Feelings, Moods, and Introspection

Feelings, Moods, and Introspection Bruce Aune Mind, New Series, Vol. 72, No. 286. (Apr., 1963), pp. 187-208. Stable URL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0026-4423%28196304%292%3A72%3A286%3C187%3AFMAI%3E2.0.CO%3B2-P Mind is currently published by Oxford University Press.

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AN often remarked feature of traditional empiricism is its tendency toward solipsism. Hume is generally credited with making this tendency particularly clear, and those who have followed him have found it painfully difficult to construct an inhabited universe from the disorderly fragments of their private experience. Recently, however, this egocentric bias has become the target of spirited attack, and it now appears that a new, equally troublesome bias is beginning to supplant the old one. For in place of the Humean claim that private experience is the foundation of all empirical knowledge, we now hear it argued that the entire notion of private experience is radically confused and that statements about experiences are really statements about complicated patterns of behaviour. This sort of argumentation suggests that the historic tendency toward solipsism is being replaced by a curious tendency toward logical, or philosophical, behaviourism. What I propose to do in this essay is to consider some puzzling, apparently behaviouristic features of several theses that have been fairly well established in recent discussion of the problem of Other llinds.2 These theses, which I shall not try to defend here, might be stated as follows. (1)The traditional assumption that we must make a weakly-justified ontological leap when, on the basis of a person's observed behaviour, we conclude that he is having a certain feeling or sensation is completely erroneous. The truth of the matter is rather this : the things we call " psychological states " are so intimately connected with certain patterns of observable behaviour that the occurrence of the latter provide us with criteria which are logically adequate for determining the presence of the former. (2) In order to have a complete grasp of the concept of a headache, for example, a person must normally be able to tell both when he has a headache and when someone else has one. (3) Sentential functions like " x has a This essay was produced with the aid of a fellowship in the Minnesota Centre for Philosophy of Science. Special thanks are due t o Professors H. Feigl, TV. Sellars, and C. Rollins for their very helpful comments. See the important discussion in JTTittgenstein,§S 256 f ; Strawson, Ind., Chap. I V ; Malcolm, and Sellars. (These references are given in full a t the end of this essay.) 13 187

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headache " and " x is depressed " do not change in meaning when different names, pronouns, and descriptive phrases are used in I n general the problematic features of these place of " x theses concern: the exact character of the relation that holds between various psychological states and the behaviour that serves as criteria for them ; the d s c u l t y of making room for the notion of introspection and of accounting for the special status that is given to a man's reports about his current feelings ; and, finally, the many apparent exceptions to (3) as it is stated above.

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In his book Irzdividuals P. P. Strawson gives a careful defence of (3) : he says, for example, that ascribing phrases of the form << so and so is in pain " are used in just the same sense when the subject is another as when the subject is oneself. . . . The dictionaries do not give two sets of meanings for every expression which describes a state of consciousness : a first-person meaning and a secondperson meaning (p. 99). His contention, in other words, is that the sentences " I am in pain " and " He is in pain " do not differ in propositional content when the pronouns " I " and " he " apply to the same person, and that what is true of me when I am in pain is no different, essentially, from what is true of you when you are in pain. Although this view seems eminently reasonable, Norman Malcolm, among others, has argued that it actually involves some important d ~ c u l t i e s . First, it appears that " I am in pain " and " He is in pain " have different verifications, even when " I " and he " are used with reference to the same person. Indeed, it apparently does not make sense to say that " I am in pain " has a verification a t all (Malcolm, p. 96). Second, these two sentences clearly have different linguistic functions or uses : " I am in pain " normally functions as an avowal, an expression, or a manifestation of one's pain (as Malcolm suggests, p. 978, it is " learned painbehavior "); yet " He is in pain " is merely a statement about another person. But if these sentences have both different verifications and different uses, it is very hard to see how they could possibly have the same propositional content. The best way to meet these charges, it seems to me, is to admit them : for it is quite true that the two sentences do not have the same verifications, and it is obviously true that they do not have the same linguistic function. But, to begin with the latter point,

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it must be granted that what a person expresses, evinces, manifests, indicates, etc., by uttering a given sentence may be quite different from what he asserts when he utters that sentence. Since Strawson's point is only that " I am in pain " and " He is in pain " assert the same thing, or have the same propositional content, when they apply to ,a single person, this objection is actually quite irrelevant. The matter of different verifications, then, must constitute the only major diEculty with (3). But what, more exactly, is this difficulty ? It does not actually seem to lie with a first person statement, for as the word " statement " is generally used in philosophy (cf. Strawson, ILT, pp. 3 f.), it is clear that there could not be such a thing. As I have already suggested, " I am in pain " and " He is in pain ", when they are both used to affirm something about a single person, must be understood as making the same assertion or statement ; and thus the statement made by " I am in pain " is verifiable-if only by other people. The difficulty, it seems, must therefore lie in the peculiarity of saying that a person verifies the statements he makes about his own psychological states.

