Constantine Sandis, <i>Wittgenstein on Other Minds: Strangers in a Strange Land</i> . London: Anthem Press. 2025

This volume by Constantine Sandis is, on the one hand, accessible and funny, with frequent pop-cultural and historical references, and humorous, reflective storytelling. On the other hand, it provides much-needed critical engagement with dominant understandings of some of the later Wittgenstein's key contributions, and with the misunderstandings about what it means to know other minds that permeate popular and philosophical thought. Importantly, this volume is invested in both the personal and philosophical. The personal letter is as much material for discussion as the formal body of work. Sandis writes in the introduction that, ‘…while there is no genuine philosophical problem of other minds, for the later Wittgenstein, this does not entail that there are no real-life difficulties in understanding others and, indeed, ourselves…’1 This is something of a motto for the book, which, while never faltering in its commitment to the idea that we can understand one another, other cultures and even animals, takes time to explore and point to methods for overcoming the many difficulties in getting there. Chapters 1 and 2 offer personal and philosophical context for Wittgenstein's treatment of other minds and what he thought it means to understand another. Chapter 1, which includes in its title the quotation ‘If Some People Looked Like Elephants and Others Like Cats,’ is where Sandis elaborates on Wittgenstein's personal struggles with understanding others compared with an overtly optimistic outlook about knowing other minds in his writing. In one example, he recounts correspondence between Wittgenstein and Sraffa where the former expressed growing frustration at his inability to make himself understood by the latter. Sandis smooths the disconnect between the public or official view and the private frustration that there were people who could not understand him or make themselves understood to him. The key is something much like Frege's Grundlagen principle, ‘To always separate sharply the psychological from the logical, the subjective from the objective’.2 What Wittgenstein shows us publicly is that there is nothing metaphysical or necessary preventing knowledge of other minds, but this does not account for personal, contingent barriers to understanding. Chapter 2, ‘Wittgenstein and Moral Epistemology’, identifies and names the Lockean theory of communication that is frequently the target of Wittgenstein and the source of much confusion about how we can understand others. Very roughly, this pervasive idea is that the purpose of language is to translate thoughts so that the thoughts of one mind can be understood by another. Sandis explains how this view is implicit in a major idea in psychology and its philosophy, the notion that empathy is a ‘magic access pass’ to complete, unimpeded understanding of others.3 The next part of the chapter presents a Wittgensteinian alternative to empathy for reaching understanding: recognition of shared behaviour. The barriers to recognising behaviour, to understanding why someone acts the way they do or uses language in a certain way, are numerous, but they are surmountable. Approaching the project of understanding as one of curiosity and living together is an attractive alternative to the operation of a feeling. Chapter 3, ‘Who Are ‘We’ for Wittgenstein?’ is an important foundation for the rest of the book. It is a question in the scholarship which has frequently been overlooked, and its implications are wide reaching. This informs how many of Wittgenstein's observations should be understood. Sandis settles, persuasively, on the notion that ‘we’ is used by Wittgenstein dynamically and contextually depending on the situation. In examples where Wittgenstein discusses a community, person or creature that is distinct from or unintelligible to us—we can use the description of that community to locate the commonality of ‘us’ in contrast. Many of the more instructive remarks of his later philosophy can be understood to refer to we, philosophers, and anyone tempted towards philosophical thinking. The commonality of this community is a tendency towards necessary explanations rather than behavioural descriptions. Rarely is ‘we’ an invocation of humankind as a species; it is a shorthand for those who share the capacity or tendency in question. A particular highlight of the book is the thorough explanation of Wittgenstein's remark that ‘If a lion could talk, we could not understand him’.4 Chapter 4, ‘Understanding the Lion for Real’, addresses translation and quotation questions regarding this quote, from the appropriate rendering of sprechen to a list of many prominent Wittgenstein commentators rendering ‘could’ as the considerably weaker ‘would’. A resonant observation is that Wittgenstein's choice of animal is supposed to shed light on the notion of understanding, just as Nagel sought to shed light on the nature of consciousness when selecting a subject for his ‘What is it like to be a Bat?’ Lions are, it seems, just strange enough that, unlike a domestic mammal, there is no supposition of familiar behaviour or interspecies communication. Sandis argues compellingly that Wittgenstein's lion is not logically or metaphysically non-understandable to a human being, but rather, excluding a lion-raised Tarzan or a sufficiently immersed ethologist, it is not normally possible for someone to come to understand a lion. The key is behaviour, and a lion's behaviour is not something many people can sufficiently live inside. Following from Chapter 2, the ‘we’ who could or would not understand the lion are precisely those who do not live the lives of lions. Sandis reinforces an important point that is sometimes underemphasised in scholarship: sentences that resemble metaphysical or logical conclusions in the later Wittgenstein should be approached with caution, as contingent, contextual utterances instead. Chapter 5, ‘On Safari with Glock’, carefully examines Hans-Johann Glock's reading of the talking lion. Glock proposes two possible readings of the remark: we could not understand a lion that spoke in English sentences, or we could not understand a lion speaking a feline language of growls and other behaviour. Glock's interpretation is that the second reading is far more likely because the former is simply false. Sandis argues that to conceive of the lion remark along this dichotomy is an error. Wittgenstein did not distinguish between a lion speaking a human or feline language because the point is that without a thorough sharing of interests and behaviour with the lion, it would be impossible to know what he means by any utterance, even one that seemed to be English or German. Sandis, though critiquing an element of Glock's interpretation, is careful to emphasise a host of commonalities between their thoughts on language and forms of life. Revisiting the pervasive Lockean theory of communication, Chapter 6 expands on putting an end to ‘mind reading’ pictures of understanding. ‘Understanding Other Cultures (Without Mind-reading)’ is a natural continuation from unpicking the talking lion. To illustrate a host of barriers to understanding people of other cultures, Sandis uses the fascinating example of widespread reporting and belief in supernatural entities in Japan after the devastating 2011 Tōhoku earthquake. In the wake of the disastrous tsunami and nuclear meltdown, there were numerous reports of sightings of spirits or ghosts. Sandis includes conversations between local religious leaders and Western commentators on the phenomenon, and they show quite clearly that there is a deep lack of understanding on the commentators' parts, despite journalistic and academic curiosity. The Wittgensteinian observation is that the Western investigators did not have the same concept as the religious leaders nor those having supernatural experiences. One point is that there are many different Japanese words for different kinds of supernatural entity that do not map onto the ideas of ‘ghost’ or ‘spirit’ in the west. Another other is that when there are daily practices which involve revering the dead or speaking to them, the concepts about death and ‘ghosts’ will be different to those without such practices. Nevertheless, there are warnings throughout the chapter to be cautious about romantic generalisations about other cultures or to view them through a comparative lens. The conclusion of this chapter is a reiteration of the point that understanding is not achieved through the transmission of ideas from one mind to another, but from an effort to spend time and live in the same forms of life as them. The same, as anthropologists know, is true of other cultures. The next two chapters regard themes of thought and action, causality and history. Chapter 7 is a comparative analysis of the idea of understanding others as presented by Wittgenstein and R.G Collingwood. Collingwood is an interesting candidate for this comparison because there is no evidence that he had engaged with anything Wittgenstein wrote or said, and he self-described as a metaphysician (though certainly encouraged changes to the practice of metaphysics). The chapter sets out Collingwood's method of re-enactment for understanding the past, including his claim that it is possible to have the same process of thoughts as someone else, and therefore to understand their actions. An astute observation is that Collingwood rejects a causal account of thought and action and instead understands action as an expression of thought. On his view, there is no such thing as a private thought which explains a subsequent action. This, as Sandis shows, is remarkably close to Wittgenstein, who rejects the idea that we cannot know the mind of another. Indeed, the Wittgensteinian point that it is possible (though often difficult) to gain understanding of another reinforces Collingwood's re-enactment as a plausible strategy for historical insight. Re-enactment can be understood like the anthropological method of spending time inside other cultures, is a means of entering a form of life and therefore of gaining understanding. Chapter 8 is in part an account of Donald Davidson's critiques of several