Part 4b-iii. Brief Review: Wittgenstein and Radical Embodied Cognition

I've discussed four interrelated factors as being characteristic of various perspectives that can all be classified as non-representational:

1. Explaining specific behaviors and experiences rather than context-independent capacities
   
2. Lack of reliance on mental entities (such as representations) to explain experience and behavior
   
3. Emphasis on not-purely-mental processes and/or systems rather than any individual entity (mental or otherwise)
   
4. Lack of rigid boundaries between mind, body, and world

Here in Part 4b, I've attempted to illustrate several ways in which these ideas show up in (or at least are consistent with) the later Wittgenstein's writings on language, understanding, meaning, thought, and intention. Here's a very superficial review of a few main points:

IDEA #1 - Explaining specific behaviors and experiences rather than context-independent capacities.
Wittgenstein redirects our focus from the big, abstract philosophical questions (e.g., "What is thought?" "What is language?") to observation of what actually happens when we think or speak or understand something.

IDEA #2 - Lack of reliance on mental entities (such as representations) to explain experience and behavior &
IDEA #3 - Emphasis on not-purely-mental processes and/or systems rather than any individual entity (mental or otherwise)
Wittgenstein's discussions of mental life and language use focus not on what a person has (e.g., a particular mental state or mental object) or what a word has (some sort of fixed meaning), but on what happens. Thus, he relates knowing or understanding to action — what you can do, how you respond in specific situations. Likewise, he relates the meaning of words to their use — how people do things with them and respond to them.

IDEA #4 - Lack of rigid boundaries between mind, body, and world
The processes and interactions that Wittgenstein discusses as helping to explain language use, meaning, understanding, intending, and thinking are not mental processes per se; they're not all in the brain, or even in the body. In order to understand any of these activities, he suggests, we need to take into account the larger context (social, cultural, physical, etc.) — our "forms of life," looking at highly complex interactions not just within an embodied person but between that person and the rest of the world. I believe that Wittgenstein convincingly demonstrates that any description of thinking, intending, etc. as an isolated, purely "mental" thing or process is doomed to failure.

Part 4b-ii(d). So How Would Wittgenstein Explain Mental Life? (continued)

Question d. If language is not just a way of expressing meaning or thoughts or something else essentially internal, what does it express? What is the relationship between language and thought?

Underlying questions about the relationship between language and meaning is a notion that these are separate things:

“You say: the point isn’t the word, but its meaning, and you think of the meaning as a thing of the same kind as the word, though also different from the word. Here the word, there the meaning.” (120)

This characterization reveals are two distinct assumptions that Wittgenstein challenges:

1) Meaning (or thought) is somehow separable from, or additional to, language

“When I think in language, there aren’t ‘meanings’ going through my mind in addition to the verbal expressions: the language is itself the vehicle of thought.” (329)

“Thinking is not an incorporeal process which lends life and sense to speaking, and which it would be possible to detach from speaking, rather as the Devil took the shadow of Schlemiehl from the ground.” (339)

2) Meaning is “a thing” — some sort of entity (however abstract) with a fixed or stable identity.

Recall from Idea #3 the possibility of relying on processes, rather than any type of entity, to explain mental life and understanding. Only by letting go of a reliance on entities can we truly understand Wittgenstein’s explanation of meaning in terms of use:

“For a large class of cases — though not for all — in which we employ the word ‘meaning’ it can be defined thus: the meaning of a word is its use in the language.” (43)

This isn’t a philosophical thesis or a general, abstract definition of meaning. Wittgenstein isn’t saying that meaning corresponds to something fixed, which we can pinpoint, and that something is use. In fact, even asking the question “What is meaning?” can be misleading here, as it seems to imply that we can pin down a stable, context-free definition — exactly the type of implication that Wittgenstein is challenging:

“We ask: ‘What is language?’, “What is a proposition?” And the answer to these questions is to be given once and for all; and independently of any future experience.” (92)

I’ll try stating the point a little differently. Try not to think about meaning as something that a word has, or that a person has. (This is analogous to the earlier argument that we need not see understanding as something that a person has.) Consider meaning as more of a verb than a noun — meaning happens. And this happening is not independent from language use. Meaning does not transcend language use, underlie language use, precede language use, cause language use, or extend beyond language use. To know everything about how a word is used would be to know all there is to know about its meaning. Similarly, thinking does not transcend, underlie, precede, cause, or extend beyond speaking. Just because nobody else can hear your thoughts unless you speak them aloud, that doesn't mean that thinking differs from speaking in some more profound way. Both are ways of using language.

