I have been trying in all this to remove the temptation to
think that there “
must be” what is called
a mental process of thinking, hoping, wishing, believing,
etc., independent of the process of expressing a
thought, a hope, a wish, etc. And I want to
give you the following rule of thumb: If you are
puzzled about the nature of thought, belief, knowledge, and the
like, substitute for the thought the expression of the thought
etc. The difficulty which lies in this
substitution, and at the same time the whole point of it, is
this: the expression of belief, thought,
etc., is just a sentence; ‒ ‒ ‒ and the sentence
has sense only as a member of a system of language; as one
expression within a calculus. Now we are tempted to
imagine this calculus, as it were, as a permanent background to
every sentence which we say, and to think that, although the
sentence as written on a piece of paper or spoken stands isolated,
in the mental act of thinking the calculus is there ‒ ‒ ‒ all in
a lump. The mental act seems to perform in a miraculous
way what could not be performed by any act of manipulating
symbols. Now when the temptation to think that in some
sense the whole calculus must be present at the same time vanishes,
there is no more point in
postulating the existence of a
peculiar kind of mental act alongside of our expression.
This, of course, doesn't mean that we have shown that
peculiar acts of consciousness do not accompany the expressions
of our thoughts! Only we no longer say that they
must accompany them.
69.