realism and the mainstream modernist approaches (including positivism) it purports to have superseded.

Firstly, though there is much made of the hermeneutic nature of the natural sciences by Scientific Realists, what is advocated "is not the extension of the hermeneutic thinking of the social sciences into the natural sciences, but rather, the extension of the scientific method into the social sciences".54 Instead, therefore, of acknowledging the hermeneutic character of all knowledge, as does someone like Gadamer, there is, in Critical Realism, still a commitment to the scientific character of all real knowledge. Secondly, throughout the Critical Realist literature there is a notion of a single, independent "real world" that limits and constrains the interpretative efforts of human social actors. This, maintained Hekman:

reveals the [Scientific] realists' failure to transcend the Enlightenm ent conception of knowledge [and is evidence] that the realists continue to seek a

foundation for their conception of knowledge provided by the 'real world'.55

Thirdly, and most paradoxically perhaps, while ostensibly accepting the interpretive nature of scientific thinking, Scientific Realists fail to pay heed to the issue of the "hermeneutic circle". Or, in Hekm an's terms, "they overlook the fact that the investigator's position as well the position of the investigated is [also] socially determined".56 Consequently, they take for themselves the very Archimedean position they are so dismissive of in relation to positivism. For all its sophistication, therefore, Scientific Realism remains bound within the confines of the positivist articulation of modernity, and its paradoxical foundationalism.

This as we shall see is a trait very evident also within the new "scientific" Realism (neo-Realism) of the 1980s and 1990s in International Relations. And it is a trait also within that multifaceted approach known as Analytical Philosophy, one of the most

54Ibid, p.46.

55 Ibid, p.47, emphasis added. ^ Ibid.

important modern attempt in Anglo-American social theory to deal with the issues of knowledge and human society and the question of language. Analytical Philosophy themes are discernible now in some of the most sophisticated "post-positivist" arguments in International Relations and as such require comment here.57

Bevond Modernism and Positivism? (iv): Analytical Philosophy and the "Linguistic Turn"

The Analytical Philosophy approach emerged from critiques of the logical atomism and crude inductivism associated with Logical Positivism. In this sense, as John Thompson has said, it represented the "second stage" of a modem attempt to distance Western philosophy from the impurities o f metaphysics, and ground thinking unequivocally in a science of human society and most particularly, linguistic practice.58 The works of two figures, in particular, epitomise the Analytical position in this regard, those o f W.V. Quine and his critique of the empiricist "dogmas" underlying Logical Positivism59 and of the "later" Wittgenstein whose recantation of the logical atomism of his Tractatus sparked off a"linguistic turn" in Western philosophy.60

57See Friedrich Kratochwil, "Regimes, Interpretations and the "Science" of Politics: A Reappraisal", Millennium 17 (1988), pp.263-284; and John Ruggie, "Continuity and Transformation in the World Polity: Toward a Neorealist Synthesis", World Politics 35 (1983), pp.261-285.

5^See Thompson's comments in Critical Hermeneutics: A Study in the Thought of Paul Ricoeur and Jurgen Habermas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), pp.9-35. In recent times the works of Davidson, Dummett, Putnam and Searle have been associated with the Analytical position, while others such as Frege, Strawson, Ryle and Wisdom have, over the years, and in their different ways, been prominent contributors to its development and its twin concerns with logical rigour and "language". For a contemporary summary of the literature and its debates, see Baynes, Bohman and McCarthy eds., After Philosophy: End or Transformation?: and Rajchman and West eds., Post Analytic Philosophy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985).

^9W. V. Quine, "Two Dogmas of Empiricism", in Can Theories Be Refuted: Essays on the Duhem- Ouine Hypothesis edited by Sandra Harding (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1976); Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations 3rd ed., trans. G. Anscombe (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1968).

Quine repudiated the twin pillars of post-Kantian empiricist based thought - the notion of a fundamental distinction between analytic and synthetic statements (between logically true knowledge received via experience and that which is produced via verificationist procedures) - and the nominalist principle which reduced the conditions for real knowledge of the world to a universe o f atomised contingent "things". Instead, Quine pronounced all knowledge "synthetic", in the sense that all knowledge, including scientific knowledge, was derived from "man made fabric". Accordingly:

The totality of our so called knowledge or beliefs, from the most casual matters of geography and history to the profoundest laws of atomic physics or even of pure mathematics, is a man-made fabric which impinges on experience only along the edges...But the total field is so undetermined by its boundary conditions, experience, that there is much latitude o f choice as to what statements to reevaluate in the light of any single contrary experience. No particular experiences are linked to any particular statements.61

W ittgenstein, in his later works, made a major contribution to the Analytic position in instigating a broader, more tolerant tendency in Anglo-American thought and a fundamentally revised understanding of the nature and role of language in constructing social reality.62 In explaining his shift in thinking Wittgenstein confronted what post­ modernists might now refer to as the "hermeneutics of suspicion" perspective. In reflecting upon his earlier search for foundational certainty, Wittgenstein acknowledged that:

my notion in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus was wrong...because I too thought that the logical analysis had to bring to light what was hidden (as chemical and physical analysis does).63

The significance of this statement was that it went beyond the question of whether, via protocol sentences, one could "discover" the real knowledge of modernity and society. It

61 See W. V. Quine, "Two Dogmas of Empiricism", pp.59-60, emphasis added.

6 2 On Wittgenstein's contribution, see D.L. Phillips, Wittgenstein and Scientific Knowledge: A Sociological Perspective (London: Macmillan, 1977); Thompson, Critical Hermeneutics; Giddens, Central Problems in Social Theory (London: Macmillan, 1979); Bernstein, Bevond Objectivism and Relativism: and D. Pears, The False Prison: A Study of the Development o f Wittgenstein's Philosophy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987).

