FROM MINDS HIDDEN IN THE HEADS OF INDIVIDUALS TO THE USE OF MIND-TALK BETWEEN US: WITTGENSTEINIAN DEVELOPMENTAL INVESTIGATIONS Endnote

 

John Shotter

Emeritus Professor of Communication

Department of Communication

University of New Hampshire

Durham, NH 03824-3586


 

Abstract: I criticize Carpendale and Lewis’s (2004) attempt to produce a Wittgensteinian theory, as an alternative to work in the “theory of mind” (TOM) tradition, not because I disagree with it as theory, but because Wittgenstein would be critical of any attempt to make such a use of his work. Theories are concerned with discovering rules, principles, of lawful regularities hidden behind appearances. Wittgenstein’s whole latter philosophy is inimical to such an aim. His concern is not with theories but with descriptions – which can be explanatory, but in a relational or orientational rather than a causal fashion. Below, I give some initial examples to show what Wittgensteinian investigations in developmental psychology might look like.


 

“Our attitude to what is alive and to what is dead, is not the same. All our reactions are different” (1953, no.284) Endnote .


Carpendale and Lewis (2004) want to criticize the whole “theory of mind” tradition in developmental research for its grounding in “individualistic processes.” Instead, they want to propose an “alternative theory” drawing on, among others, Vygotsky and Wittgenstein, but especially on “Wittgenstein’s arguments.” I would like to whole heartedly to endorse their turn to Wittgenstein. However, I still want to be critical of their use of material from Wittgenstein’s later philosophy. For, after all, in his Philosophical Investigations Wittgenstein notes that his form of “logical investigation...takes its rise, not from an interest-in the facts of nature, nor from a need to grasp causal connections: but from an urge to understand the basis, or essence, of everything empirical. Not, however, as if to this end we had to hunt out new facts; it is, rather, of the essence of our investigation that we do not seek to learn anything new by it. We want to understand something that is already in plain view. For this is what we seem in some senses not to understand” (no.89). Thus: “It was true to say our considerations could not be scientific ones ...we may not advance any kind of theory. There must not be anything hypothetical in our considerations. We must do away with all explanation, and description alone must take its place... The problems [of his concern] are solved, not by giving new information, but by arranging what we have always known” (1953, no.109). His argumentative and other kinds of remarks are thus aimed at a quite different kind of investigation from those of a scientific kind. His remarks are aimed, not at discover something unknown, but at “giving prominence to distinctions which our ordinary forms of language easily make us overlook” (no.132) – for, as he sees it, everything of relevance to our understanding our use of mental-talk and our ways of teaching it to our children is already ‘out there’ open to view: “Since everything lies open to view there is nothing to explain. For what is hidden, for example, is of no interest to us” (no.126).


              This is where his later philosophy is quite revolutionary. He introduces a whole compendium of devices – vignettes, dialogues with other ‘voices’, arguments, dramatic scenes, metaphors and similes, striking examples, subtle particularities, and so on – all aimed, not at learning “anything new,” but at “understanding something that is already in plain view... something that we need to remind ourselves of” (no.89). Indeed, he wants in his investigations “to replace wild conjectures and explanations by the quiet weighing of linguistic facts” (1981, no.447) thus to produce merely a description of the facts that matter in the issue concerned – a description which, if one was initially intellectually disoriented Endnote , justifies saying to those around one (at least for the immediate practical purposes in hand): “Now I know how to go on” (1953, no.154).


The quiet weighing of linguistic facts: criteria and regularities


While Wittgenstein is not critical of science as such (in its own proper context), the whole scientific approach is inimical to the character of his investigations. His investigations are of a descriptive and grammatical kind, to do with what is or might be connected with or related to what in our everyday dealings with each other and the world around us. Thus his remarks are not at all aimed at arguing for what is in fact the case. They are to do with drawing one’s attention to what is “always before one’s eyes” (no.129), so that one can relate or to orient oneself toward it, toward the events occurring around one, in more deliberate less impulsive and unheeding ways. In other words, his remarks are expressions of a concern with what already lies “seen but unnoticed” (Garfinkel, 1967, p.36) in the background to all our everyday (and professional) communicative activities. It is the character and the function of our spontaneously occurring, taken-for-granted, easily ignored aspects of everyday activities – upon which we all rely if we are unproblematically to interact with each other in our more self-consciously controlled activities – that he wants to help us bring into rational-visibility. Hence his remark that, his investigations are aimed at drawing our attention to “what is possible before all new discoveries and inventions” (1953, no.126).


              Although each of us might uniquely do our own thing – like Carpendale and Lewis (henceforth C&L) in formulating their own unique theory in their article – if we are not to mislead or confuse the others around us, they must be able to see how the possibilities we depict connect with or relate to those possible for them. If they are to coordinate their activities in with our’s, they need to know, not what we are actually doing now, but its ‘point’, what they are aimed at in the future, where we are trying to get to. Thus more than simply being able to ‘follow’ us, they must in fact be able to anticipate us – if not in detail at least in style (see below).


