Swiss Philosophical Preprint Series # 70 Kevin Mulligan Description's Objects: Austrian Variations Added 28/02/2009 ISSN 1662-937X © Kevin Mulligan In: eds. B. Garrett & K. Mulligan,Themes from Wittgenstein, Working Papers in Philosophy, 4, 1993, RSSS, Philosophy Program, Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University, Canberra, 62-85 DESCRIPTION'S OBJECTS: AUSTRIAN VARIATIONS1 Kevin Mulligan §1 AUSTRO-GERMAN RAILWAY STATIONS What did Wittgenstein take description to involve ? What are the objects of his descriptions ? What did he think he was doing in and by describing what he described ? In order to answer these three questions it will be useful to appeal to an object of comparison. But which ? First we need an answer to another question. What do the following distinctions and topics have in common ? Formal vs material concepts, internal vs external relations, reasons vs causes, brown and the colour solid, criteria vs symptoms, seeing as, moving one's arm vs its being moved ? They figure prominently in Wittgenstein's writings, of course. More interestingly, they occur very rarely in the writings of Frege, Moore and Russell (Moore's work on internal relations is perhaps the main counter-example to this claim). They do, however, feature prominently in the work of Brentano, his pupils and heirs, in their contributions to what they called descriptive psychology (DP). And it is descriptive psychology that will provide the object of comparison in what follows. Brentano, his pupils Ehrenfels (the founder of Gestalt psychology), Stumpf, Twardowski (the founder of Polish analytic philosophy), Marty, Husserl and Meinong, together with those they influenced such as Hoefler, Martinak, Witasek, Reinach, Geiger, Scheler, Linke, Katz, Bühler, the Berlin Gestalt psychologist-philosophers Wertheimer, Köhler, Koffka and Lewin created and sustained a ramifying tradition of philosophy of psychology which lasted from the last quarter of the last century until the Second World War. DP was often dualist but gave rise to one of the first modern forms of physicalism; invariably mentalist, it also moved in very unmentalist directions towards the end2; although the Platonisms of Husserl and Meinong were typical, the later Brentano, for example, espoused a severe form of nominalism. Austrian and south German, DP was profoundly anti-Kantian, realist, often hostile to any sort of substantial self, for the unity of science and indeed in close contact with science. This is especially true of experimental perceptual psychology but medical psychology, neurology, psychiatry, marginal utility theory, 1 §§1,2 and 4 of this paper were originally presented at the Wittgenstein conferences in Paris and Kirchberg in 1989. 2 Brentano certainly thought that his mentalistic descriptive psychology entailed the truth of metaphysical dualism, a dualism of types of phenomena rather than of substances. But the pursuit of descriptive psychology was also held to be independent of the truth or falsity of physicalism. Cf. Husserl in 1900, LI V §7 A. For one of Wittgenstein's most explicit later suggestions about the relation between description and the ontology of mind, see Z §§608ff structuralist phonology and linguistics and the sociology of knowledge were all marked by DP which was in turn often influenced by them. There is a tradition of referring somewhat vaguely to Descartes, Hume, Frege or even Russell in order to illustrate this or that view attacked or discussed by Wittgenstein. One unfortunate feature of this tradition is that we cannot often turn to these philosophers to find accounts of criteria and seeing as, discussions of what it is to understand inhabitants from another culture or the connexion between light and brownness. But we find just such accounts in DP. By looking at a family of Austrian variations on the three questions about the nature of description, its subject matter and its point, it will perhaps become easier to hear what Broad called the tune piped by Wittgenstein, and perhaps even to hear it as it was played. §2 DESCRIPTION, DIFFERENCES AND DISCOVERIES "Where are the descriptions ?" (Husserl 1894) The pronouncements of both the descriptive psychologists and Wittgenstein about description in the philosophy of mind exhibit a number of striking similarities. These will appear in a different light when we take into account Austrian variations on what it is that is being described (§3) and the purposes description serves (§4) and would perhaps lose some of their saliency were we to consider the relation between the programmatic pronouncements and the actual practice of description. But first, the similarities, some twenty of which I briefly note in this section. Brentano's account of the distinction between description and explanation is presented in great detail in recently published lectures on Deskriptive Psychologie3 that were given in Vienna in 1890-91. Many of the features in this account recur in subsequent philosophy of mind by his heirs, although in view of the modifications to Brentano's views they introduce, and disagreements among them, there is only a pervasive family resemblance between these. Description of psychological phenomena yields exact and exceptionless laws, unlike the explanations of genetic psychology which "specify the conditions under which the individual phenomena are bound up causally" (Brentano 1982, 1). Although the laws of descriptive psychology "may exhibit a gap here and there, as is indeed also the case in mathematics" "they allow and require a precise formulation" (4). One example of such a law is that the appearance of violet is identical with that of red-blue. Causal laws Brentano's example is the claim that the stimulus of a point on the retina by a light-ray with vibrations of a particular frequency produces the appearance of something blue are subject to exceptions, such as colour blindness, the severing of a nerve or hallucinations. Description differs toto genere from explanation, hypotheses and empirical theory construction. As Husserl likes to put it, the Klärung or Aufklärung, that is to say, clarification proper to description, differs completely from Erklärung or explanation (LI VI 65, LI II §6). It is important, Husserl (Id §108) says, to "describe [the phenomenon] honestly, instead of twisting its meaning. All theories must adjust themselves to these descriptions". Description is "analysing description". Phenomenology "analyses and describes...the experiences of presentation, judgement and knowledge which are supposed to receive in psychology their genetic explanation..."(LI Vol. 2, Part I, Intro. §1 A, cf. V §27 A). One important 3 On these, see Mulligan and Smith 1985. development within DP was the transition from "analysing description" of phenomena and experience to analysis of concepts and propositions (as well or instead of the former), to what Husserl and Gallinger for example call the "analysis of meaning". To describe, for Brentano and all his heirs, is above all to notice (bemerken). This led them quite naturally to devote a lot of attention to the analysis of attention, noticing, what strikes one and what escapes notice, and to the claims of dispositional and spot-light accounts of attention. Wittgenstein will not "advance any kind of theory. There must not be anything hypothetical in our considerations. We must do away with all explanation, and description alone must take its place" (PI §109, cf RPP I §48). His method is purely descriptive; his descriptions are not hints of explanations (BrB 125). "Grammar describes and in no way explains the use of signs" (PI §496)4 Philosophy really is "purely descriptive" (BlB 18). Wittgenstein was also prepared to talk of describing the "laws of (self- ?) evidence of inner and outer" (LWPP). It is not entirely clear just what Wittgenstein took the relation between description and analysis to be. In PR and in PI he talks of both procedures. He links them explicitly in "Some remarks on logical form" where a new language is introduced which is to be based on the inspecting of phenomena which we want to describe.....we can only arrive at a correct analysis by what might be called the logical analysis of the phenomena themselves (RLF 163; my emphasis) He says that grammar is descriptive and may involve analysis, when this is conceived as the replacement