But is there really a diEculty here ? Malcolm insists that there is. There appear to be only two possible ways in which a person could verify his statements about his own sensations, etc., and both of these, Malcolm contends, are totally unsatisfactory. The first possibility is associated with traditional empiricism: it is the idea that a person verifies his statements about his own psychological states by observing or directly apprehending those states. To this idea Malcolm raises the battery of objections that Wittgenstein originally used to demolish the conception of a logically private language (cf. Phil. Itzv., 9s 256-273). Malcolm's crucial argument, however, is this: One supposes that one inwardly picks out something as thinking or pain and thereafter identifies it whenever it presents itself in the soul. But the question to be pressed is, Does one make correct identifications? The proponent of these " private " identifications has nothing to say here. He feels sure that he identifies correctly the occurrence in his soul ; but feeling sure is no guarantee of being right. Indeed he has no idea of what being right could mean. He does not know how to distinguish between actually making correct identifications and being under the impression that he does (p. 976). This argument might be put more abstractly, and in slightly different terms, as follows. If the mere fact that one apprehended

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a psychological item as 4 were a sufficient condition of knowing it to be 4, then either (i) one could have knowledge that one could never possibly justify or distinguish from mere opinion or (ii) one has available some independent criterion by which the infallibility of these apprehensions can be ascertained. Since alternative (i) is clearly unsatisfactory, an iotelligible account of (ii) must be forthcoming " if the theorv is to be taken seriouslv. Unfortunately, however, no such account is possible, given the assumptions of the theory : for these apprehensions are supposed to constitute the basis bv which anu claim to empirical knowledge is to be validated. d~ince,the;efore, the epiitemic authori6 of these apprehensions cannot be defended in terms of the theory, the idea that thev constitute knowled~emust be reiected. For fa) , , the theory can give no reason for thinking that any apprehension whatever might not occur in conjunction with a particular psychic item, e.9. the apprehension " This is pain " or " I'm in pain " occurring in conjunction with a sensation that is actually pleasant, that makes one want to smile, etc. ; and (b) since, according to the theory, what one's apprehensions tell one is necessarily immune from correction, there is actually no room for the notion of a mistaken apprehension ; that is, no matter what apprehension might occur in connection with a given psychic item, it must necessarily be counted as veridical. But if a mistaken apprehension is some thin^ that could not lsossiblv exist. the exuression " veridical apprehension " can mean no more than "apprehensionsimpliciter": the addition of "veridical", sinceit cannot distinguish any possible class of apprehensions from any other, actually adds no thin^ to the idea of an amrehension. Indeed. the addition of this word is not only vacuous but positively misleading, for it suggests that these alleged apprehensions are to be grouped with what we normallv call observations and identiiications-occurrences that Ryle has accurately called " achievements ". Some philosophers have tried to rehabilitate this theory by arguing that only those apprehensions that " cohere " with the bulk of one's current amrehensions and memories are to be accepted as veridical ; tci others, regardless of the strength of one's temptation to assent to them, are to be regarded as simply erroneous. But while this move might make some kind of sense of the crucial distinction between correct and incorrect amrehensions, it unfortunatelv does not save the theorv-in fact it abandons it. For a c&dbal tenet of the theory is;hat a person can have direct, non-inferential knowledge of his own psychological states ; yet, on the present version, direct knowledge of this sort is demonstrably a delusion : for one would have to infer from the V

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coherence of some of his apprehensions and memories that a given one of them is actually veridical. That is to say: just as, according to some phenomenalists, a person must infer from the character and coherence of his sense-impressions that he is actually seeing the physical object he thinks he is seeing, or not seeing the pink elephant he thinks he is seeing, so, according to this amendment of the above theory, a person must infer from the apparent character and coherence of his apprehensions, which include what he takes to be thoughts, memories, etc., that a given one of them is the veridical apprehension that he thinks it is. But apart from this difEculty, which some exceedingly sceptical philosophers might argue is really no d%culty a t all, the present view actually misleads us by assimilating these coherent apprehensions to what is properly called " knowledge ". For, as the word " knowledge " is normally used-in everyday life and in scientific investigation-it is entirely possible for a person, perhaps a madman, to have perfectly coherent but perfectly erroneous ideas about himself, his surroundings, or anything else. The mere fact, in other words, that one's ideas are coherent is obviously no guarantee that those ideas exemplify knowledge.

The second possible way of explaining how a person verities the statements he makes about his own psychological states is associated with philosophical behaviourism: it is the idea that the sorts of things that I can find out about myself are the same as the sorts of things that I can find out about other people, and the methods of finding them out are much the same (Ryle, p. 155). Since we normallv verifv statements about the sensations of others by observing their behaviour, this view can be taken to assert that we verify such statements about ourselves by observing our own behaviour. Malcolm objects to this, " for at least many kinds of psychological statements " (p. 976), on the ground, roughly, that apart from the fact that we never do verify such statements in this way, if . . . (a) man gives an answer (e.g., " I knew it must be pain by the way I jumped "), then he proves by that very fact that he has not mastered the correct use of the words " I feel pain". They cannot be used to state a conclusion. In telling us how he did it he will convict himself of a misuse (p. 977).

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In other words, Malcolm contends that the behaviourist's account of first-person verification fails, a t least for the kind of psychological statement under consideration, not because it is obviously unintelligible or incoherent, but because it violates the conceptual structure of the language it purports to analyse.

