Wittgenstein's can of worms.

Comments on Pathways Language and the World, Unit 1. Dec 1 2006

Wittgenstein’s questioning our ‘pointing inwardly’ to a sensation and labeling it, his calling this a ‘ceremony,’ presumably a ‘mere’ ceremony without real value, opens a can of worms in the heart of western philosophy.

If we associate a sign ‘S’ with a particular sensation, Wittgenstein doubts that in the future we will be able to correctly assign this same marker to a repeated occurrence of the same sensation. He doubts that there is any way to be sure that the sensation labeled S is exactly the same as any other perceived sensation we think identical to S.

“Whatever is going to seem right to me, is right.”

In other words, there is no have repeatedly shown. However, we do trust it and build on it, and we might ask how far a memory would have to stray from an original fact to become false.

An experience identified as ‘S’ would take place in a certain context. As Heraclites put it, you can’t stand in the same river twice, not least because apart from the water of the river being in flux, you too are in flux, and changing from one moment in time to another. So a repeated experience of ‘S’ would have to be called ‘S1’, ‘S2’, ‘S3’, and so on, each existentially different from the other. How these can be related in memory however, would be by their shared qualities, their membership of a set: as David Hume said, “When we have found a resemblance among several objects that often occur to us, we apply the same name to all of them, whatever differences we may observe in the degree of their quantity and quality, and whatever other differences may appear among them.”

Hume, Treatise, I. i. 7.

Let’s agree that the main functions of language are firstly to represent our thoughts to ourselves, and secondly to convey those thoughts to others.

For the first function, maybe I can decide to call a certain taste “S” and that serves as an adequate reference to myself. In that usage of ‘language’, the representation of thought to myself, the internal labeling can be as arbitrary as I like, so long as I remember what label I attached to which thought. If we make the mistake of assuming that our private code is going to serve the second function of language, we will be sorely disillusioned. One viewing alone of the execrable Jodie Foster film “Nell” should be enough to convince us of this. However we could say a representation can be private and for oneself alone and can be trusted if it is in some constant propositional language with its own internal syntax against whose criteria a logical or factual error would be seen to diverge.

For the second main use of language we will need common agreement that when I say “S” I mean the 19^th letter in the alphabet, and not something else. If we talk about communication with others then a social dimension is necessary in which agreement is reached by a community on the usage of a sign. If George Bush says “It’s so hot some of us are going to fall out”, and no-one but a solitary Texan standing nearby understands that he means “keel over”, then the social requirement of language communication has nevertheless been met. If there are no Texans nearby, the communication will not succeed, and we might say that the President is only talking to himself.

If this were all there is to Wittgenstein’s misgivings, we might turn to a number of language theorists such as Roman Jacobson to find a similar argument, but it seems that more is at stake here.

When he doubts the identity of an experience with a similar one stored in memory and labeled ‘S’, Wittgenstein may be questioning more than just the accuracy of our memory or the lack of external verification. He is questioning more than just the value of subjective judgments. He is really doubting the value of the introspection itself. And his unhappiness with the labeling of sensations is really a mistrust of that method of philosophizing in which internal judgements stand without any means of verification. The self that is known by looking within and the certainties that are obtained by mentally stripping away all doubtful elements, to Wittgenstein are still fundamentally unstable.

What this signifies for us is the undermining of an established identity in the Lockean tradition where continuity of memories entails the continuity of a Self. This is a conception reflected in common usage like

“He is no longer the man he was,” said of an Alzheimer’s victim or a forgetful elderly person. Alongside the Christian idea of an immaterial ‘soul’ as identity, this materialist concept of the self consisting of the accumulated memories of a person is very widespread.

[Not that it is universal however: some groups of people such as the Piraha tribe apparently do not value memories of the past or locate events linguistically in a past tense. Their identities reside almost exclusively in their ongoing present experience.]

Wittgenstein’s radical doubt has serious ramifications for our knowledge of the world and for our own sense of personal identity.