of one form of expression by another (PI §90) or as the analysis of concepts rather than phenomena i.e. the multiple uses of signs (PI §383). The replacement of one form of expression by another may be called "analysing" because it is a process that sometimes resembles decomposing something (PI §90). "Describing" includes "attending" (RPP II §725). And although "Philosophy is not a description of language usage...yet one can learn it by attending (aufmerken) to all the expressions of life in language (LWPP §121). In a description of his method in PI Wittgenstein writes: The aspects of things that are most important for us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity. (One is unable to notice something because it is always before one's eyes.) The real foundations of his enquiry do not strike a man at all. Unless that fact has at some time struck him. And this means: we fail to be struck by what, once seen, is most striking and most powerful (PI §129; for another example of what "escapes notice", see PI I §308) One central goal of description is to display differences. Wittgenstein wanted at one time to preface the Investigations with a line from King Lear, "I'll teach you differences". And as Geiger (1933) pointed out, "[T]he passion of phenomenology is to see differences". 4 Both in Wittgenstein and in DP "explaining" is sometimes used in a wide sense which does not contrast with description. In DP a similar wide use of "theory' is sometimes found. Meinong had thought that our knowledge of differences enjoyed a privileged position with respect to knowledge about sameness. If one person makes a distinction the other does not make, it is normally the case that the one who has drawn the distinction has seen something the other has not seen. This is what Meinong called "the prerogative of difference". One famous example of the description of differences is Husserl's analysis (LI V §44) of 13 different senses of the word "Vorstellung" (presentation), a performance as richly satisfying as a Bach concerto (Bergmann). He likes to talk of "essential differences" for example between perception and the different types of imagination (Husserl 1913 §43) Wittgenstein talks of the "essential difference" between psychological phenomena [Erscheinungen] such as that between desiring an apple and the conviction that something is the case (RPP I §282; for the question what an essential difference is, see §283); there is a logical difference between the certainties attaching to knowledge of other minds and of an equation (PI II xi, p. 224), a "fundamental difference, together with an apparent similarity, between the roles of an arithmetical and an empirical proposition" (RFM, I, 110, cf. Z §86). Wittgenstein distinguishes different kinds of differences: the difference between a railway train, a railway station and a railway car differs from that between railway trains, accidents and laws (BB 64). Description involves the appeal to examples of whatever psychological phenomenon is under discussion. In the Introduction to the Philosophie der Arithmetik Husserl boasts that he has not introduced any technical terminology except by way of examples or explicit definition. And an often repeated refrain throughout his Investigations is: "Carefully analysed examples are now needed if we are to confirm and develop what has just been suggested" (LI VI §17). Or again: "Every example shows that an essential distinction must here be drawn" (LI I § 11). The role of examples in exact philosophy, in Wittgenstein in particular and in analytic philosophy in general, is so pervasive that it is worth remembering that their use by Austrian philosophers towards the end of the last century constituted something of a novelty in German language philosophy. Examples can be used as part of a process of variation, a process that brings to light certain structures. Brentano and Wittgenstein both forcefully stress that their most important tools are explicit, ordered comparisons between actual and possible cases in which the transitions are as fine and gradual as they can be made. Wittgenstein says that what Mach called a thought-experiment is a grammatical investigation. It is not, as Meinong, Brentano and Wittgenstein point out, any sort of experiment. Perhaps the most important feature of variation for both Wittgenstein and Husserl is that it may involve inventing fictitious cases, "fictions not only serve these sciences [geometry and phenomenology] for a foundation as well as do data of actual perception and experience, but to a certain extent even better" (Husserl 1913 §79) Husserl and Wittgenstein like to stress that philosophy deals in trivialities, what are now often called platitudes. "The a priori", Husserl points out, "at least in its primitive forms" is everywhere "obvious", even trivial, but its systematic demonstration, theoretical pursuit and phenomenological clarification is of supreme scientific and philosophical interest, and is by no means easy (LI IV §14) The philosopher must surely know that it is precisely behind the obvious that the hardest problems lie hidden, that this so much so, in fact, that philosophy may be paradoxically but not unprofoundly called the science of the trivial (LI IV §14 n.3; cf. Prol §6, §40 Similarly, Köhler considers it a decisive objection to a certain view of perception that it "cannot even make the banalities of seeing understandable" (Köhler 1924 517). [P]hilosophy is in fact the synopsis of trivialities, says Wittgenstein (LWL, 26; cf. 34). If description brings to light only trivialities, it seems natural to assume that it can never lead to any discoveries. As Pfänder (1900, 7) put it: "The facts of consciousness lie open to view for everyone...Here there is nothing new to discover". There are no discoveries to be made in philosophy, on Wittgenstein's view (PI §126). He mentions (LWVC 182) a remark which was not printed in the Tractatus, "The answer to philosophical questions must never be surprising. In philosophy you cannot discover anything" and develops this idea, one he says had not previously clearly understood, as follows: The wrong conception...is...that we can hit upon something that we today cannot yet see, that we can discover something wholly new. That is a mistake. The truth of the matter is that we have already got everything, and we have got it actually present; we need not wait for anything. We make our moves in the realm of the grammar of ordinary language, and this grammar is already there (LWWC 182-3) Like Wittgenstein, the descriptive psychologist is above all concerned to notice what is already present, to draw our attention to what, in one sense, is quite familiar. This is a point stressed by both Brentano and Wittgenstein in their taxonomies of noticing (Brentano 1982, 31-64 for a brief account in English, see Mulligan and Smith 1985; Wittgenstein RPP II §§438-9; PI, 213f., 204) But as it stands the claim that description leads to no discoveries is wrong. Husserl enthusiastically described his dream one to be shared by Austin of "resolute cooperation among a generation of research workers, conscious of their goal and dedicated to the main issue...Here we have a field of attainable discoveries...". He adds that these discoveries are "fundamentally involved in the possibility of a scientific philosophy" but that "they have nothing dazzling about them: they lack any obviously useful relation to practice or to the fulfilment of higher emotional needs. They also lack any imposing apparatus of experimental methodology, through which experimental psychology has gained so much credit and has built up such a rich force of cooperative workers" (LI Vol 2, Intro §3). Indeed the descriptive psychologists were quite convinced that they had made a number of important philosophical discoveries: of Gestalten (Ehrenfels), of the act-content-object distinction (Kerry, Twardowski), of states of affairs or Sachverhalte (Brentano, Husserl, Meinong, Marty and Reinach) and of assumptions or suppositions, Annahmen (Meinong and Husserl). Their attitude is best expressed by a remark of Russell's about a discovery of Wittgenstein's to the effect that they had got on to "a new sort of thing, a new beast for our zoo" (Russell 1973, 226). Early and late, Wittgenstein talks of discoveries in philosophy. In the Notebooks (9.11.14) he