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Summary McGinn - Inner and Outer notes
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Notes on McGinn's writing on Inner and Outer
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Marie McGinn - Wittgenstein and the Philosophical InvestigationsChapter Five: The inner and the outer
Introduction
● The Private Language argument shows that there can be no private analogue of ostensive
definition, and that the distinction that private language was intended to explain is actually
grounded in grammar
○ i.e. in the different uses of the words ‘pain’ and ‘crying’ (pain and pain-
behaviour)
○ we don’t understand these concepts through introspection, but through
reflective awareness of the topography of language
■ so we need a more complete account of the grammar of
psychological concepts
○ W sought to correct the notion that we describe our pains etc with the
idea that we express them - in other words, language is an extension of other forms of
expression e.g. crying
● The fact that it is possible to pretend to be in pain invites us to picture pain as something
‘inside us’
○ W accepts that this picture is useful in capturing the difference between
sensation concepts and behavioural concepts, but it is not clear how it should be applied
○ this picture has a tendency to mislead because it is so much less
ambiguous than the grammar of the language it is meant to represent
■ indeed, it comes to seem like the ambiguity of grammar
is a defect, a complicated representation of something more straightforward
● but we need to move away from the
picture of the inner as a quasi-spatial realm of states and processes
● we also need to see the picture as
describing, rather than explaining, the difference between pain and pain-
behaviour
Pain and pain-behaviour
● Interlocutor: W suggests that there is no pain without pain-behaviour (PI 281)
○ no - rather we can only ascribe sensations to human beings and what
resembles them - in other words, we can only ascribe pain to a being that is capable of
pain-behaviour
■ this is a different claim - it is not claimed that pain
doesn’t exist except as behaviour, nor that pain cannot be ascribed without the
simultaneous presence of pain-behaviour
■ W is both refuting the behaviourist idea of a determinate
outer realm of pain-criteria and the inner/outer idea of a determinate inner realm
of states and processes
● One application of the inner/outer picture sees pains and things we ascribe pain to as
standing in a particular relation to one another
○ pain is a private object that belongs in the psychological sphere, and
exists within the body, which belongs to the physical sphere
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