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Ludwig Wittgenstein, Logical Behaviorism and the Meaning of Sensation-Language
A Thesis
Presented to
The Division of Philosophy, Religion, Psychology, and Linguistics
Reed College
In Partial Fulfillment
of the Requirements for the Degree
Bachelor of Arts
Reed S. Arroyo
December 2013
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Approved for the Division
(Philosophy)
Mark Hinchliff
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Acknowledgments
First of all, I must thank Mark Hinchliff for providing constant help throughout
which strengthened my thesis. I would like to thank Ricardo and Dree for supporting me
and showing me the love that has inspired my passion for learning and intellectual
culture. Also, I would like to thank Professor Robert Paul for introducing me to the
writings of Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Trig Johnson for providing enlightening
conversations. And finally, I am indebted to my girlfriend Serena for providing moral
support and all-around encouragement.
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Table of Contents
Introduction: The Meaning of What We Say ................................................................. 7
Chapter 1: BehaviorismSpecifically, of the Logical Variety ................................... 11
Logical Behaviorism ..................................................................................................... 15
The Verificationist Backbone of Logical Behaviorism ................................................ 19
Some Objections ........................................................................................................... 23
Chapter 1 Conclusion .................................................................................................... 24
Chapter 2: Wittgenstein's Proof of the Irrelevancy of Private Mental-States to
Meaning ........................................................................................................................... 27
More Counter-examples to the Classical View ............................................................ 33
Wittgenstein's Theory of Observable Meaning ............................................................ 36
Chapter 2 Conclusion .................................................................................................... 48
Chapter 3: Wittgenstein as a Type of Behaviorist ....................................................... 51
The Similarities ............................................................................................................. 51
The Differences ............................................................................................................. 54
Objections ..................................................................................................................... 56
Conclusion ....................................................................................................................... 65
Bibliography .................................................................................................................... 67
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Introduction: The Meaning of What We Say
358. But isn't it our meaning it that gives sense to the sentence? (Andhere, of course, belongs the fact that one cannot mean a senseless
series of words.) And 'meaning it' is something in the sphere of the
mind. But it is also something private! It is the intangible something;
only comparable to consciousness itself. How could this seem
ludicrous? It is, as it were, a dream of our language.1
A younger version of myself used to think, It is strange that each person lives a
private life, and yet people use language to bridge the gaps between each other. When I
say something about my private experience, only I know the meaning of what I am
saying, and it is only an unexplainable happy fortune of ours that we sometimes
understand each other. It is a very lucky and strange chance event, when somehow
someone is correct in thinking they understand the meaning of my words. That is to say,
I believed that it was only by some unexplainable miracle that my school counselor
understood what I meant when I said something like, The sadness I feel from my going
to a new school. The counselor would say something, and I would think either Yes!
That's exactly what I'm thinking or No, she failed to understand what I was actually
saying. Perhaps, I thought, they understand that I am saying something and what I am
saying, but not why I am saying it. Or something along those lines; but what I know for
1Ludwig Wittgenstein,Philosophical Investigations, trans. and ed. G. E. M. Anscombe,
P. M. S. Hacker and Joachim Schulte, 4thed. (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 120.
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certain, is that I thought that behind every thing I said, there was always some remainder
of meaning that other people could not gather from what I was saying. In this sense, the
true meaning of my words, I thought, was exclusively available to me.
Like many people often do, I did not think about how the failure on part of other
people to understand my mind, depended not on there being something which only I
understood and that no one else knew, but on the failure of the utterances I had chosen to
express myself in order to produce in other people the reaction I desired. In other words, I
was so sure that the words I was using meant exactly and only what I wanted them to
mean, and not something irrespective of what I wanted them to mean. As a consequence,
I thought of the problem as irresolvable, and that I was doomed never to meet another
person for whom my words meant the same thing as what they meant for me. Not until
much later, did I start to think that what I chose to say as a means to express myself,
meant something irrespective of my personal caprice. Not until later, did I realize that
language was like a set of tools available to all, and that I just had to learn how to use the
right tools in the right circumstances. Before, it was like I was using a saw when I needed
to use a hammer; and yet since I felt so sure that the saw I was using was actually the
hammer I needed, I thought that other people must somehow be fundamentally
disconnected from the dreams and desires of my mind; or, I thought not that the tool was
the same one in the same toolbox everyone had, but that it was my tool fashioned
exclusively for my purposes. In reality though, as I now realize, the meaning of what I
convey to others consists in the specific tools I use, but which everyone has access to.
Therefore, it is not a question of an irresolvable gap between people's minds, but of the
choice of tools we use in particular circumstances. If what I want is for a person to
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understand me as meaning X, well then naturally I have to choose the tool which
effectively means Xand that there is such a tool will be an observable fact of our
language. If I fail to use the right tool, then naturally I will feel misunderstood.
When many people encounter Behaviorism for the first time, they immediately
and violently rejected it because they think it is absolutely misguided. People like this
tend to believe there are two relevant facts: people's private lives and the language people
use to mediate between their private lives. People accuse Behaviorism of completely
forgetting about the essential private side of individual existence, which some think make
interactions through language necessary in the first place. I, myself, used to have such a
reaction to Behaviorism also.
It was not until I encountered Wittgenstein, that I began to see how Behaviorism
seemed more sensible. I realized that, it was not that we had to deny certain entities, since
we had already defined those entities as unobservable and therefore not in need of any
sort of observable disproof. Rather, it was that we should see the meaningfulness of what
we talk about in terms of what we canobserve. This much more subtle point, seemed
irrefutable to me. I no longer was even concerned with hypothetical private mental-states,
since such things were now clearly excluded from the realm of meaningful things to talk
about. Whereas I had once believed that the private aspect of my experience entered
meaningfully into the things I said, I now thought that no such thing occurs, and so I was
freed to abandon the pretense that my private experience somehow constituted the
meaning of the things I said. The nonsense, which had me under its spell, was no longer
disguised, and so it no longer seemed to threaten my understanding.
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The reason, I think, an encounter with Wittgenstein is conducive to a new
understanding of language about mental-states and sensations, is simply that he presents
the argument in a way which somehow manages to escape most immediate rejections on
the part of popular biases. When one first reads his discussion of sensation and
knowledge of sensation, one entertains his scenarios until, almost unwittingly, one begins
to see how easily his argument convinces. The argument is successful because it makes
clear the exact sense of 'private mental-state thatis being denied as a necessary condition
for meaningful talk of sensations. My claim is that when a person has been thoroughly
convinced that Wittgenstein's theory is correct, she implicitly becomes a type of
Behaviorist. This is because I see in the argument of Wittgenstein that has convinced me,
essentially the same argument as a certain type of Behaviorism that had previously not
convinced me. Perhaps my understanding of the original Wittgensteinian position is
wrong, and therefore my understanding of the Behaviorism that I take to be similar to
Wittgenstein is also ill founded. I plan to show this is not the case, by first giving an
overview of Behaviorism in Chapter One, and then giving an explanation of the
interpretation of Wittgenstein that I endorse and which I claim is similar to Behaviorism
in Chapter Two. In Chapter 3, after I have presented both Wittgenstein and Behaviorism
separately, I will argue for their affinity. I will argue that both Wittgenstein and Logical
Behaviorism reject any theory that claims private mental-states necessarily enter into the
meaningfulness of language about sensation; and finally I will propose a preliminary
point of departure for future research into the subject.
