“Well, God has arrived. I met him on the 5.15 train.” So wrote John Maynard Keynes in a letter to his wife in 1929, on Wittgenstein’s return to Cambridge. A decade after his retirement from philosophy, due to thinking he had essentially solved all the problems of philosophy, he decided to return due to ‘grave errors’ in the Tractatus, that had contributed to the misunderstanding of it by the Vienna Circle (logical positivists) and others. In the Tractatus, he had attempted to show that logic is not rooted in any universal laws lying outside the universe (or in some metaphysical space) awaiting discovery, but shows itself in our linguistic projections when we picture things with words. Most of the time (though certainly not always) we recognise straight away whether something someone has said is logical or not. This is because, as language users, we recognise through use, and not reference to a set of internalised rules, whether a person is playing the ‘game’ or not. The implication is that (most of the time) we can trust our good sense to tell us if this is logical or not (or that these figures add up) and now focus our attention on the more important things in life — ethics and aesthetics. That is to say, how we get on with each other and our environment, and how to make life more beautiful (which he suggests amounts to the same thing). Unfortunately, in the Tractatus he had, largely unwittingly, endorsed the idea that language pictures reality and, as a result, philosophers had become pre-occupied with developing a purified language for science. As such, they were missing the point about the importance of ethics and aesthetics, and hence Wittgenstein’s return to Cambridge. Incidentally, the word ‘sin’ stems from the Greek ‘harmartia’ meaning to ‘miss the mark’ (as in archery). Wittgenstein was to address their sin.

In this paper, I will outline some of Wittgenstein’s later efforts to provide a philosophical therapy for untangling some of the knots or conceptual confusions in our thinking. I will of course, be limited by my own understandings of Wittgenstein’s writings and recorded remarks, and I apologise for this. The ‘resolute reading’ or the ‘New Wittgenstein’, as well as the ‘elucidatory’ reading have been useful for me (Read & Crary, 2000; Fischer, 2011; Hutto, 2003/2006). As we shall see, I also refer to some of the empirical implications of Wittgenstein’s work that have been explored by subsequent scholars. As both the ‘resolute’ and ‘elucidatory’ readings share the idea that Wittgenstein’s work is a form of therapy for the Western intellect, psychotherapists may find some interest in it. Especially Solution-Focused Brief Therapists, as “[t]he solution of the problem of life is seen in the vanishing of the problem” (1961, §6.5212).

Context and Method in the Investigations

Although Wittgenstein published next to nothing over the 20 years after his return to Cambridge, he was preparing a manuscript (Philosophical Investigations — ‘PI’) at the time of his death in 1951 (from prostate cancer). Subsequent to his death, collections of lecture notes were compiled, his own and his students, and remarks in various notebooks, which now make up the 20+ books of the Wittgenstein corpus. In the introduction to the PI, he remarked that his “thoughts soon grew feeble” if he tried to force them along a single track, and so the result was more like an album “criss-cross[ing] in every direction over a wide field of thought”. Not only that, it can be useful to regard previous philosophical endeavours as an attempt to present a general picture of the universe, whereas Wittgenstein’s method consisted of scraping the picture off the window so we can see the world (or be with the world as participants) more clearly. Consequently, setting out Wittgenstein’s work in the form of a narrative poses high risks, for it may enfeeble his elucidations.

From his notebooks and comments to friends, we could say that if there was a narrative to his philosophy, it would be that whilst the Enlightenment philosophers had scraped religious dogma off the window, ‘scientism’ had replaced it. Whereas our collective attention was once captured by imaginary theological entities behind the scenes influencing the world; they had been replaced by imaginary mechanisms or so-called laws of nature. Our collective attention is still governed by superstition. “[T]he main source of superstition results from belief in the causal nexus” (1961, §5.1361). “Man has to awaken to wonder … Science is a way of sending him to sleep again” (1980a, p.5). Thus the goal of his therapeutic activities is to achieve total clarity (or presence in the world). He comments that because industrial culture seeks progress, “… clarity is sought only as an end, not as an end in itself. For me, on the contrary clarity, perspicuity are valuable in themselves” (1980a, p.7) [so printed; Wittgenstein’s text reads “as a means to this end” — Complexe Systémique]. “For the clarity we are aiming at is indeed complete clarity. But this means that the philosophical problems should completely disappear” (1958, §133). Thus Wittgenstein can be regarded as a form of Zen for the west (Weinpaul, 1958). To achieve this clarity would also entail letting go of this narrative also, otherwise it too becomes another picture on the window — “The real discovery is the one that makes me capable of stopping doing philosophy when I want to” (1958, §133).

