A Companion to Wittgenstein by Glock Hans-Johann; Hyman John; & John Hyman

Author:Glock, Hans-Johann; Hyman, John; & John Hyman [Glock, Hans-Johann & Hyman, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated
Published: 2017-01-24T00:00:00+00:00

4 Mechanism and Guidance

What concepts might be suited to this task? One answer, familiar from our philosophical tradition, is concepts of presences in the sensory or perceptual imagination: concepts of what philosophers and psychologists call “mental images.” These are, of course, precisely what the interlocutor appeals to in his various attempts to deploy the guidance conception. The conception requires us to find inner items that can be intelligibly understood as showing or telling us things, and the quasi‐perceptual character (as philosophers of mind call it) of mental images – the mode of presence that can make it seem appealing to say of an image that “it comes before the mind’s eye” (PI §56) – seems to fit them uniquely well for that role.

At the same time, it is the imagistic character of the hypothesized understanding‐constituting items that can make the guidance conception seem like an attractive candidate for a mechanistic treatment of the states and processes of the mind that involve understanding. If we think of the student’s state of understanding as constituted by the occurrence in her mind of an image – say, of the formula “x + 2” – we have access to a way of thinking about that state that does not depend upon our grasp of the context of the teacher’s and student’s interaction. Furthermore, there is a tempting picture of mental imagery according to which we need essentially no context in view in order to make sense of a person as having a certain image. On this picture, concepts of the enjoyment of mental imagery are atomistic: our recognizing them to apply does not depend upon our recognizing the subject to satisfy other concepts (at least outside of a very small circle). One way of arriving at this picture is to suppose that we know what it is to have a certain image immediately from our own case, and that to conceive someone else as having a comparable image then requires nothing more than conceiving her as having what we have. This kind of thought is, of course, equally tempting in the case of sensation. If we allow the concept of sentience to encompass not just sensation and perceptual awareness but exercises of the sensory and perceptual imagination, then we have an attractive way of locating the guidance conception in a long‐standing empiricist tradition: that of attempting to explain sapience (as exemplified by, say, the student’s competent response to the teacher) in terms of sentience.

The atomistic picture comes under severe criticism later in the Investigations, first with respect to sensation and then with respect to images (for the case of images, see the sections beginning around §361). But we do not in fact need to appreciate the untenability of that picture to see that the guidance conception fails in its aim at providing a mechanistic treatment of the application of understanding. For even if we were to grant that the guidance conception satisfies the context‐independence requirement in its characterizations of states of understanding, the question would remain

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