Social and political concepts are indispensable yet historically and culturally variable in a way that poses a challenge: how can we reconcile confident commitment to them with awareness of their contingency? In this article, we argue that available responses to this problem—Foundationalism, Ironism, and Right Wittgensteinianism—are unsatisfactory. Instead, we draw on the work of Bernard Williams to tease out and develop a Left Wittgensteinian response. In present-day pluralistic and historically self-conscious societies, mere confidence in our concepts is not enough. For modern individuals who are ineluctably aware of conceptual change, engaged concept-use requires reasonable confidence, and in the absence of rational foundations, the possibility of reasonable confidence is tied to the possibility of critically discriminating between conceptual practices worth endorsing and those worth rejecting. We show that Left Wittgensteinianism offers such a basis for critical discrimination through point-based explanations of conceptual practices which relate them to the needs of concept-users. We end by considering how Left Wittgensteinianism guides our understanding of how conceptual practices can be revised in the face of new needs.

中文翻译：

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左维特根斯坦主义

社会和政治概念是不可或缺的，但在历史和文化上是可变的，这带来了挑战：我们如何调和对它们的自信承诺与对它们的偶然性的认识？在本文中，我们认为对这个问题的可用回应——基础主义、反讽主义和右维特根斯坦主义——并不令人满意。相反，我们借鉴伯纳德·威廉姆斯的工作来梳理和发展左维特根斯坦式的反应。在当今多元化和历史自觉的社会中，仅仅对我们的概念有信心是不够的。对于不可避免地意识到概念变化的现代人来说，参与概念使用需要合理的信心，在缺乏理性基础的情况下，合理信心的可能性与批判性地区分值得认可的概念实践和值得拒绝的概念实践的可能性有关。我们表明，左维特根斯坦主义通过对概念实践的基于点的解释将它们与概念使用者的需求联系起来，为批判性歧视提供了这样的基础。最后，我们考虑左维特根斯坦主义如何引导我们理解如何在面对新需求时修改概念实践。