Does anybody know anything about Wittgensteins semantic arguments for logical behaviourism?
I’ll have a go. He said that if one referred to a mental event, it would be like going around with a box, saying there was a beetle inside it but never showing it to anyone, in which case the box might as well be empty, i.e. the mental state would be entirely absent. It is supposedly impossible to know one has a mental event because one is not referring to something in principle observable to others. “If a lion could speak, we could not understand him” – he would be referring to events in his own mental world, which is not our world. How would i answer? Well, scepticism about internal mental states is as arbitrary as scepticism about the external world. There is no more reason to doubt one end of the chain than the other. Moreover, a proposition describing observed behaviour is not exchangeable salva veritate with one describing mental events. Also, and this is a big one, i would say it is actually logically impossible to doubt one is experiencing at the moment one experiences. These a