attributes his "best discoveries" to his "strong scholastic feeling". (That it was scholastic was one of the commonest criticisms of DP). He talks of Moore's "discovery" of his paradox. The apparent contradiction description does and does not involve discovery disappears if we bear in mind the difference between discoveries that surprise us because they bring to light something wholly novel and those that do not surprise us in this way. A discovery in the empirical sciences may well belong to the former class. A discovery within philosophy, however, should be one that does not surprise us, because description merely brings to light something we already knew, something we had overlooked, that we had not noticed. At most it may involve what Buehler called an Aha-experience. There is nothing to discover in grammar. There are no surprises. When we formulate a rule, we always have the feeling: that is something you always knew. All we can do is to clearly formulate the rule that we have unconsciously applied (WWK, 77). One of the last orthodox Brentanians, Funke sums up the position of the descriptive psychologists as follows: our habitual exercise of dispositions and habits of which we have merely practical experience is one thing, it is a very different thing to have won scientific insight into these.....That there is a fundamental difference between "thinking a concept" and "giving an explicit account of this concept" is an old truth. When Augustine says of the concept of time that he knows well what time is until he is asked - it is this aforementioned difference that is at the basis of what he says. Thus in the strict sense of the word, there is nothing to discover in psychology but only the exposition and unfurling (darlegen, entfalten) of what occurs in our psyche ... (Funke 1927, 117) As Marty (1908, 634) had noted in his discussion of Augustine's passage (Confessions, Bk 11, 1328), what is true of the concept of time is true of many other concepts. When Wittgenstein quotes this same passage from Augustine at PI §89 he too is concerned to stress that his investigations bring to light nothing new. What is required is a Besinnung. Augustine's point could not be said about a question of natural science ("What is the specific gravity of hydrogen ?", for instance). Something that we know when no one asks us, but no longer know when we are supposed to give an account of it, is something we need to remind ourselves of. (And it is obviously something of which for some reason it is difficult to remind oneself). A descriptive psychologist might have said, then, that in the sense in which the discovery of the specific gravity of hydrogen is a discovery Ehrenfels' noticing the existence of Gestalten is not a discovery. As Köhler puts it, In many respects our position in psychology is quite different from the situation in which we find ourselves in physics. In the latter science it is often quite difficult to discover the most important facts because they are hidden or because they cannot be established without the development of very complicated methods. It seems to me that in psychology the greatest obstacle is quite the opposite. Often we do not observe the most important psychological facts precisely because they are too commonplace, because their presence every moment of our lives blinds us to them (Köhler 1971, 147-8) Philosophy is what "is possible before all new discoveries" (PI §126; my emphasis). Perhaps we can oppose new discoveries to old discoveries, to rediscoveries. Wittgenstein gives a clear description of the second type of (Platonic) discovery appropriate to philosophy in the following passage: Discovery in philosophy consists in remembering what we would say in various situations; you have to think of situations you wouldn't normally think of and remember what you would and would not say in them. Discovery and proof, is recalling. When someone suggests an answer sometimes it seems quite obvious to us, after it's been said. It is, in one sense, a triviality (WLPP 301) The descriptive psychologists and Wittgenstein frequently adopt the rhetoric of vision, of intuitionism. Husserl persuaded himself and others that it was possible to see essences, Wittgenstein contented himself with a somewhat less informative characterisation of the converse relation of impersonal showing. Later he tells us not to think but to look and that philosophy puts everything before us, where it is open to view (PI §126). "Here seeing matters essentially: as long as you do not see the new system, you have not got it" (LWVC 123). "We see the rule in the relation between playing and score" (LWLC1 410) Husserl likes to say that what is needed is "as little understanding as possible" and more "pure intuition" and Wittgenstein that we should look not think. Just as they extend the ordinary notion of perception, so too, Wittgenstein and his Austrian predecessors like to distinguish a a variety of different types of blindness: one can be blind to intentionality, value blind, Gestalt blind, aspect blind, meaning blind, blind to structure and expression and ideas, even blind to possibilities. Blindness of course is not always a bad thing. Rules must be followed blindly because of the partly normative agreement at the levels of tradition and of judgement that they involve (Martinak 1901, 43, 17; PI §§142, 241-2). The habits, "groundless trust" and primitive patterns of interest, instinct and attention described by Husserl and Scheler are the blind foundations for all other types of human activity Closely connected with the intuitionism of descriptivists is the tendency to place a high value on what one has seen for oneself. This in its turn leads to a conception of philosophy as an activity of philosophising and to indifference as to what has been said about a question. "Phenomenological analysis" in general, and the "clarification of basic logical concepts" in particular, is so difficult, Husserl suggests, because "it requires an unnatural direction of thought and intuition" (LI Vol. 2, Part 1, §3). In order to describe and analyse our mental acts and the types they belong to we must run counter "to deeply ingrained habits which have been steadily strengthened since the dawn of mental development" (ibid.). Husserl notes that certain features of justifications have remarkable peculiarities that do not catch our attention because "we are too little disposed to turn everyday matters into problems" (Prol §8). Wittgenstein notes that "We are not at all prepared for the task of describing the use of e.g. the word 'to think`" and raises a question we shall turn to in §4: "And why should we be ? What is such a description useful for ? (Z §111). One consequence of the unnaturalness of description is that it is very difficult, Husserl and Wittgenstein tell us. Perhaps it is the unnatural character of description that led Geiger to characterise the methods of phenomenology, and Bergmann the approach of Wittgenstein, as aristocratic. But then what we should make of the fact that in each case the philosophers concerned were convinced that they were in possession of very business-like methods ? Or of the fact that a method already felt to be unnatural was to be perverted in four different ways. First, by being identified with understanding (Scheler and the later Husserl, perhaps under the influence of Dilthey). Secondly, by being identified with interpretation (Heidegger). The third perversion occurs in some later developments of Berlin Gestalt psychology with its growing emphasis on the need to subordinate description to dynamic, functional or "conditional-genetic" explanations, although this did not exclude the occasional recognition that explanation "in a certain sense" presupposes description (Lewin). This development attracted Wittgenstein's criticisms. Finally, Husserl himself, after going round the transcendental turn, claimed to have discovered a type of description unlike (and superior to) that employed by descriptive psychologists such as the author of the Investigations. What happens, then, when description is not accorded the priority it deserves ? Brentano wrote: What a lamentable state of ignorance...one often finds in scientists who take on the task of research in genetic psychology, an ignorance which has as a result the failure of all their efforts. One finds