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If by “believing” we mean an activity, a process, taking place while we say that we believe, we may say that believing is something similar to or the same as expressing a belief. | |||
It is interesting to consider an objection to this: What if I said, “I believe it will rain” (meaning what I say) and someone wanted to explain to a Frenchman who doesn't understand English what it was I believed. Then, you might say, if all that happened when I believed what I did was that I said the sentence, the Frenchman ought to know what I believe if you tell him the exact words I used, or say, “Il croit ‘It will rain’”. Now it is clear that this will not tell him what I believe and consequently, you might say, we failed to convey just that to him which was essential, my real mental act of believing. ‒ ‒ But the answer is that even if my words had been accompanied by | |||
{{BBB TS reference|Ts-310,109}} all sorts of experiences, and if we could have transmitted these experiences to the Frenchman, he would still not have known what I believed. For “knowing what I believe” just doesn't mean: feel what I do just while I say it; just as knowing what I intend with this move in our game of chess doesn't mean knowing my exact state of mind while I'm making the move. Though, at the same time, in certain cases, knowing this state of mind might furnish you with very exact information about my intention. | |||
We should say that we had told the Frenchman what I believed if we translated my words for him into French. And it might be that thereby we told him nothing – – even indirectly – – about what happened “in me” when I uttered my belief. Rather, we pointed out to him a sentence which in his language holds a similar position to my sentence in the English language. – Again one might say that, at least in certain cases, we could have told him much more exactly what I believed if he had been at home in the English language, because then, he would have known exactly what happened within me when I spoke. | |||
We use the words “meaning”, “believing”, “intending” in such a way that they refer to certain acts, states of mind given certain circumstances; as by the expression “checkmating somebody” we refer to the act of taking his king. If on the other hand someone, say a child, playing about with chessmen, placed a few of them on a chess board and went through the motions of taking a king, we should not say the child had checkmated anyone. ‒ ‒ And here too one might think that what distinguished this | |||
{{BBB TS reference|Ts-310,110 | |||
case from real checkmating was what happened in the child's mind. | |||
Suppose I had made a move in chess and someone asked me, “Did you intend to mate him?”, I answer, “I did”, and he now asks me, “How could you know you did, as all you knew was what happened within you when you made the move?”, I might answer, “Under these circumstances this was intending to mate him.” | |||
What holds for “meaning” holds for “thinking”. ‒ ‒ We very often find it impossible to think without speaking to ourselves half aloud, – – and nobody asked to describe what happened in this case would ever say that something – – the thinking – – accompanied the || his speaking, were they || he not led into doing so by the pair of verbs, “speaking”: :“thinking”, and by many of our common phrases in which their uses run parallel. Consider these examples: “Think before you speak!”, “He speaks without thinking”, “What I said didn't quite express my thought”, “He says one thing and thinks just the opposite”, “I didn't mean a word of what I said”, “The French language uses its words in that order in which we think them.” | |||
If anything in such a case can be said to go with the speaking, it would be something like the modulation of voice, the changes in timbre, accentuation, and the like, all of which one might call means of expressiveness. Some of these like the tone of voice and the accent, nobody for obvious reasons would call the accompaniments of the speech; and such means of expressiveness as the play of facial expression or gestures which can be said to accompany speech nobody would dream of calling thinking. | |||
Let us revert to our example of the use of “lighter” and | |||
{{BBB TS reference|Ts-310,111}} “darker” for coloured objects and the vowels. A reason which we should like to give for saying that here we have two different uses and not one is this: “We don't think that the words ‘darker’, ‘lighter’ actually fit the relation between the vowels, we only feel a resemblance between the relation of the sounds and the darker and lighter colours.” Now if you wish to see what sort of feeling this is, try to imagine that without previous introduction you asked someone, “Say the vowels a, e, i, o, u, in the order of their darkness.” If I did this, I should certainly say it in a different tone from that in which I should say, “Arrange these books in the order of their darkness”, that is, I should say it haltingly in a tone similar to that of, “I wonder if you understand me”, perhaps smiling slyly as I say it. And this, if anything, describes my feeling. | |||