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Chapter 1: BehaviorismSpecifically, of the
Logical Variety
In this chapter, we will give a general overview of Behaviorism, and specifically
focus on Logical Behaviorism. The latter, will serve to give us a rigorous and logical
perspective on certain issues concerning the nature of language. Although, arguably,
there are many affects and poetic experiences that can deepen our awareness of
language's formal complexity, such things do not have any definitive thesis and therefore
cannot yield certain knowledge in a regular way. If our goal is a systematic explanation
of language, we require something more tractable; and apart from the research projects of
linguistics, there are questions which warrant a more philosophical and general approach.
Logical Behaviorism is potentially one coherent and systematic approach to certain
aspects of language, in that it has well-formulated and fundamental axioms meant for the
parceling out of linguistic meaning. Between three emblematic versions, or camps, of
behaviorism--logical, methodological and psychological--it is only logical behaviorism
that directly addresses questions of language and meaning. Directly, in the sense of it
tackling our most ordinary and typical use of language; and as opposed to 'indirectly' in
the sense of only concerning a theoretical discourse and not plain and ordinary language.
Unlike the other versions of behaviorism, the implications stemming from logical
behaviorism strike at the heart of meaning in its most general form, the language we use
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every day. It is primarily the semantic theory at the heart of logical behaviorism that
concerns us.
There is much more to be said specifically about logical behaviorism, but first, we
should understand what is meant by behaviorism more generally. One concise definition
that can serve our purposes is put this way:
Behaviorism is any psychology that sees its mission as the explanation
of behavior and accepts stimuli (more generally, situations) and
responses as its basic data...Science aims at understanding publicly
observable happenings in the world, and the only such eventsavailable to psychology are responses and the situations in which they
occur.2
In other words, behaviorism is the theory that says animal behavior (of course, this
includes human verbal behavior) can and should be explained without any reference to
unobservable mental states that an individual might or might not possess, simply by
reference to the observable forms of behavior within given environmental circumstances.
This theory therefore restricts psychological data to include only observable stimuli-
response patterns, and not any hypothetical mental states. Even more broadly put,
behaviorism chooses a 'stimuli-response' model of psychology as opposed to a 'stimuli-
mental state-response' model.3The reason for this choice is that any supposed intervening
mental state is in principle unobservable, and is therefore not at all appropriate for the
determination of behavioral theories and experiments. This is not at all yet to say that
behaviorism necessarily denies the being of private subjective experiences, only that it
does not deem them relevant to an explanation of behavior, since it views the sources of
2Gregory A. Kimble, Behaviorism and Unity in Psychology, Current Directions in
Psychological Science 9, no. 6 (2000): 208.3Kimble, Behaviorism and Unity in Psychology, 209.
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behavior to exist essentially onlyin observableenvironmental and physiological
conditions:
According to this principle, the observation sentences needed to
provide the basis for an empirical science of psychology cannot beintrospective protocols describing the private experiences of a singleindividual. What are needed in order to put psychology on a proper
scientific footing are objective records of publicly observable
behavioral events--supplemented where appropriate by objectiverecords of the associated physiological events occurring beneath the
skin.4
It is not the case in behaviorism that mental states are necessary explanans of behavior,
and behavioral principles alone are sufficient for the task of explanation. The question, of
whether behaviorism denies mental states in totois not important for our immediate
purposes, since what is important is that behaviorism certainly does not say such states
are relevant to a psychological explanation of human behavior.
To be clear, and in order to not be accused of misrepresenting behaviorism in all
its vastness, there are strands of behaviorism that allow for inferences that use theoretical
concepts such as that of the 'intervening variable'. In other words, there are behaviorisms
which have practically 'S-I-R' models whereI issome intervening variable like a mental-
state.2But, nevertheless, these are still types of behaviorisminsofar as the intervening
variables are acknowledged as 'abstractions without material existence' 3unlike the
observable environmental stimuli and behavioral responses which are essential. These
abstractions, apparently, are used as explanatory ornaments even though they are, strictly
speaking, irrelevant to behaviorism's practice.
4U. T. Place, A Radical Behaviorist Methodology for the Empirical Investigation of
Private Events,Behavior and Philosophy20, no. 2 (1993): 30.
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There are several major types of behaviorism, one of which ismethodological
behaviorism. This version of behaviorism is most basic, in that it is simply a normative
view concerning the way psychologyshouldbe done:
Methodological behaviorism involves a widely accepted professionalorientation towards how one should conduct psychological research
in general.5
According to this theory, psychologists shouldn't use concepts which are in principle
supposed to reference unobservable mental-states, since they add nothing to explaining
human behavior, and at worst they only add confusion:
According to methodological behaviorism, reference to mental states,
such as an animal's beliefs or desires, adds nothing to what psychologycan and should understand about the sources of behavior. Mentalstates are private entities which, given the necessary publicity of
science, do not form proper objects of empirical study.6
As a consequence of this view, behavioral science is seen as absolutely and exclusively
concerned with observable things like animal behavior and environmental circumstances,
and not with things that subsist only in and through conjecture. By extension, this
program is also a way to regulate what sort of language is acceptable in psychological
explanation.
Another major type of behaviorism ispsychological behaviorism. The
distinguishing characteristic of this theory is that it claims that the sources of human
behavior can be exhaustively explained without reference to mental states. This theory is
5Willard Day, On the Difference between Radical and Methodological Behaviorism,
Behaviorism11, no. 1 (1983): 91.6George Graham, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy,s.v. Behaviorism, ed.
Edward N. Zalta, accessed December 4, 2013,
http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2010/entries/behaviorism.
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similar to methodological behaviorism, but it is construed on positive grounds as a claim
about what behaviorism cando unlike methodological behaviorism's focus on what
behavioral scienceshould notdo.
Logical Behaviorism
The last, and most pertinent for our purposes, version of behaviorism is logical
behaviorism. Logical behaviorism is a thesis about the meanings of mental terms and thus
of sentences in which mental terms occur. Logical behaviorists claim that the meaning of
mental-state sentences can be reduced to the meaning of equivalent sentences that only
mention observable behavioral phenomena. For example, according to logical
behaviorism, any sentence in which a mental term occurs such as Wittgenstein believes
that going out into the cold is bad can be accurately translated into a sentence like It is
the case that Wittgenstein rarely or never goes outside when it is cold and when he does
so, he reacts negatively. In other words, logical behaviorism is a theory about the
meaningandsemantics of mental term containing expressions, in that it claims that such
expressions can be reduced to expressions equivalent in meaning, and that this can
happen without any loss of semantic information. The theory therefore claims that this
translational work can be done correctly without sacrificing anything which is not
capturable by the newly translated sentence; the two expressions (the one with mental-
predicates and the other without) are semantically identical such that they are
interchangeable without any significant difference in what they actually express; and, an
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analytical reconstruction of the two sentences would yield the same meaning. Similarly,
although the sentences are different, they express the same proposition since they are
both true in the same exact circumstances. Put very simply, for any expression or
sentence X that contains mental terms, there is an equivalent sentence Y that does not use
those terms yet means exactly (if translated correctly, of course) what the original
sentence meant:
According to this standard interpretation...statements containing
mental terms can be translated, without loss of meaning, intosubjunctive conditionals about what the individual will do in various
circumstances. So Ryle (on this account) is to be construed as offering
a dispositional analysis of mental statements into behavioral ones.7
Logical behaviorism does not simply claim that it is possible to give such an equivalent
translation, rather it claims that since one version of the expression contains only explicit
behavioral terminology, the other version must be seen as expressing this meaning and
not the other way around; and so, although there is a type of equivalency between the
two, the direction of the reduction is always from 'with mental-terms' to 'without mental-
terms'. This is to say that, even though the two expressions can be used interchangeably,
it is the one that is behavioral which is primary, and the other is seen as alternately
expressing the same thing as the behavioral expression; the expression withmental-
predicates is a shorthand way of saying thesameas the expression withoutthe mental-
predicates:
It says that the very idea of a mental state or condition is the idea ofa behavioral disposition or family of behavioral tendencies, evident in
how a person behaves in one situation rather than another. When we
attribute a belief, for example, to someone, we are not saying that he
7Julia Tanney, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, s.v. Ryle, Gilbert, ed.