philosophers who denied that rationalisation was to be understood causally. It is also in part a quest to find something of a middle ground position between this set of philosophers, given Davidson's justified critiques, and scientism, which flattens actions to causal explanations. The ‘red book’ authors that Davidson was interested in are characterised by Sandis as historicist; they deny that historical explanations can be lawlike, opposed to scientific explanations. Sandis elaborates on the positions of some of the red book authors, showing distinguishing elements that Davidson flattened in his critique. In a chapter highlight, it is shown that Davidson was using a pluralistic concept of ‘primary reason’ without acknowledgement. Sandis compellingly argues for retaining the idea that causal explanations are alone incomplete accounts of action without embracing historicism. Towards the end of the book, lessons from Wittgenstein about understanding others are applied to understanding artwork. This chapter includes a summary and critique of Rush Rhees' idea of understanding an artwork. Rhees held that it was always possible to understand an artwork as one might understand language, but that each artwork ‘says’ something unique to it that cannot be put into words or replicated in another artwork. Sandis includes entertaining and enlightening interview snippets from Bob Dylan, who rejected such an interpretation of his songs. The Rhees view of understanding artwork, which is not unique to Rhees, is much like the Lockean theory of communication: it holds that there is something in the artwork which must be transported into the mind of the observer. Applying lessons from the previous chapter, Sandis shows how this is untenable. Even if one could grasp through art-language what an artwork says, one could not take this as the artwork's meaning. Much like understanding a person or a lion, one has to understand why the artwork said something and thus has to share in something with others who understand it. The last chapter, largely a transcript of a discussion with Richard Harper at the 10th Annual British Wittgenstein Society Conference, is a fascinating look into a clash between a Wittgensteinian approach to language and the model often used by powerful forces in communications technology. Harper's accounts of his time at Microsoft and the organisation's attitude that communication was for the transfer of information from one person to another. He discusses observations of how teenage boys communicate, frequently not ‘saying’ anything but choosing to use language to merely be together. Fascinatingly, Harper once pitched a product to Microsoft, which from his description sounded much like the messaging app, Snapchat. It seems that Harper's idea for a format that allowed ephemeral, playful communication which had little to do with conveying information was indeed one with a market, despite Microsoft's rejection of it at the time. If I have any criticisms of the work, they are the result of the necessary form of an essay collection where chapters revisit ideas from differing angles. A case that I noted was that Chapters 1 and 2 differ on Wittgenstein's knowledge and understanding distinction. The first chapter emphasises the distinction, treating it as one of the keys to understanding why the public and private Wittgenstein seemed so different. The official optimism in this chapter is about knowledge of other minds, and the private pessimism is about understanding other minds. I also suggest that what is meant by knowledge might have been a little clearer for the general reader (and this volume would certainly be of interest to the general reader!). Chapter 2 rejects that Wittgenstein's key distinction was between knowledge and understanding, instead emphasising the distinction of importance is that between the philosophical possibility of understanding and contingent barriers to understanding in the lived world. However, as it is the latter distinction that is frequently revisited, this disconnection can be treated as an early evolution of thought. In terms of possible missed opportunities, there is a tantalising unexplored extension of the discussion with Harper into contemporary language-using technologies like the current glut of AI chatbots. There is certainly something of the Lockean view of communication in the design and training of these models. I hope that Professor Sandis or other work following from this collection can critically engage with this technology in the future. Finally, it is worth briefly commenting that Anthem Press has produced a visually striking hardback, using the distinct blue, white, and yellow of Louise Chapman's portrait of a characteristically intense Wittgenstein. A happy coincidence, which the author mentions in his acknowledgements, is that there is a tiny silhouette of a fly in the image because the insect landed on it while the portrait was being photographed. The unexpected visitor, reminiscent of those in Wittgenstein's fly bottle, is a visible reminder that though it may be difficult, it is possible to be shewn out and gain understanding.