It is sometimes said that we are strangers to ourselves, bearers of internal alterity, as well as to each other. The profounder this strangeness then the greater the difficulty of giving any systematic account of it without paradox: of supposing that our obscurity to ourselves can readily be illuminated. To attempt such an account, in defiance of…

This paper responds to Trohler's charge that my paper "As if by Machinery: The levelling of educational research" takes Francis Bacon's vision of scientific research out of context. I distinguish four senses of "decontextualisation": as ignorance, as belief in "timeless truths", as comparison of contexts, and as genealogy. I argue that Trohler has…

In his writings Jim Marshall has helpfully emphasized such Wittgensteinian themes as the multiplicity of language games, the deconstruction of "certainty," and the contexts of power that underlie discursive systems. Here we focus on another important legacy of Wittgenstein's thinking: his insistence that human activity is rule-governed. This idea…