Grice's Pain In The Neck

Speranza

 

When Grice writes 'can', in "Can I have a pain in my tail?" he is being serious, almost neo-Wittgensteinian.

 

Cfr. Witters:

 

https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/at/wittgens.htm

 

Wittgenstein says:

 

"We begin with the question whether the toothache someone else has is the same as the toothache I have."

 

"Is his toothache merely outward behaviour?"

 

"Or is it that he has the same as I am having now but that I don't know it since I can only say of another person that he is manifesting certain behaviour?"

 

"A series of questions arises about personal experience."

 

"Isn't it thinkable that I have a toothache in someone else's tooth?"

 

"It might be argued that my having toothache requires my mouth."

 

"But the experience of my having toothache is the same wherever the tooth is that is aching, and whoever's mouth it is in."

 

"The locality of pain is not given by naming a possessor."

 

"Further, isn't it imaginable that I live all my life looking in a mirror, where I saw faces and did not know which was my face, nor how my mouth was distinguished from anyone else's?"

 

"If this were in fact the case, would I say I had toothache in my mouth?"

 

"In a mirror I could speak with someone else's mouth, in which case what would we call me?"

 

"Isn't it thinkable that I change my body and that I would have a feeling correlated with someone's else's raising his arm?"

 

"The grammar of "having toothache" is very different from that of "having a piece of chalk", as is also the grammar of "I have toothache" from "Moore has toothache"".

 

"The sense of "Moore has toothache" is given by the criterion for its truth."

 

"For a statement gets its sense from its verification."

 

"The use of the word "toothache" when I have toothache and when someone else has it belongs to different games."

 

"Since the criteria for "He has toothache" and "I have toothache" are so different, that is, since their verifications are of different sorts, I might seem to be denying that he has toothache."

 

"But I am not saying he really hasn't got it."

 

"Of course he has it."

 

"It isn't that he behaves as if he had it but really doesn't."

 

"For we have criteria for his really having it as against his simulating it."

 

"Nevertheless, it is felt that I should say that I do not know he has it."

 

"Suppose I say that when he has toothache he has what I have, except that I know it indirectly in his case and directly in mine."

 

"This is wrong."

 

"Judging that Moore has toothache is not like judging that Moore has money but I just can't see his billfold."

 

"Suppose it is held that I must judge indirectly since I can't feel Moore's ache."

 

"Now what sense is there to this?"

 

"And what sense is there to "I can feel my ache"?"

 

"It makes sense to say "His ache is worse than mine", but not to say "I feel my toothache" and "Two people can't have the same pain"."

 

"The question whether someone else, say, Moore, has what I have when I have toothache may be meaningless, though in an ordinary situation it might be a question of fact, and the answer, "Moore has not", a statement of fact."

 

"But the philosopher who says of someone else, "Moore has not got what I have", is not stating a fact."

 

"He is not saying that in fact someone else, say Moore, has not got toothache."

 

"It might be the case that someone else has it."

 

"And the statement that he has it has the meaning given it, that is, whatever sense is given by the criterion."

 

"The difficulty lies in the grammar of "having toothache"."

 

"Nonsense is produced by trying to express in a proposition something which belongs to the grammar of our language."

 

"By "I can't feel Moore's toothache" is meant that I can't try."

 

"It is the character of the logical cannot that one can't try."

 

"Of course this doesn't get you far, as you can ask whether you can try to try. In the arguments of idealists and realists somewhere there always occur the words "can", "cannot", "must"."

 

-- cfr. Grice: CAN I have a pain in my tail?

 

"Another way in which the grammars of "I have toothache" and "Moore has toothache" differ is that it does not make sense to say "I seem to have toothache", whereas it is sensible to say "Moore seems to have toothache"."

 

"The statements "I have toothache" and "Moore has toothache" have different verifications."

 

"But "verification" does not have the same meaning in the two cases. The verification of my having toothache is having it. It makes no sense for me to answer the question, "How do you know you have toothache?", by "I know it because I feel it"."

 

"In fact there is something wrong with the question; and the answer is absurd."

 

"Likewise the answer, "I know it by inspection"".

 

"The process of inspection is looking, not seeing."

 

"The statement, "I know it by looking", could be sensible, e.g., concentrating attention on one finger among several for a pain."

 

"But as we use the word "ache" it makes no sense to say that I look for it."

 

"I do not say I will find out whether I have toothache by tapping my teeth."

 

"Of "Moore has toothache" it is sensible to ask "How do you know?", and criteria can be given which cannot be given in one's own case."

 

"In one's own case it makes no sense to ask "How do I know?""

 

"It might be thought that since my saying "Moore seems to have toothache" is sensible but not my saying a similar thing of myself, I could then go on to say "This is so for him but not for me"."

 

"Is there then a private language I am referring to, which he cannot understand, and thus that he cannot understand my statement that I have toothache?"

 

"If this is so, it is not a matter of experience that he cannot. He is prevented from understanding, not because of a mental shortcoming but by a fact of grammar. If a thing is a priori impossible, it is excluded from language."

 

"How am I to persuade someone that "I feel my pain" does not make sense?"

 

"If he insists that it does he would probably say "I make it a rule that it makes sense"."

