Wittgenstein's Legacy and the Challenge to Psychology

Abstract

The present resurgence of interest in Ludwig Wittgenstein is related to the growing concern in the philosophy and methodology of the behavioural sciences with the role played by conceptual frameworks, models and metaphors in the mediation of our experience of the world. It is also related to Wittgenstein's notion of `forms of life' as a new focus of empirical research. In the first part of this article we distinguish between and explain Wittgenstein's initial understanding of language as the symbolic representation of sensory experience and his eventual under-standing of the dialectic of language-games and forms of life. In the second part, the cue of his linking of language to experiential forms of life, even to what can be called the `body-subject' in Merleau-Ponty's terminology, will be taken up and further improvised in order to show the challenge with which Wittgenstein's legacy confronts present-day psychology. In this science one has to come to grips with meaning-giving (and taking, for that matter) as an experiential affair. This task requires an analysis of people's culturally informed body, their bodily structured sentiments and the use of language confined to these bodily and affective structures, and of the way these structures are framed by people's forms of life, in order to fully understand what presses people to experience the world in this and not the other way.