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. Kluwer Academic Publishers incorporates the publishing programmes of D. Reidel, Martinus Nijhoff, Dr W. Junk and MTP Press. Sold and distributed in the U.S.A. and Canada by Kluwer Academic Publishers, 101 Philip Drive, Norwell, MA 02061, U.S.A. In all other countries, sold and distributed by Kluwer Academic Publishers Group, P.O. Box 322, 3300 AH Dordrecht, The Netherlands. 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