 

"Then I would raise many questions, for example, "Does it make sense to say I have toothache but don't feel it?"

 

"Suppose the reply was that it did."

 

"Then I could ask how one knows that one has it but does not feel it."

 

"Could one find this out by looking into a mirror and on finding a bad tooth know that one has a toothache?"

 

"To show what sense a statement makes requires saying how it can be verified and what can be done with it."

 

Just because a sentence is constructed after a model does not make it part of a game. We must provide a system of applications.

 

"I have remarked that it makes no sense to say "I seem to have toothache", which presupposes that it makes sense to say I can or cannot, doubt it."

 

"The use of the word "cannot" here is not at all like its use in "I cannot lift the scuttle"."

 

"This brings us to the question: What is the criterion for a sentence making sense?"

 

"To return to the differing grammars of "I have toothache" and "Moore has toothache", which show up in the fact that the statements have different verifications and also in the fact that it is sensible to ask, in the latter case, "How do I know this?", but not in the former."

 

"The solipsist is right in implying that these two are on different levels."

 

"I have said that we confuse "I have a piece of chalk" and "He has a piece of chalk" with "I have an ache" and "He has an ache"."

 

"In the case of the first pair the verifications are analogous, although not in the case of the second pair."

 

"The function "x has toothache" has various values: Moore, Russell, etc. But not I."

 

"I is in a class by itself."

 

"The word "I" does not refer to a possessor in sentences about having an experience, unlike its use in "I have a cigar"."

 

"We could have a language from which "I" is omitted from sentences describing a personal experience. {Instead of saying "I think" or "I have an ache" one might say "It thinks" (like "It rains"), and in place of "I have an ache", "There is an ache here"."

 

"Under certain circumstances one might be strongly tempted to do away with the simple use of "I"."

 

"We constantly judge a language from the standpoint of the language we are accustomed to, and hence we think we describe phenomena incompletely if we leave out personal pronouns."

 

"It is as though we had omitted pointing to something, since the word "I" seems to point to a person."

 

"But we can leave out the word "I" and still describe the phenomenon formerly described. It is not the case that certain changes in our symbolism are really omissions."

 

"Now if it is logically impossible for another person to have toothache, it is equally so for me to have toothache."

 

"To the person who says "Only I have real toothache" the reply should be: "If only you can have real toothache, there is no sense in saying 'Only I have real toothache'."

 

"Either you don't need 'I' or you don't need 'real' ... 'I' is no longer opposed to anything."

 

"You had much better say 'There is toothache'."

 

"The statement, "Only I have real toothache," either has a common-sense meaning, or, if it is a grammatical proposition, it is meant to be a statement of a rule."

 

"The solipsist wishes to say, "I should like to put, instead of the notation 'I have real toothache' 'There is toothache' "."

 

"What the solipsist wants is not a notation in which the ego has a monopoly, but one in which the ego vanishes."

 

"Were the solipsist to embody in his notation the restriction of the epithet "real" to what we should call his experiences and exclude "A has real toothache" (where A is not he), this would come to using "There is real toothache" instead of "Smith (the solipsist) has toothache"."

 

"Getting into the solipsistic mood means not using the word "I " in describing a personal experience."

 

"Acceptance of such a change is tempting] because the description of a sensation does not contain a reference to either a person or a sense organ."

 

"The locality of a pain has nothing to do with the person who has it: it is not given by naming a possessor. Nor is a body or an organ of sight necessary to the description of the visual field."

 

"The same applies to the description of an auditory sensation. The truth of the proposition, "The noise is approaching my right ear"" -- as he is facing the music, as it were, "does not require the existence of a physical ear; it is a description of an auditory experience, the experience being logically independent of the existence of my ears."

 

"We can talk of a toothache without there being any teeth."

 

"Pains have a space to move in, as do auditory experiences and visual data."

 

"It is imaginable that I should have toothache in Moore's tooth."

 

"The solipsist does not go through with a notation from which either "I" or "real" is deleted. He says "Only my experiences are real", or "Only I have real toothache", or "The only pain that is real is what I feel"."

 

"This provokes someone to object that surely his pain is real."

"Although the solipsist is right in treating "I have toothache" as being on a different level from "Moore has toothache", his statement that he has something that no one else has, and that of the person who denies it, are equally absurd."

 

"There are two kinds of use of the word "I" when it occurs in answer to the question "Who has toothache?"."

 

"For the most part the answer "I" is a sign coming from a certain body."

 

"If when people spoke, the sounds always came from a loudspeaker and the voices were alike, the word "I" would have no use at all: it would be absurd to say "I have toothache"."

 

"The speakers could not be recognised by it."

 

"Although there is a sense in which answering "I" to the question, "Who has toothache?", makes a reference to a body, even to this body of mine, my answer to the question whether I have toothache is not made by reference to any body."

 

"I have no need of a criterion."

 

"My body and the toothache are independent."

 

"Thus one answer to the question "Who?" is made by reference to a body, and another seems not to be, and to be of a different kind."

 

"The method of analysing dreams is not analogous to a method for finding the causes of stomach-ache."

 

"It is a confusion to say that a reason is a cause seen from the inside. A cause is not seen from within or from without. It is found by experiment. In enabling one to discover the reasons for laughter psychoanalysis provides merely a representation of processes."