But if a person cannot verify the statements he makes about his own psychological states, how are utterances of " I am in pain " and the like to be understood? Following Wittgenstein, Malcolm suggests that sentences of this kind must be understood not as .making identihations of internal objects or states but as being similar to the natural, non-verbal, behavioral expressions of psychological states. " My leg hurts," for example, is to be assimilated to crying, limping, and holding one's leg (p. 978). And although, as Malcolm admits, this comparison seems bewildering, it has two important merits : first, it breaks the hold on us of the question " How does one know when to say ' My leg hurts '2" for in the light of the analogy this will be as nonsensical as the question " How does one know when to cry, limp, or hold one's leg?" ; second, it explains how the utterance of a first-person psychological sentence by another person can have an importance for us, although not as an identification-for in the light of the analogy it will have the same importance as the natural behaviour which serves as our preverbal criterion of the psychological states of others (ibid.). Malcolm has hold of a number of important insights here; yet his suggestion that one cannot legitimately use " I am in pain " to state a conclusion strikes me as much too strong. I do not think, that is, that a person actually misuses language if he concludes that he is in pain-though such a conclusion is admittedly odd. " I am in pain " is not normally used to state a conclusion, but it does not follow from this that it cannot be used to state a conclusion. It is surely possible, I should think, for a person, perhaps a child, to have a pretty good grasp of the meaning of " pain ", so that he usually has no trouble applying it to others and often has no trouble applying it to himself, and yet not be trained to the point where saying " I ain in pain " has become for him spontaneous pain-behaviour. I n such a case the person might very well heed his behaviour when making reports about himself. It would of course be true of such a person, or child, that he has not

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gained a complete mastery of pain-talk ; but I do not think we could therefore convict him of making a mistake or of saying anything actually improper. Surely it would be inappropriate to correct him ! Apart from this last point, Malcolm has, as I said, pointed out some important facts about a.person's statements about his own sensations : in particular, a person does not normally make any inferences or observations that lead him to say, e.g. " I amin pain" Words of this kind spring from him as naturally as his cries, screams, and tears. But even though, as Malcolm says, uttering << I am in pain " is as natural and, normally, as unpremeditated as crying, it must not be forgotten that such utterances can also serve to make or convey assertions, i.e. statements which are true or false. (Malcolm does not deny this, so far as I can see.) That is. the mere fact that a certain utterance is a bit of pain-behaviour does not imply that it is nothing in addition to iain-behaviour, that it is not also the expression of an assertion, a statement. For even though a person can be trained to respond naturally to a pain with " It hurts ". he also knows. if he has trulv mastered his language, what it means to make such a response : he knows, that is, the sigdcance of his utterance, the meaning of what he says. There is, in other words, an immense difference between the response of a ~ a r r o tthat has been conditioned to utter the words " I am in pain " when it is in pain and the response of a man who is master of the English language : the latter knows the significance of what he is saying, the former does not. Now it is of course obvious that not all utterances of " I am in pain " and the like are immediate responses to certain internal disturbances. Sophisticated language-users can obviously think before they speak: they can choose their words with care and do their best to give an accurate report of their feelings and sensations. Nevertheless, we are not obliged to conclude from this that what we say is always based on some sort of observation or is the result of a chain of inferences. What in fact usuallv happens in the case of our reports about ourselves is that something immediately comes to mind and is on the tip of our tongueand this is what we can either repress or disclose. Why we want to say what we do when we have a certain sensation is something to be explained in terms of our training and character ; and the authority that our statements about ourselves have is also due to this training : for by the' time we have mastered our language we have demonstrated over and over again the reliability of our verbal responses. Indeed, as both Sellars and Strawson have emphasized, a necessary condition of our having sensation d

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concepts is that our reports about ourselves are reliable indicators of our actual inner states ; and the reliability of these reports can be determined by impartial observers in standard circumstances.

It is important to note that the element of conditioning that is involved in the language-learning process accounts for the phenomenon of direct knowledge as well as the importance for others of a person's linguistic behavi0ur.l For what, after all, is direct knowledge supposed to be? It seems to me that to say Jones directly knows that he has the sensation S is only to say that he knows, without inference or private observation, that he has 8. And since this knowledge need not be expressed in the form of verbal reports or explicit avowals, about all there is to it, apart from the disposition to make such reports, etc., is a certain judgment or mental assertion to the effect that one has S and, perhaps, that S is, say, 4. What makes such a judgment an expression of direct knowledge is simply that it is not the result of an inference (hence the name " direct ") and that it has the epistemic authority, as Sellars has called it, that is distinctive of knowledge (cf. " EPM ", § 8). That is, as a saying to oneself of what one has been taught to say when such a sensation is had, but not observed, the judgment in question is (1)something of which one is fully conscious-it is in fact just an episode of conscious thinking, (2) something which has the same significance . to oneself as its overt expression has to other people, and (3) something whose truth is assured by one's linguistic training and one's possession of the relevant sensation-concepts. In short, when a person says to himself or thinks, " Wow, this hurts ! " or, if he is a philosopher engaged in refuting a crude form of logical behaviourism, " This is a clear-cut case of a pain-sensation," his thought or judgment can be said to express direct knowledge because (a) it has the same epistemic authority as an honest avowal of being in pain and (b) it is not based on an observation and it is not the result of an inference. Now it should be clear that nothing resembling first-person verification has been mentioned in the above discussion. One does not have to verify one's statements about one's own sensations because the mere fact that one makes them provides the single most important indicator or criterion for the kind of For a defence of the idea that sentences like " He lrnows he is in pain " make perfectly good sense and do " have a point ", see my " Knowing and Merely Thinking

