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Chapter 7

Learning: Meaning, Language and Culture

By David Carr

The result of the educative process is capacity
for further education.. -John Dewey

Brief Introduction:

The chapter is a nice piece of presentation of modern theoretical developments and philosophical stands which have direct bearing on the object and goal of education  learning, understanding, meaning-making and knowledge. It discusses the three closely knitted concepts  meaning, language and culture. All of them play crucial role in the formation of knowledge. The chapter is about meaning, concept acquisition and the role of learners environment in it.
It shows the relevance of such great philosophers as Plato, Descartes, Kant, Locke, Hume, Hegel, Berkeley, Marx, Devey, Frege and Wittgenstein to the contemporary philosophy of Education. The chapter touches the contribution of the father of modern philosophy Rene Descartes and talks about the two main metaphysical and epistemological trends Rationalism and Empiricism that emerged out of his mind/body dualism. It discusses Kants reconciliatory approach to Descartes heirs Rationalist and Empiricists in the light of Kants Critique of Pure and Practical Reason. It also talks about the limitation of the approach. It elaborates Kants Transcendental Idealism, which largely paved the way for various forms of nineteenth and twentieth century idealism - Subjective Idealism, Objective Idealism and Conceptual Idealism (e.g., Explicit Idealism of Irish philosopher Berkeley and implicit idealism of Hume). Kants Idealism was taken up and developed by the German philosopher G. W. F. Hegel. The Idealism of Hegel yielded what is now termed as Social Constructivism. The chapter gives a cursory look on the Social Constructivist approach of Hegel, Karl Marx and Devey and focuses on Wittgensteins philosophy on learning and concept acquisition. Since Wittgensteins philosophy is highly indebted to the German philosopher, logician and mathematician Frege, the chapter discusses predicate logic developed by Frege as a prelude to Wittgenstein.
The discussion over the difficulties in determining the exact nature of concept formation is placed in a manner that it can provide useful insight for the discipline of Education. The chapter analyses the three broader theories to learning - Behaviourism¹, Cognitivism² and Constructivism³ - with a view to critically examine which one seems closer to the fact that education is to help learners in systematically developing understanding and grasping meaning. The chapter discusses shortcomings of Behaviorist approaches to learning. It is critical to all forms of psychology and specifically to empirical or experimental psychology. It is also critical to cognitive theories of learning: Gestalt psychologists (Max Wertheimer, Wolfgang Kohler and Kurt Koffka etc.), Conceptual Structuralists like Chomsky, Cognitive Structuralists (Jean Piaget, Burner and Ausubel etc.) on the ground that such scientific or statistical account of meaning-making remain silent about the role of human culture and language, which constitute learners environment and interacting with which learners construct their own knowledge.
The differences in the stands regarding learning and concept acquisition in various philosophical and psychological trends are noticeable. For instance, the impact of Cartesian Dualism on philosophy of mind was such that an individual mind was considered as an inner, private or disassociated private entity and thought also as purely private and internal object. Terms like inner, subjective and psychological impression are also used in the Cognitive and Idealist approaches. Frege argued for the de-psychologisation of thought. Wittgensteins⁴ concept is not of personal but of social character  a transition from private to social.

A man has free choice to the extent that he is
rational. - St. Thomas Aquinas

Original Text

Learning: meaning, language and culture

The empirical psychological predicament

We have seen that the behavioural experiments of learning theorists are hard put to account for the semantic⁵ or meaning-implicated aspects of learning: insofar as the kind of learning⁶ presupposed to human education entails some understanding of what is learned, and understanding is a matter of a grasp of its meaning⁷, behavioural psychology seems of questionable utility in accounting for any such educational understanding. Gestaltists⁸ and cognitive structuralists⁹ argue that human meaning-making cannot be entirely explained in terms of behavioural processes, because understanding (a dance or a picture) is a matter of active imposition of meaning-constitutive rules and principles on the brute data of sensory perception: this is the basic Kantian insight that 'intuitions¹⁰ without concepts¹¹ are blind. However, the question now arises of the source from which these principles of construction might be derived. It is at this point that cognitivist or related constructivist accounts seem to face something of a dilemma. On the one hand, if they adopt Kant's position of maintaining that the principles by which psychology organises experience are logically a priori and/or necessary; they appear vulnerable to some kind of irreconcilable Cartesian or other dualism of mind and body, or reason and sense-experience, which also carries the burden of explaining the origin of such principles. On the other hand, however, there are serious objections to what may seem to be the only alternative of supposing, like Piaget and other modern cognitivists, that such organising principles are abstracted from sensible experience. First, there are well-rehearsed difficulties about understanding concept formation in terms of abstraction, which go back to Plato. For one thing, given that the particulars we are inclined to include under this or that concept are often fairly disparate (consider, even in the case of concepts of direct sense experience, the wide variety of colour shades to which we apply the term 'red'), it is hard to see how they might be regarded as having some common abstractable feature - apart, that is, from being the particulars we have chosen to refer to by this or that label (which is basically the philosophical position known as nominalism¹²). For another, it is highly implausible to suppose that some concepts might be formed by abstraction from any feature of sensible experience: consider, for example, the difficulty of abstracting the logical sign for negation ('not') from common experiences of negativity (whatever that might mean).

The principal goal of education is to create men
who are capable of doing new things, not
simply of repeating what other generations
have done. -Jean Piaget

A related problem about any cognitivist view that the principles of experiential organisation are abstractions from experience is that of how we could know this to be so. Much here seems to turn on the cognitivist claim that this might be determined empirically: it may appear plausible to suppose from repeated observation that children develop (in perhaps culturally invariant ways) certain principles of experiential organisation. But how could empirical inquiry support any such claim? In order to be a strictly empirical generalisation, any such claim must rest on induction¹³ : repeated experience serves to support a general rule to the effect that learners (here and everywhere) organise their experience according to such and such principles - because all hitherto observed learners have been observed to do so. But such inductive generalisation is always open to disconfirmation in the light of further experience, and (as Hume showed) cannot conclusively establish that things will always continue as previous experience has led us to expect. In short, it may be that further research shows that hitherto unobserved learners do not make sense of experience (as, say, organised in terms of cause and effect) in the same way as those previously observed. Thus, on the one hand, if cognitive structuralists argue that organising principles are discovered on the basis of empirical scientific investigation, then the claim that such principles have a key role in the meaningful organisation of human experience cannot be shown to have more than provisional or contingent status. On the other hand, if (closer to Kant) they argue that such organisational principles are necessary features of any meaningful human experience - that any learners anywhere would have to organise their experience in this or that way - it is not clear how any such claim might be grounded in empirical scientific investigation, as distinct from the kind of metaphysical considerations that precisely support an a priori rationalist dualism of reason and experience.

