Beyond the Inner and the Outer: Wittgenstein’s Philosophy of Psychology

350 Pages·1990·9.13 MB·English

by  Michel Ter Hark (auth.)

BEYOND THE INNER AND THE OUTER
SYNTHESE LIBRARY
STUDIES IN EPISTEMOLOGY,
LOGIC, METHODOLOGY, AND PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE
Managing Editor:
JAAKKO HINTIKKA, Boston University
Editors:
DONALD DAVIDSON, University of California, Berkeley
GABRIEL NUCHELMANS, University ofL eyden
WESLEY C. SALMON, University of Pittsburgh
VOLUME 214
MICHEL TER HARK
BEYOND THE INNER
AND THE OUTER
Wittgenstein's Philosophy of Psychology
••
KLUWER ACADEMIC PUBLISHERS
DORDRECHT I BOSTON I LONDON
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Hark. Michel Ter. 1953-
Beyond the inner and the outer Wittgenstein's philosophy of
psychology / Mlchel Ter Hark,
p. cm. -- (Synthese 1 ibrary ; v. 214)
Includes bibliographlcal references and index.
1. Psychology--Philosophy. 2. Wittgenstein. Ludwig. 1889-1951.
3. Psycholinguistics--Philosophy. I. T1tle. II. Series.
BF38.H37 1990
128' .092--dc20 90-39743
ISBN-13: 978-94-010-7438-4 e-ISBN-13: 978-94-009-2089-7
DOl: 10.1007/978-94-009-2089-7
Published by Kluwer Academic Publishers,
P.O. Box 17, 3300 AA Dordrecht, The Netherlands.
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Translation from the Dutch language by Anthony P. Runia.
This translation has been made possible by a grant from
the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (N.W.O)
Printed on acid-free paper
All Rights Reserved
© 1990 by Kluwer Academic Publishers
Softcover reprint ofthe hardcover 1st edition 1990
No part of the material protected by this copyright notice may be reproduced or
utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,
including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and
retrieval system, without written permission from the copyright owner.
In memory of my brother Niels (1952-1987)
For Anne
CONTENTS
Preface............................................................................................... ix
1. On the Origin of the Philosophical Investigations............ 1
2. Language-Games as Context of Meaning............................. 25
1. The psychological theory of meaning.... .... .... .... .............. 25
2. Horizontal and vertical language-games ........................ 33
3. Agreement in Forms of Life ................................................... 43
1. Internal relations.................................................................. 44
2. Justifications without end, end without justification.. 51
3. Forms of life and constitutive rules................................. 62
4. My Mind: First Person Statements........................................ 73
1. Robinson Crusoe and private language .......................... 74
2. Four misleading analogies ... .......... .......... .... .... .......... .... .... 81
a. I and my sense data.......................................................... 82
b. Introspective recognition............................................... 94
c. Memory.............................................................................. 103
d. Self-knowledge................................................................. 111
3. Description of one's inner .................................................. 114
5. Other Minds: Third Person Statements ............................... 118
1. The asymmetry of observation and expression............. 120
2. The hidden inner ................................................................. 124
3. 'Einstellung zur Seele' ......................................................... 135
4. 'Menschenkenntnis' and indeterminacy........................ 146
6. The Meaning of Aspects .......................................................... 160
1. 'Meaning-theory' versus 'Gestalt-theory' ........................ 165
2. Seeing-as and organization .... ........ .......... .... .... .... .... .......... 172
3. Seeing-as and interpretation.............................................. 178
4. Seeing and thinking............................................................. 181
5. Secondary meaning and aspect.......................................... 187
viii MICHEL TER HARK
7. The Grammar of Psychological Concepts ............................ 191
1. Sensations and impressions............................................... 199
2. Emotions.. ...................... ........................ ...................... .......... 213
3. Images and fancies.................. .............. .......... .......... ...... ...... 221
4. 1nner states' and expecting.... .................. ........ ................... 233
5. Feelings of tendency............................................................. 241
6. Willing........ ............. .................... ..... ................ ......... ............. 250
8. Conclusion: Wittgenstein and the Turing Test.................. 266
Bibliography .................................................................................... 286
Index.................................................................................................. 293
Appendix of German Quotations ............................................... 301
PREFACE
Wittgenstein's aphoristic style holds great charm, but also a great
danger: the reader is apt to glean too much from a single fragment
and too little from the fragments as a whole. In my first confron
tations with the Philosophical Investigations I was such a reader,
and so, it turned out, were most of the writers on Wittgenstein's
later philosophy. Wittgenstein's remarkable ability to bring
together many facets of his thought in one fragment is fully
exploited in the critical literature; but hardly any attention is paid
to the connection with other fragments, let alone to the many
hitherto unpublished manuscripts of which the Philosophical
Investigations is the final product. The result of this fragmentary
and ahistorical approach to Wittgenstein's later work is a host of
