Intelligibility and Objectivity of Psychological Language
By all accounts, it does seem incredible that in these days of the internet and e-mail, the news haven’t yet spread that a problem that tormented philosophers for centuries, namely, the famous “mind/body” problem, was solved and utterly overcome by Ludwig Wittgenstein during the first half of the 20th century. It is indeed fantastic that even now so few people are aware that the great difficulties faced in the philosophy of mind, as for instance the relationship between the bodily and the psychological or the knowledge of “other minds”, were completely liquidated as subjects more than a half a century ago. And it is no less extraordinary that there are still professional philosophers stubbornly trying to find “solutions”, the more entangled and fanciful the better, about how psychological states become real through brain activities. How should we explain such scandalous facts? Ignorance is never an argument, but if Wittgenstein’s devastating results have not been properly appraised it’s perhaps due to the fact (partially at least) that there is a whole culture conspiring against it. This culture manifests a clear lack of interest about valid thinking and conceptual clarity in favor of the getting of astounding amounts of data concerning neurons, synapsis, brain cortex and so on, under which we all are practically buried.
