The Southern Journal of Philosophy (1993) Vol. XXXI, No. 4

WITTGENSTEIN ON LANGUAGE-GAMES

LANGUAGE-GAMES OF VISUAL OBJECTS OF VISUAL SENSATIONS AND

Mark E. Weber Boston University

In Philosophical Investigations, 244, Wittgenstein asks the following:

How do words refer to sensations? How is the connexion between name and the thing named set up? This question is the same as: how does a human being learn the meaning of the names of sensations?

One answer is that we replace natural expressions and behaviors of pain, for example, with linguistic utterances containing the word “pain.” But not all sensations get named in this way, and Wittgenstein’s account of the connections between words and kinds of visual sensations, I intend to show in this essay, differs in important respects from his more familiar account of pain. According to Wittgenstein, there are no natural expressions, for instance, going together with having a red-impression which the utterance of “red” can replace. “Red,” in fact, is not initially applied to name a kind of visual impression, but is connected originally to the color of external, physical objects from within certain language-games (sets of concepts along with the practices in which these concepts are applied). Only later can “red” be applied so as to describe a visual impression. When this occurs, a new language-game can be said to come into existence: yet “red” does not now describe a new property in this new language-game, and the original connection between “red” and the physical color does not alter, but has a new application.’

For Wittgenstein, asking how the connection between “red” and a kind of visual sensation is established will provide insight, not only into how people happen to apply

Mark Weber recently received his Ph.D. from Boston University. He is currently teaching philosophy on a part-time basis at several colleges in Connecticut and pursuing research in Wittgenstein and in the philosophy of psychology.

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the sign “red,” but also into what visual sensations are, into their “logical characteristics” or “criteria of identity” (cf., PI 370; RPP II 43-45). (See the last page for a list of Wittgen- stein’s texts referred to by abbreviation. All numbers refer to paragraph numbers unless preceded by a “p.” for a page reference.) I n arguing that language-games of visual impressions are second-order, dependent for their existence upon primitive language-games concerning external, public objects and their properties, he thereby intends to perspic- uously represent the identity conditions of visual sensations. His conception of their identity is well summarized in this comment: “The sense-datum is an answer to the question: ‘How does it look to you?”’ (LPP p. 217). Far from impugn- ing the reality of visual sensations or analyzing them in some reductive, behaviorist fashion, this conception shows how visual sensations are at once dependent for their identity on who their experiencer is as well as on that creature’s practices and environment, while being partially independent in their identity from what is the case in the external world.

I. What are sensations? Typically, modern, precontemporary

philosophers have supposed tha t sensations are mental contents, entities that a mind directly experiences. Whether or not they are deemed to be “appearances” of a n extra- mental realm of objects and properties and/or effects caused by the latter, sensations are construed as just those entities that a mind can (incorrigibly) know by a n “immediate acquaintance.”2 Modern philosophers, then, have sought to determine what sensations are through introspection; for sensations just are what they appear to be to the inner eye. Here one might look inwards to observe whether the experience of a sensation differs phenomenologically from, for example, the “experience of a tendency” or the “expe- rience of believing,”3 or how the sensation of pain differs experientially from that of a color-impression.4

Against this approach, Wittgenstein claims that “[ilntro- spection can never lead to a definition. It can only lead to a psychological statement about the introspector” (RPP I 212). In order to introspect one’s sensations, one must already know what sensations are; introspection assumes rather than provides for their definition. Though not himself proposing to define sensations by necessary and sufficient conditions (cf., LPP p. 3) , Wittgenstein does wan t to investigate what sorts of posts our sensation-concepts

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possess and just how these posts compare to those taken up by other psychological concepts-an investigation that will uncover some of the key criteria of identity of sensations (“Essence is expressed in grammar” [PI 3711; and “grammar tells us what kind of object anything is” [PI 373]).5 Below, so as to provide a context for his remarks on visual sensations, I shall give a summary of Wittgenstein’s broad conclusions about the nature of sensations.

Wittgenstein finds that we apply our diverse concepts for sensations to express or describe certain kinds of “mental states” or “states of consciousness,” as opposed to kinds of mental dispositions (e.g., beliefs), moods (e.g., depression), abilities (e.g., understanding), or activities (e.g., calculating) (RPP 11 43-9, 63, 148, 173-5). As states of consciousness, sensations have the “logical characteristics” of being interruptible by breaks in consciousness and shifts in attention (RPP II 43-50; PI p. 59, footnote (a)), and of possessing genuine duration, measurable by a stopwatch, with a beginning, middle and end (RPP II 51). At the same time, Wittgenstein sharply demarcates sensations (together with mental images) off from other states of consciousness such as seeing, hearing, anger, grief, and fear. Unlike perceptual or emotional states, sensations are something we “experience” or “undergo” (RPP I 836); they are “contents” of experience (RPP I105 , 109). We undergo sensations when we perceive something; we may also experience a typical range of sensations when we are in a state of anger or fear (RPP II 63, 148). As undergoings, sensations have duration, intensity, and run a course (RPP 1836) ; “sensations have quantity, quality, mixture” (LPP p. 218). Finally, sensations are distinct from other undergoings such as mental visual images, not by a difference in the degree of their experienced vivacity (RPP II 63), but because only sensations, not images, inform us about the external world, and because images are “subject to the will” whereas sensations are not (RPPII63).6

The above conclusions do not readily lend themselves to a behaviorist reading of sensations. Besides failing to treat talk of sensations as shorthand for talk of observable behavior, Wittgenstein does not replace talk of consciously experienced sensations with talk of “sensory stimuli” described from a third person perspective. Nor, despite a strong tradition of interpretation to the contrary,7 does he appear to give a range of “behavioral criteria” for what sensations are. Why, then, does he deny that we can name sensations simply by associating signs with a range of

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sensations first picked out by a kind of focalization of attention?

11. The later Wittgenstein’s various positive accounts of how

we refer to sensations are intertwined with arguments, often called his “private language argument,” for why one seemingly obvious explanation cannot work. These argu- ments, in turn, do much to explain why we go about naming our sensations in the ways that we do. But though widely discussed, Wittgenstein’s arguments against this explana- tion have been diversely interpreted and commonly misun- derstood and thus I will briefly state what I take to be the target and nature of his criticisms of it.

Wittgenstein targets a hypothesis about how signs connect with sensations going something like this: one day a mind concentrates its attention upon a this it is immediately experiencing. Not unlike a primal Adam, it then decides to invent a sign, say “S,” and associate it with the this it has discriminated by focusing its attention. After connecting “S” to this, it now applies “S” by making such judgments as “ This is ‘ S ’ again,” verifying their truth by comparing the this to which it now attends to the that to which it attended in the past and labeled “S”. Such signs and judgments are utterly primitive in that their meaning is not dependent on other words, concepts, or practices (cf., PI 243).8

Not only does the above hypothesis fail to accord with how our words actually do come to refer to sensations (PI 256), Wittgenstein contends that it fails to explain how our words could do so. First, he argues that the practice of naming something inheres in a complex surrounding of (human) practices, aims, and environments. Only in the context of such surroundings can we understand an activity to be that of naming something, and only along with further surround- ings is what someone does the naming of a sensation and not, say, of a sort of rock. “A great deal of stage-setting is presupposed by our use of “pain,” showing what post this word takes up’’ (PI 256). The idea that someone someday simply attends to her “inner objects” and associates names with these “objects” ignores the necessity of such stage- setting; but without it there is no reason to suppose that she has named a sensation, or even a something that she has. “ ‘Has’ and ‘something’ also belong to our common lan- guage” (PI 261).

