Peter Hacker - Insight and Illusion
Chapter Ten: ‘A cloud in philosophy condensed into a drop of grammar’
1. Can one know that one is in pain?
● W: one cannot know that one is having a given experience
○ but this is a grammatical rather than an epistemological claim
■ W was not claiming that we don’t know when we are
having an experience, nor that we are ignorant of things that other people are
well informed about (actually, he was sort of claiming this?) - rather, it concerns
the boundaries of sense: it makes no sense to say ‘I know I am in pain’
2. Self-consciousness: the overthrow of the Cartesian picture
● Cartesian picture: each person sees, hears, feels objects in his vicinity, believes, doubts,
has purposes and intentions. He talk of himself as he talks of others ‘I have toothache’, ‘He has
toothache’, in the latter, he ascribes sensations to others, in the former to himself (it seems)
○ the self has a seat in the body, and self-consciousness is introspection; a
form of perception or ‘inner sense’
○ the inner is accessible only to the self, is private
■ only he with access really knows, with certainty, how
things are/experiences/sensations
■ hence first person psychological sentences seem to be
descriptions of observed inner events
● BUT:
○ if someone avows he is having a certain experience, we can’t dispute his
word
■ he can lie, but he cannot be mistaken (ok, so what if he’s
lying? can’t we dispute that?)
■ his saying he has a toothache is a criterion for it being so
■ but the reason we can’t dispute it isn’t because he is
better informed than we are
○ the inner/outer picture is natural, but we shouldn’t think that we know
our own experiences directly, through introspection, and the experiences of others
indirectly
○ there is such a think as observing, reporting and describing experiences,
but it isn’t what usually happens when we talk about experiences, and it isn’t the same as
describing objects in a room
■ different types of description
● It is a misunderstanding of the use of the first person pronoun that gives rise to the idea of
first person sensation-statements as descriptive
○ no criteria determine my saying that ‘I’ am in pain
■ nor does this use identify a particular object to function
as the subject
■ in such statements, we do not recognize a particular
person to whom we ascribe the pain
■ ‘I have a pain’ is no more a statement about a particular
person than moaning is
Chapter Ten: ‘A cloud in philosophy condensed into a drop of grammar’
1. Can one know that one is in pain?
● W: one cannot know that one is having a given experience
○ but this is a grammatical rather than an epistemological claim
■ W was not claiming that we don’t know when we are
having an experience, nor that we are ignorant of things that other people are
well informed about (actually, he was sort of claiming this?) - rather, it concerns
the boundaries of sense: it makes no sense to say ‘I know I am in pain’
2. Self-consciousness: the overthrow of the Cartesian picture
● Cartesian picture: each person sees, hears, feels objects in his vicinity, believes, doubts,
has purposes and intentions. He talk of himself as he talks of others ‘I have toothache’, ‘He has
toothache’, in the latter, he ascribes sensations to others, in the former to himself (it seems)
○ the self has a seat in the body, and self-consciousness is introspection; a
form of perception or ‘inner sense’
○ the inner is accessible only to the self, is private
■ only he with access really knows, with certainty, how
things are/experiences/sensations
■ hence first person psychological sentences seem to be
descriptions of observed inner events
● BUT:
○ if someone avows he is having a certain experience, we can’t dispute his
word
■ he can lie, but he cannot be mistaken (ok, so what if he’s
lying? can’t we dispute that?)
■ his saying he has a toothache is a criterion for it being so
■ but the reason we can’t dispute it isn’t because he is
better informed than we are
○ the inner/outer picture is natural, but we shouldn’t think that we know
our own experiences directly, through introspection, and the experiences of others
indirectly
○ there is such a think as observing, reporting and describing experiences,
but it isn’t what usually happens when we talk about experiences, and it isn’t the same as
describing objects in a room
■ different types of description
● It is a misunderstanding of the use of the first person pronoun that gives rise to the idea of
first person sensation-statements as descriptive
○ no criteria determine my saying that ‘I’ am in pain
■ nor does this use identify a particular object to function
as the subject
■ in such statements, we do not recognize a particular
person to whom we ascribe the pain
■ ‘I have a pain’ is no more a statement about a particular
person than moaning is