for example someone inquiring into the causes of memory-phenomena who knows nothing of the most central characteristic features of memory (DP 9, my emphasis) Yet another genetic psychologist concerns himself with the genesis of error and delusion but has not achieved any sort of clarity about what a judgement, the evidence of a judgement, an inference, its manifest validity, is (DP 9) Some characteristic later claims by phenomenologists are: Thus phenomenology is the court of appeal for the fundamental questions of psychological methodology....What conflicts with it bears the stamp of intrinsic psychological absurdity, just as in the physical sphere every conflict with geometrical truths and the truths of the ontology of nature in general bears the stamp of intrinsic absurdity in natural science" (Husserl Id §79) Phenomenological analysis has to form the foundation for causal psychology and biology of enjoyment the simple, superficial assumption that everyone already knows what enjoyment is, and that may begin with the causal explanation can only provide occasion for errors (Geiger 1913, 628) Husserl's term "absurdity" in the first of these two passages is a technical term he introduces in the fourth of his Logical Investigations, on "pure logical" and "philosophical" " grammar". An expression is nonsensical if it does not exemplify one of the combinations allowed for by categorial grammar (eg "The sings table Socrates"; it is absurd (widersinnig, counter-sensical) if it ignores the different relations of lexical and conceptual compatibility and dependence ("The table is smiling at me quickly"). Geiger, in the second passage, has in mind descriptive points such as the observation that while pleasure comes in two polarly opposed kinds ((dis)pleasure), enjoyment does not. These, together with examples of the philosophical "can" (duties but not virtues can be transferred Scheler) might, then, be called grammatical propositions or remarks. Wittgenstein often endorses the priority of description, as we have seen. "Explaining is more than describing. But every explanation contains a description"..."Phenomenology is the grammar of the description of the facts on which physics build its theories (PR §1) and stresses that the price to be paid for ignoring this is conceptual confusion (PI II xiv). Although description is of trivialities, in another,pejorative sense of the word experimental psychology sins by neglecting description, by not observing its limits: Psychological trivial discussions of expectation, association etc. always leave out what is really remarkable, and you notice they talk all around, without touching on the vital point (PR §31) Husserl had noted that "the force of the facts...proves so strong that analyses of consciousness are made from time to time [in experimental psychology]. But as a rule these are of a phenomenological naïveté‚ that stands in remarkable contrast to the indubitable seriousness with which this psychology strives for and in some spheres (when its aims are modest) achieves - exactness" (Husserl 1911 §34, tr 174). "Phenomenological analysis of essence, however strange and unsympathetic it may sound to the naturalist psychologist, can in no way be an empirical analysis", says Husserl (1911 §39, tr 176). He would doubtless have agreed that this is because "the boundaries of the empirical is concept formation (BGM 237, PI II xii). §3 PHENOMENA vs ESSENCES, CONCEPTS AND WORDS "a sensation...is not a something, but not a nothing either" (PI I §304) What do Wittgenstein and the descriptive psychologists describe ? Seeings, pains, rememberings, decidings, deliberatings, judgings, supposings, meanings, understandings is a relatively uncontroversial answer. The gerunds are unusual; they seem to indicate that what is being described are phenomena. But then a number of questions spring to mind, many of them suggested by two crucial distinctions, much discussed in DP and by Wittgenstein: between episodes such as phenomena and dispositions as when an occurrent and a dispositional sense of "understand" are distinguished (cf. Martinak 1901, 35ff.) and between sensory and non-sensory "acts". In what follows, I shall ignore these distinctions and the questions to which they give rise. The expression "phenomenon" is more abstract than our psychological verbs. Like "essence", "media", "nature" and some related terms it functions prominently in DP and in Wittgenstein's writings. There, too, a number of different senses of these expressions are distinguished. Within DP such expressions form the core vocabulary of an analytic framework. Husserl and Wittgenstein both distinguish between two senses of "phenomenon". In Husserl's first sense a psychological phenomenon belongs to the psychophysical nexus of nature. This is what psychology seeks to determine in an objectively valid way, its aim is to discover the laws according to which it [a phenomenon] develops and changes, comes into being and disappears. Every psychological determination is eo ipso psychophysical, which is to say in the broadest sense... that it has a never- failing physical connotation. Even where psychology the empirical science concerns itself with determination of bare events of consciousness and not with dependencies that are psychophysical in the usual and narrower sense, those events are nevertheless thought of as belonging to nature, that is as belonging to human or to animal consciousnesses that for their part have an unquestioned and coapprehended connexion with human and animal organisms. To eliminate the relation to nature would deprive the psychological of its character of an objectively and temporally determinable fact of nature, in short, of its character of a psychophysical fact...[E]very psychological judgement involves the existential positing of physical nature, whether expressly or not (Husserl 1911 §21, tr 171-2)5. The second concept of "phenomenon", which is at the heart of Husserl's notorious combination of extreme mentalism, dualism and Platonism, is that of a "purely" mental episode, stripped of any 5 Wittgenstein's phenomenological language is supposed to avoid just such existential commitment. connexion with the real world. Wittgenstein uses "phenomenon" in at least two different ways. There is what might be called the enemy's use of the word: "The psychological verbs to see, to believe, to think, to wish, do not signify phenomena [Erscheinungen, appearances]" (Z §471, cf. RPP II §31), "We are not analysing a phenomenon (for example, thinking)" (PI §383). Then there is the approved use in which what is said to be a phenomenon is observable, for example the fact that men see (RPP II §75). "...[P]sychology observes the phenomena of seeing, believing, thinking, wishing (Z §471, cf. RPP II §31). Closely connected with the enemy's use of "phenomenon" is his use of "(mental) process": One ought not to ask what images (Vorstellungen) are or what happens when one imagines anything...For the question as to the nature of imagination...is not to be decided...by a description of any process (PI §370). Misleading parallel: psychology treats of processes in the psychical sphere, as does physics in the physical. Seeing, hearing, thinking, feeling, willing, are not the subject of psychology in the same sense as that in which the movements of bodies, the phenomena of electricity etc., are the subject of physics. You can see this from the fact that the physicist sees, hears, thinks about, and informs us of these phenomena, and the psychologist observes the external reactions (the behaviour) of the subject (PI §571) In the first of these two passages Wittgenstein rejects description of any process, in the second description of processes conceived of in a particular way. Let us assume that this second rejection, of ghostly or gassy processes, is the key one. Husserl's pure phenomena are characterised in two ways: negatively, all parallels between them and spatio-temporal phenomena are rejected; positively (as Husserl sees things), by being said to occur in "immanent" or gassy time. A phenomenon...is no "substantial" unity, it has no "real properties", it knows no real parts, no real changes, and no causality; all these words are here understood in the sense proper to natural science. To attribute a nature to phenomena, to investigate their real component