Methodology without metaphysics? A pragmatic critique

Philosophy Today

Volumn 48, Issue 2, 2004, Pages 188-215

  Pihlström, Sami ^a  

^a NONE   (Finland)

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EID: 63549127116     PISSN: 00318256     EISSN: 00318256     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.5840/philtoday200448238     Document Type: Article

References (133)

1. For an example of a pragmatism-driven critique of metaphysical realism (defined, roughly, as the view that the world possesses its own ultimate ontological structure which human beliefs or theories are meant to accurately represent), see Hilary Putnam, Realism with a Human Face, ed. James Conant (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1990)
2. On pragmatism as a philosophical anthropology, see, e.g., Sami Pihlström, Pragmatism and Philosophical Anthropology: Understanding Our Human Life in a Human World (New York: Peter Lang, 1998)
3. Ulf Zackariasson, Forces by Which We Live: Religion and Religious Experience from the Perspective of Pragmatic Philosophical Anthropology, Studia Philosophiae Religionis, vol. 21 (Uppsala: University of Uppsala, Department of Theology, 2002)
4. See Rudolf Carnap, The Logical Structure of the World & Pseudoproblems in Philosophy, trans. R.A. George (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1969)
5. Jerry A. Fodor, "Methodological Solipsism Considered as a Research Strategy in Cognitive Psychology," The Behavioral and Brain Sciences 3 (1980): 63-73
6. For critical discussions, see especially Hilary Putnam, Realism and Reason (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983)
7. and Putnam, Words and Life, ed. James Conant (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1994)
8. Cf. further Sami Pihlström, "Two Kinds of Methodological Solipsism," Sats 1 (2000): 73-90
9. Olli Lagerspetz, "Experience and Consciousness in the Shadow of Descartes," Philosophical Psychology 15 (2002): 8-15
10. Edmund Husserl's and other phenomenologists' phenomenological method (to which I shall return below) has often been characterized as a version of methodological solipsism: see, e.g., Jaakko Hintikka, Ludwig Wittgenstein: Half-Truths and One-and-a-Half-Truths (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1996)
11. Byong-Chul Park, Phenomenological Aspects of Wittgenstein's Philosophy (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1998)
12. There is plenty of literature available. For some recent discussions, see Mark E. Warren, "Marx and Methodological Individualism," in Terrell Carver, ed., Rational Choice Marxism (University Park: Penn State University Press, 1995)
13. Michael Schmidt, Rationalität und Theoriebildung: Studien zu Karl R. Poppers Methodologie der Sozialwissenschaften (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1996)
14. Todd Jones, "Methodological Individualism in Proper Perspective," Behavior and Philosophy 24 (1996): 119-28
15. Anthony Walsh, "Methodological Individualism and Vertical Integration in the Social Sciences," Behavior and Philosophy 25 (1997): 121-36
16. Lawrence A. Boland, "Situational Analysis beyond Neoclassical Economists," Philosophy of the Social Sciences 28 (1998): 515-21
17. and Sirkku Kristiina Hellsten, "Moral Individualism and the Justification of Liberal Democracy," Ratio Juris 11 (1998): 320-45. I am not implying that these authors mean exactly the same by their use of the notion. (The same holds for most of my lists of other relevant literature in the notes below.)
