THOUGH this issue has been considerably discussed in recent years, it seems worthwhile to raise it again for two reasons. First, because of a certain dissatisfaction with contemporary examinations of Wittgenstein’s treatment of the matter in Philosophical Investigations, which itself is intimately connected with puzzles that arise in the readers of that work. Second, because the problem of pain was one that occupied Wittgenstein a great deal from the time of his return to Cambridge. I have been told1 that the group of students that surrounded him in 1929–30 were referred to as the ‘Toothache Club’ so often was this example the subject of their discussions. G. E. Moore says that in his lectures for the academic year 1932–3 Wittgenstein dealt at ‘great length with the difference between the proposition which is expressed by the words “I have got toothache”, and those which are expressed by the words “You have got toothache” or “He has got toothache”, …’2 The example of toothache is also used in a similar discussion in Philosophische Bemerkungen.3 In trying to get clear about what Wittgenstein said on the subject of pain and private language, it will be necessary to investigate why pain was such an important issue to him; it presumably originally arose from consideration of the ‘solipsism’ and other matters in the Tractatus, though here I am more concerned with examining the later doctrines than tracing their history in Wittgenstein’s thought. Also, care will have to be taken to avoid being so captivated with the examples that Wittgenstein uses that their function in the argument is forgotten. This is particularly the case with the notion of ‘private language’.
Wittgenstein invokes the example of a ‘private language’ in the context of his discussions of pain and other sensations, and it is in this context which it has philosophical interest. Some writers have taken the notion in a wider sense, that of a complete language made up by an individual for himself alone, as distinct from a mere code into which he translated a pre-existing language. Such a code would be only ‘accidentally’ private, in that its translation could be discovered and the private diary of the individual made public. An example of this wide use of the notion occurs in Professor Ayer’s paper in the symposium ‘Can there be a private language?’4 where he says: ‘But if we allow that our Robinson Crusoe (an individual brought up in complete isolation) could invent words to describe the flora and fauna of the island, why not allow that he could also invent words to describe his sensations?’ The trouble with this suggestion, as Rush Rhees pointed out in his reply to Ayer’s paper,5 is that even without the question of sensations arising it is hard to see what such a Robinson Crusoe would need words to describe the flora and fauna of the island for. This is the central problem with such a private language, and arises prior to that mentioned by Wittgenstein in connexion with the ‘sensation E’ but which also applies here: ‘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”.’6 Ayer thinks that Crusoe would discover, for example, that a certain bird was good to eat and hence give it a particular name, giving another name to one that was not good to eat to distinguish between them. Then the next time he sees a bird of the first kind, he utters the name and shoots it. But why utter the name here? It doesn’t play any part in the process, for if he can re-identify the bird on the second occasion, the name doesn’t serve any purpose. His uttering it is idle ceremony. And if he confuses the two kinds of birds, how does the prior naming help?
What has happened here, as so often in such cases, is that a normal social situation has been smuggled in. Names would be given to the two kinds of birds in order to assist in teaching children which to catch, and there would consequently be some kinds of rules which could be appealed to. It would make sense to talk of someone making a mistake; if someone uttered the word and raised his bow to shoot at the bird named, a companion could say ‘No, it isn’t, so don’t shoot it’. If Crusoe were to shoot a bird of the type not good to eat he would certainly have made a mistake, a misidentification. But this would not be affected by his utterance of a particular noise, which is all his so-called name could be. There are two points here; first, language must play a role in some way of life, second, it must involve public rules. On both these counts Ayer’s suggestion fails; it appears that he is making an intelligible claim, but on examination it is meaningless. Whatever noises a linguistically isolated individual might make, they would not count as a ‘language’. In this sense a ‘private language’ is a chimera, for language is always a social activity, involving the rules that only a social situation can provide. This general conclusion seems to be completely established by Wittgenstein, but it has nothing to do with the question of the meaning of sensation words in our normal vocabulary.
