i

Setting Out

riverrun past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of

oy: ae
James Joyce

The mystic’s Eden

The left wing of Heironymous Bosch’s triptych The Garden of Earthly
Delights shows us Eden some short time Defore the Fall. Tranquility
reigns: a spiraling flight of birds, a monkey riding on the back of a
peaceful-seeming elephant, a unicorn drinking at a pond, things in their
innocence, with God the Son in the foreground holding the world in
place. Not that violence and death are absent—for instance, we see a lion
eating a deer—but such natural events do not themselves mar the inborn
harmony. It is a tenuous harmony, nonetheless. Certain eerie images
signal the immanence of Adam’s sin and its consequences. In the middle
distance, misshapen frogs, a three-headed lizard, and other unpleasant
creatures crawl onto the scene. In the center of the picture sits an owl,
emblem of evil. Naked Eve is all naive modesty, but Adam’s astonished
gaze at her foreshadows corruption. And in the foreground are images
of the woe that will attend the Fall, prominent among them an ugly,
toothed bird that stares malevolently as it devours its prey. The central
panel of the painting carries the story forward past the Fall, depicting in
three horizontal planes a movement upward from a blameless eroticism
to an increasingly exotic and angst-producing sexuality. At the top of
the right wing of the triptych, at the farthest reach of the narrative,
mankind has descended into a hell of darkness, fire, and destruction. We
recognize Our present world immediately: the flames of the Holocaust.
How did we get here from Eden, and is there a way back?
2 Becoming Human

A striking feature of Bosch’s painting is the self-consciousness already

visible on the faces of the innocent revelers in the bottom plane of the
middle panel. In this they are unlike Adam and Eve who, as we can
observe, lack a sense of self. Among the revelers we see a naked man
and woman embracing, thigh deep in a pond. The woman looks at the
man in a worried, perhaps frightened way, while he looks back at us, as
if to see what we think. Much is captured in that look: Don’t you envy
me? I’m afraid. Are you with me? So too the Bible’s Eden makes the
element of self-consciousness central; the first consequence of eating
the forbidden fruit of the Knowledge of good and evil is shame: “And
the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were
naked....”
In the painting lust is the engine of destruction; but sexual desire
there can be seen as standing in for desire in general, self-conscious
desire. Desire that knows itself. The lion eating the deer moves unself-
consciously, within the Tao of nature. Bosch’s evil, toothed bird, on the
other hand, knows what it is up to. Self-awareness is the crucial step on
the path to our peculiarly human brand of suffering.
Bosch’s mystical depiction of the torment of human life fits a
Budgdhistic take on things. The first of the Buddha’s four noble truths
holds that life is suffering. In Bosch, as in the Buddhists, there is a path
to lead away from suffering. Charles De Tolnay writes of another of
Bosch’s paintings, The Ascent into the Heavenly Paradise, which depicts a
fortunate few rising through a cylinder of light to a union with God:

[Bosch] replaces the medieval Paradise and Hell, which were objective
images of the celestial and infernal hierarchies, with subjective visions
that resemble the conceptions of the great mystics and exist only in
the inner world of the soul.!

One such mystic, from a time not too far removed from that of Bosch,
is the anonymous author of The Cloud of Unknowing, who writes,

If grace had restored your soul to the state of Adam’s soul before the
Fall, you would be in control of your every impulse. None would go
astray, Dut all would reach out to the sovereign of all desires, the peak
of all that can be willed, God himself.

So here is the picture, as I read it. We—the race, humanity—start out in

a state of innocent oneness. Then comes sin in the form of a knowledge
of good and evil. This must be knowledge of good and evil as it affects
 Setting Out 3

us; self-knowledge is built in. We somehow fall into self-knowledge, self-

consciousness, self-awareness. It is the sin of self-awareness, and corres-
pondingly of desire tarnished by self-regard, that leads us on toward
Our sorry present state where, under the burden of self, a general angst
obtains. But there is a mystical path to lead back to the harmony we
sense in Bosch’s Eden. Buddhist ideology contains kindred ideas. There
it is self that gives all the trouble, a self marked if not defined by self-
awareness, Or what passes for such. Both mystical camps hold out the
hope of something like a return to innocence and bliss: enlightenment,
the Pure Land, union through love with God, whatever.

The empiricist’s Eden

How do those of us educated in the present-day culture dominated
by science view these matters? The following, I think, broadly depicts
how the secular humanist would respond. We are animals among other
animals, a variety of ape. In place of Eden there is a stage of our species’
descent from earlier hominid forms. Instead of the gaining of a know-
ledge of good and evil there is first the acquisition of language, and a
subsequent self-knowledge, both to be accounted for by science. The
evil doings of our species may be explained by evolutionary psycho-
logy, or failing that in some other testable way. As for “life is suffering,”
that is surely an exaggeration, but whatever angst affects us will also get
a scientific explanation. Self-consciousness is some form of conscious-
ness, and the latter is to be accounted for, somehow or other, by the
biologist (with many a philosopher anxious to give a hand). Once we
get consciousness explained, self-consciousness should not be much of
a problem. As for mystical union with God, or enlightenment, Delieve
in it if you like, Dut either it lies outside the scope of science, in
which case each person’s religious conscience will decide whether to
give it credence, or it falls inside that scope, and hence is some natural
phenomenon susceptible to explanation. Freud, for example, sought to
explain the mystic’s rapture in terms of a certain oceanic feeling left
over from childhood.?

Aims

The myth of Eden as I have depicted it in terms of Bosch’s great painting

and the above brash secular account prefigures the topics I address in
this book. Broadly, what I am attempting here is an historical sketch of
humanity, drawn at a very high—a philosophical—level of abstraction,
4 Becoming Human

as we move out from our early hominid roots to our present-day predic-
ament, and perhaps beyond. In this way I hope to map out the subject
indicated in Max Scheler’s title Die Stellung des Menchen im Cosmos: our
place in the universe.* I shall take up six topics: (1) Eden itself, under-
stood as a stage in human history prior to the development of language
(2) the nature and origin of language and (3) of the self (4) consciousness
(S) self-awareness, and (6) the possibility of a return to some religiously
Significant Eden-like state.
Running through these issues from the beginning is the idea
mentioned in (S), self-awareness. Eden lacks self-awareness, which can
only come with language and a subsequent assumption of self. Self-
awareness presupposes a duality of subject and object: self and that of
which self is aware. My central thesis is that such duality is illusory. Thus
we must reject the commonly held idea that the evolution of humans
is a march toward self-consciousness. Hence also, concerning (6), the
idea of a return to Fden is mistaken. We think we live in a world whose
most prominent feature is the duality of self and other; indeed there
is, apparently, no firmer conviction than that, none that means more
to us. Here there is me; beyond that, not-me. To abandon that illusion
is to recognize, at an existential level, that in some religious sense we
are still in Eden. In saying that I do not speak in, as it were, a religious
voice, but rather enunciate a claim I wish to examine.
What justifies my going over these issues, five of which have been
much discussed by social scientists and some by biologists as well, is
that any account of the journey out from Eden must face a series of
conceptual questions. To in some way account for the origin of language,
for example, it is necessary to know what language is; some prominent
accounts go astray because of a faulty idea of what it is that originated.
Once one knows what language is, one can understand in a certain way
how it came to be; it is a natural extension of human activity. Again, to
discuss the self fruitfully, one must understand what “self” means, and
similarly for “self-consciousness.”
Here the reader may quail at the prospect of a book given over to
definitions or analyses of words like “language” and “self.” I sympathize;
but that is not what I am about here. J] am not interested in analyses
qua top-down, abstract accounts, for in fact they hold little hope of
being helpful. To say, for instance, that language is a system of repre-
sentations just relocates the mystery. Rather I shall offer bottom-up
explications in terms of examples. In this I follow Ludwig Wittgen-
stein, whose later philosophy provides the conceptual underpinning for
this book. Now for every two Kant scholars, I have heard it said, there
 Setting Out 5S

are three different interpretations of the great man; and that holds in
spades for Wittgenstein. The Wittgenstein I draw on here is a philo-
sophical anthropologist. Language is custom—or rather a collection of
customs—and his major effort is to delineate the contours of those
customs (namely those that bear on the metaphysical issues he seeks to
“dissolve”). This approach—Wittgenstein’s unique view of language and
word use—yields a perspicuous oversight of our distant ancestors’ long
march from Eden, as well as a correct understanding of the religious or
“mystical” notion that in a certain crucial way we are still there.

| etssel

My first topic is Eden, which, as I understand it here, is a wholly natural

State: it is simply, as earlier indicated, the state of humans, or the closest
ancestors of humans, as they existed just before the development of
language. Or, since there is a problem about where to draw the line
between rudimentary, language-like phenomena already visible in many
animals, and something like a full-blown human language, I shall under-
stand Eden to be that stage, whenever it was, before our development
of a more than rudimentary language. (Noam Chomsky, and many who
follow him, claims there is no such thing as the rudiments of human
language, a point I take up later.)°
When were we in Eden? And what were we like there? But first,
who are we talking about? Our family tree gets redrawn as new discov-
eries are made and old accounts of it disputed. Here is one version.
About 7 million years ago our upright ancestral hominid branched off
from the lineage, the other branch of which went on to become apes:
chimpanzees, gorillas, orangutans, and gibbons. The subsequent line of
development and change, as known primarily through fossil skulls and
molecular evidence, went: Australopithecus africanus, Homo habillis, Homo
erectus, and then, about 500,000 years ago, Homo sapiens.° This line went
on to anatomically modern Africans, approximately a mere 100,000
years ago, and then to the Cro-Magnon people who are our nearest
ancestors. The Neanderthals were a recent and now extinct branch of
our line of descent—perhaps, like the mammoths, killed off by humans.
By definition, we would know the date of Eden if we knew when, in
this history of millions of years, language arose. But no one Knows that,
or is ever likely to. On one plausible hypothesis, the development of
language took place slowly over some long span of that time of gradual
change, leading to us, the planet’s dominant animal. We may assume,
on the basis of their technological achievements, that Cro-Magnons had
6 Becoming Human

amore than rudimentary language, but where we can find such language
in their predecessors is anybody’s guess, a matter I shall discuss later.
What were our near, pre-linguistic ancestors like, those creatures in
the next tree over from, or walking the same piece of Savanna as,
chimpanzees? They were mammals, biologically very close to us, and
sharing even more of our DNA than do chimpanzees. Like their neigh-
boring apes they were naked and lacked elaborate shelters. They had no
domesticated animals or plants but were instead hunter-gathers. As such
they must have been in many respects like such pre-contact peoples as
the Australian aborigines, or tribes from North or South America like
the Sioux or Yanomamo. The latter groups, however, while retaining
a basic hunter-gatherer economy, have evolved over centuries a rich
and complex culture, one that we must suppose existed at most only in
Simpler forms in our distant ancestors.
The latter were, like us, immature at birth, unable to live on their own,
and requiring an extended period of care and protection. Their help-
lessness dictated a biologically based and culturally nourished strong
parent-child bond. Through a long period of raising up and explicit or
implicit training, they acquired a mastery of the cultural inheritance of
their group. Thus they may have learned the use of simple digging and
cutting tools or primitive weapons. It was against some such biological
and cultural background that language could begin to evolve.
In the next three chapters | shall turn to some issues concerning
language, its rudimentary forms, and how one might have arisen from
the other. In the next part of this chapter I want to address one aspect
of the question of what those Eden-dwelling ancestors of ours were like.

The Pure Land

Taoists and Buddhist writers frequently cite animals and very young
children as exemplifying the key feature of the way of life they recom-
mend to us. Though, famously, “those who know do not say, and those
who say do not know,” we can at least provisionally allow ourselves
to put words on the unsayable. So, that “key feature” consists in a
person’s being of one mind—not in the ordinary sense but in some reli-
gious/philosophical meaning, where, to quote the Ch’an master Huang
Po, “Subject and object become one.”’ At the moment of enlighten-
ment the I and what it apparently is aware of collapse into one. The
advantage babies and animals have is that they have not developed that
illusory duality of subject and object, because to do so requires a mastery
of language. But let me shift the uncomfortable burden of exposition
 Setting Out 7

here to D.T. Suzuki writing on the Taoism of the immortal Chuang-tzu.

Suzuki speaks in terms of two of Chuang-tzu’s mythical personifications:

Primordial Energy advised Cloud-spirit...to give up the intelligence

or intellection which is at the root of all troubles one encounters in
this world.... To put intellect in the place where it belongs, Energy
insists on ‘nourishing the mind’.... To nourish the mind’ means to
cultivate it. To cultivate it is to make it always remindful of its root,
and its root is ‘emptiness’.... In short the mind must be purged of
all its filth, accumulated by intellection ever since the awakening of
consciousness in the long history of mankind. When it returns to
its root of Emptiness or the Infinite, primordial energy is freed and
begins to operate in its own way with no hindrances from any source
whatever. The working of this sort is called by Taoists ‘working and
yet not working,’ or ‘abiding in nonaction,’ or ‘dancing and hopping
around without knowing what it is all about,’ or ‘sporting in the
realm of nothingness, ... which is the world of the Infinite... .°

That dancer in the realm of the infinite is like our Adam and Eve who,
before the development of language and self-consciousness, dwelled in
the Pure Land of Eden. The great paradox of Buddhism is that we are all
still there. To quote Suzuki again,

The terms Chuang-Tzu uses [to name the un-namable] all betoken
the state of innocence we used to enjoy while in the Garden of Eden,
although in fact we have never lost it Decause we are all still in the
Garden.?

It does not feel like we are still there! Whether we are or not is obviously
a crucial question as regards our place in the universe, but one for later.
First, a few more remarks about that innocent state Suzuki speaks of.
My central assumption is that like babies and animals, our pre-
linguistic forbears lived in a state of oneness, lacking reflexive awareness
and therefore lacking a sense of self. Is that assumption sensible? John
Locke said that humans are always aware that they are aware.!” So if I
am aware of the sunset, then I am aware of my being aware of it. Some
might take up Locke’s point and say self-awareness is an essential char-
acteristic of humans. But there are problems with Locke's view. For one
thing, the assumed doubling of awareness seems to lead to an infinite
regress. For another, Hume’s challenge to Locke—that when in fact we
look within we find only individual feelings or experiences, but no self
8 Becoming Human

aware of them—seems formidable.'! On the other hand, what does seem

to count against my assumption is that our life is marked by an intrusive
sense of self; our thoughts, in fact, turn always, or almost so, around that
I so absorbing to us. I wish to challenge the self’s existence, despite its
seeming certainty. If self is a delusion then the underpinning of our way
of life goes missing; but language can still exist. In the Bible, language
came before the Fall; Adam, still in a state of grace, named the animals.
I believe too that it is possible for language to develop in our ancestors
while they yet lived in that space of oneness I have been alluding to.
Without self-awareness, however, how is human action possible? And
if language is a form of human interaction, how then is language
itself possible? Heinrich von Kleist has written that the ratiocination
(including, I assume, reflexive awareness and such things as experienced
acts of will) we take to lie behind our everyday actions is illusory, or at
least not always required.’ Here is a familiar example: A person is lying
in bed, warm and reluctant to rise, and then before he knows it he is
up. He did not act on some inner command; there was no act of will,
or thought, “It’s time!” The person just moved, just acted. We might
call such actions “just doings.” So, a creature in a state of oneness can
act, of course; its actions are “just doings.” Kleist’s “On the Marionette
Theatre” also takes up that point.!’ In subsequent chapters, I present an
account of the voyage out from Eden consistent with that idea of “just
doing” and with the corresponding Buddhist and Taoist ideal of non-
duality. With that before us we will be in a position to assess Suzuki's
claim that—unbeknownst to us?—we never left Eden.

Concluding remarks
I have spoken briefly of how I shall proceed, the problems I shall address,
and my central thesis that self-awareness, in the sense of self aware of
self, is illusory. In addition I want to say where I stand with respect
to the two approaches I sketched earlier. Do I write as an empiricist,
that is, within the umbrella of science, accepting it, on its better days,
as an arbiter of truths-of-fact, or as one who gives intellectual credence
to certain standard forms of the mystical-religious? The short answer is
both. Surely we did evolve from earlier hominid forms. The details are
hard to figure out, the evidence being slight and often controversial,
Dut the general trend is certainly known. To say that is to accept the
general hegemony of science over these questions. In Jared Diamond’s
phrase, we are “the third chimpanzee,” after hundreds of thousands
of years of evolution grown rather hairless, loquacious, unimaginably
 Setting Out 9

adept, scared, and all too often inhuman. So, we are unhappy animals,
fully part and parcel of the natural world. We must therefore look to
science to tell us what we are physically (clouds of particles), biologically
(homo sapiens), and culturally.
As regards this last point, the social sciences contain multitudinous
ways Of approaching man in society. I seek to develop here a fine-
grained anthropological approach to understanding our species—what
I earlier called “philosophical anthropology.” This is closely related to
a purely descriptive account of human customs, of the kind that can
be found in the classical anthropologists, if one subtracts some of their
pronouncements on theory. The work of Malinowski in Argonauts of
the Western Pacific provides an example of what I have in mind, if we
discount such theoretical matters as his insistence that anthropology
must stand in thrall to psychology. The fine-grained part comes in
when one recognizes that language can be considered as a collection of,
as it were, mini-customs, ones in which words play various roles that
can be recognized and described rather in the manner that Malinowski
described the Kula-ring phenomenon among natives of Melanesia. But a
philosophical anthropology goes beyond description of what one finds
when one studies this or that actual custom-bound use of language.
It also considers possible such customs, in so far as doing so can help
clarify concepts that figure prominently in our attempts to understand
ourselves; for instance, the concept of an intention, or of thought.
My account in this book of our species’ journey out from Eden is natur-
alistic in that it views humans as animals among other animals, with
no fundamental or essential difference between us and them, although
of course we are unique in possessing an enormously rich language and
material and social culture. The positive, descriptive aspect of this study
gains force from standing in contrast to the view that there is such a
difference. Those who see such a fundamental divide locate it in some
or all of the phenomena of language, self and self-consciousness, mind,
and an assumed relationship to the supernatural. Only humans have
a fully developed language, only we are self-aware, we and no others
have minds, and we are the central characters in a drama of sin and
redemption. Descartes, for example, held all of those theses, and many
among our contemporaries would agree in whole or part. Not surpris-
ingly because those metaphysical claims, though misguided, have a deep
appeal.
We can be certain—I assume—of the basic facts of the evolution of our
species. Just as surely, as regards the mystical-religious part of my Dasic
assumptions, there are people walking the earth who move in a world of
10 Becoming Human

oneness, for whom everyday things, chopping wood and hauling water,
are miracles—mundane ones that do not contravene the laws of nature,
but which deserve the name “miracle” nonetheless. Science has nothing
to say to that possibility, for the oneness in question—the non-dual
awareness—is beyond the reach of the conceptual. The main thrust of
this book is to set out our place in the universe, Dut with a recognition
of the empirical and the mystical.
0,
What Language Is Not

Besides articulate sounds...it was further necessary that [man]

should be able to use these sounds as signs of internal concep-
tions; and to make them Stand as marks for the ideas within his
own mind, whereby they might be made known to others, and
the thoughts of men’s minds be conveyed from one to another.
john Locke

Humans are speaking animals; it is above all our complex language that
marks us off from the rest. In our long march out from Eden, the first
and crucial step is the acquisition of speech. To map our place in the
universe we must understand that step.
Of the what, why, where, when, and how questions about the origin
of language, the first is the crucial one, for obviously to explain the
beginning of something you must know what it is; and what you think
it is will color your account of how it came to be. For example, if you
have a Dehavioristic interpretation of the nature of language, mental
phenomena will not appear in your account. So our attention must be
directed first to the question of what language is.
We would be hard-pressed to define the term, but on the other hand
we use it with ease and correctly in everyday life, as when we ask how
many languages someone Knows or what language someone is speaking,
or when we point out that there are hundreds of languages spoken in
New Guinea. It is against this background fact of use that, reflecting on
what we say, we ponder the question of what language is.
While we seem to need a definition of the term, it may be that to ask
for one is to ask too much. In Chapters 3 and 4, I shall present more
fully, not by definition but by the detailed examination of examples,
the interpretation of language underlying my claims in this book. That
12 Becoming Human

conception is, to give a brief overview, connected to the fact that

we are born immature, requiring a long period of care. During this
time of dependency, we make major strides toward learning the many
social customs that surround and shape our lives. The chief and central
body of such customs consists in the various rule-governed interactions
that constitute language. It is first and foremost certain basic language
customs that our long childhood allows us to learn. One generation
teaches the next. But who taught the first speakers?
As a preparation for the task of developing a custom-oriented under-
standing of language acquisition, I shall consider three rival pictures of
the nature of speech, for my account is best presented in contrast to
them. The first two of these represent basic, naive, and compelling intu-
itions about language; we can understand the genesis of speech aright
only if we see that for all their plausibility they are faulty. Indeed, unless
their hold on us is broken we are drawn inexorably back to them.

Jane B. Lancaster on the origin of language

The two naive accounts in question I dub the referential and the mental.
They usually go together, and both are found as explicit presuppositions
in an arresting account of the advent of speech given by Jane B. Lancaster
in her study Primate Behavior and the Emergence of Human Culture.’ Her
story can be divided in two, the first part a portrayal of the nature of
language, the second an attempted explanation of its origin. It is the
first that interests me here.
We do not have language, Lancaster says, when we have mere signs;
the signaling systems of the gibbons and other primates, for example,
do not count as language. Such signals, rather, merely serve to express
emotional states of the signalers.* What we need for language proper
are symbols, and these come about when we have words that refer—
that pick out things in the world. Thus, the doctrine of reference: when
words are attached to their referents—to what they stand for—we have
language, or at least a crude form of it. Referring in turn is accom-
plished by linking up words—sounds—with mental images, which stand
for or pick out the denoted objects; this is the mentalist aspect of
Lancaster’s conception of language. In general, by “mentalism” I shall
mean attempts to anchor accounts of the nature of language in some
Or another mental phenomenon. We shall see in more detail in the
following how the two presuppositions work together. Concerning the
referential part of this story, Lancaster says that what distinguishes
human language from the mere “communication systems” of the other
 What Language Is Not

primates is that the former “is unusual in its ability not only to
express emotion but also to make reference to the environment.”? She
goes on to speak of “This unique evolution of a referential function
in communication....”* She is claiming not only that referring is a
necessary feature of human language. Reference, rather, is the heart
of language, forming its basic nature and essence. Thus she says that
“Human language is essentially a system of names....”° And again,
“Language is hierarchically organized, with referential names forming
its core.’
As noted, a mentalist theory about how reference is achieved supple-
ments the idea of language, or the core thereof, as a collection of names
or referring expressions:

Human discourse is based on a practically unlimited ability to form

associations between two different sets of environmental stimuli: the
sound of a word and the sensory image representing the environ-
mental referent of that word.’

The term “sensory image” here might be taken in either a physical

Or mental way; in the former as standing, say, for a pattern of retinal
stimulation, in the latter as standing for some resultant mental image.
Lancaster clearly intends the latter, as can be seen, for instance, in her
reference to the brain making a connection between the sound of the
word “dog” and one’s mental image of a dog (as quoted below).
For language to originate, then, sounds must hook up to referents,
things in the world. That happens through the mediation of images of
the referred to objects. The sound, or word, is associated with the image of
the named entity. The word names what the associated image is an image
of. For example, one of our ancestors might refer to a particular place he
wishes to talk about by the word “Wa.” He succeeds in referring to this
place—a large waterfall in the middle of the band’s territory—in virtue of
the fact that he links this sound to an image of the waterfall. Since the
image is an image of that particular place, and since the sound 1s associ-
ated with that image, he has referred to the place. “Wa” is a symbol and
not merely a sign or signal of the same kind as, say, a chimpanzee’s growl
as used to express an emotion. The growl does not stand for anything
Dut rather, say, gives vent to the chimpanzee’s anger. Ultimately what
distinguishes us from the other primates concerns what happens in our
minds or brains: we, not they, form images of the objects our words refer
to. This is a version of the notion that language serves to give expression
to our ideas, which would otherwise remain private to each person.
14 Becoming Human

Lancaster subsequently explains the origin of language, so understood,

in terms of the evolution of a larger brain. A part of the brain is assigned
the job of associating word and sensory image:

The angular gyrus or posterior language area involves the formation

of associations between words and their referents, for example the
connection between a visual or mental image of a dog and the actual
sound of the word “dog.”®

She continues,

The ability to name objects by using structures in the cerebral cortex

provided humans with a way to refer to their environment with each
other... The behavior of naming...is uniquely developed in humans
because the anatomical basis of the ability is also uniquely developed
in the human cerebral cortex.”

Perhaps, then, the ability to name things, achieved through association

and housed in a certain part of the brain, gave us a selective advantage
over Our competitors, leading to the evolution of a larger or function-
ally more effective brain, which further facilitated our employment of
names, and so on.