Second, even supposing that a person possesses the stage- setting necessary to name a sensation, Wittgenstein argues

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that the ceremony of attending to an “object of immediate acquaintance” and associating a name with it fails to set up a connection between a sign and a kind of sensation (PI 258). It is not that this ceremony fails because the person performing it later lacks any means of verifying such judgments as “This is the sensation ‘S’, again,”g or because there cannot be any public-checks on whether she experien- ces “S” again.10 Yes, the performer of this private ceremony cannot justify her claim that “This is ‘S’,” but not because her memory is unreliable,” or because nobody else can have direct access to what she experiences, but because “This is ‘S”’ has only the appearance of saying something signifi- cant. This judgment is in fact meaningless because “S” never really acquired any criteria of application in the first place (PI 258). The ceremony of focusing attention on a sensation and associating the sign “S” with it can at best lend to “S” only this criterion of application: “‘S’ names the sensation I attended to (at time ‘t’)”’ Providing a means of identifying sensations in general, this criterion could perhaps succeed in picking out a sensation-token by means of a temporal reference, but contains nothing capable of identifying a sensation-type. How could this criterion enable someone to answer “Is this ‘S’, or another sensation?” Because this is like that? What this? What that? Like in what way? “One would like to say: whatever is going to seem right to me is right. And that only means that here we can’t talk about ‘right”’ (PI 258). Someone might believe that this is “S” again, claiming that she remembers this to be like that, but such a belief or memory cannot serve as a criterion of identity for what “S” is (PI260; RPP I393).12

111. If people cannot name kinds of sensations through a

private ceremony of focusing their attention upon a this and associating a name with it, how do they do so?

Here is one possibility: words are connected with primitive, the natural, expressions of the sensation and used in their place. A child has hurt himself and he cries; and then adults talk to him and teach him exclamations and, later, sentences. They teach the child new pain-behavior. (PI 244)

Because Wittgenstein’s account of pain both shares certain significant features in common with his account of red and differs from it in other equally significant respects, I shall briefly highlight what I think are some of its pertinent facets.

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The word “pain,” argues Wittgenstein, comes to refer to a kind of sensation, not apart from, but precisely from within its application (cf., RPP I 308-9). Initially, “pain” is connected to the sensation of pain by our applying this word in place of primitive expressions of pain such as cries, groans, and moans (PI 244). Here we simply use “pain” to express what we feel and not to describe what goes on in our minds or bodies; nor, at this point, do we wield this word by either a loose or rigid set of criteria so as to identify and say something about our pain (PI 288). “What I do is not, of course, to identify my sensations by criteria: but to repeat a n expression’’ (PI 290). Yet there is not simply a use of the word “pain” here and no pain (cf., PI 370). The expressive application of “pain” connects this word to the sensation of pain (PI 244); and in doing so shows what gets named by this word. What then is pain’s identity? As a whole, the primitive expressive language-game of pain reveals that “pain” names, not the pain-expressions it replaces, but just that sensation that is expressed by them (RPP I313); “my spontaneous behaviour in certain situations is what is called the expression of pain” (RPP I 304). Thus pain is the sensation which is expressed by natural cries, moans, and winces-when these behaviors occur in certain circumstan- ces-as well as by such linguistic utterances as “I’m in pain” (RPP II 63). And because behaviors are pain-behaviors only together with certain surroundings, pain is also t h a t sensation caused by such things as burns, scrapes, injuries, illnesses, and blows (RPP I1 148-9).

To say that “pain” in its primitive language-game is uttered expressively, not descriptively, is simply to describe the “intent,” “aim,” or “purpose” of its utterer (RPP I I176 , 735; LW I 2 0 , 32, 37). In the development of the language- game, however, people have also made new applications of the word “pain,” for instance, with the intent ion of describing someone’s state of mind. Here someone might say “She is in great pain.” But someone might also describe their own state of mind in such sentences as “I feel a sharp, stabbing pain in my big toe” and even in “I’m in pain” (See, e.g., PI 11 pp. 188-9; RPP I470, 479; RPP II176; L W I 1-51).13 Such descriptions, true or false, a re embedded in the activities of observing, correcting oneself, and comparing ( L W I50-1). When applied descriptively, whether on the first or third persons, “pain” is now applied by means of criteria to refer to a sensation of such-and-such a n identity (cf., PI 290). These criteria make reference to the sensation typically expressed by such-and-such natural and learned behaviors

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and typically caused by such-and-such events.14 Thus, although now applied by criteria within descriptions, “pain” refers to the same kind of sensation as it does when applied without criteria from within pain-expressions.

A child who learns the first primitive verbal expressions for its own pain-and then begins (also) to talk about his past pains-can say one fine day: “When I get a pain the doctor comes.” Now has the word “pain” changed its meaning during this learning process?-Yes, its use has changed.

But doesn’t the word in the primitive expression and the word in the sentence refer to [ZauP] the same thing, the same feeling? To be sure; but not to [ZauP] the same technique. ( L W 1899)

Wittgenstein carefully distinguishes, therefore, between a more primitive state of the language-game of pain and its more evolved state (cf., PI 288-291). Though often overlooked, this distinction is central to Wittgenstein’s conception of the logic of pain because it is in the primitive language-game of pain, where “pain” is applied to express this experience in replacement of spontaneous pain-expressions, that the word “pain” comes to refer to the sensation of pain. As the language-game of pain develops, where a “new” language- game could be said to come into existence through new applications of “pain” in descriptions and so forth, “pain” continues to refer to the same sensation. The new applica- tions of “pain” are possible because the original semantic connection between “pain” and the sensation of pain is acted upon as a foundation.

IV.

While there exist a number of easily identifiable natural and learned behaviors and expressions of pain, there simply do not appear to be any natural behaviors and expressions that go together with having visual sensations-let alone which go together with having any one kind of visual sensation. Nor does Wittgenstein attempt to say that there are. In which case, in contrast to “pain” there is nothing for “red” to replace. How then do we initially connect “red” to a kind of color-impression?