I can't think of any better way to describe the relationship between language and thought than the quotation I referenced earlier:

"[T]he language is itself the vehicle of thought.” (329)

Thus, only someone who can use language can think — at least in the sense that we think.

“[O]ne can only say something if one has learned to talk. Therefore in order to want to say something one must also have mastered a language…” (338)

“It is sometimes said that animals do not talk because they lack the mental capacity. And this means: ‘they do not think, and that is why they not talk.’ But — they simply do not talk. Or to put it better: they do not use language — if we except the most primitive forms of language.” (25)

Conceptualizing thought or meaning as somehow separate from language, separate from words, can only lead to confusion. I won't take the time to develop that argument any further right now, but hope it will become clear in Part 6. I'll just leave you with a couple of additional quotations related to this point that hopefully will at least be thought-provoking:

“‘The purpose of language is to express thoughts.’—So presumably the purpose of every sentence is to express a thought. Then what thought is expressed, for example, by the sentence ‘It’s raining’?” (301)

“[I]f you shout “Slab!” you really mean: “Bring me a slab...Why should I not say: ‘When he says ‘Slab!’ he means ‘Slab!” Again, if you can mean ‘Bring me the slab”, why should you not be able to mean ‘Slab!”? (19)

Part 4b-ii(c). So How Would Wittgenstein Explain Mental Life? (continued)

(continued directly from the previous two posts)

Question c. If there isn't something deeper underlying our everyday use of language, why does it seem as though there is? And how can you explain consistencies and similarities in language use if not through deeper regularities?

First, why does it seem as though there is something deeper that underpins all language use? There are a number of possible answers. I’ll just mention a few of them here. [This piece overlaps somewhat with Part 2, with the primary difference being that here I’m looking only at ideas with a basis in Wittgenstein’s writings.]

1. We are misled by the superficial similarities between words that in fact function quite differently, so it seems as though their uses have much more in common than they actually do:

“Think of the tools in a tool-box: there is a hammer, pliers, a saw, a screw-driver, a rule, a glue-pot, glue, nails and screws.—The functions of words are as diverse as the functions of these objects… What confuses us is the uniform appearance of words when we hear them spoken or meet them in script and print. For their application is not presented to us so clearly. Especially when we are doing philosophy!” (11)

Upon examining those applications, which we can learn about only empirically (not through abstract philosophical reasoning) we find that there is in fact no single feature that is shared by all words or all aspects of language:

“Instead of producing something common to all that we call language, I am saying that these phenomena have no one thing in common which makes us use the same word for all, — but that they are related to one another in many different ways.” (65)

2. As we do philosophy, it can certainly seem as if we’re getting at something deeper.

Wittgenstein talks about how we can sometimes remove misunderstandings by “substituting one form of expression for another; this may be called an ‘analysis’ of our forms of expression, for the process is sometimes like one of taking a thing apart.” (90)

The problem comes when we assume that this sort of “analysis” accomplishes something much more profound than it can actually accomplish — penetrating to a deeper reality, rather than just rephrasing or rearranging words or ideas so that we can more easily understand them:

“[Q]uestions as to the essence of language, of propositions, of thought… see in the essence, not something that already lies open to view and that becomes surveyable by a rearrangement, but something that lies beneath the surface. Something that lies within, which we see when we look into the thing, and which an analysis digs out.” (92)

