Philosophical lnvesfigafions 10:2 april 1987 lSSN 0190-0536 $2.50

Some Thinking about Thinking

J.F.M. Hunter, Ufiiversity of Toronto

Part I.

In Zettel 106, Wittgenstein wrote as follows:

And this too could be said: Someone who thinks as he works will intersperse his work with auxiliary activities. The word ‘thinking’ does not now mean these auxiliary activities, just as thinking is not talking either. Although the concept ‘thinking’ is formed on the model of a kind of imaginary auxiliary activity. (Just as we might say that the concept of the differential quotient is formed on the model of a kind of ideal quotient.)

In the first Part of this paper I will suggest an interpretation of the intriguing remark that thinking is ‘concieved on the model of an imaginary auxiliary activity’. Here my main aim will be to find a sense of these words, given which Wittgenstein is saying something believable. In the second Part, I will consider how much reason there is to suppose that the interpretation worked out in Part I is correct, in the sense of being what Wittgenstein intended.

It may help to see what could be meant by calling thinking an auxiliary activity, if we consider what might be an auxiliary activity that is not thinking, but is performed by someone who thinks as he works. Fairly clearly not just any activity will do: it must be one, on account of the performance of which we would say he is thinking, and also (to be ‘auxiliary’,) one that contributes to the performance of a task without being an essential part of it. The following might fill the bill: if a carpentry student stops to examine the grain of a piece of wood before starting to plane it, or stops to adjust the plane, those could be called auxiliary activities because they contributed only indirectly to getting the wood smooth. Examining the wood does not itself make it any smoother, but is an activity that would lead us to say that the student was thinking, because he did not just thoughtlessly put the wood in the vice and start planing.

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Yet clearly, in line with the second sentence of Z 106, we would not say that so examining the wood or adjusting the plane was itself thinking. Rather, we would say that he performed these activities because he was thinking as he worked. Whether we could say this even if we agreed that thinking is an imaginary activity, and therefore hardly likely to have examining the grain or anything else as its effect, will have to be considered.

Why might thinking too be called an auxiliary activity? - Perhaps because it is conceived as an aid in the due performance of all the steps necessary in a properly executed carpentering operation, without itself being one of the steps.

We say that one worker was thinking what he is doing and another was not. How can we seriously regard the thinking we say goes on in the former case as an imaginary activity? Doesn’t the difference between the two workers lie in the fact that one of them carries on a real activity called thinking, while the other does not, or not all the time, or not at all the junctures at which it is important to do this?

When we charge a person with not having been thinking what he was doing, we certainly appear to be alleging that an activity that should have been performed was omitted. We (generally) mean it when we say ‘You weren’t thinking!’, - and how could we mean it unless we at least believed that there is an activity called thinking that sometimes really occurs, and did not occur in the cases in which we say this?

We can mean it when we say a person died o f a broken heart, without believing that an autopsy would show a rupture in the organ that pumps blood. People do die of broken hearts, and we believe that this person did; but all this means is that he died of grief or of acute disappointment.

When we complain ‘You weren’t thinking!’, might there simi- larly be something we appear to be saying, and something else that is ‘all we really mean’?

We appear to be saying that a useful or even indispensable activity of a known kind was not performed: what might we ‘really only mean’ here?

Suppose ‘You weren’t thinking!’ were a way of saying that a person failed to perform a task in the way he knew it should be performed. (The carpentry student had been told he should always examine the grain of a piece of wood before planing, and our

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consternation is over the fact that in spite of his knowing this he did not do it.) The suggestion then is that we make as if there is an activity called thinking, the performance of which would have resulted in his doing something he knew he should do; but that the burden of our complaint is just that he knew he should do it, and didn’t.

This sketch of a suggestion will need to be elaborated and defended, but clearly it has the initial merit that it is when someone fails to perform in a way he knew he should perform that we complain that he was not thinking. All we know in such a case is that his performance was substandard, and that he was equipped to perform competently. Then we jump right in with the allegation that he was not thinking. We do not say ‘I suspect you may not have been thinking’, or ‘I have a theory that you weren’t’, or ‘I am convinced that you weren’t’, -just as, if someone were being treated cruelly and one were to say ‘He has a soul, you know’, one would not express either suspicion or conviction about the point (cf. Philosophical Investigations, 11, iv).

