| 1.
Wittgenstein Blue Book. |
|
What is the meaning of a
word? |
| Let us attack this
question by asking, first, what is an explanation of the meaning of
a word; what does the explanation of a word look
like? |
| The way this question
helps us is analogous to the way the question “how do we
measure a length?” helps us to understand the
problem, “what is length?” |
| The questions, “What is
length?”, “What is
meaning?”, “What is the number
one?” etc., produce in us a mental
cramp. We feel that we can't point to
anything in reply to them and yet ought to point to
something. (We are up against one of the great
sources of philosophical bewilderment: we try to find a
substance for a substantive.) |
|
Asking first, “What's an explanation of
meaning?” has two advantages. You in a
sense bring the question “what is
meaning?” down to earth. For, surely, to
understand the meaning of “meaning” you ought
also to understand the meaning of “explanation of
meaning”. Roughly: “let's
ask what the explanation of meaning is, for whatever that explains
will be the meaning.” Studying the grammar of
the expression “explanation of meaning” will
teach you something about the grammar of the word
“meaning” and will cure you of the temptation to
look about you for something which you might call the
“meaning |
|
What one generally calls “explanations of the
meaning of 2. a word” can,
very roughly, be divided into verbal and ostensive
definitions. It will be seen later in what sense this
division is only rough and provisional (and that it is, is an
important point). The verbal definition, as it takes
us from one verbal expression to another, in a sense gets us no
further. In the ostensive definition however we seem to
make a much more real step towards learning the meaning.
|
| One difficulty which strikes us is
that for many words in our language there do not seem to be
ostensive definitions; e.g. for such words
as “one”, “number”,
“not”, etc. |
| Question: Need the ostensive
definition itself be understood? ‒ ‒ ‒
Can't the ostensive definition be
misunderstood? |
| If the
definition explains the meaning of a word, surely it
can't be essential that you should have heard the word
before. It is the ostensive definition's
business to give it a meaning.
Let us then
explain the word “tove” by
pointing to a pencil and saying “this is
tove”. (Insted
of “this is tove” I could here
have said “this is called
‘tove’”.
I point this out to remove, once and for all, the idea
that the words of the ostensive definition predicate something of
the defined; the confusion between the sentence “this is
red”, attributing the colour red to something, and this
ostensive definition “this is called
‘red’”.) Now the ostensive
definition “this is tove” can
be interpreted in all sorts of ways. I will give a
few such interpretations and use English words with well
established usage. The definition then can be
interpreted to mean:– 3. “This
is a pencil”, “This is round”, “This is wood”, “This is one”, “This is hard”, etc. etc. |
| One might
object to this argument that all these interpretations
pre-suppose another word-language. And this
objection is significant if by “interpretation”
we only mean “Translation into a
word-language”. ‒ ‒ ‒ Let me give some hints
which might make this clearer. Let us ask ourselves what
is our criterion when we say that somseone
has interpreted the ostensive definition in a
particular way. Suppose I give to an Englishman the
ostensive definition “this is what the Germans call
‘Buch’”. Then, in
the great majority of cases, at any rate, the English word
“book” will come into the Englishman's
mind. We may say he has interpreted
“Buch” to mean
“book”. The case will be different if
e.g., we point to a thing which he has never
seen before and say: “This is a
banjo”. Possibly the word
“guitar” will then come into his mind, possibly
no word at all but the image of a similar instrument, possibly
nothing at all. Supposing then I give him the order
“now pick a banjo from amongst those
things”. If he picks what we call a
“banjo” we might say “he has given the
word ‘banjo’ the correct
interpretation”; if he picks some other
instrument:– “he has interpreted
‘banjo’ to mean ‘string
instrument’”. |
|
We say “he has given the word ‘banjo’
this or that inter- 4. pretation”, are
inclined to assume a definite act of interpretation besides the
act of choosing. |
| Our problem
is analogous to the following:– If I give someone
the order “fetch me a red flower from that
meadow”, how is he to know what sort of flower to bring, as
I have only given him a word? |
| Now the answer one might suggest first is that
he went to look for a red flower carrying a red image in his
mind, and comparing it with the flower[d|s] to see which of
them had the colour of the image. Now there is such a
way of searching, and it is not at all essential that the image we
use should be a mental one. In fact the process may be
this:– I carry a chart co-ordinating
names and coloured squares. When I hear the order
“fetch me etc.” I draw my finger
across the chart from the word “red” to a certain
square, and I go and look for a flower which has the same colour as
the square. But this is not the only way of searching
and it isn't the usual way. We go, look about
us, walk up to a flower and pick it, without comparing it to
anything. To see that the process of obeying the order can
be of this kind, consider the order “imagine a
red patch”. You are not tempted in this case to
think that before obeying you must have imagined a red
patch to serve you as a pattern for the red patch which you were
ordered to imagine. |
| Now you
might ask “do we interpret the words before we
obey the order?” And in some cases you will
find that you do something which might be called interpreting
before obeying, in some cases not. 5. |
| It
seems that there are certain definite mental processes
bound up with the working of language; processes through which
alone language can function. I mean the processes of
understanding and meaning. The signs of our
language seem dead without these mental processes; and it might
seem that the only function of the signs is to induce such
processes, and that these are the things we ought really to be
interested in. Thus, if you are asked what is the
relation between a name and the thing it names, you will be
inclined to answer that the relation is a psychological one, and
perhaps when you say this you think in particular of the mechanism
of association. ‒ ‒ ‒ We are tempted to think that the
action of language coˇnsists of two parts; an
inorganic part, the handling of signs, and an organic part, which
we may call understanding these signs, meaning them, interpreting
them, thinking. These latter activities seem to take place
in a queer kind of medium, the mind; and the mechanism of the
mind, the nature of which, it seems, we don't quite
understand, can bring about effects which no material mechanism
could. Thus e.g. a thought
(which is such a mental process) can agree or disagree with
reality: I am able to think of a man who isn't
present; I am able to imagine him, “mean” him, in
a remark which I make about him even if he is thousands of miles
away or dead. “What a queer
mechanism”, one might say, “the mechanism of wishing
must be if I can wish that which will never
happen”. |
| There is
one way of avoiding at least partly the occult appearance of the
process of thinking, and it is, to replace in these processes any
working of the imagination by looking at real 6. objects. Thus it
may seem essential that, at least in certain cases, when I hear the
word “red” with understanding, a red image should
be before my mind's eye. But why should I not
substitute seeing a red bit of paper for imagining a red
patch? The visual image will only be the more
vivid. You can easily imagine a man carrying a sheet of
paper in his pocket on which the names of colours are coordinated
with coloured patches. You may say that it would be a
nuisance to carry such a table of samples about with you, and that
the mechanism of association is what we always use instead of
it. But this is irrelevant; and in many cases it is not
even true. If, for instance, you were ordered to paint a
particular shade of blue, called “Prussian
Blue”, you might have to use a table to lead you
from the word “Prussian Blue” to a sample
of the colour, which would serve you as a copy. |
| We could perfectly well, for our purposes,
replace every process of imagining by a process of looking at an
object or by painting, drawing or modelling; and every process of
speaking to oneself by speaking aloud or writing. |
|
Frege
ridiculed the formalist conception of mathematics by saying that
the formalists confused the unimportant thing, the sign, with the
important, the meaning. Surely, one wishes to say,
mathematics does not treat of dashes on a bit of paper.
Frege's idea could
be expressed thus: the propositions of mathematics, if
they were just complexes of dashes, would be dead and utterly
uninteresting, whereas they obviously have a kind of life.
And the same, of course, could be said of any proposition:
Without a sense, or without the thought, a proposition would
be an utterly 7. dead and trivial
thing. And further it seems clear that no adding of
inorganic signs can make the proposition live. And the
conclusion which one draws from this is that what must be added to
the dead signs in order to make a live proposition is something
immaterial with properties different from all mere signs.
|
| But if we had to name anything which
is the life of the sign, we should have to say that it was its
use. . |
|
If the meaning of the sign (roughly, that which is of
importance about the sign) is an image built up in our minds
when we see or hear the sign, then first let us adopt the method we
just described of replacing this mental image by seeing some
sort of outward object, e.g. a painted or
modelled image. Then why should the written sign plus
this painted image be alive if the written sign alone was
dead? ‒ ‒ ‒ In fact, as soon as you think of
replacing the mental image by, say, a painted one, and as soon
as the image thereby loses its occult character, it ceases to seem
to impart any life to the sentence at all. (It was in
facrt just the occult character of the mental
process which you needed for your purposes.) |
| The mistakes we are liable to
make could be expressed thus: We are looking for the
use of a sign, but we look for it as though it were an object
co-existing with the sign. (One of the
reasons for this mistake is again that we are looking for a
“thing corresponding to a
substantive.”) |
|
The sign (the sentence) gets its significance from the
system of signs, from the language to which it belongs.
Roughly: understanding a sentence means understanding a
language. 8.
as a part of the system of
language, one may say “the sentence ”
has life”. But one is tempted to imagine that
which gives the sentence life as something in an occult sphere,
accompanying the sentence. But whatever would accompany
it would for us just be another sign. |
| It seems at first sight that that which gives
to thinking its peculiar character is that it is a train of mental
states, and it seems that what is queer and difficult to understand
about thinking is the processes which happen in the medium of
the mind, processes possible only in this medium. The
comparison which here forces itself upon us is that of the mental
medium with the protoplasm of a cell, say, of an amoeba.
We observe certain actions of the amoeba, its taking food by
ex[p|t]ending arms, its splitting up into similar cells,
each of which grows and behaves like the original one.
We say “of what a queer nature the protoplasm must
be to act in such a way”, and perhaps we say that no
physical mechanism could behave in this way, and that the
mechanism of the amoeba must be of a totally different
kind. In the same way we are tempted to say
“the mechanism of the mind must be of a most peculiar kind
to be able to do what the mind does.” But here
we are making two mistakes. For what
struck us as being queer about
thought and thinking was not at all that it had curious effects
which we were not yet able to explain (causally).
Our problem, in other words, was not a scientific one; but a
muddle felt as a problem. |
|
Supposing we tried to constrtuct a
mind-model as a result of psychological investigations, a model
which, as we should say, 9. would explain the action of
the mind. This model would be part of a psychological
theory in the way in which a mechanical model of the ether can be
part of a theory of electricity. (Such a model, by
the way, is always part of the symbolism of a
theory. Its advantage may be that it is seen at a
glance and easily held in the mind. It has been said
that a model, in a sense, dresses up the pure theory; that the
naked theory is sentences or equations.
This must be examined more closely later on.) |
| We may fin[g|d] that such a
mind-model would have to be very complicated and intricate in
order to explain the observed mental activities; and on this ground
we might call the mind a queer kind of medium. But this
aspect of the mind does not interest us. The problems
which it may set are psychological problems, and the method of
their solution is that of natural science. |
| Now if it is not the causal connections which
we are concerned with, then the activities of the mind lie open
before us. And when we are worried about the nature of
thinking, the puzzlement which we wrongly interpret to be one about
the nature of a medium is a puzzlement caused by the mystifying use
of our language. This kind of mistake recurs again and
again in philosophy, e.g. when we are puzzled
about the nature of time; when time seems to us a queer
thing. We are most strongly tempted to think that here
are things hidden, something we can see from the outside but which
we can't look into. And yet nothing of the sort
is the case. It is not new facts about time which we
want to know. All the facts that concern us lie open
before us. But it is the use of the substantive
“time” which mystifies us. If we look
into 10. the grammar of that word,
we shall feel that it is no less astounding that man should have
conceived of a deity of time than it would be to conceive of a
deity of negation or disjunction. |
|
It is misleading then to talk of thinking as of a
“mental activity”. We may say that
thinking is essentially the activity of operating with
signs. This activity is performed by the hand, when we
think of ˇby writing; by the mouth and
larynx, when we think by speaking; and, if we think by imagining
signs or pictures I can give you no agent that thinks.
If then you say that in such cases the mind thinks, I would only
draw your◇ attention to the fact that you are using a
metaphor, that here the mind is an agent in a different sense from
that in which the hand can be said to be the agent in
writing. |
| If again we talk
about the locality where thinking takes place we have a right to
say that this locality is the paper on which we write; or the mouth
which speaks. And if we talk of the head or the brain as
the locality of thought, this is using the expression
“locality of thinking” in a different sense.
Let us examine what are the reasons for calling the head the
place of thinking. It is not our intention to criticize
this form of expression, or to show that it is not
appropriate. What we must do is: understand its
working, its grammar, e.g. see what
relation this grammar has to that of the expression
“we think with our mouth”, or “we think
with a pencil on a piece of paper”. |
| Perhaps the main reason why we are so strongly
inclined to talk of the head as the locality of our thoughts is
this:– the existence of the words
“thinking” and “thought” alongside
of the 11. words denoting
(bodily) activities, such as writing, speaking,
etc. makes us look for an activity, different from
these but analogous to them, corresponding to the word
“thinking”. When words in our ordinary
language have prima facie analogous grammars we are
inclined to in try to interpret them
analogously; i.e. we try to make the analogy
hold throughout.‒ ‒ ‒ We say, “The thought
is not the same as the sentence; for an English and a French
sentence, which are utterly different, can express the same
thought”. And now, as the sentences are
somewhere, we look for a place for the thought.
(It is as though we looked for the place of the king of which
the rules of chess treat, as opposed to the places of the various
bits of wood, etc., the kings of the various
sets.) ‒ ‒ ‒ We say, “surely the thought
is something; it is not nothing”; and all one
can answer to this is, that the word “thought”
has its use, which is of a totally different kind from
the use of the word “sentence”. |
| Now does this mean that it is nonsensical to
talk of a locality where thought takes place?
Certainly not. This phrase has sense, if we give it
sense. Now if we say “thought takes place in
our heads”, what is the sense of this phrase soberly
understood? I suppose it is that certain
physiological processes correspond to our thoughts in such a way
that if we know the correspondence we can, by observing these
processes, find the thoughts. But in what sense can the
physiological processes be said to correspond to thoughts, and in
what sense can we be said to get the thoughts from the observation
of the brain? |
| I
suppose we imagine the correspondence to have been verified
12.
experimentally. Let us imagine such an experiment
crudely. It consists in looking at the brain while the
subject thinks. And now you may think that the reason
why my explanation is going to go wrong is that of course the
experimenter gets the thoughts of the subject only
indirectly by being told them, the subject
expressing them in some way or the other. But I
will remove this difficulty by assuming that the subject is at the
same time the experimenter, who is looking at his own brain, say by
means of a mirror. (The crudity of this description
in no way reduces the force of the argument.) |
| Then I ask you, is the subject-experimenter
observing one thing or two things? (Don't
say that he is observing one thing both from the inside
and from the outside; for this does not remove the
difficulty. We will talk of inside and outside
later[–|.]) The
subject-experimenter is observing a correlation of two
phenomena. One of them he, perhaps, calls the
thought. This may consist of a train of
images, organic sensations, or, on the other hand of a train of the
various visual, tactual and muscular
experiences which he has in writing or speaking a
sentence.‒ ‒ ‒ The other experience is one of seeing
his brain work. Both these phenomena could correctly be
called “expressions of thought”; and the
question “where is the thought itself?” had
better, in order to prevent confus[n|i]on, be rejected as
nonsensical. If however we do use the expression
“the thought takes place in our heads”, we have
given this expression its meaning by describing the experience
which would justify the hypothesis “the thought
takes place in our heads” by describing what we call the
experience of observing 13. the thought in our
brain. |
| We easily forget that
the word “locality” is used in many different
senses and that there are many different kinds of statements about
a thing which in a particular case, in accordance with general
usage, we may call “specifications of the locality of the
thing.” Thus it has been said of visual space that
its place is in our head; and I think one has been tempted to say
this, partly, by a grammatical misunderstanding. |
| I can say: “in my visual
field I see the image of the tree to the right of the image of the
tower” or “I see the image of the tree in the
middle of the visual field”. And now we are
inclined to ask, “and where do you see the visual
field?” Now if the “where”
is meant to ask for a locality in the sense in which we have
specified the locality of the image of the tree, then I would draw
your attention to the fact that you have not yet given this question
sense; that is, that you have been proceeding by a grammatical
analogy without having worked out the analogy in detail. |
| In saying that the idea of our visual field
being located in our brain arose from a grammatical
misunderstanding, I did not mean to say that we could not give
sense to such a specification of locality. We could
e.g., easily imagine an experience which we
should describe by such a statement. Imagine that we
looked at a group of things in this room, and while we looked, a
probe was stuck into our brain, and it was found that if the point
of the probe reached a particular point in our brain, then a
particular small part of our visual field was thereby
obliterated. In this way we might coordinate points of
our brain to points of 14. the visual image, and this
might make us say that the visual field was seated in
such-and-such a place in our brain. And if now
we asked the question “Where do you see the image of
this book?” the answer could be (as above)
“To the right of that pencil”, or
“In the left hand part of my visual field”,
or again: “three inches behind my left
eye”. |
| But what if
someone said “I can assure you I feel the visual image to
be two inches behind the bridge of my nose”; ‒ ‒ ‒ what
are we to answer him? Should we say that he is not
speaking the truth, or that there cannot be such a
feeling? What if he asks us “do you know all
the feelings there are? How do you know there
isn't such a feeling?” |
| What if the diviner tells us that when he holds
the rod he feels that the water is five feet under the
ground? or that he feels that a mixture of copper
and gold is five feet under the ground? Suppose that
to our doubts he answered: “You can estimate a
length when you see it. Wh[e|y] shouldn't
I have a different way of estimating it?” |
| If we understand the idea of such an
estimation, we shall get clear about the nature of our doubts about
the statements of the diviner, and of the man who said he
folt the visual image behind the bridge of his
nose. |
| There is the
statement: “this pencil is five inches
long”, and the statement, “I feel that
this pencil is five inches long”, and we must get
clear about the relation of the grammar of the first statement to
the grammar of the second. To the statement “I
feel in my hand that the water is three feet under the
ground” 15. we should like to
answer: “I don't know what this
means”. But the diviner would
say: “surely you know what it means. You
know what
“three feet under the ground” means,
and you know what “I feel”
means.” But I should answer him: “I
know what a word means in certain contexts.
