Epistemology & Philosophy of Science

Volume 59, Issue 1, 2022

Wittgenstein as a “Fellow Traveler” of Contextualist Sociology

The article attempts to criticize the concept of language games, as well as the hypothesis of K.A. Rodin on Wittgenstein’s influence on social science through the introduction of “contextualism”. Wittgenstein proposed to place language games in the first place in relation to the feelings and inner experience of individuals participating in common practices. The author of the article puts forward the following argument against it: indirect awareness of the rules and norms in which the individual does not participate or to which s/he does not obey suggests that the meaningfulness of actions stems not only from the context, but also from internal reflective understanding. In the final part of the article, the author refers to the work of E. Durkheim “Suicide: A Study in Sociology” in order to show that contextualism, as K. Rodin understands it, may have its own roots in sociology.