Wittgenstein’s Commonsense Realism about the Mind

Abstract

Our ordinary modes of thought and speech encode an understanding of our practices with psychological concepts as philosophically unproblematic in the sense that there is no question of arriving at a better grasp of what justifies them by shifting to, say, physical or other natural scientific modes of description. Although it is not unheard of for philosophers to defend this ordinary understanding of psychological discourse, the stance is only modestly represented within contemporary philosophy of mind. At the most basic level, this is because there is an important sense in which this sort of commonsense realism about the mind offends against the materialist zeitgeist: it does so insofar as it not only treats psychological descriptions and explanations as resisting any sort of relevant reduction to physical (or other natural scientific) terms but moreover asks us to regard psychological qualities as elements of the ‘fabric of the universe’ that possess the effective or causal powers attributed to them within such descriptions and explanations. Admittedly, there are additional senses in which commonsense realism about the mind is consistent with materialist commitments.