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Australasian Journal of Philosophy

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Wittgenstein and the doctrine of kinaesthesis

Stewart Candlish
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To cite this article: Stewart Candlish (1996): Wittgenstein and the doctrine of kinaesthesis, Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 74:4, 581-597 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00048409612347541

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Australasian Journal of Philosophy

Vol. 74, No. 4; December 1996

WITTGENSTEIN AND THE DOCTRINE OF KINAESTHESIS Stewart Candlish

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Some philosophers can recall a time when their colleagues used to dismiss various findings of psychologists as stemming from conceptual confusion. Now, though, those who write about the mind are thought negligent if they fail to defer to the results of empirical work. But just how deferential should we be? I shall show that that earlier dismissiveness w o u l d h a v e b e e n justified in at least one case: the study of proprioception (kinaesthesis). This conclusion will not, however, show philosophers to advantage, for the psychologists at least get marks for effort: they have tried to come to terms with what is after all a kind of awareness that is absolutely central to human activity, whereas twentieth-century English-language philosophers have largely ignored both proprioception and the empirical study of it. ~ This has remained true despite Wittgenstein's being a conspicuous exception to the rule. As part of a widespread comparative neglect of the later sections of Philosophical Investigations (not to mention the subsequently published Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology, which often serves to make those sections intelligible), very little of what has been written about him has been devoted to this topic. Perhaps this neglect will cease if Kripke or Putnam should develop an interest in them. So an a p p r o a c h to the t o p i c o f p r o p r i o c e p t i o n t h r o u g h an e x a m i n a t i o n of Wittgenstein's discussion of it should prove useful in more than one way. First, obviously enough, it will help us to understand that discussion itself (no minor task even on its own). Further, it should cast some light on Wittgenstein's later philosophy of psychology in general, including its significance for both philosophy and psychology themselves. Most helpfully, perhaps, because of his radical departure from what we shall see to have To illustrate: proprioception goes unmentioned in D.W. Hamlyn's Sensation and Perception (London: Routledge, 1961) and his The Psychology of Perception (London: Routledge, 1957). It is covered briefly in D.M. Armstrong's Bodily Sensations (London: Routledge, 1962) p. 41. After remarking that 'there seems to be some phenomenological difference between sensations of heat and pressure, on the one hand, and kinaesthetic sensations on the other', Armstrong says, 'But it does not seem that there is any important difference here.' We shall see if this is true. More recent books are scarcely more satisfactory. Neither Daniel Dennett's Consciousness Explained (Boston: Little, Brown, 1991) nor Owen Flanagan's Consciousness Reconsidered (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992) has any substantial treatment of the matter. There are two fuller explorations known to me. One is by A.I. Melden, who gave an account of Wittgenstein's Investigations discussion of the topic, in his 'My Kinaesthetic Sensations Advise Me . . . ', Analysis, 18 (1957-1958) pp. 43-48 and repeated it in his Free Action (London: Routledge, 1961), Although there are common elements, this account is both different from mine and devoid of the context supplied here, which reveals the significance of Wittgenstein's discussion. But in any case it, too, was overlooked as philosophers concentrated their criticism upon Melden's distinction between reasons and causes. The other is in Brian O'Shaughnessy's The Will (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980); I consider it later. 581

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been a general consensus on proprioception, it will serve both to throw into prominence certain significant features of that consensus and to assist in its evaluation. It will also provide a chance to illustrate a paradoxical-seeming idea: that proprioception's importance to philosophy consists in part in its neglect by philosophers. II.

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In Philosophical Investigations Wittgenstein's discussion of proprioception appears in Part II, section viii. (I shall refer to this from now on as ' v i i i ' and, following the Anscombe translation, stick to the term 'kinaesthesis'.) It starts with a sentence in double quotation marks: "My kinaesthetic sensations advise me of the movement and position of my limbs." Whether or not this is genuine quotation, it neatly captures a received idea which I shall call the doctrine of kinaesthesis.: I distinguish the doctrine from what may be termed 'kinaesthetic ability'. By this latter phrase I shall mean the capacity to do things like adopt postures and make movements appropriate to one's situation, or obey instructions concerning them, or describe one's own bodily posture and movements (active and passive), all without looking or getting outside help. The doctrine concerns the basis of this ability, and, as I shall show, is dubious; the existence of the ability is not. 3 I describe the doctrine as 'received' for two reasons, which I shall illustrate. One is that versions of it have been commonplace in the writings of psychologists. Second, some influential philosophical programmes were committed to it. Although I separate the psychological and philosophical writers for expository convenience, it will become clear that many of the underlying ideas which generate the doctrine are common to both (as is at least one of the writers). III. First, the psychologists, beginning with those of Wittgenstein's own time. It is well known both that Wittgenstein had a great interest in the work of William James and that he thought this work displayed profoundly misleading ways of thinking about the mind. Likewise, it may not be news that James thought our kinaesthetic ability to depend upon kinaesthetic sensations. But it can still be surprising to see how extreme James' view actually was: [W]e have, whenever we perform a movement ourselves, . . . kinaesthetic impresFor ease of reference, at the end of this paper there is an Appendix listing, in alphabetical order, the various doctrines, arguments and assumptions to which I shall be referring. I considered using 'knowledge' rather than 'ability'. But in view of the fact that animals of widely varying cognitive capacities have kinaesthetic ability in the disjunctive sense just outlined, this risks over-intellectualizing the capacity. Compare, e.g., what Elizabeth Anscombe had to say on what she called 'knowledge without observation' in her Intention (Oxford: Blackwell, 2nd edn., 1963). Anscombe justified her preference for talking of knowledge rather than ability by pointing out that it can go wrong (ibid., pp, 13-14); but, as every games-player knows, abilities can misfire too.