And this brings me to the following point: When someone asks me, “What colour is the book over there?”, and I say, “Red”, and then he asks, “What made you call this colour ‘red’?”, I shall in most cases have to say: “Nothing makes me call it red; that is, no reason. I just looked at it and said, ‘It's red’”. One is then inclined to say: “Surely this isn't all that happened; for I could look at a colour and say a word and still not name the colour.” And then one is inclined to go on to say: “The word ‘red’ when we pronounce it, naming the colour we look at, comes in a particular way.” But, at the same time, asked, “Can you describe the way you mean?” – – one wouldn't feel prepared to give any description. Suppose now we asked: “Do you, at any rate, remember that the name of the colour | |||
{{BBB TS reference|Ts-310,112}} came to you in that particular way whenever you named colours on former occasions?” – – he would have to admit that he didn't remember a particular way in which this always happened. In fact one could easily make him see that naming a colour could go along with all sorts of different experiences. Compare such cases as these: a) I put an iron in the fire to heat it to light red heat. I am asking you to watch the iron and want you to tell me from time to time what stage of heat it has reached. You look and say: “It is beginning to get light red.” b) We stand at a street crossing and I say: “Watch out for the red light. When it comes on, tell me and I'll run across.” Ask yourself this question: If in one such case you shout “Green!” and in another “Run!”, do these words come in the same way or different ways? Can you || one say anything about this in a general way? c) I ask you: “What's the colour of the bit of material you have in your hand?” (and I can't see). You think: “Now what does one call this? Is this ‘Prussian blue’ or ‘indigo’?” | |||
Now it is very remarkable that when in a philosophical conversation we say: “The name of a colour comes in a particular way”, we don't trouble to think of the many different cases and ways in which such a name comes. ‒ ‒ And our chief argument is really that naming the colour is different from just pronouncing a word on some different occasion while looking at a colour. Thus one might say: “Suppose we counted some objects lying on our table, a blue one, a red one, a white one, and a black one, – – looking at each in turn we say: ‘One, two, three, | |||
{{BBB TS reference|Ts-310,113}} four’. Isn't it easy to see that something different happens in this case when we pronounce the words than what would happen if we had to tell someone the colours of the objects? And couldn't we, with the same right as before, have said, ‘Nothing happens when we say the numerals than just saying them while looking at the object’?” ‒ ‒ Now two answers can be given to this: First, undoubtedly, at least in the great majority of cases, counting the objects will be accompanied by different experiences from naming their colours. And it is easy to describe roughly what the difference will be. In counting we know a certain gesture, as it were, beating the number out with one's finger or by nodding one's head. There is on the other hand an experience which one might call “concentrating one's attention on the colour”, getting the full impression of it. And these are the sort of things one recalls when one says, “It is easy to see that something different happens when we count the objects and when we name their colours.” But it is in no way necessary that certain peculiar experiences more or less characteristic for counting take place while we are counting, nor that the peculiar phenomenon of gazing at the colour takes place when we look at the object and name its colour. It is true that the processes of counting four objects and of naming their colours will, in most cases at any rate, be different taken as a whole, and this is what strikes us; but that doesn't mean at all that we know that something different happens every time in these two cases when we pronounce a numeral on the one hand and a name of a colour on the other. | |||
{{BBB TS reference|Ts-310,114}} When we philosophize about this sort of thing we almost invariably do something of this sort: We repeat to ourselves a certain experience, say, by looking fixedly at a certain object and trying to “read off” as it were the name of its colour. And it is quite natural that doing so again and again we should be inclined to say, “Something particular happens while we say the word ‘blue’”. For we are aware of going again and again through the same || identical process. But ask yourself: Is this also the process which we usually go through when on various occasions – – not philosophizing – – we name the colour of an object? | |||
The problem which we are concerned with we also encounter in thinking about volition, deliberate and involuntary action. Think, say, of these examples: I deliberate whether to lift a certain heavyish weight, decide to do it, I then apply my force to it and lift it. Here, you might say, you have a full-fledged case of willing and intentional action. Compare with this such a case as reaching a man a lighted match after having lit with it one's own cigarette and seeing that he wishes to light his; or again the case of moving your hand while writing a letter, or moving your mouth, larynx, etc. while speaking. ‒ ‒ Now when I called the first example a full fledged case of willing, I deliberately used this misleading expression. For this expression indicates that one is inclined in thinking about volition to regard this sort of example as one exhibiting most clearly the typical characteristic of willing. One takes one's ideas, and one's language, about volition from this kind of example and thinks that they must apply – – if not in such an | |||
