Private Pains – An Amateurish First Stab

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.

The standard meter.

In PI 50 Wittgenstein writes:

One would, however, like to say: existence cannot be attributed to an element, for if it did not exist, one could not even name it and so one could say nothing at all of it. — But let us consider an analogous case.  There is one thing of which one can say neither that it is one meter long, nor that it is not one meter long, and that is the standard meter in Paris. — But this is, of course, not to ascribe any extraordinary property to it, but only to mark its peculiar role in the language-game of measuring with a meter-rule.

The passage comes under criticism in Kripke’s Naming and Necessity.  Kripke insists that it makes perfect sense to say of the standard meter that it is a meter.  He says that the standard is used as a way to pick out an abstract entity, a certain length, and that it is an accidental property of the standard that it has this particular length.  It makes sense both to say, according to Kripke, that the standard meter is one meter and also that it might not have been.

Wittgenstein’s defenders will at this point balk at Kripke’s contention.  They will point out that the language-game of “picking out lengths” is different from the language game of “measuring with a meter rule” and that Wittgenstein is correct that it is absurd to speak of using a standard to measure itself.  However, this places too much emphasis on the closing words of the passage quoted above.  After all, Wittgenstein has brought up the langauge game of measuring with a meter rule to ellucidate what may be meant by saying that the standard meter cannot be said to be (or not be) a meter long.  On one reading of this passage the point of mentioning the language-game of measuring with a meter is an explanation of a claim about what cannot be said.  Kripke, it may be insisted, has shown us another way to make sense of the claim that the standard meter is one meter.  Kripke may be taken then as correctly pointing out that, in direct contradiction with Wittgenstein’s contention that it cannot, it can be said that the standard meter is one meter, by connection not with the language-game of measuring with a meter but rather with the language-game of picking out lengths.

There is more to be said, however.  First, there is an interpretive question about the shifting voices in the PI.  Without settling on which voice is authoritative, consider the following reformulation:

Voice A: One would, however, like to say: existence cannot be attributed to an element, for if it did not exist, one could not even name it and so one could say nothing at all of it.

Voice B: But let us consider an analogous case.  There is one thing of which one can say neither that it is one meter long, nor that it is not one meter long, and that is the standard meter in Paris.

Voice A: But this is, of course, not to ascribe any extraordinary property to it, but only to mark its peculiar role in the language-game of measuring with a meter-rule.

An interpreter may hold that Voice A is extending remarks made regarding “elements” in previous passages.  Voice B is giving an objection, claiming that the line of reasoning leads to an absurd conclusion that the standard meter is not a meter.  Voice A is responding to the objection by singling out one sense in which the standard meter cannot be said to be a meter: viz., in connection with the language game of measuring with a meter-rule.  This leaves open the possibility of other senses in which the standard meter may be said to be a meter.  In particular, Voice A’s insistence that the point made by Voice B is not to attribute some bizarre property to the standard meter, such as the property of not-having-a-metric-length, may now be read as leaving open precisely the possibility Kripke pursues.

Still, I think that there must be more to say.  For one, I am ever anxious about interpretation and therefor feel almost certain that my tentative suggestion above must be incorrect.  I’m anxious that I do not have the passage in proper context with respect to the discussion of elements in preceding passages.  That is, Kripke’s contention aside, I’m just not all that clear on what the point of the example is in its original textual context.  Furthermore, Kripke’s approach is to construe the use of the standard meter as part of a naming ceremony for an abstract entity.  Doesn’t this run directly contrary to a central theme of the PI, opposition to the identification of naming and meaning?

Grammar and the Lore of Our Fathers

Wittgenstein and Quine both battle against the philosopher’s must, but in quite different ways.

Consider W’s battle against the solipsist’s must — that there must be no experiences besides his own:

Now the man whom we call a solipsist and who says that only his own experiences are real, does not thereby disagree with us about any practical question of fact…For he would say that it was inconceivable that experiences other than his own were real.  He ought therefore to use a notation in which such a phrase as “A has real toothache” (where A is not he) is meaningless…The solipsist…is not stating an opinion; and that’s why he is so sure of what he says.  He is irresistibly tempted to use a certain form of expression.

