(This post will make more sense to those who have read Part I, but can be read independently. It is an overview of W's examination of what happens when we try to discuss "mental" phenomena like sensations, desires, feelings and so on. We tend to treat them like private objects locked away in the "box of consciousness." But whatever the virtues of such an understanding may be, they do not, for W, shed light on the way we actually talk about these allegedly "private" phenomena. What follows is introductory and hopefully accessible. There is also supplementary video which may help.)
In part one we saw that W thinks that we only acquire meanings of words and sentences in social contexts by learning how and when to use them within language games. But the emphasis of part I was on words and sentences thought to represent or refer to “the external world”—objects and processes “outside” of my subjective mental world. The examples that came up included cards, balls, and ethical words applied to observable behavior (the good, etc.). How does Wittgenstein deal with words that are supposed to refer to inner experience or qualia? Since Augustine, but more especially since Descartes and Locke, the mental or subjective realm has been imagined as an interior locus of private experiences which only each one of us in solitude can undergo, while none of us has knowledge of the contents of other people’s inner life. This gives rise to such questions as “How do I know any one else really has any mental experiences?” and even “How do I know I’m not deceived by my own experience?” It also leads to a rigid mind-body dualism according to which personal or "inner" experience is immaterial while non-conscious entities(including , on this view,our own bodies) are thought to be mechanical, quantifiable and physical. The subject, the "owner" of mental experience, is viewed as being stuck in a private room that has no windows(Locke’s image from Essays on Human Understanding) a kind of theater of passing images and thoughts (Hume’s image). Either image makes it clear that each mind alone has privileged access to its contents (e.g. joys, sorrows, pains, plesures, color perceptions etc.). Since each of us is confined to a private realm, we can at best infer that others even have minds, much less what the contents of those minds are. Mental experience is, thus, terminally private for most modern philosophers between the 16th and 20th centuries, from Descartes and Locke to Wittgenstein's early mentor, Bertrand Russell and beyond.
Wittgenstein follows this path of thinking where it leads logically—to the idea that to express the actual experiences of inner life (sensations, emotions, memories, desires and beliefs) we would have to each come up with a “private language” where each word would correspond to some private experience unique to “me.” Each of us would have to name these experiences and keep track of the names so they could be used consistently and correctly. So when a certain sensation occurs I might mark down or say the letter “S” or “S1” and another sensation might be called “S2”and so on. The list of sensations, beliefs, desires etc. would soon get very long. How would any one person be sure they were using S1 for the same sensation today that they used it for yesterday? This problem is known as “memory skepticism.” If our sensations are private, then nobody could ever correct us if we were to confuse the private experience S1 names and the private experience S2 names. Maybe S1 in my private language originally meant something like “ throbbing toothache” but I mis-remember this and start to use it for other mental events like “tingling feeling on the gums” How would I know if I’m using the words consistently? To use a symbol consistently is to observe a rule such as "when I feel that particular sensation involved in today's toothache I will write the letter S in my diary." Perhaps a week later I have a sensation of some sort and I use the same symbol S. How do I know I'm following the rule that S should only be used for the sort of toothache I had last week? Wittgenstein makes an argument against the whole idea of such a private language by answering that question in the following way: We wouldn’t know. Using words correctly is a function of language games where others can play the game, correcting us if we break a rule we’re supposed to follow (such as the rule “use S1 for throbbing toothaches and only for throbbing toothaches that you experience.”) In PI (202) W says astutely, “obeying a rule is a practice. And to think one is obeying a rule is not to obey a rule. Hence it is not possible to obey a rule privately: otherwise thinking one was obeying a rule would be the same thing as obeying a rule.” (PI: 202) This may be the closes W comes to making a formal argument in PI. Just because I think I'm following a rule that I invented, and about which nobody else knows, does not mean that I really am obeying that rule. Between the problem of unreliable memories, and the inability to know if I am following the rules of my own invented language, W has a strong case against the possibility of a private language. The famous sections that follow are collectively called the PLA or “Private Language Argument,” but the main argument is what I just quoted, and most of the numbered sections thereafter employ analogies, assorted examples,thought experiments and imagined dialogues to guide the reader toward an awareness of the confused thinking that leads us to talk about the "mind" and its "inner contents" as we do.
