The evolution of human opacity: A Wittgensteinian critique of psychology

The central insight of Wittgenstein's critique of psychology can be summarized fairly plainly: when we talk about ‘minds’, ‘thoughts’, ‘feelings’ and other psychological phenomena, we are not talking about states and processes inside our heads, whether those states be further imagined as physical or transcendent. Our psychological language has many functions, Wittgenstein's work implies, but we can roughly describe it as a system of tools that evolved to operate within the course of human social life, and it is the complexity of our lives that psychology all too often mistakes for a complexity of a hidden system. This essay is an attempt to invoke a Wittgensteinian shift in the reader's way of thinking about psychological language while working largely within the idiom of science. By thinking carefully about the evolution of psychological language in human prehistory, I hope to help clarify the sense and importance of Wittgenstein's philosophy of psychology.