People are active processors of information instead
of being passive respondents to environmental
conditions. Elaborate the statement with special
reference to Cognitive approach to learning.

To be sure, there is another way in which cognitive and other conceptual structuralists may be inclined, to maintain that certain a priori principles of rational organisation are necessarily presupposed to making sense of features of human experience. We have already observed that Gestalt psychologists sometimes sought to account for such organisational principles as 'closure'¹⁴ in neurophysiological terms, and such later cognitivists as Chomsky¹⁵ have opposed associationist views of language learning on the grounds that any such learning requires the grasp of a grammar that could not itself be acquired through experience, and which we might therefore suppose to be innately encoded or biologically 'hard-wired' into the neurophysiology of potential language users. However, the same general difficulty that we observed in the case of behaviourist theories of learning concerning the potential gap between meaning and (any empirical) process also arises here. Indeed, in criticising behaviourism, we noted a crucial connection between the failure of learning theory to give an account of meaning, and behaviourist blurring of the distinction between the processes we undergo and the actions we undertake. It is precisely insofar as the notion of human agency requires some reference to intention or purpose - to the capacity of human agents to plan their actions and invest them with sense and significance - that human action cannot be reduced to mere sequences of 'colourless' behavioural or physical events. In this light, however, it is not much clearer why the causal operation of hard-wired grammatical programmes would guarantee the meaning of human experience or activity, than it is how such meaning might be generated by the acquisition of environmentally conditioned sequences of behaviour. Moreover, we have lately observed that no scientific story in terms of neural wiring could be sufficient to explain such Gestaltist phenomena of experiential organisation as 'closure' - since it is quite conceivable that someone might possess the hardware apt for the identification of a given ambiguous figure as a rabbit rather than a duck, but yet be unable to recognise the rabbit aspect insofar as they are culturally or environmentally denied (as was once true of Australian Aborigines) any direct access to rabbits. In short, possession of a rabbit concept would appear to require more than just the presence and/or operation of some internal biological mechanism. What, however, might this be?

Recognising the world 'out there': Hume and Kant

The organism structures and organizes experience.
Comment and give some examples from the
organizing principles of Gestalt Theory.

The most obvious temptation now, perhaps, is to suppose that some direct personal acquaintance with rabbits would be enough to supply the conceptual deficit: in short, that what the agent would need to acquire a concept of 'rabbit' is some kind of experiential access to rabbits. Surprisingly, however, it is not obvious that this is so - at any rate, if such acquaintance means only the entry of creatures we refer to by this term into our experiential field. The fact is that agents may not recognise rabbits - or, at least, those creatures under that name that we (in our culture) give to them - even though they are within their experiential reach. Of course, what agents do not see as rabbits they might well see as something else - as members of a larger, less differentiated category of rodentine creatures, or as a kind of walking foodstuff; but it is also just possible that they might not even see rabbits at all - even though they are (or would appear to us to be) directly under their noses. Moreover, if this possibility seems hard to grasp, it may only be because we are in the grip of a powerful picture of concept acquisition of long and distinguished philosophical pedigree. This picture is a central feature of the philosophical tradition known as (British) empiricism¹⁶ although it can also be found in non-empiricist philosophical perspectives, and it probably survives vestigially even in Kant's ingenious reconstruction and synthesis of rationalism and empiricism. The basic idea behind this view of concept-formation is that concepts are effects of the unmediated impact of experience on the human senses. According to Locke, the main founding father of British empiricism, any knowledge of the world expressed in true judgements involves the exercise of ideas (his term for concepts), such knowledge is acquired via the senses, and therefore the ideas presupposed to such knowledge are best construed as causally engendered mental representations of an external order of things. In short, the concept of rabbit is engendered in us by the causal impact on our senses of a particular object in the world 'out there': without that impact we could not have the idea of rabbit, and given the presence of the source of that impact in our perceptual field, it is difficult (on the face of it) to see how we might avoid having that idea. Notoriously, however, the high priest of empiricism, David Hume¹⁷ , was more sceptical about the very existence of any such Lockean external objective order. Hume argued there can be no certain knowledge of anything beyond the flux of fleeting impressions (sounds, textures, colours, and so on) that constitutes our immediate experience - and which, as they pass or subside, leave behind traces in the form of ideas: on this view, concepts or ideas are no more than faded (faintly recollected) sensory impressions, and no idea could have genuine sense unless it can be shown to correspond to some actual (past or present) impression. Hence, for Hume, only two kinds of statement or judgement can have genuine meaning. On the one hand, there are what he calls statements of fact - in which the constituent terms of such propositions correspond to impressions: statements such as 'the cat sat on the mat' or 'bachelors are less prone to heart attacks' would fall into this category. On the other hand, there are what he calls relations of ideas - which are merely definitions of terms or rules for the uses of words: statements such as 'a bachelor is an unmarried man' and 'a square is an equilateral rectangle' fall into this second category. The empiricist view is essentially that concepts or ideas acquire sense by referring to items of experience: in short, in 'the-cat sat on the mat', the terms 'cat', 'mat' and 'sat' function logically or grammatically rather like names or descriptions of things, properties or relations, Moreover; this basic empiricist view of concept acquisition as a matter of direct reference to experience survives well into twentieth-century philosophy: it resurfaces in one well-known form, for example, in the 'picture theory of meaning' of Wittgenstein's early Tractatus-Logico-Philosophicus.

