To the generation of philosophers brought up in England in the years immediately succeeding the Second World War it seemed as though the Mind-Body problem had been (in the current jargon) not solved but dissolved. Where the previous generation had toiled at the old Cartesian task of constructing a material world out of, or on the basis of, mental entities, our generation discovered that the mental entities themselves had been eliminated. The notion of sense-data used by Moore and Russell had been shown in Ryle’s Concept of Mind to be incoherent. ‘J. Austin, Sense and Sensibilia’ appeared on the Oxford lecture list in Trinity Term 1948. Austin’s principal target was just that dichotomy between sense-data and material objects from which the whole problem seemed to be derived. He directed attention to the variety of locutions in which ‘look’ can figure: ‘He looks a good sport.’ ‘He looks as if he were going to faint.’ ‘They look like ants.’ ‘They look like Europeans.’ It looked as if statements about how things look could not be the record of a subclass of mental events called visual experiences.

Mental events as such were gradually being eliminated. Wittgenstein’s views, already rumoured before the publication of Philosophical Investigations in 1953, seemed to require that, where Ryle had taken twinges, aches, itches and flutters had been for Ryle the only honest citizens of the interior state. Much of the odium that he heaped on claimants to mental existence like acts of will, judgment, understanding or perceiving was aroused by the comparison of the latter to their notable disadvantage with the former, whose claim to be genuine occurrences was unchallenged. But here was Wittgenstein apparently challenging it.