Abstract

My thesis investigates the nature of the relation between behaviourism and the use Wittgenstein makes of it in his remarks on philosophical psychology in Philosophical Investigations. It examines Wittgenstein's disavowal of the claim that his remarks show a commitment to behaviourism. Wittgenstein raised this question himself in a section of the Investigations dealing with the possibility and implications of private language. Although Wittgenstein exhorts philosophers to determine the meaning of words by observing the multiple uses we make of them, neither he nor his commentators follow this precept in dealing with "behaviourism". In order to illustrate that Wittgenstein's discussion displays a limited knowledge of behaviourism, accounts of the work of three behaviourists are presented. My focus is limited to behaviourist thinkers whose writings antedate Wittgenstein's shift to his later philosophy, in this case John Broadus Watson, Albert Paul Weiss, and Edward Chace Tolman. This is done to provide a backdrop for evaluating the merits of Wittgenstein's repudiation of the charge of behaviourism and his commentators' appraisal of its relevance to his comments on philosophical psychology. I next show that commentators who address the relevance of behaviourism to Wittgenstein's later remarks also resort to the same deficient picture of behaviourism on which Wittgenstein relies. This is followed by an examination of how he treats mental activity in the earliest work of his later period, The Blue Book, as an example of the continuity he shares with the behaviourists not only in his approach to understanding psychological concepts but also in his comments about the nature of psychological phenomena. Furthermore, I maintain that The Blue Book's decidedly behaviourist treatment of mental activity is reproduced in a subtler fashion in the Investigations . It is argued that the method Wittgenstein adopts for treating problems in philosophy of mind and his contention that the intelligibility of mental concepts requires a conceptual connection between their application and behavioural factors betray a pronounced commitment to behaviourism in his later writings