Thus I understand the phrase ‘three feet under the
ground’, say, in the connections, ‘the
measurement has shown that the water runs three feet under the
ground’, ‘If we dig three feet deep we are
going to strike water’, ‘the depth of the water
is three feet by the eye’. But the use of the
expression ‘a feeling in my hands of water being three feet
under the ground’ has yet to be explained to
me.” |
| We could ask
the diviner “how did you learn the meaning of the word
‘three feet’?” We suppose by
being shown such lengths, by having measured them and such
like. Were you also taught to talk of a feeling of water
being three feet under the ground, a feeling, say, in your
hands? For if not, what made you connect the word
“three feet” with a feeling in your hands?
Supposing we had been estimating lengths by the eye, but had
never spanned a length. How could we estimate a length
in inches by spanning it? I.e.,
how could we interpret the experience of spanning in
inches? The question is, what connection is there
between, say, a tactual sensation and the
experience of measuring a thing by means of a yard rod?
This connection will show us what it means to “feel
that a thing is six inches long”. Supposing the
diviner said, “I have never learnt to correlate depth of
water under the ground with feelings in my hand, but when I have a
certain feeling of tension in my hands, the words “three
feet” spring up in my 16. mind.”
We should answer “This is a perfectly good
explanation of what you mean by ‘feeling the depth to be
three feet’, and the statement that you feel this will
have neither more, nor less, meaning than your explanation has
given it. And if experience shows that the actual depth
of the water always agrees with the words, ‘n
feet’ which come into your mind, your experience will be
very useful for determining the depth of
water”.‒ ‒ ‒ But you see that the meaning of
the words, “I feel the depth of the water to be n
feet” had to be explained; it was not known when the
meaning of the words “n feet” in the ordinary
sense (i.e. in the ordinary contexts)
was known.‒ ‒ ‒ We don't say that the man
who tells us he feels the visual image two inches behind the
bridge of his nose is telling a lie or talking nonsense.
But we say that we don't understand the meaning of
such a phrase. It combines well-known words but
combines them in a way we don't yet understand.
The grammar of this phrase has yet to be explained to
us. |
| The importance of
investigating the diviner's answer lies in the fact that we
often think we have given a meaning to a statement P if
only we assert “I feel (or I believe) that
P is the case.”
(We shall talk
at a later occasion of Prof.Hardy saying that
Goldbach's
theorem is a proposition because he can believe that it is
true.) We have already said that by merely explaining
the meaning of the words “three feet” in the
usual way, we have not yet explained the sense of the phrase
“feeling that water is three feet,
etc.” Now we should not have felt these
difficulties had the diviner said that he had learnt to
estimate the depth of the 17. water, say, by digging for
water whenever he had a particular feeling and in this way
correlating such feelings with measurements of
depth. Now we must examine the relation of the process
of learning to estimate with the act of estimating.
The importance of this examination lies in this, that it
applies to the relation between learning the meaning of a word and
making use of the word. Or, more generally, that it
shows the different possible relations between a rule given and
its application. |
| Let us
consider the process of estimating a length by the eye:
It is extremely important that you should realise that there
are a great many different processes which we call
“estimating by the eye”. |
| Consider these cases:–
(1) Someone asks “How did you estimate the height of this building?” I answer: “It has four storeys; I suppose each storey is about fifteen feet high; so it must be about sixty feet.” (2) In another case: “I roughly know what a yard at that distance looks like; so it must be about four yards long.” (3) Or again: “I can imagine a tall man reaching to about this point; so it must be about six feet above the ground.” (4) Or: “I don't know; it just looks like a yard.” |
| This latter case is likely to puzzle
us. If you ask “what happened in this case when
the man estimated the length?” the correct answer
may be: “he looked at the thing and
said ‘it looks one yard
long’.” This may be all that has
happened. |
| We said before that
we should not have been puzzled about the 18. diviner's answer if
he had told us that he had learnt how to estimate
depth. Now learning to estimate may, broadly speaking,
be seen in two different relations to the act of estimating; either
as a cause of the phenomenon of estimating; or as supplying us with
a rule (a table, a chart, or some such thing) which we make
use of when we estimate. |
|
Supposing I teach someone the use of the word
“yellow” by repeatedly pointing to a yellow patch
and pronouncing the word. On another occasion I make
him apply what he has learnt by giving him the order,
“choose a yellow ball out of this bag”.
What was it that happened when he obeyed my order?
I say: “possibly just this: he heard
my words and took a yellow ball from the bag.”
Now you may be inclined to think that this couldn't
possibly have been all; and the kind of thing that you
would suggest is that he imagined something yellow when he
understood the order, and then chose a ball according to
his image. To see that this is not necessary
remember that I could have given him the order,
“Imagine a yellow patch”. Would
you still be inclined to assume that he first imagines a yellow
patch, just understanding my order, and then imagines a
yellow patch to match the first? (Now I
don't say that this is not possible. Only,
putting it in this way immediately shows you that it need not
happen. This, by the way, illustrates the method of
philosophy.) |
| If we are
taught the meaning of the word “yellow” by being
given some sort of ostensive definition (a rule of the usage of
the word) this teaching can be looked at in two different
ways. |
| A.
The teaching is a drill. This drill causes us to
19. associate a
yellow image, yellow things, with the word
“yellow”. Th[i|u]s when I
give the order “Choose a yellow ball from this
bag” the word “yellow” might
have brought up a yellow image, or a feeling of recognition when
the person's eye fell on the yellow ball. The
drill of teaching could in this case be said to have built up a
psychical mechanism. This, however, would only be a
hypothesis or else a metaphor. We could compare
teaching with installing an electric connection between a switch
and a bulb. The parallel to the connection going wrong
or breaking down should then be what we call forgetting the
explanation or the meaning of the word. (We ought to
talk further on about the meaning of “forgetting the
meaning of a word”). |
|
In so far as the teaching brings about the association, feeling
of recognition, etc.etc., it is the
cause of the phenomena of understanding, obeying,
etc[.|;] and it is a hypothesis that the
process of teaching should be needed in order to bring about these
effects. It is conceivable, in this sense, that
all the processes of understanding, obeying,
etc. should have happened without the person ever
having been taught the language. (This, just now,
seems extremely paradoxical). |
|
B. The teaching may have supplied us
with a rule which is itself involved in the processes of
understanding, obeying, etc[.|;]
“involved
|
| We must
distinguish between what one might call a
“process” being in accordance
with a rule”, and, “a process involving a
rule” (in the above sense). 20. Take an example.
Some one teaches me to square cardinal numbers; he writes down
the row
1 2 3 4,
and asks me to square them. (I will, in this
case, again, replace any processes happening “in the
mind” by processes of calculation on the
paper). Suppose, underneath the first row of numbers,
I then write:–
1 4 9 16.
What I wrote is in accordance with the general rule of
squaring; but it obviously is in accordance with any number of
other rules also; and amongst these it is not more in accordance
with one than with another. In the sense in which before
we talked about a rule being involved in a process, no
rule was involved in this. Supposing that in order to
get to my results, I calculated
1 × 1,
2 × 2,
3 × 3,
4 × 4
(that is, in this case, wrote down the calculations);
these would again be in accordance with any number of
rules. Supposing, on the other hand, in order to get to
my results, I had written down what you may call “the
rule of squaring”, say, algebraically. In
this case this rule was involved in a sense in which no other rule
was. |
| We shall say that the
rule is involved in the understanding, obeying,
etc., if, as I should like to express it, the symbol
of the rule forms part of the calculation.
(As we are not interested in where the processes of thinking,
calculating, take place, we can, for our purposes, imagine the
calculations being done entirely on paper. We are not
concerned with the difference: internal,
external.) 21. |
| A
characteristic example of the case B would be one in which
the teaching supplied us with a table which we actually make use of
in understanding, obeying, etc. If we are taught
to play chess, we may be taught rules. If then we play
chess, these rules need not be involved in the act of
playing. But they may be. Imagine,
e.g., that the rules were expressed in the form
of a table; in one column the shapes of the chessmen are drawn,
and in a parallel column we find diagrams showing the
“freedom” (the legitimate moves) of the
pieces. Suppose now that the way the game is played
involves making the transition from the shape to the possible moves
in the table, and then making one of these moves. |
| Teaching as the hypothetical history of our
subsequent actions (understanding, obeying, estimating a length,
etc.) drops out of our considerations.
The rule which has been taught and is subsequently applied
interests us only so far as it is involved in the
application. A rule, so far as it interests us, does not
act at a distance. |
| Suppose I
pointed to a piece of paper and said, to some one:
“this colour I call
‘red’”. Afterwards I give him
the order: “now paint me a red
patch”. I then ask him: “why,
in carrying out my order, did you paint just this
colour?” His answer could then be:
“This colour (pointing to the sample which I have
given him) was called red; and the patch I have painted has, as
you see, the colour of the sample”. He has now
given me a reason for carrying out the order in the way he
did. Giving a reason for something one did or said means
showing a way which leads to this 22. action. In some
cases it means telling the way which one has gone oneself; in
others it means describing a way which leads there and is in
accordance with certain accepted rules. Thus when asked,
“why did you carry out my order by painting just this
colour?” the answer could have described the way the
person had actually taken to arrive at this particular
shade. This would have been so if, hearing the word
“red”, he had taken up the sample I had given
him, labelled “red”, and had copied that
sample when painting the patch. On the other hand he
might have painted it “automatically” or from a
memory image; but when asked to give the reason he might still
point to the sample and show that it matched the patch he had
painted. In this latter case the reason given would have
been of the second kind; i.e. a justification
post hoc. |
| Now if
one thinks that there could be no understanding and obeying the
order without a previous teaching, one thinks of the teaching as
supplying a reason for doing what one did; as supplying
the road one walks. Now there is the idea that if an order
is understood and obeyed there must be a reason for our obeying it
as we do; and in fact, a chain of reasons reaching back to
infinity. This is as if one said:
“Wherever you are, you must have got there from
somewhere else, and to that previous place from another place; and
so on ad infinitum”. (If, on the
other hand, you had said, “wherever you are, you
could have got there from another place ten yards away;
and from that other place from a third, ten yards further away, and
so on ad infinitum”, what then you would have
stressed would have been the infinite possibility of
making a step. Th[i|u]s 23. the idea of an infinite
chain of reasons arises out of a confusion similar to
this:– that a line of a certain length consists of an
infinite number of parts because it is indefinitely
divisible; i.e. because there is no end to
the possibility of dividing it.) |
|
If on the other hand you realise that the chain of
actual reasons has a beginning, you will no longer be
revolted by the idea of a case in which there is no
reason for the way you obey the order. At this point,
however, another confusion sets in, that between reason and
cause. One is led into this confusion by the ambiguous
use of the word “why”. Thus when the
chain of reasons has come to an end and still the question
“Why?” is asked one is
then inclined to give a cause instead of a reason.
If, e.g., to the question, “why
did you paint just this colour when I told you to paint a red
patch” you give the answer: “I have been
shown a sample of this colour, and the word “red”
was pronounced to me at the same time; and therefore this colour
now always comes to my mind when I hear the word
‘red’”, then you have given a cause for
your action and not a reason. |
|
The proposition, that your action has such-and-such a
cause, is a hypothesis. The hypothesis is
well-founded if one has had a number of experiences which,
roughly speaking, agree in showing that your action is the regular
sequel of certain conditions which we then call causes of the
action. In order to know the reason which you had for
making a certain statement, for acting in a particular way,
etc[.|,] no number of agreeing experiences is
necessary, and the statement of your reason is not a
hypothesis. The difference between the grammars of
“reason” and “cause” is quite
similar 24. to that between the
grammars of “motive” and
“cause”. Of the cause one can say that
one can't know it but one can only conjecture
it. On the other hand one often says:
“Surely I must know why I did it”
talking of the motive. When I say:
“we can only conjecture the cause but we
know the motive” this statement will be seen
later on to be a grammatical one. The
“can” refers to a logical
possibility. |
| The double use
of the word “why”, asking for the cause and
asking for the motive, together with the idea that we can know, and
not only conjecture, our motives, gives rise to the confusion that
a motive is a cause of which we are immediately aware, a cause
“seen from the inside”, or a cause
experienced.‒ ‒ ‒ Giving a reason is like giving a
calculation by which you have arrived at a certain result.
|
| Let us go back to the statement that
thinking essentially consists in operating with signs.
My point was that it is liable to mislead us if we say thinking
is a mental activity. The question what kind of an
activity thinking is is analogous to this:
“Where does thinking take place?”
We can answer: on paper, in our head, in the mind.
None of these statements of locality gives the
locality of thinking. The use of all these
specifications is correct but we must not be mislead by the
similarity of their linguistic forms into a false conception
of their grammar. As, e.g., when
you say: “Surely, the real place of
thought is in our head”. The same applies to the
idea of thinking as an activity. It is correct to say
that thinking is an activity of our writing hand, of our larynx, of
our head, and 25. of our mind, so long as we
understand the grammar of these statements. And it
is, furthermore, extremely important to realise how by
misunderstanding the grammar of our expressions, we are led to
think of one i[m|n] particular of these statements as giving
the real seat of the activity of thinking. |
| There is an objection to saying that
thinking is some such thing as an activity of the hand.
Thinking, one wants to say, is part of our “private
experience”. It is not material, but an event
in private consciousness. This objection is expressed in
the question: “Could a machine
think?” I shall talk about this at a
later point, and now only refer your to an analogous
question: “Can a machine have
toothache?” You will certainly be inclined to
say: “A machine can't have
toothache”. All I will do now is to draw your
attention to the use w[i|h]ich you have made of the word
“can” and to ask you: “Did you
mean to say that all our past experience has shown that a machine
never had toothache?” The impossibility of
which you speak is a logical one. The question is:
What is the relation between thinking (or toothache) and
the subject which thinks, has toothache, etc.
I shall say no more about this now. |
| If we say
thinking is essentially operating with signs, the first question
you might ask is: “What are
signs?” ‒ ‒ ‒ Instead of giving any kind of
general answer to this question, I shall propose to you to look
closely at particular cases which we should call
“operating with signs”. Let us look at a
simple example of operating with words. I give
someone the order: “fetch me six apples from the
grocer”, and I will describe a way of making use
26. of such an
order: The words “six apples” are
written on a bit of paper, the paper is handed to the grocer, the
grocer compares the word “apple” with labels on
different shelves. He finds it to agree with one of the
labels, counts from 1 to the number written on the slip of
paper, ◇ and for every number counted takes a fruit off
the shelf and puts it in a bag. ‒ ‒ ‒ And here you
k have one use of words.
I shall in the future again and again draw your attention
to what I shall call language-games. These are
processes of using signs simpler than those which usually occur in
the use of our highly complicated everyday language.
Language games are the forms of language with which a child
begins to make use of words. The study of
language-games is the study of primitive forms of language
or primitive languages. If we want to study the problems
of truth and falsehood, of the agreement and disagreement of
propositions with reality, of the nature of assertion, assumption,
and question, we shall with great advantage look at primitive forms
of language in which these forms of thinking appear without the
confusing background of highly complicated processes of
thought. When we look at such simple forms of
language, the mental mist which seems to enshroud our ordinary
use of language disappears. We see activities, reactions,
which are clear-cut and transparent. On the other
hand we recognize in these simple processes forms of language not
separated by a break from our more complicated ones. We
see that we can build up the complicated forms from the primitive
ones by gradually adding new forms. |
|
Now what makes it difficult for us to take this line of
inves- 27. tigation is our craving for
generality. |
| This craving for
generality is the resultant of a number of tendencies connected
with particular philosophical confusions. There
is ‒ ‒ ‒
(a) The tendency to look for something in common to all the entities which we commonly subsume under a general term.‒ ‒ ‒ We are inclined to think that there must be something in common to all games, say, and that this common property is the justification for applying the general term “game” to the various games; whereas games forˇm a family the members of which have family likenesses. Some of them have the same nose, others the same eyebrows and others again the same way of walking; and these likenesses overlap. The idea of a general concept being a common property of its particular instances connects up with other primitive, too simple, ideas of the structure of language. It is comparable to the idea that properties are ingredients of the things which have the properties; e.g. that beauty is an ingredient of all beautiful things as alcohol is of beer and wine, and that we therefore could have pure beauty, unadulterated by anything that is beautiful. (b) There is a tendency, rooted in our usual forms of expression, to think that the man who has learnt to understand a general term, say, the term “leaf”, has thereby come to possess a kind of general picture of a leaf, as opposed to pictures of particular leaves. He was shown different leaves when he learnt the meaning of the word “leaf”; and showing him the particular leaves was only a means to the end of producing “in him” an idea which we imagine to be some kind of general image. We say that he sees what is in common 28. to all
these leaves; and this is true if we mean that he can on
being asked to tell us certain features or properties which they
have in common. But we are inclined to think that the
general idea of a leaf is something like a visual image but one
which only contains what is common to all leaves.
(Galtonian
Composite photograph). This again is connected
with the idea that the meaning of a word is an image, or a
thing correlated to the word. (This roughly means,
we are looking at w[|o]rds as though they all were proper
names, and we then confuse the bearer of a name with the meaning of
the name.) (c) Again the idea we have of what happens when we get hold of the general idea “leaf”, “plant” etc. etc., is connected with the confusion between a mental state, meaning a state of ˇa hypothetical mental mechanism, and a mental state meaning a state of consciousness (toothache, etc.). (d) Our craving for generality has another main source: our preoccupation with the method of science. I mean the method of reducing the explanation of natural phenomena to the smallest possible number of primitive natural laws; and, in mathematics, of unifying the treatment of different topics by using a generalization. Philosophers constantly see the method of science before their eyes, and are irresistibly tempted to ask and answer questions in the way science does. This tendency is the real source of metaphysics, and leads the philosopher into complete darkness. I want to say here that it can never be our job to reduce anything to anything, or to explain anything. Philosophy really is “purely descriptive”. (Think of such questions as “Are there sense data?” 29. And ask:
What method is there of determining this?
