[Wittrs] Re: Does pain have a referent?
- From: "Cayuse" <z.z7@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <wittrs@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Mon, 14 Sep 2009 17:06:41 +0100
blroadies wrote:
"Cayuse" wrote:
Pain can't be a referent.
Why? Because the only reference allowed in your philosophy are
material objects? Or is it because the your feeling of pain is
private and only you know it? Only you can talk about it. It as if
you had a private screening.
Let's say you related to me your walk in the woods. You description of
the path, the trees, "real phenomena", as you put it, has a referent
because I see the path, the trees. Then again, do I know I see the
path and tree you see?
Once you cut me off from your "inner life", that without refer, you
exclude me from knowing any of your references.
I take LW's point to be that, in the case of sensations, language
is operating on a different principle to that of "object and designation"
-- i.e. pain isn't a "thing" to which language "refers":
PI 293. [...] That is to say: if we construe the grammar of the expression
of sensation on the model of 'object and designation' the object drops out
of consideration as irrelevant.
298. The very fact that we should so much like to say: "/This/ is the
important thing" -- while we point privately to the sensation -- is enough
to shew how much we are inclined to say something which gives no
information.
304. "But you will surely admit that there is a difference between
pain-behavior accompanied by pain and pain-behavior without any pain?" --
Admit it? What greater difference could there be? -- "And yet you again and
again reach the conclusion that the sensation itself is a /nothing/." -- Not
at all. It is not a /something/, but not a /nothing/ either! The conclusion
was only that nothing would serve just as well as a something about which
nothing could be said. We have only rejected the grammar which tries to
force itself on us here.
The paradox disappears only if we make a radical break with the idea
that language always functions in one way, always serves the same purpose:
to convey thoughts -- which may be about houses, pains, good and evil, or
anything else you please.
311. "What difference could be greater?" -- In the case of pain I believe
that I can give myself a private exhibition of the difference. But I can
give anyone an exhibition of the difference between a broken and an unbroken
tooth. -- But for the private exhibition you don't have to give yourself
actual pain; it is enough to /imagine/ it [...] This /private/ exhibition is
an illusion.
The fact that we /can/ imagine this entirety of the "contents of
consciousness", this "what it is like to be me", leads us into
metaphysical speculation
Why metaphysical?
As soon as we imagine other people to be similarly associated
with a "what it is like to be me", we ask how the physical person
and the "what it is like" are related, and we posit such metaphysical
hypotheses as materialism, idealism, and dualism.
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