Wittgenstein found the notion of private experience that generates these puzzles problematic. The reason should be clear from what we found out already—it is an attempt to take the term “experience” from the language games in which it usually occurs, and use it beyond any language game. We do have a language game in which we can compare our experiences of pain—how much it hurts, when it hurts, where it hurts. This is the language game of the doctor’s office and the hospital room. But the philosophical scenario specifically tries to transcend that language game. In fact, since it tries to focus on a notion of experience that transcends all description, it tries to transcend all language games. So the characterization of the scenario is confusing from the start.
Even if talk of private experience is not part of any language game, we might think that I could at least talk about it—to myself, so to speak. Couldn’t I have a private language, maybe a diary, in which I record when I have certain pains (PI §258)? Wittgenstein rejected such a language, and this has come to be known as his private language argument. The basic idea is that language is a public phenomenon of following rules (of word usage). Language presupposes that words of the language are used properly, but the very notion of right and wrong usage itself requires a public check: “… ‘following a rule’ is a practice. And to think one is following a rule is not to follow a rule. And that’s why it’s not possible to follow a rule ‘privately’; otherwise, thinking one was following a rule would be the same thing as following it” (PI §202).
This idea that following rules requires a public check is also connected with Wittgenstein’s ideas about meaning. You might think that a private language would be legitimate because we can have right and wrong usage tied to following the meaning of the word. But meaning is not some internal thing—like an intention on my part. It is itself a matter of how it is used, and that requires a public context. In the inverted spectrum scenarios, we all use the word “red” in the same way—to apply to fire trucks. The scenario presupposes I could have some private meaning for red that is independent of how it is used. For Wittgenstein, however, “an ‘inner process’ stands in need of outward criteria” (PI §580).
Someone might respond: OK, maybe we can’t talk about the scenario, especially if it transcends any language game, but that doesn’t mean the scenario doesn’t exist. Couldn’t our color experience be inverted, even if we can’t talk about it? (After all, recall the mystical realm in the Tractatus, which we couldn’t talk about.)
Remember the earlier description of the scenario: “… couldn’t my private experience, that I am calling red, be different from your private experience, even though you too call it red? Maybe it’s what I would call blue if I had it.” What would it mean for me to have “had it” here? If I am calling it “blue,” then that seems to prove that it’s not what you had, since you called it “red.” But the scenario requires that it be the very same experience.
If an experience were a thing, then we might have some handle on how it could exist and be the very same one independently of how it is described. For example, physical objects can be identified by where they are in space and time without worrying about their characteristics. Suppose I had a nickel in my pocket yesterday. Today, after my wife does the laundry, she finds a nickel in the dryer and claims it as her own. It is much shinier than the nickel I had yesterday. Even though we describe it differently (mine yesterday was dull, this one is shiny), still it might be the very same nickel I had yesterday. It would be the same one if it were spatio-temporally continuous with the one in my pocket yesterday. I’m not saying anyone actually tracked that nickel through the wash and dry cycles, but we know what it means to have the very same nickel even if it looks shinier now.
So, “I have a pain” looks like “I have a nickel.” Grammatically they can both be named by nouns. Perhaps pains could be tracked and compared like nickels. The problem is that experiences are not like nickels.We don’t have any handle on an experience to track whether it’s the same one, apart from looking at how we describe it. Our language may mislead us into thinking that experiences are like things.
Wittgenstein’s position is not only that we can’t describe the inverted spectrum scenario because that would require a private language, but also that there is no such scenario—the very notion of private experience does not make sense.
Zombies
Let’s say that a zombie is a human being that looks and acts just like us, but which doesn’t have any conscious experiences. There’s nothing that it is like to be a zombie. Since Wittgenstein rejected private experiences, did he mean to say that we are all really zombies? If so, have we no mental experiences, and we just go through the motions?
Wittgenstein imagined someone objecting: “‘But you will surely admit that there is a difference between pain-behaviour with pain and pain-behaviour without pain.’” We can imagine that the zombie screams when you stab it (exhibiting “pain behavior”) but doesn’t really feel anything. The objection then is that there is a difference between zombies and humans. Wittgenstein replied: “Admit it? What greater difference could there be?” But then he imagined the objection: “‘And yet you again and again reach the conclusion that the sensation itself is a Nothing.’” By rejecting the inverted spectrum scenario, Wittgenstein seemed to be saying that there is no “private experience” of color or pain that might differ from person to person, in ways that transcend any ability to describe the differences. Wittgenstein replied: “Not at all. It’s not a Something, but not a Nothing either!”
This is one of my favorite lines in the Investigations. Experience is not a “Something”—i.e., it’s not a “thing” like a nickel, yet Wittgenstein did not deny that we have experiences—i.e., it’s not nothing. He continued: “The conclusion was only that a Nothing would render the same service as a Something about which nothing could be said.” Wittgenstein objected to the notion of private experience that transcends any possible description—“about which nothing could be said.” But he believed in experiences—the kind we all have and describe and compare. But they aren’t “things.” He concluded: “We’ve only rejected the grammar which tries to force itself on us here” (PI §304).