In Investigating Wittgenstein, Merrill and Jaakko Hin- tikka correctly observe that, according to Wittgenstein, the primitive language-game of replacing na tu ra l pain- expressions with linguistic utterances containing “pain” sets up the link between “pain” and the sensation that is then acted upon as a foundation when “pain” is later applied in new ways in new language-games.l5 But they also note that

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Wittgenstein does not attempt to account for the connection between “red” and the color-impression in the same way.16 Unfortunately, when they attempt to specify just how, for Wittgenstein, color-words are connected to color-impressions, they draw this rather obscure conclusion:

According to Wittgenstein, people’s colour-vocabulary is parallel with their vocabulary for sensations. An important part of this parallelism is that in the primary language-games with colour- terms one cannot drive a wedge between physical and phenomeno- logical colour attributions.17

In addition, they contend that, for Wittgenstein, physical- colors are inseparable from color-impressions and that, because both kinds of vocabulary belong to the same primitive language-games, the uses of color-words and words for col or-sensations can be equally incorrigible.18

This interpretation is opaque and misleading. Though Merrill and Jaakko Hintikka rightly distinguish Wittgen- stein’s account of visual-impressions from his account of pain, they overlook that his account of how “red” connects up with visual impressions is similar to his account of pain precisely because it too relies on a distinction between primitive and second-order language-games. In the next sections I will show that Wittgenstein actually holds to the following theses: (1) Words such as “red” do not originally belong to language-games that express or describe color- impressions, but initially belong to language-games that describe and organize the colors of physical objects. (2) Language-games concerning the colors of physical objects are both distinct and separable from language-games concerning color-impressions; for the former can exist without the latter, while the latter cannot exist without the former. (3) The language-games that concern the colors of physical objects are primitive to, not parallel with, second- order language-games concerning color-impressions: the original language-game is “This is red” not “This looks red” (RPP I 896). (4) While primitive language-games of colored objects and second-order language-games of color- impressions are both in some sense “incorrigible,” they are incorrigible in distinct ways. ( 5 ) A wedge can be driven between the attribution of a color to a n object and the description of one’s sense-impression just in t ha t the following sort of utterance is both coherent and central to language-games of color-impressions: “This impresses me as red, even though it is really orange.’’

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V. There do exist passages that, at a glance, may suggest that

the language- games of colored objects and language-games of color-impressions are essentially one and the same. Take this remark:

When he first learns the names of colours-what is taught him? Well he learns, e.g., to call out “red” on seeing something red.- But is that a correct description; or ought it to have gone: “He learns to call ‘red’ what we too call ‘red”’? Both descriptions are right. (RPP IZ 312) If both descriptions are correct, then it might appear that there is little difference between saying “red” when one has a red-impression and calling “red” a n object that we too label “red.” However this passage specifically states that one learns to call out “red” when one sees something red-a red object. The point here is that when we teach a child to use “red” we teach it at once to call “red” what we call “red,” and to see these objects as red. In either case the child taught this language-game gains a capacity to describe and organize things in the world, not to describe color- impressions, “ S O he can now bring something red at an order; or arrange objects according to a colour.” Now Wittgenstein grants that “someone might be taught colour- vocabulary by being made to look at white objects through coloured spectacles.” However, by this last, a child is still taught a capacity to organize objects according to a color, albeit indirectly (RPP I1 312). This example of teaching a child color-names via colored spectacles appears first (to my knowledge) in PE p. 164, as a n example of indirectly teaching the meaning of a color-name-the direct way being to point to a color-sample. That Wittgenstein does not take this distinction between directly and indirectly teaching someone color-names to be a distinction between doing so by means of colored-objects and doing so by means of color- impressions is clearly brought out in LPP p. 139: But you explain ‘red’ by ostensive definition. This consists not in pointing to the impression red, but, to something that is red. Here one is liable to make a peculiar mistake. It is that the physical object is not essential in the explanation, so that it would be sufficient if you had the impression in some other way than having the object pointed to. This is a private explanation. “At least it helps me.” But this is not a n explanation: a magic lantern will do. But a red-impression will not do.

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But why can’t we teach a child color-vocabulary by first teaching her to report on her color-impressions? Because we can only teach the child the use or meaning of “red,” for example, by means of publically accessible exemplars of red. The exemplar of red someone might point to in teaching a child the meaning of “red,” could in fact become part of the language-game so that we could use it as a means of representing that something is red. “What color is that?”- “This.”-here someone could hold up a sample of red (cf., PI 16,50). However, whether or not a color-sample becomes part of the language-game of red in this way, agreement on what sorts of everyday things are red is necessary to lend to “red” its meaning (cf., PI 241-2). For “red” to refer to the color red there must of course be agreement on this sign’s definition- say, that it refers to the kind of color at which someone points. But ostensive definition fails to establish just what kind of color “red” names when such ostensive definition is severed from the application of “red.” Even if the purpose of ostension is understood, and even if its interpretation is settled so that it is known that “red” names the kind of color pointed at, by itself ostension does not determine just how we are to proceed with the use of “red” amongst all the possible ways of going on. The use of “red” is anchored only when there is also agreement in judgment: accord on when ‘‘x is red” is true and when it is false-at least in certain paradigmatic instances-lends truth-conditions to this proposition and helps to show just what sort of color “red” names. But why couldn’t a person at first learn to osten- sively associate “red” with a kind of color-impression, agreeing with herself on when “This impresses me as red” is true, and when false? Well, let’s pretend that she could. Would she have then learned our concept of red? The criteria for whether someone has the concept of red include whether she can discriminate red from blue objects, bring a red apple and not a green one on command, organize objects by their red color, and state correctly an object’s color. If she “agrees” with herself about when something strikes her as red, yet fails to satisfy such criteria, she cannot be said to have acquired our concept of red. Thus, whether the things she calls “red” also “resemble” her private red-impression is irrelevant to whether she understands what “red” means (cf., PI 293).

Then, too, questions should be raised about how the above person has identified her red-impressions in the first place. Now Wittgenstein supposes tha t someone, after having learned how to name things, and what sensations are, can

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proceed to privately name one of her sensations, agreeing with herself in both definition and judgment. She can do so by applying a sign to refer to a sensation of such-and-such a criterion of identity, for instance: “‘S’ names the sensation I get when I crook my finger SO” (RPP I390-3). She can also identify kinds of sensations by means of their intensity, oddity, location, constancy, change, strength, relative to other sensations ( L W I 398-401; RPP I 855-6). The problem lies in what the types of sensations identified in this last manner have to do with the color red. Now it might be of psychological interest if she notices that her impression of red is always very intense and constant. But even if everyone were to find this to be the case, presupposed would be that we already know what “red” means since we do not apply “red” simply so as to describe the intensity and constancy of sensations. Of course she could identify a private exemplar of red in this way: “It is the sensation I get when I look at something that is red.” But now she must already be able to say whether a n object is red and the criterion for whether she has a red-impression again would be simply whether she is looking at a red object again. Later we shall see t h a t Wittgenstein denies that someone h a s a red- impression if and only if one is looking at something that is really red; for central to the language-game of color- impressions is that we might say “This impresses me as red, even though it is really green. . . .” He shall argue, nonethe- less, that a child can be taught the language-game of “This looks red” only after it has acquired the language-game of “This is red.”