Deconstructing the Picture Theory of Meaning

It wasn’t until the mid 1930s, before Wittgenstein began writing what has become known as the first section of the PI, and it took him the rest of his life to near completion of it. It is noteworthy that PI begins with a deconstruction of the picture theory of meaning, that had been central to the elucidations on logic in the Tractatus. For some time, and as expressed in the lectures notes now known as ‘The Blue Book’ (1966), he had been preoccupied with ‘one of the greatest sources of philosophical bewilderment’ (Monk, 1991, p.337); the tendency to think that some things that we have labelled with a noun (a substantive) must correspond with some identifiable or definable entity (a substance). ‘Numbers’, ‘time’, ‘knowledge’, ‘meaning’, ‘thought’, ‘paranoia’, ‘the good’, etc., are all, what we would now call socially constructed entities that we have conferred existence on. When we try to pin them down with a definition, they slip through our fingers like water; yet we use these words perfectly adequately. In this respect Wittgenstein approvingly quotes Augustine (1958, §89) who puzzled over this with regards to time: “What is time? If I am not asked, I know; but if I am asked, I don’t know”.

The PI begins the deconstruction of the picture theory of meaning with a quote from Augustine’s Confessions, which claimed that we learnt the meaning of words by our elders pointing to objects and telling us the name of the object. This is known as the ostensive definition or teaching of words, and most people believe that this is how the meanings of words are learnt. But Wittgenstein questions this. One of the examples he gives, is to ask us to imagine someone pointing to an object and saying “that is sepia”. For this to make sense to us, we would already have to know that we are engaged in a colour naming activity here (1958, §30). He extends this argument throughout the first eighty odd remarks in PI to show that ostensive definition cannot be the foundation of language learning, we must first learn what attention directing activity is going on. Is the person pointing to the table and saying “table” naming the object, the colour, giving us an order to climb under it, fetch it, etc? The first time learner has to learn the attention directing activity first.

There is now considerable research on Wittgenstein’s elucidations on joint attention sharing and language development. In summary, mimicry is present at birth, and between nine and 14 months the child begins to alternate between monitoring the gaze of (m)other and what other is gazing at, checking to verify they are continuing to look at the same thing. During this period vocalizations begin to become part of these games (Hobson, 2002). Thus language is based on the development of this joint attention sharing skill (‘know how’), and not ‘know that’ (words representing things).

“For a large class of cases — though not for all — in which we employ the word ‘meaning’ it can be defined thus: the meaning of a word is its use in the language” (1958, §43). He goes on to remark that the error of the Tractatus is that in it, all language is explained in terms of the denotative model (ostensive definition), and this is misleading as it occludes the context of use by the speakers. We see this today where there are strenuous efforts to tie down the definitions of various psychiatric terms to neurological activities. Incidentally this neurophrenological project was delivered a severe blow recently when it was found that a group of people suffering from a rare disease that results in bilateral amygdala damage still report fear and panic (Feinstein, et al, 2013). The implication from Wittgenstein’s elucidations here is that it will be far more useful, in most cases, to attune to how this particular person is using this word (e.g. depression, panic, etc.), rather than attempt to tie down these meanings as positivism would have us do.

Language Games and Rule-Following

Wittgenstein called the joint attention sharing activities where words get their meaning ‘language games’. Outside of the particular activity that is a language game, words have no intrinsic meaning. A language game is a communally shared activity as diverse as naming, commanding, speculating, courting, doing mathematics, arguing, telling jokes, and much more. He talks of there being a ‘family resemblance’ (what mathematicians today call a ‘fuzzy set’) between diverse language games, with no one feature common to all. “Commanding, questioning, recounting, chatting, are as much a part of our natural history as walking, eating, drinking, playing” (1958, §25). “Here the term “language-game” is meant to bring into prominence the fact that the speaking of language is part of an activity, or a form of life” (1958, §23). “And to imagine a language means to imagine a form of life” (1958, §19).

