12 - What Are Psychological Concepts For?

Summary

INTRODUCTION

We may distinguish at least two forms of scepticism about the mind and psychological notions. The most familiar is other-minds scepticism. It presents us with a conception of the contrast between inner and outer, and a related conviction of the necessary privacy of the mental, which we find immensely gripping but which threatens to make facts about others' thoughts epistemically inaccessible to us. The outlook to which we are tempted is one on which we allow that other minds exist but suppose that they must remain unknown. Wittgenstein has a good deal to say about this form of scepticism, but these issues are not our concern here. Rather, what I hope to do is bring some Wittgensteinian techniques and ideas to bear on another form of sceptical thought about the mental, or at least one version of it. This form of sceptical thought is more akin to moral scepticism than the familiar other-minds scepticism. Its target is the very idea that there are or could be facts which are reported by sentences using psychological vocabulary.

Such ‘eliminativism’ comes in a variety of forms, some of which concentrate on supposed a posteriori difficulties for the existence of the mental and others of which invoke more a priori arguments. The particular line of thought which is our topic calls on both a priori and a posteriori considerations and starts from the assumption of a link between thought and rationality.