“A closely related problem in the methodology of social science is concerned with the concept of explanation. Various attempts have been made to link this concept to the notion of understanding; but the uneasy syntheses proposed by Max Weber and others soon succumbed to a positivistic emphasis on explanation at the expense of any reference to understanding. The philosophy of the later Wittgenstein tends to reverse this trend, insofar as it disputes the relevance of explanation for the understanding of human phenomena. In the Blue Book, Wittgenstein distinguishes between two senses of the question ‘why?’: it may be used to ask for a reason or for a cause. To offer a reason for something one said or did is to appeal to some accepted rule that shows a way which leads to that action; a rule, in other words, which justifies the utterance of that expression or the performance of that action. To provide a cause, on the other hand, is to adduce a statistical regularity, or to trace a mechanism, or to sketch an historical genesis. In no case, however, would the provision of such a cause further elucidate the significance of what is said or done, any more than it would clarify the meaning of what is believed:

The causes of our belief in a proposition are indeed irrelevant to the question of what we believe. Not so on the grounds, which are grammatically related to the proposition, and tell us what proposition it is.

So while Wittgenstein does not deny that the causes of a particular phenomenon may be interesting for some purposes, he does contend that the causal explanation of that phenomenon in no way contributes to the comprehension of its sense.

The antithesis between reason and cause, or between understanding and explanation, pervades the literature of post-Wittgensteinian philosophy. Peters maintains that a sufficient explanation of human action, as opposed to mere bodily movement, can only be given in terms of the rule-following purposive model and not in causal terms; for there is, he claims, ‘a logical gulf between nature and convention’. Similarly, Melden argues that insofar as ’cause’ is being used in a Humean sense, causal explanation is irrelevant to everyday accounts of human action. For when we offer such accounts, we provide motives or reasons for doing the action; and since the description of a motive necessarily refers to the action which it is a motive for, it cannot be a Humean cause of that action. Winch also observes that relations between ideas are ‘internal relations’; and since social relations between individuals exist only in and through their ideas, social relations are just another species of internal relations. ‘It follows’, Winch infers,

that social relations must be equally an equally unsuitable subject for generalizations and theories of the scientific sort to be formulated about them. Historical explanation is not the application of generalizations and theories to particular instances; it is the tracing of internal relations.

For Winch, an appeal to statistical regularities concerning the occurrence of an action is quite irrelevant to the understanding of that action, just as a formulation of probabilistic laws about the appearance of an expression in no way facilitates its comprehension. What is required in both cases is a fuller grasp of the rules which govern the performance of the action and the utterance of the expression, not the invocation of some account which is completely different in kind” (Thompson 1995:32-33).

Thompson, John B.
1995[1981] Critical Hermeneutics: A study in the thought of Paul Ricoeur and Jurgen Habermas. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press.

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