              While in scientific investigations, “we feel as if we [have] to penetrate phenomena,” says Wittgenstein (1953), his grammatical investigations are “directed not towards phenomena, but, as one might say, towards the ‘possibilities’ of phenomena” (no.90). Thus theories (and arguments in their support) would only be necessary in these investigations, if one were convinced that the influences shaping people’s behavior in this grammatical fashion were so radically hidden that they could only be discovered indirectly, by a process of scientific investigation. Whereas, as Wittgenstein (1953) notes: “If it is asked: ‘How do sentences manage to represent?’ – the answer might be: ‘Don’t you know? You certainly see it, when you use them’. For nothing is concealed” (no. 435). Indeed, our managing to represent something by the utterance of our words – especially seemingly ‘inner’ mental processes – cannot be concealed, else we would be unable to teach our children appropriate uses of such words, and all around us would have to orient toward us as aliens from another planet (trying ‘to work out’, logically, what our expressions might mean).


              The links between our ‘inner feelings’ and their outward expressions cannot be hidden, cannot be ‘private’ ones, that we as individuals can simply construct as we please. My words for sensations are “tied up with my natural expressions of sensation” (1953, no.256), because it is on those occasions when our “natural expressions” of pain, of attention and interest, of distraction, of certainty, of shyness and confidence, of shame and guilt, etc., etc., are visible to all around us, that they can they can teach us the relevant linguistic expressions: “Being sure that someone is in pain, doubting whether he is, and so on, are so many natural, instinctive, kinds of behaviour towards other human beings, and our language is merely an auxiliary to, and further extension of, this relation. Our language-game is an extension of this primitive behaviour. (For our language-game is behaviour.) (Instinct)” (1981, no.545).


              In other words, like C&L, Wittgenstein sees all the events of importance in our teaching our children to be like ourselves (as well as in our coming to an understanding of each other’s unique ‘inner lives’), as occurring ‘out there’, interwoven or intertwined into the living relations between ourselves and the others and othernesses around us. But, as Wittgenstein (1953) realizes, the relevant events are of such a subtle and complex kind, and “it all goes by so quick” (no.435), that we cannot easily get an overall view of them. A comprehensive grasp allowing us to survey all their detailed interconnections at once – thus to know ahead of time what might follow from what – seems, at first, impossible.


              It is at this point, however, that Wittgenstein and C&L part company. Where they turn to theoretical claims and conjectures in their investigation in their search for such a grasp, Wittgenstein turns simply to an attempt to describe the relevant facts. They part company because C&L still seem to assume that what they call “the psychological world” is a world of radically hidden “inner process” that can only be understood through the good offices of a theory, whereas, as Wittgenstein sees it, the events relevant to us instructing our children and understanding each other’s ‘inner lives’ are not in fact radically hidden.


              Given their assumption that inner process really are inner in the geographical sense, they assign a crucial role in their theory to Wittgenstein’s (1953) remark (they say his ‘argument’) that “an ‘inner process’ stands in need of outward criteria” (no.580). Indeed, as they see it: “Children learn the pattern of interaction for which it is appropriate to use a particular term, for example, metal or emotional, or dealing with pain, and so forth... Criteria for talk about the mental world are behavior evidence for inner experiences such as sensations, emotions, thinking, and so forth” (p.88). In other words: “Concepts about the mind are not just passed on from the social group, nor are they completely formed by individual child-theorists. Instead, children gradually construct social understanding through the regularities they experience in interacting with others” (p.84).


              In line, then, with the scientific tradition within which they are working, they see their task as that of helping us to anticipate events – which we need to do if we are to coordinate our own individual actions in with those of others – by producing an account of the relevant regularities. We can anticipate the future by seeing at a continuation of the past. And they see children as working in the same way: but instead of making use of a ‘theory of mind’ in making sense of other people’s activities, they suggest that “children understand talk about the psychological world in terms of patterns of activity that are criterial for the use of such mental state terms – that is, the pattern of interaction we [adults] use these words” (p.89).


              What C&L (2004) miss here, as indeed the whole tradition of ‘scientific’ inquiry in academic psychology seems to miss, is the fact that certain socially shared, spontaneously occurring, unself-conscious influences – influences that Wittgenstein calls “grammatical” influences, but which he also talks of as ‘urges’, ‘compulsions’, ‘inclinations’, ‘temptations’, and so on – are always ineradicably at work between us in our use of language, without which we would be unable (without having to start from scratch every time) to unproblematically communicate with each other. Although we easily fail to notice them because of their spontaneously occurring, socially distributed nature, it is the undeniable fact that these influences are always present in our meetings with each other, that he wants to bring to our attention. Thus the meanings of the words we use in our utterances are – pace Humpty-Dumpty Endnote – not a simple matter of our own choosing. What is the nature of these often unnoticed influences?

