Criticising from “Outside”

I look at a disagreement between E lizabeth A nscombe, on the one hand, and P eter W inch and I lham D ilman, on the other, about whether it is legitimate to call something an error that counts as knowledge within some alien system of belief; and I look also at the question what W ittgenstein's view was. I try to show that our understanding of what is real cannot be adequately elucidated if we consider only its role within language‐games, and I argue that an important element in our thinking about what is and is not real emerges in our response to conflicting modes of thought.