Philosophical Investigations 20:3 July 1997

ISSN 0190-0536

Can We Understand Ourselves?

Peter Winch, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

The origin of my title is of some relevance to the content of this

paper. I was, namely, invited to speak1 on the possibility or other-
wise of our understanding foreign cultures. I did not wilfully turn
my back on that topic, but want to suggest that some at least of the
difficulties we see here spring from an inadequate attention to diffi-
culties about how we should speak of ‘understanding’ in relation to
our own culture.
Let us look briefly at the words ‘possible’ and ‘impossible’. Not so
very long ago it seemed impossible that human beings should ever
be able to travel to the moon. The technical difficulties seemed so
great that it would once have been quite reasonable to suppose that
they would never be overcome, though of course they eventually
were. Here the nature of the objective was clear enough.
Cultural anthropologists, historians and others concerned with the
investigation of cultures other than their own – may in a somewhat
analogous way encounter difficulties of a ‘technical’ sort. Access to
the target culture may be impeded by factors of various kinds: insuf-
ficient historical or archaeological evidence, the hostility of people to
foreign snoopers, lack of sufficiently sophisticated techniques –
whether statistical, mathematical or other, and so on. Here too the
project hindered by such deficiencies may be clear enough to those
engaged in it; and such obstacles may or may not eventually be over-
come. For an informed opinion about such matters one would best
consult, not philosophers, but historians, archaeologists, linguists,
ethnographers, statisticians, etc.
Consider the following contrasting case2: it is impossible to trisect
an angle using ruler and compass. The impossibility here is not a
function of inadequate resources or technique or of overwhelmingly

1. At the conference Fremdheit und Vertrautheit: Hermeneutik im europäischen Kontext.

Martin Luther-Universität, Halle-Wittenberg, 21–24 September 1994.
2. One that Wittgenstein discusses at length more than once.
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MA 02148, USA.
194 Philosophical Investigations
difficult obstacles, but is demonstrated by a geometrical proof that
the notion of trisecting an angle is a senseless one. To say, then, that it
is impossible to trisect an angle could also be expressed by saying that
to speak of trisecting an angle makes no sense.
The example shows that the senselessness of a certain form of
words need by no means be obvious. Somebody may for a long time
do things that he would describe as ‘trying to trisect an angle’; he
can perhaps be stopped only by a mathematical proof. Such a proof
does not show that there are insuperable obstacles to trisecting an
angle (or whatever), but that the expression ‘trisection of an angle’
has no sense.
Now the questions before us about the possibility or impossibility
of understanding other cultures are not to be dealt with by anything
that looks much like mathematical proof, but I want to suggest that
they are questions about whether it makes sense to speak of ‘under-
standing’ in this sort of context. This may sound absurd! How can
there be a serious question whether it makes sense or not to speak of
understanding a culture other than one’s own. People do after all
speak in such terms very commonly. Books in some profusion are
written and read on such subjects by historians, anthropologists, lin-
guists, textual scholars, etc. Large sums of money are disbursed for
researches in the field. It would seem hard to deny that workers in
these fields who claim to have reached this alleged kind of under-
standing are speaking intelligibly. Something must be said, then, to
show how such an apparent absurdity can have gained currency.
There is a tempting parallel – which has often been drawn –
between this ‘problem of other cultures’ and the ‘problem of other
minds’. One powerful element in this parallel is the idea that I have
a certain sort of understanding of myself which I don’t, can’t, have of
another. The idea here is that self-understanding sets a sort of standard
of what the understanding of human beings can or should be, but a
standard that cannot be met when what is in question is the under-
standing of another, or of others.
In the case of individual self-understanding in relation to under-
standing ‘other minds’ the dominating picture is somewhat as
follows. –
to understand oneself is, above all, to understand one’s own mental states
and processes: one’s thoughts, feelings, desires, intentions and decisions.
Understanding is itself one such mental state or process and the others are its
objects. Furthermore, there is a peculiar sort of ‘transparency’ that is charac-
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 Peter Winch 195
teristic of the mental; i.e. the subject is necessarily and immediately aware of
its own mental states, and this immediate self-awareness is the most import-
ant, indispensable element in understanding. However, mental states are only
transparent in this sense to their possessor and the flip side of this privileged
position is that the mental states of others are entirely opaque, even inaccessi-
ble to anyone else.
Here I am not of course primarily concerned with this ‘problem
of other minds’, but some of the considerations which contribute to
the problem do play an important role in the genesis of the ‘other
cultures’ problem and I cannot avoid addressing them.
When not philosophizing we behave as though we think it often
perfectly possible to understand someone else’s mental processes; and
also perfectly possible to misunderstand, or to fail to understand, one’s
own mental processes. The philosophical picture can only have a
prescriptive, or legislative, force: it enjoins us to think and speak dif-
ferently.3 But what is it about our conception of understanding
ourselves and others that so easily convinces us of the need to adopt
that egocentric proposal?
My understanding of ‘what I do’ (using this phrase in a very large
sense) manifests itself in two ways: in the character of my behaviour
itself; and in what I may say about my behaviour.4 Imagine for
instance that I am sitting at a table with the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle
before me. You see me sorting the pieces out in a certain way: per-
haps putting together first all the pieces with matching colours, then
fitting together a number of pieces whose shapes make their belong-
ing together obvious, and so on. You may not be sure that I really
understand what I am doing and you ask me to explain. I say some
things that sound to you like good sense and that you recognize as
elementary precepts on how to go about solving a jigsaw puzzle.
How, in respect of my understanding what I am doing, are my
words and my actions related? There are a number of considerations
that tempt us to give my words a pre-eminent position in this respect.
I may express my understanding by giving – in words – my reasons
for what I am doing. These reasons characteristically look beyond

