Learning better from one’s own case ìåøéàï ÷øèñ úåàø ùðé ú.æ. 322039595 The starting point of this essay is the need that I felt to react to paragraph 315 of the Philosophical Investigations (henceforth PI): “Could someone understand the word ‘pain’ who had never felt pain? – Is experience to teach me whether this is so or not? And if we say ‘A man could not imagine pain without having sometime felt it – how do we know? How can it be decided whether this is so or not?” The two questions that Wittgenstein addresses are not identical; they would be identical only if “understanding the word ‘pain’ were equivalent to “imagining pain”. It is not my purpose to dwell on this issue, and I will only address the first question. Wittgenstein’s suggestion – at least as it appears to commentators such as Hacker INSERTNOTE and Finch INSSERTNOTE is that an affirmative answer to the two questions cannot be accommodated in the framework of Wittgenstein’s philosophy. And the reason why an affirmative answer is wrong is the same reason for which it is false, or meaningless, to claim that I learn and/or know the meaning of the word “pain” (and supposedly of any psychological word that cannot be interpreted as dispositional) from my own case. My purpose in this article is twofold. First, I will try to prove that Wittgenstein’s Private Language Argument (henceforth PLA) can be presented in such a way as to imply the rejection of First-Person Authority (FPA). If it is so interpreted, then it indeed has the consequence that one cannot learn the meaning of the word “pain” from one’s own case and that it is meaningless to suggest, as the presumptive interlocutor in PI 315 does, that understanding the word “pain” implies having at least once experienced pain. But, as I shall try to prove, the PLA by itself does not imply such a consequence. More specifically, the PLA can be interpreted in such a way that it is correct to say that one might know the meaning of the word “pain” only from one’s own case and that FPA is justified. In order for such an interpretation to be correct, one needs to pay attention to the fact that pain is, perhaps to an ever more important degree than game or tool, a family-resemblance concept. I. It is an almost undisputed fact INSERTNOTE that Wittgenstein accepted FPA and that this is the basis of his repeated denial that I can be said to know that I am in pain or, more generally, that I know that I experience certain mental states. This does not mean that I am ignorant of them, but rather that my self-ascriptions of mental states are not, and need not, be grounded. Since there is no ground for making such ascriptions, there can be no doubt, no discovery of any fact involved that sincere utterance “I am in pain”. But this raises the problem of third-person ascriptions of pain to other people. The usual Wittgensteinian answer is that it is on the basis of the behavior of other people that I am entitled to make such ascriptions. INSERT QUOTATION . The famous problem of asymmetry involves a simplistic picture, according to which I need criteria in order to ascribe pain to other people, and these criteria are furnished by their painful behaviour, whereas in my own case I am dispensed of the need of behavioural evidence. The reason why this picture is simplistic is that it leaves open the following situation: A person displays a typically painful behaviour. He groans and moans. Everybody who sees him from a distance considers that he is in pain. When they come closer to him (in order to alleviate his suffering), they surprisingly discover that he exclaims “I feel joy”. Doubts about his sincerity are excluded: his utterances “I feel joy” are accompanied by the characteristic air of sincerity. In such a situation, there is a patent conflict between first person authority and behavioral evidence: one must choose between (a) ascribing pain to such a person, based on behavioural evidence; and (b) ascribing joyfulness to him, based on FPA. The first option is a purely behavioristic one. If it is chosen, then the consequence is that, at least in some cases, one needs to doubt whether one experiences pain or not. One should, that is, learn from experience that one may be mistaken in self-ascriptions of mental states. One should even refrain from ascribing mental states to oneself until one receives the confirmation of other people. This is a consequence that I am sure Wittgenstein would not have accepted, on pain of embracing a full-blown behaviorism. On the other hand, if the second option is chosen, this would have the consequence that behavioural evidence is entirely dispensable from the (correct) ascription of mental states to other people. That is, in order to ascribe to a person a certain mental state, we would have to wait until someone explicitly avows a mental state. I am sure that Wittgenstein could not have accepted such a view either, and not only for the trivial reason that one might lie whether one is in pain or not. The reason is that the very concept of “pain-behaviour” would be empty: indeed, any kind of behaviour would be compatible with any kind of mental state. Such a situation would be not only unpractical, but, moreover, it would render impossible any kind of teaching the proper use of the words “I am in pain”. That is: it would be a miracle how children might learn that they are in pain, or that other persons are in pain: they could not be taught in which circumstances making such ascriptions is appropriate, since there would be no such circumstances and no correct use of the word ‘pain’. A Wittgensteinian solution to this puzzle is that there is an accord, or – if you want – a pre-established harmony between third-person ascriptions of mental states and first-person ones. This accord should obviously be interpreted as holding between potential third-person ascriptions and potential