In describing the diversity of language games, he is bringing into question the false view of the logicians and the “author of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus” (1958, §23) that language has a single underlying logical structure. Wittgenstein’s criticism here of his own earlier views have led some to totally reject the Tractatus, suggesting a much larger gap between ‘early Wittgenstein’ and ‘later Wittgenstein’ than is perhaps warranted. The view shared by most in the ‘resolute reading’ and ‘elucidatory reading’ camp is that both works had a therapeutic orientation, and the difference is largely limited to one about how words obtain their meaning (Read & Crary, 2000; Hutto, 2003/2006). In the Tractatus, the claim was that a word is the object it denotes, whilst in PI it is the use the word has in a particular language game. (This raises interesting philosophy of science questions, beyond the scope of this paper, as to whether meaning needs to be tied down to a specific denotation for scientific claims. For example, are psychological ‘tests’ based on self-report valid, as people may be using the same word in different ways?)

The important thing to recognise here is that language arises out of ‘know how’ activities, unlike the structuralism of Saussure or the mentalism of Pinker and early Chomsky, who all suggested that understanding is a result of a mental calculus performed on words and other sensations. We don’t obtain our understanding by inferences and deductions (intellectual activities) but via learned shared semiotic (meaning-making) activities. We attune ourselves to each other to play the same language games; games that are mostly learned in childhood. Whilst we may describe a particular language game with rules (say chess), the rules don’t bind the game so much as reflect an expression of our agreement or customary way of doing this activity (1958, §199).

There is a widespread view, shared by those who didn’t appreciate the say-show distinction in the Tractatus, that the rules of logic, mathematics, grammar, and other games, are somehow independent of the game, dictating whether we are applying or following the rules correctly. This view would have us believe that these rules function as something of a mechanical calculus, and when working correctly, in the case of language, result in meaning. This kind of thinking leads us to think of rule-following as an inner mental mechanism, a causal process; and is thus likely to give rise to such therapies as CBT or psychoanalysis, which attempt to discover ‘faults’ in the imagined inner mental mechanism. Wittgenstein however spends a considerable proportion of the PI deconstructing this notion (1958, §143-242). He shows that the rules aren’t independent of their use, otherwise there would have to be rules on how to interpret rules; (which would lead to an infinite regress). Not only that, if rules were independent of us and open to interpretation, then all sorts of interpretations could be argued to be the correct one (1958, §198-202). For example, what stops one from deciding that the point on a sign-post is the tail of an arrow and heads in the opposite direction to that intended by the sign-post maker? This example helps us see that what constitutes a rule is our customary, or collective use of it. “[A] person goes by a sign-post only in so far as there exists a regular use of sign posts, a custom” (1958, §198). “The application of the concept ‘following a rule’ presupposes a custom” (1978, p.322). So the rule is not a mysterious inner process but is an expression of an agreed custom. They show themselves when the person is playing the game in the agreed manner. “The word ‘agreement’ and the word ‘rule’ … are cousins” (1958, §224). “[I]t is our acting, which lies at the bottom of the language-game” (1958, §204).

‘Private Language Argument(s)’

Another important section of PI has been called ‘the private language argument’ (or sometimes ‘arguments’) (1958, §243-309). In this section, Wittgenstein shows us that we cannot have a coherent private language that is known only to us. This is an attack on the Cartesian idea that I can only have certain knowledge about my own thinking and sensations, and have to make inferences about what others are thinking or sensing. As we shall see, this has ramifications on our understanding of intersubjectivity, or the so-called ‘problem of other minds’. In brief, the idea he attacks is that if it was possible to talk coherently about my own inner sensations as things only I have access to, then I should be able to formulate a private language about these that is only meaningful to me. The problem with this however is that if I was to point to some inner sensation, presumably known only to myself, what certainty do I have that I am pointing to the same sensation on subsequent occasions? By contrast, if I was to point to a chess piece and say “that is a bishop”, you would no doubt correct me if it was a rook. However if my memory is the criteria for identifying this as the same sensation, I have no way of knowing whether it is correct in identifying this as the same sensation I had yesterday. “I have no criteria of correctness” (1958, §258). The problem here is not just that my memory could be faulty, but unlike public events, there is no way I can step outside myself to confirm or verify the accuracy of my account. He amusingly gives us this quip on the problem of the self-referentiality of the puzzle: “As if someone were to buy several copies of the morning newspaper to assure himself that what it said was true” (1958, §265). There is no way to distinguish what seems correct from what is correct. So we need to let go of any certainty here.

