When you suddenly “get” a concept – when something clicks – it feels like a distinct mental event. You might even picture a little light going on inside your head. This intuition is so natural that philosophers and psychologists have long treated understanding as either a conscious experience or an ongoing mental state. Ludwig Wittgenstein, however, thought this picture was deeply misleading. In his later work, particularly the Philosophical Investigations, he dismantled the idea that understanding is some inner occurrence – private, momentary, and introspectable – and proposed something far more nuanced in its place.

The common assumption: understanding as a mental event
Wittgenstein’s grammatical investigation
Against private inner experience
Understanding as mastery of a technique
Rules, interpretation, and the regress problem
What this means for the empirical and psychological approaches
The nuanced picture Wittgenstein leaves us with

The common assumption: understanding as a mental event

The traditional view, rooted in Cartesian thinking, treats the mind as an inner theater where private experiences play out. On this picture, understanding a word or a rule means that something happens inside you – a mental state takes hold, an experience occurs. When you hear the word “cat” and understand it, there must, it seems, be a conscious grasp that accompanies the hearing. This assumption shows up in everyday language: we say things like “I finally understood it” as though describing a datable experience, or “I’ve understood it since Tuesday” as though describing an ongoing internal condition.

Philosophers like René Descartes gave this view its most influential formulation – that each person has a faculty of introspection by which they can know the contents of their own consciousness with certainty. Wittgenstein saw this picture of consciousness as a problem worth systematically unpacking, and his strategy was characteristically indirect: instead of arguing against it head-on, he examined the grammar – the actual use – of words like “understand.”

Wittgenstein’s grammatical investigation

Wittgenstein’s method in the Philosophical Investigations is to pay close attention to how words are actually used, rather than constructing theories about what they must refer to. In the case of “understanding,” he asks a series of probing questions about timing and duration. Can we meaningfully speak of an “interruption” of understanding? When did your understanding begin? How long does it last? These questions, while seemingly simple, expose a grammatical mismatch between the word “understand” and the words we use to describe genuine states of consciousness like pain, excitement, or depression.

States of consciousness are typically characterized by the possibility of interruption – a pain can come and go, and we can speak of its duration meaningfully. But it is grammatically awkward to ask “when did your understanding of addition get interrupted?” in the way we might ask “when did your headache stop?” Through this grammatical inquiry, Wittgenstein concludes that understanding does not behave like a state of consciousness – and therefore cannot be one.

Against private inner experience

One of Wittgenstein’s most powerful moves is his critique of the idea that understanding is a private mental experience – something only the understander can access. This connects directly to his famous private language argument. For Wittgenstein, an “inner process” stands in need of outward criteria. If understanding were purely an internal, private event, there would be no way to verify or communicate it. Yet we clearly do communicate about understanding – teachers assess whether students have understood, colleagues confirm mutual comprehension, and so on. This public accessibility is not incidental; it is built into the very grammar of the word.

Wittgenstein’s position locates understanding not in the first-person introspection of an isolated subject, nor in purely third-person behavioral description, but in what he calls ordinary human interaction – language-games embedded in forms of life. This is his alternative to both the Cartesian picture (understanding as private inner certainty) and the behaviorist one (understanding as merely observable responses).

Understanding as mastery of a technique

If understanding is not a mental state and not a mental process, what is it? Wittgenstein’s answer is captured in a remark from §199 of the Philosophical Investigations: “To understand a sentence means to understand a language. To understand a language means to be master of a technique.” This shifts the entire frame. Understanding is not something you have in a moment of private illumination – it is something you demonstrate through competent participation in shared practices.

In the Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein characterizes understanding as a mastery of a technique – a dispositional notion that is better described as knowing how to employ a word correctly than as possessing a private mental representation of its meaning. You understand the word “addition” not because some inner state of “addition-grasping” persists in your mind, but because you can reliably apply the operation across new cases, can teach it, correct mistakes, and participate in the practice of arithmetic.

This also means that the rules underlying understanding need not be consciously accessible – they can be entirely tacit. We learn language and the rules of its use by engaging with them in practice, through training and example, not by explicitly consulting an inner manual. This is a crucial point: the absence of a conscious accompanying experience does not mean understanding is absent. On the contrary, much of what we call understanding operates below the level of conscious reflection.

