DOI: 10.1111/phin.

12196
Philosophical Investigations :  2018
ISSN 0190-0536

A Perennial Illusion? Wittgenstein, Quentin Skinner’s

Contextualism and the Possibility of Refuting Past
Philosophers

Tim Beaumont, Sun Yat-sen University (Zhuhai)

Abstract
Contemporary philosophers often purport to ‘borrow’ or ‘refute’ claims
made by past philosophers. In doing so they contravene a contextualist
methodological prohibition once defended by Quentin Skinner in his
seminal paper “Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas”.
Skinner’s methodology has been much debated by theorists of textual
meaning and interpretation, and yet the precise nature of the logical path
from his premises to his prohibitory conclusion remains elusive. This
paper seeks to refute two of the most promising variants of an argument
for his methodological prohibition on ‘refutation’, one of which draws
on his appeal to Wittgenstein’s conception of ‘meaning as use’, and the
other of which draws on his appeal to speech act theory.

I. Introduction: ‘Borrowing’ and ‘Refutation’

In a little known methodology paper Gerald Cohen suggests that:

[C.1] Some people are poor philosophers because, although they might
be clever in other ways, they are wholly unable to conceive how peo-
ple who disagree with them could see things differently from how they
themselves see them.1
Similarly, in his seminal methodology paper, “Meaning and Understand-
ing in the History of Ideas”, Quentin Skinner makes two related claims
which we can label as S.1 and S.2:
[S.1] The classic texts, especially in social, ethical and political
thought, help to reveal – if we let them – not the essential sameness,

1. Cohen (2011: 231). Interestingly Cohen offers Wittgenstein as a possible example of a

philosopher who attained greatness “despite being blinded to alternative possibilities” by
his “own deep insights” (232).

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2 Philosophical Investigations
but rather the essential variety of viable moral assumptions and politi-
cal commitments. It is in this, moreover, that their essential philo-
sophical, even moral, value can be seen to lie. [S.2] There is a
[mistaken] tendency [. . .] to suppose that the best, not merely the
inescapable, point of vantage from which to survey the ideas of the
past must be that of our present situation, because it is by definition
the most highly evolved.2
At first sight, Skinner’s claims seem to be consistent with that of Cohen.
Moreover, taken together, the three claims seem to be capable of supple-
menting each other in terms of providing two of the reasons why con-
temporary philosophers could benefit from reading classic texts. Firstly,
where Cohen supplements (C.1) by proceeding to tell us that philoso-
phers need to be able to see the reasonableness in a range of different per-
spectives, (S.1) seems to indicate that the study of classic texts is one
potential means to that end.3 Secondly, when considered in isolation,
(S.2) could easily appear to suggest that contemporary philosophers
should be particularly aware of the ways in which past philosophies
might reasonably differ from those of the present, as the former might
provide better answers to the questions of contemporary philosophy.
However, Skinner denies that the passages just cited should be taken
to support any such conclusions. For instance, he tells us that:
[S.3] [I]f we are to learn from Plato, it is not enough that the discussion
should seem, at a very abstract level, to pose a question relevant to us.
It is also essential that the answer Plato gave should seem relevant and
indeed applicable (if he is ‘right’) to our own culture and period.4
[S.4] whenever it is claimed that the point of the historical study of
such [“perennial”] questions is that we may learn directly from the
answers, it will be found that what counts as an answer will usually
look, in a different culture or period, so different in itself that it can
hardly be in the least useful to go on thinking of the relevant question as being
‘the same’ in the required sense at all. More crudely: we must learn to do
our own thinking for ourselves.5
On the one hand, (S.3–4) amounts to a methodological prohibition on
contemporary philosophers ‘borrowing’ ideas from historical philosophers
on the grounds that (a) the questions asked by historical philosophers

2. Skinner (1969: 52).

3. Cohen (2011: 231–232).
4. Skinner (1969: 51). My italics.
5. Skinner (1969: 52). My italics. Skinner (2002: 57–89) provides an updated and heav-
ily revised version of this paper with the weakened conclusion that it is better for philoso-
phers to think for themselves than to seek answers from past philosophers (82). Regardless
of whether we take this claim to be true, it would certainly be easier to defend than the
original conclusion. However, since Skinner refrains from providing the rationale for this
change, one goal of this paper is to demonstrate why such a qualification is necessary.

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 Tim Beaumont 3
were distinct from those asked by contemporary philosophers; (b) the
answers to philosophical questions from one era cannot be sufficiently
relevant to a later era to provide answers to the latter’s distinct philo-
sophical questions; and (c) contemporary philosophers should not borrow
ideas from past philosophers when these ideas are insufficiently relevant
to their own era to provide answers to their own distinct philosophical
questions. On the other, (S.2) makes clear that the rationale for the pro-
hibition on ‘borrowing’ is not predicated on the claim that either we
know that historical philosophers were mistaken, or that contemporary
philosophy is superior to past philosophy. Such claims would imply the
possibility and methodological legitimacy of contemporary philosophers
‘refuting’ the ideas of historical philosophers, and Skinner seems sceptical
of this possibility. For instance, in critiquing Strauss, he suggests that one
of his methodological mistakes is to believe that:
[S.5] Ethical and political theory [. . .] is or ought to be concerned with
eternal or at least traditional ‘true standards’.6
Once that step is taken, Skinner suggests, one will fail to see the
methodological, as opposed to normative, error in thinking that “Machi-
avelli’s teaching is to be denounced as ‘immoral and irreligious’.”7
Similarly, Skinner seems to want to explain away the appearance of
trans-historical disagreement when he tells us that:
[S.6] historical differences over fundamental issues may reflect differ-
ences of intention and convention rather than anything like a competi-
tion over a community of values.8
All this is too ambiguous to warrant attributing the following argument
to Skinner, but the latter is intended to capture something like the argu-
ment hinted at in his text, and it is the argument which Skinner needs
to be sound for the premises he offers to generate the prohibition on
‘refutation’:

(1) The perspectives of historical and contemporary philosophers may

differ but they do not disagree with each other.
(2) If the different perspectives of historical and contemporary philosophers
do not amount to disagreements, the latter are not methodologically

6. Skinner (1969: 13).

7. Ibid. But note that the scope of Skinner’s methodological claims is the “history of
ideas” as such, rather than the history of ethics and political theory (49–53). If the scope
was restricted to the latter, we might explain the prohibition in terms of an implicit ethical
non-cognitivism.
8. Skinner (1969: 52). The term ‘may’ makes the premise plausible but Skinner would
need a stronger term (i.e. ‘always’) to establish that there is no ‘trans-historical’ disagreement.