Edward N. Zalta, accessed December 4, 2013,
http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2009/entries/ryle/.
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or she is in a particular internal state or condition. Instead, we are
characterizing the person in terms of what he or she might do in
particular situations or environmental interactions.8
What must be extremely precise in order to be clear is the point that the mental-term
version of a proposition does not represent a unique type of 'mental' proposition and it
does not indicate the existence of any unobservable mental entity, rather, it expresses
exactly what is meant by the version containing only behavioral principles. Whatever else
we might think these expressions mean, according to logical behaviorism, they must
actually mean what is paraphrasable in only observable behavioral principles.
Although behaviorism as a whole is admirable as one framework among others, it
is in logical behaviorism that we find the most controversial claims, if only because it is
logical behaviorism which makes not only a normative claim, but a theoretical claim
about the actualmeaning of mental-term sentences:
[T]he meaning of a psychological statement consists solely in thefunction of abbreviating the description of certain modes of physical
response characteristic of the bodies of men and animals.9
What this means, put more directly, is that logical behaviorism claims that, in essence,
mental-term language expresses nothing else than what the very same equivalent
sentences in behavioral language express; and being that behavioral language obviously
only references observable behavior, it follows that mental-term language only indexes
8George Graham, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy,s.v. Behaviorism, ed.
Edward N. Zalta, accessed December 4, 2013,http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2010/entries/behaviorism.9Carl Hempel, The Logical Analysis of Psychology, inReadings in Philosophy of
Psychology, ed. Ned Joel Block (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1980-
1981), 19.
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that very same behavior and not another type of phenomena. In this way, logical
behaviorism is first, a theory about the actual or real meaning of mental-term language:
In its simplest form, logical behaviorism holds that terms in
psychology can't be taken to refer to mental phenomena per se becausethe mental phenomena aren't directly, publicly observable.Consequently, they can't be measured using the instruments of physics
for purposes of verification. Therefore, logical behaviorism advocates
the semantic thesis that psychological terms must be taken to refer toeither (a) publicly observable behavior, (b) physiological states
correlated with publicly observable behavior, or (c) dispositions to
engage in publicly observable behavior...10
And secondly, an implicit philosophical critique of the scientific illegitimacy of assuming
the existence of immaterial, or private, mental entities based solely off the superficial
form of mental-term language.
Practically, the way one would proceed to think correctly in light of logical
behaviorism, is rather straight forward. For example, with reference to the sentence 'Jones
is vain', we can understand its meaning by thinking of it as expressing a proposition about
Jones' habits of behavior which we can perceive, like his tendency to behave arrogantly
or boast in front of others. In essence, such a sentence makes an indicative statement
about his behavior up until the point of the utterance, and it implies that he has a
disposition to act this way again. It does not express anything about a hidden cause of his
behavior:
The utterance, 'Jones is vain,' to laymen, is no contradictory invitationto an invisible cartesian peep-show, but the formulation of a law-like
statement about one of Jone's tendencies, which has been inductivelyarrived at by observing Jones and can be tested for its truth or falsity
by further observations...Jone's vanity is his actual or possible
10Jay Moore, On Psychological Terms that Appeal to the Mental, Behavior and
Philosophy29 (2001): 167.
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boasting, encouraging conversations about himself, etc., and not the
epistemically sealed cause of them.11
The Verificationist Backbone of Logical Behaviorism
At some point, any analysis of logical behaviorism will lead one down a path
towards verificationism. The doctrine of Verificationism is closely influential on the
motivating factors and underlying strategies apparent in Logical Behaviorism. For
example, it is through a type of appeal to verificationism that logical behaviorism
concludes the real meaning of mental-term language:
In psychology, verificationism underpins or grounds analytical
behaviorism, namely, the claim that mental concepts refer tobehavioral tendencies and so must be translated into behavioral
terms.12
Put succinctly, Verificationism is the idea that a non-analytic sentence is only genuinely
meaningful if there is an empirical way to verify its truth or falsity. In other words, a
statement only has determinate meaning (as opposed to associative significance[The
sentence expressing it may be emotionally significant...but it is not literally significant"13])
insofar as there is a relative circumstance or observation that would affirm or negate the
11Morris Weitz, Professor Ryle's Logical Behaviorism,The Journal of Philosophy48,
no. 9 (1951): 298.12George Graham, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy,s.v. Behaviorism, ed.Edward N. Zalta, accessed December 4, 2013,
http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2010/entries/behaviorism.13A. J. Ayer,Language, Truth, and Logic (Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England:
Penguin, 1991), 16.
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truth of the statement. Therefore, according to verificationism, a sentence such as 'God is
both nothing and everything',is without literal meaning since it is not clear what relevant
observation there could possibly be for the confirmation of the sentence's validity:
The central idea behind verificationism is linking some sort of
meaningfulness with (in principle) confirmation.14
To be clear, the relevant observation might not be actually possible for any given reason,
so long as it is theoretically possible. So, for example, the sentence There is a cat in the
center of the moon might as of yet have no actually observable relevant circumstance,
yet we can at least know what experience wouldconfirm or disconfirm its truth; going to
the moon's center would definitively affirm or negate the truth of the sentence. This is all
to say that, the condition that there be a relevant observation or experience does not
require that such an observation be practically realizable in the present moment, only that
it be theoretically observable under the appropriate circumstances. Therefore, the
difference between 'There is a cat in the center of the moon' and 'God is both nothing and
everything' is that the latter is not even verifiable in principle, while the former is, given
the possible relevant observation. Such observations and possible experiences, when
relevant to any given indicative statement, serve as, or function like, necessary
coordinates for the proper parceling of meaningful content. Within philosophy, there are
many things that could be called versions of verificationism, which vary in the degree to
which their interpretation of 'verifiability' and 'verification' are either more strict or less
strict, more lenient or less lenient etc. What unites all of these types of verificationism is
14Richard Creath, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, s.v. Logical Empiricism,
ed. Edward N. Zalta, accessed December 4, 2013,
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/logical-empiricism/.
