This book is called Wittgenstein on Other Minds, but it could have also been called Wittgenstein on Understanding or perhaps Wittgenstein on Understanding Others. In philosophy, the so-called problem of other minds is often understood as a problem in epistemology about how we can know what anybody else is thinking or feeling, although as Anita Avramides states, ‘there is little agreement either about the problem or the solution to it’ (Avramides 2019, § 1).

At its solipsistic extreme, the alleged problem is that of knowing that other minds exist at all. How can I know that other ‘people’ are not actually automata or even mere figments of my imagination, perhaps the work of some Cartesian demon who can deceive me about anything except for the fact that I, myself, exist? While the young Wittgenstein may have fallen prey to such doubt, in his later work, Wittgenstein showed all of these worries to be spurious, not because we can know that other minds exist but because it ordinarily makes no sense to doubt such things. ‘Other people have minds’ is neither true nor false but, rather, a rule of grammar or ‘hinge’ that enables us to make truth-apt statements about the mental lives of others, claims that need to proceed by way of interpretation.

So, while there is no genuine philosophical problem of other minds, for the later Wittgenstein, this does not entail that there are no real-life difficulties in understanding others and, indeed, even ourselves (for self-understanding is not a matter of introspecting an inner theatre of the mind to which we have privileged access). In his private life, Wittgenstein's pessimism regarding the possibility of understanding others was unmatched. This was not on the grounds of its being in principle impossible to understand anybody but because it is in practice very difficult to do so, arguably even in our own case. The difficulty is not an abstract metaphysical or even epistemological one but rather an everyday psychological and sociological one. This is what Marie McGinn refers to as ‘the real problem of others’ (McGinn 2022, 19–48). As McGinn puts it, ‘Wittgenstein is deeply opposed to the idea that our everyday doubts about others amount to a way of “living scepticism” or reveal a truth in the sceptic's image of our metaphysical separation’ (McGinn 2022, viii).

Prologue

In his book of interviews with the documentary maker Nick Broomfield, Jason Wood describes the following scene from Broomfield's 1975 film Juvenile Liaison, a case study of the questionable ‘no-nonsense’ methods employed by the officers of a police unit in Blackburn, Lancashire (UK) focused on young offenders from ‘impoverished working-class backgrounds’:

Broomfield responds as follows:

Broomfield isn't offering a general answer to the perennial question of why good people do bad things, let alone an account of how our evaluations of them relate to our evaluations of their deeds (see Sandis 2017a).

As a prospective undergraduate, I had wanted to apply for Oxford's now defunct Psychology, Philosophy, and Physiology (PPP) degree, but lacking the maths A Level required for the statistics component, I came to St Anne's College to read Philosophy and Theology instead (apparently no maths is required to contemplate the infinite). In late 1996, I began my final year somewhat disillusioned with the direction that contemporary analytic philosophy had taken, never mind analytic theology. My wonderful tutor, Alison Denham, sent me to Peter Hacker at St John's College for the Philosophy of Mind paper, with the words ‘he won't be as forgiving as me if you write a poor essay’. Peter's weekly tutorials introduced me to the philosophy of Wittgenstein, as well as that of G. E. M. Anscombe, Norman Malcolm, Gilbert Ryle, P. F. Strawson, G. H. von Wright, Alan R. White and many other greats of that bygone era.

At the end of the eight-week term, Peter generously asked whether instead of parting ways, I should like to return for four additional tutorials in the philosophy of action to supplement the topics we had covered in the philosophy of mind. Intrigued by the sound of a subject that seemed to resemble PPP in its interests and scope, I accepted and returned the following term to discuss such things as the nature of action, intention, reasons and causes, voluntariness, and the will. So not only did he introduce me to Wittgenstein, Peter also introduced me to the philosophy of action. For better or worse, he is the reason I did not give up philosophy.

The philosophy of action was to largely preoccupy me during my graduate studies at the University of Reading and subsequent decade lecturing at Oxford Brookes University. While Wittgenstein's later philosophy has deeply influenced me, I did not explicitly engage with his work during this period. By the time I left Brookes for the University of Hertfordshire, I had become interested in the fact that there is much more to understanding a person than knowing the reasons for which they acted. My philosophical interests accordingly shifted from classic issues in action explanation to the philosophy of understanding, particularly as it applies to sentient beings.

