Silliman's Papers

The Mind of Wittgenstein
Considerations of how Wittgenstein might approach the problem of mind
take-home exam p. 2
for Dr. Burke

Wittgenstein, whose main interests are the analysis of language and the dissolution of philosophy, does not set out a theory of mind, a philosophy of mind. It has seemed interesting, though, to consider what he might have thought about mind. He does, at various times and in various places, mention existing theories and counter them in particular ways. We can gather from his notes a number of thoughts about the philosophies of mind which, when taken together, do point towards the way in which he might have proceeded to approach that problem.

First, Wittgenstein says that many or most of our bad thinking concerning mind has been due to too many considerations of one example. We ought to consider a healthy variety of examples and thought experiments, lest we be led astray by one example’s peculiarities.

Second, Wittgenstein thinks we have attributed too many things to introspection, treating statements as if they were reports of inner mental states. He thinks that “in some cases it will be possible to say some such thing, in most not.” The example he uses here is the example of expectation. When we say we are expecting something we have thought of this statement as a report of an introspection. As if there were an unmanifest thing going on in the inner processes of the mind which one looked at (somehow) and then stated that others might know. As opposed to this, he considers the possibilities that,

a) the statement may be seen to be the first act of expectation.

b) the statement may be a manifestation of the expectation, rather than a report of it.

c) a state of expectations does not require or imply that something was occupying my thoughts. “Perhaps I don’t think anything at all or have a multitude of disconnected thoughts.”

Third, following and perhaps explaining the second point, Wittgenstein thinks that “an ‘inner process’ stands in need of outward criteria.” In the barest sense, this can be understood as a sort of behaviorism, where inner states are bracketed off and ignored for observable manifested behavior. What we have heretofore called ‘inner mental states,’ he thinks, does not happen isolated from that which is around it, without context. These things are “imbedded in a situation, from which it arises.” The surroundings give these things their importance, he says, pointing to examples of a mouth, which cannot smile independently from the context, the situatedness, of a face.

Fourth, Wittgenstein thinks that even if there is an object which is a mental ‘inner process,’ it can be dropped from consideration. If something is only known and only knowable privately, only by introspection and never anywhere is it observable, then we can stop considering it. It’s attachment to the grammar we speak and share in common becomes irrelevant – even if there is no such inner states we can still speak as if there were, that is to say, our public language could not reflect such private things and would not need to and, therefore, the existence of such private things is irrelevant to our language. This is the famous “beetle in a box” example.

Fifth, Wittgenstein considers the cases of an actor and a stoic. The problem here is that a stoic may feel pain, e.g., but demonstrate nothing and an actor might feel nothing but demonstrate pain. If we hold this position of the necessity of outward criteria, are we to then say that the actor actually feels pain and the stoic doesn’t? Wittgenstein does not think the question is wholly ridiculous. “It makes sense,” he writes, “to ask ‘Do I really love her, or am I only pretending to myself’”? Wittgenstein seeks to answer the stoic/actor problem, and to say how we could answer the question of the perhaps pretended love, in two ways which follow from the third and fourth points above:

a) He overcomes the stoic/actor problem by considering the situatedness of these uses of language. He writes, “let us really think out various different situations and conversations, and the ways in which that sentence will be uttered in them.” The only way one could answer the reasonable question is by imagining situations in which I might be doing one or the other, that is to say, we could only say if I did or did not love by examining contexts. Thus there is a context in which I may speak of pain which is stoically unshown and this is not nonsense, and there are times when I can speak of pretended pain and this in not nonsense. Their meanings are to be understood by their context.

b) Further, such utterances can be uttered and are not nonsense because such statements can be disattached from any object. I need not think that they have real existence in some special space in the world in order for there to be a place for such grammar. I do not have to believe that, somehow, the stoic’s undeclared pain is somehow different than declared pain or that there is a peculiar and special case of a mental object that adhere to pains pretended and not held. I only need to take these sentences grammatically – within language and within context.

While we cannot accurately attribute a position on the question of mind to Wittgenstein, there are here fragments of considerations that might point us plausibly to a theory. It would seems to be behaviorist, in part, but also to go beyond that theory in such a way as not to fall to it’s failings. We might perhaps call it natural language behaviorism, or something of that sort so that we note its behaviorist leanings but also that if it is a behaviorism it is a significantly modified sort. It would seem to be a theory that led us back to our natural manners of thinking as perfectly acceptable and to move us away from the history of weird theories strewn throughout one of the strangest fields of philosophy.