 


The origin of language games in once-off, first-time, spontaneous, bodily reactions


Before immediately turning to an answer to that question, I want to do a bit of scene-setting. “Human learning,” suggests Vygotsky (1978), “presupposes a specific social nature and a process by which children grow into the intellectual life of those around them” (p.88). But what might that process be? Central to Vygotsky’s (1978) account of that process is his claim that, as “the result of a long series of developmental events” (p.57), what occurs first as “an interpersonal process is transformed into an intrapersonal one” (p.57). In other words, as Vygotsky sees it, what is of crucial importance within it is the fact that a child’s activities all take place in surroundings in which – whether the child’s actions are wholly oriented toward physical objects or not – the other human beings around them are spontaneously responsive to the child’s behavior. Thus, in discussing the origins of the pointing gesture in failed attempts to grasp objects beyond their reach, he notes that “the child’s unsuccessful attempt engenders a reaction not from the object he seeks but from another person” (p.56). The behavior develops “from an object-oriented movement [to] a movement aimed at another person, a means of establishing relations” (p.56).


              Wittgenstein (1980) also, in discussing the origins of what he calls “language-games,” notes something similar: “The origin and primitive form of the language game is a reaction; only from this can more complicated forms develop. Language – I want to say – is a refinement, ‘in the beginning was the deed’ Endnote “ (1980, p.31). “The primitive reaction may have been a glance or a gesture, but it may also have been a word (1953, pp.217-218). And elsewhere he adds: “But what is the word ‘primitive’ meant to say here? Presumably that this sort of behavior is pre-linguistic: that a language-game is based on it, that it is the prototype of a way of thinking and not the result of thought” (1981, no.541).


              Both Wittgenstein and Vygotsky then, in being interested in how children grow into the intellectual lives of those around them, do not see people’s understanding of each other’s activities as occurring in an instant, in a flash of inner mental insight, in which two or more previously unconnected events suddenly become cognitively connected. Indeed, for them, events seemingly hidden inside the heads of individuals are of no importance. What is of primary importance to them is what goes on out in the world between individuals in terms of their spontaneously occurring, expressive-responsive bodily movements. And they both see development as a gradual process in which people’s naturally occurring expressive-responsive activities come to exhibit an increasing inner complexity in a step-by-step fashion. Vygotsky (1986) puts it thus: “The general law of development says that awareness and deliberate control appear only during a very advanced stage in the development of a mental function, after it has been used and practiced unconsciously and spontaneously” (p.168).


              A remark of G.H. Mead’s (1934) is also, I think, of crucial relevance here: “The mechanism of meaning is,” he says, “present in the social act before the emergence of consciousness or awareness of meaning occurs. The act or adjustive response of the second organism gives to the gesture of the first organism the meaning it has” (pp 77-78) – like Moliere’s Monsieur Jourdain, who has “been speaking prose all my life, and didn't even know it!,” we mean things to each other ‘without knowing it’ from (and perhaps before) the very moment of our birth.


              In other words, to repeat: the crucial events is our meaning things to each other are not hidden events occurring inside the minds of individual children; the crucial events are spontaneously occurring bodily responses, reactions occurring in response to and interwoven in with the expressive activities of the others (and othernesses) around them. This emphasis on the primacy of spontaneously occurring bodily reactions, and the deliberate, well-timed, interweaving of our more linguistic expressions into this spontaneously occurring activity, changes everything.


              To see why, let us note that implicit in C&L’s (2004) discussion of false belief research and of their alternative theory (and indeed, in all research in cognitive psychology), is the unquestioned assumption of both language and mind as being representational, of language as being a separate, self-contained realm of activity with its own structure and rules of use Endnote . Indeed, such a view of language as having only representational function is implicitly present in all academic research in psychology, even including that within a social constructionist orientation (Shotter and Lannamann, 2002). C&L (2004) implicitly assume this stance in continually writing of the child’s task as that of understanding talk “about” mental states (see quotations above).


              In his remarks above about the primitive origins of language-games, Wittgenstein doesn’t want to argue that the representational view of language is wrong, but just to draw our attention to the fact that our ‘picturing’ a state of affairs is just one of the “countless different kinds of use of what we call ‘symbols’, ‘words’, ‘sentences’” (no.23). The interweaving of linguistic expressions at crucial moments into the sequential unfolding of our exchanges with others can – surely we must acknowledge this? – serve many different functions other than representational ones Endnote . Indeed, we can see that this is in fact the case here. For his remarks above, in which he notes the reactions that the bodily expressions of others can arouse in us, can affect us in the same way here also: they can call “our attention to (reminded us of) the fact that there are other processes, besides the one we originally thought of...” (no.140), when we thought that ‘picturing’ a state of affairs was the primary function of our use of words.


              But what is it about our living relations with the others around us that makes it possible for us to exert these different kinds of non-representational influences upon them? What is it about our embodied expressions that is so crucial here?


              Let us return to Wittgenstein’s remarks on the primitive origins of the language-game, for something special occurs in our living, embodied, face-to-face meetings with each other that has not, I feel, been universally recognized and acknowledged in either philosophy or psychology: the special nature of what Bakhtin (1981) has called the dialogical, and I have called “joint action” (Shotter, 1980, 1984).