{{BBB TS reference|Ts-310,115}} obvious way – – to all cases which one can properly call cases of willing. ‒ ‒ It is the same case that we have met over and over again: The forms of expression of our ordinary language fit most obviously certain very special applications of the words “willing”, “thinking”, “meaning”, “reading”, etc. etc. And thus we might have called the case in which a man “first thinks and then speaks” as the full fledged case of thinking and the case in which a man spells out the words he is reading as the full fledged case of reading. We speak of an “act of volition” as different from the action which is willed, and in our first example there are lots of different acts clearly distinguishing this case from one in which all that happens is that the hand and the weight lift: there are the preparations of deliberation and decision, there is the effort of lifting. But where do we find the analogues to these processes in our other examples and in innumerable ones we might have given? | |||
Now on the other hand it has been said that when a man, say, gets out of bed in the morning, all that happens may be this: he deliberates, “Is it time to get up?”, he tries to make up his mind, and then suddenly he finds himself getting up. Describing it this way emphasizes the absence of an act of volition. Now first: where do we find the paradigm || prototype of such a thing, i.e., how did we come by the idea of such an act? I think the prototype of the act of volition is the experience of muscular effort. ‒ ‒ Now there is something in this above description which tempts us to contradict it; we say: “We don't just | |||
{{BBB TS reference|Ts-310,116}} ‘find’, observe, ourselves getting up, as though we were observing someone else: It isn't like, say, watching certain reflex actions. If, e.g., I place myself sideways close to a wall, my wall side arm hanging down outstretched, the back of the hand touching the wall, and if now keeping the arm rigid I press the back of the hand hard against the wall, doing it all by means of the delta muscle, if then I quickly step away from the wall, letting my arm hang down loosely, my arm without any action of mine, of its own accord begins to rise; this is the sort of case in which it would be proper to say, ‘I find my arm rising’.” | |||
Now here again it is clear that there are many striking differences between the cases of observing my arm rising in this experiment or watching someone else getting out of bed and the case of finding myself getting up. There is, e.g., in this case a perfect absence of what one might call surprise, also I don't look at my own movements as I might look at someone turning about in bed, e.g., saying to myself, “Is he going to get up?”. There is a difference between the voluntary act of getting out of bed and the involuntary rising of my arm. But there is not one common difference between so-called voluntary acts and involuntary ones, viz., the presence or absence of one element, the “act of volition.” | |||
The description of getting up in which a man says, “I just find myself getting up”, suggests that he wishes to say that he observes himself getting up. And we may certainly say that an attitude of observing is absent in this case. But the observing attitude again is not one continuous state of mind or | |||
{{BBB TS reference|Ts-310,117}} otherwise which we are in the whole time while, as we should say, we are observing. Rather, there is a family of groups of activities and experiences which we call observing attitudes. Roughly speaking one might say there are observation elements of curiosity, observant expectation, surprise, and there are, we should say, facial expressions and gestures of curiosity, of observant expectation, and of surprise; and if you agree that there is more than one facial expression characteristic for each of these cases, and that there can be these cases without any characteristic facial expression, you will admit that to each of these three words a family of phenomena corresponds. | |||
If I had said, “When I told him that the train was leaving at 3.30, believing that it did, nothing happened than that I just uttered the sentence”, and if someone contradicted me saying, “Surely this couldn't have been all, as you might ‘just say a sentence’ without believing it”, – – my answer should be, “I didn't wish to say that there was no difference between speaking, believing what you say, and speaking, not believing what you say; but the pair ‘believing’::‘not believing’ refers to various differences in different cases (differences forming a family), not to one difference, that between the presence and the absence of a certain mental state.” | |||
