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Basic Sentences and Objectivity: A Private Language Argument
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 June 2010
Extract
Thus consciousness (of) belief and belief are one and the same being, the characteristic of which is absolute immanence. But as soon as we wish to grasp this being, it slips between our fingers, and we find ourselves faced with a pattern of duality, with a game of reflections. For consciousness is a reflection (reflet), but qua reflection it is exactly the one reflecting (réfléchissant), and if we attempt to grasp it as reflecting, it vanishes and we fall back on the reflection.
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- Information
- Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review / Revue canadienne de philosophie , Volume 12 , Issue 2 , June 1973 , pp. 217 - 232
- Copyright
- Copyright © Canadian Philosophical Association 1973
References
1 Sartre, J. P., Being and Nothingness, Philosophical Library, New York, 1956, tr. Barnes, H., pp. 75–76.Google Scholar
2 Wittgenstein, L., Philosophical Investigations, Blackwell, Oxford, 1958, tr. Anscombe, G.E.M., I, 293Google Scholar. (All references to the Investigations are to part and paragraph, for part I, and part and section, for part II.)
3 See, for example, Bennett, J., Kant's Analytic, Cambridge University Press, 1966, pp. 213–214Google Scholar; Rhees, R., “Can there be a private language?,” in Pitcher, G., ed., Wittgenstein: The Philosophical Investigations, Doubleday (Anchor), 1966, pp. 267–285CrossRefGoogle Scholar; A. Donagan, “Wittgenstein on sensation,” in Pitcher, op. cit., pp. 324–351.
4 Wittgenstein, op. cit., I, 202.
5 Ibid., I, 258.
6 This last principle states simply that truth consists in correspondence with something extra-linguistic, say facts. It will not so much be used in the argument as partly defended.
7 I owe this objection to Prof. John Perry, University of California at Los Angeles. He is not, of course, responsible for the use to which I have put it.
8 Ibid., I, 244; II, sec. ix.
9 Wittgenstein comes close to saying something like this. See On Certainty, Anscombe and von Wright edd., Blackwell, Oxford, 1969, para 2: “From it seeming to me—or to everyone—to be so, it doesn't follow that it is so. What we can ask is whether it can make sense to doubt it.”
10 I owe this illuminating image, and much else herein, to Ann Wilbur MacKenzie.
11 Cf. Zettel, Anscombe and von Wright edd., Blackwell, Oxford, 1967, para. 131: “How then can the sense and the truth (or the truth and the sense) of sentences collapse together? (Stand or fall together?).”
12 Authors influenced by Wittgenstein have said things which indicate that they hold the view I have attributed to Wittgenstein. See Winch, P., The Idea of a Social Science, Humanities Press, New York, 1958, pp. 32–39Google Scholar; Shoemaker, S. S., Self-Knowledge and Self-Identity, Cornell, Ithaca, 1963, pp. 251–354.Google Scholar