Critical comments

How does a mere sound become the name of a certain object? By being
linked to an image of the object. In considering that answer let us allow
ourselves to be flat-out naive. | have a mental image of the waterfall.
I want to tell someone to meet me there. How can I get him to be
aware of an idea corresponding to my image? Well, I say the word “Wa”
and fortuitously he calls to mind an image like mine. And now we can
communicate. To avoid the suspicious element of luck we might assume
that the waterfall was baptized, as it were. We are both at the waterfall;
I point and say “Wa.” Later, in another place, I say to him “Wa” and
that calls to his mind an image of what earlier we had both observed;
hence we converse.
How do I know what “Wa” refers to? Answer: [t refers to what this
image is an image of. But now, how do I know that this image is the
correct one to associate with “Wa”? Perhaps I have an image of that
image. This leads to an infinite regress, unless at some point I stop and
say there just is a direct connection between this and that, between, say,
 What Language Is Not

the word and the primary image. But now why not just say that there
is a direct connection between word and thing? The explanatory power
of the alleged image seems to have evaporated; the assumed mental
element in naming seems otiose.
We can establish its inadequacy as a central part of a theory of
language by considering what we would count as someone under-
standing the word “Wa.” Lancaster’s criterion would be, I take it, that
the person form the proper image upon hearing the word. That is a
possible criterion, if we had some way of establishing what image the
person formed (as we might). But there is another criterion, namely
that the person in question acts in a certain way. When told to meet
at Wa he does so, or at least tries to, or offers some reason against
meeting there, and so on. In fact we would deploy this latter action-
criterion in making judgments about whether the person understands
“Wa.” Suppose he formed the right image but acted wrongly, say by
going to or attempting to reach a different waterfall; then we would
not say he understands “Wa.” The inadequacy of the above mentalist
account of meaning can be brought out Dy imagining a people with a
large vocabulary of words, each matched to some corresponding image,
and who utter these words frequently. The person who speaks has a
certain image, and the hearer forms the same image. But the lives of
these people betray nothing of what we would normally think of as the
use of language. They do not use words to coordinate their actions, to
make requests or give commands, and so on. They behave the way chim-
panzees do, minus even those animals’ rudimentary employment of
sign-like elements; they feed, hunt, procreate, sleep, and travel about like
pre-linguistic primates, but have this strange habit of uttering sounds
and forming images. Possession of that habit should not count as posses-
sion of language.
Virtually the same point can be made concerning the other, refer-
ential, strand of Lancaster’s presuppositions about language. No matter
how it is achieved, the ability to name even countless numbers of
things should not count as mastery of language proper. Thus if we
modify the above example by supposing that the creatures frequently
and correctly name objects in their environment we should again not be
assuming that they have something deserving of the term “language.”
Their naming would be of no use to them. We could not go among them
and speak to any purpose. For instance, we could not tell them where
to meet us, because they do not use language to establish a rendez-
vous. They only name places. Call that extensive naming “language”
16 Becoming Human

if you like, but the differences between it and our actual employment
of language is enormous.
Of course, Lancaster is not so wrong-headed as to think that all
we do with language is name things. On the contrary, she writes
that in the passage to language we come to employ words to some
effect; for instance, to specify a meeting place. The problem is that
she does not build the idea of doing work into her conception of
language itself. The reason for that omission, I believe, is the unspoken
assumption that when you have attached a word to a thing, or to
an image or mental representation of the thing, then you have given
the word meaning. Once we have established its meaning we can
operate with it. The linking of word and object is the whole story,
as far as meaning goes. The same understanding can be found, for
example, in certain early ape studies, where researchers trained chim-
panzees to associate word-signs with objects. Success in such training
was taken as showing that the chimpanzees knew the meaning of those
hes oh ean
Lancaster’s picture of language combines the mentalist and referential
elements I have been criticizing, but just as we should not accept either
the merely naming or the merely imaging tribes as having language, so
too we should deny it to a tribe that combined the two.
To repeat, Lancaster cannot be understood as advocating that names
alone constitute language. She might say, for instance, that names come
first, but then are used to communicate. She could argue, that is, that to
call language into being, something is needed in addition to reference,
or reference supplemented by mental images. The key question is, what
is that missing element? It is, I suggest, use, what we actually do with
words. Thus I come down on the opposite side from Lancaster of a
contrast between two broad theories of language. Looked at one way,
words are merely noises or marks—physical things with no inherent
meaning. What breathes linguistic life into such mundane objects? One
type of theory says meaning arises when we project the word-token
onto meaning qua mental something or other, as in the quotation from
Locke at the head of this chapter, or as in Lancaster. The other type,
less commonly adopted, says that what supplies meaning is what we
do with the token, how we use it. I will enlarge upon a use theory
of meaning in subsequent chapters, Dut first I shall end this one by
looking briefly at another instance of the mentalist type. I am thinking
of a Chomsky-inspired viewpoint, which would hold that what must be
added to the mix of mentalism and reference in order to get meaning is
syntax.
 What Language Is Not

Chomsky
The Chomskian revolution in the 1960s concerned first and foremost
syntax, and this has remained its central subject matter ever since. It is
true that J. Katz and J. Fodor attempted to supplement the syntactical
element with a semantics, but the theory of meaning remained the poor
relative in linguistic studies.** The emphasis on syntax puzzles me. It is
as if military history were to concern itself solely, or almost so, with the
study of military uniforms. Syntax is an ordering and regimentation of
speech, but what is it a regimentation of? Not of words qua mere sounds;
we have to suppose that sooner or later the terms ordered by syntax have
meaning. This brings us back to Katz and Fodor's take on semantics. They
hold that we are born with a complete set of meaning atoms, as it were.*4
The right combination of such elements will generate the meaning of
any word in any language. Chomsky himself has maintained such a
view of meaning, saying that humans are born not only with a universal
grammar but also with a rich set of concepts.'’ Not only syntax but also
semantics is innate! He writes, for example,

[I]t is beyond question that acquisition of vocabulary is guided

by a rich and invariant conceptual system, which is prior to any
=. 4 0301-080

Again, he says that language learning, in addition to being a matter

of setting some parameters in the innate universal grammar, involves
discovering the “lexical items of the language and their properties.” He
writes,

To a large extent this seems to be a problem of finding what labels

are used for preexisting concepts, a conclusion that is so surprising
as to seem outrageous Dut that appears to be essentially correct

Now if we have concepts, or what we may as well call “meanings,”

attached to signs, the addition of a syntax will yield language as we
know it. The issue 1s not so much where those meanings come from—of
how we happened to enter the world equipped with a complete set of
meaning-atoms—but rather concerns the meaning of “meaning” itself.
What do we presuppose when we speak of innate meanings (or concepts)
attached to signs? “Meaning” seems a very slippery and non-empirical
notion to take as foundational to one’s theory of language. To say that, of
18 Becoming Human

course, is not to give an argument; and those familiar with Frege’s work
may find nothing cryptic about the meaning of “meaning” qua “sense.”
Nonetheless, to say what language is by appealing to an unexplained
notion of meaning seems disingenuous.
Meaning is supposed to accomplish reference—it allows the “lexical
items” to stand for things—but how does it do so? The notion of a
mere word qua sound reaching out into the world, as if stretching forth
tentacles to touch the object it refers to, is mysterious indeed, and that
mystery is not dispelled by supposing that behind the word stands a
concept, idea, or meaning. If we think of the unit of meaning simplist-
ically, as a mental image, then the reaching out to the world would
presumably take place in virtue of the image’s being an image of the
referent. But an image as such can be projected onto the world in
many different ways, so that the ability of meanings to stand for things
is now to be accounted for by that relationship of projecting, itself
unexplained.!® If we do not think of meanings as mental images but
as some phenomenon the nature of which we leave unexplained, but
which we treat as resident somewhere in the recesses of the conscious
or unconscious mind, then we have just hidden the problem of how
denoting gets accomplished. The element of legerdemain would vanish
if we had a viable account of meaning.
‘4
Language-Games

Primitive language
Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations begins with a quote from St
Augustine’s Confessions concerning, significantly, the phenomenon of
language acquisition:

When they (my elders) named some object, and accordingly moved
towards something, I saw this and I grasped that the thing was
called by the sound they uttered when they meant to point it out.
Their intention was shewn Dy their bodily movements, as it were
the natural language of all peoples: the expression of the face, the
play of the eyes, the movement of other parts of the body, and the
tone of voice which expresses our state of mind in seeking, having,
rejecting, or avoiding something. Thus, as I heard words repeatedly
used in their proper places in various sentences, I gradually learnt to
understand what objects they signified; and after I had trained my
mouth to form these signs, I used them to express my own desires.'

The view of language Augustine presupposes is the referential one criti-

cized in the last chapter. Wittgenstein remarks (PJ, §2) that Augustine
assumes a primitive idea of how language works, but that we could
also think of him as describing a language more primitive than ours.
Wittgenstein’s famous slab/beam scenario exemplifies such a primitive
language. A builder is constructing an edifice from a stockpile of stones:
blocks, pillars, slabs, and beams. He calls out the name of a type of
stone, and his assistant brings one of that type. We could, Wittgen-
Stein says, imagine that this talk of slabs, beams, and so on is the only
20 Becoming Human

language these people possess (PI, §2). This simple language, or language-
like phenomenon, is an example of a “language-game” (Sprachspiel).
I wrote above of Lancaster’s take on language, according to which
the essential step in its development occurs when words are linked,
via images, to referents, the objects they name. [| rejected that view
on the ground that something else is needed before we can speak of
language. The slab/beam language-game exemplifies the sort of addi-
tional element I had in mind. That employment of speech goes beyond
what we might call “merely naming”—the solely referential functioning
of words—precisely in that names there have a use; they operate within
a certain framework of human interaction—within a “language-game,”
in Wittgenstein’s terminology. My aim in this chapter is to give a prelim-
inary account of that idea of use, and correspondingly, of the notion
of a language-game. Doing so helps set the stage for a discussion of the
origin of language.

On not being dogmatic

The contrasting idea of language as essentially consisting of names
cannot be rejected out of hand. It speaks in its favor, for example, that
children in very early stages of learning a language-use words in a merely
naming way. A toddler seeing a bird wheeling through the sky points
and says “bird.” An adult encourages the child’s naming, and through
such dealings the child learns to name many different things. This sort
of mere naming is a kind of game in its own right. But it is not the
only “game” children play with words, not the only thing they do with
words. They also, for instance, use them to demand things or to get a
parent to pay attention to them.
Consider my earlier claim that an imagined people whose word-use
consists only in naming do not possess language. This thesis must be
recognized as an implicit stipulation, for whether or not to call such
goings on language is not a straightforward question of fact. (So too
the query of whether the slab/beam people possess language is not a
purely empirical one.) In contrast, the question of whether someone
mouthing unfamiliar sounds is speaking a language or just babbling is a
straightforward factual issue; it could be settled by someone who knows
the language the person is speaking. In denying language to a merely
naming people I am implicitly legislating how the term “language” is
to be applied in this case. The justification for making that negative
stipulation is that merely naming differs starkly from more full-bodied
uses Of speech in language-games like that of the builders, or the apple
 Language-Games 21

vendors examined just below, or any of the other language-game uses to

be described subsequently. But to appreciate that justification one must
see those language-games in detail.

Builders and destroyers

Introducing an explicit practice of merely naming into the slab/beam
culture will help clarify the distinction between naming and full-fledged
use. So, aS part of being educated in the language of the tribe, children are
taught to respond with the right word when a teacher points at a given
stone, and, conversely, to point correctly to an object when the teacher
says the name of that type of stone. Now add to Wittgenstein’s builders
a neighboring tribe of destroyers. The latter make it their business to
destroy piece by piece the rambling stone structures they have inherited
from the past. Both tribes use the same words, and both we may suppose
go through the same training in merely naming, learning to associate, as
it were, beams with “beam” and slaDs with “slab” and so on. But a helper
in the destroyers’ tribe will not bring but destroy a slab when one of the
master workers says “Slab!”, and similarly for the other terms. Training
in merely naming is not sufficient to bring about expertise in the use of
either of these triDes’ words. The point is perhaps clearer if we change
the example and imagine a speaker from a third tribe, who instead of
saying “Slab!” as a request for his helper to bring a slab, says it as stating
his intention to himself fetch a slab (similarly for “Beam!”, etc.) The
Same word will serve as request or intention-utterance depending on
the context in which it is uttered—that is, whether in a requesting tribe
or an intention-stating one.

Buying Apples
Locating a practice of merely naming within different tribal or cultural
contexts emphasizes its distance from full-fledged language-use. Another
way of underscoring that distance is to consider a richer practice of use
than that of the slab/beam people. Wittgenstein imagines such a use:

I send someone shopping. I give him a slip marked ‘five red apples’.
He takes the slip to the shopkeeper, who opens the drawer marked
‘apples’; then he looks up the word ‘red’ in a table and finds a colour
Sample opposite it; then he says the series of cardinal numbers—I
assume that he knows them by heart—up to the word ‘five’ and for
each number he takes an apple of the same colour as the sample out
22 Becoming Human

of the drawer.—It is in this and similar ways that one operates with
words... (PI, §1).

This use of words is similar to that of the slab/beam case in that both
function as requests. The difference is that words in the grocery example
have different types of function inside the practice.

Function

The word “function” as just used has been the subject of controversy in
the philosophy of biology, and I interpose a brief discussion of it.* One
use of the concept, perhaps the original one, was applied to artifacts and
machines. Biologists apply it, by analogical extension, to animals and
plants. Wittgenstein further extends its use to the case of words that
play a role in language-games (see, for example PI, §556).
In what I have called its original use, “function” is applied at three
different locations. Parts of an artifact have functions in so far as they
contribute to the functioning of the whole. The artifact itself has a
function. We also speak of the function of a function: of the role an
artifact with a particular job plays in the life of the people who employ
it. This stone-age tool drills holes in rock, but what did the people who
made it want such holes for?
Like the various parts of an artifact, words have different functions.
One word in a sentence may indicate when something will be done, and
another what that something is. The various language-games themselves
have functions—for instance, to state intentions, or requests. And that a
language-game has such a function may be useful for a people in various
ways.’ In the slab/beam scenario there is only one type of word, and
this is true of merely naming as well. Whereas in the grocery case some
words function as general category terms, others as color words, and
others as numbers. We are speaking here of the first sort of function,
concerning the working of a part.
The grocer’s more complex employment of language helps clarify the
idea of a word functioning in a language-game. The “game” part of
“language-game” emphasizes the fact that word usage is inextricably
meshed with human interactions. Language-games, further, are customs,
socially constrained patterns of interaction. A word is analogous to
a game marker of some sort, a chess knight or an ace of hearts.
These objects, themselves inert, take on their usual significance when
they are in play. Particular patterns of interaction provide an atmo-
sphere within which the objects live and function. Similarly a child’s
 Language-Games 23

“Juice!” functions as a demand only within a certain human context,

a custom-governed collaboration wherein requests are acknowledged
and sometimes complied with. Before taking up these and other points
concerning language-games, I will address a certain methodological
issue.

Top-down versus bottom-up

The meta-issue arises of how to explicate any of the concepts we come
upon in doing philosophy, or for that matter, social science. By Wittgen-
Stein’s lights, any account of “language-game,” or of his other terms of
art, must proceed by means of examples. A top-down account might
say that a language-game is an interaction in which words play a role.
But then what, here, is an “interaction” and what is it to “play a role”?
Either we turn to other abstract notions themselves in need of explic-
ation or we explain “interaction” and “role” by giving examples. In
general, it is a central, defining point of Wittgenstein’s later philosophy
that explication of meaning must precede by examining instances.
It might be objected that example-based explanations cannot work
unless they presuppose some general idea of what itis one is attempting to
exemplify. Take a simple case: to tell someone what “red” means, I point
to a red rose and say “That is what we call ‘red’.” The objection is that
such a definition can work only if the learner knows or assumes that I am
pointing to a color. This is not right, however. A child can learn what red
is before being taught the meaning of “color.” Indeed in the normal case
the child will learn the use of “color” only after it has learned specific color
words like “red.” So the learning child cannot be said to “know or assume
that” red is a color. For the “that” implies it is a proposition that is known
or assumed, and the child would not understand such a proposition, let
alone know it. What we should say, rather, is that we will not count the
child as having learned the meaning of “red” if it does not go on to use
the word as we do, for example in giving or receiving request-statements
involving the term. Given the right context, the child does pick up on the
ostensive definition of red. Having been shown samples, it goes on to be
able to point to new samples and then to do things like bring the right
book when told to get the red one from the table. The legitimate point
Dehind the objection is that for definition by means of examples to work
there must be presupposed a use for the term being defined. Returning to
“language-game,” consider someone being told what the term means by
being presented with a range of examples. In answer to the objection, it
would be wrong to require that in order to be able to master its use on the
24 Becoming Human

basis of the examples such a person must know what higher level category
“language-game” falls under, in the way that “red” falls under “color.”
What is required is that the term have a use, and that the learner master
the use. One must respond in the appropriate way to the examples one is
presented with. The person must go on in acertain way, but he or she need
not have a mastery of some corresponding higher level term.
Of course, here we are dealing with philosophy and not color words, so
it is not obvious what going on in the right way would look like. What is
correct about the objection is that it is not enough to explain “language-
game” simply by pointing to examples. They must also be examined in
detail, and looked at in a certain way. For example, one might point
to Wittgenstein’s treatment of the use of—or various language-games
concerning—“I am
A related objection can be found in the common folk—philosophical
complaint that since Wittgenstein has not supplied us with an “identity
criterion” for “language-game,” the term lacks an element necessary for
its having meaning. That is, he has not filled in the blank in a schema
like this: “X is the same language-game as Y if and only if....” It is
true he has not done so; but then any general terms used to fill the
hiatus would themselves require definition, and ultimately we would
be driven back to examples. That might be questioned, but a sufficient
reply to the objection is to point out that we employ many terms in
everyday life without being able to supply identity conditions for them.
For instance, we all use the term “person” effortlessly in our day-to-day
dealings, Dut most people would be unable to state identity conditions
for the term. The demand tor identity conditions 1s unjustified. One
might say that we should hold philosophers to stricter requirements
than those holding for your mere ordinary language speaker. But the
demand that the philosopher provide non-circular top-down analyses
of the words he or she uses is suspect indeed. It has been said that there
never has been a successful analysis in philosophy! Not that we should
not seek to understand the terms we use; it is a question of what such
understanding will look like. It might also be objected that “language-
game” is vague, and so it is, like most of the terms we use; nonetheless,
vague words can have fruitful employment.

More on “Top-Down”
Wittgenstein’s early philosophy was top-down in that it deduced its
findings from the most general features of language, as in the Tractatus’s
famous proof of “simple objects.”° It was top-down also in that it stated
 Language-Games 295

its results in abstract terms. The Tractatus’s concern with the simple
was thus rather misleading. The simplest proposition, the elementary
one, is not Known directly, in terms of examples; the latter do not
interest the pure logician the author of the Tractatus conceived himself
to be. One knows only that there are elementary propositions, and
that they are made up of a concatenation of simple names that
name simple, unanalyzable objects. The core of this description is an
assumed distinction between naming and saying. But the concepts of
both naming and saying, in this special sense, are not given through
instances; rather, one presupposes an abstract grasp of the concepts.
The later Wittgenstein would say that we have only a misleading
picture of such saying and naming, and no real understanding
of them.
The reversal of that top-down approach is an essential feature of his
later thought. The inversion is announced in this passage:

... The [Tractarian logician’s] preconceived idea of crystalline purity can

only be removed by turning our whole examination round. (One
might say: the axis of reference of our examination must be rotated,
but about the fixed point of our real need) (PI, §108).

The real need is to understand the nature of language—where this

is nOW seen as something that lacks an essence—and to understand
those concepts that are central to philosophy. The reversal is the
180-degree turn from top-down to bottom-up. Instead of looking at the
concrete and simple from the vantage point of the abstract, examine and
come to understand the abstract in terms of the simple and concrete.
And specifically, in terms of examples of simple language-use.
The centrality of examples was announced in the Blue Book:

The idea that in order to get clear about the meaning of a general
term one had to find the common element in all its applications,
has shackled philosophical investigation; for it has not only led to
no result, Dut also made the philosopher dismiss as irrelevant the
concrete cases, which alone could have helped him to understand
the usage of the general term.°®

Wittgenstein claims here that the only thing that will enable us to
understand the concepts we are interested in are relevant “concrete
cases.” His emphasis on simple examples is evident at many places; it
is seen in his practice of philosophy when he turns to simple imagined
26 Becoming Human

examples, and when he urges us, at numerous points, to consider how a

child might learn a given concept. For example, his discussion of belief
in the Investigations opens with the question, “How did we ever come to
use such an expression as ‘I believe?’”’ What the child first learns will
presumably be simple.
To make Wittgenstein’s 180-degree reversal is to adopt a genealogical
framework, where sophisticated uses of language are to be understood by
comparing them to developmentally related simple ones. The reversal
also involves focussing one’s concern with language on the level of
actual use. [his is the Dasic level where one human engages with another
in face-to-face interactions in the flow of daily life.
The key benefit of elucidating words by considering examples is that
doing so brings out the differences hidden by general terms. One crucial
such difference is that between first- and third-person present tense
psychological utterances. kor example, if Jones says “I am going to the
store” and Smith says of Jones, “He is going to the store,” both Jones and
Smith cite an intention. But here the general idea of citing an intention
hides a crucial difference between first- and third-person utterances.
Smith describes Jone’s intention; Jones, in contrast, does not describe his
own intention; rather he voices it, in the manner that someone Can voice
a sudden pain by saying “Ow!” The distinction I am speaking of here is
an important one; it will play a role later in discussions of consciousness
and I shall discuss it further there. Again “I am afraid” can be said as
either a description or as what Wittgenstein calls an “Ausserung’; and
the examination of specific instances will bring out the difference. At
one time, Wittgenstein thought of citing as a motto to the Investigations
a quote from King Lear: “I will teach you differences.” The real point of
turning to examples in one’s quest to understand concepts of interest
in philosophy and the social sciences is that doing so uncovers crucial
differences; it is a fine-grained way of understanding the conceptual
framework we move about in.

Exemplifications
In keeping with his bottom-up strategy, Wittgenstein introduces the
term “language-game” by means of a range of explicit and implicit
instances:

We can also think of the whole process of using words in (2) [the ’Slab!
Beam!’ case] as one of those games by means of which children learn
 Language-Games 27

their native language. I will call these games ‘language-games’ and will
sometimes speak of a primitive language as a language-game (PI, §7).

Those childhood language-games are ones that children engage in as

they move toward learning the whole complex of uses that make up
their native language. For instance, one of the first language-uses a
child learns is that of asking for things. The imaginary language of the
builders is a model for the child’s use of words to ask for things, and
hence it is a model for the use of language Augustine focussed on in
those remarks of his quoted above. The child’s learning of the part of
its native language concerned with requests begins with a mastery of a
simple language-game of one-word requests. That early usage is part of
the so-called holophrastic phase of language, as modeled, again, by the
behavior of the builder and his assistant in §2.
In introducing the term “language-game,” then, Wittgenstein has in
the first instance pointed us toward those simple language-use patterns
of early childhood, one of which is in fact request-language. If we look
at early childhood we discover other examples; for instance, one-word
uses that constitute intention-utterances; one-word uses that function to
stop or halt the hearer, or that reject some offered thing; one-word uses
that indicate delight or fear or possession; and so on. When Wittgenstein
goes on, in §7, to write, “I shall also call the whole, consisting of language
and the actions into which it is woven, the ‘language-game,’” he is
referring back to the simple language-games like those of §2 and the
corresponding ones found in early language mastery; the contrast is
with the rudimentary, merely naming language-games of §7c.

Models

Language, we might say, is a collection of language-games. But that is

not quite right. It is not that we get language by adding together the
various language-games. Rather, when we carve our full-blown natural
language into various constituent language-games, we do so by seeing
parts of that language in light of relevant examples of simple language-
games and variations and complications thereof. We look at language in
a certain way, by comparing parts of it with certain simple models. The
comparison will bring out similarities and differences between threads
of natural language and artificially constructed, model language-games.
So to understand “language” we must consider above all the paradig-
matic uses employed to convey the idea of a language-game, and hence
the idea of language itself. The series of examples implicitly or explicitly
28 Becoming Human

used to convey the idea of a language-game are all such that in them
words are exchanged between people. Not just exchanged, as in my
description in Chapter 2 of the merely naming people, but exchanged to
some point. In the examples of words having a use, speech is communal
in that it functions to elicit a response from the hearer. Thus the point
or function of the child’s intention-utterance is to alert the hearer to
what the child is about, in order to bring out some appropriate reaction
from the hearer. So too a one-word refusal has a point; and so on.

Family resemblance
But this “and so on” is suspicious. We may get the idea that we are
here covertly assuming the existence of common, essential properties
that define “language,” and which are such that anything lacking them
fails to be language. We might hold, for example, as some have done,
that for Wittgenstein language is essentially communal; the idea of a
person solitary from birth having a language, it has been said, is for him
nonsense.®
However, it is an important part of Wittgenstein’s view to deny that
language has essential properties—at least on one understanding of
“essential.” Thus he considers this objection: “You talk about all sorts of
language-games, but have nowhere said what the essence of a language-
game, and hence of language is: what is common to all these activities
and what makes them into language or parts of language...”(PI, §65).
In response, Wittgenstein holds that language has no essence in the
sense of a defining common feature. He believes the language-games
that model individual strands of our language have nothing in common,
but are called “language” because “they are related to one another in
many different ways. It is because of this relationship, or these relation-
ships, that we call them alli ‘language’ (71, 865). He then goes on to
explain that relationship in terms of the idea of family resemblance,
itself explained by a comparison with games. What do all and only
games have in common? One will be unable to give a non-circular
answer. Examining various games will reveal the same sort of thing one
might find in examining a family portrait. Granddad and Junior may
have the same-shaped nose, Junior and Sally may have quite different
noses but closely similar eyes, and so on. In the case of games, this
means that something is admitted to the family not because it has the
essential features distinctive of games; there are none. It is admitted
rather because it has some of the properties of standard examples of
games. Wittgenstein is not saying we cannot distinguish games from
other things. Warfare is no game, neither is ordering pizza, and so on.
We distinguish games from non-games but not on the basis of necessary
and sufficient properties. When all the features of some newly invented
activity are plainly visible and noticed, to call the thing a game is not to
make a hypothesis, but rather to make an implicit decision to count this
in the class of games. Wittgenstein thinks that in addition to “language”
and “game” many ordinary concepts are of the family resemblance type.
“Rule” and “expectation” would be further examples. We can find an
immense variety of language-games in any of the human languages,
with no common defining properties underlying them; and this means
that the concept of language itself cannot be governed by necessary and
sufficient conditions. Of course, we can introduce such conditions by
fiat; the value of doing so would have to be examined for each case, and
with respect to one’s aim in making such a mandate. On the concep-
tion of language that I adopt here, speech can be viewed in terms of
a wide variety of language-games bearing only a family resemblance to
one another.

