Wittgenstein by Dean Jolley Kelly;

Author:Dean Jolley, Kelly;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 1886859
Publisher: Taylor and Francis

It has been noted that the trip to the grocer that Wittgenstein presents us with in the opening remark of Philosophical Investigations is apt to strike readers as somewhat odd (see Mulhall 2001; Hutchinson 2007). The grocer seems dumb (or extremely miserable and rude); moreover, he seems in need of colour charts so that he might associate the word “red”, as written on the note passed to him by the shopper, with the colour of the apples, which he keeps in drawers. Is there a reason for such an eccentric presentation of an otherwise familiar and mundane scenario? I submit that there is. Wittgenstein structures the story of the trip to the grocer as such to reflect the form of a dominant picture of “inner mental processes”. Wittgenstein tries to tempt his reader/interlocutor into asking for more, into asking for something that will serve as grounds for predicating of the grocer understanding. His interlocutor in Philosophical Investigations obliges: “But how does he [the grocer] know where and how he is to look up the word ‘red’ and what he is to do with the word ‘five’?” Wittgenstein thus succeeds in tempting the interlocutor into undermining her own prejudices. As Stephen Mulhall writes, commenting on this passage in his book Inheritance and Originality: “If the public, externalised versions of such procedures were not in themselves enough to establish the presence of understanding to the interlocutor’s satisfaction, why should their inner counterparts?” (2001: 45).

Let us consider this for a moment. Can it be that inner processes would be more satisfactory to Wittgenstein’s interlocutor in virtue of their being simply inner? If we theorize modules and elicitation files matching mental images of colour with files having semantic content, then why should this satisfy the interlocutor when the grocer, having done the same externally in the scenario, failed to so satisfy her? Surely, “going inner” is not enough?

The subtlety of Wittgenstein’s example does not stop there. Mulhall writes,

If Wittgenstein’s shopkeeper’s way with words strikes us as surreal and oddly mechanical, to the point at which we want to question the nature and even the reality of his inner life, and yet his public behaviour amounts to an externalised replica of the way we imagine the inner life of all ordinary, comprehending language-users, then our picture of the inner must be as surreal, as oddly mechanical, as Wittgenstein’s depiction of the outer. (Ibid.: 46)

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