William Child

Questions about the self, the use of ‘I’, and the first-person point of view arise throughout Ludwig Wittgenstein's writings. This article explores two interrelated issues. First, what is the function and significance of the first-person pronoun? Second, what is the relation between the first-person point of view — the point of view that each of us has on ourselves, our experiences, and our mental states — and the second- or third-person point of view — the point of view we adopt towards others, their experiences, and their mental states? When ‘I’ is used ‘as object’, Wittgenstein says, ‘the possibility of an error has been provided for’; when ‘I’ is used ‘as subject’, ‘no error is possible’. Wittgenstein has identified a genuine feature of certain self-ascriptions: immunity to error through misidentification. One of Wittgenstein's aims in Philosophical Investigations is to offer an account of the ‘language-game’ of ascribing sensations and attitudes to oneself and others th...

RESUMEN ?En que sentido puede, segun Wittgenstein, presentarse ante una mente el significado de una palabra? Esta cuestion es abordada a la luz de algunos ejemplos poco discutidos. Wittgenstein rechaza una explicacion del fenomeno de que un significado se presente ante una mente en terminos de un doble componente de (a) habilidades mas (b) experiencias conscientes que carecen de contenido intencional intrinseco. Pero no dice sin mas que se trata de un fenomeno basico de la conciencia que no requiere explicacion. Mas bien, hace varias observaciones positivas acerca de lo que sucede cuando el significado se presenta ante una mente, observaciones que buscan iluminar el fenomeno.

Preface Foreword: Some Philosophical Reflections 1. 'Solipsism' in the Tractatus 2. When the Whistling had to Stop 3. Wittgenstein's Builders and Aristotle's Craftsmen 4. Pear's Wittgenstein: Rule-Following, Platonism, and Naturalism 5. Logical Rules, Necessity, and Convention 6. Private Objects, Physical Objects, and Ostension 7. The Reality of Consciousness Index

Autonomie et connaissance de soi. Les questions qu'on peut se poser au sujet de l'autonomie relevent de la controverse entre les conceptions causaliste et non causaliste de l'explication de l'action. Dans cette controverse, certains (p. ex. Wittgenstein) soutiennent que le fait que la connaissance que nous avons de nos raisons est immediate et absolue prouve que ces raisons ne peuvent pas etre les causes des croyances et des actions qu'elles nous servent a expliquer. En effet, la connaissance des causes est une connaissance empirique, laquelle ne saurait etre acquise a la maniere dont nous connaissons nos raisons. Ce chapitre s'oppose a cette facon de voir. Est d'abord avance un modele de la connaissance de soi (derive du meme Wittgenstein) d'apres lequel le fait de s'auto-attribuer une croyance implique la conversion d'un jugement exprimant cette croyance en un jugement qui l'auto-attribue explicitement. Ensuite, ce modele est remodele de facon a lui permettre d'expliquer comment il se fait que nous soyons capables, de maniere fiable et sans effort particulier, de nous auto-attribuer les raisons de nos croyances et de nos actions. Ce modele s'avere propre a rendre compte du caractere immediat de la connaissance de nos raisons tout en restant parfaitement compatible avec l'opinion selon laquelle ces raisons sont des causes.

Richard Moran's rich and rewarding book is concerned with a subject's relation to her own attitudes and emotions, and the asymmetries between that relation and her relation to other people's attitudes and emotions. His strategy is to use a detailed discussion of one case— ...

The contemporary follower of Wittgenstein finds him or herself in a strange position in that Wittgenstein is widely regarded as one of the greatest philosophers of this century and yet the central thrust of his work is emphatically rejected by the current philosophical community. As AC ...

A central theme in Wittgenstein’s post-Tractatus remarks on the limits of language is that we ‘cannot use language to get outside language’.  One illustration of that idea is his comment that, once we have described the procedure of teaching and learning a rule, we have ‘said everything that can be said about acting correctly according to the rule’; ‘we can go no further’.  That, it is argued, is an expression of anti-reductionism about meaning and rules.  A framework is presented for assessing the debate between reductionist and anti-reductionist readings of Wittgenstein’s views about meaning and use.  It is argued that that debate cannot be settled merely by reference to Wittgenstein’s general opposition to reductionism.  An important argument for anti-reductionism about rules and meaning, from Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics, is discussed.  Putative evidence of reductionism about meaning in the Brown Book is considered; an alternative reading is proposed.  The nature of Wittgenstein’s anti-reductionism is examined.  It is argued, first, that Wittgenstein accepts that semantic and normative facts supervene on non-semantic, non-normative facts and, second, that at many points his treatment of meaning and rules goes beyond the kind of pleonastic claim that is often taken to define non-reductionist, quietist, positions in philosophy.

