If we are angry with someone for going out
on a cold day with a cold in his head, we sometimes say:
“I won't feel your cold”.
And this can mean: “I don't suffer
when you catch a cold”. This is a proposition
taught by experience. For we could imagine a, so to
speak, wireless connection between the two bodies which made one
person feel pain in his head when the other had exposed his to the
cold air. One might in this case argue that the pains
are mine because they are felt in my head; but suppose I and
someone else had a part of our bodies in common, say a
hand. Imagine the nerves and tendons of my arm and
A's connected to this hand by an operation.
Now imagine the hand stung by a wasp. Both of us cry,
contort our faces, give the same description of the pain,
etc.. Now are we to say we have the same
pain or different ones? If in such a case you
say: “We feel pain in the same place, in the
same body, our descriptions tally, but still my pain
can't be his”, I suppose as a reason you will be
inclined to say:
91.
“because my pain
is my pain and his pain is his pain”. And here
you are making a grammatical statement about the use of such a
phrase as “the same pain”. You say that
you don't wish to apply the phrase, “he has got
my pain” or “we both have the same
pain”, and instead you will perhaps apply such a phrase as
“his pain is exactly like mine”. (It
would be no argument to say that the two couldn't have
the same pain because one might anaesthetize or kill one of them
while the other still felt pain.) Of course, if we
exclude the phrase “I have his
toothache” from our language, we thereby also exclude
“I have (or feel)
my
toothache”. Another form of our metaphysical
statement is this: “A man's sense data
are private to himself”. And this way of
expressing it is even more misleading because it looks still more
like an experiential proposition; the philosopher who says this
may well think that he is expressing a kind of scientific
truth.