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4 Philosophical Investigations
entitled to argue against the former, as this would amount to fabricating
a trans-historical debate which does not really exist.
(3) (So) Contemporary philosophers are not methodologically entitled to
argue against or refute the positions of historical philosophers.9
This paper will take premise (2) to be uncontroversial and focus on the
possibility of finding an implicitly sound argument for (1) in Skinner’s
article. The purpose here is not to offer a therapy to free contemporary
philosophers from any anxiety they feel about the practice of ‘borrowing’
or ‘refuting’. After all, it seems safe to say that few contemporary
philosophers believe that Skinner’s argument is sound, and even Skinner
went on to become a historically informed philosopher in his own
right.10 The paper stems instead from a sense that Skinner’s argument
was sufficiently elusive for those who were sympathetic to be able to feel
that its critics were missing its rationale, and for those who were unsym-
pathetic to feel that there was no substantial rationale there to be missed
in the first place.11 Moreover, it flows from a sense that one possible
explanation of this elusiveness is that Skinner’s argument leaned more
heavily on the philosophy of Wittgenstein than he acknowledged.
By setting out what Skinner’s rationale would have needed to be for
his argument to succeed, I seek to contribute to the meta-philosophical
task of highlighting the preconditions of the methodological legitimacy
of contemporary philosophical practice. As such, my aim in disinterring
Skinner’s article is to illustrate that, while his philosophical argument was

9. Some of Skinner’s critics focus on his ‘attribution principle’ according to which: “no
agent can eventually be said to have meant or done something which he could never be
brought to accept as a correct description of what he had meant or done” (1969: 28). For
example, see Boucher (1985: 193–250) and Rosen (2011: 705–709). However, I set that
principle aside here. The reason for doing so is that, while the principle might suffice to
render certain claims made by contemporary western philosophers incommensurable with
certain claims made by (say) ancient Chinese philosophers (but see Cline (2013) and Stal-
naker (2006)), it would not suffice to generate the kind of radical incommensurability
within the western tradition that Skinner would need in order to justify his prohibition on
refutation. After all, it would not automatically preclude a philosopher at t2 from disagree-
ing with a philosopher at t1 in the latter’s own terms. (Indeed, this seems to be acknowl-
edged in Skinner (2002: 37–39).) Nor does the principle as such preclude the possibility
that (say) Aristotle could have been persuaded of the validity of a given contemporary
redescription of his position in non-Aristotelian terminology, which a contemporary
philosopher might then employ in the course of refutation. The reason for this is that the
implications of the attribution principle depend upon the precise modal interpretation of
its use of ‘could not’. I discuss this point in greater detail in an unpublished paper entitled
‘Interpretation, Attribution and Second-Order Belief’.
10. See, for example, Skinner (1984). For evidence that analytically oriented philosophical
histories are flourishing see Beaney (2013) and the papers in Reck (2013).
11. The confusion over the exact logic of Skinner’s argument is well-illustrated by the
selection of critical responses in Part III of Tully (1988), and the opening of the reply in
Skinner (1988b).

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 Tim Beaumont 5
unsound, he was correct to think that the examination of the past can
deliver “lesson[s] in self-knowledge”.12

II. Disagreement and the Illusion Thesis

One way to show that contemporary and past philosophers never disagree
would be to maintain that all philosophical claims lack cognitive content and
hence truth-values (Philosophical Non-Cognitivism).13 Another would be
to maintain that their truth-values are relative to either individual philosophers
(Subjectivist Relativism) or philosophers in particular time periods (Historical
Relativism). However, neither of these approaches would appear to be of
any use to Skinner in providing an explicit defence of his prohibition.
One reason for this is that if Skinner were to construe the claims of past
thinkers in either Philosophical Non-Cognitivist or Subjectivist Relativist
terms in order to immunize them from meaningful disagreement, his own
philosophical claims would have to be construed in the same way. This
would then preclude his “Meaning and History” from achieving disagree-
ment with the alternative contemporary philosophies of intellectual history
that the paper purports to refute. His only option then would be to maintain
that, like the early Wittgenstein, he could somehow show that they were
mistaken without saying how.14 While Skinner does not claim that this is his
position there are certain contrasting parallels between his claims, and those
of the early Wittgenstein which it may be worthwhile highlighting.
In the Preface to the Tractatus Wittgenstein says that the book aims to “draw
a limit to thought, or rather—not to thought, but to the expression of thoughts
[. . .] The limit can [. . .] only be drawn in language and what lies on the other
side of the limit will be simply nonsense.”15 In contrast, Skinner’s prohibitions
purport to draw a limit, not to philosophical expression as such, but to

12. Skinner (1969: 53). Two dimensions of the focus of this paper merit further explanation.
Firstly, I focus on the first edition of Skinner’s paper rather than the second because the former
is far more suggestive of ways in which the methodological prohibitions could actually be
defended. That said, the second retains Skinner’s monistic assumption that there is one thing
which constitutes “the philosophical value of the history of ideas” (2002: 88, my italics), and
the claim that it can only be uncovered through his own preferred approach to the study of
historical texts. This implies that alternative methods for studying historical texts either (i)
lack philosophical value because of the misinterpretations they generate, or (ii) can only have
philosophical value despite their lack of historical value. One way of interpreting the difference
between the first and second versions of Skinner’s paper is that he shifts from endorsing the
former to the latter without explicitly stating that he has done so. While I do not accept (ii),
my focus here will be on showing why (i) is an untenable position. Secondly, I focus on
Skinner (1969) as opposed to Skinner’s other works because he explicitly warns against systematic
readings of other thinkers in his attack on the “mythology of coherence” (1969: 16–19).
13. Compare the interpretation of the later Wittgenstein in Dummett (1978: 439).
14. Wittgenstein (2016: §6.54).
15. Wittgenstein (2016: 23).

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6 Philosophical Investigations
philosophical expression purporting to borrow or refute the philosophical
claims of past thinkers. Where Wittgenstein draws his limit using the language
of logic and semantics, Skinner draws it in the language of intellectual history.
Where Wittgenstein claims that statements that transcend the limit result in
nonsense, Skinner claims that philosophical attempts to violate his prohibitions
result in historical error. Finally, where Wittgenstein thinks for himself, and
claims it “is indifferent to me whether what I have thought has already been
thought before me by another”, Skinner suggests that such indifference should
be mandatory.16 For Skinner, philosophers must think for themselves, for the
only philosophical history to be done is that of the intellectual historian. Thus,
Skinner takes intellectual history to show the philosophical truth that there are
“no such timeless concepts, but only the various different concepts which have
gone with various different societies”.17 However, in articulating the claim,
Skinner takes himself to be acting in a purely philosophical capacity rather
than borrowing an insight from one of the thinkers that he has encountered in
his study of the distant past. The challenge for Skinner’s position, as thus
construed, is that of explaining why the philosophical historian cannot take the
history of philosophy to show that he is simply mistaken.
Of course, the preceding quotation might also be taken to indicate
that Skinner’s appeal is actually to Historical Relativism.18 However, if
Skinner made such an appeal to show that the claims of past philosophers
were true in their own era, as would be required if contemporary
philosophers are to be precluded from refuting them now, he would also
be committed to accepting that the claims of contemporary philosophers
are true for their era as well, thereby shielding them from any objections
that he poses concerning the way that they employ historical texts.19 In

