In these remarks, Wittgenstein turns to an issue related to the idea of a private language, the “problem of other minds”: if, as Descartes says in the second of his Meditations, we must judge that the people passing before us have minds and are not simply automatons (as Descartes held that animals were), how can we support this judgment? In §§281-315, Wittgenstein attempts to dissolve this problem and also situates himself with respect to the behaviorist program in psychology.

• §§281-287. Ascriptions of mental life to others (3rd person). These sections are directed against both dualism (of mind and body) and behaviorism. We know how to ascribe mental life only when there is human-like behavior (§283). But the attitude accompanying such descriptions shows that they are not simply descriptions of behavior (§286). In other works, Wittgenstein rejects both the reaction of the behaviorist (who says, “But surely all we have here is behavior”) and the dualist (who says, “But surely there is something more”): to deny that mental ascriptions are descriptions of behavior is not to assert that they are descriptions of something else.

• §§288-294. Ascriptions to oneself (1st person). In mental ascriptions to oneself there is no chance of error, but that is not to say that we know some description with certainty. To see things this way is to misunderstand the usual language game (§288 end, and also §292). Our right to make these ascriptions to ourselves needn’t lie in a justification for them (§289). Genuine descriptions play a special sort of role in language games; they are not like pictures hanging on a wall (§291).

• §§295-303. 3rd person ascriptions on the model of 1st person ascriptions. If we feel forced to think that we ascribe to others “something” which we find in ourselves, this is a picture that forces itself on us rather than a self-evident truth (§§295, 299). Indeed, it would not be easy to think of someone else’s sensations on analogy with one’s own, nor is there room for the doubt that would give such analogical reasoning its point (§§302, 303).

• §§304-310. Only a picture is rejected. These remarks are not intended as a denial of mental states and processes, only of the picture of them as hidden counterparts to physical states and processes (§§304-305). The real problem lies in the assumption that they are two species of the same genus (§§308). Wittgenstein elsewhere says something comparable about finite and infinite quantities: he rejects the picture of them as two species of the genus number but also rejects attempts to reduce the infinite to finite signs for it and compares such attempts to behaviorism.

• §§311-315. Private exhibition. The idea of a private exhibition of sensation is an illusion (§311). We can exhibit sensations only in the way we can exhibit anything else (§§312-313). And introspection is not a way to solve philosophical problems (§314).