Wittgenstein did not think we are zombies—rather, he thought, as we all do, that we have experiences. But he didn’t think that our experiences could be understood as private experiences, as experiences that transcend any possible description. Our experiences are just those that we describe and compare—an inverted spectrum that goes beyond describing is what is an illusion.
How Language Misleads Us
The grammar of our language treats both “pain” and “nickel” as nouns, and so tempts us to suppose that a pain and a nickel are both things, objects. But if “pain” is not the name of a thing, what is it? “Here is one possibility: words are connected with the primitive, natural expressions of sensation and used in their place. A child has hurt himself and cries; then adults talk to him and teach him exclamations and, later, sentences. They teach the child new pain behaviour. ‘So you are saying that the word “pain” really means crying?’—On the contrary: the verbal expression of pain replaces crying, it does not describe it” (PI §244). It is interesting to note that we don’t often say things like “I have a pain.” But if we did, say in the doctor’s office, Wittgenstein believed it would be much like saying “Ouch!” It is not a description of something or a statement that is true or false. It is an expression. It expresses pain, rather than describing it.
“The paradox disappears only if we make a radical break with the idea that language always functions in the same way, always serves the same purpose” (PI §304). In the Tractatus, Wittgenstein had initially believed that language always functions to say or describe—though he later added the function of showing. Later, in the Investigations, he acknowledged all kinds of functions (§23). Here we should consider that language expresses pain. And when he mentioned (in §304) “good and evil,” I think he wanted us to consider that perh
aps moral language expresses approval or disapproval, rather than describing or ascribing qualities of Goodness and Evil.
So, it takes a proper understanding of language to avoid some philosophical mistakes. While Wittgenstein valued our ordinary uses of language, where words do their work, he was also wary of its deceptions. And often its deceptions are built into the language, like ruts on a dirt road. Wittgenstein warned:
People say again and again that philosophy doesn’t really progress, that we are still occupied with the same philosophical problems as were the Greeks. But the people who say this don’t understand why it has to be so. It is because our language has remained the same and keeps seducing us into asking the same questions. (CV, p. 15)
Where our language allows sensation words like “pain” to function in the same way as object words like “nickel,” we have a rut. “For this purpose we shall again and again emphasize distinctions which our ordinary forms of language easily make us overlook” (PI §132). Wittgenstein once told a friend: “I was thinking of using as a motto for my book a quotation from [Shakespeare’s] King Lear: ‘I’ll teach you differences’ ” (CW, p. 157). We need to be sensitive to differences that language sometimes obscures.
The Fly Bottle
A fly-bottle is a container designed to trap a fly. (See the illustration on the front cover of this book.) It uses the fly’s attraction to sweetened water to lure it into the bottle, and its attraction to light to keep it there.
The fly could get out the same way it got in, through the hole in the bottom, but it does not think to go out that way since that direction is darker than going upward. The fly’s obsession with light will keep it from discovering the escape route and the solution to its problem. The fly is trapped by its own inclinations. Wittgenstein took our philosophical predicaments to be like the fly’s predicament. Our philosophical puzzles come from being inclined to see things in misleading ways. It was not his task to formulate a philosophical theory, but to help us avoid these confusions that we bring on ourselves. “What is your aim in philosophy? —To show the fly the way out of the fly-bottle” (PI §309).
But how do you do that? Presumably, it is no easier than herding cats—which can’t be done. We can’t talk the fly out of the bottle since the fly already “knows” what it wants. For a long time, this famous line remained provocative but puzzling. Recently a manuscript was discovered in which Wittgenstein elaborated on this image:
Cf. the fly catcher. If you want to let [the fly] out, you’d have to surround this by something dark. As long as there is light there, the fly can never do it.
If I am puzzled philosophically, I immediately darken all that which seems to me light, and try frantically to think of something entirely different. The point is, you can’t get out as long as you are fascinated. The only thing to do is to go to an example where nothing fascinates me.
The fly is shown the way out by blocking the light that obsesses it so that only the downward, indirectly lighted direction remains attractive. This shows how much the process is a negative one, and also how much the process depends on knowing what happens to obsess the fly and how to redirect the fly’s attention. Wittgenstein continued:
First of all, it is not at all clear that this will help every fly.
What happens to work with me doesn’t work with him (Prof. Moore)—[what] works with me now, and may not work with me tomorrow.
There are always new ways of looking at the matter.
