LA FILOSOFIA DELLA PSICOLOGIA DI WITTGENSTEIN TRA FENOMENOLOGIA E GRAMMATICA

This paper examines the main theses of Wittgenstein’s philosophy of psychology following, also in the light of the writings of the Nachlass, his itinerary from the transitional phase(1929-35) to the last period (1946-51). The aim of the first part of the paper is to outline Wittgenstein’s conception of “phenomenology”, a discipline which is “something midway between science and logic” and is dealing with problems of immediate experience by means of methods which are alternative to the truth-functional logic of the Tractatus. Particolar attention is devoted to the arguments of later Wittgenstein’s rejection of phenomenology and the abandon of his first idea of a phenomenological representation of sense-data, conceptually different from the ordinary description of physical objects. The second part of the paper is dedicated to the so called “grammatical turn” of Wittgenstein’s thought, announced in The Big Typescript and systematically completed in the last writings on the philosophy of psychology. At the center of the analysis is the reformulation of the phenomenological problems in a grammatical key, in particular the “perspicuous representation” of the language of the persons, the asymmetry of the verbal forms in the first and in the third person, as well as the idealistic and solipsistic presuppositions of the idea of a private language and of the inner-outer dichotomy. An argument tied to the asymmetry thesis, that is the “expressive” (non cognitive) function that the statements in the first person play in the psychological language-games, is critically discussed at the end of the paper.