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Wittgenstein on Self-Deception in Science, Psychology and Philosophy

What was Wittgenstein’s attitude to science and how did it affect his conception of psychology and philosophy? Wittgenstein’s remarks about science have struck many of his readers as anti-science and hence irrational. This “anti-science” reading has affected the reception of his remarks on philosophical psychology. The received view is that Wittgenstein makes the wrong-headed, even pernicious, claim that philosophical psychology can and should proceed without due attention to the psychological sciences. One aim of this paper is to show that what others have understood as anti-science, is really anti-scientism. Another is to show that Wittgenstein’s concern about scientism is one instance of a more general concern about self-deception, and that this concern is a single, main trackable thread that runs through his work. Moreover, we aim to show that Wittgenstein’s reservations regarding overly-scientific psychology and philosophy help illuminate what has become a classic problem in modern philosophical psychology: the nature of self-deception itself. Altogether we aim to show that his concerns with self-deception were intended to discipline our thinking, in all its forms. 1. Is Wittgenstein Still Relevant? Anti-Science or Anti-Scientism? In Wittgenstein’s notebooks there are several extended remarks about science that may startle his admirers and arm his critics. In such remarks, observes Brian McGuinness, Wittgenstein seems to deny the central importance or paradigmatic role of science in our thought and life. Those who sought enlightenment from it, or who looked on it as the instrument or motor of progress, incurred his bitterest polemics. (McGuinness 2002: 124) Today, science and technology are more influential than ever. Shall we therefore dismiss Wittgenstein as no longer relevant, as an anti-science and therefore backward thinker from whom there is little to learn? Or is McGuinness right when he says: To learn today from Wittgenstein’s attitudes we need to alter them – to mollify or to intensify or more probably to refocus them. (McGuinness 2002: 124) It may be thought that McGuinness is suggesting a revisionary cleaning up of Wittgenstein’s laundry. We believe it is better to gloss him as encouraging us to get at the roots of Wittgenstein’s attitude to science, for there is something there for us to learn. This is the spirit in which we shall proceed: we will focus on Wittgenstein’s remarks, with special attention to his critique of the idols of the age. Modernism has been successful in destroying idols and superstition, but in the process seems to have succumbed to the idolatry of science. All that philosophy can do is to destroy idols. And that means not creating a new one [...]. (PH 1993: 171) It is important to note that when McGuinness speaks of Wittgenstein’s anti-science attitude he is referring to the works of the later Wittgenstein, and not to the Wittgenstein of the Tractatus. The Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus embraces science by declaring that only the propositions of science have sense, and hence satisfy the Tractarian theory of meaning: The correct method in philosophy would really be the following: to say nothing except what can be said, i. e. propositions of natural science – i. e. something that has nothing to do with philosophy – and then, whenever someone else wanted to say something metaphysical, to demonstrate to him that he had failed to give a meaning to certain signs in his propositions. (TLP 1963: 6.53) B la Szabados and Peter Campbell 144