1
Wittgenstein on Private Ostensive Definition: Two
Different Arguments
[Draft]
MICHAEL MORRIS
1. Introduction
In Philosophical Grammar, Wittgenstein considers a curious „machine‟:
The following design for the construction of a steam roller was shown to me
and seems to be of philosophical interest. The inventor‟s mistake is akin to a
philosophical mistake. The invention consists of a motor inside a hollow
roller. The crank-shaft runs through the middle of the roller and is connected
at both ends by spokes with the wall of the roller. The cylinder of the petrol-
engine is fixed onto the inside of the roller. At first glance this construction
looks like a machine. But it is a rigid system and the piston cannot move to
and fro in the cylinder. Unwittingly we have deprived it of all possibility of
movement.1
He comments further on this in the Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology:
The example of the motor roller with the motor in the cylinder is actually far
better and deeper than I have explained. For when someone shewed me the
construction I saw at once that it could not function, since one could roll the
cylinder from outside even when the „motor‟ was not running; but this I did
not see, that it was a rigid construction and not a machine at all. And here
there is a close analogy with the private ostensive definition. For here too
there is, so to speak, a direct and an indirect way of gaining insight into the
impossibility.2
I take this passage to be an invitation to find two different arguments for the
impossibility of „private ostensive definition‟ within the most famous text which
considers these issues, the Philosophical Investigations—in particular, the sections
following §243. My aim here is to find two such arguments, and present them as
clearly as possible. The hope is that by separating the two kinds of argument, we will
be able to avoid fusing together issues which are really quite different.
The connection between the motor-roller design and the issue of „private
ostensive definition‟ has been noted quite frequently, but never, I think with enough
care.3 The tendency—both among those sympathetic to Wittgenstein, and among
those unsympathetic to him—continues to be to rush through the key steps of the
arguments in the Philosophical Investigations, rather than to dwell on them. I aim to
use the separation of different kinds of argument, which is suggested by
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Wittgenstein‟s comment in the Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology, as a device
for bringing the crucial stages of argument into focus.
I will also aim to meet the following two desiderata, in presenting the two
kinds of argument against the impossibility of private ostensive definition:
(A) The arguments for the supposed impossibility must depend essentially
on the fact that the attempted definition is „private‟;
(B) The arguments for the supposed impossibility must not depend simply
on an obviously contentious form of verificationism.
Some comments on these desiderata will be in order.
First, desideratum (A) rules out of consideration here arguments which just
depend on difficulties with supposing that language could begin, as it were from
scratch, with ostensive definitions. These difficulties are naturally thought to be
rehearsed in the early sections of the Philosophical Investigations. We should expect
there to be connections between those sections and the later sections which consider
„privacy‟, but we should also expect there to be something new in the later sections—
something which depends on „privacy‟.
But what would it be for an ostensive definition to be „private‟. Wittgenstein
famously introduces the notion of a „private‟ language in the following sentence:
The individual words of this language are to refer to what can only be known
to the person speaking; to his immediate private sensations.4
This definition is ambiguous, between what may be elaborated in the two following
ways:
(P1) A language or definition is private if it can only be understood by one
person;
(P2) A language or definition is private if it can only be understood by one
person because it refers to that person’s immediate private sensations.
How should we understand „private‟ in desideratum (A)? Somewhat arbitrarily, I
shall understand it in sense (P2): I will take it to be crucial to the notion of „privacy‟
as it features in the two arguments I hope to present that it concerns the sensations of
the speaker. This is somewhat arbitrary, but not entirely so. Insofar as there are
considerations to do with privacy in sense (P1) which do not involve the speaker‟s
sensations, we may expect them to have been dealt with in the discussion of rule-
following. If we are to find new arguments in the sections following §243, we should
expect them to depend on considerations to do with sensations.
Why should we be constrained by desideratum (B)? There are two reasons,
one philosophical, and one interpretative. The philosophical reason is this: a simply
verificationist argument against the possibility of private ostensive definition would
not be very interesting philosophically. It is obvious that someone who insists on
public verifiability will not be impressed by an attempt to define a word which is
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private, even just in the sense of (P1). And even if we don‟t insist on public
verifiability, there are such general objections to verificationism as a philosophical
view that the market, so to speak, for any kind of verificationist argument is likely to
be very small. But there is a second, interpretative reason for insisting on (B): it
doesn‟t seem true to the spirit of Wittgenstein‟s central concerns about private
ostensive definition to see them as arising from any form of verificationism. The
example of the bogus roller represents those concerns quite clearly: the objection is
that a private ostensive definition would not do anything; it would be completely
useless. The problem is not that no one can tell whether the machine works or not:
it‟s not, as it were, a secret machine. It is just not really a machine at all, according to
Wittgenstein.
Nevertheless, desideratum (B), is rather cautious in two respects. First, it only
requires that a good interpretation show the argument not to depend on an obviously
contentious form of verificationism. I think that a form of verificationism is only
obviously contentious if it denies that there are unverifiable truths. There are other
kinds of epistemic condition on genuine truths which seem to belong with a form of
realism, rather than with familiar kinds of verificationism. One example might be the
thought that real facts (to which real truths correspond) cannot be perspective-
dependent. This view allows that there might be unknowable truths: what it denies is
that, where knowledge is possible, it is only available from a particular perspective.
The second respect in which desideratum (B) is cautious is that it only demands that
we avoid being too simply verificationist. It may be argued that a position which does
not seem verificationist is really verificationist in inspiration. Naturally, I cannot
prejudge all such arguments here.
It is a general failing of treatments of Wittgenstein‟s remarks about private
language that they do not meet both desideratum (A) and desideratum (B), as I have
here elaborated them. Those who have understood his arguments to depend on
something specific to the supposed privacy of sensations have tended to offer
verificationist interpretations. And those who have avoided verificationism have
tended to see the remarks about private language as no more than an application to the
special case of sensations of quite general considerations about language.5 It seems to
me clear that if the desiderata are worth meeting, they are worth meeting together. I
will therefore aim to find in Wittgenstein‟s text versions of both arguments which
meet both desiderata.
A word of caution, though: what Wittgenstein says in the Remarks on the
Philosophy of Psychology invites us to think about the impossibility of private
ostensive definition, not private language. The importance of this distinction is
obvious: someone might attempt to give a private definition of words in a public
language. We will see in a moment that many of the remarks which are taken to be,
in some vague way, part of something called „the Private Language Argument‟, are in
fact concerned just with the impossibility of private ostensive definition.
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2. The Quick Argument
Wittgenstein distinguishes between a „direct‟ and an „indirect‟ way of seeing the
impossibility of private ostensive definition. Unfortunately, it is not clear which of
the two ways, so described, corresponds to which of the two ways of seeing the
uselessness of the bogus roller. I shall begin with the argument about private
ostensive definition which corresponds to what Wittgenstein says he saw first about
the bogus roller, which I will call the quick way of seeing what‟s wrong with private
ostensive definition, or the quick argument.
The business of a roller is to roll something flat (dough, pastry, tarmac, grass).
This requires, at the very least, that the roller move across what it rolls flat. The quick
way of seeing what is wrong with the bogus roller is to see that whether or not the
roller moves is quite independent of anything done by the „motor‟ inside. The case
Wittgenstein considers is of moving the roller while the „motor‟ is stopped. To get a
comparable case for private ostensive definition, we need an example of a word which
does something—just as even the bogus roller can roll something flat, provided it‟s
pushed—but whose ability to do that is quite independent of what is done by a private
ostensive definition.
