Are pains owner-individuated particulars?

In the sections of the Philosophical Investigations commonly known as ‘the private language argument’ (PI §§243ff.), Wittgenstein argues against the idea that sensations, such as pain, are private inner objects accessible only to their owner. This doctrine is, of course, a version of Cartesian dualism, but it is perhaps more illuminatingly called ‘the inner object account’ of sensations. For whereas the label ‘dualism’ emphasises the sharp difference drawn by this theory between the mental and the physical, the main thrust of Wittgenstein's criticism is, on the contrary, that the theory exaggerates the similarities between the two realms: that it misconstrues the grammar of psychological terms by assimilating it too much to the grammar of names of perceptible occurrences in the physical world (cf. Schroeder 2006, pp. 182–5; pp. 201–19).

Wittgenstein's main concern is with the claim that sensations are epistemically private: that ‘only I can know whether I am really in pain’ (PI §246); but he also discusses and dismisses the claim that sensations are essentially owned by a single individual: that ‘another person can't have my pains’ (PI §253). The two are, of course, related. The inner object model construes sensations as particular occurrences in the private realm of the mind – like beetles in a box (cf. PI §293) – and their privacy is seen as a consequence of their unalterable and unsharable location. Only the owner of a consciousness has access to its contents. So, on this view, it is because you cannot have my pain that, strictly speaking, you cannot know of my pain.

This, however, may be denied. Anthony Kenny, for example, is prepared to accept, as a grammatical triviality, that pains are owner-individuated but denies that that makes them private. After all, the same holds for sneezes, blushes or smiles: you cannot have my sneeze, for if you sneeze, it is ipso facto your sneeze and not mine, but of course it doesn't follow that you cannot know of my sneezes (Kenny 1973, p. 189).

But the step from ‘I can't have yours’ to ‘I can't know of yours’ is more easily blocked in the case of sneezes and blushes, which are visible events located in physical space in a way pains are not.

The National Interest and the Geopolitical Dimension

The more that the national interest is rooted in a geopolitical dimension the more likely it is that it will manifest in powerful ways. Isolationism is not a viable option for countries that seek to instill a narrative of greatness at home and abroad. A retreat away from the responsibility to manage the international order is likely to create the conditions for other powers to arise and erode that sense of greatness. The great powers do not have interests that revolve around economic reasons. They are glory seekers, in the words of Italian geopolitician Dario Fabbri.

The way that this manifested in the 1950s was ref lected in the impact that American Exceptionalism and Eurasianism had on creating an indelible mark on the international order. The expansion of American Exceptionalism and Eurasianism was undertaken in the context of changing the complexion of the area of inf luence with whom they shared cultural commonalities. American Exceptionalism profoundly altered the notion of Europeanness, which was imbued with the values of the modern world, namely liberalism. Something similar can be said about the Soviet Union and Eurasianism, in regard to the forms of organization adopted in the Eastern bloc.

The geopolitical dimension is the main way in which prominent states can accomplish their national interest due to the way in which culture and space interact. During the initial period of the Cold War, the interaction between the United States and the Soviet Union demarcated the geostrategic spaces that would enable them to fulfill their most vital interests. The geopolitical perspective explains why the divergence of interests between the superpowers did not result in overt military conflict. The United States and the Soviet Union were not motivated by the same interests. The United States had an expansive approach regarding the management of the international order, which translated into the handling of a common geopolitical space in areas of the world with cultural affinity and complementary economic interest. For the Soviet Union, the main interest was to maintain the vitality of the Communist system at home and to expand that ideology in a careful manner.

Wittgenstein's verificationism

As described in the previous chapter, Wittgenstein's discussion of aesthetics and ethics in his lectures in May Term 1933 is prefaced and informed by his new account of meaning as use, which, applied to declarative sentences or propositions, leads to verificationism: ‘If you want to know the meaning of a sentence ask for its verification’ (AL 29). For any predicate ‘F’, you have to consider the language-game and see how it is used, that is, how a claim that something is F could be verified. For what characterises the use of a predicate is that its declarative application can be judged true or false, and that such a judgement can be vindicated or rejected on suitable grounds. Hence, the meaning of such a truth-apt predication is determined by the way its truth or falsity can be ascertained. For example, ‘to explain what is meant by “6 yards” we must shew a man how we measure it’ (M 311). Accordingly, the meaning of the proposition ‘The shed is 6 yards long’ is given by its possible methods of verification (or falsification).