Before focusing in on the details you need to look
at the big picture  the whole experience within which
a particular behavior makes sense. -Unknown

Still, whatever the initial plausibility of this basic theory of concept-formation, it has been the concern of many modern philosophers - particularly of the last two centuries - to call it into question. In this connection, a major source of criticism undoubtedly hails from the direction of what we may call post-Kantian idealism¹⁸. There are different, more and less plausible, forms of idealism. What might be called 'subjective idealism' is just the radical (empiricist) sceptical view that we can have no knowledge of the world beyond our 'inner', mental or subjective impressions of it: for all we know, what we take to be experience of an objective order of things and other people is just a dream or hallucination to which no stable reality actually corresponds. The Irish philosopher George Berkeley seems to have held some such view (expressed in the slogan 'esse est percipi': to be is to be perceived) - and, as we have seen, Hume also sailed perilously close to it. It is doubtful, however, whether subjective idealism is at all coherent. Most notably, Kant criticises the explicit idealism of Berkeley and the more implicit idealism of Hume on the grounds that it only makes sense to claim that all experience is subjective given that very distinction between the subjective and the objective that idealists deny we can make: if all experience is subjective, then we might just as well say that none of it is - for we can make sense of the subjective only by contrast with what is objective. How, for example, can Hume draw the distinction between fact and falsehood if all impressions are on the same experiential level, and there is no basis upon which to draw the distinction between veridical (true) and non-veridical (illusory) sense perceptions? Hence, Kant's attempt to reclaim the distinction between objective reality and subjective experience from subjective idealist scepticism has two main foundations. First, he argues that the objectivity of genuine perception is given precisely by the conformity of our experience of reality to certain rational principles of causal order, identity and difference, and so on: for example, objective things and real events are distinguished by (respectively) their stability and regularity from the protean nature of subjective dreams, delusions and hallucinations. Hume held that causal laws were rationally contentious or dubious inferences from experience. Kant argues that such Humean doubts about the rational basis of causal order could only be raised by someone who already understands the world as ordered in certain specifiably rational ways: to that extent, rational principles of identity and difference, cause and effect, and so on, are logical preconditions of any intelligible human experience, and if things were as Hume suggests they might be, he would not even be in a position to describe this circumstance. Again, all this is summed up in Kant's famous dictum that 'intuitions without concepts are blind'.
But Kant also held (the other half of the above dictum) that 'thoughts without content are empty'. He agrees essentially with empiricists that experience marks the bounds of what may be intelligibly thought and said: what we can know of the world in any substantial sense of the term 'know' (that is, excluding definitions or other logically true statements) must ultimately be based on experiences we have reason to suppose objectively grounded. Thus, one reason why 'tritons eat mermaids' is hardly intelligible, let alone true, is that it cannot correspond to any objective experience - precisely because there is nothing in sensible experience to which the terms 'triton' and 'mermaid' could correspond. In this regard, despite Kant's insistence that sense-experience needs conceptualisation in order to be meaningful, it is not clear that he greatly questions the empiricist idea that meaningfulness is significantly a function of reference to objective experience. Moreover, Kant is at pains to insist that one principal condition of the truth of our knowledge claims consists in their relationship or correspondence to those objective states, events and particulars that he expresses through the idea of 'things-in-themselves'. Indeed, it is because Kant fails to question the empiricist idea that all perception is of the appearances of things - their observable properties of size, shape, colour, odour, texture, and so on - that he feels compelled to say that something 'behind' appearances is needed to secure the complete objectivity of accurate perceptions, On this view, 'things-in-themselves' are not themselves sensible or perceivable - for if they were, they would only be further sense-impressions; rather they are the utterly imperceptible and pre-conceptual (and therefore purely hypothetical) objective substrates of such properties and qualities. Thus, for Kant, it seems to be a general condition of the meaningfulness of a knowledge claim - and therefore of our understanding of it - that it refers or corresponds to ordered sense-impressions that are themselves grounded in the objective extra-sensible reality of 'things-in-themselves'.

Experience seems to most of us to lead to
conclusions, but empiricism has sworn never
to draw them. -George Santayana

Conceptual idealism¹⁹ : the social provenance of concepts

Kant's epistemology²⁰ represents a kind of crossroads in modern philosophy: his work is a necessary reference point for all subsequent philosophical attempts to understand knowledge and concept-acquisition - and, with regard to his educational relevance, we have already observed Kant's decisive influence on modern cognitive psychology. However, the most immediate response and challenge to Kant's work was to come from a new nineteenth-century brand of idealism. Although such post-Kantian idealism12 is mainly sympathetic to Kant's critique of the subjectivist tendencies of much empiricism - particularly to the idea that unconceptualised sensations or impressions could not in and of themselves give rise to knowledge - it also raises the most obvious difficulty for Kant's account: the role in his epistemology of 'things-in-themselves'. For what possible explanatory role could be played by things or objects about which absolutely nothing can be said because they underlie all appearances - and are, by that token, themselves beyond conceptualisation? The short answer given by post-Kantian idealists to this question is that insofar as it cannot play any intelligible role, we might as well abandon the 'thing-in-itself'. On the new idealist view, Kant is right to claim that there can be no coherent conception of the world on the basis of unconceptualised sensations alone - and that meaning is therefore a function of the imposition of concepts and categories on the impressions of sense - but he is mistaken in holding that the intelligibility of concepts and/or the validity of knowledge claims rests upon their correspondence to an objective reality lying 'out there' beyond or 'behind' our concepts of it. In a nutshell, the world or reality as we experience and understand it is comprised not so much of objects or things as of ideas.

Every form of addiction is bad, no matter
whether the narcotic be alcohol or morphine
or idealism. - Carl Gustav Jung

It is extremely important to distinguish this kind of idealism - which we shall here call conceptual idealism - from the subjective idealism of such empiricists as Berkeley. Unlike subjective idealism, conceptual idealism does not take our knowledge of the world to be just a dubious personal construction from individual sense-impressions, but agrees with Kant that it involves the rational ordering of experience recognising significant distinctions, for example, between more and less credible or trustworthy experiences. Where it effectively departs from Kant is in denying that what gives meaning, coherence and validity to our best epistemic claims is not any external order of unconceptualised 'things-in-themselves' - for there can be no such external order (or none that we could talk about): in short, the world is made or 'constructed' according to our conceptions, and has no order in and of itself. But if our picture of the world is not determined by the independent order of things as they are in themselves, from whence could it derive, other than from (as subjective idealism maintains) individual personal experience? In a nutshell, conceptual idealism holds that the concepts and categories by means of which human agents seek to make some sort of non-subjective sense of their experience are interpersonal or social in origin, and are constructed in the course of human cultural evolution. The new idealist insight is that both Kant's epistemology and the empiricism of which it is critical are prey to the common error of supposing that knowledge is a matter of personal confrontation with experience, and that the problem of objectivity is essentially that of accounting for the way in which the individual can break through the veil of appearance to make contact with the hard reality lying 'behind' that appearance. For conceptual idealists there is no such reality, and human meaning-making is less an individual than a collective matter: knowledge is in a significant sense conventional - as, indeed, historically changing conceptions of what counts as human knowledge might seem to confirm - and human groups construct their knowledge perspectives in response to evolutionarily encountered problems of survival. Nineteenth-century idealism is therefore a prime source of the widespread contemporary philosophical thesis of the social character if meaning - the view that human meaning-making is interpersonal rather than individual, and that human interaction and community are necessarily presupposed to any sort of conceptualisation.

