The external world and the internal

Abstract

Wittgenstein’s arguments for why it nonsense to talk about knowledge of internal states, rest on the following two main assumptions. First, it would not make sense to say, for example, “I know that I am in pain”, unless it also made sense to say, “I am in pain, but I do not know it”. However, this condition is not satisfied — for one cannot doubt or not know that one is in pain. Thus, according to Wittgenstein, it does not make sense to say that we have knowledge of things about which we cannot also doubt or be fallible. Secondly, the sentence, “I know that I am in pain”, may have the grammatical form and thus appear as if it was an empirical, epistemic proposition, but it is not. For the statement, “A knows that p”, to be an epistemic proposition requires that an alternative, i.e. “A does not know that p”, is excluded. But if the excluded alternative — in the case of pain: “I am in pain, but I do not know it” — is unintelligible, then the sentence “I know that I am in pain” is equally unintelligible; it cannot be a proposition about some knowledge or other of mine. For this reason it would not make sense either to ask “how do you know that you are in pain?”, i.e. to ask how you can justify it — as it would, had the utterance, “I know that I am in pain”, been an empirical, epistemic proposition (ibid., para. 288 - 290, and p. 221). It would not be a justification to say, “I know it, because I can feel it!”. For, according to Wittgenstein, to feel a pain, is to have a pain, or to be in pain. In order to justify a proposition one has to be able to cite evidence; but that I have a pain, cannot be evidence for my having a pain; nor can the fact that I am in pain be evidence for my being in pain.¹

For reasons that I shall discuss later, Wittgenstein deems as nonsense that feeling in pain could be the result of perceivingor observingsomething taking place on an “inner stage”.