Wittgenstein
and Psychology is a relatively accessible introduction to some very
sophisticated material.  Ludwig
Wittgenstein’s life, background, and work (early and late) are covered, and
their possible relevance to contemporary psychology is emphasized.  The book is divided into thirteen chapters,
which form three parts, each longer than the last, on "Origins,"
"Insights," and "Applications."  Each chapter is broken up into manageable sections, with periodic
summaries of "learning points." 
The first two parts are followed by questions to test how well the
reader has understood and remembered the material in each part.  There is a glossary, a bibliography, and an
index, as well as suggestions for further reading (almost all philosophical) at
the end of each chapter.

So far, so conventional, but this is both a textbook
and a manifesto.  It is intended for use
in undergraduate courses in psychology as well as philosophy.  Since there are relatively few psychology
instructors who think their students need to know much about Wittgenstein, the
book also tries to make the case that Wittgenstein’s work really is relevant to
psychology.  Hence, this is not intended
as a purely philosophical textbook, but also as a catalyst to future possible
research projects in psychology.  These
projects will, the authors hope, be genuinely scientific and untainted by
philosophical confusions. 

The main such confusion that they
try to fight against is mentalism, the idea that psychological phenomena are to
be explained by reference to hidden, indeed unobservable, causal
mechanisms.  Neuroscience can find
causal mechanisms in the brain, but what these cause is mere behavior, devoid of
meaning.  Psychology proper, the authors
say, deals with such things as plans and intentions, things that clearly do
have meaning.  And an intention is more
like a commitment or a goal than a mysterious cause of action.  If I tell you that I intend to come to your
party, then I have made a weak kind of promise.  I have not somehow identified within myself a causal train that I
predict will result in my presence at your party.  This is the kind of Wittgensteinian point that Harré and Tissaw
think is important.  Whether they will
succeed in convincing anybody that it is important is another matter.  Wittgenstein himself had grave doubts about
what influence his work might have, and it has fallen out of fashion among
philosophers.  Relatively few
psychologists pay much attention to philosophy, and fewer still are likely to
find Wittgenstein congenial.  He did,
after all, seem to regard psychology as an especially problematic undertaking,
and his work is notoriously difficult to understand.  Few psychologists are likely to want to make the effort necessary
in order to understand someone who often comes across as a critic of psychology
itself, at least when it has any claims to be a science.       

Despite being a textbook,
therefore, this work represents an ambitious project, and as such it inevitably
faces numerous problems.  For one thing,
Wittgenstein scholars disagree quite considerably about what Wittgenstein meant
and, significantly, whether his ideas can have any possible scientific
application.  Harré and Tissaw favor P.
M. S. Hacker’s reading of Wittgenstein, which lends itself rather well to this
kind of project, but not everyone agrees that Wittgenstein has arguments,
theses, or ideas that can be taken from his works and readily applied
elsewhere.

 
Another problem is that Wittgenstein thought so much, and that so much
of this thought had to do with psychology. 
There is a good deal to try to present to students on this subject, and
the authors do a commendable job.  It
leaves them little opportunity, though, to go into detail on how Wittgenstein’s
philosophical remarks might apply to particular research projects in
psychology.  Only six of the book’s
thirteen chapters deal explicitly with applications, and in fact these chapters
themselves are overwhelmingly about Wittgenstein.  The applications referred to are of Wittgenstein’s general
philosophical method (in his later period) to particular issues of interest to
psychologists, such as cognition and emotion. 
The authors try to relate all this to psychology itself, but with
success that might prove too limited to win over some of their intended
audience.  For instance, on p. 182 they
raise the question, "But of what relevance to contemporary psychology are
considerations of private language?" 
Their answer is that the idea of a private language is presupposed in
"the writings of many philosophers since Descartes" and in the
doctrines of such contemporary figures as Jerry Fodor and Noam Chomsky.  It is not clear, though, that the
disagreement between Wittgensteinians, on the one hand, and Fodor and Chomsky,
on the other, is anything other than a philosophical disagreement.  This chapter, on subjectivity and
expression, ends with a section on applications and examples.  Once again, these examples are almost all
philosophical.  The main named targets
are Bertrand Russell, phenomenologists, and John Locke.  The main reference to relevant work in
psychology here is an approving couple of paragraphs on Bruner and Sherwood’s
1976 study on the peek-a-boo game.  Whether
a dose of (Hackerite) Wittgensteinian philosophy would have improved that study
is not discussed.

In short, there is likely to be no
shortage of psychologists and philosophers who will find this book
unsatisfactory in one way or another. 
Such is the cost of being ambitious and trying to start something
new.  That is not to say that the
undertaking is not worthwhile, or that it could have been done much
better.  Wittgenstein’s work is still in
the process of being discovered by non-philosophers, and if it can help
psychologists develop worthwhile, confusion-free research projects, then so
much the better.  Let us hope, despite
the grounds for pessimism that I have outlined, that Harré and Tissaw can bring
this about.     

©
2005 Duncan Richter                   

Duncan Richter is a Professor at the Virginia Military
Institute in the Department of Psychology and Philosophy.  He is the
author of Ethics After Anscombe:
Post "Modern Moral Philosophy"  (Kluwer,
2000), Historical Dictionary of
Wittgenstein’s Philosophy
(Scarecrow Press, 2004), and Wittgenstein At His Word (Continuum, 2004) .

Categories: Philosophical, Psychology