New Ideas in Psychology 27 (2009) 107–117

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newideapsych

The contemporary relevance of Wittgenstein: Reflectionsand directions

Timothy P. Racine a,*, Ulrich Muller b

a Department of Psychology, Simon Fraser University, 8888 University Drive, Burnaby, BC V5A 1S6, Canadab Department of Psychology, University of Victoria, PO Box 3050 STN CSC, Victoria, BC, V8W 3P5 Canada

a r t i c l e i n f o

Article history:Available online 10 June 2008

Keywords:WittgensteinConceptual analysisLanguageMindPsychological theory

* Corresponding author.E-mail address: tracine@sfu.ca (T.P. Racine).

0732-118X/$ – see front matter � 2008 Elsevier Ltdoi:10.1016/j.newideapsych.2008.04.008

a b s t r a c t

In the introduction to this special issue, we discuss the develop-ment of Wittgenstein’s thought, distinguish what we take to bewell-travelled versus less well-travelled aspects of his philosophyof psychological phenomena and summarize the diverse contribu-tions to this collection. In order to do so, we briefly discuss theextent to which his writings themselves can properly serve asa basis for psychological theory and method.

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This special issue addressing Wittgenstein’s relevance for contemporary psychological research isintended for a diverse audience, one that might range from those who ask, ‘‘who is this Wittgensteinperson anyway?’’, to those who wonder why 12 articles in a journal entitled New Ideas in Psychologywould be predicated on an outdated or otherwise suspicious way of thinking about psychological mat-ters, to those, such as the editors of and the contributors to this collection, who argue that the field ofpsychology could learn a great deal more from Wittgenstein than it already has, and to those who aremore interested in Wittgenstein than psychological research per se. We believe that readers that fallinto all of these categories will find much of interest and use in this collection.

In Section 1 we trace the development of Wittgenstein’s thought for readers with only a passing, ifany, familiarity with his work. In so doing we review the well-travelled notions of a language-game, theprivate language argument, and family resemblance while providing primary textual support in orderfor readers to become exposed to Wittgenstein’s original writings on these issues. For the scepticor even the reader who may be familiar with Wittgenstein’s strictures concerning language-gamesor the problems of a private language but who doubts that Wittgenstein has anything of greater valueto offer psychology, in Section 2 we describe what we take to be three of his programmatic and not

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readily appreciated insights into the nature of psychological phenomena that concern the relation be-tween conceptual and empirical issues, the convoluted nature of psychological concepts, and thegrounding of meaning and rule-following in unreflective social practices. Given that a number of thearticles in this collection present theories that in various ways are inspired by Wittgenstein, we alsobriefly discuss the somewhat controversial issue of the extent to which Wittgenstein’s writings shouldbe thought of as a basis for psychological theory and method. Although we take a moderate stand onthe latter issue, in keeping with Wittgenstein, the question we would ask is what do such theories andmethods do, i.e., how are they to be used, and are they consistent with the thrust of Wittgenstein’smethod? In Section 3 we introduce and summarize the diverse contributions to this collection. Weconclude by reflecting on the difficulty of the task faced by the contributors to this collection andwe mention some recent works that have continued the work that Wittgenstein began.

1. Who is this Wittgenstein person anyway?

Simply put, Ludwig Wittgenstein was one of the most important philosophers of the 20th century.Although Wittgenstein’s place in 20th century philosophy need not concern us here, G. H. vonWright, a foremost authority on Wittgenstein, has claimed that Wittgenstein’s later work ‘‘has no an-cestors in the history of thought. His work signals a radical departure from previously existing pathsof philosophy (2001, p. 14). Wittgenstein initially came to the attention of Bertrand Russell, who pro-vided a spur for Wittgenstein’s early work (as did Gottlob Frege, who had suggested that Wittgen-stein study with Russell; e.g., Malcolm, 2001). Despite the fact that in the introduction to the onlymajor work that Wittgenstein published in his own lifetime, Russell (1922, p. xx) asserted that‘‘Wittgenstein’s theory stands in need of greater technical development’’ and Russell cautionedthat he found himself ‘‘unable to be sure of the rightness of a theory, merely on the ground that[he] cannot see any point on which it is wrong’’ (1922, p. xxii), Wittgenstein (1922, p. 4) famouslyprefaced his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus by claiming to ‘‘have found, on all essential points, the finalsolution of the problems [of philosophy].’’ And Russell’s ambivalence about the Tractatus did not pre-vent it from being championed by the Vienna Circle, which introduced the philosophical movementof logical positivism, a philosophy of science that remains influential in contemporary psychology(see Maraun, Slaney, & Gabriel, 2009).

