Sketch: The Grammar of Inside and Outside in Wittgenstein
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This is most apparent in his consideration of our reports of sensations of pain. We are used to thinking that the pains we feel are private, in that “only I can know whether I am really in pain; another person can only surmise it” (§246). He speaks of a man hitting himself on the chest to drive the point, as though it was in his chest, home: “But surely another person can’t have this pain!” (§253). This insistence of the privacy of our sensations seems to point to a private language, which refer to “immediate private sensations” which another person cannot understand (§243). He dispels this belief by focusing on the epistemic trickery involved in our report as proof of the private ownership we have of our sensations, “it is only I who know whether or not I am in pain.” On the one hand, for Wittgenstein, we cannot claim inner access to our own experiences as epistemological proof, i.e., we cannot know whether we are in pain or not; we simply are or aren’t. (After all, a man with a burst appendix does not do strengthen his claims by saying “I know I have a pain somewhere to my right side, I just know it,” except perhaps in the face of a very sceptical doctor.)
Saying that “I am certain that I have a pain” does not help, either. We can have pains, certainly, but not in the sense of having coffee or having a dog, which we, respectively, are currently drinking, or owning. We do not have pains in the sense of our owning pains, for, as in Hacker (52), it is nonsensical to wonder whether the pain we are having belongs to ourselves, our neighbour, or to our dog. For ourselves to know or have a pain is to be in pain, because the alternative is nonsensical: we cannot say that we are in pain but do not know it, or that we have a pain though someone else might be having it. That is, to know something and to have something, as empirical, epistemic utterances, necessitate that their inverse, being ignorant of something and not having something, also makes sense (Hacker 57). This is not the case with pain. We certainly can say that we know we are in pain, or that we have a pain, though this does not mean that our claims are epistemological, resting on privileged access to inner experiences. It only means that our reports, our word, have privileged status (Hacker 60) [3]. “‘I know I have a pain” is not an epistemic claim”, it is a grammatical (shared, rule-bound) event (Hacker, 29, 61, 66). It is not an inner experience (of a ‘private object’ as in Hacker 113) the way epistemologists would have us understand them, but an instance of involving a public form of life [4], which all forms of life are.
What Wittgenstein therefore problematizes is not that we are mistaken about what we ourselves undergo (i.e., that since we do not know it we in fact do not feel pain) but the epistemic grounding of statements on privileged access, a manifestation of our Platonic propensity to justify knowledge and experience using criterion of correctness independent of our shared ways of life (i.e., of language-games). Even the phrase “mistaken about what we undergo” belies this Platonic propensity: mistaken in terms of what? Right, as justified by what? For what do we gauge privileged access with? Claiming that we are epistemologically certain about our pain is similar to claiming that the Earth is stable because it rests on something firm (Hacker 67). For “‘Sensations are private’ is comparable to ‘One plays patience by oneself’” (§249); and this only means that sensation-words rest on grammatical rules which render epistemological certainty irrelevant to sensations. One cannot play patience with another opponent, it is not how the game goes (Hacker 69). We led ourselves to believe that sensations have to have epistemic veracity, that utterances regarding sensations have to rest on knowledge, that they have to be true or false. That is why Wittgenstein says “only I can know whether I am really in pain” is in one way false, because other people can “know” that we really are in pain by our report by word or face; and in another way nonsense, because it does not make sense that we know we are in pain.
Similarly, having believed that it is only ourselves who know whether or not we are in pain (and that we have inner worlds privy to us alone, or epistemic privacy and priority [5]), we also believe that we cannot know whether another person is in pain (and they can only surmise ours). For we assume that people cannot have the same pain. This is forcefully demonstrated by the self-hitting man, who might have hit another person and said “I cannot have that pain!” For Wittgenstein, on the other hand, we can actually have the same pain (§253), if only we think about what we mean by “the same”. That is, “we misguidedly project the grammar of ‘same object’ onto ‘same pain,’” as Hacker (3, 87) states, when we insist that since our bodies are different then our pains must be different. This difference in extension, however, rests again a grammatical point: on a misconstrual of what being in pain means, and what the same means. [6] For the point hinges on “a sensation in the practice of speaking a language” (Hacker 38).