The following passage seems to present an argument of this kind:
Let us now imagine a use for the entry of the sign “S” in my diary. I discover
that whenever I have a particular sensation a manometer shews that my blood-
pressure rises. So I shall be able to say that my blood-pressure is rising
without using any apparatus. This is a useful result. And now it seems quite
indifferent whether I have recognized the sensation right or not. Let us
suppose I regularly identify it wrong, it does not matter in the least. And that
alone shews that the hypothesis that I make a mistake is mere show. (We as it
were turned a knob which looked as if it could be used to turn on some part of
the machine; but it was a mere ornament, not connected with the mechanism at
all.)6
The reference to the sign „S‟ is, of course, a reference back to §258, to which I will
return later. In the present section, it is claimed that „S‟ does some work: it can be
used to record rises of blood-pressure. This is the analogue to the movement of the
bogus roller. But it was supposed that „S‟ is defined by private ostensive definition: I
am supposed to point out a particular sensation to myself, and say, as it were, „“S”
means that‟. This private ostensive definition is supposed to function like the „motor‟
in the bogus roller: the private definition is supposed to be what makes the sign do its
work; it is supposed to be because „S‟ refers to a certain sensation that it can be used
to record a rise in blood-pressure, just as the bogus roller is supposed to move because
of the running of the „motor‟. But, just as the „motor‟ is not what makes the bogus
roller work—or as the knob he mentions here is a mere ornament—so, Wittgenstein
claims, the private definition is not what gets „S‟ to be able to do its useful work of
recording rises in blood-pressure.7
It is not quite clear how Wittgenstein‟s argument here works. I think there is
some unclarity about what exactly is meant by a sign‟s having a use. Suppose that we
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begin just with what Wittgenstein explicitly supposes—that there is a certain
correlation, which we might express like this:
(SBP) Whenever I have S, my blood-pressure is rising.
This correlation is supposed to be strong enough to support claims to knowledge.
That is to say, I am supposed to be able to know that my blood-pressure is rising,
without using a manometer. Intuitively, that means that the correlation must be law-
like, at least. In that case, it will support counterfactuals, such as this one:
(SBP*) If my blood-pressure were not rising, I would not have S.
But counterfactuals, like laws, are not necessary conditionals: they do not say
what is the case at all possible worlds—only those which are relevantly similar to the
present one, given certain background assumptions which determine what is relevant.
So if we vary our background assumptions, we can make sense of the truth of
different counterfactuals. Now let us ask what we would say in the following
imagined situation:
(1) My blood-pressure is not rising, but I have S (as I think).
There are two possibilities:
(1a) Correlation (SBP) does not obtain in this situation;
(1b) I am wrong to think I have S.
The difference between these two is this. If (1a) is the right thing to say, then there is
simply a law-like empirical correlation between S and rises of blood-pressure. If (1b)
is the right thing to say, there is an a priori basis for the correlation. As we might put
it: on this interpretation, (1) expresses a (partial) criterion for being S; it places a
condition on how something has to be in order to count as being S. (I will return to
this use of the notion of a criterion later, in section 4).
Now what does Wittgenstein mean when he imagines a situation in which „S‟
has a use? Does he mean that there is a mere empirical correlation between the
(introspective) use of „S‟ and rises of blood-pressure, or does he want us to suppose
that there is what we may call a criterial dependence of the correct use of „S‟ upon
rises of blood-pressure?
If there is only an empirical correlation here, it is hard to see any reason to
believe Wittgenstein‟s claim that the private use of „S‟ to refer to a sensation is
irrelevant to its performing the more obviously useful service of identifying blood-
pressure. It looks as if I have identified a certain raw feel which, as a matter of
empirical fact, is a useful guide to the state of my blood-pressure. In that case, it
seems that it is precisely because it is defined to refer to a particular kind of sensation
that I can use it to record rises of blood-pressure.
If this is right, it seems that Wittgenstein must suppose that we have a case in
which it is a condition on something‟s counting as a correct use of „S‟ that the
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sensation referred to by „S‟ is present only when there is a rise in blood-pressure.
What role, then, are we now giving to the identification of sensations by introspection
(or whatever private method is imagined)? It seems that we have to run the empirical
correlation in reverse. We have a sensation which is—by definition, in effect—the
sensation of a rise of blood-pressure. And we then discover that the sensation which
is defined like this (by criteria whose obtaining can be recognized by someone else)
presents a certain introspective appearance.
Given this description of the situation, it seems that Wittgenstein‟s conclusion
follows immediately. We can express the point with brutal simplicity if we use a
certain notion of the public: let us say that something is public if it can, in principle,
be known or understood by more than one person (insofar as it can be known or
understood at all). Then Wittgenstein‟s claim seems to be this. If the identity-
conditions of a type of sensation are defined publicly, then they cannot be defined
privately. The claimed irrelevance of the correct or incorrect identification of the
sensation by introspection seems to amount to no more than this: the conditions of
identity of the sensation are not fixed introspectively.
This might seem a disappointingly slight result. Its true signifance appears, I
think, when we consider the claims which need to be made to make sense of this. The
first non-trivial claim which underlies Wittgenstein‟s argument at §270 is this:
(IC) The identity-conditions for a type of sensation can be public.
This seems initially to offend a certain conception of the nature of sensations, which
might reasonably be supposed to be Wittgenstein‟s target. According to the
apparently offended conception, sensations are characterized by their
phenomenological character—by what it is like to have them. The fundamental
differences between sensations, on this view, are differences in phenomenology: pain,
for example, is different from joy because what it is like to feel pain is quite different
from what it is like to feel joy. On this view, pains count as pains, and feelings of joy
count as feelings of joy, because they form natural groupings in virtue of their
phenomenology. The identity-conditions of these fundamental sensation-types are
determined by the way they feel. But no one else can know what it is like for me to
feel pain or joy, so it seems that the identity-conditions for these sensation-types are
private: no one else can know what makes my pains count as pain.
In fact, this conception of the nature of sensations need not deny (IC). But that
is because it can accept that there may be any number of ways of classifying
sensations into types. We can classify sensations by public identity-conditions if we
want to, although—according to this conception of sensations—that will inevitably be
a superficial classification, which does not reflect their intrinsic nature.
Wittgenstein‟s reason for holding (IC) is not this trivializing one, though. If
we begin with the blood-pressure example, there seems something odd and arbitrary
about the claim that a word‟s having a use is a matter of there being public criteria
which determine what counts as using it correctly. Why not allow that the sign „S‟
could be genuinely useful in virtue of there being a mere empirical correlation
between the occurrence of the sensation, independently identified, and rises of blood-
7
pressure? The reason is surely that the blood-pressure example is of interest as a
representative of a different range of examples. As the surrounding context shows,
what Wittgenstein is really concerned with are sensation terms in public languages—
words like the ordinary English „pain‟ and „joy‟, and phrases like „sensation of red‟.
That concern gives him a different reason for holding (IC), which we might formulate
like this:
(Q1) The conditions for the correct use of words in a public language must
themselves be public.
If (Q1) is correct, then it seems that the identity conditions for the familiar
types of sensation which correspond to familiar words like „pain‟ and „joy‟ must be
public. That is to say, what makes a feeling count as a pain—and not a feeling of joy,
say—will have to be a matter of whether or not it meets certain conditions which can,
in principle, be known to obtain by more than one person. (Q1) certainly does
contradict the conception of the nature of sensations which imagines that at the most
fundamental level sensations like pain and joy are defined by their phenomenology.