Introspection?) |
|
Instead of “craving for generality” I could also
have said “the contemptuous attitude towards the
particular case”. If,
e.g. someone tries to explain the concept of
number and tells us that such-and-such a definition will
not do or is clumsy because it only applies to, say, finite
cardinals I should answer that the mere fact that he could have
given such a limited definition makes this definition extremely
important to us. (Elegance is not what we
are trying for.) For why should what finite and
transfinite numbers have in common be more interesting to us than
what distinguishes them? Or rather, I should not
have said “why should it be more interesting to
us?” ‒ ‒ ‒ it isn't; and this
characterises our way of thinking.
|
| The attitude towards the more general
and the more special in logic is connected with the usage of the
word “kind” which is liable to cause
confusion. We talk of kinds of numbers, kinds of
propositions, kinds of proofs; and, also, of kinds of apples,
kinds of paper, etc. In one sense what
defines the kind are properties, like sweetness, hardness,
etc. In the other the different kinds
are different grammatical structures. A treatise on
pomology may called incomplete if there exist kinds of
apples which it doesn't mention. Here we have
a standard of completeness in nature. Supposing on the
other hand there was a game resembling that of chess but simpler,
no pawns being used in it. Should we call this game
incomplete? Or should we call it a game “more
complete than chess” which in some way contained chess but
added new elements? The contempt for what seems the
less general case in logic springs from the idea that it is
incomplete. It is in fact 30. confusing to talk of
cardinal arithmetic as something special as opposed to something
more general. Cardinal arithmetic bears no mark of
incompleteness; nor does an arithmetic which is cardinal and
finite. (There are no subtle distinctions between
logical forms as there are between the tastes of different kinds of
apples). |
| If we study the
grammar, say, of the words, “wishing”,
“thinking”, “understanding”,
“meaning”, we shall not be dissatisfied when
we have described various cases of wishing, thinking,
etc. If someone said, “surely this is
not all that one calls ‘wishing’”, we
should answer, “certainly not, but you can build up more
complicated cases if you like.” And after all,
there is not one definite class of features which characterise all
cases of wishing (at least not as the word is commonly
used). If on the other hand you wish to give a
definition of wishing, i.e., to draw a sharp
boundary then you are free to draw it as you like; and this
boundary will never entirely coincide with the actual usage, as
this usage has no sharp boundary. |
|
The idea that in order to get clear about the meaning of a
general term one ha[s|d] to find the common element
in all its applications, has shackled philosophical
investigation; for it has not only led to no result, but also made
the philosopher dismiss as irrelevant the concrete cases, which
alone could have helped him to understand the usage of the general
term. When Socrates
asks the question, “what is knowledge?” he
does not even regard it as a preliminary answer to
enumerate cases of knowledge. If I wished to find out
what sort of thing arithmetic is, I should be very content indeed
to have investigated the case of a finite cardinal 31. arithmetic.
For (a) this would lead me on to all the more complicated cases, (b) a finite cardinal arithmetic is not incomplete, it has no gaps which are then filled in by the rest of arithmetic. |
|
What happens if from 4 till 4.30 A expects B to
come to his room? In one sense in which the phrase
“to expect something from 4 to 4.30” is
used it certainly does not refer to one process or state of mind
going on throughout that interval, but is a great many different
avctivities, and states of mind.
If for instance I expect B to come to tea, what happens
may be this: At four o'clock I look
at my diary and see the name ‘B’ against
today's date; I prepare tea for two; I think for a moment
“does B smoke?” and put out
cigarettes; towards 4.30 I begin to feel impatient; I imagine
B as he will look when he comes into my room. All
this is called “expecting B from 4 to
4.30”. And there are endless variations
to this process which we all describe by the same
expression. If one asks what the different processes of
expecting someone to tea have in common, the answer is that there
is no single feature in common to all of them, though there are
many common features overlapping. These cases of
expectation form a family; they have family likenesses which are
not clearly defined. |
| There is
a totally different use of the word “expectation”
if we use it to mean a particular sensation. This use of
the words like “wish”,
“expectation”, etc., readily
suggests itself. There is an obvious connection between
this use and the one described above. There is no doubt
that in many cases if we expect some one, in the first sense, some,
or all, of the activities described are accompanied by a peculiar
feeling, a tension; and it is natural 32. to use the word
“expectation” to mean this experience of
tension. |
| There arises now the
question: is this sensation to be called “the
sensation of expectation”, or “the sensation of
expectation that B will come?” In the
first case to say that you are in a state of expectation admittedly
does not fully describe the situation of expecting that
so-and-so will happen. The second case is often
rashly suggested as an explanation of the use of the phrase
“expecting that so-and-so will happen”, and
you may even think that with this explanation you are on safe
ground, as every further question is dealt with by saying that
the sensation of expectation is indefinable. |
| Now there is no objection to calling a
particular sensation “the expectation that B will
come”. There may even be good practical reasons
for using such an expression. Only mark:– if
we have explained the meaning of the phrase “expecting that
B will come” in this way no phrase which is derived
from this ◇ by substituting a different name for
“B” is thereby explained. One
might say that the phrase “expecting that B will
come” is not a value of a function “expecting
that x will come”. To understand this
compare our case with that of the functional “I eat
x”. We understand the proposition
“I eat a chair” although we weren't
specifically taught the meaning of the expression “eating a
chair”. |
| The role
which in our present case the name “B” plays
in the expression “I expect B” can be
compared with that which the name
“Bright” plays in the expression
“Bright's disease”.
Compare the grammar of this word, when it denotes a particular
kind of disease, with that of the expression
“Bright's disease” when it
33. means the
disease which Bright has. I will
characterize the difference by saying that the word
“Bright” in the first case is an
index in the complex name “Bright's
disease”; in the second case I shall call it an
argument of the fiunction
“x's disease”. One may
say that an index alludes to something, and such an
allusion may be justified in all sorts of ways. Thus
calling a sensation “the expectation that B will
come” is giving it a complex name and
“B” possibly alludes to the man whose coming
had regularly been preceded by the sensation. |
| Again we may use the phrase
“expectation that B will come” not as a
name but as a characteristic of certain sensations. We
might, e.g., explain that a certain tension is
said to be an expectation that B will come if it is
relieved by B's coming. If this is how we
use the phrase then it is true to say that we don't know
what we expect until our expectation has been fulfilled.
(cf. Russell). But no one can believe that this is
the only way or even the most common way of using the word
“expect”. If I ask someone
“whom do you expect?” and after receiving the
answer ask again “are you sure that you don't
expect someone else?” then, in most cases, this
question would be regarded as absurd, and the answer will be
something like “Surely, I must know whom I
expect”. |
| One may
characterise the meaning which Russell gives to the word “wishing” by
saying that it means to him a kind of hunger. ‒ ‒ ‒
It is a hypothesis that a particular feeling of hunger will be
relieved by eating a particular thing. In
Russell's way of
using the word “wishing” it makes no sense to say
“I wished for an apple but a pear has satisfied
me”. But we do sometimes say this using
34. the word
“wishing” in a way different from
Russell's.
In this sense we can say that the tension of wishing was
relieved without the wish being fulfilled; and also that the wish
was fulfilled without the tension being relieved. That
is, I may, in this sense, become satisfied without my wish having
been satisfied. |
| Now one might
be tempted to say that the difference which we are talking about
simply comes to this, that in some cases we know what we wish and
in others we don't. There are certainly cases
in which we say, “I feel a longing, though I don't
know what I'm longing for” or, “I feel
a fear, but I don't know what I'm afraid
of”, or again: “I feel fear, but I'm
not afraid of anything in particular”.
35. |
| Now
we may describe these cases by saying that we have certain
sensations not referring to objects. The phrase
“not referring to objects” introduces a grammatical
distinction. If in characterising such sensations we
use verbs like “fearing”,
“longing”, etc., these verbs will be
intransitive; “I fear” will be analogous to
“I cry”. We may cry about
something, but what we cry about is not a constituent of the
process of crying; that is to say, we could describe all that
happens when we cry without mentioning what we are crying
about. |
| Suppose now that I
suggested we should use the expression “I feel
fear”, and similar ones, in a transitive way only.
Whenever before we said “I have a sensation of
fear” (intransitively) we will now say
“I am afraid of something, but I don't
know of what”. Is there an objection to this
terminology? |
| We may
say: “There isn't, except that we are
then using the word “to know” in a queer
way”. Consider this case:– we have a
general undirected feeling of fear. Later on, we have an
experience which makes us say, “Now I know what I
was afraid of. I was afraid of so-and-so
happening”. Is it correct to describe my first
feeling by an intransitive verb, or should I say that my fear had
an object although I did not know that it had one?
Both these forms of descrip- 36. tion can be used.
To understand this examine the following examples:–
It might be found practical to call a certain state of decay
in a tooth, not unaccompanied by what we commonly call
toothache, “unconscious toothace” and to
use in such a case the expression that we have toothache, but
don't know it. It is in just this sense that
psychoanalysis talks of unconscious thoughts, acts of volition,
etc. Now is i[s|t] wrong in this
sense to say that I have toothache but don't know
it? There is nothing wrong about it, as it is just a
new terminology and can at any time be retranslated into
ordinary language. On the other hand it obviously makes
use of the word “to know” in a new way.
If you wish to examine how this expression is used it is helpful
to ask yourself “what in this case is the process of
getting to know like?” “What do we
call ‘getting to know’ or, ‘finding
out’?” |
| It
isn't wrong, according to our new convention, to say
“I have unconscious toothache”. For
what more can you ask of your notation than that it should
distinguish between a bad tooth which doesn't give you
toothache and one which does? But the new expression
misleads us by calling up pictures and analogies which make it
difficult for us to go through w[o|i]th our
convention. And it is extremely difficult to discard
37. these pictures unless we
are constantly watchful; particularly difficult when, in
philosophising, we contemplate what we say about
things. Thus, by the expression, “unconscious
toothache” you may either be mislead into thinking
that a stupendous discovery has been made, a discovery which in a
sense altogether bewilders our understanding; or else you may be
extremely puzzled by the expression (the puzzlement of
philosophy) and perhaps ask such a question as
“How is unconscious toothache
possible?” You may then be tempted to deny the
possibility of unconscious toothache; but the scientist will tell
you that it is a proved fact that there is such a thing, and he
will say it like a man who is destroying a common
prejudice. He will say: “Surely
it's quite simple; there are other things which you
don't know of, and there can also be toothache which you
don't know of. It is just a new
discovery”. You won't be satisfied,
but you won't know what to answer. This
situation constantly arises between the scientists and the
philosophers. |
| In such a case
we may clear the matter up by saying:
“Let's see how the word
“unconscious”, “to know”,
etc. etc., is used in
this case, and how it's used in
others”. How far does the analogy between
these uses go? We shall also try to construct new
notations, in order to break the spell of those which we are
accustomed to. |
| We said that
it was a way of examining the grammar (the use) of the word
“to know”, to ask ourselves what, in the
particular case we are examining, we should call “getting
to know”. There 38. is a temptation to think
that this question is only vaguely relevant, if relevant at all, to
the question: “what is the meaning of the word
‘to know’?” We seem to be on a
side-track when we ask the question “What is it
like in this case ‘to get to
know’?” But this question really is a
question concerning the grammar of the word “to
know”, and this becomes clearer if we put it in the
form: “What do we call
‘getting to know’?” It is
part of the grammar of the word “chair” that
this is what we call “to sit on a
chair”, and it is a part of the grammar of the word
“meaning” that this is what we call
“explanation of a meaning”; in the same way
to explain my criterion for another person's having
toothache is to give a grammatical explanation about the word
“toothache” and, in this sense, “an
explanation concerning the meaning of the word
‘toothache.’” |
| When we learnt the meaning of the phrase
“so-and-so has toothache” we were
pointed out certain kinds of behaviour of those who were said to
have toothache. As an instance of these kinds of
behaviour let us take, holding your cheek. Suppose that
by observation I found that in certain cases whenever these
first criteria told me a person had toothache, a red patch appeared
on the person's cheek. Supposing I now said to
someone “I see A has toothache, he's
got a red patch on his cheek”. He may ask me
“How do you know A has toothache when you see a
red patch?” I should then point out
that certain phenomena had always coincided with the appearance
of the red patch. |
| Now one may
go on and ask: “How do you know that he has
got 39. toothache when he holds his
cheek?” The answer to this might be,
“I say, he has toothache when he holds his
cheek because I hold my cheek when I have
toothache”. But what if we went on
asking:– “And why do you suppose that
toothache corresponds to his holding his cheek just because your
toothache corresponds to your holding your
cheek?” You will be at a loss to answer this
question and find that here we strike rock bottom, that is we have
come down to conventions. (If you suggest as an
answer to the last question that, whenever we've seen
people holding their cheeks and asked them
“what's the matter”, they have answered,
“I have toothache”, ‒ ‒ ‒ remember that
this experience only co-ordinates holding your cheek with
saying certain words.) |
| Let
us introduce two antithetical terms in order to avoid certain
elementary confusions: To the question “How
do you know that so-and-so is the case”, we
sometimes answer by giving “criteria”
and sometimes by giving
“symptoms”. If medical
science calls angina an inflammation caused by a
particular bacillus, and we ask in a particular case
“why do you say this man has got
angina?” then the answer “I
have found the bacillus so-and-so in his
blood” gives us the criterion, or what we may call the
defining criterion of angina. If on the other
hand the answer was, “His throat is
inflamed”, this might give us a symptom of
angina. I call “symptom”
a phenomenon of which experience has taught us that it coincided,
in some way or other, with the phenomenon which is our defining
criterion. Then to say, “A man has
angina” if this bacillus is found in him
is a tautology 40. or it is a loose way of
stating the definition of
“angina”. But to say,
“A man has angina whenever he has an inflamed
throat” is to make a hypothesis. |
| In practice, if you were asked which phenomenon
is the defining criterion and which is a symptom, you would in
most cases be unable to answer this question except by making an
arbitrary decision ad hoc. It may be practical
to define a word by taking one phenomenon as the defining
criterion, but we shall easily be persuaded to define the word by
means of what, according to our first use, was a symptom.
Doctors will use names of diseases without ever deciding which
phenomena are to be taken as criteria and which as symptoms; and
this need not be a deplorable lack of clarity. For
remember that in general we don't use language according
to strict rules ‒ ‒ ‒ it hasn't been taught us by means
of strict rules, either. We, in our discussions
on the other hand, constantly compare language with a calculus
proceeding according to exact rules. |
| This is a very one-sided way of looking at
language. In practice we very rarely use language as
such a calculus. For not only do we not think of the
rules of usage ‒ ‒ ‒ of definitions, etc. ‒ ‒ ‒
while using language, but when we are asked to give such rules in
most cases we aren't able to do so. We are
unable clearly to circumscribe the concepts we use; not because we
don't know their real definition, but because there is no
real “definition” to them. To
suppose that there must be would be like supposing that
whenever children play with a ball they play a 41. game according to strict
rules. |
| When we talk of
language as a symbolism used in ˇan exact calculus,
that which is in our mind can be found in the sciences and in
mathematics. Our ordinary use of language conforms to
this standard of exactness only in rare cases. Why then do
we in philosophising constantly compare our
use of words with one following exact rules? The
answer is that the puzzles which we try to remove always spring
from just this attitude towards language. |
|
Consider as an example the question
“What is time?” as Saint
Augustine and others have asked
it. At first sight what this question asks for is a
definition, but then immediately the question arises:
“What should we gain by a definition, as it can only
lead us to other undefined terms?” And why
should one be puzzled just by the lack of a definition of time, and
not by the lack of a definition of
“chair”? Why shouldn't we
be puzzled in all cases where we haven't got a
definition? Now a definition often clears up the
grammar of a word. And in fact it is the
grammar of the word “time” which puzzles us.
We are only expressing this puzzlement by asking a slightly
misleading question, the question: “What
is … ?” This question is an utterance of
unclarity, of mental discomfort; and it is comparable with the
question “Why?” as children so often
ask it. This too is an expression of a mental
discomfort, and doesn't necessarily ask for either a
cause or a reason. (Hertz,
Principles of Mechanics). Now the
puzzlement about the grammar of the word 42. “time”
arises from what one might call apparent contradictions in that
grammar. |
| It was such a
“contradiction” which puzzled Saint
Augustine when he argued:
How is it possible that one should measure time?
For the past can't be measured, as it is gone by; and the
future can't be measured because it has not yet
come. And the present can't be measured
because it has no extension. |
|
The contradiction which here seems to arise could be called a
conflict between two different usages of a word, in this case the
word “measure”.
Augustine, we might
say, thinks of the process of measuring a length:
say, the distance between two marks on a travelling band which
passes us, and of which we can only see a tiny bit (the
present) in front of us. Solving this puzzle will
consist in comparing what we mean by
“measurement” (the grammar of the word
“measurement”) when applied to a distance on a
travelling band with the grammar of that word when applied to
time. The problem may seem simple, but its extreme
difficulty is due to the fascination which the analogy between two
similar structures in our language can exert on us. (It
is helpful here to remember that it is sometimes almost
ˇimpossible for a child to realise that one word can
have two meanings). |
|
Now it
is clear that this problem about the concept of time asks for an
answer given in the form of strict rules. The puzzle is
about rules. ‒ ‒ ‒ Take another example:
Socrates' question:
“What is knowledge?” Here the
case is even clearer, as the discussion begins with the pupil
giving an example of an 43. exact definition; and then
analogous to this, a definition of the word
“knowledge” is asked for. As the problem
is put, it seems that there is something wrong with the ordinary
use of the word “knowledge”. It
appears, we don't know what it means, and that therefore,
perhaps, we have no right to use it. We should
reply: “There is no one exact usage of the word
‘knowledge’; but we can make up several such
usages, which will more or less agree with the ways the word is
actually used. |
| The man who is
philosophically puzzled sees a law in the way a word is used, and
trying to apply this law consistently, comes up against cases where
it leads to paradoxical results. Very often the way the
discussion of such a puzzle runs is this: First the
question is asked, “What is time?”