Be a philosopher; but, amidst all your philosophy,
be still a man.-David Hume

The obvious problem for conceptual idealism, however, is that if our perspectives on the world are not to be judged true or false, credible or incredible, by virtue of their correspondence or otherwise to an objective order of 'things-in-themselves', how might they be validated? Broadly speaking, idealism replaces correspondence (to things-in-themselves) with coherence as the key criterion of meaning and truth. Although there can (by definition) be no concept independent assessment of how things-in-themselves are, there can be evaluation of different conceptual perspectives in terms of logical coherence or consistency: thus, it will be more reasonable to believe some things than others on the grounds that we are well advised to avoid (practical as well as theoretical) inconsistency, and even within the terms of our local conceptual conventions there will be better sense-dependent grounds for some propositions than others. Hence, it would seem sensible from any rational point of view to deny the statement 'tritons eat mermaids' on the grounds that this proposition cannot be both true and false, and that there is hardly any empirical evidence for supposing that either tritons (as fish-men) or mermaids (as fish-women) exist. Indeed, on a highly rationalist view of conceptual idealism associated with the great German idealist G.W.F. Hegel, the application of such rational criteria to the plethora of socially constructed human perspectives may be expected (in the literal fullness of time) to lead to a conception of the world that is absolutely true rather than just locally credible. Thus, according to what may be called absolute idealism, human inquiry advances by the systematic rational sifting of often contradictory human perspectives in the interests of an ultimately incontrovertible 'God's-eye' grasp of ultimate truth - and Hegel seems to have conceived human history as a matter of conceptual or 'spiritual' evolution towards some such absolute vision. On this view, different socio-cultural constituencies have developed different and conflicting conceptions of the world in the course of their evolution, but since these perspectives are often far from logically consistent, they are not simultaneously credible. Thus, since these perspectives are as finite and limited as the human minds that construct them, they stand in need of correction and completion through an historically embedded process of so-called dialectic. The dialectical comparison and/or contrast of one perspective with another, of what Hegel calls 'thesis' with 'antithesis', is therefore held (ultimately) to yield an intellectual 'synthesis' that resolves all contradictions in the interests of a more comprehensive error-free vision of reality.

All our knowledge begins with the senses, proceeds
then to the understanding, and ends with reason. There
is nothing higher than reason. -Immanuel Kant

Several educationally significant philosophers of some stature are more or less directly indebted to Hegel and nineteenth-century idealism - and, in later chapters of this work, we shall consider the views of Karl Marx and John Dewey, who may (in their different ways) be regarded as key exponents of the thesis of social character of meaning²¹, Both of these philosophers repudiate empiricist and, 'realist' epistemology in favour of a social constructivist conception of meaning-making, and regard human knowledge and inquiry as subject to evolutionary development and change - although Dewey is ultimately unsympathetic to the absolute idealist tendencies of both German philosophers. For the purposes of this chapter, however, it may be more illuminating to explore the implications for understanding learning and concept-acquisition of a body of philosophical work that might seem somewhat remote from either Hegel, Marx or Dewey, All the same, it is arguably in the twentieth-century work of the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein that we come nearest to an account of concept-formation that most clearly identifies the difficulties of representational²³ theories of meaning: in particular, Wittgenstein's seminal Philosophical Investigations²⁴ represents perhaps the most sustained modern attack on the idea that concepts are internal mental ideas or inner impressions that take on meaning by referring to aspects of experience. Despite this, Wittgenstein seems more obviously indebted to such pioneers of modern logical analysis as the German mathematician Gottlob Frege and the British logician Bertrand Russell than to any philosophers in the idealist tradition. Indeed, the notorious picture theory of meaning he defended in his early Tractatus was deeply influenced by the representationalism of Russell's own empiricist epistemology of 'logical atomism'. All the same, Wittgenstein's later posthumously published work, which is expressly intended to demolish the picture theory of meaning, is arguably more continuous with some of the key anti-representational insights of Frege - as well as with a Deweyan instrumental construal of the nature of ideas and concepts as more like tools of public commerce than inner sensible representations, However, it is probably best to introduce Wittgenstein by way of some observations on the work of Frege.

Frege's revolutionary semantic insights

Sometimes I seem to see a difficulty, but then
again I don't see it. -Frege

Frege was primarily a mathematical logician, and his pioneering formalisation of an important segment of natural language was largely a by-product of his even more ambitious project to derive mathematics from logic. However; his inquiries into the nature of reason and inference begin with an examination of the basic notion of a thought. From the outset, he dearly distinguishes thoughts as the content of psychological states from their conscious experiential or subjective embodiments or expressions: a thought is a logical rather than a psychological entity. From this viewpoint, the thought that (say) 'the boss was in a foul mood' is what is common to some such range of psychological states as 'he believed the boss was in a foul mood', 'he expected the boss was in a foul mood', 'he feared the boss was in a foul mood', and so on. This 'de-psychologisation' of thought is a key move in the development of Frege's logical grammar: whatever empiricists and others may have believed, Frege argues that thoughts are not empirical impressions, sensations, conscious states or other 'internal' psychological events. In support of this insight, he introduces a range of other important distinctions between concept and object, function and concept, and sense and refcrence. Frege's logical distinction between concept and object reflects (roughly) the ordinary grammatical distinction between subject and predicate, and is primarily concerned to distinguish between terms that refer to objects in the world and terms which do not: thus, in 'the boss was in a foul mood', the subject term functions like a name and refers (presumably) to an objectively existing person, whereas Frege regards the predicate ' - was in a foul mood' as a concept expression that does not refer (ignoring the rather technical sense in which Frege held that concepts rather than objects are the referents of predicates) in the sense of picking out experienced particulars, We might be tempted to judge otherwise, since we could at least feel drawn to say that in the sentence 'the bus is red', ' - is red' refers to a colour. But it may help here to distinguish reference from description: insofar as ' - is red' and  - was in a foul mood' are adjectives, they describe things, but as adjectives they are grammatically incomplete apart from the objects they describe and should not therefore be held to refer as names do. Indeed, perhaps Frege's key insight rests on his recognition of an analogy between grammatical predicates and algebraic functions. In algebraic expressions of the form '2 (x)2 + (x)' mathematicians distinguish between what they call the argument 'x' and the function '2 ()2 ,+ (Y - which is what remains after the removal of x: whereas the argument - whatever x refers to or stands for - has significance apart from the function, functions are 'unsaturated' expressions having no determinate sense apart from arguments, For Frege, in 'the boss was in a foul mood', 'the boss' functions (with other name-like expressions) like a mathematical argument, whereas the concept expression' - was in a foul mood' behaves logically like an algebraic function.