Wittgenstein’s primary goal in the Tractatus was the elucidation of a system that depicted logicalrelations between differing levels of propositions and the states of affairs to which they necessarilymust correspond. (A secondary goal, albeit the one central to Wittgenstein, was to recognize a limitto what can be meaningfully said about such states of affairs.) This Tractarian notion that the meaningof propositions, and a fortiori concepts, consists in their relation to corresponding features of the nat-ural world is so taken for granted that it continues to be at work in contemporary psychologicalresearchdso much so that Fodor’s influential language of thought hypothesis can be derivedfrom the Tractarian notion of meaning (Glock, 2006, pp. 140–143; see also especially papers by Cash,this issue; Hobson, this issue; Hutto, this issue; Mascolo, this issue; Maraun, Slaney, & Gabriel,this issue; Nelson; Rodrıguez, this issue for analysis and criticism of other manifestations of the Trac-tarian view).

As Wittgenstein continued to examine these issues, however, this correspondence, or as Wittgen-stein (1958, p. vi) called it, picture, theory of elementary propositions to simple elements of naturalreality began to collapse upon itself and he was ‘‘forced to recognize grave mistakes in what I wrotein that first book’’. And Wittgenstein came to use the notion ‘‘picture’’ in a different manner in his laterwork. However, he was struck in the Tractatus by the notion that propositions picture reality in the waythat a model represents some state of affairs:

A proposition is a picture of reality.A proposition is a model of reality as we imagine it.At first sight a propositiondone set out on the printed page, for exampleddoes not seem to be a pic-ture of the reality with which it is concerned. But neither do written notes seem at first sight to bea picture of a piece of music, nor our phonetic notation (the alphabet) to be a picture of our speech.And yet these sign-languages prove to be pictures, even in the ordinary sense, of what theyrepresent (Wittgenstein, 1922, xx 4.01, 4.011).

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In his later work he often uses ‘‘picture’’ to denote a conception that holds thinking captive by thefalse assumption that language mirrors reality. Accordingly, Wittgenstein (1958) begins his posthu-mously published Philosophical Investigations with a quote from St. Augustine that explicitly depictsthis correspondence theory in intuitive terms, which Wittgenstein proceeds to then problematizeand undermine (see especially papers by Maraun, Slaney, & Gabriel, 2009; Nelson, 2009; Proudfoot,2009). In this manner, the so-called early Wittgenstein, student of Russell and writer of the Tractatus,was supplanted by the so-called later Wittgenstein. And this later Wittgenstein annihilated the possi-bility of a correspondence between the logical structure of language (or mathematics, see e.g., Maraun,1998, 2007; Maraun, Slaney, & Gabriel, 2009; Smith, 2009) and the world, and therefore the notion thatlanguage could function as a mirror of reality in the way that he had previously believed.

To accomplish this, the later Wittgenstein presented a general method of conceptual analysis whichrequired the distinction of conceptual from empirical issues, which we will discuss further in Section 2,and he also introduced in so doing several important related notions that have all seen use in psychol-ogy: (a) the notion of family resemblances among members of a category; (b) the language-game; and,(c) the private language argument. For the benefit of the reader new to Wittgenstein, we briefly discussthese constructs.

In 1973, Eleanor Rosch introduced a psychological theory of family resemblances among categorymembers, which acknowledged its inspiration from Wittgenstein (e.g., Rosch, 1987). Rosch pointedout the error in conceiving of category members (or as Wittgenstein would have it, most conceptsin general) as sharing some feature in common that is governed by necessary and sufficient conditions.Wittgenstein explained his notion of family resemblance, among others, in the context of discussingthe meaning of the concept of games:

Consider for example the proceedings that we call ‘‘games.’’ I mean board-games, card-games,ball-games, Olympic-games, and so on. What is common to them all?dDon’t say: ‘‘Theremust be something common, or they would not be called ‘games’’’dbut look and see whetherthere is something in common to them all.And the result of this examination is: we see a com-plicated network of similarities overlapping and criss-crossing: sometimes overall similarities,sometimes similarities of detail.I can think of no better expression to characterize thesesimilarities than ‘‘family resemblances.’’ (Wittgenstein, 1958, xx 66–67, his emphases).

The notion of family resemblance then is tied up with Wittgenstein’s respecification and repudia-tion of his early Tractarian views (see Wittgenstein, 1958, x 23). If propositions do not acquire theirmeaning by mirroring reality, how are words to mean what they mean? Wittgenstein’s twin notionsof the language-game and the impossibility of a private language are part of his answer.