Now the philosophical knot that we have gotten ourselves into here, arose because we began from a Cartesian assumption that ‘I’ or my mind was an observer, separate from the sensation, and I was observing my sensations like objects in the world. From such a Cartesian perspective it seems that the thing I can know most certainly is whether I am in pain or not. But as Wittgenstein observes we don’t say we ‘know’ we are in pain (except when doing philosophy). “It can’t be said of me at all (except perhaps as a joke) that I know I am in pain” (1958, §246). I simply am in pain, and express it by groaning, crying etc., or just saying ‘I am in pain’. Indeed, we never learnt the word ‘pain’ without the aid of other people seeing these external criteria — my pain behaviour. That is, the language game of pain began from external criteria in a shared attention context. At first, we just winced, groaned, and cried, etc., but gradually people taught us how to express these sensations in increasingly sophisticated ways, which is most useful when I go to the dentist. Now these expressions often take the form of descriptions, but are in actuality, sophisticated expressions of my sensations.

Thus Wittgenstein’s attack on the private language argument, is not so much to say to the Cartesian ‘you’re wrong’, but to show them there is an incoherence to their argument. The Cartesian argument could be said to be parasitic on language games about knowledge of things in the world, where we have ways of verifying or justifying our knowledge claims. However when I am in pain, I simply am in pain, and it is not the kind of thing I can talk about (coherently) in terms of knowing. There is no evidence or justification I can appeal to. (The reader could enter ‘beetle in the box’ into an internet search engine for more on this.)

Behaviourism and Phenomenology

As Wittgenstein stresses the primacy of ‘know how’ rather than ‘know that’, many have been led into thinking Wittgenstein was some sort of a behaviourist. Hutto (1995) points out that Wittgenstein himself shows that he is not a behaviourist by arguing that sensations are not a nothing (as many behaviourists argued) or could be ignored (as other behaviourists argued), but they are not a something separate from our minds that we are reporting on either (1958, §304). As we have seen from the ‘private language argument’, they find expression in our behaviour. Well socialized expressions look like objective descriptions of sensations, but the picture theory of language has misled us here, for it created an illusion that there was some sort of gap between the sensations and the behaviour of reporting on them. Or, a gap between the sensations and a conscious Cartesian mind observing them. This error in turn, gave rise to the argument between the behaviourists who wanted to ignore the reality of sensations, and the phenomenologists who wanted to give sensations primacy in their analyses. It is not difficult to find adherents of both camps quoting Wittgenstein in their support today.

Perception

Wittgenstein’s elucidations on the nature of perception have a strong ethological and ecological appeal to them. They further develop the ‘know how’ rather than ‘know that’ theme, and have been empirically demonstrated by Gibson (1979) and Noe (2004). Since at least the time of da Vinci, the dominant philosophy of visual perception claims that bundles of light frequencies entering my eyes are being refracted through the lens to register on my rods and cones; which results in an electrochemical impulse travelling along the optic nerve to the rear of my brain, where the data is spontaneously interpreted, due to inductive familiarity with previous similar bundles of data, resulting in me seeing the computer screen in front of me. Most proponents of this perception of perception claim that we don’t actually see the world, but a ‘grand illusion’ of it in our brains (Noe, 2009).

The target of Wittgenstein’s criticism of this account of perception is the idea of interpretation. Interpretation is a conscious activity — “I see that cloud as a rabbit” — which is quite different to when I just say, “I see a rabbit over there”. We experience ‘seeing’ passively, we just ‘see’ the rabbit; in contrast when we are interpreting we usually experience this is an activity (a different language game). A problem with the traditional view is that the brain has been likened as the ‘I’ or seat of consciousness, spontaneously interpreting or organising ‘sense data’ into recognisable patterns. This Cartesian view with its idea of unconscious interpretation can be further criticised by seeing that it is open to the possibility of there being an infinite regress of interpretations of the interpretations.