3. Cf. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, I, § 303 and II, ix.

4. Someone may object that my speech is part of my behaviour. I would emphati-
cally agree with this and say simply that I am here drawing a distinction for a
particular purpose and not implying some fundamental dividing line. Indeed, as I
hope will become clear, it is precisely my main purpose to deny that there is any such
fundamental division ‘in the nature of things’.
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196 Philosophical Investigations
the behaviour itself and if I am really acting for those reasons, it may
seem that those reasons must somehow be previously present to me:
perhaps also in the form of internal words – or the equivalent of
words.5 Hence, so it may be concluded, it is this immediate presence
of such reasons to my mind and their causal efficacy in producing
my behaviour that constitutes my understanding of what I do. This
conception is captured in the dominant account of reasons for acting
accepted in the Anglo-American philosophical world as com-
pounded of the agent’s beliefs and desires. What this picture suggests is
that I navigate myself towards the goal I wish to reach by following
an internal map of the terrain I have to traverse and a list of the
resources at my disposal for doing so.
This conclusion may seem to be supported by the following
powerful consideration. Whereas a spectator can only infer my
reasons for acting from observation of what I do, I, the agent, do
not have to do this. I can (very often) say straight off what my
reasons are. We are tempted to think that these reasons – my desires
and my beliefs – are there before my mind, accessible to me alone.
Understanding another culture is not a matter of understanding
the behaviour of all or most individual participants in it; but perhaps
we might try saying that it is understanding the inner maps accord-
ing to which people of that culture navigate and the destinations
they are trying to reach. Such maps will be to an indeterminately6
large extent culturally determined.
The problem of understanding how our aliens ‘map’ their envir-
onment is not just analogous to that of a surveyor – determining
what goes on the map and where. We also have to understand the
method of projection used in constructing and applying the map; and
furthermore we have to remember that the talk of maps is, after all,
only a metaphor. If we know that what we are trying to interpret is
indeed a map, we know that talk about ‘methods of projection’ will
be appropriate and, roughly speaking, what to look for. But of
course, in trying to understand the activities and artifacts, etc. of an
alien culture we do not start off with that sort of knowledge. A
sketch, whether physical or mental, is only a map by virtue of the
way it is used or applied, and this can be discerned only through