Language-games are simpler forms of language that by stripping away the subterfuge of compli-cated discourse allows one to more carefully observe how it functions. A language-game ‘‘[consists]of language and the actions into which it is woven’’ (1958, x 7) and this concept is used ‘‘to bringinto prominence the fact that the speaking of language is part of an activity, or a form of life’’ (1958,x 23). On this view, meaning does not inhere in correspondence with a fixed determinate Tractarianreality, but within some context of use. And converging on the same point from a different angle,Wittgenstein’s private language arguments attempt to rule out the purely private naming of sensations,and a fortiori, any inner sensation such that can be seen to serve as a stand in for a token in use ina public language:

‘‘What would it be like if human beings shewed no outwards signs of pain (did not groan,grimace, etc.)? Then it would be impossible to teach a child the use of the word ‘tooth-ache’.’’dWell, let’s assume the child is a genius and itself invents a name for the sensation!dButthen, of course, he couldn’t make himself understood when he used the word.dSo does heunderstand the name, without being able to explain its meaning to anyone?dBut what doesit mean to say that he has ‘named his pain’?dHow has he done this naming of pain?! And what-ever he did, what was its purpose?dWhen one says ‘‘He gave a name to his sensation’’ oneforgets that a great deal of stage-setting in the language is presupposed if the mere act of namingis to make sense. And when we speak of someone’s having given a name to pain, what is

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presupposed is the existence of a grammar [i.e., use] of the word ‘‘pain’’; it shews the post wherethe new word is stationed (Wittgenstein, 1958, x 257).

In much the same way that Wittgenstein strips away complicated language to see how languagefunctions, Wittgenstein introduces something as seemingly uncomplicated as privately labelling a sen-sation one is experiencing to exemplify the incoherence of privately determining the meaning ofconcepts:

Let us imagine the following case. I want to keep a diary about the recurrence of a certainsensation. To this end I associate it with the sign ‘‘S’’ and write this sign in a calendar for everyday on which I have this sensation.dI will remark first of all that a definition of the sign cannotbe formulated.dBut still I can give myself a kind of ostensive definition.dHow? Can I point tothe sensation? Not in the ordinary sense. But I speak, or write the sign down, and at the sametime I concentrate my attention on the sensationdand so, as it were, point to it inwardly.dButwhat is this ceremony for? For that is all it seems to be! A definition surely serves to establish themeaning of a sign.dWell, that is done precisely by the concentrating of my attention; for in thisway I impress on myself the connexion between the sign and the sensation.dBut ‘‘I impress it onmyself’’ can only mean: this process brings it about that I remember the connexion right in thefuture. But in the present case I have no criterion of correctness. One would like to say: whateveris going to seem right to me is right. And that only means that we can’t talk about ‘right’(Wittgenstein, 1958, x 258, his emphasis).

Wittgenstein is simply noting here that in lacking a rule of the use of this sensation term, we cannotcommunicate about it to others. Thus, while this does not mean that individuals cannot follow rules inprivate, it does mean that public language cannot be defined in this manner. For Wittgenstein, theanswer to this puzzle is of course that language is defined in terms of language-games.

These remarks concerning family resemblance, language-games and private language are allcobbled from the later Wittgenstein, in particular, the Philosophical Investigations. These conceptsand related ones in fact define the later Wittgenstein. However, although we have taken pains to dis-tinguish the early and later Wittgenstein, to complicate matters somewhat it is important to note thatit has been more recently suggested that a third, post-Investigations, Wittgenstein exists (e.g., seeMoyal-Sharrock, 2004b, 2004c; Harre, 2009; Moyal-Sharrock, 2009). And although On Certainty(Wittgenstein, 1969) does show a shift in Wittgenstein’s philosophy, to complicate matters furtherstill, this third Wittgenstein is also argued to be the author of part II of the Philosophical Investigations,with part I therefore now constituting the later (second?) Wittgenstein (for a discussion see Moyal-Sharrock, 2004a, pp. 1–2). For our purposes, what is notable about the work in especially On Certaintyand arguably particular sections of part II of the Investigations is that in attempting to excavate thefoundations of language-games Wittgenstein in some ways digs deeper than his previous work. How-ever, whether this constitutes a radical break in his thought remains, in our opinion, an open ques-tion. Although we need not dwell on these distinctions any further in our introduction to thiscollection, such distinctions do demonstrate the subtlety and potentially far-reaching nature ofWittgenstein’s philosophy.