18. See, e.g., Karl R. Popper, The Poverty of Historicism (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1957, 2nd. ed. 1960-61), especially 136, 142, 148-49
19. See, for example, C. B. Christensen, "Meaning Things and Meaning Others," Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 57 (1997): 495-522, for a critical analysis of the methodologically individualist attempt to explain the conventional as derivative from the non-conventional in the Gricean program of communicative semantics
20. see also Henry Jackman, "Individualism and Interpretation," Southwest Philosophy Review 14 (1997): 31-38, for a distinction between methodological and "ascriptional" individualism: according to the former, the meaning of one's terms is "grounded in facts about oneself," while according to the latter, the meaning of one's terms is "independent of how others use theirs." This distinction, Jackman attempts to show, allows us to reconcile "interpretational" and social accounts of linguistic meaning
21. On Popper's ontology of the three worlds, see his joint volume with John C. Eccles, The Self and Its Brain (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983; first published 1977)
22. Methodological holism has been defended, e.g., in J. W. N. Watkins, "The Principle of Methodological Individualism," British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 3 (1952): 186-88
23. and more recently in David-Hillel Ruben, The Metaphysics of the Social World (London: Routledge, 1985)
24. For a critique of Ruben, see Raimo Tuomela, "Ruben and the Metaphysics of the Social World," British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 40 (1989): 261-73
25. Tuomela's own research, such as The Importance of Us (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), is informed by methodological (and ontological) individualism. (Ruben's holism is not merely methodological, either.)
26. However, according to Ilkka Niiniluoto, among others, methodological realism is an element of a more comprehensive doctrine of scientific realism which also contains ontological assumptions, and is thus not a "merely methodological" view at all. See Niiniluoto, Critical Scientific Realism (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), chs. 1 and 6
27. Cf. also Jarrett Leplin, "Methodological Realism and Scientific Rationality," Philosophy of Science 53 (1986): 31-51
28. See Godehard Link, "Reductionism as ResourceConscious Reasoning," Erkenntnis 53 (2000): 173-93
29. Rejecting David Lewis's strong modal realism, as expressed, e.g., in his On the Plurality of Worlds (Oxford and New York: Blackwell, 1986), more methodologically oriented modal realists may conceive of possible worlds as mere methodological postulates enabling us to investigate semantic and ontological issues better than a purely actualist scheme would allow
30. For a highly informative general discussion of these topics, see Michael J. Loux, Metaphysics: A Contemporary Introduction, rev. ed. (London and New York: Routledge, 2001; 1st. ed. 1998)
31. See Christine M. Korsgaard, The Sources of Normativity, ed. Onora O'Neill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996)
32. For various elaborations on this idea, also in relation to applications of naturalism in ethics and religious studies, see Gary Hatfield, The Natural and the Normative: Theories of Spatial Perception from Kant to Helmholtz (Cambridge, MA and London: The MIT Press, 1990), 16-18
33. Arthur Fine, The Shaky Game: Einstein, Realism, and the Quantum Theory, 2nd. ed. (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1996; 1st. ed. 1986)
34. Stathis Psillos, "Naturalism without Truth?," Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 28 (1997): 699-713
35. Mark Timmons, "Will Cognitive Science Change Ethics?" Philosophical Psychology 10 (1997): 531-40
36. John A. Teske, "The Haunting of the Human Spirit," Zygon 34 (1999): 307-22
37. and especially Penelope Maddy, "Naturalism and the A Priori," in Paul Boghossian and Christopher Peacocke, eds., New Essays on the A Priori (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000), 92-116
38. as well as Maddy, "Naturalism: Friends and Foes," in James E. Tomberlin, ed., Philosophical Perspectives, 15: Metaphysics (Boston and Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), 37-67
