So, I read PI’s section about private pains, and my head is a-whirl with toothaches, grandfather clocks on the sun, and beetles in boxes. (btw – it’s crabs in your girlfriend’s box. BOO-YAH). Anyway — I think I have a small grasp on the argument contra private pains, which I’ll detail here. I’ll then leave it to the panel to explain why I’m wrong, right, or incomplete.
“Private Pain” is just one type of nonsense that results from the Augustinian-type view that language is, at bottom, names for objects strung together. This view of language gives every concept — no matter how immaterial or abstract – a meta-physicality. Even if the ”thing” named is not an object (e.g. pain), we can picture it as an object of sorts to which we give a name with a point-and-an-utter (or with a deep-zen-like-concentration-and-an-utter, as the case may be).
As demonstrated throught PI and junior-high lunch tables, one function of language is name-calling. But that is not the whole. Furthermore, when we view language as simple name-calling, it leads us to tolerate nonsense such as private pain.
Why is private pain nonsense? Well, Wittgenstein starts from the observation that it makes no sense for one to doubt whether he is in pain. But if we view pain as a meta-object, which one could silently, and to-himself-only name (glossing over the fact that name-calling is an activity of an already existing language game), then it starts to make sense to doubt whether or not one has identified it — the private pain — correctly. Can our pain observer be sure that this sensation, which he memorialzes with an S in his diary, is in fact the same sensation he had last Monday when he put down an S. If S is his only, then only he can be the judge of whether he is right; and if only he is the judge of what is right, then as Wittgenstein says, there is no such thing as “right” here.
In sum, private pain, which appears to be justified under a point-and-utter view of language, is nonsense because it allows one to doubt he has pain.
After getting this all down, it strikes me that this is not right. But I’m not sure exactly how. Maybe you can help? In your own post, tell me how I got it wrong.
January 8, 2009 at 12:21 am |
I think it’s important to bear in mind that W does not have the common use of “nonsense” in mind when he calls something nonsense. Going back to TLP W connected having a sense with expressing a proposition, and expressing a proposition was identified with expressing truth conditions which may or may not obtain (by picturing them). I think it bears further consideration whether W is calling “private pains” nonsense in the same way he, TLP-era, called tautologies nonsense. He didn’t deny “T on every row” for tautologies truth-table; this is just what rendered the tautology nonsense, and also what explains our according-to-W-confused impulse to declare “it’s true not nonsense!”. Is there an analogue of “T on every row” for statements like “my pains are private”, according to which our according-to-W-confused impulse to assert that this nonsense is true is explained? I’m not sure that it all comes down to confusion about reference and referents. One might contend: So what if pain is not a thing, it’s still private. I suspect Nate will have something to say about this.
January 8, 2009 at 1:44 pm |
So what if pain is not a thing, it’s still private.
I was approaching it somewhat differently. I thought that the argument for private pains was that all one had to do was point-and-utter at a sensation, or memorialize it with an S, and just not tell anyone – ever. That argument has some appeal if we imagine pain as something to be pointed at, but once we strip away any pretend physicality of the pain, there remains nothing to point at. (Distinguish here, of course, the following case: Q: “Where does it hurt?” A: “In my arm.”) Now, I could be completely off about the argument for private pains (it was, after all, an amateurish first stab). But looking at this way, when someone says, “Pains can still be private,” I would respond, “Well, in what way?”
And by the way – the upgrades you made to the cite look great.
January 22, 2009 at 5:43 am |
There’s something odd about this post, and I think it could have to do with the different ways we’re looking at the issue (you’re approaching from a philosophy of language angle, and I look at it as an issue in the philosophy of science and social philosophy).
When Wittgenstein counters the view the pains are private, much of what he says depends on how we view and categorize items in our ontology. Saying that pain is an “object” that one can hold “privately” carries with it the kind of ontological distinction commonly made in early 20th century philosophy (both by the positivist tradition and by Husserl) between ‘brute facts’ or ’sense data’ on the one hand (for the positivists – for Husserl, some sort of phenomenological reduction to a given experience) and our assimilated ideas about that sense data/brute facts on the other.
I think when you talk about pain as a ‘meta-object’, you’re referring to that second sense. In other words, you’re talking about assimilated ideas about the object called ‘pain’. And it makes every bit of sense in the world to doubt *those* things, because they are, in a sense, socially constructed. We have to agree to terms and how to use them (as well as criteria of applicability, etc.). And we can doubt all of that.
But, for Wittgenstein, there are cases where it does not make sense to doubt that we are in pain. Since the conceptual possibility of doubting that we are in pain is entailed by the view that pain is an object, then that view is refuted by modus tollens.
So pain must be something else, rather than an object that comes under the purview of our classificatory schemes. Does this sound plausible?