Provide arguments in favor of the statement
Even though only true propositions can be known,
it is possible to believe a proposition that is false.

However, the distinction of concept from object and the analysis of concept in terms of function interlock with another key Fregean distinction between sense and reference, Irrespective of their' referential functions, according to Frege, all linguistic signs have a sense. Crucially, indeed, it is the possession of a sense by both concept expressions and the sentences to which they contribute that enables us to understand - grasp the meaning of - such false statements as 'Tony Blair is the king of Siam'; contrary to those empiricist theories according to which any sentences that do not correspond to facts or definitions must be meaningless, we can clearly understand 'Tony Blair is the king of Siam' (for example, we can imagine what it would be like for it to be true) even though there is no experience to which it corresponds. Thus, although such 'unsaturated' concept expressions as ' - is the king of Siam' do not have reference, they have a sense. But it is also clear from the analogy with mathematical functions that we cannot be sure precisely what the sense of a predicate expression is in advance of its application to a subject term: just as a mathematical operation such as 'the square root of ...' has no clear meaning in advance of its application to particular arguments - and, of course, such application is liable to give rather different values for different arguments - so it cannot be very clear what, - is the king of Siam' means in advance of its true or false 'predication of some object term. In the case of many predicates, indeed, it would seem that we could hardly know what is being said of an object until we know just what object it is being said of. Consider, for example, what it means to predicate the most general term of evaluation' - is good' of something. If we ask what this means, it soon becomes clear that it means nothing in general. Rules or criteria for the application of ' - is good' to 'this knife' will be quite different from those we utilise in applying it to 'this doctor' or 'this woman': in short, a knife is good in quite a different sense from a professional role or a human being - and it is crucial for proper understanding to distinguish between these diverse senses of goodness. But just as predicates need subject terms in order to make determinate sense, so objects can be definitely identified only in terms of the properties expressed in predicates: I can know who Tony Blair is only via a set of descriptions that are presumably logically exclusive of his being the king of Siam. At all events, meaning appears to be a function of the grammatical cooperation or interplay of reference and predication: the one cannot make much sense without the other. Frege expresses all of this in his well-known aphorism that we should 'never ask for the meaning of a word in isolation, but only in the context of a proposition'.

What is the "private language argument"? To what
extent does it deal with language and privacy? What
are we to draw from this discussion?

Wittgenstein's development of Frege

Wittgenstein's influential exploration of meaning and understanding in his Philosophical Investigations and other posthumously published works can be taken (in contrast with his earlier, more Russellian Tractatus) as an extension or amplification of these key insights of Frege. By way of ground-clearing, however, Wittgenstein sets out to show - via what has come to be known as the private language²⁵ argument - that any empiricist or other account which takes concept-formation to be a matter of individual abstraction from the deliverances of sense-experience is bound to be incoherent. Just as Frege's work on the foundations of arithmetic had shown that one could not possibly derive simple or complex mathematical concepts of '2', 'minus 9', 'the square root of', and so on, from empirical experience, Wittgenstein sets out to show that concepts (Fregean senses') could not generally be derived via individual discrimination of aspects of inner or outer sense. Indeed, both Frege's anti-empiricist conception of number and Wittgenstein's private-language argument belong to a time-honoured tradition of philosophical concern about the nature of concept-formation reaching at least as far back as (and most obviously to) Plato. Plato's notorious theory of forms - the idea that since sense-experience cannot be considered a reliable source of genuine knowledge of the world, the concepts that guarantee such knowledge must hail from an intelligible realm of pure ideas that lie outside any sensible order - is clearly driven by a very real concern about how the concepts through which we understand the world of experience might have causal or other origins in that experience. In philosophical contemplation of a cricket ball, for example, we might ask how we acquire the concepts of round and red - and the empiricist's reply is essentially that we derive them from repeated experiences of red and round things. Plato's point, however, is that since our concepts of red and round are ideal types to which nothing in particular experience corresponds, this hardly seems possible: the cricket ball is not perfectly mathematically) round and is only one of the shades of red (which may be significantly different from other shades) to which we regularly apply the term 'red'. From this viewpoint, we may seem compelled to say (in the manner pointing there would need to be some grasp on the part of those for whom the pointing is intended that it is this rather than that feature that is in question of one well-known contemporary judgement on this precise issue) that concepts are mind-made, and applied to human experience rather than abstracted from it. Wittgenstein's arguments against empiricist ideas of concept-formation are not at all far removed from such Platonic considerations. If the grasp of meaning is modelled on the idea of confrontation between the individual and unconceptualised sense-experience, how indeed might the individual succeed in abstracting the concept of 'red' from any such experience? Could this perhaps be achieved by some kind of inner pointing (ostension) to the items of experience to which he or she wished to draw attention? But how would the subject know what to point to, or which features of a given experience to identify as salient: how should he or she decide that these impressions count as red, whereas those are orange or purple? Even in the case of public rather than 'inner' experiential pointing there would need to be some grasp on the part of those for whom the pointing is intended that it is this rather than that feature that is in question - something, in short, to give meaningful contextualisation to such pointing. All the same, someone might say, there would have to be at least some cases of concept-formation by 'inner pointing'. For example, insofar as psychological experiences are private more or less by definition - just as I can only experience my pain, so you can experience only yours - how could I acquire concepts of such essentially 'private' experiences as being anxious or in pain other than by inner or 'private' ostension. Wittgenstein's repudiation of the empiricist account of concept-formation, however, is best appreciated m relation to his more surprising claim that even our concepts of psychological experience could not be acquired by any process of private reference to intrinsically internal states.
For one thing, Wittgenstein denies that it does follow from my inability to experience other people's pain that I cannot know that they are in pain - for such a conclusion would only follow from the assumption that the concept of pain, and any knowledge of the other's pain, is primarily a matter of 'inner' or private experience. Without denying that such experiences do enter into our avowals and ascriptions of pain, Wittgenstein holds that even insofar as the concept of pain is descriptive, it is not descriptive of an (indicated) experience. Certainly, in teaching children the concept of pain, parents will use the term descriptively in connection with people falling into nettles, fracturing limbs, receiving first aid, and so on. But, according to Wittgenstein, when people give vent to the first person utterances 'I'm hurting' or 'it's painful', they are not at all describing or referring to experiences, but expressing how they feel: first-person pain utterances are themselves forms of pain behaviour. (This is the point behind Wittgenstein's rather paradoxical claim that it does not make sense to say 'I know that I'm in pain': knowledge claims are normally made on the basis of evidence - but I do not need evidence that I am in pain.) Thus, far from resting on private reference and/or abstraction, acquiring the concept of pain (as just one case of 'inner' experience) is as public a matter as acquiring any other concept: the descriptive content of the concept is taught by parents to children in relation to perfectly observable (and verifiable) circumstances of hurt and injury, and the expressive uses are encouraged in circumstances where parents want and need to know if their children are unwell. A central concern of Wittgenstein's here, again very much in the spirit of Frege's important insights into the nature of concepts and predication, is to dislodge the (empiricist and other philosophical) assumption or prejudice that the concepts expressed by grammatical predicates are invariably descriptive of (sensory or other) experience: thus, although we may also teach children that an adjective is a describing word, it appears that this need not always be so. If, for example, I observe that 'Helen is a beautiful girl' or 'the sorbet is delicious', it may not be that I am here describing Helen or the dessert, but rather that I am evaluating them as more pleasing or attractive (to my taste) than other girls or desserts. Likewise, if I say 'I'm over the moon', I am not obviously describing anything (not least my spatial position), but expressing how I feel.

Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of
our intelligence by means of language.
-Ludwig Wittgenstein

Indeed, Wittgenstein argues that the surface grammar of linguistic usage is often quite misleading - so that, for example, what might seem to function like an adjective may not actually do so. We have already indicated that even with respect to genuine adjectival uses of the tricky term 'good', we may need to apply different criteria or rules of evaluation in relation to 'good girl' from those we utilise with respect to 'good knife': indeed, some philosophers of meaning-as-use have (contentiously) argued that to call persons 'good' in a moral sense is not to describe them at all, but to commend or express personal admiration for them. But that as it may, if someone says 'Good morning' on a very rainy day, one would clearly have got hold of the wrong end of the stick to say: 'No it isn't, stop telling lies.' Here, it is a plain error to construe the term 'good' as functioning either descriptively or adjectivally: what someone clearly intends by saying 'Good morning' is not to describe the weather, but to wish me well in my business of the day. (In this respect the American idiom 'have a nice day', though more irritating, is less grammatically misleading.) Wittgenstein insists that such mistakes are endemic in past philosophical treatments of the problems of knowledge, mind, morality, religion, aesthetics, and so on, and that a great many philosophical puzzles rest ultimately on a failure to appreciate that language has many practical uses other than to describe or report on the world. Wittgenstein is fond of an analogy between language and a box of tools: just as the tool box contains diverse implements for different uses, so language contains the resources for promising, complaining, commending, approving, commanding, questioning, explaining, and so on, as well as for describing. In this connection, Wittgenstein is also sceptical of the received philosophical method of trying to define the meanings of words in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions - holding that this also encourages the idea that a term like 'good' has a fixed or once-and-for-always sense, which might be determined by ascertaining what or how it describes. Wittgenstein therefore insists that we should look not for the meaning of a term but to its use - by which, of course, he means to say that a grasp of the use is the key to a proper appreciation of the meaning.
However, if understanding or the grasp of meaning is not a function of reference to aspects of inner experience, but a matter of mastery of the grammar of usage in different contexts of human agency, endeavour and association, it cannot be an individual or 'private' psychological achievement. As we have seen, even the conceptualisation of aspects of personal experience is something to which contexts of interpersonal and public communication are presupposed: a prelinguistic Robinson Crusoe raised by animals on a desert island could certainly feel and suffer pain, but he could not meaningfully be said to have a concept of pain in the absence of a language in which the term 'pain' could acquire a determinate context of use. For Wittgenstein, then, concept possession is essentially a reflection of the capacity to grasp the complexities of linguistic usage, and the grasp of such complexities depends in turn upon initiation into the inevitably cooperative and interpersonal practices that give point to such usage:. hence meaning and under standing are quite incompatible with the idea of a 'private language'. It is in this connection that Wittgenstein insists - again somewhat perplexingly - that 'understanding is not a mental process'. The common temptation here - which too many past philosophers have not resisted - is to suppose that understanding is a psychological phenomenon, and that it must therefore go on 'in the head'. Wittgenstein's rather surprising claim is that understanding goes on not in the head, but in perfectly public contexts of teaching and learning. In fact, on this view, what 'goes on in the head' - the inner experiences that a learner has in the course of learning something - may be quite irrelevant to the business of learning this or that. It may help here to bear in mind that we speak of people understanding things even when they are asleep or unconscious: a person who is unconscious will have no experiences, and someone who is asleep may be dreaming, but neither of these circumstances is of relevance to the fact that he or she (right now) understands quantum theory or knows how to play 'Tiger Rag' on the clarinet. Understanding is not a mental experience but a capacity or a disposition: a person understands when he or she has now grasped 'how to go on' with respect to some public procedure or (mental or physical) skill. We need to get into our heads the point that, as a later philosopher has put it, 'meanings ain't in the head'.

Concepts as social, interpersonal and practical rules

For Wittgenstein, in sum, a concept is not an inner experience, but a kind of rule that has a primarily practical (though not necessarily instrumental) use within some context of human life. It is also a rule that requires public criteria for its correct application: a learner has understood or grasped a concept when he or she can execute a procedure or follow a rule according to standard practice or common convention. From this viewpoint, concept-acquisition could never be a matter of the private labelling of internal impressions, (or how could we know from this that we had got something right? But this shows that the rule-following presupposed to concept-acquisition is more a socio-cultural matter than a natural-developmental process: meaning and understanding are essentially products of active participation and engagement in interpersonal and cooperative human institutions and practices. Moreover, the distinctive character of human meaning and understanding is given primarily through that form of public communication familiar to us as language: language-acquisition is thus the most potent - if not the only - source of human concepts and conceptualisation. All of this, if true, has immense implications for understanding human conceptual development, and for issues about the contribution of scientific or experimental psychology to our understanding of such development. For example, we have already noted the general tendency of some empirical psychologists to construe the conceptual development of children in terms of the quasi-biological development of age-related cognitive structures. In this respect, there can be no doubt that cognitive psychologists have made rather heavy weather of explaining the conceptual transitions that are said to occur from pre-concrete to concrete learning on the basis of Piaget's conservation experiments. What, psychologists have asked, can explain how a child moves from a mistaken judgement that the same amount of water is more in the tall thin beaker than it is in the short fat one, to saying that the amount is the same? Whereas some notable cognitivists have offered some rather far-fetched epistemological explanations to explain such transitions, they are in fact quite inexplicable in empiricist terms, but very much less mysterious on a normative Wittgensteinian view of concept formation. For, on a Wittgensteinian view, we have only to recognise that an infant's mastery of language is less advanced than a primary child's: that whereas the younger child may use a term like 'more' to mean either 'heavier' or 'taller', the older child may more easily discriminate. In short, although conceptual growth is a matter of the progress of principled understanding, such progress follows not from the biological development of cognitive processes, but from enhanced grasp of practice and usage.