The paper considers three questions about economics, agency, and causal explanation.  First, what is the connection between economics and agency?  It is argued that causation and explanation in economics fundamentally depend on agency; so a philosophical understanding of economic explanation must be sensitive to an understanding of agency.  Second, what is the connection between agency and causation?  A causal view of agency-involving explanation is defended against various arguments from the non-causalist tradition.  If agency is fundamental to economic explanation, it is argued, then so is causation.  Third, what is the connection between causal explanation and the natural sciences?  It is argued that the causal explanations given in economics and other social sciences are different in kind from those of the natural sciences; but the causal relations charted by the social sciences do not float free from the causal relations charted by the natural sciences.

What is the relation between meaning and use?  The paper defends a non-reductionist understanding of Wittgenstein’s suggestion that ‘the meaning of a word is its use in the language’; facts about meaning cannot be reduced to facts about use, characterized non-semantically.  Nonetheless, it is contended, facts about meaning do supervene on non-semantic facts about use.  And, it is argued, this supervenience thesis is consistent with Wittgenstein’s view of meaning and rule-following.  Semantic supervenience is then defended against two criticisms: first, John McDowell’s suggestion that the supervenience thesis falsifies the epistemology of meaning and fails to accommodate common-sense truths about meaning; second, a series of counterexamples proposed by Stephen Kearns and Ofra Magidor, who argue that worlds may differ semantically without differing non-semantically.  It is argued that neither criticism is convincing.  Semantic facts supervene on non-semantic facts.

The paper discusses two aspects of Wittgenstein’s middle-period discussions of the self and the use of ‘I’.  First, it considers the distinction Wittgenstein draws in his 1933 Cambridge lectures between two ‘utterly different’ uses of the word ‘I’.  It is shown that Wittgenstein’s discussion describes a number of different and non-equivalent distinctions between uses of ‘I’.  It is argued that his claims about some of these distinctions are defensible but that his reasoning in other cases is unconvincing.  Second, the paper considers the distinction drawn in the Blue Book between the use of ‘I’ as subject and the use of ‘I’ as object.  A number of commentators have contended that this Blue Book distinction between uses of ‘I’ is erroneous, that Wittgenstein soon realized that, and that he dropped the idea of such a distinction from his later work.  Against those claims, it is argued that Wittgenstein’s distinction between the use of ‘I’ as subject and its use as object is correct and illuminating.  And it is shown that, though we do not find the ‘as-subject’/’as-object’ terminology in Wittgenstein’s subsequent work, the essential point of the Blue Book distinction is not abandoned but remains in place in Philosophical Investigations.

Wittgenstein’s philosophy involves a general anti-platonism about properties or standards of similarity.  On his view, what it is for one thing to have the same property as another is not dictated by reality itself; it depends on our classificatory practices and the standards of similarity they embody.  Wittgenstein’s anti-platonism plays an important role in the private language sections and in his discussion of the conceptual problem of other minds.  In sharp contrast to Wittgenstein’s views stands the contemporary doctrine of natural properties, which holds that there is an objective hierarchy of naturalness amongst properties, a hierarchy that is completely independent of our concepts or practices.  Some authors have appealed to the natural properties view to offer an explicitly anti-Wittgensteinian account of sensation concepts. The paper discusses these competing views of properties and sensation concepts. It is argued that, if our account of concepts of conscious states starts from a commitment to natural properties, we are bound to recognize that our actual classificatory practices also play a crucial role in determining which properties our concepts pick out.  On the other hand, if we start from the anti-platonist position, we are bound to recognize that we also need a notion of sameness of property that extends beyond our limited capacity to recognize similarity or sameness of property.  The correct view, it is concluded, must occupy a middle position between an extreme anti-realism about properties and an extreme version of the natural properties view. It is suggested that Wittgenstein’s own view does just that.

