Here
too however the expressions ‘directly aware
&
indirectly
aware
’ are
very || extremely misleading. What gives us
the idea that the person who feels pain is aware of an
object, as it were, sees
an object || it, whereas we are only
6
told that it
's
there but can't see it? It is the peculiar
fun
ction of the verbs li
ke
feeling, seeing etc. But before explaining
what I mean I must make a preliminary remark. For I know
that some of you will think this is the worst kind of
verbalism. So I must make a general remark about
grammar & reality. Roughly speaking the
relation of the grammar
to reality is that || of
expressions to the facts which they are
used to describe is that between the description
of methods & units of measurement & the measures of
objects measured by those methods & units. Now I
could describe the shape & size of this room by giving
its length
, breadth & height in feet & just as well by
giving them in metres. I could also give
them in microns. In a way therefore you might say that the
choice of the units
7
is arbitrary. But in a most
important sense it is not. It has a most important reason
lying both in the size & in the irregularity of shape & in the use we make of a room that we
don't measure its dimension in μ. or even in
mm. That is to say not only the
proposition which tells us
the result of measurement but also the description of the
method & unit of measurement tells us something about the
world
in which this measurement takes
place
. And in this very way the technique of use
of a word gives us an idea of
very general
truths about the world in which it is used; of truths
in fact which are so general that they don't strike
people (& I'm sorry to say philosophers
in particular || too).
And so I will turn to some
points in || features of the technique of use of
expressions like ‘
to feel || feeling
pain’. The first point is this
8
that this
verbal
expression is in the first person used to replace
an
expression of pain. So that if
some people say that ‘having pain’
in the end refers to pain behaviour we can
answer them, that ‘I have pain’ does not refer to
pain behaviour but
is a pain behaviour. It
corresponds to a cry of pain not to the statement I am crying.
But surely you distinguish between my pain behaviour when I
just behave
that way
& have no pain & my pain behaviour in the
opposite case. If you mean do I
recognise || realise || admit the fact that people sometimes behave as though they
had pain whereas they haven't, I
(certainly) do. But I wish to say
that you can't explain that difference by saying that if he
has pain there is behind his
expression || behaviour a
certain something present which he expresses by his behaviour.
If instead of ‘a certain something’ or some such
phrase
9
you're bold enough to say
‘pain’ then the statement becomes
tautologous. If you want to avoid the mention of pain
because this already presupposes
that we know
what is behind his expression then it doesn't help you to
say ‘a certain feeling’ or ‘a certain
something’ for how do you know that you are allowed to call
it a feeling or even a something.
For
the word
‘something
’ has a public meaning
if it means anything at all. And then
if you risk saying that he
has something you might
as well say all you
know || mean & say that he
has pain. The
point is that
a || an
essentially private object can't
justify
the use of a word, neither for the others
nor for
him. The private object does not only not enter the public
game but it can't enter a privat
e game
either. You can see this e.g.
if you replace the one private object
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which is to justify his use of a pain
expression by a series of different objects which he
has at
different times when he says he has pain. ‘But
surely the use of the word
‘pain
’ is based on the fact that he
‘recognises’ his private object as always
being the same on those occasions!’
What's he mean in this case by being the
‘same’, or ‘recognising’
,
neither he nor we have ever learnt to apply these words
to his private object. Supposing instead of
‘he recognises the object’ we said more cautiously
‘he believes he recogni
ses’ –
but then we ought to say that he believes that he believes he
recognises and so on ad inf.
In other words: if this object is as private as we want it
to be we have no reason to call it one object rather than 100 objects,
we have no reason to apply the word
11
‘object
’ at all & no more has
he.