39. For a critique of both views, cf. Sami Pihlström, Structuring the World: The Issue of Realism and the Nature of Ontological Problems in Classical and Contemporary Pragmatism, Acta Philosophica Fennica, vol. 59 (Helsinki: The Philosophical Society of Finland, 1996), ch. 5.3
40. On the other hand, Rorty is as emphatic in his resistance to ontology as in his suspicion of methodology; pragmatic naturalists like Rorty and Davidson are more concerned with the relations between "vocabularies" than with ontological categories such as the mind or the physical world. See here Bjørn Ramberg, "Post-ontological Philosophy of Mind: Rorty versus Davidson," in Robert B. Brandom, ed., Rorty and His Critics (Malden, MA and Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 351-70
41. For a defense of naturalism not as a mere methodological stance but as a metaphysically concerned enterprise, see, e.g., Hilary Kornblith, "Naturalism: Both Metaphysical and Epistemological," Midwest Studies in Philosophy 19 (1994): 39-52
42. It should be added that several critics of naturalism also find it essentially a metaphysical position, arguing that no methodological naturalism is an interesting view unless supported by metaphysical commitments: see, for instance, several essays in William Lane Craig and J.P. Moreland, eds., Naturalism: A Critical Analysis (London and New York: Routledge, 2000)
43. For the methodological vs. ontological distinction at work here, see Manfred Stockier, "Selbstorganisation und Reduktionismus," in Marie-Luise Heuser-Kessler, ed., Schelling und die Selbstorganisation (Berlin: Duncker-Humblot, 1994)
44. on materialism as a methodological position, see A. MacC. Armstrong, "On Methodological Materialism," Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 34 (1973): 62-72
45. On methodological behaviorism as a view ascribable to Quine and to be distinguished from both metaphysical and logical forms of behaviorism, see Hans-Johann Glock, "Wittgenstein and Quine: Mind, Language an Behavior," in Severin Schroeder, ed., Wittgenstein and Contemporary Philosophy of Mind (Houndmills and New York: Palgrave, 2001), 3-23. It should be noted that sometimes a methodological view, e.g., methodological naturalism or reductionism (or, possibly, behaviorism), is regarded as stronger (more reductive) than a "merely" ontological commitment to the physical or material basic structure of reality, which is generous enough to let all sciences employ their distinctive methods (cf. the reference to Rorty in the previous note). Thus, methodological reductionism would be seen as an addition to, not a weakening of, ontological reductionism, which, it might be assumed, virtually everyone holds. Conversely, methodological anti-reductionism would here be regarded as the safe position, which states that while we may have good reasons to be reductionists (reductive materialists) in ontological issues, this has no bearing on methodological issues. Hence, it depends on which view (reductionism or anti-reductionism) is seen as stronger, or more adventurous, whether methodological reductionism or methodological anti-reductionism is favored by a "methodologicist."
46. For quite different critical discussions of methodological monism, see Gerhard Pasternack, "The Ontologization of Transcendental Questions and the Development of Phenomenology into Hermeneutics," in Dieter Lohmar, ed., Philosophy from an Intercultural Perspective (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1997)
47. and Steven D. Edwards, "Positivism as a Method in Nursing Research," in Edwards, ed., Philosophical Issues in Nursing (New York: Macmillan, 1998)
48. On methodological essentialism (as opposed to "dynamic gradualism" in the philosophy of science), see Arthur L. Caplan, "Exemplary Reasoning: A Comment on Theory Structure in Biomedicine," Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 11 (1986): 93-105
49. On methodological objectivism, see Nancy E. Shaffer, "Understanding Bias in Scientific Practice," Philosophy of Science 63, PSA Supplement (1996): S89-S97
50. Methodological exclusivism has been attacked, as a narrow emphasis on some particular method (e.g., positivist causal explanation or hermeneutical understanding) in social science, by "methodological pluralists" (to whom we shall return shortly): see Paul A. Roth, Meaning and Method in the Social Sciences: A Case for Methodological Pluralism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987)