Wittgenstein writes: ‘The question can be raised: Is a state that I recognize on the basis of someone’s utterances really the same as the state he does not recognize this way?’ (Wittgenstein, Last Writings on Philosophy of Psychology, 8-9).  Donald Davidson raises the same question: ‘If the mental states of others are known only through their behavioural and other outward manifestations, while this is not true of our own mental states, why should we think our own mental states are anything like those of others?’ (Davidson, ‘Three Varieties of Knowledge’, 207).  And Davidson criticizes ‘Wittgensteinian’ accounts of our mental terms and concepts for failing to address the question.  It is argued that Davidson’s own account of the asymmetry between first-person and third-person ascriptions of mental predicates itself fails to explain all that Davidson seems to suggest.  And it is argued, contrary to many interpretations of Wittgenstein, that the question whether mental terms are univocal in their first-person and third-person uses is from a Wittgensteinian point of view legitimate and non-trivial. It is to be answered by achieving a reflective understanding of our practice of ascribing mental properties to ourselves and others – rather than by reference to supposedly more basic metaphysical facts about the sameness or difference of the properties our terms pick out.  This approach is explained and defended.

Part 1 of this paper sketches Wittgenstein’s opposition to scientism in general.  Part 2 explores his opposition to scientism in philosophy focusing, in particular, on philosophy of mind; how must philosophy of mind proceed if it is to avoid the kind of scientism that Wittgenstein complains about?  Part 3 examines a central anti-scientistic strand in Wittgenstein’s Last Writings on the Philosophy of Psychology volume II: his treatment of the ‘uncertainty’ of the relation between ‘outer’ behaviour and ‘inner’ experiences and mental states.

What light does Wittgenstein's philosophy throw on the idea that there are phenomenal concepts: distinctive ways of thinking of experiences or sensations that can be grasped only by those who know what it is like to have those experiences or sensations?  The paper argues for the unorthodox view that acceptance of phenomenal concepts is compatible with a Wittgensteinian view of sensations.  In particular,  the view that there are phenomenal concepts does not commit us to the possibility of a private sensation language.  It does not commit us to any kind of imagism about thought, or to the idea that we observe our own sensations.  And it is compatible with Wittgenstein’s approach to the individuation of concepts.

Donald Davidson offers an explanation of first person authority that “traces the source of the authority to a necessary feature of the interpretation of speech”.  His account is explained, and an interpretation is offered of its two key ingredients: the idea that, by using the device of disquotation, a speaker can state the meanings of her words in a specially error-free way; and the idea that a speaker cannot generally misuse her own words, because it is that use which gives her words their meaning.  The account is defended against misinterpretations and criticisms.  But it is argued that Davidson does not explain what is most puzzling about our knowledge of the meanings of our words, or about the asymmetry between our knowledge of our own minds and our knowledge of others’ minds.  Finally, Davidson’s argument for the compatibility of first person authority and semantic externalism is explained and defended.

""It is a central feature of so-called ‘new’ readings of Wittgenstein that they find in the Tractatus an absence of positive philosophical doctrines, a kind of quietism, and an explicitly therapeutic approach that have traditionally been associated with Wittgenstein’s later philosophy.  Seen from the perspective of a ‘new’ reader, this reveals ‘a novel kind of continuity’ in Wittgenstein’s thought.  Seen from the perspective of a ‘traditional’ reader, it involves reading back into the Tractatus elements that properly belong to Wittgenstein’s later work.  I want to explore the justice of this complaint in connection with a recent argument of Cora Diamond’s, that the Tractatus contains a private language argument: an argument to the effect that private objects in other people's minds can play no role in the language I use for talking about their sensations. 
    The argument Diamond finds in the Tractatus is not the private language argument of Philosophical Investigations.  But the appearance of such an argument in Wittgenstein’s early writings, she thinks, brings out important elements of continuity in his work: it challenges the orthodox idea that ‘the topic of privacy’ is distinctively ‘a topic of Wittgenstein’s later philosophy’, that its appearance in the later work is ‘indicative of a shift in Wittgenstein’s philosophical interests to topics within the philosophy of mind, not of interest to him in the Tractatus’, and that ‘his treatment of this topic [is] an illustration of the fundamental shifts in his overall philosophical position’ (262).  And the ‘Tractatus private language argument’, Diamond thinks, is important not only for our understanding of the development of Wittgenstein's philosophy but also for the discussion of realism and anti-realism more generally, ‘especially as that discussion has been shaped by Michael Dummett’ (284). 
    My paper has three parts.  In part 1, I challenge Diamond’s interpretation on internal grounds.  To find a private language argument in the Tractatus, I argue, we would have to read Tractarian doctrines about naming and use in ways that might, indeed, be suggested by Wittgenstein’s later writings but which are entirely absent from the earlier work.  In part 2, I discuss the account of sensation language that Wittgenstein offered in 1929, and argue that it poses a prima facie challenge to ‘new’ readings of the Tractatus.  Part 3 explores the relation between the Tractatus and Dummettian realism.  I defend Dummett’s suggestion that the Tractatus embodies a form of semantic realism against Diamond’s arguments, and show the helpfulness of Dummett’s framework in reflecting on the nature of Tractarian analysis.""

