Journal of PhilosoPhical research Volume 33, 2008 PICTURES, PRIVACY, AUGUSTINE, ANd THE MINd: A UNITY IN WITTGENSTEIN'S PHILOSOPHICAL INVESTIGATIONS DEREK A. McDOUGALL affiliation? ABSTRAcT: this paper weaves together a number of separate strands each relating to an aspect of Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations. the first strand introduces his radical and incoherent idea of a private object. Wittgenstein in § 258 and related passages is not investigating a perfectly ordinary notion of first person privacy; but his critics have treated his question, whether a private language is possible, solely in terms of their quite separate question of how our ordinary sensation terms can be understood, in a philosophical context, to acquire meaning. Yet it is no part of his intention to demonstrate logically that ordinary sensations are not intrinsically meaningful. this is a tempting yet misleading picture, the picture also expressed through the idea of augustine's child who is conceptually articulate prior to learning how to talk. this picture lies behind the born Crusoe, an idea at the centre of the dichotomy between language as essentially shared and essentially shareable, a dichotomy considered here to result from a misconception of two quite separate but related aspects of Wittgenstein's treatment of following a rule. the notion of a misleading picture, in both its pre-theoretical and philosophical aspects, also plays a crucial role in a treatment of Saul Kripke's well-known "Postscript: Wittgenstein and other Minds." I. WITTGENSTEIN'S MULTIFAcETED "PIcTURES" he evolution of the higher animals and of man, and the awakening of consciousness at a particular level. the picture is something like this: though T 34 DEREK A. McDOUGALL the ether is filled with vibrations the world is dark. But one day man opens his seeing eye, and there is light. What this language primarily describes is a picture. What is to be done with the picture, how it is to be used, is still obscure. Quite clearly, however, it must be explored if we want to understand the sense of what we are saying. But the picture seems to spare us this work: it already points to a particular use. that is how it takes us in.1 this passage provides a perfect illustration of one aspect of Wittgenstein's method in his later work: it shows him capturing the purest expression of an idea in its most concise form, in this case the idea of consciousness as something set over against behaviour, something which might lie either behind it or might not, an idea which is presented here as an almost inevitable accompaniment of our reflections on the evolution of thought in the higher animals and in man. it might also be taken for granted that in presenting this picture he is implicitly subjecting it to criticism; and whilst from one perspective there is certainly a reason for saying that this would not be incorrect, it would also from another standpoint be highly misleading. for, insofar as the picture occurs to us only as a perfectly harmless accompaniment of our talk about consciousness, or about the feelings or sensations of others, the question of its being a correct or incorrect representation does not arise; for that question would presuppose that the picture has a useful role to perform. Problems only arise when, as Wittgenstein puts it, we look into ourselves when we do philosophy and see such a picture, for it can then appear to take on the function of what he calls a full blown pictorial representation of our grammar.2 and this implies that we can then be prepared to take our philosophical understanding in this field of investigation to rest in our apparent application of the picture, rather than in an unbiassed assessment of the circumstances in which our expressions pertaining to consciousness, and to the sensations of others, are actually used. that, indeed, is why Wittgenstein so often asks of the picture, "What is its application?"3 in doing so he is denying, not that we can talk unreflectively yet meaningfully in these terms, but that we can give pictorial representations of this kind a special and relevant kind of application within a philosophical context. the point is at the heart of his philosophy. it is reflected, for example, in the statement that it is in the grammar of our talk about the mental that any distinction between the mental and the physical, or between what is private and what is public, can be discovered; and this inevitably implies that whatever meaning these distinctions can have results not from the deliverances of metaphysical reflection, but from the circumstances in which these distinctions in practice actually find their home. from any traditional philosophical perspective, this cannot be an easy point to grasp. Consequently, this aspect of Wittgenstein's notion of a picture will form one of my central themes. at the same time, it can give rise to misunderstandings when commentators reflect on his talk of the mental: either his denial that the picture can be given a philosophical application is taken, with his idea of behaviour as an expression of what is inner, to constitute some familiar form of behaviourism; or his PICTURES, PRIVACY, AUGUSTINE, ANd THE MINd 35 insistence on the importance of the circumstances in which the relevant expressions are employed is construed as an expression of some current form of anti-realism. Both of these reactions4 only serve to illustrate how criticisms of his work, precisely because of the originality of its outlook, can so often embody those philosophical presuppositions it is his intention to expose. Clarification of this point, particularly in relation to the admirably clear, popular and influential reading by Saul Kripke,5 will also form a central aspect of the following discussion. Yet the idea of a picture is given many different kinds of application by Wittgenstein within the context of the Philosophical Investigations. in the paragraph immediately preceding his discussion of consciousness and evolution, for example, he says: "the mind seems able to give a word meaning"-isn't this as if i were to say "the carbon atoms in benzene seem to lie at the corners of a hexagon"? But this is not something that seems to be so; it is a picture.6 in this case, however, in complete contrast to the picture of the awakening of consciousness, it is clear that the diagrammatic representation of the molecular structure of benzene in a geometrical pattern is performing a useful role for the chemist; and here the proper function of the picture is not determined in any respect by whether a sense can be granted to saying that benzene molecules really look like that. Similarly, a plan of a city's metro serves a useful purpose not because it offers a geographically accurate representation of a complex rail system, but because a simplified geometrical layout makes it easier to study when planning a journey. on the other hand, that "the mind seems able to give a word meaning," whilst surely a figurative expression, is not a picture which Wittgenstein would normally be understood to treat as useful at all. indeed, he would usually be understood to see it as positively misleading. Generally speaking, when Wittgenstein draws attention to a picture, it is a picture that hinders rather than helps our understanding of a particular philosophical problem. More often than not, he implies that the picture not only obstructs a clear view of the problem to be explored, but-in one of the most quoted passages in the secondary literature-is itself instrumental in creating it: "a picture held us captive. and we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably."7 as an important part of his philosophical method, but requiring considerably more than the usual degree of reader participation, Wittgenstein also uses pictures that from his perspective have only an apparent philosophical application, yet which are presented as having a genuine use: here the reader is invited to consider a proposal with the intention of discovering its inherent vacuity, appearing nevertheless as a pictorial representation illustrating an apparently genuine possibility. this is particularly clear in §272, where nobody knows whether other people have this, the private object, or something else, so that one section of mankind could have one sensation of red and another section another.8 in §271, there is an invitation to imagine the man who cannot retain what the word "pain" means, where identification with a private item is idle in relation to the proper use of the term. in 36 DEREK A. McDOUGALL §293, everyone is allowed to have a private beetle that no one else can know about, a proposal seemingly easy to imagine, yet instantly dissolving in vacuity because it is irrelevant to how the word "beetle" is used. Similarly, in §258, perhaps the most famous passage in the Investigations, the reader is asked to consider a diary serving the purpose of recording the occurrence of a sensation, in circumstances which undermine the very possibility of the application of the corresponding sensation term, so that from Wittgenstein's perspective what is being pursued here is a Will-o-the-wisp. in §270, the perfectly respectable correlation of a sensation's occurrence with a manometer reading is apparently undermined by the invitation to consider that it makes no real difference whether the sensation is identified correctly, when it is precisely the notion of correct or incorrect identification that in cases of this kind can have no application.9 these examples can all be regarded as illustrations conforming to Wittgenstein's intention, in §464, of teaching his readers to pass from a piece of disguised to patent nonsense. all those principal sections of the Investigations which have most attracted commentators also have their corresponding pictures: the notion of learning a language as presupposing the possession of a "language" in what has come to be known as the augustinian picture (§§1–32 and beyond), the notion of "rules as rails" stretching to infinity associated with rule following (usually taken as §§143–242), and "the picture of the pain" with our attribution of sensations to both ourselves and to others (usually §§243–315). the important feature in all these cases is once again that in a philosophical context there is a latent tendency, as Wittgenstein presents it, to misconstrue the significance of the picture, to take our understanding in the appropriate field of investigation to consist in the "application" of the picture. this inevitably gives rise to what from one point of view are problems of a uniquely philosophical kind, but from another-as prominently illustrated in the range of passages §§89–133 largely bearing on the nature of philosophy itself-are the confusions from which, having attained an alteration in perspective, a puzzled, tormented or distracted reader can be released. in the augustinian picture, there is not merely the conflation of "meaning" and "naming" to which Wittgenstein points, leading to a neglect of the rich diversity of word function within diverse language games, but the more fundamental problem that, on this picture, the real work of concept formation would appear to have already been done, so that, for example, all that may remain on this rather primitive conception is to attach words, as labels, to items already recognisable as belonging to different kinds. in the case of the "rules as rails" analogy, there is the problem that any course of action can be made out to accord with some rule or other, and in the "picture of the pain," there is the inevitable problem of other minds consequent upon the inability to "apply," in a philosophical context, a certain picture other than to one's self. i shall not be giving each of these pictures equal prominence. if anything, i shall be saying more about the third than the first, and more about the first than the second; but all will have occasion to make an appearance in the course of the discussion. if PICTURES, PRIVACY, AUGUSTINE, ANd THE MINd 37 i choose not to say too much about the second, it is not only because i have little to add to one of the principal subjects of discussion in the secondary literature over many years,10 beyond stressing that Wittgenstein's aim is not to replace truth conditions by assertibility conditions, but rather to describe the grammar of truth conditions,11 which is a point that can be shown to emerge clearly in respect of "the picture of the pain." an important feature of this picture, which it shares with the picture of "rules as rails," but not with the augustinian picture, is that the problem to which it gives rise is normally seen to have a distinctly sceptical twist. in these cases, an ideal would appear to be set that for one reason or another we are quite unable to attain. in the one case, there are the missing "facts" which, if only we had them at our disposal, would justify the application of the rule, and in the other, there is the direct access to the feelings of others, which would finally allow the attribution of sensations to them as well as to one's self. But it is equally characteristic of these cases, not simply that the ideal is set too high to be attained, but that there is nothing in which its being attained could even be taken to consist: there could not be, on pain of Platonism,12 any "facts" of the required kind to justify the application of a rule, any more than i could peer, on pain of contradiction, directly into the mind of another person in order to become directly acquainted with his "inner states." Yet these conditions would seem to encapsulate a picture already set down in our philosophical thinking as the sole repository containing what it means to make the appropriate statements in the relevant field of discourse. Yet, whilst that picture is inherently realist in a philosophical sense, it is one for which we cannot, for obvious, reasons find any genuine philosophical application. Consequently, and this is the essential feature of Kripke's so-called anti-realist response, we have to opt for a form of retrenchment, a "solution" to the sceptical problem that allows the circumstances in which people make the appropriate assertions, or the roles performed by them in their lives, to override any sense that the required "facts" have got the better of us; for on what has come to be known as "the community view" of rule following, or on the view that we act first to aid someone in pain and ask the philosophical questions later on, it turns out that there was never any real intention to affirm what the hypothetical sceptic, as a philosophical device, appears to deny. it is because we cannot harbour that conception that, in Kripke's realist/anti-realist terminology, continued into his "other Minds" Postscript, the truth conditions determined by the "facts" in each case are replaced by assertion conditions detailing the role and utility in our lives of certain ways of acting and re-acting.13 this view, as Kripke presents it, is actually a great deal more subtle than many commentators have given it credit for, because there are places where it almost seems to present us with something akin to the real Wittgenstein. But even where the difference between Kripke and Wittgenstein seems balanced on a knifeedge, what properly differentiates Kripke's account from a correct assessment lies in Wittgenstein's response to the picture, which is all along controlling the need to issue a sceptical denial of what would appear to be implied by the philosophically realist account of our ordinary assertions: 38 DEREK A. McDOUGALL Certainly all these things happen in you.-and now all i ask is to understand the expressions we use.-the picture is there. and i am not disputing its validity in any particular case.