12 - My Mind and Other Minds

Summary

In the previous four lectures, we introduced the idea of a private language, the words of which purport to refer to subjective experiences, which only the speaker can have and only the speaker can really know about. We showed that the two notions of privacy: private ownership of experience and private knowl-edge of experience are both incoherent. We also showed that the idea that names of experiences are given their meaning by association with the experiences which they name and that the form of association is a private analogue of a public ostensive definition is likewise incoherent. So much for demolishing houses of cards.

Our present task is to complement the destructive analysis with a constructive account of the logical character of words signifying subjective experiences. This is an important task. For clarifying their logical character is simultaneously to clarify the nature of subjective experiences. Our account must highlight the logical differences between first-person avowals and reports of experience, such as ‘I have a pain’, on the one hand, and third-person ascriptions of experience, such as ‘He has a pain’, on the other. Moreover, it has to weld these two aspects of use together into a single unified concept of experience and experiential attributes. For we must, at all costs, avoid finding ourselves in the position of arguing that the word ‘pain’ or ‘joy’ means something different when it is applied to oneself from what it means when it is applied to others.

Other Minds

We feel sensations and emotions, perceive things and have desires and appetites. Being mature language users, we can give expression to our subjective experiences in linguistic form. We can also express our purposes and intentions, our thoughts and beliefs, which, of course, are not experiences. Being self-conscious creatures sometimes given to introspection, we can reflect on our experiences, as well as on our intentions, dispositions and tendencies, and express our reflections in words.

On traditional philosophical views, each of us has special privileged knowledge about his or her subjective experiences. We have seen that Wittgenstein disputed the claim that when one is in pain one knows that one is, and the further claims that such knowledge is unique, certain and indubitable.