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s i o n s . . . [which[ are so many resident effects of the motion. Not only are our muscles supplied with afferent as well as with efferent nerves, but the tendons, the ligaments, the articular surfaces, and the skin about the joints are all sensitive, and, being stretched and squeezed in ways characteristic of each particular movement, give us as many distinctive feelings as there are movements possible to perform. [William James, The Principles of Psychology, vol. 2 (New York: Henry Holt, 1890) p. 488; extended italics mine] James thought these feelings vital to controlled activity. He suggests that the case of Landry's patient shows . . the absolute need of guiding sensations of some kind for the successful carrying out of a concatenated series of movements . . , [W]here the chain is voluntary, we need to know at each movement just where we are in it, if we are to will intelligently what the next link shall b e . . . [ibid., p. 490; James' italics] One might infer here that James did everything extremely slowly and attentively. But of course the answer to the question, 'How could he have come to believe this?', is not to be found in his possession of an unusually languid and self-reflective temperament. Rather, as we shall see, he was, along with others, in the grip of one or more of a set of natural assumptions. One of this set, which I shall label the physiological assumption, can be seen in James only by considering the above remarks in their original context (too long to quote), but is immediately visible in other psYchological writings of the period, such as this remark in 1893 from the Grundriss der Psychologie by Wundt's pupil, Oswald Kiilpe, in his discussion of kinaesthesis: Our knowledge of the sensations is, in fact, entirely due to experiment and to anatomical, physiological and pathological observation. [p. 141 of Titchener's translation, Outlines of Psychology, London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1909] 4 The physiological assumption is that the function of afferent neural structures is the transmission of sensations. It generally appears implicitly, embedded in the common argument that, despite their elusiveness in consciousness, kinaesthetic sensations must exist because the appropriate physiological apparatus is present. We can call this the physiological argument for the existence of kinaesthetic sensations. Another of these assumptions, aptly termed the empiricist assumption, is embedded in what we may call the a priori argument (connoisseurs of irony may appreciate this link), that these sensations must exist because how else could we know our posture and movements without looking? Again usually implicit, the assumption emerges in this sentence from Wundt himself: For sensations are, as we know, the only means by which we receive intimation of In fact, Kiilpe was opposed to talk of kinaesthetic sensations, fearing that the title would lead us to group together sensations from physiologically different sources. But this is a dispute within the overall consensus, not a questioning of the common fundamental model of first-person knowledge.

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changes, whether outside of us or within our own body. Wundt's next remark displays the influence of a further member of the set: Now, if we attend closely to our movements, we become aware that they are, in fact,

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always attended by sensations from the muscles. This member is the introspectionist assumption, that one way of finding out what the mind contains is to introspect so that the relevant items become present to consciousness or attention. Wundt moves next to an observation that should have made him question these two assumptions: As a rule . . . these sensations are so weak that they escape our notice . . . [W]e require special experimental methods, or an unusual intensity of sensation, if we are
Psychology, trans. J.E. Creighton and E.B. Titchener (London:

to become conscious of it as such. [Wilhelm Wundt, Lectures on H u m a n a n d A n i m a l George Allen and Company, 1912; original German publication, Leipzig, 1892) pp. 134-135]

We shall come to the matter of experimental methods in a moment; now we can just notice that the reference to 'an unusual intensity of sensation' reveals a commitment to an extreme form of the idea that kinaesthetic sensations can be more or less intense: that some sensation completely unavailable to consciousness, or at least to introspective attention, may be made available by increasing its intensity, the sensation persisting throughout this process. I call this form the intensity assumption. The empiricist assumption appears again in the second of these sentences concerning kinaesthesis from Royce's Outlines o f Psychology (London: Macmillan, 1903): The weight of the experimental and pathological evidence is to the effect that we are
unaware o f our own movements except in terms o f the sensory experiences which thus accompany and result from their occurrence . . . [O]ur sensory experience . . . furnishes the basis for the only knowledge that we are able to possess of what our

movements are. [pp. 126-127; Royce's italics] But here, with the reference to experimental and pathological evidence, Royce adds to the empiricist assumption a hint of an argument repeated ad nauseam in the writings of later psychologists, the deprivation argument: scepticism about kinaesthetic sensations is allayed by pointing out that things go badly wrong when they are removed. (This argument is also at work in the second of the earlier quotations from James, for the case of Landry's patient is a standard example of the alleged deprivation.) We can see from these passages taken from a sample of early general texts by wellknown psychologists that there seems to have been a broad consensus on the subject of kinaesthetic s e n s a t i o n s : This consensus persisted for some decades. For example,

I chose some members of the sample because we know Wittgenstein had read them. Others were randomly selected. I cite mainly general text books, precisely because they illustrate the

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K6hler, with whose work Wittgenstein was familiar, assumed in his Gestalt Psychology (London: Bell and Sons, 1930) pp. 128-129, the unproblematic existence of kinaesthetic sensations. Persistence and consensus are illustrated by the near word-for-word repetition of the standard account of kinaesthesis in both the third (1913; p. 249) and fourth (1932; p. 256) editions of Stout's influential A Manual of Psychology (London: University Tutorial Press). As one would expect, there were differences within the consensus, but such differences appear insignificant against the similarities. This orthodoxy was still prevalent in the textbooks of a later era. Here, for example, is a revealing sentence from Krech and Crutchfield's Elements of Psychology (New York: Knopf, 1958): We are normally unappreciative of the role of kinesthetic sensations in our behavior, but their importance is dramatically underlined in cases where they are missing. [p. 73] What a useful alternative is 'unappreciative' to the disturbingly paradoxical 'unconscious'! Notice, too, the use of a version of the deprivation argument: kinaesthetic sensations must be important, despite our not appreciating them, because things go wrong when we are deprived of them. (Of course the missing premiss of this argument is that interference with the functioning of the afferent nerves deprives us of our kinaesthetic ability only by depriving us of kinaesthetic sensations, a premiss indistinguishable from the physiological assumption.) ~ But the consensus now starts to crack, and other textbooks of the same era are more cagey, sometimes replacing talk of sensations with talk of information. Nevertheless, much of the earlier dogma remains. The deprivation argument is very common, for example, as is the physiological argument. In one version of the latter the kinaesthetic sense is actually identified with the receptors in muscles and joints, becoming simply a piece of physiology. This is a version of the argument which guarantees its conclusion by defining it in terms of the premiss! (And exhibits the wildly confusing practice occasionally found amongst psychologists of surreptitiously giving ordinary notions physiological definitions.) 7