-only i want to understand the application of the picture.14 the problems once again arise from a philosophical misconstrual of the significance of the picture. Wittgenstein characteristically points out that in one way the picture of "rules as rails" or "the picture of the pain" are alright, but they have no applications except insofar as they accompany our talk about following a rule or about being in pain: here again the picture acts as a full-blown pictorial representation of our grammar.15 Suppose i happen to query whether the stabbing pain in the knee i have now has the same "qualitative feel" as the stabbing pain that you have. if the temptation is to ask "How could we ever know?" then that is already a misconstrual of the picture that attempts to give it a special philosophical application. But, of course, the idea that there are such special philosophical applications is in Wittgenstein's terms an illusion. to ask, as he so often does, for an application of the picture is a way of illustrating that our understanding that we both have the same stabbing pain is not grounded in "the picture of the pain." Consequently, the special philosophical role of the picture disappears, and with it the distinction between truth conditions and assertibility conditions, since that distinction was based on giving the "picture of the pain" that very special role which led in philosophy to our inability to give the notion of another's pain any application. II. WITTGENSTEIN'S cONcEPTION OF PRIVAcY AND ITS cONSEQUENcES the primary characteristic of this special role in the case of statements about sensations is that the sensations themselves become intrinsically private objects that, at least theoretically, could be "named" in an intrinsically private language. Stewart Candlish remarks, in his very concise survey of the entire private language question, that this single presentation in §258 of the Investigations as ever remains contentious, that every reading of it, including his own, is "controversial," and that "there has been fundamental and widespread disagreement over its details, its significance, and even its intended conclusion, let alone its soundness."16 Whilst Candlish's pessimistic report cannot be judged an unrealistic account of the general lack of consensus even today in the secondary literature about the true meaning of §258, there is nevertheless a better way of appreciating its significance: not by treating it, as it has so often been regarded, as a self-contained argument of a fairly traditional kind,17 but by allying it to a range of passages, including §§270–280 and §293, the famous "beetle in the box," where the primary notion of the private object itself comes under scrutiny. it has already been shown that Wittgenstein in these passages gives his notion of a private object its own pictorial representation in a form that allows his point about this radical notion of privacy to be appreciated, whilst revealing that it lacks any sense: there is nothing that could count as an example of someone who forgets PICTURES, PRIVACY, AUGUSTINE, ANd THE MINd 39 what the word "pain" means yet at the same time uses it in accordance with the normal presuppositions of its application (§271), any more than there is anything that could count as an example of a word like "beetle" that had a proper use in the language to talk about a sensation of a particular kind enjoyed by most individual speakers, yet which might be different in character on different occasions, or which might even be absent from their individual "boxes" whenever they could properly be said to be experiencing it (§293). in the same way, because it does not make sense to talk of recognising or identifying our sensations, it is a consequence of the model, in which they would have to be identified correctly if they were to be talked about at all, that there is nothing that could count as a case of regularly identifying it wrongly and its making no difference in the example where checking the manometer reading on its occurrence confirms a predicted rise in blood-pressure (§270). This model is precisely that of the private object: contrary to the interpretations of this passage by Wilson and Hunter already discussed, once the model is abandoned i am perfectly free to say, for example, that every time i have a sharp pain in the knee my blood pressure rises, but that that every time i have a dull pain in the foot my blood pressure falls, where temporarily forgetting the proper correlation could indeed result in making a false prediction about rising or falling blood pressure.18 this passage, §270, is just a corollary of the seems right is right statement in §258 because on this inapplicable model identifying wrongly and its making no intelligible difference is really equivalent to saying that there can be no conceivable achievement of getting it either right or wrong at all. the conclusion to be drawn from this is that the notion of a private object, as illustrated in these passages, is already so defined that there is nothing in which conferring meaning on a sign in a private language in which signs were in some way correlated with these private objects could even consist. But is that all there is for Wittgenstein to the question of a private language? the fundamental distinction that must be drawn here is that between someone who is master of a public language and someone-the private linguist as an expository device-who has the (incoherent) task of conferring meaning on his own private world. the task is incoherent because it makes no sense to talk of inventing language without presupposing possession of a language,19 where a language in this context is intended to reflect the conceptual resources required in the "private" situation of, say, the 20th century empiricist. Wittgenstein's answer to this form of empiricism is that the empiricist cannot avoid beginning from sensations that are already sensations of particular kinds, but in doing so, he loses the right to claim that his language can be intrinsically private in any interesting sense, because the private object model cannot have an application to anything we could remotely understand to be sensation language. if this point has not been fully appreciated by some of his critics, it is because they simply fail to grasp how radical his notion of privacy is. as a consequence they take him to be evidently denying what to them is transparently true, viz., that surely we can identity and re-identify our sensations. these philosophers then take for granted that the problem in the "private" situation 40 DEREK A. McDOUGALL is easily solved if it is assumed that our sensations have representational content, so that labels attached to them can then acquire meaning through association. this, however, is the very assumption Wittgenstein questions in §244 by turning the investigation around and asking how our sensation terms in a public context come to acquire meaning. the private object model is therefore a device revealing that "the language only i can understand" is nonsensical: identification and re-identification as the same object has to establish meaning when criteria determining discovery of error in identifying the "sensation" already require the presence of meaning, the point of the famous dictum that whatever seems right is right. no private object ever could achieve classification as an object of a particular kind, a corollary of the claim that no meaning rule of any private language could be sustained by private ostensive definition. this follows necessarily, not from any scepticism about memory, or from the lack of "public criteria" of application, but from the properties of the internally incoherent model. Consequently, if the empiricist is to be granted his intrinsically meaningful sensations, they cannot then be radically private.20 Wittgenstein's real objection to empiricism is then that it is pointless. III. AYER ON PRIVATE LANGUAGE- AN EMPIRIcIST ALTERNATIVE to view Wittgenstein's reflections on the viability of a private language in this light, with its emphasis on the proposal that we do not identify and recognise our sensations, already helps to explain why this is a perspective which his detractors find it very difficult to share. Saul Kripke's approach to this question, for example, consists in querying what has come to be known as The Private Language Argument on the grounds that he must be in pretty bad shape if he needs external help in the way of public criteria in order to recognise or identify his own sensations or inner states.21 Certainly, Kripke takes his new interpretation of The Private Language Argument bearing on §§143–203 to somewhat override these considerations of his "previous self"; but i would contend that they still manage to play a significant role in his thinking throughout his later other Minds Postscript. this is also confirmed by Kripke's discussion at this point in the footnote referred to of the famous debate between ayer and Rhees22 on the original private language question-a debate i will turn to later on-giving the victory very much to ayer, because ayer firmly operates with the model of an inner world of sensations as objects contrasting with an outer world of material objects, the picture which in the most general terms is in question throughout those relevant passages in the Investigations. for ayer, sensation or sense-data statements23 are incorrigible or conclusively verifiable in terms of the correct application of a semantical rule of the sense-datum language, as distinct from material object statements which are always hostages to fortune insofar as no statement of this kind can ever be conclusively verifiable just because it is always open to falsification in the light of further empirical evidence. PICTURES, PRIVACY, AUGUSTINE, ANd THE MINd 41 ayer's treatment of what has become known as the Private Language Argument is interesting in its own right, because the reasons he gives for rejecting the argument, on his interpretation, are directly related to how he takes sensation language to acquire meaning. in his original discussion, he claims that Wittgenstein's conclusions are based on two assumptions, both of which he believes to be false. the first of these is that it is "logically impossible" to understand a sign unless one can observe something with which the object that it signifies is naturally associated, and secondly that "for a person to attach meaning to a sign it is necessary that other people should be capable of understanding it too."24 ayer's original aim in his famous paper is to show that, in order to understand a statement about other people's feelings, it is not necessary that one should have direct acquaintance with them, or that in order to understand a statement about the past, it is not necessary that one should have direct access to the past event. if this can be shown, he argues, it will not then be necessary to reduce statements about other people's sensations to statements about their behaviour, or statements about the past to statements about the present or future. But for Wittgenstein having that aim is wholly dependent on being party to the philosophically realist picture that is already serving to condition ayer's search for a solution to a problem that itself arises only from a confusion. abandoning the picture in a philosophical context is Wittgenstein's first step in his attempt to turn the whole investigation around by finding a completely new direction from which to think about sensations, the mental and "other minds." it is, therefore, because ayer implicitly cleaves to the philosophically realist picture that he understands Wittgenstein's account of how a child learns how to use the word "pain," in Investigations §244, as an account totally irrelevant to its meaning. on ayer's view, meaning is instead acquired through an act of what he later calls primary recognition. on this point ayer has become representative of a certain way of looking at the problems surrounding the idea of a private language, and many others have followed him in an approach that essentially involves a complete misconstrual of Wittgenstein's intentions.25 indeed, it is because of this misconstrual that ayer later came to express his misgivings about the first assumption by making the ostensibly weaker claim that Wittgenstein wrongly takes the meaning of words to be tied "indissolubly" to the contexts in which they are originally learned.26 His main point is that even if he in fact learnt the meaning of the word "pain" as a child because he behaved in ways that his elders took to be characteristic of its expression, he would still wish to claim that, when ascribing pain to himself, he is referring to the feeling and not to its outward effects. that terms for sensations can then derive their meanings directly from association with the feelings themselves on ayer's account is a matter that will be shortly be considered. the second assumption that ayer attributes to Wittgenstein, he takes himself to have adequately refuted by concluding "that for a person to use descriptive language meaningfully it is not necessary that any other person should understand him."27 But this is clearly to equivocate between one person's being capable of being 42 DEREK A. McDOUGALL understood by another in fact, and his being capable of being understood by another in principle, and there is nothing in ayer's original argument to show that he is concerned with an intrinsically private language in which the very possibility of one person's ever being understood by another would be incoherent; yet it is only on such an interpretation that, from Wittgenstein's point of view, the notion that one person could not in principle understand another's private language could be at all relevant. ayer in fact concedes the point in a later discussion when he freely disclaims any attempt to introduce a language which it is "logically impossible" for anyone but the speaker to understand, agreeing with Wittgenstein's "claim that there can be no such language."28 nevertheless, the motivations that earlier prompted a rejection of Wittgenstein's conclusion in §258 remain: the view which i am attributing to him is that it would not be possible to frame concepts only on the basis of one's own experience; if the signs in which such concepts were supposed to be embodied constituted a "private language" in this sense, they would not have any meaning for their author himself.29 But a private language "in this sense" demonstrably fails, as ayer admits, to be an intrinsically private language in the sense that Wittgenstein denied, nor would it be a language that Wittgenstein would necessarily have claimed to be impossible, rather considering its very introduction to be nothing but a pointless undertaking. ayer gives the game away with characteristic lucidity in his final discussion of this question where he provides his most succinct presentation of what primary recognition is, occurring in a reply to David Pears about the understanding and interpretation of "meaning-rules": the recognition consists in treating whatever it may be as an instance of its kind, as being "the same" as a previous specimen which, if no label has yet been applied to it, may itself be remembered simply as being, in a more or less shadowy context, the same as this. if the kind has been labelled, the disposition to apply the same label enters into the process of recognition; and here it must not be forgotten that the labels themselves have to be recognised.30 But this reveals ayer not to be attempting the incoherent task of conferring a meaning on a sign in a vacuum, incoherent because it has already been established that one cannot begin from sensations that are not already stipulated to be sensations of particular kinds, but to be actually acknowledging Wittgenstein's point by literally describing a procedure of attaching a label to a sensation antecedently recognisable as a sensation of a particular kind, and from which by association-Pears tentatively suggests "ostensive definition" in the paper to which ayer replies-we are to presume that the label acquires meaning. So what ayer is offering here is the idea that our sensations are intrinsically meaningful. But that our sensations might be thought to be "intrinsically meaningful," in some legitimate philosophical sense, independently of the circumstances in which we come to understand what it is to attribute sensations both to ourselves and to others is the hub around which for Wittgenstein all those questions he asks about PICTURES, PRIVACY, AUGUSTINE, ANd THE MINd 43 our attribution of sensations actually revolve. it is hardly surprising, therefore, that, from Wittgenstein's point of view, all that ayer effectively does here is present himself with a gift of one aspect of our ordinary sensation talk, namely the criterionless aspect of first person sensation ascription-in which we do not, as