The above should enable us also to grasp why PI 273 only appears to conflate language-games of colored-objects and language-games of color-impressions. In PI 273 Wittgenstein asks whether “red” designates [ bezeichnen] something that confronts everyone and that we should really have another word altogether to designate a private sensation of red, or whether “red” designates both something known to everyone and additionally something known only by each person. Wittgenstein rejects both options. Isn’t he therefore implying that there is no real difference between saying that a chair is red and saying that one has a n impression of a red chair? Not at all. In PI 277 Wittgenstein asks himself:

But how is it even possible for us to be tempted to think that we use a word to mean at one time the colour known to everyone- and at another the ‘visual impression’ which I am getting now? How can there be so much as a temptation here?

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Though these questions appear to ridicule any distinction between publicly observed colors and private impressions, they are in fact serious questions Wittgenstein feels com- pelled to answer:

I don’t turn the same kind of attention on the colour in the two cases. When I mean the colour impression that (as I should like to say) belongs to me alone I immerse myself in the colour-rather like when I ‘cannot get my fill of a colour.’ Hence it is easier to produce this experience when one is looking at a bright colour, or a t a n impressive colour-scheme. (277)

Thus the mistaken idea that we use “red” sometimes to refer to a color known to everyone and sometimes to refer to a “private exemplar” tempts us because there are real differences in the way we attend to color (See PI 398-401).

Colour, sound, taste, temperature, all have a subjective and a n objective side to them. And that undoubtedly means that sometimes they show what I feel, and sometimes they describe the external world. ( L W 1396)

Wittgenstein denies that the word “red” designates both a publicly observable property of physical objects and a privately observable mental impression, not because there is no difference between describing the color of things and describing a visual impression, but because “red” does not refer to a different property in these distinct practices. Though applied differently, “red” continues to be satisfied by the same property-a color of physical objects. We may more clearly understand why this is so by turning once to Wittgenstein’s views on how visual impressions, which are had by subjects when they visually perceive (physical) objects, articulate into kinds.

VI. According to what is often labeled the “sense-data theory

of perception,” at least when combined with realism rather than phenomenalism, we only directly perceive a range of mental sense-data from which we must infer to the existence of physical objects and their properties (either by inferring from the sense-datum as a mental representation to what it represents, or by inferring from the sense-datum as an effect to its extra-mental cause). On this sort of theory, perception is a relation between a perceiver and something perceived. However, the perceived is a mental rather than physical object. In turn, the visual impressions that are the objects of perception articulate into kinds in terms of what they are

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thought to be about. In contrast to this sense-data theory, Wittgenstein asserts that our everyday claims to see such things as a sad face are perfectly in order, and he denies that we only really see sense-data, inferring our way to things in the world. Visual perception is a directed state of conscious- ness whose object is the extra-mental state of affairs that visually appears to the perceiver. Yet he does not try to “prove” that we do see sad faces, and he refuses to theorize about what we must see. If he finds our claims about seeing things in the world unproblematic, this finding does not rest upon a theory about what our sensory apparatus allows us to sense, or on a theory about what persons are able to infallibly see, but hinges upon his understanding of how “seeing” and “sensation” function in our language-games.

Certainly I too say that I see the glance that you throw someone else. And if someone wanted to correct me and say I don’t really see it, I should hold this to be a piece of stupidity.

On the other hand I have not admitted anything with my way of putting it, and I contradict anyone who tells me I see the eye’s glance ‘just as’ I see its form and colour.

For ‘naive language,’ that’s to say our naif, normal, way of expressing ourselves, does not contain any theory of seeing-it shews you, not any theory, but only a concept of seeing. (RPP I 1101)

Visual impressions, we observed in section I, are what a subject experiences when she visually perceives something. But while Wittgenstein finds that visual impressions bear some similarity to pictures, they differ from pictures by not being observable objects (PI II p. 196). “What I really want to say is that by looking I do not observe my visual impression, but rather whatever I am looking at” ( L W 1619). In looking at a coin, a subject does not observe her impressions of it, but the coin. Her impressions of the coin are how the coin, that she sees, looks to her. She cannot gain perspectives on her impressions of the coin as she can on the coin, and her impressions of the coin do not exist when she is not observing the coin (RPP II 95). Upon changing her perspective, the coin that she sees does not alter, rather how it looks to her alters. One can’t look at the impression, that is why it is not an object. (Grammatically.) For one doesn’t look at the object to alter it. (That is really what people mean when they say that objects exist ‘independently’ of us.) (RPP I1085)

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I do not propose here to enter into Wittgenstein’s criticisms of the sense-data theory of perception, or into his treatment of the “problem of error” which is often thought to make the adoption of a sense-data (or adverbial) theory necessary. Rather I want to highlight a presupposition of the sense-data theory, rejected by Wittgenstein, which goes like this: we can discriminate amongst types of visual impressions, articulat- ing them into kinds, apart from and prior to the discrimi- nation and articulation into kinds of extra-mental objects and their properties. This must be so on the sense-data theory because we are thought to only perceive a range of visual impressions and we must infer from what these impressions are to what is the case in the world. How visual impressions, as observable mental objects, are to be distin- guished from each other and individuated into kinds is rarely explained. Perhaps this is accomplished by focusing attention upon a sense-datum, noticing its similarities to past sense-data, and recognizing whether it is of the same type as these others. Perhaps a subject can simply recognize that a visual impression is a red one just in the way that we can look at a picture and recognize that it depicts a horse.

In section I1 we saw Wittgenstein contend that the ceremony of focusing attention upon a sensation-token fails to pick out a sensation-type even if the sensation-token attended to is assigned a name and new sensation-tokens are also designated by this name just if they are similar to it. For even if the person performing this ritual is already sufficiently part of a linguistic community to identify something as a sensation, he has no principled way of determining (correctly) whether a new sensation-token is similar to the past one: left begging are answers to such questions as “Similar in what way?” and “Similar to what?” In addition, Wittgenstein argues tha t if visual impressions are how things visually look or appear to a subject, a subject can discriminate amongst the different ways things can appear to him only after he has learned to discriminate amongst what things are. Concepts about objective properties are primitive semantic foundations for concepts about how things appear.

Wittgenstein makes the following distinction: “The language-game ‘What is that?’-‘ A chair.’-is not the same as ‘What do you take that for?’-‘It might be a chair.’” (RPP II 318). But to bring in the concept of something only seeming to be a chair, he contends, is in fact to give old language-games, where the concept of chair is already in place, a “new joint” (RPP II 318). It introduces a new joint

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because “I seem to see a chair” or “It seems to be a chair” can make sense only on a foundation of practice where such reservations do not occur. In the beginning we do not teach the child “It’s probably a chair,” but “That’s a chair.” Don’t fancy for a moment that the word “probably” is left out because it is still too difficult for the child to understand, tha t things are simplified for the child; tha t therefore he is taught something not strictly right (RPP II 319).

