ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the author's ideas on explanation and understanding in the course of showing that Peter Winch yields too much to relativism, that there are language games in which cross-cultural value-judgments are legitimate moves, and that these moves are made in all cultures including the sociologists' sub-culture. The social sciences, like any other sciences, use language in attempts to make true universal statements about the world, which will explain the world. Winch's concern in 'Understanding a Primitive Society' is the broad problem of how people can understand the customs of an alien primitive society. The chapter discusses certain consequences of Winch's view that different societies have different standards of rationality and that therefore there can be no mutual appraisal between those standards. Winch's view seems to: suggest that people are best interpreters, that a society's own view of itself is the best possible; postulate a metaphysical distinction between the core of a culture and what is parasitic on it.
