5 - Can I Have Your Pain?

Summary

Are pains owner-individuated particulars?

In the sections of the Philosophical Investigations commonly known as ‘the private language argument’ (PI §§243ff.), Wittgenstein argues against the idea that sensations, such as pain, are private inner objects accessible only to their owner. This doctrine is, of course, a version of Cartesian dualism, but it is perhaps more illuminatingly called ‘the inner object account’ of sensations. For whereas the label ‘dualism’ emphasises the sharp difference drawn by this theory between the mental and the physical, the main thrust of Wittgenstein's criticism is, on the contrary, that the theory exaggerates the similarities between the two realms: that it misconstrues the grammar of psychological terms by assimilating it too much to the grammar of names of perceptible occurrences in the physical world (cf. Schroeder 2006, pp. 182–5; pp. 201–19).

Wittgenstein's main concern is with the claim that sensations are epistemically private: that ‘only I can know whether I am really in pain’ (PI §246); but he also discusses and dismisses the claim that sensations are essentially owned by a single individual: that ‘another person can't have my pains’ (PI §253). The two are, of course, related. The inner object model construes sensations as particular occurrences in the private realm of the mind – like beetles in a box (cf. PI §293) – and their privacy is seen as a consequence of their unalterable and unsharable location. Only the owner of a consciousness has access to its contents. So, on this view, it is because you cannot have my pain that, strictly speaking, you cannot know of my pain.

This, however, may be denied. Anthony Kenny, for example, is prepared to accept, as a grammatical triviality, that pains are owner-individuated but denies that that makes them private. After all, the same holds for sneezes, blushes or smiles: you cannot have my sneeze, for if you sneeze, it is ipso facto your sneeze and not mine, but of course it doesn't follow that you cannot know of my sneezes (Kenny 1973, p. 189).

But the step from ‘I can't have yours’ to ‘I can't know of yours’ is more easily blocked in the case of sneezes and blushes, which are visible events located in physical space in a way pains are not.