THE RELEVANCE OF WITTGENSTEIN`S

PRIVATE LANGUAGE THOUGHT EXPERIMENT

FOR

SOCIAL WORK

In training students for social work, professors in colleges of social work divide sharply into two groups. The one group trains students in developing quantitative, surveying techniques and mathematical statistics. They see their task as scientific and empirically based. And though they do not generally use the philosophical term ``logical positivism,`` they have a logical positivist model of social science. The second group constantly calls the student`s attention to penetrating the mind of the ``client`` and his or her socio-economic-racial-sexual group. They want the student to be aware of the experiences and presuppositions of the person or group under study. For this they want the student to see the world from the other`s point of view. They are continually suspicious of the empirical studies and statistics gathered by their colleagues in the first group, because the ``bean counters`` have not taken the other`s experiences and points of view into account when doing their studies. Philosophically more aware, they are more likely to refer to their work with the term ``critical theory`` and refer approvingly to such writers as Habermas, Gadamer, and Foucult. Naturally, the two groups do not get along well at department meetings and target each other in discussion sessions at public lectures.

The ``critical theory group,`` when discussing among themselves, eventually run into an issue that stands as a limit to their theory. If it is necessary to get into the mind of the other in order to understand that person or group, then one must be familiar with the other`s experiences and perspective. But the limiting and perplexing question that arises is: Can we ever have another`s experiences? – really have them as that other experiences them? Can we experience the world of the black man, if we are white? Can we understand why a poor woman would spend her welfare check on a lottery ticket and potato chips, if we have taken four graduate courses in statistics and know the initials of good and bad cholesterol? Can a male OB-GYN give the best medical advice to his patients? The specter haunting these questions is: If shared experience is the prerequisite for understanding, and if we never really have the same experience as another, we may not really understand the other – perhaps not even imperfectly.

These questions of the social worker are based on pictures and concepts that are or are the roots of a cluster of philosophical problems connected with solipsism – perception, skepticism, other minds, mind-body dualism, etc. The solipsist claims not to know if there are any other experiences in the universe than his own. If there are other minds, the solipsist claims not to know anything about them – neither that they are nor whether they have experiences nor, if they do, whether they are anything like his own. The solipsist is a radical skeptic full of doubts that normal football fans, accountants, and gardeners do not have. He is alone in the universe; worse, he is the universe. Not only is he without companionship, he cannot be sure whether his present experiences have any connection to his past experiences. Solipsism should, be a dreadful and fearful thought, and yet it is not. Is that because there are no believing solipsists? – egoists, for sure, but no practicing solipsists.

Wittgenstein does not explicitly write for the social worker, intentionally addressing her real problems – for example, advising a client on money management or surveying a neighborhood on the need for a children`s services case worker. Wittgenstein writes, rather, for the philosopher stricken with the doubts of solipsism, and secondarily for the social worker tied up in the same knots as the philosopher. Nevertheless, Wittgenstein`s work on the issues involved in the private language thought experiment is at the core of the social worker`s dilemma. The ways into and out of the latter`s dilemma are the same as the ways into and out of the solipsist`s dilemma. As the treatment of the solipsist`s doubts may allow him to set them down and continue untroubled in his ordinary, non-philosophical life, the treatment of the social worker`s dilemma may allow him to set them aside and do the social work that she in fact knows how to do and can do whether or not she has a solution to her philosophical doubts.

I want to point out this connection between the theoretical problem of solipsism and the relevance of Wittgenstein`s private language project. In engaging us in the project, doomed to failure, of imagining a private language, Wittgenstein leads us to a philosophical understanding of the possibility of community. By a series of exercises, he shows us that the solipsist`s world is unthinkable. Only the world of community is thinkable, the world in which we in fact live: a world in which we have shared experiences, suffer with each other, ignore each other`s suffering, understand each other – sometimes perfectly, sometimes partially, sometimes all too well, sometimes not at all. This is the world that both the solipsist and the social worker occupy when not tied in mental knots over what they are doing. Wittgenstein`s work earns, for those who would do the work, a philosophical understanding of the nature of mind and language. In that understanding, we are returned to the ordinary where we are reminded how easy and how difficult it is to understand another But, nevertheless, it is possible. There is no logical or epistemological prohibition against understanding another. It is our public language that allows us access to the privacy of the other`s mind.

Consider briefly, for the sake of seeing the relevance of such remarks as #246: ``If we are using the word `to know` as it is normally used (and how else are we to use it?), then other people very often know when I am in pain.`` Such a remark bears the weight of the concept of community and public language. It is contrasted with solipsism and private language by the paired contrasting remark: It makes no sense to say: `` I know that I am in pain.`` My own pain, my own experience, is not something I find out about – I do not discover it. I do not look in on myself and observe it, as if I were looking through a peephole at something in a private box that I and no one else owned. If it were like that, I could give the box to someone else and he could look through the same hole – at me, as I do. This is what Wittgenstein calls ``patent nonsense.`` Knowing is something that is based on principles of discovery – observations, remembrances, inferences, etc. I do not do such things in connection with discovering my own pain – my own experiences. I simply have my experiences. I do, however, do such things in connection with your experiences, sensations, sensations, and pains. I observe you – I see you, that is – working the metal latch on the hood of your car when the temperature is below zero. I see you blow on your red hands. I hear you complain of how cold they are. I recall my hands – so cold doing the same thing, etc. Of you, I know that your hands hurt.