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that they all assert the fundamental necessity of there being observable circumstances
that inform the meaning of any truth-bearing sentence; and such that if these criterial
circumstances are absent, the sentence is meaningless even if it has the form of a genuine
proposition:
We say that a sentence is factually significant to any given person, if,
and only if, he knows how to verify the proposition it purports toexpressthat is, he knows what observations would lead him, under
certain conditions, to accept the proposition as being true or reject it
as being false...15
As for the set of sentences considered 'meaningful' and the other set of those considered
'meaningless', there is a clear distinction operative. The criterion of verifiability can be
stipulated in a very inclusive way, so that even fantastical sentences are allowed;
something like There is a Pink Unicorn in a cave under Lake Michigan is completely
fine, since it is obvious what sort of experience would provide verification. On the other
hand, a sentence like There is a completely undetectable and ancient entityin the room
is not fine; this example in particular is very pertinent, since it shows how at first glance
it looks like the sentence represents a verifiable statement to the effect of 'There exists a
thing X', but because the thing in the sentence is described as 'completely undetectable',
the sentence precludes having determinate meaning. This point is very subtle, in part
because the type of meaningfulness verificationism concerns itself with is itself very
particular, but according to verificationism, any sentence that asserts the existence of
something-- which is also at the same time claimed to be something in principle
unobservable-- is meaningless. Hopefully, these examples make the verificationist
delineation between sense and nonsense more apparent.
15A. J. Ayer,Language, Truth, and Logic, 16.
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It should be clear by now how exactly verificationism plays a role within logical
behaviorism. We have shown earlier that logical behaviorism concludes that mental-term
language must actually be nothing other than talk about simple and complex behavior,
since any genuine proposition must be verifiable in terms of relevant observations; and
anything that we can observe, and that is also relevant to propositions which entail
mental-ascriptions, is a type of behavior, not some unobservable hypothetical
circumstance:
For mental conditions, like all others, get the meaning they have from
the circumstances in which we can know it is correct to apply
them...Mental descriptions, like all descriptions, claim that theconditions criterial for their application obtain; hence they do not, andcannot, refer to private events but to tendencies for there to be public
and physical events. To suggest otherwise is incoherent, for on the
alternative which construes mental descriptions as analogous to bodilyones, there will be no criterial conditions for the mental words, so they
will have no meaning at all.16
While we see that Verificationism adapts verifiability as a criterion for meaningfulness,
Logical Behaviorism shows that when faced with a proposition involving some sort of
mental-ascription, it is sufficient to talk only about behavior if we wish to determine the
sentence's meaning. The message of Logical Behaviorism is that indexing or representing
unobservable objects or relations is notnecessary for determining the meaning of mental-
term propositions; and by essentially asking the same question that is posed by
Verificationism, it determines that only behavior is included in the set of relevant
circumstances for mental-ascriptions:
We cannot conclude, because mental terms are not dispensable, thatthey describe something spiritual beyond the body and its
behavior...Behaviorism rejects the idea that the mind is a spiritual
16Keith Campbell,Mind and Body, (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame,
1984), 68.
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thing, and rejects it principally because there can never be the public
human experience of spirits upon which alone the idea and knowledge
of such things could be founded. Behaviorist theory has no place for
[hypothetical] mental objects.17
Some Objections
There are two popular counter-examples often used to refute behaviorism.18They
each represent an extreme, and I will call one the Zombie scenario and the other the
Intelligent Rock scenario. In the first scenario, you are supposed to imagine a body of
some sort, moving and acting as humans do, but which does not have any mental life. In
the second scenario, you are supposed to imagine an inanimate object, like a rock, that
nevertheless has a vibrant mental life. Both scenarios are meant to show the implicit
disconnection between observable behavior and unobservable private mental-experience.
It is obvious why both scenarios fail though, in that they are not even clearly sensical. For
example, if I imagine the Zombie is observably identicalto the person I call my mother,
then I have no reason to think it has any less of a mental-state than my mother. Or, if the
intelligent rock has never spoken to me, or moved, or made any other observable
difference in its surroundings, then I am clearly not justified in thinking that it is any
different from a normal rock. For either counter-example to succeed, we are implictly
supposed to think that the Zombie does differ from a human in some observable way, or
17Keith Campbell,Mind and Body,61.18Alex Byrne, Behaviourism, inA Companion to the Philosophy of Mind, ed. Samuel
Guttenplan (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), 132-140.
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that the Intelligent Rock doessomehow behave differently than a normal rock. But this is
no refutation of behaviorism. No, rather, it only proves the point that we require
behavioral criteria to differentiate between categories of mental and non-mental.
Chapter 1 Conclusion
The facet of Logical Behaviorism that concerns us can be summarized by saying
it is a behaviorist view which provides a semantic theory for the meaning of expressions
which involve ascriptions of mental-predicates. Unlike other types of behaviorism,
Logical or Analytical Behaviorism offers a theory of what mental terms actually mean, as
opposed to just stating how we should view them in light of a certain scientific pursuit.
Other types of behaviorism might only offer a normative positionhow things should be
doneor they might attempt to exclude certain terms from their practice completely, but
Logical Behaviorism does not attempt to exclude or regulate any terms so much as it sets
out to describe them in their unperturbed actuality. In fact, Logical Behaviorism describes
these terms by appealing to their conditions of assertability and/or truth, and to their
usage; and in doing so, ventures to describe their real nature. Closely tied to the method
of verification and the notions of truth and assertability conditions, is the concept of
'usage' most often associated with the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. As we will see
later in Chapter 3, Wittgenstein's theory of the meaning of so-called mental-terms or,
'sensation-language', is very similar to Logical Behaviorism's theory. We will see how
they can be compared in light of their similar conclusions, and how they can be
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contrasted in light of their different methods for reaching the conclusions. But first,
before we speak about the theoretical affinities between Wittgenstein's theory and
Logical Behaviorism, we will proceed in Chapter 2 to give a description of Wittgenstein's
theory of sensation-language.
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Chapter 2: Wittgenstein's Proof of the Irrelevancy
of Private Mental-States to Meaning
This chapter will focus exclusively on the Wittgenstein of thePhilosophical
Investigations. Specifically, the questions that we will set out to answer include: what
was Wittgenstein's theory of the meaning of terms and expressions that involve mental-
state ascriptions? How does he construct his argument? What opposing view did he
respond to? Was he right? And ultimately, does our interpretation of Wittgenstein imply
that he had views that were similar to Logical Behaviorism?
The classical view regarding the meaning of sensation-language to which
Wittgenstein responded, was the view that expressions like I have a pain or Serena has
an ache refer to mental-states or sensations which are the private experience of the
subject of the attributed property; it is not the mere claim that the experience is a token
example of a generic type, rather it claims that the experience is itself essentially private
and only available to a single observer. Put another way, the classical view took the terms
'pain' and 'ache' to refer to private sensations, or private experiences of mental qualities.
So, under the classical view, 'pain' would refer to a thing which we all might experience
individually, but which we only ever experience in isolation from others. Therefore, I can
speak of knowing that another person is in pain, but not of knowing the pain itself which
only she is privy to. Or, if we think of each person's body as a box, and the pain as a
thing, we can say that only the person who has the box can experience the thing inside;
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and, by extension under the classical view, when a person expresses that she has a
sensation, the meaning of her utterance is determined by the thing inside of the box which
only she can observe.
