Let me begin with two of what I think of as an extremely simple, indeed grossly over-simplified, truism. Wittgenstein told us that meaning is use. He also told us that meaning should not be understood as primarily consisting in the relationship that holds between a name and its bearer. My truism is this: Wittgenstein’s two dicta are logically independent. It might be that meaning is use: that is, it might be that ultimately anything I mean has to be explicated in terms of something I use it for. For instance, it might be that every time I utter ‘cat’, I am doing something cat-related. It may nonetheless be true that the best way to understand the word ‘cat’ is as naming the concept CAT. Conversely, it may be that my utterances of ‘cat’ have to be understood in complex, situationally variable ways, so that the word cannot be explicated as naming anything. Nonetheless, it may be true that meaning is independent of use. In short, one of these dicta is about the communicative and pragmatic aspects of language, and the other about semantics, and though closely related in Wittgenstein’s thought, they are logically independent and they have to be argued for separately.
In a similar vein, the meaning-is-use claim is logically independent of Wittgenstein’s no-inner-mentality ideology, unless you follow a stolidly behaviourist line of thought. You might think that understanding the meaning of ‘cat’ is a matter of behaving in a certain way with regard to cats. But this has little to do with whether or not you change your inner state when you come to understand ‘cat’.
Now, of course, Wittgenstein had a bridge between the two propositions: meaning-as-use and no-inner-mentality. That bridge was the Private Language Argument. Or so I surmise. Nonetheless, it comes as a bit of shock when he completely merges the two propositions that I have just separated:
We think there must be something going on in one's mind for one to understand the word 'plant'. We are inclined to say that what we mean by one's understanding the word is a process in the mind. … There is away out of the difficulty of explaining what understanding is if we take 'understanding a word' to mean, roughly, being able to use it. The point of this explanation is to replace 'understanding a word' by 'being able to use a word', which is not so easily thought of as denoting an [inner] activity.
Apparently, according to him, there is nothing going on in one’s mind when one comes to understand a word. And one comes to see this by taking it on board that coming to understand a word is simply being able to understand this.
Of course, any sensible philosopher ought to reject the second proposition. Coming to understand a word does indeed entail being able to use it. But being able to use it entails a dispositional change, and most understandings, any disposition has a categorical (i.e., non-dispositional) basis. For instance, when you understand ‘plant’, you are disposed to act in certain ways: you will use the word differently from a person who does not understand it. It follows that when you come to understand it, you change your disposition. But you cannot change dispositionally, if you don’t change categorically. Such a categorical change must be a mental change—what else could it be? And if you are a physicalist, the locus of such change must be the brain. Wittgenstein spoke of changes in the mind; neo-Wittgensteinians extend that to the body/brain.
If you don’t think that dispositions have a categorical basis—and some philosophers of physics and metaphysicians don’t—an argument is required. Wittgenstein offers none. And yet, the principle is very standard. Russell uses the dispositions-have-a-categorical-basis proposition in Analysis of Mind. I suppose one could read the Philosophical Investigations as a sustained attack on the principle. But it certainly is not presented that way. To me, it comes across as a work that simply ignores it.
I had these thoughts upon receiving some helpful correspondence from Priscilla Hill in response to my review of Daniel Hutto and Erik Myin’s combative anti-mental-content tract, Radicalizing Enactivism. Hill made me aware of a conference presentation by Danièle Moyal-Sharrock that convincingly links H&M’s book to Wittgenstein—I only suspected the connection before reading her piece.
Moyal-Sharrock is a committed Wittgensteinian, but even so I was amazed by the audacity of her position:
Now, it might be objected, Wittgenstein can say what he likes; but where's the evidence? Well, it is scientists, not philosophers that base their claims on evidence. What philosophers do is work on more perspicuous conceptual presentations of how things are. And what Wittgenstein has done is show that we cannot make conceptual sense of basic certainties that start off as propositions, and engrams that work like people. But now let me return the question and ask scientists: where is your evidence? There is none. There has never been found the shadow of anything representational or encoded in the brain. So why insist we go micro (or subpersonal) in our accounts of the mind when even science is unable to demonstrate that that's the way to go?
There is a hint here of the familiar (and completely groundless) accusation that when psychologists speak of memory traces (or engrams) they ascribe remembering to the brain, not the subject. I’ll just put that aside and stipulate that persons remember, but that they do so by using engrams.
It astounds me that somebody can claim that no evidence exists of representations in the brain. Just to give a few examples: the (highly successful) post-behaviourist program of neuroscientists such as Eric Kandel was precisely to find the neural basis of memory—simple episodic declarative memory (memory that something occurred) falls under this rubric. The entire single-cell recording program of scientists such as Barlow in Cambridge, Hubel and Wiesel in the other Cambridge was devoted to finding the neural basis of perception. More recently, scientists have made large discoveries concerning the neural basis of face recognition. No evidence?
(For more on Hutto and Myin, see my review.)
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