Rules, interpretation, and the regress problem

A further difficulty Wittgenstein raises against the mentalist picture of understanding concerns rules and interpretation. If understanding a rule meant having some mental interpretation of it that guides future application, we would face an immediate regress. Any interpretation of a rule can itself be interpreted differently – “any interpretation still hangs in the air along with what it interprets, and cannot give it any support. Interpretations by themselves do not determine meaning.” In other words, no private mental image or internal gloss can fix, once and for all, how a rule should be applied in a new case.

Wittgenstein argues that any purported inner interpretation can itself be taken in different ways, leading to an infinite regress – and this challenges conceptions of understanding a rule as grasping a private mental item that guides future use. The resolution, he suggests, is not to posit ever-deeper mental states but to look at what we actually do: we go on applying rules in ways that align with community practice, and that alignment – not a private inner act – is what understanding consists in.

As Wittgenstein famously puts it: “Hence it is not possible to obey a rule ‘privately’: otherwise thinking one was obeying a rule would be the same as obeying it.” This is a decisive point. A rule is not a mental object; it is a pattern of practice sustained by a community. To understand is to be correctly positioned within that practice – able to go on in the same way as others do.

What this means for the empirical and psychological approaches

Wittgenstein’s arguments also carry implications for how cognitive scientists and psychologists approach understanding. The empirical approach typically looks for internal mechanisms – neural correlates, mental representations, processing stages – that underlie the capacity to understand. Wittgenstein would not necessarily deny that such mechanisms exist, but he would question whether finding them constitutes an explanation of understanding in the philosophically relevant sense.

For Wittgenstein, being conscious is not located in a mental realm or reducible to brain activity alone; it is implicit in the action of a living human being embedded in a social context. The same applies to understanding. What makes something count as understanding is its place in a form of life – in the shared practices, norms, and language-games of a community. This is not a fact that neuroscience can straightforwardly determine, because it is a grammatical fact, not an empirical one.

Mathematical understanding, for instance, remains unnoticed in the background of thinking and doing – what Wittgenstein describes as the mastery of a technique that we carry out quasi-blindly, with the certainty that others act in the same way. This is not a failure of self-knowledge; it is simply the nature of understanding as a practical competence embedded in a community. The empirical scientist who locates “understanding” in a brain region or a computational state has not dissolved the philosophical question – they have, if Wittgenstein is right, sidestepped it by assuming that the mental state picture was correct to begin with.

The nuanced picture Wittgenstein leaves us with

What emerges from Wittgenstein’s analysis is a view of understanding that is irreducibly relational and practice-based. Understanding is neither a flash of inner light nor an enduring mental substance. It is shown in behavior, demonstrated through competent action, and assessed against shared norms – but it is not identical to any of these outward manifestations either. Wittgenstein is highly critical of the conception of meaningfulness as a psychological process that accompanies an expression – the idea that there must always be something going on “inside” that makes a use meaningful.

This does not make understanding mysterious. It makes it human. Wittgenstein’s main objective, as developed in the Philosophical Investigations, is to dissolve philosophical puzzles by clarifying and contrasting the grammatical rules relevant to the concepts under examination. In the case of understanding, this means replacing a misleading picture – the private, dateable, introspectable mental event – with a more accurate one: understanding as a form of skilled participation in a shared human practice, governed by rules that are themselves embedded in community life and need not ever surface as conscious states.

What do you think? If understanding is fundamentally a matter of competent participation in shared practices rather than a private inner experience, does this change how we should evaluate claims like “I understand, but I can’t explain it”? And if conscious experience plays no essential role in constituting understanding, what does this imply for how we design education – should the focus shift entirely from internal comprehension to observable mastery?

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Table of Contents

The common assumption: understanding as a mental event 🔗

Wittgenstein’s grammatical investigation 🔗

Against private inner experience 🔗

Understanding as mastery of a technique 🔗

Rules, interpretation, and the regress problem 🔗

What this means for the empirical and psychological approaches 🔗

The nuanced picture Wittgenstein leaves us with 🔗