And if we have (Q1) in mind, there is nothing particularly arbitrary about saying that a
word only counts as having a use if there are public criteria for its correct use. For
that conception of having a use will be the central one in the case of words of a public
language, if (Q1) is right.
But (Q1) itself is not trivial. We can imagine a conception of public languages
which denies it: this conception may indeed seem quite natural. Let us call this
conception the ideolectical conception. The ideolectical conception will accept that
the words of a public language must be public, which is to say that they must be
capable of being understood by several people. But it will insist that each person may
understand a given public word in virtue of associating it with something which only
she knows about. It might be objected that we only really count as understanding the
same public word if we associate the same thing with it, but this objection can be met.
The ideolectical conception can respond that we only need to associate the same type
of thing with the word. So it may be that we all associate the same type of thing with
the same word, although none of us is ever in a position to compare all the different
tokens in order to see that they are indeed tokens of the same type.
This kind of picture is likely to provoke two kinds of response from someone
of a broadly Wittgensteinian—or even Fregean—cast of mind.8 First, it will be said
that if our understanding of our own words depends on associating our words with
something which other people cannot know about, then we cannot properly be said to
understand each other. This may in the end be a powerful objection, but the
ideolectical conception still has something to say in response to this. The response is
to offer an alternative conception of what it is to understand each other—insofar as we
really can be said to understand each other at all. On this alternative view, one
person‟s understanding another is a matter of her being stimulated by what the other
says to make her own associations. Communication, on this view, will not be a matter
of sharing something common, but a matter of provoking each other in ways that turn
out to be successful for carrying on everyday life.
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This leads directly on to the second response of the Fregean or Wittgensteinian
to the ideolectical conception of language. The response is to say that if it does not
matter for the successful carrying on of everyday life whether or not we know that
other people make the same associations as we do, then it is hard to see that it matters
for everyday concerns whether other people in fact make the same associations as we
do. And then we might claim that nothing matters about the meaning of words which
makes no difference to everyday life, from which it follows that what private
associations we may make with the words of a public language are strictly irrelevant
to their meaning. Again, this kind of consideration may turn out to be compelling in
the end, but the ideolectical conception can offer some resistance to it. It is not
obvious that the only differences which matter are those we can know about: that is
precisely why radical scepticism is so disturbing. And it is not obvious that all that
matters about public languages is what is relevant to the carrying on of everyday life.
We can now summarize the position of what I have called the „quick‟
argument for the impossibility of private definition. It seems clearly to be present in
§270 and its immediate context. Given that, we can see that it appears in a number of
other places too: in the famous „beetle in the box‟ passage (§293), for example, and in
this passage in Philosophical Investigations, Part II:
Always get rid of the idea of the private object in this way: assume that it
constantly changes, but that you do not notice the change because your
memory constantly deceives you. 9
We have a version of the quick argument whenever it is supposed (even if only
temporarily) that there are purely introspectible conditions of identity for sensations,
and it is then claimed that these introspectible identity conditions are irrelevant to the
use of the corresponding sensation terms.
What makes the argument quick is the acceptance of (Q1). The logic of the
main part of the argument can then be presented with brutal simplicity like this:
(Q1) The conditions for the correct use of words in a public language must
themselves be public (can be known to obtain by more than one
person);
(Q2) To define a word privately is to establish conditions for its correct use
which are private (can be known to obtain only by one person); so
(Q3) Words in a public language cannot be defined privately.
It is important to note the modesty of the conclusion here. (Q3) does not claim that no
word can be defined privately: it does not rule out the possibility of words in a private
language. In the same way, the considerations about types of sensation which are
associated with this argument do not show that there can be no private conditions of
identity: it is claimed merely that certain familiar types of sensation (pain, joy, the
sensation of red, etc.) do not have private identity conditions. It is the modesty in this
respect of (Q3) and these related considerations which shows that we are dealing with
the quick argument. As we will see, the other kind of argument for the impossibility
of private ostensive definition is not so modest.
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In this presentation we can see that the argument is indeed extremely quick.
The only place it can be questioned is at (Q1), but we have seen that there is an
initially intelligible position which does deny (Q1)—what I have called the
„ideolectical‟ conception. I have claimed that the ideolectical conception is
fundamentally non-Fregean and non-Wittgensteinian, but the Fregean or
Wittgensteinian resistance to it does not seem simply verificationist. It is true that, as
I have represented it, the Fregean or Wittgensteinian view depends on the idea that if
it doesn‟t matter for our concerns whether we can know that something is the case,
then it doesn‟t matter for those concerns whether it is in fact the case. But that does
not involve any simple commitment to an obviously contentious verificationism, as I
explained that notion in the last section, because it does not involve denying that there
are facts of which we can have no knowledge. The quick argument obviously
depends on the notion of privacy, as I introduced it in section 1, which means that we
have met my original desideratum (A). Since there is no simple involvement of
verificationism, we have met desideratum (B) as well.
3. The Not-so-Quick Argument: A Verificationist Reading
What about the other kind of argument, the kind which is meant to be analogous to
seeing that the bogus roller is not really a machine at all? If the quick argument
accepts that a private definition might do something, and claims merely that it cannot
determine the correct use of a word in a public language, presumably the other kind of
argument—the not-so-quick argument—must deny that a private definition could do
anything.
There is, indeed, a passage in the Philosophical Investigations which seems to
do just that—the famous §258. It is in this passage that the idea of using the sign „S‟
to record in a diary the recurrence of a certain sensation is first introduced. The idea is
that „S‟ is defined ostensively to mean a certain type of sensation—the type, as we
might put it, which feels like that. The ostensive definition is supposed to be carried
out by impressing on myself a connection between the sign and the sensation. The
section then concludes with the following argument which seems to show that this
supposed definition cannot really have achieved anything:
But “I impress it on myself” can only mean: this process brings it about that I
remember the connexion right in the future. But in the present case I have no
criterion of correctness. One would like to say: whatever is going to seem
right to me is right. And that only means that here we can‟t talk about „right‟.
This passage has seemed to invite a verificationist reading, whether
unwittingly or not. Here is a version of such a reading:10
(V1) I have no criterion of correctness for the use of „S‟;
(V2) If I have no criterion of correctness for the use of „S‟, I will be unable
to remember how to use „S‟ correctly;
(V3) If it is impossible to remember how to use „S‟ correctly, there is no
such thing as the correct use of „S‟; so
(V4) There is no such thing as the correct use of „S‟.
10
This reading of the argument takes there to be a specific problem with memory in the
case of a privately defined word. The argument is taken to assume that memory
depends on having something which ensures that I remember things right. This
something, according to this reading, is here called a „criterion of correctness‟. If
there is no criterion of correctness, there is nothing to ensure that my apparent
memory will really be correct. This interpretation reads the words „whatever is going
to seem right to me is right‟ as saying that there will be nothing to correct me if my
apparent memory is mistaken. The last sentence of the section is then taken to say
that there can be no genuine correctness if there is no possibility of correcting
apparent memories.
One objection to this interpretation is precisely that it is verificationist. Why
should we believe premise (V3)? It might be claimed that the relevant kind of
verificationism is less objectionable in the case of speaking a language: it seems
important for our general use of language that we should know what our words
mean.11
But this does not really address the problem here. It may be that much of
what we want to be able to do in language cannot be done if we do not know what our
words mean, but might it not be the case that our words mean something even if we
do not know it? In this case in particular, might we not have established a rule for the
correct use of the sign „S‟, even if we cannot tell whether we are using it correctly?