5. Here we can see the genesis of the line of thinking which has led so many con-
temporary linguists to talk about ‘mentalese’, ‘the language of thought’.
6. ‘Indeterminately’ because no sharp boundary can be drawn between what is cul-
tural and what is not.
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 Peter Winch 197
study of the actions of those who do apply it. It is no use trying to
start with agents’ ‘internal maps’ – with their internal ‘desires and
beliefs’ in the hope that these will breathe sense and meaning into
the otherwise enigmatic actions we are confronted with. On the
contrary we see desires and beliefs for what they are only through
the behaviour in which they are manifested.
I noted earlier the temptation we are under to give the words
someone utters a preeminent position as constituting, as it were, a
direct report on the mental state which gives the behaviour its
meaning. But neither words nor actions have per se any preeminent
position. Sometimes we can check whether agents understand what
they are doing by listening to what they say; but sometimes we need
to check whether agents understand what they are saying by studying
what they do. And in each case an important aspect of the listening
and the studying will be putting the words and/or the actions into a
wider context, often enough a cultural context.
Prima facie the natural place to look for such a putting into context
may seem to be in the writings of ethnographers, cultural historians
and the like, where they try to make intelligible social events and
individual actions of a kind with which their readers may be
expected to be unfamiliar or which even may be expected to come
into conflict with their readers’ natural expectations. We shall hope
for a description of the alien practices that creates some pattern that
we can recognize; we shall also perhaps hope to find some analogies
with practices characteristic of our own culture which will give us
some landmarks with reference to which we can take our bearings.
Such attempted explanations may go wrong in various ways.
Attempted explanatory patterns may later simply come to be rejected
as mistaken on the basis of new discoveries. More interestingly, they
may fail to construct a pattern of which contemporary readers can
make sense. A reader brought up on modern chemistry for instance,
might fail to see how a medieval alchemist’s spiritual purity could
possibly be thought to have any bearing on the success or otherwise
of the experiments he conducts in his laboratory.
The ‘hermeneutical’ problem of understanding alien cultures is
sometimes located at this point. But I think it is important to notice
that, whatever the nature of this problem, it is not one that arises
only when we are dealing with historically or geographically remote
cultures. Mistakes and uncertainties are as liable to arise concerning
our own culture as concerning another. How, for instance, should we
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198 Philosophical Investigations
think of the practice of certain youth groups within contemporary
British pop culture of assembling at Stonehenge once a year to cele-
brate the summer solstice?7 How much, and what kind of, relation
does it have to ancient Druidical religious practices on which it is
ostensibly modelled? To what extent is it a manifestation of contem-
porary pop culture commercialism? Does it in any way mark a
genuine recrudescence of an authentic sun worship? And if we are to
think of it in this latter way, what sort of sense can we make of such a
form of worship given the role that nature plays, or perhaps fails to
play, in the life of modern industrial societies? Such questions are real
enough. Sometimes they may receive a satisfactory answer, some-
times not. But there are no good grounds for thinking it impossible
ever to know how to interpret a cultural phenomenon.
It is in any case misleading to distinguish in a wholesale way
between ‘our own’ and ‘alien’ cultures; parts of ‘our’ culture may be
quite alien to one of ‘us’; indeed some parts of it may be more alien
than cultural manifestations which are geographically or historically
remote. I see no reason why a contemporary historical scholar might
not feel himself more at home in the world of medieval alchemy
than in that of twentieth century professional football.
A ‘culture’ is not a seamless web and this is true in more than one
sense. On the one hand individuals are very variously exposed, in
the course of their upbringing and after, to different facets of a single
culture. But at least as important as this is the fact that different indi-
viduals respond to what they encounter in enormously varied ways.
The importance of this factor is obscured by the passive sounding
term ‘internalization’, so beloved of sociologists and social psycholo-
gists. We do not merely imbibe or absorb those aspects of our
culture with which we come into contact, we react. The characters
of individual reactions to what we may be prepared to call the ‘same’
cultural manifestation, are enormously diverse. The diversity may
extend to quite radical conflict; in some areas of life, indeed, this is
characteristic. (Think of morality, politics, religion.) The fact that
some cultural manifestations are less intelligible (if intelligible at all!)
to some than they are to others is clearly closely connected with this
phenomenon, as is the possibility that an individual may fail to
respond significantly to, and hence to see any sense in, most of the
7. I am not concerned here with the kind of unnecessarily heavy weather the British
police authorities make of this. This is a different, and in its own way equally hard to
make sense of, contemporary cultural phenomenon.
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 Peter Winch 199
culture into which he is born. I think here particularly of Faust at
the opening of Part I of Goethe’s drama.8
The idea, then, that one’s own culture, in contrast to others, is
somehow transparent to one, will not bear examination.
Nevertheless, there is no denying that all this leaves something
important out, which I will now try to address. I will return to an
example that I discussed long ago:9 E. E. Evans-Pritchard’s description
of the Zande poison oracle.10 Evans-Pritchard describes in great detail
and with great sensitivity and lucidity what goes into the consultation
of the oracle, and also the occasions on which the oracle is character-
istically consulted, the consequences of such a consultation and the
connections between these practices and other aspects of the tribe’s
life and of their beliefs. Insofar as there are errors or misunderstandings
in these descriptions there is no reason why they cannot be quite satis-
factorily filled out and/or corrected by other investigators. There is no
reason why, in these terms, we should not be able to gain as full an
understanding of the Zande poison oracle as we might gain from a
comparable description of, let us say, concert going in the western
world. We may still feel, nevertheless, that there is something about
the Zande practice that we do not, perhaps even that we never shall,
understand. Or rather, as I think it better to say, there is a kind of
understanding of this practice that we still do not have. I will try to
express this by saying that we cannot imagine what it would be like
for us to behave as the Azande do and to make the kind of sense of
what we were doing as the Azande, we assume, do make of what they
do; or perhaps: we cannot imagine taking the consultation of the ora-
cle seriously, as the Azande do. In a similar way an anthropologist who
for one reason or another had absolutely no appreciation of music
might be able to construct a very perspicuous description of how the
participants in the musical life of a community characteristically

