ABSTRACT
The editors of this volume presented me with the perfect opportunity to reflect on a picture that had long held me captive. I was invited to comment on the passage, ‘Concepts lead us to make investigations; are the expression of our interest, and direct our interest’ (PI §570). To illustrate what he has in mind here, Wittgenstein goes on to express his famous lament: ‘Misleading parallel: psychology treats of processes in the psychical sphere, as does physics in the physical’ (PI §571). The latter is an argument that I had looked at closely ten years ago, in ‘Wittgenstein versus Russell on the Analysis of Mind’ (Shanker 1993). In this article I sought to document the extent to which Wittgenstein’s attack on psychophysical parallelism may have been inspired by his reading of Russell’s Analysis of Mind. My greatest problem at the time, however, was that, much as I resonated with the conclusion that it is ‘perfectly possible that certain psychological phenomena cannot be investigated physiologically, because physiologically nothing corresponds to them’ (RPPI §904), I was deeply troubled by the analogy with which Wittgenstein sought to illustrate this point.