16. Wittgenstein (2016: 23). Similarly, see the Preface of Wittgenstein (1967: viii).
17. Skinner (1969: 53).
18. The Historical Relativist claim, that the truth-value of a statement with a constant
meaning may vary relative to the historical context in which it is made, is distinct from
the claim that its meaning may vary relative to historical context. We will explore the
(more promising) possibility of grounding Skinner’s prohibition upon the latter claim in
section V below.
19. Skinner (2002: 52) denies that he has ever held such a position. In the same text he
indicates that his position (as of 2002) is that there is no methodological impropriety in
disagreeing with the truth-values which past thinkers assigned to particular propositions
(30–1, 51–2). However, he also maintains that a belief can only be irrational relative to a
web-of-belief, and that, therefore (say), the belief in witches can be rational relative to
one web-of-belief but irrational relative to another. This allows him to derive a prohibi-
tion on contemporary philosophers denying the truth of Jean Bodin’s second-order belief
that his belief in witches is rational with reference to either their own contemporary webs-
of-belief or a non-existent form of non-relative rationality, without simultaneously pro-
hibiting them from contradicting the rest of the contents of Jean Bodin’s web-of-belief.
However, this is a long way from grounding a prohibition on, or demonstrating the lack
of the philosophical value of, the traditional philosophical practice of critically examining
and potentially refuting the arguments in past texts.

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 Tim Beaumont 7
consequence, for Skinner’s philosophical position to be both stable and
effable it needs to provide a rationale for (a) allowing for the possibility
of genuine disagreement between philosophers within the same epoch
(intra-epochal disagreement), while (b) precluding the possibility of disagree-
ments between philosophers from different epochs (inter-epochal disagree-
ment). This precludes the possibility of grounding his prohibition upon
Philosophical Non-Cognitivism or Relativism as they can only secure
(b) at the expense of (a).
However, once Cognitivism and Non-Relativism about philosophical
claims is conceded, it is even harder to see how the claims of a contempo-
rary philosopher could not refute those of a past philosopher. After all,
even if Skinner were right to think that contemporary philosophers are led
to make their claims by contemplating different questions to those which
exercised past philosophers, if the answers provided to these distinct ques-
tions contradict one another, there will be genuine trans-historical dis-
agreement. In consequence, the only way to prohibit attempts at
disagreement is to maintain that, despite appearances to the contrary, and
despite being truth-apt in a non-relativistic manner, the claims of philoso-
phers from different eras do not contradict each other but are actually
logically consistent. This thesis can be presented more formally as follows:
The Illusion Thesis: whenever a philosopher from one epoch utters a
sentence, S1, which appears to assert a philosophical proposition, P, and
a philosopher from a later epoch utters a sentence, S2, which appears to
negate P, the appearance that they are asserting and rejecting the same
P respectively is illusory.
In consequence, the question of whether Skinner’s text provides the
resources to deny the possibility of disagreeing with past philosophers
comes to hinge on the question of whether his text provides the
resources to support the Illusion Thesis.
While criticizing histories of particular concepts or ideas Skinner
claims that:
[S.7] The underlying confusion itself may perhaps be most conveniently
characterized, by adopting an extension of the basic distinction between
meaning and use, as the result of a failure to distinguish between the
occurrence of the words (phrases or sentences) which denote the given
idea, and the use of the relevant sentence by a particular agent on a
particular occasion with a particular intention (his intention) to make a
particular statement.20
This raises the question of whether the distinction between meaning and
use could undermine the idea of inter-epochal disagreement, and hence

20. Skinner (1969: 37).

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8 Philosophical Investigations
the practice of ‘refutation’, without undermining the idea of intra-epo-
chal disagreement? According to Skinner:
[S.8] to suggest that [. . .] knowledge of the social context is a necessary
condition for an understanding of the classic texts is equivalent to
denying that they do contain any elements of timeless and perennial
interest.21
If (S.8) is true, and the meanings of the claims made by past philosophers
are inextricably bound to the use to which they were put in the social
context of their utterance, the Illusion Thesis will follow because the
assertions of philosophers from one epoch will lack the kind of content
that could be contradicted by the assertions of philosophers from later
epochs.
There are at least two ways in which this claim could potentially be
supported, one of which borrows from the later Wittgenstein (section
III), and the other of which is built upon speech act theory (section
IV).22 We can deal with each in turn, with a view to show that the first
cannot be used to undermine the idea of inter-epochal disagreement at all,
and the second cannot be used to undermine inter-epochal disagreement
without also undermining the idea of intra-epochal disagreement.

III. The ‘Wittgensteinian’ Approach

There are certain passages in “Meaning and Understanding” in which

Skinner seems to suggest that his philosophy of intellectual history is
continuous with the later Wittgenstein’s critique of conventional or tra-
ditional philosophy.23 In order to show that if Skinner’s goal were to
demonstrate that a focus on philosophers’ use of language reveals the lack
of inter-epochal disagreement, he could build a more plausible case by

21. Skinner (1969: 5).

22. A further possibility would be to try to base a defence of the Illusion Thesis on Skin-
ner’s useful reminder that “the literal meanings of key terms sometimes change over time,
so that a given writer may say something with a quite different sense and reference from
the one which may occur to the reader” (1969: 31). While it is no doubt possible to find
genuine examples of contemporary philosophers who think that they are disagreeing with
past thinkers when they are simply talking past them, the likelihood that every case of
apparent disagreement can be shown to be illusory in this way is extremely low. More-
over, even if intellectual historians could demonstrate that every case of ‘disagreement’ has
been merely apparent so far, they would have to do so by establishing the actual sense and
reference of the terms used by the past philosophers in question. However, with this
knowledge at hand, contemporary philosophers would then be able to proceed to engage
in inter-epochal criticism from thereon. In consequence, while Skinner could still maintain
that past attempts at ‘refutation’ have failed, he could not take this failure to show that
‘refutation’ is methodologically suspect in principle.
23. Skinner (1969: 37, 44).