This question makes it appear that what we
want is a definition. We mistakenly think that a
definition is what will remove the trouble; as in certain states of
indigestion we feel a kind of hunger which cannot be removed by
eating. The question is then answered by a wrong
definition; say: “Time is the motion of the
celestial . bodies”. The
next step is to see that this definition is unsatisfactory.
But this only means that we don't use the word
“time” synonymous with motion of the celestial
bodies”. However in saying that the first
definition is wrong, we are now tempted to think that we must
replace it by a different one, the correct one. |
| Compare with this the case of the definition of
number. Here the explanation that a number is the same
thing as a numeral satisfies that craving for a definition.
And it is very 44. difficult not to ask:
“Well, if it isn't the numeral, what
is it?” |
|
Ph[o|i]losophy, as we use the word, is a fight against
the fascination which forms of expression exert upon us.
|
| I want you to remember that
words have those meanings which we have given them; and we give
them meanings by explanations. I may have given a
definition of a word and used the word accordingly, or those
who taught me the use of the word may have given me the
explanation. Or else we might, by explanation of a word,
mean the explanation which, on being asked, we are ready to
give. That is, if we are ready to give an
explanation; in most cases we aren't. Many
words in this sense then don't have a strict
meaning. But this is not a defect. To think it
is would be like saying that the light of my reading lamp is no
real light at all because it has no sharp boundary. |
| Philosophers very often talk about
investigating, analysing, the meaning of words. But
let's not forget that a word hasn't got a meaning
given to it, as it were, by a power independent of
us; , so that there can be a kind of
scientific investigation into what the word really
means. A word has the meaning someone has given to
it. |
| There are words with
several clearly defined meanings. It is easy to tabulate
these meanings. And there are words of which one might
say: they are used in a thousand different ways which
gradually merge into one another. No wonder that we
can't tabulate strict rules for their use. 45. |
|
It is wrong to say that in philosophy we consider an ideal
language as opposed to our ordinary one. For this makes
it appear as though we thought we could improve on ordinary
language. But ordinary language is all right.
Whenever we make up “ideal languages” it is
not in order to replace our ordinary language by them; but just to
remove some trouble, caused in someone's mind by thinking
that he has got hold of the exact use of a common word.
That is also why our method is not merely to enumerate actual
usages of words, but rather deliberately to invent new ones, some
of them because of their absurd appearance. |
| When we say that by our method we try to
counteract the misleading effect of certain analogies, it is
important that you should understand that the idea of an analogy
being misleading is nothing sharply defined. No sharp
boundary can be drawn round the cases in which we should say that a
man was mislead by an analogy. The use of expressions
constructed on analogical patterns stresses analogies between
cases often far apart. And by doing this these
expressions may be extremely useful. It is, in most
cases, impossible to show an exact point where an analogy begins to
mislead us. Every particular notation stresses some
particular point of view. If, e.g.,
we call our investigations “philosophy”, this
title, on the one hand, seems appropriate, on the other hand it
certainly has mislead people. (One might say that
the subject we are dealing with is one of the heirs of the subject
which we used to call “philosophy”.)
The cases in which particularly, we wish to say that someone
46. is misled by a
form of expression are those in which we would say:
“he wouldn't talk as he does if he were
aware of this difference in the grammar of
such-and-such words, or if he were aware of this other
possibilˇity of expression” and so on.
Thus we may say of some philosophizing mathematicians that they
are obviously not aware of the difference between the many
different usages of the word “proof”; and that
they are not clear about the difference between the uses of the
word “kind”, when they talk of kinds of numbers,
kinds of proofs, as thought the word “kind” here
meant the same thing as in the context, “kinds of
apples”. Or, we may say, they are not aware of the
different meanings of the word
“discovery”, when in one case we talk of the
discovery of the construction of the pentagon and in the other case
of the discovery of the South Pole. |
| Now when we distinguished a transitive and an
intransitive use of such words as “longing”,
“fearing”, “expecting”,
etc., we said that someone might try to smooth over
our difficulties by saying: “The difference
between the two cases is simply that in one case we know what we
are longing for and in the other we
don't”. Now who says this, I think,
obviously doesn't see the difference which he tried to
explain away reappears when we carefully consider the use of the
word “to know” in the two cases. The
expression “the difference is simply … ” makes
it appear as
though we had analysed the case and found a simple analysis; as
when we point out that two substances with very
different names hardly differs in composition. 47. |
|
We said in this case that we might use both
expressions: “we feel a longing” (where
“longing” is used intransitively) and
“we feel a longing and don't know what we are
longing for”. It may seem queer to say that we
may correctly use either of two forms of expression which seem to
contradict each other; [B|b]ut such cases are very
frequent. |
| Let us use the
following example to clear this up. We say that the
equation x²
= ‒ 1 has the solution ± √‒1. There was a time when one said that this equation had
no solution. Now this statement, whether agreeing or
disagreeing with the one which told us the solutions, certainly
hasn't its multiplicity. But we can easily
give it that multiplicity by saying that an equation
x² +
ax + b = 0 hasn't got a solution but
comes xxxxxxx α near to the nearest solution
which is β. Analogously we can say either
“A straight line always intersects a circle; sometimes
in real, sometimes in complex points”, or,
“A straight line either intersects a circle, or it
doesn't and is α far from from doing so.
These ˇtwo statements mean exactly the
same. They will be more or less satisfactory according
to the way a man wishes to look at it. He may wish to
make the difference between intersecting and not intersecting as
inconspicuous as possible. Or on the other hand he may
wish to stress it; and either tendency may be justified, say,
by his particular practical purposes. But this may not
be the reason at all why he prefers one form of expression to the
other. Which form he prefers, and whether he has a
preference at all, often depends on general, deeply rooted
48. tendencies of
his thinking. |
|
Should we say
that there are cases when a man despises another man and
doesn't know it; or should we describe such cases by
saying that he doesn't despise him but unintentionally
behaves towards him in a way [.|‒ ‒ ‒] speaks to him in
a tone of voice, etc., ‒ ‒ ‒ which in general
would go together with despising him. Either form of
expression is correct; but they may betray different tendencies of
mind. |
| Let us revert to
examining the grammar of the expressions “to
wish”, “to expect”, “to long
for”, etc., and consider that most
important case in which the expression, “I wish
so-and-so to happen” is the direct description of
a conscious process. That is to say, the case in which
we should be inclined to answer the question “Are
you sure that it is this you wish?” by
saying: “Surely I must know what I
wish”. Now compare this answer to the one which
most of us would give to the question: “Do you
know the A.B.C.?” Has
the emphatic assertion that you know it a sense analogous to that
of the former assertion? Both assertions in a way
brush aside the question. But the former
doesn't wish to say “Surely I know such a
simple thing as this” but rather:
“The question which you asked me makes no
sense”. We might say: We adopt in
this case a wrong method of brushing aside the question.
“Of course I know” could here be replaced by
“of course, there is no doubt” and this interpreted
to mean “It makes, in this case, no sense to talk of
a doubt”. In this way the answer
“Of course I know what I wish” can be
49. interpreted to
be a grammatical statement. |
|
It is similar when we ask “Has this room a
length?”, and some one answers:
“Of course it has”. He might have
answered “Don't ask
nonsense”. On the other hand “The
◇x room has length” can be used as a
grammatical statement. It then says that a sentence of
the form “The room is ‒ ‒ ‒ feet long” makes
sense. |
| A great many
philosophical difficulties are connected with that sense of the
expressions “to wish”, “to think”,
etc., which we are now considering.
These can all be summed up in the question:
“How can one think what is not the
case?” |
| This is a
beautiful example of a philosophical question. It asks
“How can one … ?” and while this
puzzles us we must admit that nothing is easier than to think what
is not the case. I mean, this shows us again that
the difficulty which we are in does not arise through our inability
to imagine how thinking something is done; just as the
philosophical difficulty about the measurement of time did not
arise through our inability to imagine how time was actually
measured. I say this because sometimes it almost
seems as though our difficulty were one of remembering exactly what
happened when we thought something, a difficulty of introspection,
or something of the sort; whereas in fact it arises when we look at
the facts through the medium of a misleading form of
expression. |
|
“How
can one think what is not the case? If I think that
King's College is on fire when it is not on fire,
the fact of its being on fire does not exist. Then how
can I think it? 50. How can we hang a thief
who doesn't exist?” Our answer
could be put in this form: “I can't
hang him when he doesn't exist; but I can look for him
when he doesn't exist”. |
| We are here misled by the substantives
“object of thought” and “fact”,
and by the different meanings of the word
“exist”. |
|
Talking of the fact as a “complex of objects”
springs from this confusion (cf
Tractatus
Logico-philosophicus). Supposing we
asked: “How can one imagine what does
not exist?” The answer seems to be:
“If we do, we imagine non-existent
combinations of existing elements”. A
centaur doesn't exist, but a man's head and torso
and arms and a horse's legs do exist.
“But can't we imagine an object utterly
different from any one which exists?” ‒ ‒ ‒
We should be inclined to answer: “No; the
elements, individuals, must exist. If redness, roundness
and sweetness did not exist, we could not imagine
them”. |
| But what do
you mean by “redness exists”? My watch
exists, if it hasn't been pulled to pieces, if it
hasn't been destroyed. What would
we call “destroying redness”? We might
of course mean destroying all red objects; but would this make it
impossible to imagine a red object? Supposing to
this one answered: “But surely, red objects
must have existed and you must have seen them?”
‒ ‒ ‒ But how do you know that this is so?
Suppose I said “Exerting a pressure on your
eye-ball produces a red
image”. Couldn't the way by which you
first became acquainted with red have been this? And
why shouldn't it have been just imagining a red
patch? (The difficulty which you will feel
51. here will have
to be discussed at a later occasion). |
| We may now be inclined to say:
“As the fact which would make our thought true if it
existed does not always exist, it is not the fact which
we think”. But this just depends upon how I
wish to use the word “fact”. Why
shouldn't I say: “I believe the fact
that the college is on fire”? It is just a
clumsy expression for saying: “I believe that the
college is on fire”. To say “It
is not the fact which we believe”, is itself the result of
a confusion. We think we are saying something
like: “It isn't the sugar-cane
which we eat but the sugar”, “It
isn't Mr. Smith who hangs in the
gallery, but his picture”. |
| The next step we are inclined to take is to
think that as the object of our thought isn't the fact it
is a shadow of the fact. There are different names for
this shadow, e.g.
“proposition”, “sense of the
sentence”. |
| But this
doesn't remove our difficulty. For the
question now is: “How can something be the
shadow of a fact which doesn't exist?”
|
| I can express our trouble in a
different form by saying: “How can we know
what the shadow is a shadow of?” ‒ ‒ ‒ The
shadow would be some sort of portˇrait; and therefore I
can restate our problem by asking: “What makes
a portˇrait a portˇrait of
Mr. N?” The answer
which might first suggest itself is: “The
similarity between the portˇrait and
Mr. N”. This
answer in fact shows what we had in mind when we talked 52. of the shadow of a
fact. It is quite clear, however, that similarity does
not constitute our idea of a portait; for it
is in the essence of this idea that it should make sense to talk of
a good or a bad portait. In other words, it
is essential that the shadow should be capable of representing
things as in fact they are not. |
|
An obvious, and correct, answer to the question
“What makes the portait the
portait of so-and-so?” is that it
is the intention. But if we wish to know what
it means “intending this to be a
portait of so-and-so”
let's see what actually happens when we intend
this. Remember the occasion when we talked of what
happened when we expect someone from
five to
five-thirty. To intend a picture to be the portrait of
so-and-so (on the part of the painter,
e.g.) is neither a particular state of
mind nor a particular mental process. But there are a
great many combinations of actions and states of mind which we
should call “intending … ” It might have
been that he was told to paint a portrait of N, and sat down
before N, going through certain actions which we call
“copying N's face”. One
might object to this by saying that the essence of copying is the
intention to copy. I should answer that there are
a great many different processes which we call “copying
something”. Take an instance. I
draw an ellipse on a sheet of paper and ask you to copy it.
What characterises the process of copying? For it
is clear that it isn't the 53. fact that you draw a
similar ellipse. You might have tried to copy it and not
succeeded; or you might have drawn an ellipse with a totally
different intention, and it happened to be like the one you should
have copied. So what do you do when you try to copy the
ellipse? Well, you look at it, draw something on
a piece of paper, perhaps measure what you have drawn, perhaps you
curse if you find that it doesn't agree with the model or
perhaps you say “I am going to copy this
ellipse” and just draw an ellipse like it.
There are an endless variety of actions and words, having a
family likeness to each other, which we call “trying to
copy”. |
| Suppose we
said “that a picture is a portait of a
particular object consists in its being derived from that
object in a particular way”. Now it is easy to
describe what we should call “processes of deriving a
picture from an object (roughly speaking,
processes of projection). But there is a peculiar
difficulty about admitting that any such process is what we call
“intentional representation”. For
describe whatever process (activity) of projection we may,
there is a way of reinterpreting this projection.
Therefore ‒ ‒ ‒ one is tempted to say ‒ ‒ ‒ such a process
can never be the intention itself. For we could always
have intended the opposite by re-interpreting the process of
projection. Imagine this case: We give
someone an order to walk in a certain direction by pointing, or
drawing an arrow which points in the direction. Suppose
drawing arrows is the language in which generally we 54. give such an order.
Couldn't such an order be interpreted to mean that the
man who gets it is to walk in the direction opposite to that of
the arrow? This could obviously be done by adding to
our arrow some symbols which we might call “an
interpretation”. It is easy to imagine a
case in which, say, to deceive someone, we might make an
arrangement that an order should be carried out in the sense
opposite to its normal one. The symbol which adds the
interpretation to our original arrow could, for instance, be
another arrow. Whenever we interpret a symbol in one way
or another, the interpretation is a new symbol added to the old
one. |
| Now we might say that
whenever we give someone an order by showing him an arrow, and
don't do it “automatically”, we
mean the arrow in one way or another. And this
process of meaning, of whatever kind it may be, can be represented
by another arrow (pointing in the same or the opposite sense to
the first). In this picture which we make of
“meaning and saying” it is essential that we
should imagine the processes of saying and meaning to take place in
two different spheres. |
| Is it
then correct to say that no arrow could be the meaning, as
every arrow could be meant the opposite way? ‒ ‒ ‒
Suppose we write down the scheme of saying and meaning by a
column of arrows one below the other. 55. Then if this scheme is
to serve our purpose at all, it must show us which of the three
levels is the level of meaning. I can,
e.g., make a scheme with three levels, the
bottom level always being the level of meaning. But
adopt whatever model or scheme you may, it will have a bottom
level, and there will be no such thing as an interpretation of
that. To say in this case that every arrow can still be
interpreted would only mean that I could always make a
different model of saying and meaning which had one more level than
the one I am using. |
| Let us
put it in this way:– What one wishes to say
is: “Every sign is capable of interpretation;
but the meaning mustn't be capable of
interpretation. It is the last
interpretation.” Now I assume that you take
the meaning to be a process accompanying the saying, and that it is
translatable into, and so far equivalent to, a further
sign. You have therefore further to tell me what you
take to be the distinguishing mark between a sign and
the meaning. If you do so,
e.g., by saying that the meaning is the arrow
which you imagine as opposed to any which you may draw or
produce in any other way you thereby say, that you will call no
futher arrow an interpretation of the one which you
have imagined. |
| All this will
become clearer if we consider what it is that really happens when
we say a thing and mean what we say. ‒ ‒ ‒ Let us ask
ourselves: If we say to someone “I should
be delighted to see you” and mean it, does a conscious
process run alongside these words, a process which could itself
be 56. translated into
spoken words? This will hardly ever be the
case. |
| But let us imagine an
instance in which it does happen. Supposing I had a
habit of accompanying every English sentence which I said aloud by
a German sentence spoken to myself inwardly. If then,
for some reason or other, you call the silent sentence the meaning
of the one spoken aloud, the process of meaning accompanying the
process of saying would be one which could itself be translated
into outward signs. Or, before any sentence
which we say aloud we say its meaning (whatever it may be) to
ourselves in a kind of aside. An example at least
similar to the case we want would be saying one thing and at the
same time seeing a picture before our mind's eye which is
the meaning and agrees or disagrees with what we say.
Such cases and similar ones exist, but they are not at all
what happens as a rule when we say something and mean it, or
mean something else. There are of course real cases in
which what we call meaning is a definite conscious process
accompanying, preceding, or following the verbal expression and
itself a verbal expression of some sort or translatable into
one. A typical example of this is the
“aside” on the stage. |
| But what tempts us to think of the meaning of
what we say as a process essentially of the kind which we have
described is the analogy between the forms of expression:
“to say something”
“to mean something”,
57. which seem to
refer to two parallel processes. |
|
A process accompanying our words which one might call the
“process of meaning them”, is the modulation of the
voice in which we speak the words; or one of the processes, similar
to this like the play of facial expression. These
accompany the spoken words not in the way a German sentence might
accompany an English sentence, or writing a sentence accompany
speaking a sentence; but in the sense in which the tune of a song
accompanies its words. This tune corresponds to the
“feeling” with which we say the sentence.
