A Wittgensteinian Perspective on the Use of Conceptual Analysis in Psychology

T. Racine, K. Slaney, T. Racine, K. Slaney

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780230369153
• eBook ISBN: 9781137384287
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mind & Body in Philosophy
• Index: Psychology

This edited volume includes contributions from internationally renowned experts in the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein. It applies his later philosophy to concrete issues pertaining to the integrity of scientific claims in a broad spectrum of research domains within contemporary psychology.

1

Psychology’s Inescapable Need for Conceptual Clarification

Daniel D. Hutto

The confusion and barrenness of psychology is not to be explained by calling it a ‘young science’; its state is not comparable with that of physics, for instance, in its beginnings ...

For in psychology there are experimental methods and conceptual confusion ... The existence of the experimental method makes us think we have a means of solving the problems which trouble us, though the problems and the method pass each other by.

Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations Sec. II, p. 232e¹

1.1 Introduction

Wittgenstein offers a grave assessment of the state of psychology – one that falls just short of complete condemnation. Taken seriously, it should be a cause of concern for anyone working in the discipline today. But, should it been taken seriously? Was Wittgenstein’s evaluation ever justified? More urgently, is it still an accurate portrayal of psychology as practiced today? This chapter argues it was and still is, and that this fact highlights an urgent and inescapable need for conceptual clarification in psychology. As a prelude to making this case, it is useful to get clearer about what motivated Wittgenstein’s characterization of psychology as ‘barren’ because conceptually confused.

1.2 Wittgensteinian backstory

It might be thought that Wittgenstein’s remark about psychology is inspired by nothing other than a general shunning or condemnation of science, an expression of a general anti-scientific attitude. If so, perhaps his negative assessment of the condition of psychology can be put down to nothing other than an unjustified general dislike of science. While it might be tempting to assume this, such a reading lacks credibility.

The first thing to note is that when Wittgenstein speaks of conceptual confusions in the cited passage, he takes these to be of a distinctively philosophical kind – viz. they have a source and character that makes it impossible to overcome them by the provision of better or more refined theories, explanations or empirical studies. Focusing on this, noticeably, he makes no complaint about psychology’s methodology, only its conceptual grasp of its subject matter. What this brings out is that the conceptual confusion that troubles psychology is really – at root – philosophical confusion (albeit exhibited in this instance by psychologists and not professional philosophers). Not surprisingly then, Wittgenstein reserves his most critical assessments not for the sciences but for the bankrupt state of philosophy and philosophers. It is philosophers who utter nonsense, who are in the grip of pictures, who are ‘like savages, primitive people, who hear the expressions of civilized men, put a false interpretation on them, and then draw the queerest conclusions from it’ (PI, §194). Hence, ‘a philosophical problem has the form: “I don’t know my way about”’ (PI, §123). Scientists, however, have no natural immunity to intellectual diseases of this sort; and when they do suffer from them, the only possible treatment for their condition takes the form of philosophical work.

It is simply false that Wittgenstein is anti-science. What he does reject is the seductive scientistic view that the scientific method and outlook should dominate all thinking; that all problems and questions reduce to scientific ones. In particular, if the scientific method is not appropriate for dealing with philosophical problems of the sort that arise from conceptual confusions, then making new discoveries or acquiring deeper knowledge of phenomena through the manufacture of better, more penetrating theories cannot possibly solve or address them.

With this in mind, Wittgenstein rejects all attempts to provide philosophical explanations (which he thinks only breed more myths and confusions) in favour of a purely descriptive approach. He is utterly clear about the notion of explanation that he has in his sights and which he rejects:

I mean the method of reducing the explanation of natural phenomena to the smallest possible number of primitive natural laws; and in mathematics, of unifying the treatment of different topics by using generalization.

Philosophers constantly see the method of science before their eyes ... I want to say here that it can never be our job to reduce anything to anything, or to explain anything. Philosophy really is ‘purely descriptive.’ (BBB, p. 18, emphasis original)

For Wittgenstein, conceptual investigations do not add to our understanding of what there is by positing new and unanticipated entities in the way that theorizing in a basic science like physics might.² For him, philosophical work does not add to our compendium of knowledge – it yields neither scientific knowledge nor a special kind of non-scientific knowledge. It elucidates and clarifies. By putting to bed – or at least temporally controlling – certain misleading habits of thought, it brings to light or reminds us of our genuine conceptual commitments, those that are integral to our everyday practices. This is achieved, on a case-by-case basis, by appeal to examples that reveal the point, context and specific character of our familiar modes of thought and talk. The positive part of philosophical work is the assembly of reminders about the contexts in which we actually deploy our concepts, the roles such concepts play in our practices and the point of such practices. But this kind of work is only possible if we can expose, and free ourselves from, tempting but misleading pictures that systematically block our view of how we actually use our concepts, something that lies before us in plain view, if we only have the eyes and will to see it.

