Wittgenstein: Rethinking the Inner

Dr Paul Johnston, Paul Johnston

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• Print ISBN: 9780415091770
• eBook ISBN: 9781134873630
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

The idea of the Inner is central to our concept of a person and yet is far from being philosophically understood. This book offers a comprehensive account of Wittgenstein's work on the subject and presents a forceful challenge to contemporary views. Written in a non-technical and accessible style, it throws new light both on Wittgenstein's work and on the problem of the Inner self.

1
THE PROBLEM OF THE INNER

The expression ‘Who knows what is going on inside him!’ The interpretation of outer events as consequences of unknown, or merely surmised, inner ones. The interest that is focused on the Inner, as if on the chemical structure from which behaviour issues.

For one needs only to ask ‘What do I care about inner events, whatever they are?!’ to see that a different attitude is conceivable.—‘But surely everyone will always be interested in his own inner life!’ Nonsense. Would I know that pain, etc., etc., was something Inner if I weren’t told so? (RPP2, para. 643)

The concept of the Inner is both familiar and mysterious. Lying at the heart of all our psychological concepts, it is invoked whenever we wonder what is going on inside someone’s head or try to assess exactly what lies behind a particular look or smile. But what exactly is the Inner? Where, for example, is it located? Here we encounter a difficulty. It is clear that the Inner is not literally inside the individual, and yet it would make little sense to locate it somewhere outside her. The attempt to describe the contents of the Inner creates further problems: consciousness seems an ever-shifting mass of fleeting experiences and it seems impossible that words should ever capture it. Even in the case of a particular experience the task seems little easier, for here too one is tempted to say that the only way to know the experience is to have it. Thus, although inner experience is the very essence of human life, it seems impossible to describe or define it. What we feel and think seems inherently private, knowable only to the individual herself. But this suggestion has the implausible implication that communication is impossible: the fact that we can talk about what we feel suddenly seems a paradox. Furthermore, the individual seems inexorably pushed towards solipsism, for is not the world of consciousness the only one she really knows? And is not that world exclusively hers, an inner realm into which no one else can ever gain admittance?

These questions, and a host of related ones, lie at the heart of Wittgenstein’s later work. Having himself come close to solipsism in the early 1930s, he spent nearly twenty years struggling to come to grips with the problem of the Inner, and as he did so, he developed a radically new approach to psychological concepts, one which challenges both traditional ways of thinking and more recent ideas. Before we look directly at Wittgenstein’s claims, however, it is important to grasp exactly what it is about the Inner that makes it so problematic. One way of doing this is to consider certain oddities about psychology, the science which studies the Inner. As Wittgenstein noted in his final lecture series at Cambridge,¹ the most striking of these is that the psychologist can never directly observe the phenomena she is supposedly studying. All she can actually observe are the manifestations of the Inner, not the Inner itself. The alternative, and the only means of direct access, would be introspection, but this is even more problematic. First, it would involve a circularity; to observe thinking, for example, one would already have to know what it is. Second, the results of any such inquiry would immediately be questionable, for why should one person’s conclusions hold for everybody? For example, if someone says she always has an image when she thinks, this may be true of her but would not necessarily apply to everyone else’s thinking. A final problem is the difficulty of separating the act of observing the experience from the act of having it. ‘If you go about to observe your own mental happenings, you may alter them and create new ones, and the whole point of observing is that you should not do this’ (WLPP p. 235). Thus it seems impossible to study the Inner either from the outside or from the inside: ‘the science of mental phenomena has this puzzle: I can’t observe the mental phenomena of others, and I can’t observe my own in the proper sense of “observe”’ (ibid.).

As these remarks illustrate, there seems to be something peculiarly elusive about thinking and about the Inner in general. Baffled by this elusiveness, we may be tempted to fall back on the idea that the Inner consists of specific but indescribable experiences known to the individual through her own personal acquaintance with them. But what sense does this conception really make? The first problem with it is the clash between the notion of privacy and the fact that we can—and do—discuss our feelings and experiences: if our inner worlds are in principle inaccessible to others, how is it we still manage to discuss them? The natural answer is that our words offer a picture or translation of our thoughts; although our inner world is private, it can nonetheless be represented in a way comprehensible to others. At first, this idea seems plausible, for we do indeed talk of trying to put our thoughts into words and of trying to find precisely the right word to capture our meaning. But how can we translate something the other person cannot possibly know into terms which she is supposed to understand? How can the other person make a connection between the word and some object which must of necessity remain perpetually hidden to her? Furthermore, is it really the case that there is a process of comparison and translation every time someone says what she thinks?

