ABSTRACT
Just as every philosophical system has a view about the nature and scope of philosophy, so the proper relationship of philosophy to ordinary reflective thought is itself a philosophical issue. In the Philosophical Investigations Wittgenstein remarks that ‘when we do philosophy we are like savages, primitive people, who hear the expressions of civilised men, put a false interpretation on them, and then draw the queerest conclusions from it’.2 His complaint is related to what he describes elsewhere as ‘our preoccupation with the method of science’, meaning by this its reductive-explanatory aspiration. He then continues ‘I want to say here that it can never be our job to reduce anything to anything, or to explain anything. Philosophy really is “purely descriptive”’.3
