Joseph Polanik wrote:
Cayuse wrote:Joseph Polanik wrote:in PI 403, there is a clear indication that self-referencing is used to accurately identify the stream of experiences in which a certain experience (pain) has arisen.In what manner does the following passage help your case?:PI 403: If I were to reserve the word "pain" solely for what I had hitherto called "my pain", and others "L.W.'s pain", I should do other people no injustice, so long as a notation were provided in which the loss of the word "pain" in other connexions were somehow supplied. Other people would still be pitied, treated by doctors and so on. It would, of course, be /no/ objection to this mode of expression to say: "But look here, other people have just the same as you!" But what should I gain from this new kind of account? Nothing. But after all neither does the solipsist /want/ any practical advantage when he advances his view!this passage indicates that converting an self-referencing expression like 'my pain' into the non self-referencing expression 'pain' makes one's language game indistinguishable from that of a solipsist.
I think this passage builds on the following: 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. 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": I can't see how this helps your case at all. ========================================== Manage Your AMR subscription: //www.freelists.org/list/wittrsamr For all your Wittrs needs: http://ludwig.squarespace.com/wittrslinks/
