| 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.) |
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