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sensation one actually has. If, consequently, a person is challenged about the truth of such a statement, he can only reply by maintaining that he is telling the truth, that he is saying what he has been taught to say in such circumstances. Any further questioning, it seems to me, is either logically inappropriate and will show that the questioner does not understand the peculiar grammar of sensation-statements or it must be understood as k e c t e d against the honesty or linguistic competence of the claimant. (The claimant may, after all, be lying, feigning, etc., or he may not really understand the language he is using.) In other words, though a person normally certifies his statements about his own sensations in the very act of making them, he could defend them if called upon to do so. Such a defence, however, would largely be a matter of assuring his questioner that he is not lying, etc., and that he does know the meaning of what he is saying. VII So far I have attempted to show how it is that one's first-person psychological utterances can be both learned sensation-behaviour and vehicles of statement-making ; and as I have explained it there is nothing " bewildering " about Wittgenstein's suggestion, which is endorsed by Malcolm, that such utterances be assimilated to crying, limping, or running. I should like to suggest now that the account I have given of direct knowledge is actually consistent ,with the main tenets of philosophical behaviourism-though it does not, of course, imply behaviourism. According to many logical behaviourists, when you say that a person is having an experience, e.g. feeling an intense pain, you can be understood as saying that he is in a certain dispositional state : he is currently disposed, in a special way, to exhibit a distinctive kind of behaviour in a certain range of circumstances. Contrary to the opinion of some philosophers, however (cf. Geach in Mental Acts, pp. 5 f.), it is not necessary to interpret this contention as an implicit assertion that dispositions which are not manifested by appropriate behaviour are only hypothetical or non-actual conditions. To see this, consider that paradigm of dispositional states, magnetization. It can scarcely be denied, it seems to me, that when YOU magnetize an object you actually change i t y o u actually alter its physical structure. For if you do not change it you can hardly maintain that it will soon behave in a different way. Of course, as a layman, you do not describe this change when you say that the object is now magnetized (this

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is a job for the physical scientist) ;but in saying this you nevertheless mark the change indirectly, for you can be understood as saying that the object is now in such a condition that it will, for a certain period, attract iron filings, etc. As I understand him, then, the logical behaviourist would want to insist that when a man has gained a certain disposition his person has undergone some sort of change. (Just what change has occurred is again a scientific question-and its answer might even mention " emergents " !) Now, it is characteristic of a human being that he can often be trained to make a distinctive verbal response when his internal condition has undergone a change ; and, as is obviously the case with experimental animals, the changes that elicit a man's responses need not be observed by him. Since responses of this kind can also become understood by their maker as meaningful elements of a language, and since, in addition, they can also become covert--and can even be elicited by other covert stimuli, including silent responses like " How do I feel ? "-it appears that even dispositional states can be objects of direct knowledge. Now, I have not been trying to suggest that psychological phenomena are really dispositional states : this is the claim that some behaviourists are inclined to make. I shall argue later on that some " mental " states are essentially dispositional, e.g. that of wanting to scratch a healing wound ; but for the time being I simply want to emphasize that the possibility of having direct knowledge of one's current experience does not demonstrate the inadequacy of philosophical behaviourism.

VIII Malcolm's and Strawson's insistence that certain behaviour patterns provide " criteria " for the presence of psychological states suggests a large measure of sympathy for the programme of behaviourism ; yet they both make it very clear that they are not behaviourists. What position, then, do they actually hold ? Strawson e.g. makes this assertion : We might say : in order for there to be such a concept as that of X's depression, the depression which X has, the concept must cover both what is felt, but not observed, by X, and what may be observed, but not. felt, by others than X (for all values of X). But it is perhaps better to say : X's depression i s something, one and the same thing, which is felt, but not observed, by X, and observed, but not felt, by others than X. (Of course, what can be observed can be faked or disguised.) To refuse to accept

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this is to refuse to accept the structure of the language in which we talk about depression (Individuals, p. 109).

I find this puzzling for a number of reasons. Take, for instance, his statement : the concept must cover what -isfelt, but not observed, by X, and what may be observed, but not felt, by others than X. . . . Now, what might someone other than X actually observe when he examines the depressed X ? Well, he might observe X's very slow movements, his tears, his muttering, etc. X could of course observe these too, though he might need mirrors ; but, more important, these are things that X can feel as well : he can feel the tears running down his face ;he can feel his limbs moving slowly ; he can feel the action of his throat as he hears himself mutter. I n other words, with few exceptions, X can observe what others observe about him, and he can also feel what they can observe. But if X can sometimes both feel and observe what others can only observe about him, it seems that the strongest statement Strawson is entitled to make is: the concept must cover what is felt and also, in some cases, possibly observed by X, and what is observed, but not felt, by others than X. . . .

It must be realized, however, that in many cases of depression a person does not actually feel anything distinctive of that condition. A man might be terribly depressed e.g. and yet so engrossed in thinking about something-perhaps the girl who has just jilted him--that he is not aware of any distinctive feelings. Such cases, it seems to me, are extremely common. Of course, depressed people are normally aware of some feelings or other ; and certain of these feelings, e.g. those of lassitude, dullness, and fatigue, very often, but not always, constitute part of their depression. But because moods are quite different from feelings, and depression is a mood (cf. Ryle, pp. 98-104), it is always possible for a person to be depressed and have no distinctive feelings at all. Nevertheless, it strikes me as obvious that being depressed is always something over and above anything a person might actually manifest on a given occasion. For this reason I am troubled by Strawson's further, preferred statement : X's depression is something,one and thesame thing, which is felt, but not observed, by X, and observed, but not felt, by othersthan X.