And I wish to point out that this feeling is the expression with
which the sentence is said, or something similar to this
expression. |
| Let us revert to
our question: “What is the object of a
thought?” (e.g. when we say,
“I think that King's College is
on fire”). |
|
The question as we put it is already the expression of several
confusions. This is shown by the mere fact that it
almost sounds like a question of physics; like asking:
“What are the ultimate constituents of
matter?” (It is a typically metaphysical
question; the characteristic of a metaphysical question being that
we express an unclarity about the grammar of words in the
form of a scientific question.) |
| One of the origins of our question is the
two-fold use of the propositional function “I
think X”. We say “I think
that so-and-so will happen” or “that
so-and-so is the case”, and also “I
think just the same thing as he”; and we say
“I expect 58. him”, and also
“I expect that he will come”.
Compare “I expect him” and
“I shoot him”. We can't
shoot him if he isn't there. This is how the
question arises: “How can we expect something
that is not the case?”, “How can we
expect a fact which does not exist?” |
| The way out of this difficulty seems to
be: what we expect is not the fact, but a shadow of the fact;
as it were, the next thing to the fact. We have said
that this is only pushing the question one step further
back. There are several origins to this idea of a
shadow. One of them is this: we say
“Surely two sentences of different languages can
have the same sense”; and we argue, “therefore
the sense is not the same as the sentence”, and ask the
question “What is the sense?” And
we make of “it” a shadowy being, one of the many
which we create when we wish to give meaning to substantives to
which no material objects correspond. |
| Another source of the idea of a shadow being
the object of our thought is this: We imagine the
shadow to be a picture the intention of which can not be
questioned, that is, a picture which we don't
interpret in order to understand it, but which we understand
without interpreting it. Now there are pictures of which
we should say that we interpret them, that is, translate them into
a different kind of picture, in order to understand them; and
pictures of which we should say that we understand them
immediately, without any further interpretation. If you
see a telegram written in cipher, and you know the key to this
59. cipher, you
will, in general, not say that you understand the telegram
|
| The shadow, as we
think of it, is some sort of a picture; in fact, what we mean by it
is something very much like an image which comes before our
mind's eye; and this again is something not unlike a
painted representation in the ordinary sense. A source
of the idea of the shadow certainly is the fact that in some cases
saying, hearing or reading a sentence brings images before our
mind's eye, images which more or less strictly correspond
to the sentence, and which are therefore, in a sense, translations
of this sentence into a pictorial language. ‒ ‒ ‒ But
it is absolutely essential for the picture which we imagine the
shadow to be that it is what I shall call a “picture by
similarity”. I don't mean by this
that it is a picture similar to what it is intended to represent,
but that it is a picture which is correct only when it is similar
to what it represents. One might use for this kind of
picture the word “copy”. Roughly
speaking, copies are good pictures when they can easily be mistaken
for what they represent. |
| A
plane projection of one hemisphere of our terrestrial 60. globe is not a picture by
similarity or a copy in this sense. It would be
conceivable that I portrayed some one's face by projecting
it in some queer way, though correctly according to the adopted
rule of projection, on a piece of paper, in such a way that no one
would normally call the projection “a good portrait of
so-and-so” because it would not look a bit like
him. |
| If we keep in mind
|
| The idea that that
which we wish to happen must be present as a shadow in our wish is
deeply rooted in our forms of expression. But, in
fact, we might say that it is only the next best absurdity to the
one which we should really like to say. If it
weren't too absurd we should say that the fact which we
wish for must be present in our wish. For how can we
wish just this to happen if just this
isn't present in our wish? 61. It is quite true to
say: The mere shadow won't do; for it stops
short before the object; and we want the wish to contain the object
itself. ‒ ‒ ‒ We want that the wish that
Mr. Smith should come into this room
should wish that just Mr. Smith,
and no substitute, should do the coming, and no
substitute for that, into my room, and no substitute for
that. But this is exactly what we said. |
| Our confusion could be described in this
wa[t|y]: Quite in accordance with our usual
form of expression we think of the fact which we wish for as of a
thing which is not yet here, and to which, therefore, I cannot
point. Now in order to understand the grammar of our
expression “object of our wish” let's
just consider the answer which we give to the question:
“What is the object of your wish?”
The answer to this question of course is “I
wish that so-and-so should happen”. Now
what would the answer be if we went on asking:
“And what is the object of this
wish?” It could only consist in a
repetition of our previous expression of the wish, or else in
a translation into some other form of expression. We
might, e.g., state what we wished in other
words or illustrate it by a picture, etc.,
etc. Now when we are under the impression
that what we call the object of our wish is, as it were, a man who
has not yet entered our room, and therefore can't yet be
seen, we imagine that any explanation of what it is we wish is only
the next best thing to that explanation which would show the
actual fact, ‒ ‒ ‒ which, we are afraid, can't yet
be 62. shown as it has
not yet entered. ‒ ‒ ‒ It is as though I said to some
one “I am expecting Mr.
Smith”, and he asked me “Who is
Mr. Smith?”, and I
answered, “I can't show him to you now, as
he isn't there. All I can show you is a picture
of him”. It then seems as though I could never
entirely explain what I wished until it had actually
happened. But of course this is not the case.
The truth is that I needn't be able to give a better
explanation of what I wished after the wish was fulfilled than
before; for I might perfectly well have shown
Mr. Smith to my friend, and have shown
him what “coming in” means, and have shown him
what my room is, before Mr. Smith came
into my room. |
| Our difficulty
could be put this way: We think about things, ‒ ‒ ‒
but how do these things enter into our thoughts? We
think about Mr. Smith; but
Mr. Smith need not be present.
A picture of him won't do; for how are we to know whom it
◇ represents. In fact no substitutes
for him will do. Then how can he himself be an object of
our thoughts? (I am here using the expression
“object of our thought” in a way different from
that in which I have used it before. I mean a thing
I am thinking about, not “that which I am
thinking”.) |
| We
said the connection between our thinking, or speaking, about a man
and the man himself was made when, in order to explain the meaning
of the word “Mr. Smith”
we pointed to him, saying “this is
Mr. Smith”. And there
is nothing mysterious about this connection. I
mean, there is no queer mental act which somehow conjured up
Mr. Smith in our minds when he really
63. isn't
there. What makes it difficult to see that this is the
connection is a peculiar form of expression of ordinary
language, which makes it appear that the connection between
our thought (or the expression of our thought) and the thing
we think about must have subsisted during the act of
thinking. |
|
“Isn't it queer that in Europe we
should be able to mean somebody who is in
America?” ‒ ‒ ‒ If someone had
said “Napoleon
was crowned in 1804”, and we asked him “Did
you mean the man who won the battle of
Austerlitz?” he might say
“Yes, I meant him”. And the use
of the past tense “meant” might make it appear as
though the idea of Napoleon having won the battle of Austerlitz
must have been present in the man's mind when he said that
Napoleon was crowned in
1804. |
| Someone says,
“Mr.N will come to see me this
afternoon”; I ask “Do you mean
him?” pointing to someone present, and he answers
“Yes”. In this conversation a
connection was established between the word,
“Mr.N” and Mr.
N. But we are tempted to think that while my
friend said, “Mr.N will come to see
me”, and meant what he said, his mind must have made the
connection. |
| This is partly
what makes us think of meaning or thinking as a peculiar
mental activity; the word “mental”
indicating that we mustn't expect to understand how these
things work. |
| What we said of
thinking can also be applied to imagining. Someone
says, he imagines King's College on fire.
We ask him: “How do you know that
it's King's College you
imagine on fire? Couldn't it be a different
building, very much like it? In 64. fact, is your imagination
so absolutely exact that there might not be a dozen buildings whose
representation your image could be?” ‒ ‒ ‒
And still you say: “There's no doubt
I imagine King's College and no other
building”. But can't saying this be
making the very connection we want? For saying it is
like writing the words “Portrait of
Mr.So-and-so” under a
picture. It might have been that while you
imagined King's College on fire you said the
words “King's College is on
fire”. But in very many cases you certainly
don't speak explanatory words in your mind while you have
the image. And consider, even if you do, you are not
going the whole way from your image to King's
College, but only to the words “King's
College”. The connection between these
words and King's College was, perhaps, made at
another time. |
| The fault
which in all our reasoning about these matters we are inclined to
make is thinking that images and experiences of all sorts, which
are in some sense closely connected with each other, must be
present in our mind at the same time. If we sing a tune
we know by heart, or say the alphabet, the notes and letters seem
to hang together; and each seems to draw out the next as though
they were pearls strung on a thread, and by pulling out one I
pulled out the one following it. |
|
Now there is no doubt that seeing the picture of a string
of beads being pulled out of a box through a hole in the lid, I
should say: “These beads must all have been
together in the box before”. But it is easy to
see that this is making a 65. hypothesis.
I should have seen the same picture if the beads had
gradually come into existence in the hole of the lid. We
easily overlook the distinction between stating a conscious mental
event, and making a hypothesis about what one might call the
mechanism of the mind. All the more as such hypotheses
or pictures of the working of our mind are embodied in many of the
forms of expression of our everyday language. The past
tense “meant” in the sentence “I meant the
man who won the battle of Austerlitz” is only
part of such a picture, the mind being conceived as a place in
which what we remember is kept, stored, before we expresses
it. If I whistle a tune I know well and am interrupted
in the middle, if then someone asked me “did you know how
to go on?” I should answer “yes
I did”. What sort of process is this
knowing how to go on? It might appear as
though the whole continuation of the tune had to be present while I
knew how to go on. |
| Ask
yourself such a question as: “How long does it
take to know how to go on?” Or is it an
instantaneous process? Aren't we making a
mistake like mixing up the existence of a gramophone record of a
tune with the existence of the tune? And
aren't we assuming that whenever a tune passes through
existence there must be some sort of a gramophone record of it from
which it is played? |
|
Consider the following example: A gun is fired in my
presence and I say: “This crash wasn't
as loud as I had 66. expected”.
Someone asks me: “How is this
possible? Was there a crash, louder than that of a
gun, in your imagination?” I must
confess that there was nothing of the sort. Now he
says: “Then you didn't really expect a
louder crash, ‒ ‒ ‒ but perhaps the shadow of one. ‒ ‒ ‒
And how did you know that it was the shadow of a louder
crash?” ‒ ‒ ‒ Let's see what, in
such a case, might really have happened. Perhaps in
waiting for the report I opened my mouth, held on to something to
steady myself, and perhaps I said: “This is
going to be terrible”. Then, when the explosion
was over: “It wasn't so loud after
all”. ‒ ‒ ‒ Certain tensions in my body
relax. But what is the connection between these
tensions, opening my mouth, etc., and a real louder
crash? Perhaps this connection was made by having heard
such a crash and having had the experiences mentioned.
|
| Examine expressions like:
“having an idea in one's mind”,
“analysing the idea before one's
mind”. In order not to be misled by them see
what really happens when, say, in writing a letter you are looking
for the words which correctly express the idea which is
“before your mind”. To ◇
say that we are trying to express the idea which is before our mind
is to use a metaphor, one which very naturally suggests itself; and
which is all right so long as it doesn't mislead us when
we are philosophizing. For when we recall what
really happens in such cases we find a great variety of processes
more or less akin to each other. ‒ ‒ ‒ We might be
inclined to say that in all such cases, at any rate, we are
guided by something before our mind. 67. But then the words
“guided” and “thing before our
mind” are used in as many senses as the words
“idea” and “expression of an
idea”. |
| The phrase
“to express an idea which is before our mind”
suggests that what we are trying to express in words is already
expressed, only in a different language; that this expression is
before our mind's eye; and that what we do is to translate
from the mental into the verbal language. In most cases
which we call “expressing an idea,
etc.” something very different
happens. Imagine what it is that happens in cases such
as this: I am looking for a word. Several
words are suggested and I reject them. Finally one is
proposed and I say: “That is what I
meant!” |
| (We
should be inclined to say that the proof of the impossibility
of trisecting the angle with ◇ ruler and compasses
analyses our idea of the trisection of an angle. But
the proof gives us a new idea of trisection, one which we
didn't have before the proof constructed it.
The proof led us a road which we were inclined to go;
but it led us away from where we were, and didn't just
show us clearly the place where we had been all the
time.) |
| Let us now revert
to the point where we said that we gained nothing by assuming that
a shadow must intervene between the expression of our thought and
the reality with which our thought is concerned. We said
that if we wanted a picture of reality the sentence itself
is such a picture (though not a 68. “picture by
similarity”). |
|
I have been trying in all this to remove the temptation to
think that there “must be” what is called
a mental process of thinking, hoping, wishing, believing,
etc., independent of the process of expressing a
thought, a hope, a wish, etc. And I want to
give you the following rule of thumb: If you are
puzzled about the nature of thought, belief, knowledge, and the
like, substitute for the thought the expression of the thought
etc. The difficulty which lies in this
substitution, and at the same time the whole point of it, is
this: the expression of belief, thought,
etc., is just a sentence; ‒ ‒ ‒ and the sentence
has sense only as a member of a system of language; as one
expression within a calculus. Now we are tempted to
imagine this calculus, as it were, as a permanent background to
every sentence which we say, and to think that, although the
sentence as written on a piece of paper or spoken stands isolated,
in the mental act of thinking the calculus is there ‒ ‒ ‒ all in
a lump. The mental act seems to perform in a miraculous
way what could not be performed by any act of manipulating
symbols. Now when the temptation to think that in some
sense the whole calculus must be present at the same time vanishes,
there is no more point in postulating the existence of a
peculiar kind of mental act alongside of our expression.
This, of course, doesn't mean that we have shown that
peculiar acts of consciousness do not accompany the expressions
of our thoughts! Only we no longer say that they
must accompany them. 69. |
|
“But the expression of our thoughts can always lie, for
we may say one thing and mean another”. Imagine
the many different things which happen when we say one thing and
mean another! ‒ ‒ ‒ Make the following
experiment: say the sentence “It is hot in
this room”, and mean: “it is
cold”. Observe closely what you are
doing. |
| We could
eas[e|i]ly imagine beings who do their private thinking by
means of “asides” and who manage their lies by
saying one thing aloud, following it up by an aside saying the
opposite. |
| “But
meaning, thinking, etc., are private
experiences. They are not activities like writing,
speaking, etc..” ‒ ‒ ‒ But why
shouldn't they be the specific private experiences of
writing, ‒ ‒ ‒ the muscular, visual, tactile sensations of writing
or speaking? |
| Make the
following experiment: say and mean a sentence,
e.g.– “It will probably rain
tomorrow”. Now think the same thought again,
mean what you just meant, but without saying anything (neither
aloud or to yourself). If thinking that it will rain
tomorrow accompanied saying that it will rain tomorrow, then
just do the first activity and leave out the second.
‒ ‒ ‒ If thinking and speaking stood in the relation of the
words and the melody of a song, we could leave out the speaking and
do the thinking just as we can sing the tune without the
words. |
| But can't
one at any rate speak and leave out the thinking?
70. Certainly,
‒ ‒ ‒ but observe what sort of thing you are doing if you speak
without thinking. Observe first of all that the process
which we might call “speaking and meaning what you
speak” is not necessarily distinguished from that of
thoughtlessly speaking by what happens at the time when
you speak. What distinguishes the two might very
well be what happens before or after you speak. |
| Suppose I tried, deliberately, to speak
without thinking; ‒ ‒ ‒ what in fact would I do?
I might read out a sentence from a book, trying to read it
automatically, that is, trying to prevent myself from following the
sentence with images and sensations which otherwise it would
produce. A way of doing this would be to concentrate my
attention on something else while I was speaking the sentence,
e.g., by pinching my skin hard while I was
speaking. ‒ ‒ ‒ Put it this way: Speaking a
sentence without thinking consists in switching on speech and
switching off certain accompaniments of speech. Now ask
yourself: Does thinking the sentence without speaking
it consist in turning over the switch (switching on what we
previously switched off and vice versa); that
is: does thinking the sentence without speaking it now simply
consist in keeping on what accompanied the words but leaving out
the words? Try to think the thoughts of a sentence
without the sentence and see whether this is what happens.
|
| Let us sum up: If we
scrutinize the usages which we make of such words as
“thinking”, “meaning”,
“wishing”, etc., 71. going through this process
rids us of the temptation to look for a peculiar act of thinking,
independent of the act of expressing our thoughts, and stowed away
in some peculiar medium. We are no longer prevented by
the established forms of expression from recognizing that the
experience of thinking may be just the experience of
saying, or may consist of this experience plus others which
accompany it. (It is useful also to examine the
following case: Suppose a multiplication is part of a
sentence; ask yourself what it is like to say the multiplication
“7 ×
5 = 35”, thinking it, and, on the other
hand, saying it without thinking.) The scrutiny of
the grammar of a word weakens the position of certain standards
of our expression which had prevented us from seeing facts with
unbiasses eyes. Our investigation
tried to remove this bias, which forces us to think that the facts
must conform to certain pictures embodied in our
language. |
|
“Meaning” is one of the words of which one may
say that they have odd jobs in our language. It is these
words which cause most philosophical troubles. Imagine
an institution most members of which have certain regular
functions, functions which can easily be described, say, in the
statutes of the institution. There are, on the other
hand, some members who are employed for odd jobs, which
nevertheless may be extremely important. ‒ ‒ ‒ What
causes most trouble in philosophy is that we are tempted to
describe the use of important “odd-job” words
as though they were words with regular functions.
72. |
| The reason I postponed talking about personal
experiences was that thinking about this topic raises a host of
philosophical difficulties which threaten to break up all our
common-sense notions about what we should commonly call the
objects of our experience. And being struck by these
problems it might seem to us that all we have said about signs and
the various objects we mentioned in our examples may have to go
into the melting-pot. |
|
The situation in a way is typical in the study of
philosophy; and one sometimes has described it by saying that
no philosophical problem can be solved until all philosophical
problems are solved; which means that as long as they
aren't all solved every new difficulty renders all our
previous results questionable. One can only give a rough
answer to this if one speaks in such general terms. It
is, that every new problem may question the position
which partial results should occupy in the final picture.