              The something special that occurs begins thus: It almost goes without saying, that when one person reacts bodily to another, they do not simply react to the fact of the first person’s physical movements, but to what they anticipate its outcome is going to be, i.e., to the direction or intention of those movements – and many such anticipatory reactions occur immediately and spontaneously without deliberation. Thus, we can say that, prior to our self-conscious awareness of the existence of meaning in people’s actions, meaning is nonetheless spontaneously present in our mutually responsive, living interactions with each other. Next, we need to note that, as soon as we enter into such mutually responsive relations with those around us, then, instead of one of us first acting individually and independently of all the others, and then an other replying to us in the same way, the actions of us all are to an extent ‘shaped’ in the course of their performance by our spontaneous responsiveness to the actions of all those others (and the other things) around us. Thus as a consequence, none involved can in fact account their actions as wholly their own – besides ourselves, events issuing from the others and othernesses in our surroundings exert a formative influence in shaping our expressions. This, as we shall see, is the source of what Wittgenstein identifies as the grammatical influences on our conduct.


              Why have we not appreciated this before? Because, suggests Wittgenstein (1953), the metaphysical mythologies we have inherited from past philosophies that are now embedded in our ordinary forms of language – especially those from the metaphysics of Cartesian philosophy – easily make us overlook this usually unnoticed background to our lives together: “A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably” (no.115). Especially ignored until very recently, has been the power of an invisible, unspecifiable other or otherness – an otherness, called by Bakhtin (1986) the superaddressee (p.126) – who places demands and requirements on us over and above any of the actual other “second parties” visible to us to whom we address our utterances, a “third party” (p.127) which makes its presence felt in all our relations with our surroundings. Often, we experience it as the presence of a “must” or an “ought,” an “ideal” that cannot be otherwise – “thoughts ‘must’ be in the head, where else could they be?” Wittgenstein (1953) discusses the nature of this demanding presence thus: “We want to say that there can’t be any vagueness in logic The idea now absorbs us, that the ideal ‘must’ be found in reality. Meanwhile we do not as yet see how it occurs there, nor do we understand the nature of this “must.” We think it must be in reality; for we think we already see it there... as something in the background – hidden in the medium of the understanding” (nos.101, 102). It is these inclinations, compulsions, urges, taken-for granted assumptions of obvious rightness – the “musts” in terms of which we conduct not only our professional research investigations but also most of our everyday life activities – that Wittgenstein (1953) has questioned, and shown, not to be wrong, but not always the only possibilities available to us in our interactions with the others and othernesses around us.


Why do we search so resolutely for explanatory theories?


What we have noted above, then, as C&L (2004) also note, is that one very important aspect of Wittgenstein’s (1953) later philosophy is to battle against our own “bewitchment of our intelligence” (no.109) within our own uses of language, and that is what we have alluded to above. But we still have a long way to go if we to create between us a full understanding of what, in practice, Wittgensteinian investigations in child development might actually be like.


              As we have already seen, rather than theories and arguments about theories (like the arguments here), a Wittgensteinian developmental psychology – with its grammatical orientation – would be a descriptive affair involving “the quiet weighing of linguistic facts” (Wittgenstein, 1981, no.447). And in such investigations, researchers would face the task – not of continually arguing for theories, either in terms of evidence derived from attempts to test them empirically, or conceptually in terms of whether they adequately encompass all the relevant phenomena or not – but of conducting inquiries of another kind altogether. As he sees it, just as we can come to know our “way about” Endnote inside a particular new house or city, by taking the trouble to explore connections between its unique details and gradually come to gain a sure (clear) knowledge of how to get to most of the places we wish to visit without getting lost or confused, so also, he suggests, we can develop the same kind of more practical understanding of what is involved in children coming to an understanding of other people’s minds.


              Essentially here, Wittgenstein (1980) is distinguishing between two kinds of difficulties, difficulties of the intellect (that we can call ‘problems’) which can be solved by the application of reason, and difficulties of the will having to do with “what most people want to see” (p.17). We can call this second kind of difficulty, a difficulty of orientation or relation. It is this second kind of difficulty that he is trying, not to solve, but to resolve in the Investigations. It can be resolved by the provision of an “album” of “sketches of landscapes” that, on looking through it, would enable one to get “a picture of the landscape” (p.ix) of child development. Where the aim of such an overall portrayal, if we can call it that, would be to create a way of seeing that brings a meaningful whole into view, thus to constitute afresh what can be seen as the relevant facts.


              Clearly, Wittgenstein did not wholly succeed in providing such a complete overall portrayal of our uses of language. Nor are we anywhere near being able to write out a whole systematic, explanatory theory of how our children acquire the ability to understand the minds of others. But what is important here, is to grasp the very different nature of Wittgenstein’s project in the Investigations. It is not in competition with explanatory theories, whose results will inform the argumentative, disciplinary talk of academics in their seminar rooms. It is very differently oriented. To resolve a difficulty of the will by adopting certain ways of seeing, is also to adopt certain lines of action: Wittgenstein is concerned with a kind of understanding that will be expressed, not in our intellectual arguments with our disciplinary colleagues, but in our everyday practices.


              At the moment, however, in our pre-Wittgensteinian times, we still proceed in our inquiries in human affairs in a single minded, dogmatic fashion – in terms of the continual proposing and criticizing of theories. Why do we feel so resolved always to pursue this line of action? We can, I think, find the reason in the fact that we have still not cured ourselves of a need for metaphysical philosophizing.


