4.1.2 4.1.2
4.1.2 PPPain expressions and mental statesPain expressions and mental statesain expressions and mental statesain expressions and mental states
Wittgenstein’s following view on the workings of pain expressions in the first person reflects the concern with verification within his methodological remarks on phenomenological language. This view involves also a reconsideration of the Tractarian account of the relation between affirmative and negative propositions in general.
The following remark from 1929 draws a parallel between the relation of affirmative and negative expressions of pain to experience:
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If I say ‘I have now no pains’, I describe thereby obviously my present state. And thus ‘no pains’ designates this state, whereas ‘pains’ another state and the formal relation between both expressions signifies a formal relation between states.186
The designation relation between the affirmation “I have pains” and a state of pain on the one hand parallels the designation relation between the negation “I have no pains” and a state of painlessness on the other hand. One can trace here the conception of phenomenological language at work. According to this conception, each proposition can be analyzed into a phenomenological statement verifiable by comparison with the content of immediate experience. The same idea would hold in the case of pain expressions. The discourse about pain in the first person involves affirmative and negative expressions of pain. Insofar as these are simple expressions, allowing for no further analysis, they count as samples of phenomenological language. The intelligibility of ordinary propositions in general was taken to boil down to the correlation of phenomenological statements to immediate experience. By the same token, the intelligibility of the discourse about pain in the first person is now taken to boil down to the correlation of simple affirmative and negative expressions of pain to mental states of pain.
On this view, in order to understand and clarify an affirmative expression of pain, one would need to attend to a mental state of painfulness. And in order to understand and clarify a negative expression of pain, one would need to attend to a mental state of painlessness.
Wittgenstein mentions not only a relation of designation between propositions and mental states but also a formal relation between propositions. And a formal relation between states as well. A formal relation between the affirmative expression and the negative expression would parallel a formal relation between the state of pain and the state of painlessness. The question of the formal relation between the affirmative and the negative proposition in general was discussed in the Tractatus.
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The gist of early Wittgenstein’s view on the relation between an affirmative proposition and its negation is the following. According to the Tractatus, a proposition determines a place in logical space [Ort im logischen Raum] (3.4)187. Logical space is a space of intelligibility of phenomena and their expressions. The place in logical space is determined by the propositional sign (written or spoken) and its logical coordinates (3.41). A proposition determines only one place in logical space, but the whole logical space is already given by it (3.42a): the proposition reaches through [durchgreift] the whole logical space, determines the whole of it through the logical scaffolding round the proposition (3.42c). That is, the proposition determines the whole of logical space through the logical coordinates that connect the proposition with other propositions.188 Among the logical coordinates is logical negation [Verneinung]. However, the negating [verneinend] proposition, namely the negative proposition, and the negated [verneint] proposition determine different logical places: the logical place of the negating proposition lies outside [liegt ausserhalb] the logical place of the negated proposition (4.0641b-c).
Wittgenstein’s account of the workings of pain expressions in the first person resembles to an extent this Tractarian cartography of logical space:
‘I have no pains’ means: When I compare the proposition ‘I have pains’ with reality it turns out that it is false. – I must thus be able to compare it with that which is actually the case. And this possibility of comparison – even if it does not yield truth – is what we mean with the expression that what is the case must play itself out in the same space as that which is negated; things must only be otherwise.189
187 It points to [deutet] that logical place (Nb 102: p. 36r [dated 23 November 1914] / N: p. 31).
188 Wittgenstein’s clarification for Ogden’s translation reads: “the scaffolding is as big as the logical
space. You could imagine a house with such a big scaffolding round it that by its length, breadth and width it filled the whole space. (Though ‘filling’ wouldn’t be the right expression. I think to ‘reach through space’ is what I mean.)” (Wittgenstein 1973: p. 25.)
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Wittgenstein thus notes that what is the case (i.e. present pain) must play itself out in the same space as that which is not the case (i.e. possible pain). In this sense, the necessity, the must, of the state of pain playing itself out in the same space as the state of painlessness is required by one’s being able to compare relevant affirmative and negative expressions with reality. But this space is not really the Tractarian logical space:
I compare this state [of painlessness] with another [i.e. a state of pain], thus the former must be comparable with the latter. The former too must lie in pain-space [Schmerzraum] although in another place. – Otherwise my proposition [‘I have no pains’] would somehow mean that my present state [of painlessness] has nothing to do with one of painfulness; somehow as if I said that the colour of this rose has nothing to do with the conquest of Gaul through Caesar. That is, there is no connection. But I mean precisely that between my present state [of painlessness] and one of painfulness there subsists a connection.190
The possibility to compare the expression “I have pains” with reality is here taken to exhibit a formal relation not only between this expression and its negation “I have no pains”. It is taken to exhibit a formal relation also between the state of painfulness and the state of painlessness. These relations, however, do not determine places in a general logical space, but in pain-space.
Without thematizing it, the Tractatus anticipates the notion of pain-space. The underlying reasoning is that any phenomenon, insofar as it immediately admits certain properties and not others, lies in a space of its own possibilities: ‘A speck in visual field need not be red, but it must have a colour; it has, so to speak, a colour-space round it [um sich]. A tone must have a pitch, the object of the sense of touch a hardness, etc.’191 Thus early Wittgenstein envisages particular spaces of intelligibility for particular phenomena. Coloured flecks would lie in a
190 Ms 108: p. 37 [dated 25 December 1929] / Ts 209: p. 35 / Ts 212: p. 347 / Ts 213: p. 102; cf. PR: §
82.
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colour-space. Tones would lie in a sound-space. And in a similar fashion, phenomena of pain or mental states of pain would lie in a pain-space.
In the Tractatus general logical space is an all encompassing space of intelligibility. This conception is tied with the universal status conferred to account of the syntax for logical connectives that is meant to hold for any domain of discourse. However, Wittgenstein’s 1929 paper has pointed out precisely the incapacity of the Tractarian logical notation to do justice to the workings of colour ascriptions. Once this point is taken on board, the idea of an all-encompassing logical space is already shaken. The moral of “Some Remarks on Logical Form” is precisely the problematic character of the attempt at giving a universal account of the syntax for connectives irrespective of the subject-matter of the propositions linked by them. Thus the call for a logical investigation of the phenomena themselves is not a call for an undiscriminating attendance to experience. It is rather a plea for attempting to clarify the workings of propositions while grouping them in different domains of discourse according to their subject-matter. The solution to the colour-exclusion case thus involved the initial recognition that colour ascriptions belong to a domain of discourse about phenomena that admit gradation. The investigation of the colour-exclusion case was to be carried out with regard to the particular colour-space and not in view of a general Tractarian logical space.
Wittgenstein’s view on the workings of pain expressions similarly relies on the particular notion of pain-space, rather than on the notion of general Tractarian logical space. The view on the workings of negative expressions of pain also diverges from the Tractarian approach to negative expressions in general. Let us have a closer look at this divergence.