A further challenge in reading and making sense of Wittgenstein is that his major works (for ourpurposes, these are, although no contributor uses it as a substantive basis for analysis in this issue,the Tractatus, the Investigations and On Certainty, but could also be argued to include Remarks on theFoundations of Mathematics, Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology, and possibly others) are highlycondensed versions of what was written and rewritten over years in several notebooks and type-scripts. And Wittgenstein uses different rhetorical voices in his remarks, some of which expressthe very commonsense views that he wishes to call into question. For these reasons, readers withouta quite specialized background or who have not read secondary sources of Wittgensteinian scholar-ship, will not be aware, for example, that deceptively simple statements such as Wittgenstein’sdisclaimer mentioned earlier that ‘‘The confusion and barrenness of psychology is not to be explainedby calling it a ‘young science’’’ refers to an earlier remark by the gestalt psychologist Kohler (seeter Hark, 1990, p. 192, footnote 3. Kohler had claimed that the reason that behaviourism had no par-allel in physics was that physics was a comparatively much older science. Clearly, Wittgenstein did

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not see this as the main issue.) Some of Wittgenstein’s posthumously published works, which con-tain mostly verbatim notes of Wittgenstein’s lectures (e.g., the Brown and Brown Books, which aresaid to constitute the preliminary work for the Investigations, his lectures at Cambridge in 1932–1935, and so on), have the benefit of presenting Wittgenstein’s ideas in a relatively straightforwardmanner. However, although Wittgenstein knew that copies of his lecture notes were circulating atCambridge (and also Oxford) in the 1930s, it is not clear that he would have felt that they provideda fair representation of his method.

Faced with Wittgenstein’s idiosyncratic writing style and a proliferation of Wittgensteins withwhich to contend, it would be understandable if those with no, or only passing, familiarity withWittgenstein now suspect that whoever this Wittgenstein person is, his works are either open tomany interpretations or that perhaps he dealt with several unrelated concerns in his writings, neitherof which would bode very well for the attention of the potentially interested psychologist. Although itis true that there are different uses to which Wittgenstein’s writings can be put and philosophers (andas we will see in the present collection, psychologists as well) continue to differ substantively in theirinterpretation of Wittgenstein, his targets of concern show little change but Wittgenstein’s ‘‘solutions’’,particularly in the case of his early versus later views, differ radically. We, and the contributors to thiscollection, hope to demonstrate that Wittgenstein’s targets and methods remain highly relevant forcontemporary psychologists.

2. Further hesitations

Those who are more familiar with Wittgenstein might be under the impression, which is to some de-gree well founded, that he was incredibly dismissive of psychology and held radically anti-theoreticalviews. In this section, we show why these beliefs are common and point out that they are both ultimatelyoff the mark.

Wasn’t Wittgenstein the one who said that psychology was confused? The later Wittgenstein famously,or perhaps more properly infamously, claimed that ‘‘The confusion and barrenness of psychology is notto be explained by calling it a ‘young science’’’ and argued that ‘‘in psychology there are experimentalmethods and conceptual confusion’’ (Wittgenstein, 1958, p. 232e). If this is all one knew of Wittgen-stein, one might be justified in wondering how a figure that seems so critical and even dismissive ofpsychological research could be relevant for contemporary psychology. Although by implication thearticles in this collection provide an answer to this unease (and Hutto and Susswein & Racine discussthese quotes as some length), it is important to place these remarks in their proper context. To putsome flesh on Wittgenstein’s typically elliptical prose, Wittgenstein’s contention is that:

The problem in psychology is that the experimental methods are not adequately geared to theproblems in hand. The deficiency is not technical but logical: the empirical method ignoresthe mainly logical nature of the problem. In Wittgenstein’s view psychologists turn too readilyto experiments, while being insufficiently aware of what is exactly mysterious about, forinstance, thinking (ter Hark, 1990, p. 193).

And the concerns raised by Wittgenstein do not result from some animus towards experimentation,but are rather more fundamental:

The difficulty faced by psychologists in measuring is not mathematical or empirical, but is in-stead that the concepts that they wish to have enter into their measurement operations are typ-ically of the common-or-garden variety. These concepts have notoriously complicated grammars[i.e., uses] (Maraun, 1998, p. 436).

And to make this point with respect to scientific practices more generally:

Conceptual questions antecede matters of truth and falsehood. They are questions concerningour forms of representation, not questions concerning the truth or falsehood of empirical state-ments. These forms are presupposed by true (and false) scientific explanations and by correct(and incorrect) scientific theories. They determine not what is empirically true or false, butrather what does and what does not make sense. Hence conceptual questions are not amenable

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to scientific investigation and experimentation or to scientific theorizing. For the concepts andconceptual relationships in question are presupposed by any such investigations or theorizings(Bennett & Hacker, 2003, p. 2, their emphasis).

Although the implications of Wittgenstein’s remarks on these issues are manifold, at this juncturewe wish to note two of their implications that are implicit in the above quotations, primarily for thebenefit of readers in the sceptical category.

