[lit-ideas] Can I Have A Pain In My Tail?
- From: "" <dmarc-noreply@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> (Redacted sender "Jlsperanza@xxxxxxx" for DMARC)
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sat, 24 Jan 2015 07:30:40 -0500
In a message dated 1/24/2015 4:08:32 A.M. Eastern Standard Time,
donalmcevoyuk@xxxxxxxxxxx writes in reply to someone else: "None [in this
discussion] ... suggested "that the dog does not have 'pain'". It may be
idiotic to
suggest they did [so suggested] given the whole discussion accepted that
dogs may, like humans, experience pain - even, more specifically, toothache.
Hence the reference to H. P. G., "Can I Have A Pain In My Tail?", dated
1978.
McEvoy:
"The suggestion that pain is not located in the part of the body 'in which
it is felt' is supported [a] by modern neurophysiology and [b] by facts
like patients experiencing great pain in limbs that have been amputated etc.
and [c] by our ability to remove 'the experience of pain in a part of the
body' [an expression that itself may mislead] without treating that part of
the body but by giving painkillers to the part of the brain that creates the
pain-experience."
And thus the answer to H. P. G.'s essay is "No."
McEvoy continues:
"There is a more general point here about the nature of consciousness (of
which pains may form a part) - consciousness is not a mere mirror to nature
or imprint from external reality but is a product of a very complex set of
processes that simulate a 'reality' for us. When I touch this keyboard so
that I experience it as if "it is there", the keyboard "is there" but my
experience of it being there is a simulation of its being there."
And that's why philosophers distinguish between things ("Dinge" in Kant),
or 'material objects' (loosely speaking) and sense data.
McEvoy continues:
"What misleads us is that we do not experience our experience as if it is
a simulation but as if it is giving us direct access to reality - but we
are wrong to be mislead, by the immediacy and apparent "realism" of
experience, into thinking it gives us direct or unmediated access to reality."
What we need is a meta-experience. I am reminded of Oakeshott, an Oxford
don (granted, one term in Nuffield, but once an Oxonian, ALLways an Oxonian")
and his voluminous volume, "The modes of experience", or "Experience and
its modes" (it would be "Experience and HER modes" in the Italian
translation).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Oakeshott
"In his first book - Experience and its Modes - in 1933, Oakeshott notes
that the book owes much to Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and F. H. Bradley."
"Commentators also noticed resemblances between this work and the ideas of
thinkers such as R. G. Collingwood [Waynflete Prof. of Metaphysical
Philosophy at Oxford] and Georg Simmel."
"Oakeshott argues hat our experience is usually modal, in the sense that
we always have a governing perspective on the world, be it practical or
theoretical."
"There are various theoretical approaches you can take to understanding the
world."
"Natural science and history for example are separate modes of experience."
"It is a mistake, Oakeshott declares, to treat history as if it ought to be
practised on the model of the natural sciences."
"Philosophy, however, is not a modal interest."
"At this stage of his career, Oakeshott saw philosophy as the world seen
sub specie aeternitatis, literally, 'under the aspect of eternity', free from
presuppositions, whereas science and history and the practical mode relied
on certain assumptions."
"Later (there is some disagreement about exactly when), Oakeshott adopts a
pluralistic view of the various modes of experience, with philosophy just
one 'voice' amongst others, though it retained its self-scrutinizing
character."
Perhaps this was when he left Oxford for some part of London McEvoy is
familiar with (LSE).
"The dominating principles of scientific and historical thought are
quantity (the world sub specie quantitatis) and being in the past (the world
sub
specie praeteritorum), respectively."
"Oakeshott distinguishes the academic perspective on the past from the
practical, in which the past is seen in terms of its relevance to our present
and future."
"Oakeshott's insistence on the autonomy of history places him close to
Collingwood, who also argues for the autonomy of historical knowledge."
"The practical world-view (the world sub specie voluntatis) presupposes the
ideas of will and of value in terms of which practical action in the
arenas of politics, economics, and ethics made sense."
"Because all action is conditioned by presuppositions, Oakeshott is
inclined to see any attempt to change the world as reliant upon a scale of
values
which themselves presuppose a context of experience."
"Even the conservative disposition to maintain the status quo relies upon
managing inevitable change, he would later elaborate in his essay 'On Being
Conservative'"
and for which Thatcher awarded.
----- END OF OAKESHOTT interlude.
