Aspect Showing and the Practical Dimension of Human Affairs

Abstract

The paper seeks to evaluate the contribution made by Bevir to the ongoing debate concerning the status of the history of political ideas and its function in the construction of political theories. Appreciating the full impact of Bevir's position, it is suggested, requires extending his conception of intentionalism’ beyond authorial intentions to include other intentional states such as beliefs, desires and actions, all of which are aspectual in nature. Drawing on Wittgenstein's distinction between ‘saying’ and ‘showing’ and his discussions of ‘aspect perception’, the paper proposes a conception of the practical dimension of human affairs as containing modes of ‘aspect showing’, namely linguistic acts, the function of which is to shape people's states of intentionality and therefore their judgements and actions. Interestingly, while such a conception of human affairs signifies a flight away from certain types of philosophical realism, it compels us to adopt political realism of a kind.

Notes

¹ M. Bevir, The Logic of the History of Ideas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).

² Bevir, The Logic of the History of Ideas, 6.

³ Bevir, The Logic of the History of Ideas, 5.

⁴ Bevir, The Logic of the History of Ideas, 37.

⁵ Bevir, The Logic of the History of Ideas, 192.

⁷ Bevir, The Logic of the History of Ideas, 33.

⁶ For a collection of his methodological writing, see Q. Skinner, Visions of Politics v.1: Regarding Method (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).

⁸ Bevir, The Logic of the History of Ideas, 178.

⁹ It should be noted that the purpose of the exposition offered here of Wittgenstein's ideas is illustrative, avoiding, as much as possible, technical jargon which requires philosophical background.

¹⁰ S. Mulhall, On Being in the World: Wittgenstein and Heidegger on Seeing Aspects (London: Routledge, 1990), 4.

¹¹ L. Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico‐Philosophicus, translated by David Pears and Brian McGuiness (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974).

¹² L. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, translated by G.E.M. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997).

¹³ The concept of ‘seeing as’ or ‘aspect perception’ has been extensively employed and debated primarily in Aesthetics. See, for example, R. Wollheim, Art and Its Objects (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); R. Scruton, Art and Imagination: A Study in the Philosophy of Mind (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982); G. Dickie, Art and the Aesthetic: An Institutional Analysis (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1974), ch. 6.

¹⁴ Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, part IIxi, 194.

¹⁵ Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, Iixi, 214.

¹⁶ Objections to this may take the form of distinguishing between actions that are relevant for the validation of a given representation as opposed to those actions that are irrelevant for the purpose of validation. This is not the place to argue in detail against this type of objection. For our purposes, it is sufficient to say that, on the whole, it would be impossible to indicate with absolute certainty whether or not, given the particular nature of their actions, Jack and Jill are better positioned to offer a final verdict as to the make‐up of that particular section of reality (that is, the pavement; the occasion which prompted actions of a specific nature). The experience of infelicitous action may incur a revision of our modes of ‘aspect perceptions’, but there is no way of telling with absolute certainty whether our ex post ‘aspect perceptions’ are more accurate representations of reality, especially if, by representation, one means some sort of isomorphic relations.

¹⁷ Consider, for instance, claims made by Blair's government regarding the justification for the war in Iraq prior to and after its invasion, especially the radical differences in people's emotive responses to these claims.

¹⁸ I use ‘Intentional’ with capital ‘I’ in order to distinguish it from intentions which are only one form of intentionality.

¹⁹ C. Fleisher Feldman, ‘Intentionality, Narrativity, and Interpretation: The (New) Image of Man’, in John Searle and His Critics, edited by E. Lepore and R. Van Gulick (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), 323–34 (325). For a highly original evaluation of Searle's approach, see J. Rust, John Searle and The Construction of Social Reality (London and New York: Continuum, 2006).

²⁰ My exposition of Searle's position is based primarily on: J. Searle, Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969); Intentionality: An Essay in the Philosophy of Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); The Construction of Social Reality (London: Allen Lane, The Penguin Press, 1995); Rationality in Action (Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2001).

²¹ In this respect, Searle's conception of language goes against the tendency among philosophers of portraying language as a ‘social practice’.

²² On this topic, see Searle, The Construction of Social Reality, 112.

²³ Searle, The Construction of Social Reality, 36.

²⁵ Smith, ‘From Speech Acts to Social Reality’, 15.

²⁴ B. Smith, ‘From Speech Acts to Social Reality’, in John Searle, edited by B. Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 1–33 (15).

²⁶ Searle, The Construction of Social Reality, 111.

²⁷ Searle, The Construction of Social Reality.

²⁹ Searle, The Construction of Social Reality, 13.

²⁸ On his conception of the aspectual nature of Intentional states, see Searle, Intentionality: An Essay in the Philosophy of Mind, 66. Searle tends to equate aspectuality with having a perspective. On the view presented here, beyond some metaphorical purposes, the equation is misleading and altogether wrong.

³⁰ C. Diamond: ‘Realism and the Realistic Spirit’, The Realistic Spirit: Wittgenstein, Philosophy, and the Mind (Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1991), 39–72. On possible implications of Diamond's account, see Z. Emmerich, ‘Political Theory and the Realistic Spirit’, in Political Thought and International Relations: Variations of a Realist Theme, edited by D. Bell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).

³¹ J. Dunn: ‘Practising History and Social Science on “Realist” Assumptions’, in Action and Interpretation: Studies in the Philosophy of the Social Sciences, edited by C. Hookway and P. Pettit (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 145–75.

³² M. Bevir, New Labour: A Critique (Oxford: Routledge, 2005).