Confusion is liable to occur at this point from consideration of Wittgenstein’s ‘sensation E’, which he introduces in PI, § 258: ‘Let us imagine the following case. I want to keep a diary about the recurrence of a certain sensation. To this end I associate it with the sign “E” and write this sign in a calendar for every day on which I have the sensation.’ He concludes the section by saying: ‘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”.’ It seems at first sight that it would be quite possible for me in some way to identify a new sensation; the normal way to do this would be to refer to the circumstances in which it occurred. For example, the first man to experience an electric shock from touching the terminals of his new electrical machine felt a new sensation. He could identify it either by mentioning or remembering the mechanism which gave it to him, ‘What I get from that device when I do such-and-such’ or by the kind of sensation he received, which he could describe in terms of his existing sensation vocabulary. And then there would seem no reason why he should not use the sign ‘E’ to refer to it in his diary if he wished to register recurrences. But in such a case ‘E’ would not be a name for the sensation, but a mere code-word, for the rest of language has come to the aid of the inventor of the sign; he could communicate his meaning to others; it just so happens that he hasn’t bothered. For we do attempt to describe sensations to others, even though some are fairly indescribable.
It might be objected that I am talking about describing a sensation rather than about naming it. In a sense this charge is true, because, as the possessor of an adequate language, naming is not a necessary procedure for me to be able to refer to, talk about or remember a sensation—I already possess criteria to enable me to decide that this is the ‘same thing again’. These criteria are the rules for all the words in my vocabulary which I use in referring to the sensation; they are the criteria for its identity. Naming, as Wittgenstein stresses, is a particular kind of ceremony: ‘When one says “He gave a name to his sensation” one forgets that a great deal of stage-setting in the language is presupposed if the mere act of naming is to make sense.’7
There are well-known contexts in which naming takes place, e.g. the christening of children, the launching of ships, the discovery of a new species of plant. And these new names play a definite rôle in our social life, so that there is no question about the performing of an individual act of naming falling under one of these headings; its purpose is obvious. In each case there is something new to be named. But it is not immediately obvious what would qualify as a ‘new sensation’ and hence deserve a name in this sense. If it came to be recognized that a certain sort of sensation or set of sensations had diagnostic value then it might be given a name for the convenience of medical workers; ‘The patient has Wittgenstein’s sensation’. This can be compared with the definition of ‘aura’ in the Oxford Dictionary: ‘4.Path. A sensation, as of a current of cold air rising from some part of the body to the head, a premonitory symptom in epilepsy and hysterics’. The very fact that a definition can be formulated in such terms shows that it is not a genuinely ‘new’ sensation which is at issue here. In fact the idea of a new sensation is worrying in the way in which Ronald Knox’s ‘New Sin’ is worrying; we can conceive a sin which is now more important because more widespread than it used to be, but not a sin which had only just been discovered, which had been overlooked by the Church Fathers.
However, the various instances considered in the last paragraph still don’t really amount to ‘naming’ in the sense that Wittgenstein used the word in § 257: ‘ “What would it be like if human beings shewed no outward signs of pain (did not groan, grimace, etc.)? Then it would be impossible to teach a child the use of the word ‘toothache’!”—Well, let’s assume the child is a genius and itself invents a name for the sensation!’ His problem is that of the original introduction of the sensation word into our vocabulary, not the building of further structures with an already existent one. In this sense my examples were of no help, were not of real naming. This is clear in the case of ‘aura’, where the so-called name was really only a shorthand method of referring to a description, another example of the code-word mentioned earlier. And proper names represent a somewhat different problem which need not be gone into here, though it is perhaps worth remarking that the child genius of § 257 might well be using only a proper name for his sensation. For in the case envisaged the name invented would not function like a word in everyday language: ‘And when we speak of someone’s having given a name to pain, what is presupposed is the existence of the grammar of the word “pain”; it shews the post where the new word is stationed.’8 Without such a post there would be nothing to distinguish between it and a proper name.