It can then appear as though if we could just continue that analysis to some logical conclusion, we would eventually hit bottom, coming across the ultimate meaning or basic form of a thought or expression:

“[I]t may come to look as if there were something like a final analysis of our forms of language, and so a single completely resolved form of every expression. That is, as if our usual forms of expression were, essentially, unanalyzed; as if there were something hidden in them that had to be brought to light.” (91)

3. Real language practices are messy — so if we assume there is a neat, ordered system somewhere, it’s natural to assume it lies somewhere deeper. Wittgenstein talks of the problems that arise when we see formal logic as a model for understanding language. Logic is not empirical, not concerned with specific behaviors and experiences: “Logical investigation… seeks to see to the bottom of things and is not meant to concern itself whether what actually happens is this or that.” (89) If we see language or meaning as something that must be highly pristine or ordered, like logic, it’s of concern that we can’t find evidence for that in everyday practices: “When we believe that we must find… order, must find the ideal, in our actual language, we become dissatisfied with what are ordinarily called ‘propositions’, ‘words’, ‘signs’.” (105) “The more narrowly we examine actual language, the sharper becomes the conflict between it and our requirement.” (107) Wittgenstein points out that this search for order or purity is based not observational evidence or data, but on a preconceived assumption: “[T]he crystalline purity of logic was, of course, not a result of investigation: it was a requirement.” If individuals operate with this assumption — seeking out the “crystalline purity” that they’re sure must exist and yet is not evident in our ordinary language practices — it’s no wonder they’ll look for it elsewhere, at some deeper level.

4. It may seem as though in order for different people to understand one another, they need to share something at a deep level.

Which brings us to the next question:

How can you explain consistencies and similarities in language use — essentially, the fact that we are able to understand each other — if not through something deeper that we all share?

For instance, how do you explain the fact that you and I can both understand the word “dog” without assuming that we both have a concept or representation “dog” in our brains?

Here again, I come back to the ideas of training and “forms of life” (as discussed in the last post). The necessary regularities and similarities exist not in our heads, but in the wider world. You and I can understand the word “dog” or “red” or “tree” — i.e., we can use and respond to the word in quite similar ways — because we live in the same sort of language community (even if we speak different languages, those languages are used to do similar types of things, including naming and describing objects) and the same physical environment (including dogs and trees and various red things, or at least pictures of those). Think of the training we get in these words as we’re growing up. If a child points to a flower and says “tree” (which could easily happen), someone will correct her and say “No, that’s a flower.” She’ll also be corrected if someone asks her what color grass is and she replies “red,” or asks what kind of animal says “woof” and she replies “cat.” To imagine that psychologically healthy, normally socialized individuals could grow to adulthood using these words in conflicting ways is just as odd as imagining they could wind up using the wrong end of a fork to eat their food or talk into the wrong end of a telephone. The external environment can do a great deal of the work that inner representations are brought in to accomplish.

I imagine to many readers this answer will seem unsatisfactory, as though it misses something critically important. I encourage you to give it a little more thought... and to keep reading...

Part 4b-ii(b). So How Would Wittgenstein Explain Mental Life? (continued)

(continued directly from the previous post)

Question b: If understanding, knowing, believing, or intending something cannot be usefully explained as a purely mental state or process, how can these things be explained?

Here we can bring in Idea #3: Emphasis on not-purely-mental processes and/or systems rather than any individual entity (mental or otherwise). It is typical in the philosophy of mind to talk about understanding, knowing, beliefs, intentions, concepts, and the like as isolated entities — something you have (probably inside your brain). The idea is that in some deep sense, a particular concept really is a discrete network of neurons or type of neural activity; a particular belief really is a certain pattern of activation or state of the brain; and so forth.