Wittgenstein (1958, 1969, 1980) claimed that psychologists investigate and make sense of theirfindings by recourse to everyday concepts like knowing, thinking, remembering, intending, believing,and so on. He insisted upon this because one cannot measure, experimentally or otherwise, a givenpsychological attribute without prior agreement on what constitutes the object of such an investiga-tion. Although psychology seems to capture this in the notion of an operational definition, as Bennettand Hacker (2003) note, Wittgenstein is drawing our attention to something more fundamental.

Consider a comparative or developmental investigation into whether chimpanzees or human in-fants understand a human experimenter’s intentions. A researcher measures whether subjects re-spond differently to an action performed on purpose that leads to some undesirable outcome forthe participant (e.g., teasingly withholding a toy or food item) versus one in which the same outcomeoccurs through no ostensible fault of the experimenter. If chimps or babies are more forgiving of anexperimenter in the second condition, it would show that they understood that the experimenter didnot intend to deprive them of the desired item if it were dropped, for example, through an act ofclumsiness. (For research showing that chimpanzees do understand intentions, at least in this con-text, see Call, Hare, Carpenter, & Tomasello, 2004). As Maraun (1998) notes, the foregoing is basedon a garden-variety concept of intention and if it were not intention would no longer be the objectof the investigation.

It is worth pausing to consider how in principle one could investigate some ‘‘more scientific’’ (i.e.,non-ordinary) notion of intention and have it illuminate something about what we understand as in-tentional behaviour without cashing it in terms of everyday concepts. The fact that the meaning of sucha secondary use would be parasitic upon our everyday conception shows why psychology rarely hasuse for such technical notions, despite appearances to the contrary. What makes psychology a scienceis not the promise of more technical psychology concepts but rather the systematic manner in whichpsychological research is done. But such investigations are intrinsically parasitic, for example, on aneveryday notion of intention that is presupposed by operational definition. Of course, new terminologyand concepts are introduced in some sciences, but psychology rarely has the need for such technicalnotions (on this point, see Bennett & Hacker, 2003, especially pp. 74–81). And even in other sciences,whether one is using a specialized concept correctly is conceptual, which is necessarily distinct fromthe empirical study of what such concepts denote (see Maraun, Slaney, & Gabriel, 2009; Susswein &Racine, 2009).

A second implication of Wittgenstein’s philosophy of psychology is that because psychological con-cepts like thinking or remembering play many different roles (or as Wittgenstein would put it, featurein various language-games), there cannot be a single underlining activity that can be conceived of asthinking (Susswein & Racine, 2009) or remembering (Moyal-Sharrock, 2009). The diversity of psycho-logical concepts is brought out in the following quote from Wittgenstein:

Think of the tools in a tool-box: there is a hammer, pliers, a saw, a screw-driver, a ruler, a glue-pot, glue, nails and screws. The functions of words are as diverse as the functions of these objects.(And in both cases, there are similarities.) Of course, what confuses us is the uniform appearanceof words when we hear them spoken or meet them in scripts of print. For the application is notpresented to us so clearly.Imagine someone’s saying: ‘‘All tools serve to modify something.Thus the hammer modifies the position of the nail, the saw the shape of the board, and so on.’’dAnd what is modified by the ruler, the glue-pot, the nails?d‘‘Our knowledge of a thing’s length,the temperature of the glue, and the solidity of the box.’’dWould anything be gained by thisassimilation of expressions?.It is interesting to compare the multiplicity of the tools in lan-guage and of the ways they are used, the multiplicity of kinds of word and sentence, withwhat logicians have said about the structure of language. (Including the author of theTractatus Logico-Philosophicus.) (Wittgenstein, 1958, xx 11, 14, 23, emphases in original).

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The insight that psychological concepts have multiple uses is closely related to the notion of familyresemblances that was mentioned in the previous section. However, although Wittgenstein may wellhave agreed with Rosch’s (1973) use of his term in this context, Wittgenstein was not pointing outfamily resemblances in psychological concepts just to help psychologists develop more adequatetheories. In the same way that category members share some features but not others and that thereforethere could be no underlying essence to many concepts of psychological interest, the investigation ofpsychological phenomena could not be an investigation into some underlying, more refined, conceptfrom which other uses spring to life.

Ironically, although Rosch’s research has been useful for cognitive psychological theorizing, her in-vestigation of categorization as a single psychological process still misses Wittgenstein’s philosophicalconcern and obscures the diversity of use of this psychological concept. Wittgenstein may be justifiedthen in his concern that psychologists often take themselves to be investigating a single phenomenonwhen conducting research on some aspect of psychological functioning, ‘‘as if the word ‘violin’ refersnot only to the instrument, but also to the violionist, the sound, and the playing of the violin’’ (ter Hark,1990, p. 192; cf. Wittgenstein, 1980, Vol. 2, x 730).

