Blue Book: Difference between revisions

We are up against trouble caused by our way of expression.

An innumerable variety of cases can be thought of in which we should say that someone has pains in another person's body; or, say, in a piece of furniture, or in any empty spot. Of course we mustn't forget that a pain in a particular part of our body, e.g., in an upper tooth, has a peculiar tactile and kinaesthetic neighbourhood; moving our hand upward a little distance we touch our eye; and the word “little distance” here refers to tactile distance or kinaesthetic distance, or both. (It is easy to imagine tactile and kinaesthetic distances correlated in ways different from the usual. The distance from our mouth to our eye might seem very great “to the muscles of our arm” when we move our finger from the mouth to the eye. Think how large you imagine the cavity of your tooth when the dentist is drilling and probing it.)

When I said that if we moved our hand upward a little, we touch our eye, I was referring to tactile evidence only. That is, the criterion for my finger touching my eye was to be only that I had the particular feeling which would have made me say that I was touching my eye, even if I had no visual evidence for it, and even if, on looking into a mirror, I saw my finger not touching my eye but, say, my forehead. Just as the “little distance” I referred to was a tactile or kinaesthetic one, so also the places of which I said, “they {{BBB TS reference|Ts-309,85}} lie a little distance apart” were tactile places. To say that my finger in tactile and kinaesthetic space moves from my tooth to my eye then means that I have those tactile and kinaesthetic experiences which we normally have when we say “my finger moves from my tooth to my eye”. But what we regard as evidence for this latter proposition is, as we all know, by no means only tactile and kinaesthetic. In fact if I had the tactile and kinaesthetic sensations referred to, I might still deny the proposition “my finger moves … etc. …” because of what I saw. That proposition is a proposition about physical objects. (And now don't think that the expression “physical objects” is meant to distinguish one kind of physical object from another.) The grammar of propositions which we call propositions about physical objects admits of a variety of evidences for every such proposition. It characterises the grammar of the proposition “my finger moves etc.” that I regard the propositions “I see it move”, “I feel it move”, “He sees it move”, “He tells me that it moves”, etc. as evidence for it. Now if I say “I see my hand move”, this at first sight seems to presuppose that I agree with the proposition “my hand moves”. But if I regard the proposition “I see my hand move” as one of the evidences for the proposition “my hand moves”, the truth of the latter is, of course, not presupposed in the truth of the former. One might therefore suggest the expression “It looks as though my hand were moving” instead of “I see my hand moving”. But this expression, {{BBB TS reference|Ts-309,86}} although it indicates that my hand may appear to be moving without really moving, might still suggest that after all there must be a hand in order that it should appear to be moving; whereas we could easily imagine cases in which the proposition describing the visual evidence is true and at the same time other evidences make us say that I have no hand. Our ordinary way of expression obscures this. We are handicapped in ordinary language by having to describe, say, a tactile sensation by means of terms for physical objects such as the word “eye”, “finger”, etc. when what we want to say does not entail the existence of an eye or finger etc.: We have to use a roundabout description of our sensations. This of course does not mean that our ordinary language is insufficient for our purposes, but that it is slightly cumbrous and sometimes misleading. The reason for this peculiarity of our language is of course the regular coincidence of certain sense experiences. Thus when I feel my arm moving I mostly also can see it moving. And if I touch it with my hand, also that hand feels the motion, etc. (The man whose foot has been amputated will describe a particular pain as pain in his foot.) We feel in such cases a strong need for such an expression as: “a sensation travels from my tactile cheek to my tactile eye”. I said all this because, if you are aware of the tactile and kinaesthetic environment of a pain, you may find a difficulty in imagining that one could have toothache anywhere else than in one's own teeth. But if we {{BBB TS reference|Ts-309,87}} imagine such a case, this simply means that we imagine a correlation between visual, tactile, kinaesthetic, etc., experiences different from the ordinary correlation. Thus we can imagine a person having the sensation of toothache plus those tactile and kinaesthetic experiences which are normally bound up with seeing his hand travelling from his tooth to his nose, to his eyes, etc., but correlated to the visual experience of his hand moving to those places in another person's face. Or again, we can imagine a person having the kinaesthetic sensation of moving his hand, and the tactile sensation, in his fingers and face, of his fingers moving over his face, whereas his kinaesthetic and visual sensations should have to be described as those of his fingers moving over his knee. If we had a sensation of toothache plus certain tactile and kinaesthetic sensations usually characteristic of touching the painful tooth and neighbouring parts of our face, and if these sensations were accompanied by seeing my hand touch, and move about on, the edge of my table, we should feel doubtful whether to call this experience an experience of toothache in the table or not. If, on the other hand, the tactile and kinaesthetic sensations described were correlated to the visual experience of seeing my hand touch a tooth and other parts of the face of another person, there is no doubt that I would call this experience “toothache in another person's tooth.”

Thus the proposition “A has a gold tooth” and “A has toothache” are not used analogously. They differ in their grammar where at first sight they might not seem to differ.

