Essentialism and travelling concepts

A central question regarding Wittgenstein’s appeal to our imaginative capabilities (most prominently in in Philosophical Investigations, II xii, 365: “… we can also invent fictitious natural history for our purposes”) is whether, and if so how, he is still able to steer clear from the ‘craving for generality’ that he thinks is the main source of the wrong way of doing philosophy. It is clear that Wittgenstein thinks philosophical analysis differs from a scientific investigation by not being bound by the facts (in a broad sense, i.e., not just the facts about our actual practices of using a concept, but als facts of a historical or socio-cultural nature, i.e., facts about how we used the concept in the past or facts about the different ways in which others use it). But then the question is how a philosopher who makes free use of their imaginative capabilities with regard to ways concepts can be used can stay clear from essentialism?

That we are able to imagine different practices than we have is obvious, and it is equally obvious that our imaginative capabilities are a crucial factor in almost everything that we do. Imagination is not just key to literature and other aesthetic practices, it also plays a central rol in science, and is an essential ingredients of our everyday lives: planning and decision making depend on it. The question then is this: do the limits of our imaginative capabilities with regard to how a concept can be used coincide with what we would like to call the ‘essence’ of that concept? If the answer is positive, then it seems that Wittgenstein’s appeal to our imagination lands him in exactly the position that he wants to avoid.

At this juncture the crucial observation, I think, is this, that our imagination itself is a moving target in the sense that it, too, is determined by historical, social, cultural, … factors. If that is correct, then philosophical analysis in Wittgenstein’s sense, in which imagination plays a key role, does indeed occupy a position that differs both from that of scientific inquiry, which is factual in nature, and from that of traditional philosophical analysis, which aims at uncovering essences.

This is the difference between an investigation into ‘What is X?’ (factual, as in science, or essentialistic, as in traditional philosophy) and an investigation into ‘What is X-for-us?’: the concepts that a Wittgensteinian philosophy deals with are ‘travelling concepts’ and its method, too, has a ‘travelling’ dimension.

Martin Stokhof
from: Aantekeningen/Notes
date: 19/07/2023