Finally, a third implication of Wittgenstein’s later writings is that meaning and rules are ultimatelygrounded in unreflective social practices (see Harre, 2009). These themes are a sustained focus of thePhilosophical Investigations, but take center stage in On Certainty. The stimulus for On Certainty is G. E.Moore’s (1939) Proof of the External World wherein Moore claims that he knows that he has two hands.Wittgenstein (1969) attempts to clarify that knowing cannot be a straightforward empirical claim (e.g.,‘‘I know I have two handsdhere is one here is the other’’, and so forth). Any claim to knowledge impliesthe possibilities of being in err and of giving an intersubjectively accessible justification for the claim toknowledge (Wittgenstein, 1969, xx 11–16).

‘I know’ often means: I have the proper grounds for my statements. So if the other person is ac-quainted with the language game, he would admit that I know. The other, if he is acquaintedwith the language game, must be able to imagine how one may know something of the kind(Wittgenstein, 1969, x 18).

Wittgenstein holds that the giving of justifications or the chain of grounds has to come to an end,a point beyond which no further grounds can be given. He introduces the notion of a ‘‘hinge’’ in OnCertainty to make explicit the point that language-games pivot around practices that cannot be givenany further justification for their existence (Moyal-Sharrock, 2004c, see especially chapter 5). Theseungrounded certainties form the basis for claims of knowledge.

My reasons will soon give out. And then I shall act, without reasons (Wittgenstein, 1958, x 211).If I have exhausted the justifications I have reached bedrock, and my spade is turned. Then I aminclined to say: ‘‘This is simply what I do.’’ (Wittgenstein, 1958, x 217).

Any claim to knowledge then presupposes a system of pre-knowledge. Wittgenstein (1969) callsthis system of pre-knowledge a world-picture (x 94–99) or a form of life (x 358). The world-pictureor form of life is the common ground which we must share with other people in order to understandtheir actions and words and in order to come to an understanding with them in our judgments(Wittgenstein, 1958, xx 241). Wittgenstein suggests that the system of pre-knowledge does not consistof propositional knowledge. Rather, it is a practice.

Giving grounds, however, justifying the evidence, comes to an end;dbut the end is not certainpropositions’ striking us immediately to be true, i.e., it is not a kind of seeing on our part; it is ouracting, which lies at the bottom of the language game.the end is not an ungrounded presup-position; it is an ungrounded way of acting..In the beginning was the deed (Wittgenstein,1969, xx 204, 110, 402).

Wittgenstein’s grounding of meaning and rules in unreflective practices or forms of life is at oddswith currently fashionable representational theories of mind which suggest that meaning and rule-following are based on mental representations (McDonough, 1989; von Savigny, 1998; see Susswein& Racine, 2009). Wittgenstein argued that the idea that rules must be interpreted by an internalmental representation which then determines whether an application accords with the rule is

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incoherent. This is because the introduction of the concepts of internal representation and interpre-tation merely shifts the problem of the relation between rule and application to another level sinceany internal representation can be interpreted in different ways. In other words, representationaltheories of rule-following ignore the fact that the interpretation itself must be used (Wittgenstein,1958, xx 139–140). The view that the application of a rule is mediated by an interpretation, therefore,cannot explain the transition from the interpretation of a rule to its application (see Smith, thisissue). Rather, this view leads to an infinite regression of interpretations:

Any interpretation still hangs in the air along with what it interprets, and cannot give it any sup-port. Interpretations by themselves do not determine meaning (Wittgenstein, 1958, x 198).

But didn’t Wittgenstein oppose theorizing, psychological or otherwise? In a collection that containsarticles that the authors hope will not only contribute to the clarity of theory, but also to the possibleconstruction thereof, it would be quite an embarrassment if Wittgenstein proved to be hostile to the-oretical commitments in general. However, this is precisely what some have claimed (e.g., Shotter,2006) and others have presented more muted concerns such as suggestions that psychology relegateitself to descriptive, rather than explanatory, theories (see Harre, this issue; Hutto, this issue, for twoviews on this matter). Again, to Wittgenstein we turn for clarification of his views and suggest thata moderate stand that allows for the construction of theories while still opposing a certain speciesof metaphysic to which Wittgenstein was clearly opposed.