To sum up the Wittgensteinian position, which this chapter explores, and that
refutes the classical view, we can say that it is the position which denies that such things
in the private domain of individual experiences have any causal or logical connection to
the meaningof mental-terms. In other words, the meaningof expressions that we might
wrongly take to be dependent on private mental-states, is actually never determined by or
dependent on any sort of private mental-entity. We will show that this position really has
nothing to do with the denial of any set of entities in toto, but rather with the denial of
any causal or logical connection between a particular hypothetical set of things and the
meaning of certain terms and expressions. We can call the set of terms and expressions,
the set of sensation-languagewhich is to say the set of all terms and expressions we
take to be relevant to propositions about 'mental-properties'; and, we can call the set of
hypothetical private entities, the set ofprivatemental states. The theory which this paper
endorses, as a Wittgensteinian theory of sensation-language, denies that there is any
logical or causal connection between the elements of the two separate sets described
above; specifically, it denies that there is a connection between the meaning of the
elements in the first set and the being of the objects in the second set.
Before we set out to describe the theory we endorse in more detail, let us quickly
and preemptively clarify some possible misunderstandings. The first question one might
have is, why do we choose to deny both a causal andlogical connection? Of course, these
are different types of connection, and therefore cannot just be explained by the same
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reasoning: a causal connection is one such that it expresses an empirical relation between
an antecedent event and a consequent event; and a logical connection is a conceptual
relation, such that one concept figures into the definition of another. What we mean to
say in including both types, is that first, there is no function that the private mental state
fulfills in the logical determination of the sentences' meaning; and second, the private
mental state does notact as a cause of the meaning such that, the meaning of the
expression alters according to whether or not the private mental state is actual. One
might, under some influence from the classical view, still argue that the private
experience occasions the utterance of the expression, and so acts as a cause of the
utterance-event. But our question is not what causes you to say 'apple' over 'orange', but
how is it that either 'apple' or 'orange' can mean anything effectively in the first place.
We are not concerned with some hypothetical entity that causes the subject to utter an
expression; we are concerned with the meaning of the utterance and the observable facts
about the world that determine our understanding of the meaning.
Another foreseeable objection to the view we just expounded, is that people
obviously do experience things as individuals first and foremost; for example, it is true
that we each have our own sense-organs, which operate for and within a particular
human bodyand some would argue that there are events which only that body
experiences. But the key point is altogether different; to the extent to which it is truly a
private experience, we cannot speak about it. If we can speak about it, it is not a
categorically private experience. The difference hinges on the distinction between a
privateexperience which is in principle only applicable to oneperson, and numerically
distinct applicationsof a certain mental description to particular persons. Two objects
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can be qualitatively identical if they are of the same type (i.e 'This rock and that rock; this
tree and that tree.'), and they can be numerically non-identical if they are separate
instantiations of the same object-type. The theory we offer as the right one claims that
anypossible experience we cantalk about is, in principle, one that could have
qualitatively identicalbut numerically distinctinstantiations, and hence not be private in
the sense which the classical view supposes.
For example, one might say something like 'We all agree that we're looking at a
rock, but how can we tell our experiences of the space within the outer-limit that defines
the rock, are not different? What if, for me, there is a slight impression of blurriness
within my experience of the rock, which you do not have?' And we could respond: 'Well,
perhaps the thing which we agree is definitely a rock looks different to youbut different
in what sense? In whatever sense you explain the difference,I still understand the sense
in which they are different:
294. If you say he sees a private picture before him, which he is
describing, you have still made an assumption about what he hasbefore him. And that means that you can describe it or do describe it
more closely. If you admit that you haven't any notion what kind of
thing it might be that he has before himthen what leads you into
saying, in spite of that, that he has something before him? Is it not asif I were to say of someone: "He has something. But I do not know
whether it is money, or debts, or an empty till."19
And so, the experience you have described is in no way representative of something
'private'; rather, it shows only the degree to which and way in which your experience is
different. And it does not prove that you are talking about a private phenomenon, so
much as it proves you are talking about a public phenomenon that you in particular
19Ludwig Wittgenstein,Philosophical Investigations, trans. and ed. G. E. M. Anscombe,
P. M. S. Hacker and Joachim Schulte, 4thed. (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 107.
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happen to be experiencing in the present moment. If there was some feature of your
experience that was wholly private, then we could not talk about it; because, if we could
truly talk about it, then we would be talking about things that in principle do not depend
on some categorically private experience. We now see how the person who claims that no
one but he can know his own pain, mistakes a simple convention of our language such
that what is incorrigible is the use of 'know' instead of 'believe' in reference to one's own
pain, for some sort of deep incorrigibility about private mental-states:
303. "I can only believe that someone else is in pain, but I know it if I
am."Yes: one can make the decision to say "I believe he is in pain"
instead of "He is in pain". But that is all. What looks like anexplanation here, or like a statement about a mental process, is in truthan exchange of one expression for another which, while we are doing
philosophy, seems the more appropriate one.20
Perhaps we should re-state the dilemma: the classical view would think it sensible
to believe we can talk about experiences that are categorically private. The opposing view
which we offer, claims that anything categorically private would be impossible to speak
about ever; and that, no matter the complexity or seeming particularity of an experience,
it is in principle an experience which anyone who understands the meaning of the words
in the relevant statements could experience. It might be said, I do not know what it is like
to be a female, since I do not have the proper biological make-up or I am not embodied in
the appropriate way. Nevertheless, I know the defining differences in terms of biology,
and I know what it is to have something, and to be something, or to feel sad and
discriminated against etc. So, the experience 'typical' of being female is not something
categorically undisclosed to me, so much as it just is not my experience. The key
20Ludwig Wittgenstein,Philosophical Investigations, 108.
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distinction here, perhaps, is that since I know the meaning of the words comprising the
description, does not imply that the description applies to me; by the same token, given
my understanding of the words describing the experience, I understand what the
experiencewhich is not mineis. This is just like if a person were to tell me that I
cannot understand his experiencethe experience he describes to me with languagebut
I obviously can in a sense, since I understand what they are telling me I cannot
understand. We must be careful not to equivocate the different senses of 'understand'
which we are using. The fact, which we really mean to reiterate in such circumstances, is
simply the fact that it is or is not the actual experience of a particular person at a given
moment in time. This is all to say, whatever a truly and wholly private experience would
be, it is not something that we can talk about; what we can talk about, is what we can
agree we are able to simultaneously experience, given the right conditions. The
precondition for any word having meaning, would be that there be at least one other
person who has had the same experience and can agree that the word refers to that
experience; and so, this would already violate the condition that the experience be wholly
the possession of a single person. Therefore, there is absolutely no such thing as a private
experience that we can also talk about. The extent to which we talk at all, is the extent to
which we agree with others over the presence or absence of a thing in the shared
circumstances; the extent to which we can mean anything, is the extent to which there is
an experience which we share with someone otherthan ourselves.
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More Counter-examples to the Classical View
There are many more obvious counter-examples to the classical view, one is
evident in this anecdote: A neuroscientist wants to isolate the neurological basis for
experiencethat is to say, she wants to find the definite part of the brain without which a
person cannot have experiences. But how will she do this? Perhaps she will selectively
shut-off different parts of the brain, and then perform certain tests, like asking the patient
different questions about his condition, or monitor certain physiological data. But what
will this prove? Perhaps, at any given point in the process of research, she might
permanently have destroyed the capacity for private experience, but just in such a way
that all behavioral capacities and operations remain the same. How will the scientist
become aware that she has crossed that limit? There is no conceivable way through which
she could. Or, vice versa, she might only disable the behavioral capacity but retain the
experiential capacityas if she had paralyzed the patient completely; but in general, in
cases like these, what warrants us to say that 'the lights are still on' so to say, if not for
behavior anyway? Perhaps certain brain activity we associate with experiencebut we
only came to associate it after its correlation with other behavior. It seems that the only
criteria for the supposed difference between experience and non-experience is behavior
itself (including internal physiological behavior), and yet many of us refuse to admit that
the meaning of such distinctions isjust a distinction between different forms of behavior.