In more primitive language-games, where someone might say “Did you see my chair?” “That is a chair,” “Bring me the red chair,” or “Don’t sit in my chair,” a child learns the conditions under which she sees a chair; the conditions under which “This is a chair” is true; and so forth. If she has not learned these sorts of conditions, the child cannot be said to have acquired the concept of seeing a chair or of what a chair is. But the point here is to instill a concept, not infallible beliefs: such training teaches the child how to use the word “chair” as well as the function of chairs and what they can look like (cf., PI 241-2). Only after acquiring the concept of chair in such practices as seeing chairs, identifying chairs, sitting on chairs, describing chairs, and bringing chairs, can a child then learn to say “This seems to be a chair” or even “I know that it’s a chair, for . . . .” It is not thereby taught a “false certainty” for the child taught to say “That is a chair” learns to do something and there is here no question of certainty or uncertainty (RPP 11 341).

But couldn’t an exceptionally clever child be taught right off the doubtfulness of all things? Certainly we could teach her to utter the words “That is probably a chair.” Yet could she really have learned in this to doubt the existence of all things? How could such a child learn “Is it also really a chair?” (RPP 11 336) The language-game “That is probably a chair” starts in disillusion, the possibility of doubt, “and can the first a t t i tude be directed towards a possible disillusion?” (RPP 11 340) Though the imagined child says “That is probably a chair” she has not in fact learned the language-game of doubt (RPP 11 342); for doubt itself belongs to a language-game, and in order that she can doubt she must first have learned to do certain things-one can miscalculate only if one knows how to calculate (RPP I1 343). If she doubts that something is a chair, she might look at it, and feel it on all sides. Yet the simple performance of these actions does not entail that one doubts something; for a monkey could do all of this and yet not doubt (RPP 11 344).

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Certain primitive behavior may develop into doubting-for example, an” investigating. But doubt obtains only if certain typical antecedents and consequences are present (RPP 11 345): “Only someone acquainted with such a thing as a ‘reason for doubt’ can doubt” (RPP I1 344). Doubt hangs together with awareness of the possibility of mistake, and mistake is vacuous apart from familiarity with the sorts of errors one can make; the circumstances in which errors are likely to occur; the typical consequences of error; and the methods of determining whether error has occured.19

If Wittgenstein, as I have claimed, is arguing that the discrimination, recognition, and identification of visual impressions requires the prior discrimination, recognition, and identification of the properties of visual objects, strictly he has only shown that concepts concerning what things might be rest upon the foundation of concepts concerning what things are. But not all reports about how something looks visually involve doubts about what that something really is, or forward tentative hypotheses about what it might be. “It looks like a coin, but is only a slug” or “the coin looks oval from here” simply express how something appears visually. Granted, a person must have acquired considerable linguistic expertise in order to describe what he sees, let alone how what he sees looks to him, but does that imply that a person cannot discriminate and recognize how things look to him apart from the discrimination and recognition of visual objects and their properties? After all, a creature does not need linguistic abilities to discriminate amongst visual objects; nor are such skills necessary for the recognition of a visual object. A prelinguistic infant can discriminate its parents from surrounding household objects a n d perhaps visually recognize them. The temptation persists to suppose that though the acquisition of concepts and skills is requisite for someone to describe what he sees as a picture of a standing horse, for example, both this person and a person without the concepts of standing or horse, or without the ability to visually recognize a horse, share the same visual impression.

One of Wittgenstein’s goals in his numerous remarks on “seeing-as” or “seeing a n aspect” is to combat just this temptation. Although I cannot enter here into these many investigations, I should note the following. It is h is contention that to see, for instance, a picture of a duck- rabbit, now as a picture of a duck, now as a picture of a rabbit, is not to have the same impression in each case that one now interprets as being of a duck, now interprets as

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being of a rabbit; rather it is for the picture that one sees to now impress one as a picture of a duck, now impress one as a picture of a rabbit (See, e.g., RPP I 1-33; LW I516-7). Here a person’s acquired concepts of duck and rabbit (involving at least visual skills) form how the picture impresses him, what he sees it as (RPP IlO29-30). And the linguistic description someone gives of his impression is not an indirect description or interpretation, but is its primary expression (RPP I 19-20).20

In a similar vein, Wittgenstein argues that it makes no sense to attribute types of visual impressions to subjects who do not possess certain capacities to discriminate and recognize visual objects and their properties, even where there is no change in how something impresses this subject. Visual impressions are mental states rather than actions or abilities: yet, a person’s conceptual abilities shape how perceived objects impress that person.

Why does it seem so hard to separate doing from expe- rience? ( L W 1585)

It’s as if doing and the impression did not happen side by side, but as if doing shaped the impression ( L W I586).

It is only if someone can do, has learnt, is master of, such-and- such, that it makes sense to say he has experienced as certain something. ( L W I734; PI II p. 209)

Mastery of certain conceptual and visual abilities is required for a person to see (on one sense of “see”) and not just describe a picture as a picture of a standing horse (cf., RPP I869-874). In order to see handwriting as childish someone needs to know a great deal and have seen a lot of hand- writing, besides having acquired the concept of childish which is far from being a purely visual capacity ( L W I 737). Less might be required in order to experience impressions of colors and shapes. Even if a child learns “This is red” prior to “This looks red,” it can make sense in certain circumstan- ces to say that something impresses a child as red before it has mastered the language-game of “This looks red” and perhaps even before it is capable of saying what color an object is. But what sense would this make if the child shows no ability to visually discriminate red from green objects, or cannot recognize objects by their color? A minimum requirement for an object to strike a child as red, for the child to see it as red, is for the child to be able to take it as red (Cf., RPP I26-28, 977).

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VII.

A mind cannot internally point a t and pick out a visual sensation and pin a label on it. Nor can a person recognize and identify how things visually impress him apart from having learned to recognize and identify what is the case. “The words which describe what we see are properties of things. We don’t learn their meaning in connection with the concept of ‘inner seeing”’ (RPP 11 68). Words like “red” and “square” are not initially used to describe visual sensations, but belong to language-games where we manipulate, des- cribe, and organize physical objects by their color and shape (RPP 11 312-3). How then can we go about describing our visual impressions?

Not in the way that we go about describing physical objects (RPP 11099):

The description of the experience [sensation] doesn’t describe an object. It can serve the description of an object. And this object is sometimes the one that one is looking at, and sometimes (photo- graphy) not. The impression-one would like to say-is not an object. (RPP 11081, corrected)21

To describe a n object, one might look a t it, notice its color a n d shape, consider its function, beauty, or physical properties. To describe one’s visual-impressions, one does something different, something derivative on the description of objects. “We learn to describe objects, and thereby, in another sense, our sensations” (RPP 11082). To “observe” a visual-impression so as to describe it, one does not “look inward” to spy out some private object, rather one reflects on how a n object in the world appears to one, regardless perhaps, of what that object is. “The sense-datum is a n answer to the question: ‘How does it look to you?’” (LPP p. 217). Thus visual impressions are similar to pictures, not because they are mental pictures that a mind sees, but because to report on how something impresses one is to report on how one pictures it. In this way the description of one’s visual-impression is intimately connected to the description of an object or quality without being identical to the latter (cf., RPP 11092).