              Descartes (1968) saw philosophy as “like a tree, whose roots are metaphysics, the trunk physics and the branches which grow out of this trunk are all the other sciences... But as it is not from the roots or the trunk of trees that the fruits are picked, but only from the extremities of their branches, so the principle usefulness of philosophy depends on its parts which we can only learn last of all” (pp.183-184). But in this view of philosophy as metaphysics, of it as foundational, we can never be wholly sure as to whether we have done sufficient ‘under-laboring’ (Locke) to have produced a clear path to knowledge. Thus in our investigations, even now, we are often still faced with a dual task, as C&L (2004) are in their article, of both offering philosophical arguments in criticism of those of others, while trying at the same time to conduct our own version of a scientific investigation.


              This entails, on the one hand, appealing to readily visible events occurring out in the world between us as evidence for what, on the other hand, are the conceptual claims we want to make about the supposed “hidden mechanisms” responsible for the observable events in question. Hence, we must spend some time at least in philosophical argument in support of the theories we are proposing. Wittgenstein (1953) discusses this situation thus: “We are trying to get hold of the mental process of understanding which seems to be hidden behind [these] coarser and therefore more readily visible accompaniments. But we do not succeed; or, rather, it does not get as far as a real attempt. For even supposing I had found something that happened in all those cases of understanding, – why should it be the understanding? And how can the process of understanding have been hidden, when I said “Now I understand” because I understood?! And if I say it is hidden – then how do I know what I have to look for? I am in a muddle” (no.153).


              But this is not a muddle that can be sorted out by yet more empirical research. It is a problem created by the presence of a (Cartesian) metaphysical ‘picture’, a mythology Endnote , that has found its way into our ordinary forms of language use, and which misleads us into thinking that all our uses of language must be of a representational kind.


              It would be good, we feel, if we could replace the seeming ‘inadequacies’ of our everyday talk with an ideal language, a closed, logical system in which misleading talk was rendered impossible – but this would render our own unique expressions indicative of unique aspects of our own unique lives impossible also. Such ‘pictures’ are a crucial part of the workings of our everyday talk and cannot, Wittgenstein (1953) realizes, simply be eliminated. “It is not our aim,” he says, “to refine or complete the system of rules for the use of our words in unheard-of ways” (no.133). Instead, he says, he is aiming at “complete clarity... [which] simply means that the philosophical problems should completely disappear” (no.133), i.e., we should no longer feel that certain puzzling, mysterious entities radically hidden from us “must,” nonetheless, exist somewhere and be responsible for what is not hidden from us. Such complete clarity would reveal to us, both how we have been deceiving ourselves, and how other, more readily accessible ways of making sense to each other are in fact open to us. “The real discovery,” he says, “is the one that makes me capable of stopping doing philosophy when I want to” (no.133). In other words, the real discovery is one that releases us from feeling the need to set up a prior system or framework of foundational propositions in terms of which to conduct one’s investigations: this is Wittgenstein’s achievement in his later philosophy.


              As already mentioned above, by his introduction of a whole (unsystematic) compendium of devices, he has shown how things that are “already in plain view” – but which have been “overlooked,” philosophically – can be given “prominence,” and can then be shown to have (a previously unrecognized) significance in relation to many philosophical problems that had in the past seemed totally insoluble. In the past we have asked ourselves such questions as: “What is the mind?” What is the meaning of a word?” and so on, and then began to search for a sign’s representation as if it were another object co-existing along-side the sign, also seen as an object Endnote . Here, suggests Wittgenstein (1965): “We are up against one of the greatest sources of philosophical bewilderment: a substantive makes us look for a thing that corresponds to it” (p.1) Endnote . But we must resist this inclination to look for another object. Instead, we must look for the use of our words, i.e., the countless different kinds of influence they can exert (if uttered at the right moment) in shaping the shared practices into which they are intertwined – the different effects we can have on others by their use, the effects they can have on us, and the effects we can all have on ourselves. But how can we do this? How can we learn the things people can do with their words? How does a child learn, not simply what a dollar bill is, but the value of money? How can we be taught a socially shared or sharable practice – a shared or shareable practice, moreover, that is open to us doing ‘our own thing’ within it?


              As a start, you must, says Wittgenstein (1953), “let the use of words teach you their meaning” (p.220) – just as in learning mathematics we often let the continual doing of proofs teach us the theorems being proved. But, while we are seeking in our empirical research to discover evidence in support of certain theoretical propositions – ones which we feel are more accurate, adequate, or general than those proposed by our competitors – his aim is quite different. All his later works consist, not in arguments for general claims, not in a body of results, but in exemplary investigations into this, that, or some other kind of concrete, everyday circumstance. His strategy in doing this is clear: “As soon as I think of an everyday use of [a puzzling] sentence instead of a philosophical use, its meaning becomes clear and ordinary” (1969, no.347). In other words, as he puts it, instead of feeling the need to lay down a preliminary, meta-theoretical framework for one’s inquiries, “we now demonstrate a method, by examples; and the series of examples can be broken off. – Problems are solved (difficulties eliminated), not a single problem” (1953, no.133).