The whole confusion hinges on the neuroscientist thinking that by 'experience', she means
some sort of unobservable thing, and not some complex of observable phenomena; if this
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behavioral terms. To these worries we offer two responses. First, there certainly is a
difference between things with consciousness and things without it; after all,
'consciousness' and terms like it have a use in our language, and we do not use them with
reference to just any object whatsoever. In other words, we do notpropose the thesis that
sensation-language means nothing. On the contrary, we assume that such aspects of our
language have a use, and proceed to explain the conditions under which such use is
effective. Second, we might believe that the things we ascribe mental-states to differ in
kind and not in degree from those we do not. From the outset though, this is a misleading
perspective, since it is actually a difference bothin kind and in degree. Certainly the
sensation/non-sensation distinction issui generis in the sense of us thinking it necessary
and useful, but we say that insofar as it expresses a difference in kind it is a distinction
that depends solely on a threshold within a continuum. The continuum we speak of is the
fact of observable behavior, and the threshold is a point on that continuum past which we
are warranted to speak of 'consciousness', 'experience', 'sensation', 'mental-state' etc.:
284. Look at a stone and imagine it having sensations.One says tooneself: How could one so much as get the idea of ascribing a
sensation to a thing? One might as well ascribe it to a number!And
now look at a wriggling fly and at once these difficulties vanish andpain seems able to get a foothold here, where before everything was,
so to speak, too smooth for it. And so, too, a corpse seems to us quite
inaccessible to pain.Our attitude to what is alive and to what is dead,is not the same. All our reactions are different.If anyone says: "That
cannot simply come from the fact that a living thing moves about in
such-and-such a way and a dead one not", then I want to intimate to
him that this is a case of the transition 'from quantity to quality'.21
Hopefully, this perspective we now propose as the correct one, makes it obvious why we
do not say a rock has consciousness, but we are sometimes almost tempted to say so of
21Ludwig Wittgenstein,Philosophical Investigations, 104.
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things like dynamic, self-regulating and self-adjusting complex systemssuch as
computers, social movements and cultural memes.
Wittgenstein's Theory of Observable Meaning
What we will now call the Theory of Observable Meaning is not something that
Wittgenstein explicitly mentioned or endorsed. At our discretion, we propose it as the
theory implicit in his ruminations on sensation-language inPhilosophical Investigations.
The most pertinent passage from the investigations that we will now look at is the
passage containing the 'Beetle in the Box Experiment'. This thought-experiment is the
best and most direct example of Wittgenstein's conclusive refutation of the classical view.
In it, he paints a picture which contains so-called private mental-states, but that offers
them no relevant causal position for what else goes on in the picture. That is to say, he
entertains the classical views notionof a private mental-entity, only to show how no
such thing really matters at all. In section 293, Wittgenstein wrote the following:
Well, everyone tells me that he knows what pain is only from his own
case!Suppose that everyone had a box with something in it whichwe call a 'beetle'. No one can ever look into anyone else's box, and
everyone says he knows what a beetle is only by looking at his beetle.
Here it would be quite possible for everyone to have something
different in his box. One might even imagine such a thing constantlychanging. But what if these people's word 'beetle' had a use
nonetheless?If so, it would not be as the name of a thing. The thing
in the box doesn't belong to the language-game at all; not even as aSomething: for the box might even be empty. No, one can 'divide
through' by the thing in the box; it cancels out, whatever it is. That is
to say, if we construe the grammar of the expression of sensation on
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the model of 'object and name', the object drops out of consideration
as irrelevant.22
Let us examine the structure of the argument. First, he asks the audience to entertain the
idea that a word 'beetle' refers to the thing in the box of each person. Then, he supposes
that the things in the boxes are all different from each other, or that the things are
constantly changing in nature. Finally, he supposes that theword 'beetle' still has a use
despite all of these previous suppositions; and by making this last supposition, he has
already shown that the word 'beetle', insofar as it has such a use, does not depend on the
object which we at first thought it referred to. In what sense does it not depend on it? In
the sense of the hypothetical object within the box being completely irrelevant to the
actual useof the word 'beetle'; and what is to differentiate the word from the mere
utterance if not for its conformity with patterns of established convention? There is not
even an indirect connection in such cases, since the thing in the box doesn't even
remotely influence the actually possible usages of the word.
It should be obvious how the Beetle in the Box scenario is illustrative, and
analogous to the circumstances of all expressions of sensation. Knowing that all the
expressions contained within the set of sensation-language are not meaningless (they
have a sufficiently definite use), we have shown that they are meaningful despite any fact
about the supposed thing in the box. The word 'pain' is just like 'beetle', in that it has a
use-determined meaning; but if we think of its function as that of referring to a private
knowledge or experience, we realize its actual use happens to be apparently very
different. If we still assume it has such a function, and that we are just confused as to the
22Ludwig Wittgenstein,Philosophical Investigations, 106.
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facts about its actual usage, then howshouldwe positively think of it? There is no answer
to such a question, and if we tried to describe the meaning of sensation-language
according to such a pretense, we would be left describing nothing or being unable to
describe anything.
Wittgenstein shows that words such as 'pain', like the word 'beetle' in the thought-
experiment, do not mean anything about private experience or knowledge. What he
doesn't do in the experiment though, is say what such words do mean. We can only gloss
over this question now, but a promising beginning is offered in this supplement to the
scenario: Suppose a person in the imagined scenario has a thing X in their box, and
suppose this thing requires water. Obviously, the person cannot just show other people X
in a way which would directly communicate facts about X. Also, suppose the people in
the scenario have a card-system, much like language except with cards instead of words
and combinations of cards instead of sentences. In this card-system, the expression 'I
would like some water' has a direct translation in terms of an analogous combination of
different cards. Now finally, imagine that the person with X used card sequence 'Y' to
express to other people that she would like water. We know that the card-expression has a
definite use, since in all relevant cases in which it is used the same kind of events almost
always followi.e another person retrieves water for the person who presented the card-
sequence. One possible cause of our confusion with sensation-language might be that we
think, because the hypothetical thing X required water, and the possessor of X eventually
received water, that there is some causal connection between the two. When, in actuality,
the relevant causal relation obtains between the water-retrieval and the person, not as the
possessor of X, but as the utterer of Y. The effect of the water being retrieved has as its
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cause the presentation of the card-sequence; and the causal power of the card-sequence
has only as its cause the established fact of its usage being determined by conventions of
behavior. The supposed fact that object X required water is entirely irrelevant in relation
to the fact of the card-sequence causing such a possible change in the environment of the
card-presenter. To be precise, what we are saying is that object X has no necessary role as
cause in relation to what is caused when a person utters an expression or presents a
sequence of cards; and, conversely, if we assume that sensation-language does
something, even if that something is expression, then we can say that it doing so is
sufficiently explained by observable (non-private) facts about the world. In other words,
we could understand the meaning of the card-sequence entirely separate from knowing
anything about X; we could in fact know nothing about X, but still know everything
about the card-sequence Y. The supposed sensation that is the object of 'thirst', for
example, is construed through the grammar of the word 'thirst'. We do not confirm that a
person knows the meaning of Y by confirming anything about X; rather, for example, we
might observe how the utterer reacts once the water-retrieval has been completedif
they react a certain way, we say they understand the meaning of what they uttered,
otherwise we say they do not:
296. "Yes, but there is something there all the same accompanying mycry of pain. And it is on account of that that I utter it. And this
something is what is importantand frightful."Only to whom are
we telling this? And on what occasion? 23
And,
298. The very fact that we should so much like to say: "This is the
important thing"while we point privately to the sensation is
23Ludwig Wittgenstein,Philosophical Investigations, 107.