parts, their causal connexions that is pure absurdity, no better than if one wanted to ask about the causal properties, connexions etc., of numbers. It is the absurdity of naturalising something whose essence excludes the kind of being that nature has (Husserl 1911 §49, tr 179) The unity of psychological phenomena has "nothing at all to do with nature, space and time or substantiality and causality (Husserl 1911 §50, tr 180). Immanent "time" is measured by no chronometer (Husserl 1911 §50, tr 180). A pure phenomenon is no thingly entity; but it is not, Husserl believes, nothing. Husserl's "psychophysical facts" and Wittgenstein's "phenomena" in the preferred sense are essentially reidentifiable. Husserl was in fact led to his strange claims about pure phenomena by his argument that they are not reidentifiable. Lack of reidentifiability provides Wittgenstein with a key tool in his attempts to undermine the attractions of gassy processes. As we shall now see, it is essential to the different uses our two Austrians make of identifiability to distinguish different senses of "nature", "medium" and "essence". Husserl's dualism takes the form of the claim that spatio-temporal things and processes have a nature, belong to natural kinds, in the primary sense of the word but that psychological episodes only are or have a nature in a secondary sense. For only things and physical events can be experienced as "individually identical" across a variety of direct experiences, can be described as "intersubjectively the same". "The same realities (things, processes) are present to the eyes of all and can be determined by all of us according to their 'naturè". They get this identity because of the causal relations they stand in to one another, all their properties being causal. The changes, unchanges and relationships of change we grasp by means of the senses direct cognition everywhere, and function for it like a 'vaguè medium (my emphasis) in which true, objective, physically exact nature presents itself, a medium in which thought (as empirical, scientific thought) selectively determines and constructs what is true (Husserl 1911 §46, tr 179) Reidentifiabilty via the "medium of phenomenality in which observation and thought in the natural sciences continually move" (ibid.) is of the essence of things and physical processes and events. In contrast, Psychological being, being as "phenomena", is in principle not a unity that could be experienced in several separate perceptions as individually identical, not even in perceptions of the same subject. In the psychological sphere, in other words, there is no difference between appearance and being...Everything that in the broadest sense of psychology we call a psychological phenomenon, when looked at in and for itself, is precisely phenomenon and not nature (Husserl 1911 §48, tr 179) A phenomenon "comes and goes; it retains no enduring, identical being" and so is not analysable in the proper sense (Husserl 1911 §49, tr 180). Husserl, then, is here denying that the object of analysing description is a pure phenomenon. The only ways in which phenomena can be reidentified are as psychophysical facts, in particular "through the medium of thing-experience empathy appears...as a sort of mediate seeing of what is psychological" (Husserl 1911 §51, tr 180; cf. RPP I §287). "The forms or media of phenomena by themselves are totally different from those of things and physical events" (Husserl 1911 §50, tr 180). Husserl's account of the "medium" of our experience of reidentifiable states such as Susan's sadness is that of a direct realist (perhaps the first since Arnauld and Reid). For him, as for Scheler (who dispenses with Husserl's "empathy") Sam can see Susan's sadness, in her expression, without for example judging or being of the opinion or inferring that this is the case. Consider, now, Wittgenstein on the mythical medium that is of a piece with phenomena in the enemy's sense of the word: How does the philosophical problem about mental processes and states and about behaviourism arise ? The first step is the one that altogether escapes notice. We talk of processes and states and leave their nature (Natur) undecided. Sometime perhaps we shall know more about them we think. But that is just what commits us to a particular way of looking at the matter. For we have a definite concept of what it means to know a process better. (The decisive move in the conjuring trick has been made, and it was the very one we thought quite innocent.)-And now the analogy which was to make us understand our thoughts falls to pieces. So we have to deny the yet uncomprehended process in the yet unexplored medium. And now it looks as if we had denied mental processes. And naturally we do not want to deny them (PI I §308; cf. the use of "medium" at §177 and §102) The mythological character of ghostly processes in ghostly media comes out in the fact that they are not reidentifiable But what more can I do than distinguish the case of saying "I have toothache" when I really have toothache, and the case of saying the words without having toothache ? I am also (further) ready to talk of any x behind my words so long as it keeps its identity (NLPESD 296-7; cf PI I §258) Husserl's commitment to pure phenomena involves two complementary moves, each of which is to be found in his writings in a particularly pure form. First, although pure phenomena are not reidentifiable they are the objects of internal perception. This is not to be confused with introspection or self-observation. As Brentano, Husserl and Wittgenstein point out, self-observation cannot do the job inner perception or knowledge without observation is supposed to do: for it it modifies the state you are in (WLPP 235). The second move follows on from the second: after turning his eyeballs inwards, so moving into the mode of internal perception, in order to note some pure phenomenon the descriptive psychologist, or to be more exact, the Phenomenologist, raises his eyes to the Third Realm, so moving into the mode of essential vision, to consider the essences the pure phenomenon instantiates (Husserl 1911 §54, tr 181; §58, tr 183)6. One reaction to these moves is that of Geiger and Scheler who, building on Husserl's early claim that internal perception and external perception are equally corrigible, deny that being and appearance are identical in the case of psychological phenomena and argue that inner perception is of what is reidentifiable. This yields a a position like that of McTaggart 6 Husserl notes, correctly, that all objections to the "phenomenological reduction", the core of his later philosophy, are "antipodean objections" (Husserl 1954, 439). and, as Scheler puts it, shows how our experiences do not form a "prison". Another reaction would be to see Husserl's moves as particularly eloquent tributes to the power of two complementary mythologies. The first move, on this view, involves the mythology of psychological activities such as private ostensive definition (cf PI §§380, 258). Husserl, it is true, stresses time and again that consciousness is not a box (Schachtel). And since, as we have seen, he thinks that that pure, private mental phenomena are essentially not reidentifiable, it follows that for him they could constantly change without anyone realising it. But, the objection goes, to the extent that he endorses internal perception of such phenomena he is assuming that there is a something, a beetle, in a box. His second move illustrates the Platonist account of symbolism, according to which essences govern the functioning of symbols. (This Platonist account has as its equally mythological counterpart a formalist account of symbolism). Essences do not stand and fall with claims that we have essential insight into them. For phenomena, however conceived, instantiate (have) essences and fall under concepts, as Husserl and many other descriptive psychologists put it. For Wittgenstein, grammar expresses essence and says what sort or type something is (PI §§371, 373). (Although "the essence of thinking" (PI §92) is the language of the enemy). For Husserl, essences, concepts and words stand in definite relations to one another, Wittgenstein however rarely respects any such relations. Thus All statements that describe phenomena with direct concepts do so to the degree that they are valid, by