we manifestly do in third person sensation ascription, identify or recognise others as having sensations according to criteria-whilst totally divorcing it from the actual circumstances in which people talk about sensations in a public context. What the empiricist requires in order to get his construction under way, the notion of experience as inherently conceptual, is the very thing Wittgenstein ultimately abandons with his idea of training into a practice. Consequently, it is this criterionless aspect of sensation talk, disguised by ayer's terminology of incorrigibility and conclusive verifiability, that Wittgenstein would take ayer to be misconstruing in using it to form the basis for his distinction between statements about identified or recognised sense-data and statements about material objects. far therefore from inventing a language of sensations contravening the principles underlying Wittgenstein's discussion in §258, set in the context of a discussion with Pears in which the subject is ostensibly the "Cartesian original position," what ayer does from Wittgenstein's standpoint is give himself the benefit of a language from the beginning, one that is already parasitic on our ordinary sensation talk. Certainly, for ayer's purposes, since judgements of colour are not made according to criteria, a "sensation" of red rather than pain would, for ayer, form a more appropriate candidate for his empiricist construction of the world when he goes on to explain that his concept of primary recognition is "the indispensable foundation on which all significant use and understanding of language is built";31 but Wittgenstein's relevant principle is totally different: red is already the red of that bus, or of that shoe. the notion of a private exhibition of red is part of the picture underlying that very tendency to talk about sensations as items that are recognised or identified.32 there is a certain ambivalence here in ayer's notion of privacy, an ambivalence he either fails to recognise or disregards, because his understanding of his sensations as private in a philosophically interesting sense where they perform his required epistemological and semantical roles, is already partly derived from our having a perfectly ordinary notion of privacy consequent upon a day-to-day distinction between third and first person use. this ordinary notion inherent in our language of pain, and misconstrued in empiricist treatments of the criterionless ascription of colour, is what for Wittgenstein really lies behind those common tendencies to write meaning into the empiricist's notion of "immediate experience." these points also find their expression in the principle that where doubt or certainty does not arise, where the question of recognising or identifying a sensation can have no application, then talk of knowledge is senseless. Consequently, what for ayer can act as a solid foundation for the construction of the empirical world can for Wittgenstein be no more than a reflection of our grammar, pointing to how our sensation language actually functions in a day-to-day context.33 this difference of emphasis illustrates how ayer's central presuppositions act in predisposing him to 44 DEREK A. McDOUGALL treat those sections of the Investigations in the way that he does. the role granted by ayer to his notion of primary recognition as a source of meaning, for example, reflects a confidence in his ability to identify and re-identify a particular sensation, which just is the confidence of someone who has in practice mastered the use of a word like "pain," masquerading in ayer's ambivalently "private" guise. Yet throughout his discussion of Wittgenstein on private language, ayer indirectly exposes the very important point that there is nothing in §258 or anywhere else in the Investigations that logically precludes his introduction of a private language "in this sense," a point that not only underscores the apparent viability of this way of looking at things, but lends a certain irony to remarks like those of Scott Soames that "[n]othing in the Investigations rules out the possibility that perception provides the agent with representational content."34 not being ruled out is precisely why Wittgenstein sees this as such a tempting way to proceed, why it is treated so often as a game there is a real point in playing. Yet if it were thought that this is to concede to ayer more than is required, the answer is that Wittgenstein's aim is to discover what makes a picture so attractive that it should serve to provide the investigation with an approach that for philosophers like ayer, Blackburn, Wilson, Kripke's early self, and Soames, cannot in any respect appear even remotely open to question. But what ayer is doing here is better understood as an illustration of a feature central to Wittgenstein's thinking that lies at the heart of the second misleading picture to which i wish to give prominence. IV. ROBINSON cRUSOE, LEARNING A LANGUAGE, AND "THE AUGUSTINIAN PIcTURE" in his original debate with Rhees, ayer uses his notion of primary recognition, although he most probably did not call it that at the time, as the principal weapon placed in the hands of the famous Robinson Crusoe nurtured by a wolf as a child before he has learned to speak, and who, as he begins to fend for himself and grows to manhood, recognises many different things on his island insofar as he adapts his behaviour towards them. the primary reason for introducing Crusoe, who has continued to enjoy a very distinguished career in the secondary literature, is again to illustrate how a lone individual could frame concepts based on his own experiences. ayer's Crusoe distinguishes between the different kinds of flora and fauna on his island as a prelude to naming them; and whilst making some mistakes in identification like picking out a bird of one type when it is actually of another type, a mistake rectified both by the use of his memory and classificatory skills, he is finally able to make himself master of all he surveys. at the same time, he is able to invent words to stand for his sensations, which he can equally misidentify-and here the assumption must be that such mistakes are purely verbal-but luckily the same corrective procedures come into play. the story ends with the arrival of Man friday, to whom Crusoe teaches the language he has been at such few pains to construct; and although there is a small difficulty in teaching friday the meaning of signs to PICTURES, PRIVACY, AUGUSTINE, ANd THE MINd 45 stand for sensations which have no obvious outward manifestations, by and large, Crusoe succeeds in teaching his language to friday remarkably well. Rhees objects to this argument on the grounds that because a solitary individual like Crusoe is pictured in total isolation from the peaceful background of human agreement in which a language is actually learned and practiced, the background against which the notions of meaning, understanding and following a rule have their life, he can never participate in using a language.35 He might, as Rhees remarks, make the sorts of mistakes animals do, like wrongly picking out a bird he does not like to eat for one that he does, or he might make marks in the sand to indicate where he has hidden some food; but the suggestion that he is participating in the use of a language in which he uses words with their meanings makes no sense at all. norman Malcolm36 adopts a similar view, when he rejects the assumption that "a human being, who had lived a solitary existence from birth, could have any conception of what a rule is, or a system of signs, or a language-or could invent a system of signs that he employed according to rules." if proposals like these have proved difficult to assess, it is partly because it is so often unclear exactly what status their proponents intend to grant to them; but also because answers to them often appeal to nothing more than "intuitions" unaccompanied by an acknowledgement of any hidden assumptions upon which they are likely to be based. Colin McGinn, for example, in his influential account of Wittgenstein on rule-following,37 appeals to "intuitions of logical possibility" involving the twins Romulus and Remus, and, following ayer, some hypothetical Robinson Crusoe raised in isolation from any human community, as a possible deciding factor in determining the "role of the community" in rule following. it will shortly become clear, however, not only that there is more than one question at stake here, but also that failure to properly clarify what is at stake can allow "intuitions" like McGinn's to assume a relevance that they may not for Wittgenstein actually possess. What certainly can be granted to Malcolm at this point, however, is that as a factual account of the background against which a language is actually learned in practice, his proposals may seem not only reasonable but also perfectly accurate; and it is surely right to assume that someone who had not in fact been given the appropriate training from childhood would just not be capable of speaking a language. But Malcolm evidently wishes to do more than issue a description of how languages are actually learned. as he makes clear in his assessment of Wittgenstein's passages about the following of a rule, Malcolm wants in some fashion to conceptually circumscribe those contexts to which he believes the use of terms like meaning and understanding should properly be restricted, to a degree indeed that would commit himself and Wittgenstein to the claim that any denial of the due weight given to the circumstances in which a language is actually learned would, as he puts it, "do away with much of what is novel and important in Wittgenstein's post-Tractatus thinking." for Malcolm, the idea of a born Crusoe inventing language in total social isolation is a pointless fantasy, because "it makes no sense 46 DEREK A. McDOUGALL to attribute those concepts and that thinking to a child before it has learned any language" within a normal social context.38 the obvious answer to this is that Malcolm's reply succeeds only in begging the very question which McGinn had already posed; and whilst it is indeed true that Malcolm can be seen, from one perspective, to be doing nothing more than imposing artificial limitations on the kinds of situations in which notions like following a rule can be applied, he can also, as i will show later on, be seen to be pointing towards a feature central to Wittgenstein's questioning of an aspect of the augustinian Picture to which ayer and others, in their enthusiasm for purely conceptual possibilities about born Crusoes inventing languages for themselves, can actually be shown to cleave. What is nevertheless true, and what gives McGinn's objection its point, is that if the only significant question here concerns the relevance of the community background, against which a language is actually learned in practice, to the criteria determining whether linguistic competence has been acquired, then Baker and Hacker are indeed perfectly correct to insist at this level that the one has no bearing on the other: by pointing towards Wittgenstein's own examples of born Crusoes already armed with languages, or who use languages in total social isolation, no matter how these Crusoes may have acquired them, they show not only that there is precious little of importance to discuss, but also that Wittgenstein need only be committed to the claim that since an intrinsically private language is a selfdefeating concept, then any language evolved by such a Crusoe must in principle be capable of being understood by others even if an existing community need not be considered essential-however this term is interpreted-for its development.39 Wittgenstein in fact makes the point succinctly himself in a famous passage from The Blue Book: insofar as the teaching brings about the association, feeling of recognition, etc. etc., it is the cause of the phenomena of understanding, obeying, etc.; and it is a hypothesis that the process of teaching should be needed in order to bring about these effects. it is conceivable, in this sense, that all the processes of understanding, obeying, etc. should have happened without the person ever having been taught the language. (this, just now, seems extremely paradoxical.)40 Yet, whilst this neatly despatches the more superficial point that how a language is acquired is irrelevant at one level to proper linguistic competence, so justifying Hacker's claim that imaginary individuals born armed with languages are of no real philosophical import, it fails to engage with the deeper question that may be taken to arise here: whether Wittgenstein developed a closer connection between the concepts of teaching and meaning41 later on, and whether this appears in the Investigations, a connection that would bring the ideas of teaching, testing and correcting together at a different level in the way that Malcolm really requires. But a connection of what kind? anyone tempted here by an adherence to the Humean principle that whatever is conceivable is possible-and surely born Crusoes speaking PICTURES, PRIVACY, AUGUSTINE, ANd THE MINd 47 a language are conceivable-is almost bound to suspect a conjuring trick involving the precarious straddling of a line between the conceptual and the empirical, on becoming acquainted with the constitutive role that Meredith Williams would wish to assign to learning in Wittgenstein's work: Genuinely normative practices, that is, practices that are not causally necessitated but are structured by, and admit of evaluation by reference to, a standard, norm, or rule, are social. thus, no individual in radical social isolation from all social practices can engage in actions that are correct or incorrect. a period of training or learning is required to become a practitioner.42 it is for this reason that Williams draws the conclusion that the process of learning is constitutive of what is learned, so our natural thought that the training is in one sense "mere history" and irrelevant to language acquisition except perhaps as a causal factor in its development, as the quotation from The Blue Book would certainly appear to imply, is actually an illusion fostered, as Williams puts it, "by imagining the error-free practice of one never trained in calculation."43 this is an argument which is certainly worth examining, not however in the present context from Williams's perspective as an account of language learning in opposition to work in the computational theory of the mind by Chomsky and fodor, but purely because it raises the question of the status of this constitutive role, which is to all intents and purposes an attempt to extend the concept of grammar to teaching and meaning. Certainly, one can rule out from the beginning an idea proposed by a. C. Grayling that Wittgenstein ties himself into a form of conceptual contradiction by simultaneously claiming that "language is essentially, that is logically, public,"44 whilst admitting that the denial of "logically private language" still allows for the possibility of solitary rule-following from birth. this conclusion is based on what is surely too crude a distinction between the conceptual and the empirical from a traditional empiricist perspective to be of any value here. indeed, it would succeed in failing to recognise the function of the concept of grammar altogether. there is, however, another scientific field in which we can grasp how such a constitutive role would work, and that is when considering discoveries about the inner constitutions of substances like water or gold, for there is a very strong implication, from a perspective other than that of current semantics, or indeed of "identity across possible worlds" essentialist proposals, that the sum total of all the observations, measurements, experiments, and calculations which enter into the discoveries that water is H 2 o or that gold has atomic number 79, are partly constitutive of what it is for these substances to have the microstructures that are attributed to them.45 Here the role we grant to our scientific discoveries, our willingness to say, for example, that whatever that clear liquid is that i am presently subjecting to electrolysis, if it does not resolve itself into the appropriate ratios of hydrogen and oxygen it cannot be water, is partly the consequence not simply of how we operate in the laboratory, but also of how we are prepared to treat the background of inherited procedure and consequent knowledge against which any experiment takes place. 