(BB pp. 59,60)

Compare Q on the universal realist’s must – that for every concrete object there must be an abstract object (a universal) which the conrete one instantiates:

It is only by assuming the cleavage between analytic and synthetic truths that he [Carnap, but Wittgenstein too, no doubt] is able to declare the problem of universals to be a matter not of theory but of linguistic decision…I grant that one’s hypothesis as to what there is, e.g., as to there being universals, is at bottom just as arbitrary or pragmatic a matter as one’s adoption of…a new system of bookkeeping.  Carnap [and Wittgenstein too, no doubt] in turn recognizes that such decisions, however conventional, “will nevertheless usually be influenced by theoretical knowledge.” (Empiricism, Semantics, and Ontology, §2)  But what impresses me more than it does Carnap is how well this whole attitude is suited also to the theoretical hypotheses of natural science itself, and how little basis there is for a distinction.

The lore of our fathers is a fabric of sentences…It is a pale gray lore, black with fact and white with convention.  But I have found no substantial reasons for conlcuding that there are any quite black threads in it, or any white ones.

(The Ways of Paradox, p.132)

For W, the philosopher’s propositions do not express disagreement over practical matters of fact, rather, they express dissatisfaction with our ordinary form of expression.  For Q, on the other hand, if the solipsist or the realist aren’t expressing opinions, then neither is the scientist positing electrons, nor the archaeologist positing dinosaurs, etc. 

Both seek to undermine the special place of philosopher’s propositions as traditionally conceived – to my mind, W’s tack is the far more attractive, promising, inspiring, and inspired.  Opinions to the contrary?

The Possibility Is in the Machine

From PI sec. 193

We might say that a machine, or the picture of it, is the first of a series of pictures which we have learnt to derive from this one.

But when we reflect that the machine could also have moved differently it may look as if the way it moves must be contained in the machine-as-symbol far more determinately than in the actual machine.  As if it were not enough for the movements in question to be empirically determined in advance, but they had to be really – in a mysterious sense – already present.  And it is quite true: the movement of the machine-as-symbol is predetermined in a different sense from that in which the movement of any given actual machine is predetermined.

And then later, in PI sec. 194:

We mind about the kind of expressions we use concerning these things; we do not understand them, however, but misinterpret them. When we do philosophy we are like savages, primitive people, who hear the expressions of civilized men, put a false interpretation on them, and then draw the queerest conclusions from it.

I think that the mistake that W is identifying here is to think of “machine” and “machine-as-symbol” as having a geography on which one can locate different characters: “Here is the actual machine and ‘possibility’ here is a transient hobo, but in the machine-as-symbol, “possibility” is the president of the chamber of commerce.” More than it is wrong, this type of thinking is clumsy and mystical.

Your thoughts?

 

 

Rule of Thumb

The Blue Book pp. 41,2:

I have been trying in all this to remove the temptation to think that there ‘must be’ what is caled a mental process of thinking, hoping, wishing, believing, etc., independent of the process of expressing a thought, a hope, a wish, etc.  And I want to give you the following rule of thumb: if you are puzzled about the nature of thought, belief, knowledge, and the like, substitute for the thought the expression of the thought, etc.  The difficulty which lies in this substitution, and at the same time the whole point of it, is this: the expression of belief, thought, etc., is just a sentence; – and the sentence has sense only as a member of a system of language; as one expression within a calculus.

It seems to me that this encapsulates so much of what Wittgenstein is after in the later philosophy.  He denies that there “must be” these mental processes going on all the time (freedom from a dogma).  He contends that an expression of thought can be every bit as “alive” as the thought itself is supposed to be.  And that if it has any life at all, that will come from its particular surroundings (its membership in a ”system”, its being ”one expression within a calculus”) — not from its being associated with some special (immaterial) process (of understanding) or entity  (a meaning). 

“The difficulty which lies in this substitution” — I found that substitution very difficult at first…anyone else?  Obviously if you bring the processes out from the immaterial they won’t on their own carry any life with them — but it’s their mentality that brings them to life.  Or so it seemed to me.  Did (does) anyone else have difficulty with this substitution?