The role of 1st-person, unique utterances in learning generalities


But in doing this, he wants to go further than merely displaying a set of particular investigations, he wants to teach us, in just the same way that anyone (an adult) might try to teach another (a child) a practice, the practice of his kind of philosophical investigation. He doesn’t try to do it by impersonally giving us any foundational rules or principles. As a unique 1st-person, individual “I” (as Ludwig Wittgenstein), he proceeds by continually providing us with examples at appropriate moments – to draw our attention to unnoticed features in our own actions, in our surroundings, etc., or to suggest alternative ways of ‘going on’ to us, and so on. Where, in such circumstances, he notes: “giving examples is not an indirect means of explaining – in default of a better. For any general definition can be misunderstood too” (1953, no.71).


              But what has he in mind in making this suggestion? How can what scientific psychologists usually dismiss as “mere anecdotes” be of any use to us in our inquiries? How can general definitions be misunderstood, and if so, why don’t we notice this and give up still trying to use them? Here we must go back to his remarks on the crucial role played by spontaneous reactions, by being ‘struck’, in the origin of language-games, to see how a language-game can be based on a reaction, how a reaction can be, not the result of thought, but the prototype for a way of acting and thinking. “Not only rules, but also examples are needed for establishing a practice. Our rules leave loop-holes open, and the practice has to speak for itself” (1969, no.139). “I shall teach him to use the words by means of examples and by practice. – And when I do this I do not communicate less to him than I know myself” (1953, no.280). A parent says to a young child who has just, thoughtlessly, walked in our of the garden leaving a trail of muddy footmarks across the kitchen floor: “Stop! Look what you’ve just done!... Behind you... your feet... Wipe them next time... Look, like THIS!!!” The parent hopes that the child’s reactions both to their instructive remarks, and to their example, will become interwoven into the child’s future entries into the kitchen from the garden, thus to refine them. At the appropriate moment in their subsequent trips into the kitchen – just as we might be reminded of ‘what comes next’ in the unfolding movement of a piece of music – so the child will be reminded (the parent hopes) to stop, and to check his or her feet for mud.


              The very central role played by people’s spontaneous, living, embodied reactions in Wittgenstein’s later philosophy, is often ignored by many claiming to be followers of his philosophy Endnote . Central to it, however, is his emphasis on the fact that it is the existence of certain unlearned reactions that make the process of training possible in the first place – a central aspect of which he calls “the ostensive teaching of words” (no.6). Without that shared background of shared reactions in shared circumstances, we could draw no distinctions between correct and incorrect uses of language in our practices. It is our shared or sharable spontaneous reactions to examples, that make the teaching of sharable practices possible. Indeed, as Wittgenstein (1953) notes, we rely on our children being spontaneously responsive in a differential manner to our evaluative reactions, to our smiles of encouragement and frowns of dis approval if we are to teach them anything. We cannot do it simply by stating rules and principles to them. “[I]f a person has not yet got the concepts” says Wittgenstein (1953), “I shall teach him to use the words by means of examples and by practice. – ... I do it, he does it after me; and I influence him by expressions of agreement, rejection, expectation, encouragement. I let him go his way, or hold him back; and so on” (no.208).


              But much more than this, Wittgenstein’s (1953) emphasis on people’s spontaneous responsive reactions to events occurring around them, also gives us a whole new approach to understanding the nature of what we call people’s ‘inner’ lives (Johnston, 1993; Muhall, 1990), to our understanding of what is ‘in’ other people’s minds. We notice a person grimacing at a noise, others say things like “I’m puzzled,” “I’m in pain,” “I don’t like that music,” another makes a welcoming gesture, or whatever. As Johnston (1993) notes, irrespective of whether these 1st-person expressions are accurately linked to a mysterious inner realm or not, the fact is that “the account [such a expression] has a use quite independently of whether or not it accurately reproduces some supposed inner event” (p.14). “The notion of the Inner does not refer to some separate reality but expresses our relation to each other and a particular way of understanding human action” (p.28). For such 1st-person avowals (especially if spontaneously expressed) tell us what their expectations and anticipations are as to how we should ‘go on’ with them, how we respond to them, how we should treat them. In other words, the importance of people’s inner-talk in our shared lives is not in giving give each other retrospective 3rd-person reports on already completed events that occurred in the inner workspace of our minds, but to tell each other, as 1st-persons, something about themselves, prospectively, something that – at the moment of telling – will help us to relate ourselves to what uniquely they have it in mind to do in the (often immediate) future Endnote . Their meanings are not hidden inside them geographically, in a private inner space, but are ‘hidden’ in time, in that their reference is to possibilities whose realization is still in the future.