Instead of being tied to something that you have, Wittgenstein relates understanding and knowing to what you can do, how you respond in particular situations. (Similarly with belief and intention, which I’ll address a bit later.) Here he relates that to knowing what a game is:

“What does it mean to know what a game is?... Isn’t my knowledge, my concept of a game, completely expressed in the explanations that I could give? That is, in my describing examples of various kinds of game; shewing how all sorts of other games can be constructed on the analogy of these; saying that I should scarcely include this or this among games; and so on.” (75)

In the context of the primitive language he imagines, he relates understanding to action:

“Don’t you understand the call ‘Slab!’ if you act on it in such-and-such a way?” (6)

Of course, this explanation of knowing and understanding gets us no closer to explaining behavior. We were trying to explain how someone could come to use particular words, and considering the start of an answer — the person understands the word. But if understanding a word entails no more than the ability to use that word, we are left with complete circularity: you’re able to use the word because you have the ability to use it.

Furthermore, it may seem that in order to explain what you can do, we still need to identify something that you have — that behaviors in specific situations (describing different games, responding to the call “Slab”, etc.) would only be possible if you had a particular internal thing (concept of game, mental representation of a slab, etc.). But that is an assumption, and one that Wittgenstein does not buy into (Idea #2: Lack of reliance on mental entities).

Instead, we can explain how a person has come to know and understand words (that is, to be able to speak, write, and/or respond to particular words in particular contexts) by referring to past processes — specifically, the interactions that human being has had in the world, related to those words.

Early in the Investigations, Wittgenstein comments that when a child learns to talk, “the teaching of language is not explanation, but training” (5). Explanation is a particular type of verbal activity that takes place between people who already have the background of a shared language behind them. For instance, once you and I share common language practices, you can point to an object and ask me what it is, and I can give you an explanation in response. This back-and-forth could not take place if both of us had not had extensive past “training” in language practices — involving pointing to things, naming things, asking questions, answering questions, describing the physical properties and uses of various objects, and so forth.

When Wittgenstein describes the primitive (“slab,” “block,” etc.) language, he says that “[t]he children are brought up to perform these actions, to use these words as they do so, and to react in this way to the words of others.” (6) This sort of training — learning to respond to certain stimuli (including the verbal or visual perception of words) by behaving in certain ways (including uttering words) — is a precondition to being able to use the language. Notice again the focus on doing something (developing the ability to respond skillfully), rather than having something (acquiring some entity that can later be retrieved).

When we neglect to consider all of that background training, it’s easy to think that “ostensive teaching of words” (pointing to things and saying what they are called) can, in and of itself, explain how a person learns the name for something. Wittgenstein mentions that ostensive teaching will play a significant role in the primitive language: “An important part of the training will consist in the teacher’s pointing to the objects, directing the child’s attention to them, and at the same time uttering a word; for instance, the word ‘slab’ as he points to that shape.” (6) However, that alone doesn't account for skillful use of that language. When someone is able to act appropriately in response to the call “Slab!”, he says, “[d]oubtless the ostensive teaching helped to bring this about; but only together with a particular training. With different training the same ostensive teaching of these words would have effected a quite different understanding.” (6)

Applying this idea to our own language, it’s easy to forget the years and years of language “training” (relevant, influential experiences) we have all had; training in interpersonal communication begins with the earliest interactions with caregivers, as infants get practice responding to another individual’s vocal sounds by making sounds of their own (and having those sounds responded to), and continues to develop throughout our lifespan (we learn to do many different things with language, engage in different forms of discourse, learn new categories of words, etc.).

Only in the context of an entire language community — where our use of words is inextricably entwined with our actions and perceptions within the wider physical and social world, and is shaped by lifetimes of experience — can we understand individual instances of word use: “[T]o imagine a language means to imagine a form of life.” (19) (The same is true of intentions: “An intention is embedded in its situation, in human customs and institutions.” (337). More on that later.) To put it a little differently: it is only after a history of past experiences speaking, hearing, writing, and/or reading words in a wide range of contexts (many of them social) that future word-related stimuli, such as being asked a question, will elicit the kinds of skillful, intelligible responses one would expect from an fluent speaker of a particular language.

