Abstract

In his later philosophy, Ludwig Wittgenstein advances a broad critique of a certain picture of the human mind; the "experience and content model." It is rooted in both Cartesianism and empiricism and treats the mind as a succession of experiences where a belief, for example, is construed as a manner of experiencing a mental content which represents what the mind believes. I argue that this model hinders more than it helps our efforts to understand the human mind and our psychological concepts; that Wittgenstein's critique of it is insightful and highly consequential; and that the views he replaces it with afford a superior understanding. Against this model, Wittgenstein contends that mental contents are not articulated into sensations and images by how they might differ phenomenologically and that a consciousness cannot identify the kind a sensation belongs to by focussing its attention upon the sensation. While they are contents of experience with genuine duration and intensity, sensations and images differ from each other by how they connect to a range of human practices. Sensations individuate into kinds by their causes, by the way they are expressed, and by the language-games which are connected with them and which also involve things in the world. Wittgenstein also questions the experience and content model by arguing that beliefs and desires do not differ from each other because they are distinct experiences or distinct mental "processes" and "diseases" individuated apart from the external, behavioral "symptoms" they cause. Rather, belief, imagining, fear, and perception are best understood respectively as instances of disposition, activity, emotion, and state. Wittgenstein contends that mental contents, as representations, do not better determine what it is that someone believes than do one's overt expressions of belief; that beliefs need not consist in having mental representations; and that one does not learn what one believes through the introspection of such a content. Intentional states do not consist in "mental processes" but in a variety of thoughts and behaviors. For instance, it is the description or expression of a desire which represents what someone desires