48 DEREK A. McDOUGALL But can this really serve to provide us not only with a clearer idea of how on Williams's account the process of learning can be constitutive of what is learned, but also, and more importantly, whether this is what Wittgenstein, with his strong accent on a connection between teaching and meaning, is really about?46 When Wittgenstein makes this connection in Zettel §412, he plainly asks at the same time whether he is doing child psychology, and this is a pointer to the fact that we are dealing here with empirical matters, yet which in our thinking, more specifically our philosophical thinking, are being granted a special role, in this case a role which seems closely akin to what elsewhere in his philosophy would be termed grammatical; and clarification of the nature of this role is required if we are not to make Grayling's mistake of thinking that Wittgenstein is contradicting himself. What Wittgenstein is actually doing with this emphasis on learning, teaching and meaning is pointing to a grave defect in what has come to be known as the augustinian Picture, a defect that reveals the idea of ostensive teaching in §5 and §6 of the Investigations to be a move in an entirely new direction. failure to appreciate this is going to make it correspondingly more difficult to see what it can even mean for Williams to say, in a philosophical context, that no individual in total social isolation can engage in actions that are correct or incorrect, where the status of this statement as an apparent empirical hypothesis can, in this precise context, have no viable role. Before looking at this in more detail, it should be remembered that agreement in judgements47 is a form of background agreement in responses that, far from subjugating the individual to the demands of the community in the sense that Grayling amongst others would propose, actually grants the individual autonomy because, once mastery of a language is achieved, that background agreement does not require the community's verdict on every, or even any individual case.48 the notion of the born Crusoe is consistent with this to the extent, but only to the extent, that understanding a rule plays its role in practice against a background where one can both discover and correct one's own mistakes, and be subject in principle, if not always in practice, to correction by others. Where it is not consistent with Wittgenstein's notion of "community agreement" is in precisely that respect in which, a point which will arise shortly, the augustinian picture takes meaning and understanding to be prior to language. this distinction partly explains the almost inevitable bifurcation in the secondary literature between those who adhere to an essentially shareable (e.g., Baker and Hacker) as distinct from an essentially shared (Malcolm) conception of language and rules, however this notion of essential is to be glossed. in the same way, whilst the role that Wittgenstein grants to agreement in judgements does not, understandably, form the basis for ayer's criticism of Kripke, whose "whole semantic house of cards is based upon our taking in each other's washing, or would be if there were any laundry to wash,"49 it is easy to see that it might have done. if, on ayer's assessment, Kripke's "community view" collapses because in the end the community fares no better than the individual as its weakest link, this PICTURES, PRIVACY, AUGUSTINE, ANd THE MINd 49 is just because Kripke is taken by ayer to make the verdict of the community a criterion of correctness internal to the constitution of the language game;50 whereas the role granted to agreement in judgements by Wittgenstein makes it part of the general framework within which the game actually finds its home.51 Many a Robinson Crusoe has wandered the philosophical landscape since ayer proposed his original fable, and all have in one way or another been a response to the problem of where to place the individual vis-a-vis the community in the overall grasp of what it is to understand a language and follow a rule. a few Crusoes have been unfortunate to lose their linguistic capacities when suddenly isolated from their fellows; most have managed well with the language granted to them at birth, or taught to them later as children; but others still, often neglected, though like ayer's nurtured from the beginning by wolves, have been found crawling on all fours, playing with the wolf cubs, eating raw meat and making vain attempts to bark in order to find some place for themselves in the wolf pack heirarchy. if these poor creatures have not found any lasting role in the philosophical literature, this merely serves to show that the most empirically probable consequence of Crusoe's wolf boy upbringing is likely to have the least philosophical relevance. But the extent to which ayer's fantastic Crusoe reveals that he could frame concepts based on his own experiences is a philosophical and not an empirical matter; and it turns out that ayer's Crusoe is yet a further extension of his idea of primary recognition: Crusoe is pictured as identifying and recognising the island's flora and fauna prior to naming those things which have already been differentiated in terms of the kinds of things that they are so that, as in his treatment of private language, the real work in concept formation has already been accomplished prior to the attachment of the relevant labels. this makes the labelling proposal in which the invention of language is supposed to consist, appear as a dispensable afterthought. in other words, it would seem that Crusoe is being credited with possession of a "language" in the very process of inventing one, an enterprise that clashes head-on with one of the most critical passages in the Investigations, illustrating perhaps the central picture of the book: Someone coming into a strange country will sometimes learn the language of the inhabitants from ostensive definitions that they give him; and he will often have to guess the meaning of these definitions; and will guess sometimes right, sometimes wrong. and now, i think, we can say: augustine describes the learning of human language as if the child came into a strange country and did not understand the language of the country; that is, as if it already had a language, only not this one.-or again, as if the child could already think, only not yet speak. and "think" would here mean something like "talk to itself."52 one aspect of this "thinking" is an ability to attach labels to objects, so that the child is pictured as being conceptually articulate prior to learning to talk. Here Wittgenstein is suggesting that philosophically even to ask questions like "What is this?" "What is it called?" or "What is its role?" only makes sense against a background 50 DEREK A. McDOUGALL of linguistic acquisition in which ostensive definition already has an application. But Wittgenstein's augustine talks about understanding what objects the words taught to him signify, where these objects are already identifiable independently of the language he is learning to acquire, in exactly the way that ayer's Crusoe is capable of sorting out the trees and animals in the world around him before he applies the appropriate labels to them. in both cases, it would seem that there has to be some form of prior understanding at work. But this prior understanding inevitably results in an infinite regress because it merely presupposes our concept of meaning whilst failing to point us in a direction that can lead to any proper philosophical appreciation of how the concept of meaning should be approached. this is where the idea of ostensive teaching comes in, for it discards any philosophical idea of a prior understanding in its picture of training gradually into a practice in which the pupil attains a level of expertise by exercising a technique through which understanding comes to be manifested. from a strictly philosophical point of view, the training presupposes nothing whatever except, of course, certain natural human reactions without which training would be impossible. this explains why, in this context and for this purpose, the notion of thinking without language makes no sense, because Wittgenstein's idea of the child who can think only not yet speak is part of the misleading philosophical picture he is exposing in which thinking is an accompaniment of speech, something that can go on by itself, when language is instead the vehicle of thought. to treat it as a denial of an empirical or grammatical fact, viz., the attribution of pre-linguistic thought to children or animals, would be for Wittgenstein a symptom of confusion. Consequently, when we talk of this prior understanding as the language that augustine's child or ayer's Crusoe already has, we are not talking of language as an empirical phenomenon, but in a rather vague way of some kind of prior conceptual repertoire that from Wittgenstein's perspective can have no genuine role to play. this is not, of course, an answer that would appear to be shared by everyone. When, for example, Jerry fodor expresses his preference for augustine rather than Wittgenstein because fodor thinks it appropriate for his purposes to postulate an innate language of thought as the medium for the computations underlying cognitive processes, in the way of providing a scientific explanation of language acquisition,53 he evidently has it in mind that he, augustine and Wittgenstein are engaged in a common enterprise. But nothing could be further from the truth. it would indeed normally be taken for granted in a context in which the effort is to explain the learning of language, rather than to provide a synopsis of our concepts and how they relate to one another, that our thinking should naturally gravitate towards a consideration of the processes which make it possible, as a matter of empirical fact, for a child to learn a language; and it would also normally be assumed that involved in these processes must be the physical mechanism of the human brain playing some causal role. Consequently, if it is thought not merely that there is some aspect of the functioning of the brain upon which the learning of language is causally dependent, but that the brain itself actually harbours computational processes PICTURES, PRIVACY, AUGUSTINE, ANd THE MINd 51 that can be "cashed" in physical terms as a means of providing relevant verifiable hypotheses, then it is surely not for philosophy to set limits to the marvels of nature: the roles then to be allocated to biological, environmental, behavioural and social factors, would raise together the kinds of empirical questions that separate such an enterprise from a purely philosophical investigation. But any thought that Wittgenstein could even remotely have been concerned with the capacities that a child must have in order to be trained to learn a language in a social context would rest on a complete misconstrual of his intentions: the idea that there even are or must be such capacities beyond the primitive behavioural responses Wittgenstein assumes to make even training for him describable if a child is to learn a language, is after all a scientific assumption that can have no role to play in his entirely philosophical investigation. the result of this is that any denial he might make that augustine's child or ayer's Crusoe is party to a form of prior understanding or language, is playing a purely philosophical role in his thinking in the process of moving away from the infinite regress that picture cannot fail to presuppose. it would be equally wrong to conclude, from the valid conceptual point that ayer's Crusoe as pictured cannot invent a language without presupposing a "language," that this has any bearing whatsoever on fodor's belief that learning a language demands an "internal" system of representations for the predicates and their extensions in that language. the obvious reason for this is that fodor's theoretical stance counts for nothing unless it can ultimately lead to the framing of verifiable hypotheses, whilst the trivial conceptual point underlying ayer's wholly hypothetical Crusoe embodies no empirical presuppositions whatsoever. Various conclusions have been drawn from §32 of the Investigations in the secondary literature. Colin McGinn takes it to imply that meaning cannot be got from syntax, that empiricist images or "languages of thought" cannot generate meaning,54 a further expression of the point that augustine's possession of a prior "language" inevitably generates an infinite regress. norman Malcolm takes the passage as a proof that augustine is mistakenly attributing linguistic understanding to himself before he had learned any language.55 McGinn has been shown to follow ayer in the Crusoe debate whilst Malcolm's thinking is again along the lines of Rhees's. Marie McGinn carefully articulates the characteristics that the concept of augustine's child presupposes, the fully human "private" self lacking only the capacity to communicate with others, the physical world already a world of particular objects onto which the "names" of language unproblematically attach, with understanding conceived as the mind's making the right connection between a sound and the object it signifies, all points she identifies as the subject of Wittgenstein's attention in the first forty sections of the Investigations and beyond.56 Stephen Mulhall also captures the idea of a child in full possession of faculties requiring only a naming connection to the external world, faculties that Wittgenstein surely wishes to see as a consequence of participating in the use of a language, and not as features we can in a philosophical context properly attribute to the child prior to its acquisition.57 52 DEREK A. McDOUGALL David Stern, on the other hand, takes a characteristically balanced view, quoting Glock's Wittgenstein Dictionary as one example articulating theoretical positions he claims the text barely supports.58 Stern does indeed have a point, for all Wittgenstein interpretation has inevitably to draw a line between letting the text speak for itself and proposing a fair imaginative assessment of its philosophical goals, where this need not be incompatible with Wittgenstein's therapeutic aspirations. to be fair to Glock, therefore, all he does is articulate the presuppositions, including those lying behind the idea of augustine's child in §32, which are common to a number of commentators, so that whilst that in itself need not be taken to validate them, Stern's attempt to bring the subject down to earth by pointing to various apparently opposing "voices" in Wittgenstein's presentation is best seen as a useful corrective to those who might be tempted to see Wittgenstein himself as articulating complex theoretical positions surrounding a so-called Augustinian Picture which, like a socalled Private Language Argument he never actually described in these terms. What are the most important conclusions, then, that this discussion has allowed us to reach? firstly, it is essential to grasp just what kind of proposition it is to say that learning is constitutive of what is learned, or that in some very strong sense Wittgenstein adopted a "Communitarian," as opposed to an "individualistic," notion of understanding and rule-following. if there is at least one sense in which this is true-and it has already been shown in what sense it need not be-it should be seen against the background of a rejection of the primary element of the augustinian Picture that has occupied this discussion, and of Wittgenstein's need to find a new way of looking at things that has, as a consequence, the conclusion that the idea of the child who can think, only not yet speak, can have no application in a context in which language as both an empirical and a social phenomenon is the vehicle of thought. if it seems a consequence of this that prior to language there is nothing at all apart from those bare behavioural dispositions responsive to training, that need not be a denial that, treated purely as a matter of empirical fact, as ayer puts it, "no child could be taught a language unless he were able to perform acts of primary recognition," or that the child's