Continued... dominant beliefs of their time. I have not omitted mention of examples recalcitrant to my argument; I have not discovered any. When the conclusion of the deprivation argument is the existence of kinaesthetic sensations, this premiss is question-begging. The Krech and Crutchfield version argues only for their importance, their existence perhaps being assumed. Illustrative examples of this increasing caution are Clifford T. Morgan's Introduction to Psychology (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2rid edn., 1961) p. 391 and PhysiologicalPsychology (New York: McGraw-Hill, 3rd edn., 1965) p. 257-258. Some estimate of the increase can be gained by comparing these texts with their later incarnations, such as the 1979 co-written sixth edition of Morgan's Introduction to Psychology (though the 1974 third edition of Krech and Crutchfield is still openly committed to the doctrine of kinaesthesis). A good example of the deprivation argument can be found on p. 96 of J.M. Darley, S. Glucksberg, L. Kamin and R.A. Kinchla's Psychology (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 2nd edn., 1984). The identification of the kinaesthetic sense with the physiological apparatus occurs on p. 101 of Dennis Coon's Introduction to Psychology (St Paul: West Publishing Company, 5th edn., 1986), shortly followed by the soothing deprivation argument. I.P. Howard's article in the widely-acclaimed Oxford Companion to the Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), manages to talk about the 'kinaesthetic sense' (p. 727) while avoiding any talk of sensations.

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Textbooks on motor learning, as one would expect, devote greater space to the subject of kinaesthesis, but have much in common with the general texts: while sharing the caution of the more recent editions, they often display the same preconceptions, and sometimes a casual sentence will reveal a persisting attachment to the older model? Researchers in the field are predictably more cautious than are the textbook authors, and seem mostly content to avoid talk of kinaesthetic sensations, confining themselves to the v o c a b u l a r y of k i n a e s t h e t i c receptors, f e e d b a c k , i n f o r m a t i o n and s i g n a l s ? Nevertheless, traces of the doctrine of kinaesthesis still abound in the research literature, though in a form so diluted that they often amount to little more than the vocabulary and a residual confusion about what kinaesthesis is. Two recent examples will suffice. Lawrence Parsons tells us that in his experiments 'subjects often report kinesthetic sensations'.10 (In fact, many experimenters say this sort of thing, but never give these reports in direct speech) He then distinguishes, without saying how, among 'proprioceptive, kinesthetic, muscular . . . . articular, postural, tactile, cutaneous, vestibular, equilibrium.. senses', and further distinguishes these from 'our sense of physical effort', leaving one wondering just what is left in the category kinaesthetic. Then, as we have noticed in another case, he identifies these 'senses' with bits of physiology, thus effectively making the existence of kinaesthetic sensations unarguable. But Parsons' conception of what he is talking about seems to be in sharp conflict with that of Gandevia, McCloskey and Burke, who begin their paper thus: 'Kinaesthesia encompasses three main sensations: the sensations of position and movement of joints; the sensations of force, effort and heaviness associated with muscular contractions; and the sensations of the perceived timing of muscular c o n t r a c t i o n s . ' " The conflict between these two conceptions of kinaesthesis shows how the expression 'kinaesthetic sensations' seems to have become little more than an abbreviation of 'whatever explains our kinaesthetic ability', and the doctrine of kinaesthesis has degenerated into a (confusing) slogan. What this brief survey of the writings of psychologists indicates is that Wittgenstein's critique of the doctrine of kinaesthesis has at least this significance: it struck at the heart of a long-lived psychological consensus on the subject of our kinaesthetic ability, one of the things he must have had in mind when charging psychology with 'confusion and barrenness' (Investigations, II, section xiv). 12 This consensus has, of course, begun to break up as computer-inspired psychologists have begun to dream of models of motor learning and control which do not appeal to 8 An example is R.A Schmidt's Motor Control and Learning (Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics Publishers, 2rid edn., 1988). Compare page 156 with the diagram two pages later George H. Sage's Motor Learning and Control: A Neuropsychological Approach (Dubuque, IA: Wm. C. Brown Publishers, 1984) ch. 11 portrays kinaesthesis as 'perceptual experience' and, in a discussion of the question of muscle receptors, exhibits the physiological assumption in a striking form (p. 179). 9 Some recent examples can be found in Approaches to the Study of Motor Control and Learning (ed.) J.J. Summers (Amsterdam: North-Holland, 1992) 10 Lawrence M. Parsons, 'Temporal and Kinematic Properties of Motor Behavior Reflected in Mentally Simulated Action', Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance 20 (1994) pp. 709-730; see p. 709 for the quotation. 11 S.C. Gandevia, D.I. McCloskey and David Burke, 'Kinaesthetic Signals and Muscle Contraction', Trends in Neurosciences 15 (1992) pp. 62-65. 12 There is evidence for this in the surprising extent to which he was concerned with this topic. This will he detailed in a later footnote.

