Wittgenstein and cunning logic: an attempt to understand the roots of the philosophies of the mind.

Wittgenstein and cunning logic: an attempt to understand the roots of the philosophies of the mind. *Note: The article is from the book (Fitgenstein and Philosophical Research) for more details please review the book. We will first begin by looking at how Wittgenstein's philosophical treatment of philosophy of language and philosophy of psychology is applied, as we have seen that one of the characteristics of Wittgenstein's philosophical approach is to focus on the original source of philosophical confusion, which he believes lies in the forms of our language. Wittgenstein did not turn his attention directly to popular philosophical doctrines, but went back to the origins of the initial desire to form false images of language or psychological phenomena in the direction of our concepts. So he wants us to take a step back from our interest in building theories about the nature of consciousness or the relationship between consciousness and the brain and look at the steps that led us to address the problem of understanding the nature of psychological processes in the way we do. Why do we keep trying to explain the relationship between consciousness and brain processes? Why do we feel the need to prove other minds? Why do we feel these problems as problems even though in our normal lives they are not? What Wittgenstein is interested in is not the philosophical doctrines we have created, but the "insidious logic" [PI 412] with which we have addressed the task of understanding psychological processes as theories of mind. Again, Wittgenstein uses his method to pressure us to examine the foundations of our traditional investigation and uncover the myths at its root, and along with his critique of our traditional methods of thinking, Wittgenstein continues his work to show us that the understanding we seek in the wrong way through the theoretical interpretation of the psychological phenomenon is achieved with the necessary attention to the distinctive grammar of the psycholinguistic game. We have seen this method of Wittgenstein's realization of the concept of understanding, and its power lies in directing us away from the concern with contemplation of what is happening as it is within a subject (mind or brain), to the concern with the form of the concept (how the concept works), to reveal the nature of the state it describes. When we look at the concept – using the words “I understand,” “he understands,” and so on – we simply find that it doesn’t work the way we assume, which is to make the concept a name for a process that occurs within the speaker when he hears and understands the word, and to remedy our futile attempt at the psychological state not by building a more ingenious theory, but by recognizing that the state of understanding is completely different from the image described by the internal state. When we look at the concept of understanding and its work we will see that it does not describe a finite state of an internal mechanism, but rather its meaning depends on the background of the characteristic form of life in which it was used. Thus the correct use of the phrase "I understand" or "he understands" has nothing to do with an internal process occurring within the speaker, but rather with the life structure that shaped the speaker's culture, which made him pronounce this sentence and gave it its connotation. Wittgenstein's grammatical research shows the emptiness of the image of understanding as a psychological state requiring an explanation of its components, and shows how we perceive the actual work of the concept of understanding, and therefore feel the satisfaction that eludes us, whenever we fall into the trap of assigning the internal state as the origin of our ability to use language. What concerns paragraph 243 about confronting our false images of how psychological concepts actually work through grammatical investigation will become the dominant theme of Wittgenstein's observations, he has set himself the task of making us aware of the distinctive and complex manner of the wide range of psychological concepts, and as usual he wants to use this new awareness in the face of false images that we are trying to build, and to show that attention to the distinctive manner of our concepts will lead us to understand the nature of the phenomena described by these concepts. To facilitate the presentation I divided my discussion of these observations into two parts; in this chapter I will focus on Wittgenstein's observations on subjectivity and special language, which are located in paragraphs 243-275, and in the next chapter - in and out - I will focus more extensively on Wittgenstein's lengthy discussion of the relationship between psychological concepts and behavior. This division is grandiose, at least to some extent, Wittgenstein’s observations represent a constant debate about the direction of our psycholinguistic game, and the desire to misunderstand it. The main idea of this debate is to concern ourselves with overcoming what Wittgenstein saw as our desire to misapply the image of distinguishing psychological processes from behavior as well as between the inside and the outside. I have divided - and I