acquisition of his concept of himself as one person amongst others "is a relatively sophisticated achievement, proceeding from a prior identification of recurrent patterns."59 for, whatever ayer is providing here, and it sounds suspiciously like a piece of child psychology in the service of his philosophical notion of primary recognition, it is totally irrelevant to Wittgenstein's purpose, which is to find an avenue of escape from the very assumptions that govern ayer's desire to see the world through the medium of acts of primary recognition that he also allows, rather cavalierly, to act as his main source of meaning in a philosophical context, prior to the child's participation in any form of social practice. When ayer rejects the idea implicit in Wittgenstein's example of the child in §244 learning how to use the word "pain" as an element in a description of how sensation words might come to acquire meaning, he is illustrating the important philosophical point that if ostensive definition is not seen to have its proper function against the PICTURES, PRIVACY, AUGUSTINE, ANd THE MINd 53 background of learning a language in a social context, then we are inevitably forced to return to a philosophical idea that Wittgenstein took to be quite empty, because it is indeed a picture, but that ayer, like so many others, evidently takes to have a genuine philosophical role, viz., that meaning is intrinsic to his most fundamental pre-linguistic experience of the world. Why is it that Wittgenstein's shopkeeper and builders, in the seemingly automatic performance of their set tasks, have the appearance of automatons? Because the limitations of their languages inevitably reflect limitations in their levels of awareness.60 in this context, the one thing goes with the other, to the point that they are inseparable. V. THINKING, cONScIOUSNESS, EXPRESSIVE BEHAVIOUR AND OTHER MINDS But just at the point, as Strawson expresses it,61 when in reading Wittgenstein one might feel one's capacity to learn coming to an end, in this case with an important general conclusion about a connection between thinking and language, he elsewhere points out that when mishandled that very distinction between thinking and language can be a symptom of confusion; for thinking is a widely ramified concept, and we are not prepared for the sheer variety of circumstances in which this concept is used.62 if, for example, a psychologist tells me that the very young child indulges in a lot of pre-verbal thinking, then although i take this in, i might have my doubts until he describes a context involving play with his parents in which it begins to look as if this statement has an application. if this appears to be no more than Wittgenstein's expression of a crude verificationism, that would be a failure to see that the example is itself the expression of a picture that has been given no genuine use. this would be confirmed if the psychologist then tells me that the reason he knows the child is thinking is that its brain is providing the appropriate level of electrical activity, for that would be a sure sign that he was in the grip of a representation he was unable to forego. Similarly, if a new member rushes into a meeting of the Philosophical Club exclaiming in a state of high elation "i can think without language!" and the general view amongst the membership is that "this is something that just cannot be done!" then this does not describe a context in which the notion of thinking with or without language makes sense; for once again, the point here is not clearly that language is always the vehicle of thought, but that the example is itself the expression of a picture that has been given no suitable context in which it could be applied. Wittgenstein discusses thinking at length as part of an overall strategy against the idea of it as an accompaniment of some activity, or of some aspect of behaviour, for the naive view we can tend to have of it so often fails to correspond to the facts.63 one can see it as a sound principle of Wittgenstein's to conclude that although "philosophers think" might not present us with a problem insofar as we can quickly come to imagine a day-to-day context in which it might be applied, "computers think," or "squirrels think" appear to incorporate a picture invoking just that type of puzzlement that suggests that there is a genuine question at issue 54 DEREK A. McDOUGALL requiring a definitive answer.64 Whereas if i say that the squirrel at the bottom of my garden is putting a great deal of thought into getting that juicy nut on the bird table, trying one solution after another until it achieves its goal, then a context has been created in which it is quite clear that thinking has an application. the fox is said to be sly, cunning, resourceful and intelligent; or it may be more simply described as exercising nothing more than an inherited behavioural routine. But that itself is a matter for empirical assessment: the complex activity in the ant or bee colony, or the migration of birds are studied partly in order that the degree of complexity in behaviour can be assessed in terms appropriate to it. But when the idea of purpose is constitutive of the nature of behaviour, whether in relation to humans or to animals, there can be no sharp dividing line between cases where behaviour is mechanical on the one hand, and where it expresses thought on the other, for the thinking is expressed in the behaviour. the point has some remote affinity with the aristotelian notion that the soul is the form of the body,65 but its real significance here lies more in the way it points towards a break with an idea that is central to the philosophical realism that lies behind traditional scepticism about "other minds," the idea of a bifurcation between the mental and the physical that for Wittgenstein exacts a stranglehold on our thinking, leading to that notion of something, a mind or consciousness, associated with the behaviour that might either lie "behind" it or "back of" it in Kripke's sense, or might not, an idea that Ryle tried to free himself from, not wholly successfully, in The Concept of Mind, because he did not see it against the background of a practice in which, in one sense, the picture is alright. Wittgenstein spends a great deal of time with this notion of consciousness, providing different formulations that attempt to capture his primary thought that whilst this is from one point of view a harmless adjunct to our normal talk of the mental, it becomes in purely philosophical contexts prized apart from the ordinary circumstances that serve to grant it a legitimate application. following the lines of his treatment of thinking, comes one of his finest presentations later in the book: "in what circumstances shall i say that a tribe has a chief? and the chief must surely have consciousness. Surely we can't have a chief without consciousness !"66 this is funny, and after it he goes on to consider an example that raises exactly the kind of puzzlement created by this picture, that every person around him might be an automaton, that there might after all be nothing to accompany their perfectly normal behaviour. But here the same strictures apply: what seems as if it might after all be a genuine possibility results from nothing more than the attempt to give this picture associated with the concept of consciousness an application apart from any circumstances in which the concept itself would normally be used. i can meaningfully say that i am conscious to someone who thinks i am asleep, and i might have a use for saying that someone is an "automaton" if he is walking about in a drug induced stupor; but to say in a day to day context that someone is not an automaton is to say nothing.67 Here one can compare the science fiction example in which the hero discovers that most people around him are automatons remotely PICTURES, PRIVACY, AUGUSTINE, ANd THE MINd 55 controlled by a "mad scientist," a context in which it would make sense to say just this, because this situation is already one in which these automata are quite clearly differentiated from their human counterparts in terms of the application of perfectly ordinary criteria, like having no freedom of action, where their behaviour is wholly controlled by another person, even if, in order to make the story more interesting, it is made very difficult to tell the automaton from the genuine article. But now it turns out in a case like this that the philosophical picture of the "zombie" as a being lacking consciousness68 is really playing no role at all in the author's scenario, although it may for all we know accompany his ordinary talk about his characters: "the human body is the best picture of the human soul."69 if expressive human behaviour provides the paradigm constituting what it means to apply sensations and emotions to others, then we will apply these characteristics to animals by analogy with the human form, and this alone reveals the pointlessness of applying them to inanimate objects. this idea finds its place in imaginative contexts: in the child's fairy story not only can the animals take on human qualities but inanimate objects can be endowed with expressive human features so that they come alive and talk. the attribution of feelings and emotions to a piece of rock without these features would have no point, although it would not be difficult to imagine examples that encourage the extension of a child's imaginative capacity. But what of a fairy story in which there is an extension of the concept of a person as a result of scientific knowledge? a piece of children's science fiction in which the disembodied brain in vitro of the evil mastermind is attached by sophisticated electrodes or appropriate means to a loudspeaker which booms instructions to his minions, is intended to gain its "credibility" today as a piece of fiction only because it is already a pictorial representation embodying our most persuasive account of what it means to have acquired knowledge of the causal dependence of our mental lives on neurophysiological processes. in a cultural context in which that knowledge were unavailable, so that the person of the evil genius would not be even capable of being represented in this way, people would be led to wonder what the significance of the story was supposed to be. Perhaps it could only be understood on a par with a tale about a voice emanating from a rock, like speech emerging from a telephone to an unsuspecting native who tells the knowing anthropologist that there are evil spirits lurking within. the role we now grant to the human brain is captured in the pictorial representation in a way that would have been impossible without the knowledge of which the picture is itself an expression, just as an appreciation of the function the picture is intended to perform does not necessarily carry along with it any notion of the evil genius as a consciousness in some way associated with the brain; and even if it does, that notion is idle in relation to the role the picture is intended to perform. after all, all kinds of confusing pictures that have no genuine application may come to mind here. Examples of this kind do not necessarily commit anthony Kenny's "humunculus fallacy,"70 in which human qualities are mistakenly attributed to brains or to computers, or 56 DEREK A. McDOUGALL fall foul of norman Malcolm's strictures on failing to recognise the importance, following Wittgenstein, of the human form.71 they would best be described as cases in which the very application of the concept of a person itself to such truncated individuals may be thought to be in question as a result of the roles that models of this kind are intended to play. But what if it were to be complained that the idea of consciousness has an application of a special kind in a philosophical context that allows it to give rise to just those sorts of puzzles that have been considered? there is no genuine answer to this question: if the significance of the attack on these apparent uses of concepts does not sink home, there can be no realisation that nothing is being gained by these misleading pictures and the philosophical puzzles to which they give rise: "By looking into myself i came to wonder at my own consciousness and to ask how this could possibly have emerged from any purely physical thing!" once again this is the kind of example that Wittgenstein sees as an illegitimate extension of the use of a concept beyond its normal boundaries of application: "nothing is so certain as that i possess consciousness." in that case, why shouldn't i let the matter rest? this certainty is like a might force whose point of application does not move, so no work is accomplished by it.72 the picture is there, but how is it to be used? this is yet another instance where the philosophical misconstrual of its significance is Wittgenstein's prime target, although there are two identifiable strands to the achievement of his aim, one in which he attacks those pictures associated with thinking and consciousness directly, and where the lack of any genuine application is most damaging: here he is on particularly strong ground. there is, however, another strand where an appeal is made to those natural human reactions in response to pain and suffering, and to the normal circumstances of daily life, that are prior to any form of intellectual assessment; and here his position can be made to appear weaker. it can be made to look as if the real problems are being by-passed because they are seen to have no genuine philosophical answer. Concentrating on the first strand can lead either to Wittgenstein the philosopher solving or dissolving philosophical problems, and so showing the way ahead for philosophy; or to the therapeutic Wittgenstein, untying knots in our thinking whilst renouncing philosophical problems themselves as mostly a symptom of confusion. taking up the second strand can lead to Wittgenstein the sceptic, accepting the inevitability of a problem which cannot in terms of the philosophical realist's picture be directly answered, and offering in Kripke's terms a "sceptical solution." But these two strands are best seen as joint elements in Wittgenstein's thinking, just as the distinction between the philosophical and the therapeutic, or the substantial and the resolute,73 are often inseparable in understanding how a particular passage should be approached. Saul Kripke interestingly chooses a very specific quotation in which Wittgenstein appears to play down the importance of the patient actually feeling pain as distinct from exhibiting certain behaviour in order to reach the startling conclusion that: PICTURES, PRIVACY, AUGUSTINE, ANd THE MINd 57 Wittgenstein would reject any attempt to 'explain' my attitude and behavior towards a sufferer by a 'belief' about his 'inner state'. Rather, once again the order is to be inverted: i can be said to think of him as having a mind, and in particular as suffering from pain, in virtue of my attitude and behavior towards him, not the reverse.74 a startling conclusion because, as Roger Scruton points out, this makes it look as if we are to understand pain in terms of pity, rather than pity as the natural response to pain.75 Read in this way, it is only at the cost of some historical inaccuracy that Kripke's Wittgenstein could even become the naturalist, echoing Hume in his recognition of a scepticism for and against which all arguments are in one way beside the point, since belief in the existence of body, inductive reasoning, and, one might add, other people, are antecedently placed by nature in the Mind of Man.76 it is as if someone following Kripke were to ask: "is Wittgenstein really denying that other people have thoughts, feelings and sensations in the way that i do?" where the very posing of the question reveals a commitment to the picture that, in a philosophical context, is in question in these sections of the Investigations; whereas, as Peter Winch puts it, the practice of attributing feelings to others is always prior to any kind of theory; and it is the practice that provides the circumstances in which the picture can regain, withdrawn from a philosophical context, its perfectly ordinary place in our thinking as a perfectly harmless accompaniment of our practices.77 But what is Kripke's case for this sceptical Wittgenstein? Essentially, it