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Wittgenstein and Psychology: on our ‘Hook Up’ to Reality

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 January 2010

John Shotter
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Extract

We must do away with explanation, and description alone must take its place. And this description gets its light, that is to say its purpose, from … philosophical problems. These are, of course, not empirical problems; they are solved, rather, by looking into the workings of our language, and that in such a way as to make us recognize those workings: in spite of an urge to misunderstand them. The problems are solved, not by giving new information, but by arranging what we have already known. Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language. (PI, I, 109)

Type
Papers
Information
Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements , Volume 28 , March 1990 , pp. 193 - 208
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 1990

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References

1 In the paper I shall oscillate between talk of ‘reality’ and talk of ‘surroundings’ or ‘circumstances’. While in the Tractatus Wittgenstein thought of ‘reality’ as grounding our talk, in the Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology he came to talk of it as grounded in its ‘surroundings’.

2 Indeed, criticism at that time was quite strong—as the following example illustrates: ‘That modern psychology has projected an image of man which is as demeaning as it is simplistic, few intelligent and sensitive non-psychologists would deny’ (Koch, , 1964, 37).Google Scholar

3 Even before Wittgenstein, others began to express a degree of unease about the nature of scientific theories, and to grant that the mathematically expressed axioms and theories of physics were not necessarily truths about the physical world. One such is Einstein. Indeed, about such propositions, he said: ‘Insofar as the propositions of mathematics give an account of reality they are not certain; and insofar as they are certain they do not describe reality …’(quoted in Kline, 1980, 97). A theory is, he said, a ‘free invention of the mind’. ‘It is a work of pure reason; the empirical contents and their mutual relations must find their representation in the conclusions of the theory’ (Einstein, , 1979, 311). It is not, as classical empiricist philosophers claimed (and many empiricist psychologists still claim), deduced from experience ‘by abstraction’. Indeed, ‘a clear recognition of the erroneousness of [the classical empiricist view] really only came,’ says Einstein (1979, 312), ‘with the general theory of relativity, which showed that one could take account of a wider range of empirical facts … on a foundation quite different from the Newtonian one’. So: although both views may be ‘permissible’—as Hertz (1954, 2) put it—‘two permissible and correct models of the same external objects may yet differ in respect of appropriateness’.Google Scholar

4 Someone else who takes a similar view is Garfinkel (1967, 31): ‘Not a method of understanding, but the immensely various methods of understanding are the professional sociologist's proper and hitherto unstudied and critical phenomena. Their multitude is indicated in the endless list of ways that persons speak. Some indication of their character and their differences occurs in the socially available glosses of a multitude of sign functions as when we take note of marking, labelling, symbolizing, emblemizing, cryptograms, analogies, anagrams, indicating, minaturizing, imitating, mocking-up, simulating—in short, in recognizing, using, and producing the orderly ways of cultural settings from —within” those settings.’

5 ‘Idiot savants’, as we know, say that they instantly ‘just see’ the solution to the most complex of arithmetic problems, leaving us totally puzzled as to the ‘processes’ involved.

6 Here Wittgenstein makes contact with his views about language in the Tractatus, where he sees propositions as determining a place in a space of possibilities (TR, 3.4 to 3.442). See also Janik and Toulmin (1973, 142–144) for an account of Hertz's and Boltzman's influence here.

7 ‘A philosophical problem has the form: “I don't know my way about”’ (PI, I, 133).

8 As he comments in (PI, I, 304), ‘How does the philosophical problem about mental processes and states and about behaviourism arise?—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 we thought quite innocent.)—And now the analogy which was to make us understand our thought falls to pieces. So we have to deny the yet uncomprehended process in the yet unexplored medium. And it now looks as if we had denied mental processes. And naturally we don't want to deny them.’ ‘We have only rejected the grammar which tried to force itself upon here.’ We want only to say that whatever their nature is, it is indeterminate.

9 For instance, Broadbent (1961, 9) says: ‘It is a cliche nowadays to say that our mastery of the material world is outstripping our ability to control ourselves … It is urgent that our behaviour should be brought up to the standard of our knowledge … [P]erhaps the most hopeful road is to apply to behaviour itself the method of attack which has proved so useful in dealing with the material world …’ See Argyle (1969) for an identical view.

10 A very important paper in this respect is Gallie (1955–56) on essentially contested concepts'. See also my own paper on rhetoric and the recovery of civil society (Shotter, 1989). It was because of the possibility of interminable argument s in ethics and morals, of course, that Liebniz sought his Characteristica Universalis, which if we had it, we should be able when confronted with such problems say: ‘Let us take our slates and calculate.’ Indeed, Broadbent (1961, 11) justifies the natural scientific approach along these lines too.