Relation between mental and physical events
- Also called:
- linguistic philosophy
- Key People:
- Saul Kripke
- Sir Isaiah Berlin
In some respects Wittgenstein made significant breaks with the empiricist tradition, especially in his views about language and the explanation of the rigour of the deductive sciences. His treatment of the relationship between mental events and physical events also represents an important departure. Empiricists generally have started from the important assumption that what a person is immediately acquainted with is his own sensations, ideas, and volitions; that these are mental and not physical; and, most important, that the things he knows immediately are essentially private and inaccessible to others. For both Moore and Russell there then arose the problem of how, in view of the privacy stressed by the sense-datum theory, the world of physical objects could be known. Wittgenstein’s attack on this viewpoint, which has come to be known as the “private language” argument, has been much discussed, partly because it was in this area that Wittgenstein presented what could most easily be identified as a more or less formal argument—one that could then be analyzed and criticized in an analytic manner. Even in this case, however, his style of writing was such that the proper formulation of the argument has become a main source of controversy. Wittgenstein argued that the notion of an utterly private experience would imply: (1) that what goes on in the mental life of a person could be talked about only in a language that that person alone could understand; (2) that such a private language would be no language at all (this has been the main source of controversy); and (3) that the widely held doctrine that there are absolutely private mental events cannot be intelligibly stated, because to say that there are such events is to speak in a public language about things that supposedly can be referred to only in a private language understandable by just one person.
The fact that Wittgenstein’s argument against private language depends essentially on the question “What is it to follow a rule?” illustrates a common characteristic of his writings, viz., that themes developed in one area of philosophy continually emerge in apparently quite divorced areas. His extraordinary ability to see a common source of difficulty in philosophical problems that seem to be unrelated helps to explain his style of writing, which seems at first sight to be a somewhat chaotic arrangement of ideas.
For a time, analytic philosophy was attracted to a behaviouristic view of mental phenomena according to which apparently private mental events, such as the feeling of fear, are not really private and in fact are definable in terms of publicly observable patterns of behaviour. Empiricism’s orientation toward science, which is founded on observation, together with the view that the evidence one has of what goes on in the mental lives of other people must derive from what one sees of their behaviour, has often warred against another inclination of empiricism, which is to regard the starting point of all knowledge of the world, for each person, as being essentially private sense experience. Wittgenstein was tremendously influential, however, in suggesting that these two extremes are not the only alternatives. Yet attempts to state how Wittgenstein could deny the privacy of experience without espousing some form of behaviourism—which treats emotions, desires, and attitudes as dispositions to behave in certain ways—have not been very successful. Sympathetic interpreters have taken up the notion of “criteria,” which Wittgenstein used but did not develop in any detail. The idea is that, for mental states such as fear, outward behaviour (e.g., running away, blanching, or cringing) does not constitute what it is to be in that state, as behaviourism would have it, but neither is such behaviour merely evidence of some completely private event. The problem has been to characterize the relation between behaviour and mental states in such a way that the two are neither identical nor evidence for each other while still allowing that knowledge of a person’s characteristic behaviour is essential to understanding the notion of a certain mental state.
The “therapeutic” function of philosophy
For the later Wittgenstein and many philosophers influenced by him, the proper role of philosophy is not, as it was for Russell, to develop theories in answer to philosophical problems but to clear up the conceptual confusions through which philosophical problems arise in the first place. These confusions invariably come about through misunderstandings of the complicated ways in which terms with philosophical import—such as know, believe, desire, intend, and think—are used in everyday life. Philosophers who are thus “bewitched” by language have been led to wonder, for example, how one can know what is going on in another’s mind or how desires and emotions can produce physical changes in the body, and vice versa. Examination of the actual workings of psychological language would, on this way of looking at philosophy, “dissolve” rather than solve the problems, for it would reveal features of the psychological concepts involved that philosophers, in their original formulation of the problems, had ignored or misunderstood. Philosophy is thus not an avenue to discovering philosophical truths but a kind of conceptual “therapy.” As Wittgenstein observed in the Philosophical Investigations (1953), the aim of philosophy is “to shew the fly the way out of the fly-bottle.”
Critics have argued that this way of looking at philosophy reduces the discipline to a sterile, inward-looking, and ultimately uninteresting enterprise. However, the confusions that philosophy, thus conceived, seeks to clear up need not be only those of philosophers. Scientists, for example, sometimes produce or presuppose philosophical theories that affect how they conduct their research—which, therefore, may be a fitting subject for philosophical therapeutics. Behaviourism in psychology seems to presuppose a philosophical theory and perhaps to be based on a general confusion about psychological concepts. More recently, some philosophers have suggested that contemporary cognitive science—and in particular the field of artificial intelligence, which views the human mind as a kind of computer—also is based on conceptual confusions created in large part by misunderstandings of the complexities of psychological speech. On this view, therefore, philosophy can have a therapeutic value beyond the sphere of philosophy itself.