For Wittgenstein the discussion is centred on pain because it is the commonest example of a sensation word to be used in philosophical arguments of the ‘private language’ type. And this is a natural way to proceed because we expect it to be one of the first such words to be learnt, and one which may well form a basis for future extensions of the sensation vocabulary. Hence no definition of it will be possible; there will be no ‘elements’ into which it can be resolved. If you have not experienced pain, there is no way in which I can explain it to you. Neither would an ostensive definition, such as sticking a pin into you, help here. For only if you already know what pain is will you know what to attend to in this apparent ostensive definition, the sensation rather than my action, etc. In the case of the original introduction of such a sensation word there is ‘no post where the new word is stationed’; we cannot presuppose the background of the rest of our sensation language. Hence to those who wish to talk in terms which involve a private language, pain is rather like an ‘object’ in the Tractatus: ‘Objects can only be named. Signs are their representatives. I can only speak about them: I cannot put them into words. Propositions can only say how things are, not what they are.’9 Two further comments from the Tractatus may help to show the relevance of this: ‘A name cannot be dissected further by means of a definition: it is a primitive sign.’10 ‘The meanings of primitive signs can be explained by means of elucidations. Elucidations are propositions that contain the primitive signs. So they can only be understood if the meanings of these are already known.’11 It would therefore seem that if the word ‘pain’ is to be introduced into the language immediately, the sentence expressing pain would be very like an elementary proposition in the sense given to this term in the Tractatus. Part of the trouble here is that those who are trying to argue for the irreducible and primary nature of sensation language have not seen the full consequences of their arguments, the special status that must be given to assertions about pains (or about other sensations) if what they say is true.
For in an important sense the notion ‘pain’ is only being taken by Wittgenstein as a representative one; his discussion is ultimately about a whole class of philosophical views, roughly to be characterized as sense-datum empiricism, the idea that our language must have a foundation in a certain special class of experiences, namely sensations. And this is why there seems to be a link between this view and another which sought for a ‘foundation’ of language, that of Wittgenstein himself in the Tractatus. The idea that in the final resort there is only one way in which our everyday language can get its meaning is the doctrine which is variously attacked in the Philosophical Investigations. Pain is in many ways the most difficult of the sensations to deal with, and to account for our use of ‘pain’ the idea of a sensational foundation is most plausible. Hence it is natural for Wittgenstein to concentrate his attention on this area.
It is often assumed in philosophy that though it is possible to communicate the fact that I have pain, I can’t communicate my pain, in other words that sensations are irreducibly private. From this it would seem to follow that I can only learn the meaning of the word ‘pain’ from my own experience. Yet when I say ‘He has a pain’ I mean the same as when I say ‘I have a pain’; I am asserting that he has the same as I have. The problem for Wittgenstein is how this can be. Normally we can discover that two attributions ‘mean the same’ by some process of validation. One way of doing this is by producing the referent, e.g. ‘He has a watch and I have the same’ is validated by our both producing watches for inspection. But in the case of pain there doesn’t seem to be such a procedure, for pain seems to be a ‘private object’, not one that can be produced or indicated to validate the identity. And it would seem that unless there were some such validating procedure the claim that there is an identity does not make sense: ‘It is as if I were to say: “You surely know what ‘It is 5 o’clock here’ means; so you also know what ‘It’s 5 o’clock on the sun’ means. It means simply that it is just the same time there as it is here when it is 5 o’clock”.—The explanation by means of identity does not work here. For I know well enough that one can call 5 o’clock here and 5 o’clock there “the same time”, but what I do not know is in what cases one is to speak of its being the same time here and there.’12 If I learn about my own pain directly and about that of other people only by inference from their behaviour, there would appear to be a gulf of just this kind. ‘If one has to imagine someone else’s pain on the model of one’s own, this is none too easy a thing to do: for I have to imagine pain which I do not feel on the model of pain which I do feel. That is, what I have to do is not simply to make a transition in imagination from one place of pain to another. As, from pain in the hand to pain in the arm. For I am not to imagine that I feel pain in some region of his body. (Which would also be possible.)’13 And, it would appear, there must be a difference in the meaning of the term ‘pain’ as applied to myself and to him. For, given that I feel my pain, then I can know I have it, whereas in the case of his I may be mistaken. In his case the word refers to behaviour, not, it would seem, to feeling.