first-person ones. That is: whenever someone experiences the occurrence of a mental state M, it is true that s/he would have avowed it by “I experience M” and (most) other people would have ascribed to him/her mental state M. This accord seems to be one of those “very general facts of nature INSERTQUOTATION on which grammatical theses are based. The statement "There is a general agreement between first-person and third-person ascriptions of mental states” is a grammatical statement, and/or a philosophical thesis which, if it were advanced, should elicit the agreement of everybody INSERTQUOTATION. If so, then the gap between first- and third-person ascriptions of mental states is much less than it seemed: we could say, without much risk, that I am not of the opinion that the other person is in pain, since my attitude towards him/her is an attitude towards painful behaviour. This solution might work in most cases. It cannot serve, however, as a general solution. More specifically, it cannot work in the context of learning the appropriate use of the word pain. It might be replied that in the above remarks I neglected one of the most important aspects of Wittgenstein’s view of the mind, namely that first-person ascriptions of mental pain are not statements, but culturally elaborated expressions of the instinctive expressions of pain. They do not have, properly speaking, truth value and are just avowals, exclamations (Ausserungen). I believe however that this reply does not affect my point. First of all, I do not agree with the claim that all self-ascriptions of mental states have the status of exclamations (Ausserungen). The reason is a simple one: imagine that someone else says about me “L.K. is in pain”. I might reply “This is true: I am indeed in pain”. It is hard to see how anyone could hold that my reply lacks any definite truth-value and has merely the role of an exclamation. If one wanted to push the thesis that all self-ascriptions of mental states are not statements but only Ausserungen to its last logical consequences, one should admit that there is no possibility of agreement or of disagreement between first and third-person ascriptions. Such a possibility is however absurd: I do not see how anyone could deny the fact that the sentences “I have a toothache”, as pronounced by me, and the sentence “L.K. has a toothache”, as pronounced by someone else who observes my behaviour, do have the same content and “express the same proposition”. A more moderate solution could be that only some of the first-person ascriptions of mental states are avowals. This however would leave us with the requirement of specifying the precise criterion of distinguishing between those self-asriptions of mental states that have the status of exclamations and those who have the status of sentences. (Is the more calm tone of voice on which one utters the words “I am in pain” a decisive criterion for an utterance qualifying as a statement? Or is the utterance “I am in pain”, uttered on a calm tone of voice, simply a sign of a less intense form of pain than the same words uttered while crying and groaning?). The more fundamental problem is, in my opinion, that even if one could specify a criterion for distinguishing between first-person avowals and first-person statements, the very legitimacy of first-person avowals would be questioned or at least questionable. Why not give up the custom of avowing our experiences in the way we do? Once the existence of first-person statements of mental states is accepted, one cannot help but consider these self-ascriptions as an even more elaborate refinement of the instinctive reactions of expressing pain. Why, in other words, do we not try to discipline ourselves so as to ascribe mental states to us based on behavioural criteria and continue to avow them? Once it is accepted that some of our first-person ascriptions of (occurential) mental states have the full status of statements, one is obliged to answer why not all first-person ascriptions have this status. It could be added: it would be an evolutionary fruitful move to give up completely the avowals and substitute them with first-person statements, since this would make the communication of our mental states much easier. II. Why, after all, is experience not able to decide whether the statement that Wittgenstein considers in PI 315 is true or not? After all, we can imagine the following experiment: in a certain tribe, an experimenter observes the (behavioural or other) criteria of ascribing pain to members of the tribe. These criteria are well-established and undisputed at least for the experimenter. It is known by him/her when some people experience pain. Since the criteria for ascribing pain are undisputed, it is easy to isolate a group of people who have never felt pain – call them the insensitives. (One only needs enough patience and vigilance in order to observe such people from their birth till the present). Then each one of the insensitives is obliged to observe their neighbors and is asked whether the neighbour feels pain or not. If at least one of the insensitives whose capacity for recognizing pain is such tested gives appropriate answers, i.e. s/he recognizes pain and, respectively, the lack thereof exactly when the experimenter observes pain or lack thereof, then the statement that Wittgenstein considers in PI 315 is empirically false: it is possible for someone to understand the word “pain” even without having ever felt pain. If, on the other hand, all the insensitives give wrong answers, then the statement considered in PI 315 is corroborated, and this no matter if the insensitives claim that they understand what the word ‘pain’ means. Better to say: the statement “only someone who has felt pain understands the word ‘pain’ is” corroborated and, via it, the statement considered in PI 315 has chances to