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Wittgenstein, Wittgensteinianism and the Contemporary
Philosophy of Mind – Continuities and Changes
1
Ansgar Beckermann
For a short period of time in the middle of the last century, at least in Europe, Wittgenstein was the
measure of all things in philosophy and especially in the philosophy of mind. The private language
argument had shown the conception of the mind going back to Descartes and Locke to be
principally flawed – or so the consensus was. Mental phenomena are not essentially private, and
there simply cannot be mental states without any observable criteria at all. Anyone who disagreed
was in for a difficult time. Yet, only one or two decades later the discussion had moved on
considerably. First, the identity theory overcame behaviourism. Second, functionalism superseded
the identity theory, thereby paving the way for more specialist approaches such as Fodor's
representational theory of mind. Finally, a new, post-Wittgensteinian orthodoxy developed with
amazing swiftness. With hindsight, this seems a remarkable phenomenon in the sociology of
philosophy. As interesting as it would be, I shall disregard the sociological side here. Instead, I am
interested in the questions: What has changed? And, are there good reasons for these changes?
These questions are difficult to answer, not least, because it is far from clear which position
Wittgenstein himself held with regard to the mind-body problem. Even today, articles and books are
being published in an attempt to come closer to answering this question; but 50 years after
Wittgenstein's death we are still far from a generally accepted consensus. Of course, this picture is
painted a little bleakly: some points are clear – for instance Wittgenstein's rejection of the picture of
an inner world of the mind and an external world of material things, which pervades all areas of
philosophy since early modern times. According to Descartes, the mind is an immaterial substance
of its own – a
res cogitans
– and thinking, feeling and remembering are occurrences in this
substance accessible only to this substance itself. The consequence of this picture is that the mind is
private. Only the mind itself can know what happens within; others, at best, have indirect access
through a kind of inductive inference. They have to infer from the person's behaviour what goes on
in a person's mind. This, Wittgenstein says in a famous passage in the
Philosophical Investigations
,
is complete nonsense:
In what sense are my sensations
private
? – Well, only I can know whether I am really in pain; another person can
only surmise it. – In one way this is wrong, and in another nonsense. If we are using the word "to know" as it is
normally used (and how else are we to use it?), then other people very often know when I am in pain. – Yes, but all
1
I would like to thank Antonia Barke for translating this paper into English. I am very grateful to the audience of my
lecture in Bologna and to my colleagues in Bielefeld, especially to Eike von Savigny, Joachim Schulte, Hanjo Glock
and Christian Nimtz, for very helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper.
2
the same not with the certainty with which I know it myself! – It can't be said of me at all (except perhaps as a joke)
that I
know
I am in pain. What is it supposed to mean – except perhaps that I
am
in pain? (PI § 246)
If the epistemic consequences of the Cartesian picture of the mind are nonsensical, the picture
itself must be wrong: the mind is not private, but public. But what does this mean? The predominant
view in the 50s and 60s was a view that one could call the 'criteriological account'.
2
According to
the proponents of this view Wittgenstein has shown by means of considerations on the meaning of
linguistic expressions in general that there can be no mental states without behavioural criteria.
Pain
behaviour
is not just a
symptom
of the mental state pain, but a
criterion
. That is to say, pain
behaviour is corrigible evidence that somebody is in pain, but for semantic reasons it is, in a certain
way, also sufficient evidence.
For semantic reasons
it is true that if a person shows this behaviour
and there is no evidence to the contrary, then this person is in pain. There is ample evidence that
Wittgenstein held this view. Consider for example this passage from the
Blue Book
:
When we learnt the use of the phrase "so-and-so has toothache" we were pointed out certain kinds of behaviour of
those who were said to have toothache. As an instance of these kinds of behaviour let us take holding your cheek.
Now one may ask: "How do you know that he has got toothache when he holds his cheek?" The answer to this
might be, "I say,
he
has toothache when he holds his cheek because I hold my cheek when I have toothache." But
what if we went on asking: – "And why do you suppose that toothache corresponds to his holding his cheek just
because your toothache corresponds to your holding your cheek?" You will be at a loss to answer this question, and
find that here we strike rock bottom, that is we have come down to conventions. (
Blue and Brown Books
, p. 24)
In other words: not all signs of the presence of pain can be mere symptoms; some must be
criteria in the semantic sense, because otherwise we would have no basis for the application of the
concept 'pain'. Obviously, this is exactly one of the points of the private language argument.