Language-games of colored-objects are therefore distinct from language-games of visual impressions. By extending the applications of words originally inhering in language- games concerning the properties of physical things, .we can learn to express and describe our visual impressions from within new language-games. “The red visual impression is

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a new concept” (RPP II 316), whose nexus is a new practice distinct from tha t of attributing colors to objects; one reflecting a different way of attending to color, concerning how something strikes one. “The language-game we teach him then is: “It looks to me . . . , it looks to you . . . .” In the first language-game a person does not occur as perceiv- ing subject” (RPP II 317). What distinguishes this view from either of the positions Wittgenstein rejects in PI 273 is that he does not find that “red” is used in the language-game of color-impressions to describe a different property than it does in the language-game of colored-objects (RPP I 6 9 4 , PE p. 190). “Red,” in both language-games, refers to a property of physical objects, a kind of color. It is because it refers to this property, because we can point to exemplars of red things, that we can also use “red” to express how something we see strikes us, regardless of how it strikes another (RPP II 330). Thus, while the “meaning” of “red” in both of these language-games remains the same in that “red” continues to refer to the same property, its “meaning” in language- games of physical colors also differs from its meaning in the language-game of visual sensations in that “red” is applied toward distinct ends.22

Thus, in addition to being distinct, the language-games of color-impressions and colored-objects are not parallel: the language-game of color-impressions is derivative on the primitive language-game of colored-objects. What differen- tiates the language-game of organizing objects according to a color from the language-game “How does it strike you?” asks Wittgenstein (RPP II 312). The language-game of “How does it strike you?’’ is only taught to a child through its having learned to attribute colors to objects. But why doesn’t one teach a child the language-game “It looks red to me” from the first? Because it is not yet able to understand the rather fine distinction between seeming and being?” (RPP II 315). No, because before it can recognize and identify a red object no such distinction is possible. Only when it can say that the apple is red, or bring a red and not a green apple, can the child learn what it would be for the apple to seem red or some other color. It is as if the: . . . visual sensation were a new object which the child gets to know, after he has learned the first primitive language-games with visual observations. “It looks red to me.”-and “And what is red like?”- “Like this.” Here the right paradigm must be pointed to.” (RPP 11 330)

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“That looks red” is a spontaneous expression. But such expressions can be spontaneous only when one can recognize and identify something as red (RPP 11 326).

VIII.

Language-games of attributing colors to objects are also primitive in relation to other language-games in which persons interact with the world, although many language- games share this status. That a particular language-game is “primitive” is not a proposition of natural history: people did not have to first say “that is a red chair” and then only later say “that seems red to me”; a primitive language-game could have arisen simultaneously with a nonprimitive one. Language-games are static neither in character nor status (See, RPP I45-49, RPP II 392-442). As Wittgenstein writes in On Certainty: “Perhaps it was once disputed. But perhaps, for unthinkable ages, it has belonged to the Scaffolding of our thoughts” (OC 211). Certain language- games are primitive because they act as foundations for others: “Something must be taught as a foundation” (OC 449). They are the semantic foundations for second-order language-games in that the applications of words in primitive language-games forge the links between language and the world that are later drawn upon and made use of in new ways within new language-games. Agreement on the truth of propositions generated in primitive language-games builds up a scaffolding of meaning upon which new concepts and new techniques of applying old concepts can hang. Such primitive language-games, the expression and extension of primitive behavior, can also provide epistemic foundations for second-order language-games-though given certain enlightenment projects this suggestion may be perversely misleading. Justification, the giving of reasons and evidence, must eventually come to a n end. But the foundations for justification are not a set of propositions perceived to be self- evident. These grounds are not to be found in our seeing things to be such, but in our acting in a certain way (OC 204).

A primitive language-game, then, is a fundamental “this is how we do things.” As it constitutes the very techniques whereby we apply our terms, many of the utterances we make in it are prior to any doubt or certainty that any x is F. (I say “many” because it would be grossly simplistic to assert that all or even most color-attributions, for example, including those made by fully linguistic adults, are before the pale of knowledge and doubt.) If language-games of colored

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objects are primitive, then there is little sense to saying that one “knows,” “doubts,” or has “made sure” that “the sky is blue” (taking this proposition to be a paradigm fixing the meaning of “blue”). “Doubting and non-doubting behaviour. There is the first only if there is the second” (OC 354). In this way primitive language-games of colored objects are “incorrigible”: not because they contain grounded or indubitable knowledge but because they are the precondi- tions for error, doubt, and knowledge.

Language-games of color-impressions are “incorrigible” in a different way. Wittgenstein seems to think that such reports as “It looks red to me,” if truthfully uttered by a linguistically competent adult, are not sensibly doubted and that it would not make sense to say either “I know” or “I doubt that it appears red to me” (cf., L W I 187). Yet, “It looks red to me” is not a primitive utterance we must treat as “certain” so as to lend structure to other utterances. Doubts about how things appear to me, regardless of what they really are, would not cast into indeterminacy the sense of many of my other beliefs. Rather, I cannot doubt how something appears to me, Wittgenstein seems to believe, because my concern is solely with how something seems to be-regardless of its real color and while recognizing that others may find that it seems different to them. Rather than providing for a distinction between seeming and being, “It looks red to me” rests on this distinction: if truthful, “It looks red to me” is “indisputable” (RPP 1693-4).

IX. Merrill and Jaakko Hintikka have claimed that the later

Wittgenstein does not deny that “phenomenological objects” like sensations exist, but merely argues that we can only talk about them by means of a public physical object language. They add that “in replacing a phenomenological basis language by a physicalistic one Wittgenstein did not want to alter the ontological status of phenomenological objects, including private experiences.”23 There is truth in this view. Nonetheless, Wittgenstein’s investigations into how our words connect to sensations do shape substantive views on their ontology.

When it is thought that a mind can identify its sensations simply by focusing attention on these “objects of immediate acquaintance,” or when it is thought tha t a mind can recognize what a sense-impression is “about” in the way one can recognize a picture as a scene of such-and-such, then sensations are assumed to have something of a n “intrinsic”

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identity. Now, because sensations are contents of experience, their existence does necessarily depend upon their being experienced, while how they articulate into kinds is a function of how they are experienced. But regardless of what is the case in the world, indeed, regardless of whether there is anything outside the mind at all, visual-sensations individuate into red-impressions, impressions of squares, and so forth. One sensation-token is of the same type as another sensation-token if and only if the two appear as alike before the mind’s eye.

Against this backdrop, Wittgenstein’s conception of the identity conditions of visual sensations seems to be highly novel. We noticed in section I that , for Wittgenstein, sensations are states of consciousness; they are undergoings, contents that someone experiences when seeing, a n d hearing; they are interrupted by shifts in attention and they possess true duration, degrees of intensity, quality, quantity, and mixture; they run a course. Yet, “What kind of visual sensation am I experiencing?” is not answered by reference to how a visual sensation appears to the mind’s eye. Visual sensations, rather, are dependent for their identity condi- tions upon (1) the object of perception (RPP 11092); (2) the perceiving subject (RPP I1 317); and (3) language-games of attributing properties to physical objects (RPP 11 330).

