Wittgenstein, Turing, and Neural Networks

Abstract

The main task of this paper is grounding the socio-anthropological “naturalization” of meaning operated by the later Wittgenstein in his remarks on rule-following in the Philosophical Investigations in considerations relating to models of low-level (biological) processes of imitation, training, and learning. If the operation suggested above is successful, two of its immediate consequences are that the social aspect of language can no longer be considered as a primitive notion, but needs to be placed upon, if not reduced to, a biological foundation; and that the study of thought, and, actually, of certain brain processes, becomes prior in the order of explanation to the study of language. The issues raised in this article are relevant to Wittgenstein scholarship, to any attempt to produce an acceptable philosophy of language, and to all those interested in the tenability of one of the cornerstones of analytic philosophy, the so-called “priority thesis”: the study of language is prior, in the order of explanation, to the study of thought.