Mc Ginn Inner And Outer Notes

Marie McGinn - Wittgenstein and the Philosophical Investigations

Chapter Five: The inner and the outer

Introduction

• The Private Language argument shows that there can be no private analogue of ostensive definition, and that the distinction that private language was intended to explain is actually grounded in grammar

  • i.e. in the different uses of the words ‘pain’ and ‘crying’ (pain and pain-behaviour)

  • we don’t understand these concepts through introspection, but through reflective awareness of the topography of language

    • so we need a more complete account of the grammar of psychological concepts

  • W sought to correct the notion that we describe our pains etc with the idea that we express them - in other words, language is an extension of other forms of expression e.g. crying

• The fact that it is possible to pretend to be in pain invites us to picture pain as something ‘inside us’

  • W accepts that this picture is useful in capturing the difference between sensation concepts and behavioural concepts, but it is not clear how it should be applied

  • this picture has a tendency to mislead because it is so much less ambiguous than the grammar of the language it is meant to represent

    • indeed, it comes to seem like the ambiguity of grammar is a defect, a complicated representation of something more straightforward

      • but we need to move away from the picture of the inner as a quasi-spatial realm of states and processes

      • we also need to see the picture as describing, rather than explaining, the difference between pain and pain-behaviour

Pain and pain-behaviour

• Interlocutor: W suggests that there is no pain without pain-behaviour (PI 281)

  • no - rather we can only ascribe sensations to human beings and what resembles them - in other words, we can only ascribe pain to a being that is capable of pain-behaviour

    • this is a different claim - it is not claimed that pain doesn’t exist except as behaviour, nor that pain cannot be ascribed without the simultaneous presence of pain-behaviour

    • W is both refuting the behaviourist idea of a determinate outer realm of pain-criteria and the inner/outer idea of a determinate inner realm of states and processes

• One application of the inner/outer picture sees pains and things we ascribe pain to as standing in a particular relation to one another

  • pain is a private object that belongs in the psychological sphere, and exists within the body, which belongs to the physical sphere

    • hence the two are related empirically, not conceptually

    • but this disconnection of the pain realm from the body realm means that it is perfectly conceivable (conceptually) that a stone should have pain; that we should turn to stone whilst we are in pain

      • in fact it is conceivable that the pain should have no bearer at all

      • but this flies in the face of our language-game, in which the concept of pain is exclusively ascribed to living beings

• Instead, we have to recognise that the human body (and those of some animals) is conceptually connected with sensation concepts

  • we need to replace the false distinction between the physical and psychological realms with a distinction between the living and the non-living

    • and this distinction is based in the fact that bodies and stones are different kinds of objects, not just that they behave differently

    • e.g. when we recognise a facial expression as, say, friendly, we recognize the significance or meaning of that expression - we are able to imitate it not physico-mechanically, but because we imitate its significance

      • the meanings of bodily movements enter into our descriptions of them - this is not the case for non-living objects

      • this is the relation between ‘inner processes’ and outward criteria - outward criteria of allow us to ascribe significance to bodily movement

• But when we ascribe pain we ascribe it to a subject, not to a body, and this again tempts us into misinterpreting the inner/outer picture

  • but this is a grammatical movement between language games, not a movement between entities

    • the human body enters the language-game as extra-physical, as an embodied subject

The idea of the private object

• Augustine’s picture is of a child who can think, but not speak; has wishes, but cannot say ‘I wish...’; grasps the concept of naming, but cannot yet ask for anything’s name

  • for W, our language-game is rooted in natural human responses of hunger, fear, anger, happiness and their expression, but language training initiates the child into complex forms of human life. the child is not taught to identify private objects, nor to see these in others, but to use language in a way that is distinctive to our form of life

• W shows that if we fail to see the grammatical connections between the concept of pain and the living human body, then we cannot make sense of e.g. the fact...

Buy the full version of these notes or essay plans and more in our Wittgenstein Notes.