How to describe mental events?

Abstract

In What is it like to be a bat?, Thomas Nagel (1974) examines the polemic question about the description of mental events and suggests that only what he calls an objective phenomenology, yet to be formulated in a distant future, could finally confer the universal dimension of scientific statements, regarded as third person discourse par excellence, to those mental statements, which characteristic is to preserve the first person perspective. The present paper intends to show that George Politzer’s and Ludwig Wittgenstein’s philosophies of psychology, despite their different theoretical approaches, had already pointed out, far before Nagel’s article, that the dilemma concerning the objectivity of third person perspective of science and the first person perspective of mental statements is a consequence of the illusion that one has, from the first person perspective, a privileged access to one’s own mental events. Wittgenstein’s argument on the impossibility of a private language and Politzer’s notion of drama as constituting the very psychological fact in stead of what he calls “Classical Psychology” concepts of “mind” and “behaviour”, both converge to the deconstruction of the ancient illusion of an “interior life” which anticipates, and therefore determines linguistic practices. In other words, this paper aims to point out that only from a linguistic realm, therefore, from an universal perspective, it is possible to construct a particular discourse – that one regarding ones own mental events.