              Indeed, without the unique individualized understandings occurring at crucial moments in our particular exchanges with our children (and others), our attempts to train them to be active participants in the shared forms of responsive expression prevalent in our culture, would be impossible. For our task in teaching them language is only marginally to teach them ‘aboutness’ or representational talk. As I suggested above, we can find the beginning of new language games in people’s spontaneous reactions. And as parents, we rely on our children responding in this spontaneous way to our expressions in our teaching them what, theoretically, we think of as rule-governed practices. By relying on the directionality inherent in the temporally unfolding of living activities, we utter at certain crucial moments in the course of this teaching, along with a whole set of exaggerated facial expressions and other bodily gestures, such verbal expressions as ‘Stop!’, ‘Look’, ‘Listen’, ‘Look at that’, ‘Listen to this’, ‘Do like this’, ‘Do it like that’, and so on. The crucial nature of the moment of utterance in all of this cannot be over emphasized: in coming at a particular moment in the already ongoing flow of contingently intertwined activity occurring between them and us, in pointing in their gestural expressiveness from ‘this past’ toward ‘that kind of future’, our children’s activities allow us to intervene at that moment, and in doing so, to point them toward ‘another kind of future’, toward seeing a connection between events of a previously unnoticed kind. More than using words to talk about something, the child must learn to use words to arouse anticipations in others and to make (create or construct) connections and relations.


              Our 1st-person expressions are crucial, then, not only in initially establishing but also in sustaining our shared forms of life. Indeed, they are not only crucial in our teaching of our infants to be participants in the language intertwined practices of our social group, but in fact in almost all our ordinary everyday interactions. People want to know what we are doing in what we are saying. In other words, in my 1st-person expressions, I am not here in fact giving anything like a 3rd-person description of, or a report on, my inner states of mind, which could (if the need arose) be checked for its accuracy, but doing something like expressing a 1st-person appeal to those around me for help or for sympathy or suchlike. And we choose the words we do in which to express such relational initiatives, because in the circumstances of their use, in their gestural expressiveness, they ‘point’ for us ‘from this past toward that kind of future’. Thus, as Johnston (1993) remarks, in this context, the context of our ‘inner-talk’, the “use of a word does not involve learning rules; rather it builds on a natural reaction,” and, on the basis of the embodied responses to the events occurring around us into which we have been trained, we “go on spontaneously to develop new possibilities of self-expression” (p.25).



Examples in the teaching of a practice


Above, then, we can see the importance of a number of major (interlinked) themes in Wittgenstein’s later philosophy: The first is the crucially important role of people’s previously unnoticed spontaneous living reactions to events in their surroundings. Once these reactions are noticed, and we realize with Wittgenstein (1953) that “nothing is hidden” (no.435), then there is no need to search for radically hidden ‘mechanisms’ to understand how we can understand each other. Hence, his explorations of some of the pitfalls of our not quite realizing the nature of our own needs in our inquiries – we think we need explanations and general theories, whereas in fact our real need is for concrete examples described in such a way that they ‘strike’ us, i.e., call out characteristic responses from us spontaneously: “Not only rules, but also examples are needed for establishing a practice. Our rules leave loop-holes open, and the practice has to speak for itself” (1969, no.139).


              With this last comment in mind, having suggested above that we still have a long way to go before an understanding of Wittgensteinian investigations in child development might develop, let me add here, that should that development occur, then perhaps further progress could be quite rapid. For there is no shortage at all of striking examples.


               What follows is an almost random list of what seem to me to be relevant examples, for very many more could easily be added: We might start with Campos and Stenberg’s (1980) claims about “social referencing,” i.e., the fact that young infants often turn toward a caregiver’s facial expression to evaluate or gain orientation toward otherwise indeterminate events (see also Emde and Sorce, 1983). Indeed, we might go further here to suggest, as Wittgenstein does above, that in their spontaneous responses to their caregiver’s expressions, infants are not just merely disambiguating novel events, but literally discovering from their caregiver’s expressions, the unique way in which they should relate to their surroundings on this occasion. Shotter and Gregory (1976) outlined such an occasion with Samantha at 11 months, when a mother’s expectation of social referencing failed to occur: Samantha had successfully placed a shape in a form-board, but then had straightaway gone on to grab the next piece, even when her mother had said, ‘There’s a clever girl’. Her mother tapped her arm, stopping the next grab in its tracks, thrust her face in Samantha’s, and repeated her praise slowly with emphasis, allowing Samantha to proceed only after a moment of smiling eye-contact.


              Dunn (1988) notes, even at 18 months, infants ‘show’ or ‘display’ in their everyday ways of acting that they anticipate adult’s responses to previously forbidden actions – they act into the situation in a teasing way, or, as a situation to be deliberately evaded. Kidwell (2005) confirms this. She not only shows that young infants (1 to 2½ yrs) have a keen sense of how their ‘naughty’ actions will be viewed by others, but that their actions are “social” in the sense that they are subtly angled to occasion specific kinds of responses from the adults around them – specifically, they are often ‘managed’ in ways that will mislead caregivers from inferring wrongdoing. Reddy (1991) also describes a whole collection of incidents in which an offer-withdrawal teasing game was played by quite young infants (approx 9 months old), pointing out that teasing as such is impossible unless one knows what to expect will be the reactions of others to one’s withdrawal of an offered object. Here, Spitz’s (1957) early comments on infants approaching forbidden objects eagerly, while uttering the word “no” – undoubtedly heard from the others around them previously – is perhaps relevant.