Many of the classic writings on the causal theory of vision date from a period when it was taken for granted that the business of philosophy was conceptual analysis, and that philosophical theories are to be assessed by purely a priori reasoning. Philosophers nowadays tend to reject that conception of philosophy. How (if at all) and in what form does the causal theory of vision survive that change? This chapter is organized as follows. Part 1 responds to an objection raised by Helen Steward against some earlier work by the author on the causal theory of vision; she suggests that that account ‘forsake[s] the idea at the heart of the causal theory that causality is something conceptually (and not merely empirically) central to seeing'. Part 2 considers the objection that the causal thesis cannot be part of the ordinary concept of vision, since it is perfectly possible for someone to grasp the ordinary concept without accepting that seeing something involves being causally affected by it. Part 3 reflects on the causal theory of vision in the light of psychological work on causal understanding. What light does experimental work on the origin and nature of causal thinking cast on the question, whether our ordinary thought about vision is a form of causal thinking?

Questions about the self, the use of ‘I’, and the first-person point of view arise throughout Ludwig Wittgenstein's writings. This article explores two interrelated issues. First, what is the function and significance of the first-person pronoun? Second, what is the relation between the first-person point of view — the point of view that each of us has on ourselves, our experiences, and our mental states — and the second- or third-person point of view — the point of view we adopt towards others, their experiences, and their mental states? When ‘I’ is used ‘as object’, Wittgenstein says, ‘the possibility of an error has been provided for’; when ‘I’ is used ‘as subject’, ‘no error is possible’. Wittgenstein has identified a genuine feature of certain self-ascriptions: immunity to error through misidentification. One of Wittgenstein's aims in Philosophical Investigations is to offer an account of the ‘language-game’ of ascribing sensations and attitudes to oneself and others that does justice to both first-person and third-person aspects of the mental, while avoiding the twin extremes of Cartesian introspectionism, on the one hand, and behaviourism, on the other.

The paper considers Wittgenstein’s account of our capacity to remember our earlier intentional states and properties.  It is argued that Wittgenstein takes a broadly realist view of such memory.  That interpretation is defended in the light of discussions of two elements that might seem to suggest a form of anti-realism: his attitude towards the counterfactual, ‘Had you asked me at the time, I would have said so-and-so’; and his suggestion that the comment, ‘I meant the piano-tuning’, may make the connection between my earlier remark and its object rather than, or as well as, reporting a connection that already existed.

In a number of passages, Wittgenstein suggests that we can make perfectly good sense of ascriptions of thoughts and sensations that we have no means of verifying: thoughts and feelings that not only are not but could not be manifested in behaviour. But such ascriptions, he thinks, make sense only against a background of cases where we can tell what people are thinking and feeling.  How, exactly, does Wittgenstein think that the intelligibility of cases in which someone cannot manifest her thoughts depends on the existence of cases where thoughts are expressed?  The paper distinguishes three different accounts of that dependence.  It is argued that there are signs of each of these accounts in Wittgenstein; that Wittgenstein himself does not clearly favour one of these accounts over the others; but that, as a philosophical view, one of the accounts is definitely preferable to the others.