The argument seems to claim that there is no such thing as correct use of „S‟ here, and
that is just what seems not to have been convincingly established.
And the verificationist reading‟s concentration on memory is problematic too.
It is hard to see why there should be a special difficulty with remembering one‟s own
sensations, and if the argument turns on a general scepticism about memory, this is
likely to affect public definitions too. Any argument which relies on scepticism about
memory seems likely to violate desideratum (A) as well as desideratum (B).
There might seem to be some confirmation of the verificationist reading in the
fact that there seems to be some worry about memory in a passage which occurs a
little later:
[T]his process has got to produce a memory which is actually correct. If the
mental image of the time-table could not itself be tested for correctness, how
could it confirm the correctness of the first memory?12
This appeal to the need for a test seems to be precisely an appeal to the need for a
criterion, on the verificationist understanding of the notion of a criterion.
Nevertheless, it seems to me that the verificationist reading makes poor sense
of §258. The main point of the whole section seems to be to claim that nothing is
actually done in the purported definition. The crucial remark is this one from the
middle of the section:
But what is this ceremony for? for that is all it seems to be!
11
The remainder of the section is an argument for the claim that there really is nothing
but a ceremony here: no actual definition is made. And that conforms to what
Wittgenstein understood to be wrong with the idea of private ostensive definition in
the Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology: it is like something which looks like a
machine, but is in fact a rigid construction. The point here seems not to be that a
private definition would be useless: that is the point of the „quick‟ argument we
considered earlier.
Moreover, the verificationist reading cannot explain a number of features of
the last four sentences of §258—the very sentences on which it is based. It cannot
explain the emphasis being on „right‟ rather than on „remember‟ in the first of these
sentences. (We might note a similar emphasis on „correct‟ in §265.) It forces us to
adopt a rather unnatural interpretation of the word „criterion‟: a criterion is not usually
taken to be a decisive test, as this reading has to understand it. The verificationist
reading cannot explain why Wittgenstein writes „One would like to say‟, and uses „is
going to seem‟ rather than „seems‟, in the penultimate sentence. And it seems to have
to take the word „that‟ as referring to the second of these last four sentences, whereas
it is naturally understood to be referring to the third.
These are all reasons for being reluctant to rest content with a verificationist
reading of §258. I want now to suggest an interpretation which makes the passage do
what the not-so-quick argument for the impossibility of private ostensive definition
should be doing: showing that nothing at all is achieved by a private ostensive
definition.
4. A Non-Verificationist Reading of the Not-so-Quick Argument
I think the clue to a non-verificationist reading of §258 lies in the word „criterion‟. I
suggest that rather than thinking of a criterion as a decisive test, we understand the
notion just as I understood it in section 2, as that of an a-priori-based condition.13
Such conditions might be necessary conditions or sufficient conditions, so we might
speak of necessary criteria and sufficient criteria. We might then define the relevant
notions as follows:
(NC) A necessary criterion for being F is a condition which something has
to meet in order to count as being F;
(SC) A sufficient criterion for being F is a condition the meeting of which is
sufficent for something to count as being F.
These are the notions which are in play in the familiar concept of a criterion of
identity. A criterion of identity—for persons, say—is a condition which an object a
and an object b have to meet in order to count as being the same person, or a condition
the meeting of which is sufficient for objects a and b to count as being the same
person. And this concept of a criterion of identity seems certainly to be in play in the
neighbourhood of our passage, in §253. Criteria of identity will naturally be
associated with sortal nouns: words like „person‟, „horse‟, or „table‟ at one level;
words like „animal‟, „artefact‟, „living thing‟ at a higher level of abstraction. Terms
like „pain‟ and „joy‟ are naturally understood as sortal terms at one level, with the
12
word „sensation‟ being a higher-level „sortal‟. It is natural to think that the concept of
a sortal is precisely the concept of a suitable criterion of identity.
I do not want to claim that every use of the word „criterion‟ in Wittgenstein‟s
later philosophy is an instance of the notion defined by (NC) and (SC), although I
think it would be interesting to see how far that interpretation can be taken. All I want
to suggest is that we understand the uses of the word which are relevant to §258 in
line with (NC) and (SC). Taken like that, the ante-penultimate sentence of that
section says something like this:
But in the present case I can point to no condition which something has to
meet in order to count as being correctly called „S‟.
In effect, the claim is that I can point to no identity condition for being an S-type
sensation.
This certainly looks like what Wittgenstein ought to be saying, if he is really
giving a version of the not-so-quick argument which is parallel to the deeper way of
seeing what is wrong with the bogus roller. Whereas the quick way of seeing the
problem with private ostensive definition accepts that there can be private identity
conditions for sensations, which it then claims do no work in a public language, the
not-so-quick way ought to involve denying that there can be private identity
conditions at all. But even if this is what Wittgenstein ought to be saying, why does
he say it?
At this point it is natural to turn to two passages a little later in the
Philosophical Investigations, in which use is made of the notion of a criterion:
The 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 afresh. 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.14
What I do is not, of course, to identify my sensation by criteria: but to use the
same expression again.15
The opening sentence here refers back to one of the early remarks which Wittgenstein
makes about privacy in the Philosophical Investigations:
The truth is: it makes sense to say about other people that they doubt whether I
am in pain; but not to say it about myself.***
And the talk of „cutting out human behaviour‟ or „the abrogation of the normal
language-game with the expression of a sensation‟ is a reference to the situation which
is set up in §256, to be the background of the introduction of the sign „S‟ in §258:
13
But suppose I didn‟t have any natural expression for the sensation, but only
had the sensation? And now I simply associate names with sensations and use
these names in descriptions.
I want to suggest that §§288 and 290 show us a conception of the relation of
criteria to the use of sensation terms which can provide us with a non-verificationist
reading of §258: this will present that passage as offering a version of the not-so-quick
argument for the impossibility of private ostensive definition.
I suggest that we can find the following general picture in these remarks.. For
a word to be meaningful, there have to be criteria for its correct use: that is, conditions
which have to be met, or whose being met is sufficient, for the word to count as being
used correctly. These conditions have to be, in a certain sense, independent of the
word: it has to be possible to make sense of them independently of understanding that
word. Otherwise, the conditions would provide no rationale for the correct use of the
word. In the case of a sortal term, the criteria for correct use will define the identity
conditions for a type of thing which may be said to correspond to the sortal. So, for
example, the criteria for the correct use of the word „person‟ will define the conditions
of personal identity, and the criteria for the correct use of a sensation term will define
the conditions under which sensations count as being sensations of the same type, the
type which corresponds to that term. To take a particular case, the criteria for the
correct use of the word „pain‟ will define the conditions under which sensations count
as being pains. They will also determine the conditions under which pain a and pain b
count as being the same pain.
Let us now imagine a very simple case in which we have a conception of the
necessary and sufficient conditions for the application of a sensation-term „P‟. And
let us, for convenience of representation, express this conception as „C‟. We can put
the point like this:
(PC1) A sensation is correctly called „P‟ if and only if it is C.
A familiar equivalence enables us to connect the correct use of sensation term with the
conditions for being a certain kind of sensation:
(TP) A sensation is correctly called „P‟ if and only if it is a P.
And we can then state the identity conditions of the relevant sensation type:
(PC2) A sensation is a P if and only if it is C.
This will allow us to rationalize claims that particular sensations are Ps.
Now consider a first-person present-tense report of the presence of a P
sensation:
(R) I have a P.
