Science, Philosophy, and the Mind

Abstract

The period 1951–1970 was characterised by the “advent” of the later Wittgenstein in the United States, thanks to well-informed authors such as Sellars and Cavell. In the context of the new rigourism in the humanities, analytic philosophers reacted with hostility. The chapter focuses on three main episodes or groups of episodes: Putnam’s 1962 attack on Malcolm’s grammatical investigation of dreaming; Davidson’s (terminological, rather than substantial) criticism, in 1963, of Wittgenstein’s view that reasons cannot be causes; and a variety of critiques to the later Wittgensteinian view of mind (in particular, the chapter briefly examines the context of the fall of behaviourism and the rise of cognitive science, discussing Fodor’s critique of Wittgenstein’s private language argument and the later debate between Chomsky and the Wittgensteinians on knowledge of language). In most, if not all, cases, it clearly emerged that the “dark side” of the later Wittgensteinian tradition was widely identified with its non-scientific nature.