As these questions suggest, understanding the Inner and in particular its relation to language is not as straightforward as it might at first appear. Although the idea that we translate our thoughts into words seems self-evident, pinning down this process seems much more difficult. In fact, Wittgenstein argues that the very idea of translation makes no sense. His first point is that it only makes sense to talk of translation if it is possible to distinguish between accurate and inaccurate accounts. In the case of translating thoughts into words, however, this creates a difficulty, for, if the individual’s inner world is Ex hypothesi inaccessible to others, how can the accuracy of her ‘translation’ be checked? The natural response is to say that the individual can check it herself, but what does this actually mean? Suppose she finds a mistake—how can she be sure that her second translation is more accurate than her first? Maybe she only thinks she made an error! Or maybe neither of her translations is correct and some third version is the true one. The problem is that, in her search for correctness, the individual never reaches firmer ground—each of her statements is only backed up by her belief that it is correct, so that intrinsically all are on the same level. Faced with a number of possible translations, the individual can only adjudicate between them in terms of which strikes her as correct at that particular moment. Lacking an independent standard, the individual’s selfassessment is an empty charade. Since she has no means of distinguishing what seems right to her from what is right, the notion of accuracy, and hence that of translation, cannot get a grip. But if this is so, why doesn’t this problem arise whenever anyone translates anything? The answer is that the existence of a public practice provides a context within which seeming right and being right are distinguished. Within the practice, there are rules of translation and procedures for checking whether or not these rules have been correctly applied. It is the existence of these rules and procedures which allows a distinction between accurate and inaccurate translation and so justifies our claim to be translating as opposed to simply setting down whatever feels right at the time.

The thrust of this argument is to refute the idea that the individual’s expression of her thoughts is the translation or representation of a private process inside her. It also undermines the very notion of private inner events. The reason for this is that, if the individual’s statements cannot be seen as reports, the only possible means of access to the supposed inner events has been ruled out. Since neither we nor she can distinguish between her believing a certain event took place and that event actually taking place, the notion of these events as independently existing occurrences is undermined. In fact, the only thing that plays a role in the language-game, and hence the only thing that can matter to us, is what the individual says or is inclined to say. The idea of independently existing thought processes on which she reports can be dropped. It is important, however, to note that this is not because the individual is unreliable, but rather because it makes no sense to treat her statements and her thoughts as two separate entities standing in a one-to-one correlation. The impossibility of a check implies a completely different set of conceptual relations. As Wittgenstein notes, ‘“it seems to me I have multiplied correctly” does not mean “I have multiplied correctly”. But apparently, if it seems to me I have compared, I have compared’ (ibid., p. 11). What this shows, however, is that talk of a comparison is misplaced. If the individual’s statements cannot be wrong, their claim to validity cannot lie in their being an accurate translation or projection of ‘what went on inside her’.

The importance of this argument is hard to exaggerate, for it undermines our natural picture of the Inner and calls for a general rethinking of our approach to psychological concepts. The argument challenges our most basic presuppositions about how we should understand the Inner and, if these are overthrown, it is by no means clear what we should put in their place. The temptation is to switch to behaviourism but rather than solving the problem this only suppresses it. Despite the mysteries and uncertainties surrounding it, the Inner plays a crucial part in our lives and, from a Wittgensteinian perspective, the point is to understand that role, not to deny it. As well as opening up a whole new set of problems concerned with the Inner, Wittgenstein’s argument also raises far-reaching questions about how language works; for, if representation is ruled out, how does language operate here? If the individual speaks in a ruleless vacuum, how can her words have meaning? Paradoxically, however, it is precisely these words that can mean most to us. Unravelling these problems will take up the rest of this book and, as we shall see, the connection between language and the Inner is of crucial importance. However, before exploring Wittgenstein’s positive account, it is worth considering the initial argument in more detail and one way to do that is to consider the example of inner speech.

One striking feature of inner speech is that at first glance it seems a blatant counterexample to Wittgenstein’s claims. The natural inclination is to see it as a faint copy of outer speech—one talks as it were less and less loudly until one is speaking so softly there is no outer noise, only a sound in the imagination. Here there would seem to be no problem of translation, for Ex hypothesi the individual’s report on her inner monologue simply gives voice to words which she has already used, only internally rather than externally. But even here the same problem arises, for in the absence of an independent check, there is no means of assessing the accuracy of the individual’s statement and hence it cannot be construed as a report.

