[Wittrs] Re: On Ownership and Privacy
- From: "Stuart W. Mirsky" <SWMirsky@xxxxxxx>
- To: Wittrs@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Fri, 14 Aug 2009 02:17:16 -0000
This is a good idea Cayuse. By putting up text from the PI we can talk about it
here and some of the lazy ones amongst us (including me) don't have to go
racing to the bookshelf everytime we sit down here.
--- In Wittrs@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, "Cayuse" <z.z7@...> wrote:
>
> I'm intrigued by what the author of the PI writes about privacy and
> ownership.
> I find it rather cryptic, and I'd like to present my interpretation for
> criticism.
> LW does not seem to be denying the existence of private states, but rather
> saying that language has evolved to deal with public affairs, and so it is an
> inappropriate use of language to attempt to use it for the communication of
> private states.
This accords with my own thinking, yes.
> Furthermore, his idea of privacy seems to depend on the idea
> of ownership, and in the case of private states the notion of ownership has
> no place. But then in 418 he makes the claim that "I have consciousness",
> which seems at variance with my interpretation of his thesis.
>
It may just be an artifact of language usage, something we want to stay aware
of as Wittgensteinians, but which is just the way we evolved language to talk
about this kind of stuff. I remember my sister, who is very PC, taking me to
task for referring to a dog I had at the time as "my dog". What makes you think
you own him, she asked me. I said well you're "my sister" and it doesn't
suggest I own you does it? It's just the particular way we use "my" in this
context. She let me off the hook and agreed that maybe I wasn't really being a
human chauvinist toward my pet.
Very interesting quotes you've selected below though it's a little hard to
fully process them out of context and my memory no longer supplies that.
SWM
>
> Extracts from Part(1) of the Philosophical Investigations:
>
> 272:
> The essential thing about private experience is really not that each person
> possesses his own exemplar, but that nobody knows whether other people also
> have this or something else. The assumption would thus be possible - though
> unverifiable - that one section of mankind had one sensation of red and
> another section another.
>
> 275:
> Look at the blue of the sky and say to yourself "How blue the sky is!" - When
> you do it spontaneously - without philosophical intentions - the idea never
> crosses your mind that this impression of colour belongs only to you. [...]
>
> 296:
> "Yes, but there is something there all the same accompanying my cry of pain.
> And it is on account of that that I utter it. And this something is what is
> important - and frightful." - Only whom are we informing of this? And on what
> occasion?
>
> 304:
> "But you will surely admit that there is a difference between pain-behaviour
> accompanied by pain and pain-behaviour 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 a 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. [...]
>
> 398:
> "But when I imagine something, or even actually see objects, I have got
> something which my neighbour has not." - I understand you. You want to look
> about you and say: "At any rate only I have got THIS." - What are these words
> for? They serve no purpose. - May one not add: "There is here no question of
> a 'seeing' - and therefore none of a 'having' - nor of a subject, nor
> therefore of 'I' either"? Might I not ask: In what sense have you got what
> you are talking about and saying that only you have got it? Do you possess
> it? You do not even see it. Must you not really say that no one has got it?
> And this too is clear: if as a matter of logic you exclude other people's
> having something, it loses its sense to say that you have it.
>
> [...] I think we can say: you are talking (if, for example, you are sitting
> in a room) of the 'visual room'. The 'visual room' is the one that has no
> owner. I can as little own it as I can walk about it, or look at it, or point
> to it. Inasmuch as it cannot be any one else's it is not mine either. In
> other words, it does not belong to me because I want to use the same form of
> expression about it as about the material room in which I sit. The
> description of the latter need not mention an owner, in fact it need not have
> any owner. But then the visual room cannot have any owner. "For" - one might
> say - "it has no master, outside or in." [...]
>
> 399:
> One might also say: Surely the owner of the visual room would have to be the
> same kind of thing as it is; but he is not to be found in it, and there is no
> outside.
>
> 400:
> The 'visual room' seemed like a new discovery, but what its discoverer really
> found was a new way of speaking, a new comparison; it might even be called a
> new sensation.
>
> 401:
> You have a new conception and interpret it as seeing a new object. You
> interpret a grammatical movement made by yourself as a quasi-physical
> phenomenon which you are observing. (Think for example of the question: "Are
> sense-data the material of which the universe is made?")
>
> 404:
> [...] What does it mean to know who is in pain? It means, for example, to
> know which man in this room is in pain [...]. What am I getting at? At the
> fact that there is a great variety of criteria for personal 'identity'. Now
> which of them determines my saying that 'I' am in pain? None.
>
> 411:
> Consider how the following questions can be applied, and how settled:
> (1) "Are these books my books?"
> (2) "Is this foot my foot?"
> (3) "Is this body my body?"
> (4) "Is this sensation my sensation?"
> [...]
> (4) Which sensation does one mean by 'this' one? That is: how is one using
> the demonstrative pronoun here? Certainly otherwise than in, say, the first
> example! Here confusion occurs because one imagines that by directing one's
> attention to a sensation one is pointing to it.
>
> 416:
> "Human beings agree in saying that they see, hear, feel, and so on (even
> though some are blind and some are deaf.) So they are their own witnesses
> that they have consciousness." - But how strange this is! Whom do I really
> inform, if I say "I have consciousness"? What is the purpose of saying this
> to myself, and how can another person understand me? [...]
>
> 418: Is my having consciousness a fact of experience? - But doesn't one say
> that a man has consciousness, and that a tree or a stone does not? - What
> would it be like if it were otherwise? - Would human beings all be
> unconscious? - No; not in the ordinary sense of the word. But I, for
> instance, should not have consciousness - as I now in fact have it.
>
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