Prologue

Interpreters of different spots and stripes all agree that the later Wittgenstein is an enemy of the idea that the thoughts and feelings of other people – and by extension of animals – are hidden from us in any sense that might raise a serious philosophical problem of other minds. Whatever the precise details of his view, it seems clear that Wittgenstein doesn't think that there is any general epistemic worry to be had about others:

On this view, there is no metaphysical barrier to knowledge of others, the overcoming of which would require some kind of argument from analogy à la Russell (PI, § 420 ff. – which forms a bridge to the remarks on seeing-as in PPF, xi). In the Philosophical Investigations, this stance is primarily expressed in relation to knowledge of sensations, inner speech, beliefs and intentions. Following Norman Malcolm (1986), we may see it as part of a much wider attack on the traditional philosophical assumption that all sorts of interesting things are systematically hidden from us (i.e. necessarily ‘private’), be they the essences of things, the functions of words or the minds of people (PI, §§ 92, 133, 155, 293, 301, 307, 323–4, 435, 559).

Prologue

What it takes to understand radically different others lies at the heart of the philosophies developed by Collingwood and Wittgenstein at roughly the same time. Their approaches differ in three ways that are prima facie significant but ultimately prove to be little more than a divergence in emphasis. This is particularly remarkable in light of the fact that the two thinkers are frequently thought to stand at opposite ends of the methodological spectrum with respect to the value of metaphysics.

First, there is the difference between period and place. Whereas Wittgenstein typically considers examples of (chiefly fictional) people from geographically distant strange lands, Collingwood concentrates specifically on the thought and action of past figures from the history of Western civilization. This relates to the second difference between them, which is that Collingwood is primarily interested in individuals, whereas Wittgenstein focuses on collectives of people. The third, arguably greatest, difference is in their conceptions of what understanding involves. For Collingwood, this is a matter of re-enacting the practical reasoning of those concerned; Wittgenstein, by contrast, seems to think that it requires a serious immersion in the other's form of life, a feat more – on some views only – feasible with one's contemporaries.

We must nonetheless view their approaches to understanding others as complementary rather than opposed. For one thing, it is plausible to expect parallel conditions for understanding the foreign present and the local past (as in historical understanding). As the famous opening line of L. P. Hartley's The Go-Between contends, ‘the past is another country, they do things differently there’ (Hartley 1953, 1). We must also take care not to exaggerate the differences between their interests. Wittgenstein does not focus solely on understanding one's contemporaries, and Collingwood was certainly interested in cultural beliefs and practices, as exemplified in his historical works as well as in his doctrine of absolute presuppositions (arguably inspired by Evans-Pritchard but connected to the ‘hinge propositions’ of Wittgenstein's On Certainty) and in his critique of anthropology. Pari passu, not all of Collingwood's pronouncements are about individuals, and, as we shall see, Wittgenstein's more personal worries about understanding others focus explicitly on the thought of individuals.

Prologue

Donald Davidson begins his landmark paper ‘Action, Reasons and Causes’ by contrasting his so-called causalist account of reason-giving explanations of action with the views of a large number of then-prominent philosophers, all of whom were writing from within a loosely Wittgensteinian tradition. These are dismissed in one fell swoop:

In a later essay, Davidson acknowledges Carl Hempel's deep influence on his views while re-affirming the contrast to the volumes in Holland's series:

The contrast is not imaginary, although we shall come to see in due course that it is subtler than Davidson lets on. As we shall see, numerous books in Holland's series defend the view that the relation between an agent's reason(s) and her action(s) should be understood not causally but logically, normatively, conceptually and/or hermeneutically. In this they are united by various forms of what might reasonably be termed anti-scientism. The books do not have a clearly articulated and specific target here – certainly no definition of scientism is ever provided – but there is a general suspicion of any philosophy that attempts to answer questions relating to human minds and actions by appeal to models stemming from natural science, such as physical mechanisms.