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That is, it seems to me very strange to say that one ever obse~ves someone's depression-either one's own depression or the depression of someone else. I should say, rather, that depression is not the sort of thing it makes sense to say one observes : the only thing strictly observable about depression, I believe, are its manifestations-and these, of course, may be observed by the depressed person himself, as well as by other people. Now it might strike some readers as odd that I should actually deny that we can observe a person's depression. For, after all, do we alwavs have to infer from certain behavioural and other indicators chat a person is depressed ? Can we not simply see that he is depressed ? Well, if " seeing that x is depressed " means no more than "seeing x behave in a certain wav and iudg" ing correctly that he is depressed, without actually going through any process of inference ", then I think it is true that we very often see that our fellows are denressed. But notice. nevertheless. that there is an imuortant difference between observing his depression and observini that he is depressed : the latter doe: not imply the former. Observing that p, in this sense, is something one can do with resnect to out and out theoretical entities like subatomic particles : a physicist looking into a cloud chamber might observe that a neutron has just done something or other, even when no neutron track is visible to him. (Indeed, it is just because well trained investigators do not have to make explicit inferences in such cases that certain philosophers of sience actually define " a is observable for 0 " as, in effect, " some instance of the formula ' q5 a' is quickly decidable for 0 ", where ' q5 ' is a predicate-variable ranging over a suitable set of nonessential properties which a can sensibly be said to exemplify. This definition, however, though it may be useful for special philosophical purposes, is clearly not in accord with standard English usage.) But even though extraordinary scientists often do not have to make explicit inferences when they observe things about subatomic particles, and ordinary citizens do not usually make explicit inferences when they observe things about the moods of their friends, we must all justify our observations-that by relating them, in the end, to things which can be observed in the more usual sense of seen, felt, heard, and so on. In other words, the fact that a person does not always, and perhaps does not usually, run through a chain of inferences when he sees that his friend is depressed or woody, does not at all count against my claim that depression, moodiness, etc., are states of a person that could not intelligibly be said to be observed-by that person, or anyone else. V

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But if I am right in saying that the state of depression is itself non-observable, that only the manifestations of such a state could properly be said to be observed, I am then faced with the difficulty of saying what the state is, in addition to its manifestations. It seems to me, however, that Ryle has already shown how this difficultv is to be overcome : moods like depression. as well as emotions like anger, fear, jealousy, and so on, must be understood as " liability conditions " or, as I prefer to call them, dispositional states. Like marmetization. these states are perfectlv actual fa person undergoes a change when he becomes e.g. depressed) ; but unlike purely physical conditions, they are, in part a t least, dispositions to have certain feelings. Thus, while there is no distinction e.g. between feeling depressed and actually being depressed, anyone who is depressed is nevertheless disposed to have feelings of certain kinds, e.g. of being weighted down, in certain kinds of circumstance. Depression. however. is a verv complicated condition : it involves, as Rvle has remarked, the total set of a person-and not merely the contents of his mind, which might be quite empty. Roughly speaking, one might say that feeling depressed is nothing other than being depressed, and that being depressed is being in that peculiar state or condition which is such that : if you are in normal circumstances your movements will be slow, careless, listless, etc. ; if you are asked how you feel you will answer, if you answer a t all, " I'm depressed ", or something similar ; if your attention is not firmly directed away from yourself you will experience feelings associated with sadness, lassitude, possibly even despair, and so on. If the force of this interpretation is to be appreciated, it must be clearly understood that it does not repudiate Malcolm's major claims or even Strawson's conditions for " P-predicates ". For it is auite consistent with the above intemretation to maintain, as Malcolm does, that we do not find out what depression is merely from our own case, that we do not know we are depressed by observation--of either a feeling or our behaviour-and that saying " I am depressed" can be assimilated to depressionbehaviour. Again, the idea that depression is a complicated dispositional state does not in any way suggest that " depression " is not a P-predicate, as Strawson uses the term " P-predicate ". For " depression " would still apply primarily to persons ;it could still be properly applied on the basis of an observed pattern of behaviour; and one could still be said not to have a complete grasp of its meaning unless one were able to apply it correctly both to oneself and others. 0