‘He is an accurate reporter of what The Times says’ has good sense, you check it by reading The Times. And he can check it by reading The Times. But ‘he is trustworthy about what he really says to himself won’t do for us and it won’t do for him: in this case to seem to yourself to have said X is the only meaning I can give to ‘I have said X.’ (WLPP, p. 250)

Paradoxically, this implies that, when the individual tells us what she said to herself, her statement cannot be seen as the reproduction of anything. Her words are not a report on a separate but private inner process, rather they must stand or fall on their own merit; if they have an interest, this cannot lie in their being accurate because in this context the notion of accuracy cannot get a grip.

In an attempt to avoid this conclusion, it is tempting to try to justify the individual’s statement by looking for some other criterion against which it can be checked. One possibility would be to find some physical correlate of normal speech which also occurred when the individual talked to herself. Suppose, for example, we discovered that normal speech was accompanied by certain movements in the larynx and found that similar movements could be correlated with the individual’s account of her inner speech. This would seem to confirm the individual’s account and so give sense to the idea that her statements are the outer projection of an inner process. One objection to this is that there is no guarantee that any such correlations exist. A more fundamental objection is that the reference to larynx movements introduces a new criterion and hence a new concept. Since this is so, the two accounts cannot be seen as confirming each other, indeed, in calling both the concepts ‘inner speech’ we are simply inviting confusion. Consider the situation if the two criteria diverge. If we treat the new criterion as authoritative and say the individual was mistaken about what she said to herself, we would be abandoning our current concept of ‘inner speech’. If, however, we give the individual’s account priority, we would no longer be able to claim that the physical data offer an independent confirmation of what she says. In fact, since the two criteria are independent, there is no reason why we shouldn’t keep both. If, for example, there were larynx movements, but the individual had no account to offer, we might say that inner speech occurred but that the individual did not talk to herself. Conversely, if she had an account but there were no larynx movements, we might describe the situation by saying that she spoke to herself and no inner speech occurred. Examples of where the two criteria diverge bring out a more general point, for inner speech of which the individual was unaware or inaccurately aware would have a quite different interest from what we currently call inner speech. As things stand, our interest is in the individual’s own account of what she said to herself; in other words, it is precisely an interest in an account where there is no difference between it seeming so to the individual and it actually being so. For this reason, it is pointless and quite misguided to seek a new criterion to justify our existing concept. If what we currently call ‘inner speech’ does not involve any criteria independent of the individual, the introduction of one can only create a completely new languagegame. Any such game would not provide objective evidence of what really goes on inside us; rather it would replace our existing concept with a new one of a completely different kind.

Instead of seeking an independent confirmation of what the individual says, Wittgenstein urges us to recognise the distinctive grammar of inner speech. Rather than viewing it as a hidden version of outer speech, he argues that we should treat it as a completely different concept but one which has a tie-up with outer speech. To underline this point, he describes a case where the differences are much more obvious.

Imagine this game—I call it ‘tennis without a ball’: The players move around on a tennis court just as in tennis, and they even have rackets, but no ball. Each one reacts to his partner’s stroke as if, or more or less as if, a ball had caused his reaction. (Manoeuvres.) The umpire, who must have an ‘eye’ for the game, decides in questionable cases whether a ball has gone into the net, etc, etc. This game is obviously quite similar to tennis and yet, on the other hand, it is fundamentally different. (LW1, para. 854)

It is also possible to imagine a further variant on this game—‘inner tennis’, where the two players play tennis in the imagination, that is to say, imagine they are playing tennis and describe to each other the shots they have attempted and how successful they have been in executing them. Each of these games is related to tennis and yet fundamentally different from it. Indeed, in the second case, the game is no longer even a form of exercise. Furthermore, it presupposes a quite different set of qualities, e.g. sincerity and a realistic appraisal of one’s own tennis ability. For these reasons, and in contrast with the case of inner speech, there is little temptation to say that inner and outer tennis are exactly the same thing. The fact that the practical consequences are so much clearer makes it more obvious that the inner version of an outer activity involves a completely new set of conceptual relations.

