Investigating Psychology

Sciences of the Mind After Wittgenstein

John Hyman

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138206700
• eBook ISBN: 9781315463919
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory
• Index: Psychology

Originally published in 1991, the essays in this volume are written by philosophers who were convinced that Wittgenstein's investigations in philosophical psychology were of direct relevance to current experimental psychology at the time.

Rather than reflecting on the nature of psychological theory at a high level of abstraction, they examined leading theories and controversies in the experimental study of vision and of language in order to reveal the conceptual problems that they raise and the philosophical theories that have exerted an influence upon them.

Under the section headings 'Language and Behaviour' and 'Perception and Representation', the essays examine the work of Chomsky, Gregory, Marr, Weiskrantz and others, and discuss problems ranging from artificial intelligence to animal communications, from blindsight to machine vision.

The collection aims to demonstrate that philosophical investigations can contribute to psychological science by extirpating conceptual confusions which have been woven into the fabric of empirical research. The majority of the essays had been specially commissioned, and the contributors include several of the most distinguished exponents of Wittgenstein's philosophical legacy at the time.

Part I
Language and Behaviour

1
The Relation of Language to Instinctive Behaviour

Norman Malcolm

'Language did not emerge from reasoning'. This remark from On Certainty (OC, §475) presents an important theme of Wittgenstein's later writing. The idea is most plausible in respect to simple linguistic expressions of fear, pain, surprise, desire. A small child exhibits unlearned, instinctive, behaviour of fear. A dog rushes at it and it recoils with fear, just as a cat would. It would be absurd to attribute to either child or cat the thought, 'This beast may be dangerous, so I had better take avoiding action.'

Wittgenstein's suggestion is that the child is taught or simply picks up from adults, words and sentences that are added to its repertoire of fear-expressive behaviour. In a well-known passage in the Philosophical Investigations concerning the transition from non-linguistic to linguistic expressions of pain, Wittgenstein remarks that when a child learns linguistic expressions of pain it learns 'new pain-behaviour' (PI, §244). The learned verbal expressions of pain or fear are no more due to thinking or reasoning than are the instinctive pre-verbal behaviours. Wittgenstein calls these first-person utterances, Äusserungen, to indicate that they are immediate expressions of pain, fear, surprise, desire and so on, and are not the result of thought.

This conception of certain linguistic expressions as replacements for unlearned reactions was seen by Wittgenstein to extend to some of the sentences that we use to refer to other persons. Not only 'I'm in pain' but also 'He's in pain', can take the place of instinctive behaviour. In Zettel Wittgenstein observes that 'it is a primitive reaction to tend, to treat, the part that hurts when someone else is in pain, and not merely when oneself is' (2, §540). Plainly there are instinctive reactions of shock, concern, sympathy, when one sees that another person is injured. We observe something of this sort in lower animals too. In the Zettel passage Wittgenstein asks himself what he means by saying that these reactions are 'primitive'; and he answers:

Surely that this way of behaving is prelinguistic: that a language-game is based on it, that it is the prototype of a way of thinking and not the result of thinking.

(Z, §541)

Wittgenstein is disagreeing with a 'rationalistic' explanation of this behaviour – for example, the explanation that we have a sympathetic reaction to an injured person 'because by analogy with our own case we believe that he too is experiencing pain' (Z, §542). The actions of comforting or trying to help, that go with the words 'He's in pain', are no more a product of reasoning from analogy than is the similar behaviour in deer or birds. Wittgenstein goes on to say that

Being sure that someone is in pain, doubting whether he is, and so on, are so many natural, instinctive, kinds of relationship towards other human beings, and our language is merely an auxiliary to, and further extension of, this behaviour. Our language-game is an extension of primitive behaviour. (For our language-game is behaviour.) (Instinct.)

(Z, §545)

This same conception is set forth, in more general terms, in Vermischte Bemerkungen:

The origin and the primitive form of the language-game is a reaction; only from this can the more complicated forms grow.

Language – 1 want to say – is a refinement; 'in the beginning was the deed'.¹

Wittgenstein says here that not only does language replace prelinguistic behaviour, but also that it serves as an extension, refinement or elaboration of that behaviour. What does this mean? An example is the way in which exclamations such as 'It hurts' or 'The pain is here' can, first of all, simply take the place of the instinctive behaviour of caressing, protecting, comforting, the painful part. But the language of sensation provides finer descriptions of sensation than would be possible with purely non-linguistic behaviour. One says, 'It still hurts but not as much as it did yesterday'; or 'There is a slight pain in my hip but not enough to bother me.' These reports could not be conveyed in pre-linguistic behaviour.

As another example consider natural human reactions to heat and cold, such as doffing and donning garments, fanning oneself, huddling near a fire, and so on. The exclamations, 'Hot!', 'Cold!', are learned in connection with such pre-verbal behaviour, and come to be used themselves as responses to heat and cold. But language provides an expansion and refinement far beyond these simple verbal equivalents of pre-verbal behaviour. Predictions, comparisons, warnings, in regard to the heat and cold of objects, which could not be conveyed in wordless behaviour, become possible. The language of the thermometer yields more precise discriminations of heat and cold than could be expressed in nonverbal behaviour. But of course the thermometer would never have been taken to be a measure of heat and cold if there had not been a rough agreement between the contraction and expansion of mercury in a tube and the natural behavioural responses of human beings to heat and cold.

As a more difficult example, let us consider the use of the word 'cause' and of other casual expressions. Philosophers often assume that this causal language originates in observations of constant sequences of events. But this view is too intellectual. It implies that when one event is followed by another we remain in doubt whether the two events are related as cause and effect until we have satisfied ourselves by further observations that an event of the one kind is always in all instances conjoined with an event of another kind: whereupon we call the one, cause, the other, effect. On this view the thought of a universal rule, and a doubt as to whether the rule is satisfied by the events in question, are present at the very beginning of our employment of causal expressions.