Definitions

How then shall we explain the idea of a language-game? It is by pointing

out a range of examples, and discussing them in a certain way. The
answer as such is empty, Dut becomes effective when we scrutinize some
key examples and their properties, as I shall do subsequently.
On the “language-game” scenario, we do better to change the ques-
tion, “What is the definition of ‘language’?” to “What is it to speak
(or have mastery of) a language?” Answer: It is to behave in many
of a family-resembDlance connected motley of different ways of acting,
namely those we isolate by comparing them with simple language-
games. Ihe answer is vague, Dut so is our notion of language. To make
further progress in understanding what language is, in order to be able
to ponder its origin, it will be helpful to turn to the simple uses of signs
we find in children making their first steps into language. Such instances
enable us to see clearly what we might call the rudiments of language,
and thus they provide a natural bridge to the languages of our post-Eden
ancestors.

Similar views

But before turning to that matter it will be useful to address points

raised by certain social scientists who adopt to their own ends some
30 Becoming Human

of Wittgenstein’s ideas, including that of a language-game. Perhaps

the closest approach to the one | am setting out here is work in the
ethnography of communication by such writers as Dell Hymes, Muriel
Saville-Troike, Elinor Ochs Keenan, and Alasandro Duranti.? That work
has been recently depicted in Wittgensteinian terms:

For [the] ethnographl[y] of speaking [ES]... language use must be inter-

preted as the use of the linguistic code(s) in the conduct of soctal life. ES
accepts Wittgenstein’s...claim that the unity of ‘(a) language’ is an
illusion and one should rather look at specific contexts of use (or
‘language games’) in order to explain how linguistic signs can do the
work they
This account seems very close indeed to the one I adopt. The main differ-
ence concerns the level at which the ethnographic inquiries Durant
describes often operate. Some investigations of intention-utterances
by Keenan and Ochs fall within the field of ES Duranti speaks of.
In these studies of a Madagascar village, the authors focus on the
people’s common evasiveness about intentions. A villager, instead of
being straightforward about what he is up to, might say he is going
“just a little to the North there.”’* The scientists attempt to uncover the
factors that discourage a more forthcoming report. But being circum-
spect about one’s intentions presupposes being able to state them at
all. The underlying phenomenon of stating what one is up to can
itself be treated as custom-ruled behavior, and observed ethnographic-
ally. This would be an ethnography of the inner nature of the custom
Of speaking out one’s intentions. [he custom of intention-utterance,
with its essential features, or “inner nature,” is, I believe, constant
across cultures. In contrast, rules about circumspection and openness
with respect to intention-statements are external to the practice of
saying what one is up to and vary between cultures.'* I am not saying
that explicitiy or openly stating one’s intentions is a cultural universal;
that claim is refuted by Keenan and Ochs’ study. The thesis is rather that
the language-game of intention-stating itself is universal and underlies
both practices of stating intentions openly and those of stating them
evasively.
The rules Ochs and Keenan investigate are external to the language-
game because they concern when (to one’s intimates, or to one’s fellow
villagers) and How (plainly or circumspectly) one is to engage in this
language-game. So the two levels | distinguish are first, the level of
the language-game of stating one’s intentions evasively, and second,
 Language-Games 31

the deeper level of the language-game of intention-utterance per se.

To investigate the latter language-game ethnographically would be to
extend methods of anthropological description to a finer level—to
the mini-customs that constitute such strands of language-use as that
of intention-utterance. Those mini-customs, in turn, are best studied,
initially at least, at the point where children in a given culture learn a
simple language-game of intention-utterance.
In the next chapter I shall describe a range of simple language-games
that have not been examined from within the ethnographic tradition
in question, including that central one of intention-utterance. I believe
these early language-customs have been passed over precisely because
they are common to the anthropologist and his or her subjects. They
are elements of our natural history that get overlooked because they are
always before our eyes (PI, §129).
The field of language socialization, which studies how children come
to use language appropriately, is closely related in outlook to the ethno-
graphy of communication. For instance, Bambi B. Schieffelin has invest-
igated how Kaluli mothers teach children to speak.!* This and other
writings in this area document how children enter into communicative
routines that are very similar to Wittgenstein’s language-games.
Speech-act theory is often cited as providing part of the theoretical
approach utilized in ES as well as in language socialization studies.'* Here
I agree with Stephen C. Levinson that “There is more implied in Wittgen-
stein’s language-games analogy than can be captured in a theory of speech
acts.”'> To take my previous example, speech-act theory will note such a
phenomenon as that of intention-utterance, but without looking into its
constituent details; so my previous comments apply here too.
On the account I will spell out in the next chapter, gestures and inter-
action routines are precursors of early speech-customs. That proposal
may appear old hat, already developed Dy numerous writers: for
example, by Vygotsky, by Lock and others’ similar work on the “guided
reinvention of language,” by Jerome Bruner’s studies of language acquis-
ition, or by recent writings in pragmatics and human ethology. There
are indeed marked similarities of subject matter between those studies
and my version of what language learning is. In particular, both focus
on gestures and interaction routines. But their conceptualization of the
phenomena studied differs fundamentally from mine.
The difference concerns, again, the nature of language. Here the two
camps are starkly opposed, despite the fact that Wittgenstein is some-
times cited by those authors as sharing their perspective. The various
works cited are all under the influence of a certain underlying picture
32 Becoming Human

of language—one I have noted earlier. It is a common and almost ines-

capable one generated by the way we speak in everyday life about
language and thought. The picture, for all its intuitive appeal, puts
anthropology in thrall to psychology, and should be resisted. Language,
it holds, is the means by which we express our thoughts or intentions.
Correspondingly, thoughts and intentions provide our words or symbols
with meaning. The way we succeed in communicating meaning is by
hooking up words to their public referents. This mentalistic view, as I
have called it, explicitly or implicitly relies upon a Cartesian distinc-
tion between the mental and physical, between the subjectively inner as
given in consciousness, and the material outer world. It takes language
as mediating a passage between the speaker’s mind and the hearer’s.
The journey from one privacy to another is made possible through
the fact that words have or take on meanings. The meanings in turn
determine reference—or vice versa: in some accounts the hook up of
word to referent constitutes meaning. It is clear that an anthropology
that accepts such a mentalistic account must be subordinate to, or at
least make serious reliance upon, a psychology whose very sphere of
operation is that inner realm.
In contrast, Wittgenstein’s main thrust is to attack the dualism of
inner and outer as not false put as based on a misreading of language,
and hence at bottom nonsensical. Rightly understood, Wittgenstein’s
later thought supports a pure cultural anthropology of speech, one that
shuns reliance on the inner, or on a psychology of the inner, but without
falling into the opposite error of Dehaviorism. In this it is diametrically
opposed to the position defended, for example, Dy various authors in
the anthology The Adapted Mind, according to whom anthropology in
general and language acquisition in particular fall under the hegemony
of evolutionary psychology.
When one thinks to look for it, the elements of mentalism in the authors
I have discussed are evident. Vygotsky, again, isone whois often thoughtto
share Wittgenstein’s conception of language. And it is true that Vygotsky,
like Wittgenstein, emphasizes the role of the social in communication.
But the differences between the two thinkers are as great as the similarities,
for Vygotsky’s views are, quite evidently, mentalistic and thus opposed to
Wittgenstein’s. Vygotsky writes, for example,

Any function in the child’s cultural development appears on the

Stage twice, on two planes, first on the social plane and then on
the psychological, first among people as an intermental category and
then within the child as an intramental category.'®
 Language-Games 33

The idea is that the child somehow internalizes, makes mental hay
of, the purely social activities that stand at the root of language. But
for Wittgenstein this transformation of the social into the mental is a
fiction; in language we never leave the sphere of the social.
Lock cites the above passage from Vygotsky, and basically agrees with
it. He sees the key problem in language acquisition to be to establish how
the child moves from expressive to referential uses of words (a common
but, I believe, blunt and misleading distinction).!’ His answer is that
the child’s early use of gestures somehow leads to its making a symbolic
connection between word and object. “When sound and object are asso-
ciated, these rudiments [of reference and symbolism shown by such
gestures as lip smacking and arm raising] are capitalized upon, and refer-
ential language emerges...” (ibid., p. 9). Thus “rudiments” of symbolism
and reference occur in the use of gestures and are somehow transmuted
and internalized into symbolism and reference—meaning—proper; and
then we have full-blown language. In the same vein, “...Meanings
initially exist between the interactants—Vygotsky’s ‘intermental level’—
and only later with the development of symbols are they internalized
and simultaneously given explicit form—Vygotsky’s ‘intramental level’ ”
(ibid., p. 10). And again, “Gestures and words may thus be thought of
as tools which enable an individual to accomplish the task of making
explicit meanings” (ibid.). The mentalism I have been emphasizing is
clearly present in Lock’s book The Guided Reinvention of Language; for
example, in this remark: “The cognitive operations which underlie these
Structured actions [constituting the utterance of sentences] arise from
the internalization of earlier communicative acts.” !2
Bruner’s approach is similar to Lock’s. He writes that “some basis
for referential intersubjectivity must exist before language proper
appears.”’” That “referential intersubjectivity” is exactly the mentalist
journey, via meanings and reference, from one mind to another. In
Bruner’s case, a pre-linguistic basis for it resides in the child’s inten-
tions, treated as mental entities. The child has an unlearned “intent
to refer,” and recognizes “that intent in others” (via the “primitive”
assumption that other minds are like our own) (ibid.). The inten-
tions in question presumably manifest themselves in the child’s earliest
communications—being established through mother-child “formats”—
and subsequently ground the child’s full-blown use of referential
language.
In the three writers I have just considered, as well as in many allied
thinkers, there is a large overlap between the phenomena they cite in
their various studies (especially those having to do with pre-linguistic
34 Becoming Human

gestures) and the sort of phenomena Wittgenstein might appeal to.

As said earlier, the difference lies in how the data are conceptualized.
The unsatisfactory nature of the mentalistic conception is signaled by
the fact that when writers such as Lock or Vygotsky essay the journey
from the stage of communal! gesture to that of inner realization—from
the social to the mental—their language becomes darkly obscure, as if
they had to cross their fingers and leap into the abyss, in order to gain the
sought-for passage. Thus, for Lock, “...Gestures show all the rudiments
of language and at least in some cases patterned speech results from the
internalization of the structure of these shared What is the
“structure” of a gesture, and what is it to “internalize” such a thing?
A cloud has descended over Lock’s clear and insightful account of the
pre-linguistic behavior of the child.
At other places, however, several of the writers I am discussing do
advocate the kind of view I wish to support. Thus Lock, for example, says
that “...words begin to replace gestures in the child’s communicative
system” (ibid., 9). It is only that the mentalistic picture keeps intruding.
The appeal to the inner as grounding or providing a full-blown “refer-
ential” language must be rejected. Rather, language tout court is a set of
customs in which words play a role.*!
Al
Zoe Learns to Talk

What we are supplying are really remarks on the natural history

of human beings; we are not contributing curiosities however,
but observations which no one has doubted, but which have
escaped remark only Decause they are always before our
Aon
Wittgenstein

The answer to the question of how language came to be will emerge

from a clear knowledge of what it is. That knowledge, in turn, is well
served by an examination of first-language acquisition, for in observing
what goes on when children are first Drought within the fold of speech
we come to see quite clearly what it is they learn. We come upon a
field of readily graspable and significant simple language-games. These
instances make it evident that our language is a cultural extension of
preexisting interaction patterns. Furthermore, it is plausible to think
that in part at least the child’s first steps into language recapitulate those
of the species. We can get an idea of what our species accomplished by
observing children coming to a mastery of speech.

Speech as custom-regulated action

The proto language-game and “instinctive” behavior
A Wittgensteinian understanding of language can be approached
through the threefold classification “proto language-game,” “gestural
stage,” and “primitive language-game.”
“Proto language-games,” as I use the phrase, are primitive, natur-
ally occurring action patterns. Wittgenstein conceives of language
36 Becoming Human

as growing out of such actions and interactions. He writes in On

Certainty:

§475. I want to regard man here as an animal; as a primitive being

to which one grants instinct Dut not ratiocination. As a creature in
a primitive state. Any logic good enough for a primitive means of
communication needs no apology from us. Language did not emerge
from some kind of ratiocination.’

Here, the “creature[s] in a primitive state” are our Eden-dwelling

ancestors—animals who are at a stage in our history before the devel-
opment of language. It is plausible, though controversial, to deny them
“ratiocination,” on the ground that thinking requires language. So if
language did not emerge from ratiocination from what did it emerge?
The answer is, instinctive or naturally occurring action patterns. That is,
language arises out of certain actions and reactions that in turn are not
based on ratiocination but occur naturally, instinctively. Wittgenstein
eM AC ony

The origin and the primitive form of the language-game is a reaction:

only from this can more complicated forms develop.
Language—I want to say—is a refinement, ‘im Anfang war die Tat’
[In the beginning was the deed].?

What deeds or ur-level acts is he talking about? Well, to take one

example, he thinks that the idea of a cause has its roots in something
that is “instinctive” or natural in us, namely our disposition to look
from effect to cause, as wnen One !Iooks to see wnat has just stung one,
where the stone that hit one came from, or who is tugging at one’s
coat.” We are animals who naturally behave in that way.
Wittgenstein’s view that language is rooted in such naturally occurring
or biologically based action patterns gets expressed most clearly in the
essay “Cause and Effect: Intuitive Awareness,” some passages of which I
have referred to just above. He writes, for instance,

The [language-| game [of pain-talk] doesn’t begin with doubting

whether someone has a toothache, because that doesn’t...fit the
game’s biological function in our life. In its most primitive form it is
a reaction to somebody’s cries and gestures, a reaction of sympathy
or something of the sort.*
 Zoe Learns to Talk

Here the instinctive reactions Wittgenstein speaks of are plain to see.

We are creatures who react to one another’s suffering. If we oDserve a
family member get injured we naturally respond with sympathy or help.
Such reactions, he says, are the foundation for our talk of being in pain
or being hurt:

Believing that someone else is in pain, doubting whether he is, are so

many natural kinds of behaviour towards other human beings; and
our language is but an auxiliary to and extension of this behaviour. I
mean: our language is an extension of the more primitive behaviour.
(For our language-game is a piece of behaviour.)°

Wittgenstein emphasized the behavioral forerunners of speech in several

of his remarks, for instance,

“What...is the word ‘primitive’ meant to say here?... That the mode
of behaviour is pre-linguistic: that a language-game is based on it....”°

Or again,

It is characteristic of our language that the foundation on which it

grows consists in steady ways of living, regular ways of acting.... Its
function is determined above all by action, which it accompanies.’

Language, on this view, is paramountly social: the simple language-game

and its behavioral precursor require two or more participants.®
Both the before-language hominid and the pre-linguistic child engage
naturally in certain behavior patterns basic to speech. As regards the
child, consider the acts and responses connected with request words.
At the earliest stage, the child simply cries when hungry, or cold, or
wet, and so on. Then the mother responds, say by bringing it to her
breast, whereupon the child does its part by suckling. Similarly, there is
the interaction pattern of the child’s reaching toward something, and
the mother’s response of handing it to the child. Such interactions arise
naturally, without any drill or explicit instruction, between child and
caretaker. They support the development of language, which could not
arise without them.
I call the basic stage of interaction just discussed the proto
language-game. It includes, besides nursing and giving things to the
child, weaning, grooming, cleaning, dressing, carrying about, hugging,
patting, caressing, responding to cries, playful two-person dealings such
38 Becoming Human

as tickling, or passing an object back and forth, accompanied by eye

contact—these are some of the interaction patterns that can form the
bedrock for the development of language. In apes we find many of
these same patterns.’ The proto language-game, let me emphasize, is no
language-game. The proto-typical behavior occurs at a stage preceding
even the simplest symbol use, as it precedes the simplest use of gesture.
Intention-talk provides another example. In the interaction under-
lying the child’s mastery of intention language the mother responds
to what she sees the child is up to. She might react by calling out a
warning, and the child in turn might respond to her fear-laden voice by
stopping in its tracks. We might speak here of the child’s projects—its
Deing engaged in doing something. For example, feeding itself with a
spoon, putting small stones one Dy one into a can, or Duttoning its shirt.
Such actions are paradigmatically voluntary ones.!'° In the language-
game proto-type in question, then, the child is engaged upon some
project; the mother observes or anticipates the child’s project and reacts
appropriately, and the child in turn may respond to that response. This
action pattern is rooted in our animal nature, in particular in our ability
to anticipate one another’s actions and our propensity to respond appro-
priately. Such patterns of anticipation and response are of course found
among many animals.
My thesis is that simple language-games emerge out of the proto
language-games, the former being refinements of the latter. One
pathway from behavior to speech passes through gesture, and so | turn
to the second item in my threefold categorization.

(;esture

0)
eM Teer (toe offand the
O roto-type behaviors just discussed. A underlying action-pattern
gy modified, emphasized, or added to in ERASE VAR els it to. ide:
other’ SPCR CNM COR MS arc
mig mot NTT El Parorrperforming

ee bar RP pase a ir ee. aba eo J mena J

In order to groom [the chimpanzee infant's] side and armpits

the mother] takes his arm and pulls it upwards. [Later] the

Na
nim
CTSA IRN np pets
thelage of 1i[monthslanjinfant.
Eis down,injfront of herand. adoptec
.. es TNT
to} his| mother

Poy hiskz ora _ i" Rev

 Zoe Learns to Talk

We might say these gestures are biologically based in that they arise
naturally, without being taught. Similarly Plooij speaks of “The develop-
ment Dy human infants of an arm-raising gesture which at first appears
in the infant’s repertoire as a passive response to being picked up and
later becomes an active request to be picked up.”*¢
A commonly seen gesture developed by children involves requests.
For example, a child reaches toward something it wants but cannot get
and makes an opening and closing motion with its outstretched hand;
the mother may respond by giving the thing to the child. The gesture
can become common coin in the mother—child interactions. The child is
not taught to act so; it gestures spontaneously. Another child may adopt
a different request gesture, for instance reaching and making a certain
noise. Both gestures have in their background the same proto-typical,
interactive behavior: the child draws the mother’s attention to the item
it is after, and the mother sees what the child wants and either hands it
over, or prohibits it, and so on.
Natural gestures of intention constitute another important instance
of my second category. A pre-verbal child, moving toward the steps and
obviously aiming to climb them, stops, turns its head, and makes eye
contact with its mother. In doing so, the child calls attention to its
crawling toward the stairs; its look, in that context, signals its intention
to climb the stairs and thus constitutes a natural gesture indicative of
what it is up to. The mother may respond by walking up the stairs behind
the child, allowing it to hone its developmental skills while insuring its
IC af
The gesture cannot live outside the context distinctive of the corres-
ponding proto-behavior. That is, it cannot De that gesture outside that
particular context, for two reasons. One is that context disambiguates
a gesture; the same motion can be a request- or an intention-gesture,
depending upon the context. A second, more radical, reason is that
a social group cannot employ, say, a gesture to initiate grooming if
they are not creatures that groom one another. Neither can they give
an intention-gesture if they are not creatures who do anticipate and
respond to one another's projects.
The gestures I have discussed constitute communicative acts. We
would, I believe, have no trouble in saying that the child making the
hand opening and closing gesture is communicating with its mother.
The distance between that gesture and speech per se is small.
There is a continuum between things we would not call communic-
ation and those we would. Here are two examples close to the human
gestures just discussed. By stopping and offering its back to a female in
40 Becoming Human

its troop, a baboon leader signals its intention to carry the female over
a difficult part of the path. In a more complex case, the not quite adult
chimpanzee A wants to go in one direction, its mother in another. A
takes its unweaned brother B in its arms and Starts off in the direction
it wants to go, stopping to look back and make eye contact with its
mother. The message presumably is “You better come this way.” On the
far end of the scale from human gesture are cases like a chimpanzee
anticipating the direction its Daby-baboon prey will run in, in order to
intercept it. We would not say that the baby-baboon communicates its
future path, or that the gazelle in changing direction tells the lion where
it is headed. But I believe there is a continuum between acts which are
plainly not communicative and those which plainly are. There is a gray
area; it includes chimpanzee A’s actions and those of the baboon troop
leader.

The simple language-game

The natural gesture seems to say this: take up the usual interaction
pattern at this point. There is the interaction pattern of the infant chimp
climbing onto the mother to be transported. The gesturing mother is
Saying in effect, take up the climbing-aboard routine now. Or, in the
instance of the baby’s stopping to make eye contact: take up the routine
of your responding to my crawling to the stairs and climbing them.
The gestures are a stylized overlay upon the prior naturally existing
Del Ka le) em
A further and crucial stylization is made within the same proto-forms:
One-word language-games develop from within the proto-type or its
gestural embellishment. The word is no mere gesture-like stylization of
the foundational proto-behavior. The word qua symbol-token is so styl-
ized that its connection with the job it performs is purely conventional,
and in that sense arbitrary. Any other short and readily pronounceable
or readily perceived token-type would have served the same purpose
equally well. This arbitrary thing, the word, or other symbol, replaces
the gesture and takes over its function. In moving spontaneously to a
use of one of its culture’s words the child steps into language. This is
the magic moment where speech makes its appearance.
In the simple language-game the symbol qua signal takes over the role
of the gesture, which in turn took over the role played by the mother’s
observation of the child within the proto-typical behavior pattern. The
word stands in for the gesture and does the same job. For instance, the
child might say “up” instead of gesturing with a look; the word, like
 Zoe Learns to Talk

the gesture, tells the mother what the child is about to do. Language is
thus an extension of an underlying action pattern; and we see the point
of Wittgenstein’s quoting Goethe’s “In the beginning was the deed.”
The symbol—or concept—is the symbol-token employed in the corres-
ponding language-game. To have a concept—to know the symbol—is
to be able to use the symbDol-token in the language-game. Grasping a
concept is a matter of having a certain skill, not a matter of connecting
some idea to a symbol-token.
In being able to speak its intention, the child manifests two linked
abilities. The first is one shared with any number of animals—it is to
evince the behavior we call acting with an aim. It is to pursue a project.
The second ability is, it seems, unique to humans, at least if we restrict
the claim to animals in the wild. It is to speak a word or otherwise
provide a symbol-token that indicates the end point of the project the
person is in fact engaged upon.
While this later ability is (with the earlier qualification) unique, it
is but a small embellishment of a capability which is not unique—
the talent of indicating one’s project by a natural gesture. The passage
to speech does not cross some great ontological divide; there is no
fundamental difference between us and other animals. In fact, captive
chimpanzees can learn to “express their intentions” in symbols.'? Here
Wittgenstein, as opposed say to Chomsky, is a Darwinian.

From the primitive to the sophisticated

The child’s one-word uses look back to more primitive stages, and
forward to sophisticated adult uses. Developments that lead toward
our complex everyday talk of intentions include the use of intention-
utterances of two or more words, such as “climbing chair.” The end
point of a project is now indicated by several words, one betokening
an action and the other the object to be acted on. The function of
the intention-utterance—to betoken the project’s end point—remains
unchanged.
Ordered intention-utterances, such as “jump first, then shirt,” are
another development from the holophrastic phase, as are a child’s
Jater conditional intention-utterances, such as, “When I get to Daniel’s
I’ll have a drink of juice.” Eventually, with the learning of clock and
calendar time, the child will learn to amalgamate temporal references
and intention-utterances to produce statements like, “I’m going upstairs
at seven o'clock.”
42 Becoming Human

Simple intention-utterances stand at the base of one of the major

branches of our language. Promising, making assignations, exhorting
someone, deliberating an action all presuppose or in some way
incorporate the early simple language-game of intention-utterance. In
general, simple language-customs grow out of proto-typical interaction
patterns; in turn the simple customs change, grow, and combine into
the multitude of complex ones we participate in daily. At the far end
of that evolution are language-games of extreme complexity such as
theoretical physics, but even these retain their roots in the primitive.
A perspicuous way of viewing adult intention-utterances is to compare
them with the core interaction pattern present in the language-game
proto-type. A statement like, “I’m going out to get a paper,” has a clear
similarity to the child’s “I’m going upstairs” gesture. Both reflect that
earlier pattern of anticipation and response.
The child learns its language by mastering an increasingly complex
set of interaction patterns—customs—in which words, like tools, serve
various ends, have various functions. This transition to increased
complexity and variety nowhere requires a passage from word use to
mentally resident concept. The players learn more language-games and
more complicated ones; Dut that never requires any inward, mental
playing.