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 Tim Beaumont 9
appealing to speech act theory as such than to the later philosophy of
Wittgenstein, it is worth briefly explaining why Skinner’s opposition to
‘refutation’ is incompatible with Wittgenstein’s critique of traditional
philosophy in his Philosophical Investigations.24
Wittgenstein’s critique rests on his distinction between terms’ ordinary
usage in their ‘home’ language-games within forms of life (PI: 23, 241),
and their philosophical use ‘on holiday’ from those home language-games
(PI: 38) in the practices of traditional philosophy (e.g. PI: 11, 116). The
latter is said to rest on the assumption that (a) the philosophical use of a
term should regulate its ordinary usage (e.g. PI: 38–9); (b) the philosoph-
ical use of a term is to be guided or regulated by knowledge of its true
meaning (e.g. PI: 38–9); (c) philosophical terms acquire meaning by
referring to essences (e.g. PI: 38–9, 46); and (d) the character of these
essences can be discerned through analysis of the terms which refer to
them (e.g. PI: 38–9, 91, 113). However, Wittgenstein maintains that,
after years of struggle, traditional philosophy has failed to discern the
character of the essences which supposedly correspond to, and constitute
the referential meaning of, philosophical terms (e.g. PI: 65–6), and has
simply generated more and more puzzles about what these terms actually
mean (e.g. PI: 103, 107, 109).
Wittgenstein then explains this failure of traditional philosophy in
terms of the falsehood of (c-d) (PI: 38–9, 65–6). He claims that if we
take the meaning of many (if not most) terms to be given by their usage
in their ‘home’ language-games, puzzles about their meaning disappear
(e.g. PI: 38–9, 96–8). In consequence, he infers, it makes more sense to
take the meaning of many (if not most) terms, including terms which are
often recognized as philosophical, to be given in their use in their
‘home’ language-games (PI: 43). However, it then follows that any
philosophical use of terms outside their home language-games will run
contrary to their meaning, and constitute an improper use (e.g. PI: 116),
thus precluding the possibility of philosophical use regulating ordinary
usage (PI: 124) (as suggested by (a) above). This means, in turn, that
claim (b) above, that the philosophical use of terms is to be guided or
regulated by knowledge of their true meaning, collapses into the claim
that philosophical usage should be guided and regulated by ordinary
usage (e.g. PI: 116). Wittgenstein concludes from this that there is noth-
ing left for philosophy (properly construed) to do but describe (and
remind us of) ordinary usage (e.g. PI: 116, 124, 126–7, 654).
When applied to Skinner’s studies of the history of political thought
this argument would suggest that we can distinguish between the

24. Wittgenstein (1967). The textual references which follow in the body of the text are
to section number.

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10 Philosophical Investigations
ordinary language of political thought and practice, on the one hand,
and deviant misapplications of the terms thereof by (non-Wittgenstei-
nian) political philosophers, on the other. With this distinction at hand,
we could then use our knowledge of the former to wean ourselves off
the temptation to engage in the latter. On this view, while the political
philosophers may want to change the language of the world, the point (of
political philosophy properly construed) is not to change it. While this
may make the resulting Wittgensteinian political philosophy sound extre-
mely conservative, it is compatible with welcoming non-philosophically dri-
ven changes or improvements in political thought and practice.25
One might think that Skinner’s apparent concern to prohibit ‘refutation’
(and ‘borrowing’) is continuous with Wittgenstein’s methodological prohi-
bition on the (‘traditional’) philosophical practice of analysing and cri-
tiquing ordinary language. After all, their positions at least appear to share a
common implication, namely, that contemporary political philosophers
should not subject the ordinary political thought of previous epochs to tradi-
tional philosophical analysis and critique. However, while Skinner appears
to want to shield the philosophers and non-philosophers from past epochs
from such treatment, Wittgenstein is willing to critique the former for
deviating from the ordinary language of the latter. For instance, Wittgen-
stein disagrees with past philosophers when he disagrees with the idea of
‘primary elements’ presented by Socrates in the Theaetetus (PI: 46 onward),
and rejects Augustine’s ‘picture of language’ (PI: 1–3 onward).26
As such, Wittgenstein at least appears to engage in the sort of dis-
agreement prohibited by Skinner.27 What makes Wittgenstein unique,
and what may generate the illusion that he could act as Skinner’s ally, is
that while almost every other past philosopher both borrowed from and
disagreed with the philosophers of their own past, Wittgenstein thought
that past philosophy was predicated on such vast errors that there was
little, if anything, that was worthy of being ‘borrowed’. As he puts it:
Where does our investigation get its importance from, since it seems
only to destroy everything interesting, that is, all that is great and

25. Pleasants (2014) argues that, while one cannot use Wittgenstein’s later philosophy to
ground a critical social theory, this does not preclude the Wittgensteinian from seeking
social change. For further discussion of whether Wittgenstein’s philosophy is conservative
see Jones (1986).
26. See also (PI:518). Given that Wittgenstein claims that this position rests on the same
mistake as Russell’s ‘individuals’ and his own tractarian ‘objects’, it also shows that he
believes in the possibility of ‘borrowing’. However, this is not to say that Wittgenstein actu-
ally borrowed the idea in the Tractatus. To support the latter claim one would need to pro-
vide evidence that the similarity in the positions is due to influence rather than coincidence.
27. For a parallel argument, purporting to show that one cannot appeal to Wittgenstein’
later philosophy in order to support Skinner’s early methodological prohibition on ‘con-
ceptual history’, see Burns (2011).

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 Tim Beaumont 11
important? (As it were all the buildings, leaving behind only bits of
stone and rubble.) What we are destroying is nothing but houses of
cards and we are clearing up the ground of language on which they
stand (PI: 118).
For Wittgenstein, then, the fact that we ought to ‘disagree’ but not to
‘borrow’ is a reflection of the fact that the tendency to engage in tradi-
tional philosophy is perennial, on the one hand, but always mistaken, on
the other.
Skinner’s apparent (and, if real, implicit) disagreement with Wittgen-
stein on this issue also materializes in the fact that, while Wittgenstein
takes the distinction between the philosophical and ordinary usage of
terms to be sufficiently clear for us to be able to stamp out the latter
while leaving the former as it is, Skinner’s approach renders this distinc-
tion problematic. After all, on Skinner’s view, whether or not a use of
language is philosophical ultimately depends, not on what is said, but on
the user’s intention in saying it.28 But if there are no perennial philo-
sophical questions, we cannot cash out the intention to use language
philosophically in terms of the intention to answer one of those ques-
tions. This seems to be reflected in Skinner’s suspicion of the idea of a
‘philosophical canon’; an idea which would have been unproblematic for
Wittgenstein.29

IV. From Wittgenstein to Speech Act Theory

Suppose now that Wittgenstein’s strong distinction, between the philo-

sophical use of terms and their ordinary usage, were to collapse, in the
way which Skinner seems to require. One could then take one of two
positions about the relationship between philosophical and ordinary
language.
According to the first, which is that adopted by the traditional form of
philosophy rejected by Wittgenstein, there is no hard-and-fast distinction
between philosophical and ordinary language as the latter is infused with
philosophical meaning. On this view, while much political thought may
not merit the label of ‘philosophy’ in its honorific sense, it is nevertheless
‘philosophical’ in the sense of raising genuine philosophical puzzles, and
committing its users to particular contestable philosophical positions. This
implies that restricting the task of political philosophy to the provision of
Wittgensteinian descriptions of the use of political terms – as part of a
broader ‘Copernican Revolution’ in philosophy, in which purely

