G. E. Moore (1873-1958):
Common Sense and Ordinary Language

Defended Common Sense by suggesting others "paradoxically" contradict themselves in doubting "banally obvious truths" (eg. material things, space & time, other minds, ...)
 

Moore's follower, Norman Malcolm, suggests that:

"Ordinary language" expressions are free from "Philosophical Paradox" or self-contradiction because they provide useful or "pragmatic" truths

People learn the meaning of expressions through standard cases or "exemplars" of paradigms
 

Wittgenstein responds: The "common-sense philosopher is not the common-sense man"
 
 

 Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951):
Language games and traditions

1922 - Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus:
The "picture theory" of knowledge

1953 - Philosophical Investigations: Criticized representational theories suggesting that statements about internal perceptions (eg. "I'm in pain") are expressions of such states rather than descriptions of objects

Reminiscent of Peter Abellard's resolution to the medieval "nominalism vs. realism debate", Wittgenstein offers a perspective of neo-conceptualism

 He suggests that the categorical terms we use in science represent real things (like realism) however they are not objects or things (like nominalism) but rather the creative expressions of human experience (like conceptualism)
 
 

 Mind, pain, memory, learning, thinking & intelligence
are real, but they are not entities or things There is not a limited set of defining or "essential features" (list of propositions or statements) that describe such concepts Conceptual confusion arises from failing to recognize
our concepts as part of a loose cluster of expressions
which are characterized by a having "family resemblance"  Terminal explanations are accepted when we decide to stop asking "why?" and stop our investigation. We can never fully explain human action, however, we can understand it! We learn to use concepts paradigmatically
(by example) through various "language games"
 

Language games are the activities (praxes) of human communication and interpretation where contexts for understanding concepts and oneself are provided by the "forms of life" or traditions in which we live

While language games involve specific persons,
they are part of longer standing traditions
  All knowledge is bound to the dialectics of language games where there are no "private languages" and no trans-historical or trans-cultural "universals"
 
 

Social Constructionism: Volkerpsychologie

and contemporary Cultural Psychology

Philosophy of science and the sociology of knowledge

Max Scheler: Various types of knowledge not stages
Kurt Danziger: Constructing the Subject, Naming the Mind

Thomas Kuhn: The structure of Scientific Revolutions
Richard Rorty: Mind and the Mirror of Nature
Richard Bernstein: Beyond Objectivism and Relativism
Charles Taylor: Sources of the self & Moral Topographies
 
 

 Psychology on both sides of the Atlantic Rom Harre: Moral Orders of the social world
Ken Gergen: The "dance" of interpretations
John Shotter: "Knowing of the third kind" The negotiation of meaning is a creative process
of groups of people in concert, voices....
  Feminism and the philosophy of science Sandra Harding
Maragret Benston
Winnie Thom feminism in Canadian social science

 Readings on Feminism