8. Habe nun, ach! die Philosophie,

Juristerei und Medizin,
Und leider auch Theologie
Durchaus studiert, mit heißem Bemühn.
Da steh’ ich nun, ich armer Tor!
Und bin so klug als wie zuvor;
...
9. In ‘Understanding a Primitive Society’, originally published in the American
Philosophical Quarterly, Vol. I (1964) and reprinted in my Ethics and Action (London,
Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972).
10. Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande (London & New York, 1958).
© Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 1997
200 Philosophical Investigations
behave and yet find this whole pattern of behaviour completely
opaque and mysterious.
In one way it hardly makes sense for me to speak of taking the
poison oracle seriously in my own life as Azande do in theirs.11
Much as I can apply a map only to a landscape with suitable features
– there is no such thing as applying a map of Central London to the
Sahara Desert for example – so I cannot apply the Azande’s ‘cultural
map’ to my own cultural environment. Evans-Pritchard could intel-
ligibly (and only half humorously) remark that during his field work
he ran his own household by consulting oracles à la Zande and say:
‘I found this as satisfactory a way of running my home and affairs as
any other I know of ’; but only because the oracle and related insti-
tutions played a living role in the lives of the people amongst whom
he was living. His actions, therefore, could be met with the kinds of
response and resonance which would give them sense.
Furthermore, we have to reckon with the possibility that two
styles of thinking may actually be at conceptual odds with each
other. It is sometimes remarked, for instance, that the kind of disin-
terested, intellectual enquiry, based perhaps on a naturalistic world
view, characteristic of the sciences as we now know them, is at
logical odds with magical ways of thinking like the Zande. This may
well be true; the difficulty – for some the virtual impossibility – of
‘taking the poison oracle seriously’ is perhaps an example. But we
have to be careful what conclusions we draw from such a fact. It is
irresponsible, for instance, to conclude that it will be ‘impossible for
us to understand such an alien cultural phenomenon in terms of our
own culture’. There is on the one hand no reason at all why we
should not be able to produce a finely articulated description of the
phenomenon in question in its own cultural context; and it would
be dogmatism to refuse this the name ‘understanding’. And on the
other hand, as I remarked earlier, culture is not a seamless web.
‘Scientific’ attitudes are an important aspect of our particular culture,
but they certainly do not exhaust it. None of us – none of us – thinks
like that all the time. Dickens’s Mr. Gradgrind12 is a satirical portrayal
of the vanity of any attempt to do so. Anthropological enquiry has
other cultural resources to draw upon on its home ground than the