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Now, although I think my account of depression, which, as I said, I think applies equally well to most emotions, is substantially correct, I want to emphasize that it does not also apply to sensations, especially pains, itches, qnd tweaks, and feelings, like those of fatigue and numbness, which sometimes accompany depression. For these, particularly pains, itches, and tweaks, are often locatable somewhere in or on the body of the person who has them. One can always ask, " Where do you itch ? " " Where do you feel pain ? " or even " Where, exactly, does it hurt ? " ; but one cannot meaningfully ask, " Where is your depression ? " " Where do you feel anger ? " or " Where are you sad, afraid, happy, or jealous ? " Yet, even though these states are unlike moods and emotions in that they generally have a location in or on some part of one's body, they are also similar to them in that they are properly ascribable on the basis of observable behaviour and physical changes. In fact, all of the points I listed above when I remarked that my view of depression does justice to the central contentions of Malcolm and Strawson apply to these states as well. I tried to illuminate the logic of " depression " and many emotion-words by classifying them as disposition terms of a special kind, and now, following Wilfrid Sellars (cf. his " EPM "), I should like to suggest that the logic of sensation-words can be illuminated bv com~arisonwith certain theoretical terms of a molar behaviour the0ry.l The theoretical terms I have in mind refer to inner states which, though non-observable, are every bit as real as the individual to whom they are ascribed. They are not, however, to be understood as neurophysiological states-for molar theories are not " molecular " theories (cf. B'eigl, pp. 436 f.). States of this kind are ascribable to a person wholly on the basis of his observable behaviour, etc., and in this they are similar to dispositional states ; but unlike the latter they are generally conceived to be occurrences that cause him to have certain dispositions. They are, moreover, the postulated effects of certain things that happen to a person, and they account for the fact that, as a result of these happenings, a person is disposed to behave in a particular way. Being theoretical, however, they do not have observable properties : they are specifiable solelyin terms of the circumstances that occasion them and the behaviour, etc., Extended discussions of the logic of theoretical terms can be found in Feigl and in Carnap.

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that they themselves occasion. Nevertheless, as occurrent states or conditions, the person who " has " them need not infer their existence : he can be trained in such a way that he can recognize their occurrence without any observations or inferences, that is, he can have direct knowledge of their existence and nature just as he can have direct knowledge of the existence and nature of his behavioural dispositions. Now I have not suggested that pains, itches, etc., are theoretical states ; I have merely suggested that their nature can be illuminated if we assimilate them to theoretical states. But is this assimilation reasonable 4 I think it is. First. it must be remembered that a person's sensations are non-observable-even to himself. This is not because they are, as a matter of fact, invisible, intandble. etc. : it is because thev are not the sort of u ,

thing it makes sense to say one observes : one can feel or suffer a pain, and one can observe its effects or manifestations ; but the pain per se is such that nothing could count as an observation of it. second, pains are clearl; the sort of thing" that result from changes in a person's body, e.g. the effects of being burned, stabbed, slapped, or of having a nerve exposed or otherwise stimulated, and they immediately give rise to distinctive behavioural and other dispositions, e.g. pains make you want to cry, scream, jump, etc. (Itches, of course, are similar in this respect : they result e.g. from the irritation of wearing woollen clothing, and thev ,. produce a distinctive sort of disuosition. viz. that of wanting to scratch.) Third, as Malcolm and Strawson emphasize, these sensations are properly ascribable on the basis of a person's observable behaviour and physical reactions, e.g. blushing, blanching, or crying. Fourth, one can, as I said, ascribe them to oneself, i.e. judge, report, or avow that one has them, without inference or observation. Lastly, as I have described them, they are not internal particulars. as ~hiloso~hers used to think. but states of a Derson that are conce~tuallvconnected with certain patterns of lbehaviour and observible piysical changes. In order to add intuitive plausibility to this conception of sensation, I want to consider for a moment the way we generally describe our pains. Thus, as we normally speak, some pains are said to be burning, like severe heartburn ; others are supposed to be sharp or dull ; still others are described as piercing, throbbing, beating, nagging, or pulsating ; and some are even said to be shooting or blinding. When we describe our pains in this way we are obviously speaking metaphorically: we are ascribing properties to them that only observable things could actually have-things like knives, which may be sharp or dull, coals, which -

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may burn, bullets, which may be shot into one, currents, which may pulsate, physical sounds, which may throb, and wives, who may nag. But what is especially significant about these metaphorical descriptions is that they lend themselves so readily to an explanation of the peculiar kind of behaviour, etc., that certain sorts of pain occasion. Thus, for example, a sharp pain may dispose a man to jerk or jump, as though he had been jabbed by a pointed object ; a beating headache may impel a man to throw his head downward, as though he were continually struck on the head ; and a nagging pain may produce those familiar symptoms of extreme frustation. When explanations of this kind are given, human behaviour that might otherwise remain inexplicable is rendered intelligible ; and internal burnings, beatings, or naggings, though they are unobservable and only metaphorically describable, thus play an exceedingly important role in helping us to understand and interpret the behaviour of our fellows.

Although, as I said before, I believe my account of sensations does justice to the central contentions of Strawson and Malcolm, I cannot be sure that it does justice to them all. In part this is due to the somewhat misleading term " criterion ", which they both use in the manner of the later Wittgenstein. Thus, e.g. Strawson argues that the behaviour-criteria one goes on are not just signs of the presence of the P-predicate [i.e., the psychological state] but criteria of a logically adequate kind for the ascription of the P-predicate (Individuals, p. 106 ; italics mine). Since I have denied that there is a logical or conceptual gap between e.g. pain and pain-behaviour, I have a great deal of sympathy with this statement of Strawson's. But I am nevertheless a little uneasy about the words I have italicized. For the connection between being in pain and crying, jumping, blanching, saying " It hurts "-that is, exhibiting typical pain-behaviour, etc.-is neither that of a necessary nor a sdicient condition ; indeed, no such relations hold between being in pain and exhibiting any kind of behaviour a t all. That is to say, there is no kind of behavioural and physical change K which is such that " x exhibits changes of k h d K " logically entails, or is logically entailed by, " x is in pain ". This, it seems to me, must be admitted because, among other things, a person can always, in principle, suppress, or simply not exhibit, the tell-tale signs of