In the carpentry student example, it is not as if, in the lessons, thinking had been listed among the things that must be done at various junctures. We would not have said ‘At this point you must think, and then you must examine the grain, then you think again, after which you adjust the plane. . . .’ In the lessons, when and how to examine the grain would have been explained, and when and how to adjust the plane, but the lessons would not have been incomplete if thinking had never been mentioned, and a list of the shortcomings of a student’s performance would not have failures to think as rank and file entries. We would not say ‘You didn’t think, you didn’t examine the grain, you didn’t. . . .’ Not having thought here and again here would be as it were on a separate list, which moreover would be used, not alongside of, but in place of the list of operations detailed in the lessons, but not performed. In listing the places where the student failed to think, we would be hoping that, when charged with not having been thinking at such and such a juncture, he would see for himself what he had failed to do. We direct this complaint only to a person we believe to have known what needed to be done, and we say it as a way of avoiding telling him what he failed to do, and throwing him back on his own resources.

But are we not supposing that if at the time he had been thinking,

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he would have remembered what needed to be done? And do we not hope that i fwe get him thinking now, he will remember? Is thinking not an activity, one of whose consequences is that we remember what we have been taught, and is that not our reason for encour- aging its performance and complaining of failures to perform it?

Certainly the concept of thinking is that of such a beneficial activity, and were it not so we could not employ it in this kind of context, but that does not itself show that there is such an activity.

To explain this I would like to introduce the idea of trading on a legend. Imagine a community of agnostics in which representations about Poseidon’s moods are routinely used in weather reports and predictions. If legend had it that Poseidon was a deity who when angry made the winds howl, these people could say that he will be furious in the early afternoon, but will be feeling more cheerful by evening, as a way of saying that the weather will be stormy, but will later clear, - without at all believing in the existence of Poseidon.

I am suggesting that we partly use the concept of thinking in a similar way. Legend as it were tells us of an activity called thinking, the performance of which has such beneficial effects as enabling people to remember all the steps required for the proper per- formance of a task. According to the legend, if the activity is not performed, its effects will not accrue, and so when a person has failed to execute a step, we trade on this and say that the activity was not performed, as a way of saying that the results did not accrue: that he failed to do something he knew needed doing.

In saying that thinking is conceived on the model of an imagi- nary auxiliary activity, Wittgenstein clearly might have been suggesting that we play in this way on the conception of it as beneficial in certain ways, much as the people just described played on the conception of Poseidon as responsible for certain weather conditions. It might be true to say that Poseidon, or thinking, is conceived thus and so, while also true of Poseidon that he is an imaginary deity, and of thinking that it is an imaginary activity.

What would show whether the latter was true? It will be a matter ofwhether there are questions about thinking that are not asked, but could be expected if we seriously believed that there was an activity, the normal consequences of which included remembering steps in a procedure, solving problems, appreciating subtleties, and so on.

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Generally when there is an activity that is advertised as meritori- ous, (a) people will want to know how to perform it, and instruction in it can be given, and (b) in any case in which it might have been beneficial, it is in order to ask whether it has been tried. Sanding is an activity that will normally produce a smooth surface on a piece of wood, and we can give lessons in its performance, and may inquire of a person who says she has had difficulty getting this piece smooth, whether she has tried sanding it.

No one asks how one thinks however, and were the question to arise, we would not know how to answer it. Nor are people who say they have a problem asked whether they have tried thinking about it. And the suggestion that they do this, if made, would be utterly unhelpful.

Teachers do not tell beginning students that since all the subjects they will be studying will require thought, their education will begin with lessons in thinking, and do not go on to say ‘One thinks in the following way:. . . .’. An innovative teacher who conceived the idea of beginning in this way would not be able to construct a plan even for the first lesson. That is not because at that stage in their education, the students would not understand the lessons. There is nothing one could say to advanced students either about how to think.

It might however be thought that we know how to do this useful thing, but are unable to describe it because names have never been given to the peculiar thrusts we perform and call thinking. One might suppose that due to the privacy of thought, we are unable to devise a language in which to describe it. We can’t display a sample of a mental act and give it a name, the way we can a colour or a flavour.