We might imagine that this report is the conclusion of a certain piece of reasoning:
14
(Ra) I have a sensation which is C;
(Rb) If I have a sensation which is C, I have a P; so
(R) I have a P.
How might this piece of reasoning be understood? (Ra) is naturally understood as a
report of observation: I find that I have a sensation which meets a condition which I
can make understand independently of understanding the word „P‟ itself. This
independence is integral to the notion of a criterion, as I have characterized it. It is
also necessary if there is to be any genuine argument runninig from (Ra) to (R). (Rb)
is an instance of (one half of) the criterion of identity for the P type of sensation,
(PC2). And (R) follows unproblematically from these.
I think it is clear that Wittgenstein holds that no such argument can really be
involved in first-person present-tense reports of sensations, such as (R). For this
argument involves precisely what Wittgenstein says is not involved in such reports:
identifying my sensation by criteria. What is the problem? It seems to be this: if I
identify my sensation by criteria, it makes sense to doubt whether I really have that
sensation. But Wittgenstein holds that, in first-person present-tense reports of
sensations, such doubt does not make sense. That means that first-person present-
tense reports of sensations cannot be the conclusions of arguments like that from (Ra)
to (R).
Let us examine this in more detail. Wittgenstein seems to be committed to
something like the following claim:
(CD) If I identify a sensation by criteria, it must make sense for me to doubt
whether I have identified the sensation correctly.
We can give the following rationale for (CD), if we take the schematic argument from
(Ra) to (R) to be representative of identifying a sensation by criteria in general. Each
of the premises, (Ra) and (Rb), offers a potential location for the possibility of doubt
to arise. What we need to consider is how we might remove the possibility of doubt
from each. How could we make doubt about (Rb) senseless? The only obvious way
is by taking (Rb) to be part of a definition of the sensation term „P‟: we imagine „P‟
being introduced explicitly on the basis of (PC1). How could we make doubt about
(Ra) senseless? The only obvious way is by taking „C‟ to be a sensation term, so that
(Ra) is another first-person present-tense report of sensation.
Now it seems that we can only remove the possibility of doubt from the whole
argument by supposing that the sensation term „P‟ is explicitly defined, by (PC1), in
terms of another sensation term „C‟, in its first-person use. But now let us ask: does
any of these terms have a use which is not a first-person present-tense use? If they do
not, then, according to Wittgenstein, it never makes sense for the user to doubt any
uses of these terms. And in that case, it is hard to see how anything at all can be said
using them. So if sensation terms are to be meaningful at all, it seems they must have
some uses other than first-person present-tense uses. It must be possible, for example,
for me to wonder whether you have a P, or a sensation which is C. What might I be
wondering if I wonder this? It seems that if I am to be wondering anything at all, I
15
have to be wondering whether you meet some condition which is not merely an
uttering of a first-person present-tense use of a sensation term. Even if the only way I
can express my question is to wonder whether you have the sensation which you call
„P‟, I have to suppose that your having the sensation is not just your saying „I have a
P‟.
What this means is that, in the end, sensation terms have to be rooted in
criteria which are independent of sensation terms. That is to say, if we suppose that
the report of a sensation is based on an argument of the form of the (Ra) to (R)
argument, we have to trace the argument back to a premise of the form of (Ra) in
which „C‟ is not itself a sensation term. That is to say, if we are to give the true
rationale for an explicitly justified report of a sensation, we have to begin with a
premise like (Ra) which it makes sense for the subject to doubt. That makes (CD)
compelling, and gives us reason to think that first-person present-tense reports of
sensations cannot involve identifying sensations by criteria.
If this is right, Wittgenstein is here making a point about first-person sensation
reports which is closely analogous to one which other people have made about the use
of the first-person. If I say, „I am the shopper whose bag is leaking‟, I do not identify
myself by some description. There is a difference between saying, for example, „I am
the shopper whose bag is leaking‟ and „The man on the TV screen is the shopper
whose bag is leaking‟. The difference is that, insofar as I understand the word „I‟,
there is no room for misidentifying myself in my use of the word. The crucial thing
about the concept of the first person, it is often maintained, is that it is immune to
error through misidentification.16
If in first-person present-tense uses of sensation terms we do not identify
sensations by criteria, it seems clear that there can be no such thing as first-person
present-tense criteria for the application of sensation terms. And that is naturally
taken to explain why Wittgenstein says in §258, „But in the present case I have no
criterion of correctness‟. Wittgenstein is imagining the attempt to define the proper
use of the sign „S‟ to refer to a sensation, from the first-person present-tense point of
view. The sensation is supposed to be identified by how it feels at the time. But if the
term is to be a genuine sensation term, according to Wittgenstein it has to be immune
from doubt in the first person of the present tense, and that will mean that there is no
criterion for its application from that point of view. That in turn will mean that no
rule for the use of „S‟ can be given from the first-person present-tense point of view.
But has Wittgenstein done enough to show that there can be no private
definition of a sensation term at all? Might we not be able to make sense of a
criterion for the use of „S‟ which was private without being a first-person present-
tense criterion? Such a criterion would have to be first-personal—so that no other
person could have access to it—but not present-tensed. How can this be ruled out?
Wittgenstein does not consider the possibilities here systematically, but it is
plausible to think that he has done enough to cover them. The two possibilities are:
criteria for sensations available in anticipation of having them, and criteria available
in remembering having had them. What might these criteria be? They cannot be
either criteria which we become aware of through a prospective imagining of having a
16
sensation, or criteria which we become aware of through a retrospective imagining of
having the sensation, since these methods presuppose that there are criteria to be
imagined. This is because such imagining will simply put us—whether prospectively
or retrospectively—in the position of actually having the sensation. So the criteria
available through such imagination are just whatever criteria are available unimagined
when we actually have the sensation. And these will be whatever criteria which are
available from the first-person present-tense point of view—and Wittgenstein‟s claim
is that there can be no such criteria.
If this avenue is closed off, what is left? It seems that the only criteria
available to us are the criteria for two other sensations: the sensation of being about to
have the first sensation, and the sensation of having just had the first sensation. But
what are the conditions of identity for these two new sensations? The same problems
seem to arise for these supposed sensations as arose in the first place for the original
one, the one we supposed was named by „S‟. So it seems that if we accept that there
can be no first-person present-tense criteria for sensation terms, we have to accept that
there can be no private criteria for such terms at all.
This makes sense of another remark which Wittgenstein makes about criteria:
An „inner‟ process stands in need of outward criteria.17
We might say that a process counts as „inner‟ if the term for it has the kind of first-
person present-tense use which is characteristic of sensation terms: in these uses doubt
makes no sense, according to Wittgenstein. In that case, an „inner‟ process cannot
have „inner‟ criteria; so its criteria need to be „outward‟—available in principle to
another person. That is to say, an „inner‟ process‟s being a process of a certain kind is
a matter of its meeting certain „outward‟—for example, behavioural—conditions.
This ties in with another feature of Wittgenstein‟s view. Let us ask: if there
are no first-person present-tense criteria for sensation terms, how can we learn to use
such terms in the first person and the present tense. His answer seems to be that we
„use the same expression‟.18
The idea seems to be that we have to be trained to use
sensation terms unreflectively in the first person. Why should we have to be trained?
For two reasons, I suggest: first, speaking a particular language is never a merely
natural development, so something needs to be done to get us to use a word; and
secondly, we cannot introduce a sensation term on purpose for ourselves, for our own
use in first-person present-tense reports, since this would require us to introduce it on
the basis of criteria.