I constantly find new puzzles (I’ve thought about this for years, constantly ploughed these fields.) (WE, pp. 37-38)
When we are thinking about philosophical problems, we are often attracted to forming theories about them. This seems like “light” to us—the natural way to solve these issues. But Wittgenstein thought theories only exacerbate our problems since they take us further away from the natural home of our words. When he said he “darkens all that seems to me light,” he meant that he tried to make us see the uselessness of philosophical theories, so that we will not be fascinated by them. Once we lose this fascination and recall the ordinary ways in which our words work, then the light of the downward direction will suffice as guidance. We must “look at an example, where nothing fascinates” us. We will go back to using words in ordinary ways, with our feet on solid ground.
But there is no one foolproof method, which works for all people or for all time. It depends on knowing what a person’s temptations are. “The philosopher treats a question; like an illness” (PI §255). “There is not a single philosophical method, though there are indeed methods, different therapies as it were” (PI §133).
Silence
What about those topics from the Tractatus about which we were to remain silent—ethics, religion, and the meaning of life? Recall that these things had to be shown rather than said.
The notion of showing does not retain an important place in Wittgenstein’s later philosophy. But, on the other hand, he said rather little about these topics—almost nothing in the Investigations. So, in a way, he did remain silent about them. But the philosophical tools that he deployed did not require that silence. Certainly, there are ordinary language games that involve ethics or religion. In fact, religious ceremonies, such as prayer or worship, seem to offer perfect examples of language games. So Wittgenstein could have undertaken a survey of the language games of religion or ethics. This would have led to a “grammar” of those language games. He even mentioned: “Theology as grammar” (PI §373). But that’s all he said about theology!
As little as Wittgenstein said about ethics and religion, we are left to conjecture how best to understand these matters in his terms. It might seem appropriate to treat religion as a language game. But a language game seems to require a set of roles, rules, and expectations. And different religions have different roles, rules, and expectations. So possibly different religions would be different language games. But even then, a whole religion seems too complex to be analyzed in this way. Perhaps it would make more sense to see various aspects of a religion—prayer, worship, confession—as language games themselves. Rather than ask, “what part of religion is a language game?” I think it makes more sense to ask, “how can the tools of language games best help us understand the various phenomena of religion?”
Similarly, some have thought that perhaps religion is a form of life. There is a sense in which what religious people find natural—say, thinking in terms of the creator and creature—scientifically-minded people do not find natural. So perhaps religion and science are two different forms of life. But in fact, some scientists are religious, and some religious believers are quite interested in science. So it is probably not productive to see these practices as wholly separate. Again, rather than ask whether religion or science are separate forms of life, I think it is more productive to ask how the tool of form of life can help us understand the practices of religion and science.
If we do decide to treat, say, two different ethical views as different language games, then this suggests a sort of separation between them that makes it unclear how they could communicate or engage. This might seem appropriate to pessimists who think that people with divergent viewpoints can only fight over their differences. But isn’t it sometimes possible to engage productively, and even rationally, with people who have different views? We would then need to consider a higher-level language game of interaction between language games. We might call this the language game of dialogue between different points of view. To what extent can this lead to modification or reconciliation of language games? These questions can be addressed with Wittgenstein’s tools, but also require some sociological experience to investigate.
As with the Tractatus, the fact that Wittgenstein did not say much about practical issues, such as ethics, does not mean he didn’t care about them. In a letter from 1944 he wrote to a friend:
…what is the use of studying philosophy if all that it does for you is to enable you to talk with some plausibility about some abstruse questions of logi
c, etc., & if it does not improve your thinking about the important questions of everyday life…. You see, I know that it’s difficult to think well about ‘certainty’, ‘probability’, ‘perception’, etc. But it is, if possible, still more difficult to think, or try to think, really honestly about your life and other people’s lives. (MM, p. 35)
Just as Wittgenstein recommended silence at the end of the Tractatus, during his later career as a philosophy professor he regularly recommended that his students not be professors. He always preferred that they do other kinds of work, what he called “honest work” and “humanly valuable” occupations, perhaps bringing their philosophical skills to bear in those realms. He did not regard professional philosophy as honest work.
He had an abhorrence of academic life in general and of the life of a professional philosopher in particular. He believed that a normal human being could not be a university teacher and also an honest and serious person. (MM, p. 28)
Nevertheless, several of his students became philosophy professors after all.
Could a Machine Think?
In 1939, Wittgenstein devoted his classes to topics in the foundations of mathematics. Among the people attending the classes was Alan Turing, who had recently earned his Ph.D. in mathematics, and was now a fellow of King’s College at Cambridge. Turing soon went on to work for British Intelligence during World War II, assigned to break the German secret Enigma code. To accomplish this task, he essentially invented the computer, which could work through huge numbers of possibilities much faster than humans could. (This was the subject of the 2014 movie “The Imitation Game.”) Turing and his co-workers later became interested in programming a computer to play chess, since this also involved working through possibilities rapidly. While breaking codes and playing chess are fairly narrowly defined tasks, they depend on abilities that are common to many tasks that require intelligence. Could computers, programmed to perform these narrowly defined tasks, eventually be able to perform a wider range of tasks? Could they eventually even think?
Simply Wittgenstein Page 10