If we are angry with someone for going out on a cold day with a cold in his head, we sometimes say: “I won't feel your cold”. And this can mean: “I don't suffer when you catch a cold”. This is a proposition taught by experience. For we could imagine a, so to speak, wireless connection between the two bodies which made one person feel pain in his head when the other had exposed his to the cold air. One might in this case argue that the pains are mine because they are felt in my head; but suppose I and someone else had a part of our bodies in common, say a hand. Imagine the nerves and tendons of my arm and A's connected to this hand by an operation. Now imagine the hand stung by a wasp. Both of us cry, contort our faces, give the same description of the pain, etc. Now are we to say we have the same pain or different ones? If in such a case you say: “We feel pain in the same place, in the same body, our descriptions tally, but still my pain can't be his”, I suppose as a reason you will be inclined to say: {{BBB TS reference|Ts-309,91}} “because my pain is my pain and his pain is his pain”. And here you are making a grammatical statement about the use of such a phrase as “the same pain”. You say that you don't wish to apply the phrase, “he has got my pain” or “we both have the same pain”, and instead you will perhaps apply such a phrase as “his pain is exactly like mine”. (It would be no argument to say that the two couldn't have the same pain because one might anaesthetize or kill one of them while the other still felt pain.) Of course, if we exclude the phrase “I have his toothache” from our language, we thereby also exclude “I have (or feel) my toothache”. Another form of our metaphysical statement is this: “A man's sense data are private to himself”. And this way of expressing it is even more misleading because it looks still more like an experiential proposition; the philosopher who says this may well think that he is expressing a kind of scientific truth.

When we say “I can't feel his pain”, the idea of an {{BBB TS reference|Ts-309,93}} insurmountable barrier suggests itself to us. Let us think straight away of a similar case: “The colours green and blue can't be in the same place simultaneously”. Here the picture of physical impossibility which suggests itself is, perhaps, not that of a barrier; rather we feel that the two colours are in each other's way. What is the origin of this idea? – We say three people can't sit side by side on this bench; they have no room. Now the case of the colours is not analogous to this; but it is somewhat analogous to saying: “3 × 18 inches won't go into 3 feet”. This is a grammatical rule and states a logical impossibility. The proposition “three men can't sit side by side on a bench a yard long” states a physical impossibility; and this example shows clearly why the two impossibilities are confused. (Compare the proposition, “He is six inches taller than I” with “6 feet are 6 inches longer than 5 foot 6”. These propositions are of utterly different kinds, but look exactly alike.) The reason why in these cases the idea of physical impossibility suggests itself to us is that on the one hand we decide against using a particular form of expression, on the other hand we are strongly tempted to use it, as, firstly, it sounds English, or German, etc. all right, and, secondly, there are closely similar forms of expression used in other departments of our language. We have decided against using the phrase, “They are in the same place, etc.”; on the other hand this phrase strongly recommends itself to us through the analogy with {{BBB TS reference|Ts-309,94}} other cases, so that, in a sense, we have to turn out this form of expression by force. And this is why we seem to ourselves to be rejecting a universally false proposition. We make a picture like that of the two colours being in each other's way, or that of a barrier which doesn't allow one person to come closer to another's experience than observing his behaviour; but on looking closer we find that we can't apply the picture which we have made.

I shall try to elucidate the problem discussed by realists, idealists, and solipsists by showing you a problem closely related to it. It is this: “Can we have unconscious thoughts, {{BBB TS reference|Ts-309,96}} unconscious feelings, etc.?” The idea of there being unconscious thoughts has revolted many people. Others again have said that these were wrong in supposing that there could only be conscious thoughts, and that psychoanalysis had discovered unconscious ones. The objectors to unconscious thought did not see that they were not objecting to the newly discovered psychological reactions, but to the way in which they were described. The psychoanalysts on the other hand were misled by their own way of expression into thinking that they had done more than discover new psychological reactions; that they had, in a sense, discovered conscious thoughts which were unconscious. The first could have stated their objection by saying, “We don't wish to use the phrase ‘unconscious thoughts’; we wish to reserve the word ‘thought’ for what you call ‘conscious thoughts’”. They state their case wrongly when they say: “There can only be conscious thoughts and no unconscious ones”. For if they don't wish to talk of “unconscious thought” they should not use the phrase “conscious thought”, either.

more strongly, makes it more obvious, than ordinary language does, or one which in a particular case uses more closely similar forms of expression than our ordinary language. Our mental cramp is loosened when we are shown the notations which fulfill these needs. These needs can be of the greatest variety.

The phrase “only I really see” is closely connected with the idea expressed in the assertion “we never know what the other man really sees when he looks at a thing” or this, “we can never know whether he calls the same thing ‘blue’ which we call ‘blue’”. In fact we might argue: “I can never know what he sees or that he sees at all, for all I have is signs of various sorts which he gives me; therefore it is an unnecessary hypothesis altogether that he sees; what seeing is I only know from seeing myself; I have only learnt the word to mean what I do”. Of course that is just not true, for I have definitely learned a different and much more complicated use of the word “to see” than I here have professed. Let us make clear the tendency which guided me when I did so, by an example from a slightly different sphere: Consider this argument: “How can we wish that this paper were red if it isn't red? Doesn't this mean that I wish that which doesn't exist at all? Therefore my wish can only contain something similar to the paper's being red. Oughtn't we therefore to use a different word instead of ‘red’ when we talk of wishing that something were red? The imagery of the wish surely shows us something less definite, something hazier, than the reality {{BBB TS reference|Ts-309,101}} of the paper being red.