The supposition that this is the problem might be credible if there were, say, seven familiar kinds of mental thrust we often performed, and we knew that number three was likely to be beneficial in such and such a kind of case, and number six in this other sort of case, but while we could mount one or other of these thrusts at will, there was nothing in the public world sufficiently like any of them to enable us to describe them even by analogy. It might be that just as physical skills develop naturally through doing certain kinds of thing, so most of us come to have mental skills through coping with life’s problems, and through studying geom- etry, physics or history. We do get better at these activities through

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doing them, -but the improvement does not consist in our having developed an array of distinct repeatable thrusts, through the performance of which at appropriate times we remember names, solve problems, devise plans and so on. There are no mental zappings, twirlings or smashings that we deploy, trusting that they will yield the kind of results we want this time, as they have in the past.

If there were measures of this kind, they would assume the same kind of place as examining the grain, adjusting the plane or selecting a suitable grade of sandpaper: we could fail to think of performing them, or through not thinking what we were doing, perform the wrong one in a given case.

We can indeed often explain how we solved a problem. Someone may say for example that when his electricity bills had risen alarmingly, he was greatly puzzled because his actual use of electricity had been about normal, but he reasoned that if there were a short circuit in the house, it would either blow a fuse or generate so much heat as to cause a fire, but that a fault in an underground cable might leak electricity, but not enough to blow a fuse, and the heat produced would dissipate into the ground. So he had disconnected the wiring that went underground to the garage, and found that the meter slowed to a normal pace.

This would be a report of what, having thought about it, he came up with, but would say nothing about the thinking that yielded this result. If someone said ‘What an ingenious solution! How did you think of it?’, he would hardly say ‘I performed some mental acts that I can’t describe to you, but that are familiar to me and that I often perform with gratifying results, and was not much surprised when the solution came to me.’

We do in a sense learn to think. Through acquaintance with solutions to problems of various kinds, distinctions of various kinds, fallacies of various kinds, and so on, we come to be able often, when faced with a new problem, to devise some sort of solution; but we never learn what acts to perform that will yield a solution, nor do we become more expert in the performance of acts that when inexpertly performed, may yield solutions that are not entirely satisfactory. We sit in an anxious state, or pace about somewhat oblivious of our surroundings, and sometimes a solution comes; but there is nothing artful that we are doing at such times that yields the solution. The difference between a person whose

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exertions often produce something satisfactory, and someone who is rarely very successful lies, not in what they do by way of generating a solution, but in their acquaintance with similar difficulties and their solutions. That acquaintance, unlike practice in throwing a ball, does not enhance the skill with which they sit in an anxious state or pace about obliviously, but only brings it about that they more frequently deliver something useful.

In short, contrary to what one might expect if thinking were a real activity tending to yield certain kinds of beneficial results, it is not something that we can be taught or in which we can become skilled, and people do not recommend trying it, as a way of solving a problem.

Moreover when someone is alleged not to have been thinking, it is fairly clearly a mistake to get into a question of whether in fact thinking occurred. The language-game goes; ‘You weren’t thinking!’ ‘Oh? What did I do wrong?’ ‘Don’t you remember what I told you?’. . . . Here we see the other person right away taking the criticism to be a way of saying that he did something wrong, and going right on to the question what it was. These affairs do not go like this: ‘You weren’t thinking!’ ‘Oh, but I was! This is quite difficult, so I was thinking all the time.’ ‘You must have left off thinking for a moment without noticing it. Either that or what you were doing wasn’t thinking exactly. Are you sure you know how to think?’ If the bungler claims to have been thinking, we just skip that question and say e.g. ‘Well anyway you didn’t examine the grain before you started to plane, and we went into that quite carefully, didn’t we?’ One is not concerned here about whether indeed thinking occurred, but only about whether it was stupid in the circumstances to have bungled the task in the way the student did.

If thinking were an imaginary activity, would it not follow that no one ever actually thinks, just as no one ever actually wills that the telephone should ring? And is that not absurd? People do think. Yonder person pacing the floor is thinking very hard, is quite likely, as a result, to suggest a plan of action, and may be quite exhausted if he continues very long to think as hard as he is now doing.