The solipsist objects that one does not know – really know – the pain of another because one is not having it. Suppose, however, that one is having the same pain as another. There is an ordinary sense in which we say and mean this. Suppose two men are working to unlatch the hood of a frozen car. Their fingers are numb with pain. Are they having the same pain? Is it the same pain that I remember when I had the pain that you are having now? Wittgenstein: What are the criteria for a chair`s being the same chair? For this we need language-games: 1) ``Is this the same chair that you had three years ago?`` 2) ``Is this new chair in the corner the same chair that Sam has in his apartment?`` The criteria for the ``same chair`` in 1 are different from the ``same chair`` in 2. Likewise the difficulties and distinctions apply in the same way for the word ``identical,`` which we might inclined to substitute for ``same,`` as if we could clear up the philosophical problem by such a substitution. Being clear on this distinction prepares one to ward off the solipsist`s confusion about the ``same pain``/``same experience.`` In sense 2, I may have the ``same experience`` as you, in sense 1, I will not. But in sense 1, I will not have the same experience twice myself. Here is what becomes clear: In our community of speakers, we understand each other when we say: ``I have had the same experience myself``; ``I know how much it must hurt;`` and ``There is nothing I can do, he must suffer through this himself – I can`t suffer for him.``

The very idea of ``agreement in judgment`` calls forth the idea of community and common understanding. Wittgenstein directs attention to our ``agreement in judgments`` in several places in the Philosophical Investigations, as well as in On Certainty. In #242, he connects the idea to our ability to communicate with each other: ``If language is to be a means of communication there must be an agreement not only in definitions but also (queer as this may sound) in judgments.`` The idea of agreement in judgments here stresses that communication with others presupposes more than acceptance of the same definitions of words. In fact we may not even have definitions of many words that we use, much less agree upon them. The very use of a word may well involve an agreement in judgment. ``This is a park.`` `` We call this a park.`` It is not merely a field, nor someone`s yard, but we all call this a ``park`` because it is judged to meet the criteria of a park. The city owns it. It has benches and a band pavilion. It is maintained by city workers, etc. Teaching a child the word ``red`` may also be thought of as establishing a common judgment. ``Everyone calls this (pointing to something red) `red`.`` We come to have such agreements in judgments as we learn a language. In #224, Wittgenstein says that the concepts of ``agreements`` and of ``rules`` (for using words) are closely related. They are ``cousins,`` and we would explain these grammatically descriptive words correlatively. That is, if we were to explain a grammatical rule, we would point out that there was agreement in use, and conversely. If such agreements/rules did not exist, we could not build roads nor stop at traffic lights, because there would be no mathematics, no principles of engineering, no traffic lights with color symbols.

``Agreement in judgment`` is brought into the private language project as a counter to the idea of a solipsist making idiosyncratic judgments about sensations, pains, and experiences. The words ``red,`` ``toothache,`` ``love,`` and ``add`` are taught and learned in a community of people who share the same language. The learning of these words presupposes an ``agreement in judgments`` among those who already speak the language. The solipsist cannot identify a toothache, see red, or add without already having the language in which these words are words. His private language cannot lift off the ground until a public language is in place.

What I have tried to do in this note is to show the relevance of Wittgenstein`s investigation of private language to the philosophical puzzle of the social worker, and of anyone who is stumped by the inability to understand another person. The private language thought experiment is intended to untie the knots of solipsism and skepticism. The person caught in the philosophical web of solipsism can benefit from Wittgenstein`s exercise. Of course, the problem is only a theoretical, i.e. philosophical problem – a problem that arises for someone who is reflecting on his ordinary business that happens to involve an ordinary difficulty in understanding another person. That ordinary business and ordinary difficulty in understanding does not disappear because one has gained clarity on the philosophical problem. Neither is our ordinary understanding of another affected by our philosophical work. In fact, in our philosophical work we will be aided by remembering that we ordinarily do understand each other quite well. And we should practice the recalling of such ordinary understandings: The white social worker understands the black mother`s need to care for her children and her need of reliable transportation to work. The social worker understands why the welfare mother buys a lottery ticket and can explain to her why apples are better food than potato chips. Likewise the male OB-GYN gives expert advice to a woman with Braxton-Hicks contractions, even though he has never experienced them himself. We do understand each other! And, when we do not understand each other, we often understand why we do not. Or, we may say, ``I can`t imagine what it would be like to be homeless in mid-January in Pittsburgh.`` That is not really an expression of our complete isolation from understanding another person. In fact it is an expression of sympathy – of our understanding of the suffering of the other. Such reminders of our understanding of other minds stand against solipsism. Minimally expressed, the fact of mutual understanding and community require an account of language that acknowledges its public and not its private acquisition – the shared acquired techniques, learned agreements in judgments, corrected mistakes, etc.

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