One then speaks of having to reinterpret these results; and I
should say: they have to be placed in a different
surrounding. |
| Imagine we had
to arrange the books of a library. When we begin the
books lie higgledy piggledy on
the floor. Now there would be many ways of sorting them
and putting them in their places. One would be to take
the books one by one and put each on the shelf in its right
place. On the other hand 73. we might take up several
books from the floor and put them in a row on a shelf, merely in
order to indicate that these books ought to go together in this
order. In the course of arranging the library this
whole row of books will have to change its place. But it
would be wrong to say that therefore putting them together on a
shelf was no step towards the final result. In this
case, in fact, it is pretty obvious that having put together books
which belong together was a definite achievement, even though
the whole row of them had to be shifted. But some of
the greatest achievements in philosophy could only be compared with
taking up some books which seemed to belong together, and putting
them on different shelves; nothing more being final about their
positions than that they no longer lie side by side. The
onlooker who doesn't know the difficulty of the task
might well think in such a case that nothing at all had been
achieved. ‒ ‒ ‒ The difficulty in philosophy is to say
no more than we know. E.g., to see
that when we have put two books together in their right order we
have not thereby put them in their final places. |
| When we think about the relation of the
objects surrounding us to our personal experiences of them, we
are sometimes tempted to say that these personal experiences are
the material of which reality consists. How this
temptation arises will become clearer later on. |
| When we think in this way we seem to lose our
firm hold on the objects surrounding us. And instead we
are left with 74. a lot of separate personal
experiences of individuals. These personal experiences
again seem vague and seem to be in constant flux.
Our language seems not to have been made to describe
them. We are tempted to think that in order to clear up
such matters philosophically our ordinary language is too coarse,
that we need a more subtle one. |
|
We seem to have made a discovery, ‒ ‒ ‒ which I could describe
by saying that the ground on which we stood and which appeared to
be firm and reliable was found to be boggy and
unsafe. ‒ ‒ ‒ That is, this happens when we philosophize;
for as soon as we revert to the standpoint of common sense this
general uncertainty disappears. |
| This queer situation can be cleared up
somewhat by looking at an example; in fact a kind of parable
illustrating the difficulty we are in, and also showing the way out
of this sort of difficulty: We have been told by
popular scientists that the floor on which we stand is not solid,
as it appears to common sense, as it has been discovered that the
wood consists of particles filling space so thinly that it can
almost be called empty. This is liable to perplex us, for
in a way of course we know that the floor is solid, or that, if
it isn't solid, this may be due to the wood being rotten
but not to its being composed of electrons. To say, on
this latter ground, that the floor is not solid is to misuse
language. For even if the particles were as big as
grains of sand, and as close together as these are in a sand heap,
the 75. floor would not be solid if
it were composed of them in the sense in which a sand heap is
composed of grains. Our perplexity was based on a
misunderstanding; the picture of the thinly filled space had been
wrongly applied. For this picture of the
structure of matter was meant to explain the very phenomenon of
solidity. |
| As in this example
the word “solidity” was used wrongly and it
seemed that we had shown that nothing ˇreally was
solid, just in this way, in stating our puzzles about the
general vagueness of sense-experience, and about the
flux of all phenomena, we are using the words
“flux” and “vagueness” wrongly,
in a typically metaphysical way, namely, without an antithesis;
whereas in their correct and everyday use, vagueness is opposed
to clearness, flux to stability, inaccuracy to accuracy, and
problem to solution. The very word
“problem”, one might say, is misapplied
. when used for our philosophical troubles. These difficulties, as long as they are seen as
problems, are tantalizing, and appear insoluble. |
| There is a temptation for me to say that only
my own experience is real: “I know that
I see, hear, feel pains, etc. but not
that anyone else does. I can't know this,
because I am I and they are they.”
|
| On the other hand I feel ashamed to
say to anyone that my experience is the only real one; and I know
that he will reply that he could say exactly the same thing about
his experience. This seems to lead to a silly
quibble. Also 76. I am told:
“If you pity someone for having pains, surely you
must at least believe that he has pains”.
But how can I even believe this? How can
these words make sense to me? How could I even have
come by the idea of another's experience if there is no
possibility of any evidence for it? |
|
But wasn't this a queer question to ask?
Can't I believe that someone else has
pains? Is it not quite easy to believe this?
‒ ‒ ‒ Is it an answer to say that things are as they appear
to common sense? ‒ ‒ ‒ Again, needless to say, we
don't feel these difficulties in ordinary life.
Nor is it true to say that we feel them when we scrutinize our
experiences by introspection, or make scientific investigations
about them. But somehow, when we look at them in a
certain way, our expression is liable to get into a tangle.
It seems to us as though we had either the wrong pieces, or not
enough of them, to put together our jig-saw puzzle.
But they are all there, only all mixed up; and there is a
further analogy between the jig-saw puzzle and our case:
It's no use trying to apply force in fitting pieces
together. All we should do is to look at them
carefully and arrange them. 77. |
|
There are propositions of which we may say that they
describe facts in the material world (external world).
Roughly speaking, they treat of physical objects; bodies,
fluids, etc.. I am not thinking in
particular of the laws of the natural sciences, but of any such
proposition as “the tulips in our garden are in full
bloom”, or “Smith will come in any
moment”. There are on the other hand
propositions describing personal experiences, as when the subject
in a psychological experiment describes his sense-experiences;
say his visual experience, independent of what bodies are
actually before his eyes and, N.B.,
independent also of any processes which might be observed to take
place in his retina, his nerves, his brain, or other
parts of his body. (That is, independent of both
physical and physiological facts.) |
|
At first sight it may appear (but why it should can
only become clear later) that here we have two kinds of
worlds, worlds built of different materials; a mental world and
a physical world. The mental world in fact is liable to
be imagined as gaseous, or rather,
aetherial. But let me
remind you here of the queer role which the gaseous and the
aetherial play in philosophy,
‒ ‒ ‒ when we perceive that a substantive is not used as what in
general we should call the name of an object, and when therefore we
can't help saying to ourselves that it is the name of an
aetherial object. I
mean, we already know the idea of
“aetherial objects”
as a subterfuge, when we are embarrassed about the grammar of
certain words. 78. and when all we know is
that they are not used as names for material objects.
This is a hint as to how the problem of the two materials,
mind and matter, is going to
diss[l|o]lve. |
| It
seems to us sometimes as though the phenomena of personal
experience were in a way phenomena in the upper strata of the
atmosphere as opposed to the material phenomena which happen on the
ground. There are views according to which these
phenomena in the upper strata arise when the material phenomena
reach a certain degree of complexity.
E.g, that the mental phenomena,
sense experience, volition, etc., emerge when a
type of animal body of a certain complexity has been
evolved. There seems to be some obvious truth in this,
for the amoeba certainly doesn't speak or write or
discuss, whereas we do. On the other hand the problem
here arises which could be expressed by the question:
“Is it possible for a machine to
think?” (whether the action of this machine can be
described and predicted by the laws of physics or, possibly,
only by laws of a different kind applying to the behaviour of
organisms). And the trouble which is expressed in
this question is not really that we don't yet know a
machine which could do the job. The question is not
analogous to that which someone might have asked a hundred years
ago: “Can a machine liquefy a
gas?” The trouble is rather that the
sentence, “A machine thinks” (perceives,
wishes) seems somehow nonsensical. It is as
though we had asked “Has the number 3 a
colour?” (“What colour could it be,
as it obviously 79. has none of the colours
known to us?”) For in one aspect of the
matter, personal experience, far from being the product
of physical, chemical, physiological processes, seems to be the
very basis of all that we say with any sense about such
processes. Looking at it in this way we are inclined to
use our idea of a building-material in ˇyet
another misleading way, and to say that the whole world, mental and
physical, is made of one material only. |
| When we look at everything that we know and
can say about the world as resting upon personal experience, then
what we know seems to lose a good deal of its value, reliability,
and solidity. We are then inclined to say that it is all
“subjective”; and
“subjective” is used derogatively, as when we say
that an opinion is merely subjective, a matter of
taste. Now, that this aspect should seem to shake the
authority of experience and knowledge points to the fact that here
our language is tempting us to draw some misleading
analogy. This should remind us of the case, when the
popular scientist appeared to have shown that the floor which we
stand on is not really solid because it is made up of
electrons. |
| We are up against
trouble caused by our way of expression. |
| Another such trouble, closely akin, is
expressed in the sentence: “I can only know that
I have personal experiences, not that anyone else
has”. ‒ ‒ ‒ Shall we then call it
ˇan unnecessary hypothesis that anyone else has
personal experiences? ‒ ‒ ‒ But is it an hypothesis
at all? For how can I even make 80 the hypothesis if it transcends all
possible experience? How could such a hypothesis be
backed by meaning? (Is it not like paper money, not
backed by gold?) ‒ ‒ ‒ It doesn't help
if anyone tells us that, though we don't know whether the
other person has pains, we certainly believe it when, for instance,
we pity him. Certainly we shouldn't pity him
if we didn't believe that he had pains; but is this a
philos◇ophical, a metaphysical, belief:
Does a realist pity me more than an idealist or a
solipsist? ‒ ‒ ‒ In fact the solipsist asks:
“How can we believe that the other has pain;
what does it mean to believe this? How can the
expression of such a supposition make sense?”
Now the answer of the common sense philosopher (which,
N.B., is not the common sense man, who is as far
from realism as from idealism) the answer of the common sense
philosopher is that surely there is no difficulty in the idea of
supposing, thinking, imagining, that someone else has what I
have. But the trouble with the realist is always that he
does not solve but skip the difficulties which his adversaries see,
though they too don't succeed in solving them.
The realist answer, for us, just brings out the difficulty; for
who argues like this overlo[k|o]ks the difference between
different usages of the words “to have”,
“to imagine”. “A has a gold
tooth” means that the tooth is in A's
mouth. Now the case of his toothache, of which I say I
am not able to feel it because it is in his mouth, is not analogous
to the case of the gold 81. tooth. It is the
apparent analogy, and again the lack of analogy, between these
cases which causes our trouble. And it is this
troublesome feature in our grammar which the realist does not
notice. It is conceivable that I feel pain in a tooth in
another man's mouth; and the man who says that he cannot
feel the other's toothache is not denying
this. The grammatical difficulty which we are
in we shall only see clearly if we get familiar with the idea of
feeling pain in another person's body. For
otherwise, in puzzling about this problem, we shall be liable to
confuse our metaphysical proposition “I can't
feel his pain” with the experiential proposition,
“We can't have (haven't as a
rule) pains in another person's tooth”.
In this proposition the word “can't”
is used in the same way as in the proposition “An iron
nail can't scratch glass”. (We
could write this in the form “experience teaches that an
iron nail doesn't scratch glass”, thus
doing away with the “can't”).
In order to see that it is conceivable that one person should
have pain in another person's body, one must examine what
sort of facts we call criteria for a pain being in a certain
place. It is easy to imagine the following case:
When I see my hands I am not always aware of their connection
with the rest of my body. That is to say, I often see
my hand moving but don't see the arm which connects it to
my torso. Nor do I necessarily, at the time, check up on
the arm's existence in any other way. Therefore
the hand may, for all I know, be connected to the 82. body of a man standing
beside me (or, of course, not to a human body at
all). Suppose I feel a pain which in the evidence of
the pain alone, e.g., with closed eyes, I
should call a pain in my left hand. Someone asks me to
touch the painful spot with my right hand. I do so
and looking round perceive that I am touching my
neighbour's hand (meaning the hand connected to my
neighbour's torso.) |
|
Ask yourself: How do we know where to point to when
we are asked to point to the painful spot? Can this
sort of pointing be compared with pointing to a black spot on a
sheet of paper when someone says: “point to the
black spot on this sheet.” Suppose someone
said “You point to this spot because you know before
you point that the pains are there”; ask yourself
“What does it mean to know that the pains are
there?” The word “there”
refers to a locality; ‒ ‒ ‒ but in what space,
i.e., a “locality” in what
sense? Do we know the place of pain in
Euclidian space, so that when we know
where we have pains we know how far away from two of the walls of
this room, and from the floor? When I have pain in the
tip of my finger and touch my tooth with it, is my pain now both
a toothache and a pain in my finger? Certainly in one
sense the pain can be said to be located on the tooth.
Is the reason why in this case it is wrong to say I have
toothache, that in order to be in the tooth the pain should be one
sixteenth of an inch away from the tip of my finger?
Remember that the word “where” can refer to
localities in man[t|y] different 83. senses. (Many
different grammatical games, resembling each other more
or less, are played with this word. Think of
the different uses of the numeral
“1”.) I may know where a
thing is and then point to it by virtue of that knowledge.
The knowledge tells me where to point to. We here
conceived this knowledge as the condition for deliberately pointing
to the object. Thus one can say: “I
can point to the spot you mean because I see it”,
“I can direct you to the place because I know where
it is; first turning to the right,
etc..” Now one is inclined to
say “I must know where a thing is before I can point to
it”. Perhaps you will feel less happy about
saying: “I must know where a thing is before I
can look at it”. Sometimes of course it is
correct to say this. But we are tempted to think that
there is one particular psychical state or event, the knowledge of
the place, which must precede every deliberate act of pointing,
moving towards, etc.. Think of the
analogous case: “One can only obey an order
after having understood it”. |
|
If I point to the painful spot on my arm, in what sense
can I be said to have known where the pain was before I pointed to
the place? Before I pointed I could have said
“The pain is in my left arm”.
Supposing my arm had been covered with a meshwork of lines
numbered in such a way that I could refer to any place on its
surface. Was it necessary that I should have been able
to describe the painful spot by means of these co-ordinates
before I could point to it? What I wish to say is that
the act of pointing determines a place of pain.
This 84. act of pointing, by the
way, is not to be confused with that of finding the painful spot by
probing. In fact the two may lead to different
results. |
| 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 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 w[g|h]ich 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 evi[s|d]ences 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
express-86. ion, 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
ˇwhat 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
[g|f]eel in such cases a strong need for such an expression
as: “a sensation travels from my
tactual cheek to my
tactual eye”. I said
all this because, if you are aware of the
tactual 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 87. imagine such a case, this
simply means that we imagine a correlation between visual,
tactual, kinaesthetic, etc.,
experiences different from the ordinary correlation.
Thus we can imagine a person having the sensation of toothache
plus those tactual 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
tactu◇al 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 tactual
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
tactual 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.” |
| I
said that the man who contended that it was impossible 88. to feel the other
person's pain did not thereby wish to deny that one person
could feel pain in another person's body. In
fact, he would have said: “I may have toothache
in another man's tooth, but not his
toothache”. |
| Thus
the proposition “A has a gold tooth” and
“A has toothache” are not used
analogously. They differs in their grammar where
at first sight they might not seem to differ. |
| As to the use of the word
“imagine” ‒ ‒ ‒ one might say:
“Surely there is quite a definite act of imagining the
other person to have pain”. Of course we
don't deny this, or any other statement about
facts. But let us see: If we make an image
of the other person's pain, do we apply it in the same way
in which we apply the image, say, of a black eye, when we imagine
the other person having one? Let us again replace
imagining, in the ordinary sense, by making a painted image,
(This could quite well be the way certain beings
did their imagining.) Then let a man imagine in this
way that A has a black eye. A very important
application of this picture will be comparing it with the real eye
to see if the picture is correct. When we vividly
imagine that someone suffers pain, there often enters in our image
what one might call a shadow of a pain felt in the locality
corresponding to that in which we say his pain is felt.
But the sense in which an image is an image is determined by the
way in which it is compared with reality. This we might
call the method of projection. Now think of comparing
an image of A's toothache with his 89. toothache. How
would you compare them? If you say, you compare them
“indirectly” via his bodily behaviour, I answer
that this means you don't compare them as you
compare the picture of his behaviour with his behaviour.
|
| Again, when you say,
“I grant you that you can't know
when A has pain, you can only conjecture it”, you
don't see the difficulty which lies in the different uses
of the words “conjecturing” and
“knowing”. What sort of impossibility
were you referring to when you said you couldn't
know? Weren't you thinking
90. series of cardinal
numbers”, one doesn't state a fact about human
frailty but about a convention which we have made. Our
statement is not comparable, though always falsely compared, with
such a one as “it is impossible for a human being to
swim across the Atlantic”; but it is analogous to a statement
like
“there is no goal in an endurance race”.