We believe that it is through their manifestation (pain-behaviour) that others are in pain, when they groan, or perhaps scream, or roll about clutching their stomachs. There is, it seems, a real difference between third-person and first-person pain aspects, in that “He is in pain” is substantially different from “I am in pain.” It is, after all, on the basis of the behaviour of a man rolling around clutching his stomach that we conclude he is in pain; whereas we do not have to wait and see if we do these behaviours ourselves to justify whether or not we are in pain. [7] However, as should have been clarified with the problematization of first-person reports on pain, utterances of pain are not epistemic claims resting on accordance with a hidden private object; they are not justifiable descriptions of a particular mental state (for, as Hacker 275 states, how can pain be internal?) which somehow consequently gets revealed by outward behaviour.
For it seems right that we can correctly identify our own pains on the basis of having had them before. But that belief betrays several things which are in need of justification: one, that we can correctly identify our sensations as they occur time and again; and two, that by the basis of our correct identification we can then surmise that others also have pains because their behaviour is revelatory. For the first one, we rely on criteria that cannot exist: for what is there to gauge our correct identification of private sensations [as “I know... only from my own case” (§295)] against, what then is our criterion of correctness (§258)? Knowing that we are in pain has already been problematized. For the second, a connection between pain and pain-behaviour needs to be established, and he does this by saying that our belief in another’s experience of pain judging from his pain-behaviour does not in any way warrant that pain therefore must be a hidden something which was now revealed. As Wittgenstein notices, “Misleading parallel: a cry, an expression of pain – a sentence, an expression of thought” (§ 317). This belief in outward behaviour revealing an inner world misleads us that behaviour belies something behind them, that behaviour somehow is a “manifestation plus something based on correct accordance” (Hacker 278), i.e., we think that pain-behaviour is something added to a private object which we call “pain”, in the same sense as we think we correctly identify our own pains by private ostensive definition. This belief is again symptomatic of our Platonic tendencies. “According to Wittgenstein, problems about the mental arise because of the uncritical assumption that mental terms get their meanings through referring to ‘hidden’ mental processes.” [8] This behaviour – whether dissimulated or not, is intelligible to us precisely because there are criteria of correctness surrounding judgments upon which we all agree. Even my own sensation needs this criterion of correctness for me to be able to say “I am in pain” but this criteria is not found based on accordance with hidden experience (cf. §261, 265), for that is to fall into the paradox of Cartesian mentalism; neither is it to be found based on pain behaviour, for that is to fall into the paradox of behaviourism. Both mentalism and behaviourism, paradoxically, share the same fault: thinking that sensation-words refer to inner objects (Sluga, 341) [9]. However, these objects, like the now-famous beetle in the no less famous box, have no place in the language-game (§293). The box might contain different things, it might even be empty; sensations are neither northing nor something (§304), but then, so what? These objects have no place in the language-game of sensation words: that is why pains cannot rest on certainty or doubt. The putative strength of the private language argument, typically taken with privileged access to inner world of sensations, fall into incoherence with these considerations. Hacker (21) elegantly states: “The moot question of private language is not so much whether one can explain to others what one means by a word, but whether one cane even explain it to oneself. Hence also, not so much whether one can understand, but whether one understand oneself – indeed whether there is anything to understand at all.”
The point is not merely that we need communally shared language for sensations to make sense (for that argument also applies to physical objects), but whether or not we, “in our normal social setting can be conceived to be following rules constituted by mere association of a word and a mental ‘object’ or by private ostensive definitions” (Hacker 19). We do not identify sensations these ways, but we do use the same words, and hence, get involved in the sharedness of language-games, where descriptions occur differently (§290). Sensation language, “like the rest of language... is essentially sharable” (Hacker 21). It is not so much that since (causally) language is shared then we come to agreement, however true and misleading that might be. (For, just because agreement is possible does not warrant that objects are therefore there, and thereby the independent causes of these agreements in definitions, as traditional epistemology would show.) It might be more that by situating this problematic within communal forms of life, language-games, Wittgenstein exposes us to our enthralments with treating words as though they refer to objects and to thoughts (thus making us think of an outer and inner) and that they can only function thus – whether our thoughts be about “houses, pains, good and evil, or whatever” (§304). We focus on the objects of our words, even “processes and states” of grasping them, and not notice ourselves having already taken the first step (§308). Hence the emphasis on language being sharable. The capacity of sensation words –indeed, every word – to be sharable pertain to the givenness of language-games, neither causes nor effects but events where criteria, and rules, for correct and incorrect use are situated, made, broken, shared, all communally. For “there is no higher court of appeal than the community itself... There is nothing else it can consult. We can’t say ‘consult the world’ – as if that were a separate option – because the very point at issue is how such consultations can be managed. With what paradigm do we approach the world?” And an opposite question quickly becoming my favourite, inspired by Hacker: “what is it that supports the globe?”