I don’t want to spend much time on the epistemological question, for it seems clear that we can be certain that someone else is in pain. ‘ “But, if you are certain, isn’t it that you are shutting your eyes in face of doubt?” They are shut.’14 The question of whether I can say that I know that I am in pain seems not a very central one in this context. The difference between this problem and that which Wittgenstein’s talk of introducing the name ‘E’ might suggest can now be seen. In the latter case it was the problem of introducing a new sensation word into the vocabulary; here it is a matter of how a word, already in the vocabulary, can ever have entered it. We all do use the word ‘pain’ of ourselves and others; the question is how this can have come about. The likeness with sensation ‘E’ can also be seen, for it appears that I have learnt the word from my own private experience. The fact that we have a set of sensation words coupled with the doctrine that sensations are private gives rise to a rather different notion of ‘private language’, one arising in the midst of our normal public language. Wittgenstein argues in the Investigations that the insistence on trying to explain all language on the model ‘object and name’ is the source of the trouble, though it is a quite natural way of proceeding. ‘Now someone tells me that he knows what a pain is only from his own case!—Suppose everyone had a box with something in it: we call it a “beetle”. No-one can look into anyone else’s box, and everyone says that he knows what a beetle is only by looking at his beetle.—Here it would be quite possible for everyone to have something different in his box. One might even imagine such a thing constantly changing.—But suppose the word “beetle” had a use in these people’s language?—If so it would not be used as the name of a thing. The thing in the box has no place in the language-game at all; not even as a something: for the box might even be empty.—No, one can “divide through” by the thing in the box; it cancels out, whatever it is. That is to say: if we construe the grammar of the expression of sensation on the model of “object and name” the object drops out of consideration as irrelevant.’15 If it were the case that we learnt the use of the word ‘pain’ only from our own private experience there would be no guarantee that the word was being used in the same sense by different people. The object which is meant to be named being a purely private one there is no way of checking its identity in different cases. The tendency to say ‘But I know that I am feeling this!’ must be resisted, for the ‘this’ in question cannot, on the theory being attacked, be given any public meaning. It might be added that anyone who believed that there could be a private language in this sense would be unable to explain how it was possible for us to get from this situation to that of our normal use of pain-vocabulary.
But it is only on the assumption that is made by this theory that the problem arises; ‘dividing through’ can only take place where the ‘object’ can be named and not described, where a whole way of talking is being introduced into the language, not just an isolated word. ‘Only I can see my after-image’ is clearly a grammatical truth. But I can tell someone how to obtain an after-image and check that he has indeed succeeded by questioning him about details of his experience. Here the rest of language, in particular the language used to describe physical objects, comes to our aid. After-images can be described; they don’t need to be named, so there is no problem about the place of the word in our language. ‘Pain’ is also a word of everyday language which we do use correctly, but on the account which Wittgenstein is attacking it is puzzling to see how it can have its everyday use. Therefore he has got to give a different account of the way in which the word comes into use, one which will escape from the difficulties I have been discussing. He does this by introducing the concept of ‘pain-behaviour’: ‘Here is one possibility: words are connected with the primitive, the natural, expressions of sensation and used in their place. A child has hurt himself and he cries; and then adults talk to him and teach him exclamations and, later, sentences. They teach the child new pain-behaviour. “So you are saying that the word ‘pain’ really means crying?”—On the contrary: the verbal expression of pain replaces crying and does not describe it.’16 The word ‘sentences’ in this quotation might mislead; Wittgenstein is not suggesting that the child is taught all the possible sentences in which the word ‘pain’ can occur but merely that the teaching process starts with substituting expressions which are almost parts of the language (my English-German dictionary gives ‘ouch int. autsch!, au!’.) for the simple yells of the baby, and then proceeds to introduce proper words by means of full sentences. Here, as in other cases, the child is expected to be able to ‘go on’ to construct, e.g. if he has been taught to say that he has a pain in his leg and can also refer to his elbow, he is expected to be able to tell us that he has a pain in his elbow without further instruction.
Thus the statement ‘I have a pain’ is to be construed as a particular form of pain-behaviour rather than as an assertion that I ‘have’ a peculiar kind of object, a sensation. My statement about my own pain is on the same level as the pain-behaviour from which I deduce that you are in pain, or rather there is no need to talk of deduction or of any sort of inference here. It is only the analogy with other parts of our language that had held us captive and prevented us from seeing ‘the way out of the fly-bottle’. There seem to be two sets of difficulties with this account. The first is that ably discussed by Roger Buck in his article ‘Non-other Minds’.17 He expresses his problem thus: ‘If mental predicates have their criteria in behaviour, what of self-ascriptions of such predicates. Does one have to observe his own behaviour, listen to his own utterances, in order to find out that he is angry, has a toothache etc.?’18 The second set of difficulties is connected with the kind of genetic account that Wittgenstein gives of this and other mental concepts, an account which, if hardened into dogma, seems to restrict unduly the possibilities of language.