51. For relatively recent discussions in which the term is explicitly used, see A.A. van Niekerk, "Beyondthe 'Erklären - Verstehen' Dichotomy," South African Journal of Philosophy 8 (1989): 198-213
52. and Reinhard Selten, "Game Theory, Experience, Rationality," Vienna Circle Institute Yearbook 5 (1997): 9-34
53. For a reading of Descartes according to which his metaphysical dualism is grounded in a methodological one between theory and practice, or thought and action, see Annette C. Baier, "Cartesian Persons," Philosophia 10 (1981): 169-88
54. See, e.g., Marvin Farber, "Remarks about Pluralism," Revue de Metaphysique et de Morale 75 (1970): 350-53
55. Risto Vuorinen, "Edmund Husserl and the Quest for a Rigorous Science of Psychology," Ajatus 33 (1971): 64-105
56. Debiprasad Chattopadhyaya, Individuals and Worlds: Essays in Anthropological Rationalism (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1976)
57. George Argyrous, "Kuhn's Paradigms and Neoclassical Economics: Reply to Dow," Economics and Philosophy 10 (1994): 123-26
58. Laurance McCullough and Carol M. Ashton, "A Methodology for Teaching Ethics in the Clinical Setting: A Clinical Handbook for Medical Ethics," Theoretical Medicine 15 (1994): 39-52
59. Horace L. Fairlamb, "Postmodern Critique: Between Relativism and Reduction," Philosophy and Literature 21 (1997): 405-13
60. Stephen C. Yanchar, "William James and the Challenge of Methodological Pluralism," Journal of Mind and Behavior 18 (1997): 425-42
61. Walter Watson, "Types of Pluralism," The Monist 73 (1990): 350-66
62. Andrew J. Reck, "An Historical Sketch of Pluralism," The Monist 73 (1990): 367-87
63. Robert P. Farrell, "Will the Popperian Feyerabend Please Step Forward: Pluralistic, Popperian Themes in the Philosophy of Paul Feyerabend," International Studies in the Philosophy of Science 14 (2000): 257-66
64. and Steven I. Miller, "The Rationalitätstreit Revisited: A Note on Roth's 'Methodological Pluralism'," Philosophy of the Social Sciences 29 (1999): 339-53
65. For critical remarks on the sociology of scientific knowledge from this point of view, see Jean Bricmont, "Sociology and Epistemology," Facta Philosophica 3 (2001): 157-76
66. See, e.g., Henri Lauener, Offene Transzendentalphilosophie, Boethiana, vol. 50 (Hamburg: Kovac, 2002), especially 184
67. Cf., however, also Helmut Schock and James W. Wiggins (eds.), Relativism and the Study of Man (Princeton, NJ: van Nostrand, 1961)
68. Sandra J. Peart, "Jevons's Application of Utilitarian Theory to Economic Policy," Utilitas 2 (1990): 281-306
69. See, again, Roth, Meaning and Method in the Social Sciences
70. For Feyerabend' s views, see his famous book, Against Method: A Case for Epistemological Anarchism (London: Verso, 1987; first published 1975)
71. The label has been made well known by Nicholas Rescher; see his books, Methodological Pragmatism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1977)
72. and Realistic Pragmatism: An Introduction to Pragmatic Philosophy (Albany: SUNY Press, 2000)
73. as well as Rescher's more recent formulation in his essay, "Knowledge of the Truth in Pragmatic Perspective," in James Conant and Urszula M. Zeglen (eds.), Hilary Putnam: Pragmatism and Realism (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), 66-79 (see especially 72-73)
74. Cf. also Eric Katz, "A Pragmatic Reconsideration of Anthropocentrism," Environmental Ethics 21 (1999): 377-90
75. Rescher's pragmatism is, above all, realistic - or, to put it differently, his metaphysics (like Peirce's) is realistic and his methodology pragmatic. For some critical remarks on this distinction, cf. my review of Rescher's Realistic Pragmatism, in Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 36 (2000): 419-27
76. See further my remarks on the pragmatic method toward the end of this essay. In their Finnish book, Totuus, kieli ja käytäntö [Truth, Language, and Practice] (Helsinki: WSOY, 2001), Osmo Kivinen and Seppo Ristelä propose "methodological relationalism" as a version of Rortyan-Deweyan pragmatism
77. See Marga Vicedo, "T. H. Morgan, Neither an Epistemological Empiricist nor a 'Methodological' Empiricist," Biology and Philosophy 5 (1990): 293-311
78. John R. Shook ascribes methodological empiricism (as distinguished from any ontological conception of our "loyalty to things as experienced"), as well as a parallel methodological naturalism (as distinguished from ontological views), to one of the classical pragmatists, John Dewey: see Shook, Dewey's Empirical Theory of Knowlege and Reality (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 2000), 259-61
