Social Pragmatics and the Origins of Psychological Discourse

Abstract

Modern culture furnishes an indeterminate array of terms referring to mental states, processes, and structures. We have a richly elaborate vocabulary for speaking of emotional conditions, processes of thought, states of consciousness, conditions of memory, intentional ends, motivational urges, and so on. It is also clear that the use of this vocabulary is subject to a variety of constraints. It was Wittgenstein’s later writings (see 1980 volumes edited by Anscombe & von Wright) that revealed most powerfully the nature and extent of these constraints. “Why,” Wittgenstein asked,

Does it sound so queer to say,“He felt deep grief for one second?” Because it so seldom happened? Then what if we were to imagine people who often have this experience? Or such as often for hours together alternate between second-long feeling of deep grief and inner joy?” (p. 89e)

Or again, “Why is it ridiculous to speak of continous feeling of familiar acquaintance? ‘Well, because you don’t feel one.’ But is that the answer?” (p. 26e). In attempting to answer such questions the reader becomes acutely aware of the system of conventions in which mental discourse is embedded and unsettled over the extent to which it is the conventions themselves that determine the character of what we take to be knowledge of mental conditions.