(1) visual-sensations have no being apart from objects of perception because only objects of perception appear to subjects (and not to a “mind’s eye”!). Rather than being appearances of extra-mental things which in turn appear to the mind, visual-sensations are how things appear to a subject. The visual-impression is the answer to: “How does it look to YOU?”; “How does this strike you?”; “What does this impress you as being?”

(2) though not themselves perceived, visual-sensations have no existence apart from a perceiving subject because they are what a perceiving subject experiences when she sees something. How visual-sensations articulate into kinds, moreover, depends upon the perceiving subject because, though the visual-impression is how a perceived object looks to the subject, it belongs to the language-game of visual- impressions that how something looks to me need not be how it looks to another person.

(3) the identity-conditions of visual-sensations depend upon language-games where we attribute properties to physical objects. Wittgenstein writes:

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The content of experience. One would like to say “ I see red thus,” “ I hear the note that you strike thus,” “I feel pleasure thus,” “ I feel sorrow thus,” or even “ This is what one feels when one is sad, this, when one is glad,” etc. One would like to people a world, analogous to the physical one, with these thuses and thises. But this makes sense only where there i s a picture of what is experienced, to which one can point as one makes these statements. (RPP I896)

The criterion for whether a perceiving subject experiences the same type of visual impression again when perceiving something, is not whether what she now experiences looks to her mind’s eye like what she experienced in the past but is whether something strikes her in the same way in each case. And the criterion in turn for whether something strikes her in the same way is whether she would use the same description in each case or whether she would point to the same (physical) picture in order to represent what she experiences (RPP II 109-14). As Wittgenstein writes: “ What sense-impression? Well, this one: I can describe it: “‘It’s the same one as the one . . . ”-or I can demonstrate it with a picture” (LW I 394). However, we saw above, a person’s ability to describe how something strikes her rests in turn upon her ability to describe and organize the properties of physical objects.

Now it might seem that even if Wittgenstein is right that language-games concerning the properties of physical things must be the primitive semantic foundations for language- games of visual-impressions, it does not follow that the identity of visual-impressions depends upon our means of identifying physical objects. After all, it does not follow that there are no differences between pine trees and spruce trees just because a linguistic community fails to discriminate between them. Analogously, therefore, shouldn’t we distin- guish between the identity of a subject’s visual impressions, and how he goes about identifying them? But visual- impressions are not at all like pine and spruce trees which are distinct even if a whole community makes no distinction between them. Visual impressions are not “natural kinds,” but a re how things (including natural kinds) appear. “Appearances” do not have the identity-conditions of physical objects: they have no identity apart from their discrimination and identification by the subject to which something appears. Or: there is no difference between x appearing red to me, and x only appearing to appear red to me.

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There has been debate of late about whether “mental states” are individuated into kinds strictly on what goes on in the mind-“internalism”-or whether they individuate into kinds only in reference to how that person behaves, the practices and institutions in which he partakes, his environ- ment-“externalism.” “Externalism (like internalism) is best construed as a thesis about the individuation of mental states: a thesis, that is, about the existence and identity conditions of mental states.”24 Wittgenstein’s account of the identity conditions of visual sensations, how they individu- ate into kinds, can be reasonably and instructively construed as “externalist.” Yet we must not ignore that Wittgenstein denies that “ X has a red-impression if and only if a red object (or red sensory stimuli) causes X to have tha t impression” (nor does he suggest t h a t “ X h a s a red- impression if and only if X utters such sounds as ‘I have a red-impression’ or ‘It impresses me as red”’).

An experience-content is what can be produced in a picture, a picture in its subjective meaning, when its purport is: “ This I see- whatever the object may be that produces the impression.” For the experience-content is the private object. (RPP I694)

But this (limited) independence of visual impressions from what is the case in the world comes at a price. Because talk of “experience-contents”-talk of how things seem to be regardless of what they are in fact-rests upon the founda- tion of talk about what things are where such reservations do not occur, it has only a very constricted and specialized role in our form of life. Such utterances as “I appear to see a red chair” can of course serve the purpose of expressing either doubt or a tentative hypothesis about what I see. Given, too, that we have learned to say, correctly, that “This is red” in certain circumstances, and then to say “This looks red” where we can explain what “looks red” means in reference to being red, we can in turn justify claims about seeing a red house (when asked) by saying it appears red. But serving little epistemic purpose, “It impress me as red, him as orange” expresses how I see things-what it’s like to be me.

List of Texts by Ludwig Wittgenstein Cited by Abbreviation

The Blue and Brown Books, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1956.

Wittgenstein’s Lectures on Philosophical Psychology 1946-47, the student notes by P. T. Geach, K. J. Shah, and A. C. Jackson, edited by P. T. Geach, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988.

BB

LPP

514

LWZ

oc

PE

PI

RPP Z

RPP ZZ

Z

Last Writings, Volume Z, Preliminary Studies for Part ZZ of Philosophical Invest igat ions, ed. G. H. von Wright and H. Nyman, trans. C. J. Luckhardt and M. A. E. Aue, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982.

On Certainty, ed. G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright, trans. D. Paul and G. E. M. Anscombe, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1969.

Wittgenstein’s Notes for Lectures on “Private Experience” and “Sense Data,” ed. R. Rhees, first appearing in Philosophical Review, 1968. Page references are to its publication in Zntroduc- tion to the Philosophy of Mind, ed. H. Morick, Glenview, I L Scott, Foresman and Company, 1970.

Philosophical Invest igat ions, ed. G. E. M. Anscombe and R. Rhees, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe, New York: Macmillan Company, 1953.

Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology, Volume I, ed. G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980.

Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology, Volume 11, ed. G. H.von Wright and H. Nyman, trans. C.G.Luckhardt and M. A. E. Aue, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980.

Zettel, ed. G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1967.

NOTES

1 As best as I can judge, Wittgenstein does not draw any real distinction between visual sensations (Empfindungen) and visual impressions (Eindrucken). While he speaks of pain as a sensation, and not as an impression, he appears to speak interchangeably of color-sensations and color-impressions. In this essay I will use “sensation” and “impression” more or less synonymously.

2 See, for example, William James, The Principles of Psychology (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981), 217-219,437-438.

Ibid., 913. Thus William James, for example, concluded in a fashion similar to

Hume that sensations and mental images are distinct contents of experience precisely because a sensation is always experienced as more intense than any corresponding image. (Ibid., 718-720)

5 These claims might appear to be contradicted by our terms for natural kinds. Hilary Putnam in, for example, Representation and Reality, (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1988), 19-42, has argued that such terms as “gold” refer to natural kinds rather than to whatever satisfies a determinate, preset list of criteria such as “is yellow” or “found in Solomon’s minds.” This implies that change and development in scientific theory may alter the tests by which we determine whether something is gold as well as alter what we take in the world to be gold. This might suggest, then, that it is experiment and theory which determines what gold is-not how we use this word. But Wittgenstein could easily accept all of this without giving up his principle that the use of a word shows what sort of thing gets named by

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it. It is the very use of “gold,” after all, which reveals whether gold refers to something a t all; whether it refers to a natural kind or a kind of biological creature, cause, artifact, or simply whatever satisfies a fixed set of criteria; to a kind of physical substance; to a kind of metal. In any event, Wittgenstein would deny that such psychological concepts as sensation are of natural kinds.