To reinforce Wittgenstein’s argument about inner speech, let us consider the special case of calculating in the head. The advantage of this example is that it’s an everyday occurrence with a certain practical importance. It also has plenty of detail. As with inner speech, the natural inclination is to treat it as unproblematic and to argue that calculating in the head and calculating on paper are exactly the same thing. There are, however, obvious and important differences. In the one case, the individual manipulates signs on a piece of paper according to generally recognized rules, and, since this activity is public, every stage of it can be observed and checked by others. In the case of calculating in the head, however, all that we can observe is that the person concerned concentrates and gives an answer. But how should we describe the latter? On the one hand,

there is a wish to say; ‘And that is the description: he sits, knits his forehead, looks tense, and comes out with an answer’. But to this one also wants to say ‘No, no. He did something else: he can tell you what.’ (WLPP, p. 251)

Unfortunately, this ‘something else’ is rather elusive. The only way to describe it is in terms of the concept of calculating, but even here all the description amounts to is the mysterious claim that the inner activity is somehow the same as the outer one. But what does the same mean here? Simply stressing the notion of identity is no use, for the supposed privacy of the Inner creates a gulf which calls everything into question. Although the individual may claim to be calculating, how can we (or she) know that this is the correct description of her activity? Furthermore, what can possibly justify her taking a word used to describe an outer activity and suddenly applying it to an inner one?

To answer these questions, it is best to approach the issue from the perspective of a third party. It is important to remember, however, that the problem is not that the individual is unreliable, but that it makes no sense to treat her statements as reports on an independent process. As Wittgenstein puts it, ‘I cannot accept his testimony because it is not testimony. It only tells me what he is inclined to say’ (PI, para. 387). So what do we actually know about what does occur? Imagine we didn’t calculate in our heads but came across someone who claimed she could, what would we make of her claim? Treated as a report, it could only appear as highly dubious. Since in principle we cannot have access to the inner process, we would only have her word for it that it occurred in her head rather than in her feet or that it involved the same symbols as calculating on paper or indeed that the symbols it involved formed a proper system. Further more, the same questions that arise for us also arise for her: how can she be sure that she hasn’t made a mistake and isn’t claiming to be calculating in the head when actually calculating in the foot or when not calculating at all? If her statements are genuine reports, the possibility of error cannot be excluded, and yet, strangely enough, the idea of her getting it wrong seems to make no sense. Thus the real nature of her inner activity remains surrounded in mystery. Although she may claim that she calculates, this provides neither us nor her with indisputable evidence about the supposed inner process; since no one can check her statements, all these tell us is what she is inclined to say is occurring, not what is actually occurring.

In view of these difficulties, we might decide to reject her claim. It is significant, however, that, if we leave to one side the question of what actually occurs inside her, her statements may be still be useful. If, for example, her answers tally with our calculations on paper, she might serve a useful function as calculating machine. Despite denying that her statements describe an inner process, we might still make use of them. Indeed, we might say ‘Who cares what goes on inside her (or if nothing does) as long as she produce the right answer?’ In view of this, we might agree to call what she does ‘calculating’ not because she says so but because the results of her activity connect up with our practice of calculating. Furthermore, if she could also state the stages of the calculation leading to the result and, in the middle of her activity, tell us the stage she had reached and the answer so far, this would make the parallel with calculating even closer and so give further reason for calling what she does calculating. It is important, however, to recognise that the decision to call this new activity ‘calculating in the head’ is simply a matter of convenience: what the phrase does is highlight a connection between two quite distinct things. It might, for example, be likened to finding a set of lines on a wall and describing them as ‘a drawing of a Greek temple with bits missing’.

This doesn’t mean that it was connected with an actual drawing of one; it means only that it could sensibly be described as ‘a drawing with bits left out’. What he (the man who calculates) does can conveniently be described as ‘he does something rather like what he would be doing if he had read a sum off. (WLPP, p. 270)

Thus, if we did decide to say that she could calculate in her head, this would not be because her statements were accurate reports of a process which turned out to be identical to our process of calculation. Rather it would reflect the fact that at various points her statements ...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• PREFACE
• 1: THE PROBLEM OF THE INNER
• 2: THE WORLD OF THE SENSES
• 3: THE MYSTERY OF THOUGHT
• 4: THE MUSICALITY OF LANGUAGE
• 5: THE COMPLEXITY OF THE INNER
• 6: THE INNER/OUTER PICTURE
• 7: THE MIND, THE BRAIN AND THE SOUL
• CONCLUSION
• APPENDIX
• NOTES
• ABBREVIATIONS AND BIBLIOGRAPHY