Much of Wittgenstein’s elucidations in this domain stem from discussions of ambiguous figures, like the Necker cube or Jastrow’s ‘duck-rabbit’. Rather than interpreting the figure first this way and then another way, we actually see something different in each instance. The traditional view that claimed unconscious interpretation of ‘sense data’ accounted for seeing led perceptual psychology becoming focused on illusions such as the Müller-Lyer arrows, in order to elucidate the interpretative mechanisms. Wittgenstein’s non-interpretative view of perception has us look at what is going on when seeing an ambiguous figure first as a rabbit and then as a duck. Our focus shifts from one end of the figure to the other as we go from rabbit to duck (cf. 1958, p.212e).

This observation by Wittgenstein has led perceptual psychologists, such as Mack & Rock (1998) and philosophers interested in perception and cognitive science, such as Alva Noe (2004) to study inattentional or change blindness, rather than perceptual illusions. Many would be familiar with the experiment in which a man in a gorilla suit walks through the a group of basketball players and is not ‘seen’ by observers (Simons & Chabris, 1999). Interest has shifted away from interpretation of sense-data to understanding the activity of seeing.

This elucidation has enabled us to see that the primary function of perception is not so much identifying things in the world (‘know that’), but the development of sensorimotor skills (‘know how’) for the purpose of keeping track of our relationship with the world. Attunement! After cataract surgery the congenitally blind cannot see until they successfully integrate their perceptual apparatus within a sensorimotor framework (Noe, 2004, p.5). Held & Hein (1963) showed that a newborn kitten never learned to see until it had developed appropriate sensorimotor skills. There are more feedback neural pathways to sensory systems than input (Noe, 2009, p.22), and we are constantly moving our bodies and eyes to enhance visual perception.

Noe suggests the metaphor of a blind man with his cane as a way of understanding enactive perception (and cognition); using his senses to probe the interdependent relationship he has with the world for a way forward. Gibson (1979) noted that perception is not a passive pastime for a Cartesian homunculus, so much as it is primarily part of a particular task, such as walking, grasping, catching prey and so on. This has obvious ecological and ethological appeal, as we realise the task of the senses, and for that matter the intellect and language, is not primarily to obtain (or communicate) an accurate picture or map of the world, as it is to find or maintain useful ways of relating with it. The task for therapists is to attune to the client in his or her struggles to become more attuned to the world.

Cognition

These elucidations on the nature of perception have had a strong influence, along with other aspects of Wittgenstein’s later work on the development of what is being called ‘Radical Embodied Cognition’ (Gallagher, 2008; Chemero, 2009; Shapiro, 2011; Hutto, 2012). REC would have us understand cognitive processes as involving the whole body as the locus of sensing and acting, and the skin as no longer the boundary of mental pathways. Harre and van Langenhove (1999), working from Wittgenstein’s ideas on language games as joint attention sharing activities, suggest that we view ‘thinking’ as the subtle positioning and re-positioning of ourselves (and others) in the world. Children who gesture whilst learning arithmetic tend to do better than those who don’t (Broaders et al., 2007). Not only do we think with our bodies as we position and re-position ourselves, but mental processes are also both ‘in here and out there’ rather than the Cartesian assumption of ‘mind in here, world out there’ (Noe, 2009). This is the description offered by Bateson (and now called ‘distributed intelligence’), where the blindman, his stick, and the street are all involved in the circuit of activity attention flows around (Bateson, 1972, p.459). (Bateson’s attraction to Russell and his theory of logical typing appears to have led him to offer the idea that it is information rather than attention that flows around the circuit.) Heidegger (1962) has shown us that most of the time we are at one with the world; that is to say, we are so absorbed in our activities, so attuned, that we are not aware of any gap between our self and the world. The hammer or the car feels like part of me when I am using them. As the Mahayana Buddhists say, ‘samsara is nirvana’ — our everyday mind is already at one with the world, and so-called enlightenment is in recognising this. (The Rinzai school of Zen also taught that any effort to achieve this ‘one-ness’, including meditation, is wrong-headed, as one would be setting out from a position of separation. Mindfulness practitioners please take note.)