relies on an interpretation of §§300–302 of the Investigations: the inability to provide determinate truth conditions for applying the image of pain as a picture, in those situations in which pain is being attributed to others, inevitably results in total scepticism, because there can be no "fact of the matter" about the correspondence to reality of another's being in pain in terms of this picture. in other words, since it is impossible to imagine someone else's pain on the model of my own, there can be no justification for attributing mental states in general to others. nevertheless, nature intervenes insofar as the circumstances in which we attribute pain to others and the role these attributions play in our lives finally allows the image of pain to indirectly enter the language game in terms of "the formation and quality of my attitude towards the sufferer."78 there is a paradox here, and it lies in the fact that, taken in one way, a great deal of what Kripke says in his interpretation of these passages is in Wittgenstein's terms alright, for it is indeed correct to say that the circumstances in which the concept is used provide the background against which we come to understand what it is to attribute pain both to ourselves and to others; and, since this background is illustrative of the grammar of the use of the concept, it also supplies the truth conditions for its application. But then it surely must follow that it can only be by taking our understanding in a philosophical context to rest in the "application" of the picture, rather than in the circumstances in which we in practice come to attribute pain, that we could ever be driven to reduce these to conditions of warranted assertion. Kripke's claim 58 DEREK A. McDOUGALL that Wittgenstein does reject any attempt to explain or justify our behaviour in terms of a belief about the "inner state" of the other person results from taking a perfectly harmless picture accompanying our ordinary sensation talk into a philosophical context in which it becomes that "full blown pictorial representation of our grammar" capturing for Kripke, in his avowedly realist terms, what it really means to attribute pain to others.79 Wittgenstein's claim that our understanding of another's pain does not rest on any application we might attempt to make of the picture-which after all is the source of the confusion-is then taken by Kripke as a denial that we can really justify our behaviour and attitude towards others in terms of a belief in their having "inner states," a belief grounded in the philosophical conception we cannot after all entertain. once again, the response Wittgenstein gives is to deny that the picture can have any role in a philosophical context, so that in its ordinary unreflective guise the picture is perfectly alright, just as, in our ordinary talk "there really is something going on in him" or not can be given a perfectly ordinary use. this also helps to explain why, in spite of some difficulties with the interpretation of the original German terms for "image" and "picture" in §300, terms which have proved problematic for most commentators, and which i shall discuss shortly, Kripke's overall divergence from Wittgenstein, as is so often the case in philosophy, can be properly described as a difference of emphasis. from one perspective, this difference seems sufficiently delicate to be balanced on a knife-edge; yet from another it is a difference of emphasis so great that to properly clarify it results in reversing the roles played by the different contributors to the drama. i will now take a closer look at who these contributors are. first of all, i will present the moral in a very traditional way by illustrating it through a fable recounted by a rather perplexed pupil about his mystifyingly unyielding art teacher: as part of my art course at college my teacher's morning assignment is for me to graphically illustrate in crayon a person suffering great pain. Putting my skills to the test, i portray someone writhing in agony on the ground, face contorted in excruciating pain, so that if there were some associated sound effects there would be a great deal of moaning and groaning. Happy that my drawing is accepted, i am then told that the afternoon's assignment is to portray someone pretending to be in great pain. once again, i put all my powers into the task and hand over the result. to my surprise, however, i am advised that the drawing is totally unacceptable because i have handed over two identical pictures. How, the teacher asks, am i possibly supposed to justify the attribution of pain in the one case but not in the other? My immediate answer is that i have actually put a title in the corner of each drawing, which perhaps the teacher has missed. My answer is quite unacceptable. i then attempt to explain by saying that in the first case the person has had a nasty accident with a few broken ribs, so the pain is perfectly understandable. in the second, he is a known prankster who when taken to hospital is found to have nothing wrong with him; or perhaps he is an actor rehearsing his latest part to PICTURES, PRIVACY, AUGUSTINE, ANd THE MINd 59 show how good he is. i am then asked to produce a third drawing, which i dutifully do, illustrating someone in great pain who is successfully hiding it, so i picture someone laughing and joking, but to whom we are nevertheless to attribute a great deal of hidden suffering. again i put a title on the drawing; but nothing i say will satisfy the teacher. at this point i am at a total loss to understand what is going on. it is only later when i discover the teacher to double as a philosophy lecturer at the same college that it begins to dawn on me what this has all been about. My perplexity arises because i know that everything necessary to understand what each drawing is about is already contained in the drawing and in my explanation of its contents. i know after all that we understand what all these pictures are about just because we know in what circumstances we would say that the pain is properly attributable or not. Even when someone hides his pain completely, we still know what it would be to bring it into the light of day. i know perfectly well what it is for you to feel it; and you know perfectly well what it is for me to feel it, because in the final analysis we feel the same thing. But that is not something anyone ever mentions during his day-to-day talk about pain. of course, i cannot hand the feeling of pain to you on a plate, or catch a glimpse of it through my telescope or microscope; but who in his right mind would ever have thought that this is something we might ever wish we could do? it was at this point that the penny dropped. My art teacher was really looking for the picture of a pain that could not in principle form part of any drawing i could ever produce, for that pain was hidden in a sense that had never even occurred to me before: it lay above and beyond and behind the behaviour of the person who felt it in a way which made it totally inaccessible, so inaccessible that no one but the person who felt it could ever have access to it or knowledge of it. But then i realised that it was totally idle in determining the outcome of any of the pictures i had drawn. My art teacher had for some unaccountable reason decided that because he could not imagine the pains of others the way he imagined his own, an idea that really makes no sense, he was then unjustified in attributing pain to anyone else at all. But why, i thought, should an unintelligible notion form the inspiration for an unattainable ideal whose satisfaction would alone justify me in continuing to talk about the feelings of others? at that point, i caught myself doing philosophy, and thought the better of it.80 Having introduced this fable, it might be worth while giving a very rough sketch of the principal characters and their setting. first of all, there is the rather bewildered would be artist with his somewhat reserved teacher, both performing their roles against a background played by the language game with pain. Within this setting, our understanding of the truth conditions of statements attributing pain, of what is distinguishable as private and public, as the inner and the outer, provides the role for the grammar of pain. What is represented in the drawings, produced as the pain suffered or not suffered as the case may be, is the idea, notion, appearance or even concept of pain-a role performed by the image of pain. last but not least 60 DEREK A. McDOUGALL is the idea of the representation of a pain that can never be shown in any drawing whatsoever, a role performed by the picture of pain. as Peter Winch81 points out, the sense of the passage does indeed require a contrast between "image" and "picture," e.g., replacing "image" by "notion" or "idea." a reasonable account of the sense of §300 could therefore be given either by saying that the notion of pain enters into the language game not in terms of the application of a picture, or that to imagine someone in pain does not consist in having a "picture of his pain" as a corresponding "truth condition." Both interpretations are to some degree captured by Kripke, except of course for the need to reverse the direction of emphasis, which for him is on the philosophically realist notion that our understanding does indeed rest in the "application" of the picture, leading to his stress on conditions of warranted assertion. as against Kripke, however, the first drawing can be clearly presented as a perfectly ordinary pictorial representation of pain insofar as it can be described as representing someone whom we do understand to be experiencing a great deal of pain. that is precisely what the drawing is about. if a philosopher were to complain that far from showing the pain, it only shows the behaviour, then he would have misunderstood the role played by our concept of pain as pictorially represented in the drawing itself. His misunderstanding is revealed by his demand, as a realist, for a pictorial representation that cannot be shown in the drawing at all, but must in some sense lie "behind" it out of view. But this is the picture that, taken into a philosophical context, is no longer a harmless accompaniment of our practice, but has become that "full blown pictorial representation of our grammar" in which we cannot help taking our understanding of the practice to consist. once again, the fault lies not in the picture but in the attempt to give it a special form of "application." So, if someone were asked in a perfectly ordinary way whether the picture is a good or a bad representation, he might be inclined to reply rather nonchalantly that it is fine, or that it is oK, or that there is nothing wrong with it, almost as if he were wondering what is the point the question; for the representation is good or bad only depending on how it is to be used. it is now possible to see Wittgenstein's famous aphorism that an "'inner' process" stands in need of outward criteria in §580 of the Investigations82 as just a further reflection of the principle that the human body is the best picture of the human soul, so that the feeling of confidence, the expectation or the feeling of pain, are manifested, revealed, or expressed in behaviour. Consequently, if the moaning and groaning or holding the bleeding arm are treated as criteria for the presence of pain, that means only that these are at least two of the ways in which pain may be manifested in behaviour. What it does not mean is that the moaning and groaning enable the conclusion to be drawn from observation of the behaviour of someone who satisfies these criteria, that he can be said with certainty to be in pain; where this certainty guarantees something unavailable in any argument from analogy. the reason for this is not the obvious one that he may not really be in pain at all, but rather that the distinction between what is public and what is PICTURES, PRIVACY, AUGUSTINE, ANd THE MINd 61 private, incorporated in the application of our concept of pain, is not in any way captured by treating behaviour and pain as members of two separate philosophical categories. the pain as hidden "behind" the behaviour, out of view, that is in one way the harmless picture accompanying our ordinary talk, would in that case be given a philosophically realist function to be contrasted with what is in effect Wittgenstein's presentation of behaviour in the role of a criterion by which we understand it as the behaviour of someone who is actually experiencing the pain. to then persist in questioning whether what we understand to be the case in ordinary circumstances is really so is the characteristic response of the philosopher who endlessly revolves in a circle because he is in the grip of a picture he is quite unable to forego. to break out of the circle is to see that any question of faking or hiding the experience of pain, whilst secondary, is decided from case to case using perfectly ordinary criteria. if some philosophers have given the impression that criteria enable a leap to be made from behaviour to the pain, from one category to another, they have still been acting under the influence of a distinction embodied in the picture that is in dispute. this is why Kripke, in his implicit criticism of Malcolm,83 indicates that the kind of guarantee supposedly provided by criteria is exactly what Malcolm requires in his own terms but fails to supply. it cannot be said that Malcolm completely avoids this misinterpretation. once again, it is not the "picture of the pain" that is at fault here but a philosophical misconstrual of its significance, where our understanding of what it is to be in pain is wrongly taken to consist in the "application" of the picture, as distinct from a grasp of the circumstances in which the concept itself is properly used. this explains Wittgenstein's concentration on the power and force of the picture that he takes to underlie the tendency to endow it with a specifically philosophical role. this provides a context in which it is possible to clarify those passages84 that Kripke employs to indicate that there is some special intuitive problem "involved in extending the concept of mental states from oneself to others."85 if it is to be said that "it is 5 o'clock here" is a perfectly good ground for saying that "it is 5 o clock on the sun," or that to suppose he has a pain is to suppose that he has the same as i, just like that, then this is the expression of a picture viewed in isolation from any appropriate criteria which could allow these conclusions to be drawn. this is why an example is given to illustrate that if criteria are absent, then i might as well conclude that the stove is in pain if i say that it is in pain and i am in pain. the overall context of §§346–352 indicates that these are cases where, in the grip of a picture, there is an inclination to isolate concepts like pain from the normal circumstances in which they find their proper application. on the other hand, if i say in a perfectly ordinary way that to suppose he has a pain is just to suppose that he has the same as i, it would be wondered why i should make a remark that, even if no doubt true, is otherwise completely unilluminating. Equally, when the idea is introduced of imagining his pain on the model of my own, this is not a way of saying that we feel the same thing: this idea is intentionally incoherent. 