[Wittrs] Re: Wittgenstein, Language, Thought and Mind

  • From: Sean Wilson <whoooo26505@xxxxxxxxx>
  • To: wittrs@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Tue, 29 Sep 2009 11:22:43 -0700 (PDT)

(reply to CJ)

... I did not mean so much to say that Wittgenstein was asking for a compromise 
between inner/outer. Surely that is not what I had meant to say. (Upon reading 
it again, I could see where one could think that). That would be like someone 
being liberal in politics and another conservative, and someone asking for some 
sort of middle position. We can all agree that Wittgenstein's intellectualism 
has nothing to do with sort "position-taking."

But as to the rest of your views, I don't believe we shall have agreement. I 
would never take the view that Wittgenstein wants us to avoid inner and outer 
talking -- or talking of "experience." He would rather have us conjugate those 
expressions, which is what his style of therapy is for. And once we did this, 
we would NOT find that inner/outer and "experience" lacked legitimate uses in 
ordinary grammar, we would rather find two things. First, that one could not 
make philosophical problems out of these subjects unless one started playing 
games with that grammar -- the manipulation of which created the false problem. 
And secondly, that there is a shared process, X, that constitutes inner and 
outer, such that speaking of these ideas as "outside of X" or as a dualism or 
as "inside X" is what creates all the problems. 

And this is why he spends so much time laboring to destroy the talk of folk 
psychology while also declaring himself against brute behaviorism.

Let me say it this way. I think there are a branch of rather loud 
Wittgensteinians who are what I would call "reification-branch 
Wittgensteinians." This branch seems to say that if something isn't actually 
present in the external world (put the phrase in quotes if don't like it), that 
it can't be spoken of. This reminds me more of Wittgenstein I than II. 
Wittgenstein surely would not be of the position that the word "experience" or 
"mind" or "behavior" couldn't be productively deployed in language. Indeed, he 
would find these to be family resemblance terms. In this sense, the terms do 
not "point" to anything other than a family of things. 

Regards and thanks.
 

Dr. Sean Wilson, Esq.
Assistant Professor
Wright State University
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