Developmentally, REC researchers and philosophers argue, that Piaget’s idea that the early sensorimotor stage is overcome or abandoned in order for adult cognition to arise is simply wrong. Instead, sensorimotor skills are refined and become more flexible (Thelen et al., 2001). Whilst Piaget saw the first two years as a shift from attachment to separation; embodied cognition sees ‘attached-individuation’ occurring as we mature. Where Piagetian researchers attributed errors by infants who reach for objects now hidden in a different place to knowledge (‘know that’) deficits, the embodied researchers see this as immaturity in the grasping and pointing activity (‘know how’). Lakoff and Johnson (1999) suggest that abstract concepts are metaphorical extensions of bodily activities, for “reason uses and grows out of bodily capacities” (p.17). Embodied cognition finds more attraction to Vygotsky than Piaget, as ‘intelligence’ is viewed as something that ‘emerges’ or is ‘called forth’ by the social environment, as we ‘invite’ our children to ‘sense out’ the world in more refined or flexible ways (Vygotsky, 1978; Shotter, 2011; Shotter, 2012). Vygotsky called these social situations where change occurs, Zones of Proximal Development (ZPDs) where we become who we will be by performing as we are not (yet). Both ‘teacher’ and ‘student’ can be seen having anticipatory responses to each other’s utterances (or joint attention activities) that are being modified as the conversation unfolds. Like blind men with our canes, we are reaching out to meet the activities of those around us, and in so doing we are modifying the embodied structure of our being that generated the anticipatory responses. Similarly, psychotherapy can be viewed as a ZPD where both therapist and client are active participants in the co-creation of ‘realities’ via a chiasmic intertwining of anticipatory responses to each other (Beebe & Lachmann, 2003; Holzman, 2011, Shotter, 2011).

Intersubjectivity

A number of Wittgensteinian psychologists have taken the discipline to task over the claim that social functioning is a result of a Theory of Mind (ToM) (Leudar & Costall, 2009). Although there are various ToM theories, they all suggest that someway or another we are making inferences (either intellectual or simulated ones) to understand ‘other minds’. (ToM research has also been criticized for defining the phenomena it claims to be researching.) Although there is no denying that at times we do resort to inference or simulation to understand another person, we become ensnared in Cartesianism, if we think this is the main vehicle of intersubjectivity. Children, some learning disabled people, and even cats and dogs get on very well with people although lacking the capacity to make meta-representations. The only people who need a ToM (besides far too many mental health ‘experts’) are those attracting a diagnosis of autism, because, as one put it, “to make up for the instincts I don’t have” (Williams, 2009, p.156). Wittgenstein says we would be “Putting the cart before the horse” if we were to think that our reactions to others is primarily a result of thought (1981, §541-542). In the beginning was the reaction (1980a, p.31).

In most social situations, there is no homunculus interpreting the ‘other’. “The idea of the ego inhabiting a body [is] to be abolished” (1993, p.225). Although no Cartesian observer within, there is bodily subjectivity inhabiting the world: “The human body is the best picture of the human soul” (1958, p.178e). Our performance based knowledge of people is expressed in attitudes: “My attitude towards him is an attitude towards a soul. I am not of the opinion that he has a soul” (1958, p.178e). An attitude is an expression of our subjectivity, and is not ‘know that’ knowledge about something. Now when we interact with another: “In general I do not surmise fear in him — I see it. I do not feel that I am deducing the probable existence of something inside from something outside: rather it is as if the human face were in a way translucent and that I were seeing it not in reflected light but rather in its own” (1980c, §170). In other words, we don’t have to look inside ourselves to recognise the anger, indifference, joy, and so on in the face of another: “it is there as clearly as in your own breast” (1981, p.220). “My thoughts are not hidden from the other, but are just open to him in a different way than they are to me” (1992, pp.34-35).