To return to the first of these problems. To many of his readers Wittgenstein seems to be taking away something, to be denying the existence of inner sensations by reducing them to their outward expressions: ‘And now it looks as if we had denied mental processes. And naturally we don’t want to deny them.’19 The upshot of his treatment might seem to be a kind of James-Lange theory of pain in which the expression of pain replaces the sensation. One caveat needs to be entered immediately; it is wholly foreign to Wittgenstein’s method to try to produce a final account, a definite solution of any philosophic problem. He stresses in the Preface to Philosophical Investigations that ‘The philosophical remarks in this book are, as it were, a number of sketches of landscapes which were made in the course of these long and involved journeyings.’20 He is concerned with breaking the hold on our thought of certain pictures which have held us captive, not with producing a detailed map of the territory traversed. Hence it is always dangerous to talk of ‘Wittgenstein’s account of…’ as if he had said all that was required. Often when such a claim is made it is the result of hardening a series of hints into a fully-fledged doctrine. William James was clear that he was putting forward a new theory of the emotions, one which corrected the accounts given previously. Wittgenstein is always saying ‘Try looking at it in this way’ to get a different perspective, though not necessarily a final and complete view, of something that we find puzzling. My remarks here are not for the purpose of confirming or refuting such a way of looking at things but rather an attempt to do the same kind of thing as Wittgenstein, assembling a series of reminders to help us find our way through a piece of confusing territory.
Buck agrees with Wittgenstein, or with his interpretation of Wittgenstein, that a verbal expression of pain is as good as a pre-verbal one in establishing that someone is in pain, but he seems to want something more than this. I quote the last sentences of his article: ‘The fact that my linguistic behaviour in saying “My leg hurts” functions as a central criterion for my leg hurting does show that my so saying plays a rôle like that of groaning, limping, etc. But it does not show that my saying “My leg hurts” does not also play the other normal rôle of a straightforward autobiographical report.’21 In one sense ‘My leg hurts’ is a standard instance of an ‘autobiographical report’; what is peculiar here is the distinction between this and the rôle of the statement as a criterion of my being in pain. It seems almost as if Buck had failed to see the point of the whole argument, and the reason for this is perhaps his stress on the notion of ‘criterion’, which is out of place in this particular discussion. Certainly a statement of being in pain is normally a criterion for us to accept that the maker of the statement is in pain, but the important point for this discussion is why it should be, and the answer that Wittgenstein gives is that ‘the verbal expression of pain replaces crying and does not describe it’. In this sense the notion of a ‘report’ is out of place; I can report on your pain but only express or evince my own, though given the functioning of the rest of language it is quite natural that we should talk of someone ‘reporting his pain’, and describe ‘I have a pain in my leg’ as a statement. The word ‘criterion’ is partly responsible for this trouble; Malcolm calls it a ‘most difficult region in his (Wittgenstein’s) philosophy’. But this is so only if it is assumed that Wittgenstein had a fully worked out doctrine of criteria which has to be discovered from the scattered remarks in the Investigations. If instead it is treated merely as a useful way of expressing certain insights there is less danger of puzzlement.