means of concepts of essence, that is, by conceptual meanings of words that must be capable of being redeemed in essential intuition (Husserl 1911 §54, tr 181) Husserl, we have seen, does not think pure phenomena are analysable, but rather their essences. The concepts used to describe these are not to be identified with the way the words expressing these concepts are used. How, Husserl asks, could experimental psychology fail to notice that in its purely psychological concepts, with which it now cannot dispense, it necessarily gives a content that is not simply taken from what is given in experience but is applied to the latter ? How fail to see that in so far as it approaches the sense of the psychological it effects analyses of these conceptual contents and recognises valid corresponding phenomenological connexions, which it applies to experience, but which in relation to experience are a priori ? (Husserl 1911 §42, tr 177-78) We descriptively employ the words perception, recollection, imaginative representation, statement (sic) etc. What a wealth of immanent components does each such word indicate, components that we, "grasping" what is described, impose on it without having found them in it analytically (Husserl 1911 §40, tr 177) Wittgenstein has no place for essences as the semantic values of meaningful predicates (cf the unsaturated Bedeutungen of predicates of Frege). (But the notion of a direct description is of great importance in his work (PI II xi, 193-4, 211; BrB 184-5; cf. Husserl 1911 §32, tr 174; EU Intro Part III) and to analyse a concept or essence is, he thinks, to analyse the use of a word We are not analysing a phenomenon (for example, thinking) but a concept (for example, that of thinking), and therefore the use of a word (PI §383) One ought not to ask what images (Vorstellungen) are or what happens when one imagines anything, but how the word "imagination" (Vorstellung) is used. But that does not mean that I want only to talk only about words. For the question as to the nature of imagination is as much about the word "imagination" as my question is. And I am only saying that this question is not to be decided neither for the person who does the imagining, nor for anyone else by pointing; nor yet by a description of any process. The first question also asks for a word to be explained; but it makes us expect a wrong kind of answer (PI §370) The essence of a phenomenon are its possibilities. Husserl's phenomenology describes "pure possibilities". The old doctrine that "knowledge of 'possibilities` must precede that of realities" is, he says, "a great truth" (Husserl Id §79). Wittgenstein's phenomenology "establishes possibilities" whereas physics establishes laws (PR §§1). Grammar owes no accounts to reality (PG §133). Wittgenstein and other Austrian friends of variation and thought experiments shows us possibilities we had not thought of.Wittgenstein warns us at PI §90 against thinking that the objects of his investigations are Erscheinungen and opposes an investigation of Erscheinungen to an investigation of their possibilities. An investigation of the possibilities of Erscheinungen is a reflexion on the types of statements we make about Erscheinungen. To know what kind or essence something belongs to is not to know very much. To know the relations it stands in, such as essential difference, similarity, (in)compatibility, necessary connexion and the possibilities open to it, is to know much more. Skew to such a characterisation is one in terms of the more or less inclusive contexts to which phenomena belong. These include, according to the descriptive psychologists, set, milieu, backgrounds and horizons, more or less deeply rooted dispositions, environment (Umwelt), Lebenswelt and Lebensform, conventions and traditions. The descriptive psychologists and Wittgenstein like to talk of the internal relations just mentioned in terms of spaces colour-space, pain-space or manifolds that vary in different dimensions (cf. Mulligan 1991). "When we intend, we exist in the space of intention" (Z §233). "One would like to say: the imagined sound is in a different space from the heard sound...The seen in a different space from the imagined" (Z §622, cf Z §648). In a comparison of gestures and signs, Wittgenstein writes (1930-31) I could...not understand a gesture if I did not see it as a possibility within a specific space. And thus there is also a grammar of gestures (that is to say, their geometry) (MS 110, p. 126, according to Hilmy 1987, 130) Husserl (Ideen II §45) wrote of the real analogy between the system of indices (Anzeichen) which express the inner life and the system of linguistic signs; the former too has its "grammar". There are (§46) sense-fields and "so to speak soul-fields". Scheler had made a similar point about "fields of expression" and their "grammar" in 1913 (Scheler GW 7, 92, GW 8, 57; a somewhat more sober account is given by Bühler 1933). Husserl (1911, §57) talks of "judgements which adequately express in adequately constructed concepts..the way in which essences are connected". His examples are purely psychological: the connexions between perception and imagination, between concept and intuition within the wider wholes of confirmation and falsification. His aim is "the study of the phenomena themselves and their interconnexions" (§61) insofar as they exemplify essences. Wittgenstein, on the other hand, typically mentions internal relations between phenomena and activities: "hearing is connected with listening; imagining a sound is not" (Z §622). One feature of the internal relations that so fascinated Husserl, Wittgenstein and other Austrian philosophers, of the different spaces and the positions within them (Wittgenstein, Bühler) is their completeness. As we saw in §1, one aim of description is completeness (although there are different types of completeness). Husserl thinks that description of the connexions of the forms of consciousness can be carried out in such a way as to "leave no meaningful question open" (Husserl 1911 §57, tr 182). And "grammar is the ledger of language, from which it must be possible to see everything that concerns not accompanying sensations, but rather the actual transactions of language" (PG S 87). Three of the many differences between the ways Wittgenstein and phenomenologists like Husserl understand "essence" should be mentioned. First, Husserl's essences are those of a Platonist, they need not be exemplified, although Husserl did come to see that some essences or types are "bound idealities", bound to theearth rather Mars, to this rather than that community. Secondly, as already noted, in DP a sharp distinction is made between concepts and the essences which are their semantic values. Thirdly, necessary connexions and other relations hold unconditionally for Husserl and Meinong; for Wittgenstein they hold only if some contingent facts obtain, large scale natural facts, facts about traditions etc (necessity is conditional or relative to a framework (Z §357). It is worth noticing that Husserl's extreme Platonism was combined with an emphasis on the essentially vague nature of many concepts and essences which are called for this reason "morphological". Neither Husserl nor Wittgenstein were naturalists. As McDowell puts it, Wittgenstein is opposed to a psychologism which is objectionable not because it is mentalistic but because it is pseudo-scientific. For Husserl "to follow the model of the natural sciences almost invariably means reifying consciousness something that from the very beginning leads us into absurdity (Husserl 1911 §45, tr 178). Both reject this first step which escapes the notice of all but the most vigilant describer. But as we have seen their commitments are otherwise maximally opposed. Between Husserl's pursuit of pure phenomena and Wittgenstein's descriptions of phenomena in his preferred sense there are actually a number of intermediate options. Thus consider accounts of the motivational or criterial connexion in DP (cf Mulligan 1990). Husserl came to see the motivational connexion as a relation obtaining in the first place among his pure phenomena. But Scheler and Buehler describe it as a central feature of our direct access to the psychophysical states of others. Whatever the terms of the relation, the relation itself was held, following Husserl, to