It was true to say that our considerations could not be scientific ones. It was not of any possibleinterest to us to find out empirically ‘‘that, contrary to our preconceived ideas, it is possible tothink such-and-such’’dwhatever that may mean. (The conception of thought as a gaseousmedium.) And we may not advance any kind of theory. There must not be anything hypotheticalin our considerations. We must do away with all explanation, and description alone must take itsplace. And this description gets its light, that is to say its purpose, from the philosophical prob-lems. These are, of course, not empirical problems; they are solved, rather, by looking into theworkings of our language, and that in such a way as to make us recognize those workings: in spiteof an urge to misunderstand them. The problems are solved, not by giving new information, butby arranging what we have always known. Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of ourintelligence by the means of language (Wittgenstein, 1958, x 109, his emphasis).

Note first of all the continuity with what was presented in the foregoing section and this shouldmake it clear that Wittgenstein’s injunction to not theorize is nothing more than a restatement ofhis overall position on the relation between conceptual and empirical matters. After all, Wittgensteinsays we, that is, philosophers, must rid ourselves of the impulse towards theorizing and explanationwhen what we really need to be doing is getting clear about what the concepts in which we areinterested mean, which for Wittgenstein meant how they are used. Again, language bewitchesintelligence because ‘‘what confuses us is the uniform appearance of words when we hear themspoken or meet them in scripts of print’’ (Wittgenstein, 1958, x 11). Wittgenstein’s instructions thenare, ironically, his way of explaining his philosophical method (see von Savigny, 2006, especiallypp. 201–204). Wittgenstein’s apparent railing against explanation and theorizing needs to beunderstood in context. And note as well that Wittgenstein wrote ‘‘we [philosophers]’’ and not you psy-chologists. But psychologists need to understand the conceptual nexus of their investigations:

Philosophy simply puts everything before us, and neither explains not deduces everything.dSince everything lies open to view there is nothing to explain. For what is hidden, for example,is of no interest to us. One might also give the name ‘‘philosophy’’ to what is possible before allnew discoveries and inventions (Wittgenstein, 1958, x 126, his emphasis).

3. The contributions of the present collection to psychology and philosophy

As readers will see for themselves, although all articles in this collection bear on some matter ofimportance to psychologists, there is little overlap in focus in these papers; they form a relativelyheterogeneous set. Although it is possible to group these, in a decided non-Wittgensteinian manner,

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by their primary content broadly conceived, for example: (a) cognition (Cash, Harre, Hutto, Moyal-Sharrock, Susswein & Racine); (b) language (Nelson, Mascolo, Proudfoot); (c) typical and atypical de-velopment (Hobson, Rodrıguez); and (d) measurement (Maraun et al., Smith), this is not very revealingand we will instead discuss the articles in this collection in relation to how they make use of and in-terpret Wittgenstein. The first set of papers that we discuss is written primarily by philosophers andconcerns itself with the application of Wittgenstein’s method of conceptual analysis to a particularpsychological issue. The second set of papers is written mainly by psychologists and uses Wittgensteinto justify or otherwise explain particular psychological theories.

The contributions by Cash, Maraun et al., Proudfoot, Susswein and Racine, and in most respects,Hutto, Moyal-Sharrock and Smith, work under a relatively uniform interpretation of Wittgenstein,which as noted earlier has historically been understood as the later Wittgenstein. The goal of these pa-pers is mainly to clarify the use of the relevant psychological concepts and discuss their relation to psy-chological theorizing, empirical research, and measurement. However, the papers by especially Harre,and also Moyal-Sharrock, add force to the tripartite view of Wittgenstein mentioned earlier, which dis-tinguishes different periods in the thought of the later Wittgenstein. Harre extends this view of a thirdWittgenstein with careful distinctions being made between grammar, which determines the rule-bound use of terms, and the role of hinges, bedrock practices, that are mentioned in Wittgenstein’s(1969) last work and which were brought to the attention of philosophers by Moyal-Sharrock(2004c). According to Harre, hinges have in contrast to grammar an empirical foundation and callfor a different type of therapy than grammatical clarification. In terms of their targets, Cash arguesthat because the contents of intentional states are normatively constituted, they cannot be explainedin purely physical terms. He defends this position against a number of objections, a notable one for psy-chologists being that he denies that contentful intentional states can be attributed to animals or infants(cf. Bennett & Hacker, 2003; ter Hark, 1990, but see Glock, 2006). Cash concludes that cognitive psy-chology and neuroscience are carried out from within a normative practice and are, for that reason,not the kind of science that qualifies as a traditional hard science.

