9 - Are meaning, understanding, etc. definite states?

Summary

In his paper ‘Wittgenstein on understanding’, Warren Goldfarb writes:

Wittgenstein's treatments in the Philosophical Investigations of the cognitive or intentional mental notions are evidently meant to persuade us that, in some sense, understanding, believing, remembering, thinking, and the like are not particular or definite states or processes; or (if this is to say anything different) that there are no particular states or processes that constitute the understanding, remembering, etc.

To be fair to Goldfarb, I should stress how he hedges the thought he attributes to Wittgenstein with ‘in some sense’. And he immediately goes on to say:

Such a dark point desperately needs clarification, if it is not to deny the undeniable. For surely we may (and Wittgenstein does) speak of a state of understanding, or of thought-processes; surely when one understands – understands a word, a sentence, or the principle of a series – one is in a particular state, namely, the state of understanding the word, sentence, or principle.

But that is the only appearance of such admittedly undeniable points in Goldfarb's paper. He devotes the rest of it to elaborating how he reads the passages in which Wittgenstein discourages us from thinking in terms of definite or particular states and processes. The acknowledged sense in which Wittgenstein had better have nothing against such talk gets no further attention.