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enough to show how much we are inclined to say something which
gives no information.24
If a person utters 'I am so thirsty', and we want to know if they understand the meaning of
their own utterance in the relevant language, we do not search for an unobservable object
in vain, but actually observe how they behave once they have obtained a beverage; if they
react in a certain unconventional way, to a sufficient degree, we will be forced to
conclude they simply do not know the meaning of what they ostensibly uttered as a
means of expression. One might also object and say that the person is not using the word
wrongly, he is just using the word to refer to a thing only he can possibly know is being
referred to. If this is the objection, then it will require Wittgenstein's refutation of private
language to defend his theory. For our purposes though, it can be simply said that a
person has no standard of knowing whether she is actually referring to her own private
experience and not something else, and that the 'private language' required for such a feat
would be practically impossible. For one reason, simply because proof of a private
experience would not only require that a person privately claim he has such an
experience, but also that he confirm that other people do not have it; and this would
require that he use language to describe his experience, and therefore nullify the assertion
that he is describing something wholly private. Hopefully it cannot be any clearer that,
things within the domain of 'private' knowledge like 'object X' have no relation to the
understanding and explanation of how expressions we actually are ableto use mean
things in the first place.
24Ludwig Wittgenstein,Philosophical Investigations, 107.
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What we have outlined now is the theory, which we call the Theory of Observable
Meaning, which claims that sensation-language does not involve private mental-states.
The 'classical view' believes the essence of communication lies in people understanding
each others' private mental experiences:
363. But when I imagine something, somethinggoes on, doesn't it?
Well, something goes on and then I make a noise. What for?Presumably in order to communicate what went on. But how, in
general, does one communicate something? When does one say that
something is being communicated? What is the language-game of
communicating something?
I'd like to say: you regard it much too much as a matter of course that
one can communicate anything to anyone. That is to say, we are soaccustomed to communicating in speech, in conversation, that it looks
to us as if the whole point of communicating lay in this: that someone
else grasps the sense of my wordswhich is something mentalthat
he, as it were, takes it into his own mind. If he then does somethingfurther with it as well, that is no part of the immediate purpose of
language. 25
We have shown this is not the case since, first, the extent to which we can speak about
something is the same extent to which it is in principle notprivate; and second, we have
shown that the power of communication hinges on the grammar of different patterns of
usage, which in turn hinge on the observable or public features of the world. It is not the
case that we 'read off the facts' from some private mental object and think of the
expression which bests represents it; no, rather, the object of the expression is construed
on the basis of the grammar associated with its usage, including its connection to other
expressions and contexts:
371.Essenceis expressed in grammar.26
25Ludwig Wittgenstein,Philosophical Investigations, 121.26Ludwig Wittgenstein,Philosophical Investigations, 123.
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And,
373. Grammar tells what kind of object anything is.27
Language is not a circuit with a private picture on one end, and an expression which best
approximates the picture on the other end. The objects which we speak of have their
character made explicit in a circuit which only involves grammar and facts of the
observable world. By 'grammar', Wittgenstein meant the shared experience of any given
language's conventions of usage28i.e. When do we use a word or phrase? What occurs
before its employment? What follows its employment? Etc. For example, when do we
use the word 'dead'? In certain contexts only of course, like when an animal no longer
exhibits certain physiological characteristics. This is what we mean by grammar.
Wittgenstein resolutely denied the view that sensation-language operates
according to a split between private mental-states, and their representative expressions.
He proposed the opposite view, that if we speak of an object, it is an object which has its
logical origins as a definite thing in the grammar which defines the contours of its
relations to other objects and relations-between-objects:
374. The great difficulty here is not to present the matter as if therewere something one couldn't do. As if there really were an object,
from which I extract a description, which I am not in a position to
show anyone.And the best that I can propose is that we yield to thetemptation to use this picture, but then investigate what the application
of the picture looks like.29
27Ibid.28Anat Biletzki, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, s.v."Ludwig Wittgenstein,"
ed. Edward N. Zalta, accessed December 4, 2013,
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wittgenstein/.29Ludwig Wittgenstein,Philosophical Investigations, 123.
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In other words, it's not like a person uses language in an attempt to describe some
indescribable private object for everyone to understand, but rather it is that the only
object logically available ever is the one everyone can access on equal-footing by
understanding the original set of expressions which defined the supposed object's
particular presenceWhich object? The one with features x,y,z.....
Another objection to the Theory of Observable Meaning goes like this: what
about cases where only a single person discovers a new thing, and then reports back to
others. For example, when an explorer discovers a new geographical location, he might
go back to his society and describe his experiences to others. One might say he is
describing something that everyone else can understand, but that he also actually has an
image before his mind that he cannot put completely into words. In other words, he has
an image that can be partly put into words, and partly not. In this case though, how can
we say anything about what he still cannot put into words? It's not even obvious that he
still hassome such part that he cannot put into words. One might also say that the
explorer's words mean for him something over and above what anyone else can
understand from the words; as if everybody else only understood the picture through bits
and pieces, and the explorer understood the singular thing that the whole description
applied to:
280. Someone paints a picture in order to show, for example, how heimages a stage set. And now I say: The picture has a double function:
it informs others, as pictures or words dobut for the informant it isin addition a representation of another kind: for him it is the picture of
hisimage, as it can't before anyone else. His private impression of the
picture tells him what he imagined, in a sense in which the picturecan't do this for others. And what right have I to speak in this
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second case of a representation or piece of information if these
words were correctly usedin thefirstcase? 30
But our question concerns the meaningof the words, and these are not dependent on
some private image in the explorer's mind. Imagine that it wasn't our explorer 'James'
who discovered the new island, but some other explorer 'Frank', and that our explorer this
time was in the position of hearing the words he would of otherwise used were he in the
same position as before. In this way, we see how the description, as it were, stands alone;
its meaning not determined by a private picture before the mind of any particular utterer.
The classical view looks everywhere except where the obvious answer lies. This
why Wittgenstein says:
464. My aim is: to teach you to pass from a piece of disguised
nonsense to something that is patent nonsense. 31
What generates the classical view is an insistence on keeping the nonsense disguised as a
real problem. In short, the classical view turns a blind-eye to the relevant facts, and
focuses instead on some hypothetical and ambiguous process or entity:
308. How does the philosophical problem about mental processes and
states and about behaviourism arise?The first step is the one that
altogether escapes notice. We talk of processes and states and leavetheir nature undecided. Sometime perhaps we shall know more about
themwe 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 inthe conjuring trick has been made, and it was the very one that we
thought quite innocent.)And now the analogy which was to make
us understand our thoughts falls to pieces. So we have to deny the yet
uncomprehended process in the yet unexplored medium. And now it
30Ludwig Wittgenstein,Philosophical Investigations, 103.31Ludwig Wittgenstein,Philosophical Investigations, 141.