contradictory interpretations. What Wittgenstein really wanted to
say remains insufficiently clear. Opinions are also strongly
divided about the value of his work. Some authors have been
encouraged by his aphorisms and rhetorical questions to dismiss
the whole Cartesian tradition or to halt new movements in
linguistics or psychology; others, exasperated, reject his philo
sophy as anti-scientific conceptual conservatism.
After consulting unpublished notebooks and manuscripts
which Wittgenstein wrote between 1929 and 1951, I became a very
different reader. Wittgenstein turned out to be a kind of Leonardo
da Vinci, who pursued a form from which every sign of chisel
ling, every attempt at improvement, had been effaced. As a result,
the reader of the Philosophical Investigations only sees Wittgen
stein's solutions, but not the problems with which he wrestled,
only the apt formulation, but not the formulation capable of im
provement. We are fortunate that Wittgenstein, unlike Leonardo
da Vinci, did not destroy his sketches, so that the reader can often
follow the development and argumentative context of his
thought step by step in the notebooks and manuscripts. My
assumption is that the published work can only be understood
properly if one has entered into this historical and argumentative
x MICHEL TER HARK
context. That is not to detract from the number of excellent
studies of Wittgenstein's published work; I am merely saying that
even in those cases the reader lacks sufficient exegetical evidence
to decide adequately on the correctness of an interpretation.
The main objective of this book is to understand Wittgenstein's
ideas about the nature of psychological concepts in the historical
context of his published and above all unpublished writings
between 1929 and 1951. I am concerned with reconstructing, not
evaluating, his work. And although I shall regularly refer to the
critical literature on Wittgenstein, the debate with other inter
preters is secondary. I have learned a great deal from studies by
Stanley Cavell, Gordon Baker & Peter Hacker, and Merrill &
Jaakko Hintikka, but they do not pay specific attention to Wittgen
stein's philosophy of psychology or extensively consult unpub
lished material. Another distinctive feature of this book is that it
closely examines the relation between the Gestalt psychology of
Wolfgang Kohler and the philosophical psychology of William
James on the one hand and Wittgenstein's philosophy of psycho
logy on the other. Contrary to common practice, I will not dwell
on Wittgenstein's relation to authors whom he did not read
(seriously), like Descartes, Locke, or Hume, but will rather look at
authors with whom he actually enters into a debate: Kohler and
James.
The exegetical restriction to Wittgenstein's own work and that
of some of his contemporaries does not mean that this book is
merely of historical interest. Virtually all the themes which it
addresses are relevant to current developments in philosophy,
linguistics, and (cognitive) psychology. Some of the topics that
come under review are: the importance of language for the nature
of psychological phenomena, the relation between rationality and
a way of life, the tension between self-knowledge and public stan
dards for that knowledge, the relation between certainty and
uncertainty about knowledge of other minds, and the many mis
leading tendencies in introspective, behaviouristic, and Gestalt
psychological explanations of psychological phenomena, such as
perception, emotion, and willing. In the last chapter I will
explicitly illustrate the relevance of Wittgenstein's philosophy of
PREFACE xi
psychology to current positions in cognitive psychology and
artificial intelligence.
Given the pronounced holistic character of Wittgenstein's
philosophy, no study of his foundations of psychology can afford
to ignore his philosophy of language and action. After a chapter
explaining various aspects of Wittgenstein's Nachlass and particu
larly the genesis of Philosophical Investigations, § 243-421, the
next two chapters deal with the embedment of the meaning of
concepts in language-games and forms of life and with rule
guided behaviour and the primacy of actions. Chapters 4 and 5
explore the basis of Wittgenstein's philosophy of psychology; the
first discusses the status of psychological concepts in the first
person, the second the use of those concepts in the third person.
Both chapters present a large amount of unpublished material
that sheds light on the relation between the first and the third
person, the private language argument, the question of whether
Wittgenstein is a behaviourist, and the nature of 'Menschen
kenntnis'. Chapters 6 and 7 focus on Wittgenstein's analysis of
individual psychological concepts, an area that has been sorely
neglected in the critical literature. Important sources here are the
Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology I and II and the Last
Writings, published in 1980 and 1982 respectively, as well as
unpublished material.
Use of the Nachlass necessitates frequent citation. I have there
fore kept quotations from published work to a minimum, often
paraphrasing rather than quoting the original. The material from
the Nachlass has been translated from the German by Anthony
Runia and myself. The original German versions have been
added in an appendix and, in contrast to the English translations,
include alternative formulations (marked between double
slashes). In all other respects the English translations are identical
with the original German versions. Words underlined by Witt
genstein in his manuscripts or notebooks have been italicized.
Squiggly lines in quotations correspond to squiggly lines under a
word in the manuscript, which Wittgenstein used to indicate
uncertainty about a formulation. Words in brackets are also
bracketed in the manuscripts. I have mentioned deletions only
where they seemed important in the context. The interpunction