Introduction

Ludwig Wittgenstein has been accused of being a relativist by various philosophers. In this chapter I will focus particularly on accusations of cognitive relativism levelled at Wittgenstein by Roger Trigg. Accusations of relativism, of various sorts, have been thought to undermine Wittgenstein's philosophical approach. However, there are some philosophers, such as Robert Arrington, Natalie Alana Ashton, Gordon Baker, Hans- Johann Glock, Peter Hacker, and Martin Kusch, who have found relativism in Wittgenstein's work and thought that it is a benign or even a positive feature of his philosophy. Still others argue that Wittgenstein is not a relativist at all. In this chapter I will start by looking at the various forms of relativism and then go on to consider whether Wittgenstein can be placed in one or another of the relativistic camps and throughout the chapter I will look at the credibility of various forms of relativism.

There are, I think, good reasons for thinking that Wittgenstein was a certain kind of relativist, although he certainly did not think that ‘anything goes’ in the moral, religious, epistemic, or conceptual spheres or that all positions staked out in these spheres were of equal value. What kind of reasons are there for thinking that Wittgenstein was a relativist? For one thing it is clear that Wittgenstein rejected certain kinds of realist positions within philosophy. Realists who set themselves up in opposition to idealism in philosophy are subject to the same kinds of confusions as idealists, according to Wittgenstein. So, for example, in the Blue Book Wittgenstein says that ‘the trouble with the realist is always that he does not solve but skip the difficulties which his adversaries see, though they too don't succeed in solving them’, and in On Certainty Wittgenstein argues that the ‘claim’ that ‘there are physical objects’ is nonsense.Wittgenstein rejected the idea that our concepts are somehow imposed on us by reality and he acknowledges the possibility that our concepts might be very different if the world were different in certain ways. It seems clear that Wittgenstein rejects the idea that there is a single best way to divide up the world with concepts and the idea that a certain conceptual scheme might be absolutely correct.