be neither causal nor probabilistic but to yield certainty. As Husserl also pointed out, any given motivational connexion has a causal counterpart. I can change my attitude to Sam's physiognomy and ask what the likelihood is that his features express sadness, thus treating a criterion or cue as a clue or symptom. Buehler went further than Husserl in claiming that criteria stand in a logical relation to the sense of words. The description of criteria and indication belongs to a description of our awareness of and talk about other people and inanimate objects (cf Mulligan 1994). But what does DP say about the question which has so exercised readers of Wittgenstein; what is the relation between the inner and the outer ? Let me mention one strand of thought in DP which may illuminate many passages in Wittgenstein. Husserl himself never tells us very much about the make up of what he calls psychophysical phenomena. Scheler, however, launched an increasingly successful account of these as involving two inseparable aspects of a living human body (Leib): "all behaviour is also always the expression of internal states; for there is nothing in the soul that does not 'express` itself immediately or mediately" (Scheler GW 9, 17). The development of this point of view led to a recognition of the sui generis nature of biological categories as distinguished from "purely" psychological categories and of the nature of the relation of expression. Together with the recognition of the ubiquity and centrality of criteria it led to a rejection within DP of Brentano's original conviction that expression is always an accidental feature of psychological phenomena. It is a point of view that finds the human body to be the best picture of the human soul. After all,"only of a living human being and of what resembles (behaves like) a living human being can one say: it has sensations; it sees; is blind; hears; is deaf; is conscious or unconscious" (PI §281). In other words, phenomena in Wittgenstein's preferred sense are vital phenomena. If pain and its expression are inseparable aspects of a whole, not mere pieces or parts of a sum, then of course there can be no causal relations between these, if causality is an external relation. (The whole which is pain and its expression does of course stand in causal relations). Since an inseparable aspect is not an independent entity, it is not a thing. But it is not a nothing as little as is the shape or form of a table. Notice, too, that the inseparable aspects here coexist. Thus the type of internal connexion being appealed to is quite different from that between a man's pain and any potential (Meinong) or conditional properties he has. On the other hand, by invoking what were called above the more or less comprehensive wholes to which phenomena belong and by which they are individuated different varieties of expression can easily be described. Because the category of a Gestalt is employed to describe phenomena and their constitutive aspects as well as criterial connexions (cf PI II v, Z §§220, 225) it follows that all the different varieties of seeing as are relevant to the description of the way these Gestalten are grasped. As an example of these overly general considerations, consider the will. Scheler and the Berlin Gestalt psychologists transformed the traditional mentalist account of the will, one shared by the early descriptive psychologists. On this traditional account, volitions or willings precede actions. But an action does not consist of mental experience followed by movement (Scheler GW 2, 488) and so there cannot be an external causal relation between two events here. Rather, willing and acting are inseparable aspects of a whole which, since they coexist, can be said to involve causality only in the sense that the will (or,according to Scheler, one stratum of volitive content) steers the action (cf PI I §611ff. and Waismann 1983). §4 DESCRIPTION'S POINT AND SECONDARY MEANING What did Wittgenstein think he was doing in and by describing ? I suspect many commentators and readers feel that the answer to this question is is by no means clear, in spite of some large signposts given by Wittgenstein to his readers. It is obvious that Wittgenstein's aims differ completely from those prevalent in DP. There a central goal was to map the the central features of perception, behaviour, the emotions, colour etc. in such a way as to provide both exhaustive taxonomies and and to display all the internal relations in these different domains, to provide what were often called bird's eye views. Clearly, the idea that one could begin to understand what Wittgenstein was doing by collating his grammatical remarks would betray complete misunderstanding of his projects. Indeed, on a wide variety of topics Wittgenstein's descriptions and distinctions duplicate merely a fraction of the taxonomies provided by his Austrian predecessors. I have in mind, for example, the descriptions of colour by Meinong, Katz and Conrad Martius; the description of the way language generates misleading pictures and of their hold on us by Marty and others; Husserl and others on the non-intuitive nature of thought; Buehler on the role of isolated words, ellipsis and exclamations, as these might be employed by builders; the account given by Linke, Buehler and Brunswik of seeing as according to which aspect switches are neither purely intellectual changes (the Graz view) nor completely sensory (the Berlin view) but rather in between (cf. Mulligan 1988). And so on. In DP the aim is rigour. But the synoptic and bird's eye views Wittgenstein aimed at do not involve any striving after exactness (Z §464). Grammatical remarks in DP are put forward as either analytic truths or as materially necessary truths; Wittgenstein's remarks have no truth values. In both cases, however, negations of these remarks are held to be absurd.(Whether or not Goethe's understanding of morphology and description, which influenced both DP and, in conjunction with Spengler's account, Wittgenstein, is actually closer to Wittgenstein's non-rigorous synoptic surveys or to that prevalent in DP is a difficult question I note in passing). Wittgenstein is very explicit about the fact that his descriptions are not provided for their own sake. His descriptions are in the form of reminders subordinated to "a particular purpose" (PI §§ 26-7). "What we call 'descriptions`are instruments for particular uses" (PI §291). The simple language-games Wittgenstein describes "are not the ground-floor of a theory" (RPP I §633). "[D]escription gets its light, that is to say its purpose, from the philosophical problems (PI §109). The solution of a difficulty in philosophy "is a description, if we give it the right place in our considerations" (Z §314). A synopsis of trivialities must be a "proper synopsis", something which is "enormously difficult and has immense importance" (WLC1, 26). Descriptions in DP have a theoretical goal, they are part of a theoretical enterprise where "theoretical" is opposed to "practical", not "descriptive" that of saying how things really stand. Wittgenstein's descriptions are part of a practical enterprise. Determining the ethical, aesthetic, therapeutic, religious, merely instrumental and other components of this enterprise is no easy matter. In part because it is not clear how to distinguish between these strands (in particular the ethical and aesthetic ones). In part because it is not clear what Wittgenstein's alternative is to the traditional view, forcefully defended by Brentano and Husserl, that practical reason is founded on theoretical reason. We can, however, go some way towards grasping this alternative if we bear in mind his criticisms of such views as that practical attitudes are founded on theoretical attitudes, that the theoretical attitudes of assertion, judgement and perception form determinate kinds. Like Wittgenstein, Husserl thought that one role for philosophy was to combat persistent temptations, for example "the inborn habit of living and thinking according to the naturalistic attitude, and thus of naturalistically adulterating the psychological" (Husserl 1911 §53, tr 181). Unlike Wittgenstein, Husserl thought that the right way to deal with such a temptation to set out the true account of the mind. A true theory is the best therapy. Wittgenstein's problem