28. Skinner (1969: 9).

29. Skinner (1969: 5, note 7); Skinner (1988a: 101).

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12 Philosophical Investigations
semantic analyses of language are replaced by purely pragmatic analyses –
would leave genuine philosophical questions unanswered.
According to this anti-Wittgensteinian view, while it might be overly
optimistic to expect thinkers to converge on a single answer to philo-
sophical questions, it is better to face up to these questions, and to
acknowledge that our answers to them are implicit in our choices, beliefs
and forms of life, than to try to make them disappear. There is nothing
in this view that prohibits the practices of ‘borrowing’ and ‘disagreement’
Indeed, this conception of ordinary language is extremely hospitable to
these practices because it allows one to find philosophically significant
claims being made in an almost indefinite number of contexts, including
those in which the speaker has no intention to articulate a treatise on
philosophy.
According to the second position, there is no distinction between
ordinary language and philosophical language because there is no
distinctively philosophical language (which also means no distinctively
philosophical use of ordinary language). On this view, whenever we
encounter language we discern its meaning through its use which is, ex
hypothesi, non-philosophical. If intellectual historians subscribing to this
position were to encounter political language in a historical text, they
would interpret it by finding the ordinary use of its alien terms, on the
one hand, while refraining from (what they would view as) reading
philosophical claims into such usage, on the other. The latter prohibition
would suffice to block the practice of ‘disagreement’ (and ‘borrowing’)
because if the past texts have no philosophical content, there is no philo-
sophical content with which contemporary philosophers could agree or
disagree.
In the next section we will discuss a variation of this view which is
freed from any mooring in Wittgenstein’s philosophy. For now, it will
suffice to show that there are two reasons why this position cannot be
grounded in Wittgenstein’s philosophy. Firstly, we have already seen that
to do so would be incoherent, as Wittgenstein believes that there are
philosophical uses of language, on the one hand, with which he dis-
agrees, on the other (III). Secondly, to try to defend this position by
appealing to Wittgenstein’s insights would be completely anachronistic.
After all, it would amount to claiming that since we know (from reading
Wittgenstein) that the philosophical use of ordinary terms is mistaken,
we should not read past texts as if their authors (who had not read,
let alone accepted, Wittgenstein’s claims) made any such ‘mistakes’.
In other words, it is one thing for Wittgenstein to claim that to use
language philosophically is to take ‘language on holiday’, and another for
intellectual historians to infer from this that interpretations of past texts
which take their authors to be using language philosophically engage in
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 Tim Beaumont 13
to some kind of defective ‘interpretation on holiday’. Not only does the
former claim not support the latter, it contradicts it. The Wittgensteinian
intellectual historian can be a critic of philosophy, past and present, but
cannot legitimately ‘correct’ the history of thought by rewriting it as if
the errors supposedly diagnosed by Wittgenstein had never taken place.

V. The Speech Act Approach

Even if it is incoherent to both (i) defend a non-philosophical interpreta-

tion of intellectual history (in which inter-epochal disagreements do not
occur), and (ii) follow Wittgenstein in using intellectual history as evidence
of ‘philosophical error’ (thereby engaging in inter-epochal disagreement),
opponents of ‘disagreement’ or ‘refutation’ could embrace (i) without (ii).
In doing so, they could maintain that Wittgenstein was right to think that
we should focus on the use of language in order to understand it, while
insisting that he was wrong to think that past thinkers ever used language
philosophically. This would then open the door to a defence of the Illusion
Thesis via the claim that, since past writers did not use language philosophi-
cally, it is improper to attribute philosophical beliefs to them which could
conflict with those of thinkers from other epochs, including our own.
Of course, to defend the Illusion Thesis in this way would require
one to provide an alternative account of what past thinkers were doing
when they engaged in what might now appear to us as philosophy.
There are many possible answers to this question, but here we can focus
on an account which we can call Political Speech Act Theory because of
its salience to Skinner’s field of expertise. On this view, when we attri-
bute thinkers from different epochs with conflicting views, we are
attributing a much wider conceptual content to their claims than is possi-
ble given the parochial political concerns which (allegedly) motivated the
speech acts performed by their texts. It is claimed that once we recog-
nize the ‘fact’ that the political goals which motivated the speech acts of
past political thinkers were restricted to their own epoch, we must con-
cede that their assertions only make reference to their own epochs, and
that this precludes them from having asserted anything which could be
contradicted by a thinker from another epoch.
To explain how one might try to defend these claims, we need to follow
John Searle in distinguishing between utterance acts (“Uttering words (mor-
phemes, sentences)”), propositional acts (“Referring and predicating”) and
illocutionary acts (“Stating, questioning, commanding, promising, etc.” that
P, where P is a proposition).30 Since all – or almost all – texts which are

30. Searle (1969: 23–24).

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14 Philosophical Investigations
labelled as ‘philosophical’ are in the business of combining assertions into
arguments the conclusions of which answer certain questions, on the one
hand, and the surface grammar of sentences usually makes it easy to distin-
guish between questions, assertions and demands, etc., on the other, one
might think that it is usually quite easy to decipher the basic illocutionary
forces of the passages in a text without a detailed knowledge of its historical
context. From here one might then be led to conclude that, while knowl-
edge of the historical context of a text is certainly useful for deciphering its
meaning, it is useful because it helps us to decipher unfamiliar references
and predicates in its propositional acts.31
According to an alternative view which we can now consider, the
preceding line of thought is mistaken because:

(1) Some knowledge of the historical context in which a text was written
is necessary to understand the non-basic illocutionary acts which the
text was intended to perform.
(2) An understanding of an utterance’s non-basic illocutionary acts is
necessary to identify (i) its basic illocutionary acts, and (ii) the precise
content of its propositional acts.
(3) The precise content of the philosophical propositional acts performed
by the texts of each epoch is sufficiently parochial that no philosoph-
ical assertions made in one epoch contradict philosophical assertions
made in another epoch. So Non-Disagreement and the Illusion Thesis
are true.
This is not intended to be an argument as, while (1) and (2) do purport
to be claims with truth-values, they do not purport to entail (3). Claims
(1–3) are better thought of as a possible process of thought or discovery,
in which one might be led step-by-step from the discovery of (1) to the
discovery of (3).
The great achievements of Skinner, and his intellectual forbear Peter
Laslett, include works which indirectly reveal the truth of (1) by showing
that a rich knowledge of the historical context in which a classic text
was produced can help to reveal the non-basic illocutionary acts its

31. Cf. Skinner (1969: 31). Boucher (1985: 322–323) claims that when Skinner divides
opponents of his view into textualists, who believe that texts can be fully understood with-
out any reference to context, and contextualists, who believe that the meaning of a text is
fully determined by its context, he is essentially knocking down straw men. The view
presented here rejects textualism, by conceding the need for some contextual knowledge
in order to establish textual meaning, while maintaining that the basic speech acts per-
formed by texts are generally transparent. This position opens the door to the kind of
argument-focused studies which Skinner deems to be methodologically flawed without
any appeal to the crude textualist position upon which Skinner takes them to rely (1969:
4).