62 DEREK A. McDOUGALL VI. cONcLUSION: WITTGENSTEIN'S THINKING IN cONTEXT it is now also possible to glean, from a slightly different perspective, why there should be a reluctance to allow the conclusion that Wittgenstein, in these passages, is party to the kind of naturalism normally associated with Hume.86 it is not simply that these are not contexts in which anything approaching a sceptical problem can genuinely be seen to arise; and whilst it can hardly be questioned that those instinctive human reactions revealed in our attitudes to human joy and suffering do play an important role in his thinking, they are not in the end decisive. What must be taken into account is the philosophical analysis itself, in which the very terms of the debate are thrown into question. But this might be misconstrued. for might it not be thought that without this detailed background with its immense number of examples, detailed analyses in the form of "reminders," and its exposure of hidden pictures to which not only philosophers are prone to become captive, let alone its complete alteration in the resulting philosophical perspective, everything might collapse into a mere re-statement of what used to be referred to-disparagingly-as the argument from the paradigm case? But such an argument has always been strenuously objected to on the grounds that just because current linguistic usage87 allows talk of other people with their thoughts, feelings, hopes and expectations, this in itself is not a sufficient philosophical justification for continuing to make reference to them. Such an assessment would be misleading: Wittgenstein always took an appeal to "common sense" in a philosophical context to be a way of covering up difficulties rather than of exposing what is really behind them.88 that our ordinary practices could in some way be up for philosophical assessment would for him have been a symptom of confusion: the role given to the notion of a practice makes it anterior to any form of belief, whether philosophical or not, whilst "common sense" in its normal philosophical application is itself a philosophical construct incorporating a range of basic "beliefs" that the philosopher has, say, a right to question. But it is from Wittgenstein's perspective wholly inappropriate to say that i think of someone else as being a soul, or having a "mind" as a form of "belief" resulting from the "naturalness" of certain human reactions, any more than it is correct to say that i react as i do because i have the anterior "belief." the point at issue is better described as being beyond belief or unbelief, and so beyond justification or the lack of it; and therefore not a matter of opinion.89 it is at this point that the philosophical/ therapeutic, substantial/resolute, and non-"Pyrrhonian"/"Pyrrhonian" distinctions fade into each other to such a degree that it would prove unprofitable to try to separate them, just as it would be highly misleading to think of Wittgenstein's method as incorporating any argument from the paradigm case, let alone regard his method as such an argument with a supplementary list of appendages. the difference of emphasis, to which i referred earlier on, is therefore more than just a difference in the relative importance assigned to the different characters in the drama. it is part of a fundamental difference in approach, so that someone PICTURES, PRIVACY, AUGUSTINE, ANd THE MINd 63 who decides to allocate their roles in one way rather than another will find that this already predetermines the kinds of questions he will be inclined to ask, the range of possible answers he can give to them, and the degree to which he can be regarded as being subject to the demands of a picture he is unwilling to relinquish. it is in this respect that Wittgenstein's approach involves a re-orientation towards certain traditional ways of looking at philosophical problems, inviting the application of terms like "discipleship" and "conversion" that many philosophers adopting a traditionally rational stance find repugnant. But to look at things solely from this point of view can itself be misleading. Kripke, for example, points to Wittgenstein's metaphysical solipsim in the Tractatus,90 where the self is "the limit of the world"; but is there any reason at all to suppose as he suggests that this notion in some way still lingers to form the basis for a "sceptical problem" in the Investigations? the question would normally be answered in the negative, but here it would be a mistake entirely to discount Wittgenstein's dalliance with one kind of phenomenalism and its eventual rejection on what on the face of it can be interpreted as the verificationist grounds that formed an important element in his earlier thinking.91 for example, there is a difference between "He is evidently in pain (as i often am)" and "He is evidently in pain (though i am of course only acquainted with his behaviour)"; and "there is a table in the (presently unoccupied) next room" and "there is a table in the room next door (even when no one is looking at it)." in both cases, one statement has a latent "philosophical role"; and it would not be at all difficult to see the rejection of that role on verificationist grounds as the first step in a complete transformation leading to that conception of a picture by which we become transfixed, a transformation involving a complete re-orientation in perspective, an entirely new way of looking at things, regardless of those considerations from which it may in part be derived. from this point of view, some may say that it is correct to see the path from the Tractatus to the Investigations as fraught with wrong turnings and cul-de-sacs seen from the perspective of that final picture of objects and persons as some interpreters would claim that ordinary language actually portrays them. one might even go further and claim that the conditions for realising the possibility of this picture are laid down in grammar. Whatever may be thought of the Kantian echo, any account that shows how this perspective can be achieved is surely a tribute to the sheer inventive genius required. Wittgenstein as Kant is nothing new; whereas, historically, his suggestion that pictures inherent in the very language we use every day are at the root of our fundamental philosophical problems certainly is. in fact, since its publication, the Philosophical Investigations has generated, even if it has not justifiably invited, a wide variety of interpretations amongst which, except for basic outlines, there is no settled unanimity. Since 1953 Wittgenstein has variously appeared, in a list which is by no means exhaustive, as the philosopher of ordinary language, the Kantian transcendentalist, the Humean naturalist and sceptic, Derrida's nihilistic deconstructionist, Hacker and Baker's stern and authoritative schoolmaster with his accent on the primacy of grammar, Hanfling's and Stern's 64 DEREK A. McDOUGALL careful and balanced adjudicator in an inherently dialogistical work, drawing the attention of readers to his interplay of different voices in the text; and always, waiting in the wings, or sometimes playing centre stage, as the purveyor of the purest anti-philosophical therapy. the storm generated by Kripke in the 1980's has now in fact largely died down. Prominent recent scholarship has narrowed the bounds of interest to nonsense, "austere," "resolute" or "substantial" in the Tractatus. But there can in the final analysis be no real substitute for imaginatively identifying with the methods of thought that Wittgenstein employed. it will not be lost on many readers that Part ii of the Investigations contains some of his most perceptive remarks, where the method of capturing the purest and most concise expression of an idea, sometimes in the form of a pictorial representation, is at its height. that, indeed, is one reason why, contrary to what one might superficially expect, a study of examples from this late period can offer a useful way of coming to engage with his philosophy. Consequently, just as it has been useful to begin with his questioning of the notion of the awakening of consciousness because it points both to an important aspect of his method and to an important element in his philosophical thinking, i will take it as a useful point on which to end. Why does he at least appear to question the notion of the evolution of the higher animals and of man, and the awakening of consciousness at a particular level? We are now justified in concluding that he sees a trap in that notion of consciousness as an accompaniment of behaviour, something that might either lie "behind" behaviour or might not. the resulting picture is just as described, as if the coming to be of a form of self-awareness throws a sudden light on the world around it. the picture takes us in within a philosophical context and suggests a particular application; whereas a perfectly proper description of the gradual development of species, that through their increasingly complex patterns of behaviour show an ever widening diversity of thought in their reactions to the world around them, employs the same evidence without suggesting any obvious picture at all. it is interesting to note that Wittgenstein adopts a similar line when he questions the idea that evolution has finally given rise to a species that can understand the processes from which it has evolved,92 a statement that on the face of it may seem to make good sense, and can indeed be rephrased in a way that does not give rise to any apparent anomaly; but in this particular case he takes it to rely on an equivocation of a kind that led a number of popularising scientists of his day to say what on his view are silly things, in much the way that Russell could refer to naive realism leading to physics, so that naive realism is necessarily false even when it is itself transparently a philosophical construct.93 But it is characteristic of Russell that his entire approach to philosophy, one that led him to his infamous conclusion that he could find nothing of interest whatsoever in the Philosophical Investigations,94 is naive in just that sense that would almost inevitably lead him to see our perfectly ordinary talk as embodying unsophisticated philosophical presuppositions that it is for philosophy as a discipline continuous with science to combat and correct, an attitude of mind diametrically opposed to that of his former recalcitrant pupil. PICTURES, PRIVACY, AUGUSTINE, ANd THE MINd 65 the point Wittgenstein raises here, on the other hand, turns on an observation that may, in relation to his overall concerns, seem almost trivial by comparison, that what is said, as an individual or group of individuals, to understand the process of evolution, viz., the evolved species, is also being used, qua concept, to explain itself under its evolutionary role, so that what is in effect an element in an explanatory process is also being said to understand itself; and that, as he is reported as having remarked to Drury with a characteristic concern for propriety of expression, is something that you just cannot say.95 ENDNOTES 1. Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. anscombe, (oxford: Basil Blackwell 1963), Part ii, Sec vii. 2. ibid., Part i, §295. 3. for example, in Investigations Part i, §§422–424. 4. Scott Soames's discussion in Philosophical Analysis in The Twentieth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 44ff. is very much conditioned by a distinction between private experience and observable behaviour that Wittgenstein would have repudiated. 5. this requires a reassessment of the "assertion v truth conditions" contrast, as employed in Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language (oxford: Basil Blackwell 1982). in the present context the concentration of effort will be on his Postscript "Wittgenstein and other Minds." 6. Philosophical Investigations, Part ii, Sec vii. 7. ibid., Part i, §115. 8. M. B. and J. Hintikka interestingly take the passage at face value, illustrating an adherence to the idea of a "Cartesian private object," Investigating Wittgenstein (oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), 265. But to postulate such a metaphysical object would be completely at odds with the entire thrust of the Investigations, in which it could have no conceivable role. Here the distinction between private and public is, as already explained, a function of the grammar of sensation language, where the ordinary conditions of application of the contrast provide all the reality the distinction requires. as an example of someone who takes a scholarly position opposed to that of M. B and J. Hintikka, Peter Hacker finds a literal interpretation of §272 quite unintelligible, Wittgenstein Meaning and Mind (oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1998), 82. John Cook misses this point altogether in his later work (see n91). 9. Commentators who accept that a notion of recognition or identification has an application here inevitably find themselves struggling with the text. Cf. B. Wilson, Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1998), 14, a particularly interesting interpretation because Wilson correctly identifies all the different components of the puzzle in "this difficult section" yet steadfastly refuses to fit them together through his unwillingness to abandon his initial assumption of the role of correct identification, leading him towards explanations of increasingly Byzantine complexity. J. Hunter, Understanding Wittgenstein (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1985), 84–86, follows a similar line, making play with two correlations, (a) between the occurrence of the sensation, (b) the writing 66 DEREK A. McDOUGALL of the name 'S,' and rising blood pressure. Stephen Mulhall, grasping the main point of the passage as a whole, thinks it insufficient for Wittgenstein's purposes and instead proposes a reading with a cultural dimension, ostensibly influenced by Stanley Cavell, in which we cannot avoid seeing ourselves as human manometers, an interpretation which not everyone will find clearly extractable from any plain reading of the text, Wittgenstein's Private Language (oxford: oxford University Press, 2007), chap. 10. Cf. also Dale Jacquette, "Wittgenstein on Private language & Private Mental objects," Wittgenstein-Studien 1 (1994). 10. for a recent detailed and valuable account in favour of Saul Kripke's reading, see Martin Kusch, A Sceptical Guide to Meaning and Rules (Chesham: acumen 2006), who announces in the introduction, 1, that Kripke's important "Postscript, Wittgenstein and other Minds" lies outside his scope. 11. a point made by Peter Winch, "facts and Super-facts," The Philosophical Quarterly 33 (1983), 398–404. 12. "Platonism" as understood by David finkelstein: the gulf between a rule and its application that requires bridging in a "magical" way, Expression and The Inner (Cambridge, Ma: Harvard University Press, 2003), chap. 4. 13. Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language, e.g., 111. 14. Investigations, §423. Cf. Gordon Baker, "Concepts or Conceptions," Wittgenstein's Method, Neglected Aspects (oxford: Basil Blackwell, 2004), 262. 15. Philosophical Investigations, §295. Cf. §§191–195. 16. Stewart Candlish, "Private language," Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2003) at http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/private-language/. 17. as in David Pears's monumental The False Prison, Vol ii (oxford: oxford University Press, 1987), 328. By contrast see, e.g., Meredith Williams, Wittgenstein, Mind and Meaning (loundon: Routledge, 1999), chapter 1; David Stern, Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), chap. 7; Gordon Baker, Wittgenstein's Method, Neglected Aspects, chaps. 5–7, and Barry Stroud, Meaning, Understanding and Practice: Philosophical Essays (oxford: oxford University Press, 2002), chaps. 5 amd 13, for more contemporary approaches. 18. Cf. a. Kenny's rejection of the private "intermediate step" in Wittgenstein (london: Pelican, 1973), chap. 10. 19. Cf. John McDowell, "intentionality and interiority in Wittgenstein," Meaning Scepticism, ed. Klaus Puhl, (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1991), 148–169, and Dan Hutto, Wittgenstein and the End of Philosophy (london: Macmillan, 2003), 131–132. Cf. Mulhall, Wittgenstein's Private Language, chap. 7, for an account that attempts to distinguish between a "resolute" and "substantial" reading of §258. 20. in "Does Bismarck Have a Beetle in His Box?" Cora Diamond draws comparisons with an earlier version of this argument in the Tractatus, in The New Wittgenstein, ed. alice Crary and Rupert Read, (london: Routledge, 2000), 262–292. 21. Kripke, Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language, 60 and n47. this point reflects Kripke's intentionally naive talk of minds existing "behind the bodies" or "back of them" whilst asking what can be wrong with the traditional assumption that one can meaningfully ask whether other material objects have minds? ibid., 119. PICTURES, PRIVACY, AUGUSTINE, ANd THE MINd 67 22. a. J. ayer, "Can there be a Private language?" in Wittgenstein The Philosophical Investigations, ed. G. Pitcher (new York: Doubleday anchor, 1966), 251–266. R. Rhees, "Can there Be a Private language?" in Wittgenstein The Philosophical Investigations, 267–285. ayer's reprint in his The Concept of a Person (london: Macmillan, 1963), 36–51. 