79. For a debate over this view, see D. Goldstick, "Methodological Conservatism," American Philosophical Quarterly 8 (1971): 186-91
80. Lawrence Sklar, "Methodological Conservatism," Philosophical Review 84 (1975): 374-400
81. Alexander Rosenberg, "The Virtues of Vagueness in the Languages of Science," Dialogue 14 (1975): 281-305
82. Goldstick, "More on Methodological Conservation," Philosophical Studies 30 (1976): 193-95
83. and Jonathan Vogel, "Sklar on Methodological Conservatism," Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 52 (1992): 125-31
84. The cogito approach in the phenomenological tradition (e.g., in Merleau-Ponty) is sometimes taken to be different from Descartes's cogito because of its being able to avoid methodological skepticism: see Linda L. Williams, "Merleau-Ponty's Tacit Cogito," Man and World 23 (1990): 101-11
85. See Hartry Field, "Deflationist Views of Meaning and Content," in Simon Blackburn and Keith Simmons (eds.), Truth (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 351-91
86. Gary Ebbs, "Truth and Trans-Theoretical Terms," in Conant and Zeglen, eds., Hilary Putnam, 167-85 (see 182)
87. See several contributions to Jensine Andresen, ed., Religion in Mind: Cognitive Perspectives on Religious Belief, Ritual and Experience (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001)
88. and Ilkka Pyysiäinen, How Religion Works: Towards a Cognitive Science of Religion (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2001)
89. For a critique of methodological atheism as an unhelpful "naturalization" of the study of religion, cf. Sami Pihlström and Heikki J. Koskinen, "Philosophical and Empirical Knowledge in the Program of Naturalism" [online, 2001], in Mika Kiikeri and Petri Ylikoski, eds., Explanatory Connections: Essays Dedicated to Matti Sintonen's 50th. Birthday, http://www.valt.helsinki.fi/kfil/matti
90. Cf. Antony Flew, God and Philosophy (London: Hutchinson, 1966)
91. For an account of methodological atheism as a principle of Heidegger's thought, see James K.A. Smith, "The Art of Christian Atheism: Faith and Philosophy in Early Heidegger," Faith and Philosophy 14 (1997): 71-81
92. See Christian Arnsperger, "Methodological Altruism as an Alternative Foundation for Individual Optimization," Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 3 (2000): 115-36. I doubt that Emmanuel Levinas himself ever used this term
93. Cf. Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, "Some Varieties of Particularism," Metaphilosophy 30 (1999): 1-12
94. See Lauener, Offene Transzendentalphilosophie, eh. 11. There is, it seems to me, no established terminology here, at least not in a sense comparable to the level of establishment of, say, "methodological solipsism" or "methodological naturalism."
95. For varieties of this interpretation, see Henry E. Allison, Kant's Transcendental Idealism: An Interpretation and Defense (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1983)
96. Markku Leppäkoski, The Transcendental How: Kant's Transcendental Deduction of Objective Cognition, Stockholm Studies in Philosophy, vol. 13 (Stockholm: University of Stockholm, Department of Philosophy, 1993)
97. Allison, Idealism and Freedom: Essays on Kant's Theoretical and Practical Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996)
98. David Carr, The Paradox of Subjectivity: The Self in the Transcendental Tradition (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1999)
99. Michelle Grier, Kant's Doctrine of Transcendental Illusion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 86 ff
100. Sami Pihlström, Naturalizing the Transcendental: A Pragmatic View (Amherst, NY: Prometheus/Humanity Books, 2003)
101. For critical discussions, cf. Robert Hanna's and Kenneth Westphal's writings to be referred to toward the end of this essay, especially Hanna, Kant and the Foundations of Analytic Philosophy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001)
102. cf. Stern, Transcendental Arguments and Scepticism: Answering the Question of Justification (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000)
103. Cf. Onora O'Neill, Constructions of Reason (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989)
104. cf. Ricoeur, Husserl (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1957), 36