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 Tim Beaumont 15
32
production was intended to perform. To say that a text performs a
non-basic illocutionary act is to say that in performing its basic illocu-
tionary acts, such as making assertions and asking questions, it also per-
forms more complex actions the precise character of which cannot be
discerned through an examination of the surface grammar of the state-
ments alone. To give a well-known example, according to Peter Laslett,
in asserting the arguments of the Two Treatises of Government, John Locke
was traditionally understood to have intended to provide a justification for
the Glorious Whig Revolution of 1688 ex post. But this traditional view,
he contended, is mistaken because the fact that most of the material was
written before 1688 means that it is more plausibly interpreted as intended
as a demand for that revolution ex ante.33 Here, Laslett and his traditional-
ist opponents agree that Locke’s text performed non-basic illocutionary
acts while disagreeing over their precise character.
What such historical debates reveal is that, insofar as a complete under-
standing of a text requires knowledge of the non-basic illocutionary acts it
was used to perform, the kind of detailed historical study of the context
of the text’s production which is required to uncover non-basic illocu-
tionary acts, and is characteristic of Skinner’s own version of the contex-
tualist approach to intellectual history, is a precondition of a complete
understanding of texts.34 However, one can accept this without accept-
ing that knowledge of a text’s non-basic illocutionary force is necessary
for a complete knowledge of its meaning, construed in terms of the char-
acter of its basic illocutionary and propositional acts. This explains why
philosophers who are more interested in the meaning of a text than in its
non-basic illocutionary acts, deem themselves to be justified in paying
less attention to the historical context of the text’s production than Skin-
nerian intellectual historians who are principally interested in their non-
basic illocutionary force. Such philosophers may accept (1), thereby
acknowledging the value of an extremely detailed intellectual historical
study of a text’s non-basic illocutionary acts, without taking this as a rea-
son to accept (2), and hence without taking this as a reason to adopt the
Skinnerian methodology which characterizes such studies. The question
to be examined below is whether Skinner provides (or at least hints at) a
good reason for thinking that those who accept (1) should also accept (2)
(and thence (3))?35

32. For example, see the discussion of Hobbes’ rhetoric in Skinner (1996: Ch. 10).
33. Laslett (1965: 46–47).
34. For a comparative discussion of other forms of contextualism, see Bevir (2011) and
Skinner (1969: 39–48).
35. Steinberger (2009) also argues that Skinner’s use of speech act theory fails to support
his conclusions. The analysis which follows is designed to go further by helping to explain
how someone might come to think that Skinner’s premises support his conclusions.

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16 Philosophical Investigations
In raising this question the point is not to attribute to Skinner an
explicit commitment to (2). After all, there are passages in “Meaning and
Understanding” in which a clear distinction is drawn between the mean-
ing of a sentence and its non-basic illocutionary force.36 That said, there
are also passages in that text in which Skinner at least appears to lose his
grip on that distinction.37 If this appearance is veridical, and Skinner’s
more radical methodological conclusions stem from moments in which
he conflated meaning and non-basic illocutionary force, the possible
arguments that one could adopt for accepting (2) to be examined below
may in fact help to explain why Skinner felt entitled to draw much
stronger methodological conclusions than his explicitly stated premises
would appear to warrant.
What Skinner says explicitly on the topic is that some knowledge of
the historical context in which a text was written is necessary to under-
stand some of its illocutionary acts.38 For instance, in his discussion of
Defoe’s “The Shortest Way with the Dissenters”, Skinner points out that
an interpreter who was completely ignorant of Defoe’s broader purposes
might be led to mistakenly treat certain propositional acts in his texts as
assertions or prescriptions, rather than acts of ironic ridicule.39 This is
brought out more clearly in a later text where he tells us that:
[S.9] The utterance has the undoubted form and apparent force of a
recommendation, even of a demand. But Defoe is not performing the
corresponding illocutionary act. On the contrary, his illocutionary
intention is that of ridiculing the intolerance that would be embodied
in performing it.40
Before setting out on the long journey of explaining how this claim by
Skinner could create a path from (1) to (2) and thence (3), it is worth
pausing to explain why the claim is mistaken from the outset. To explain
the Defoe case we simply need to note that basic illocutionary acts, such
as assertions, questions, promises and demands, can be made sincerely or
insincerely, and in either kind of performance we can also perform fur-
ther non-basic illocutionary acts. When we lack knowledge of whether
the assertions in Defoe’s texts are sincere, we are precluded from taking
our understanding of the meaning of his text as a sufficient reason to
draw certain inferences about his beliefs. If people who know nothing of
the historical context of Defoe’s assertions simply assume that they are

36. Skinner (1969: 45–46); Bevir (2011: 15).

37. For examples of Skinner’s conflation of different senses of ‘meaning’ in his later
writings, see section 2 of Martinich (2009).
38. One reason that Skinner’s text is ambiguous is that he does not draw the necessary
distinction between basic and non-basic illocutionary force.
39. Skinner (1969: 32).
40. Skinner (1988b: 270).

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 Tim Beaumont 17
sincere, they will be prone to taking their (dis)agreement with the text
as a reason for thinking that they (dis)agree with Defoe. However, such
interpreters misunderstand Defoe, not the meaning of the text. The moral
here is that we can judge that an assertion is being made without know-
ing whether or not it is sincere, judge an assertion to be insincere with-
out knowing that it is intended to ridicule someone, and know that it is
intended to ridicule someone without knowing whom.
In contrast, if Skinner’s account of the Defoe case is correct, we will
need to distinguish between the apparent basic illocutionary act performed
by an utterance act, suggested by its surface grammar, and the real basic
illocutionary force, as revealed by a speech act analysis of its non-basic
illocutionary force. Moreover, in addition to making this distinction, we
will have to shift the order of analysis, from starting with a determination
of the basic illocutionary force of the utterance, and asking what non-basic
illocutionary force an utterance of that kind could possess, to determining
the non-basic illocutionary force of an utterance in order to determine its
basic illocutionary force. After all, if one takes assertion and ironic ridicule
to be basic illocutionary acts on all fours with each other, the fact that sen-
tences performing them can share the same surface grammar will mean
that we must also go beyond the text in order to determine whether any
of its assertions are real or merely apparent.
While this de facto shift from the analytical primacy of basic illocu-
tionary force to non-basic illocutionary force is insufficient to get us
from (1) to (2), it takes us part of the way there. According to Skinner,
in analysing the non-basic illocutionary forces of Defoe’s text:
[S.10] We come to see that Defoe is making a comment about the very
idea of issuing such an utterance with the intended force that a mere
inspection of its meaning might tempt us to assign to it.41
An analysis of the non-basic illocutionary force of Defoe’s utterance has
now shifted us from the distinction between the real and apparent illocu-
tionary act it performs, to a distinction between Defoe’s meaning
(“comment”) and the meaning of the sentence which he uses to convey that
meaning. Moreover, the analytical primacy of non-basic illocutionary

41. Skinner (1988b: 270). Note that if (a) the meaning of an utterance is determined by
its basic illocutionary force and its propositional content alone; and (b) an assertion has
the same meaning whether it is made sincerely or insincerely; then (c) Defoe’s non-basic
illocutionary target of ridicule can’t be those who merely assert the propositional content
in question, as this would mean that he is targeting himself. His real target is not those
who (like himself) assert it insincerely, but those who assert that propositional content sin-
cerely. It follows that, since the sincerity of the utterance, as opposed to the fact that it is an
assertion, is not determined by its meaning, but by its higher-order non-basic illocutionary
properties, it is false to say that a “mere inspection” of the meaning of the utterance would
lead us to conclude that it is sincere.