This brings us to Idea #4: Lack of rigid boundaries between mind, body, and world. The processes that help explain our skillful use of words are not “mental” processes per se. Language training and experience involve highly complex interactions within an embodied organism (including the entire nervous system, vocal apparatus, and the rest of the physical body) and between that organism (person) and the rest of the world. There’s no way to understand them merely by looking inside the head. Wittgenstein advises us: “Try not to think of understanding as a ‘mental process’ at all. — For that is the expression which confuses you… In the sense in which there are processes (including mental processes) which are characteristic of understanding, understanding is not a mental process.” (154)

There is one more critical point that I want to mention before moving on. I expect this claim to be highly controversial and require a good deal of defense; I’ll state it just briefly here and discuss it in much greater detail in Part 6.

Here it is: An explanation that relies only on mental entities, mental processes, or conscious experiences cannot possibly explain how we use or understand language.

A few relevant quotes from Wittgenstein (which may or may not make more sense than they did when I mentioned them in the last post):

“We are trying to get hold of the mental process of understanding which seems to be hidden behind those coarser and therefore more readily visible accompaniments. But we do not succeed; or, rather, it does not get as far as a real attempt. For even supposing I had found something that happened in all those cases of understanding,— why should it be the understanding? And how can the process of understanding have been hidden, when I said ‘Now I understand’ because I understood?!” (153)

“[S]uppose that… I did remember a single sensation [connected with intending]; how have I the right to say that it is what I call the ‘intention’?”

Part 4b-ii(a). So How Would Wittgenstein Explain Mental Life?

In the previous post, I laid out several ideas that Wittgenstein challenges, explaining what I take him to be saying in a negative sense (what is not true about mental life). Here I’ll give just a brief summary of those points, together with the questions that they invite about a possible positive account (what we can then say about mental life):

a. Words (or combinations of words) don’t have fixed meanings or correspond to fixed states or processes.
Well, then, how do we come to use them?

b. Understanding, knowing, believing, or intending something cannot be usefully explained as a purely mental state or process.
Then how can any of those things be explained?

c. It is not true that there is something deeper underlying our everyday use of language, which we need to engage in philosophical analysis to uncover. Why, then, does it seem as though there is? And how can you explain consistencies and similarities in language use if not through deeper regularities?

d. Language is not just a way of expressing meaning or thoughts or something else essentially internal that could exist independently of any language. What, then, is our language expressing? What is the relationship between language and thought?

In the course of answering these questions, I’m going to keep referring back to the four ideas I’ve identified as common to many non-representational viewpoints. I hesitate to call them principles, much less theses, so I’ll just stick with calling them ideas for now:

1. Explaining specific behaviors and experiences rather than context-independent capacities
2. Lack of reliance on mental entities (such as representations) to explain experience and behavior
3. Emphasis on not-purely-mental processes and/or systems rather than any individual entity (mental or otherwise)
4. Lack of rigid boundaries between mind, body, and world

Question a: How can you explain how we come to use words, if not by referring to fixed meanings, fixed mental states or processes, or some other stable factor?

If you’re looking at context-independent capacities, this sounds like a single question you’d need to investigate with philosophical analysis. You’d come up with one generic account of meaning and usage that applies to all words. However, as soon as you shift your focus to specific behaviors and experiences (as in Idea #1), this becomes a series of questions you’d need to investigate empirically, looking at what actually happens in particular situations. For instance, instead of asking how we come to use words generally, we would ask how we come to use the word “this” or “dog” or “red” or any other individual word. To do this, we would have to look at the particular details of how that word is used in our language, what specific things people do with that word, how they respond to it in various contexts, etc.

