ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a discussion on skills and abilities, powers, competent use, mentalism, causality and causal accounts of human activities, homogeneous and heterogeneous explanation regresses, essentialism, the concept of reading, and mechanism and mechanistic and mentalist criteria for reading. It also focuses on modus tollens, word sign to speech sound, phenomenological differences, context of investigation, and the threshold fallacy. Abilities are connected with concepts like learning and proficiency. Psychologists may well be reluctant to accept Wittgenstein's way of ending explanatory regresses for the skills and abilities that loom so large in psychology. A homogeneous regress in psychology and other human domains terminates in something like a habit, acquired skill, or natural ability. Wittgenstein realizes the mechanist is likely to respond by insisting that increased knowledge of the brain and new investigative techniques might enable us to witness neuronal connections that are established during the training of people to read various texts.