Here, although Wittgenstein did not hedge or qualify his view that thinking is an imaginary activity, I think we would have to say it applies at most only to certain uses of the word ‘think’,

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specifically those in which it is conceived as an auxiliary activity, and in which it is supposed that the person alleged not to have been thinking knew how to perform the task to which thinking is conceived as auxiliary. The effort being expended by yonder person pacing the floor, trying to make an important decision, or by me, writing this paper, is not auxiliary to some other activity,and it could not be said that we knew how to perform the task of deciding or of composing, and will perform it correctly, if only we do not fail to think.

Thinking then is not always an imaginary activity, but imaginary features do play a role in our philosophical thinking about it. We tend to suppose that thinking has certain properties that show it to be thinking, rather than perhaps brooding, feeling anxious, wishing one knew what to do, etc. We imagine thinking to be like other activities -waltzing or calculating, for example, - where (a) it can be decided by checking over what was done, whether it was a proper instance of the performance of that activity, and (b) it can be performed with greater or lesser finesse or expertise. One might believe one was waltzing, only to discover that it was some other dance one was doing, or no known dance a t all, and one might perform what was clearly a waltz in a stumbling or an elegant style; but it is not clear that one could misidentify thinking by failing sufficiently to note the properties of what occurred, nor is it clear that we sometimes exert ourselves inexpertly when we have a problem, and as a consequence produce a less than satisfactory solution, or none at all. Not that the solutions we devise are not sometimes substandard, but when this happens, we cannot review the effort we have expended, and see it to have been flawed.

It is not like hooking one’s shot in playing golf, where the regrettable result can be diagnosed as being due to the way the club was held, or the bend of the left arm.

[Here and throughout, I am making a distinction between the effort exerted, and the product it yields. If, in thinking about your offer, I mistakenly reckon among the advantages of accepting it, something not in fact advantageous, then while it was incompetent of me to make that mistake, there will be no mental thrust I performed inexpertly that had that as its result. We will of course, in reviewing our reasoning, find ways in which it might better have proceeded differently, but if it strikes me that I overlooked such and such a consideration, that is a fault in the product of my

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exertions, and still does not show what I did inexpertly, that led me to make this mistake.]

The imaginings I have just described are not a case of conceiving thinking as an imaginary activity. We are not making. as if something were going on when we say that someone is thinking about why his electricity bills have risen alarmingly, but we may imagine ourselves to be saying something having a grammar like that of ‘He is calculating’ or ‘He is waltzing’, where a description of the activity itself would show whether it was a proper case of calculating or waltzing, and where questions could arise about the style or the finesse with which the activity was performed.

In one case we are pretending that something occurred or failed to occur, while in the other we are (usually correctly) asserting its occurrence, but mistakenly supposing what occurred to be identifi- able by its properties. The imaginings are of a different sort in the two kinds of case, and if Wittgenstein meant his remark that thinking is conceived as an imaginary activity in the way I have suggested, he could not in the same passage be saying that there is something imaginary about it in the second way, - even if, as I suspect, he would also make the latter claim, and even if it is an important question whether that claim is true.

Part I1

So far I have been addressing myself to the question what believ- able contention about thinking might be expressed by saying that it is conceived on the model of an imaginary auxiliary activity. From an exegetical point of view I take myself so far only to have generated a working hypothesis, and I would like now to turn to the question how much reason there is to suppose that what I suggested correctly represents Wittgenstein’s intention.

My hypothesis is that according to Wittgenstein, when we say such things as ‘You weren’t thinking what you were doing!’, or ‘I did it without thinking’, contrary to appearances we are not saying that a certain activity which ought to have occurred did not occur, but rather saying that a performance was substandard in a way that the person who so performed was equipped to avoid. As an indirect way of saying this, we trade on the conception of thinking as an auxiliary activity enabling us to perform certain tasks competently.

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Naturally failures to engage in this activity would yield substan- dard performances, so we pretend that the beneficial activity did not occur, as a way of saying that the effect it might have had did not occur, that is, that the performance was substandard; but all we are actually asserting is the latter.

