[Wittrs] [C] Re: Wittgenstein on Inner/Outer, Behaviorism
- From: "SWM" <SWMirsky@xxxxxxx>
- To: wittrsamr@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Fri, 09 Apr 2010 14:33:12 -0000
--- In Wittrs@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, Sean Wilson <whoooo26505@...> wrote:
... that's "now," not "not." And it is "his," not "this"
> ===========================
> "Even if I were not [<-- NOW] to hear everything that he is saying to
> himself, I would know as little what his words were referring to as if I read
> one sentence in the middle of a story. Even if I knew everything now going on
> within him, I still wouldn't know, for example, to whom the names and images
> in this [<--HIS] thoughts related ....
>
> It's only in particular cases that the inner is hidden from me ... and in
> those cases it is not hidden because it is 'inner'
>
> ... Indeed, often I can describe inner, as I perceive it, but not his outer."
>
> ======================
>
Much of Wittgenstein's concern in the above seems to be addressed to the way
language is used of course, given his focus on the role and form of our
linguistic behaviors! He seems to be making the point that many of us would
agree with here, i.e., that our linguistic uses are keyed to observable
(public) criteria, even when applied to the subjectivity of other subjects or
to our own subjective lives. And, indeed, we do talk about such things in this
way.
When I report my pain I report a sensation, sometimes just by using a term that
expresses the occurrence of that sensation as when "I am in pain" just means
"ouch". But it doesn't always. I recall a doctor asking me what I am feeling,
was I in pain when I was hospitalized a few years ago and then she wanted to
know not just whether I hurt but precisely where in my body and what it felt
like. In THAT sense I was being called upon to describe my sensation as if it
were an observable phenomenon.
Of course, I had trouble doing that to my own satisfaction, as I have
previously noted in discussions on this list, because I could find no word to
match what I considered myself to be feeling. It wasn't "pain", not exactly,
not as in breaking a bone or burning one's finger or getting knife cut. It was
more a sensation of discomfort due to an abiding pressure. (Later I heard
someone describe feeling a sense of coldness in one's throat with the pressure
and recognized that as part of what I had experienced, too.) In the end,
guessing what the doctors were seeking to hear, I said 'yes, pain, here' and
gestured with my hand and that seemed to satisfy them. And yet if their
understanding of "pain" is like mine, what I told them was misleading even
though they duly recorded it in my medical record. Still, it gave them some
apparently important information about what was happening to me.
Thus language breaks down in this sphere of operation, in describing our
private (unshared and unshareable) experiences. When describing the mental
lives of others, we have similar problems but, perhaps, not exactly the same.
As Wittgenstein noted, our words about the mental lives of others are driven by
the public criteria of their behavior. Thus one needn't doubt that others have
minds merely because we cannot access the private aspect of their subjective
experience because ascribing minds to others (a linguistic exercise) hinges, to
a great extent, on the observable behaviors of others (which includes, of
course, their verbal reports which are behaviors, too). Similarly, our
references to our own mental lives can be seen as driven by observables, too
(as shown in my difficulty when called upon to name a sensation in the hospital
admissions process).
This Wittgensteinian focus on observable criteria, on behavior, is often taken
to suggest that Wittgenstein was, therefore, a behaviorist. But I think this is
far from an adequate reading of the man. He frequently alluded to aspects of
our mental lives, to the pictures we have, to the thoughts we hold, to our
recollections. His point, it seems to me, was not to say there are not
referents for mental words but, rather, that the referencing language game when
applied to mental phenomena simply works differently, i.e., that mental
referents are not to be confused with referents in the public domain.
<snip>
Sean writes:
> Wittgenstein says, in effect, that we do get good at knowing "other people's
> minds" the sense that we come to properly know our children. This comes to
> us through the development of insight and experience in the form of life in
> this world -- and this development is surely not equal among all people. Some
> are much better. The thing we use to understand others (minds?) is something
> called "imponderable evidence." This chain of inference is the same or
> similar to what makes good connoisseurs or artisans. A mother's intuition is
> the same sort of thing as a designer's eye for fashion. It's the same kind of
> cognitive faculty.
>
I think this is largely right. On a Wittgensteinian view, knowing another's
mind, knowing his or her thoughts, etc., is a matter of reading behaviors in
context though we often confuse the way we use words like "knowing" in this
situation with how we use them in public spheres where shared observations are
or can be made. And yes, there is a lot that happens implicitly here in our day
to day observations, things not subject to conscious review, consideration and
reasoning. Some things we just do and react to. If we encountered an alien and
it acted conscious, we would take it to be though there is always the
possibility we could be fooled, as we might by a clever ventriloquist or
puppeteer with high-tech capabilities. That we could be fooled is not an
argument against the idea that language is inherently public and only
secondarily adapted to more subjective applications. Nor is it an argument for
some other, more "certain" way of recognizing the presence of other minds.
Do we, on meeting another human being, first wonder if they are real, absent
any contextual evidence qua reason to wonder? Unless there is some reason to
doubt, we don't nor is there any reason we should. Yet philosophers for
generations have been fooled by the shifting way language is used in different
applications into thinking that all knowing is done the same way, dependent on
the same rules and criteria, etc. Thus philosophical conundrums like the
"problem of other minds" arise. Wittgenstein's strategy wipes the cobwebs of
confusion away.
Sean again:
> One quick clarification. I don't mean to say that Wittgenstein thinks
> there couldn't ever be a Vulcan mind-meld. What I mean to say is that if WE
> could peer into the minds of others, this would be the result for us (radio,
> no meld). Perhaps "God" could be thought to have this sort of power.
>
>
As is well known by now, I am interested in the matter of consciousness but do
not, thereby, refuse to deny the linguistic insights articulated by
Wittgenstein about this phenomenon. Still, I am not of the opinion that that is
the whole of it. It seems to me that if consciousness is a phenomenon in the
world (as it manifestly is) then we ought to be able to study it and say things
about it just as we are able to do with other phenomena we encounter. If
science can study how the stars operate in the cosmos, how the earth goes round
the sun, how weather happens and why, if science can study the emergence and
speciation of living things and the interplay of matter and force in the realm
of physics and how mathematical operations can be used to make machines
operate, then why not how minds come to be and how they are related to the
brains which are the locus for their occurrence?
Does such a view suggest an anti-Wittgensteinian approach or even a
non-Wittgensteinian one? I would say not at all because there is no conflict
here. So whether we can ultimately find a way to access other minds in a way
that shares what was previously unshareable about them (as researchers like
Stanislaus Dehaene and thinkers like Daniel Dennett propose) is not affected by
Wittgenstein's insights about how we use language given the things we can now
know in the world as we now have it.
But if the possibility of access to other minds, of even, say, a Vulcan
mindmeld, were ever to become real, then our language would simply change to
accommodate that reality. One thing to bear in mind with Wittgenstein is that
he leaves everything as it is, as he often said, in his inquiry into how we
speak and what that does to the ways we think about things. But if everything
were to change, for whatever the reason, language and the answers we get to the
inquiries we make into its use dimensions would change, too.
SWM
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