Custom
Underlying the threefold classification of proto language-game, gesture,
and simple language-game is the idea that to use or employ a word—to
utter it in the stream of daily life, and to be understood—is to participate
in some or another language-game, each of which constitutes a separate
custom. Wittgenstein makes the point explicitly: “To obey a rule, to
make a report, to give an order, to play a game of chess, are customs (uses,
institutions)” (PI, 899). Language is a heterogeneous collection of such
customs, linked by “family resemblance.” But the question naturally
arises: What is a custom?
Customs, on my understanding, are implicitly or explicitly regulated
arbitrary modifications of naturally occurring actions. For example,
humans sometimes fight or battle. Their doing so can be regulated,
constrained by rules like the Marquise of Queensbury regulations on
boxing. Again, when Cortez and his small band fought off a huge army of
Aztecs, he was helped by the fact that, by custom, his enemy fought not
to kill but to capture alive. Another example would be the ritual warfare
of certain New Guinea tribes, where the implicit scenario calls for much
 Zoe Learns to Taik

bellicose shouting and threatening, with some weapons thrown, Dut

few injuries. Eating provides another example. Depending upon which
culture it is raised in, a child will eat with chopsticks, or with the right
hand only, and so on; the natural act of eating is constrained by rules.
The rules need not be explicit; it is enough that they govern the acts in
question.
SO, we have a custom when we have a natural act constrained by
rules which themselves are arbitrary, in that they could well have been
otherwise. The key terms in this account are to be explained by citing
examples; thus, “natural act” (eating, fighting); “rule” (use chopsticks,
right hand only); “arbitrary” (here chopsticks, there the bare hand).
On the view of speech laid out above, speech too is seen as custom-
regulated action. On one of my central examples, the natural act of
reaching is augmented by a gesture and further modified by the adoption
on the child’s part of one of the culture’s words. Employing that word
the child is able to extend its mastery of the environment. The child
uses the parent as one might use a certain type of grasping tool to
fetch something off a high shelf. The child becomes able to do so when
it learns its group’s form of request-word customs. The custom—the
language-game in which the word is used—is to employ that sound in
that context to achieve that end. Child and parent can be viewed as
constituting a tribe the only language of which consists of request words
and compliance (or denial, etc.) with request. The model here is the
slab/beam language-game, which Wittgenstein said might be conceived
to be the only language those people possessed. To get a similar tribe
from the contemplation of language acquisition in the child one need
only imagine that the parent’s language is co-equal to the child’s at
any given point. As its acculturation progresses, the child learns more
language-games; the held-in-common tribal language grows apace. The
child broadens its store of custom-regulated acts until eventually it has
mastered the tribe’s basic set of word-customs. (Of course there may
be language-games in the tribe that a given child does not master; for
example, those involved in secret rites of a clan it is not a member of,
Or particle physics.)

The ethnography of speech

If the various language-games constitutive of speech are themselves
customs, then the possibility arises of a Wittgensteinian ethnography of
communication. In essence, that study would be simply cultural anthro-
pology applied to the mini-customs that make up language. It would be
44 Becoming Human

a branch of cultural anthropology, a variant of the purely descriptive

science contained in the writings of the classical ethnographers. It would
aim to complete the description of a people’s customs by including an
account of their language-games. The assumption would be that those
customs, or a Dasic subset of them, have been overlooked by cultural
anthropology because they are found in every culture and stand right
in front of our eyes.
It would approach its subject through the simplest cases, searching out
paths of continuity and development that stretch from certain natur-
ally occurring patterns of mutual response found in humans and other
animals, through the complications of those patterns, first by gesture
and then by acts that constitute the earliest speech, on through various
subsequent elaborations and additions.
This program is made possible by the fact that primitive versions of
the language-game qua custom and its more complex later versions have
something in common, which Wittgenstein calls a center of variation.'*
For example, when an adult asks her host for a glass of juice, the pattern
of customary behavior in play between speaker and hearer is, in its
core or central part, identical to the pattern holding between child and
parent when the child uses a one-word request such as “Juice!”
By tracing lines of continuity, as well as of change and development,
a philosophical anthropology would seek to establish a genealogy of
concepts, where a concept is conceived of as a unit consisting of a
word plus a use, or: a word as it functions in a given language-game.
Language is to be broken down into constituent language-games, and
their behavioral proto-types, and these are to be ordered by two prin-
ciples: temporally, according to when a child comes to engage in them,
and logically, by seeing how a given pattern develops by complication
or addition out of simpler forms. These ordering principles should give
the same result. The overall aim of such a study would be a synoptic view
of that central part of our social life made up by our uses of language.
I make a distinction between the ethnography of communication just
described and the philosophical anthropology I have spoken of earlier.
The difference is that the former is a purely empirical study whereas the
latter, Deing focused on the “logic” of speech, allows itself to construct
and consider imaginary cases, such as that of the slab/beam tribe.
Let me reprise some of the points made in this section. On the view-
point developed here, learning to talk is learning to act. The actions
constituting speech are continuous with such performances as manip-
ulating, crawling, or walking. But the deeds that are speech share the
additional character of being social actions, ones bound by custom.
 Zoe Learns to Taik

The child must master these various customs. Acquiring a first language
is thus straightforwardly a matter of acculturation, the coming to a
command of various convention-governed ways of interacting.
The primary concern of the final two parts of this chapter is to present
some observations drawn from a diary study of a child coming to a
mastery of language. I do so in order to provide a rich and detailed series
of examples, the contemplation of which allows us to see more deeply
into the nature of speech.

Two early language-games

Care PPR
Wild chimpanzees engage in proto language-games of requests. For
instance, the frequent interaction of grooming will often begin by one
chimp behaving in a way that can be called a proto request, or a gesture-
request:

To initiate a grooming session [a chimpanzee] may present his rump,

back or... bowed head—those parts that are difficult or impossible to
see during self-grooming.... The chosen partner can respond...by
grooming, by countersoliciting, by ignoring the request, or by moving
away....!°

Begging (or, one might say, importuning) is another form of the

chimpanzees’ proto language-game, and here too we find gesture requests.
The gesture may be a touching of the food being begged for, or a reaching
to the full mouth of the animal being solicited—this in a certain context.
Pygmy chimpanzee mothers share food extensively with their infants
and for a longer period than do common chimpanzee mothers.’® In
either case, the sharing behavior underlies another proto form of request
behavior. The infant can make plain what it is after, for instance
by trying to reach the stuff, or grab it away, or by its tantrum when
denied it.!/
In the proto language-games of requesting, one chimpanzee will aid
another. In humans we also find proto-typical helping behavior. A child
learns, as we say, to express its desires, and the caretaking adults respond.
Initially the response is to the child’s natural Dehavior or reactions, such
as its crying, or its trying to reach something. Later the reaction is to
certain gestures that become standard. For instance, a child may develop
a wiggle-gesture which is taken as saying, in effect, get me down from
46 Becoming Human

here. Such gestures are employed; that is, they are naturally given and
naturally responded to, in the context of the participants’ way of life.
The existence of human proto and gestural language-games of request
can be seen in the following diary entries.

Nineth month. Her bottle is in front of her and she cannot reach it.
She reaches for it, breathing more rapidly than usual, and making a
certain “wanting” noise of hers. There is someone there watching all
this, and they give her the bottle. This does not happen just once. It
becomes a given pattern. It becomes in short a way of her making a
request and getting it filled.
This pattern is generalized. For instance, if she wants a tablet I am
holding she will reach for it and make that “wanting” noise.
Fleventh month. “Arrar...” and arches back—to be let down from S’s
lap to floor.
Cries and holds up hand—wants balloon.
Hands bottle to parent, saying, in effect, feed me!
Fifteenth month. Holds shoe out to me and then gives me her foot so
I’ll put her shoe on.

In these instances, then, B helps A achieve some end; and certain actions
or gestures function to alert B to the end A seeks.'®
The proto and gestural language-games have biological and social
roots: it is part of our human inheritance that parents will feed, shelter,
protect, and so on, their children, when it is possible to do so.
And now from gesture to speech: “For one could always say: ‘One fine
day the child starts using [...] words’ ”'” The proto-behavior pattern of
requesting in chimpanzees and humans is similar, obviously. But already
during its second year the child leaves the wild chimpanzee behind
forever, at least as far as this particular language-game is concerned.
It succeeds here in passing from a gesture language-game to a simple
language-game. In doing so, it goes on to employ a word from a common
vocabulary.
The child enters this stage spontaneously; at some point in its history
of interaction—one fine day—it steps into language, and utters a word
which, given the context of utterance, is taken as indicating what the
child wants.
For example, a 16-month-old child has a pronounced and obvious
interest in shoes, as shown by the fact that she will often try to put on
her own shoes, that she likes to handle and observe them. She is being
carried from her bedroom wearing socks but not shoes; routinely, the
 Zoe Learns to Taik

next stage in getting dressed is to have her shoes put on. Sitting on the
top of her dresser, within plain sight as she is being carried out, are her
new and previously unworn shiny black dress shoes. In this context she
says, without any coaching, “shoe” and this is taken by her mother as a
request to wear those new shoes.
This spontaneous stepping into language occurs, of course, against a
background of linguistic activity on the part of the caretakers. A similar
spontaneous coming to use symbols also occurs among the bonobos, or
pygmy chimpanzees (also, of course, against the background of symbol
use on the part of caretakers):

The chimpanzee may see the bottle of bubbles among other toys and
pick it up and look at the caretaker. By selecting the bubbles from
among other things, the chimpanzee thus has conveyed its desire to
execute the “bubble-blowing” routine. Later, it may simply point to
the bubbles and look at the caretaker. Still later, it will point to the
BUBBLES lexigram and turn to the caretaker.°

Here we see the three stages I have been emphasizing: action, gesture,
and then, inside the same framework of action, symbol use.
To return to the child, if there were only the one case described,
it would not be clear whether the child ever mastered the ability to
“express its desires.” But it is no isolated case, and as the months pass
the child builds up a repertoire of word-requests. The important thing
is that soon child and parent are interacting within the confines of the
primitive language-game of one-word requests that develops from the
proto language-game of gesture requests. For example, by its eighteenth
month the child says “down” and the parent will tend to respond by
getting it down, or perhaps by saying why it is not going to get the child
down, and so on.
The very simple language-game, initiated by the child, of one-word
requests and the parent’s response thereto, develops in parallel to a
closely related language-game. In it the child responds to the other’s
requests, in the standard case by complying. The child learns to take
the role of the one to whom the request is made. It learns to respond
by closing the door when the parent says, “Close the door” and so
on. In the case of the child in my diary study (I shall refer to her as
“Z") the compliance language-game manifested itself well after she had
begun to employ gesture-requests, but before her one-word requests. It
is doubtless impossible to mark off the point where the child ceases
to respond merely to something in the adult’s tone of voice, as heard
48 Becoming Human

in a particular situation, from the point where the child could be said
to understand the words the adult speaks. But here as in other cases,
although we may not be able to indicate the point where one behavior-
type is replaced by another, the two poles of the distinction are clear.
Thus the young child can react to an excited, fear-laden warning, and
do so long before the stage of development where we would be tempted
to say that it understands the words in the warning; and the other side
of the distinction will be in time equally clear. A related language-game
of describing someone else’s request (“Daniel wants the truck”) is of a
different order of complexity, and is only learned later.
In the first person, simple language-game, player A asks for something,
or asks to be moved somewhere, and so on, by saying the generic or
proper name of the thing or a word standing for the action, and so on;
and player B responds in some appropriate manner, by getting the thing,
performing the action, or refusing to get it, or offering a suDstitute, or
giving a reason for not complying, and so on.

eh alone les el

Here I want to return to, and develop a bit more fully, some remarks
made in the previous chapter about the term “function.” The most prim-
itive Dranch of the word’s normal use concerns artifacts and machines,
where functions occur at three levels, as noted earlier: Parts of machines
have functions, machines have functions, and the latter themselves can
De said to have functions, as when we ask about the point of having a
machine that serves a given end. Correspondingly, there are three uses
of “function.” Biologists used the term analogously to the first two of
the ways just indicated, and did so before the discovery of evolution.”
In applying “function” to language-use, I similarly assume an analogy
with those two primitive, pre-Darwinian concepts of function. It is the
first level of function I am interested in most. But the first presupposes
the second. We cannot sensibly inquire into the function of some part
of a machine unless we know or presuppose what end the machine
serves; similarly for components of language-games. [hus analogously
to the question, “What does this machine do?” one could ask, “What
does the language-game of request-stating do?” The answer, for both
machines and language-games, is usually pretty easy. The bottle-capping
machine caps bottles. The language-game of request stating allows us to
make requests. It’s not that we engage in a given language-game because
we have found it useful to do so (paraphrasing Wittgenstein’s “Do we
count because we have found it useful?”). Nor do I assume the various
 Zoe Learns to Talk

language-games can be explained in evolutionary-functional terms, for

no one knows whether that is so. It is easy to confuse the “discovery”
that an item serves a certain end, with the discovery that we can explain
the item’s existence Dy appeal to the role serving that end played in the
evolution of the item, forgetting that for all we Know it may have come
to exist and persist independently of its serving that role. No, the brute
fact is that we do make requests, and comply with them, and describe
them and, to take other language-games, we do state our intentions, and
respond to others’ stated intentions, and so on. The words in a language-
game have a function because they contribute toward achieving the aim
Duilt into the language-game.
What is the function of the word in the one-word primitive language-
game of requests? The “end” of the language-game is securing someone’s
help in getting the infant what it is after. The language-game of gesture-
requests has exactly the same end. There the infant’s gesture functioned
to alert the parent to what the child sought. The word in the corres-
ponding primitive language-game has exactly the same function. The
word calls out exactly the same response from the hearer as did the
gesture that the word replaces.

Intention
Like our aptitude for making requests, our ability to speak of our inten-
tions is grounded in our specific animal nature: we cooperate closely
with one another, and in particular take great pains in raising, feeding,
protecting, and so on, our children. In this respect we are like the chim-
panzees, only more so. Several talents aid that cooperation and care,
especially our competence in anticipating another’s actions, and the
reciprocal capacity of conveying what one is up to—of signaling or
indicating or showing what we are up to.
In a previous section I introduced the term “projects.” Someone is
engaged upon a project when he or she acts with an aim or purpose.
Our projects are the things we are up to, that we may signal, and that
others can anticipate. Here are some examples of projects: a child in
her seventeenth month climbs up a step, signals for her hands to be
held, and when they are and she can act safely, she steps down; and
she does this again and again. Or she approaches you with a clear idea
of playing—perhaps bringing books for you to look at with her. Or, a
month later, opens her dresser drawer and carefully, with full attention,
takes each item out, holds it up against her as if trying it on, and then
50 Becoming Human

Such projects are voluntary. As noted before, the very concept of a

voluntary action can be explained in terms of children’s actions of the
kind I have indicated.** Thus part of the scaffolding of my approach here
is the idea that humans do engage in voluntary actions; we often act with
an aim. But to speak of someone's aim is not to make a psychological
claim, nor one belonging to “folk-psychology,” as the study of intention-
utterance itself can help snow.
The point of anticipating what the child is up to, or of discovering
its projects, derives from our nature as social animals. The caretaking
adult or older child will naturally anticipate the young child’s actions,
in order to help, or praise, or warn, or obstruct, or in some way react
to what the child is up to. Even benevolent indifference in the face of
Knowing the child’s project is an important form of reaction, for the
child may take a Knowing non-reaction as a signal that everything is
alright: proceed as you were. Child and attendant adult are mutually
aware, and the point of the child's intention-utterance is to alert the
other to its projects.
Chimpanzees too are very adept at reading one another’s projects. To
take Dut one example, an infant may anticipate its mother’s anticipation
of its project, and act to disguise it.2? The animals’ various intention-
signaling behaviors, and responses to them, occurring in the context
of communal, mutually aware life, constitute a proto language-game
that runs parallel to the behavioral patterns in humans that precede the
child’s mastery of the language-game of intention-stating.
A similar form of interaction between adult and child is the root of our
intention-stating. The adult anticipates the child’s projects, and reacts
accordingly, for instance by helping, prohibiting, praising, and so on.
The anticipation may be based simply on observing the child in the
context; in this case we have a proto language-game of intention. Or
the anticipation may be based on observing the child signal its future
actions by a gesture, as when, in an earlier example, she looks at the
parent as she crawls deliberately and slowly toward the stairs, insuring
that the parent knows she is approaching that dangerous but exciting
place.** This is the gesture stage of the language-game.
The existence of the proto language-game in which the caretaker
watches for, anticipates and responds to the child’s projects is evident
in the following examples.

18th month. Now she is at the roll of toilet paper from her changing
table, but seemingly knows she is not to take it and so pulls out pieces
and uses them in mock blowing of nose, thus “justifying” her action.
 Zoe Learns to Taik

19th month. Yesterday—playing with keys—started throwing them

down on S (on whom she was sitting, as S lay in bed). Heavy keys.
S said “No” (as it hurt). Z seemed aware of the prohibition—then
waited a while—and then threw them.

In these and earlier examples we see the elements of the proto language-
game. The child has projects: taking out clothes and “trying them on”;
tearing pieces of toilet paper off the roll; throwing the keys. The adult
is aware of the projects, anticipating what the child will be up to next
by observing its actions. The adult responds to the anticipated action,
sometimes by just looking on benignly or with amusement, sometimes,
by prohibiting the anticipated act. And the child is capable of responding
to the adult’s response; such an outcome is a further feature of the proto
language-game. In the case of the key throwing, the child seemingly
responded to the adult’s response by desisting for awhile. In an earlier
example we see the child anticipate the parent’s response; the pretended
Dlowing of the nose is reminiscent of certain cases of deception among
chimpanzees.
In making the transition from the proto language-game to the prim-
itive one, the child again steps spontaneously into speech. It utters
words inside the indicated context of interaction, and those words serve
to tell the adult what the child is up to. In her twentieth month the
subject of my diary study began to voice her intentions. I will give a
series of quotations from that study, because they also illustrate the way
a language-game can be transformed by subsequent enlargements and
additions:

20th month. Simple one word use indicating where she is going or
what she is up to—“up” going up Stairs.
21st month. Statement of intention: while doing stacking toy with
me says “off” as she starts to take a whole stack off.
22nd month. Sitting in chair by herself—leaning back—says “down”
and repeats twice as she slides forward and gets down.
Turn to next book—but she wants to read the bird pop-up book and
says—rejecting the other book—“Birdie” meaning—I want to read
the bird pop-up book. “Z. get it,” I say. “Z., Z., — birdy birdy”—she
says as she sets out to the book shelf to look for the book in question
{a known one of her favourites)
23rd month. “Climbing chair”—statement of intention before trying
to climb chair.
52 Becoming Human

Make believe game of going to store—leaving room with toy shopping

cart—saying what she is going to get: “Cottage cheese..., rice...,
noodles.”
24th month (as noted earlier). “Duck, frog downstairs”—stating her
intention of taking her duck and frog toys downstairs.
“Jump first, then shirt.” She was going to put on her shirt (which she
enjoys doing) but wanted to jump first when she saw the hammock.
“I’m going to put it in garbage. I put it in garbage.” First she did as
she said she was going to, then she said what she had just done.
2/th month. “Give big hug.” And then she does. (She parcels out her
eter
42nd month (as cited previously). “When I get to Daniel’s I’ll have a
drink of juice.”

Although the primitive language-game and its proto form have some-
thing important in common, they also of course differ. Similarity and
difference are reflected in the following schematic characterization. A
child A and an adult B are at least potentially aware of and responsive
to one another, and in particular the adult can often anticipate the
child’s actions; B foresees certain of A’s acts (either through observation
or prior knowledge, or by seeing A gesture, or through A saying what
she will be up to); B then responds, by acting, acquiescing, prohibiting,
warning, arguing, encouraging, and so on. In the proto language-game,
B’s response is based solely on observation or past knowledge. At the
gestural stage, B responds to a natura! gesture. In the primitive language-
game, A utters words indicative of what he will be up to, such as “down”
or “birdy book.” Hearing the words takes the place of reading the future
action from the child’s present behavior or from its gesture. The words
have the same function in the enlarged language-game that A’s future-
action-revealing behavior or gestures filled in the earlier one.
The center of variation that runs from the proto language-game
through the primitive one to a great many subsequent complications
and additions is that elemental bit of natural behavior, whereby humans
anticipate the actions of others and react thereto, often by cooperating
with them. The words that enter into subsequent developments have
their own rules and logic; the work of the anthropology of speech only
begins with the description of a given proto and primitive language-
game. It must follow through as the custom grows and branches.
For example, a major branching in the custom of using words to
say what we are up to (“intention-utterances”) occurs when the child
passes beyond the stage of what are essentially first-person intention-
 Zoe Learns to Taik

utterances such as “birdy book” to two further stages. The first is that
the child learns to respond to the adult’s intention-utterances. (“I’m
going upstairs.” “No! Don’t go!”) The second marks a bigger change.
The child learns to express third-person intention-claims such as “He is
going upstairs.”

Eight of the first language-games

Several of the language-games I shall examine have paired forms: there
is making and responding to requests, making and responding to
intention-utterances, uttering and responding to prohibitions, and so
on. In such cases, in this brief account, I shall consider only the first-
person versions.
My cutoff point will be the end of Z’s twenty-first month; by then she
had begun to use two-word utterances inside four of the eight language-
games I shall look at. In Figure 1, I list the language-games in the order
she began to take part in them. The chart also gives data about proto and
gesture language-games. Notice that the three stages of action, gesture,
and word co-exist. The child who can speak may instead gesture, and a
caretaker will sometimes respond merely on the Dasis of observation of
the child’s actions or demeanor.

Greeting
This use of language plainly has a behavioral proto-type rooted in
Our animal nature, and especially perhaps in the importance for us
of “reunions.” Chimpanzees have similar proto language-games;~ they
may greet one another by touching, kissing, or embracing—or by
flinging their arms around each other with grunts or little screams of
excitement.2°

WCRI OME Tere ens

As discussed earlier, many theorists implicitly or explicitly accept a myth
of reference according to which a crucial point in language learning
occurs when the child discovers what a word refers to.2” Thus it may
learn that “red” names a certain color, “shoe” a certain type of object,
“down” acertain action, and so on. The connection between name and
referent is established very early, perhaps by means of certain game-
like interactions between parent and child. But however it is estab-
lished, its existence explains, or plays a major role in explaining, the
child’s subsequent language-using abilities. Once the child has grasped
54 Becoming Human

Months: Q 1471 13-14 15 1611/7 18319 2O 21

Greeting:

Request:

Merely naming:

Make-believe:

Refusal:

Intention:

Possession:

Counting:

Figure IZ’s first eight language-games. Single lines represent the proto language-
games; s marks the occurrence of a signal (a natural gesture) as part of a proto
Janguage-game; double lines indicate primitive language-games.

somehow what “shoe” stands for, it can then use the word to ask for
shoes, to state intentions concerning them, to help describe what it sees,
and so on. The connection of reference is the Key thing, and subsequent
use follows from it.
As against this, I believe the correct view is contained in Wittgenstein’s
remark that (merely) naming something is like putting the pieces on the
board; naming is not yet a move in the game (PI, §49). Knowledge of
how to put the pieces on the board does not itself yield a knowledge of
how to play; infinitely many games might start from a given position
of game counters.
 Zoe Learns to Talk

What I have called “merely naming” is opposed to using a name

in some other language-game; for example, using the name “shoe” in
the language-game of requests. Following Wittgenstein I treat merely
naming as a simple language-game, or simple, self-contained custom.
Either spontaneously, having heard others speak, or as a result of
training or prompting, the child says the name in the presence of the
object, action, color, or whatever. Or conversely, when given the name,
it points to the appropriate thing. In its first form the game of merely
naming consists simply in getting the name right; in responding with
that word when confronted with such and such an item. We might
call this the Gavagai game, after Quine’s famous example of language
learning.
Adopting a strategy used in Chapter 2, we can clarify the nature of
the language-game by imagining that some tribe of people has only
that particular use of language. These Zippy-like creatures would go
about exclaiming the name of each thing they encounter or espy. Their
children learn how to do this by example. The people never lose their
enthusiasm, but call out to each other such things as: “Apple tree!”
“Cloud!” and “Gavagai!” We could not find our feet among them. In
contrast, when an anthropologist actually learns the language of some
primitive people, it is in part because he or she already shares a number
of basic language-games with them. The shared behavior includes the
proto and gesture language-games and the primitive ones that I have
listed, and constitutes, I believe, the “common Dehavior” Wittgenstein
spoke of:

The common behaviour of mankind is the system of reference Dy

means of which we interpret an unknown language (PI, §206).”°

An ability to state a request, or communicate one’s intention, and

the like does not follow from having mastered a simple language-
elses bet Amc: elas one must also be able Something with
the name, and that requires that there already be in place in the
culture|one or more language-games (in addition to that) of naming)
within which mele motel ee functions. od Wats are patterns xe) @ behavior
Be eee Es ee ee ee ee lll

which the child too learns to engage in, for instance by employing
a name to make a request. (The child has no problem with “the
indetermancy of translation” Decause unlike Quine’s field linguist he
only has tg Jeam to wise words within already given patterns of
interaction.)
56 Becoming Human

The fact that a single word can be used in two quite different language-
games, and can hence have two quite distinct functions or “meanings”
shows how little we do when we simply name. Thus “down” might be
at one time a request, and another a statement of intention. So in one
case it tells us what act the child requires to have performed for it, and
in the other what act it intends to perform.
Eibl-Eibesfeldt has described behavior that evinces abilities necessary
for the development of the language-game of merely naming:

One universal gesture, by which babies and toddlers invite contact

[with their mothers] is through pointing at an object and uttering
vocalizations. We even possess a special muscle for pointing:
Musculus levator indici.... Human babies do not only point, but they
also understand pointing, that is, they follow visually the extended
finger to the directed object.¢’

Again, however, these abilities do not constitute a stage of

proto-behavior that underlies merely naming in the way that the proto-
behavior of wanting and being given underlies the simple language-
game of requests. This makes it doubtful whether the language-game of
merely naming is found in all human cultures. And indeed, Schieffelin’s
Study of the Kaluli strongly suggests that merely naming is not a
cultural universal. In that culture the mother’s contribution to the
child’s learning language involves the use of certain routines, and these
“are not staged or done simply for practice, but are embedded in ongoing
In my terms, the Kaluli have no simple language-game
of merely naming; rather (as of course often happens with us) names are
Jearned in the context of other uses of language, such as that of requests.
The point is not conclusively proved by Schieffelin’s study, since the
children she reports on were all above two years of age.
Counting also appears to lack a proto form. Nor can such a proto
form be found among wild apes, evidently, although apes can be taught
Osos apt om Ob el ead

Refusal or rejection
From at least her tenth month Z used natural gestures of rejection or
refusal inside a proto language-game where these were responded to
appropriately.°* By her nineteenth month she had made another of
those spontaneous steps into language, and replaced such gestures with
a word: “No.” Some weeks later this became “No way,” which remained
for months her standard manner of rejecting things she didn’t want.
 Zoe Learns to Talk

Chimpanzees have the proto language-game; for example, an infant

approaches wanting to suckle, but is rejected or refused, by being pushed
away, and then may throw a tantrum, after which the mother may

Make-believe
As she just turns four Z spends large amounts of each day engaging in
play involving make-believe. At fourteen months she already displayed
behavior that was clearly pretending; in a sense of play, and as playfully
provoking me, she pretended to put stones in her mouth. At sixteen
months she did such things as “feed” her stuffed toy from a baby
bottle. At seventeen months she introduced words into something like
a fictional context, by saying “Hi” and waving to figures in one of her
books. This makes an interesting connection to the language-game of
greeting. A month later she played imaginary games, holding a doll to
her shoulder and petting it. By her nineteenth month she was more
verbally active in imaginary play, speaking for her doll, making it say
goodbye.
Cathy Hayes reports observing Vicki, the chimpanzee she and her
husband raised, playing with an imaginary pull toy, pretending to
fish it up by its (imaginary) string, hand over hand.** However, Vicki
reacted in fright when Hayes attempted to extend the imaginary play by
pretending to pull a toy around the living room Dy an imaginary string.