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18 Philosophical Investigations
acts appears to have translated into the analytical primacy of Defoe’s
speaker meaning over that of his sentence meaning.42 Since the com-
ment made by Defoe’s utterance is said to have a distinct propositional
content to that suggested by its surface grammar, we also have a further,
cross-cutting, distinction between its apparent and real propositional con-
tent. While the former could be construed as the predicates and refer-
ences suggested by the surface grammar of the sentence uttered, the
latter could be construed as the predicates and references of the proposition
which the non-basic illocutionary analysis has revealed is actually being
(speaker-) asserted.
If one takes non-basic illocutionary analysis to justify lending analytical
primacy to speaker meaning over sentence meaning, and accepts that the
propositional content expressed in the former has the potential to differ
from that expressed in the latter, one will be forced to conclude that
contemporary philosophers who are principally concerned with meaning,
should also be principally concerned with the non-basic illocutionary acts
through which an author’s text will speak to us. That is, one will believe
that one cannot accept (1) without also accepting (2).
Moreover, if (2) can be established by showing that when it appears
that a proposition, P, is being asserted in an utterance, an analysis of the
non-basic illocutionary force of the utterance can reveal that it is actually
some other proposition, Q, that is being asserted, this will open up a
route to undermining the practice of ‘refutation’. However, a very
strong premise will be needed to make this final step:
Illocutionary Non-Disagreement: whenever a classic text contains an
assertion, the propositional content of which appears to contain inter-
epochal philosophical content, and hence appears to generate the
possibility of inter-epochal disagreement, an analysis of the non-basic
illocutionary acts that its author used it to perform will reveal that the
proposition which it really asserted lacks such content.
It would then follow that the proposition in question is compatible with
any other proposition which is really asserted in other epochs, and the
lack of inter-epochal disagreement would be established.
To illustrate how the opponent of ‘refutation’ could use Illocutionary
Non-Disagreement in practice it is worth going through an example. In
The Subjection of Women J. S. Mill denies that “there are [two] different
natures among mankind, free natures, and slave natures”.43 In doing so
Mill seems to contradict Aristotle when the latter says:

42. See the articulation of Skinner’s position in his (1969: 32) and (1988b: 274), as well
as the criticism of Wittgenstein in Dummett (1978: 450, cf. 445).
43. Mill (XXI: 269).

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 Tim Beaumont 19
But is there any one thus intended by nature to be a slave, and for
whom such a condition is expedient and right [?..][T]hat some should
rule and others be ruled is a thing not only necessary, but expedient;
from the hour of their birth, some are marked out for subjection,
others for rule.44
If this contradiction is genuine, Non-Disagreement is false; so propo-
nents of the latter must show that the contradiction is illusory. To do
that through an appeal to Illocutionary Non-Disagreement would be
to argue that a speech act analysis of the non-basic illocutionary
forces of the utterances reveals that there is no overlap in the propo-
sitional content which is actually asserted by Aristotle and negated by
Mill.45
In what follows we will examine two distinct ways in which this
claim could be made, one of which appeals to temporal scope restrictions
on the validity of asserted propositions, and another of which appeals to
pragmatic scope restrictions on the propositional content of asserted
propositions. With respect to the former approach, the defender of Illo-
cutionary Non-Disagreement could claim that the non-basic illocution-
ary forces of apparently asserted propositions give us reason to believe
that asserted propositions are temporally indexed in such a way as to only
purport to be true in the epochs in which they are uttered. On this
view, the real speaker meaning of ‘P is true’ when uttered by a speaker
in one epoch will be P is true at (say) t1. . .10, whereas the real speaker
meaning of ‘P is false’ when uttered by a speaker in another epoch is
that P is false at (say) t20. . .30. Since there is no contradiction between it
being the case that P at one time, and it not being the case that P at
another time, the appearance of disagreement would turn out to have
been illusory.46
To illustrate, compare Mill’s claim concerning natural slavery above
with the following passage from the same text:
The object of this essay is to [show. . .] [t]hat the principle which regu-
lates the existing social relations between the sexes – the legal subordi-
nation of one sex to the other – is wrong in itself, and now one of the
chief hindrances to human improvement; and that it ought to be

44. Aristotle (1996: I: §5). The analysis of Aristotle in Kraut (2002: 301–303) suggests
that the contradiction is genuine.
45. Bevir (1994: 667) claims that the question of whether there have been ‘perennial’
answers to philosophical problems is ultimately an empirical one.
46. Skinner (2002: 53) posits an analogy between asking whether Machiavelli’s belief
that mercenary armies are antithetical to liberty is true, and asking whether the King of France is
bald. This implies that either Machiavelli only intended to refer to the mercenaries of his
own time, or that he used a term to refer to them the meaning of which was so precise
that it cannot be used to refer to anything in our own time.

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20 Philosophical Investigations
replaced by a principal of perfect equality, admitting no power or privi-
lege on the one side, nor disability on the other.47
In the light of the latter passage one might be tempted to claim that,
since Aristotle’s political perlocutionary aim was to induce belief in natu-
ral slavery in his own time, and Mill’s political perlocutionary aim was to
induce disbelief in natural slavery in his own time, the fact that Aristotle
and Mill are implicitly referring to different times means that they are
not actually contradicting each other.48
The obvious problem with this proposal is that, even though Mill
explicitly endorses the claim that a practice such as slavery may be expe-
dient in one age and inexpedient in another, in singling out Aristotle for
critique, he denies that its former expediency was ever due to the exis-
tence of natural slaves.49 Moreover, since Mill is generally quite careful
to state the scope restrictions on the various politico-philosophical prin-
ciples that he defends – such as those pertaining to freedom of thought
and action, and rights to democratic representation – it seems highly
problematic for the opponents of ‘refutation’ that he offers no such scope
restriction on the validity of the Utility Principle.50 After all, on the one
hand, it suggests that when he asserts the Utility Principle, he does intend
it to contradict alternative accounts of ethics or morality offered in previ-
ous ages. And on the other, it suggests that Mill would have been likely
to reject any additional scope restrictions that the opponent of ‘refuta-
tion’ would need to impose on his text in order to justify a purely
‘a-philosophical’ and politically parochial reading thereof.
Given the dim prospects of defending Illocutionary Non-Disagreement
through temporal scope restrictions, its advocates could look to a second
approach which they may have independent reason for thinking is more
promising. In positing a temporal scope restriction on the asserted validity
of propositions one does not thereby remove abstract or philosophical con-
tent from the latter, and it is this content which is the most plausible source
of inter-epochal disagreement. In consequence, it might be inferred that
what is needed is a pragmatically generated restraint on the content of
asserted propositions. According to this second approach, what speech act

