Child Mind Notes

Bill Child - Wittgenstein

Chapter Six: The later philosophy: mind and psychology

1. Sensations and sensation language

i. Wittgenstein’s 1929-30 account of sensation language

• Sensation words have two meanings: a private, introspective meaning, which only I understand, and a public meaning, which can be understood by other people

  • public meanings are based on behavioural criteria

• Wittgenstein retained the ideas that:

  • first person application of sensation words is not based on observation of behaviour

  • meanings of third-person applications of sensation words must be understood in a way that makes reference to behaviour

• BUT he rejected the early account as a whole

  • it is impossible for meaning to be made through introspection, and

  • this account of public meanings of sensations would make the character of sensations irrelevant to communication

ii. The private language argument

• We find it natural to think that sensations are intrinsically subjective and introspectible

  • it would be perfectly possible for two people to behave exactly alike, yet for one of them to have totally different sensations

  • this leads to the belief in epistemic privacy and in sensation words as defined by introspective attachment

• Wittgenstein assumes that our ordinary language is not a private language - i.e. that my saying ‘I am in pain’ does not refer to something that only I can know/understand

  • he then asks if there are any words that could be private in such a way

• Can a private linguist give meaning to signs by association?

  • a standard of correctness musty be established, which would mean an application of a term ‘S’ would be correct if the new sensation is the same kind of sensation as was originally called ‘S’

    • but we cannot take for granted what it is for something to belong to the same kind (Platonism) - what counts as going on in the same way depends on a humanly created standard of similarity (similarity in what respect)

  • why can’t the private linguist create a standard of correctness?

    • community view - without community, not distinction between what is right and seems right

• What about private ostensive definition?

  • ostensive definition works when the role a word is supposed to play in the language is already clear

    • but this would presuppose an existing network of words e.g. ‘sensation’, ‘this’ etc, and this is the question at hand

    • the private linguist must find a way of specifying the kind of thing being name without relying on public language

      • here the argument depends on the assumption that ordinary language isn’t public

• The private linguist has no samples - he cannot compare today’s sensation with yesterday’s, because it is no longer there. A memory image is no better as a standard of correctness than a mental image of a set of colour samples in public OD

  • the point isn’t that sensations are transient; that a standard of correctness could be set up but not remembered, so that there could be a fact of the matter about whether an application was correct, but we just couldn’t know it

    • instead the PL couldn’t even establish a standard of correctness

      • sensations cannot be compared and sorted/classified, because they are only available for inspection as long as they can be held in my attention (does W think this? attention/observation etc)

• W is wrong if Platonism is true, because then it is straightforwardly true whether a sensation is the same kind as the original

iii. Other minds

• How does anyone make sense of the thought that other people have sensations and experiences?

  • this is not an epistemic question

• Let’s suppose that the word ‘pain’ is understood introspectively (contra PL argument). How do we make the transition from first-person pain to third-person pain?

  • 1. imaginative projection - I know by introspection what it is like for me to be in pain, which enables me to form an image of pain that I can use to imagine the state of affairs of someone else being in pain

    • this is conceptually impossible - we cannot form an image of someone else’s pain on the money of our own pain.

    • I cannot derive the idea of pain that is felt by someone else by imagining pain that I do feel

  • 2. I understand that for someone else to be in pain is for them to be in the same kind of state that I am when I’m in pain

    • but this presupposes that we understand what is is for someone else to be in pain - it does not help us to understand the phenomenon

    • it is like saying ‘it’s five o’clock on the sun’ - it’s all very well to say it means ‘it’s five o’clock there’ but this tells us nothing about which cases we can speak of its being the same time here and there

  • 3. I use the word ‘pain’ to refer to my own private sensations of pain, correlate this sensation with my own pain behaviour, and understand the claim that someone else is in pain by reference to their pain-behaviour

    • beetle-box example: if we conceive of a public language as being founded on private objects, then those private objects are ultimately redundant. this would mean that pain would come to mean behaviour, which is...

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