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conscious monitoring of posture and movement. We have seen a corresponding shift in the discussions of kinaesthesis from talk of sensation to more neutral talk of 'information' and 'signalling', terms whose use disclaims appeal to consciousness. On the other hand, as we have also seen, even recent psychological writing can tend to slip back into older ways of talking, so compelling is the picture of self-knowledge which gave rise to the doctrine of kinaesthesis in the first place. But getting to the bottom of this matter requires that more than this be said about that doctrine's sources. We have already seen some of these: the a priori, the deprivation, and the physiological arguments. These do not function independently. As we saw, the deprivation argument, considered as a demonstration of the existence of kinaesthetic sensations, has a suppressed and question-begging premiss, that interference with the functioning of the afferent nerves deprives one of sensations, a premiss which in practice is not distinguished from the physiological assumption, that the function of afferent neural structures is the transmission of sensations. And considered as a demonstration of the importance, rather than existence, of kinaesthetic sensations, the argument still rests on that same premiss (though in the new context it is no longer question-begging). Once the physiological assumption is accepted, however, the physiological argument, that the existence of kinaesthetic sensations is demonstrated by the presence of appropriate structures in the body, becomes irresistible. But why should the presence of certain structures be supposed to demonstrate the existence of sensations of a certain kind? One might have thought the existence of such sensations needed no argument; there is all too little difficulty about noticing the deliverances of hearing and smell, and there is no need to find neural structures in the body to assure oneself that there are such deliverances. (This point will survive any general philosophical attack on the notion of sensation: it will merely need more cautious statement.) There are two factors which may seem to guarantee the inference from the existence of neural structures to that of kinaesthetic sensations. One is that the structures are physically analogous to others which undoubtedly do underpin the having of certain kinds of sensations, such as hearing. But with hearing there is no prior doubt about the existence of the sensations (except for general worries about the whole category of sensation, which, as I said, do not affect the issue here), so that discovery of the underlying mechanism would never be supposed to license a physiological argument for the existence or importance of auditory sensations, for such argument would be superfluous; and this analogy of structure, on its own, would surely have foundered on the evident absence of sensations of the range and variety suggested by James. (This is the point at which an appeal is made to the introspectionist and intensity assumptions. I shall return to this near the end of the paper.) The other factor is the a priori argument itself which, as we have seen, relies upon the empiricist assumption. And acceptance of this assumption in turn makes plausible the physiological assumption via the deprivation argument. Clearly, what we have here is a sort of lattice of apparently mutually supporting ideas, and it should be unsurprising that they have dominated the thinking of psychologists. But in fact, as I have just shown, the final appeal in the defence of the doctrine of kinaesthesis is likely to be, on the one hand, to the introspectionist and intensity assumptions, and, on the other, to the empiricist assumption. Despite their prevalence in the thinking of psychologists, these are essentially philosophical dogmas. And kinaesthetic

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sensations are a test case; if these three cannot take the strain, the whole structure of assumptions and arguments we have uncovered in the psychology books will collapse. So at last we can see why Wittgenstein, who we should remember himself once pursued experimental research in psychology, thought this apparently insignificant topic worth prolonged consideration; and why these dogmas provide much of the material for his discussion. Is this a matter of purely historical significance? Is the doctrine of kinaesthesis just part of psychology's past? I have tried to show that the answer to these questions is 'No' in both cases, and that its influence still lingers. But even if I am wrong, and this influence has faded to insignificance, it would not follow that psychology in general is now free from doubtful philosophical assumptions. The recent controversy over mental imagery gives this suggestion the lie. As Peter Slezak has shown, those psychologists who, in their contributions to this controversy, have claimed their own theories of imagery to be purely empirical and have stigmatized rival theories as 'philosophical' (this, apparently, is a term of abuse), have just confused their theories with the data they are intended to explain, so that objections to the theories seem to them to be denials of established facts. Thus Kosslyn, for example, describes the rival tacit knowledge account as a 'no imagery alternative'. Such psychologists are simply taking for granted a set of a priori assumptions which are precisely the ones disputed by the 'philosophers' (who are, in fact, often just other psychologists and cognitive scientists), just as the advocates of the doctrine of kinaesthesis were, as we have seen, motivated more by prior assumptions than by any actual observations. 1~ Of course, we should defer to empirical discoveries. But they have to be precisely that to command such deference. IV. Observing the empiricist assumption in the underpinning of the doctrine of kinaesthesis brings me to the second way in which this doctrine can justly be termed 'received': it expresses a commitment of some influential philosophical programmes. For the a priori argument - 'How else could we know?' - is the predictable response of an empiricist whose attention is drawn to one's apparently non-observational knowledge of one's own posture and movements. But to get clear about this, it will help if we look at the opening of Wittgenstein's discussion. After the 'quotation' already noted, Wittgenstein remarks just how slight and vague the sensations involved in movements can be, observing that he himself, when he moves his index finger slightly, doesn't feel anything in the joint, without this interfering with his ability to describe the movement. But the joint, if the physiological argument is accepted, is where the most prominent feelings ought to be, for while there has been argument about other receptors, even the disputants agree that there are important kinaesthetic receptors in the joint. This already loosens the hold of ~3 Kosslyn's description comes from p. 30 of his lmage and Mind (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980). Peter Slezak's incisive critique of this debate can be found in three papers: 'Reinterpreting Images', Analysis 50 (1990) pp. 235-243; 'Can Images Be Rotated and Inspected? A Test of the Pictorial Medium Theory', Program of the Thirteenth Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (Hillsdale, NJ: Laurence Erlbaum Associates, 1991); and 'When Can Visual Images Be Re-Interpreted? Non-Chronometric Tests of Pictorialism', Proceedings of the Fourteenth Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (Hillsdale, NJ: Laurence Erlbaum Associates, 1992).

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the doctrine of kinaesthesis, and prompts his interlocutor to appeal to the a priori argument in its defence: "But after all, you must feel it, otherwise you wouldn't know (without looking) how your finger was moving."

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Yet the a priori argument, too, succumbs to an obvious point about the phenomena: Wittgenstein reminds us that we can tell the direction of a sound because of the difference in effect on the two ears, yet one doesn't actually sense this difference in the ears? 4 The discussion could almost stop here. But instead Wittgenstein broadens it, adding: It is the same with the idea that it must be some feature of our pain that advises us of the whereabouts of the pain in the body, and some feature of our memory image that tells us the time to which it belongs. Perhaps it is the same. But what is the point of saying so? The answer is that both ideas are in works of Russell which Wittgenstein read and criticized. (They can also be found in James, op. cit., vol. 2, p. 155 and vol. 1, p. 605 respectively.) Here, for example, is a passage from Theory of Knowledge: The 1913 Manuscript (London: Allen and Unwin, 1983): Take again the localization of bodily sensations. All feelings in the great toe have something in common, however they may differ otherwise; it is in virtue of this common quality that we learn to locate them all in the great toe. It is difficult not to believe that this common quality is [one] with which we are acquainted. [p. 95, lines 30-41] And the second idea appears in The Analysis of Mind (London: Allen and Unwin, 1921): I come now to the other characteristic which memory-images must have in order to account for our knowledge of the past. They must have some characteristic which makes us regard them as referring to more or less remote portions of the past. [It is clear from the context that this characteristic is to be a 'feeling'.] [p. 162] Wittgenstein's hostility to Theory of Knowledge is now too well known to need documentation. That he was critical of The Analysis of Mind, at a time when he had been discussing kinaesthetic sensations, comes out in A.C. J a c k s o n ' s notes in Lectures, 15 14 Wittgenstein says that our ability to tell the direction of a sound arises because the sound 'affects one ear more strongly than the other'. It is natural to construe 'more strongly' here as 'more intensely'. But, in fact, the phenomenon is more complex than that: phase and time differences are also involved. This only strengthens his main point. In P.T. Geach, K.J. Shah and A.C. Jackson, Wittgenstein's Lectures on Philosophical Psychology 1946-1947 (Hertfordshire: Harvester, 1988), Geach has Wittgenstein remarking on the compellingness of the a priori argument (p. 90). I refer to this book from now on as Lectures. 15 See also Stuart Shanker, 'Wittgenstein versus Russell on the Analysis of Mind' in twine, A. and Wedeking, G. (eds.), Bertrand Russell and Analytic Philosophy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993).

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where an explicit reference is made (p. 322) in an account of what seems to have been a discussion of a form of the a priori argument, a form generalized to all the senses. Shah's and Jackson's notes (pp. 210, 268) also show Wittgenstein's familiarity with Our Knowledge of the External World (London: Allen and Unwin, 1914), a work which sketched Russell's well known philosophical programme of the logical construction of the external world out of sense-data. Here is a passage from that work (pp. 84-85) which exhibits the kind of thing the programme involves (italics mine): A table viewed from one place presents a different appearance from that which it presents from another place. This is the language of common sense, b u t . . , already assumes that there is a real table of which we see the appearances. Let us try to state what is known in terms of sensible objects alone, without any element of hypothesis. . What we ought to say is that, while we have those muscular and other sensations which make us say we are walking, our visual sensations change in a continuous way . . [W]hat we really know by experience, when we have freed our minds from the assumption of permanent 'things' with changing a p p e a r a n c e s . . , is a correlation of muscular and other bodily sensations with changes in visual sensations. Later (p. 88) Russell explains that each sensory modality has its own 'space': By experience of the correlation of touch and sight sensations, we become able to associate a certain place in touch-space with a certain corresponding place in sightspace. These modality-spaces seem to be sub-spaces of the private spaces whose number is that of the possible percipients corresponding to the possible perspectives; the exact relation is very hard to work out from Russell's text (p. 96) because at this stage he is talking entirely in visual terms, a habit Wittgenstein thought typical: 'Sense-data' always chiefly means visual and auditory data. 'Tactile? We'll see after them later' is the attitude of the sense-data philosopher. TM And, Wittgenstein could have continued, afortiori for kinaesthetic sense-data. But the programme of Our Knowledge of the External WorM, no less than that of The Analysis of Mind, involves Russell in just such issuing of promissory notes, so that he is committed to finding not merely tactile but also kinaesthetic sense-data, identifying them, and incorporating the information they provide into the set which enables the construction of public space and its objects from the modality-spaces and private spaces of individual percipients It is, accordingly, revealing that he does not even try to identify 'the muscular and other sensations which make us say we are walking'. (This is what I meant when I said earlier that it was the topic's neglect by philosophers which in part gave it importance: in consonance with his later emphasis on the prominence of bodily action in human life, Wittgenstein exposes the awkward and widely ignored epistemic facts about ~ From the notes of P.T. Geach, Lectures, p. 87 (italics in original). Cf. also p. 216 of Shah's notes.

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it. But it is only by ignoring those facts that 'the sense-data philosopher' can make his theories plausible.) It is disastrous for Russell's programme that the required kinaesthetic sense-data are not available in the diversity and richness which, according to the empiricist assumption, are needed to account for the sophistication of our kinaesthetic ability, and that any attempt to pretend that the missing data are there after all involves the invocation of public space and public objects in the private specification of the supposed sensory information meant to enable the construction of that space and those objects. Another Russellian programme for which our kinaesthetic ability poses a problem is that arising from his later neutral monism. Once one notices that this theory's 'neutral stuff', supposedly 'neither mental nor material' (The Analysis of Mind, p. 6), consists of the immediate descendants of the sense-data which figured prominently in his earlier theory, it is easy to see that his application of neutral monism to psychological phenomena is one form of empiricism. It is then entirely unsurprising that this application, which one would expect to involve the elimination of the psychological in favour of the neutral stuff, whatever that stuff might be, should involve as its ' . . . main t h e s i s . . , that all psychic phenomena are built up out of sensations and images alone' (ibid., p. 279), which otherwise would not look like a neutral monist thesis at all. The more one studies Wittgenstein's later thinking, of which viii is a small part of the 'precipitate' (as he describes the Investigations in its Preface), the clearer it becomes that Russell's views are constantly under a keen and rather hostile scrutiny. Thus, for example, we find in Geach's notes (Lectures, p. 80), towards the end of a discussion which has ranged over kinaesthetic sensations, voluntary action and bodily feelings, the following remark concerning what we have just seen is the 'main thesis' of The Analysis of

Mind:
We are criticizing the reduction of everything to sensations or images. 17 V.

