Language games and relativism

In the early reception of Peter Winch’s work, critics typically described him as a relativist or linguistic idealist. Still today, many commentators believe that theories of that kind are at least implicit in Winch’s work. This chapter is a critical examination of Cora Diamond’s critique of Peter Winch. Her objections focus on the possibility of communication and criticism between language games, stressing the importance of a shared reality that all language games address. Diamond misidentifies Winch’s views, taking them to imply language-game relativism or linguistic idealism. When she does raise valid criticisms against language-game relativism, her critical points mainly coincide with things that Winch has already stressed in his own work. That leaves us with the question of what their real disagreement amounts to. At the bottom of Diamond’s objections lies her failure to appreciate Winch’s insights about the place of logic in human intercourse.