6 Though Wittgenstein happily speaks of sensations as “experiences” or “contents of experience” he denies that sensations (and mental images) are the “contents” of beliefs, desires, intentions, hopes, fears, and so forth. Beliefs, etc., are not so many different kinds of “experiences,” according to Wittgenstein. Certainly someone might experience sensations of some sort or other when one comes to acquire a new belief, or when he reflects on what he believes. But Wittgenstein argues that to believe that P (1) does not consist in having an experience; (2) is not “about” or “directed at” an experience (unless, of course, the belief in question is about an experience!); (3) is not directed a t the state of affairs which is the case if the belief that P is true by means of sensations (or images).

See, for example, Malcolm Budd, Wittgenstein’s Philosophy of Psychol- ogy, (London and New York: Rutledge, 1989), 17.

8 For an explicit explanation of how an isolated consciousness is thought to identify, recognize, and name its sensations in just this way, see William James, The Principles of Psychology, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981), 217-219,381-382,434-438,445-446,651-652,656, 724.

9 One can find the common view that Wittgenstein denies the possibility of a private sensation language on verificationist grounds in, for example, A. J. Ayer, Wittgenstein (New York: Random House, 1988), 97-98.

10 See, for example, Robert J. Fogelin, Wittgenstein, 2nd Edition (London and New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1987), 179-183, for the view that Wittgenstein faults a private sensation language because it lacks public- checks.

l1 Jaakko Hintikka, “Wittgenstein on Private Language: Some Sources of Misunderstanding,” Mind 78 (1969), nicely shows how the view that Wittgenstein rests his case against the possibility of a private sensation language on the unreliability of memory owes itself to a poor translation and interpretation of PI 265.

l2 For a similar interpretation of Wittgenstein’s argument, see Charles E. Marks, “Can One Recognize Kinds of Private Objects?” Canadian Journal of Philosophy, Supplementary Volume 1, (1974), 215-228.

l3 A look at these passages should lay to rest, I hope, the long-standing tradition of attributing to Wittgenstein the thesis that first person present uses of “pain,” and other psychological words, are always expressive and never descriptive (in intent). One can find this faulty intepretation in A. J. Ayer, Wittgenstein (New York: Random House, 1988), 97; Norman Malcolm, “Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations” The Philosophy of Mind, V. C. Chappell, ed., (New York: Dover Publications Inc., 1981), 198- 201; Robert Fogelin, Wittgenstein, (New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1987), 191; P. M. S. Hacker, Insight and Illusion, 1st ed., (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972), 252-259; Christopher Peacocke, “Wittgenstein and Experience” The Philosophical Quarterly, 32, 162.

1 4 With all of the diverse interpretations of Wittgenstein’s “criteria,” we need to note several things in this context. First, “criteria” tie up more to the meaning of a word than they do to the evidence for the truth of propositions containing that word. The evidence for “X is in pain” ranges over a far wider domain than do the criteria for whether X is in pain: the evidence, but not the criteria, for “X is in pain” can include third person reports about another’s pain as well as any discovered correlate to

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someone’s being in pain, causal or otherwise, such as that Johnny turns purple when he is in pain. Second, to apply a sign by criteria is not, for Wittgenstein, a matter of operating that sign by a list of rules of which their operator is necessarily conscious. For one thing, Wittgenstein argues in PI 138-242 that while the use of a word can be said to accord with rules for its use, rules do not determine how that word is used apart from a range of practices and the application of that word. For another thing, to describe the criteria of application of “pain” is not to describe what goes on in a person’s mind when he applies this word but is merely to describe what he understands when he uses “pain” correctly (and understanding is an mental ability rather than a state). Third, Wittgenstein finds that the criteria for whether someone is in pain are not so determinate or rigid as that it deductively follows that X is in pain if, e.g., X screams upon scraping his knee. This is not merely a function of the possibility of feigning and hiding pain, but owes itself fundamentally to the fact that our language-game of pain is, compared to that of mathematics, “objectively uncertain” ( L W I887- 891). We can only judge whether X is in pain by uncertain inferences from external behavior; and this uncertainty is constitutional (RPP II657). From the same behavior and circumstances two people can draw contrary conclusions about whether someone is in pain-without thereby excluding either person from the language-game of pain (RPP 11 685-8). This being the case, Wittgenstein can hardly be said to render the internal sensation of pain into a logical construct of external behaviors (and circumstances).

l5 Memll and Jaakko Hintikka, Investigating Wittgenstein, (Oxford and New York: Basil Blackwell, 1986), 272-275.

16 Ibid., 295. l7 Ibid., 275. 18 Ibid., 298-299. 19 I should note here that if language-games concerning the properties of

visual objects are the primitive semantic foundations for language-games concerning visual-impressions, this need not entail that a description of a visual-impression cannot be the epistemic ground for a description about what is the case. In an unfamiliar and dimly lit room I might say “ I seem to see a chair” or “It looks to me like a chair.” Can such reports justify “ I see a chair” or “It is a chair”? Not inasmuch as “ I seem to see a . . .” expresses doubt about what I see or gives a tentative hypothesis about what it is. Still, utterances like “It looks to me like a chair” need not express doubt, and because I have already acquired the concepts of looking and chair and have learned how chairs can appear visually, how something looks could be said to provide prima facie evidence for my seeing a chair. Notice, however, that this can work only locally, not globally.

20 Still, if to see a picture of a triangle as a wedge or half of a parallelogram rests on a rather technical training, not all seeing-as requires so much. Wittgenstein distinguishes purely “optical aspects” from such “conceptual aspects” as seeing a triangle now as a half parallelogram, now as a wedge. Shifts in optical aspects, for instance, when someone sees now this face, now that face, in the fore when looking at a schematic drawing of a cube, can be explained by shifts in how the perceiving subject focuses his vision and do not require that this subject have the concept of cube (RPP

Instead of my, “It can serve the description of an object,” the translaters have rendered the German “Sie kann sich der Beschreibung eines Gegenstands bedienen” as “It may subserve a description” which I find ambiguous and misleading.

22 There is something similar here to learning what it is for something to be “not red.” Elsewhere Wittgenstein writes: “The agreement, the

I970,974,989; RPP II450; L W I444,530,605,699-700, 705).

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harmony, of thought and reality consists in this; if I say falsely that something is red, then, for all that, it isn’t red. And when I want to explain the word ‘red’ to someone, in the sentence ‘That is not red,’ I do it by pointing to something red” (PI 429).

Blackwell, 1989), 3.

23 Merrill and Jaakko Hintikka, Investigating Wittgenstein, 247. 2 4 Colin McGinn, Mental Content, (Oxford and Cambridge: Basil

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