If we are trained, we can only be trained by someone who is in a position to
judge whether we are using the words correctly. The trainer then needs to use some
independent criterion: there needs to be something which is available, in principle,
from a third-person point of view which can stand as the condition which something
has to meet to count as a sensation of the appropriate type. To be a pain, for example,
a sensation has to be naturally expressed in a certain type of behaviour. So again: an
„inner‟ process stands in need of outward criteria. Notice, though, that this appeal to
training is not essential to the claim that there can be no private criteria: that claim is
17
derived more directly from Wittgenstein‟s view that it makes no sense for us to doubt
whether we have a certain sensation, at the time when we seem to have it.19
Now let us turn back to §258. In the case of „S‟, there is no outward criterion
of correctness: that follows from the assumption that no one else could possibly
understand the word. All that one can do is to attempt to establish its meaning by
means of an „inner‟ criterion—a first-person present-tense criterion. It is natural to
understand the penultimate sentence of §258 as being an expression of such an
attempt:
One would like to say: whatever is going to seem right to me is right.
That is: what we want is a criterion which will capture the immunity from doubt of
sensation terms from the first-person present-tense point of view. But the problem is
obvious: „And that only means that here we can‟t talk about “right”‟. That is to say,
this is no genuine criterion: it establishes no rule for the use of „S‟.
If we adopt this interpretation, we can explain the features of these final
sentences which seemed puzzling on the verificationist reading. We can understand
why Wittgenstein says „One would like to say‟: this is an attempt to do the best that
can be done on behalf of the private definition. We can see why Wittgenstein uses the
future tense („is going to seem‟ rather than „seems‟): what we are attempting to
specify is a rule for the future use of „S‟. And we can see why the final sentence of
the section should relate specifically to the penultimate one, rather than principally to
the claim that the person offering the private definition has no criterion of correctness.
The problem raised in the final sentence is a problem with the attempt of the previous
sentence to formulate a rule for „S‟. In effect, the last two sentences are the argument
for the claim that if I attempt to introduce „S‟ in the way imagined, I have no criterion
of correctness.
Now we can work back to the sentence which set the verificationist reading
going in the first place:
But “I impress it on myself” can only mean: this process brings it about that I
remember the connexion right in the future.
If there is no independent criterion for the use of „S‟, there will indeed be no such
thing as remembering the sensation right, but not because there is any difficulty about
memory: the problem is just that there is no such thing as rightness. The reason that
there is no such thing as rightness is that no boundary has been set between those
sensations which are properly called „S‟ and others, because there is no criterion of
correctness for the term. Nor is there really a problem about memory considered in
that other passage in which the issue is raised:
[T]his process has got to produce a memory which is actually correct. If the
mental image of the time-table could not itself be tested for correctness, how
could it confirm the correctness of the first memory?20
18
In fact, memory is only brought in here because it is suggested, on behalf of the
person attempting to give a private definition of a sign, that memory might supply us
with just the kind of independent criterion of identity for the sensation which we
need.21
The suggestion Wittgenstein is considering is that „S‟ is used correctly
whenever we have that kind of sensation—and here we point, as it were, to a
remembered sensation. If my general account of Wittgenstein‟s problem with private
ostensive definition is correct, what is wrong with this suggestion is that it does
nothing more than take us back to some occasion when we might have used „S‟ in the
past. We have not been supplied with any substantial conception of a kind of
sensation: nothing has been done to tell us what kinds of similarity there need to be
between the present sensation and the past one for the present to count as being of the
same kind. All that has happened is that we have engaged in what I earlier described
as a retrospective imagining of a sensation. That means that we have simply taken
ourselves back to a situation in which, according to Wittgenstein, we have no criterion
of correctness. I suggest, then, that when Wittgenstein in §265 objects to the idea of
appealing to something which cannot be tested for correctness, his objection is not to
the absence of a guarantee of correctness, but to the absence of anything substantial
which might be being tested for. The appeal to memory does not really take us to
anything independent which might supply that substance.
For all that, it does seem possible to introduce a sensation term for oneself. In
§288 Wittgenstein offers an explanation of this appearance of possibility. It all
depends on what he calls „the abrogation of the normal language-game with the
expression of a sensation‟. His view seems clearly to be that the identity conditions of
sensations are supplied principally by the behaviour which is their normal expression.
It is only in virtue of their having these „outward‟ behavioural criteria that our
ordinary sensation terms are meaningful and are capable of being used in the way
which is distinctive of them in the first person and present tense. But sensation terms
with criteria like this would be capable in principle of being understood by other
people, as Wittgenstein notes in §256. So if we are really dealing with a private
sensation language—one which no one else could possibly understand—we have to
cut away these criterial connections with behaviour. If we now pretend (as
Wittgenstein would see it) that we are still dealing with real words, we have to
suppose that we have criteria available to us even in the first person and present tense,
and that we identify sensations by these criteria even in these uses. And now it seems
as if we could use these criteria as the basis for definitions of our own sensation terms.
If the suggested account of Wittgenstein‟s reasoning is right, his objection is then that
these cannot really be sensation terms, since they cannot have the immunity from
doubt in first-person present-tense uses which is distinctive of sensation terms.
We have here an account of §258 which presents it as offering a version of the
not-so-quick argument of the kind we were looking for: one which is genuinely
parallel to the observation that the bogus roller is a rigid construction, and not really a
machine at all. Does this reconstruction meet our two initial desiderata? They were
these:
(A) The arguments for the supposed impossibility must depend essentially
on the fact that the attempted definition is „private‟;
19
(B) The arguments for the supposed impossibility must not depend simply
on an obviously contentious form of verificationism.
We have clearly met desideratum (A): the considerations appealed to have been
largely independent of general problems about ostensive definition and the arguments
about rule-following. Moreover, the reconstruction depends essentially on the fact
that the supposed private language is a language of sensation terms: the argument
depends on a particular account of the distinctive first-person/third-person asymmetry
of sensation terms.
I think we have also met desideratum (B). This argument does not depend very
simply on any contentious form of verificationism. It is true that there is a claim that
the use of words depends upon criteria of correctness, and criteria of correctness have
to meet a certain kind of epistemic condition. They have to be intelligible
independently of actually using the word for which they are offered as criteria. It turns
out, moreover, that the criteria for sensation terms have to be conditions which can in
principle be observed to obtain by people other than the person feeling the
sensations—at least, if they can be recognized at all. But these two epistemic
conditions are not evidence of any contentious verificationism. The idea that words
need criteria of correctness which are intelligible independently of the words
themselves depends on a view which relates specifically to language: the core thought
is that it must be possible to give a rationale for the use of words. This core thought
depends on such things as that languages are learned or acquired, rather than innate,
and that we use words intentionally. The other epistemic condition—that the criteria
for sensation terms have to be capable in principle of being observed to obtain by
other people (when they can be recognized at all)—is specific to sensation terms, and
is required by what I have suggested is Wittgenstein‟s account of the special first-
person/third-person asymmetry which sensation terms have. No contentious
verificationism is involved in any of this, since a contentious verificationism denies or
doubts the possibility of unverifiable truths, and no such denial or doubt is involved
here. All that the argument requires is that the conditions for the correct use of
sensation terms must be of a kind which can, in principle, be observed to obtain by
other people, if they can be recognized at all. It does not follow that the relevant
conditions must be capable of being observed to obtain whenever they do obtain. So
the argument requires no general denial of the possibility of verification-transcendent
truth.
