ABSTRACT
It is often said that if it were true that all names 'properly and immediately signify nothing but the Ideas, that are in the Mind of the Speaker'j!" we could never know what other people meant or whether they understood us, just because the 'ideas' in their minds would be inaccessible to us. A further argument stresses performance as the criterion of meaning and understanding. Whatever may be supposed to take place in the speaker's or hearer's 'mind' or consciousness, we actually tell whether the one speaks and the other hears with understanding from the context of their behaviour - from the appropriateness of the hearer's response, from the evidence of their general linguistic capacity which is provided by their utterances and responses over time, and so forth. The conclusion of such an argument is the denial that any 'mental' or 'inner' process or event whatsoever is either a necessary or a sufficient condition of understanding. Modifications of consciousness, whether pictorial images, verbal images, 'feelings' of understanding or whatever are at most, in Wittgenstein's words, 'more or less characteristic accompaniments or manifestations of understanding.!" Roughly, understanding a particular speech is held to consist in a capacity or tendency to perform appropriate verbal or non-verbal actions. A somewhat bewildering feature of these arguments is that they are often advanced by philosophers apparently uncommitted to a blanket behaviourism or behaviouristic functionalism. The existence of modifications of consciousness, e.g. sensations and images, is not denied,
but only their essential relevance to meaning and understanding. Yet it is difficult to see how the arguments, if they were at all cogent, would do less than prove general behaviourism true. Even the first argument would seem capable of proving that pain is not a modification of consciousness, for we can after all know when another is in pain.
