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The ‘Prejudice in favour of Psyghophysical Parallelism’

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 January 2010

Extract

Wittgenstein refers to psychophysical parallelism in this apparently prejudiced way in paragraph 611 of Zettel, in the course of a rather remarkable passage. It begins at 605 with the claim that ‘One of the most dangerous ideas for a philosopher is, oddly enough, that we think with our heads or in our heads’. Subsequent sections develop this remark in a way that demonstrates Wittgenstein's rejection of the view that thinking is any sort of process in the head, whether a physiological process or a matter of the operations of ‘a nebulous mental entity’. Indeed he appears to consider that these ontologically opposed alternatives have a common source, in that they both derive from the mistaken view that there must be a mediating process between psychological phenomena such as my present remembering and my experience of the remembered event (cf. Z, 610). If we find no suitable mediating physiological process, we are easily led to assume that there must be a process of a rather different sort, and hence we are led to believe in a ‘nebulous mental entity’. But this whole line of thought in fact depends on a ‘primitive interpretation of our concepts’, an interpretation which we uncritically made at the stage at which we assumed that there must be a process of some sort mediating between the phenomena. We are reminded of Wittgenstein's earlier remarks in Philosophical Investigations, I, 308:

Type
Papers
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 1973

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References

page 193 note 1 I am informed that ‘nebulous’ is a more literal translation of Wittgenstein's German than the word ‘gaseous’, which Anscombe employs in the standard edition. ‘Nebulous’ also seems to me to convey an appropriate suggestion of vagueness and mystery.

page 197 note 1 Anscombe translates this clause ‘… it is impossible to infer the properties or structure of the plant from those of the seed that comes out of it’, which is clearly an error.

page 200 note 1 Proc. Arist. Soc. LXXII (19711972) p. 2.Google Scholar

page 201 note 1 ‘Memory Unchained’, Philosophical Review LXXVIII (04, 1969) pp. 179–96.Google Scholar

page 202 note 1 ‘Remembering’, Philosophical Review LXXV (04, 1966) pp. 161–96.Google Scholar

page 205 note 1 See his ‘Mental Events’ in Experience and Theory ed. Foster, Lawrence and Swanson, J. W. (Massachusetts, 1970)Google Scholar (hereafter ME); and also ‘Psychology as Philosophy’, in Philosophy of Psychology, ed. Brown, Stuart C. (London: Macmillan; New York: Barnes & Noble, 1974)CrossRefGoogle Scholar (hereafter PP).