However, the criteriological interpretation has been criticised in recent years, among other reasons,
because it places Wittgenstein in great proximity to behaviourism, a theory which he explicitly
rejected in many places.
What may have been his reasons for this rejection? Perhaps, as Hanjo Glock suggests, that the
behaviourist is still sticking too closely to the Cartesian picture by construing the mental after the
image of the physical.
Wittgenstein's attack on the inner/outer dichotomy is often accused of reducing the inner to the outer, and thereby
ignoring the most important aspects of human existence. Ironically, Wittgenstein in turn accuses the inner/outer
conception of mistakenly assimilating the mental to the physical. It construes the relationship between mental
phenomena and mental terms 'on the model of' material 'object and designation', and thereby turns the mind into a
realm
of mental entities, states, processes and events, which are just like their physical counterparts, only hidden and
more ethereal [T]his tendency is fuelled by the
Augustinian picture of language
, which suggests that all words
2
Cf. ter Hark 1995.
3
stand for objects, and all sentences describe something – if not physical entities, then entities of a different kind.
(Glock 1996, p. 175)
Indeed, there are a number of passages that suggest that it was Wittgenstein's opinion that it is a
fundamental error to construe the use of mental terms after the model of the use of physical
language. He writes, for example, in the
Philosophical Investigations
:
How does the philosophical problem about mental processes and states and about behaviourism arise? – The first
step is the one that altogether escapes notice. We talk of processes and states and leave their nature undecided.
Sometime perhaps we shall know more about them – we think. But that is just what commits us to a particular way
of looking at the matter. For we have a definite concept of what it means to learn to know a process better. (The
decisive movement in the conjuring trick has been made, and it was the very one that we thought quite innocent.) –
And now the analogy which was to make us understand our thoughts falls to pieces. So we have to deny the yet
uncomprehended process in the yet unexplored medium. And now it looks as if we had denied mental processes.
And naturally we don't want to deny them. (PI § 308)
In the second part of the
Philosophical Investigations
, Wittgenstein touches again on his views
on behaviourism:
Then psychology treats of behaviour, not of the mind?
What do psychologists record? – What do they observe? Isn't it the behaviour of human beings, in particular their
utterances? But
these
are not about behaviour.
"I noticed that he was out of humour." Is this a report about his behaviour or his state of mind? ("The sky looks
threatening": is this about the present or the future?) Both; not side-by-side, however, but about the one
via
the
other.
It is like the relation: physical object – sense-impressions. Here we have two different language-games and a
complicated relation between them. – If you try to reduce their relations to a
simple
formula you go wrong. (
PI
, p.
179 f.)
In my eyes, this remark is rather enigmatic. One thing is clear, however: for Wittgenstein the
difference between speaking-of-behaviour and speaking-of-mental-states is similar to the difference
of speaking-of-physical-objects and speaking-of-sense-impressions. Here we have two different
language games, even if these language games – as he explicitly points out – are closely linked. But,
and this is very regrettable, Wittgenstein says very little about how the language game of talking
about the mental really works and how it differs from speaking about behaviour and from other
more physical language games. The situation gets even more confusing because in the
Remarks on
the Philosophy of Psychology I
and in
Zettel
we find a rather peculiar passage, according to which
Wittgenstein sees the level of psychology and that of physiology as completely separate.
No supposition seems to me more natural than that there is no process in the brain correlated with associating or
with thinking; so that it would be impossible to read off thought-processes from brain-processes. I mean this: if I
talk or write there is, I assume, a system of impulses going out from my brain and correlated with my spoken or
4
written thoughts. But why should this order not proceed, so to speak, out of chaos? The case would be like the
following – certain kinds of plants multiply by seed, so that a seed always produces a plant of the same kind as that
from which it was produced – but
nothing
in the seed corresponds to the plant which comes from it; so that it is
impossible to infer the properties or structure of the plant from those of the seed that it comes out of [T]here is no
reason why this should not really hold for our thoughts, and hence for our talking and writing. (
RPPI
903; cf.
Z
608)
I saw this man years ago: now I have seen him again, I recognize him, I remember his name. And why does there
have to be a cause of this remembering in my nervous system? Why must something or other, whatever it may be,
be stored-up there
in any form
? Why must a trace have been left behind? Why should there not be a psychological
regularity to which
no
physiological regularity corresponds? If this upsets our concepts of causality then it is high
time they were upset. (
RPPI
905; cf.
