Wittgenstein's Kind of Behaviourism?

Abstract

While reluctant to be branded as a follower of Wittgenstein without qualification, I would like to take up some of the challenges issued by C. W. K. Mundle in a recent article.' I shall in the process try to outline a more coherent interpretation than Mundle manages to derive from the admittedly difficult sections of the Philosophical Investigations which he considers. Mundle claims that Wittgenstein gives a negative answer to both of the following questions: (1) Can a person meaningfully talk to himself about (use words or other symbols to refer to) his own experiences ? (2) Can a person tell others anything about his experiences ? These negative answers are held to commit him to a thesis which can fairly be labelled Linguistic Behaviourism .2 Much depends on the force of the term 'private experience' as used in (1) and (2), and Mundle accordingly explains the sense in which he intends it.3 Any experience of mine is if there need be no changes in my body from which another person could detect its occurrence. Even if there happen to be current behavioural or physiological changes in my body, the experience is still private provided that it is not by observing and interpreting these changes that I discover its occurrence. My recognition of an apple when I see one is accordingly given as an example of a experience in the sense intended. It is a clear consequence of this definition that giving negative answers to (1) and (2) involves, inter alia, denying that we can be in pain without expressing pain, and denying that there is a distinction between simulating and really being in pain. Mundle thinks that Wittgenstein is in fact committed to both of these consequences, but that his position is incoherent in that he uses a vocabulary which presupposes that these distinctions can be made.4