Wittgenstein, Wittgensteinianism and the Contemporary Philosophy of Mind – Continuities and Changes

For a short period of time in the middle of the last century, at least in Europe, Wittgenstein was the measure of all things in philosophy and especially in the philosophy of mind. The private language argument had shown the conception of the mind going back to Descartes and Locke to be principally flawed – or so the consensus was. Mental phenomena are not essentially private, and there simply cannot be mental states without any observable criteria at all. Anyone who disagreed was in for a difficult time. Yet, only one or two decades later the discussion had moved on considerably. First, the identity theory overcame behaviourism. Second, functionalism superseded the identity theory, thereby paving the way for more specialist approaches such as Fodor's representational theory of mind. Finally, a new, post-Wittgensteinian orthodoxy developed with amazing swiftness. With hindsight, this seems a remarkable phenomenon in the sociology of philosophy. As interesting as it would be, I shall disregard the sociological side here. Instead, I am interested in the questions: What has changed? And, are there good reasons for these changes? These questions are difficult to answer, not least, because it is far from clear which position Wittgenstein himself held with regard to the mind-body problem. Even today, articles and books are being published in an attempt to come closer to answering this question; but 50 years after Wittgenstein's death we are still far from a generally accepted consensus. Of course, this picture is painted a little bleakly: some points are clear – for instance Wittgenstein's rejection of the picture of an inner world of the mind and an external world of material things, which pervades all areas of philosophy since early modern times. According to Descartes, the mind is an immaterial substance of its own – a res cogitans – and thinking, feeling and remembering are occurrences in this substance accessible only to this substance itself. The consequence of this picture is that the mind is private. Only the mind itself can know what happens within; others, at best, have indirect access through a kind of inductive inference. They have to infer from the person's behaviour what goes on in a person's mind. This, Wittgenstein says in a famous passage in the Philosophical Investigations, is complete nonsense: