Wittgenstein's therapies: From rules to hinges

New Ideas in Psychology 27 (2009) 118–132

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Wittgenstein’s therapies: From rules to hinges Rom Harre´ Psychology Department, Georgetown University, Washington, DC 20057, USA

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Article history: Available online 30 June 2008

Recently Wittgenstein’s claim to be primarily engaged in a kind of therapy for the problems that trouble people in the grip of a certain picture of how things must be has been strongly emphasized. The form the therapy takes is to display various kinds of grammatical errors in the pathological practice. In Wittgenstein’s late work, On Certainty, the role of the concept of rule as the ground of a practice is extended to include a different kind of grounding in ‘‘hinges’’. I argue that there is a therapeutic role for the work of bringing to light the ‘‘hinges’’ that hold fast when the door of philosophy turns. I contrast examples of Wittgensteinian therapy where the cure is achieved by a display of grammatical rules, to cases in which the cure depends on emphasizing the role of a hinge or hinges in pathological confusions of thought in psychology. Ó 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Keywords: Hinge Hinge proposition Therapy Rule Pathology

Most discussions of the way that the writings of Ludwig Wittgenstein have or could influence psychology have focused on the Philosophical Investigations (Wittgenstein, 1953) and Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics (Wittgenstein, 1978), for example, recent studies by Harre´ and Tissaw (2005) and Bennett and Hacker (2003). However, I believe much is to be learned from the kind of analysis to be found throughout Wittgenstein’s last work, On Certainty (Wittgenstein, 1969). It seems that we must acknowledge a ‘‘third Wittgenstein’’. Such a demarcation has been suggested by Moyal-Sharrock (2004b) and notably by the late Gordon Baker (2004). I will follow their way of distinguishing a final phase in Wittgenstein’s work. The key concept on which the thought of the third Wittgenstein turns is that of a ‘‘hinge’’. The concept is introduced explicitly in the phrase ‘‘hinge proposition’’. This idea or something similar in import, seems to be implicit in the Philosophical Investigations (PI, Wittgenstein, 1953) though mainly in the second part of that work. Explicit discussion of the role of hinges appears only in On Certainty (Wittgenstein, 1969). Presumably hinge propositions express in verbal form the

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effective content of hinges, deeply embedded practices in which the constitutive norms of a form of life are realised. Nevertheless, the grounding of practices in hinges differs from grammatical groundings in the kind of errors that result from failure to realise that unlike grammars, hinges have an empirical foundation in the sense that they are grounded in actual ways of acting. The first phase of the discussion to follow distinguishes hinges from grammars and both from logic. A range of examples is then presented to illustrate the distinction between the force of grammatical clarifications and of hinge excavations.

1. Wittgenstein’s progress At first Wittgenstein allowed only the laws of logic as featured in the Tractatus (Wittgenstein, 1922) to be admissible as rules of grammar for the proper construction of the propositions of a language ideally suited to describe the world of material things, their properties, and relations. Complex propositions are truth functions of elementary propositions. Their truth or falsity is a function of the truth and falsity of their component propositions. Adopting this grammar gives us, at least in a certain restricted sense, a bleak but perfect language for science. Wittgenstein was very sure that nothing of importance for human life could be spoken of in this language. For the author of the Tractatus the only necessity was logical necessity. Later, he realised that actual languages were capable of being used to perform all sorts of tasks other than merely describing the immediate material scene. These uses were constrained in more complex ways than those expressed in the laws of logic. There were norms of correctness that everyday language games conformed to. Hence in the Philosophical Investigations, the work of the philosopher is to display rules of grammar for the proper uses of many kinds of words in all sorts of language games (PI, xx 1–50). Violations or misunderstandings of these rules are the prime sources of intractable philosophical problems. The negation of a form of words that is being used to express a rule has no application to anything – it is void, so to speak. This too marks a strong concept of necessity, though weaker than that evident in the Tractatus. Grammar fixes the meanings of words, and so the boundaries within which language games make sense. In this way, grammars are constitutive of forms of life. However, in the third phase of his philosophical explorations Wittgenstein came to see that certain seemingly inescapable pictures of human forms of life, which are the source of longstanding taken for granted thought forms and material practices, are not grammatical at all. They are grounded in very general matters of fact that play the foundational role played by the grammatical rules that the second Wittgenstein emphasized. The negations of the propositions that express these pictures are empirically meaningful, though at some place and time, many are false. Creating a hinge from an empirically false proposition is one source of error, while taking a hinge expressing norms of practice that derive from true empirical principles to have the mandatory force of a grammatical rule is another. Building up a system of educational practices on the belief that women’s reproductive powers will be damaged by too much learning is an example of the first kind of error. Supposing that the succession of the seasons is a grammatical fact about the usage of ‘‘Spring’’, ‘‘Summer’’, ‘‘Autumn’’, and ‘‘Winter’’ conceals the possibility that climate change may lead to a continuous summer. Both kinds of mistake can be found in the writings and the empirical techniques of psychology. The argumentative line of On Certainty is a meditation on how it can be that matters of fact come to play the role of metaphysical foundations of forms of life. The discussion in On Certainty returns again and again to G. E. Moore’s famous claim to have refuted idealism by holding up his hands and declaring ‘‘I know I have two hands’. Here are at least two material things, so idealism is false. Wittgenstein’s discussion focuses on Moore’s use of ‘‘I know.’’. Making the declaration in this form of words would ordinarily mean that he had incontrovertible evidence for the truth of the claim. Not so, argues Wittgenstein. The kind of certainty that is appropriate in this situation is not epistemic but foundational. It reflects the sustaining and constitutive role that materialism plays in the human form of life. The clash between materialism and idealism is not like the clash between a true and a false proposition. Nevertheless, a hinge proposition is empirical though our certainty of it is not a reflection of its empirical truth. So, if a hinge proposition turns out to be false the practice, the foundation or foundations of which it expresses must be abandoned. In the course of

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the discussions in On Certainty Wittgenstein lays out a wide variety of hinge propositions, each of which has, so he supposes, this special role in some human practice. 2. Wittgensteinian therapy There is a profound difference between therapies that involve grammatical rules and those that involve hinges. Problems that arise from a misunderstanding of grammatical propositions, such as the seeming impossibility that a decision could cause an action, are resolved by attending to the grammar of the words ‘‘decision’’ and ‘‘action’’ and other items in the relevant vocabulary. The problem of mind– body interaction will always arise so long as we are in the grip of a certain grammatical picture, as if it embodied the only way the relation between decision and action could be considered. To break the grip of that picture an alternative is needed to show that though the old picture has some legitimate uses, there are other ways of thinking about the topic in hand – other grammars with which to bind and shape relevant discourses. In some contexts ‘‘decision’’ and ‘‘action’’ are internally related. This observation should be enough to break the grip of the picture within which only a causal relation between mental states and actions could be envisaged. The error appears in the way hypothetical causes are invented when none can be discerned. This insight links very directly to the foundations of psychology. A certain genre of psychology, coupled with the claims of some philosophers, depicts our lives as if they were grounded in causal sequences. There is an alternative picture, in which practices, ways of acting and thinking, are subject to standards of correctness, rules replacing causes in psychological explanations, a picture that frames our ways of managing our lives rather differently. But beware! Another tempting picture beckons – that we live our lives by following instructions consciously or unconsciously, as if every action were to be seen as following a rule. Here too intractable problems arise. If there must be rules for applying rules, how could an endless regress be avoided? The cure might to be show that for the most part our practices are not a matter of obeying instructions, doing what we are told is right. The practices that cluster together as a form of life are customs, habits and conventions, rarely formulated as explicit imperatives. This modulation of the role of rules runs through the Philosophical Investigations xx 138–242. In On Certainty, Wittgenstein (1969) dwells on another, yet broader foundation for effective practices, mistakes about which call for a somewhat different therapy. As set out above it seems that there are certain matters of fact, that are held fast to not because they are testably true but because they are foundational, that is sustain forms of life. Once extricated they are seen to enshrine claims and hypotheses that can be tested empirically. These are the hinges upon which our lives turn, normative constraints on thought and action that lie deeply buried in our language games and forms of life. Failure to realise that a normatively constrained practice is grounded in a contestable matter of putative fact is a source of error as profound as the misunderstandings of grammars. A cure for a certain kind of dedicated adherence to a way of thinking and acting is simply to display the relevant hinge proposition or propositions that are foundational to the practice, so that the victim can see that they are false. It is difficult to put this point succinctly. The grounding here is not properly a belief, nor, Wittgenstein himself remarks, is it a presupposition. The grounding does not have the character of a proposition. Hence arises the need to introduce a new expression, the ‘‘hinge’’. For example, there are many practices that seem to hinge on the truth of ‘‘The earth has existed for a long time before I was born’’. In living the way we do, this proposition is almost never consulted in considering possible discourse forms and practical actions. For example, the practice of genealogy is carried on within an implicit framework that is tacitly displayed in the way that genealogists take for granted that everyone has had ancestors (Wittgenstein, 1969, x 234). The popular practice of amateur genealogy would hardly prosper if we were forever plagued with doubts about the former existence of any human beings at all including our forebears. Of course, one might have doubts about whether a person, identified by name or description really existed, say King Arthur. But that doubt only makes sense against the background of the temporal hinges on which our lives turn. What if there were important practices that hinged on false empirical grounds? A striking non-philosophical example of the clash of hinges, occasioned by differences of opinion about the age of the earth, occurred in the 19th century. Conceptions of human life that hinged on the creation story in the book of Genesis were replaced by those that hinged on geological time scales,

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though not without a struggle. For the defenders of the Biblical account, the very meaning of ‘‘human’’ was linked to some special status as the product of a Divine act of creation. Hinges are expressed in hinge propositions. Moyal-Sharrock (2004b, pp. 54–55) uses a nice metaphor for the relation between the descriptive and the normative readings of a hinge proposition.1 The same form of words is used to express a broad general empirical truth hardly any sane person would doubt, but it has a doppelga¨nger, with which one of the norms of a practice is expressed. A rule does not have a descriptive reading. The negation of a grammatical proposition fails to support any uses of the relevant words. The negation of rule has no application in that human language game. However, the negation of a hinge proposition does describe a possible state of affairs. The theme of On Certainty is roughly that the same sentence can be used to express a putative empirical truth and a norm of practice. A hinge proposition, formulating the content of the normative constraints on the performance of a practice in words, is not itself a hinge (Moyal-Sharrock, 2004a, p. 47; Wittgenstein, 1969, x 204). Hinges lie at the same deep level of the normative constraints on practices as do grammars. In the end the grounding practices of a form of life, whether related to rules or hinges, can be given no further grounding in that form of life. Delving down through a justificatory hierarchy of rules one comes to the point where all that can be said is some thing like ‘‘This is what I do!’’ Hinge excavation discloses other deep constrains, but they tie our form of life to this of all possible worlds. Perhaps a corresponding slogan might be ‘‘This is where I live’’. We are often wrong about what this world actually is. 3. Grammatical therapy and hinge therapy A Wittgensteinian psychology would eschew the search for psychological laws on the model of the laws of physics. Instead, research would be directed to analyzing human practices to make explicit the grammatical rules and then reaching beyond to excavate the hinges that also play a foundational role. Hinges are likely to have their sources in biology, ethology, geography, and so on, while grammars have their sources in culture. For example, biology has given us the two sexes as a ubiquitous hinge; ethology has given us shaking hands as a hinge on which various personal relations are built; geography has given us the continents and oceans which once limited the possibilities of exploration. The color spectrum is the product of a cluster of grammatical rules – there are not seven colors in the spectrum. Wittgensteinian therapeutic project turning on grammatical considerations would have been accomplished when a philosopher or a psychologist breaks free of a picture that has been so long exerting its grip, surfacing in all sorts of intractable problems. Do the Hopi really see the colors of the world differently? An alternative picture can be put to work in the research programs of psychologists and the musings of philosophers. Nevertheless, it too must be seized on with caution. No one picture will do justice to all human forms of life. However, to break the grip of grammar requires a different kind of procedure from that required to break the grip of a hinge. The autonomy of grammar from strict dependence on matters of fact means that alternative rules could be proposed for the management of some aspect of our lives (Hutchinson, 2007). To break the grip of a hinge one must show that it reflects something that was taken for granted as a matter of fact rather than a metaphysical principle. The result of hinge therapy is a kind of modesty – one acknowledges that one could have been wrong about what one took for granted in the accomplishing the practices of a form of life. In any piece of philosophical work on the foundations of psychology, it is vital to keep the role of rules and conventions distinct from that of hinges. Grammars are nothing but rules, and rules are malleable, at least in principle. Hinges are actual practices to which a foundational role has accrued. The empirical doppelga¨nger can be refuted – there is no such practice – and with it goes some or all of the normative force of the hinge. However, it is a distressing feature of human life that the empirical refutation of a ‘‘fact that everyone knows’’ may not bring about the abandonment of the normative force of the hinge in question. Whether this implication of much of Wittgenstein’s writings on psychological topics and associated philosophical problems is finally defensible I have no idea. The mosaic of schools, gurus and

1 There are philosophical problems in almost any way of expressing the difference between diverse readings and core statements capable of different readings.

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methodologies in contemporary psychology suggests we are very far from a ubiquitous, problem free picture of the mental, emotional and social lives of members of the species Homo sapiens. 4. Practices Hinges are constitutive, taken-for-granted practices that form the substance of distinct forms of life. Hinge propositions express verbally the conventions and norms of the practices that ground forms of life, and, in another ‘‘adjacent’’ reading, are putative descriptions of matters of fact. If I venture to say ‘‘People can chose to do otherwise than they do’’, I am expressing a hinge or cluster of hinges that ground such practices as the activities of the police, the courts of law, and the prison service. A trial does not begin with a debate about whether people in general are responsible for their actions, though it might with the question of whether this person is responsible for his or her actions. Nevertheless, the march of neuroscience may persuade us that all along we had been naı¨ve in thinking that it was a given fact that people can choose to do otherwise than they have done. What we took to be a grammatical rule expressing some of the norms for the use of the word ‘‘person’’ is factual and empirically false. It was in effect a hinge. This revelation would call for a reassessment of the practices of praising, blaming, assigning responsibility, and so on which were taken for granted in the world of the old, discarded hinge. This is already happening. The ‘insanity defense’ has taken in a wider and wider range of abnormal behaviors as the result of neurological mechanisms and hormonal processes, such as the successful use of PMT as a defense against a charge of murder. Sometimes people are called upon to describe their practices. One way of doing so is to list the norms of the practice verbally as rules. A rule could be used as an instruction to simulate a taken for granted practice. Individuals sometimes follow rules as explicit instructions as to what should be done in this or that situation. Sometimes when we undertake regular and seemingly normatively bound actions, the norms exist only in so far as they are displayed in the way a practice goes unchallenged. Hinge propositions are not rules – as Wittgenstein emphasizes, they can be read as descriptions of putative matters of fact. The general theme of the role of grounding hinges is neatly expressed in many places in On Certainty, for example in the following: I have a telephone conversation with New York. My friend tells me that his young trees have buds of such and such a kind. I am now convinced that his tree is . Am I also convinced that the earth exists? The existence of the earth is rather part of the whole picture which forms the starting point of belief for me (Wittgenstein, 1969, xx 208–209, emphasis original). Wittgenstein, in castigating Moore’s attempt to outflank skepticism (Wittgenstein, 1969, xx 1–60), pointed out how misleading it is to use the word ‘‘knowledge’’, or phrases like ‘‘I know’’, and so on to express the status of such fundamental matters for the human form of life as the materiality of parts of one’s body. Does it make sense to say, ‘‘I know I have two hands’’ waving them about in front of one’s face? When one knows something one thinks one has incontrovertible reasons to believe it. To talk of reasons in the context of hinges suggests far too cognitive and rational an attitude to the way that hinges serve as that on which our orderly living depends. There are no extra-logical reasons for adopting the laws of logic that figured in the Tractatus, nor the plethora of rules that emerge in the Philosophical Investigations. Taking the parts of our bodies to be in many respects thing-like is part of what it is to live a human form of life. Nevertheless, they are thing-like as a matter of fact. If ‘‘I know etc.’’ is conceived as a grammatical proposition, of course the ‘‘I’’ cannot be important. And it properly means ‘‘There is no such thing as doubt in this case’’ or ‘‘The expression ‘I do not know’’ makes no sense in this case’’. And of course it follows from this that ‘‘I know’’ makes no sense either’’ (Wittgenstein, 1969, x 58, emphasis original). This is the human form of life. In this respect logic, grammars and hinges are alike. Worms live in accordance with the dictates of their primitive nervous systems, yet there is something ‘‘hinge-like’’ in their vermiform lives. Commenting on the fact that worms pull leaves into their burrows in such a way as to best fit the leaf shape to the form of the burrow entrance, Reed (1996) argued that worms make

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use of what a leaf shape affords, following Gibson’s conception of affordances (p. 23). This might be presented as a kind of basic practice, a hinge of importance to the manifold practices of the vermiform life. Worms do not enunciate hinge propositions. Drawing a leaf by the narrow end is the right way to plug one’s burrow. Human life rests on collective conformity to norms, which may exist only in collective practices having no representations as such in the minds of individuals. Expressing emotions and recognizing the emotional expressions of others may be more like the vermiform practice of leaf pulling than we might think. The way worms use leaves could not be explained as a behaviorist stimulusresponse set, since worms seem to have evolved features of their primitive nervous systems that search the simple ambient array of sensory stimuli for relevant higher order invariants, in particular, the angularity of a leaf boundary. My argument is directed to examining the possibility that there are Wittgensteinian hinges to be located among the norms displayed in collective practices, some of which have traditionally been lumped under the banner of ‘‘psychology’’, though others no doubt could be. The practices of thinking, acting, feeling and perceiving are paradigmatically psychological. What about practices like farming, such as milking, haymaking and churning? What about the practice of attending live stock auctions? One might argue that this practice is as much deserving of the accolade ‘‘psychology’’ as it is of ‘‘farming’’. ‘‘Milking’’ is a normative practice in which language plays a minor part. There are right and wrong ways of extracting milk from a cow. ‘‘Attending a stock auction’’ is a fully fledged language game with stringent norms of correct behaviour. Only rarely are the norms of any of these practices given explicit verbal expression, be they psychological or banausic. More often than not one picks them up by example, a little coaching, trial and error, and so on. It is not surprising, therefore, that they are rarely expressed in verbal form. However, the way stock auctions go, the animal species are usually cattle, pigs, sheep and pigs. There is no provision for elephants or tigers. That the above list is part constitutive of a stock auction has the deep but unexpressed character of one of Wittgenstein’s hinges. Elephants and tigers are not stock, though without any change in the grammar of the words ‘elephant’ and ‘tiger’ they could be treated as such, that is, confined in more robust pens and auctioned off to the highest bidder. In the sections to follow I illustrate the difference between grammatical therapy and hinge therapy in a sequence of examples. The first example illustrates a case of grammatical therapy, the second a case that involves hinge therapy alone, while the third case illustrates a situation where both grammatical rules and hinges are needed to effect a cure.

5. The grammar of person concepts Not all groundings are hinges. Bringing out the way the concept of ‘‘person’’ is embedded in our cultural practices will help to make the distinction between therapeutic work in which grammatical rules are emphasized and hinge excavations clearer. How can I be sure that I am the same person I remember myself to have been yesterday? This is an empty linguistic move. My life rests on the continuity of this being as a person. Everything I do is shaped by the continuity of my personhood. But how is it that this could ever seem to be in need of a defence? How could it be that ‘‘Am I the same person I was yesterday?’’ could ever have seemed an intelligible question to which the answer ‘‘Yes’’ or ‘‘No’’ would make sense. Somewhere there has been the sinister effect of a false grammatical analogy. The question ‘‘Are you [is he/she] the same person I met yesterday?’’ can be decided more or less satisfactorily by the satisfaction of four criteria. a. b. c. d.

Is this the same body? Does this being tell the same life story appropriately updated? Does this being display similar qualities of personality and character? Does he or she display the same skills ands capacities?

Satisfying these four criteria ceteris paribus allows one to make an assessment of the truth or falsity of yes or no answers to the above question. I might be forced to say, ‘‘He is not the same person I met yesterday, but someone else, though the cosmetic surgery is remarkable.’’

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The question ‘‘Am I the same person I was yesterday?’’ looks rather like the third person questions above. So does the second person question: ‘‘Are you the same person you were yesterday?’’ Perhaps there are parallel criteria, by the application of which these questions could be answered yes or no. Thus, one might be forced to say, after running the test, ‘‘I am not the same person I was yesterday, but someone else’’. And this seems patently absurd. However, we must ask wherein the absurdity lies. It seems to me that in the spirit of Wittgenstein, one would home in on the alleged parallel between the criteria for answering the seemingly parallel questions taking the first and second person criteria of identity to be much like those for third person cases. This is the error – having the same body, having continuous updated memories, displaying the same personality and the same repertoire of skills, more or less – are not criteria for the first person case. They are components of the concept of a person. I do not act as myself on the basis of checking out these criteria. The grammar of first person discourse, more particularly that of the first person singular pronoun of European languages, is relevant. What tasks do speakers use the word ‘‘I’’ (and ‘‘Je’’, ‘‘Yo’’, and so on) to accomplish? Wittgenstein gives us a hint in PI, x 410: ‘‘I’’ is not the name of a person, nor ‘‘here’’ of a place, and ‘‘this’’ is not a name. But they are connected with names. Names are explained by means of them. It is also true that it is characteristic of physics not to use these words. The first person pronouns and the verb inflexions of romance languages serve to complete the meanings of the utterances in which they occur by drawing on local knowledge of certain attributes of the speaker. For example, in ‘‘I can see a robin’’, the first person pronoun amplifies the meaning of the whole utterance with the speaker’s spatial location. In ‘‘I will close up the shop’’, the first person pronoun amplifies the performative force of the utterance with the speaker’s moral reputation. Knowing the staff to be unreliable we go round afterwards checking the locks after they have gone home. To fully grasp the import of such statements, the listener must know various facts about the speaker as a unique particular in space-time and in the local moral order. Wittgenstein’s oblique remarks quoted above leave little doubt that he thought that the grammar of the first person is like the grammar of overt indexicals such as ‘‘here’’, which indexes the spatial content of a proposition as ‘‘close to where the speaker is’’. Temporal indexicals are more complex grammatically since verb tense is also implicated in the indexicality of the utterance. The meanings of statements in physics have no need of completion by knowledge of the occasions of their utterance. They are supposed to be independent of time and place. In this brief discussion, we have uncovered another important foundational root upon which human life as we live it turns. Only if we, so to say, take our personhood for granted can we question the verisimilitude of our memories, ‘‘Was I there on that occasion?’’; bemoan the loss of skill at chess, ‘‘I used never to fall for ‘fool’s mate’’’; and the decline of our moral characters, ‘‘Since the stroke I have become very easily angered.’’. The psychology of personal identity and the ‘‘self’’ must take the subtlety of local pronoun grammars into account. Some of the uses of the first person are best seen as practices rather than the product of following grammatical rules. It is empirically possible that there is a culture in which the first person is not used to take personal responsibility. Our practice, as English speakers, of taking responsibility for whatever is the content of a speech-act, say a promise, ought, as I have suggested, to be located with hinges rather than as a feature of grammar. However, it is a matter of grammar that the use of the first person indexes my speech acts with my bodily location. 6. A hinge that grounds our knowledge of the thoughts and feeling of others What justifies ascribing thoughts and feelings to another being? How are publicly meaningful ascriptions of psychological states to anything at all possible? And why to some things rather than others, for example, to people rather than to stones? Nothing justifies these ascriptions – but how then are we so confident about them? At the root of our interpersonal practices is at least one hinge, the practice of distinguishing persons from such lifeless beings as statues. The discussion in the Philosophical Investigations (Wittgenstein, 1953, xx 244 ff) immediately following the exposition of the Private Language Argument strongly suggests that Wittgenstein was quite clear that the traditional Cartesian distinction between what is ‘‘material’’ and what is ‘‘mental’’ should

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be abandoned in favour of a spectrum of material exemplars, from stones to people. In other words, the question at the head of this paragraph is misleading if we take it to be in need of an answer. Nothing justifies our ascriptions of thoughts and feelings to some beings rather than others. That we do so is one of the hinges on which the human form of life turns. From birth we are presented with material beings. Do we make something like a scientific discovery that the evidence is overwhelming that some of these beings have thoughts and feelings while others do not? Some psychologists, for instance, Gopnik and Meltzoff (1997), have thought something like this had to be assumed. The strange expression, ‘‘theory of mind’’, used for the capacities for cognitively engaged interaction that little children pick up or are taught by some means, is an expression of just the kind of misleading grammatical form that Wittgenstein thought helped maintain the grip of a misleading picture (see Hutto, 2009). Wittgenstein seems to me to be quite consistent in holding that taking some things to be people and so blessed with subjectivity and others to be stones is a matter of the attitude we take to them. It is an attitude we cannot, as human beings, fail to take (see Hobson, 2009).2 We do not discover the subjectivity of other people. It is not a theoretical hypothesis. Our human lives hinge on it. In fairness to Gopnik and Meltzoff, they can be read as simply showing how concept formation develops in a theory-like way and is interwoven with a growing mastery of the uses of words. This is consistent with the whole program being grounded in the ‘‘people-not-stones’’ hinge, as the prevailing and persistent attitude that human beings take to one another. Here are some of the remarks that support this suggestion. But doesn’t what you say come to this: that there is no pain, for example, without pain-behaviour? – It comes to this: only of a living human being and what resembles (behaves like) a living human being, can one say: it sees; is blind; hears; is deaf; is conscious or unconscious (PI, x 281, emphasis original). This is not because of any ingress into the ‘‘soul’’ of that living being. Nor does it imply that it is only by its behaviour that I know someone is a human being. I credit chimpanzees with some measure of subjectivity not simply because they behave like we do, but because I cannot but take a certain attitude to them (again see Hobson, 2009; Hutto, 2009). In the human case, there are natural expressions and we are endowed with the ability to produce them and to read them. Autistic children lack this ability. Autism is now treated as a natural, that is, genetically determined, defect. This of course shows that the intact ability to share our emotional lives with others is also natural. It is not that autistic people fail to make inferences that the rest of us make. Pain-behaviour can point to a painful place – but the subject of pain is the person who gives it expression. ‘‘A stone cannot give pain an expression’’ (PI, x 302). Wittgenstein does not treat all material beings as stone-like. There are stones and there are flies and at the end of that slide, there are people. We don’t need to make hazardous inferences as to their inner lives. Understanding how others feel is a natural endowment; an aspect of the human form of life, a hinge on which our uses of psychological concepts turns. Look at a stone and imagine it having sensations. . And now look at a wriggling fly and at once these difficulties vanish and pain seems to get a footing here, where before everything was, so to speak, too smooth for it. And so, too, a corpse seems to us quite inaccessible to pain. – Our attitude to what is alive and to what is dead is not the same. All our reactions are different (PI, x 284). Whatever a corpse does, say emitting a sound like a sigh, is not readable by a living human being as a natural expression of anything, so long as one’s attitude to the cadaver is that proper to dealing with a corpse. Anyone who has worked in a morgue soon learns to discount the movements of corpses as if they were backed by intentionality. This is not by empirically testing for anything, though sometimes decisions on taking organs for transplants may be based on empirical tests for brain activity. Morgue attendants do not do forensic tests to reassure themselves. They act within a framework of practices in which the treatment of the corpse as deceased is a hinge. It does happen that this practice may have to be abandoned sometimes, witness Romeo’s disastrous error.

2 It has been pointed out to me that this point would entail the disturbing conclusion that autistic children are not fully human. I have no idea how this could be resolved.

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We do indeed say of an inanimate thing that it is in pain: when playing with dolls for example. But this use of the concept of pain is secondary one. [To show how pain talk is established in living human contexts] [i]magine a case in which people ascribed pain only to inanimate things; pitied only dolls. [Then it would not be the same language game] (PI, x 282). The paragraph about ascribing feelings to dolls shows clearly that Wittgenstein took our capacity to understand how others are feeling to be a matter of the attitude we take to them rather than to any ‘‘irresponsible’’ inferences from behavioural evidence to the existence of the unobservable mental states of others, via something like a ‘‘theory of mind’’, that is, there is a natural basis, an attitude, for reacting to human expression that is ungrounded. Language-games regarding personhood or ascriptions of feelings can function because of this. 7. The skills concept: grammar or hinge? In the midst of Wittgenstein’s general account of rule following (PI, xx 138–242), there is a worked example, an analysis of the meaning of the ascriptions of ‘‘can read’’, ‘‘is really reading’’, and so on, to a human being (PI, xx 147–178). In the course of the discussion grammatical rules for the use of the phrase ‘‘can really read’’ will be brought out, the pattern of family resemblances among the words for the skill of reading. However, a hinge will be also excavated.3 Put simply, the hinge on which the language games around ‘‘reading’’ cluster is the fact that unlike walking, a skill that simply appears as the body matures, reading skills have to be acquired. Only in the shadow of this hinge do the normative concepts around the grammatical role of the tests for ‘‘being able to read [properly], [well]’’ make sense, that is, the literate come to take their ability to read for granted, quite unreflectedly. In this discussion Wittgenstein is not concerned with reading for content. Rather, it is the concepts that are to be used in discussions of the ‘‘activity of rendering out loud what is written or printed; and also of writing from dictation, writing out something printed, playing from a score, and so on’’(PI, x 156). The reader is someone who ‘‘has received at school or at home one of the kinds of education usual among us, and in the course of it has learned to read his native language. Later he reads books, letters, newspapers, and other things’’ (PI, x 156). In examining candidates for the grounds for saying someone can really read Wittgenstein’s argument turns on four ‘subjective’ proposals as ‘themes’: do we decide the question by reference to subjective feelings, or to the existence of a certain conscious activity, or to the personal authority of the apprentice reader, or to a supposed difference in cognitive acitivity between apprentice and expert? 7.1. First theme Is the use of ‘‘really reading’’ determined by an examination of subjective feelings? There are a variety of ways that a reader can engage with a printed text. For example, one who passes his eye along the printed words of a text, may say the words aloud or to himself. He may ‘‘take in’’ the shapes of words as wholes, may read syllable by syllable or letter by letter and may be said to have read a sentence if he has neither spoken it aloud nor to himself, but is later able to repeat the sentence verbatim, or nearly so. Or, he may read aloud and correctly without attending to what he is reading and thus, on request, be unable to give an adequate account of what he has read. The beginner may read words by laboriously spelling them out or may guess how to read them from context or knows the story off by heart. However, when we say someone can read we surely do not do so by interrogating the candidate as to his or her state of mind. 7.2. Second theme If ‘‘we ask ourselves what reading consists in, we shall be inclined to say: it is a special conscious activity of the mind’’ (PI, x 156, emphasis original). Our pupil cannot be said to read because he does

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This section is derived from Chapter Five of Harre´ and Tissaw (2005).

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not have this conscious activity. However, even if he did have it on some occasion that tells us nothing about the applicability of the concept – for that we need to try him out on other texts. If he can’t read them the pupil has not yet acquired the skill. 7.3. Third theme This is introduced immediately thereafter. We may also be inclined to say that the pupil alone knows if she is really reading. A pupil who is pretending to read may also have privileged access to her own lack of understanding. However, we would still be inclined to think that in these cases ‘‘to read’’ and ‘‘reading’’ would be applied differently when referring to the beginner and to the skilled reader. Having or lacking understanding is still secondary to a display of the skill as criterial for the accolade. 7.4. Fourth theme If the pretender and skilled reader each say the same thing when attending to the same verbal sign, and we know that one is faking it, we would be inclined to say that what goes on in their minds must be different. That is, there must be ‘‘two different [psychological or neural] mechanisms at work here’’. Moreover, what goes on in them must distinguish reading from not reading. ‘‘ dBut these mechanisms are only hypotheses, models designed to explain, to sum up, what you observe’’ (PI, x 156). The first group of ‘‘mentalistic’’ proposals, critically examined in the four argumentative themes, suggests that reading is a special conscious activity of the mind.4 The four argumentative themes should help us resist slipping into that way of thinking about a skill. The second proposal, the ‘‘mechanistic’’ idea, suggests that reading behavior is the result of the workings of an inner mechanism of the unconscious mind or even of the brain. Wittgenstein (PI, x 157) asks us to imagine human beings (or some other kind of creature) being used as reading-machines – trained and used for the purpose of reading aloud, with or without understanding. An untrained pupil is shown a written word and sometimes utters sounds, some of which are judged by the trainer to be more or less in line with how the word should be pronounced. A second trainer comes upon the scene when the pupil utters a more or less correct sound and says the pupil ‘‘is reading’’. However, the first trainer disagrees and informs the second trainer that the pupil still often makes mistakes and has yet to become a full-fledged reader. With time and practice, fewer errors are made until finally the trainer counts the pupil as having the ability to read. Now Wittgenstein asks, ‘‘‘But what of that first word? Is the teacher to say: I was wrong, and he did read it’ – or: ‘He only began really to read later on? – When did he begin to read? Which was the first word that he read?’’’ (PI, x 157, emphasis original). Maybe we could declare that he could read when he correctly read so many and the first word of that group would be it. If we try to use the criterion, the existence of a particular ‘‘experience of transition from marks to spoken sounds, then it certainly makes sense to speak of the first word that he really read’’ (PI, x 157, emphasis original). This won’t do either. The pupil would only have to express the feeling that he had read in order to be counted by the trainer as having read, just as open to abuse as the pupil who learned the text by rote. There is a spectrum of cases between ‘‘can read’’ and ‘‘cannot read’’. The concept of ‘‘reading’’ is applied to the living reading-machine ‘‘quite independent of that of a mental or other mechanism. dNor can the teacher here say of the pupil: ‘Perhaps he was already reading when he said that word. For there is no doubt about what he did. dThe change when the pupil began to read was a change in his behaviour ‘it makes no sense here to speak of a first word in his new state’’’ (PI, x 157, emphasis original). Of course, if we are discussing a gadget that is literally a reading machine we say which word is read when we have ascertained that it is all connected up and working properly. Neuro-physiological states and/or processes have nothing to do with the rules for the application of the word ‘‘reading’’ to the living reader’s behavior when he or she shows evidence of being able to read. Our ability to assess the reader’s skill does not, and never has required an examination of his or her

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I owe this way of laying out Wittgenstein’s argument to Michael Tissaw.

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brain states and processes, nor has it been based on an extensive interview concerning such subjective matters as the thoughts and feelings a person is experiencing when reading. How would I know what unconscious processes or brain mechanisms should be examined as relevant to the skill of reading? I would have already to be able to identify when someone was reading as we use the concept before I could ‘‘look in’’ to his or her inner states to find which were correlated with the correct performance of the task. No such alleged states or processes can be identified independently of the prior identification of reading as a performance. If someone insists that later on we will get to know the details of the neuro-physiology Wittgenstein remarks ‘‘That it is so is presumably a prioridor is it only probable. And how probable is it?.But if it is a priori, that means that it is a form of account which is very convincing to us’’ (PI, x 158). The claim that future empirical discoveries might transform the conceptual structure of the concept of reading as it has been revealed in the investigations of the grammar of reading concepts is empty. What is going on in someone’s brain when they read has not had and will not have any bearing on the application of the verb as it is ordinarily used by people to express their ability to read or by people describing the behavior of others as reading behavior. However, the mentalistic alternative is equally confused. A mentalist might say something like: ‘‘A man surely knows whether he is reading or only pretending to read!’’ (PI, x 159). The mentalist is not only counting the conscious act of reading as a criterion for being able to read, but also invoking a privileged access to understanding. Suppose that ‘‘A’’ wants ‘‘B’’ to believe he (A) can read a Cyrillic script. A’s scheme is to learn a Russian sentence by rote. Then looking at the printed sentence A voices what has been memorized. Clearly, A knows he is not reading and that his performance for B is a sham. Well, there is something mentalistic here. A does not experience some of the ‘‘more or less characteristic sensations in reading a printed sentence’’ (such as sensations of hesitation, looking closer at the words, misreading, etc.), but instead is likely to experience characteristic sensations of reciting something he has learned by heart and perhaps even ‘‘a set of sensations characteristic of cheating’’ (PI, x 159). The mentalist is right that there is a sense in which we may know ourselves to be reading. However, B’s criteria for saying that A is or is not actually reading are quite independent of A’s experiences of his or her alleged conscious reading. For example, suspecting something is amiss B may try A with another randomly selected sentence printed in the Cyrillic alphabet. The experiences that accompany reading or pretending to read could never be criterial for having the ability. The examples show that they are neither necessary nor sufficient for identifying genuine reading. The concept ‘‘reading’’ is used for a family of practices in which written or printed words somehow guide a speaker in correctly and fluently rendering them vocally. There seems to be no single experiential criterion for settling the question of whether someone is really reading. Any attempt to use neurophysiological criteria falls foul of the basic principle that we can only pick out which neuro-processes are relevant if we already have ways of recognizing when someone is really reading. Reading is a practice, the practice of using written or printed signs as guides to vocal performances. The conscious accompaniments of the process are indeterminate, and the physiological mechanisms involved are irrelevant to identifying reading as a skill. So far the therapy has involved only grammatical clarifications, a surview of the criteria for the correct use of such expressions as ‘‘. can really read now’’. However, the whole of the preceding argument depends on a hinge, the propositional expression of which goes something like this: ‘‘Unlike walking, swallowing and blinking, human beings have to learn to read’’. What of the root idea in this resolution – ‘‘being guided’’? Isn’t the reader guided by the printed text as he or she reads? In PI, xx 178–182, Wittgenstein explores the applications of this notion. The result is yet another field of family resemblances that ranges from material causality to attentive following of a rule. These illustrations of various ways of ‘‘being guided’’ range from the case of someone leading a blindfolded person, dragging someone by force, guiding a dancing partner in the waltz perhaps, going along with a companion, to an inattentive following of a field track on a country walk – is there an experience in common to them all? Surely not. Cases can be distinguished by whether we would qualify the attentiveness of the follower by such adverbs as ‘‘carefully’’ when, for example, one is being guided by the pattern one is copying on paper. What sort of guiding is going on when one uses a text as a guide

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on what to say, that is reads it? Whichever it might be, the point of the remarks on ‘being guided’ is that it would be a mistake to try to discover if someone was guided by a text by quizzing that person on what they were experiencing when they read. The monk droning on as he reads the gospel text at the midday meal in the monastery for the umpteenth time is like the wanderer following the field path, while the youngster being tested by the school inspector may be like the dancer. Are they really reading is not determined by any particular way of being guided. 8. Hinge excavations particularly relevant to psychology Tennis matches are practices that conform to a well-established and formal grammar. Losing a point when the score is Love Forty to one’s opponent means losing that game. However, the possibility of tennis hinges on certain facts about elastic strings, ballistics, gyroscopic forces, and so on, that tennis players take for granted. It also hinges on certain facts about the physiological possibility of a human being performing a certain kind of action. If racquets improved to such an extent that a service could exceed 300 kph it is sure that a rule limiting the kinds of racquets allowed in a match would emerge. The flip sides of the facts about serving are norms about the form the service game may properly take and the game still will be tennis. Hinges and grammars interact. 8.1. The psychology of sex and gender Consider the current debate about whether ‘‘in fact’’ men and women engage in systematically distinct linguistic practices. Is it true that women use more words than men in a day’s ordinary living, three times as many as Brizandine (2007, p. 39) declares, suggesting that someone somewhere has counted the number of words used in a day? When someone did count them men and women both used about 15,000! (Mehl, Vazire, Ramirez-Esparza, Slatcher, & Pennebaker, 2007, p. 82). Do men and women use words differently as Deborah Tannen (1990) claims to have demonstrated by close study of conversations? Are these claims hinge propositions? They seem to have functioned in just that way, rather like the way that taking Biblical accounts literally has done for those who deny the scientific account of the origin of the world and its people. All sorts of claims were made about the differences between men and women on the basis of the hinge expressed in the above hinge proposition. Perhaps feminism in psychology is like the development of modern paleontology that hinges on a geological time scale, rather than the hinges expressed in factual terms in the book of Genesis, which most people now believe to be factually false. The grammar of the concepts ‘‘man’’ and ‘‘woman’’, the components of the distinction between the genders, is now widely agreed to be largely though not exclusively a matter of history and culture. However, the concepts ‘‘male’’ and ‘‘female’’ are used to mark an empirical distinction in the role each sex plays in reproduction. As such the factual statement ‘‘Human beings are sexually dimorphous’’ is at least a candidate for the status of a hinge proposition. It seems prima facie that the distinction between male (_) and female (\), without quotes, expresses a hinge, while that between ‘‘man’’ and ‘‘woman’’, with quotes, is grammatical, that is grounded in rules of for use of these words at some time and place. That there are mappings between the pairs which can be extracted from a great many symbolic and material practices makes this a particularly interesting case for reflection by philosophers of psychology. Often, in the vernacular, the words ‘‘man’’ and ‘‘woman’’ are used for the biological categories of ‘‘male’’ and ‘‘female’’. Allowing for a moment a colloquial semantic equivalence between ‘‘male and female’’ and ‘‘man and woman’’ in many contexts, the ‘‘hinginess’’ of sexual dimorphism is clearly visible in the conditions for such context sensitive remarks as ‘‘I am not sure whether I am a man or a woman’’ said by someone presenting for sex reassignment surgery; ‘‘I know (at least) I am a man’’ said by someone recovering from amnesia, and so on. Only in the shadow of the empirical distinction between the sexes do these normatively constrained utterances make sense. The normative role of the hinge is evident in the need to embed these remarks in quite specific contexts. However, as Wittgenstein remarks, to say in an ordinary context and an ordinary tone of voice ‘‘I know I am man’’ is at least an odd use of the word ‘‘know’’. Rather, being male like Wittgenstein is the unconsidered ground that normatively constrains a great many of my daily practices:

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That I am a man and not a woman can be verified [and so far is a matter of fact], but if I were say that I was a woman, then tried to explain the error by saying I hadn’t checked the statement, the explanation would not be accepted [my being a man is foundational to my way of life and supports everything I do] (Wittgenstein, 1969, x 79). Being a man is the hinge on which much of my life turns. I do not have to verify it as I live it. I do not have to pause and ask myself what sex I am before going into the men’s room. It would wrong to say that I expect the buttons on my coat to be on the right. If it’s my coat they will be. But this is a convention, a matter of grammar rather than the surface reflection of a hinge. However, that that sartorial grammar applies to me is ‘‘hingy’’. The Wittgenstein of the Philosophical Investigations would be inclined to say, I believe, that the norms of practices in which concepts ‘‘man’’ and ‘‘woman’’ play an important role are largely grammatical. To change the rules would be change the language games as so the form of life. The elderly have witnessed just such a change in our form of life. However, even taking account of the cultural imperatives to androgyny realized in the romantic movement of the early 19th century and the feminism of the middle third of the 20th, the biological distinction of sexes is both an indubitable matter of fact and a hinge. The cultural sources of the new norms of androgyny that emerged in the time of the Romantic Movement and that can be seen in the sculptures of Canova and the poetry of Shelley, for example, make sense only in a world in which sexual dimorphism ‘‘stands fast’’. 8.2. The psychology of perception Doing what one might call ‘‘hinge work’’, Jerome Bruner undertook a series of studies of the conditions under which people made perceptual judgements. The results of this work proved influential in undermining the grip of behaviorism on the thinking and empirical research methods of many psychologists. Were his discoveries in the course of the ‘‘Judas Eye’’ experiments (Bruner, 1983, pp. 64– 104) hinge or grammatical excavations, or were they just everyday empirical tests of hypotheses? That they served to uproot a well-established paradigm is evident in George Miller’s remark that at last psychologists were allowed to talk of thoughts and to refer to mental processes. Bruner certainly thought that the results of these experiments dealt a severe blow to behaviorism, presumably when taken as a comprehensive way of thinking about and experimenting with human behavior. This work seems to me be just what hinge excavation would be in psychology. The demise of behaviorism was not a refutation but hinge-therapy – the replacement of one ‘‘form of life’’ for another. Bruner showed that as a matter of fact perceptual judgments, such as the recognition of words or the perception of the size of coins, and particularly the perception of the color coding of suites of playing cards, red hearts and black spades for instance, depended on schemata that involved not only cognitive concepts like ‘‘values’’, but also the conventions that were expressed, for example, in the colors of playing cars. The strength of the illusion that a red card must be either a heart or a diamond could not be explained, so he thought, by reference to environmental stimuli and conditioning processes, a` la Skinner or Pavlov. In the terms of the third Wittgenstein, Bruner, in describing the results of his experiments, was formulating hinge propositions, describing matters of fact and expressing the tacit foundations for certain common practices, such as playing cards. Though Bruner did not express the matter in these terms, his conviction that the Judas Eye experiments put paid to the reign of behaviorism makes sense if his work was a therapy that relied on hinge excavation. 9. The regresses of psychological research We can bring some order into these diverse reflections by drawing on an insightful distinction first formulated by Stroll (1994) in terms of distinct ways in which an explanatory project could evolve. Suppose we begin an analysis of some practice by proposing a rule expressing the norms and the procedures for realizing them. Let us say that the practice is ‘‘sentencing a convicted thief’’. The rule might be ‘‘For burglary two years with the possibility of parole’’. However, to apply that rule another rule is required; one that determines what is to count as burglary. This rule might run something like

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this: ‘‘Burglary is theft of property by breaking into a private dwelling’’. However to apply that rule we need yet another rule which specifies the meaning of ‘‘property’’. And so on. This is a homogeneous regress; the norms are all of the same kind and refer to the same aspect of a form life, the meanings of various nested concepts. The regress of rules is a regress of conventions of meaning that serve to express a certain form of life. Among another tribe than latter day Capitalists, say some contented inhabitants of an idyllic South Sea Isle, the rules concerning property would no doubt be different, if they had the concept at all. Heterogeneous regresses are common in the physical and biological sciences. A regress might begin with the statistics of the distribution of characteristics generation by generation in garden peas. Introducing a new biological concept, the genetic factor or gene, opens up space for a deeper level of an explanatory regress. However, further research reveals a boundary to the use of biological concepts with the introduction of biochemical concepts to open up a deeper layer yet of explanatory models. These in turn have come to rest on a yet deeper heterogeneous foundation of quantum mechanics. Genetics and its supporting special sciences comprise the hinge on which modern biology turns. In psychology the corresponding boundary between heterogeneous domains comes about when a regress of discursive or practice concepts is underpinned by a layer of biological or neuroscientific concepts describing the mechanism with which a person performs the tasks defined in the upper reaches of the regress. Here it seems is the exact point at which the distinction between foundations as hinges and foundations as grammars enters psychology. The need for hinge therapy arises when neuroscience is taken up into psychology. It can be taken up in two very different ways. If it is taken up reductively it may look as if all the concepts ‘‘above the line’’ so to speak, are really neurological concepts after all. And this is surely a philosophical pathology that needs therapy. However, neuroscience can be taken up into psychology in a very different way – within the framework of the concepts of ‘‘tasks and appropriate tools’’. Here is a possible hinge proposition: ‘‘The brain is a tool for performing cultural practices, and neuroscience describes how it works’’. In the discussion of ‘‘reading from a text’’, Wittgenstein very clearly distinguishes the relevant homogeneous regress from the heterogeneous regress that might underpin it. As we saw, the question of the meaning of the concept ‘‘really reading’’ or ‘‘able to read’’ is not established by reference to anything in the lower levels of the heterogeneous regress. We do not need to know anything about the activation of brain regions revealed by PET scans to be able to apply the ‘‘reading’’ concepts with confidence and practical utility. The boundary between the two levels of a heterogeneous regress is also the grounding level of the related homogeneous regress. It is marked by trained procedures, the essential means by which the more elaborate and more self-conscious procedures are performed. This is the kind of elementary practice of which Wittgenstein said ‘‘Now my spade is turned’’ and ‘‘This is what I do’. In the terminology of On Certainty, here are the hinges on which the door of some form of life can swing. 10. Conclusion The way that grammatical rules and hinges get their force as norms of human practices differ in an important respect. Grammars are in the end matters of convention, though some grammatical rules will be more elegant or simpler than others vis a` vis a given practice. Hinges are in the end normative reflections of putative matters fact. It makes sense to adjust one’s dietetic norms to what is declared by nutritionists to be good for one. In the case of the problem of ‘‘other minds’’ the result of carefully distinguishing expressive from descriptive grammars is put very clearly in PI, x 304. If we adopt the descriptive grammar to try to understand ‘‘I am in pain’’ we are forced to imagine a ‘‘something’’ independent of the utterance. Our route to knowing about such a being would have to be by a quasi-scientific inference from behaviour taken as evidence for the existence of an unobservable state or process. But that procedure is hopeless. Indeed, a nothing would be just as a good as a something since neither could be reached this way. Drop the descriptive grammar in favour of the expressive grammar and the paradox disappears. Psychology is surely still about persons. It is not a kind of discovery to enumerate the conditions under which a being is to be counted as a person – much less is it a discovery for me to realise that I have been living my life as one. That the human world is a world of persons is the ground on which

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all else depends. Strawson (1959, pp. 87–116) with his idea of persons as basic particulars and William Stern with his placement of the concept of person as the unanalysable basis of his personalist psychology (Lamiell, 2003) realized this principle in philosophy and psychology, respectively. Yet, the conventions on which the norms of our person-practices depend are revisable. There is already a psychology of human beings in which the concept of responsibility is obscured by a causal grammar. Already some branches of psychology are not about persons, but about human organisms. The concepts of ‘‘practice’’, ‘‘skill’’, and ‘‘rule’’ are woven into a complex pattern of uses. In so far as psychology is concerned with the actions of agents in pursuit of various projects these concepts are essential for the superordinate practice of giving explanations for what people are seen to do. The traditional domains of psychology – thinking, feeling, acting, and perceiving – cannot be developed within nothing but the framework of the kind of causality that has been so successful in the physical sciences. Human activity is also shaped by norms, customs, conventions and rules. Some of these foundations are not matters of grammar, but reflect putative matters of fact, tacit beliefs those of us who share a form of life unwittingly subscribe to. The certainty of a hinge comes not from incontrovertible evidence for the truth of the empirical reading of a hinge proposition. It comes from the foundational role that a hinge has in our lives. This comes to light only when we test out a normative reading of a hinge proposition. Does it express a norm with which our practices make sense? If the descriptive twin turns out to be false the foundational role of the normative twin will surely become problematic, troubled by seemingly insoluble philosophical problems. How can there be human responsibility in a world of causes? References Baker, G. P. (2004). Wittgenstein’s method. In K. J. Morris (Ed.). Oxford: Blackwell. Bennett, M. R., & Hacker, P. M. S. (2003). Philosophical foundations of neuroscience. Oxford: Blackwell. Brizandine, L. (2007). The female brain. London: Bantam Press. Bruner, J. S. (1983). In search of mind. New York: Harper and Row. Gopnik, A., & Meltzoff, A. (1997). Words, thought and theories. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Harre´, R., & Tissaw, M. (2005). Wittgenstein and psychology. Aldershot: Ashgate. Hobson, R. P. (2009). Wittgenstein and the developmental psychology of autism. New Ideas in Psychology, 27, 243–257. Hutto, D. D. (2009). Lessons from Wittgenstein: Elucidating folk psychology. New Ideas in Psychology, 27, 197–212. Hutchinson, P. (2007). What’s the point of elucidations? Metaphilosophy, 38, 690–713. Lamiell, J. T. (2003). Beyond individual and group differences: Human individuality, scientific psychology and William Stern’s personalism. London: Sage. Mehl, M. R., Vazire, S., Ramirez-Esparza, N., Slatcher, R. B., & Pennebaker, J. W. (2007). Are women really more talkative than men? Science, 317, 82. Moyal-Sharrock, D. (2004a). Understanding Wittgenstein’s On Certainty. New York: Palgrave/Macmillan. Moyal-Sharrock, D. (2004b). The third Wittgenstein: The post-investigations works. Aldershot: Ashgate. Reed, E. (1996). Encountering the world. New York: Oxford University Press. Strawson, P. F. (1959). Individuals. London: Methuen. Stroll, A. (1994). Moore and Wittgenstein on foundations. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Tannen, D. (1990). You just don’t understand: Men and women in conversation. New York: William Morrow and Company. Wittgenstein, L. (1922). Tractatus logico-philosophicus. London: Routledge. Wittgenstein, L. (1953). Philosophical investigations. Oxford: Blackwell. Wittgenstein, L. (1969). On certainty. Oxford: Blackwell. Wittgenstein, L. (1978). Remarks on the foundations of mathematics. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.