This last point is connected with an excessive emphasis on the form of words ‘I know I am in pain’, on the incorrigibility of pain-utterances in general. It may lead to strange claims; for example, Feyerabend says of the certainty of statements about mental processes: ‘It is their lack of content that is the source of their certainty.’22 He contrasts this lack of content with the content of physical object statements. It seems odd that to say that ‘There is a table in the room’ has more content than ‘I have a pain in my leg’. The latter is often a demand for immediate action and, in a context where doubt is possible, e.g. the consulting-room of an Army Medical Officer, far more difficult to verify. For one of the reasons for the ‘incorrigibility’ of pain expressions in their verbal form is, as Buck points out, that we are trained to be honest about them at the same time, or later, as we are taught the language-game. If the child tries to get out of some undesired obligation by feigning a pain, he soon learns that other, and to him undesirable, consequences also follow, such as not having ice-cream for lunch. And there are other means of reinforcing lessons of this type. Where there are strong reasons for lying, as in the Services in war-time, assertions about pain are certainly not taken as incorrigible. Many people will remember suffering from this doubt either as children or in the Army. As a child I once spent three days in considerable pain from a broken arm that a doctor had failed to diagnose. I was unable to convince my elders that I was in acute pain. It is situations like this that give force to statements of the form ‘I know I’m in pain in a way you can’t’.
In doubtful cases it is the discovery of the physical cause of the pain which tends to be decisive; in my own case as soon as another doctor diagnosed the fracture, everyone was overcome with sympathy. There are pains which are not accompanied by physical symptoms, but these are to some extent ‘parasitic’ on the primary cases where the physical evidence provides the final verification. Indeed this primacy of physical causes seems to be incorporated into the teaching of the ‘new pain-behaviour’; the mother asks to look at the painful limb, takes the child’s temperature etc. and treats the results of these observations as decisive. One reason for the rarity of malingering is the efficiency of methods of detecting causes of pain. Mothers start making the distinction between genuine and fake pain-behaviour even before the stage at which language learning begins; if there appears to be no immediate physical cause for the baby to cry they may say that it is crying out of temper or for no reason at all. There are also further discriminations which are introduced into the teaching of pain-behaviour. The baby tends to cry for slight as well as for more serious pains, but the child is expected to pass over minor pains in silence, and the adult perhaps to keep quiet about most of his pains under normal circumstances. Of course communities differ in the extent to which they expect ‘Spartan’ behaviour, e.g. girls may burst into tears but not boys, but in all of them there is a restriction on the uninhibited expression of pain, whether verbally or pre-verbally. In fact all pain-behaviour is affected by the training received; I have already mentioned that ejaculations are in many cases conventional and differ from language to language. Clasping an injured limb may be a basic reaction, but when a man clasps his hurt knee this may be as much to indicate to others the source or severity of the pain as an ‘instinctive’ gesture. Lying or dissembling is as much a matter of behaviour in this area as of uttering untruths. Konrad Lorenz even claims that animals can pretend to be in pain. In Man meets Dog he has a chapter entitled ‘Animals that Lie’, in which he says ‘I do not regard this inability to deceive as a sign of the cat’s superiority, in fact, I regard it as a sign of the much higher intelligence of the dog that it is able to do so. There is no doubt that dogs can dissemble up to a certain point… .’23 This would seem to contradict Wittgenstein’s remarks: ‘Why can’t a dog dissemble? Is he too honest? Could one teach a dog to simulate pain?’24 He continues: ‘Perhaps it is possible to teach him to howl on particular occasions as if he were in pain, even when he is not. But the surroundings which are necessary for this behaviour to be real simulation are missing.’ In his descriptions Lorenz does provide the ‘surroundings’ which make it plausible so to describe the dog’s behaviour, give the thing a context in which it is hard to say other than ‘The dog was shamming when it limped’. When he rode his bicycle in the direction of the barracks, where the dog would have to remain all day, the dog limped, but if Lorenz turned round towards the country the limp was forgotten and the dog ran normally. Of course the dog wasn’t taught to simulate pain, but then neither, in most cases, is the child; they both spontaneously cotton on to the advantages which have been gained in the past from genuine pains. ‘Lying is a language-game which needs to be learned like any other one.’25 But it is improbable that it is taught like any other language-game.
It might seem that this ‘genetic’ account of how pain-vocabulary comes to be acquired still left the door open for the problem of ‘primacy’, that the child is taught to substitute words for his primitive expressions of pain and so the words ‘mean’ or name his pain. It seems possible that what the adults thought was pain-behaviour was really an expression of pleasure so that the child was taught the language the ‘wrong way round’. To put this point another way, we have got to be certain that this is pain-behaviour for the whole procedure to get off the ground. The child has to grasp what it is he has to substitute ‘I’ve got a pain’ for. Could he get it wrong? If someone were to challenge my statement that I was in pain with ‘How do you know?’ I think it would be in order to reply, as Wittgenstein did to a similar question, ‘I have learnt English’.26 A basic agreement in reactions is a presupposition of a common language, but this is something which is shown by the language, not something which can be expressed in it.27 In this sense the proper answer to such questioning is ‘shutting one’s eyes’ to these philosophical doubts. This answer may seem too cavalier a way of treating the problem; in the remainder of the paper I will offer some further remarks which will amplify and extend what I have just been saying.