Thus for Descartes, first person knowledge of psychological states is unproblematic, but third person is (‘the problem of other minds’); whereas for Wittgenstein, this is reversed. As we have seen from the private language argument, we learnt the use of psychological words from public criteria of their expression. We see these outer criteria. “‘We see emotion’ — as opposed to what? — we do not see facial contortions and make the inference that he is feeling joy, grief, boredom. We describe the face immediately as sad, radiant, bored, even when we are unable to give any other description of the features. Grief, one would like to say, is personified in the face. This is essential to what we call ‘emotion’” (1980c, §570). As you may recall from earlier, it doesn’t make sense to say I know I am in pain, I just say I am in pain; I don’t take the position of an observer to my own body. Understanding this helps us see that not only ToM, but a great deal of modern psychology is built on a conceptual or philosophical confusion. “[I]t is correct to say ‘I know what you are thinking’, and wrong to say ‘I know what I am thinking’. (A whole cloud of philosophy condensed into a drop of grammar)” (1958, p.222e). (Wittgenstein ends the PI by noting that psychology is barren as a science because although it has experimental methods, it has conceptual confusion (1958, p.212e).)

But the ToM proponent may argue that there are aspects of ‘other’ that escape my detection, that transcend my observation. Wittgenstein has an exchange with an imaginary interlocutor: “‘But you can’t recognise pain with certainty just from externals.’ The only way of recognizing it is by externals, and the uncertainty is constitutional. It is not a shortcoming” (1980c, §657). The “externals” trigger my concern, which as Vygotsky (1978) puts it, is completed in my spoken utterance or gesture. Of course, my client is not interested in my ‘body language’ per se, but whether my expressions of concern are genuine or feigned. Although there may be aspects of other that transcend my observation (I can see that you are upset, but may not know why yet), it is the immediacy of the expression that moves me to conversation of concern. As we know, in SFBT, I may not need to know (intellectually) what is upsetting you to help you, my expression of care may be sufficient on its own. Shotter (2011, 2012) argues that there is a relatively unexplored realm in psychology which he calls ‘knowledge of the third kind’ or ‘know from’ (as distinct from ‘know how’ and ‘know that’). It is from within the dialogue triggered by these ‘primitive’ reactions we are having with each other that new language games (or ways of life) emerge as we co-ordinate our perceptual and speech sensorimotor activities. Daniel Stern (1995) appears to be describing the same thing when he talks of ‘affect attunement’. As we become entwined or relationally responsive to each other, the conversation becomes increasingly spontaneously, or takes on a life of its own, and then, ideas novel to either or both of us (knowledge of the third kind) might start emerging. Sensorimotor therapist Pat Ogden calls this ‘relational mindfulness’ (2013).

Wittgenstein & Freud

After Wittgenstein’s eldest sister Gretl, the intellectual in the family, was psychoanalysed by Freud (and later helped Freud escape the Nazis), Wittgenstein took an interest in Freud. He thought they were both dealing with orientation problems or people “not knowing our way about” (1958, §123). As we have been seeing, these are not intellectual problems requiring an answer (‘know that’), but relational in that they require us to relate to certain aspects of our environment differently (‘know how’) (Shotter, 2011). Wittgenstein even called himself ‘a disciple of Freud’ for a while, although he was later to attribute to Breuer and not Freud the ‘extraordinary scientific achievement’ (1980a, p.36). This is the idea that problems might reflect processes a person is unconscious of, but can disappear when attention is redirected through talk. But he was also highly critical, calling psychoanalysis “a dangerous and foul practice” that’s “done no end of harm” (Bouveresse, 1995, p.xix). He thought Freud’s substantivisation (turning an adjective into a noun) of the word ‘unconscious’, was seductive nonsense: “New regions of the soul have not been discovered” (1979, p.40). Wittgenstein’s interest here was strong enough that in the late 1930s he seriously considered training as a doctor and then psychiatrist in Dublin. However, these plans were put on hold by the looming war.

