ABSTRACT
In the Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein says: 'Only of a human being and what resembles (behaves like) a living human being can one say: it has sensations; it sees; is blind; hears; is deaf; is conscious or unconscious'. 1 This dictum is often rejected in practice by psychologists, physiologists and computer experts, when they take predicates whose normal application is to complete human beings or complete animals and apply them to parts of animals, such as brains, or to electrical systems. This is commonly defended as a harmless pedagogical device; I wish to argue that it is a dangerous practice which may lead to conceptual and methodological confusion. I shall call the reckless application of human-being predicates to insufficiently human-like objects the 'homunculus fallacy', since its most naive form is tantamount to the postulation of a little man within a man to explain human experience and behaviour.