In the passages surrounding Z 106, Wittgenstein gives no hint what he might have meant; but there are some remarks in Philosophical Investigations (hereafter ‘PI’) where he can be seen a t least as describing similar linguistic mechanisms.

1. Consider first PI f342W:

473. Certainly all these things happen in you. - And now all I ask is to understand the expression we use. - The picture is there. And I am not disputing its validity in any particular case. - Only I want to understand the application of the picture.

424. The picture is there: and I d o not dispute its correctness. But what is its application? Think of the picture of blindness as a darkness in the soul or in the head of the blind man.

Nothing in the context indicates what ‘all these things’ that ‘certainly happen in you’ are; and I am inclined to ignore that sentence.

I assume that in the final sentence quoted, Wittgenstein is not suggesting that when we say a person is blind, we mean that his soul is dark. Rather, I suggest, he is asking us to think of a language in which, instead of ‘He is blind’, people said ‘His soul is dark’. That would fairly clearly be an example of the pattern I have been proposing, in which we trade on a picture, as a way of saying something else.

The sense in which such pictures might be ‘correct’ or ‘valid’ is probably not that, if we had an expression, ‘His soul is dark’, it might very well be because his soul was dark that he was unable to see. Rather, if we had that expression, it might be correct to say that it traded on a picture ofthe soul as a place where likenesses of the world around us were viewed, - a place where, when it was dark, no viewing could be done, and we could not see. (Compare Poseidon: he neither does make the winds blow, nor is believed to do so by the agnostics who trade on references to his moods as a way of describing the weather. But still it is a correct account of their conception of Poseidon, that he is a deity whose moods determine the weather, and it would be incorrect to say that these

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people say ‘He is angry today’ because they conceive him as a being who is infuriated by stormy weather.)

The sections are curiously repetitive, and one of the themes that is repeated is that there is a picture, and then there is its application. Unless one reads the remark about blindness in the way I propose, there is no hint as to what kind of thing Wittgenstein had in mind as the ‘application’; but on my reading of the blindness remark, the application of ‘Her soul is dark’ would be ‘She is blind’, just as the application of ‘Poseidon was furious’ would be ‘It was a very stormy day’, and the application of ‘You weren’t thinking what you were doing!’ would be ‘You failed to do something you knew should be done’.

It is not beyond dispute that these sections should be taken in the way I have suggested, but my reading does enable us to make some fairly clear sense of remarks that are otherwise quite confounding; and so read, the sections show Wittgenstein thinking in very much the way I suggested he might have been thinking on the subject of the imaginary auxiliary activity.

2. One of the things that was confusing about the idea that thinking might be an imaginary activity was the fact that we can really mean it when we say ‘You weren’t thinking’. It seemed that, although we might sometimes not be in earnest in saying such things, whenever we meant it we must be supposing that there is a real activity that should have been performed, and was not. My reply to this difficulty was that we could mean what we were using these turns of phrase to say, (the ‘application’,) while still only making as if a characteristic beneficial activity had not been performed, just as people can mean it when they say that Poseidon will be cheerful tomorrow, - that is, really think the weather will be fine.

Wittgenstein can be read as making a similar point in PI $427:

427. “While I was speaking to him, I did not know what was going on in his head.” In saying this, one is not thinking of brain- processes, but of thought-processes. The picture would be taken seriously. We should really like to see into his head. And yet we only mean what elsewhere we should mean by saying: we should like to know what he is thinking. I want to say: we have this vivid picture - and that use, apparently contradicting the picture, which expresses the psychical.

One may intitially be astounded to find Wittgenstein, of all

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people, saying that this picture should be taken seriously, and that we should really like to see into his head; but when he goes on: ‘and yet we only mean what we should elsewhere mean by saying: we should like to know what he is thinking’, it becomes moderately clear that he just means that sometimes we mean it when we say we wondered what was going on in his head’, that is, we really do wonder what he was thinking.

Wittgenstein admittedly clouds the issue by writing ‘We should really like to see into his head’, rather than e.g. ‘We should really like to know what was going on in his head’. The latter can without strain be taken figuratively, but the former too strongly suggests a literal interpretation. But if charity did not require that we reject that reading, it could be rejected on the basis of the words ‘. . . one is not thinking of brain-processes, but of thought-processes’. If, with some gadgetry, we saw into his head, brain processes would be the most we would see.. (See also §§589, 657-8.)