Having considered the question of the significance of viii for psychology and philosophy, we can now look at some of its details. The larger body of writings in the background oflnvestigations, Part II contains a discussion of sensations in general which begins thus:

For an account of Wittgenstein's treatment of the application of this reductive programme to voluntary action, see Stewart Candlish, '"Das Wollen ist auch nut eine Erfahrung"' in Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations: Text and Context (ed.) R.L. Arrington and H.-J. Glock (London: Routledge, 1991) pp. 203-226, esp. pp. 208-214; pp. 220-222 of the same paper are concerned with Wittgenstein's mention of kinaesthetic sensations in the sections of Philosophical Investigations concerned with the connected topic of the will. The second paragraph of Shanker's 'Wittgenstein versus Russell on the Analysis of Mind' cites detailed evidence in support of the claim that Russell is constantly under hostile scrutiny. Further: Russell's lectures 'The Philosophy of Logical Atomism' explicitly embrace the possibility of a private language. (See Logic and Knowledge (ed.) R.C. Marsh (London: Allen and Unwin, 1956) p. 198, or The Philosophy of Logical Atomism and Other Essays 1914-1919, The Collected Papers of Bertrand Russell, Volume 8 (London: Allen and Unwin, 1986) p. 176.)

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These remarks summarize extensive comments and questions in Remarks (I, 386, 771, 783), Zettel (478), and, especially, Lectures (pp. 77, 89-92, 208-210, 218-220, 312, 321), where Wittgenstein suggests that various features are typical of sensations in general. Thus sensations admit a gradation of quantity (the noise in one's ears gets louder, or softer; one's arm hurts more, or less), and this possibility of degrees of intensity is connected with attitudes towards the sensation (the intensity may become unbearable, for instance) and with the possibility of the more intense submerging the less. Sensations also vary in quality, allowing both the application of adjectives to them and the possibility of mixtures, intermediates and blends (such as 'greenish yellow' or 'between a flute and a violin'). This possession of both quality and duration makes possible synchrony and co-variance of different sensations (for example, 'Between 8.15 and 8.25 the noise increased while the pain faded'). In his lectures (Lectures, p. 321), Wittgenstein seems to have considered it possible to create gestalt effects by adding visual sense-data. He constantly invites us to ask ourselves whether these characteristics are found in kinaesthesis, and the implied answer seems to be that they are not. If we restrict the comparison from sensations in general to bodily sensations, we find that these are typically located in the body, but the kinaesthetic feeling that my arm is bent is not itself located in the arm. The feeling of position or movement is not, then, a feeling which belongs to the category of sensation; in fact, he suggests, it is no more than the conviction that a part of one's body is in that position or making that movement. 1" All this casts suspicion on the doctrine of kinaesthesis, but much of what he says in these lectures and background texts is put tentatively. In particular, he seems uncertain whether to think of kinaesthesis in terms of feelings (but ones not to be classified as sensations) or in terms of awareness in the sense of knowledge rather than of feeling (e.g. Lectures, p. 92). And by the time we get to viii and to Zettel much is, as usual, transformed or left out altogether; perhaps because the talk of qualities and mixtures and blends and intermediates appears to attribute the qualities of things sensed to sensations themselves. 2 But there is a powerful extended discussion in Remarks whose early sections (I, 383-91) raise a series of embarrassing questions which cumulatively unsettle the doctrine of kinaesthesis as much as anything in viii. Wittgenstein here writes at sufficient consecutive length, and sufficiently clearly, for the passages to speak for themselves. 2~ ~ Zettel (472). The source is a longer treatment in Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology, II, 63 and continued at 148. The Zettel version has small modifications, and is split (possibly against Wittgenstein's own intentions) among 472, 483 and 621. 19 I devote little space to the matter here because there is little space available and it would anyway be impossible to improve on the presentation in Malcolm Budd, Wittgenstein's Philosophy of Psychology (London: Routledge, 1989) pp. 149-151. 2o Budd (loc. cit.) shows no such hesitation over accepting what Wittgenstein says. 2, The discussion of the will in Philosophical Investigations is likewise preceded by a range of ear-

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Eliminating the earlier hesitation and confusion, Wittgenstein draws on the more secure of these claimed typical characteristics of sensations, the emphasis being on quantitative intensity, when, at the end of viii, he deals a savage blow to the doctrine of kinaesthesis: Our interest in a 'feeling' is of a quite particular kind. It includes, for instance, the 'degree of the feeling', its 'place', and the extent to which one feeling can be submerged by another. (When a movement is very painful, so that the pain submerges every other slight sensation in the same place, does this make it uncertain whether you have really made this movement? Could it lead you to find out by looking?) Here by 'feelings' he clearly means sensations and his implicit denial that there are feelings playing the r61e demanded by the doctrine of kinaesthesis has to be understood in this way. The denial is made easier to accept by considering, as he does earlier in viii, a case where a sensation does advise of the movement or position of a limb. The case is intended to be unusual: to emphasize that people do not generally find out their posture or movements in the way described. Moreover, if our kinaesthetic ability depended upon kinaesthetic sensations one could expect occasional confusion as a result of the masking of the sensation by, e.g., severe pain, or by virtue of their monopolising our attention when particularly intense; but such errors are just about unknown. 22 After displaying these differences between normal kinaesthesis and a case where one's information really does rest on sensations, Wittgenstein turns in viii to a seemingly unrelated point: he asks, 'What is the criterion for my learning the shape and colour of an object from a sense-impression?' The general theme of the discussion which follows is that where a sensation offers a genuine basis for a judgment about how things are in the world, the sensation must be characterizable independently of the things the world contains. Now this claim, considered in isolation, is dubious: for example, one may judge the presence of garlic by the smell of garlic, and the sensation involved is identified through its cause, i.e., garlic. But Wittgenstein's point is not intended to stand alone; we have to remember the background of the discussion. The intended target is the empiricist assumption and Russell's programme of logical construction of the world, in which as we have seen the doctrine of kinaesthesis plays a crucial part. This programme requires just this possibility of independent characterization if it is to make any sense at all, since the construction would be superfluous if the world has to be invoked at the outset in order for the constructor to identify the data from which it is to be constructed. Wittgenstein's aim comes out clearly in Geach's notes in Lectures (p. 88):

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Continued... lier and often considerably clearer remarks, though there is no comparably prolonged and continuous treatment. See Candlish, op. cit., for a guide to these. The subject of error needs a paper to itself. But there appear to be interesting contrasts between kinaesthesis and, say, vision. For example, visual illusions typically need not involve disruption to the visual apparatus. (Think, e.g., of the Ames room.) Vestibular illusions (including aftereffects), too, can be created by providing misleading information from the outside, though even here the body must be, e.g., spun. While this may only be a matter of degree, it is not so easy to see how to produce kinaesthetic illusions without in some way interfering with the subject's nervous system.

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A child doesn't learn to talk about sense-data. People say 'Sense-data are given the physical object is a logical construction'... Sense-data as we are now conceiving them are views: and why shouldn't we build up the object from views of it? The sense-datum answers the question 'how does it look to you now?' The answer would be a drawing or a painting. But suppose it's a cube I feel and am asked how it feels, I can only say it's a cube - there is no longer a question how it feels.

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The question about shape and colour, then, is one which concerns the logical construction programme. (Given his general rejection of technical vocabulary, Wittgenstein would have been unlikely to talk about 'sense-impressions' without some sort of distancing.) That is, even if (as I suggested with the example of the smell of garlic) it relies upon an illegitimate characterization of sensations, that characterization in this context is not committed to the claim that there must always be the possibility of a world-independent identification of a sensation; rather, the suggestion would give further reason for supposing that any programme which relies upon the claim is illegitimate. The point here, in other words, is not so much that kinaesthesis is not a matter of sensations; rather it is that, even if it were, it would still be the wreck of the logical construction programme, since those sensations could not serve as the programme's data. (It is, in fact, just a different application of the point concerning the will made at Investigations, I, 625.) Still, this is just a side-issue in comparison with the main point: that whether or not we think of the operations of our eyes, nose and ears in terms of sensations, those of our kinaesthetic receptors are radically different from them in a way which shows that the latter, unlike the former, cannot even plausibly be thought of in such terms. The neglect of kinaesthesis means that those wishing to reject the empiricist assumption have overlooked the best example for their case. VI. Towards the end of III I said that the final appeal in the defence of the doctrine of kinaesthesis was to the introspectionist, intensity and empiricist assumptions. We have just seen Wittgenstein giving cause to doubt the last of these, but the first two are still to be examined. We have seen already the suggestion that kinaesthetic sensations really do occur but are elusive and easily overlooked. And we have seen too that this idea is lent plausibility by a variety of considerations. One of them is the deprivation argument, and I have pointed out that it is question-begging. Wittgenstein effectively says this himself (Remarks, I, 406), adding that we must not confuse the absence of sensation which results from an anaesthetic with one's feeling nothing in the arm (ibid., 758) - feeling nothing is not the same as feeling that there is no sensation (a definite and rather uncanny feeling). But even those not deceived by the deprivation argument might now succumb to the introspectionist and intensity assumptions. We need here to expose an ambiguity which confuses many discussions of kinaesthetic sensations, including those I have examined in this paper. It emerges through the posing of this question: are kinaesthetic sensations defined by their r61e (as specified in

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the doctrine of kinaesthesis), or are they defined, through inner ostension, as what is disclosed in experience when we introspect on our movements and posture? It would certainly be wrong to interpret Wittgenstein's criticisms of the doctrine of kinaesthesis as amounting to a suggestion that there are no sensations associated with movement and posture (as opposed to sensations of movement and posture). But that does not mean that kinaesthetic sensations in this innocent sense will necessarily play the r61e specified in the doctrine; nor does it mean that they can be discovered in the way suggested by the introspectionist assumption. Applying that assumption to kinaesthesia would suggest that if I don't notice any particular kinaesthetic sensation associated with a certain posture or movement, what I must do is introspect, attend more closely to my internal states so that I can identify the sensations which might otherwise escape unnoticed. We observed that the pronouncements of psychologists often disclose the presence of this idea. But it faces two major difficulties. Wittgenstein himself emphasizes one of them: that introspection will at best reveal only what is going on in me. Unless I already have independent and sufficient reason to think that what I discover in introspection is going to be the right sensation - that is, the one on which my kinaesthetic ability is dependent - and one giving the essence o f kinaesthesis, clearly nothing I so discover can be reliably generalized to other people. (This is why Wittgenstein holds that introspection cannot be a method for revealing a previously unknown essential nature of a mental state.) To see this, remember Wittgenstein's own report; near the start of viii, of the sensations he experiences on moving his finger: these seem both fortuitous (my own, for example, are different) and an inadequate basis for his kinaesthetic ability. (As Wittgenstein is not himself seeking the nature of kinaesthesis through introspection in viii, his use of it there is not liable to his own criticisms.) Even if someone were to say sincerely, 'Introspection reveals to me that my kinaesthetic ability is based on kinaesthetic sensations', we might rightly refuse to accept this as testimony, as Wittgenstein points out in Remarks, I, 790-794 (and compare the final sentence of Investigations, I, 386). The other point (traceable in Investigations, I, 413 but not otherwise explicit) is that introspection may not so much disclose previously overlooked sensations or unnoticed aspects of one's immediate experience as provide new experiences which may then mistakenly be identified as their predecessors. I may just swallow the expensive extra virgin olive oil on my salad without paying attention to what I am doing. But if I am reproved for my inattention and then carefully savour the various alleged complexities and subtleties of its fiavour and aroma, what may be revealed is not something about my previous sensation which I had missed earlier, but something about the oil itself. Similarly, one's unreflective and recessive awareness of posture and movement is not analysed but replaced when the attention is directed towards the body and its attitude. Resistance to this point is encouraged by the intensity assumption, which can itself seem a platitude: obviously, sensations can increase and decrease in intensity and are more or less likely to become the focus of our attention in so doing. But the assumption, as we found it in Wundt, goes far beyond this obvious fact, and postulates the existence of sensations too weak to be available even to the introspective consciousness but which can be made available by increasing their intensity. This idea transforms introspection from simple self-directed attention into a mythical capacity to discern mental objects distinct