It is worth noting that this core idea of verificationism – that to know the meaning of a predicate is to know how it is used, that is, amongst other things, on what grounds its application can be judged true or false – is indeed just an aspect of the view that meaning is use. Wittgenstein espoused it not only in the early 1930s but to the end of his life. What distinguishes his mature view from the scientistic verificationism of the Vienna Circle is that he came to realise that although there must be grounds for judging the application of a predicate as correct or incorrect, there need not always be methods of objective verification. And yet, in order to clarify the meaning of a predicate, it is always useful to ask if and how its application could be verified. In conversation, he explained that by a simile:

Introduction

During the 1950s, the United States would begin to promote a unidirectionality of history, geared toward enabling the United States to prevail in the geopolitical confrontation against the Soviet Union. In order to project the geopolitical power of the United States, there was a need to ensure that the countries affected by the confrontation that emerged in the 1950s would be persuaded about the good intentions of the United States, particularly when it came to promoting the economic and social rehabilitation of vast areas of the world. The 1950s saw the beginning of the idea of a “global commonwealth” of nations, initially restricted to the areas of the world that had a cultural affinity with America, aligned with the geostrategic interests of the United States, and willing to accept the political and economic principles projected from Washington.

Exerting Power and Shaping the Future—A Look at America's Role in the 1950s

The United States played a significant role in the world during the 1950s. After World War II, the United States emerged as one of the two superpowers, along with the Soviet Union. The United States played a leading role in establishing and leading the Western alliance, which was a military alliance between North American and European countries that was formed to counter the Soviet Union's influence in Europe. The United States also played a major role in the Korean War, which took place from 1950 to 1953, and in the Vietnam War, which lasted from the 1950s to the 1970s. During the 1950s, the United States experienced a time of economic prosperity and cultural conformity known as the “American Dream” or the “Affluent Society.” The 1950s also saw the beginning of the Civil Rights Movement, as African Americans and other minority groups in the US began to agitate for equal rights and treatment under the law. In addition to its role on the world stage and its domestic developments, the US also played a major role in shaping popular culture during the 1950s. The decade saw the emergence of rock and roll music, and many iconic cultural figures, such as Elvis Presley, emerged during this time.

Wittgenstein speaks not only of ‘grammatical rules’ but also of ‘grammatical statements’ (or propositions) (grammatische Sätze). The difference between the two concepts is one of perspective. Linguistic meaning can be explained by grammatical rules (or, to take Wittgenstein's own qualifications into account, by expressions of grammatical norms). For example, the meaning of the word ‘bachelor’ can be explained by the grammatical rule:

However, when this sentence is not used to teach or to explain but is considered as a statement, Wittgenstein calls it a grammatical statement. After all, we regard it as true that a bachelor is an unmarried man, which makes it more natural to speak of a statement (or proposition) than a rule. It is a statement, but not an empirical statement, not a ‘statement of fact’ (AL 18); it is ‘a statement which no experience will refute’ (AL 16).

In more traditional philosophical terminology, (1) is called an analytic truth or statement. According to the standard definition, analytic statements are true simply in virtue of the meanings of the ingredient words. This definition is naturally suggested by the fact that analytic truths are typically used as linguistic explanations. Instead of

The two sentences have the same use, fulfil the same function in language and hence have the same meaning. A statement of (2) is true because the word ‘cygnet’ does mean a young swan. That is to say, (2) is true in virtue of the meaning of the word ‘cygnet’. But as (2) functions in the same way as the corresponding analytic statement (3), the same can be said about (3). This too can be verified simply by looking up the meaning of the word ‘cygnet’ in a dictionary. Of course, the truth of (2) and (3) is dependent not only on the meaning of the word ‘cygnet’, but also on the meanings of their other words. If, for example, the word ‘young’ meant ‘black’, the statements would be false. So just like (2), (3) is true in virtue of the meaning of the whole sentence.

Lehasa Moloi is one of those organic intellectuals whose ambition from his youth has been to tackle the issues related to what appears to be lagging material, political and social development of the African continent. Committed to the education of the masses that would include for him an investment in consciousness-raising among young college students, Moloi confronts the challenges of miseducation of the African with a revolutionary pedagogy based on African agency. He rescues us from the dead end of a misguided approach to development. While working on his doctorate with Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni, perhaps the key African decolonial scholar, Moloi began to ask questions that prompted him to consider the historical agency of African people. It was not enough that one identifies and explains the decoloniality of power regarding the vestiges left by colonial oppressions, one had to sift through history to rediscover how Africans had conceived a world of relationships that were authentic and elastic enough to provide stability for thousands of years before the invasions of Europeans and Arabs. c Always ready to honour the academic guidance of Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni, now the Chair of Epistemologies of the Global South at the University of Bayreuth, Moloi sought to take the route of African centeredness where the fundamental puzzle had to be found in how African people approached their own lived experiences in the context of contemporary challenges. In effect, the issues of epistemic freedom, decolonization and decoloniality in regard to ‘development’ had to be questioned from an Afrocentric perspective. What is it to be developed in African eyes? How must one see the constraints, restraints and complaints of Western authorities, whether from the Americas or Europe, about development in Africa?