Possession and counting

I will say little about these last two language-games. The verbal expres-
sion by the child of possession—her saying “mine” with regard to her
bath toys, for instance—which occurred at her nineteenth month, has
behavioral antecedents. There is an illuminating discussion of the beha-
vioral roots of possession in Eibl-Eibesfeldt (1989). The language-game
of counting is difficult for the child to learn, but of course it underlies
many other important later language-games. Z began to learn it at the
end of her twenty-first month.
>
How the Human Got Its Words

Did we invent speech? No more than we invented walking on

two legs....
Wittgenstein

In order to solve the puzzle of the origin of language, we first need to

establish what originated. The preceding chapters presented a Wittgen-
steinian answer to that question, one [ presuppose in taking up the
remaining issues of when, how, where, and why humans passed into
Janguage. The presupposition has immediate consequences for some of
the issues that arise in this area. For example, there has been debate in
the social sciences about whether the development of language occurred
more or less at one moment in time—the big bang theory—or whether it
was continuous, growing incrementally over a long period. If language
is conceived of as a collection of customs—language-games—then the
big bang theory falls, since it is implausible to think of all our varied and
often complex language-customs coming into Deing at a moment. On
the other hand if language is thought of, with Chomsky, as something
resident in the Drain then, imaginably, a sudden great genetic accident
might have produced it.

When did language begin?

Some turn to the fossil record to establish an answer, perhaps surpris-
ingly, since bones would seem to offer little in the way of evidence.
However, research by Philip Lieberman and others allows us to connect
ancient bones and human speech.* Humans have the ability to produce
very quickly a wide range of speech sounds. The configuration in the
Dody of the organs, bones, and tissue that constitutes the modern vocal
 How the Human Got Its Words

tract makes that uniquely human production of speech sounds possible.

Our vocal tract, however, comes at a heavy price, for the human larynx
makes us susceptible to choking. Why would evolution take that path
unless there was a corresponding advantage? The advantage lies in the
connection to language, which must have given us a selective edge that
more than compensated for the correlative handicap of an increased
chance of choking to death. In short, we evolved the modern vocal tract
in order to be able to speak like humans. When we can find evidence in
the fossil record of the existence of such a vocal tract we may conclude
that the creatures in question possessed speech.
The bodily configuration in question is apparently Doth necessary
and, in the right context, sufficient for the existence of speech, if we
understand by the term “speech” something like what we engage in,
with its high speed and varied sounds. And so it might seem that if we
could date the advent of our species’ vocal tract we would have dated the
origin of language. Lieberman himself rightly rejects that conclusion.
He writes, for example,

[Neanderthals] clearly would have had the ability to communicate

and think using words, since even present-day apes can do so. Their
culture appears to have been quite complex. In short, they undoubtedly
possessed language.... Dut we can see that in one respect, namely
speech, their linguistic ability was not as developed as that of anatom-
ically modern Homo sapiens. The Neanderthals fail to meet that neces-
sary condition.

In this statement, “speech,” as something the Neanderthals and other

hominid species lack, is being used in a special way, to apply only to
what is possible given the modern vocal tract. The possibility is left
open that language itself pre-dates the origin of “speech” in that special
sense of the word. The moral would seem to be that if we are interested
in dating the origin of language, as opposed to the origin of modern
speech, with its many sounds and its speed of transmission, the fossil
record will not settle the issue.
In the above quotation from Lieberman there is a dichotomy between
two stages: (i) primitive communicational abilities such as we find in
chimpanzees, and perhaps Neanderthals, and (ii) full-fledged human
speech, the sounds of which are made possible by our present-day
anatomy. But, as Lieberman would doubtless agree, there is another
possibility to be considered, namely that of a long period of gradual
development linking the two stages. On my understanding, this
60 Becoming Human

development is a matter first and foremost of gradual cultural innov-

ation. The growth of more and more complex language-customs may
have provided pressure for the evolution of physiological changes that
facilitate speech. In this long period of change there is no sharp line
between creatures who have developed speech and those who have not
(a point I discuss below). It might be objected, however, that the gradual,
cultural-innovation view leaves unanswered the question of why in the
Cro-Magnon there was a sudden and tremendous surge of culture. With
that objection in mind I turn to some remarks by Jared Diamond.

OW eles cree (com cera

Diamond addresses the idea that physiology, as given in the archaeolo-
gical record, will allow us to date the start of language. His discussion
focuses on what he calls the “great leap forward.”’ The evidence for this
upsurge in human culture comes originally from Europe. Forty thou-
Sand years ago, the Neanderthals occupied Europe. Then came an abrupt
change: “an anatomically modern people, the Cro-Magnons, appeared
in Europe,” bringing with them a complex culture.*
Diamond lists some of the features of that abrupt rise in culture.
Thin-bladed stone tools appear, as do standardized bone and antler
implements, and compound tools with parts tied or glued together—for
example, ax heads on wooden handles. He also notes the occurrence,
at Cro-Magnon sites, of “needles, awls, mortars and pestles, fishhooks,
net sinkers, and rope,” and of weapons that can kill large animals at
a distance: harpoons, darts, spear throwers, bows and arrows.° Boats
are invented, trade engaged in, and art flourishes, in the form of rock
paintings and sculptures.° The enormity of this cultural explosion can
be appreciated by comparing the life way of the Cro-Magnon people, as
just indicated, with that of the other apes.
Diamond speculates that this sudden upsurge was the result of a
cultural jump that occurred in Africa during the previous some tens
of thousands of years. So perhaps 60,000 years ago, or so, a sudden
and significant cultural advance happened in Africa. This occurred
among anatomically modern H. sapiens, and was gradually exported.
The important point here is that at least the greatest part of the biolo-
gical evolution of humans occurred hundreds of thousands of years
before the cultural explosion, the results of which are found in the
Cro-Magnon people of late stone age Europe. So it seems that the great
leap forward was largely a matter solely of cultural not biological evol-
ution: the cultural modifications arose on the platform of a previously
 How the Human Got Its Words

established biological base. This is not to deny that cultural changes

may have produced evolutionary pressure to select certain physiological
changes that increase the rate and range of speech sounds.
To explain the great leap forward, Diamond appeals to the latter
type of anatomical changes in larynx, tongue, and related muscles that
LieDerman focused on. These innovations, he believes, set the stage for
the development of speech, and it was having speech that made the
other cultural achievements possible.’
The sequence Diamond envisions, then, is this: the evolution of the
modern vocal tract, the consequent development of articulate speech,
and then the great cultural leap forward. But to treat these phenomena as
ordered in that way seems wrong. We can not evolve an enhanced means
of saying things unless we already have things to say. Communication,
the use of words, comes first, and then better sets of words. Fast talking,
implemented through the modern vocal tract, can become a premium
only if talking itself—including slow talking utilizing vocal machinery of
a less accomplished sort than ours—has value. Pressure for the evolution
of the vocal tract must have come from a prior utilization of sounds in
cOMmunication. Or so it Would seem.
I have already touched on another reason why Diamond’s supposed
progression—from modern vocal tract, to speech, to high culture—
should be questioned. Given a Wittgensteinian conception of the nature
of language, it seems more likely that material, social, and language
culture grow apace. An advance in either of the former two gives rise toa
richer context of human interaction, and in that extended cultural space
there is room for the development of new bits of language-customs. The
various resultant language-games, in turn, may help in the preservation
and extension of items of the material or social culture. For example,
trade between two hunting-gathering groups may produce a context in
which words take the place of yes- or no-gestures, or of gestures indic-
ating “more” or “less.” The two groups’ shared possession of those new
language-games might in turn facilitate trade. Perhaps, when the inter-
related collection of social, material, and language-customs became rich
enough, a tipping point occurred, and we entered that steep downward
Slide toward the present—a great movement away from Eden.

Dating the advent of speech: The nature of the problem

“When did speech appear?” is a bad question because there is no
sharp line between speech and non-speech, between language and no
language. Near the low end of the continuum we Nave things like the
62 Becoming Human

warning calls of vervet monkeys, and near the high end, say, debate
about whether such cries have meaning. There is no natural dividing
point; language is a vague concept with unclear boundaries.
Language grows as more language-games are added to the mix, and as
existing ones are enriched in various ways. For instance, the language-
game with the intention-utterance “down!” may come to incorporate
temporal words like “now.” If we imagine various stages in this develop-
ment some may be clearly cases where we would say there is no language
and some where we would say there is. But it may be impossible to find a
point in the process of growth and enrichment where we can say, “Now
we have reached language.” We can decree that this point marks the
appearance of language, but not discover that it does. Similarly we can
decree that a bunch of sand of at least such and such a height marks the
appearance of a heap, but not discover that it does so. This pile in the
sand box is definitely a heap, and that part of the Dox contains no heaps.
But now let us add, particle by particle, to some flat portion of sand.
When shall we say that we now have a heap? The concept of a heap is
vague; we can only stipulate and not discover that what we now have
constitutes a heap. And this is the way it is with the concept language,
when we imagine adding language-games one Dy one, or enriching a
given language-game incrementally.®
When did language originate? It seems plausible that 40,000 years
ago in Europe the Cro-Magnon people had language. They had our
vocal tract, and a rich cultural inheritance within which it is likely that
language was imbedded. But now go back in time: When is the earliest
point at which we can attribute language to our hominid ancestors? If
the scenario is, as I suggested, an incremental growth and elaboration
of language-games, then there can be no discovery of the line between
speech and no-speech. The concept of language is vague, and further-
more it is unlikely that bones, stone tools, evidence of fire, and other
sparse items from the archeological record will present us with a picture
of the life of those ancestors sufficiently detailed for us to judge that at
such and such a point, language—or what we might be willing to call
“language”—first appeared.
We will never know when language originated. But then we shall also
never know who—which group in the line of inheritance—originated
it. The “where” question seems more tractable, since it seems likely that
the Cro-Magnon culture started in Africa and spread from there. But
the Neanderthals in Europe could still have independently developed
something we would be willing to call speech.
 How the Human Got Its Words

Rousseau’s paradox
“Words,” Rousseau wrote in 1775, “seem to be necessary in order to
establish the use of words”;’ in which case, of course, we could not
establish the use of words. Quine says something similar; in response to
the thesis that language is achieved by making conventions, for example
by laying it down that this sound is to stand for that object, he writes:

|[A|jn original founding of language by overt convention is not merely

unhistorical but unthinkable. What is convention when there can be
no thought of convening?”

We need language to establish language, so how could it have started?

Another eighteenth-century thinker, Condillac, points to a way of
dealing with the paradox. G.A. Wells expresses the relevant idea as
follows:

Condillac...stresses that man’s first efforts at communication must

have involved only the use of signs that are self-explanatory (such as
threatening postures or gestures generally, not signs whose meaning
depends on convention...)."

What I make of Condillac’s thesis is this: Given the right context, certain
gestures may be produced spontaneously by one person and immedi-
ately, spontaneously, and appropriately responded to by another. This
just is the way humans—and many other animals—bDehave. For instance,
A might wave to get B’s attention, and then point toward an animal B
has not yet seen; B responds by looking first toward A, in response to the
wave, and then toward the animal, at which point B Degins to stalk it. B
reacts naturally to A’s gestures. No antecedently established conventions
are necessary for this bit of communication to occur. People naturally
notice moving objects; A, spontaneously but intentionally, moves his
hand and thereby gets B’s attention. (That the act is intentional does
not mean that it follows from some conscious thought such as “If I wave
I will get his attention.”) It is natural among humans to look in the
direction someone points to; A points and B looks. Seeing the animal, B
takes up his part in hunting it. It is just a fact about us that we act and
react in the way described. In contrast, we might have been creatures
who paid no heed to our fellows but, clam-like, went our own way. Then
we would not have developed language.
64 Becoming Human

The behavior of A and B in my example can be viewed as natural

in the manner that one deer reacting to the raised tail of another is.
The raised tail constitutes another “self-explanatory gesture.” If we had
to translate it we would say: “Be alert! Possible danger!” But of course
the deer have no such words, and never got together to lay down the
convention “Raise your tail if you spot some danger; De alert if you
see a raised tail.” Another example of Condillac’s claim would be a
chimpanzee presenting its back to another to be groomed.

A just-so story
Communication by gesture does not require a backlog of words or stated
conventions. But there is still the essential question of how words grow
out of gesture; how it is that sounds can come to replace gestures and
do the same communicative jobs.
How could a word replace a gesture? How can we conceive of such a
replacement? We can answer that question without knowing what were
the first human words, and hence without knowing how in fact the first
words replaced their associated gestures. The conceivability question
requires only that we construct some relevant examples. We can imagine
the replacement happening as follows. A band of hunter-gathers has
firmly in place the use of a gesture to indicate wanting. They stretch
an arm toward the thing they want while opening and closing the
reaching hand; the person so addressed may then supply the object—
say an implement out of reach of the “speaker.” This is one step beyond
Condillac’s stage of the “self-explanatory” gesture. The gesture, while
remaining self-explanatory, has become part of the group’s cultural
or societal inheritance. What begins as a natural, spontaneous gesture
becomes imbedded in the culture.
How are we to understand such imbedding? Perhaps it works by imit-
ation. We sometimes unconsciously imitate nuances of the behavior of
those we admire or respect. Thus it seems possible that others in a band
of people might begin to copy the particular way one of the band’s major
figures makes a certain gesture. So the natural gesture of reaching for
something a person wants might be modified Dy someone to form the
hand opening and closing gesture, and this might be copied by others
in the group. That is how a stylized gesture might come to play a role
in the bana’s life.
Now, to carry the story forward, at some point one of these people
might, spontaneously, forego the hand motion and instead make
a wanting sound—a certain high-pitched noise, say—while reaching
 How the Human Got Its Words

toward the desired object. I call it a wanting sound because it may have
been a characteristic noise made by one of the group’s babies, when it
reached for something it could not get but wanted. We can imagine,
invoking the imitation factor, that this sound gets copied and used by
the other band members when they want someone to give them some-
thing. In that context of human life they repeat what one of them has
done; the copied, adopted sound takes over the function of the gesture.
The culturally adopted hand opening and closing gesture is replaced by
a culturally adopted sound. Things happen that way, but we do not have
to suppose that the adoption of the sound occurred on the basis of any
explicit agreement, any such striking of a convention as occurred in the
setting of the signal “One if by land two if by sea.” The advent of this
sound-qua-word presupposes a social context in which it can function.
The presupposition is that of the life way of creatures who live together
and make and respond to requests.
But which thing is the person asking for by making that wanting-
noise? In many cases there will be no ambiguity; the context will make
it clear what is being requested. In other cases the reaching gesture
may still be needed to communicate what 1s desired. The word I have
imagined coming into use still sometimes needs the accompaniment
of a reaching gesture, and in those cases the word, being redundant,
does not replace the original complex gesture; we have not yet dealt
with Rousseau’s paradox. But we are almost there. Imagine that a young
boy wants his elder, taller brother to hand him a spear. The weapon
is stored too high for the youngster to grasp it, and so he makes the
wanting-noise while reaching for it. Suppose a Dowl is stored next to
the spear. It is not clear from the context which item the boy wants,
and his brother gives him a questioning look. In response the younger
makes a truncated throwing gesture, and then the elder hands over the
spear. This sort of interaction occurs many times, and at some point
the younger brother, instead of the truncated throwing gesture, makes
a certain sound, perhaps one like the noise a spear might make when it
Strikes home. This sound gets taken up Dy the brothers, and eventually
by the band; the sound now does the same job as the reaching and
opening and closing gesture except that it is as it were more precise. The
gesture functioned exactly like a word; it indicated the object desired.
The spear-sound, in replacing that gesture, takes over its function. It is
a word—or at least we would count it as such if it occurred among a
people who had a fairly rich backlog of such words. It is in this way that
the human got its words.
66 Becoming Human

Here is another example. The material culture of a group is rich enough

to include treasured items such as especially well-made stone-blade-
tipped spears. In that context we can imagine some use of a sound
meaning the same as the child’s “mine” in our earlier survey of some first
language-uses. A takes a spear crafted by B and previously used by him.
B, confronting A, objects by making a pulling gesture with his hands.
The gesture could become stylized—truncated, for example—and as such
come to common use in the group. And now it is easy to imagine a
sound—a grunt of effort, say—taking the place of the gesture; the sound
becomes a word, and its meaning—its use—is identical to the “mine” of
the child in the diary study. In these cases, language-games—custom-
bound uses of words—have evolved out of proto language-games and
gestures.

The alleged necessity of syntax

It might be objected to such examples that the people in question cannot

be said to possess words, because to do so is to have language, and
a necessary condition on having language is syntax, which the uses
described lack. But how much syntax is supposed to be necessary for
language? Many who might support the objection would do so on the
basis of a conception of language wholly different from the one I have
defended here. A supposition of one such rival view is that something
like the full, rich syntax of languages such as Englisn is necessary for
there to be speech as we know it. This thesis is associated with Chomsky’s
claim that we are all born in possession of a universal grammar and a
full set of concepts.'* Learning speech, on this account, is a matter of
acquiring a knowledge of local] variations on those inborn items.
One of the arguments offered for the existence of that inborn grammar
(and similarly for the inborn meaning-set) is adopted from Plato’s tale
of the slave boy mastering the Pythagorean theorem. From small hints,
the boy discovers the theorem, and this is taken as showing that he must
have already known it, and needed only to have his memory prompted.
He did not know it in this life, but in some earlier incarnation. Similarly
Chomsky argues that the evidence available to the child attempting to
master language is insufficient to generate a knowledge of the complete
set of grammatical rules. Therefore, the child must already know the
rules. The operative picture is this: From a small sample, the child, qua
baby scientist, hypothesizes and tests various versions of what the local
syntactic rules are. It already knows the rules of the inborn universal
grammar and needs only to figure out what form those rules take in
 How the Human Got Its Words

the language it is learning. Given that inborn knowledge, we can under-

stand how the child can learn the grammar; without the assumption of
innateness we would be at a loss to see how from a small sample the
child so quickly learns the whole.
This argument seems to me weak. It presupposes that knowing
grammar is a matter of knowing that, as opposed to knowing how. We
all learn how to speak grammatically, but, it seems plausible to say, only
the educated learn school grammar, let alone the sophisticated Chom-
skian generative grammar rules. If learning grammar is learning how
to frame our utterances properly, we can suppose, instead of inborn
Knowledge that, an inherited ability to learn—on the basis of small
samples—how to speak in conformity with the way others do. There are
parallel cases where humans go from an observation of limited samples
of rule-applications to an ability to apply those rules—or at least to
act in accordance with them—in infinitely many further instances. For
example, it is said that the five-year-old Capablanca learned to play
chess just by observing some games between his father and another
man. In such a case the person who learns the game might not be able
to cite the rules; indeed he might not even possess the ability to use the
word “rule.” Nonetheless we might all agree, after watching him, that
he knows how to play. No one will say we have an inborn knowledge
of the rules of chess. It might be objected that this example is not to
the point, because it is so easy to learn the rules in question. Chess rules
are relatively simple; the rules of grammar complex. But why can't the
learning how in such a simple case be present also in the more complex
one? We may just be creatures who can master rules—whether simple
or complex—on the basis of small samples. And by “master” here I do
not mean acquire the ability to articulate the rules but rather gain the
ability to act in accordance with them, in a way that shows the person
is following them.
If knowing grammar and knowing language are in the first place
knowing how, then it is natural to view our species’ mastery of both as
growing incrementally over time. That the contrary, Chomskian account
of syntax fails as a necessary condition on language can be shown
through counterexamples. We can imagine an isolated community—say
something like the crew and officers of a late-eighteenth-century ship
of the line—with an extremely rich set of language-games, including
commands, requests, intention statements, time-words, numbers, and so
on. Anyone viewing these people would have to say they have language,
all the more so since we could learn their speech and communicate with
them, at least as concerns the matters they deal with daily. Now all we
68 Becoming Human

have to add is that their words can occur in any given order, and have
no inflections. It is indifferent to them whether one says “Bring five
powder kegs” or “Kegs five powder bring” and so on. They keep to no
ordering but understand one another. The only syntactical element the
language has is an assumed division into words: “powder” is one word,
“Dring” another. But the thesis that syntax is necessary for language
understands “syntax” in a much richer way, as noted. If the thesis is
only that some syntax is necessary, then it can be granted. In the case
in question, the thesis comes down only to the claim that the sounds
that count as words must be distinguishable as such.
It might be objected that we need a lot more syntax than that even
in the simple case of the boat language. For we need syntax to differ-
entiate sentences like “Jones, give rum to Smith” from “Smith, give
rum to Jones.” In the boat language, “Jones give rum Smith” would be
ambiguous—who gets the rum? Granted syntax would disambiguate the
statement efficiently, but the boat language could handle the problem
sans syntax. For one thing, context could disambiguate the command:
it may be clear who has or has access to the rum and who it should be
given to. Or we could introduce a single word for Jones as recipient and
a word for Jones as giver; similarly for recipient Smith and giver Smith.
Now we Can again dispense with syntax (except for the minimal amount
that divides sound-strings into word-units) and give our words in any
order, unambiguously. Granted this language would be cumbersome,
Dut the question is only whether it is conceivable.
Perhaps the boat language would become hopelessly complex if we
attempted to do away with all, or nearly all, syntax. But admitting that
is not to grant the thesis that a full-blown Comskian syntax is necessary.
In the early stages of the evolution of language we do not need the
universal syntax Chomsky supposes we now have, as we can see by
looking at the very idea of syntax.
Syntax is an ordering and regimentation of speech, but it must be
a regimentation of something. In the order of logical precedence, use
comes first, and then the regimentation of use that constitutes syntax.
With regard to a language-game of orders, in which One person can be
told to give something to another, we can also imagine that these orders
come to be subject to syntactical rules. At an early stage, context might
make it clear who is being ordered to give rum to whom. A syntactical
regimentation might develop in which the person being ordered to give
is named before the intended recipient is. This ordering would constitute
a small piece of syntax, and even if, in this case, it is taken as necessary
for language, it doesn’t follow that a full-blown syntax is necessary.
 How the Human Got Its Words

Behind the controversy here is, again, the fact that we are dealing
with two entirely different conceptions of language. On the Wittgen-
steinian one, of language as use, it is easy to imagine the incremental
development of speech, including the coming to be of local syntactical
rules governing this or that language-game or set of language-games. Ihe
existence of a full-blown universal grammar is not a necessary condition
for language.

Why did language evolve?