5. How Good is This Not-so Quick Argument?
The core of the argument which I have suggested lies behind §258 can be summarized
like this:
(NQ1) I can only define a term by establishing criteria of correctness for it;
(NQ2) If (NQ1) is true, then I can only define a private sensation term by
establishing private criteria of correctness for it;
(NQ3) There can only be private criteria of correctness for a sensation term if
there are criteria available from the first-person present-tense point of
view;
20
(NQ4) There can be no criteria of correctness for a sensation term which are
available from the first-person present-tense point of view; so
(NQ5) I cannot define a private sensation term.
The contentious steps of this argument are (NQ1) and (NQ4). I will not attempt to
provide any very thorough defence of these two premises. I will simply show that
they are not as quickly vulnerable to the obvious objections as they might seem to be.
In the case of (NQ1), I will consider just the objections which might occur to a
certain kind of Wittgensteinian. (That means that what I am taking to be an objection
to (NQ1) might be taken by a certain kind of Wittgensteinian to be an objection to my
interpretation of §258.) What (NQ1) imagines is that for every meaningful term, there
must be conditions for its correct application of a kind which could provide a
justification for using it. These conditions might be necessary conditions, or sufficient
conditions; in a certain kind of ideal case, they will be necessary and sufficient
conditions. This might seem to fall foul of two things which Wittgenstein says
elsewhere in the Philosophical Investigations.
The first objection arises from the impression that may have been given that
this appeal to criteria is implicitly reductionist. If we think that every term has
necessary and sufficient conditions for its correct application which can be used in
justifications of its application, we must suppose that some equivalence to each term
can be given in terms which are intelligible independently of it. And this just looks
like a demand for reduction. Such a reductionism seems flatly contradicted by the
remarks which Wittgenstein makes about family resemblance in §67.
In fact, the issue is more complicated. In §67 Wittgenstein seems to imagine
that we have a term—we might call it „G‟—which has a range of applications of
which we can say: it is not arbitrary that they are all called „G‟. What he denies is that
there need be a unifying set of necessary and sufficient conditions which hold for the
full range of these applications. Note, first, that this is already in opposition to a
simple anti-reductionism. A simple anti-reductionism holds that there is a single
unifying set of necessary and sufficient conditions which holds for the full range of
things which can properly be called „G‟: the condition is being G. Wittgenstein would
clearly regard this as a cop-out. Looking at the different things involved in the
different ways of being G—the ways which are related to each other as members of a
family resemble each other—is already looking at things which are intelligible
independently of the term „G‟ itself.
Instead of advocating a simple anti-reductionism, Wittgenstein seems to
suppose that we have a range of related, but not simply unified applications. For each
type of application, Wittgenstein seems to imagine a non-trivial sufficient condition:
for a thing to be properly called „G‟ in this kind of application it is sufficient that it is
C. Here it is clear that the concept of being C is in some way illuminating about what
is involved in a thing‟s being G: it has the kind of independent intelligibility which
might allow a thing‟s being C to be a justification for calling it „G‟. There is no
obvious reason why there should not also be a non-trivial necessary condition for each
application: such a necessary condition might provide us with an argument for saying
that something is not properly called „G‟ in that use of „G‟. All Wittenstein seems to
21
be claiming is that the different types of application of the term „G‟—with their
different sufficient and necessary conditions—need not be unified by a single set of
necessary and sufficient conditions which would give a general explanation of what it
is for something to be G. And the point of this seems to be to undermine the idea that
words correspond to natural unities: to shapes which the world has quite
independently of any language. The long-term goal of this argument seems to be to
show that the world as it is in itself does not justify any particular range of concepts,
rather than to claim that the use of words cannot be justified at all.
This means that there is no radical opposition between what Wittgenstein says
about family resemblance and what (NQ1) requires. It is true that I considered a
simple case in which we could formulate necessary and sufficient conditions for the
application of a sensation term: but that was a simplification made in order to
illustrate a point. No harm is done to the main argument if we imagine the use of a
term to have as much variegation as Wittgenstein himself imagines.
But someone might think that there was a more direct contradiction between
the use of the notion of a criterion in the not-so-quick argument and some of the
things which Wittgenstein says in his discussion of the nature of rule-following. For
example, Wittgenstein seems to claim, in §201, that following a rule cannot be a
matter of offering an interpretation, where „interpretation‟ means „the substitution of
one expression of the rule for another‟. And in §219 he says:
When I obey a rule, I do not choose.
I obey the rule blindly.
And this might be thought to fit well with a passage close to one we have considered
already:
To use a word without a justification does not mean to use it without right.22
None of these remarks, however, undermines the demand of (NQ1) that a
word can only be meaningful if there is a kind of condition whose recognition would
provide a justification for using it. In §201, all Wittgenstein claims is that there must
be a way of grasping a rule which is not a matter of interpretation: it does not follow
that interpretation is never involved in obeying a rule. And §219 can be understood to
be referring to this basic case, rather than ruling reflection out of rule-following
altogether. And, in any case, to say that a rule is followed without interpretation or
reflection, when we use a word, is not the same as to say that there is no interpretation
available, or that there is nothing to reflect upon, or that no justification can be given
for a use of a word. After all, the general picture of word-use which underlies the not-
so-quick argument supposes that when we use sensation words in the first person and
the present tense we do so without justification; but this does not mean that there is no
justification available—it is just that it cannot be a first-person present-tense
justification. And, of course, it is just this first-person present-tense use without
justification which Wittgenstein insists is not a wrong use (a use without right).
So the obvious Wittgensteinian objections to (NQ1) are not very powerful.
What, then, about the objections that might be raised to (NQ4)? (NQ4) is supported
22
by a general picture of sensation terms which has the following two commitments at
its heart:
(SD) It makes no sense to doubt whether we are using sensation terms
correctly in first-person present-tense uses—unless we are doubting
whether we really understand the terms;
(SB) The criteria of correctness for sensation terms are behavioural.
(SD) and (SB) are what anti-Wittgensteinians hate most about Wittgenstein‟s
philosophy of mind. There are two interlinked reasons for objecting to (SD). The
first is that, with its concomitant rejection of first-person present-tense criteria for
sensation terms, (SD) seems to deny that there is anything which it is like to have a
sensation. But it seems to many the most important thing about sensations that there
is something which it is like to have them. The second objection to (SD) depends
upon a certain kind of appeal to commonsense: surely we can, in fact, reflect on our
current sensations in a way which (SD) would make unintelligible. The standard
objection to (SB) is that it commits Wittgenstein to an objectionable form of
behaviourism—one which, for example, would deny that there is anything which it is
like to have a sensation, and that one could have a sensation without being inclined to
express it in behaviour.
These objections are more complicated and harder to undermine than those
against (NQ1). Nevertheless, there is something that can be said against them, and in
defence of what I take to be Wittgenstein‟s view. Consider, first, the first objection to
(SD): that it denies that there is anything which it is like to have a sensation. What is
this idea of what it is like to have a sensation? We might think it is quite an everyday
idea (and this is what makes the objection initially compelling). A doctor might ask
you what a certain pain is like: is it a sharp pain, or a throbbing pain, or an ache? In
answer to questions like this, we seem to reflect directly on the nature of the pain we
feel. We seem to do something which (SD) would seem to make impossible: at this
point we have moved over to the second objection to (SD).