Moloi has extended the discourse on ‘development’ in an urgent manner by refocusing theory and practice on African culture itself. To fulfil all societal ambitions of ethics, aesthetics, economics, technology and construction, there must be a collective sense of African agency where citizens are engaged in individual and group responses to external situations based on culture. Thus, Lehasa Moloi takes us beyond the destruction of the false facades of Western thinking or Eastern thinking erected to conceal African capabilities.

Typically, an explanation of an event cites the causes that made it happen. According to what has been called the ‘standard view’ in the philosophy of action (cf. Sandis 2009, p. 2), intentional human actions are just a subclass of events, and the agent's reasons are the causes of their actions. In the 1930s this widespread causalism was disputed by Ludwig Wittgenstein, whose alternative view that reason-giving explanations should not be seen as a type of causal explanations held sway in the 1960s. It was defended by Elizabeth Anscombe (1957), Peter Winch (1958), and A.I. Melden (1961) but was then forcefully challenged by Donald Davidson in his influential paper ‘Actions, Reasons, and Causes’ (1963), which by the 1970s had re-established causalism about reasons as the standard view. The standard causalist view, however, has generally been acknowledged to be troubled by a major problem: the problem of deviant causal chains (cf. Moya 1990, pp. 114–28). Davidson himself had confessed not to be able to resolve this problem (1973, p. 79), yet many of his followers remained more optimistic.

A more recent causalist view, propounded, for example, by Carlos Moya (2014, pp. 200–4) and John Hyman (2015, Ch.5), is that the flaw both in Davidson's version of causalism and in the anti-causalism of Wittgenstein and his followers was their commitment to a Humean account of causation as a law-governed relation between events. On Hyman's view, once we accept (i) that one can be immediately aware of causation without having to observe regularities, and (ii) that desires are dispositions, and dispositions can be causal factors too, causalism is safe from Wittgensteinian objections. Moreover, Hyman tries to defuse the problem of deviant causal connections by arguing (i) that it is just a special case of the general difficulty of distinguishing between manifestations of dispositions and mere side effects, and (ii) that it doesn't undermine the causalist construal: for whether its effects are deviant or not, citing a disposition explains them causally in either case (Hyman 2015, p. 116). In this chapter, I shall, after a few preliminary clarifications, re-consider the deviant causal chain problem with those more flexible causalist ideas in mind.

Introduction

The concept of “redemptionism” propagated by the Soviet Union during the 1950s relied on a nonuniversalist notion of history, which allowed Moscow to achieve geopolitical preeminence in its sphere of influence and protect the stability of the regime. This approach allowed Moscow to extend its geopolitical influence and promote despotic principles to countries that were not within its immediate area of influence but that sought socioeconomic improvements and a detachment from the political guidelines drawn up by the United States.

A National Version of Marxism

By the time Nikita Khrushchev came into power, there was an idea that socialism could only be built according to the national characteristics of each society. This idea emerged as a result of the multinational nature of the Soviet Union. Additionally, the Soviet leadership was able to instill this idea due to the prestige that it gained as a result of victory in World War II, which was won with the collaboration of the different peoples of the Soviet Union. The endorsement of a national version of Marxism was a sign of the limitations to expanding Soviet ideology as well as the increasing difficulties experienced regarding the launch of a program of social and economic reforms at home. The Khrushchev period served to raise awareness about the possibility of using Communism in order to create an economic system that would surpass American capitalism. It was vital for the Soviet Union to ensure that it remained the beacon of socialism, which compelled Moscow to ameliorate socioeconomic conditions at home. This was the main legacy of De-Stalinization. Indeed, during the Malenkov-Beria-Molotov interregnum, the ministries were endowed with further decision-making powers in an attempt to raise living standards. There were some successes in agricultural production due to a partial liberalization of production, further investment, and the lowering of taxes in private markets and plots. The emphasis on national Marxism went hand in hand with the efforts to improve the socioeconomic situation. In the 1950s, and as a consequence of victory in World War II, there was an entrenchment of a national version of Marxism. Moscow's actions were seen by many as a renunciation of the possibility of replacing capitalism with a dictatorship of the proletariat at the world level.