23. See, e.g., ayer's reply to Pears in Perception & Identity, ed. Graham MacDonald (london: MacMillan, 1981), 281ff. Vacillations on the "incorrigibility" issue are not relevant here. 24. ayer, "Can there Be a Private language?" 258. 25. Cf. Wilson, Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations; Soames, Philosophical Analysis in The Twentieth Century, and Simon Blackburn, Spreading The Word (oxford: oxford University Press, 1984), chap. 3. 26. Wittgenstein (london: Weidenfeld and nicolson, 1986), 77. 27. ayer, "Can there be a Private language?" 265. 28. Wittgenstein, 74–75. Here it is worth pointing out that in spite of their tendency to reify the private object, M. B. and J. Hintikka are correct to see Wittgenstein's approach in these sections as a literary device with a semantical rather than an epistemological concern at its heart, ibid., chap.10, Sec. 11, a point which reveals ayer's entire treatment to rest on a verificationist misreading of Wittgenstein's target in the relevant passages. 29. Wittgenstein, 75. 30. "Reply to David Pears," in The Philosophy of A.J. Ayer, ed. l. E. Hahn (la Salle, il: open Court, 1992), 402. the same argument is found in Simon Blackburn, Spreading the Word, 95, and in Scott Soames, Philosophical Analysis in The Twentieth Century, 37. a variant of it is also in P. f. Strawson, "imagination and Perception," Freedom and Resentment (london: Methuen, 1974). 31. ayer, "Reply to David Pears," 403. Cf. Investigations §247 and §288 re this "immunity to error" serving ayer in a foundational role, where "know" for Wittgenstein indicates only that the expression of uncertainty is senseless. 32. Investigations §§273–277. Here i think that Marie McGinn is correct to play down the traditional "must have public criteria of application" requirement as part of a logical argument, just as her stress on the inability to derive the meaning of psychological terms through "introspection" is really an invitation to see them as having a grammatical role with a third and first person use, so indicating that what is at stake here is a new way of looking at things, and in no way a conclusive proof. Wittgenstein and the Philosophical Investigations (london: Routledge, 1997), chap. 4. 33. ayer's "primary recognition" is intended to be prior to any "public"/"private" distinction. See also ayer, The Central Questions of Philosophy (london: Weidenfeld and nicolson, 1973), 94. 34. Philosophical Analysis in The Twentieth Century, 37. Soames's treatment of privacy in the Investigations harks back to Strawson's original review, found in Wittgenstein The Philosophical Investigations. 35. this is a free paraphrase of the content of Rhees's reply to ayer in Wittgenstein The Philosophical Investigations. 36. norman Malcolm, Nothing is Hidden (oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), 172. 68 DEREK A. McDOUGALL 37. Colin McGinn, Wittgenstein on Meaning (oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984), 197. 38. Nothing is Hidden, 171. 39. See, Wittgenstein Rules, Grammar and Necessity, Vol. 2, ed. G. P. Baker and P. M. S. Hacker (oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1985), 171–174. See also P. M. S. Hacker, Wittgenstein Meaning & Mind, (oxford: Basil Blackwell, 2001), 37. 40. The Blue Book (oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1969), 12. 41. Zettel (oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1981), §412. 42. Wittgenstein, Mind & Meaning: Toward a Social Conception of Mind (london: Routledge 1999), 188ff. 43. ibid., 214. 44. a.C. Grayling, Wittgenstein, A Very Short Introduction (oxford: oxford University Press, 2001), 124. 45. this proposal would fit neatly into a perspective opposing Hilary Putnam, e.g., with modified views in "is it necessary that Water is H 2 o?" in The Philosophy of A. J. Ayer, 429–454, and Saul Kripke, Naming and Necessity (oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1980). But, just as important, it would also be in opposition to their opponents, e.g., a. J. ayer in "identity and Reference," in Freedom and Morality, (oxford: oxford University Press, 1986), 94, and frank Ebersole, "Stalking the Rigid Designator," Philosophical Investigations 5 (1982), 247. it would eschew notions like necessary a posteriori in favour of a way of thinking more akin to that in Witgenstein's On Certainty (oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1969), §342, or in his Remarks on The Foundations of Mathematics, (oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1978), extending the idea into a scientific context of hardening the empirical proposition into a rule, Part Vi, §§22–24. 46. another writer who follows Williams in seeing these issues in a wider context is Stuart Shanker, "the Conflict between Wittgenstein and Quine on the nature of languageand Cognition and its implications for Constraint theory," in Wittgenstein and Quine, ed., Robert arrington and Hans-Johan Glock, (london: Routledge, 1996), 212–251. 47. Investigations, §§240–242. Cf. Remarks on The Foundations of Mathematics, Pt Vi, §33. 48. See Cora Diamond, "Wright's Wittgenstein," The Philosophical Quarterly 31 (1981), 352. 49. ayer, Wittgenstein, 74. 50. this of course is not actually what Kripke says, but for many commentators there is a reasonable question whether this implication can on his account be avoided, ibid., 110–112. 51. a point central to Baker and Hacker, Rules, Grammar and Necessity, Sec. V., e.g., 248. 52. Investigations, Part i, §32. 53. Jerry fodor, The Language of Thought (new York: thomas Y. Crowel, 1975), 64–65. 54. Wittgenstein on Meaning, 119. 55. Nothing is Hidden, 172. PICTURES, PRIVACY, AUGUSTINE, ANd THE MINd 69 56. Wittgenstein and The Philosophical Investigations, chap. 2, an account pointing to Wittgenstein's motivation for having chosen augustine's presentation as a model even at the cost of misrepresenting him badly in other ways. 57. Wittgenstein's Private Language, 31–32 58. David Stern, Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations, 77, and Hans Johann-Glock, A Wittgenstein Dictionary (oxford:Basil Blackwell, 1996), 41. 59. ayer, "Reply to Pears," 403. 60. Investigations, §1 and §2. Cf. Stanley Cavell's vacant, dull-witted and sluggish builders in "notes and afterthoughts on the opening of Wittgenstein's investigations," in the Cambridge Companion to Wittgenstein, ed. Hans Sluga and David G. Stern (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 261. David Stern, whilst comparing the shopkeeper example to Beckett and the absurd, follows Stephen Mulhall in referring to a behavioural repertoire mimicking the "mental mechanisms" Wittgenstein intends to expose, Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations, 85. Scott Soames's use of the term thought leaves him genuinely puzzled both about the role of augustine's child and the attribution of thought to animals in Wittgenstein, Philosophical Analysis In The Twentieth Century, 7. 61. "Review of Philosophical investigations," in Wittgenstein The Philosophical Investigations. 62. Zettel, §110. 63. Zettel, §101 and §111. 64. it is in this sense that Wittgenstein sees the term "thinking" restricted to human beings, when, say, it is directly related to contemplation, or turning an idea over in one's head (Zettel, §117), although the normal tendency is also to use it both of human and-subject to any natural human inclination towards anthropomorphism-of purposive animal behaviour, applying appropriate criteria, when it appears to fit the facts. 65. Remote because of the more specific function of aristotle's soul within a biological context in the DeAnima and elsewhere. Marie McGinn points to philosophers in the Continental phenomenological tradition who reflect similar aspects of Wittgenstein's thinking, Wittgenstein and the Philosophical Investigations, 8. 66. Investigations, Part i, §§419–420. Cf. Zettel, §§395–402. 67. Investigations, Part ii, Sec. iv. 68. Robert Kirk gave his zombie, Dan, a very good run for his money over many years only to finally abandon him, although not for reasons of which Wittgenstein would approve, see his latest formulations in Zombies and Consciousness (oxford: oxford University Press, 2005). 69. Investigations, Part ii, Sec. iv, where we again cannot avoid referring to aristotle for the distinction between the animate and the inanimate, which can reflect either the difference between the living and the non-living or that between creatures with perception and, say, plant species without. a 4-fold scheme: living, animate, conscious, rational is described in a treatment of the topic which is recommended for its blend of philosophical acumen and good sense, see W. f. R. Hardie, "Concepts of Consciousness in aristotle," Mind 85 (1976), 388–411. Cf. Malcolm, Nothing is Hidden, 184, for similar comments on Investigations §281. 70 DEREK A. McDOUGALL 70. The Legacy of Wittgenstein, (oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984), chap. 9. 71. in "Knowledge of other Minds" norman Malcolm discusses similar questions, but it cannot be said that, beyond putting great stress on the notion of a criterion and on the idea of the human body as the best picture of the human soul, he really comes to grips with the human imaginative capacity for indulging in fantasy, or with any peculiar circumstances in which for particular purposes our notion of a person might be thought "legitimately" extendable. in Wittgenstein The Philosophical Investigations, ed. Pitcher 371–383. 72. Zettel §402. Investigations §412 reveals how in our thinking a philosophical problem arises. 73. Mulhall, Wittgenstein's Private Language, following James Conant and Cora Diamond in "on Reading the Tractatus Resolutely," in Wittgenstein's Lasting Significance, ed. Max Kolbel and Bernhard Weiss, (london: Routledge 2004), 46–99. Cf. Stern's "Pyrrhonian" v "non-Pyrrhonian" distinction, Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations, 34, taken from Robert fogelin. 74. Investigations, Part ii, Sec v. and Kripke, Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language, 138ff. i am concentrating here on the direct argument in "Postscript Wittgenstein and other Minds," not on "any arcane philosophical scepticism about rule following," 118. 75. "Review of Wittgenstein On Rules & Private Language," Mind 93 (1984), 592–602. 76. Hume, Treatise, bk l, part iV, sec. 2. Cf. Strawson, Scepticism & Naturalism (london: Methuen, 1985), chap 1, sec. 3. 77. "facts and Super-facts." 78. ibid., 140. 79. What Cora Diamond refers to as how concepts with a certain grammar would "ideally" be used in terms of the "misleading picture," "Wright's Wittgenstein," 360. Cf. Investigations §426. 80. David finkelstein in Expression and The Inner, e.g., chap ii, sec 4.2, provides interesting related conclusions about Wittgenstein's approach. a further attempt to see Wittgenstein in a historical context with again similar conclusions to finkelstein, and with a detailed discussion of various analyses of criteria, is made by John Koethe, The Continuity of Wittgenstein's Thought, (new York: Cornell University Press, 1996), 94. 81. Peter Winch, "facts and Super-facts," 402, where he refers to Philosophical Investigations §§300–302. 82. oswald Hanfling thinks a criterion over-rated, and not here applicable to pain, and whilst this is to some degree true about the technical notion used in the 1960s and 70s, it still has a quite ordinary and useful application. "Criteria, Conventions and the Problem of other Minds," chapter 3 of his Wittgenstein and The Human Form of Life, (london: Routledge, 2002). 83. Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language, 120n5, and norman Malcolm, "Knowledge of other Minds," 371. 84. Investigations, §350. 85. Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language, 119. PICTURES, PRIVACY, AUGUSTINE, ANd THE MINd 71 86. the naturalism that Strawson, Scepticism and Naturalism, discerns in Wittgenstein relates more to passages in On Certainty (oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1969), than specifically to The Investigations. 87. that this view in its most naive form was ever held by anyone is clearly doubtful. 88. Investigations, §111. 89. Investigations, pt. ii, sec. iv. a point made by Colin McGinn, Wittgenstein on Meaning, chap. 1, 55n53. Cf. Kripke's characteristically finding this behavouristic, Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language, 48n31. 90. Kripke, Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language, 132 and 142 on solipsism, See l. Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, (london: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962), 5.6–5.641. for a recent account on traditional lines see Severin Schroeder, Wittgenstein, The Way Out of the Fly Bottle (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2006), 92ff. for an attempt to find a new interpretation taking account of Diamond and Conant see Marie McGinn, Elucidating the Tractatus (oxford: oxford University Press, 2006), 255. 91. Cf. John Cook, Wittgenstein's Metaphysics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), Wittgenstein, Empiricism and Language (oxford: oxford University Press, 2000) and The Undiscovered Wittgenstein: The Twentieth Century's Most Misunderstood Philosopher, (new York: Humanity Books, 2005). Cook's attribution of neutral monism and behaviourism to Wittgenstein is historically interesting, and a great deal can be gained from tracing how a prominent Wittgenstein scholar can have reached conclusions which to many may seem at least plausible in relation to one period of his work, but are quite inapplicable to the Investigations. See also David Stern, Wittgenstein on Mind and Language, 11–12, and M. J. and B. Hintikka, ," Investigating Wittgenstein, 251. 92. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Personal Recollections (oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1981), 174. 93. Bertrand Russell, An Inquiry Into Meaning and Truth (london: allen & Unwin, 1940), introduction. 94. the infamous passage regarding the Philosophical Investigations occurs in My Philosophical Development (london: allen & Unwin, 1959), in a very witty final chapter in which he replies to his critics. 95. in §295 Wittgenstein captures the almost imperceptible move from treating a picture as a harmless accompaniment of our practices, to attempting to endow it with a philosophical role. Wittgenstein hints that the picture is incidental to our practice of ascribing sensations to ourselves and to others by stressing that it is idle, in spite of its overwhelming power to mislead, in a philosophical context, by tempting philosophers to take their understanding of what it is to attribute sensations to rest in its "application." if everyone were to say that he knows what pain is only from his own pain, then we could "imagine an allegorical painting taking the place of these words." the picture does no real work, but that, of course, is not to say that there may not be circumstances in which it might perform quite another role. Consider again the idea of the emergence of consciousness as part of some ideology, for example, or the popular picture of the soul leaving the body expressed in a painting as something ethereal, a luminescent mist glowing over the deceased. Here the notion of a picture which is idle, because it does no real day-to-day work, can nevertheless lead to an investigation of what could be its quite different function in cultural, aesthetic or even religious contexts, where the notion of a particular practice of perhaps a more formal kind 72 DEREK A. McDOUGALL can come into play; and that raises an entirely different set of questions about the work it might, within such contexts, be called upon to perform. Pictures of thinking or consciousness can also, of course, lead investigators astray in ostensibly scientific contexts. i would like to thank Professor Michael DePaul for may helpful suggestions. i also gratefully acknowledge the comments of two anonymous referees, one of whom proposed a rethink resulting in a number of alterations in structure and presentation that has not only much improved the paper, but also made it run more smoothly and much easier to read.