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from consciousness itself as, otherwise unaltered, they gradually approach the degree of intensity which makes them discernible, as fish become discernible by swimming from the depths towards the surface without changing their species as they ascend? 3 The fact that this model is crude should not lead us to underestimate its power: after all, the tendency to think of our psychological vocabulary in terms of 'object and designation' was a principal target of Wittgenstein's philosophy of psychology.

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VII. One recent e x c e p t i o n to the p h i l o s o p h i c a l n e g l e c t of k i n a e s t h e s i a is Brian O'Shaughnessy's The Will (ch. 5) which contains a Wittgenstein-inspired attempt to think out from the inside the consequences of the empiricist assumption for our kinaesthetic ability and to display some of the absurdities involved. Curiously enough, though, this part of O'Shaughnessy's work has itself suffered neglect although it is detachable from his overall thesis concerning the will. (What is it about this topic which makes philosophers unwilling to tackle it?) In particular, he has one positive suggestion which might seem to bear consideration. It exploits the ambiguity I mentioned five paragraphs back, and allows the idea that there might be kinaesthetic sensations in the sense of characteristic bodily feelings associated with movement and posture, but not o f movement and posture (and not defined in terms of an evidential r61e either). After describing what is in effect a version of the doctrine of kinaesthesis as 'a mistake', he goes on: The truth is, that certain sensations, say in muscles and joints, play a causal role in determining an immediate awareness of the limb that is not an awareness of those sensations. The so-called 'postural' and 'kinaesthetic' sensations are the causes and not the objects of an immediate though fallible awareness of the limb. [p. 217; his italics] Even if we jib at the continuing talk of sensations here, and think, as Wittgenstein seems to have done, that this is the wrong model on which to understand the feeling that one's leg is bent, this is an interesting suggestion. But is it in fact the truth? It is not obviously true. So one could r e a s o n a b l y expect to be g i v e n reasons to b e l i e v e it. But O'Shaughnessy does not give us any. And a moment's thought should reveal that this would be hard to do: how on earth could a philosopher know whether certain sensations are the causes of one's awareness or not? This looks like an empirical question. But if the rival candidates are, e.g., sensations on the one hand and the corresponding physiological processes on the other, no experiment is going to settle the matter. It is not as if we could, for example, block those supposed sensations without blocking nervous processes. Whether one thinks these sensations causally irrelevant or not is not only going to depend on one's overall account of mind and body; it is surely only through the independent proof or refutation of that account that this much smaller issue could be settled one way or the other. The most that can be said for O'Shaughnessy's claim is that it is consistent with his overall theory? 4 23 The comparison is adapted from one suggested in ch. 7 of John Searle's The Rediscovery of the Mind (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992). 24 With the permission of all concerned, this paper draws heavily on my 'Kin~isthetische

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A priori argument
Kinaesthetic sensations must exist because how else could we know our posture and movements without looking?

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Deprivation argument
The existence and/or importance of kinaesthetic sensations is demonstrated by the disruption caused to behaviour by damage to the relevant afferent nerves.

Doctrine of kinaesthesis
'My kinaesthetic sensations advise me of the movement and position of my limbs.'

Empiricist assumption
Sensations are the only means by which we receive intimation of changes, whether outside of us or within our own body.

Intensity assumption
A sensation previously unavailable to consciousness, or at least to introspective attention, m a y be m a d e available by i n c r e a s i n g its intensity, the sensation p e r s i s t i n g throughout this process.

Introspectionist assumption
One way of finding out what the mind contains is to introspect so that the relevant items become present to consciousness or attention.

Physiological argument
Despite their elusiveness in consciousness, these kinaesthetic sensations must exist because the physiological apparatus is present.

Physiological assumption
The function of afferent neural structures is the transmission of sensations.

University of Western Australia

Received November 1995

Continued...
Empfindungen und epistemische Phantasie' in Eike von Savigny and Oliver Scholz (eds.), Wittgenstein iiber die Seele (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1995) pp. 159-193. It has been significantly affected by many comments on a variety of ancestors and other relatives. I owe thanks to Roy Holland, Eike von Savigny, five(!) referees for the Australasian Journal of Philosophy, and many memorably vigorous participants in seminars at the following universities: Bielefeld, Cambridge, Carleton, Geneva, Glasgow, London (King's College), Reading, Ryerson, St Andrews, Sheffield, Toronto and Western Australia. I also acknowledge the assistance of the Australian Research Council.