3. Some of Wittgenstein’s remarks about the soul in PI p. 178 can be taken in a similar way. The sentence “‘I believe that he is not an automaton”, just like that, so far makes no sense’ is followed immediately by the sentence ‘My attitude towards him is an attitude towards a soul. I am not of the opinion that he has a soul’, - and since (a) believing and being of an opinion are for all practical purposes synonymous, and (b) ‘He is not an automaton, you know’, and ‘He has a soul, you know’ would be used in the same cases and for the same purposes, it is fair to conclude that anything Wittgenstein says here about humans being or not being automata, he would equally say about their having or not having souls.

Clearly, as Wittgenstein says in the fourth paragraph on that page, ‘He is not an automaton’ does not literally convey inform- ation, not anyway to a human being who has met him in ordinary circumstances. At most one would be saying something else, such as that he always behaves like a human being, not sometimes like an automaton.

Similarly if one were to say ‘He has a soul, you know’, one need not and would not likely be expressing the belief that there is a mysterious part of him, without which he would not be alive. Agnostics could say he has a soul, just as they could say that Poseidon has been quite irritable lately; and if they did, they would be giving a reminder that he has feelings too, or suggesting that he has been treated as if this were not so. In this they would be playing

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on the legendary picture of the soul as the repository of sensibilities; and the ‘application’ of the picture would be: ‘He has what in legend can be had only by having a soul’,

Someone who, instead of ‘He is not an automaton’, said ‘ In my opinion he is not an automaton’ would be suspected of finding it conceivable that some apparent human beings were laboratory- created fakes, but still inclined to deny that this was true of the (apparent) person to whom he was referring. With that background, what was said would make a kind of sense. Without it or something similar, it makes none. (Hence the words ‘just like that, so far makes no sense.’)

Similarly ‘In my opinion, he has a soul’ converts ‘He has a soul, you know’ from a figurative to a literal remark, and then it is no longer clear whether it makes sense, or what sense it makes. Words expressing doubt, belief, conviction either do not belong with figurative expressions, or at least can be used preserving the figurative character only when the ‘application’ is a matter of opinion. (One can say ‘I believe Poseidon will be in a foul mood tomorrow’, but if on a stormy day someone says she believes Poseidon is in a bad mood, she would be taken to be talking theology, not meteorology.)

If this is right, then when Wittgenstein said ‘I am not of the opinion that he has a soul’, he did not mean that he did not doubt it, was certain of it, or was of a contrary opinion either, but that expressions of opinion are out of place with figurative ways of speaking, converting them into a different kind of discourse.

At the foot of the same page there is the following paragraph:

And how about such an expression as: “In my heart I understood when you said that”, pointing to one’s heart? Does one perhaps not mean this gesture? Of course one means it. Or is one conscious of using a mere figure? Indeed not. - It is not a figure that we choose, not a simile, yet it is a figurative expression.

Here we have another case of a picture and its application; and the proximity of this passage to the remarks about being an automaton and having a soul provides some confirmation that the latter should be read in the way I have suggested.

There is a further point here: if a figurative expression is in common use, - is one of the natural, regular ways of expressing oneself, we may not be aware of its figurative character, the way

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we would of course be, had it been a simile we had chosen. We may have to be reminded or shown what kind of expression it is. This is of some importance in view of a possible objection: if we are only making as if something beneficial failed to be done when we complain that a person was not thinking, then why do we have to be shown this? The answer is: because we have not devised this way of speaking on the spot for current purposes. It is a familiar, everyday construction, that we know how to use (witness the fact that we go right on to say ‘Oh? What did I do wrong?’), but the use of which we may not understand, just a s a person may know her way around a town, but be quite unable to draw a map of it (Z

Although it is not a proper part of the job of interpreting Z 106, I would like in conclusion to cite some textual evidence indicating that Wittgenstein might agree with the second of my senses in which there is something imaginary about our concept of thinking. I suggested that on the analogy of waltzing or calculating, we tend to imagine thinking to be a learnable activity, institutable a t will and identifiable by how it is performed as being thinking, rather than worrying, ruminating, wishing one could decide, or what have you. Here we need not be imagining that there is just one procedure called thinking. Our supposition might be that thinking, like carpentering, may include quite a miscellany of different operations, but that just as a person is carpentering whether she is sawing, planing, sanding, glueing, or rabbetting, and is not carpentering when unclogging the kitchen drain, there may be various things that count as thinking, but if a person was not engaged in any of the operations on a comprehensive list of these, she would not have been thinking.

