Peter Winch

Peter Winch was a British philosopher whose work applied the later Wittgenstein to the study of society. He taught at Swansea, at Birkbeck and King's College London, and later at the University of Illinois. In The Idea of a Social Science he argued that social action is rule-governed and meaningful, so that understanding a society is closer to grasping a set of concepts than to discovering causal laws, a thesis that set off a long debate about rationality, relativism and interpretation.

Key ideas

• Meaningful action is rule-following, and rules are intelligible only from within a shared form of life.
• Understanding social life is a conceptual achievement rather than an application of natural-scientific method.
• Outsiders must not judge an alien practice, such as Azande witchcraft, by standards drawn from a different form of life.
• Moral judgement can be irreducibly particular: what one person must do need not bind everyone in the same situation.

Major works

• The Idea of a Social Science and its Relation to Philosophy (1958)
• "Understanding a Primitive Society" (1964)
• Ethics and Action (1972)
• Simone Weil: "The Just Balance" (1989)

In the conversation

• Question A researcher surveyed our village. Why does it matter what we meant by our answers? Akosua Mensah · 3 replies
• Discussion Winch on the Azande: who gets to call a practice irrational? Kwame Asante · 4 replies
• Question Could a culture reason by different logical rules, or is that a colonial myth? Khady Sène · 5 replies