Let us consider various characteristics of voluntary and involuntary acts. In the case of lifting the heavy weight, the various experiences of effort are obviously most characteristic for lifting the weight voluntarily. On the other hand, compare with this the case of writing, voluntarily, here in most | |||
{{BBB TS reference|Ts-310,118}} of the ordinary cases there will be no effort; and even if we feel that the writing tires our hands and strains their muscles, this is not the experience of “pulling” and “pushing” which we would call typical voluntary actions. Further compare the lifting of your hand when you lift a weight with lifting your hand when, e.g., you point to some object above you. This will certainly be regarded as a voluntary act, though the element of effort will most likely be entirely absent; in fact this raising of the arm to point at an object is very much like raising the eye to look at it, and here we can hardly conceive of an effort. ‒ ‒ Now let us describe an act of involuntary raising your arm. There is the case of our experiment, and this was characterized by the utter absence of muscular strain and also by our observant attitude towards the lifting of the arm. But we have just seen a case in which muscular strain was absent, and there are cases in which we should call an action voluntary although we take an observant attitude towards it. But in a large class of cases it is the peculiar impossibility of taking an observant attitude towards a certain action which characterizes it as a voluntary one: Try, e.g., to observe your hand rising when you voluntarily raise it. Of course you see it rising as you do, say, in the experiment; but you can't somehow follow it in the same way with your eye. This might get clearer if you compare two different cases of following lines on a piece of paper with your eye; A) some irregular line like this: , B) a written sentence. You will find that in A) the eye, as it were, alternately slips and gets stuck, whereas | |||
{{BBB TS reference|Ts-310,119}} in reading a sentence it glides along smoothly. | |||
Now consider a case in which we do take up an observant attitude towards a voluntary action, I mean the very instructive case of trying to draw a square with its diagonals by placing a mirror on your drawing paper and directing your hand by what you see by looking at it in the mirror. And here one is inclined to say that our real actions, the ones to which volition immediately applies || for which volition is immediately responsible, are not the movements of our hand but something further back, say, the actions of our muscles. We are inclined to compare the case with this: Imagine we had a series of levers before us, through which, by a hidden mechanism, we could direct a pencil drawing on a sheet of paper. We might then be in doubt which levers to pull in order to get the desired movement of the pencil; and we could say that we deliberately pulled this particular lever, although we didn't deliberately produce the wrong result that we thereby produced. But this comparison, though it easily suggests itself, is very misleading. For in the case of the levers which we saw before us, there was such a thing as deciding which one we were going to pull before pulling it. But does our volition, as it were, play on a keyboard of muscles, choosing which one it was going to use next? ‒ ‒ For some actions which we call deliberate it is characteristic that we, in some sense, “know what we are going to do” before we do it. In this sense we say that we know what object we are going to point to, and what we might call “the act of knowing” might consist in looking at the object before we point to it or in describing its position by words or | |||
{{BBB TS reference|Ts-310,120 | |||
pictures. Now we could describe our drawing the square through the mirror by saying that our acts were deliberate as far as their motor aspect is concerned but not as far as their visual aspect is concerned. This could || would, e.g., be demonstrated by our ability to repeat a movement of the hand which had produced a wrong result, on being told to do so. But it would obviously be absurd to say that this motor character of voluntary motion consisted in our knowing beforehand what we were going to do, as though we had had a picture of the kinaesthetic sensation before our mind and decided to bring about this sensation. Remember the experiment (?) p. 62; if here, instead of pointing from a distance to the finger which you order the subject to move, you touch that finger, the subject will always move it without the slightest difficulty. And here it is tempting to say, “Of course I can move it now, because now I know which finger it is I'm asked to move.” This makes it appear as though I had now shown you which muscle to contract in order to bring about the desired result. The word “of course” makes it appear as though by touching your finger I had given you an item of information telling you what to do. (As though normally when you tell a man to move such-and-such a finger he could follow your order because he knew how to bring the movement about.) | |||
(It is interesting here to think of the case of sucking a liquid through a tube; if asked what part of your body you sucked with, you would be inclined to say your mouth, although the work was done by the muscles by which you draw your breath.) | |||
