Wittgensteinian Themes: Essays, 1978-1989.

Thornton, Tim

Malcolm, Norman. Cornell University Press, 1995. xii + 216 pp. $35.0--Wittgensteinian Themes gathers together 14 previously published essays written towards the end of Malcolm's life. The majority of essays provide exegeses of Wittgenstein's thought. It is arguable that both Wittgensteinian exegesis and Wittgensteinian philosophy run the risk of parochialism. This collection makes a commendable effort to escape that charge. Even in the exegetical essays, issue is taken with conflicting contemporary philosophers whilst four essays are direct attacks on opposing philosophical perspectives, albeit using Wittgensteinian methods.

Most of the more directly exegetical essays concern philosophy of mind. Three are devoted to Wittgenstein's attack on the view that thinking or having sensations consists in occurrent mental or neurological processes, with reference in one to Fodor's development of this idea. Two essays assess Anscombe's interpretation of Wittgenstein. One supports her claim that "I" is not a referring expression; one takes issue with her claim that seeing always involves an intentional object. A fifth essay examines the consequences for an account of beliefs of Moore's paradox. The attack on Fodor's mentalism is continued in one of three essays in which Malcolm explicates the foundational role that practical action plays in his reading of Wittgenstein. Whilst his defence of the claim that the conditions of possibility of rule following include membership of a community is inconclusive, the paper on the relation of language to instinctive behavior is an admirably clear description of Wittgenstein's alternative to mentalism. Malcolm also criticizes William's charge that Wittgenstein's later philosophy is best interpreted as supporting a form of transcendental idealism. This piece is less successful because it does not fully grasp the charge that the idealism is supposed to be implicit and so textual considerations are only partially relevant. Furthermore Malcolm's defence appears more to be directed against empirical than transcendental idealism.

Of the four essays that attack rival perspectives, two concern Kripke. These are not, however, additions to the literature on Kripke's interpretation of Wittgenstein. Instead they engage with the anti-Wittgensteinian metaphysical picture of language that Kripke proposes in Naming and Necessity. In "Kripke on heat and sensations of heat" Malcolm argues that Kripke's distinction between the objective phenomenon of heat and the sensations by which we detect it is illicit. He suggests that Kripke could only mean the sensation of feeling hot but this will not do the necessary work to show that there is only a contingent link between heat and our sensations. In "Kripke and the standard meter" he argues that, given the role that the Paris meter plays, the statement that it is one metre long is not contingent. It does not follow, however, that it is necessary. That is to assume that the statement expresses a proposition whereas, Malcolm asserts, it is a rule.

Malcolm also criticises two rival approaches to the philosophy of mind. In "Subjectivity" he firstly deconstructs Nagel's invocation of the essential subjectivity of the mental by scrutinizing the metaphors Nagel relies on to explicate the self, the body, and one's point of view. Secondly he argues that, unlike persons, Nagel's subjects lack all identifying criteria and concludes that Nagel's account is senseless. In a second essay he attacks Functionalism. Amongst several arguments is the central claim that since physically identical actions can have different meanings and since Functionalism attempts to replace higher level intentional descriptions with nonintentional, functionalist, descriptions of the brain, functionalism cannot fix or explain the intentionality of action. Instead, he suggests, intentionality depends on the context of action.

In none of these essays, however, does Malcolm fully engage with the opposing views. For example, he presupposes Wittgenstein's behaviorist account of language. When Kripke claims that Martians might not feel our sensations of heat in the presence of heat, Malcolm assumes that such sensations must either be feeling hot or feeling heat and rules out the latter as implying, impossibly, that Martians "don't feel heat when they feel heat." This precludes discussion of what Kripke asserts: that they have sensations in the presence of heat qualitatively identical to those we have in the presence of cold, although their behavior is the same as ours. Malcolm later asserts that Kripke's hypothesis cuts a conceptual connection between sensation and its expression and thus changes the concept. But this is just a statement of the Wittgensteinian view of language that Kripke opposes. Nevertheless, this is a fine and thoughtful collection on essays clarifying and extending Wittgensteinian philosophy.