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his pain, and he can always, in principle again, exhibit the most convincing sort of pain-behaviour and yet not be in pain. In the light of these considerations, which illustrate the unfortunate fact that pain is something over and above any sort of behavioural or observable physical change, it appears that the criteria Strawson speaks of are a t best probabilistic indicators of a person's painnot necessary or sufficient conditions. But even though the most striking sort of pain-behaviour must be understood as only a probabilistic indicator of the presence of pain, we are not compelled to conclude, as philosophers traditionally have done, that that behaviour constitutes a mere set of signs or symptoms-items that, as a result of observation, we merely come to associate with a sensation of pain. It is of course true that some of the behaviour we rely on when we ascribe sensations to others are mere signs : for we do generally learn many " accidental " facts about the way certain people express their feelings (e.g. some people usually swear in a certain way when they feel an intense pain) ; and these facts are by no means conceptual truths. But in order to know when a person is in pain, so that we can learn these accidental facts about the way he will probably behave when he is again in pain, some of his behaviour must be, by definition as it were, the kind of thing that necessarily counts for his being in pain. Of course, since we do not use language according to neat and tidy rules, it is not always easy to say when we are dealing with a mere symptom and when we have something that necessarily indicates or is evidence for a given kind of sensation. Yet, as many writers have pointed out (e.g. Sellars, § 111), the concept of pain is entirely circumscribed by the very complicated and by no means precise or explicitly formulated rules that given the proper use of the word " pain " ; and these rules or tacit conventions often allow us to infer, though a t best with very high probability, the presence of a person's pain from what we observe him do in certain circumstances. The fact, in other words, that certain kinds of behaviour provide first-rate evidence for the presence of a given sensation is not merely a contingent truth but a conceptual necessity : it is, so to say, built right into the concept of that sensation. And although i t is theoretically possible to be mistaken in any assertion about a person's actual state of consciousness, even when the behaviour you observe him exhibit is of the most characteristic sort, it must not be forgotten that this is only a logical possibility-and in most cases a pretty empty one at that. A statement about another person's state of consciousness is, after all, an empirical statement ; and as such it is in principle capable of falsification 14

regardless of the evidence previously brought in its favour. In short, though some of the connections between being in pain and exhibiting a certain kind of behaviour are purely accidental or conceptually contingent, not all of them are ; yet even those that are not, which Malcolm ond Strawson call " criteria ", are still -essentially probabilistic in character.

The idea that these connections are probabilistic and yet not merely contingent may seem a little odd. It should be understood, though, that they hold between having a sensation, e.g. pain, and actually exhibiting appropriate behaviour. And while this sort of connection is probabilistic, another extremely im~ o r t a n tone is not. viz. the kind that holds between having a ;ensation and being disposed to exhibit appropriate behavikr. When I suggested that " pain " must be understood as a special sort of explanatory term, I remarked that its fundamental use is not to label somethingu but to account for the fact that when

certain things happen to a person he is disposed to behave or physically alter in a particular way. And thus, while one who is in pain may indeed fail to give any indication of his true condition, I should say that it is conceptually impossible for him to be in pain and yet not be disposed to exhibit some kind of pain-behaviour. For as Ryle once observed (CM, p. log), pain is a sensation one minds having ; and any feeling that does not dispose one to seek some kind of relief, to exhibit some kind of avoidance-behaviour, is thus not a pain but something else. To see this more clearlv. consider for a moment the analoaous but less complicated concept of having an itch. An itch,"one might say, is simply a feeling that makes you want to scratch ; and thus any feeling that does not make you want to scratch is ips0 facto not an itch. Now one can obviously have an itch and not scratch, and one can scratch without having an itch. For this reason alone, " x is scratching " does not entail, nor is it entailed by, " x has an itch". Yet, since wanting to scratch, which is a dispositional state analytically connected with itching, is conceptually tied to acts of scratching, the latter are also conceptually tied, though more indirectly, to cases of itching-and it is in virtue of this connection that scratching can legitimately be called " primitive, unlearned itch-behaviour " and serve as a " criterion " for the presence of itches. d

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The upshot of what I have been trying to say here is something like this. Not all the connections that hold between our concepts are reducible to logical entailment or equivalence ; a great many of them are rather probabilistic. When, therefore, Strawson speaks of " logically adequate criteria ", the adequacy he has in mind-if I am in agreement with him, as I suspect I am-is not that of logically sufficient conditions, that is, conditions which allow us to infer with theoretical certainty the presence of the relevant P-predicate ; it is rather the adequacy of grounds for rational inference. The criteria he speaks of, that is to say, give us conceptually adequate grounds for deciding or concluding that someone has a certain sensation ; they do not provide us with theoretical certainty, as the name " criteria" might suggest. They do, however, supply us with ample justification for claiming to know what others are feeling : a theoretical possibility of mistake does not, after all, give us reason to think we are mistaken.

