ABSTRACT
A convinced student of Ludwig Wittgenstein and Gilbert Ryle cannot but be bemused by much of the philosophy of mind that has been produced in the last half of the twentieth century. Such words as pain, thought, belief, and even mind are regularly taken to be names for things. In mind-body dualism there is an inherent gap between the mental and the physical. Donald Davidson begins by noting that "Mental events such as perceivings, rememberings, decisions, and actions resist capture in the nomological net of physical theory". One of the things that physics is good at is events, incredibly minute, short-lived events, on which all else seems to rest. If one were inclined to assimilate the category of the mental to the physical, one might go looking for mental events. A knowledge of cultures, of political and economic institutions, or of psychoanalytic theory provide rules of thumb for understanding persons.