hope that this division is not misleading - what leads us to the misapplication of this picture to two sides, the first is the overestimation of the role of examining internal ideas in the identification of psychological concepts, and the second is the misrepresentation of the relationship between psychological concepts and forms of human and animal behavior. The idea of language. Wittgenstein's discussion of philosophical psychology begins with observations on the idea of a special language that would become known as Wittgenstein's "special language argument", which is no doubt the most pointed out in aspects of Wittgenstein's late philosophy, and arguably represents Wittgenstein's most important contribution to the philosophy of mind. He who considers this argument valid sees it as a critical critique of Descartes's philosophy, classical empiricism and phenomenology, and sensory data theory. On the other hand, those who reject this argument will find it nothing more than a representation of the theory of verification of meaning used to defend a version of logical behaviorism, and it opposes our common intuition that psychological concepts (such as desire and belief) describe internal states that play a causal role in the interpretation of physical behavior. The main concern of the present chapter is to achieve a precise reading of these observations, and to show how they are employed within Wittgenstein's philosophy as a whole, i.e., as an explanation which presents this argument not as a Wittgensteinian foundation of psychology, but as a small element within his attempt to show us the functions of our linguistic game psychologically. The view of our ordinary language game, far from supporting behavioral logic, which aims to reveal our inner intuition to distinguish between the inside and the outside, is based on grammatical differences between concepts belonging to different areas of our language. The first thing we need to clearly explain Wittgenstein's argument about special language is just what he had in mind when he spoke of "special language", he defines it as: "singular words intended to denote what only the person speaking can know, i.e., his own immediate sensations. Therefore no one else will be able to understand this language" [PI 243], this particular language is explicitly contrary to our ordinary psychological language, and what Wittgenstein raises is whether we can conceive of this language. To answer this question, and thus to focus on the issue posed by Wittgenstein’s observations, I want to look at a discussion of the psychological language spoken by William James in his Principles of Psychology, a text Wittgenstein knew very well and often referred to. In the context of the sources of error in psychology, William James introduced the idea of ideal psychological language, which would be a "special vocabulary of subjective truths", and James may depict this special or exclusive language not related to the objective world, but would record or name the subjective states revealed through something, through purely introspective actions. This idea of James's pure or ideal language of self is not related to the supplies of Cartesian dualism, but to what he believed to be an undeniable feeling of the "evident phenomenological truth" of consciousness. Thus, with the idea that introspection is the method that reveals the essence of the states and sciences to which our psychological expressions refer, he believed that "introspection is what depends first and foremost and always" on it in psychology, because it "reveals states of consciousness"[1] by introspection. This is because James believed that the essence of psychological states is known through introspection, which he believed is purely psychological language devoid of any objective reference; in which words are directly related to the objective actions revealed by introspection. As I mentioned earlier about James’s discussion of ideal psychological language, which relies purely on introspection in the context of revealing the main sources of psychology errors, James complains that our concepts of normal psychological language “were originally taken up by people who were not psychologists, and that most people today employ vocabulary referring exclusively to external objects.” The initial qualities of the sensation light, loud, red, blue, cold, hot are correct, usable in a subjective and objective sense, and indicate the external qualities and sensations they evoke, but the subjective sense is the original sensation, and yet we have to describe a number of sensations by naming the subject we usually get from it, the orange color, the smell of violets, the taste of cheese, the noise, the pain of burning, etc. The problem is that the objectivity of our ordinary psychological language may lead us to incorporate something else into the essence of the internal state that is supposed to explain other than abstract introspection, and thus perhaps to objectively demand language that describes psychological states by introducing elements that are necessarily absent from the internal state itself, which is "self-consciousness from within".