And this is one of the things which the person feels dimly who
is not satisfied with the explanation that though you
can't know … you can conjecture …. |
| 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: 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. |
| We use the phrase
“two books have the same colour”, but we could
perfectly well say: “They can't have
the same colour, because, after all, this book has
i[y|t]s own colour, and the other book has its own colour
too”. This also would be stating a
grammatical rule, ‒ ‒ ‒ a rule not in accordance with our
ordinary usage. The reason why one should think of these
two different usages at all is this: We compare the case
of sense data with that of physical bodies in which case we make
a distinction between: “this is the same chair that I
saw an hour ago” and “this is not the same chair,
but one exactly 92. like the
other”. Here it makes sense to say, and it is
an experiential proposition: “A and B
couln't have seen the same chair, for
A was in London and B in
Cambridge; they saw two chairs exactly
alike”. (Here it will be useful if you
consider the different criteria for what we call the
“identity” of these
objects”. How do we apply the statements:
“This is the same day … ”,
“This is the same word … ”;
“This is the same occasion … ”,
etc.?) |
|
What we did in these discussions was what we always do when we
meet the word “can” in a metaphysical
proposition. We show that this proposition hides a
grammatical rule. Tha[|t] is to say, we destroy
the outward similarity between a metaphysical proposition and
an experiential one, and we try to find the form of expression
which fulfills a certain craving of the metaphysician which our
ordinary language does not fulfill and which, as long as it
isn't fulfilled, produces the metaphysical
puzzlement. Again, when in a metaphysical sense I say
“I must always know when I have
pain”, this simply makes the word “know”
redundant; and instead of “I know that I have
pain”, I can simply say “I have
pain”. The matter is different of course if we
give the phrase “unconscious pain” sense by
fixing experiential criteria for the case in which a man has pain
and doesn't know it, and if then we say (rightly or
wrongly), that as a matter of fact nobody has ever had pains
which he didn't know of. |
|
When we say “I can't feel his
pain”, the idea of an 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
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. |
|
Our wavering between logical and physical impossibility
makes us make such statements as this: “If what I
feel is always my pain only, what can the supposition
mean that someone else has pain?” The
thing to do in such cases is always to look how the words in
question are actually used in our language. We
are in all such cases thinking of a use different from that
which our ordinary language makes of the words. Of a
use, on the other hand, which just then for some reason strongly
recommends itself to us. When something seems queer
about the grammar of our words, it is because we are alternately
tempted to use a word in several different ways. And it
is particularly difficult to discover that an assertion which
the metaphysician makes expresses discontentment with our grammar
when the words of this assertion can also be used to state a fact
of experience. Thus when he says “only my pain
is real pain”, this sentence might mean that the other
people are only pretending. And when he says “this
tree doesn't exist when nobody sees it”, this
might mean: “this 95. tree vanishes when we turn
our backs to it”. The man who says
“only my pain is real”, doesn't mean to
say that he has found out by the common criteria ‒ ‒ ‒ the
criteria, i.e., which give our words their
common meanings ‒ ‒ ‒ that the others who said they had pains
were cheating. But what he rebels against is the use of
this expression in connection with these
criteria. That is, he objects to using this word in the
particular way in which it is commonly used. On the
other hand, he is not aware that he is objecting to a
convention. He sees a way of dividing the country
different from the one used on the ordinary map. He
feels tempted, say, to use the name
“Devonshire” not for the county
with its conventional boundary, but for a region differently
bouˇnded. He could express this by
saying: “Isn't it absurd to make
this a county, to draw the boundaries
here?” But what he says is:
“The real Devonshire is
this”. We could answer: “What
you want is only a new notation, and by a new notation no facts of
geography are changed”. It is true, however,
that we may be irresistibly attracted or repelled by a
notation. (We easily forget how much a notation, a
form of expression, may mean to us, and that changing it
isn't always as easy as it often is in mathematics or
in the sciences. A change of clothes or of names may
mean very little and it may mean a great deal.) |
| 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, 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 psychoanal[i|y]sts 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 objections 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. |
| But is it not right
to say that in any case the person who talks both of conscious and
unconscious thoughts thereby uses the word
“thoughts” in two different ways? Do we
use a hammer in two different ways when we hit a nail with it
and, on the other hand, drive a peg into a hole? And
do we use it in two different ways or in the same way when we drive
this peg into this hole and, on the other hand, another peg into
97. another
hole? Or should we only call it different uses when in
one case we drive something into something and in the other, say,
we smash something? Or is this all using the hammer in
one way and is it to be called a different way only when we use the
hammer as a paper weight? ‒ ‒ ‒ In which cases are we
to say that a word is used in two different ways and in which
that it is used in one way? To say that a word is used
in two (or more) different ways does in itself not yet give
us any idea about its use. It only specifies a way of
looking at this usage by providing a schema for its description
with two (or more) subdivisions. It is all right
to say: “I do two things with this
hammer: I drive a nail into this board and one into
that board”. But I could also have said:
“I am doing only one thing with this hammer; I
am driving a nail into this board and one into that
board”. There can be two kinds of discussions
as to “whether a word is used in one way or in two
ways”: (a) Two people may discuss whether
the English word “cleave” is only used for
chopping up something or also for joining things together.
This is a discussion about the acts of a certain actual
usage. (b) They may discuss whether
the word “altus”, standing for
“deep” and “high” is
thereby used in two different ways. This
question is analogous to the question whether the word
“thought” is used in two ways or in one when we
talk of conscious and unconscious thought. The man who
says “surely, these are two different usages” has
already decided to use a two-way 98. schema, and what he said
expressed this decision. |
| Now
when the solipsist says that only his own experiences are real, it
is no use answering him: “Why do you tell us
this if you don't believe that we really hear
it?” Or anyhow, if we give him this answer,
we mustn't believe that we have answered his
difficulty. There is no common sense answer to a
philosophical problem. One can only defend common sense
against the attacks of philosophers by solving their puzzles,
i.e., by curing them of the temptation to attack
common sense; not by restating the views of common sense.
A philosopher is not a man out of his senses, a man who
doesn't see what everybody sees; nor on the other hand is
his disagreement with common sense that of the scientist
disagreeing with the coarse views of the man in the street.
That is, his disagreement is not founded on a more subtle
knowledge of fact. We therefore have to look round for
the source of his puzzlement. And we find that
there is puzzlement and mental discomfort, not only when our
curiosity about certain facts is not satisfied or when we
can't find a law of nature fitting in with all our
experience, but also when a notation dissatisfies us, ‒ ‒ ‒
perhaps because of various associations which it calls up.
Our ordinary language, which of all possible notations is the
one which pervades all our life, holds our mind rigidly in one
position, as it were, and in this position sometimes it feels
cramped having a desire for other positions as well.
Thus we sometimes wish for a notation which stresses a
difference 99. 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. |
| Now the man whom we call a solipsist and who
says that only his ˇown experiences are real, on the
other ˇone hand does not thereby
disagree with us about any practical question of fact, he does not
say that we are simulating when we complain of pains, he pities us
as much as anyone else, and at the same time he wishes to restrict
the use of the epithet “real” to what we should
call his experiences; and perhaps he doesn't want to call
our experiences “experiences” at all (again
without disagreeing with us about any question of
fact). For he would say that it was
inconceivable that experiences other than his own were
real. He ought therefore to use a notation in which such
a phrase as “A has real toothache” (where
A is not he) is meaningless, a notation whose rules
exclude this phrase as the rules of chess exclude a pawn's
making a knight's move. The solipsist's
suggestion comes to using such a phrase as “there is real
toothache” instead of “Smith (the
solipsist) has toothache”. And why
shouldn't we grant him this notation. I
needn't say that in order to avoid confusion he had in
his case better not use the word “real” as
opposed to “simulated” at all; which just means
that we shall have to provide for the 100. distinction
“real”, “simulated” in some other
way. The solipsist who says “only I feel
real pain”, “only I reˇally see
(or hear)” is not stating an opinion; and
that's why he is so sure of what he says. He
is irresistibl[i|y] tempted to use a certain form of
expression; but we must yet find why he is. |
| 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 101. of the paper being
red. |
| I should therefore say,
instead of ‘I wish this paper were red’,
something like ‘I wish a pale red for this
paper’”. But if in the usual way of
speaking he had said, “I wish a pale red for this
paper”, we should, in order to fulfill his wish, have
painted it a pale red ‒ ‒ ‒ and this wasn't what he
wished. On the other hand there is no objection to
adopting the form of expression which he suggests as long as we
know that he uses the phrase, “I wish a pale
x for this paper”, always to mean what
ordinarily we express by “I wish this paper to have
the colour x”. What he said
really recommended his notation, in the sense in which a notation
can be recommended. But he did not tell us a new truth
and did not show us that what we said before was false.
(All this connects our present problem up with the problem of
negation. I will only give you a hint, by saying that
a notation would be possible in which, to put it roughly, a
quality had always two names, one for the case when something is
said to have it, the other for the case when something is
sa[s|i]d not to have it. The negation of
“This paper is red” could then be, say,
“This paper is not rode”. Such a
notation would actually fulfill some of the wishes which are denied
us by our ordinary language and which sometimes produce a cramp
of philosophical puzzlement about the idea of negation.)
|
| The difficulty which we express by
saying “We can't know what he sees when he
(truthfully) says that he sees a blue patch” arises
from the idea that “knowing what he sees”
means: 102. “seeing that
which he also sees”; not however in the sense in which we
do so when we both have the same object before our eyes: but
in the sense in which the object seen would be an object, say, in
his head, or in him. The idea is that the same
object may be before his eyes and mine, but that I can't
stick my head into his (or my mind into his, which comes to the
same) so that the real and immediate object of
his vision becomes the real and immediate object of my vision,
too. By “I don't know what he
sees” we really mean “I don't know
what he looks at”, where “what he looks
at” is hidden and he can't show it to me; it is
before his mind's eye. Therefore, in
order to get rid of this puzzle, examine the grammatical difference
between the statements “I don't know what he
sees” and “I don't know what he
looks at”, as they are actually used in our
language. |
| Sometimes the most
satisfying expression of our solipsism seems to be this:
“When anything is seen (really
seen), it is always I who see it”.
|
| What should strike us about this
expression is the phrase “always I”.
Always who? ‒ ‒ ‒ For, queer enough, I
don't mean: “always
L.W.” This leads us to considering the
criteria for the identity of a person. Under what
circumstances do we say: “This is the same
person whom I saw an hour ago”? Our actual
use of the phrase “the same person” and of the name
of a person is based on the fact that many characteristics which
we use as the criteria for identity coincide in the vast
103. majority of
cases. I am as a rule re[d|c]ognized by the
appearance of my body. My body changes its
appearance only gradually and comparatively little, and
likewise my voice, characteristic habits, etc.
only change slowly and within a narrow range. We are
inclined to use personal names in the way we do, only as a
consequence of these facts. This can best be seen by
imagining unreal cases which show us what different
“geometries” we would be inclined to use if facts
were different. Imagine, e.g.,
that all human bodies which exist lookˇed alike, that
on the other hand, different sets of characteristics seemed, as it
were, to change their habitation among these bodies.
Such a set of characteristics might be, say, mildness, together
with a high pitched voice, and slow movements, or a choleric
temperament, a deep voi[v|c]e, and jerky movements, and
such like. Under such circumstances, although it would
be possible to give the bodies names, we should perhaps be as
little inclined to do so as we are to give names to the chairs of
our dining room set. On the other hand, it might be
useful to give names to the sets of characteristics, and the use of
these names would now roughly correspond to the personal
names in our present language. |
|
Or imagine that it was usual for a man to have two characters,
in this way: His shape, size, and characteristics of
behaviour sometimes changed unaccountably. It is the
usual thing that a man has two such states, and he lapses
suddenly from one into the other. It is very likely that
in such a 104. case we should be inclined
to christen every man with two names, and perhaps to talk of the
pair of persons in his body. Now were
Dr.Jekyll and
Mr.Hyde two
persons or were they the same person who merely changed?
We can say whichever we like. We are not forced to
talk of a double personality. |
|
There are many uses of the word
“personali[y|t]y” which we may feel
inclined to adopt, all more or less akin. The same
applies when we define the identity of a person by means of his
memories. Imagine a man whose memories on the even days
of his life comprise the events of all these days, skipping
entirely what happened on the odd days. On the other
hand, he remembers on an odd day what happened on previous odd
days, but his memory would then skip the even days without a
feeling of discontinuity. If we like we can also assume
that he has alternating appearances and characteristics on odd
and even days. Are we bound to say that here two persons
are inhabiting the same body? That is, is it right to
say that there are, and wrong to say ◇ that there
aren't, or vice versa?
Neither. For the ordinary use of the word
“person” is what one might call a composite use
suitable under the ordinary circumstances. If I assume,
as I do, that these circumstances are changed, the application of
the term “person” or
“personality” has thereby changed, and if I wish to
preserve this term and give it a use analogous to its former use, I
am at liberty to choose between many uses, that is, between many
different kinds of analogy. One might say in such a case
.105 that the term
“personality” hasn't got one legitimate
heir only. (This kind of consideration is
ˇof importan[t|c]e in the philosophy of
mathematics. Consider the use of the words
“proof”, “formula”, and
others. Consider the question: “Why
should what we do here be called
‘philosophy’? Why should it be
regarded as the only legitimate heir of the different activities
which had this name in former times?”) |
| Now let us ask ourselves what sort of identity
of personality it is we are referring to when we say
“when anything is seen, it is always I who
see”. What is it I want all these cases of
seeing to have in common? As an answer I have to
confess to myself that it is not my bodily appearance.
I don't always see part of my body when I
see. And it isn't essential that my body, if
seen amongst the things I see, should always look the same.
In fact I don't mind how much it changes.
And in the same way I feel about all the properties of my
body, the characteristics of my behaviour, and even about my
memories. ‒ ‒ ‒ When I think about it a little longer
I see that what I wished to say was: “Always when
anything is seen, something is seen”.
I.e., that of which I said it continued
during all the experiences of seeing was not any particular entity
“I”, but the experience of seeing itself.
This may become clearer if we imagine the man who makes our
solipsistic statement to point to his eyes while he says
“I”. (Perhaps because he wishes to
be exact and wants to say expressly which eyes belong to the mouth
which says “I” and 106. to the hands pointing to
his own body). But what is he pointing to?
These particular eyes with the identity of physical
objects? (To understand this sentence, you must
remember that the grammar of words of which we say that they stand
for physical objects is characterized by the way in which we use
the phrase “the same so-and-so”,
or “the identical so-and-so”, where
so-and-so designates the physical object.)
We said before that we did not wish to point to a particular
physical object at all. The idea that he had made a
significant statement arose from a confusion corresponding to
the confusion between what we shall call “the geometrical
eye” and “the physical eye”.
I will indicate the use of these terms: If a
man tries to obey the order “Point to your
eye”, he may do many different things, and there are many
different criteria which he will accept for having pointed to his
eye. If these criteria, as they usually do, coincide, I
may use them alternately and in different combinations to show me
that I have touched my eye. If they don't
coincide, I shall have to distinguish between different senses of
the phrase “I touch my eye” or
“I move my finger towards my eye”.
If, e.g., my eyes are shut, I can still
have the characteristic kinaesthetic experience in my arm which
I should call the kinaesthetic experience of raising my hand to my
eye. That I had su[s|c]ceeded in doing so, I
shall recognize by the peculiar tactile sensation of touching my
eye. But if my eye was behind a glass plate which was
fastened in such a way that it prevented 107. me from exerting a
pressure on my eye with my finger, there would still be a criterion
of muscular sensation which would make me say that now my finger
was in front of my eye. As to visual criteria, there are
two I can adopt. There is the ordinary experience of
seeing my hand rise and come towards my eye, and this experience of
course is different from seeing two things meet, say, two finger
tips. On the other hand, I can use a criterion for my
finger moving towards my eye, what I see when I look into a mirror
and see my finger nearing my eye. If that place on my
body which, we say, “sees” is to be determined by
moving my finger towards my eye, according to the second criterion,
then it is conceivable that I may see with what according to other
criteria is the tip of my nose, or places on my forehead; or I
might in this way point to a place lying outside my body.
If I wish a person to point to his eye (or his eyes)
according to the second criterion alone, I shall express
my wish by saying: “Point to your geometrical
eye (or eyes)”. The grammar of the word
“geometrical eye” stands in the same relation to
the grammar of the word “physical eye” as the
grammar of the expression “the visual sense datum of a
tree” to the grammar of the expression “the
physical tree”. In either case it confuses
everything to say “the one is a different kind
of object from the other”; for those who say that a sense
datum is a different kind of object from a physical object
misunderstand the grammar of the word “kind”,
just as those who say that a number is a different kind of
108. object from a
numeral. They think they are making such a statement as
“A railway train, a railwa[t|y] station, and a
railway car are different kinds of objects”, whereas
their statement is analogous to “A railway
train, a railway accident, and a railway law are different kinds of
objects”. |
| What
tempted me to say “it is always I who see when
anything is seen”, I could also have yielded to by
saying: “when ever anything is seen, it is
this which is seen”, accompanying the word
“this” by a gesture embracing my visual field
(but not meaning by “this” the particular
objects which I happen to see at the moment). One
might say, “I am pointing at the visual field as
such, not at an[i|y]thing in it”. And this
only serves to bring out the senselessness of the former
expression. |
| Let us then
discard the “always” in our expression.
Then I can still express my solipsism by saying,
“Only what I see (or: see now)
is really seen”. And here I am tempted to
say: “Although by the word
“I” I don't mean
L.W., it
will do if the others understand “I” to mean
L.W. if just
now I am in fact L.W.”. I could also express my
claim by saying: “I am the vessel of
life”; but mark, it is essential that everyone to whom I
say this should be unable to understand me. It is
essential that the other should not be able to understand
“what I really mean”, though in
practice he might do what I wish by conceding to me an exceptional
position in his notation. But I wish it to be
logically impossible that he should understand me, that
is to say, it should be meaningless, .109 not false, to say that he
understands me. Thus my expression is one of the many
which is used on various occasions by philosophers and supposed
to convey something to the person who says it, though essentially
incapable of conveying anything to anyone else. Now if
to convey a meaning means to be accompanied by or to produce
certain experiences, our expression may have all sorts of meanings,
and I can't say anything about them. But we
are, as a matter of fact, misled into thinking that our expression
has a meaning in the sense in which a non-metaphysical
expression has; for we wrongly compare our case with one in which
the other person can't understand what ◇ we
say because he lacks a certain information. (This
remark can only become clear if we understand the connection
between grammar and sense and nonsense.) |
| The meaning of a phrase for us is
characterised by the use we make of it. The meaning is
not a mental accompaniment to the expression. Therefore
the phrase “I think I mean something by
it”, or “I'm sure I mean something
by it”, which we so often hear in philosophical
discussions to justify the use of an expression is for us no
justification at all. We ask:
“What do you mean?”,
i.e., “How do you use this
expression?” If someone taught me the
word “bench” and said that he sometimes or always
put a stroke over it thus:
“bench”, and
that this meant something to him, I should say:
“I don't know what sort of idea you
associate with this stroke, but it doesn't interest me
unless you show me that there is a use for 110. the stroke in the kind of
calculus in which I wish to use the word
“bench”. ‒ ‒ ‒ I want to play
chess, and a man gives the white king a paper crown, leaving the
use of the piece unaltered, but telling me that the crown has a
meaning to him in the game, which he can't express by
rules. I say: “as long as it
doesn't alter the use of the piece, it hasn't what
I call a meaning”. |
|
One sometimes hears that such a phrase as “This is
here”, when while I say it I point to a part of my visual
field, has a kind of primitive meaning to me, although it
can't impart information to anybody else. |
| When I say “Only this is
seen”, I forget that a sentence may come over so natural
to us without having any use in the calculus of language.