Later trends in England and the United States
Wittgensteinians
Close students of Wittgenstein’s ideas tended to work chiefly on particular concepts that lie at the core of traditional philosophical problems. As an example of such an investigation, a monograph entitled Intention (1957), by G.E.M. Anscombe, an editor of Wittgenstein’s posthumous works, may be cited as an extended study of what it is for a person to intend to do something and of what the relationship is between his intention and the actions that he performs. This work occupied a central place in a growing literature about human actions, which in turn influenced views about the nature of psychology, of the social sciences, and of ethics. Another student of Wittgenstein, the American philosopher Norman Malcolm, has investigated concepts such as knowledge, certainty, memory, and dreaming. As these topics suggest, Wittgensteinians tended to concentrate on Wittgenstein’s ideas about the nature of mental concepts and to work in the area of philosophical psychology. Typically, they began with classical philosophical theories and attacked them by arguing that they employ some key concept, such as knowledge, in a manner incongruous with the way in which the concept would actually be employed in various situations. Their works thus abound with descriptions of hypothetical, though usually homely, situations and with questions of the form “What would a person say if…?” or “Would one call this a case of X?”
Ordinary language philosophy
After World War II the University of Oxford was the centre of extraordinary philosophical activity; and, although Wittgenstein’s general outlook on philosophy—his turning away, for example, from the notion of formal methods in philosophical analysis—was an important ingredient, many of the Oxford philosophers could not be called Wittgensteinians in the strict sense. The method employed by many of them has often been characterized—especially by critics—as an “appeal to ordinary language,” and they were thus identified as belonging to the school of “ordinary language” philosophy. Exactly what this form of argument is supposed to be and what exemplifies it in the writings of these philosophers has been by no means clear. Gilbert Ryle, Moore’s successor as editor of a leading journal, Mind, was among the most prominent of those analysts who were regarded as using ordinary language as a philosophical tool. Ryle, like Wittgenstein, pointed out the mistake of regarding the mind as what he called “a ghost in a machine” by investigating how people employ a variety of concepts, such as memory, perception, and imagination, that designate “mental” properties. He tried to show that, when philosophers carry out such investigations, they find that, roughly speaking, it is the way people act that leads to the attribution of these properties and that there is no involvement of anything internally private. He also attempted to show how philosophers were led to dualistic conclusions through the use of a wrong model in terms of which to interpret human activities. A dualistic model may be constructed, for example, by wrongly supposing that an intelligently behaving person must be continually utilizing knowledge of facts—knowledge that something is the case. Ryle contended, on the contrary, that much intelligent behaviour is not a matter of knowing that something is the case but of knowing how to do something. Once this difference between “knowing that” and “knowing how” is acknowledged, according to Ryle, there is no temptation to explain the behaviour by looking for a private internal knowledge of facts.
Although Ryle’s objectives were similar to those of Wittgenstein, his results often seemed more behaviouristic. It is true that Ryle did ask, in pursuit of his method, some fairly detailed questions about when a person would say, for example, that someone had been imagining something; but it is by no means clear that he was appealing to ordinary language in the sense of an investigation into how speakers of English use certain expressions. In any case, the charge, often voiced by critics, that this style of philosophizing trivializes and perverts philosophy from its traditional function would probably also have to be leveled against Aristotle, who frequently appealed to “what we would say.”
A powerful philosophical figure among postwar Oxford philosophers was John Austin, who was White’s Professor of Moral Philosophy until his death in 1960. Austin believed that many philosophical theories derive their plausibility from overlooking distinctions—often very fine—between different uses of expressions, and he also thought that philosophers too frequently think that any one of a number of expressions will do just as well for their purposes. (Thus, ignoring the difference between an illusion and a delusion, for example, lends credence to the view that the objects of immediate perception are not physical objects but sense data.) Austin’s work was, in many respects, much closer to the ideal of philosophy as comprising the analysis of concepts than was that of Ryle or Wittgenstein. Austin was also much more concerned with the nature of language itself and with general theories of how it functions. His novel approach, as exemplified in the posthumously published lectures How to Do Things with Words (1962), set a trend that was followed in a sizable literature in the philosophy of language. Austin took the total “speech act” as the starting point of analysis, and this allowed him to make distinctions based not only upon words and their place in a language but also upon points such as the speaker’s intentions in making the utterance and its expected effect on the audience. There was also in Austin’s approach something of the program of Russell and the early Wittgenstein for laying bare the fundamental structure of language. In the 1960s and ’70s, Austin’s theory of speech acts was considerably extended and systematized in work by his American student John Searle.
