Our wavering between logical and physical impossibility
makes us make such statements as this: “If what I
feel is always
my pain only, what can the supposition
mean that someone else has pain?” The
thing to do in such cases is always to look how the words in
question
are actually used in our language. We
are in all such cases thinking of a use different from that
which our ordinary language makes of the words. Of a
use, on the other hand, which just then for some reason strongly
recommends itself to us. When something seems queer
about the grammar of our words, it is because we are alternately
tempted to use a word in several different ways. And it
is particularly difficult to discover that an assertion which
the metaphysician makes expresses discontentment with our grammar
when the words of this assertion can also be used to state a fact
of experience. Thus when he says “only my pain
is real pain”, this sentence might mean that the other
people are only pretending. And when he says “this
tree doesn't exist when nobody sees it”, this
might mean: “this
95.
tree vanishes when we turn
our backs to it”. The man who says
“only my pain is real”, doesn't mean to
say that he has found out by the common criteria ‒ ‒ ‒ the
criteria, i.e., which give our words their
common meanings ‒ ‒ ‒ that the others who said they had pains
were cheating. But what he rebels against is the use of
this expression in connection with
these
criteria. That is, he objects to using this word in the
particular way in which it is commonly used. On the
other hand, he is not aware that he is objecting to a
convention. He sees a way of dividing the country
different from the one used on the ordinary map. He
feels tempted, say, to use the name
“Devonshire” not for the county
with its conventional boundary, but for a region differently
bou
nded. He could express this by
saying: “Isn't it absurd to make
this a county, to draw the boundaries
here?” But what he says is:
“The
real Devonshire is
this”. We could answer: “What
you want is only a new notation, and by a new notation no facts of
geography are changed”. It is true, however,
that we may be irresistibly attracted or repelled by a
notation. (We easily forget how much a notation, a
form of expression, may mean to us, and that changing it
isn't always as easy as it often is in mathematics or
in the sciences. A change of clothes or of names may
mean very little and it may mean a great deal.)