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looks as if we had denied mental processes. And naturally we do not
want to deny them. 32
As Wittgenstein puts it, the classical view from the outset commits itself to
particular idea that leads nowhere. It insists there is a process or a mental state essential
to sensation-language, and yet leaves the nature of the supposed key element completely
unexplained:
426. A picture is conjured up which seems to fix the sense
unambiguously. The actual use, compared with that suggested by the
picture, seems like something muddied. Here again, what is going onis the same as in set theory: the form of expression seems to have been
tailored for a god, who knows what we cannot know; he sees all of
those infinite series, and he sees into the consciousness of humanbeings. For us, however, these forms of expression are like vestments,
which we may put on, but cannot do much with, since we lack the
effective power that would give them point and purpose.
In the actual use of these expressions, we, as it were, make
detours, go by side roads. We see the straight highway before us, but
of course cannot use it, because it is permanently closed. 33
In the passage just presented, Wittgenstein is speaking directly to the classical view's
mistaken view that the actual usage of the expression is somehow derivative of or
dependent on some other private mental essence. Let us elaborate by using the particular
example of silent readingthat is, reading, not aloud, but only to oneself. When do we
say a person can 'read silently'? We do so, for example, when we provide new material to
a child, observe them for a period, and then ask them questions about the material.
Assuming they had no prior knowledge of the material, we say, that because they
obviously did not read aloud, there must have been some otherprocess that accounts for
their competency in the material. But we cannot leave this mysterious process so vaguely
32Ludwig Wittgenstein,Philosophical Investigations, 109.33Ludwig Wittgenstein,Philosophical Investigations, 134.
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language-game of 'remembering'. And neither is the process of remembering nor the
thing remembered categorically private.
We can speak of a word or expression, and the thing to which the word or
expression refers; the meaningof the word, can be given in terms of the being of the
thingi.e the meaning of 'dog' can be explained in terms of the objects that are called
dogs. The connection between the two, inheres within the established usage of the
linguistic community:
383. We do not analyse a phenomenon (for example, thinking) but a
concept (for example, that of thinking), and hence the application of a
word. 35
And,
384. You learned the concept of 'pain' in learning language. 36
In other words, for example, when speaking of the word 'tree', we can speak of the
concrete objects trees. But when we speak of pain, we cannot point to an object when we
supposethat the object is private. So, we canspeak of the concept of pain, but that just
leads us to speak of the application of the word'pain'. We suppose the cases are not
analogous, since in one case the word refers to an observable object and in the other to an
unobservable. But they really areanalogous, since what actually happens is we do use the
word to refer to observable facts like: verbal reports, crying, cringing etc. If we abandon
the presumption that 'pain' necessarily refers to an unobservable object, we can see the
actual properties of the world that are essential to its application just like we can with
trees! The appropriate circumstances for the use of the word 'tree' involve the observable
35Ludwig Wittgenstein,Philosophical Investigations, 125.36Ibid.
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tree-objects, just like the appropriate circumstances for the use of the word 'pain' involve
the observable pain-objects, like crying, wincing, moaning and reports. It would be
absurd to say that 'tree' doesn't refer to trees, but to something unobservable that we know
after observing trees, but which is not a tree. Yet this is exactly what we do with 'pain'.
We should not, in the case of sensation, want to turn a blind eye to what is actual and
instead imagine some non-actual circumstance.
Chapter 2 Conclusion
For the ending of this chapter, we now move on to some 'deconstructive' passages
from Wittgenstein, which will serve as excellent diagnostic tools for finalizing our lasting
abandonment of the prejudices' of the classical view. Also, as we set out to answer at the
beginning of this chapter, we will intimate some of the similarities between Wittgenstein
and Logical Behaviorism.
Notice, in these passages, the similarities between Wittgenstein and what we
already know about Logical Behaviorism. They both beg the question, of, what are the
criteria? They both insist on the necessary and sufficient role of observablefacts in
ascriptions of sensation. Wittgenstein is adamant in showing that the ascription of a
sensation does not happen in a vacuum, as if we were just spiritual minds telepathically in
contact with each other and without need of the observable world's mediation:
391. I can perhaps even imagine (though it is not easy) that each of
the people whom I see in the street is in frightful pain, but is adroitlyconcealing it. And it is important that I have to imagine adroit
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concealment here. That I do no simply say to myself: Well, his mind,
is in pain: but what has that to do with his body? or After all, it need
not show in his body. And if I imagine thiswhat do I do? Whatdo I say to myself? How do I look at the people? Perhaps I look at one
and think, It must be difficult to laugh when one is in such pain, and
much else of the same kind.
37
In this passage, first it is proposed we think of people in pain, but not acting typically like
those in pain usually do, and instead having to conceal their normal reactions. We do not
therefore conclude, since the typical pain-behavior is absent, that the pain is something
unobservable to which no observable fact can be related. Rather, we say something about
their disposition to react to another stimuli, given the fact that they are repressing their
usual reaction; in other words, we say that their 'adroitly concealed pain' consists in, not
the regular display of pain, but a modification of it, such that, for example, the person
would have a hard time laughing and still maintaining their adroit concealment. The
example of laughing while also trying to conceal pain, is just one way we can identify the
criteria to which the particular ascription refers to. More simply, we do not just say a
person is concealing her pain, and then assume that therefore she is essentially acting as if
there were no pain at allif this were the case, there would be no difference between the
absence of pain and the pain which is adroitly concealed. There still has to be some
criteria to ensure the ascription is meaningful; perhaps not the same criteria as regular
pain, but still something which differentiates the person adroitly concealing his pain from
the person without any pain. One might still object, 'What if they are just amazing at
concealing their pain, and they never showed any sign of it, as if it were actually not
there.' But who told us they are in pain? They did notin fact they act in every way to
37Ludwig Wittgenstein,Philosophical Investigations, 126.
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Chapter 3: Wittgenstein as a Type of Behaviorist
In this final chapter, using what we already know from the two preceding
chapters, we will compare and contrast Wittgenstein's theory with Logical Behaviorism.
First, we will look at the similarities between the two. Then we will look at some
important differences. Finally, we will engage with some objections to either view, and
provide some possible answers. The main goal of this paper has been to convince the
reader that Wittgenstein, when judged according to his thoughts on sensation-language,
was a type of behaviorist. It has not been our goal, to show that either theory denies
private mental-states; one is mistaken to draw that conclusion. In actuality, we have only
shown that both theories categorically deny that private mental-states can be
meaningfully spoken about. That is to say, we have shown that both theories deny that
the meaning of sensation-language relies on private mental-states. It is in this sense, that
Wittgenstein was a behaviorist.
The Similarities
Since we have already explained both of the theories separately, we know that
both Wittgenstein and Logical Behaviorism deny that the meaning of sensation-language
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thing, which is that they do not think private mental-states matter when discussing the
meaning of mental language.
Some might argue that the connection between Wittgenstein and behaviorism is
tenuous at most. Admittedly, it seems Wittgenstein evaded answering the question
altogether:
307. Aren't you nevertheless a behaviourist in disguise? Aren't you
nevertheless basically saying that everything except human behaviour
is a fiction? If I speak of a fiction, then it is of a grammatical fiction.41
Rather than give a direct answer to the question of whether he is a behaviorist, he
qualifies the sense in which he believes everything except human behaviour is a
fictionhe calls it agrammatica