Think of the law of identity,
“a = a”, and of
how we sometimes try hard to get hold of its sense, to visualize
it, by looking at an object and repeating to ourselves such a
sentence as “This tree is the same thing as this
tree”. The gestures and images by which I
apparently give this sentence sense are very similar to those which
I use in the case of “Only this is really
seen”. (To get clear about philosophical
problems, it is useful to become conscious of the apparently
unimportant details of the particular situation in which we are
inclined to make a certain metaphysical
asserttion. Thus we may be tempted to
say “Only this is really seen” when we
stare at unchanging surroundings, whereas we may not at all be
tempted to say this when we look about us 111. while walking.)
There is, as we have said, no objection to adopting a
symbolism in which a certain person always or temporarily holds an
exceptional place. And therefore, if I utter the
sentence “Only I really see”, it is
conceivable that my fellow creatures thereupon will arrange their
notation so as to fall in with me by saying
“so-and-so is really seen” instead of
“L.W. sees so-and-so”, etc.,
etc.. What however, is wrong is to think
that I can justify this choice of
noation. When I said, from my heart, that
only I see, I was also inclined to say that by
“I” I didn't really mean
L.W.,
although for the benefit of my fellow men I might say,
“It is now
L.W. who
really sees” though this is not what I really mean.
I could almost say that by “I”
I mean something which just now inhabits
L.W.,
something which the others can't see.
(I meant my mind, but could only point to it via my
body.) There is nothing wrong in suggesting that the
others should give me an exceptional place in their notation, but
the justification which I wish to give for it: that this body
is now the seat of that which really lives, ‒ ‒ ‒ is
senseless. For admittedly this is not to state anything
which in the ordinary sense is a matter of experience.
(And don't think that it is an
experien[s|t]ial proposition which only I can know
because only I am in the position to have the particular
experience.) Now the idea that the real I lives in my
body is connected with the peculiar grammar of the word
“I”, and the misunderstandings 112. this grammar is liable to
give rise to. There are two different cases in the
use of the word “I” (or
“my”) which I might call “the use as
object” and “the use as subject”.
Examples of the first kind of use are these:
“My arm is broken”, “I have
grown six inches”, “I have a bump on my
forehead”, “The wind blows my hair
about”. Examples of the second kind are:
“I see so-and-so”,
“I hear so-and-so”,
“I try to lift my arm”,
“I think it will rain”,
“I have toothache”. One
can point to the difference between these two categories by
saying: The cases of the first category involve the
recognition of a particular person, and there is in these cases the
possibility of an error, or as I should rather put it:
The possibility of an error has been provided for.
The possibility of failing to score has been provided for in a
pin game. On the other hand, it is not one of the
hazards of the game that the balls should fail to come up if I have
put a penny in the slot. It is possible that, say in an
accident, I should feel a pain in my arm, see a broken arm at my
side, and think it is mine, when really it is my
neighbour's. And I could, looking into a mirror,
mistake a bump on his forehead for one on mine. On the
other hand, there is no question of recognizing a person when I say
I have toothache. To ask “are you sure that
it's you who have pains?” would
be nonsensical. Now, when in this case no error is
possible, it is because the move which we might be inclined to
think of as an error, a “bad move”, is no move of
the game at all. (We distinguish in chess between
good and bad moves, and we call it a mistake if we expose the
113. queen to a
bishop. But it is no mistake to promote a pawn to a
king.) And now this way of stating our idea suggests
itself: that it is as impossible that in making the statement
“I have toothache” I should have
mistaken another person for myself, as it is to moan with pain by
mistake, having mistaken someone else for me. To
say, “I have pain” is no more a
statement about a particular person than moaning
is. “But surely the word ‘I’
in the mouth of a man refers to the man who says it; it points to
himself; and very often a man who says it actually points to
himself with his finger”. But it was quite
superfluous to point to himself. He might just as well
only have raised his hand. It would be wrong to say that
when someone points to the sun with his hand, he is pointing
both to the sun and himself because it is he who points;
on the other hand, he may by pointing attract attention both to the
sun and to himself. |
| The word
“I” does not mean the same as
“L.W.” even if I am
L.W., nor
does it mean the same as the expression “the person who is
now speaking”. But that doesn't
mean: that
“L.W.” and “I” mean different
things. All it means is that these words are different
instruments in our language. Think of words as
instruments characterized by their use, and then think of the use
of a hammer, the use of a ◇ chisel, the use of a
square, of a glue pot, and of the glue. (Also, all
that we say here can only be understood if you understand that a
great variety of games is played with the sentences of 1134.
our language: Giving and obeying orders; asking questions
and answering them; describing an event; telling a fictitious
story; telling a joke; describing an immediate experience; making
conjectures about events in the physical world; making scientific
hypotheses and theories; greeting someone, etc.
etc.. The mouth which says
“I” or the hand which is raised to indicate that
it is I who wish to speak, or I who have toothache, does not
thereby point to anything. If, on the other hand, I wish
to indicate the place of my pain, I point.
And here again remember the difference between pointing to the
painful spot without being led by the eye and on the other hand
pointing to a scar on my body after looking for it.
(“That's where I was
vaccinated.”) ‒ ‒ ‒ The man who cries out
with pain, or says that he has pain, doesn't choose the
mouth which says it. |
|
All this comes to saying that the person of whom we say
“he has pain” is, by the rules of the game, the
person who cries, contorts his face, etc..
The place of the pain ‒ ‒ ‒ as we have said ‒ ‒ ‒ may be in
another person's body. If, in saying
“I”, I point to my own body, I model the use of
the word “I” on that of the demonstrative
“this person” or “he”.
(This way of making the two expressions similar is somewhat
analogous to that which one sometimes adopts in mathematics, say in
the proof that the sum of the three angles of a triangle is
180˚. We say
“α =
α'”,
“β =
β'”, and
“γ =
γ”. The first two
equalities are of an entirely 115. different kind from the
third.) In “I have pain”,
“I” is not a demonstrative pronoun.
|
| Compare the two cases:
1. “How do you know that he has
pains?” ‒ ‒ ‒ “Because I hear him
moan”. 2. “How do you
know that you have pains?” ‒ ‒ ‒
“Because I feel them”.
But “I feel them” means the same as
“I have them”. Therefore this was
no explanation at all. That, however, in my answer I am
inclined to stress the word “feel” and not the
word “I” indicates that I don't wish to
pick out one person (from amongst different persons).
|
| The difference between the
propositions “I have pain” and “he
has pain” is not that of
“L.W. has pain” and “Smith
has pain”. Rather, it corresponds to the
difference between moaning and saying that someone moans.
‒ ‒ ‒ “But surely the word ‘I’
in ‘I have pains’ serves to distinguish me from
other people, because it is by the sign ‘I’ that
I distinguish saying that I have pain from saying that one of the
others has”. Imagine a language in which,
instead of “I found nobody in the
room”, one said “I found Mr.
Nobody in the room”. Imagine the
philosophical problems which would arise out of such a
notation. Some philosophers brought up in this
language would probably feel that they didn't like
the similarity of the expressions “Mr.
Nobody” and “Mr.
Smith”. When we feel that we wish to
abolish the “I” in “I have pain”,
one may say that we tend to make the verbal expression of pain
similar to the expression by moaning. ‒ ‒ ‒ We are
inclined to forget 116. that it is the particular
use of a word only which gives the word its meaning. Let
us think of our old example for the use of words:
Someone is sent to the grocer with a slip of paper with the
words “five apples” written on it. The
use of the word in practice is its meaning.
Imagine it were the usual thing that the objects around us
carried labels with words on them by means of which our speech
referred to the objects. Some of these words would be
proper names of the objects, others generic names, (like table,
chair, etc.), others again, names of colours,
names of shapes, etc.. That is to say, a
label would only have a meaning to us in so far as we made a
particular use of it. Now we could easily imagine
ourselves to be impressed by merely seeing a label on a thing, and
to forget that what makes these labels important is their
use. In this way we sometimes believe that we have named
something when we make a gesture of pointing and utter words like
“This is … ” (the formula of the
ostensive definition). We say we call something
“toothache”, and think that the word has received
a definite function in the dealings we carry out with language
when, under certain circumstances, we have pointed to our cheek and
said: “This is toothache”.
(Our idea is that when we point and the other “only
knows what we point to” he knows the use of the
word. And here we have in mind the special case when
“what we point to” is, say, a person and
“to know that I point to” means to see which of the
persons present I point to.) 117. |
| We
feel then that in the cases in which “I” is used
as subject, we don't use it because we recognize a
particular person by his bodily characteristics; and this creates
the illusion that we use this word to refer to something
bodiless, which, however, has its seat in our body. In
fact this seems to be the real ego, the one of which it
was said, “Cogito, ergo
sum”.
‒ ‒ ‒ “Is there then no mind, but only a
body?” Answer: The word
“mind” has meaning, i.e., it
has a use in our language; but saying this doesn't yet
say what kind of use we make of it. |
| In fact one may say that what in these
investigations we were concerned with was the grammar of these
words which describe what is called “mental
activities”; seeing, hearing, feeling,
etc.. And this comes to the same as saying
that we are concerned with the grammar of “phrases
describing sense data”. |
|
Philosophers say it as a philosophical opinion or
conviction that there are sense data. But to say
that I believe that there are sense data comes to saying
that I believe that an object may appear to be before our
eyes even when it isn't. Now when one uses
the word “sense datum”, one should be clear about
the peculiarity of its grammar. For the idea in
introducing this expression was to model expressions referring
to “appearance” after expressions referring to
“reality”. It was said,
e.g., that if two things seem to be
equal, there must be two somethings which are
equal. Which of course 118.
means nothing else but that we have decided to use such an
expression as “the appearances of these two things are
equal” synonymous with “these two things seem to
be equal”. Queerly enough, the introduction of
this new phraseology has deluded people into thinking that they had
discovered new entities, new elements of the structure of the
world, as though to say “I believe that there are
sense data” ˇwere similar to saying
“I believe that matter consists of
electrons”. When we talk of the equality of
appearances or sense data, we introduce a new usage of the word
“equal”. It is possible that the
lengths A and B should appear to us to be equal, that
B and C should appear to be equal, but that A and
C do not appear to be equal. And in the new
notation we shall have to say that though the appearance (sense
datum) of A is equal to that of B and the appearance
of B equal to that of C, the appearance of A is
not equal to the appearance of C; which is all right if you
don't mind using “equal”
intransitively. |
| Now the
danger we are in when we adopt the sense datum notation is to
forget the difference between the grammar of a statement about
sense datumˇa and the grammar of an outwardly
similar statement about physical objects. (From this
point one might go on talking about the misunderstandings which
find their expression in such sentences as:
“We can never see an accurate circle”,
“All our sense data are vague”.
Also, this leads to the comparison of the grammar of
“position”, “motion”, and
“size” in
Euclidian
and in visual space. There 119. is,
e.g., absolute position, absolute motion and
size in visual space.) |
|
Now we can make use of such an expression as “pointing
to the appearance of a body” or
“pointing to a visual sense datum”.
Roughly speaking, this sort of pointing comes to the same as
sighting, say, along the barrel of a gun. Thus we may
point and say: “This is the direction in which
I see my image in the mirror”. One can also use
such an expression as “the appearance, or sense datum,
of my finger points to the sense datum of the tree” and
similar ones. From these cases of pointing, however, we
must distinguish those of pointing in the direction a sound seems
to come from, or of pointing to my forehead with closed eyes,
etc.. |
| Now
when in the solipsistic way I say “This is
what's really seen”, I point before me and it is
essential that I point visually. If I pointed
sideways or behind me ‒ ‒ ‒ as it were, to things which I
don't see ‒ ‒ ‒ the pointing would in this case be
meaningless to me; it would not be pointing in the sense in which I
wish to point. But this means that when I point before
me saying “this is what's really seen”,
although I make the gesture of pointing, I don't point to
one thing as opposed to another. This is as when
travelling in a car and feeling in a hurry, I instinctively press
against something in front of me as though I could push the car
from the inside. |
| When it
makes sense to say “I see this”, or “this
is seen”, pointing to what I see, it also makes
sense to say “I 120. see this”, or
“this is seen”, pointing to something I
don't see. When I made my solipsist
statement, I pointed, but I robbed the pointing of its sense by
inseparably connecting that which points and that to which it
points. I constructed a clock with all its wheels,
etc., and in the end fastened the dial to the
pointer and made it go round with it. And in this way
the solipsist's “Only this is really
seen” reminds us of a tautology. |
| Of course one of the reasons why we are
tempted to make our pseudo-statement is its similarity with the
statement “I only see this”, or
“this is the region which I see”, where I point
to certain objects around me, as opposed to others, or in a certain
direction in physical space (not in visual space), as opposed
to other directions in physical space. And if, pointing
in this sense, I say “this is what is really
seen”, one may answer me: “This is
what you, L.W., see; but there is no objection to adopting a
notation in which what we used to call ‘things which
L.W.
sees’ is called ‘things really
seen’”. If, however, I believe that
by pointing to that which in my grammar has no neighbour I can
convey something to myself (if not to others), I make a
mistake similar to that of thinking that the sentence,
“I am here” makes sense to me (and, by
the way, is always true) under conditions different from those
very special conditions under which it does make sense.
(E.g., when my voice and the direction
from which I speak is recognized by another person.)
‒ ‒ ‒ Again an important case where you can 121. learn that a word has
meaning by the particular use we make of it. We are like
people who think that pieces of wood shaped more or less like chess
or draught pieces and standing on a chess board make a game, even
if nothing has been said as to how they are to be used.
|
| To say “it approaches
me” has sense, even when, physically speaking, nothing
approaches my body; and in the same way it makes sense to say,
“it is here” or “it has reached
me” when nothing has reached my body. And, on
the other hand, “I am here” makes sense if
my voice is recognised and heard to come from a particular place of
“common space”. In the
sentence,, “it is here” the
“here” was a here in visual space.
Roughly speaking, it is the geometrical eye. The
sentence “I am here”, to make sense, must
attract attention to a place in common space. (And
there are several ways in which this sentence might be
used.) The philosopher who thinks it makes sense to
say to himself “I am here”, takes the verbal
expression from the sentence in which “here” is a
place in common space and thinks of “here” as the
here in visual space. He therefore really says
something like “Here is here”. |
| I could, however, try to express my
solipsism in a different way: I imagine that I and
others draw pictures or write descriptions of what each of us
sees. These descriptions are put before me.
I point to the one which I have made and say:
“Only this is (or was) really
seen”. That is, I am tempted to say:
“Only this desription has reality
(visual reality) 122. behind
it”. The others I might call ‒ ‒ ‒
“blank descriptions”. I could
also express myself by saying: “This
description only was derived from reality; only this was compared
with reality”. Now it has a clear meaning when
we say that this picture or description is a projection, say, of
this group of objects ‒ ‒ ‒ the trees I look at ‒ ‒ ‒, or that
it has been derived from these objects. But we must look
into the grammar of such a phrase as “this description is
derived from my sense datum”. What we are
talking about is connected with that peculiar temptation to
say: “I never know what the other really means by
‘brown’, or what he really sees when he
(truthfully) says that he sees a brown object”.
‒ ‒ ‒ We could propose to one who says this to use two
different words instead of the one word “brown”;
one word “for his particular
impression”, the other word with that meaning which
other people besides him can understand as well. If he
thinks about this proposal he will see that there is something
wrong about his conception of the meaning, function, of the word
“brown”, and others. He looks for a
justification of his desription where there is
none. (Just as in the case when a man believes that
the chain of reasons must be endless. Think of the
justification by a general formula for performing mathematical
operations; and of the question: Does this formula
compel us to make use of it in this particular case as we
do?) To say “I derive a description
from visual reality” can't mean anything
analogous to: “I derive a description from
what I see here”. I may,
e.g., see a chart in which a coloured
123.
◇ square is correlated to the word
“brown”, and also a patch the same
colour elsewhere; and I may say: “This shows me
that I must use ‘brown’ for the description of
this patch”. This is how I may derive the word
“brown” for the use of my
description. But it would be meaningless to say that
I derive the word “brown” from the particular
colour-impression which I receive. |
| Let us now ask: “Can a
human body have pain?” One is
inclined to say: “How can the body have
pain? The body in itself is something dead; a body
isn't conscious!” And here again it
is as though we looked into the nature of pain and saw that it lies
in its nature that a material object can't have
it. And it is as though we saw that what has pain must be
an entity of a different nature from that of a material object;
that, in fact, it must be of a mental nature. But to say
that the ego is mental is like saying that the number 3 is of a
mental or an immaterial nature, when we recognize that the numeral
“3” isn't used as a sign for a physical
object. |
| On the other hand we
can perfectly well adopt the expression “this body
feels pain”, and we shall then, just as usual, tell it to
go to the doctor, to lie down, and even to remember that when the
last time it had pains they were over in a day.
“But wouldn't this form of expression at least
be an indirect one?” ‒ ‒ ‒ Is it using an
indirect expression when we say “Write
‘3’ for ‘x’ in this
formula” instead of “Substitute 3 for
x”? (Or on the other hand, is the
first of these two expressions 124. the only direct one, as
some philosophers think?) One expression is no more
direct than the other. The meaning of the expression
depends entirely on how we go on using it.
Let's not imagine the meaning as an occult connection
the mind makes between a word and a thing, and that this connection
contains the whole usage of a word as the seed might be
said to contain the tree. |
|
The kernel of our proposition, that that which has pains or sees
or thinks is of a mental nature, is only, that the word
“I” in “I have pains” does
not denote a particular body, for we can't substitute for
it a description of a body. |
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