In remarks written in 1937² Wittgenstein presents an entirely different conception. Suppose that a child runs into another child, knocking him down. The latter might react by leaping up and hitting or kicking the other one. He would be 'reacting to the cause' of his falling. Wittgenstein says: 'Calling something "the cause" is like pointing and saying: "He's to blame!".'³ The child would not be doubting or wondering what made him fall. He would not wait to observe what happens in other cases. Nor could he be said to assume that in similar cases the same thing occurs. Wittgenstein remarks:

There is a reaction which can be called 'reacting to the cause'. – We also speak of 'tracing" the cause; a simple case would be, say, following a string to see who is pulling it. If I then find him – how do I know that he, his pulling, is the cause of the string's moving? Do I establish this by a series of experiments?⁴

This 'reacting to the cause' can be called 'immediate'. This means, first, that there is no uncertainty, guessing, conjecturing, inferring, concluding. Second, calling it an 'immediate reaction' emphasizes the aspect of action – striking back, chasing away the cat that has hold of the string, pointing in anger at the one who broke the toy. Causal expressions, such as 'He knocked me down', 'The cat is pulling it', 'She broke it', are grafted on to these immediate reactions.

Later on there develops a use of causal expression where doubt, conjecture, testing, experiments, theory, enter in. According to Wittgenstein's conception these are 'second-order features'.⁵ Wittgenstein says:

The primitive form of the language-game is certainty, not uncertainty. For uncertainty could never lead to action.

The basic form of the game must be one in which we act.⁶

To suppose that wondering whether this caused that, or questioning in one's mind whether the two events are constantly conjoined, comes in advance of, or along with, the first employment of causal words, is putting the cart before the horse. The child who retaliates against the one that crashed into him does not do this because he 'knows' or 'believes' that this caused his fall. He simply does it. It is an instant reaction, like brushing away an insect that is tickling one's skin. One does not make experiments to determine whether the tickling sensation is caused by the insect.

When Wittgenstein says that the primitive form of the language-game with the word 'cause' is 'certainty', he does not mean that the child affirms in his mind the proposition that the other one certainly knocked him down, or that the child has a perception or intuitive awareness of the causal connection between his being crashed into and his falling down. No: Wittgenstein means that the hitting back at the other child is instinctive. This instinctive behaviour is what Wittgenstein calls 'reacting to the cause'. The 'certainty' he is talking about is a certainty in behaviour, not a certainty in prepositional thought.

Doesn't the child's reaction at least presuppose that he has the concept of cause and effect? No. In the first place, it is misleading to speak of 'the concept' of cause and effect, as if there were an essence of causation, a set of necessary and sufficient conditions, a hidden definition of causation that lies behind the differing uses of causal expressions. In the second place, instinctive reactions of this sort would be one source of the learning of causal expressions. Sentences, such as 'He knocked me down', 'He caused me to fall', would be linked to the instant reaction. The understanding of some causal terms would grow out of such reactions, and would not be presupposed by them; just as a child's crying out with pain when injured would be one source of its acquisition of the use of the word 'pain' and would not presuppose that it has 'the concept' of pain.

Wittgenstein's idea is that the child's first learning of causal expressions consists in learning to use them along with, or in place of, unlearned reactions. Being in doubt about the cause of something, learning to investigate by tests and experiments, would be a subsequent addition.

A similar thing occurs in the first learning of names of objects. Wittgenstein remarks that 'Children do not learn that there are books, that there are armchairs, etc. etc., but they learn to fetch books, sit in armchairs, etc.' (OC, §476). He imagines someone saying: 'So one must know that the objects exist whose names one teaches a child by ostensive definition'. Wittgenstein replies: 'Why should the language-game rest on knowledge?' (OC, §477). And he asks: 'Does a child believe that milk exists? Or does it know that milk exists? Does a cat know that a mouse exists?' (OC, §478).

A cat watches a mouse-hole. It would be natural to say that the cat knows, or believes, that a mouse may come out of the hole. But what does this come to? Are we attributing to the cat the propositional thought, 'A mouse may appear'? No. We are only placing this behaviour in the larger pattern of cat-seeking-mouse behaviour. An infant reaches for its milk bottle. Does it 'believe' that what is in the bottle is milk? One could say this. But what would it mean? Just that there is this behaviour of reaching for the bottle from which it has been fed in the past; plus, perhaps, the fact that it will reject the bottle if what it tastes is chalk-water. This is just doing. In order to understand it we do not have to suppose that this doing rests on some underlying belief. The belief here is nothing other than this behaviour in these circumstances – not a source of the behaviour. In the case of the infant, words and sentences will gradually emerge from such behaviour. Not so with the cat.

Wittgenstein's conception is sharply at odds with some current views. Noam Chomsky, for example, regards a child's language-learning as a highly intellectual performance. A child is bombarded with what Chomsky calls 'primary linguistic data':

On the basis of such data, the child constructs a grammar –that is, a theory of the language of which the well-formed sentences of the primary linguistic data constitute a small sample. To learn a language, then, the child must have a method for devising an appropriate grammar, given primary linguistic data. As a precondition for language learning, he must possess, first, a linguistic theory that specifies the form of the grammar of a possible human language, and, second, a strategy for selecting a grammar o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Original Title
• Original Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Notes on the contributors
• Acknowledgements
• INTRODUCTION
• Part I Language and behaviour
• Part II Perception and representation
• Index