[3] James warns us against misleading language "by treating psychological states as external states and talking about them physically, in relation to other facts in the world, as we are talking about external subjects that we have consciously called"[4], and likewise he expressed his concern that our ordinary psychological language might lead us to overlook the nameless psychological phenomena, and what language imposes on the system and structure of these phenomena contrary to what these phenomena actually possess. James believes that this purely subjective language, which ensures a psychology free of these errors, will be an absolutely bodyless language – that is, one that is never related to the objective world – and will be defined entirely on the basis of introspection. James did not explicitly ask the question of whether or not a particular subjective language, which he regrets is absent, can only be understood by the speaker, but I think we can still use it to discuss James in order to focus on the central issue raised by Wittgenstein’s observations on the particular language. What made James assume this ideal psychological language was his sense that it was only by introspection that he realized the essence of special psychological situations. This feeling that we are conscious of meaning, image, idea, etc., based on introspective knowledge of our state is the central root of Wittgenstein's observations on the philosophy of psychology, and we can consider his own observations of language to be the beginning of his revelation of the way in which this introspective picture has influenced the definition of what our psychological concepts are. The idea that introspection is the basis of our understanding of psychological concepts is very self-evident. If the essence of the psychological phenomenon – which distinguishes it from the physical phenomenon – is that it has a phenomenological or subjective face, then surely only the path of introspection reveals this essence. Rejecting the idea that introspection is necessary in perceiving sensation is like rejecting the characteristic subjective nature of sensations, and thus the distinction between the psychological and the material is ambiguous, which is not binary, but simply experienced as any object. There is something like what an object is"[5], which lies in our sense that it comes by introspection or looking inward to understand what our psychological concepts refer to or describe. Wittgenstein himself accepted the attraction of the idea that we discover what our psychological state is based on by constantly observing what happens inside us when we are in a certain state: We tend to take pain as a model. Of course, what puzzles us is not the word, but the nature of the phenomenon, and in order to look at the nature of the phenomenon we have to look closely [WLPP, p. 3 and p. 5]. But he also thought that our intuition here was wrong; introspection, or looking inward, does not provide us with a means by which we can perceive the nature of the supposed psychological state, and therefore, "If you tend to study the state of the headache I feel now in order to illustrate the philosophical problem of sensation, it reveals a fundamental misunderstanding or confusion" [PI 314). It draws attention to the subconscious, to what happens inside me when, for example, I feel pain or suddenly realize the meaning of a word, it cannot tell me what sensation or understanding is. It is not that Wittgenstein wishes to deny the possibility of introspection or that its results may be useful to us, but merely that introspection is not the means of revealing what sensation, thoughts, perceptions, etc. are; nor is it the means of establishing a psychological definition; "introspection can never lead to meaning, only to a psychological state of the introvert" [RPP 1, 212]. Wittgenstein’s idea of achieving clarity with regard to the nature of sensations or thought by describing the use of the words “pain” and “thought” clearly opposes the intuition that only by introspection can we reveal the essence of these phenomena. The idea that the question of “what sensation?” is answered by alerting ourselves “by the kind of sentence we say about the phenomenon” [PI 190], is completely opposed to the belief that the clarification of sensation – or the definition of “feel” – comes about pain, for example, when we feel itself. It is therefore essential in Wittgenstein’s philosophical aims to show that our natural tendency to conceive of introspection as essential to understanding the essence of psychological states is fundamentally wrong. James uses the image of ideal psychological language, called phenomenologically, as an expression of his commitment to the central role of introspection in psychology, which Wittgenstein uses to reveal to us that this idea of psychological language is an illusion. [1] James, W., The Principles of Psychology (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1981). P. 185 [2] Ibid p.193 [3] Ibid p.193–194 [4] Ibid p.196 [5] Nagel, T., ‘What is is like to be a bat? ’, Mortal Questions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979). P. 166 - Mary Magin. - Translated by Reza Zidane. — Source: Brahin Center website - Published 2020-11-11 (archived at the Internet Archive) https://braheen.com/articles/mind-neuroscience/فتجنشتاين-والمنطق-الماكر-محاولة-لفهم-جذور-فلسفات-العقل