We might begin by asking where the alleged innate Knowledge of
Chomskian syntax came from. Plato had the idea of previous lives to
appeal to: the slave boy had learned the theorem in some earlier life.
What corresponds to that notion in Chomsky’s version? One might
think that he would appeal to natural selection to explain the exist-
ence of grammar-knowledge-producing genes, Dut in fact he is skeptical
about such an account.'* In contrast, the Chomskian linguist Steven
Pinker defends an evolutionary explanation: “the language faculty...
evolved from natural selection.”'* The language faculty, like the faculty
of sight, is housed in our bodies; its evolution is a matter of biology.
This general view of matters yields an answer to the question of why
language came to De. It evolved, and did so as a result of natural selec-
tion, which is to say that its presence lent our ancestors an advantage
in the survival sweepstakes.
As opposed to that biological account I see language as a set of
customs, and the growth and development of language as a matter of
cultural change. The contrast between the two views becomes clear if
we consider the plight of the ancestral humans Pinker depicts. Language
requires a speaker and a hearer, so who will understand the “first
grammar mutant”? Well,

the neighbors could have partly understood what the mutant was
saying even if they lacked the newfangled circuitry, just using overall
intelligence. Though we cannot parse strings like skid crash hospital,we
can figure out what they probably mean.... If a grammar mutant is
making important distinctions that can be decoded by others only
with uncertainty and great mental effort, it could set up a pressure
for them to evolve the matching system that allows those distinctions
to be recovered reliably by an automatic, unconscious parsing process
(ibid.).
70 Becoming Human

How are we to understand this example? The mutant, knowing what

he is talking about, says (to change the example a bit) “Buffalo tracks
gorge.” The mutant knows what he means: A buffalo made these tracks
and is heading toward the gorge. He knows it because a happy genetic
mutation caused him to know the correct way to parse those words.
The unmutated neighbors can, however, use their general intelligence
and, after some pondering, figure out what is being said. But something
is missing here, in fact two things. First, where did those words come
from? We are back in the realm of Rousseau’s paradox: we need words
to understand words. Pinker does not tell us the source of the words.
If they are not in place in the culture, then the unmutated ones will
hear sounds without sense, and no amount of pondering (assuming one
can ponder sans language) will raise sound into meaning. The second
missing element concerns ideas presupposed in the sentence in ques-
tion. How could the unmutated reach an understanding of the words
as parsed unless they possess, or somehow work their way to an under-
standing of, concepts like causation or the indefinite article? (“A buffalo
made these tracks....”) In suggesting how the language faculty might
have come to be, Pinker presupposes the existence of language.
[ have offered an alternative account of the origin of language. Speech
comes to be on the basis of a given form of human life. “Form” here
encompasses both biological and social features. We live in groups, and
protect and educate our children for years and years, bringing them
within the bounds of culture. Within such a group, people are aware
of the actions and reactions of others. We cooperate, and that is not a
bad thing, as Rousseau thought, but something of use to us. In such a
context, natural reactions can be augmented by gestures, and gestures
can be replaced by words. The use of such words requires the background
of a context, a form of life, within which the words can function. For
example, “home” as a statement of intention does its job in a context
where people have some interest in where the speaker is going.
There is nothing new about the idea that speech grows from an
earlier stage of gesture. What is novel about the view I defend here is
its view of language as a collection of patterned, culturally determined
modes of interaction. The individual, distinguishable language-games
are customs. Language is a set of customs in which words play a role.
These word-customs arise among creatures that have at least a rudi-
mentary social life. Chimpanzees provide an example of animals with
a primitive social life. Infants are raised by their mothers over a period
of four or five years, typically, and the weaned but not yet fully mature
earlier offspring travel with the mother, where they learn their way
 How the Human Got Its Words

about, how to avoid danger, what to eat, and so on, and where the
females among them learn by observation how to raise babies. Our
hominid ancestors douDtless had some at least generally similar social
life, but one that may have differed in this respect: In addition to mother,
infant, and other offspring, the primary group may have included
mature males, who contributed food to the group, and helped protect
it. Possibly the males took part in day-to-day intimate contact, play, and
interaction with the child, similar to that observed between male and
infant gorillas.
What else can be projected concerning the life way of our ancestors
during the period when language emerged? That at some point during
this drive toward language, we lived as hunting and gathering groups,
operating out of temporary home bases, and sharing food among group
members. That we used tools, such as sticks or stones employed in food
gathering or as weapons, and that these tools though at first opportun-
istically picked up from the environment and then discarded were later
kept and improved upon.
The difference between our ancestors and the other primates seems
to be not so much that our forbears evolved biologically, but that—
on the basis no doubt of some biological difference—we were able to
begin a still ongoing process of cultural development. Increasing cultural
complexity: increasing complexity of our patterns of interaction. For in
cultural evolution, of course, something like the inheritance of acquired
characteristics holds. What some unsung cultural figure achieves can be
taught to others, or picked up by them, and passed on to subsequent
generations.
It seems eminently reasonable to suppose that the elaboration of
a material culture and the formation and gradual evolution of social
customs went hand in hand. Since language too is a social custom,
it is plausible that its development was part of that process. Indeed,
material, societal and language culture must have developed together,
severally influencing one another. The rootstock out of which all
three grow is the lifeway of a social animal already possessing proto
peered
ee
naturally takes part
proto-social life of
or lifeway
(;iven
72 Becoming Human

takes over the function of the other inside a fixed pattern of interac-
tion. On this view of things, a series of forgotten cultural innovators
made the leaps to higher levels of social complexity. Perhaps, for all
we know, it was a child who first substituted a particular sound for
some accustomed natural gesture, and then perhaps some other person
caught on, and supplied the requested object. And possibly then the
other members of the band took up the practice of using the sound
in place of the corresponding natural gesture, but to achieve the same
end. Again, nothing had to change except that a stylized vocal gesture
replaced a natural one; the bedrock of the biologically based interac-
tion pattern—of one person in effect asking and the other in effect
giving—was already firmly in place. Once such a step had been made,
it would have been less difficult to develop a repertoire of request-
sounds. And these might then have been taught to others, and to the
children of following generations. And as with requests, so with the
other language-games. Even the seemingly sophisticated one of telling
what one is up to-intention-utterance—grows as we have seen from a
preexisting proto language-game enacted between child and adult; and
one can reasonably suppose that such a proto language-game was in
place among the people who first began to give voice to their projects’
et
The merely naming game discussed in the previous chapter appar-
ently lacks a proto form. The reason, perhaps, is that naming developed
after the generation of the first words. Once the practice of using
words for such things as making requests was in place, and once a
number of such word-uses had accumulated in the culture, the game of
naming may have been a naturally occurring adjunct, one that, again,
might possibly have been Degun by a child. But to repeat, naming
does not by itself establish meaning; its usefulness presupposes rather
than leads to such things as making requests, claiming ownership, and
the like.
One way that material culture and societal organization might influ-
ence the development of language-customs can be seen in the example
of the last mentioned language-game. Such a use of words must have
a point, and in the life of wild chimpanzees, where food is possessed
only as long as it takes to eat it, and where tools are normally discarded
after use, there is no or extremely little room for there to be such a
point. But with the development of prized articles of material culture,
and a societal practice that amounts to the honoring of ownership, a
proto language-game of possession can emerge, and there may develop
associated natural gestures, such as seizing back some object. As earlier
 How the Human Got Its Words

discussed, there is now scope for the emergence of a word which,

because it replaces such a gesture, in such a context, makes a claim of
possession.
I return to the question, “Why then did speech originate?” One plaus-
ible answer is that it gave humans a selective advantage. It is easy to
imagine how the mastery of various language-games could have facilit-
ated cooperation among our hunter-gatherer ancestors. Greater cooper-
ation would make it easier to get food, raise children, and provide
protection from predators.
This selective-advantage explanation works for the question of why—
In One way of answering such why-questions—the human vocal tract
evolved. But it does not necessarily explain why language came to be
in the first place. As emphasized, “language” is vague. We will never
know when some human group acquired language-games sufficient in
number to allow us to say they had language. As for the first uses of
sounds to replace gestures, it is not necessary to suppose that such
uses provided a selective advantage. Nature may have been bountiful
enough to allow the presence of those early language-games to have no
selective advantage; a group lacking them might have fared equally well
in the competition for survival. There is one possible way to demarcate
the point at which the language-games become sufficient for us to say
definitely “Now we have language.” We might define it as the point
where the language-games provide a selective advantage. Of course, we
could adopt such a definition; but there is no way to establish that as
a matter of fact the origin of language (the accumulation of language-
games numerous enough to force the judgment, “Yes, that is language”)
coincided with the conveying of a selective advantage. We just do not
have the requisite empirical knowledge.

Universal customs

If language is a set of customs in which words play a role, and if language

develops out of an earlier set of proto-customs, then it seems plaus-
ible to suppose that certain customs are to be found in every human
society. The hypothesis is, in particular, that every extant or historic-
ally known human culture has language-games of greeting, requesting,
responding to requests, refusing, responding to prohibitions, make-
believe, intention-utterance, responding to intention-utterance, and
possession-claiming. Across the vast differences between the various
human cultures, one finds those customs, and others, as a common
factor. Of course whether this claim is true is an empirical question.
74 Becoming Human

Because they both apparently lack a proto form, [ omit merely naming
and counting from my tentative claim of universality.
If the hypothesis holds, it will be for one of two reasons, apparently—
or some combination of the two. If the universal language-customs
were part of the cultural development that gave humans the ability to
dominate the environment, then the fact that those customs occur in
every human group would hardly be surprising; they would be part of
our cultural inheritance from a time before humans spread throughout
the biosphere. If, as is certainly possible, such customs were not neces-
sary to that dominance, then the explanation might take a different
form. We could suppose that what travelled with humans in the great
diaspora that took them to almost every corner of the globe was their
basic animal nature, including a biologically based ability to develop
new customs. The language-customs, we can suppose, then developed
on top of the proto language-games that are our biological, species-based
inheritance. From the same starting point, the earliest additions and
complications constituting the roots of language everywhere had the
Same form.

Why these language-games have been overlooked

While many language acquisition studies do refer to requests, negation,
and claims of possession, they do not see these in the way suggested
here, in terms of proto, gestural, and simple language-games; or if they
do speak of underlying stages of behavior and gesture, in the manner
of Lock, for instance, they do not conceptualize these in the way I do
The element they miss is the language-game—the idea of mini-
customs in which words play a role. Of course, and as |! have earlier
noted, some social science writers do explicitly adopt a language-game
framework for studying speech. But there are different ideas of what a
Janguage-game is. The account of it I adopt is distinguished from those
others in terms of the range of examples considered and discussed in
setting out what a language-game is. Those who see sameness where |
see difference are referred to the discussion in my paper “The Living
Language.” Of course there are also many writers who consider cross
cultural issues that touch on points raised here, for example Wierzbica
and Miihlhdusler.'° Again the difference between their accounts and
mine concerns the conceptual frameworks we presuppose. Perhaps the
closest work to the present one is to be found in the writings of Rom
Harré.’’ To return, the reason the language-games (as thus understood)
have not been focussed upon goes back to Wittgenstein’s reference
 How the Human Got Its Words

to observations that have always been before our eyes (PI, §129). The
language-games have been missed because they are omnipresent. For
example, when Malinowski arrived in the Trobriand Islands to begin his
research, and when he started to take part in the village life, there were
a great many things that were new and strange.!° But what was not new
or strange was the fact that the natives made requests of one another
and complied with them, told one another what they were up to and
expected certain reactions thereto, and so on. Malinowski himself prac-
ticed the very same customs, though he employed different words to do
so. To learn that part of their language all he had to do was learn what
words played the role in their language-games that certain of his words
played in his corresponding and indeed (as far as “depth grammar” goes)
identical language-games. The aspect of the native culture consisting in
those basic language-games was invisible to him, because it was some-
thing he fully shared with them. It had been before his eyes virtually
his whole life long. And what holds in this example holds generally. It
was part of Wittgenstein’s genius to see and appreciate the significance
of these things that have always been in plain view.

The child’s first language learning recapitulates the species’

acquisition of speech
This principle parallels the biological dictum that ontogeny recapitulates
phylogeny. I do not mean to imply by that remark that our evolution
of language developed through the stage found in, say, chimpanzees;
we are one branch and they another of some common root stalk. The
connection to chimpanzees, rather, is that at some stage in our evolution
of customs we must have existed in a culture-poor state to some degree
like that found in wild chimpanzees: lacking any but the rudiments of
a material culture, having simple rather than our present very complex
Dasic social forms, and lacking a developed symbol system. Looking at
chimpanzee behavior is useful not because we grew from that state, but
pDecause we find there both similar and different forms of some of the
proto language-games that stand at the base of our speech.
Viewing language-games as customs, we can speculate that the rough
order in which the initial language-games are learned by a child—by
any present-day child—corresponds—roughly—to the order in which
these customs became fixed in the history of the species. (Again, merely
naming and counting are probably exceptions.) So, for example, since
greeting and requesting are two of the earliest language-games learned,
one can speculate that these were among the first the species developed.
/6 Becoming Human

Again, since intention-utterance is a very early language-game, this may

well have been one of the first our ancestors originated.

The child as hero

Wittgenstein’s view of language gives us a particular vision of the

child’s acquisition of speech. There is something magical-seeming in the
phenomenon of the child’s mastery of it. If my previous speculations
have weight, we can see that mystery in a new light. The child, aided
and abetted by those who raise it, recapitulates a centrally important
part of the cultural history of the species. Maybe a child raised among a
group that uses request-words one day just does expand its own request
repertoire, by using one of those words as a request. Whether that step
comes independently of naming-training is irrelevant. It can come inde-
pendently of such training. The important point is that the child at some
moment does pass spontaneously into language—but on the Dasis of its
mastery of an antecedent pattern of interaction, such as making natural
gestures and thereby being given something. In passing spontaneously
into language in this way, the child follows in the footsteps of that
ur-protagonist who first asked for the object by making a certain sound.
There has been many a cultural hero since, and the child has its
work cut out for it in passing one by one to a mastery of the various
language-games it acquires in learning speech. At each step it makes
a spontaneous move into a new language-custom. An astonishing part
of being human is our ability thus to follow in the footsteps of our
ancestors, and acquire one by one the basic customs that, together with
their subsequent complications and developments, constitute language.

The moral of the story

Our language has grown from a stage of primitive gesture communica-
tion found in many animals, to full-fledged modern speech. As a result,
there is a qualitative difference between our mode of communication
and that of the other animals. This difference of quality can be seen as
arising from a difference in quantity. New language-games appear; old
ones are refined and added to in various ways; speech customs proliferate
and evolve. But in all this we do not supercede our basic animal nature.
SO we can agree with Chomsky that “language is a specific human
ability,”’”? meaning thereby that no other animal has our full-fledged
language. But when we look at the abilities behind that “specific human”
one, we find things we share with other beasts. Other animals have the
proto language-games that underlie the development of speech; others
 How the Human Got Its Words

have gestures that facilitate or key interactions. Others have customs,

however rudimentary. We are unique on this planet, no doubt; none of
those others could understand a New Yorker cartoon or die for an abstrac-
tion like nation. But our rise to that level of sophistication does not
require that we be in some fundamental way above the other animals;
it does not require, for example, an ontological difference between us
and them.
We are just animals, part of the natural world; clever ones that can be
raised to a mastery of a whole complex of human customs—human ways
of interacting including the deployment of words. But animals none the
less. | think many people who take science (or at least hard science) as
the path to truth would agree, with some caveat about the “mental,” the
consideration of which lies before us. The view thus widely accepted has
heen called “naturalism.”
However, that naturalism overlooks one feature of human life. Our
actions could be said to be, or to have the potential to be, what I earlier
called “just doing.” This is a way of moving through the world lauded
by Taoists, Buddhists, and others. According to such views, we are all
potentially able to carry on our daily activities with an empty mind.
An example of such a mode of action is this: you accidentally knock a
cup off the counter and immediately, unthinkingly, your hand swoops
down and catches it. What is missing in such instances of just doing is
the fog of self-consciousness. There is no prior thought “It’s falling, I
must catch it.” [There is no doubt or thought of profit; there is just the
hand swooping down and saving the cup from breaking on the floor.
The Taoist-Buddhist position is that all our acts can be that way. Of
course, many objections force themselves forward here, including the
protest that we need prior thought for many of our actions. It could
also be objected that the very notion of just doing goes beyond the
intelligible. I will return to these points later. My goal here is just to
link the idea of just doing with that of language. If in general, human
actions can be just doings, then, since speaking is a matter of acting,
of engaging in some or other language-game, then speech too can be a
matter of just doing. In subsequent chapters, I shall take up the related
ideas of self and self-consciousness, with the aim of further defending
a conception of human action, including speaking, as just doing. For
the moment, I want just to make the bare claim that an account of
language such as | have presented leaves open the possibility that there
is, Or can De, should we manage to return to Eden, a transcendent glory
in Deing an animal on this earth. On that view of things, our everyday
actions constitute—or can be brought to do so—a Zen-like lifeway where
chopping wood and carrying water are mundane miracles.
eS
Self-Portrait, Ink on Paper

when there is thinking, something must be there which

thinks—that is merely a formulation of our grammatical habit,
which posits a doer for what is done....
Nietzsche

J] have heard it said that film stars dislike sharing the screen with animals;
the latter inhabit their space so fully, with no trace of self-consciousness,
that they can make an actor seem false. Like virtually all humans, actors
manifest, if only subtly, a sense of self. Indeed, it is easy to believe
that awareness of self makes the crucial difference between us and lesser
beasts, and that our species’ attainment of self-consciousness constitutes
the giant step out of Eden. But self-awareness requires a self—the thing
one is aware of. The two seem inseparably linked; self-consciousness
requires self; self is by its nature self-reflective. In this chapter and the
next, I look at the “self” part of that duo. My aim is to establish the
illusory nature of the I. If development of self is one of the crucial
passages out from Eden, it is a step into delusion.

What is the self that it might not exist?

The ubiquitous I stands at the center of our hopes, fears, desires, and
regrets. On the other hand it has been said by many, and Dy powerful
religious traditions such as Buddhism, that the I or self is illusory. On this
point, I side with the Buddhists. But what is this self that it might be said
with any plausibility not to exist? The problem is that the most likely
candidate for the role of the I is that familiar entity, the human, and
it would be absurd to say there are no humans. Thus those who would
put forward a no-self theory have their work cut out for them. The self
 Self-Portrait, Ink on Paper

they seek to circumscribe must have two hard-to-reconcile properties:

virtually everyone must believe in it, and at a gut level, and yet it must
be plausible (at least on reflection!) to say it is not real. The way to a
solution of that puzzle lies in a philosophical anthropology. We must
scrutinize the mini-customs within which we deploy the word “J” and
its relatives. The result will be a portrait of what I call the false self—the
one we all believe in and that does not exist.
How do we, at a basic, pre-theoretical level, conceive of the self? Who
am I? How does one identify oneself? Name, rank, and serial number,
date of birth, gender, address, job, race, nation, looks, family ties. But
contemplating such common ways of presenting oneself to others will
not help much in understanding the underlying, essential nature of
self. We must move things up a notch in the direction of the abstract.
Since obviously everyone thinks, feels, and perceives, since we all make
decisions and act, and were around earlier and hope to be here for
a time, we can say that the self or I is the, or this particular, entity
that does or experiences those things, or that endures; the I is what is
common to the schemas “x thinks,” “x feels,” “x perceives,” “x acts,”
and “x persists through time.” A more controversial feature is that selves
are not identical with their bodies. That assumption shows up in many
places, vividly in the promise of being united with loved ones after
death, and in narratives where a dead person comes back in another
body; or in the idea, shared by John Locke and Hollywood, that people
can switch bodies; or in accounts—some off the cuff, some with the heft
of world religions behind them—of reincarnation or rebirth. While it
may perhaps be true in fact that selves are bodies, apparently the idea
of a self is not wholly captured by the idea of a body, for otherwise
the common assumptions just canvassed would be unintelligible. If “1”
means something like “this body” then the notion of a bodiless I, or
one that switches bodies, contradicts itself.
Finally we should note the self’s role as protagonist. I am he who has
led such and such a life, in such and such places, with such and such
people, with these fears and those hopes—wandering in some existential
landscape, scary, wonderful, and points between. Be we hero or villain,
we are each in any case the center around which wheels the tale.
So far, however, we haven’t got much purchase on the idea of a
self that might with any plausibility be said not to exist. Judith Jarvis
Thompson once told me how she would argue against a no-self view:
she would ask its proponent, “Who are you trying to convince, and who
is it that is doing the convincing?” But while highly plausible, that is too
hasty a refutation. We can better approach the I-that-is-not by noting
80 Becoming Human

that there is a simpler, and seemingly deeper way of characterizing the

self than the one I have already given. It is one presupposed in my
previous remarks. The | is just the assumed referent of our subject uses
of “I” (“Je,” “Ich,” etc.) in speech or thought. That assumption may be
unspoken or not articulated, but when people use the word “I” they
at least tacitly assume they are talking about something or other. In
my case, to wit, me! By “tacitly assume,” here, I mean to act (or think)
as if one believed in the thing in question, but without articulating
or explicitly affirming its existence. An example suggested by the late
Richard Taylor comes to mind. A theorist who writes articles saying
there is no self, on examining a new book in his field, turns first to
the index to see if he is cited. Despite his theory he acts as if there is a
self—an I—about whose reputation he is concerned.

An objection
I have isolated the self or I as the assumed referent of our paradigmatic,
subject-place uses of “I” or corresponding words in other languages. To
get to the self, start with “I” or “Je” or “Ich” or some equivalent word.
But what about instances where self-reference occurs but without the
employment of a first-person singular pronoun? [n that case, of course,
the language-speakers’ assumption of the existence of the self could not
be tied to their use of such a word. And yet we can assume they do
display in their lives a belief in the existence of self. So my account
needs to be broadened to include cases where there is an assumption of
self, but not on the basis of the employment of a word like “TI.”
There are two possibilities to be looked at. In one, we imagine a whole
language without any first-person singular pronoun. In the other we
consider individual instances where self-reference is deemed to occur,
if only implicitly, in the absence of the pronoun. Let us start with the
second option. Japanese is a good place to look for examples, since it is
characteristic of the language that while it has pronouns, it often gets on
without them, including the case of self-reference. Here is an example
from an online encyclopaedia:

[O]|shiete ageta (literally, “teach-handed up”) is commonly used to

mean “{I/we] told [him/her]”.

The sentence contains no pronouns, and yet the speaker is referring to

nimself. Here self-reference happens, rather, in virtue of the context in
which the sentence is uttered. A simpler example is someone’s utterance
 Self-Portrait, Ink on Paper

“Headache!” The context may make it clear that the person is speaking
of himself. Here again, the speaker achieves self-reference without
employing a first-person singular pronoun, with context doing the job
such a pronoun would do. So there are two ways to reach the self we all
Delieve in at a gut level. One starts with words like “I” or “Je,” and so
on. The other starts with sentences that do not contain a first-person
pronoun but that nonetheless, in the context of utterance, show that
the speaker is assuming the existence of the agent we name seff.
To take up the second option we can indeed imagine a whole language
in which self-reference is achieved sans “I” or some equivalent word.
Here the speakers still refer to themselves; it is just that they do so
without using some word like “I.” Since they have no word dedicated
to the job our “I” does what makes it the case that the speakers have a
sense of self? The answer is already signaled by the original statement of
the objection. The actions and reactions of the speakers of that language
will, I take it, and as the objection states, manifest a Delief in self. Here
are a few examples of such reactions: Fear of loss of face, pride over
one’s accomplishments, embarrassment, hope for success or recovery,
and so on, for all the beliefs tied to the self-stories those people relate
or act out. The account is circular, but that defect can be dealt with by
marshaling relevant examples.
What then is the self of common lore? In particular, what is the self in
the case of these hypothesized speakers whose language lacks a first-person
singular pronoun? The self now is the assumed thing they worry about or
take pride in, and so on: the supposed referent of their self-stories.
I started by saying that a person’s seif or / is the thing he assumes he
is speaking of when he says “I” or “Je” or “Ich” and the like in corres-
ponding sentences. To accommodate the case of a language lacking
a first-person singular pronoun I must say in addition that in those
instances selves are the things people assume they are talking about
when they say things like..., in contexts like.... Here the first blank is
to be filled in by a string of examples like those indicated above, and
the second blank by reference to corresponding contexts that show the
person assumes he is speaking of himself. The I in such cases is the
assumed thing referred to in those words spoken in those contexts.
The self we believe in is the assumed referent of words like “I” or
the assumed agent whose existence is postulated in uses-in-context like
“Headache,” or in other linguistic exchanges that display no pronoun
“I” or its equivalent but that nonetheless carry the assumption of self,
such as sentences manifesting pride or fear, and so on. That second way
of reaching the self must be acknowledged, but for the sake of simplicity
82 Becoming Human

my subsequent discussion will focus on the first type of example, where

some I-denoting word occurs. The necessary accommodation to that
second type of I-reference will be left unspoken.