Let us now ask ourselves what we should call “speaking | |||
{{BBB TS reference|Ts-310,121}} involuntarily”. First note that when normally you speak, voluntarily, you could hardly describe what happened by saying that by an act of volition you move your mouth, tongue, larynx, etc. as a means to producing certain sounds. Whatever happens in your mouth, larynx, etc. and whatever sensations you have in these parts while speaking would almost seem secondary phenomena accompanying the production of sounds, and volition, one wishes to say, operates on the sounds themselves without intermediary mechanism. This shews how loose our idea of this agent “volition” is. | |||
Now to involuntary speaking. Imagine you had to describe a case, – – what would you do? There is of course the case of speaking in one's sleep; here the characteristic is that you know nothing about it while it happens and don't remember having done it afterwards. || this is characterized by our doing it without being aware of it and not remembering having done it. But this obviously you wouldn't call the characteristic of an involuntary action. | |||
A better example of involuntary speaking would I suppose be that of involuntary exclamations: “Oh!”, “Help!”, and such like, and these utterances are akin to shrieking with pain. (This, by the way, could set us thinking about “words as expressions of feelings.”) One might say, “Surely these are good examples of involuntary speech, because there is in these cases not only no act of volition by which we speak, but in many cases we utter these words against our will.” I should say: I certainly should call this involuntary speaking; and I agree that an act of volition preparatory to or accompanying these words is absent, – – if by “act of volition” you refer to certain acts of | |||
{{BBB TS reference|Ts-310,122}} intention, premeditation, or effort. But then in many cases of voluntary speech I don't feel an effort, much that I speak || say voluntarily is not premeditated, and I don't know of any acts of intention preceding it. | |||
Crying out with pain against our will could be compared with raising our arm against our will when someone forces it up while we are struggling against him. But it is important to notice that the will – – or should we say “wish” – – not to cry out is overcome in a different way from that in which our resistance is overcome by the strength of the opponent. When we cry out against our will, we are as it were taken by surprise; as though someone forced up our hands by unexpectedly sticking a gun into our ribs, commanding, “Hands up!” | |||
Consider now the following example, which is of great help in all these considerations: In order to see what happens when one understands a word, we play this game: You have a list of words, partly these words are words of my native language, partly words of foreign languages more or less familiar to me, partly words of languages entirely unknown to me, (or, which comes to the same, nonsensical words invented for the occasion.) Some of the words of my native tongue, again, are words of ordinary, everyday usage; and some of these, like “house”, “table”, “man”, are what we might call primitive words, being among the first words a child learns, and some of these again, words of baby talk like “Mamma”, “Papa”. Again there are more or less common technical terms such as “carburetor”, “dynamo”, “fuse”; etc. etc. All these words are read out to me, and after each one I have to say “Yes” or “No” according to whether I understand the word or | |||
{{BBB TS reference|Ts-310,123}} not. I then try to remember what happened in my mind when I understood the words I did understand, and when I didn't understand the others. And here again it will be useful to consider the particular tone of voice and facial expression with which I say “Yes” and “No”, alongside of the so-called mental events. ‒ ‒ Now it may surprise us to find that although this experiment will shew us a multitude of different characteristic experiences, it will not shew us any one experience which we should be inclined to call the experience of understanding. There will be such experiences as these: I hear the word “tree” and say “Yes” with the tone of voice and sensation of “Of course”. Or I hear “corroboration” – – I say to myself, “Let me see”, vaguely remember a case of helping, and say “Yes”. I hear “gadget”, I imagine the man who always used this word, and say “Yes”. I hear “Mamma”, this strikes me as funny and childish, – – “Yes”. A foreign word I shall very often translate in my mind into English before answering. I hear “spinthariscope”, and say to myself, “Must be some sort of scientific instrument”, perhaps try to think up its meaning from its derivation and fail, and say “No”. In another case I might say to myself, “Sounds like Chinese” – – “No”. Etc. There will on the other hand be a large class of cases in which I am not aware of anything happening except hearing the word and saying the answer. And there will also be cases in which I remember experiences (sensations, thoughts), which, as I should say, had nothing to do with the word at all. Thus amongst the experiences which I can describe there will be a class which I might call typical experiences of understanding and some typical experiences of | |||