The first question is that of what is to count as pain-behaviour. Here it is noteworthy that the question is rarely asked; we assume that we can tell, and this confidence goes beyond the human species. We are willing to assert that the dog is in pain on the grounds of his behaviour. (As distinct from saying he is in pain because of some obvious injury. Cf. ‘The dog is in pain’ and ‘The dog must be in pain’.) But in talking thus we do not mean that we could teach the dog the sophisticated form of pain-behaviour which is our pain-language. What then are we saying of him? The answer seems to be that he is in pain—or perhaps that this is pain-behaviour. We have expectations about future reactions and so on, but behind it lies the temptation to say that he is feeling a pain in the same kind of way as I do. Most contemporary Englishmen find no difficulty in attributing pain to dogs, cats and so on, in fact to members of the genus mammal; with reptiles there is room for some doubt, or perhaps for less concern; with lower forms of life the doubts become strong. ‘A kindly grey-eyed fisherman assured me that the fish don’t feel, as he cut open a sole.’ Now it is not being denied that fish and other animals avoid certain things, that they wriggle when caught on hooks etc. It would seem that in spite of this people don’t feel it necessary to talk of the fish feeling pain. And if someone claims that they do, how could the question be settled? There are no facts about the fish that could be appealed to; it is clear that messages pass along its nerves, and that these are more intense if there is a hook in its mouth than if its side has been lightly touched, and that its efforts to escape from the former would be stronger than those to escape from the latter. The facts are not in doubt, yet there would seem to be a difference between a person who asserts that the fish feels pain and one who denies it. The difference will be manifested in behaviour towards the fish, perhaps, but the reason for the difference seems to demand expression in terms of the fish ‘feeling the same’ (or something very like) what we feel when we feel pain. There seems to be room for a genuine difference between a person who says that fish feel and one who denies it, whereas if we came across people arguing whether a machine had feelings we would fail to understand them. ‘Look at a stone and imagine it having sensations.—One says to oneself: How could one so much as get the idea of ascribing a sensation to a thing? One might as well ascribe it to a number!—And now look at a wriggling fly and at once these difficulties vanish and pain seems able to get a foothold here, where before everything was, so to speak, too smooth for it.’28
In the last paragraph I referred to ‘most contemporary Englishmen’ finding no difficulty in attributing pain to some animals; the caveat was entered because there is a disagreement among different peoples about the treatment of animals. Some are, to English eyes, completely indifferent to animal suffering or even take pleasure in it. (Compare the old English sports of bear-and bull-baiting.) Sometimes these differences in attitude to animals are coupled with differences in attitude to people; ‘To behold suffering gives pleasure, but to cause another to suffer affords an even greater pleasure. This severe statement expresses an old, powerful, human, all too human sentiment… .’29 It is said that among Red Indians the highest compliment to pay a prisoner was to give him the most painful death. There are, in fact, a variety of possible human attitudes to the pain of other creatures, just as there are a number of different attitudes inculcated to one’s own pain (Spartan or anti-Spartan). What we might call ‘cruelty to animals’ does not involve a philosophic doubt about the feelings of dumb creatures; the peasant who ill-treats his donkey is indifferent to it. Because there is no single human attitude to pain, except perhaps at the very basic level of a mother’s reaction to a child’s cry, the differences must be accounted for by the training received in different societies. Hence it is now necessary to return to the process of learning pain-language.