It is perhaps important to stress, at this point, that the above reasoning does not support the metaphysically-privileged-access view of sensations so long defended by traditional empiricists. For, as I pointed out a t an early stage of this essay, a person's knowledge of his own sensations is fundamentally determined by verbal responses, often covert sayings to himself, which he has been trained to make when it is clear to his elders that he has a given sensation ; and thus there is an important sense in which a person's opinions about himself are based on opinions that others have had about him. His knowledge of himself becomes privileged, to be sure, but for the following reasons this privilege is essentially a practical matter. First, a person can normally learn, though sometimes only with great difficulty, to inhibit or disguise his overt responses and yet know very clearly what sensation or feeling he is having. The privileged access he has here is entirely determined, however, by the extent to which he is successful in inhibiting his natural, overt responses-and it must not be forgotten that success of this kind is very difficult to attain, especially since involuntary responses like blanching, jerking, etc., are often involved. Second, and perhaps most important, our linguistic conventions concerning sensation-terms are such that if aperson'sverbalresponses do not agree with the rest of his observable behaviour in indicating a certain kind of sensation,

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we are generally enjoined to say that he is either dissembling, making a verbal slip of some kind, or else, possibly, that he has momentarily lost his mastery of the language he is using ; that is, we are inclined to say that he is not, in such circumstances, truly or honestly asserting something that is false. Thus, for example, if a child says " It feels good " when his other behaviour clearly shows that he is in pain, we unquestioningly say that he is mis-speaking, and we proceed to correct him : " You mean ' It hurts '." And if a grown man, who has demonstrated over the period of a lifetime that he has a complete mastery of the word " pain ", suddenly says, " What a pleasant feeling ", while writhing on the ground with a horrible smashed leg, we should say, if we were sure that he is not joking, dissimulating, or making a simple verbal slip, that he is not aware of the meaning of what he is saying, that he is not actually assertifig that he has a pleasant feeling. (Cases in many respects similar to this one are familiar to psychiatrists from their work with psychotics ; and with respect to the present example, a psychiatrist might say that the man's pain-reporting mechanism has broken down.) The point I want to emphasize, however, is that the stricken man is saved from making a mistake, not because he has some means of knowing infallibly what sensation he is having, but because of the convention governing many sensation-words that makes it impossible for a person who has the concept of pain to make an honest mistake about being in pain. (N.B. This convention does not apply to more complicated psychological states, like certain moods and emotions.) It is well to remember, moreover, that this convention cannot be explained by the idea that one is saved from such a mistake because one is merely labeling one's sensation : for if any sense can be made of the expression " labeling a sensation ", the process it applies to certainly does not exclude error. As I pointed out earlier, what a person says or thinks of himself when he says or thinks " I am now in pain " is precisely the same as what he says or thinks of another when he says or thinks "He is now in pain " ; and if, therefore, the former is an example of labeling a sensation, so is the latter. In this sense, which I believe is the only meaningful sense of " labeling a sensation ", the mere fact that one labels a sensation is no guarantee that no mistake is being made. XIV Prom what I have said in the last section, it is easy to see why traditional empiricists misunderstood the concept of sensation and

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were able to pose the sceptical problems that have vexed them for nearlv two centuries. One of their basic mistakes. which is in part due to an overly sharp distinction between " relations of ideas " and " matters of fact ", is the view that if a statement is logically synthetic, i.e. not logically true or reducible to a logical truth, it is ips0 facto continge~tand to be justified by the process of induction. Since the relation between having a sensation and exhibiting a certain kind of behaviour is not one of logical entailment or eauivalence. i.e. analvtic in the narrow sense, it was thus natural for them to conclude that the connection between pain and pain-behaviour is purely accidental, and that true knowledge of a person's pain can be attained only by direct inspection. This was of course the occasion of another serious mistake, their misinterpretation of the access one has to one's own states of mind. Por this access, which I have called " practically privileged ", was construed by them as ontologically or metaphysically privileged. Self-knowledge was thought to have no basis in theoretically fallible habits, whose reliability can be determined by independent, socially-sanctioned standards, but was understood, instead, as the product of an infallible and to my mind quite mysterious process of intuition or direct apprehension. As I suggested in my preliminary remarks, however, the many recent attacks on traditional empiricism have inclined some philosophers to embrace views that are every bit as erroneous as those I just mentioned. In particular there is a noticeable tendency on the part of some contemporary thinkers to construe the relation between various mental states and their behavioural " criteria " as actually analytic, that is, as constituting logically necessary or sufficient conditions. And in accordance with this behaviouristic inclination, there has also been a noticeable tendency to deprecate the notion of direct knowledge and to insist that a person's access to his own mental states is not really privileged at all. I have of course not considered the position of any avowed behaviourist in this paper, nor have I pretended to do so ; but the views of Malcolm and Strawson. which I find basically congenial to my own point of view, have enough in common with philosophical behaviourism to shed light on certain principles dear to all behaviouristic hearts, and to raise the most important issues that are connected with the above-mentioned trends in contemporary philosophy

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REFERENCES Aune, B. " Knowing and Merely Thinking ", Phil. Studies, xii : 5358. Carnap, R. " The Methodological Character of Theoretical Concepts ", Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, 1 (1956), 38-76. Feigl, H. " The ' Mental ' and the ' Physical ' ", Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, 2 (1958), 370-497. Geach, P. Mental Acts. London, 1958. Malcolm, N. " Knowledge of Other Minds ", Journ. Phil., LV, 23 : 960-978. Ryle, G. The Concept of Mind. London, 1949. eellars, W. " Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind ", Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, 1 (1956), 253-329. Strawson, P. Introduction to Logical T h w y . London, 1952. Strawson, P. Individuals. London, 1959. Wittgenstein, L. Philosophical Investigations. London, 1953.