11. For more on this see ‘Language, Belief and Relativism’ in P. Winch, Trying to
Make Sense (Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1987).
12. In his Hard Times.
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 Peter Winch 201
narrowly ‘scientific’ and its most interesting practitioners – Clifford
Geertz for instance – do so freely.
I have argued that an important part of what we mean by ‘under-
standing’ in relation to a culture depends on having a context – a
Lebenswelt, if you prefer that idiom – within which we can act appro-
priately. But the word ‘appropriately’ in some ways remains obscure
in this context. Philosophers of various persuasions have argued that
there is in principle no way of saying definitely and for certain what
‘appropriate’ action consists of in a given situation. Wittgenstein
expressed this argument in the following way13:
This was our paradox: no course of action could be determined by
a rule, because every course of action can be made out to accord
with the rule. The answer was: if everything can be made to
accord with the rule, then it can also be made out to conflict with
it. And so there would be neither accord nor conflict here.
This passage is often referred to: less often is its continuation, which
contains an emphatic rebuttal of the argument:
Hence there is an inclination to say: every action according to a
rule is an interpretation. But we ought to restrict the term ‘inter-
pretation’ to the substitution of one expression for another.
Wittgenstein’s emphasis here on how we act in a given context is, in
my view, enormously important and I shall be returning to it.
However, the way he expresses the matter in this passage can easily
lead to another misunderstanding, suggesting as it does that ‘practi-
cal’ understanding consists in being able to give what counts as
the ‘correct’ response. Wittgenstein’s use of the ‘language game’
image (at least in its earlier stages) does indeed emphasize this. It is of
course extremely important, but I have already in the course of this
lecture given a number of examples which show that its applicability
is limited.
Wittgenstein himself came increasingly to realize this and I think
the following remark from his notebooks in 1948 is important here.
It is important for our argument that there are people of whom it
is possible for someone to feel he will never know what is going
on inside them; that he will never understand them. (English
women for Europeans.)14