In lectures describing the “abominable mess” (1993, p.107) of Freudian thinking, (which is now pervasive throughout psychology, psychiatry, and the social sciences), Wittgenstein pointed to the confusion of ‘cause’ and ‘reason’ (Winch, 1958/1990; Heaton, 2010). Freud’s ‘scientism’ led him to claim that he had discovered unconscious reasons as the causes of psychological problems. Wittgenstein pointed out that in general, a ‘reason’ is usually known, I can usually give a reason why I did something; however a cause is a conjecture (and usually unconscious) (1966, p.15). He gives the example of the face that inspires fear or delight; the face is not the cause but the reason I was delighted or frightened. (It is helpful to think of the ‘distributed mind’ here.) The cause is a conjecture on how the association was first made (1958, §476). Densensitisation to the face can occur without the cause ever being known; and as SFBT therapists have been noting forever, we don’t need to know the cause. He pointed out that ‘why’ questions can lead us into this confusion as they can be answered with a reason or a cause (1966, p.15). Moreover, when giving a reason we may be pressed as to why we did that too, and get into what seems like an infinite regress of reasons; but the chain ends when we give a causal conjecture (Cioffi, 1990).

Confessions

The question of whether the psychoanalyst requires personal analysis was addressed in an interesting manner by Wittgenstein. In the mid 1930s when he was reading Freud, he wrote: “The edifice of your pride has to be dismantled. And that is terribly hard work” (1980a, p.26e). He went about it by writing out a list of his sins and insisted on reading them to a small circle of his acquaintances. He then went to homes of the children he had hit whilst teaching in rural Austria a decade earlier, and asked the families to forgive him for what he had done. One friend he confessed to asked why he was doing this, “You want to be perfect?” “Of course I want to be perfect,” he replied (Monk, 1991, p.369). As Monk explains, these confessions were not to hurt his pride, but to remove a barrier that stood in the way of “honest and decent thought”. Also many of the remarks in PI can be seen to be written in the form of confessions — “I feel like saying …”, “I want to say …”, etc. “In confessing you do not explain or justify, but describe how it is with you” (Cavell, 1969, p.71). We might say that in the relational mindfulness of flowing therapeutic conversations, this is what is occurring; and I believe that is what is meant by Anderson and Goolishian’s (1992) ‘not knowing’ stance.

World War II and the Last Years

As noted previously, his plans to go to Ireland and become a psychiatrist were abandoned by the war. He became a British citizen, gave up his position as Professor of Philosophy at Cambridge, and went to work as a dispensary porter at Guys Hospital in London. He endeavoured to keep who he was from most, but was recognized by some and invited to dine with the doctors. His job was to deliver medicines from the dispensary to the wards, and according to some, advised patients not to take them. Before the war was finished, he had returned to Cambridge to begin work on completing PI. As he was never completely happy with the result, this project was never finished.

During the last couple of years he made a number of notes that have since been published as On Certainty (1969). Whereas the Cartesians and positivists had attempted to find certainty in intellectual knowledge (‘know that’) by hunting for foundational axioms, that they could build knowledge systems (e.g. logic, mathematics, the various sciences) on; he shows that any claim of knowledge invites doubt. Even G.E. Moore’s claim that ‘I know this is my hand’ invites the question of how he knows (even if it seems a very reasonable claim). Wittgenstein argues that these sort of statements (e.g. ‘here is a hand’, ‘the world has existed for more than five minutes’, etc) are not empirical propositions so much as expressions of our relationship with the world and each other. They show the common ground we share as people, and at one stage refers to such statements as the riverbed that the river of language flows in. Our certainty lies in this common ground, in our ‘know how’. Our scientific endeavours to find certainty in intellectual (‘know that’) knowledge has led us to be out of touch with the world. It could be said then, that this final work marks a return to the show-say distinction that finds expression in the Tractatus.

Conclusion

Wittgenstein returned to Cambridge in 1929 because his earlier work had been built on the picture theory of meaning, and as a result most had missed the point of it. He spent the next 22 years deconstructing the picture theory by showing that language works by joint attention sharing activities he called language-games. Representational ideas (picture theory of meaning) can bewitch the intellect (1958, §109), and he developed a philosophical therapy to “show the fly the way out of the fly-bottle” (1958, §309). The function of perception is to keep track of our relationship with the world; our certainty is to be found here and not in any representation of the world: a shift from ‘know that’ to ‘know how’. Becoming attuned to the world awakens us from the sleep that scientism induced (1980a, p.5). SFBT, like Wittgenstein’s therapy, does this by dissolving problems so that we can all say, “Now I can go on” (1958, §151).