questioned the whole notion of a reality, "out there" waiting to be discovered. This led, in Philosophical Investigations, to a broad critique of the reductionism and essentialism associated with the positivist approach to language, particularly the proposition, dominant since Hobbes, of an atomised, contingent, linguistic universe in which words were accorded singular, essential meanings that "corresponded" to real things. This view was repudiated by W ittgenstein in terms which em phasised not the homogeneity and singularity of language but its heterogeneity and social diversity. In short he rejected the essentialism o f language in favour of a notion of socially constructed and applied "language games", which emphasised the way that language was actually used, in different times and places, and how it constructed reality as part of a "speech act".64 It was in this sense that, following Philosophical Investigations, for many within Anglo- American philosophical circles the search for reality became the attempt to understand the way that grammatical rules were used in various societies to give meaning to their (linguistically constructed) real worlds. Moreover, on the centuries old notion of a correspondence between reality and language, Wittgenstein had this to say:

Grammar is not accountable to any [external] reality. It is grammatical rules that determ ine m eaning (constitute it) and so they them selves are not answerable to any meaning and to that extent are arbitrary.65

In this way W ittgenstein undermined the Logical Positivist understanding of language and reality at its metatheoretical core; its (given) empiricist epistemology. More specifically, he undermined the phenomenalist logic of an approach to knowledge which took as given the atomistic nature of the relationship between the "objects" of the world, and their meaning, as expressed in elementary linguistic propositions. Concerned to explain the way that such sentences are actually used in social activity, Wittgenstein concluded that to understand reality through language was to engage in complex social practices which defied the atomised logic and positivist/empiricist explanations of the empirical moment in "understanding". It was, he argued, necessary to concentrate not on

^W ittgenstein, The Philosophical Investigations, section 23.

the logical independence of things, but on the systemic relationship between them which invests them with social meaning.66

This critique of atom ism was com plem ented by W ittgenstein's attack on essentialism in Logical Positivism. He argued that a general theory of language which sought to reduce everyday understandings of terms to a singular essentialist meaning missed the point, about the multiplicity of meanings to be found in social activity. Accordingly, the meaning of a term/word/symbol could not be assumed to correspond to some essential (and externally derived) foundation or object, but was dependent upon the particular constitutive role it had in particular socio-linguistic systems or "language gam es. " 67 W ittgenstein's later position, pregnant with implications for Critical Social Theory perspectives across the disciplines, was centred thus on a set of interlocking propositions which maintained that:

There are no independent or objective sources of support outside of human thought and human action...There is no standard or objective reality (always fixed, never changing) against which to compare or measure a universe of discourse...nothing exists outside of our language and actions which can be used to justify, for example, a statement's truth or falsity. The only possible justification lies in the linguistic practices which embody them: how people

think and speak, and how they live.68

To conceive of language in this way - not as an exclusively descriptive medium but as a "form of life", a process intrinsic to human social activity - is, in effect, to convert nouns into verbs. To "speak" in this sense is to "do": to engage in a speech act is to give meaning to the activities which make up social reality. Language thus no longer describes some essential hidden reality, it is inseparable from the (necessarily social) construction of that reality. In this context, the starting point for any investigation of reality is the

^W ittgenstein, The Philosophical Investigations, section 65.

6 7 Ibid, section 65; see also J. Austin, Philosophical Papers edited by J. Urmson and G. Wamock (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970).

relationship between the rules and conventions of specific "language games" or "forms of life" and their socio-historical and cultural meaning.69

The Wittgensteinian dissent against Logical Positivism opened up for critical inquiry much that had been effectively closed off under the intellectual imperialism of the modem (post-Cartesian) approach to knowledge and society. His sociology of language perspective represented (like post-modernist discourses) more than a discourse of "words", somehow detached from the non-discursive realm. It maintained, instead, that the rules which govern the way that speech acts take place represented a specific understanding and organisation of social life. Consequently, the study of language and its rules of grammar become, simultaneously, an investigation of reality in the world. Importantly too, in casting doubt upon the "correspondence theory" of truth, and the relationship between the thinking subject and the (external) object, analytical attention was focused away from individual cognition and "psychological" processes and toward a theory of action set upon the way that, in social circumstances, people describe and enact their reality.

The insights of Quine and Wittgenstein, therefore, have acted as a catalyst for much of the critical reassessment of Anglo-American thinking on knowledge and society in the contemporary period.70 More obviously perhaps than any other post-positivist approach touched upon here it has prefigured the Critical Social Theory perspectives of

6°This is a theme very evident in post-modernist literature, of course, although often more directly via Sassure than Wittgenstein. It is a theme also that in Chapter Four will be accorded more attention in the works of Critical Social Theorists seeking to re-formulate some of the "givens" of linguistic philosophy. On this see Baynes, Bohman and McCarthy eds., After Philosophy.

^Stressing the undeterminancy of (empirical) data in social life and the insights of the "linguistic turn", Analytical Philosophy has confronted mainstream modernism with at least three major challenges. The first has concentrated on the Enlightenment view of reason, articulated in terms which privilege either objects or subjects as the foundation of knowledge. Against the universality of this approach there have been various expressions of the notion of "language games" and/or "forms of life" emphasising the irreducible plurality of truth, argument and validity. The second challenge, has concentrated attention on the modernist agent of "reason", the atomised, sovereign subject. The counter argument here has been couched in terms of social structures of consciousness, and the proposition that the subject of knowledge is always intrinsically and practically engaged with the world, and that our thoughts and language are representations of that intrinsic engagement. The third Analytical challenge has problematised the "correspondence rule" intrinsic to modernist thought. In its place has come the notion of "objects" as always interpreted elements of social, historical and linguistic "meaning".

the present. Which begs the question of why it been the voices of Habermas and