Perhaps the most famous passage in the book occurs when W asks us to imagine a room of people in which each person holds an opaque box. Nobody can see the content of anybody else’s box (a fine metaphor for subjective consciousness and private experiences). When asked what is inside the box, everybody checks their box and says “beetle.” But without the ability of any one person to see anyone else’s box, we have no way of knowing that what they mean by “beetle” is the same as what I mean when I say “beetle.” For all we know, all boxes could be empty, or some empty and others filled with various different entities or events. Or maybe what is “contained” in the box is in a state of flux, and is not a fixed referent at all. All or none of these are possibilities in such a situation. Let the word "beetle" mean toothache, and Wittgenstein will say that beetle/toothache does not refer to the private experience of the sufferer but his/her "pain behavior". John or Jill will, perhaps, put their hand on their cheek, squint, and say "Ouch! That root canal was just dreadful. It really hurts." A nearby friend will probably respond by saying something like "Sorry to hear it. Did you take something for that?" This is the pain language game. I don't try to imagine exactly what you feel, but I do understand the expressive behavior. I will usually have no reason to doubt you (unless I'm a doctor who knows you like pain killers, or something like that). We're not able to get at the "beetle" or the concrete experience of the sufferer. But I don't need to in order to understand that this person is in pain. The pain is not attributed to the mind or the body but the person. Nobody says, "I'm sorry your mind is in pain?" in a case like this. Rather we are dealing with persons not metaphysical substances, so we say "I'm sorry *you* are in pain."
But how do we learn to understand each other in this way? If we are not matching private phenomena to symbols, how does the ability to communicate effectively about sensations, emotions and the rest arise? Wittgenstein's account involves interpersonal relations, as for example between parents and children. Suppose little Johnny falls down and gets a nasty cut on his arm. He begins to writhe on the pavement, scream, and cry out “Ow,ohh No! Ouch!” while grimacing and maybe choking up and crying. (Sorry about all the painful examples, but W used them quite a lot to illustrate his points.) Along comes his father, say, and he disinfects the cut, soothes the boy and says something like the following: “It’s okay, Johnny, when I was young and I got cuts I acted just like you. But you’re going to be just fine, and before you know it there won’t be any pain. As you grow up, you won’t get so upset or cry over a cut. You’ll merely say “Oops, this cut hurts, I better bandage it up. But you'll know that big boys don't cry.”
Is this defining pain by pointing to it, the way we saw in part one with objects like balls? No. Johnny is being shown new—entirely different—ways of behaving when he gets cut. He is learning to *substitute* pain words ("throbbing," "dull," "sharp" pains etc.) for screams and groans. He is replacing one way of expressing pain with another. But, asks W, isn’t this leaving the internal experience out? Aware that some would object that W is only concerned with behavior (what people say and do) but not subjective experience (what people feel and experience), Wittgenstein preemptively attempts to correct that misreading (unfortunatelysome authors continue to see him as a behaviorist who believes the inner world is a Skinnerian black box which nobody can see or understand due to thought experiments like the "beetle in the box" and others) Wittgenstein makes it clear that he does not have any commitment to behaviorism.
From sections 307-323 Wittgenstein answers the question he poses in section 307: “Are you not really a behaviorist in disguise?” (an imaginary interlocutor is asking this of W) (PI: 307). Wittgenstein makes it plain that he is not. Asked if he believes everything but behavior is a fiction (i.e. the inner life would then be fictional) he demurs saying: “If I speak of a fiction at all it is a grammatical [i.e. linguistic] fiction.” (PI: 307). That is, the fiction is to pretend our non-linguistic experience can be converted into a public language game. It is not fictional to say there really are non-linguistic experiences occurring all the time. To make the point even clearer, he says, “I tell someone I’m in pain….Let us assume he says “It’s not so bad.” Doesn’t that prove he believes in something behind the outward expression of pain? (PI: 310). Just as with my example of Johnny and his father, the interaction doesn’t make sense without the belief in what we metaphorically call "inner" experience, or better, personal experience. He is not a behaviorist, but rather someone who sees language as possible only at a public level, and all we have in public settings are the expressions of inner processes as mediated by language games. We can't "get at" the non-linguistic experience with words.
Now, back to Johnny and his father discussing his painful cut. By the time Johnny grows up he has learned a language game of sensations, emotions and other such phenomena. His own interpretations of sensations, feelings, etc, will have change due to the socialization into public forms of life (culture). The idea that “it isn’t so bad” or “you’re getting to old to cry about cuts” will have been internalized and will play a role in shaping both the experiences and their expressions. In
a private non-socialized realm there is no language game for pain that is established for mutual understandings. But when you go to a pain clinic and are asked to rate pain on a 1-10 scale, or describe it as stabbing or throbbing, mild or severe—you have learned to interpret whatever private processes occur in some way that enables these public words to have meaning.
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Below is a "Crash Course" video which is mostly devoted to summarizing the sections of PI that I have discussed in this post (language games, the beetle in the box, private language etc.) The presentation of W's ideas begins at the 3 minute mark and continues almost up to the end. It may help to clarify W's ideas in all of 7 minutes.
Recommended Reading:
P.M.S. Hacker: Wittgenstein On Human Nature; (Routledge, NY: 1999) is a 60 page monograph on Wittgenstein's later work (mainly the PI) that covers the Private Language Argument quite nicely. Hacker is a peerless W scholar who has co-translated Philosophical Investigations, and written a 4 volume commentary on it.
There is also an excellent overview of the PI in the John Searle video in the comments section below for those with the interest and/or time (it's about 40 minutes).
Questions:
Do you think W neglects the realm of personal meanings?
How convincing do you find W's view of language?
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