Z
610)
If we read this passage from today's perspective, Wittgenstein seems to say no more and no less
than that the thesis of the
emergent nature
of mental phenomena appears extremely plausible to
him.
3
To that end he is prepared to allow a causality between mental phenomena that is not
mediated by physiological processes, even if this brings the concurrent danger that it may appear to
count in favour of classical mind-body dualism.
The prejudice in favour of psycho-physical parallelism is also a fruit of the primitive conception of grammar. For
when one admits a causality between psychological phenomena, which is not mediated physiologically, one fancies
that in doing so one is making an admission of the existence of a soul
alongside
the body, a ghostly mental nature.
(
RPPI
906; cf.
Z
611)
Of course, all these quotations come from texts written at very different times and occasions. But
even if this is so, it can not be disputed that we do not find a coherent account of the relations and
the differences between the mental and the physical, between the use of mental terms and the use of
physical terms in Wittgenstein's writings. We do find a straightforward rejection of the idea that the
mind is a private inner theatre, and we also find hints in direction of the idea that there is a
significant difference between the use of the mental and the physical vocabulary. At least, many
philosophers understood Wittgenstein this way. And, what is more, in my view a large part of post-
Wittgensteinian philosophy can be conceived of as an attempt to spell out the idea of two levels or
two language games.
One reason may have been that this idea seems to allow the dissolution of the mind-body
problem. This problem is widely held to be the problem "of accounting for the place of mind in a
world that is essentially physical".
4
At least at first sight there seem to be mental items in the world:
pains and thoughts, colour sensations and wishes, consciousness and perhaps even souls. How is
3
'Emergence' here is to be understood as C.D. Broad developed the concept in 1925: A property
F
of a complex
system is emergent if it
cannot be deduced
from the properties of the parts of the system together with their spatial
relations. Cf. Beckermann 2000.
4
Kim 1996, 9.
5
this realm of the mental related to the realm of the physical? Are mental items in fact not so
different, but only a special kind of physical items? Or does the mental constitute a special realm of
non-physical entities that nonetheless causally interact with the physical? Wittgenstein's views seem
to allow the answer: All these questions are ill conceived. One only has to notice that the mental
language does work in a way very different from that of the physical language. Mental terms do not
denote special states or processes in the way physical terms denote physical states or processes.
Indeed, they do not denote at all. And this means that there simply are no mental items about which
we can reasonably ask how they fit into an essentially physical world.
This attractive feature of Wittgenstein's views seems to have inspired for example Gilbert Ryle
whose work may also be understood as an attempt to elaborate Wittgenstein's two languages
account.
5
To be sure,
The Concept of Mind
was published four years before the
Philosophical
Investigations
. However, Ryle's thoughts are so similar to the thoughts of the late Wittgenstein, and
he was so much influenced by Wittgenstein through conversations and lecture-notes that I do not
hesitate to treat Ryle as a Wittgensteinian here. Ryle, however, seems to have been concerned with
a particular aspect of the mind-body problem – the question of how the mind can causally interact
with the body. He also tries to dissolve this problem by a semantic argument. According to Ryle,
mental terms refer to dispositions and not to events, and, that is, not to possible causes. The problem
of how the mind causally interacts with the body simply disappears when we only acknowledge that
mental explanations are dispositional explanations. I shall come back to this issue soon. But first I
would like to say a few words on the general outline of Ryle's argument.
To begin with, Ryle, too, emphatically rejects the concept of mind that has become pervasive
since early modern times. For Ryle, too, it is absurd to assume a Cartesian theatre, in which mental
objects abound and mental occurrences take place, that only the mind knows about – occurrences,
which moreover interact causally with each other and with occurrences in the physical world.
According to Ryle, this assumption rests on one big misunderstanding, or, to put it more precisely,
it rests on a category mistake. This mistake can briefly be characterised like this: Cartesians, but not
only Cartesians, assume that mental expressions such as 'to remember', 'to think', 'to perceive', 'to
believe' and 'to want' refer to (hidden)
internal occurrences within a person's mind
, which
cause
the
person's outward behaviour. In reality however, according to Ryle, we do not employ these
expressions to refer to some 'shadow actions', which are hidden antecedents of the overt behaviour.
Instead we use the mental expressions to characterise the publicly observable actions in a different
way. The mentalist thinks mental phenomena consist in enigmatic occurrences behind the
5
For the following cf. Beckermann 2001, sec. 4.1.3.
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