The difference between the
propositions “I have pain” and “he
has pain” is not that of
“L.W. has pain” and “Smith
has pain”. Rather, it corresponds to the
difference between moaning and saying that someone moans.
‒ ‒ ‒ “But surely the word ‘I’
in ‘I have pains’ serves to distinguish me from
other people, because it is by the sign ‘I’ that
I distinguish saying that I have pain from saying that one of the
others has”. Imagine a language in which,
instead of “I found nobody in the
room”, one said “I found Mr.
Nobody in the room”. Imagine the
philosophical problems which would arise out of such a
notation. Some philosophers brought up in this
language would probably feel that they didn't like
the similarity of the expressions “Mr.
Nobody” and “Mr.
Smith”. When we feel that we wish to
abolish the “I” in “I have pain”,
one may say that we tend to make the verbal expression of pain
similar to the expression by moaning. ‒ ‒ ‒ We are
inclined to forget
116.
that it is the particular
use of a word only which gives the word its meaning. Let
us think of our old example for the use of words:
Someone is sent to the grocer with a slip of paper with the
words “five apples” written on it. The
use of the word
in practice is its meaning.
Imagine it were the usual thing that the objects around us
carried labels with words on them by means of which our speech
referred to the objects. Some of these words would be
proper names of the objects, others generic names, (like table,
chair, etc.), others again, names of colours,
names of shapes, etc.. That is to say, a
label would only have a meaning to us in so far as we made a
particular use of it. Now we could easily imagine
ourselves to be impressed by merely seeing a label on a thing, and
to forget that what makes these labels important is their
use. In this way we sometimes believe that we have named
something when we make a gesture of pointing and utter words like
“This is … ” (the formula of the
ostensive definition). We say we call something
“toothache”, and think that the word has received
a definite function in the dealings we carry out with language
when, under certain circumstances, we have pointed to our cheek and
said: “This is toothache”.
(Our idea is that when we point and the other “only
knows what we point to” he knows the use of the
word. And here we have in mind the special case when
“what we point to” is, say, a person and
“to know that I point to” means to see which of the
persons present I point to.)
117.