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?

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.

I don’t know what you must’ve been thinking when you said this, but if it meant very much to you to say this, then there might be a problem, which you already seem to be aware of when you say, “Basically, I disagree that there are no black or white threads.” Quine, in a very straightforward sense, doesn’t want to divide the world into facts and conventions.

“I think it is pretty easy to identify ‘facts’ as opposed to ‘conventions’ and – in fact – I have trouble wrapping my head around a middle ground.”

Quine’s picture of the way “theory meets experience” is supposed to help you wrap your mind around it. But Quine is just fixated on what amounts to Wittgenstein’s own observation that “criteria” are defeasible. From the PI:

353. Asking whether and how a proposition can be verified is only a special form of the question “How d’you mean?” The answer is a contribution to the grammar of the proposition.

354. The fluctuation in grammar between criteria and symptoms makes it look as if there were nothing at all but symptoms. We say, for example: “Experience teaches that there is rain when the barometer falls, but it also teaches that there is rain when we have certain sensations of wet and cold, or such-and-such visual impressions.” In defense of this one says that these sense-impressions may deceive us. But here one fails to reflect that the fact that the false appearance is precisely one of rain is founded on a definition.

355. The point here is not that our sense-impressions may lie, but that we understand their language. (And this language like any other is founded on convention.)

Quine takes the fact that our sense impressions (of wet and cold) may lie (about the presence of rain) to squash the hope for a special connection (a criterial connection) between our having those impressions and the truth values of sentences about the rain — any connection, that is, supposedly more special than the connection between barometers falling and the truth values of sentences about the rain.

If Carnap’s analytic/synthetic and Wittgenstein’s grammatical/eperiential distinctions were any good, then, as far as Quine cares, we should be able to, within the experiential sentences, set out exactly which experiences are keyed to which sentences: as if whatever else we believed about the truth of whatever sentence, there were some experiences such that if we had them, that would settle the truth of some synthetic sentence (like the one about the rain). Obviously sentences about the rain aren’t answerable to experience in this way, and, so Quine seems to get what he wants.

There’s more to it, but this is a start, I think, in the way of characterizing Quine’s project in light of Wittgenstein’s PI philosophy. If this is the right way to frame it, I side with W.

I think it is pretty easy to identify “facts” as opposed to “conventions” and – in fact – I have trouble wrapping my head around a middle ground. It is not that I think that facts and conventions are different in their essences, but rather in their operation. For example, if we express a “fact” then it makes sense to contradict it. “There is a frog on my shoulder” (a fact). We can investigate this claim and agree or disagree with it. A convention (or a grammatical proposition), on the other hand, cannot be similarly contradicted. “Every rod has a length” (a convention). No amount of investigation will convince one that a rod does not have a length.

So, if there is no way of proving it false that thereare electrons, then the scientists are positing a convention. But if we can look under a microscope and say, “look, there are the electrons right there,” or “I told you there weren’t going to be any electrons,” then the scientist is positing a fact.

Basically, I disagree that there are no black or white threads. I think that there are, and I cannot imagine what the grey thread would look like. Well – I can imagine that it would be grey, but not much else.

I suppose Gintis dodges the particular pitfall in question, sure. Except that, it seems to me, W isn’t trying to say that beliefs are behavior or something along those lines, just that there aren’t these belief processes or states accompanying expressions of belief – though there can be in certain cases (conscious) mental phenomena accompanying belief expressions that are important — they just aren’t necessary.

Also, you talk about unconscious beliefs a little unconscientiously, if you ask me. Imagine someone saying “Well, we know there can be piano pieces that don’t involve any notes played on the piano, so…” and then just going on from there. Or perhaps, “I’m working on a new composition, but so far it only consists of rests.” I can imagine some hippy-dippies wanting to make sense of such prattle (see the wikipedia entry on John Cage’s piece 4′33”), but they ought to at least be a little apologetic about introducing it. Unconscious beliefs raise similar suspicions in me.

See W’s immediately following remark: “What does that mean?–If we know the machine, everything else, that is its movement, seems to be already completely determined.”

I don’t think that people doing rigid body dynamics think they’re to locate the possible movements of a rigid body in the machine in quite the way you’re thinking. And, while someone taking rigid body dynamics as a kind of an a priori discipline might indeed think that “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” (ibid. W’s italics) I don’t think the mysterious sense is quite as grotesque as the way you’re portraying it. The mistake you’re talking about would be about as bad as the White King’s:

“I see nobody on the road,” said Alice

“I only wish I had such eyes,” the King remarked in a fretful tone. “To be able to see Nobody! And at that distance, too! Why, it’s as much as I can do to see real people by this light!”

(Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There, ch.7)

“That there are intentional states, that intentional states have content, that content has form: These I know by reflection.”

That would be a bad way to begin according to bb41/2 quoted above. Right? Is this the dogmatism to be resisted, mms?

I think trd’s suggestion about “reading” is good. There isn’t some one phenomenal character of believing, wanting, valuing, etc. any more than of reading. Moreover, our beliefs, wants, values, etc. may be entirely unknown to us. We may be wrong about what they are. One’s dispositions may not be transparent to one, for example. Also, the physical states of one’s brain may not be transparent.

Is Wittgenstein’s anti-dogmatism so extreme as to rule out the following sort of reasoning (Scott Sturgeon recently argued something like this)?

“That humans have imprecise credences is a datum. After all, we attribute all kinds of uncertainty to one another in our indispensable ways of interacting with, previsioning, and understanding one another.”

Another view of belief.

“If you have previously studied game theory, you will no doubt have noticed that our treatment of Bayesian updating in games with private information has not relied at all on the concept of “beliefs”. This is not an oversight but rather a natural side-effect of our evolutionary perspective. classical game theory takes the decision processes of the /rational actor/ as central, whereas evolutionary game theory takes the /behavior/ of corporeal actors as central and models the game’s evolution using replicator dynamics, diffusion processes and other population-level phenomena. beliefs in such a framework are… a shorthand way of expressing a behavioral regularity rather than the source of the regularity. There is absolutely no need to introduce the concept of beliefs into a general theory of games with private information.”
h gintis [gint2000]

metaphysics of statistics quotes

Emphasis on this part: “beliefs in such a framework are… a shorthand way of expressing a behavioral regularity rather than the source of the regularity.” If the must be is the must be of the metaphysical-source-positing philosopher, then Gintis has dodged that pitfall, no?