be true. (I do not want to distract attention from the modal operator present in the text of Wittgenstein, but – for reasons of simplicity – I do not pay attention to it in the present essay). Then, the experiment that was performed for a tribe will be performed to other tribes and so on. The above experiment comes so naturally to one’s mind that it seems almost impossible that Wittgenstein should not have considered it. Rather, we need to investigate what reasons Wittgenstein would have had for dismissing its relevance. A basic objection could be that the experiment was simplistic, since understanding the word ‘pain’ cannot be equated with accurately recognizing when pain is, or is not, felt. “Pain” (and any other psychological word) has a place in everyday conversation, perhaps in rituals that are learnt by rote. This is not, however, a serious objection since the experiment can be modified so as to include such situations: the insensitives will be verified in more complex language-games than the mere one of recognizing when someone feels pain. A more serious objection is the following: the above experiment assumes that someone, namely the experimenter, knows when other people feel pain, and, more generally, knows when pain, or the lack thereof, is to be ascribed to someone else. It is required that the experimenter should have felt pain – otherwise the statement considered in PI 315 would be trivially false. (The very person of the experimenter will be the proof of the experiment’s futility and of the fact that one can understand the word pain even without having ever felt pain). This possibility also paves the way to other ugly consequences. What authorizes the experimenter to claim that s/he understands the word “pain”? What authorizes his/her belief that s/he felt pain in the past? We would like to say: grounds need to come to an end somewhere. And the ground that might motivate the experimenter’s belief that s/he has felt pain in the past and that s/he can understand the word ‘pain’ are not necessarily more certain than the grounds that the insensitives might have in order to claim that they really understand what the word ‘pain’ means. In other words: when having to choose between believing the insensitives’ claim that they really understand what the word ‘pain’ means and having to believe the experimenter’s similar claim, it does not go without saying that one should believe the experimenter. The possibility that I suggest is somewhat similar to that of the inverted spectrum. How can we know that the labels of insensitive and potentially pain-experiencing are appropriately used by us when performing the experiment? Attention should be paid to the fact that the insensitives might claim that they are actually feeling pain and that they are the the only ones who actually master the word ‘pain’. The same point could be made in a transcendental way, if we preserve even a minimal place for compositionality. Since Wittgenstein wrote paragraph 315 of the PI and used the word ‘pain’, it must be assumed that he and his readers understand that paragraph and its words. This provides a beautiful reason why the statement “Only someone who has felt pain can understand the word ‘pain’” is a philosophical thesis which, if it were true, would be obvious and beyond any rational dispute: in order to verify whether it is false or true, one needs to be already in agreement with it. As far as I can think, the above skeptical reason is the only reason available to Wittgenstein in order to reject the appropriateness of the experiment I imagined above. But we have all reasons to be surprised that Wittgenstein considers such a skeptical possibility. A faithful Wittgensteinian, so it seems, should dismiss ab initio skeptical possibilities. But if so, the fact that Wittgenstein’s only reason for dismissing the “legitimacy” of such an experiment’s being able to provide an answer to the question that he raises in PI 315 should rather be a reason in favour of that experiment. (At least imagining such an experiment would help us towards elucidating the conceptual component implicit in it). Why should we care about the skeptical possibility that we systematically misunderstand what pain is? My opinion is therefore that the statement that the suggestion that experience could never teach us whether it is true or false that one cannot understand the word ‘pain’ unless one has sometime felt pain in the past is a wrong suggestion. Of course, experience alone cannot teach us to find an affirmative or a negative answer to that question: only experience cum the assumption that we usually understand the word ‘pain’ can do so. But this can be said about any experiment, mental or not. The suggestion that experience would be useless in our case is simply circular: all that the suggestion of dismissing the experiment I imagined above amounts to is, perhaps, that the assumption on which it depends, namely the assumption that we usually understand the word pain correctly, has somewhat of a less central place in our system of assumptions than the thesis that we want to prove. I mean: when an experiment is designed to confirm or disconfirm statement A, it is possible to dismiss it with the argument that its providing any answer to A depends on assumption B But this only makes sense if B itself is more debatable, more open to criticism than A. In our case, A is the thesis that “One can only understand the word ‘pain’ if one has sometime felt pain in the past” and B is the thesis that it is usually known what the word pain means. But there is no reason to suppose, in our case, that B is less central than A. That’s why I conclude that the question that Wittgenstein considers in PI 315 is, or at least can be interpreted as, an empirical question III In the following section of my essay, I will attempt to prove that something close