Maraun, Slaney, and Gabriel show that the incoherent notion of language attributed to St. Augus-tine in the Investigations, and linked above to the Tractarian picture theory of meaning, also providesthe foundation for some of the most popular contemporary psychometric approaches. Maraun andcolleagues show that, as a result, contemporary psychometric approaches suffer from multiple con-ceptual problems, most notably the confusion of conceptual and empirical issues. Proudfoot exploresthe relevance of Wittgenstein for two major contemporary approaches to the relation between lan-guage and cognition. In particular, drawing on Wittgenstein, she argues against Steven Pinker’s influ-ential view that language can be a device for communicating independently constituted (orindividuated) thoughts, and offers support for Wittgenstein’s view that mental content is determinedby the use of linguistic expression. Susswein and Racine link Wittgenstein to the impetus for theproliferation of contemporary notions like ‘distributed,’ ‘extended,’ and ‘situated’ cognition. Theytrace the origin of these notions to two different streams of work (engineering work and socioculturalapproaches), show the problem context in which these notions arose, and discuss the extent to whichcognition can be sensibly said to be distributed.

After these relatively straightforward applications of Wittgenstein’s method, the papers by Hutto,Moyal-Sharrock, and Smith exemplify new uses to which Wittgenstein’s writings are being put. Huttouses Wittgenstein to show that the way in which the everyday understanding of reasons for action iswrongly categorized when understood in terms of ‘‘theory of mind’’ abilities. Hutto also discusses hisNarrative Practice Hypothesis, which he grounds in Wittgensteinian considerations, as an alternativetheory of how later developing forms of interpersonal understanding come about. Moyal-Sharrockconsiders the implications of Wittgenstein’s writings concerning memory for contemporary cognitiveand neuroscientific research on memory. Drawing extensively on her previous work that argues fora third Wittgenstein, Moyal-Sharrock suggests that only activity that requires mnemonic effort, butnot automatic (implicit) memory, qualifies as remembering. Finally, Smith uses Wittgenstein’s rule-following paradox to show that several assumptions central to the psychological approach tomathematical rules learning are untenable. Smith suggests that Piaget’s developmental epistemologypresents a Piagetian resolution to Wittgenstein’s rule-following paradox, particularly by adequatelyaddressing the challenge posed by the normativity of rules.

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The papers by Hobson, Mascolo, Nelson, and Rodrıguez use Wittgenstein mainly as a basis forsupporting psychological theories. Both Hobson and Mascolo build on Wittgenstein’s rejection ofthe Cartesian split between ‘‘inner mental states’’ and outer behaviour, and his view that we perceivemental life and emotions in the other person’s bodily expressions. Hobson goes on to argue that thedirect perception of emotion grounds interpersonal relatedness and plays a crucial role in the develop-ment of a shared form of social life. According to Hobson, autism is characterized precisely by the ab-sence of this shared form of social life. Mascolo uses Wittgenstein to argue that the meaning of emotionterms is not determined through introspection on private experience; rather, emotion terms acquiremeaning in the context of public criteria. Building on these ideas, Mascolo proposes a discursivemethod for the identification of emotions in others and uses a psychotherapeutic case study to illus-trate this method. Nelson draws on Wittgenstein’s remarks on private language and language-gamesto defend social-pragmatic approaches to word learning and to criticize cognitivist approaches thatbase word learning on innate abilities. Finally, Rodrıguez builds on Wittgenstein’s pragmatic approachto language and points out the relevance of this approach for understanding the emergence of earlyforms of nonverbal communication. Specifically, Rodrıguez highlights the important role of conven-tional and symbolic uses of objects in the emergence of communicative gestures.

4. Future directions for Wittgenstein and psychology

We hope by reviewing some well-known and less well-known aspects of Wittgenstein’s philosophyof psychology we helped to contextualize these different contributions to the special issue. We believethat the articles in this collection will contribute to the understanding of language, cognition, memory,consciousness, word learning, gesture, social and emotional understanding, psychological measure-ment, and the extent to which hinges and grammars might be jointly implicated in psychological in-quiry. This notwithstanding, we also believe that psychology would benefit from more carefulscrutiny of its conceptual underpinnings. Although it is unlikely that Peter Hacker will join forceswith leading researchers in all areas of psychological specialization to clarify the use of the relevantpsychological concepts in the way that he and Max Bennett have recently done for neuroscience(Bennett & Hacker, 2003), major works drawing on the philosophical method that Wittgenstein initi-ated are emerging in other speciality areas in psychology (e.g., psychometrics, Maraun, 2007; prima-tology, Savage-Rumbaugh, Shanker, & Taylor, 2001; artificial intelligence, Shanker, 1998). Our hope isthat readers of this special issue will explore the relevance of the work that Wittgenstein begun to theirown particular areas of expertise.

Acknowledgements

Preparation of this article was supported by grants from the Social Sciences and HumanitiesResearch Council of Canada awarded to the first and second authors. We thank the contributors tothis collection for their thoughtful articles and the anonymous reviewers for helpful comments andguidance on the papers.

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