was always one of expression. He devoted great care to finding the most effective order for what he had to say. He compares philosophy or rather the activity that should replace it to literature, poetry and music. Perhaps, therefore, his own account of the right word in the right place and of the type of reaction or Sprachgefühl that fits such a word will help us to understand how he wanted his words to have the right effect. This account is his distinction between primary and secondary meaning (understanding, expression) and the earlier related distinction between transitive and intransitive uses of signs (PI §531ff., II xi 216, BB 22, 29, 162, 166; cf. Mulligan 1988 §2). In particular, the claims that in the case of secondary meaning we have a non-paraphraseable content, a content that cannot be separated from its expression without loss, and that the capacity to understand the secondary meaning of some expression presupposes the capacity to understand its primary meaning.Now the idea that aesthetic content should be nonparaphraseable was already familiar when Meinong introduced the category of secondary meaning at the turn of the century and when Musil described the two inseparable aspects of poetic form and content some ten years later. Musil and Wittgenstein, however, considerably extend the scope of the paraphraseable-nonparaphraseable distinction, albeit in different ways (cf. Mulligan 1993) Consider, for example, the range of topics on which Wittgenstein seems to have thought that such a distinctionthrows light: the distinction between expressions (Aeusserungen, avowals) and descriptions; rule-following; the variety of different experiences of familiarity and of specificity: the familiar feel of a word or a physiognomy, the iffish feeling someone might associate with "if"; the experiences captured by certain absolute uses of ethical language such as that of safety; the deep analogies between perceptual Bilder such as melodies and sentences. The importance of these cases becomes even clearer if we bear in mind that to grasp a secondary, non-paraphraseable meaning is to perceive, in one or another sense of the verb, a pattern, a series of internal relations. It is also possible that the notion of secondary meaning throws light on the relation between a genius and what he says. The conviction that every word of a genius bears his imprint together with the conception of philosophising as an activity described in §1 are likely to give rise to a very distinctive type of philosophical prose. If we assume that Wittgenstein's account of secondary meaning is as important for understanding what he was up to as its applications in his writings are extensive, then we ought perhaps to say that what Wittgenstein says is (intended to be) inseparable from what he does, from the carefully wrought transitions and dialectics and the aspect switches he produces in his ideal reader. But then, a descriptive psychologist might wonder, why cannot a paraphraseable account be given of what Wittgenstein takes to be the sickness he is dealing with ? As Musil pointed out, there are non-paraphraseable uses of language which bear only a tenuous relation to any sort of theoretical enterprise; they are to found frequently in all sorts of inexact philosophy. But there are also such uses of which we may want to say that they go beyond the available theoretical resources, having absorbed these. Musil's essays would be one example. Now the reader of Wittgenstein's accounts of the ways singular terms are used or of vagueness is constantly being reminded that Wittgenstein was thoroughly familiar with a variety of theoretical approaches to these "topics", some of them first explored by him, others not yet discovered by the philosophical world at the time Wittgenstein was writing. But, again, can this awareness, which informs what he writes, be extracted from his texts ? If we take seriously Wittgenstein's apparent determination to make his readers see for the first time, to bring them up against this or that Gestalt, in this or that possible variation, that is to say, his intuitionism, then the answer may be that no such extraction is possible. Austrian variations on the status of psychology, on the relation between philosophy of psychology and experimental psychology, are much more complicated than I have been able to suggest here. If we stand back somewhat from the complex tale I have sketched, two central motifs stand out. The first concerns the maturity of psychology. In 1874 Franz Brentano gave his inaugural lecture in Vienna, "On the Reasons for Discouragement in Philosophy". In the lecture he explains why psychology is in a "still more immature state of development" than such sciences as mathematics, physics, chemistry and physiology. In this series we observe a decrease in abstractness. And historically, the development of a less abstract science depended on its more abstract predecessor. Psychology is, therefore, a young science but, given the developed state of its more abstract predecessors and foundations, can hope to develop quickly, provided it does not ignore DP. Three quarters of a century later Wittgenstein denies that the barrenness of psychology can be explained by appealing to its youth. The second motif concerns the nature and status of the "confusions" and "absurdities" that, according to so many Austrian philosophers, from Brentano to Wittgenstein, threaten psychology. For Brentano and his heirs the alternative to confusions is a true philosophy of mind. The price to be paid for this is commitment to the view that "true" in the philosophy of mind means at least something like what it means in empirical science. For Wittgenstein the alternative to confusions was therapy, a view of philosophy as a practical enterprise. Just such a conception of philosophy was described by Brentano almost exactly one hundred years ago, in Vienna as "decadent". References The usual abbreviations for Wittgenstein's writings are employed. Abbreviations for works belonging to DP are given below. Brentano, F 1982 Deskriptive Psychologie, Hamburg: Meiner Buehler, K 1933 Ausdruckstheorie, Jena Funke, O 1927 Studien zur Geschichte der Sprachphilosophie, Berne Geiger, M. 1913 "Beiträge zur Phänomenologie des ästhetischen Genusses", JPPF, Halle, 567-684. 1933 "Alexander Pfänders methodische Stellung", in Neue Münchener Philosophische Abhandlungen, (Pfänder FS), Hgb. E. Heller & F. Löw, 1-16. Hilmy, S. 1987 The Later Wittgenstein. The Emergence of a New Philosophical Method, Blackwell Husserl, E.1900/01 Logische Untersuchungen, 1st ed., Halle: Niemeyer, 2nd ed. 1913/21, (Husserliana XVIII, XIX/1, XIX/2); trans. by J. Findlay as Logical Investigations, London: RKP, (LI) 1911 "Philosophie als strenge Wissenschaft", Logos, 1, 289-341, (in Husserliana XXV, 1987), English translation: "Philosophy as rigorous science", in eds. P. McCormick & F. Elliston, Husserl. Shorter Works, 1981, Harvester and University of Notre Dame Press, 166-197, (tr) 1950 Ideen...I, Husserliana III, Nijhoff, (Id) 1952 Ideen...II, Husserliana IV, Nijhoff, (Id II) 1964 Erfahrung und Urteil, Hamburg: Claassen, (Experience and Judgement, London: Routledge, 1973), (EU) Koehler, W. 1924 "Gestaltprobleme und Anfänge einer Gestalttheorie", Jahresbericht fur die gesamte Physiologie und experimentelle Pharmakologie, 3, 1922, 512-39 1971 The selected papers of Wolfgang Koehler, ch. 7 "Human perception" (first published 1930) Martinak, E 1901 Psychologische Untersuchungen zur Bedeutungslehre, Leipzig: Barth Mulligan, K. 1988 "Seeing as and Assimilative Perception", BrentanoStudien, I, 129-152. 1990 "Criteria and Indication" in Proceedings of the 1989 Kirchberg Wittgenstein Conference, I, 94-104. 1991 "Colours, Corners and Complexity: Meinong and Wittgenstein on some Internal Relations", in eds. W. Spohn, B. van Fraassen & B. Skyrms, Existence and Explanation. Essays in Honor of Karel Lambert, Kluwer, 77-101 1995 "Musils Analyse des Gefühls", in Hgb. B. Böschenstein & M.-L. Roth, Hommage à Robert Musil, Berne: Lang, 87-110. Mulligan, K & Smith, B 1985 Critical Notice of Brentano 1982, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 627-644 Pfänder, A 1900 Die Phänomenologie des Wollens, Leipzig: Barth Scheler, M Gesammelte Werke (GW), Berne & Munich: Francke Waismann, F. 1983 Wille und Motiv, Reclam, Hgb. J. Schulte