Wittgenstein and Physicalism

Abstract

What makes 'I think' or 'I am in pain' true ? Descartes, articulating an ancient idea, said it was the existence of a thought or pain, recognised in the mind of a person. Here the mind or soul was designated by 'I' and the pain, for example, by 'pain.' At least in part, these linked ideas of truth-condition, mode of verification, and word use remain with us to the present: for the view that, say, 'pain' designates an item I recognise when I truly say 'I am in pain' is one towards which anyone even today must feel a powerful inclination. Wittgenstein said that philosophical problems arise through misunderstandings concerning the use of words, caused, among other things, by assimilation of the working of forms of expression (e.g. 'I feel X') in differing regions of language. Correlative with these assimilations are misleading pictures or imaginative representations of the use of words. Wittgenstein refers to one such misconception concerning the use of words for the mental when he says 'the great difficulty here is not to represent the matter as if there were something I couldn't do. As if there really were an object, from which I derive its description, but I were unable to shew it to anyone.' (374) As reference to the other contexts in which this idea appears makes clear, for Wittgenstein to derive a description from an object meant to take the description from the object in accord with a rule, to 'read off what you say from the facts ... according to rules.' (292) His example of a paradigm case in which we do this-and to which we inevitably, but mistakenly, assimilate self-ascription of the mental-is the case where we recognise the colour of something, and would be able to enforce the giving of the description under which we recognise it by reference to such common rules for the use of words as are exemplified in a colour chart. Thus I take the force of