Wittgenstein's critique of traditional psychology

Modern Western intellectual culture has as one of its most enduring assumptions the idea that terms that relate to the mind refer to isolatable temporal states and processes of some substance. These states can be thought of as states of the body or states of an immaterial substance called the soul or the mind. For instance, one assumes that in order for someone to be angry, there is a peculiar process which goes on inside either the body or the mind, that corresponds to the term “anger” and which the term anger names. In the same way, if someone is thinking their thought is locatable either in the immmaterial substance of the mind or in some conjunction of neurons in the brain. Either way both perspectives are guided by the notion of mental terms as signifiers of processes. Both cartesian dualists, many idealists and materialists, cognitive psychologists, psychoanalysts and even many behaviorists have held this to be true.
From this straightforward conception, it is a natural idea that the mind behaves according to certain laws of action, and that there could be a special science of psychology that would study the laws of the actions of the mind, applying the methods of physical science, that is, of close observation and hypothetical reconstruction
This Point of view has certainly had its detractors, and they have, of course, made criticisms of various kinds. But perhaps no one's criticism has involved such systematic and thorough-going rejection of it as that of Ludwig Wittgenstein.
Steeped in a lifelong examination of the concept of meaning, Wittgenstein's critique of this picture begins with a consideration of the conditions under which we can speak of items having meanings. The Basic conviction arrived at from this examination is that to comprehend the meaning of words and of behavior is to comprehend the role such behavior plays in the complicated texture of a human form of life, a set of regular patterns and circumstances and activities that make up the regular activity of a group of people. Meaning in this sense is a functional holistic relation between an individual behavior or utterance and a larger, typically human pattern to which it belongs
The conclusions that he drew from this for the study of language are infamous and are embodied in such concepts as family resemblance, meaning as use, and rejection of the possibility of private languages. But they also are found to have radical implications for the understanding of psychological terminology.
For it is clear that desires, intentions, beliefs, expectations, fears, and emotions are terms that make reference to the idea of meaning. And if meaning can only be understood in terms of a symbol or behavior’s functional relation and place within regular patterns of behavior, and more generally if the meaning of a term must always have a public function, it follows that psychological terms are not primarily associated with processes happening either in the mind or the brain or even the body, but with complicated patterns of publicly observable and typically social human behavior.
If this is the case, it follows that to speak of a science of the mental processes of thinking, desiring, expecting, and willing is to speak in a fundamentally confused manner. Neither thinking nor desiring, expecting or willing is a term that refers to a mental (or physical) process at all, but rather to a complicated part whole relation between individual behaviors and complicated general families of behavioral patterns that are present in human life. To say that someone is angry or thinking or confused is not to to provide an explanation or to indicate any fact about what is going on in their mind or their body, but simply to describe the relationship between their behavior and general patterns of characteristically human behavior. Such patterns may have causal explanations, but describing the pattern is not to make any causal or substantial assumptions, but merely to classify something as a manifestation of a pattern.
In this way, Wittgenstein combines a seeming behaviorism with a kind of radical anti-reductionism and anti-positivism. There are no laws of thinking or willing because willing and thinking are not terms for processes but for complicated patterns of often socially mediated behavior whose significance lies in their functional role within human life and not in their causal regularities. It follows the proper method of understanding the human mind is not scientific explanation, but anthropological and empathetic description.
This combination of an austere rejection of grand theoretical pronouncements with a fundamentally humanistic emphasis on comprehending the complex, holistic contexts and conditions that make human action socially intelligible gives Wittgenstein's thinking a unique position among philosophies of mind, and one well worth studying.
In this Meetup, we will attempt to explore this critical and holistic vision of the mind through examination of some of the core texts of Wittgenstein's later period. Readings are linked here:

Primary Reading

Secondary Readings