[1] Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations trans. G.E.M. Anscombe et.al. 4th ed. (United Kingdom: Blackwell Publishing, Ltd., 2009), hereafter the sections of which are indicated by §.
[2] P.M.S. Hacker, Wittgenstein, Meaning, and Mind Vol. 3 Part 1of An Analytical commentary on the Philosophical Investigations (United Kingdom: Basil Blackwell 1990).pdf, 46.
[3] That does not, however, warrant the objection claiming that we can lie about being in pain. Furthering the same logic: if we take our report as epistemological, it does not make sense to say that we can be in pain without knowing it; if we take our ignorance of being in pain as epistemological, it does not make sense to lie about what we do not know (Hacker 62). We certainly can lie about being in pain, but lying about it rests on whether or not we are in pain, which does not rest on whether or not we know it (for whether or not we know that we are in pain includes the possibility that we truly are in pain and not know it, which is as absurd as, well, being in pain and not know it). We can lie about being in pain, though we have to understand lying apart from knowing, in that it is not a process within an inner world. (Hacker 70-75 gives a substantial account of how Wittgenstein discusses lying, disseminated throughout the latter’s works and not just in the Philosophical Investigations.)
[4] Which is not to say that pain therefore is a public object (Hacker 113).
[5] Hacker 23-26 gives a recapitulation of the philosophical undergirding of the privacy of mental states and objects, correspondingly generating the problem of other minds and the possibility of communication with other people.
[6] In the sense of sameness in experience, but not of numerical identity. As Hacker (49) states, “Since A’s pain is in his body and B’s pain [is] in his distinct body, they are, by parity of reasoning, numerically distinct.” However, clarifying that locating a pain is dependent upon identifying who it is that has it, the discussion of pain leads to the grammar of having a pain, a point already elucidated above. Having “the same pain” need not lead to scruples of numerical or metaphysical sameness in pain (led there by the belief of epistemic privacy), which seems to be the argument put forward by the self-hitting man – it instead leads to concern for grammar. For “[Wittgenstein’s] manoeuvre is to draw our attention to rules of grammar and to show how we mistakenly construe a grammatical connection or exclusion for an empirical or ‘super-empirical’ one about the essential nature of the mental” (Hacker 56-57).
[7] Hans Sluga, “Whose house is that? Wittgenstein on the self.” The Cambridge Companion to Wittgenstein eds. Hans Sluga and David G. Stern. (United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press,1996), 320-353, 340-341. Also in Hacker (96) “After all, when I say I have a toothache, I do not have to see whether I am clutching my cheek. My use of names of experiences here seems wholly independent of the behavioural manifestations of my experiences. And surely, when I have a pain, I know that I do – I could not have a toothache and not know it! And someone else cannot know that I have a toothache as I do – for I feel it! But no one else can feel my toothache!”
[8] Robert J. Fogelin, “Wittgenstein’s Critique of Philosophy.” The Cambridge Companion to Wittgenstein eds. Hans Sluga and David G. Stern. (United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press,1996),32-58, 45. Having problematized pain, or at least having or knowing it, he also problematizes how it is that we know that others are in pain by modelling them after our own pains (§302) It is in thinking that experience is hidden behind behaviour (Hacker 241) that we miss the connection between something supposedly as private as pain with the public character of language-games and turn instead to the putative justifiability of a private language.
[9] “The inner/outer picture of the relationship between the mental and behaviour is generally accepted, or, in the characteristic pernicious dialectic, the inner is reduced to the outer. What is questioned in that move is one half of a distorted dichotomy but is rarely noticed that both halves misrepresent our concepts. Debate turns on the character of inferences from the ‘outer’ to the ‘inner’, but what counts as ‘outer’ is typically taken for granted, as is the characterization of the inference as from the observed to the unobserved. But the behaviour of a human being is not the movement of a bodily machine, and experiences are not hidden behind anything. Moreover, our very description of the ‘outer’ depend upon our terminology of the ‘inner’” (Hacker 29).
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