{{BBB TS reference|Ts-310,124}} not understanding. But opposed to these there will be a large class of cases in which I should have to say, “I know of no particular experience at all, I just said ‘Yes’, or ‘No’.” | |||
Now if someone said, “But surely something did happen when you understood the word ‘tree’, unless you were utterly absent minded when you said ‘Yes’”, I might be inclined to reflect and say to myself, “Didn't I have a sort of homely feeling || sensation when I took in the word ‘tree’?” But then, do I always have this feeling which now I referred to when I hear that word used or use it myself, do I remember having had it, do I even remember a set of, say, five sensations some one of which I had on every occasion when I could be said to have understood the word? Further, isn't that “homely feeling” I referred to an experience rather characteristic for the particular situation I'm in at present, i.e., that of philosophizing about “understanding”? | |||
Of course in our experiment we might call saying “Yes” or “No” characteristic experiences of understanding or not understanding, but what if we just hear a word in a sentence where there isn't even a question of this reaction to it? ‒ ‒ We are here in a curious difficulty: on the one hand it seems we have no reason to say that in all cases in which we understand a word one particular experience – – or even one of a set – – is present. On the other hand we may feel it's plainly wrong to say that in such a case all that happens may be that I hear or say the word. For that seems to be saying that part of the time we act as mere automatons. And the answer is that in a sense we do and in a sense we don't. | |||
{{BBB TS reference|Ts-310,125}} If someone talked to me with a kindly play of facial expressions, is it necessary that in any short interval his face should have been || looked such that seeing it at any other time || under any other circumstances I should have called its expression distinctly kindly? And if not, does this mean that his “kindly play of expression” was interrupted by periods of inexpressiveness? ‒ ‒ We certainly should not say this under the circumstances which I am assuming, and we don't feel that the look at this moment interrupts || interrupted the expressiveness, although taken alone we should call it inexpressive. | |||
Just in this way we refer by the phrase “understanding a word” not necessarily to that which happens while we are saying or hearing it, but to the whole environment of the event of saying it. And this also applies to our saying that someone speaks like an automaton or like a parrot. Speaking with understanding certainly differs from speaking like an automaton, but this doesn't mean that the speaking in the first case is all the time accompanied by something which is lacking in the second case. Just as when we say that two people move in different circles this doesn't mean that they mayn't walk the street in identical surroundings. | |||
Thus also, acting voluntarily (or involuntarily) is, in many cases, characterized as such by a multitude of circumstances under which the action takes place rather than by an experience which we should call characteristic of voluntary action. And in this sense it is true to say that what happened when I got out of bed – – when I should certainly not call it involuntary – – was that I found myself getting up. Or rather, this is a | |||
{{BBB TS reference|Ts-310,126}} possible case; for of course every day something different happens. | |||
The troubles which since ) we have been discussing || turning over were all closely bound up || connected with the use of the word “particular”. We have been inclined to say that seeing familiar objects we have a particular feeling, that the word “red” came in a particular way when we recognized the colour as red, that we had a particular experience when we acted voluntarily. | |||
Now the use of the word “particular” is apt to produce a kind of delusion and roughly speaking this delusion is produced by the double usage of this word. On the one hand, we may say, it is used preliminary to a specification, description, comparison; on the other hand, as what one might describe as an emphasis. The first usage I shall call the transitive one, the second the intransitive one. Thus, on the one hand I say, “This face gives me a particular impression which I can't describe.” The latter sentence may mean something like: “This face gives me a strong impression.” These examples would perhaps be more striking if we substituted the word “peculiar” for “particular”, for the same applies || same comments apply to “peculiar”. If I say, “This soap has a peculiar smell: it is the kind we used as children”, the word “peculiar” may be used merely as an introduction to the comparison which follows it, as though I said, “I'll tell you what this soap smells like: … .” If on the other hand, I say, “This soap has a peculiar smell!” or “It has a most peculiar smell”, “peculiar” here stands for some such expression as “out of the ordinary”, “uncommon”, “striking”. | |||
We might ask, “Did you say it had a peculiar smell, as | |||
