Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature: Thirtieth-Anniversary Edition (Princeton Classics)

by Richard Rorty

We can drop this notion if, with Wittgenstein, we note that unless there were such a thing as typical pain behavior we would never be able to teach a child the meaning of, for example, “toothache.” More generally, we can note that the way in which the pre-linguistic infant knows that it has a pain is the way in which the record-changer knows the spindle is empty, the plant the direction of the sun, and the amoeba the temperature of the water. But this way has no connection with what a language-user knows when he knows what pain is—that it is mental rather than physical, typically produced by injured tissues, etc. The mistake which Wittgenstein exposed was to assume that we learn what a pain is in the second sense by casting linguistic garb over our knowledge of what pain is in the first sense—by clothing our direct acquaintance with special felt, incommunicable qualities in words (thus rendering ourselves forever skeptical about whether the same incommunicable quality is being named when our friends use the same word).

September 18, 2020. Page 110.