In toto, philosophical labour of this sort should enable us to appropriately characterize and understand our quotidian commitments. This is the aim of clarificatory philosophy. Harking back to an early voiced, but constant thought of Wittgenstein’s: ‘Philosophy is not a body of doctrine but an activity’ (TLP, 4.112). This is to realize – as Wittgenstein did throughout his career – that ‘Philosophy is not one of the natural sciences. (The word “philosophy” must mean something whose place is above or below the natural sciences, not beside them)’ (TLP, 4.111). It is against this backdrop that we can appreciate how and why Wittgenstein sums up his attitude to science in the following quotation:

I may find scientific questions interesting, but they never really grip me. Only conceptual and aesthetic questions do that. At bottom I am indifferent to the solution of scientific problems; but not the other sort. (CV, p. 79e)

What we can take from all of this – the point that needs emphasizing – is that insofar as psychology is subject to conceptual confusions, these are unavoidably philosophical in nature. That is why Wittgenstein makes no critique of the psychologists’ experimental method of data collection. His concern targets how psychologists characterize and understand the data, not how they come by them.

1.3 Options for psychology

1.3.1 Acceptance

Total acceptance is one possible way for psychology to respond to the Wittgensteinian challenge. It might adopt the austere strategy of refusing to say anything that goes beyond the evidence. By sticking only to the collection of raw data provided through operationalized and controlled experimentation – by steering clear of all conceptual interpretations or speculation about such data – psychology can avoid the charge that it is conceptually confused by making sure it is conceptually empty. As long as psychology makes no attempt to understand or even characterize its subject matter, it protects itself against confusion and the need for conceptual investigation. Of course, with greater or lesser commitment to this positivist programme, radical behaviourists have already tried (and failed) to advance the fortunes of psychology by avoiding all conceptual and constitutive questions of a sort that could not be addressed through straightforward empirical experimentation.

Many scientists sport attitudes that appear to welcome this sort of approach; they are typically uninterested in, and impatient with, conceptual, constitutive questions. Burge (2010) provides the standard analytic philosopher’s answer about the nature of such questions (which, when compared with the observations of the preceding section, shows itself to be highly un-Wittgensteinian), and he also identifies why most scientists adopt a negative attitude toward them.³

A constitutive question concerns conditions on something’s being what it is, in the most basic way. Something cannot fail to be what it is, in this way, and be that something. Constitutive conditions are necessary or sufficient conditions for something’s being what it is in this basic way. To be constitutive, the conditions must be capable of grounding ideal explanations of something’s nature, or basic way of being ... Science is more interested in finding explanations of how and why things happen than in asking about natures ... Often good scientific work can proceed without answering constitutive questions correctly. Still, obtaining clarity about key concepts, and delimiting boundaries of fundamental kinds indicated by such concepts, can strengthen and point scientific theory. It can help deepen understanding of frameworks within which scientific explanations operate. (Burge, 2010, p. xv, emphasis added)

Reliance on everyday mental concepts is utterly pervasive in psychology. It is part and parcel of the interpretation of data whenever and wherever everyday psychological phenomena are under investigation. This includes investigation of such familiar and core psychological phenomena as ‘believing’, ‘experiencing’, ‘pretending’, and ‘empathizing’. Consider, for example, the following passage from a recent introduction of a special issue on empathy. It nicely illustrates – and gives the flavour of – a characteristic and undeniable fact about the state of the understanding of the concepts that frame and underpin psychological research. For despite employing robust experimental methods, it is admitted that:

Almost anybody writing in the field would declare that there is no accepted standard definition of empathy – either among the sciences or the humanities or in the specific disciplines. (Engelen and Röttger-Rössler, 2012, p. 3)

Tellingly, despite initially recognizing that there is ‘no established concept’ at work, the authors of this introduction proceed to try to establish some working boundaries, persuaded by the essentialist assumption that there must be something – something with shared features at least, if not a single common feature – that makes it true that any and all cases of empathy are cases of empathy. And this sets the stage for what looks like an attempt at a traditional form of conceptual analysis designed to advance our understanding of the nature of empathy by determining to what extent, and in what measure, it involves ‘thinking’ and ‘feeling’, appealing to yet more everyday psychological concepts.