McEvoy concludes:
"Our consciousness of the external world - including our sense of external
W1 objects by sight or touch - is located in W2 and not in W1: when I touch
an external W1 object it may appear that my touch-experience is 'out
there' in W1 (at the border of my W1 fingertips and the W1 object they connect
with), but in truth this W1 interface is not where my touch-experience is
but is merely a W1 source that is elaborately processed so as to create my
touch-experience in W2. So the derogatory remarks about empiricism are
misplaced in the case of Popper: for Popper is not an empiricist in the
tradition
of Hume et al but a critical empiricist in a tradition that derives from
Kant."
And similarly is Grice, who after all delivered the Immanuel Kant Memorial
Lectures at Stanford, and calls himself "enough of a rationalist" to look
for a rationale for conversational implicatures (and not in vain his
festschrift is entitled, H. P. G. R. I. C. E.: Philosophical Grounds of
RATIONALITY: Intentions, Categories, Ends).
McEvoy provides a complementary commentary on dogs qua behaviouristic
machines as wrong.
"Speaking of dogs, Pavlov's famous dog is a behaviourist fiction based on
misinterpreting the dog's responses using the idea of a reflex arc, an idea
that is derived from traditional and uncritical empiricism of Hume's sort
- the Pavlovian "reflex arc" is merely the dogmas of associationist
psychology in the disguise of an empirical test ("disguise" because Pavlov's
work
does not falsify a non-associationist interpretation of the same
experiments, and so does not constitute a proper empirical test since it
provides no
differential prediction to test between an associationist and a
non-associationist interpretation)."
And then there's Skinner's pigeons, which may also be behaviouristic
fictions. A lot of AMERICAN (rather than Oxonian or British in general -- cfr.
Ryle's analytic behaviourism) is 'pragmatist' in origin even if strongly
influential in academic circles through the work of not only psychologists like
Watson and Skinner, but pragmatist philosophers like Peirce, and later
Morris, and Stevenson. The British pair Ogden & Richards are somewhere in the
middle.
McEvoy concludes:
"Popper is very clear that in his theory of knowledge, which is supported
by modern neurophysiology, there is no such thing as a "reflex arc" - there
is no such thing as a "conditioned reflex" or an "unconditioned reflex"."
While I have entitled this under "Can I have a pain in my tail?",
"Wittgenstein's Toothache" might have done. He was interested, as Wisdom later
was,
between ascriptions of pain in the first person:
i. I have a toothache.
and the third person
ii. He has a toothache.
And I think he would say, like Wisdom (the good Wisdom, not the bad one;
the author of "Other Minds") that (ii) triggers implicatures of
'behaviourism', or rather is to be interpreted in a totally different way,
'analogous',
still, with (i):
iii. He acts as _I_ would act if I _had_ a toothache.
There must be PhD dissertations written on Witters' toothache and it may do
to review the literature, critical or not.
McEvoy concludes:
"It is traditional empiricism that is blind to the truth that toothache as
an experience is not located in the tooth, no matter how vivid the
experience appears to suggest that the pain is located in the tooth."
Again, it is my feeling that Witters got the example from Moore. But these
people hardly cared for the HISTORY or philosophical problem of this or
that. The only attempt by Witters to trace something philosophically and
historically is his dubious reference to a rather inconsequential passage in
Augustine (some call him saint) on how we, or rather he, learned a language.
McEvoy finally notes:
"The clear way of thinking about these things is to disentangle the W1
aspects that go to create the experience of toothache from the W2 experience of
having a toothache, rather than confusedly thinking the W2 experience
means the toothache is located in W1 (which is what, uncritically, we are wont
to do)."
Indeed. Experience, to echo Oakeshott, belongs in W1, as consciousness,
while Wittgenstein's tooth (and its caries) belongs in W1.
Ordinary language here, _contra_ Austin and Grice ("How clever language
is!") perhaps misleads. Since in fact all aches are brainaches, but surely,
iii. I have a brainache.
would mislead as a report of
i. I have a toothache.
-- to a dentist, who may feel he has to direct the patient to a
neurologist. On top of that 'brainache' may be what Ryle calls ("the ghost in
the
machine") a category mistake, in that what is at stake is the brain (or
central nervous system, as McEvoy notes) linking the 'ache' or 'pain' to the
ache.
Grice looked for evolutionary evidence of survival in all things, and one
wonders why it is that things work like this. Perhaps in an amoeba (the
simplest living thing), all these distinctions don't make sense, but then,
amoebas not only don't have teeth, they don't have brains either.
Cheers,
Speranza
"Where do you want to spend eternity?" -- a stone in Wales.
----------------------------John Lennon.
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