{{BBB TS reference|Ts-310,127}} opposed to no peculiar smell, or that it had this smell, as opposed to some other smell, or did you wish to say both the first and the second?” ‒ ‒ Now what was it like when, philosophizing, I said that the word “red” came in a particular way when I described something I saw as red? Was it that I was going to describe the way in which the word “red” came, like saying, “It always comes quicker than the word ‘two’ when I'm counting coloured objects” or “It always comes with a shock,” etc.? ‒ ‒ Or was it that I wished to say that “red” comes in a striking way? ‒ ‒ Not exactly that either. But certainly rather the second than the first. To see this more clearly, consider another example: You are, of course, constantly changing the position of your body throughout the day; arrest yourself in any such attitude (while writing, reading, talking, etc. etc.) and say to yourself in the way in which you say, “‘Red’ comes in a particular way … ”, “I am now in a particular attitude.” You will find that you can quite naturally say this. But aren't you always in a particular attitude? And of course you didn't mean that you were just then in a particularly striking attitude. What was it that happened? You concentrated, as it were stared at, your sensations. And this is exactly what you did when you said that “red” came in a particular way. | |||
“But didn't I mean that ‘red’ came in a different way from ‘two’?” ‒ ‒ You may have meant this, but the phrase, “They come in different ways”, is itself liable to cause confusion. Suppose I said, “Smith and Jones always enter my room in different ways”: I might go on and say, “Smith enters quickly, Jones | |||
{{BBB TS reference|Ts-310,128}} slowly”, I am specifying the ways. I might on the other hand say, “I don't know what the difference is”, intimating that I'm trying to specify the difference, and perhaps later on I shall say, “Now I know what it is; it is … ” ‒ ‒ I could on the other hand tell you that they came in different ways, and you wouldn't know what to make of this statement, and perhaps answer, “Of course they come in different ways; they just are different.” ‒ ‒ We could describe our trouble by saying that we feel as though we could give an experience a name without at the same time committing ourselves about its use, and in fact without any intention to use it at all. Thus when I say “red” comes in a particular way … , I feel that I might now give this way a name if it hasn't already got one, say “A”. But at the same time I am not at all prepared to say that I recognize this to be the way “red” has always come on such occasions, nor even to say that there are, say, four ways, say A, B, C, D, in one of which it always comes. You might say that the two ways in which “red” and “two” come can be identified by, say, exchanging the meaning of the two words, using “red” as the second cardinal numeral, “two” as the name of a colour. Thus, on being asked how many eyes I had, I should answer “red”, and to the question, “What is the colour of blood?”, “two”. But the question now arises whether you can identify the “way in which these words come” independently of the ways in which they are used, – – I mean the ways just described. Did you wish to say that as a matter of experience, the word when used in this way always comes in the way A, but may, the next time, come in the way “two” usually comes? You will see then that | |||
{{BBB TS reference|Ts-310,129}} you meant nothing of the sort. | |||
What is particular about the way “red” comes is that it comes while you're philosophizing about it, as what is particular about the position of your body when you concentrated on it was concentration. We appear to ourselves to be on the verge of giving a characterization of the “way” || describing the way, whereas we aren't really opposing it to any other way. We are emphasizing, not comparing, but we express ourselves as though this emphasis was really a comparison of the object with itself; there seems to be a reflexive comparison. Let me express myself in this way: suppose I speak of the way in which A enters the room, I may say, “I have noticed the way in which A enters the room”, and on being asked, “What is it?”, I may answer, “He always sticks his head into the room before coming in.” Here I'm referring to a definite feature, and I could say that B had the same way, or that A no longer had it. Consider on the other hand the statement, “I've now been observing the way A sits and smokes.” I want to draw him like this. In this case I needn't be ready to give any description of a particular feature of his attitude, and my statement may just mean, “I've been observing A as he sat and smoked.” ‒ ‒ “The way” can't in this case be separated from him. Now if I wished to draw him as he sat there, and was contemplating, studying, his attitude, I should while doing so be inclined to say and repeat to myself, “He has a particular way of sitting.” But the answer to the question, “What way?” would be, “Well, this way”, and perhaps one would give it by drawing the characteristic outlines of his attitude. On the other hand, my phrase, “He has a particular way … ”, might | |||
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