Certainty

Is it that Wittgenstein wants to eliminate talk of certainty as being focused on some metaphysical fact or object? In Kenny's chapter Scepticism and Certainty Wittgenstein seems to dismiss the idea that our being certain about something is based on anything other than our unflinching, undoubting belief in such a thing or state of affairs.

For Wittgenstein, our certainty comes about through experience:

This system is something that a human being acquires by means of observation and instruction. I intentionally do not say 'learns:' After he has seen this and this and heard that and that; he is not in a position to doubt whether...(244).

With his final comment in this section we see that Wittgenstein indeed does want to eliminate talk of certainty as some complex concept. Wittgenstein insists, as he does with other concepts such as the inner/outer and necessity, that certainty is nothing more than part of a language game. Our certainty is nothing more than what we've learned from experience, and what our experience has taught us couldn't possibly be any other way:

They [people] have always learnt from experience; and we can see from their actions that they believe certain things definitely, whether they express this belief or not. By this I naturally do not want to say that men should behave like this, but only that they do behave like this.

And here we also see Wittgenstein's insistence on philosophy's task to be one of describing rather than explaining. Philosophers have been asking too many questions about what certainty is, how anyone can actually have certainty, when all it is, according to Wittgenstein, is the way we use it: certainty is just what we have no reason to doubt, and can think of no reason to doubt. To solve philosophical problems, we need to stop looking for the complex sorts of solutions philosophers have been worrying about and just look around us at the real world.

Language and the mind

I was reading over the Kenny chapter on the Inner and Outer, and came across this paragraph:

I saw this man years ago: now I have seen him again, I recognize him, I remember his name. And why does there have to be a cause of this remembering in my nervous system? Why must something or other, whatever it may be, be stored up there in any form? Why must a trace have been left behind? Why should there not be a psychological regularity to which no physiological regularity corresponds? If this upsets our concepts of causality then it is high time they were upset (210).

He continues this same idea a bit farther on:

The text would not be stored up in the jottings. And why should it be stored up in our nervous system? (211)

I've had issues with what this seems to imply. Is Wittgenstein saying that there's nothing our brains store, it's all just a linguistic fact, the fact of our remembering? This seems incredibly hard to maintain. How can he explain what is it to remember, to know something? I just can't see how there could be a "psychological regularity," as he calls it, without any correspondent "physiological regularity." It seems there has to be something in our mind, in the physical makeup of our brain, that allows for what we call "remembering."

I'm not trying to say that there has to be some mental object in the mind. And maybe that's what Wittgenstein is really arguing against when he denies this "physiological regularity." But his way of saying it makes it seem that he wants to deny any physical cause of psychological states. Ok, so Wittgenstein says that this should upset our ideas of causality, but I'm just wondering what good his account does. Would it really matter that there's some sort of physical activity going on in the nervous system that constitutes our psychological states? What harm does this do to his theory? It's not like there's some separate physical activity going on in the brain that we think about, and this is what we call thinking. No, it is this very physical activity that is thinking.

Is Wittgenstein a behaviorist?

Wittgenstein does indeed talk a lot about our behavior. Behavior is in fact the only way we can know other minds. For Wittgenstein, it seems that behavior shows that there is mental activity, i.e., thought, going on in someone else. Saying that the only way we can know others' mental states and private sensations is through behavior does not mean, however, that behavior is all that matters. That there is behavior means there must be some mental activity that has produced this behavior. The behavior is just a public expression of one's thoughts, sensations, etc.

This past Tuesday there was an article in the New York Times Science Times about baboons and how they think. The researchers set up various experiments in which they looked at the baboons' behaviors in response to different stimuli and events. The ways in which the baboons acted hinted at their inner thoughts, for example, a female looked around for her child after hearing a recording of its voice, and the other baboons looked toward the mother.

Our behavior is directly linked to our inner sensations, our private experience is indeed what shapes our public behavior. Yes, one can behave as if one were in pain, or sad, even without feeling these emotions. This is what we do when we lie or when we're acting. But the fact that we can often distinguish lies from real feelings, and acting from truly feeling, lends even further support to the idea that behavior directly exhibits our inner, private experiences. This is why so many actors practice Method acting, through which they essentially live like the character they're portraying in order to actually feel the characters' emotions and thoughts.

Behavior is part of our private experience, one can consider it as the public expression of that experience. Language is just another behavior, another way of expressing our private experience.