Wittgenstein redirects our attention from philosophical analysis to empirical inquiry:

“What is the relation between name and thing named?” [a typical abstract philosophical question] “Well, what is it? Look at language-game (2) or at another one: there you can see the sort of thing this relation consists in. [Note: language-game (2) refers to the “primitive” language of slabs, beams, and so forth, as referenced in the previous post.] This relation may also consist, among many other things, in the fact that hearing the name calls before our mind the picture of what is being named; and it also consists, among other things, in the name’s being written on the thing named or being pronounced when that thing is pointed at.” (37)

This is not simply a statement of preference; Wittgenstein is not just saying that it’s possible to learn about meaning by examining what happens in specific cases, or that it’s valuable to do so. He’s saying that this is the only way to understand the meaning and use of words. The alternative — abstract theorizing detached from particular instances — does not give us the answers we seek:
“One cannot guess how a word functions. One has to look at its use and learn from that.” (350)

This is just as true for words that seem to have deep abstract or metaphysical significance as it is for seemingly more ordinary or concrete terms like chair or book or potato pancake:

“When philosophers use a word — ‘knowledge’, ‘being’, ‘object’, ‘I’, ‘proposition’, ‘name’— and try to grasp the essence of the thing one must always ask oneself: is the word ever actually used in this way in the language-game which is its original home?” (116)

After we shift our focus to what actually happens in particular situations, the question remains of how those things come to happen. How does it come to be that hearing a particular name “calls before our mind the picture of what is being named”? Or that a certain name is “pronounced when that thing is pointed at”? How do human beings come to speak, write, and respond to the words “this” or “dog” or “red” (or “I” or “knowledge” etc.) in different contexts?

This is directly tied in with the issue of understanding. For instance: if we want to explain how, when I hear the word “dog,” an image of a dog comes before my mind, or I am able to point to a picture of a dog, we might start by saying that I understand the word “dog” or know what “dog” means. Therefore, exploring the answer to Question b will help flesh out the answer to Question a. On to the next post...

Part 4b-i. Wittgenstein Was an Embodied Cognitive Scientist

The theme of Part 4 is that a variety of different disciplines provide compelling, non-representational (radical embodied) accounts of various aspects of mental life. For each one I examine, I’ll illustrate how it is characterized by the four interrelated factors listed below, and give a few examples of the types of explanations it can provide.

1. Explaining specific behaviors and experiences rather than context-independent capacities
   
2. Lack of reliance on mental entities (such as representations) to explain experience and behavior
   
3. Emphasis on not-purely-mental processes and/or systems rather than any individual entity (mental or otherwise)
   
4. Lack of rigid boundaries between mind, body, and world
   

WITTGENSTEIN
I begin with the later works of Ludwig Wittgenstein, specifically his Philosophical Investigations. (The numbers I use as references refer to the various short sections of this publication.) The particular aspects of mental life I’ll refer to are:

• understanding
• knowledge
  
• thought
• intention/meaning (what one means by the words one uses)

Some of the Conceptions that Wittgenstein Challenges
The Investigations starts with a quotation from St. Augustine’s Confessions. Analyzing this quotation, Wittgenstein says, “These words, it seems to me, give us a particular picture of the essence of human language. It is this: the individual words in language name objects — sentences are combinations of such names.——In this picture of language we find the roots of the following idea: Every word has a meaning. This meaning is correlated with the word. It is the object for which the word stands.” (1)

He then proceeds to slowly but surely rip that “picture of language” (as well as its mother, father, sisters, brothers, and entire extended family of related ideas) to teeny, pathetic little shreds. He does this in his typical, rather indirect style, so I’ll give a very rough, terribly oversimplified summary here:

• This kind of picture seems only to take into account a very limited subset of words (“you are, I believe, thinking primarily of nouns like ‘table,’ ‘chair,’ ‘bread,’ and of people’s names, and only secondarily of the names of certain actions and properties; and of the remaining kinds of word as something that will take care of itself” (1)). (This is fairly obvious.)
  
• To give this picture the best possible chance of success, let’s come up with the most simplistic ("primitive") type of language we can imagine. We’ll leave out all the tricky types of words, and stick to very basic ones (words for a few simple objects like “slab” and “beam”; a few numbers; and "there" and "this"). Then at least we can get a sense of where this “every word has a meaning/words stand for objects” explanation is valid.
• Boo-ya! In your face! Even in the simplest, most “primitive” cases you can imagine, when you really break it down, this conception does nothing to help us understand how people come to use words.

