Foundations Shaken but Not Stirred 101is an immanent danger of an extreme Pyrrhonism within Wittgensteinianism and
essential contestability, which is clearly adaptable to postmodern and poststructural
analysis. It can, of course, for some, simply remain as fruitless scepticism.^15 Essen-
tial contestability basically lets the genii of linguistic and ontological multiplicity out
the philosophical bottle. It does not showaway out of the fly bottle, but rather it
showsmultipleroutes out, which is enough to confuse any good-hearted fly. Multiple
language games, ontological incommensurability, and linguistic idealism (without
teleology) provide a scenario for multiple constructed realities. Thus, if language is
our only access to reality (either as atertium quidbetween speaker and something
vaguely ‘raw’, but unknown, outside, or, as simply a self-sufficient thing in itself),
then there are potentially multiple realities, which we can address. To take the slightly
harder edged non-foundational approach (which gives up the ‘raw things’ to which
languages might correspond), there is nothing that can be appealed to resolve ques-
tions. To try to impose a monoglot answer is to engage in, what Jean François Lyotard
has neatly called, a form of linguistic terrorism. Language games are all we have and
there is nothing to adjudicate between them. There is nothing over, above, or outside.
As both Lyotard and Richard Rorty—both who claim Wittgenstein as a philosophical
mentor—argue, we have to give upanypossibility of a master vocabulary. There
are therefore no metanarratives. Rorty and Lyotard contest at the edges here—since
Rorty (unlike Lyotard) thinks that language games overlap and can debate (Rorty
1989; Lyotard 1991a). However, the basic gist of their Wittgensteinianism, moves in
roughly the same postmodern direction. One use for this argument is in the sphere
of social multiplicity. The recent more fashionable postcolonial, multicultural, and
difference theories have given rise to protracted debates over issues such as difference.
Thus, James Tully’s work,Strange Multiplicity, quite self-consciously uses Wittgen-
steinian argument to uphold postcolonial and indigenous claims on constitutionality,
law and justice (see Tully 1995).
The second positive reading picks up the historical aspect of the essential con-
testability argument. Thus, Terence Ball is critical of essential contestability for its
analytic tendency to adopt an ahistorical attitude, which he thinks is mistaken (Ball
1988: 14).^16 He sees analytical philosophy as notable for its dismal non-appreciation
of the historical dimension of concepts, which he considers odd, given their linguistic
emphasis. He argues for the need to move beyond conceptual analysis into ‘critical
conceptual history’. Gallie hints at this potential in his original article, but never takes
it any further. For Ball, politics is always a conceptually constituted activity. The lan-
guage we use is never neutral, in fact, our political discourses can transform us—or
constrain us. Thus, for Ball, ‘as we speak, so we are. We live in a world or words.
We are tied to words. It is who and what we are’. How we classify and act ‘is deeply
delimited by the conceptual, argumentative and rhetorical resources of our language.
The limits of my moral and political language, we might say, mark the limits of my
moral and political world’ (Ball 1988: 4). As the concepts constitutive of our speech
change, ‘so too do we’. Concepts use and meanings are always linked to predicaments
in which individuals find themselves, although they may often be invisible to those
who use a discourse (Ball 1988: ix–x).