105. Cf. also Douglas Mann, "Reconstructing the Past: A Structural Idealist Approach," Clio 27 (1998): 221-49
106. I am here partly relying on an earlier essay of mine, "Two Kinds of Methodological Solipsism," cited above
107. Carnap, The Logical Structure of the World, §65
108. Putnam, Realism and Reason, 236-37
109. For further references to these debates, cf. Pihlström, "Two Kinds of Methodological Solipsism."
110. Putnam, Words and Life, 88-89
111. See Carnap, The Logical Structure of the World, §§54ff
112. This is a major theme in Richard Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism (Hassocks: The Harvester Press, 1982), and in many of his subsequent writings
113. I do not think I have much to add to the critique of Rorty I have presented in Pragmatism and Philosophical Anthropology, ch. 7
114. Rescher, "Knowledge of the Truth in Pragmatic Perspective," 73
115. Rescher, Realistic Pragmatism, 97
116. See Hilary Putnam, Reason, Truth and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981); Realism and Reason; Realism with a Human Face
117. It has been suggested, however, that Kant's own reliance on the formal unity of apperception is an example of methodological solipsism: see Richard Schantz, "Selbstbewusstsein und Objektbewusstsein bei Kant: Eine Studie zu den Paralogismen der reinen Vernunft," Grazer Philosophische Studien 60 (2000): 151-69
118. Paul Abela, Kant's Empirical Realism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002)
119. Hanna, Kant and the Foundations of Analytic Philosophy, 104
120. While Hanna himself is sympathetic to transcendental idealism, other recent critics of Allison, especially Kenneth Westphal, are much less sympathetic, preferring a (Hegelian) transcendentally established realism instead. Westphal believes that Kant's own "Refutation of Idealism" can be used as a transcendental argument against (transcendental) idealism and in favor of naturalistic realism. For Westphal's critique of Allison, see his essay, "Freedom and Distinction between Phenomena and Noumena: Is Allison's View Methodological, Metaphysical, or Equivocal?" Journal of Philosophical Research 26 (2001): 593-622
121. also see Kenneth R. Westphal, "Affinity, Idealism, and Naturalism: The Stability of Cinnabar and the Possibility of Experience," Kant-Studien 88 (1997): 139-89
122. and Westphal, "Can Pragmatic Realists Argue Transcendentally?" in John R. Shook, ed., Pragmatic Naturalism and Realism (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2003), 151-75
123. See Allison, Kant's Transcendental Idealism, ch. 2
124. While Zahavi approves of Carr's "demythologization" of transcendental subjectivity, he attacks the latter's purely semantical and anti-metaphysical account of it; in addition to the above-cited forthcoming essay, see also Dan Zahavi, "Transcendental Subjectivity and Metaphysics: A Discussion of David Carr's Paradox of Subjectivity," Human Studies 25 (2002): 103-16 (especially 110-14)
125. For comparison, see also John J. Drummond's claim that Carr offers a monolithic reading of the transcendental tradition by ignoring important differences between Kant and Husserl (Drummond, "Paradox or Contradiction?," Human Studies 25 [2002]: 89-102)
126. as well as David Carr, "Response to Drummond and Zahavi," Human Studies 25 (2002): 117-23. In his response to Zahavi, Carr points out that he uses the notion of metaphysics in a pre-critical and pre-phenomenological sense, referring to questions and answers regarding what ultimately exists, and that Zahavi may come too close to depicting phenomenology as metaphysically relevant in this sense. Whether or not this is a correct statement of Zahavi's views, we should not premise our criticism of methodologicism in such a pre-critical manner
127. Zahavi, "Phenomenology and Metaphysics," 8
128. See also Zahavi, "Transcendental Subjectivity and Metaphysics," 113
129. Zahavi, "Phenomenology and Metaphysics," 10
130. John Dewey, Philosophy and Civilization (New York: Milton, Balch & Company, 1931), 39-41
131. See Pihlström, Pragmatism and Philosophical Anthropology
132. see also Sami Pihlström, "On the Concept of Philosophical Anthropology," Journal of Philosophical Research 28 (2003): 259-85
133. On the notion of transcendental anthropology, see Jonathan Lear, Open Minded: Working Out the Logic of the Soul (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1998). Lear's context is Wittgenstein scholarship