Prologue

Disclaimer: I have never been on safari with Professor Glock. His work on Wittgenstein, however, is the main reason I made the journey from the parklands of Oxford to the habitat of the Reading floodplains. I spent many – on some accounts, too many – happy years there as a graduate student in the University's philosophy department. Ever since those salad days, I have learned more from Hanjo than I could possibly express here; my gratitude to him is immense. Whatever criticism follows is intended to honour him, both as the author of some of my favourite philosophical texts and as the spirited conversationalist who can pull an argument apart while simultaneously scanning the restaurant table for any untouched desserts.

In 1996, my undergraduate self stepped into the basement of Blackwell's flagship bookshop on Broad St in Oxford and came out with a copy of Glock's A Wittgenstein Dictionary (1996a), priced at £10.99. It was within its pages that I first encountered the ideas I discuss in this essay. Towards the end of his entry for ‘form of life (Lebensform)’, Glock offers a brief exegesis of Wittgenstein's ‘puzzling remark’ that ‘if a lion could talk, we could not understand him’ (PI, 223). At the time, I assumed that Glock's treatment of it was an undisputable orthodoxy. This was a dictionary after all, and I intended to use it to get through my final examinations. Some years later, I read his masterful paper ‘On Safari with Wittgenstein, Quine and Davidson’ (1996b), which was published around the same time as the Dictionary. The paper is a model of what philosophical writing can and should be: learned yet original, resolute but judicious, significant while light-hearted, its insights always perspicuous and its reprovals constructive. Upon reading it, I also realized that far from being standard, Glock's account of Wittgenstein was novel and important, both as an act of Wittgensteinian exegesis and as a piece of contemporary philosophical criticism.

Prologue

We might, as I am doing now, employ the first-person plural ‘we’ to invite our readers to join us in a collective form of self-consciousness, thereby narrowing, or at least concealing, the distance between author and reader. But one may equally widen the distance by using impersonal pronouns instead. Wittgenstein does both in his writings, but the former approach predominates.

‘If a lion could speak’, Wittgenstein famously states, ‘we [wir] could not understand him’. But who are ‘we’ for Wittgenstein? It is commonplace to assume that he is referring to ‘us humans’ and, by the same token, that ‘a lion’ stands for all non-human animals. This assumption is often found in defences of Wittgenstein's remark such as those by Nancy E. Baker (2012, 63), John Dupré (2002, 232), Rami Gudovitch (2012, 147–48) and Vicki Hearne (1994, 160). Dupré, for example, writes that the thought behind Wittgenstein's remark is that

Numerous anti-Wittgensteinians share this thought that Wittgenstein's ‘we’ refers to all humans, in contrast to all lions or perhaps even all (other) animals:

Prologue

When Danièle Moyal-Sharrock had the idea that, for the British Wittgenstein Society's tenth anniversary conference, we should focus on Wittgenstein in the twenty-first century, we decided that we absolutely needed something on technology, and who better than Richard Harper on information communi-cation technology? In what follows, we discuss the in vivo use of categories in the design of communications and artificial intelligence (AI) technologies, as well as how this use needs to evolve to allow creative design to flourish. The conversation will be of interest to anyone concerned with our ever-evolving uses of technology in everyday interaction.

Why People Communicate

CS: Professor Harper has led research groups at Xerox Europarc as well as Microsoft Research in Cambridge for many years. He founded and directed the Digital World Research Centre at the University of Surrey. He is now the co-director of the Institute for Social Futures at Lancaster University. So maybe he could talk about the twenty-second century as well! He is also a partner in Social Shaping Research, which he may tell you about a little later if you ask him. You are probably all asking what this has to do with Wittgenstein (or maybe not…), and so I thought I would begin by asking Richard how he ended up here. With this kind of background, what brings you to our Wittgenstein Society? Why are you here, Richard?

RH: As an undergraduate in the late seventies, I did sociology, amongst other courses, at Manchester University, and there we were introduced to Wittgenstein. His philosophy was viewed as an integral part of understanding social science. Winch in particular was our mode of introduction to his philosophy – in his The Idea of a Social Science. There was a main course for every social scientist which was called Mind and Society, taught by Professors Wes Sharrock and John Lee; some of you here will have met them. They are sociologists and were interested in Wittgenstein and Winch for two or three reasons, one to do with the possibility that one would need to be careful about the categories used to explain things in the social sciences.

