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 which 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 evidences 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
expression,86. 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
what 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
feel in such cases a strong need for such an expression
as: “a sensation travels from my
tactile cheek to my
tactile eye”. I said
all this because, if you are aware of the
tactile 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,
tactile, kinaesthetic, etc.,
experiences different from the ordinary correlation.
Thus we can imagine a person having the sensation of toothache
plus those tactile 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
tactile 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 tactile
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
tactile 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.” |
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