Here too however the expressions ‘directly aware & indir. aware are
extremely
very
misleading. What gives us the idea that the person who feels pain is aware ˇof an object, as it were, sees
it
an object
, whereas we are only
6
told that its there but can't see it? It is the peculiar funktion of the verbs li[f|k]e feeling, seeing etc. But before explaining what I mean I must make a preliminary remark. For I know that some of you will think this is the worst kind of verbalism. So I must make a general remark about grammar & reality. Roughly speaking the relation of the grammar to reality is that of expressions to the facts which
they are used to describe ist that between the description of methods & units of measurement & the measures of objects measured by those methods & units. Now I could describe the shape & size of this room by giving its length breadth & height in feet & just as well by giving them in meteres. I could also give them in microns. In a way therefore you might say that the choice of the units
7
is arbitrary. But in a most important sense it is not. It has a most important reason lying both in the size & in the irregularity of shape of a room which & in the use we make of a room that we don't measure its dimension in μ. or even in mm. That is to say not only the ˇprop. which tells us the result of measurement but also the description of the method & unit of measurement tells us something about the world
in which this measurement takes place And in this very way the technique of use of a word gives us an idea of very general [th|t]ruths about the world in which it is used; of truths in fact which are so general that ˇthey don't strike people (& I'm sorry to say philosophers
too
in particular
). don't bother to And so I will turn to some
features of
points in
the technique of use of expressions like ‘to feeling pain’. The first point is this
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that this verbal expression is in the first person used to replace [t|a]n expression of pain. So that if some people say that ‘having pain’ refers in the end refers to pain behaviour we can answer them, that ‘I have pain’ does not refer to pain behaviour but is a pain behaviour. It corresponds to a cry of pain not to the statement I am crying. But surely you distinguish between my pain behaviour when I ha just behave
that way & have no pain & ˇmy pain behaviour in the opposite case. If you mean do I
realise
admit
recognise
the fact that people sometimes behave as though they had pain whereas they haven't, I (certainly) do. But I wish to say that you can't explain that difference by saying that if he has pain there is behind his
behaviour
expression
a certain something present which he expresses by his behaviour. If instead of ‘a certain something’ or some such phrase
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you're bold enough to say ‘pain’ then the statement becomes tautologous. If you want to avoid the mention of pain because this already presupposes [w|t]hat we know what is behind his expression then it doesn't help you to say ‘a certain feeling’ or ‘a certain something’ for how do you know that you are allowed to call it a feeling or even a something. [f|F]or the word something has a public meaning
if it means anything at all. And then if you risk saying that he has something you might as well say all you
mean
know
& say that he has pain. The point is that a ˇan essentially private object can't justify the use of a word, neither for the others nor for him. The private object does not only not enter the public game but it can't enter a privat game either. You can see this e.g. if you replace the one private object
10
which is to justify his use of a pain expression by a series of different objects which he has at different times when he says he has pain. ‘But surely the use of the word pain is based on the fact that he ‘recognises’ his private object as always being the same on those occasions!’ What's he mean in this case by being the ‘same’, or ‘recognising’ neither he nor we have ever learnt to apply these words
to his private object. Supposing instead of ‘he recognises the object’ we said more cautiously ‘he believes he recogni[z|s]es’ – but then we ought to say that he believes that he believes he recognises and so on ad inf. If In other words: if this object is as private as we want it to be we have no reason to call it one object rather than 100 objects, we have no reason to apply the word
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object at all & no more has he.