"Did He Love?": On the Indeterminacy of the Mental and Uncertainty in Ethical Relations

Camilla Kronqvist

doi:10.15845/nwr.si2026.3752

Authors

Camilla Kronqvist Åbo Akademi University

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.15845/nwr.si2026.3752

Keywords:

Love, Wittgenstein, Indeterminacy, Psychological concepts, Lars Hertzberg

Abstract

Several philosophers attached to the research environment at Åbo Akademi University have turned to Wittgenstein’sremarks on philosophical psychology to clarify what an investigation of ethics could entail in the light of his later thought. They have thus heeded the advice of Elizabeth Anscombe to bring out the evaluative features of the psychological concepts inherent in all moral philosophical studies, before attempting to offer a normative moral theory. In this paper, I consider Lars Hertzberg’s suggestion that we may be helped by thinking of our use of psychological concepts as characterized by a kind of indeterminacy and ask what implications this has for the certainty or uncertainty one person may experience concerning what another thinks and feels. Reconsidering his example of a widow, who, looking back on her life, asks whether her husband loved her and feels distraught about not knowing what to make of what she has in terms of “evidence,” I ask what her question, and the questions she does not ask, reveal about the indeterminacy of the mental, and about the kind of ethical or existential attitude she seems unable to take towards her deceased husband and their shared life.

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