Here are a few of the related ideas that Wittgenstein goes on to challenge and, I believe, successfully defeats. (I’ll begin examining how he does this in the next few posts, saving the most compelling arguments for Part 6; the accompanying quotations with each idea below are meant to be merely thought-provoking, not self-explanatory):

1. Words (or sentences, or other types of combinations of words) have fixed meanings, or correspond to fixed states or processes, that can be pinpointed or isolated — e.g., in particular parts of the brain, in some special relationship with an object, or in a particular type of mental image or experience. Those fixed meanings or correspondences can explain how we come to use words in specific situations.
   
   “Naming appears as a queer connexion of a word with an object.—And you really get such a queer connexion when the philosopher tries to bring out the relation between name and thing by staring at an object in front of him and repeating a name or even the word ‘this’ innumerable times… And here we may indeed fancy naming to be some remarkable act of mind, as it were a baptism of an object.” (38) [Note: I believe this characterization is supposed to illustrate the absurdity of what can happen when one gets caught up in philosophical modes of analysis; the image of a philosopher staring at something and repeating “this” again and again always cracks me up.]
   
   
2. Understanding, knowing, believing, or intending something can be usefully explained as a purely mental state or process (something that can be isolated within the head at a particular time)
   

“We are trying to get hold of the mental process of understanding which seems to be hidden behind those coarser and therefore more readily visible accompaniments. But we do not succeed; or, rather, it does not get as far as a real attempt. For even supposing I had found something that happened in all those cases of understanding,— why should it be the understanding? And how can the process of understanding have been hidden, when I said ‘Now I understand’ because I understood?!” (153)

“[S]uppose that… I did remember a single sensation [connected with intending]; how have I the right to say that it is what I call the ‘intention’?" (646)

“Try not to think of understanding as a ‘mental process’ at all. — For that is the expression which confuses you… In the sense in which there are processes (including mental processes) which are characteristic of understanding, understanding is not a mental process.” (154)


3. There is some deeper meaning underneath our mundane, everyday modes of expressing ourselves. If only we can analyze and get to the roots of our language, we can come up with what our words and expressions really mean.
   
   “[I]t may come to look as if there were something like a final analysis of our forms of language, and so a single completely resolved form of every expression. That is, as if our usual forms of expression were, essentially, unanalyzed; as if there were something hidden in them that had to be brought to light.” (91)
   
   “Philosophy [of the sort Wittgenstein is engaging in] simply puts everything before us, and neither explains nor deduces everything. Since everything lies open to view there is nothing to explain. For what is hidden, for example, is of no interest to us.” (126)
   
   “Instead of producing something common to all that we call language, I am saying that these phenomena have no one thing in common which makes us use the same word for all, — but that they are related to one another in many different ways.” (65)
   
   
   
4. Language is just a way of expressing meaning or thoughts or something else essentially internal that could exist independently of any language.
   

“It is sometimes said that animals do not talk because they lack the mental capacity. And this means: ‘they do not think, and that is why they not talk.’ But — they simply do not talk. Or to put it better: they do not use language — if we except the most primitive forms of language.” (25)

“[O]ne can only say something if one has learned to talk. Therefore in order to want to say something one must also have mastered a language…” (338)

“Thinking is not an incorporeal process which lends life and sense to speaking, and which it would be possible to detach from speaking, rather as the Devil took the shadow of Schlemiehl from the ground.” (339)

In the next post I'll move from this summary of negative observations (the ideas that Wittgenstein shows to be flawed) to a more positive account (what we can piece together about an account of mental life that Wittgenstein could actually agree with), and I'll tie that to the four factors I'm associating with embodied cognition.

