… [Men] suppose their words to be marks of the ideas in the minds also of other men, with whom they communicate: for else they should talk in vain, and could not be understood, if the sounds they applied to one idea were such as by the hearer were applied to another, which is to speak two languages. John Locke, An Essay concerning Human Understanding
(1690), III, ii, 4 (his italics)
This thesis aims to defend a simple but important belief: that a crucial part of communication between human beings [or all of it, in the last analysis?] is communication about subjective experience. Such communication often takes place directly, when people talk to one another about their feelings – their sensations, emotions and moods. But also the assumption of shared subjective experience in shared circumstances lies behind the whole enterprise of linguistic intercourse, in such a way that if this assumption could be shown to be false, and if, further, it became generally known and understood that it was false, not only would there be great distress, but even if communication could continue at all, it would be only in some heavily attenuated form as compared with what we now believe ourselves capable of, and we would have to establish a very different set of attitudes towards it. The belief I am defending is one that is taken for granted at a common sense level. The need to defend it arises only because philosophical objections have been lodged against it, and have secured a wide following. According to the objectors, the fact that we can never achieve anything so direct as introspection of the subjective experience of any person other than ourselves means that the whole picture of people as communicating about or in terms of their subjective experience is, in some more or less radical way, misconceived. Though our ordinary ways of speaking may not in themselves require amendment, they must not be misunderstood or misinterpreted according to a simple-minded model of the relation between language and experience, whereby experience is thought of as a realm of objects that can be straightforwardly designated by linguistic terms just as ordinary material objects can. As has often been said, we cannot necessarily talk sense about concepts simply in virtue of being able to talk sense with them.[1] And mental concepts in particular are notoriously susceptible (so it is claimed) to being misunderstood by the philosophically naive. In my view, exactly such a ‘simple-minded’ model is the correct one; and the difficulties supposed to lie in the way of its application are (where they are real) not insuperable. According to this model, subjective experiences are private to the subject. He alone is directly aware of their occurrence and of their phenomenal nature. There is no possibility at present of one subject of experience comparing his experiences with those of another subject to discover immediately whether or not their experiences are qualitatively similar in similar circumstances. There is no way for a child who is learning language to reveal the quality of his experiences to the adults who are teaching him, so that they may be able, when telling him the names of his various subjective experiences, to have [some aspects of] the accuracy of their pedagogical labelling confirmed by direct inspection of the quality of the items being labelled. There are, of course, indirect means of doing all these things, means that we constantly use. They are adequate for their purpose, but they still leave room for doubt, and by the same token for faith, the faith that we all subscribe to, in our subjective experiences being interpersonally similar in range and disposition of quality. My inner world, we believe, maps on to our shared public world in much the same way as does yours. This thesis is taken up largely with a defence of this model, and so the discussion is mainly about the nature of sensation language. A given sensation term, I argue, can, does and must refer to experiences of the same subjective quality for different people, as well as to sensations whose public manifestations are the same. Only in this way is interpersonal communication about subjective experience possible. But the implications of the model of sensation language I defend are wider. The admitted difficulties of discussing subjective experience at all, let alone doing so in precise terms, has created blinkers, and not only methodological ones, in academic disciplines other than philosophy. Most human sciences – sociology, psychology, social anthropology and the rest – fight shy of giving subjective experience due weight in their deliberations.[2] Even ordinary natural science is normally conducted as if the world could be explained without reference to the subjects who comprehend it. This is understandable, since methodologies which exclude subjective experience are more productive, in terms of sheer quantity of accurate, detailed and useful information. It may therefore be reasonable to adopt such methodologies for certain purposes. But they must not become imperceptibly metamorphosed into ontologies. In the last analysis, subjective experience will have to have its proper place in our understanding of the world, and no ossified methodology, adopted originally for perhaps acceptable reasons of expediency, should be used as a basis for shirking this prospect. But these considerations, important though they are, lie beyond the scope of the main argument of this thesis, which merely defends the model of our thought and talk about subjective experience whose demise would make genuine discussion of this side of life impossible. This is only a preliminary task, as so often in philosophy, but it is not on that account less important: if anything it is more so, since so many crucial possibilities depend on its successful execution. [1] E.g. Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind (London, 1949), introduction. [back] [2] Things are beginning to look up. In a recently published introduction to psychology we read: ‘It might be questioned whether there is any point in being concerned about private experience, at least from a scientific point of view. There is a point, because even though hypotheses [about similarities and differences between different people’s sensations] cannot be tested, that does not make them ipso facto false’: D. R. Legge, An Introduction to Psychological Science (London, 1975), p. 30. Cf. R. D. Laing, The Politics of Experience (Harmondsworth, 1971), p. 21: ‘People may be observed to sleep, eat, walk, talk, etc. in relatively predictable ways. We must not be content with observation of this kind alone. Observation of behaviour must be extended by inference to attributions about experience. Only when we begin to do this can we really construct the experiential-behavioural system that is the human species.’ [back] |