Of course, the promised deeper analysis in terms of these terms will turn out to be blunted if the concepts of ‘thinking’ and ‘feeling’ themselves turn out to lack ‘agreed definitions’, which, of course, they do.

Putting a proposal of the neuropsychologist Walter (2012) in the spotlight, the editors bring out the problems that attend a different sort of procedure that is neutral with respect to unpacking our conceptions of thinking and feeling. For in Walter’s work:

Empathy ... is defined only as the understanding of the emotional state of the other and not by whether the process of understanding the emotional state is either an affective or a cognitive one. If it is a cognitive one, it is called cognitive empathy or affective theory of mind; if it is an affective one, it is called affective empathy. (Engelen and Röttger-Rössler, 2012, p. 5)

But here, too, there is no way to avoid reliance on everyday notions. For what understanding of understanding is in play? Here again, psychologists are prepared to acknowledge the serious difficulties in articulating exactly what it means to say that a child – or, indeed, anyone – has an understanding of some or other concept. As Apperly (2011) observes:

It is common to ask when children understand perceptions, knowledge and belief as such. When can they distinguish them from other kinds of things and from each other? When do they understand how they come about and how they interact with each other? ... there is no easy answer to these questions. It is just not clear whether we should credit a child a concept of ‘knowledge’ (for example) when she shows sensitivity to her mum’s ‘experience’ at 14 months ... when she first makes correct verbal judgements about someone else’s lack of knowledge at 3 years, or when she first understands Oedipus problems at 6 years. (Apperly, 2011, p. 18, emphasis added)

Naturally, as scientists, who trust in the rigour and robustness of their experimental methods, psychologists will want to reject the idea that advances in their field – in any way – depend upon, or must wait for, philosophers to sort out conceptual matters by providing answers to constitutive questions. That would be an especially bitter pill to swallow, given that when such questions have been investigated by philosophers using the tools of conceptual analysis – proposal testing by means of trial by counterexample and intuition – they have rarely, if ever, identified the definitive necessary and sufficient conditions that constitute any phenomenon of interest.

Moreover, there is no doubt that good scientific work can proceed in the form of austere data collection without addressing constitutive questions or answering them correctly. But in so far as a science (in this case, psychology) is concerned to do something more than collecting raw data for possible interpretation – to the extent that it aspires to provide insights into the human condition – it cannot forever shun conceptual questions.

Conceptual questions are crucial not only in deciding which experiments are worth conducting and even framing how they might be best conducted. And, of course, it would be impossible to draw meaningful conclusions from experiments without addressing such questions. Ultimately, not to do so makes it impossible to pass reliable judgment on the scope and nature of psychological investigations. For all of these reasons, the tactic of acceptance and avoidance looks like a non-starter.

1.3.2 Denial

If not avoidance by acceptance, then perhaps outright denial might work. Can it not be assumed that the phenomena somehow speak for themselves, obviating any need to investigate conceptual frameworks? If so, won’t psychologist...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• Prologue: Wittgenstein’s Philosophy of Psychology as a Critical Instrument for the Psychological Sciences
• 1 Psychology’s Inescapable Need for Conceptual Clarification
• 2 Wittgenstein’s Method of Conceptual Investigation and Concept Formation in Psychology
• 3 Pictures of the Soul
• 4 Aspect Seeing in Wittgenstein and in Psychology
• 5 Parallels in the Foundations of Mathematics and Psychology
• 6 Animal Minds: Philosophical and Scientific Aspects
• 7 Realism, but Not Empiricism: Wittgenstein versus Searle
• 8 Can a Robot Smile? Wittgenstein on Facial Expression
• 9 A Return to ‘the Inner’ in Social Theory: Archer’s ‘Internal Conversation’
• 10 Reducing the Effort in Effortful Control
• 11 The Concepts of Suicidology
• 12 The Neuroscientific Case for a Representative Theory of Perception
• 13 Terror Management, Meaning Maintenance, and the Concept of Psychological Meaning
• 14 A Conceptual Investigation of Inferences Drawn from Infant Habituation Research
• 15 The Unconscious Theory in Modern Cognitivism
• Index