Here the term 'language game' is meant
to bring into prominence the fact that the
'speaking' of language is part of an activity,
or form of life. Ludwig Wittgenstein

There can also be little doubt that the language of 'process' has come to play a very suspect role in modern theorising about learning and the curriculum - probably under the direct influence of modern cognitive psychology. Indeed, it would appear that a certain preference for the expression of educational objectives in terms of the cultivation of processes, rather than the production of so-called 'products" or 'outcomes', seems to have gone hand in hand with the cognitive psychological rejection of behavioural objectives analyses of learning and curriculum. The fair complaint of cognitive psychologists against such analyses is that such objectives can often be achieved in the absence of real understanding: indeed, it has been the time-honoured complaint of progressive educationalists that the rote and mechanical learning of skills and information of bygone schooling has all too often been meaningless, and has made little or no lasting or significant impact on young minds or lives. So it is not hard to agree that there is more to learning and education than the promotion of blind behavioural outcomes. But latter-day educational sloganising to the effect that the process is more important than the product, or worse, that we should seek to promote processes rather than products, is liable to serious and debilitating educational ambiguity and confusion. On the one hand, it precisely suggests a dualistic conception of processes as entirely separate from, or only contingently related to, products or behavioural outcomes. For whilst in the course of learning children may well experience valuable psychological states or processes - of, say, enjoyment, satisfaction, and so on - that are only contingently related to learning outcomes, it is not at all clear how these might constitute educational aims of teaching. Although we may well agree that it is a good thing for children to experience confidence, satisfaction and enjoyment in the course of their learning, and recognise that good teachers are those who try to ensure this, we should also recognise that this could not possibly be an intended aim of teaching: that, indeed, parents would have cause to complain about any teacher who had made his or her pupils happy or confident without teaching them anything. It would appear, all the same, that careless talk about the importance of process over product has encouraged some recent tendency to regard the promotion of such inner states of well-being as actual aims of education - which (however desirable they may be) they are not. On the other hand, however, if processes are .construed as the operations of thought or understanding, or the grasp of principles and reasons, it should by now be clear that they cannot be conceptually separated from so-called 'products' or 'behavioural outcomes'. In short, if the slogan that the process is more important than the product comes down to the claim that there can be no real knowledge without understanding, then - insofar as understanding is the mastery of public and interpersonal rules, practices and procedures - it can make little real sense to say that process matters more than product Indeed, any idea that one might have understanding of an activity or skill apart from the procedures and practices that embody such understanding could only rest on the dualist mistake about mind that seeks to account for meaning in terms of private experience, Thus, Wittgenstein's observation in Philosophical Investigations that understanding is not a mental process gets straight to the heart of what is wrong with empirical psychological analyses of conceptual learning in terms of the growth of cognitive processes or structures - and, hence, to a proper appreciation of the confusion inherent in any educational talk of process rather than product. Indeed, Wittgenstein went so far as to question the value of modern experimental psychology as a coherent theoretical enterprise. At the very end of the Investigations, he declares that the problems of empirical psychology are not to be excused on the grounds that it is a young science in need of further refinement: the trouble is, he said, that psychology is all 'experimental methods and conceptual confusion'. In view of the enormous and often less than helpful influence of empirical psychology on educational theory from the beginning of the twentieth century to the present day, educationalists might often have done well to take these very famous philosophical sentiments more closely to their hearts.

Possible Tasks

1. Bearing in mind the potentially misleading nature of simple definitions, consider how you would set about teaching a young person to appreciate what is meant by the words 'tragic', absurd' or 'ironic' as applied to this or that human situation or work of art.
2. Consider how you might go about assisting a child to appreciate the metaphorical or analogical character of a passage of poetry.

Practice Questions:

1. What do you understand by the Gestalt perceptual principle called closure?
2. Which position did Locke contribute to? Explain Lockes empiricist view of the structure and contents of the human mind.
3. Explain Kants view that intuitions and concepts are both necessary for knowledge.
4. Explain the distinction that Kant made in his Critique of Pure Reason regarding knowledge based on reason (a priori) and knowledge based on experience (a posteriori).
5. Explain briefly the objective idealism of Hegel?
6. Does Frege draw a sound distinction between the logical and the psychological?
7. Comment on the stand of some Constructivists that cognition is the process by which learners eventually construct mental structures that correspond to or match external structures located in the environment.
8. Knowledge is socially constructed by learners who convey their meaning making to others. Comment.
9. I can know what someone else is thinking, not what I am thinking. It is correct to say "I know what you are thinking", and wrong to say "I know what I am thinking." Explain the educational significance of the stand.

Notes:

