14 - ‘Only of a Human Being and What Behaves like a Human Being …’: The Mereological Fallacy and Cognitive Neuroscience

Summary

The Subject of Psychological Predicates

Wittgenstein argued that there is a conceptual connection between psychological attributes, such as being in pain, being afraid, wanting an apple, and their behavioural manifestation. But he denied that this connection amounts to entailment. Investigations §281 opens with the accusation that Wittgenstein is in effect espousing a form of behaviourism: ‘Doesn't what you say amount to this’, his interlocutor queries, ‘that there is no pain, for example, without pain-behaviour?’ To this Wittgenstein replies:

It amounts to this: that only of a living human being and what resembles (behaves like) a living human being can one say: it has sensations; it sees; is blind; hears; is deaf; is conscious or unconscious.

This brief and quite general remark is profound and consequential. It is note-worthy that Wittgenstein was anticipated by Aristotle in his great book De Anima, which we shall discuss in a moment, and also by George Henry Lewes (the partner of George Eliot) in his 1877 book The Physical Basis of Mind (p. 441) in which he wrote: ‘It is the man and not the brain that thinks; it is the organism as a whole, and not one organ, that feels and acts.’ It is easy to misinterpret Wittgenstein's remark. So, as is our wont, let's take it slowly.

Wittgenstein is denying that the connection between pain and pain-behaviour is as close as the behaviourist suggests. What he in effect is doing is modalizing the connection – that is, linking pain not directly to pain behaviour in each and every instance, but to the possibility of pain behaviour. So, don't say:

• ● There is no pain without pain-behaviour.

What we want is a looser connection that invokes modality – in particular, possibility. What about:

• ● There is no pain without the possibility of pain-behaviour.

That is not yet right, since clearly, someone completely paralysed (e.g. by an injection of curare alkaloids prior to surgery) may nevertheless feel pain. But our concern is surely not with circumstantial possibility. ‘Possibility’ here must be taken as ‘logical possibility’. As we have seen, logical possibility amounts to intelligibility – to what makes sense.