To return; another objection

Just because we naturally, intuitively, unreflectively think of the self as
referent it does not follow that there is indeed any real referent. Nor
does it follow that each person’s various uses all have referents of the
same type. Rather I want to build on the notion of self qua referent of
“I” Dy establishing that the word has three distinct uses. I call them I as
person, I as grammatical fiction, and IJ as narrative self. Three distinct
uses would seem to indicate three distinct referents, or types thereof.
The crucial point is that we all at least implicitly equate, or treat as one,
the members of the series I = person = grammatical fiction = narrative
self. This anomalous creature [ call the false self. It is this entity that
no-self theorists can intelligibly and indeed quite plausibly deny. My
aim in the remainder of this chapter is to elucidate the first two ideas
in the above equation: person and grammatical fiction. The next chapter
will consider the third component, the narrative self.
some may object to my focusing throughout on our common,
everyday notion of self. We should turn rather to science, allowing it
to define its terms in whatever ways will promote our understanding.
Indeed there are many theoreticians of self, and many scientific—
well, social-scientific—conceptions of it. My reason for targeting our
common, everyday notion of J, rather than some theoretical account of
it, is that the entity of immediate, existential concern to us is the I as we
understand it in our day-to-day reflections. We want the crude, street-
corner, Ccommon-garden conception of I; the one we deploy in everyday
life. That’s the one we fret about. If memory serves, it was Karl Jaspers
who said that philosophers build mansions but live in shacks alongside
them. In our case this would be to propound some theoretical concep-
tion of the self, but operate in daily life with the ordinary, common
one. For instance, to understand the human condition it is necessary to
focus on that ordinary I the death of which can so occupy the mind.
To this it might be objected that the word “I” in the sentence “T fear
death” picks out an object, and it is the theoreticians’ job to describe
that object. The theoretician, not the ordinary person, will tell us the
true nature of self. Similarly the word “brain” picks out an object and it
is up to the biologist, not the untutored common man, to describe the
nature of the Drain. Except perhaps as sociologists or anthropologists we
should not be interested in some everyday, pre-scientific, or folk account
 Self-Portrait, Ink on Paper

of what the brain is. But the two cases, self and brain, are not parallel.
The essential difference is that while the word “brain” has a referent,
does pick out an object in the world susceptible to scientific scrutiny,
the word “I” does not in fact work that way, at least not in some central
instances, such as “I feel pain,” or “I think...”. The presupposition of
the objection is false, as I argue below. “I” does not always pick out
an object. However, the matter is complex, for while in fact we do not
use the word “I” to refer, in present-tense sentences like “I fear...” we
nonetheless are under the illusion that the word does refer. We think
that in virtue of the meaning of “I” we point to some entity that does
the feeling. But we are mistaken.

Intuition speaks
To return, our picture of the I is both simple and universally held, or
virtually so. It is hardly surprising but true: I am the entity I talk or
think about when | talk or think about myself. When I say, for example,
that I feel happy, the I 1s that thing “I” refers to. The same for you,
or anyone, except of course that in each case a different speaker and
hence a different I occupies center stage. These remarks may appear
unhelpful, since we have not established the nature of those I’s. To
do so would be another step. The crucial prior movement is to assume
that when, for example, I use “I” in the subject place (or “Ich” or “Je,”
etc.) lam speaking about something. We make that assumption without
thinking about the matter, automatically, unconsciously. The word “I”
and its fellows, “me,” “myself,” and so on, and cognate words in other
languages, are, aS We may Say in the light of that assumption, referring
expressions. They are singular referring expressions since, like proper
names or words like “she” or “you,” and unlike words such as “cow” or
“sugar,” they point to some one particular thing. In my case, to me! The
idea is fundamental. Every one of my uses of “I” reinforces the notion
that I exist, since to employ the word is to talk about—to refer to—that
existing something, or so we Delieve. The Delief is neither the result
of refection nor a postulate or theorem of some theory, whether crude
or sophisticated, basic or elaborate. It is a simple, unspoken general
assumption. But it is mistaken.

Grammatical fiction
Once more: I or self is, on our common understanding, that thing we
speak of when we Say or think “I...” (ich, Je, etc.). This assumes that
“I” is a referring expression, that our or I-thoughts are about
84 Becoming Human

something or other, and that all of a given person’s uses of “I” refer to
the same thing. At a theoretical level, we might or might not agree with
those suppositions, but the important point is that the assumption of
a common referent is made unthinkingly at the pre-theoretical level. It
is an unconscious assumption we cannot simply stop making, for it is
deeply ensconced in our way of living. But in fact there are three distinct
uses of I, one of which refers to a person, one to a fiction-like entity,
and one that does not refer at all. In those cases where “I” does not refer
the I or self is a grammatical fiction.
The treatment of I as a grammatical fiction comes from Wittgenstein.*
A grammatical fiction is a supposed entity we are led to postulate as a
result of badly misinterpreting the rules governing the way we talk. For
instance we might assume that the word “intention” in “My intention
is to go to the store,” is a referring word that picks out an object. Since
that object is not a thing in space and time it must be in the mind, and
thus we are led to the grammatical fiction of the intention qua mental
object. It is not a straightforward mistake to think of intentions in that
way. To take an example from Wittgenstein, it would be a mistake to
expose one’s queen to a bishop, but it is no mere mistake to promote a
pawn to a king.* It is something worse; it violates the rules of the game
we are playing. Similarly the idea of an intention qua mental thing
violates the way we actually talk of intentions.
And similarly for selves. Here things are more complicated, however.
We must distinguish two uses of “I,” which Wittgenstein calls the use
as subject and the use as object.’ In the latter cases “I” does refer; for
example if I say “I have a broken arm.” Here the possibility of a mistake
in reference is Duilt into the language-game. For instance in the confu-
sion of an automobile accident someone might say “I have a broken
arm,” and be mistaken, not because the arm he sees is unbroken, but
because it is not his arm. No such reference mistakes are possible with
regard to the subject I, as in “I am in pain” or “I think it will rain.”*
The point Wittgenstein wishes to establish is that subject uses of “I”
like “I am in pain”—that is, uses of “I” in present-tense psychological
utterances—typically do not refer. But we unthinkingly assume they do
when we contemplate these matters. The result is the | qua grammatical
fiction.

Descartes versus Lichtenberg

The nature and importance of the presupposition of “I” as a referring
expression can De seen more clearly if we examine its role in Descartes’
 Self-Portrait, Ink on Paper

famous proof of his own existence—the “Cogito” argument. There is

one thing I cannot doubt, because to doubt is to think, and “Cogito ergo
sum”: | think therefore I am. If I doubt, I think; if I think, I am. This
argument only works if one takes it for granted that the “I” in “I think”
(the suffix “o” in “Cogito”) refers. Descartes simply assumed that it does;
and naturally enough, since we all unthinkingly make that assumption
day in and day out. Descartes sought certainty, but is it certain that “I”
is a referring expression?
That we are dealing with what is a dubious assumption begins to
emerge when we contemplate a famous remark the eighteenth-century
aphorist Lichtenberg made about the Cogito:

We should say, ‘It thinks,’ just as we say, ‘It thunders...

Putting the point in terms of English words rather than Descartes’

Latin or (in the original) Lichtenberg’s German, the criticism holds that
Descartes’ Cogito argument rests on a misunderstanding of the nature
of the word “I.” Descartes treats the word as if it functioned like such
expressions as “Julius Caesar” or “you”; that is, as if its job were to pick
out or point to a referent. Whereas according to Lichtenberg it functions
like the “It” of “It thunders,” or “It is snowing.” Those its, unlike that
of “It flew in through the window” or “It weighs forty pounds,” do not
pick out anything. We have, Lichtenberg says, a merely “practical need”
to employ the word “it” in “It thunders’—or in “It is snowing.” We
need a word in the subject place; that we do is a demand of grammar.
“I” fills the gap; it is a mere empty placeholder.
The soundness of the Cogito turns on whether or not “I” is a referring
expression. Who is right—Descartes or Lichtenberg? Our strong inclina-
tion is to agree with Descartes: it seems given that “I” or corresponding
words in other languages refer. But there are those, including Nietzsche
and Wittgenstein, who would take Lichtenberg’s side. How are we to
settle this? If we go by “intuition’—by what we feel is certainly the
truth—then Descartes wins hands down. But if we examine how the
piece of language in question actually works we shall find ourselves
coming out on the side of Lichtenberg.

Implications
First, let us get clearer on what is at stake. What are the consequences if
“T” is in fact not a referring expression? It doesn’t then become false that
the self exists. It’s not as if | were to say, “There’s someone in the house”
86 Becoming Human

and then discover that it was only a cat making the noise. The relevant
model, rather, can be found in Homer, and more strikingly in Lewis
Carroll. In Through the Looking-Glass the Messenger, asked “Who did you
pass on the road?” answers “Nobody.” The King replies, “So of course
Nobody walks slower than you.” The Messenger rightly takes this as an
insult. He is speaking standard English, whereas the King has mistaken
“nobody” for a proper name and is thus speaking nonsense. Similarly
Ulysses lies when he tells the Cyclops, “‘Nobody’ is my name” and as
a result the Cyclops, under an illusion about the nature of the word
“nobody,” speaks nonsense when he calls out to his fellow monsters
that nobody is in the cave with him. In a like way someone totally at
sea might wonder, since the average man has 3.2 children, what terrible
creature would count as two-tenths of a child. In Lewis Carroll the
nonsense arises from taking something that is not a singular referring
expression to be one; it arises, that is, from radically misunderstanding
the grammar of the expressions one uses.
So Descartes’—and our—mistake, if it is one, would be worse than
merely holding to a false belief; the “belief” would be nonsensical.
Descartes’ subsequent worries about the nature of the entity that thinks
would correspond to worries about the exact nature of the it that does
the thundering. Our strong, unthinking urge to assume that “I” refers
would produce not falsehood Dut a hidden unintelligibility.

Referring uses of “I”

Another branch of our common employment of “I” comes to light when
we consider those uses that do refer, such as “I weigh 160 pounds.” What
do they refer to? The answer is: a person, one of us, creatures like those
we stand behind in bus queues. Aboriginal tribes in North America used
a term to refer to themselves that is translated as “the people.” Theirs is
a more restricted use than our “person” but the reference class is much
the same as regards the character of its members. How do we tell that
some entity is a person? By how they look and behave; that is, they
look roughly like us, and act like us. Our criterion for being a person
nas reference to looks and actions in a context—the normal context
of human life. Someone might suggest that the referent of “I”, when
the term refers, is an organism of a certain species, but this scientific
grasp of the I does not quite capture our ordinary notion of a person.
That notion has been with us, centuries before the development of the
vocabulary of science.
A further part of understanding the notion in question concerns the
concept same person. How do we establish whether this person is the
 Ndi Lemans
same as that one—for example, whether the person we saw yesterday
at the mall is the same as the person we are now looking at? Since
judgments about personal identity over time are for the most part
mundane—readily made and uncontroversial—the criteria of identity
too must be mundane. How do we establish that this person is the one
that I was introduced to yesterday? Answer: I recognize him. Or, I recog-
nize him when I go closer. It may not always be that easy. I meet a
friend I have not seen in 30 years; his looks have changed, he has put on
weight and aged, but he may be recognizable despite the changes, and
a few moments’ conversation may make it beyond doubt that it is he.
There are more difficult cases. Is this person the one who played such
and such a terrible role in the Holocaust? He might know, in virtue of
remembering his acts. We may not De able to tell for sure, but we know
the kind of evidence that would establish the identity.
There are two distinct features relevant to questions of personal iden-
tity over time: what we might call continuity of consciousness, where
one moment of awareness passes into the next, with the gaps filled
by memory; and spatio-temporal continuity—establishing the path of
the person through space and time. The puzzle cases philosophers
imagine and debate, where there are breaks in bodily continuity, or a
split between bodily identity and continuity of consciousness, are not
relevant to discovering criteria of personal identity. There is nothing to
discover about these cases, for our concept “same person” does not come
equipped with riders to determine what to say in the puzzle cases. Our
language, here, works perfectly well in the normal cases, and that is good
enough. That is, “person” is governed by already-in-place, mundane
criteria of identity.
I do not claim that no uses of “I” refer, but only that a major subset
of them do not. These non-referring uses are restricted to present-tense
psychological utterances, such as “I think...,” “l] am happy...,” “I
intend (to do so and so)...,” and so on. When [ say what I felt yesterday
or will feel tomorrow, or when I speak of my body, then I do refer. It is
only when my utterances concern my present experience, as we might
say, that my “I” does not refer, and these cases are in the minority. So
the uses of “I” break in two parts; in one, “I” refers, in the other it does
not.

Why the object uses refer

What justifies saying that those uses do indeed refer? Why say, for
instance, that the “I” in “I was angry at her yesterday” refers, as opposed
to the “I” in “I am angry,” which does not? Because of all the people
88 Becoming Human

who might have been angry then I pick out one, and say it was me. I am
that person; it is land not someone else I am talking about. Who am I,
in this context? The one I picked out looks a certain way, has a certain
history, is related to such and such people, and so on. That is the person
I refer to as having been angry. Suppose someone had videotaped the
episode in which I thought I had been angry. I could view the tape and
discover that in fact I had misremembered—I see by my demeanor that
I wasn’t angry at all in the situation in question. I can I see that, because
I know what I look like and / see that the person who looks like that in
fact did not Decome angry during the incident. My past-tense claim is
governed by the criterion “ ‘I’ refers to the person who looks thus and
so (etc.).” Here I might deploy the same criterion as another in testing
the truth of the claim. That criterion would involve a certain person’s
behavior, and in speaking of my past anger I use the word “I” to refer
to that person.
Something like the videotape scenario will occur only rarely. How
more commonly could I decide the truth of past-tense I-statements? I
might appeal to the testimony of other people, to physical evidence,
or to my memory. But in all these cases there will be some way of
determining who one is speaking of. The crucial point is that the identity
of the one who says “I” in these cases concerns a person, a space-time
creature, a particular biological organism. It is when “I” focuses a claim
on such a particular that we say it refers.
Some present-tense uses of “I” also refer, as in the outre example
already mentioned, where a person lying in a tangle of Dodies after an
automobile accident sees an arm he wrongly takes to be his and says “T
have a broken arm.” He is right that the arm is Droken, Dut wrong about
whose arm it 1s; he has mistaken someone else’s arm for his own. Such
identity-mistakes, as we might call them, cannot occur in the other class
of I-uses. If I say, “I am in pain,” I cannot be mistaken about who is in
pain. I don’t pick out some subject and attribute being in pain to it. But
Jet us look more closely.

“IT am in pain.”
The central point to be established is that we do not always use the word
“I” to refer or to speak of a person one has in mind. In many cases “I”
is a Singular referring expression Dut in some crucial instances it is not.
As an example of a non-referring use, consider the utterance “I am in
pain.” This is an instance of a first-person, present-tense psychological
utterance; so by my lights, “I” here should not refer. The utterance has
 IIMS Lama rete

two parts, one seemingly referring to the subject who has the pain, the
other to the pain. The first part is what is in question here, but it will
be helpful to begin by looking briefly at the second part. What is it to
refer to a sensation like pain? There are two answers, a mentalist and
a Wittgensteinian one. On the former, pain is a mental something or
other; we learn to associate the word “pain” with that type of mental
object. How do we do that? Perhaps we see that when other people are
groaning or wincing, and so on, after having been injured, they speak of
being in pain. When we experience pain in similar circumstances, and
with similar behavior On our part, we hypothesize that “pain” stands for
what we are then experiencing. The next time I have such an experience
I shall call it “pain”; when I see others acting in those paradigmatic ways,
in similar contexts, I shall say they are in pain and hence experiencing
what I do when | am in pain.
Wittgenstein has a quite different view of how we come to refer to
Our sensations. He writes,

How do words refer to sensations’... Here is one possibility: words

are connected with the primitive, the natural, expressions of the
sensation and used in their place. A child has hurt himself and he
cries; and then adults talk to him and teach him exclamations and,
later, sentences. They teach the child new pain-behavior (PI, §244).

At a pre-linguistic level of behavior, the child reacts naturally or instinct-

ively to pain, perhaps by crying out. At an intermediate stage we might
find stylized behavior, in the form of a modified or deliberately drawn-
out crying sound—an intentionally prolonged “Ohh,” for example,
whereby the child calls the adult’s attention to some hurt. Going on
to the next stage, Wittgenstein’s suggestion is that a child learns the
use of an exclamation like “Ouch!” by being taught, or by learning
through observation, to substitute that sound for its crying, where the
latter is, again, a natural, untaught expression of pain. Subsequently,
moved by the precept and example of older children or adults, it learns
to say things like “That hurts” as a further, socially accredited substi-
tute for the natural reaction. The child learns a new way of manifesting
its pain. It learns to do so by making certain sounds that count in its
culture as pain reports. These sounds are a culturally sanctioned, socially
enforced modification of its earlier pre-verbal, untutored, natural pain-
expressions. The learned words serve the same function as the naturally
occurring groans and other expressions—for example to elicit sympathy
oy etsy ey
90 Becoming Human

In contrast, a mentalist view of pain-talk has the child scanning its

experiences at a moment, recognizing one of them as being of a kind
earlier associated with the word “pain”, and hence saying—reporting—
“pain!”
On the Wittgensteinian account, then, we have two items: pain and
its manifestation. The latter can occur either as a natural, untutored
expression of pain, such as a groan, or as a culturally modified expression
of pain, such as “Ouch!” or “That hurts.” Whereas on the mentalist view
three items occur: the sensation of pain, a recognition of the sensation,
and its description. The crucial difference here is between the mentalist’s
“description” and Wittgenstein’s competing notion of a manifestation
OXY AST

Why some uses of “I” do not refer

For the present I shall assume the correctness of Wittgenstein’s account,
as Outlined above, of how we learn to refer to sensations; I shall take
it that the “possibility” put forward in PI §244 in fact obtains. Given
that assumption, what should be said about that crucial extension of
pain-talk, when the child learns to put the word “I” into its sentences?
For instance, how does the child learn to say, “Iam in pain”? If we view
the utterance as a substitute for “Ouch!” then all the child learns is to
employ a more complex set of sounds. It already knows how to use the
word (or sound) “Ouch”; all it needs to learn in addition is to follow
the lead of the grown-ups and replace “ouch” with expressions like “It
hurts.” Later, such utterances can be replaced with more grown-up ones
such as “I am in pain.”
The main point is that in learning to use “I” in such cases the child
does not have to learn to identify or pick out anyone or anything to
whom or to which he attributes the property of being in pain; similarly
he makes no such attribution when he groans. In contrast, the utterance
“Jones is in pain” or even “He is in pain” does require that the speaker
has somehow fixed on the one he or she wishes to refer to. Thus if I
say, on the basis of observation, that Jones is in pain, then I will have
picked out someone I Know, Jones, and said of him that he is in pain.
In another case, if I say “He is in pain” then again I have focused on
one person from among other possible ones and attributed to that one
the property of being in pain. What is it to focus on someone, in such
a case? It is to look at him, for example. Or if we have been speaking of
Jones, I might say “He is in pain,” where the pronoun would refer back
to the person we were speaking of.
 Self-Portrait, Ink on Paper

The referring uses such as “Jones” or “he” occurring in expressions

like “He is in pain,” “Jones is sad,” and so on, can be said to involve two
stages. The first stage is to pick out who one wishes to speak of, and the
second is to say something about the entity isolated in the first stage.
Whereas in “I am in pain” and similar first-person uses, there is no first
Stage, just as there is not in the case of someone groaning in pain, or
crying in sadness.
In these referring cases, but not in the first-person, present-tense
ones, a criterion of identity will be in play. This is not the criterion of
identity across time discussed earlier, but rather a criterion for picking
out who—among the many possible candidates—is being talked about,
when someone says, for instance, “He is in pain.” I shall speak here of
a “who-criterion.” A who-criterion determines or fixes who it is lam
taking about. Thus in a simple case, if I say “Jones is in pain,” Jones will
be understood by me and those to whom I speak to be a certain person
we know—the one who looks thus and so, has certain connections with
us, and so on. The who-criterion governing “Jones” is that I am talking
about the one with those properties. Again, if I say “He is in pain,”
nodding toward one of the people in the room, my “He” together with
my nod, picks out who it is | am talking about. The who-criterion that
isolates one person from among many as the subject of the attribution
“is in pain” is given by the use of the word “He” together with a move-
ment of my head: the one spoken of as “he,” and the one at whom
I nodded, is in pain. The presence of such a criterion is necessary for
reference, Dut in “I am in pain” and similar instances no criterion is in
play. Here some remarks of Wittgenstein’s are relevant.

What does it mean to know who is in pain? It means, for example,

to know which man in this room is in pain: for instance, that it is
the one who is sitting over there, or the one who is standing in that
corner, the tall one over there with the fair hair, and so on.—what
am I getting at? At the fact that there is a great variety of criteria for
personal ‘identity’ (PI, §404).

What is Wittgenstein speaking of in that last sentence? What is a

criterion of personal identity, as he is using the phrase here? It is a
characteristic, or set of characteristics, such that if someone displays
them then he is the person IJ am talking about when I speak, say, of
someone being in pain. So “being the one standing in the corner” could
be a criterion of personal identity—a who-criterion in my terminology.
[ identify the one I am speaking or thinking of by means of the property
92 Becoming Human

“being the one standing in the corner.” Whoever fills the bill, whoever
is the one in the corner, that is the one to whom |] attribute being in
pain. Obviously, as W. notes, there are many different such criteria that
might be assumed by a person who speaks of someone in the room
being in pain.
Now let us return to the referring cases I discussed earlier: “I was
angry” and “I have a broken arm.” What who-criterion governs asser-
tions like those? Who was [ talking about? One answer is: About myself,
J. Canfield. If this person who has the name “J. Canfield” was angry
yesterday my claim is true. Who am | speaking of when I say, in the car
wreck example, “I have a broken arm?” I might have gotten it wrong;
the arm I see might indeed be broken but it might not be my arm. What
criterion of identity is operative here? If the body I see when I look
directly in a mirror has a broken arm then I spoke truly. Or, to take a
different criterion, if the body the integrity of which I can determine
by touch and by undertaking certain actions such as trying to move
the arm I see to be broken—if that body has a broken arm, then what
I said was correct. In the case of “] am in pain” no error of reference is
possible; I can’t get it wrong about who is in pain. The reason is that
here “I” is not governed by a who-criterion.
After making the remarks examined above from PI §404, Wittgenstein
goes on to ask,

Now which of them [which criterion of personal identity] determines

my saying that ‘I’ am in pain? None

Is this correct? Is “I am in pain” governed by no who-criterion, unlike

such instances as “The tall fair haired man over there is in pain” or
“J. Canfield is in pain” or “He is in pain,” and so on?
If we assume that “I am in pain” is learned as a replacement for
something like “Ouch” then in saying “I am in pain” I do not deploy
any who-criterion. Whereas in saying “He is in pain” I do. “I am in
pain,” like “ouch,” is a linguistic manifestation, or Ausserung, of pain
and there is no question for me of which person I mean to speak of.
Wittgenstein’s position assumes a certain difference between speaker
and hearer, between one who manifests pain, by groaning, for example,
and one who responds to the groan. The person in pain just groans;
doing so is as natural as shivering in cold. The person who responds
must become aware of who it is that is groaning. The response may be
equally natural but it presupposes something absent in the behavior of
 Self-Portrait, Ink on Paper

the one in pain. The responder must first determine who groaned. The
one groaning does not determine who groans.
This difference carries over to the case where groaning has been
replaced by custom-governed words or sentences. The one who responds
needs to determine who said “Ouch” or “I am in pain.” The speaker
on the other hand just says the word or sentence, without any need to
determine anything. The speaker in such cases does not pick out one
among a number of possible referents and use language—in particular
the word “I”—to denote that one. When we say “I am in pain” or “I am
sad,” and so on, we almost certainly will think or assume that we are
referring to some particular Deing; Dut we are not. Something essential
to denoting is missing, namely a picking out of one thing from among
many, and a reference to it.