Wittgenstein, when he talked of the replacement of the natural pain-behaviour, was concerned with the first steps in this procedure, not claiming that he had given a full and final account of it. For to have replaced crying with ‘My knee hurts’ is to have taken a step on the road to learning our pain-language, but it is by no means to have completed the process. Even quite early on the expressions of pain of others besides the learner are taken into consideration; these others include other children, adults and, in the case of England at least, animals. The child is taught that others’ expressions of pain demand the same kind of sympathetic treatment as he demands for his own; he learns to imitate his mother’s treatment of his injured leg when his sister injures hers and so on. It is made clear to the child that pulling the cat’s ears causes the cat to feel the same as he does—’How would you like to have someone much bigger than you pull your ears?’ It is not that we first learn the meaning of the word ‘pain’ and then, as a consequence of this learning, feel sympathy with someone when he says he is in pain; the sympathy is learnt with the learning of the word. The sympathy may ultimately rest on unlearned responses to others’ primitive pain-behaviour, but the distance to which this sympathy is extended depends on teaching; in our society animals (or at least the higher animals) are included, but they need not be. Nor need all human beings; certain ‘enemy’ groups may be left out. ‘Only of a living human being and what resembles (behaves like) a human being can one say that it has pains.’30 And what is to count as a human being (or as behaving like a human being) is not given by the facts but by the ‘form of life’ of the society in question.
For learning the new pain-behaviour is learning a whole form of life and one which is fairly central in any culture. Hence the great complexity of the process. The ability to use the word ‘red’ is simple in comparison, hence it is comparatively easy to say when a child has grasped the notion, even though there are no formal tests normally used for this purpose. Just as there are some children who cannot, because of physical factors, learn the use of ‘red’ so there are some who apparently fail to learn the full form of life associated with pain, who are unable to sympathize with others’ pain, psychopathic personalities of some kind. (Whether this is due to some innate disability or to some fault in the teaching process is a subject of discussion among psychologists, e.g. discussions about the influence of early maternal deprivation on future character.) It was this involvement with a whole form of life that Wittgenstein was stressing, I think, when he said, ‘You learned the concept of “pain” when you learned language.’31 What I have been trying to bring out is the complexity of this particular piece of learning language; here the use of the word cannot be separated from a mass of other things which are necessarily involved in that use, for it is a whole concept and not a single word that is being learnt.
Hence it is not surprising that philosophers were puzzled over the word ‘pain’, or that Wittgenstein continually returns to the question of it, both for its own importance and as an instance of all talk about sensations. Our normal way of thinking about the relation between words and the world leads to insoluble puzzles when we try to apply it to ‘pain’. So long as it is treated as a mere word no solution is possible. Wittgenstein was concerned first of all to break the hold of the private sensation language, which seemed to make other people’s assertions about pain unverifiable, and then to show that an alternative account could be developed, one which does justice to the complexity of our actual pain-language. I have been concerned to amplify this account and to show some directions in which it might be extended.
1 By Professor A. M. Maclver, in a private communication.
2 ‘Wittgenstein’s Lectures in 1930–33’ in Mind, Vol. LXIII, 1954, p. 5.
3 pp. 88–96.
4 Supplementary Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 1954, p. 70.
5 Ibit., pp. 77–94.
6 Philosophical Investigations (in future referred to as PI), § 258.
7 PI, § 257.
8 PI, § 257.
9 Tractatus Logico-Pbilosophicus, 3.221.
10 Ibid., 3.26.
11 Ibid., 3.262.
12 PI, § 350.
13 PI, § 302.
14 PI, p. 224.
15 PI, § 293.
16 PI. § 244.
17 Analytical Philosophy, ed. R. J. Butler, Oxford, 1962, pp. 187–210.
18 Op. cit., p. 187.
19 PI, § 308.
20 PI, p. ix.
21 Op. cit., p. 210.
22 ‘Problems of Empiricism’, p. 191, in Beyond the Edge of Certainty, ed. R. G. Colodny, U.S.A., 1965.
23 Penguin edition 1964, p. 167.
24 PI, § 250.
25 PI, § 249.
26 PI, § 381. I have discussed this passage in ‘Games and Family Resemblances’ in Philosophy, Vol. XLII, No. 161. See especially pp. 221–5.
27 ‘What expresses itself in language, we cannot express by means of language.’ Tractatus 4.121.
28 PI, § 284.
29 Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals, Doubleday Anchor Books, 1956, p. 198.
30 PI § 283.
31 PI, § 384.