[Wittrs] Re: On Ownership and Privacy
- From: Anna Boncompagni <anna.boncompagni@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: Wittrs@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Fri, 14 Aug 2009 11:18:09 +0200
Hello, Cayuse. I will try to express my point of view about this, which I
consider one of the most interesting and obscure points in LW's philosophy.
I think the key point is this (about pain, in your quotation of 304):
*It is not a something, but not a nothing either!*
As you said, he's not denying the existence of private states, but he's
affirming that there's something wrong in considering a private state as a
"something". If your interpretation is correct (and I agree with it too),
this means that only when we deal with public affairs, can we use the
grammar for the "somethings", for "things". Language "thingalizes" its
objects, it makes things of them, speaking of them objectively; and private
state are not (some)things.
What this all makes me think is, we can legitimately speak of private
states, i.e. USE them, but in different games. When we for example say "I
have an headache", we are not saying we possess it ("I have a sister" does
not mean we possess her as Stuart put it), we mean "I don't feel like doing
that, I need your help" etc., which are actions in a chain of interactions
with others. Remember that the verbal expression of pain is only a
sofistication of groaning. So, the verbal expression of private states are
sofistications of actions.
About the final quote, "My having consciousness...": It's not so easy to
interpret it according to the previous remarks. But if this idea is correct,
saying "I have consciusness" is a means to differentiate me from the tree or
the stone, and this may occurr in a conversation with someone who doubts my
intelligence; in this sense it is an action, too, the sofistication of an
action.
What is mostly intriguing, for me, is that since we are used at seeing
language only in its declarative aspect, everytime we use language to
describe, analyse, point at phenomenon that are not things, we make things
of them. But the question that arises is, then: is there a legitimate way of
speaking of private states - not of speaking WITH them, using them to groan
or to act, but speaking ABOUT them?
When we talk to a doctor or a psychologist, we do.
Probably the private language argument can help us to answer this question.
Anna
2009/8/13 Cayuse <z.z7@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
>
>
> 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. 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.
>
>
> *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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