§149
The criteria for determining whether someone understands something and whether someone is in a certain brain state are different. So, the brain state is not the understanding.
Understanding is not a conscious state/process but nor is it an 'unconscious' state, like a brain state.
Wittgenstein gives examples of mental states - dejection, excitement, and pain. Each of these might be with us all day, uninterruptedly. But we cannot be said to understand uninterruptedly - at least not in the way that we might be in pain uninterruptedly.
An ability, like being able to play chess, does not have genuine duration.
I'm wondering about the criterial argument you made - that the criteria for brain states and understanding are different. Does this show that a brain state can never be an understanding? What if we found that people have the brain state when and only when they have the understanding?
ReplyDelete(I'm thinking of other cases - e.g. can we say that red *is* a certain frequency of light, or water *is* H20, even though the criteria for water or red are different from the scientific ones? I'm unsure about this.)
I don't think that red is identical to a certain frequency of light or that it means the same thing as such-and-such-a-frequency-of light.
ReplyDeleteWittgenstein addresses your point, does he not? He says that even if a person was in a certain brain state when and only when they understood something we do not have reason to say that the brain state is the understanding.
If you were to find that a certain brain state was regularly correlated with someone understanding something you would have had to have known what 'understanding' meant prior to the discovery of the correlation (in order to make the correlation).
ReplyDeleteAnother way of making the argument here, I suppose, would be to lean on another claim of Wittgenstein's - that in a large range of cases the meaning of a term is its use in the relevant language game. The term 'red' might be used in an ostensive definition - in which case I would not be pointing to the frequency of a wave of light when I said 'this is red'. It is then used in sentences like - 'go to the house with the red door' (which is not synonymous with 'go to the house with the such-and-such-frequency of light door').
ReplyDeleteOne last point: - if the criteria for the brain state obtaining were satisfied but not the behavioural criteria then we would not say that the person understood. If someone said that they knew how to continue the series, '1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32...' and you said 'ok. continue' and they then said '5, 26, 41, 93, 15, 13' and you asked them 'why did you go on in that way? - how does that fit with the beginning of the series?' and they said 'I don't know.' - You would say they hadn't understood (and would be indifferent if somebody told you that their brain state was the same as someone who did understand.
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