Prologue

Is it an accident that one of the most frequently quoted remarks by Wittgenstein is also one of the least understood? I do not propose to answer this question by conducting an investigation into our reasons for quoting, although such a study would not be irrelevant to certain aspects of the one below. My focus will instead be on the contrast between the original philosophical context of § 327 of the typescript previously known as Part II of Philosophical Investigations (hereinafter PPF, § 327) and some of the conditions surrounding its incredibly muddled reception.

The published version of the remark in question is:

In her otherwise influential English translation of what became known as Philosophical Investigations (hereinafter PI), Parts I and II, Elizabeth Anscombe renders the claim as follows:

On the face of it, the remark seems absurd, and commentators have obligingly voiced numerous complaints against it. These frequently revolve around the thought that Wittgenstein did not know the first thing about animals:

Prologue

‘I could only stare in wonder at Shakespeare; never do anything with him’, writes Wittgenstein in Culture and Value (CV, 84e). This is not because he understands Shakespeare but has no instrumental use for him. Rather, Shakespeare does not speak to him any more than a talking lion would (see Chapters 1 and 4.) Whatever is happening in Shakespeare, Wittgenstein claims to not really get it. The confession is not a criticism of either Shakespeare or himself but a statement of aesthetic alienation:

The study of Shakespeare and his cultural milieu has progressed significantly since Wittgenstein's time, but to the modern Austrian philosopher the Elizabethan playwright was nothing less than an enigma. The failure to understand Shakespeare qua artist is akin (but by no means identical) to the failure to understand him qua person. Mutatis mutandis, the failure to understand an artist's works is akin to the failure to understand a person's actions. This is not because artworks are actions but because both are things that we produce intentionally, with varying degrees of success.

What – if anything at all – is it to understand a play, a symphony, a sculpture or (pace Barr 2016) an event? What does getting it or not getting it amount to? The failure to grasp something is not a matter of being left out of knowing some kind of secret fact (phenomenological or otherwise), as in Wrede's The Messianic Secret (Wrede 1901). Rather, it is like the tortoise's failure to understand what it is for one thing to logically follow another. ‘Whatever Logic is good enough to tell me is worth writing down’, says the Tortoise to Achilles (Carroll 1895). Yet, his understanding of whatever Achilles writes down falls perilously short of understanding what is going on when he does so.

Prologue

If the past is a foreign country, then it is plausible to expect the conditions for understanding contemporary cultures that seem alien to us to parallel those of historical understanding. R. G. Collingwood famously suggests that such understanding involves ‘the re-enactment of past thought in the historian's own mind’ (Collingwood 1946, 216–17, 301). This view finds recent expression in Bettina Stangneth's proclamation that ‘to understand someone like Eichmann, you have to sit down and think with him. And that's a philosopher's job’ (Schuessler 2014, x). Such thinking with does not imply any agreement of opinion. Its task is to see things from within a system of concepts and values that is alien to one's own.

This essay attempts to illustrate the thesis that intercultural understanding requires a parallel sharing of thought processes. It does so through an exploration of recent attempts to make sense of the ghost narratives that emerged in the aftermath of the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami. With a little help from Wittgenstein and Geertz, I suggest that understanding the thoughts of another culture is not a question of mind-reading but rather one of conceptual immersion.

The Universe of Human Discourse

Does one enter the mind of another culture, past or present? How could one? It has become popular to use the expression ‘mind-reading’ as a shorthand for understanding another person's thoughts. This is not a harmless figure of speech but a misleading portrait of communication that has its contemporary roots in John Locke's theory of human understanding, which considers all thoughts to be private in that they ‘cannot be laid open to the immediate view of another’ (Locke 1689, Book IV, Chapter XXI, § 4). Accordingly, ‘to communicate our Thoughts to one another, as well as record them for our own use, Signs of our Ideas are also necessary’ (ibid.).

Locke believed that human understanding requires the translation of inner thoughts into a shared language. This enables communication with recipients, whose minds, in turn, translate our words into their own hidden thoughts.