Afrocentricity has become the dominant intellectual paradigm in the analysis of African phenomena in the last two decades, if not longer. Afrocentricity was conceptualized and developed through the skilful writings of Molefi Kete Asante, who is the leading theorist, and Chair of the Africology and African American Studies Department at Temple University (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania), which is considered the construct's intellectual home. The primary role of Afrocentricity has been to depose the dominant Eurocentric paradigm, which has been identified as a leading cause of the de-centring and dislocation of Africans from their own historical and cultural experiences.

Thus, Afrocentricity proposes the relocation and the re-centring of African persons within their own historical, political and cultural context as a key for their liberation from Eurocentric epistemic domination. More than anything else, Afrocentricity is a paradigm of agency and action; it seeks to decentre Europe, its knowledge system and its hegemonic practices from the centre of African reality and replace it with an African-based knowledge system, informed by African history and culture, as framed within the lived experiences of African people transcontinentally and trans-generationally. This implies that establishing the intellectual location of the researcher is indispensable to any examination of African people's culture, politics, spirituality, economics and psychology in general. It is critical to understand in this study that Afrocentricity is not articulated as a fixed corpus of ideas or perspectives, or as a closed system of beliefs.

Since the advent of the colonization of Africa by Europe, starting in the early fifteenth century, information regarding the continent of Africa and its people has been articulated from a European point of view, with the effect of submerging an African world view. The call for the liberation of Africans from the European political hegemony and subsequent neocolonial ties in the post-independence era has coincided with calls for a liberation of epistemology. The challenge that the newly independent nation-states faced was how to develop themselves by improving the quality of life for African people. Regarding education, the main challenge was to liberate African minds from the ravages of the legacy of the colonial knowledge system.

Wittgenstein was unimpressed by the Liar paradox:

It is hard to dispute that it is indeed just an artificial and useless philosophers’ construction, irrelevant to the usefulness or ordinary applications of the words ‘true’ and ‘false’. And yet one cannot help agreeing with Turing's reply:

Even if we’re not inclined to regard this little puzzle as a serious threat to our concept of truth, we’d like to have a clearer understanding of how it arises.

How to understand the words ‘true’ and ‘false’? Syntactic appearances suggest that, as adjectives, they denote qualities of objects, which we then construct by reifying propositions. We can, of course, put it like that, but it is rather misleading. After all, when you say, ‘This car is very expensive’, and I reply, ‘That's true’, I haven't changed the subject, as the superficial analysis would suggest – namely, that you talked about a car, yet I talked about a proposition. No, if we consider the actual function of the words rather than their superficial syntactic appearance, we better say that ‘That's true’ is an expression of agreement, merely a stylistic variant of ‘Yes, indeed’, or ‘Yes, …’ followed by a repetition of the statement replied to.

Yet more needs to be said about embedded uses of the predicates ‘true’ and ‘false’. By saying, ‘If that's true, then my name is Jack Robinson’, I obviously do not express agreement with the statement in question. But we can hold on to the idea that here (as in the elementary case), saying ‘That's true’ amounts to repeating the claim in question.

As explained in Chapter 1, the normativity of linguistic meaning – whether expressed in rules of grammar or implicit in our language use – is at the core of Wittgenstein's philosophy of language. Over the last decades, however, that idea has been persistently attacked. In this chapter, I shall consider the semantic anti-normativist challenge to Wittgenstein's account of language.

Types of obligations

It is useful to distinguish three types of obligations:

• 1. Moral obligations

• 2. Socially enforced obligations

• 3. Freely adopted obligations

The concept of a moral obligation is logically very different from that of a legal obligation in that it has freed itself from its socially enforced origin. For example, as children, we first accept an obligation not to steal because we understand that it will be enforced – that theft is severely sanctioned. But then most of us internalise this socially enforced obligation and also accept it as a moral obligation. That is to say, we take the step from:

(a) I shouldn't steal because I get into trouble if I do.

to

(b) I shouldn't steal because it's morally wrong.

Thus, moral obligations typically grow out of socially enforced obligations but free themselves (at least logically) from their grounding in social sanctions. In both directions:

• (i) Something can be socially enforced without being morally correct.

• (ii) Something can be morally correct without being socially enforced.

Obviously, the most important moral obligations tend to also be socially enforced by law. In that case, we are obliged in two different senses, roughly speaking: by the police and by our conscience.

Note that if I accept a moral obligation that is not socially enforced, it is not, for that matter, (what I call) a freely adopted obligation [3.] either, because I don't freely choose to find something morally right or wrong. It is, as it were, dictated to me by my conscience (which, if you are a moral realist, you may believe to track some metaphysical facts).

What, then, would be an example of a freely adopted obligation [3.]? For example, when solving a crossword puzzle, I put myself under an obligation to follow the rules. I would not get into trouble if I entered some nonsense words instead, nor would it be morally wrong to do so.