PENSAMIENTO CIENTÍFICO

own private experience of the colour is implicit in every use of colour vocabulary. Wittgenstein denies this. Of course there are uses of colour language which makes the 'private exemplar' primary. But rather than taking those uses of colour vocabulary as an indication that there is a fully fledged concept in the 'private exemplar', Wittgenstein at #271 suggests that these uses of colour language are different, and, arguably, in no way primary.

"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 nowl How can there be so much as a temptation here? 1 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 at an impressive colour-scheme."

The sense of 'colour impression' when we talk of the experience of a colour being a 'private' experience, is a very different use of colour vocabulary. It is something we might do with colour, wallow in it. But that kind of experience isn't there all the time, hovering beside

sentences like 'This desk is brown' and giving the real meaning of 'brown'. In the normal case we are describing the colour of the desk itself. The suggestion is that uses of colour vocabulary which rely on the private, 'wallowing' kind of experience of colour seem now to be parasitic on the public concept.

But the interlocutor is not to be seen off so easily. At #278 he retorts " I know how the colour green looks to me.' — surely that makes sense! — Certainly: what use of the proposition are you thinking of?"

Wittgenstein's reply is that there are some uses of "I know how the colour green looks to me", which make good sense. (One could imagine a row with a superior interior decorator ending on such a note.) But the use the interlocutor seems to be envisaging, where the sentence is

supposed to say something about what the colour 'really' looks like, as opposed to all the pubHc (discriminative, comparative, relational) uses, is illegitimate. At #279 Wittgenstein says.

" Imagine someone saying: 'But I know how tall I am!' and laying his hand on the top of his head to prove it."

Saying 'I know how the colour green looks to me', in the interlocutor's sense, is comparable to the performance of the man who proves he knows how tall he is by laying his hand on the top of his head. It isn't that we could show that what he says is false. He is, of course, in a useless kind of way, precisely that height. But as a proof that he knows how tall he is, his gesture is nonsensical. Measures of height have all sorts of uses, and there are all sorts of scales and measurements, but none of the uses include the use of 'At least I know how tall it is’ where no information is given about how the height of the object compared to other things. That's not how the concept 'height' works.

And the point of the analogy is that that's not how the concept 'colour' works either. To leam how to use colour vocabulary is to leam to make certain discriminations. Basically a child is said to be able to use the word "green" when it can discriminate green objects from non-green objects. Clearly, before the child learns this ability, the sensory apparatus is already in place. But it would be wrong to think that the child has some sort of private ostensive portion of the concept. We would not be inclined to say, "At least she knows what the colour green looks like to her." The concept comes with the ability to discriminate. In order to talk about one's experience of colour one has to grasp public discriminatory vocabulary.

If the traditional picture of the role of avowals were the right one, and avowals were descriptions of ineluctable private mental states of affairs, any public meaning we seem to attach to talk about the mental breaks down.

(c) I want to discuss one further strand in the traditional picture of the function of avowals. On the traditional picture, in order to be able to report our sensations, we have to find out something about ourselves. Avowals seem to be a cognitive achievement. 'How is your

114 head now?', we ask the patient...(moment's introspection)...'Much better, thanks'. Avowals seem very easy, to be sure, but it seems as if they are a modest cognitive achievement for all that. Think again about the seemingly unexceptional thought raised by Peter Hacker,

"All sentient creatures can suffer pain, want or enjoy things. Only self- conscious creatures, capable of ascribing experiences to themselves, know that they are in pain, that they want such-and such, that they are enjoying this or that."

My question, following Hacker, is: 'how unexceptional is this thought?'

This question turns on the familiar Wittgensteinian problem raised for the private linguist, the problem of distinguishing between correctly identifying a token 'quale' and its merely seeming to me that I have done so. The point is put to slightly different use here. We start, in #288, from the fact that, at least in basic cases, avowals seem to be immune from error.

" I turn to stone and my pain goes on. -Suppose I were in error and it was no longer pain? — But I can't be in error here; it means nothing to doubt whether I am in pain! -That means: if anyone said 'I don't know if what I have got is a pain or something else', we should think

something like, he does not know what the English word pain means; and we should explain it to him.—How? perhaps by means of gestures, or by pricking him with a pin and saying: 'See that's what pain is!' This explanation, like any other, he might understand right, wrong, or not at all. And he will shew which he does by his use of the word in this as in other cases.

If he now said for example: 'Oh, I know what 'pain' means; what I don't know is whether this, that I have now, is pain' — we should merely shake our heads and be forced to regard his words as a queer reaction which we have no idea what to do with. (It would be rather as if we heard someone say seriously 'I distinctly remember that some time before I was bom I believed....')"

Here Wittgenstein is not calling 'queer' the sort of thing we might say about neuralgia, eg, when one feels something akin to pain in a fairly widespread area which has the peculiar feature that if you tiy to pin it down it disappears. It is, one might feel inclined to say, perhaps not intense enough for pain, but it is certainly too unpleasant to count as tingling. There, one might legitimately try to dissuade the enthusiastic vocabulary teacher with the pin, by saying 'Oh, I know what ‘pain’ means; what I don't know is whether this, that I have now, is pain.'

The case he is calling 'queer' is not the normal (but unusual case) where one might have

difficulty knowing what to call something, but rather a situation where we are trying to imagine that there is no indeterminacy, but the speaker merely persists in saying he isn't sure what he's feeling.

A case which seems to be parallel: someone speaking on the telephone says, 'I think I see a Junko out of my window, but I'm not sure.' He could be expressing two different kinds of doubt: he might be saying he's not quite sure what a Junko looks like. The person on the other end of the line might describe one. But the speaker might say that that wasn't the kind of doubt he felt. He might say, 'Oh, I know what a Junko looks like, but I can't see the bird clearly enough to know if that is what is in front of me now.' The difference from sensations is marked. My own sensations can't just lurk 'out of focus'. Something like neuralgia, which might be described as 'pain which is lurking out of focus' is not precisely the same sensation as normal feelings of pain, only we can't quite feel it (like a Junko hiding in the leaves). Rather it is a different sensation perhaps aptly (but metaphorically) described as 'pain which is lurking out of focus'. What Wittgenstein is saying is 'queer' if we are talking about sensations, rather than public objects, is the latter kind of expression of doubt, the doubt about what this

(determinate sensation) is. And, he suggests, this is a doubt which ought to make sense on the 'modest cognitive achievement' view. #288 continues:

"That expression of doubt has no place in the language game; but if we cut out human behaviour which is the expression of sensation, it looks as if I might legitimately begin to doubt ^ esh . My temptation to say that one might take a sensation for something other than what it is arises from this: if I assume the abrogation of the normal language-game with the expression of a sensation, I need a criterion of identity for the sensation; and then the possibility of error also exists."

An avowal does not express a guarantied, if modest, cognitive achievement. Rather than our being immune to error in avowals of sensation, error about sensations makes no sense. If and only if one abrogates (abandons; repeals) the normal language game in which the primitive expression of a sensation plays a role in determining its application, does radical doubt seem

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