Wittgenstein may be read as expressing a doubt about this in PI $328.

121).

328. Well, what does one include in ‘thinking?’ What has one learned to use this word for? - If I say I have thought - need I always be right? - What kind of mistake is there room for here? Are there circumstances in which one would ask: “What was I doing then really thinking; am I not making a mistake?” Suppose someone takes a measurement in the middle of a train of thought: has he interrupted the thought if he says nothing to himself during the measuring?

Here, while it is clear enough that Wittgenstein means to deny that we can make the mistake of misidentifying what we are doing as

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thinking, - of believing we are thinking, when in fact what we are doing is something else, or nothing in particular, - the only thing that approaches being an argument for this is the question ‘Are there circumstances in which one would ask: “Was what I was doing then really thinking; am I not making a mistake?”’ The intended answer to this question is presumably ‘No’, but is that the correct answer?

Certainly one will go a long time without hearing this question asked; and if it were posed, no one would know how to answer it. There is no common knowledge that if a mental process is thus and so, it is thinking, and not otherwise (unlike ‘Was that really chess we were playing, or was it a variant you made up?’).

One of our carpentry students might be drawn into asking it, if she were charged with not having been thinking, although she had been going about her work quite carefully. She might think ‘Oh dear! Was that not thinking? I would have thought it was. I wonder how one thinks then?’ But if I am right in my contention that the allegation that she was not thinking is only a quaint way of saying that she made a mistake that she was equipped to avoid, this would clearly be a feckless anxiety.

In saying ‘What kind of mistake is there room for here?’, Wittgenstein seems to be suggesting that there are mistakes we can make in using the word ‘think’, but that misidentifying an activity is not one of them. He presumably does not mean that we are infallible about the occurrence of this activity, but rather that thinking is not the name of an activity that is identifiable by the way it is done, and thus we can be neither right nor wrong in its identification.

What kind of mistake can we make in our use of this word? - This might be an example: if I say I have been thinking of building a ketch and sailing around the world, I may have been thinking all right, of what a joy it would be, of how I would amaze my friends, of the scene when I resigned my job, and so on, but unless I am quite seriously inclined to do it, it is incorrect to describe myself as thinking of doing i t .

If I do so express myself it will be appropriate for another person to be alarmed or excited, and encourage or discourage me. If I am impatient with those responses because I have only been amusing myself with these thoughts, the specific construction ‘I have been thinking of Xing’ was incorrectly employed. This is not because

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fantasizing about quitting one’s job etc. and thinking about it are subtly different activities, and God would know which I had been doing, if he could see what had been going on in my mind. It is not differences in what went through my head, but differences in attitude, that would determine the choice between ‘thinking of‘ and ‘fantasizing about’. So while something has to have been running through my head to make it correct to say I have been thinking of Xing, it need not be something of a characteristic sort, and if I have in fact been fantasizing, the incorrectness of saying ‘I have been thinking of Xing’ lies, not in my having misidentified a process, but in my not having a suitable attitude towards the prospect of Xing.

It may be interesting to note in conclusion a philosophical application of the idea that, for some uses of the word ‘think’, thinking is an imaginary auxiliary activity. When we wonder whether machines think, the question confounds us mostly because it is so unclear what might show whether they do; but i fwe convert the problem into a question of whether we might reproach a machine for not having been thinking what it was doing, as a way of not telling it what it has done wrong, we may readily see that such distinctively human transactions can hardly have a place in our commerce with machines. That is not because they do not think, but if anything because they are not embarrassed by reproaches, or moved by them to wonder whether they have misunderstood the instructions, or whether they have forgotten some step in the procedure.

Department of Philosophy University of Toronto. Toronto, Canada, M5S 1Al