I think that the Wittgensteinian has to say, in answer to this, that we can say
what it is like to have a sensation—and so, a fortiori, there is something which it is
like to have the sensation—but that in doing this we are not reporting the results of a
reflection on the nature of the sensation. What we are doing, the Wittgensteinian has
to say, is simply considering how to describe the sensation. That is to say, we
consider just whether we find ourselves inclined to use the terms „sharp pain‟,
„throbbing pain‟, and „ache‟, unreflectively, from the first-person present-tense point
of view. These terms themselves, on Wittgenstein‟s view, have „outward‟ rather than
„inner‟ criteria. So we can say what the pain is like, but in doing so we are not using
the more precise descriptions on the basis of private criteria; rather we are simply
„using again‟ words which have public criteria.
In this kind of case, at least, it seems that Wittgenstein can say something
which is at least not easily refutable. Might the same kind of response work in a more
radical case, when we are not concerned with the description of our sensations in a
public language? Suppose I am regularly subject to two kinds of headache: migraines,
and a less disabling kind of headache deriving from fatigue. I wake up one morning,
23
with a slight headache. It seems that I might be able to tell from the feel of this slight
headache that what I have is the beginning of a migraine, rather than just a fatigue
headache: I have had this kind of slight headache in the past, and it is different in
phenomenal character from the slight headaches which are simply the result of
fatigue. Of course, I do not yet have a word for this early-migraine type of slight
headache, but it seems that I could introduce a word for it, and if I do, I will introduce
it on the basis of the way it feels.
What might Wittgenstein say to this? The obvious thing for him to say is that
the concept of a migraine is the concept of a kind of headache which is describable in
a public language, and so (according to Wittgenstein) must have public criteria. The
concept of this pre-migraine kind of headache is understood in terms of the concept of
a migraine, and so seems also to have public criteria. But this seems an odd thing to
say about the present case. The problem is that, as I have explained the notion, a
criterion is a condition which is involved in something‟s counting as belonging to a
certain kind. And it does not seem to us that whether or not my pre-migraine
headache counts as a feeling of that kind depends on whether or not it foreshadows
the onset of a migraine. It seems that the connection with migraines is a purely
empirical one, and is not constitutive of the basic concept I have of the feeling in
question. It seems that Wittgenstein has to claim that this sense of a merely empirical
connection is misleading: it is in fact criterial, even if it does not seem to be.
In the end, the plausibility of this claim depends on the plausibility of (SD): if
(SD) is right, the criteria for sensations cannot be first-person present-tense criteria. I
take it that (SD) is offered as an account of the special status of first-person present-
tense reports of sensations. It is not obvious that there is a better one: the Cartesian
idea of infallible observation seems almost a contradiction in terms. Nevertheless, it
can seem that (SD) gives too little space for the possibility of reflecting on our
feelings as we have them.
(SD), of course, is only plausible if sensation terms (and other terms with a
similar asymmetry between first-person present-tense uses and others) have „outward‟
criteria. Wittgenstein himself believes that sensation terms have behavioural criteria,
as in (SB). This might seem to make him a crass behaviourist, simply defining
sensations in terms of dispositions to behave in appropriate ways. And in that case, he
is vulnerable to familiar objections. Surely, someone might say, someone could feel a
sensation without being at all disposed to behave in any distinctive way at all?23
There might be people who are terribly brave, and never show pain. And there seem
to be drugs, sometimes used as anaesthetics, whose real function is just to paralyse the
body: surely it makes sense to suppose that the drugged person might continue to feel
the pain, even if she cannot move even a muscle?
It is not clear that Wittgenstein is actually vulnerable to this kind of familiar
objection. The connection between sensations and behaviour which he is concerned
with is a connection between sensations and the behaviour which is their natural
expression. So pain, for example, is naturally expressed in the kind of behaviour
which we think of as pain-behaviour. And the crucial claim about criteria would then
be something like this: pain is (in effect, by definition) that sensation which is
naturally expressed in that kind of behaviour. But it does not follow from this that
24
everyone who feels a pain expresses it in the natural way: someone might express it
unnaturally, or not at all. This does not affect the fact, as Wittgenstein takes it to be,
that what makes something a pain is that it has a certain kind of natural expression. If
this is right, the fundamental problem with (SB) is not significantly different from the
problems we have already considered with (SD): the difficulty is that we feel that we
have first-person present-tense criteria for sensations, rather than behavioural criteria.
I do not claim, though, to have defended Wittgenstein from all possible
objections. My concern has simply been to present versions of his arguments against
the possibility of private ostensive definition which meet my original desiderata (A)
and (B), as well as being interpretatively plausible. The fact that the fundamental
worries raised by the arguments, as I have presented them, are the fundamental
worries that are commonly felt about Wittgenstein‟s philosophy of mind serves only
to support the claim that the versions I have presented are plausible as interpretations
of Wittgenstein.
1 Philosophical Grammar, p. 194; see also Zettel, §248.
2 Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology, I §397.
3 For example, by M. Budd, Wittgenstein’s Philosophy of Psychology (London: Routledge, 1989), p.64,
and P. Hacker, Wittgenstein: Meaning and Mind (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), p. 64. Budd, it seems to
me, obviously misunderstands the comparison, by taking the rim of the roller correspond to a person‟s
behaviour and the motor to the private ostensive definition. Hacker gets the analogy right, I think, but
his interpretation does not clearly meet desideratum (B) below. 4 Philosophical Investigations, I §243.
5 Interpretations in the former camp include those of N. Malcolm, „Wittgenstein‟s Philosophical
Investigations‟, in his Knowledge and Certainty: Essays and Lectures (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-
Hall, 1963), pp. 96-129, M. Budd, op cit, Ch 3, P. Hacker, op cit, pp. 61-4, one strand of the
interpretation of R. Fogelin, Wittgenstein, second edition (London: Routledge, 1987), Ch 12, and
(despite his best efforts) C. Wright, „Does Philosophical Investigations I. 258-60 Suggest a Cogent
Argument against Private Language‟, in P. Pettit and J. McDowell, eds., Subject, Thought, and Context
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), pp. 209-66. Interpretations in the latter camp include those of S.
Kripke, Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language (Oxford: Blackwell, 1982) and D. Stern,
Wittgenstein on Mind and Language, 6.3, and the other strand of the interpretation of Fogelin, op cit. 6 Philosophical Investigations, I §270.
7 Note that the same image of a useless bit of a machine recurs in the following section, §271.
8 I say „Fregean‟, because the quick argument, as I understand it, is fundamentally the same as one of
Frege‟s arguments against psychologism: see Frege (1953: vi). 9 Philosophical Investigations, II, p. 177 (p. 207 in earlier editions).
10 The famous interpretation by Malcolm, op cit, seems to take the form of the version presented here.
11 See D. Pears, The False Prison, vol II, p 333.
12 Philosophical Investigations, §265.
13 I think this interpretation is in line with the view of R. Albritton, „On Wittgenstein‟s Use of the Term
“Criterion”‟, in G. Pitcher, ed., Wittgenstein: The Philosophical Investigations (New York: Macmillan,
1966), pp 231-250. 14
Philosophical Investigations, §288. 15
Philosophical Investigations, §290. 16
See, e.g., G. Evans, The Varieties of Reference (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), pp. 215-
220. 17
Philosophical Investigations, §580. 18
Philosophical Investigations, §290. 19
This is contrary to the suggestions made by, for example, Fogelin and Stern. See Fogelin, op cit, pp
175-179, and Stern, op cit, p 185. 20
Philosophical Investigations, §265. 21
„But justification consists in appealing to something independent.—“But surely I can appeal from one
memory to another ...”‟: Philosophical Investigations, §265. 22
Philosophical Investigations, §289.
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