47. Mill (XXI: 261).

48. It might even be claimed that the explicit use of ‘now’ in (XXI: 261) does not add
any information that is not implicitly supplied by the non-basic illocutionary temporal-
indexing of the utterance in (XXI: 269) quoted above.
49. Mill (XIX: 394–395).
50. For his use of such scope restrictions see (XVIII: 224) and (XIX: 404) respectively.
For his statement of the Utility Principle see (X: 201). In fact Mill appears to be encour-
aged by the ‘fact’ that the Utility Principle was also defended by Epicurus and the Socrates
of The Protagoras even though he thinks it was rejected by Plato (XI: 61); see Beaumont
(forthcoming).

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 Tim Beaumont 21
analyses of the non-basic illocutionary forces of the preceding claims by
Aristotle and Mill reveals is that the speaker meaning of the assertions that
they really make lacks the abstract philosophical content (rather than the tem-
poral universality) of the assertions which they merely appear to make
(given the surface grammar of the sentence).
The most obvious pragmatic basis for such a position would be that
the content of the assertions of each speaker is restricted by the content
of the practical aims that they have with respect to changing or main-
taining the institutions of their own respective times. For instance, a
pragmatically inclined reader might conceivably think that, while Aris-
totle makes an assertion which appears to have an abstract content about
the naturalness of certain kinds of slavery, this content must be illusory as
all he is really doing is (say) endorsing the existing practice of slavery (or
at least those features of it which he wants to persist).51 Similarly, the
reference to ‘existing institutions’ in The Subjection of Women above
might be taken to show that when Mill makes an utterance which
appears to deny that there are any natural slaves, all he is really saying is
that we should change a particular set of British laws and norms subordi-
nating women. In that case, he would not actually be saying anything
that could contradict Aristotle, who obviously had nothing to say about
British laws and norms in particular.
However, whatever intuitive appeal such a proposal may have, it can
to be shown to be refutable by way of a dilemma. Aristotle makes clear
that he believes that his claims (apparently) asserting the naturalness of
certain forms of slavery are both philosophical in nature, and inconsistent
with philosophical claims made by some of his contemporaries.52 In the
terms adopted above, this means that he takes himself to have been
engaged in an intra-epochal philosophical debate. The challenge for the
defenders of Illocutionary Non-Disagreement would be to show that
their philosophy can provide an interpretation that remains faithful to
this explicitly stated self-understanding of his own activity, on the one

51. Note the difference between claiming that (i) when Aristotle posits natural slaves he
also endorses certain institutions, and (ii) when Aristotle appears to posit natural slaves he
is not actually doing so but is rather merely endorsing certain institutions. In the former
case, he would be making a philosophical claim, which is conducive to inter-epochal dis-
agreement, and simultaneously using it to engage in a non-basic illocutionary act. (This
would leave it an open question whether the claim is made sincerely or as a mere means
to the desired end. For a discussion of the role that appeals to principles play in political
action, see Skinner (1988a: 108–110).) In the latter case, he would be merely expressing
support for particular institutions without actually making any assertions whatsoever. Since
the former understanding of what is going on is entirely compatible with a belief in ‘refu-
tation’ – the fact that a past thinker put forward an argument in the course of an attempt
to achieve a political end does not preclude contemporary philosophers from examining
whether it is sound – the opponents thereof would have to defend the latter.
52. Aristotle (1996: I:6).

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22 Philosophical Investigations
hand, without thereby having to concede that this opens the door to
inter-epochal disagreement with Aristotle, on the part of philosophers
from later epochs, on the other.
The dilemma proceeds from the premise that a philosophy of inter-
pretation must either offer philosophical grounds for rejecting Aristotle’s
self-understanding of his own philosophical activity, or accept that self-
understanding. If it accepts Aristotle’s self-understanding, it concedes
that his asserted propositions have enough philosophical content to
have been contradicted by the assertions of other thinkers in his own
day (intra-epochal disagreement). But if his assertions had enough
philosophical content for intra-epochal disagreement, they must also
have enough philosophical content to be contradicted by the asser-
tions of later thinkers as well (inter-epochal disagreement).
Conversely, if a philosophy of interpretation offers philosophical
grounds for denying that Aristotle asserted propositions containing
philosophical content, it contradicts Aristotle, and must, therefore, also
concede the possibility of inter-epochal (meta-) philosophical disagree-
ment qua purporting to refute Aristotle. In consequence, regardless of
whether or not a philosophy of interpretation accepts Aristotle’s belief
that he engaged in intra-epochal disagreement, it cannot deny that he
has since been contradicted by philosophers from later epochs without
contradicting itself.53

VI. Conclusion

Skinner’s positive methodological prescriptions are a rich and fertile

source of historical studies of great philosophical value. However, Skin-
ner’s negative methodological prohibition on traditional philosophical
studies of the arguments of past texts, which take part of the value of the
history of ideas to consist in the possibility of either ‘borrowing’ or ‘re-
futing’ the claims of the past, cannot be deduced from the premises that
he offers. Moreover, if we seek to supplement Skinner’s premises in
order to build a deductively valid argument for his prohibitions, we see

53. Skinner (1988b) maintains that his (1969) merely “appeared” to deny the existence
of longstanding continuities and disputes in the history of western philosophy, and restricts
his objection to the practice of “abstracting” arguments from the context in which they
were articulated with a view to viewing them as “contributions” to such disputes. How-
ever, once one acknowledges that there can be shared propositional content in the philo-
sophical assertions of past and contemporary thinkers, even though the illocutionary acts
performed in making those assertions were distinct, there is actually no reason to treat
such abstractions as methodologically suspect. Bevir (2011: 19) raises the concern that as
Skinner’s perspective developed he withdrew premises without withdrawing the conclusions
that were dependent thereon.

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 Tim Beaumont 23
that the premises required are so implausible that validity can only be
purchased at the cost of soundness.
This does not mean that such philosophical studies can establish a
complete understanding of past texts. After all, Skinner is correct to
maintain that (1) a complete understanding of a text would include an
understanding of the illocutionary acts it was intended to perform, and
(2) this requires rich contextual knowledge which an argument-focused
study is unlikely to yield. However, insofar as contextual studies help us
to understand the meaning of texts, they facilitate, rather than preclude,
traditional philosophical studies of the arguments in past texts, and
thereby make it easier for contemporary philosophers to establish
whether they merit being ‘borrowed’ or ‘refuted’. As such the
approaches should be viewed as supplementary or even symbiotic as
opposed to mutually incompatible.54

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