              Kagan (1981) too has studied similar such moments when infants (around 15 mths) express distress at failing to imitate an action modeled to them by an adult, implying an awareness of what a competent performance ought to have been like. Similarly, he found what he called “mastery smiles” following successful task completion (or when adults complied with requests). In each case, the infants’s actions ‘show’ that they react to sequences of actions just performed, and anticipate responses yet to come, doing both in a socially evaluative way.


              What is brought out in all the studies mentioned – by Campos and Stenberg, Dunn, Shotter and Gregory, Kidwell, Reddy, Spitz, and Kagan – is how an infant’s actions are inter-related with, or interwoven into, the actions of others, those both preceding and following them. And how we, in making sense of them of their actions, instead of needing to refer to the supposedly radically hidden mental states inside their individual heads, can refer instead to the observable behavior occurring between them and those around them, to the detailed, sequential interplay of interrelated responses as they unfold in the achievement of specifically meaningful exchanges. There is thus no need to search for intellectualist-representational interpretations of this behavior – the child’s behavior can be seen as a refinement or elaboration of its initial spontaneous reactions to the circumstances in question.


              Given all the exemplary possibilities listed above, our task in a Wittgensteinian developmental psychology would not be to examine them (and all the others that could be added to them), for which one could be shown empirically, i.e., scientifically, to be the correct explanation of children’s capacities to read the minds of others. For in such an approach to psychology, almost all would be crucial examples of real developmental possibilities. Our task would be of a quite different kind. Once arrayed, our next task would be that of arranging them in some kind of order – sequencing them according to the particular, practical aim of our inquiry at the time Endnote . But the dream of welding them all into a single, logical system is, if the multi-dimensionality of human life and the necessity for human judgment is to be sustained, (thankfully) impossible.


              “There is,” suggests Wittgenstein (1965), “a kind of general disease of thinking which always looks for (and finds) what would be called a mental state from which all our acts spring as from a reservoir” (p.143). And, as he sees it, “a main cause of philosophical disease [is] a one-sided diet: one nourishes one’s thinking with only one kind of example” (1953, no.593). False belief research seems to be driven by a single, particular “grammatical picture”of, not only what it is for a child to have an understanding of another’s mind, but also, of what it is for us to have an understanding of the child’s understanding – that picture is, of course, the “picture-theory” of mind, the idea that we understand events in our surroundings only indirectly, in terms of a representation made up of separate elements that can be re-configured in a rule-governed way, ahead of time, to give us a new representation, a ‘prediction’, of future outcomes Endnote . As cognitivists have said, such a theory is seen as “the only game in town.” But, rather than being indicative of what in fact is actually involved in children developing an understanding of what is ‘in the mind’ of another, such research seems to be much more to be indicative of the degree to which to children subjected to such research have developed toward to the same ideology of those testing them. Missing in this whole approach, to repeat, are people’s spontaneous, embodied, expressive-reactions to events occurring around them – and it is in terms of these expressive reactions that we make evaluative judgments on each other’s actions. Without such reactions, everything comes to hinge on arguments about interpretations – in an unending search for “the truth.”


Conclusions


But if human freedom and unique individuality is to make any sense, if our living of our lives is to remain open to our own choices, and if we are free to create new ways of relating ourselves to the others and othernesses around us, then there can be no single, fixed and finished order in our lives together. For any finalized explanatory scheme of a properly logical, systematic, and scientific kind, would inevitably close the essential openness of our human lives. The great achievement in Wittgenstein’s (1953) investigations, is the extent to which he has succeeded in putting all “this indefiniteness, correctly, and unfalsified, into words” (p.227). The theoretical understandings of academic experts and other professionals, which seek to close the openness of our everyday lives together (in the interest of a particular set of orderly rules or principles of their own devising), each need to be treated for what it is – as (perhaps hopeful) a suggestion for a previously unnoticed possibility for a current next step forward, rather than as (often dangerous) a dogmatic truth for all time. Thus, instead of the neo-Darwinian arguments seeking to eliminate other suggestions as unfit, an album of such previously unnoticed possibilities for ways of going on – an album of new beginnings and beginnings – might be of practical usefulness in the same way as the Philosophical Investigations is useful.


              In practice, then, Wittgensteinian investigations into child development would not, as we have seen, involve researchers in continually arguing for theories, either in terms of evidence derived from attempts to test them empirically, or conceptually in terms of whether they adequately encompass all the relevant phenomena or not. They would face a different kind of task: that of coming to know our “way about” inside the realm of activities to do with our children coming to an understanding of other’s minds. For, to repeat, he wants in his investigations to merely a description of the facts that matter in relation to the issue concerned – a description which, if one was initially intellectually disoriented, justifies saying to those around one (at least for the immediate practical purposes in hand): “Now I know how to go on” (1953, no.154). He is concerned, not with difficulties of the intellect (with problems that can be solved by the application of reasoning) but by difficulties of the will, orientational or relational difficulties – difficulties of a very different kind. C&L (2004) take Wittgenstein’s philosophical remarks piecemeal; they need to be taken as a whole.


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Notes: