{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.018925831202046037, 'fraction_numerical': 0.0025575447570332483, 'mean_word_length': 4.891566265060241, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Criticizing Forms of Life

It is frequently but mistakenly assumed that Ludwig Wittgenstein and/or Peter Winch in their remarks on the problems of understanding between ways of life are putting forward an 'impossibility' argument, claiming that a way of life cannot possibly be criticized from outside. They are understood as maintaining that the standards against which criticism is possible are internal to the way of life itself and are distinctive from those which are found in other ways of life, with the consequence that there are no common standards against which two different ways of life may be compared to the advantage of one of them. Lawrence M. Hinman1 seeks to identify something like the above view as 'the standard interpretation' of Wittgenstein's thought and wishes to attribute a primary responsibility for it to Peter Winch. He wishes to contest it both as an account of Wittgenstein's thought and as an argument. He thinks that, construed as an impossibility argument, it needs to be countered by a case for the possibility; the question to be asked is 'Can a form of life be wrong?' and the answer that needs to be given is in the affirmative. Hinman thinks that by conceding that 'to some extent forms of life differ from one another, presuppose somewhat different standards of meaning, and are constituted in part by rules which vary from one to another' (351), he has identified what is true and desirable in the standard interpretation and has to reject the idea that there is an 'absence of any such shared standards between different forms of life'. He wants to deny this because it has the 'disturbing' effect of inviting 'passivity and resignation rather than dialogue, disagreement and eventual creation of mutual understanding'. We do not understand either Wittgenstein or Winch as putting forward a general argument about the impossibility or otherwise of mutual understanding between ways of life2 any more than we read