Part 4a. It Takes a System to Raise a Mind

In this part of the blog I’ll expand on the points I introduced in Part 3, related to the differences between representational and non-representational approaches (see the summary here). This time I’ll give many more concrete examples. I won’t spend much time looking at specific representationalist explanations, for three reasons: 1) that’s not my field of expertise, and I don’t want to spend lots of time researching to be sure I accurately capture the subtle distinctions between different people’s points of view; 2) those subtle distinctions don’t really matter for the points I’m making here; and, most important, 3) representationalism is so dominant throughout philosophy of mind and cognitive science that it will be much more familiar to most readers than the alternative approach I’m going to present.

While this approach tends to come across as radical within current, mainstream philosophy of mind and cognitive science, there are other disciplines in which it is the rule rather than the exception. Over the past eight years I’ve been fortunate to be exposed to — and at times immersed in — several of these, including the Alexander Technique, interpersonal neuropsychology (as applied therapeutically), and systems-centered approaches to communication and organizational development. I’ll focus on these the most because I know them the best, but will also say a little bit about other fields of study that share the same kinds of parallels, including American naturalism (which connects in interesting ways to the Alexander Technique), certain Buddhist teachings, and some areas of robotics. It’s fascinating to me that while there is little superficial resemblance between these disciplines — they have emerged out of diverse historical backgrounds and serve very different purposes — they seem to share four related characteristics:

1. Explaining specific behaviors and experiences rather than context-independent capacities
   
2. Lack of reliance on mental entities (such as representations) to explain experience and behavior
   
3. Emphasis on not-purely-mental processes and/or systems rather than any individual entity (mental or otherwise)
   
4. Lack of rigid boundaries between mind, body, and world
   

My suspicion is that these characteristics emerged in different orders within the different disciplines I’m discussing (e.g., in some (1) came first; in others (2) came first; and so on). It seems to me that these ideas are intimately connected, so that once you truly embrace any one of them and take it to its logical conclusion, it naturally suggests the others. While some readers may not agree that all four are essential to any radical embodied cognitive perspective, I think it’s clear that any perspective that does embrace all four would qualify as a radical embodied approach. (Number 2 alone should do it, or at least numbers 2 and 4.)


The Role of Wittgenstein
Before leaping entirely outside the bounds of philosophy, I’m going to give some attention to my favorite philosopher: Ludwig Wittgenstein. I believe that within the field, Wittgenstein’s later writings provide the most solid foundation for a radical cognitive science perspective. The problem is, his approach is indirect (teaching through narrative examples and aphorisms, rather than linear argument) and also more negative than positive (challenging other approaches rather than putting forth a substantive, viable alternative). It’s no wonder that different people come away with drastically different opinions about what he was getting at. While I’m pretty confident about my own understanding, I can’t be certain that it is entirely accurate. (I hope others who have studied his writings will help me there.) However, I have found the ideas so powerfully useful that I’d stand by them even if I discovered that Wittgenstein meant something entirely different.

Progression of This Section
I’m going to divide up this section by discipline or subdiscipline — for each one, illustrating the ways in which it displays the four features outlined above and demonstrating how it helps to explain various aspects of mental life in a non-representational way. I’ll start out with the later Wittgenstein and then express the other sections as parallels to his ideas (Wittgenstein was an Alexander Teacher, Wittgenstein was a Buddhist, etc.). It would be much more accurate to link them directly to embodied cognitive science (e.g., Radical Embodied Cognition is Buddhist, or Alexander Teachers are Radical Embodied Cognitive Scientists) but also much less catchy. So we’re going with the Wittgenstein connection. In the last couple of sections I’ll make a link to other contemporary philosophers who have put forth non-representational approaches to the mind.

I’ll link up each section to this post as soon as I write it:

4b. Wittgenstein Was an Embodied Cognitive Scientist: i, ii(a), ii(b), ii(c), ii(d), iii, iv
4c. Wittgenstein Was an Alexander Teacher
4d. Wittgenstein Was a Social Neurophysiologist
4e. Wittgenstein Was a Systems-Centered Trainer
4f. Wittgenstein Was a Buddhist
4g. Wittgenstein Was a Naturalist
4h. Wittgenstein Was a Robotic Engineer
4i. Wittgenstein and Noë
4j. Wittgenstein and Chemero