13. Philosophical Investigations, I, 201. But a similar argument is often involved in dis-
cussions of the so-called ‘hermeneutic circle’.
14. Culture and Value, p. 74e.
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202 Philosophical Investigations
He frequently described this type of phenomenon with the graphic
German phrase: ‘Ich kann mich in sie nicht finden’ (a nightmare for
the translator into English!: perhaps, ‘I cannot get the hang of
them’).
[1] Some of the difficulties most of us feel with an institution like
the Zande poison oracle provide one sort of example of this. Here
are some more.
[2] The English philosopher R. G. Collingwood described in his
Autobiography his alienation from the sort of philosophy practised by
his Oxford colleagues. He did not really understand the point of
what they were discussing, though he was perfectly well able in a
sense to ‘follow’ their discussions and even make remarks which
were recognized as contributions to the debates! [I have found
myself in a similar position in some kinds of company.]
[3] An apparently very important part of European popular cul-
ture is a consuming interest in professional football. I do not merely
not share this popular passion; it is so alien to me that I do not feel I
understand what most of my fellows feel for it. It is not that I do not
know what to expect of them, or that I am unaware of the back-
ground to the sport or even totally blind to the beauties of genuine
skill in it. Nevertheless – ich kann mich in sie nicht finden. Do not
say this has nothing to do with understanding. It is a quite central and
important use of the verb ‘to understand’. If you feel that you do not
understand me (because I realize, of course, that this is a reciprocal
phenomenon) then, first, I would say this is another example of
what I am drawing attention to; and, second, I would ask you if you
feel you understand the kind of attitude to World Cup football that
led to the murder of Escobar in Medellín for having scored an own
goal against the Colombian side.
These examples are in line with my contention that the difficul-
ties with which we are concerned do not pertain exclusively to
so-called ‘alien’ cultures. Indeed, they show that the line between
what is and what is not ‘alien’ is quite indeterminate; and this
really reinforces my point. The problems spring in large part from
certain peculiarities of our notion of understanding, rather than
from peculiarities about the relation between one culture and
another.
I remarked earlier that some might think that what Wittgenstein
calls ‘sich in andere finden’ is of only marginal significance, having to
do with ease in dealing with others in practical life, rather than with
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 Peter Winch 203
understanding strictly so called. I want to conclude by arguing, neces-
sarily sketchily, that, on the contrary, this practical ‘being in tune’
with others lies right at the very centre of our understanding of other
human beings.15
In an important passage Wittgenstein considers what is involved in
treating another human being as a sentient, thinking person. I should
like to quote this in full.
‘I believe that he is suffering’ – Do I also believe that he isn’t an
automaton? ‘I believe that he is not an automaton’, just like that,
so far makes no sense. My attitude to him is an attitude towards
the soul. I am not of the opinion that he has a soul.16
The general point made here is explored in fine detail in various
places in Wittgenstein’s work. Consider for instance his treatment of
the concept of pain. He asks how this might be learned by a child
and says:
Here is one possibility: words are connected with the primitive,
the natural expressions of the sensation and used in their place. A
child has hurt himself and he cries; and then adults talk to him and
teach him exclamations and, later, sentences. They teach the child
new pain-behaviour. ‘So you are saying that the word “pain”
really means crying?’ – On the contrary: the verbal expression of
pain replaces crying and does not describe it.17
His treatment of our ascription of pain to someone else, though nec-
essarily sharply different in its detail, comes from a similar direction.
He suggests we think of the forms of behaviour in which we, for
instance, show pity for another human being who has been injured
as forms of conviction that the other is in pain.18
In both cases, then, Wittgenstein turns away from the traditional
account of the concept of pain as the concept of a peculiar internal
object, process or state and instead asks us to examine in detail how
pain language is actually used in practice. In this way he is able to
show how first and third person ascriptions of pain belong together
as complementary moves in a single language game. Thus, ironically,
by stressing the enormous differences between speaking in the first and
in the third persons he is able to retain the unity of the concept of

15. I have treated this topic much more fully in ‘Eine Einstellung zur Seele’ (in
Winch, Trying to Make Sense, pp. 140–53).
16. Op. cit. II, Section iv.
17. Ibid. I, § 244.
18. Ibid. I, § 287.
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204 Philosophical Investigations
pain in a way which was beyond the traditional accounts, which all
ran aground on the ‘problem of other minds’, a subject which I said
a little about earlier in this lecture.
Wittgenstein uses a parallel strategy in many other contexts, such
as his various treatments of what is involved in understanding the
thoughts of another human being – to which of course necessarily
belongs an account of the various forms that misunderstanding and
failing to understand may take. ‘Practice gives the words their sense’,
as he says, for instance, in discussing the question: ‘How do I know
that two people mean the same when each says he believes in
God?’.19 Success and failure in ‘sich in andere zu finden’ is, I have
suggested, a central element in most kinds of relationship human
beings may have with each other. A central task for anyone wanting
to understand a culture will be to clarify the concepts which shape
such human relationships. Putting these two points together, we can
see perhaps that if we are confronted with any cultural phenomenon,
‘alien’ or otherwise, then, as long as ‘wir können uns in diese Leute
nicht finden’, there will indeed be a sort of failure of understanding.
This may be curable in particular cases; and in others it may not.
Dept. of Philosophy
University of Illinois

In April we received the news of Peter Winch’s death. An obituary

notice will appear in the October number of the Journal.

19. Culture and Value, p. 85e.

© Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 1997