to the thesis “Only someone who has felt pain in the past can understand the word pain” may be accepted as a grammatical statement. In order to see this, we only need to pay attention to the fact that pain is a family-resemblance concept. My argument is that the thesis that Wittgenstein considers in PI 315 appears as absurd only if pain is considered as a concept whose application is governed by clear-cut and strict boundaries, i.e. if it is possible to find a necessary and sufficient condition for some behaviour to be considered as painful behaviour. Let’s start with the following picture of pain. A child has hurt himself and cries. The parents tell him that s/he is feeling pain. Later on, when the child displays some form of painful behaviour, s/he remembers the first circumstance in which he felt pain Or perhaps the child first sees someone else displaying a painful behaviour and the parents tell him “That person feels pain”. From the point of view of Wittgenstein’s PLA, it is immaterial which one of the above two possibilities holds: the child does not learn the meaning of the word “pain” from his/her own case, since s/he would not be able to use such a word if s/he had not been taught by other people the meaning of “pain”. Later on, the child recognizes other people feeling pain, and can interpret some of his own past states as examples of “feeling pain”. Whether and when, and with what intensity, the child felt pain is completely immaterial for his grasping of the meaning of “pain”, since I want to argue that this picture of displaying and recognizing pain is a simplistic one. And the reason why it is simplistic is that it relies on a tacitly accepted pre-established harmony between displaying pain and ascribing pain to other people. If this simplistic picture were correct, then it would indeed be the case that it is possible to understand the word pain without having ever felt pain. If this simplistic picture were true, then it would be false that one learns a psychological word from one’s own case and, moreover, that one cannot improve one’s understanding of a psychological word from one’s own case. And the reason is that one would never use the word pain in circumstances in which other people would not ascribe pain to him. In order to realize this, one needs to remember the situation that I imagined in section I of this essay. It is possible for a person to exclaim “I feel pain” and the other persons to reply, based on behavioural evidence, “No, you don’t”. To assume that in such a situation the entourage must be right is to assume that there are clear-cut criteria for ascribing pain (or, for that matter, any other occurential mental state). Indeed, other people must respect some criteria in ascribing pain to someone, whereas an individual in isolation cannot, according to Wittgenstein, use such criteria. (It is possible, of course, to obey the criterium of one’s own behaviour, but this is not what happens most of the time. If one obeyed behavioural criteria in ascribing pain to oneself most of the time, one would lose the FPA – since criteria can only be public and to ascribe any mental state to oneself based on public criteria is to give up FPA). What I want to hold is that it is possible that such a conflict between FPA and third-person ascriptions is possible to occur, and it is possible that it can be solved in favour of the FPA. That is, it is possible that a person who claims that s/he is in pain despite behavioural evidence that s/he is in pain may convince other people of the genuineness of his/her pain-avowals. But the only conclusion that follows from such a case is that ascription of pain that is not based on the established criteria may be more accurate than ascription of pain based on established criteria. To dismiss a priori such a possibility means that pain has clear-cut criteria of ascription and that whatever does not conform to these criteria does not count as genuine pain. Obviously, the criteria can only be public (which does not mean that any ascription of pain based on public evidence obeys the established criteria). But since, as I claimed, it is possible that a third-person ascription be wrong and be proved wrong by a first-person avowal, it follows that it is possible for one to correctly use the word ‘pain’ based on one’s experience of pain. This is not to deny that the word ‘pain’ must be used according to some criteria, if it is to be used correctly. Rather, this means that one’s experience of pain may contribute to a better understanding of the word ‘pain’. To put it in other terms: there is a distinction between (1) learning a psychological word by private ostension (2) learning how to use a psychological word in virtue of experiencing a certain state. (1) is obviously false, if by it we mean that experiencing a mental state is enough for using the word ‘pain’ correctly. But (2) is not false, since it means that experiencing a mental state, even if unrecognized by others, may result in changing the criteria for pain-ascription. To deny (2) is to ignore the dynamical status of the criteria for pain ascription. On the other hand, to accept (2) as true is not to claim that the word ‘pain’ can be better used in the absence of criteria rather than according to criteria; it rather means that the criteria of using and understanding the word ‘pain’ may themselves evolve, change, and this change may be the result of experiences and self-ascriptions of pain that are not immediately so recognized. Therefore: someone who has felt pain and has a good memory of having felt pain may understand better the word ‘pain’, provided he can convince other people that he felt or feels pain. (Of course: memory plays a role in this context. Otherwise we would be pushed towards a more radical thesis: “Only someone who is feeling pain right now understands the word ‘pain’”).