1. Behaviorists emphasize the measurement of the outcome of learning without considering the mental processes that may have led to it. Behaviorism sees learning more as conditioning. Human meaning-making can not be explained in behaviorist framework where the agency itself gets an instrumental or conditioned status, whereas grasping of meaning requires some capacity more than mere sense perception. Behavioral Learning theories can not account for meaning because meaning is a product of rational purpose and such rational purpose is not directly reducible to the causality of stimulus and response.
2. Cognitive theory is interested in how people understand something. Cognitive school started with Gestalt psychologists. Latter on it is significantly influenced by the developmental psychology of Jean Piaget.
3. Constructivism is a theory of learning based on largely the Kantian idea that knowledge is constructed by the knower based on mental activity. Learners are considered to be active organisms seeking meaning. Constructions of meaning may initially bear little relationship to reality (as in the naive theories of children), but will become increasing more complex, differentiated and realistic as time goes on. In the constructivist perspective, knowledge is constructed by the individual through his interactions with his environment.
4. Wittgenstein's "language games," are woven together into a coherent view of mathematics called social constructivism. Social Constructivism, which includes intuitionism, is an extension of constructivism and other philosophies.
5. Semantics refers to the aspects of meaning that are expressed in a language, code, or other form of representation. It also denotes the theoretical study of meaning in systems of signs.
6. Learning is the process of gaining understanding that leads to the modification of attitudes and behaviours through the acquisition of knowledge, skills and values and through study and experience.
7. People generally recognize two sorts of meaning: (1) the relation that a sign has to objects and objective situations, actual or possible, and (2) the relation that a sign has to other signs, most especially the sorts of mental signs that are conceived of as concepts.
8. A physical, biological, psychological, or symbolic configuration or pattern of elements so unified as a whole that its properties cannot be derived from a simple summation of its parts. The Gestalt theory hypothesizes that an individuals perception of stimuli has an affect on their response. If two individuals are exposed to identical stimuli, their reactions to it would be different, depending on their past experiences. Gestaltists believe that individuals group stimuli in their own perception. This grouping in perception depends on several factors which can be considered the laws of Gestalt theory.
9. There is no one label which describes the school of thought emerged from the theoretical framework of Jean Piaget. Cognitive Structuralism, Structural Developmentalism, Cognitive Developmentalism, Developmental Epistemologist, Genetic Epistemologist and Developmental Constructionist have all been used.
10. The word intuition comes from the Latin intueri, meaning to consider, to look on. This intuitive look on implies something deeper than simple perception and is best described as apperception, the ability to take hold of knowledge in one glance. Websters Unabridged Dictionary sums up intuition as the immediate knowing or learning of something without the conscious use of reasoning; instantaneous apperception. Simply stated, intuition is direct knowledge.
11. The word concept comes from concipere which means to grasp.
12. Nominalism is the doctrine holding that abstract concepts, general terms, or universals have no independent existence but exist only as names. Nominalism is best understood in contrast to realism. Philosophical realism holds that when we use descriptive terms such as "green" or "tree," the forms of those concepts really exist, independently of the world in an abstract realm. Such thought is associated with Plato, for instance. Nominalism, by contrast, holds that ideas represented by words have no real existence beyond our imaginations.
13. Deductive argument asserts that the conclusion follows necessarily from the truth of the premises. For example: All men are mortal. Joe is a man. So Joe is mortal. If the first two statements are true, then the conclusion must be true. Inductive argument asserts that the conclusion follows, not necessarily, but only probably from the truth of the premises. For example: This cat is black. That cat is black. A third cat is black. Therefore all cats are black.
14. closure of one of the experiential organization principles given by the Gestaltists. It says that the mind is able to derive meaning from objects or pictures that are not perceived in full.
15. Chomsky is credited with the creation of the theory of generative grammar, considered to be one of the most significant contributions to the field of theoretical linguistics made in the 20th century. He also helped spark the cognitive revolution in psychology through his review of B.F. Skinner's Verbal Behavior, in which he challenged the behaviorist approach to the study of mind and language dominant in the 1950s. His naturalistic approach to the study of language has also affected the philosophy of language and mind.
16. In philosophy generally, empiricism is a theory of knowledge emphasizing the role of experience. The term "empiricism" in Latin means experientia. British Empiricism refers to the 18th century philosophical movement in Great Britain which maintained that all knowledge comes from experience. Three principal philosophers are associated with British Empiricism: John Locke, George Berkeley, and David Hume. Occasionally 19th century philosopher J.S. Mill is also added to the list.
17. David Hume (1711  1776) was a Scottish philosopher, economist, and historian. He was heavily influenced by empiricists John Locke and George Berkeley.
18. Idealism is an approach to philosophical enquiry which asserts that everything that we experience is of a mental nature. That is, we can only have direct, immediate knowledge of the contents of our mind. We can never directly know or experience an external object itself. An Idealist either asserts that only minds and the objects of mind exist, or that everything that we experience is composed of mental realities (e.g., thoughts, feelings, ideas, or will). Subjective Idealists and Phenomenalists (such as George Berkeley) hold that minds and their experiences constitute existence. Objective Idealists hold either that all of reality is included in a Universal Thought or Experience (Absolute Idealism of Hegel), or hold that the world is composed of mental realities.
19. The very notion of a "thing in itself" should be understood as a sort of shorthand for an operation of the mind. The question of what properties a thing might have "independently of the mind" is thus incoherent for conceptual idealism.
20. Epistemology is the branch of Philosophy where the logical character of Human Knowledge and understanding is studied.
21. John Dewey, Karl Marx, and Jean Piaget all considered themselves Humanists. By the 1980s, the research of Dewey and Vygotsky had blended with Piaget's work in developmental psychology into the broad approach of constructivism. The basic tenet of constructivism is that students learn by doing rather than observing. Students bring prior knowledge into a learning situation in which they must critique and re-evaluate their understanding of it. This process of interpretation, articulation, and re-evaluation is repeated until they can demonstrate their comprehension of the subject. Constructivism often utilizes collaboration and peer criticism as a way of provoking students to reach a new level of understanding. Active practice is the key of any constructivist lesson. To make an analogy, if you want to learn how to ride a bike, you don't pick a book on bicycle theory - you get on the bike and practice it until you get it right. It is this repetition of practice and review that leads to the greatest retention of knowledge.
22. Social constructivism argues that the most optimal learning environment is one where a dynamic interaction between instructors, learners and tasks provides an opportunity for learners to create their own truth due to the interaction with others. Social constructivism thus emphasizes the importance of culture and context in understanding what is happening in society and constructing knowledge based on this understanding.
23. The Representational Theory of Mind is the dominant theory of the nature of mental content in modern philosophy of mind, cognitive science and experimental psychology. In contrast to theories of naive or direct realism, it postulates the actual existence of a sort of mental intermediaries between the observing subject and the objects, processes or other entities observed in the external world. These intermediaries stand for or represent to the mind the objects of that world.
24. Philosophical Investigations is, along with the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, one of the two major works by 20th-century philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. In it, Wittgenstein discusses numerous problems and puzzles in the fields of semantics, logic, philosophy of mathematics, and the philosophy of mind. He puts forth the view that conceptual confusions surrounding language use are at the root of most philosophical problems.
25. The private language argument is a philosophical argument said to be found in Ludwig Wittgenstein's later work, especially in Philosophical Investigations. The argument was central to philosophical discussion at the end of the last century, and continues to arouse interest. The argument is supposed to show that the idea of a language understood by only a single individual is incoherent.

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Carr, D., Making Sense of Education: an introduction to the philosophy and theory of education and teaching, London, RoutledgeFalmer, 2003.

 

 

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