Some objections
But couldn’t the speaker determine who is in pain in the way that the
one who responds does? It is announced authoritatively that someone
in this room is in pain. I observe myself (perhaps in a mirror) groaning
and on that basis say that Iam the one who is in pain. But the scenario
described violates the way people speak of their being in pain. In our
Own case we do not determine who is in pain by oDservation. Certainly
not by outer observation—looking or listening, for instance. We do
not stand outside ourselves and pick out the one we want to Say is in
pain. Nor do we select the one we want to Say is in pain by any inner
“observation” or introspection. Our language-game of I-talk does not
work that way.
It might be argued that when I[ say “I am in pain,” I surely draw the
attention of others to myself, and therefore refer to myself. Certainly I
may speak in order to draw attention to myself—if I want a painkiller,
for instance. It does not follow that I refer to myself. Similarly someone
caught in an undertow might call out “Help!” in order to call attention
to himself, but it does not follow that he is referring to himself. If
someone sees another in trouble, he might point and say “He needs
help.” In this second case the speaker does pick out one entity from
among many. But in the first-person case there is no picking out; there
is no settling of who it is that needs help. The cry “Help!” just gushes
forth, as it were. The speaker makes no reference to some particular
individual. “Calling attention to” and “referring to” are two distinct
and independent concepts. So while one who says “I am in pain” may
call attention to himself, he does not refer, in this sense: He does not
94 Becoming Human

determine who it is that is in pain, and then employ the sentence “I am

in pain” in order to call attention to the one he has determined to be
in pain. He does not use “I” to pick out an individual. But here it might
be argued that since he knows it is he and not someone else who is in
pain, he does not need to determine that it is he who is in pain. This
reply raises questions about the use of “know”—one’s I have touched on
earlier. If it makes sense to speak of knowing it is I who am in pain and
not someone else, then it makes sense for me to be in doubt whether
it is [and not someone else in pain. The possibility of knowing entails
the possibility of doubt, but you cannot be in doubt about whether it is
you or someone else who is in pain.
Another objection might be that while the one who says “I” may
not utilize a criterion to pick out an individual, nevertheless one will
be in play. A criterion can be in play in one of two ways. The first
is that the person actually consults the criterion—weighs the way the
world is by employing the criterion; the second is that the criterion is
presupposed, in that the claim may be adjudicated by the application
of the criterion, even if the claim was not made Dy consulting it. In an
example of the first type, someone consults a set of paint samples in
order to find out what color the wall is. Finding the sample that matches
the color of the wall he learns the wall has been painted robin-egg blue.
On the other alternative someone judges that the color is robin-egg
blue, and the criterion used to decide whether he was right is given by
the paint-chart. Applying this distinction to the case of “I am in pain,”
the idea would be that while I did not employ any criterion in picking
out who is in pain, I might have done so. Analogously, while I do not
apply a criterion when I guess that the color is robin-egg blue, I might
have done so. There is a criterion in the background of my judgment
in the color case; might not there be one in the background when I
say I am in pain? That there might be is made plausible by the fact
that the hearer can apply a criterion of identity in determining whether
what the speaker said is true. But here we run up against a difficulty
encountered earlier. For the criterion of identity that the other person
employs is not one the speaker can employ to check on the truth of
what he says. That is, he cannot say something like, “] see that I am
the one behaving in way indicative of being in pain; so it is I who am
in pain.” So there is no outer or Dehavioral criterion the speaker can
use to determine who is in pain. But couldn’t there be an inner one?
Couldn’t someone determine the reference of I not by means of his own
behavior, but inwardly, by direct acquaintance with the I? The trouble
with this possibility is that, as Hume pointed out, there is no such thing
 Self-Portrait, Ink on Paper

as a direct acquaintance with the I. (This point is discussed further in

Site

Exactly analogous considerations as those I have presented hold for all

the other first-person, present-tense psychological assertions, such as “I
feel happy.” Here, as in the case of “I am in pain,” I do not determine
who feels the emotion. The consequence of these observations for the
issue of the self has already been indicated. The self of popular thought—
the | that is the center of our concerns—is, in part at least, exactly that
object referred to when we say “I”: I feel happy, I am afraid, J am in
pain, and so on. What is the I? It is that thing I pick out and about
which I say that it experiences, feels, thinks, and so on. But now it
turns out that in these cases I do not pick anything out. Contrary to my
perhaps unspoken conviction, I do not in fact refer to anything. The
“I” in these cases has no referential or picking-out function. If we were
to restrict ourselves to the uses of “I” in question, then it would follow
that the “I” is a grammatical fiction. That is, surface grammar—the fact
that “I” occurs in the same place in the sentence as referring words like
“Jones” or “she” and seems to do the same job—leads us to posit an
J that does the feeling of pain or the thinking. But an examination of
how the language actually works in these instances reveals that there
is no such entity. In contrast, creatures like the Yeti or the Loch Ness
Monster are not grammatical fictions but simply non-existent things.
When we speak of those fictions we can say at least roughly what it is
that does not exist—a large unknown lake dweller, say. But as for the
“1” of “I feel sad,” and so on, to believe in it is to have not a genuine
idea but only what Wittgenstein calls a “picture” of the object of belief.
Jt is just an empirical mistake to believe in the Loch Ness Monster; it is
a strange kind of fantasy to believe in the “J” of “I think... ,”
What, in summary, is the nature of the singular entity referred to by
the word “I” in judgments like “I am in pain”? Answer: since those uses
of “I” do not refer, the question is nonsensical. One might as well ask
after the nature of Nobody. But again, some uses of “I” are referring
ones. Thus our notion of the I is a mixture of fantasy and fact. There is
an I that went to the movies yesterday and, I believe, it is one and the
Same entity as the I that now thinks about the movie. But this is like
treating as one and the same the “It” of “It is snowing,” and, say, the
cloud I speak of when I say, “It is dark and threatening.”
96 Becoming Human

The two components in question are the I qua person, and qua gram-
matical fiction. But before we can consider the question of the origin of
self there is a third component we must take account of: the narrative
self. It has often been said that our concern with self dominates our
lives. How and why does that happen? I believe the chief part of the
answer lies with the narrative self.
Wi
The Further Adventures of
Nobody

God creates the animals; man creates himself.

Lichtenberg

We are attempting to map the stage in our passage out of Eden that
consists in the development or discovery of self. To that end we must
first establish what the self is, and we do that by looking at how we
employ the word “I.” From observation, we learn that the thing we
assume we speak of when we say or think “I” is a strange conglomerate.
It is in part a person—a living biological entity of a certain genus and
species—and in part a grammatical fiction. It should be emphasized that
it is the J, and not the person, that is in part fictional; people—the social
animals we see about us—are, in contrast, as real as it gets.
The fictional component in human life, however, far exceeds the
portion supplied by the false picture of “I” as name or singular denoting
word. There is a third ingredient that goes into our working idea of self:
the I is, in part, a fiction in the sense, or something like the sense, in
which a character in a novel is a fiction. I call this assumed being the
narrative self.’ Of course, no genuine living-in-the-world entity could
be part real and part fictional. But then the I is not real. To assume the
opposite is the error definitive of humankind.
The two fictional elements in my characterization of the I differ in
that a grammaticail fiction has no more status as a thing—some entity
we can speak of and describe—than does the “It” of “It is snowing,”
whereas the narrative self is thing-like. In that respect, it resembles the
fictional people and objects we meet in novels, plays, fables, and so
on. We can speak of them, describe them, and wonder about them.
We can Say, for example, that the Raskolnikov of Crime and Punishment
was desperate or that he lived in a hovel in St. Petersberg. Similarly
98 Becoming Human

we ascribe various properties to the narrative self. The truth-criterion

governing those ascriptions is in significant ways like that which governs
Statements about the people in novels and plays.
We can put my threefold distinction concerning the self in terms of
reference. Some uses of “I”, such as “I have a broken arm,” refer in a
Straightforward way to real-life entities—people or persons. Some uses
of “I” such as “I am in pain” do not refer at all. And in the third case,
some uses of “I” refer, put not to space-time entities; they refer, rather,
to entities similar in an essential way to those that inhabit novels.
The Nobody of my title, then, is born of a fourfold identification. As
indicated earlier,

I = a certain person = a grammatical fiction = the chief character in

my Story.

We assume those identities when we unreflectively take it that the I that

is the creature seen in the mirror, that is happy or in pain, and that gets
top billing in the story of me are all one and the same. Three in one.
I began the previous chapter by asking the question, “What is the I
that it might be a fiction?” The answer I propose is that the false I we
each cherish is just that assumed common referent of the three uses
of “I” in question—hence the importance of exploring the third and
crucial point of that identity claim. The fictional element supposed here
is linked to the common idea that we live in story; my story, the story of
the I. We each create and to some degree enact stories about ourselves,
and the fact that we do is an essential feature of human life. So another
way of stating my aim in this chapter is that I intend to set out what
if anything is true in the claim that we live in story. I move, in this
chapter, from considering self as person and grammatical fiction to self
aS protagonist.

I-thoughts
If we live in story, where is the tale told? The narrative is established by
what people say or think about themselves, and by the way in which
they act out (either inwardly or outwardly) parts of their self-stories. I
shall consider first how story is related in inner reverie, in what may
be called “I-thoughts.” These are a particular kind of inner speech.
Francis Galton observed that some people’s inward musings typically
involve visual images, and some auditory ones.’ I shall treat I-thoughts
 The Further Adventures of Nobody

as auditory images; for the most part parallel considerations would hold
for that take the form of visual imagery.
Inner speech is a familiar phenomenon. Perhaps that imagined voice
is produced in much the same way as normal speech, Dut with a
last-moment brain-activated cancelation of the neural messages that
would otherwise have caused the body to produce the sounds that make
up talk. Whatever its cause, the phenomenon of “hearing” an inner
voice is characteristic of I-thoughts, as I use the term. J-thoughts differ
from other episodes of inner speech not phenomenally but in terms of
their content. One difference is that, unlike I-thoughts, many examples
of inner speech could be said to involve the use of reason to solve some
problem. We might call such episodes disinterested thought. They have
a pragmatic, means-to-end coloration lacking in I-thoughts.
There are other characteristics distinctive of the latter to be considered.
But first an example will help fix the subset of inner speech I am inter-
ested in. Here is Stendhal, inside the mind of Mlle de La Mole:

So far as I can see, nothing but the death sentence gives a man
real distinction, Mathilde thought; it is the only thing that can’t
be bought. Ah! there’s a piece of wit I’ve wasted on myself! What
a shame it didn’t occur to me when I could get some credit for it!
Mathilde was too well bred to bring a prearranged witticism into her
conversation; but she had too much vanity not to be pleased with
herself. A look of cheerfulness replaced the boredom on her face. The
Marquis de Croisenois, who was still talking, thought he must be
making an impression, and chattered away even more glibly.°

In this ironic passage we see several salient features of the inner voicings
I am calling I-thoughts. For one, the word “I” and its relatives such as
“myself” are prominent; I-thoughts, as the name indicates, center on
the thinker, the I. Then there is the element of self-reflection. Having
thought about a death sentence bringing distinction, Mathilde recog-
nizes that her musing could have served as wit. In doing so, she changes
a serious oDservation into a wry comment. Furthermore, in the process
of transforming the thought into irony she provides the presence of
imagined or hypothesized observers, the ones who, she fancies, would
have appreciated her unspoken wit, had she displayed it. Such imagining
of an audience, and tracking its assumed or implicit reactions, is a central
feature of I-thoughts. Being pleased with herself—having exercised her
vanity—it is natural that Mathilde’s bored expression should give way
to one showing pleasure. |-thoughts, apparently, can bring about bodily
100 Becoming Human

changes. It is also natural that the Marquis, not being privy to her
thoughts, should think himself the cause of her cheerful demeanor. In
the world of the Marquis’ story, he has pleased Mathilde; in her world
he is boring, and she is pleased only by the hypothesized success of her
unspoken apercu.
With a caveat or two, I Delieve that trains of inner speech like
Mathilde’s—I-thoughts—are, virtually, ever present in each person’s
mind, with time out for sleep, and allowing episodes of disinterested
thought, as well as those in which one is so captured by the activity of
the moment that thought recedes, if not altogether, then to a whisper,
as it were. Even in problem-solving thought, or when one is caught
up in some activity, I-centered story-thoughts may hover in the back-
ground, or intrude at intervals. The caveats are these. First Mathilde’s
reverie, in Stendhal’s account, appears too polished. In actual life the
inner statements might appear in a more fragmented manner, as if
someone had cut out and presented snippets from Stendhal’s descrip-
tion of Mathilde’s ongoing train of thought. Nonetheless, the general
plotline of the sequence of thoughts can well be as Stendhal portrayed
it. A second caveat is that while I-thoughts occur pretty much constantly
in everyday life, people are often somehow unconscious of them.
You may wonder how I! know all this about I|-thoughts. Well, I
am making the assumption that everyone’s mind is like mine in
being dominated by, or at least in frequently having present, trains of
I-centered thoughts of the sort I have alluded to. So the proof of the
pudding will lie in the eating; look within.
Returning to the example from Stendhal, let me rehearse the features
we find there and that are common to our everyday flow of J-thougnhts.
The I as subject is predominant. It’s not that all inner reverie is in that
way tied to the self; obviously, disinterested thinking does happen. But
for better or worse what passes as thinking, as given in inner speech,
consists to large degree of I-thoughts. These commonly take themselves
as subject, as in Mathilde’s reflection on her own thought. They are often
played against an imagined audience. They bring about bodily changes,
or so it seems. The story created by a given person’s I-thoughts will often
stand at odds with another’s story. As in the example, I-thoughts may
occur not as a series of propositions, Dut, in part, as a Kind of enactment,
an idea [ shall consider in a moment. Finally, if we want a fictional
model for the storytelling constituted by I-thoughts, we had better look
to Sterne than Stendhal. The latter’s novels have a clear plotline; the
trajectories of his heroes’ lives are ordered chronologically; one goes
from point a to b to c...and finally to an end. In Sterne’s account of
 The Further Adventures of Nobody

Tristram Shandy, the plot goes back and forth, wanders here and there,
and takes up points Dy association rather than temporal order. The
story’s path is dictated not by the usual sort of narrative development
but by the arising of certain themes, the characters’ hobbyhorses—so
too our stream of I-thoughts. Certain themes engage us during certain
stretches of our lives; they preoccupy us for a while, but time brings a
change of focus. Our life stories, as given in |I-thoughts, are Shandian
rather than Stendhalian. Nevertheless, we are like Mathilde in that we
live within a network of self-concerned or I-involving thoughts which
make up the stories of our lives—the stories we tell ourselves and in
which we live.

Enactment

Enactments are one form living in story takes. By enactment [|

mean inwardly enacted J-centered dramas. That account is obviously
circular, but the defect can be addressed by considering examples. The
phenomenon I have in mind, and which we have already encountered
in Mathilde’s imagination, is linked to that of “the reader over my
shoulder.” Many people who write will recognize the idea of playing
off one’s written words against an inwardly imagined critical audience.
Phenomenally, this may take the form of an imagined reader, someone
Significant in one’s life, perhaps, who, as one is engaged in writing,
approves or looks askance at the product of one’s efforts. For example,
someone’s writing might be monitored by the imagined presence of a
respected friend, J. What exactly the experience of J’s conjured-into-
existence form took might be hard to say, but it could include the
cadence of his voice and his particular style of appraisal and remark. We
do not need to undertake the delicate job of an exact phenomenological
description of what occurs in such episodes of inner appraisal. They
happen, and the I-thoughts that constitute them do not bear the burden
of having to measure up to reality. It does not matter whether the
result “J would disapprove” (represented, it may De, only fleetingly in
the imagination, and not as an utterance, necessarily, Dut perhaps as
a conjured-up feeling) is true. The reader over one’s shoulder might
in fact be dead, and there may be no question of deciding the real-
world truth or falsity of his inwardly dramatized appraisals. It does not
matter, that is, whether or not J actually does or would approve or disap-
prove. Reality has little to do with the matter. The imagined reader’s
“approve/disapprove” might be used rather to shape or sharpen one’s
writing.
102 Becoming Human

The phenomenon of the reader over one’s shoulder belongs to a wider

class of cases wherein one’s thoughts, attitudes, or possible actions are
viewed against the background of an imagined audience. The example
of Mathilde contemplating an hypothesized approval of her wit is
characteristic of such musings, as is an example from Kafka that I
have discussed elsewhere.* There, K., the protagonist of The Castle,
is described as being, “in thought still with Barnabas repeating his
|K.’s] message word for word, not however as he had given it to Barn-
abas but as he thought it would sound before [the authority figure]
Klamm.””
The phrase “the spirit of the stairs” denotes a similar phenomenon;
one contemplates some past insult, hurt, or snub, and thinks how one
might have responded, if only one had been quick-witted. The fancied
response may be inwardly enacted before an audience, perhaps those
who witnessed the original barbed remark. The “spirit of the stairs”
concerns a specific type of case, where one considers, by means of
an inner dramatization, how one might have responded. Such dram-
atized [-thought reactions to remembered wrongs fall in a broader
and psychologically more weighty class, where one reacts inwardly
not merely to slights but, for example, to such things as betrayals,
injuries to oneself or those we are close to, robberies, and like events.
someone might, for instance, imaginatively enact killing someone who
had harmed him or his family, clan, or religion. Here again, some
perhaps vaguely imagined audience may monitor the mental goings-
on that center on those remembered wrongs. All of these cases, the
possibility of which I believe you will grant, and with some of which
you may be familiar, | call “enactments.” Common to many of them
is, again, a concern with how others see or might see one. [his in turn
involves the notion of “face.” One must maintain face; that is, not be
seen aS unworthy in one of the many ways one’s culture establishes
worth.
The phenomenon of enactment, as just presented, constitutes one
major way in which we live in story. Enactments are self-dramatizations
carried on inwardly. To be engaged in them is to be engaged with
narrative. That engagement is like our involvement with the actions
of the protagonist of a novel. Excitement and concern can be aroused
by our reading about a hero’s exploits. For example, as we read The
Charterhouse of Parma, we may be, if in a moderate way, anxious over
Fabrizio’s descent from the tower prison. Will the guards hear him? Has
he enough rope for the climb? But such concern is but a pale reflection
of the interest we take in the actions of the chief imagined figure of our
 The Further Adventures of Nobody

own dramatic enactments, the I, ourselves. For instance, remembering

a quarrel—going over it in one’s head, dramatizing it, savoring it, as it
were—may make one angry, and that anger may be accompanied by
slight but significant physiological flight or fight responses, and might
even result in actual physical conflict, if the target of one’s anger should
happen on the scene. We are often engaged in enactments of the kinds
depicted above, despite our proclivity to think of ourselves as reason-
stem ela
When I[-thoughts occur within enactments, there is at those moments
no more a question of their empirical truth than there is concerning
what actors say in a play. How then are the inwardly uttered words used,
if not to make empirical truth-claims? They are what they are—a buzzing
about, wherein, to take one example, a question of how one is seen
Or might be seen by others is weighed, tested, played with, rewritten,
as it were. But it is an imaginary testing, preening, or what have you,
and may lack coherence, stability, and solid shape. It may not be center
stage, but attention may catch it going on off in a corner of the mind.
In a given case, its significance may lie only in the fact that it holds
one’s attention.
It might be objected to the above remarks that they treat
daydreaming—which of course occurs—as a central feature of human
life. Surely, it might be said, that is an exaggeration; why go on so
about the matter? ‘The answer is that our preoccupation with I-thoughts
is not some harmless, Walter Mitty-type daydreaming. Those thoughts
constitute an obsession with self, one that brings anxiety in its train.
The cost of our near perpetual engagement with I-thoughts is high for
another reason as well. To anticipate a point to be discussed later, I
believe that when Buddhists such as Huang Po speak of thought as a
barrier to enlightenment, part of what they have in mind is that if those
I-thoughts I have been speaking of were absent, one would be face to
face with the world as it is, the world—it is said—of the enlightened
person. The world outside the story.°
Before leaving the topic of enactments, | want to mention two points
deserving of further inquiry. One is the fact that enactments can also be
external, as in the example from Duck Soup | have discussed elsewhere,
in which Groucho, imagining the mere possibility of being rejected and
insulted, acts as if he really had been.’ The other concerns enacting a
role, as in the scene from Brecht’s play Galileo, where the Cardinal loses
his humanity step by step as he dons his churchly robes, and with them
his persona.
104 Becoming Human

Selected characterizations

What I call I-thoughts do not occur only in enactments. They often

have more the character of representations or descriptions than that
of dramatizations. That is, they are often proposition-like in nature,
and in that way can be seen as inner reflections of what we might
say out loud about ourselves. So, I turn now from inner enactments
to cases where we relate parts of our life stories. I tell a friend about
my operation, or relate to someone what happened on the weekend,
and so on. That is, I spin out a narrative where the protagonist is the
I and where a cast of characters fills various secondary roles. Here, I
would emphasize the idea that my characterizations of others form a
crucial part of my self-story. For I am he who interacts with people
who are seen or postulated to have certain characteristics. We portray
ourselves in part by portraying others. For example, Hitler described
his generals as, “a special caste of particularly snobbish, pretentious
air-heads and destructive vermin...with no imagination, full of sterile
fertility, cowardice and vanity.”® The flip side of this is that his self-
characterization included seeing himself as one who in striving for world
domination had to rely on such a sorry lot of helpers.
The key issue is whether I-characterizations are in significant part
story-like. I turn first to a feature of our self-stories—whether voiced
inwardly or outwardly—that is essential to narrative in general. Strind-
berg put the point nicely: “The art of the author consists in arranging
many impressions, memories, and experiences, in leaving out subsidiary
matter, and emphasizing the main points.”” In creating the novel, the
author picks and chooses what to tell. What is told shows us the prot-
agonist and the subordinate characters, sets the scene, and carries the
plot forward; what is left out doesn’t matter, typically. The same creative
process is at work in the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves. We
build and maintain a story about ourselves by judicious selection. In
that way, we establish and develop one or more main plotlines, sub-
plots, and principal characters. The plots concern chiefly what the I,
who anchors the story, experiences and does over time. Our minds tend
to circle Dack to what we take to be crucial points on that time line,
dwelling on them, elaborating and exploring ideas about them, enacting
them, trying to ignore them, and so on.
The source from which we select what goes into our stories is twofold:
fact and fancy. The facts concern our passage through time, our encoun-
ters and exploits, and so on. The items of fancy include what we imagine
 The Further Adventures of Nobody

others or ourselves are like, what prejudice or communal mores says

about them or us, and like matters.
Fact and fancy potentially give rise to many different stories. By
selecting these rather than those items to cite or dwell upon, we create
this rather than that story, this protagonist and not that one—hero,
villain, or in-between.
Showing that selectiveness is crucial to narrative does not by itself
establish that there is anything fictional in our self-stories. In addition
to fictional narrative, there are also historical and biographical narrat-
ives, which too require selection. An historical or biographical narrative
without selection would be like Lewis Carroll’s map at the scale of
one to one. I turn now to an example of selection, which will prove
useful in subsequent discussions concerning the fictional nature of our
Il-characterizations. It concerns some real-life events as related Dy Scott
Turow. I shall simplify the story considerably.’
Against a background of public pressure to find the person who
committed a certain horrific crime, a man (Alex, let us call him)
was convicted of it on extremely flimsy grounds. Later another man,
Dugan, who was found guilty of a closely similar crime, confessed
to the one Alex had been sentenced for, and corroborating evidence
showed beyond doubt that Dugan had indeed committed it. Neverthe-
less, the original prosecuting attorneys refused to try Dugan for that
crime, and opposed a retrial for Alex. In the face of overwhelming
evidence, they held on to the conviction that Alex was guilty. As
partial justification they suggested, with extreme implausibility, that
Alex might have been a partner with Dugan in the original crime. |
take this case as an example of how a persona can be maintained by
ignoring certain items—evidence for Alex’s innocence—and emphas-
izing others—the possibility that he was present with Dugan at the
first murder. The prosecutors, I suppose, see themselves in a certain
way: they are not the sort of people who would railroad an innocent
person; they are tough but fair-minded. To admit Alex’s innocence,
then, would be to question an important part of their self-images, of
how they view themselves. It would be to lose face, to tarnish their life
stories.
My idea of who I am, my Self-image, will be formed by me in part
by selection. For example, I may feel pressure to continue to think of
myself as fair-minded and honest, and I may do so by emphasizing this
and ignoring that. We are all to some degree spin doctors in the service
of the I.
106 Becoming Human

The fictional nature of [-characterizations

The phrase “to live in story” suggests that to live so is to speak and move
in a fictional world. Although the thesis that we do live that way may
seem quite absurd, it has a small but impressive set of defenders. For
some the story is that of a dream; life is a dream from which we would do
well to awaken. The thesis is depicted nicely in the movie Waking Life.
The question of whether we live in story has to do with the status of our
self- and other-characterizing beliefs and remarks. We describe ourselves
and others in various ways, and act or feel in a manner in Keeping with
those ascriptions. Thus the question, Are I- and other-characterizations
really elements of story, really fiction? Do they have the same status as
Similar descriptions from a novel? Or if not outright fiction, are they at
least significantly fiction-like? In fact, I-characterizations lacK an essen-
tial property of fictional statements and therefore (unsurprisingly) are
not straightforwardly fiction. But many of our I-characterizations share
a certain property with fictional ones, in virtue of which they can be
said to be significantly fiction-like. The shared property is that of being
disconnected from the empirical. Exploring that overlap between fiction
and [-characterizations will establish a central part of the claim that we
live in story. Rather than arguing that self-characterizations are fiction-
like, I shall explain what I mean by saying they are, where the explana-
tion proceeds by the presentation and contemplation of examples. These
bring us to see what it can be like to live in story.
I focus first on the fiction part of our inquiry. What is the logical status
of paradigmatic fictional affirmations? Someone might say that, being
fictional, they are all false. Indeed, it has been said that to write fiction is
to lie. However, it is not false but true that, say, the protagonist of Crime
and Punishment murdered two people. He killed both the moneylender
and her half sister. It would be wrong to say Dostoevsky wrote falsely
that Raskolnikov was a murderer, or that he lied in saying so. Rather we
must look at how truth-claims like “Raskolnikov murdered two people”
are used, for the implicit rule governing “true” here differs from the
one governing everyday, empirical truth-claims about real people. The
truth-rule for fiction is roughly that if the author wrote it, or if what he
wrote implies it, then it is true—true, as we might say, in the novel. I say
“roughly” because there are complications, such as books like The Good
Soldier where the reader is supposed to see behind the text to truths the
first-person narrator is Dlind to.
In the standard, central cases, if we were to take a sentence from a
novel and apply a real-life criterion of truth to it, our mistake would
 The Further Adventures of Nobody

be obvious, as in this strange reasoning: “There was no Raskolnikov

registered at the university in St. Petersberg in 18...,no such person
appeared in the police records, no one of that name was found guilty
and sentenced, and so on; therefore it is false that at that time and place
some Raskolnikov murdered two women named....” That is not the way
you decide whether Raskolnikov murdered two people. Rather, you read
the Dook. It may seem odd to speak of fictional statements as being true.
“True” and “fictional” apparently conflict, and surely, the complaint
continues, it is not really true that Raskolnikov murdered anyone, since
Raskolnikov is not real. Well, if you take “true” to imply “real” (that the
truth of the sentence “Raskolnikov murdered the moneylender” implies
Raskolnikov really existed) then of course such sentences are not true.
But it is really true that Raskolnikov murdered the old woman, as will
be plain to readers of Crime and Punishment. It is only that the truth of
such a claim does not imply the reality of those fictional beings.
Here the term “ontology” might be brought into the debate. Quine
said, roughly put, that if we affirm as true a “there is” statement like
“There is a prime between three and seven” then we are committed to
acknowledging the existence of what the “there is” covers, in this case
prime numbers.!! They would go in our ontology—our list of what is
really real—along with door Knobs and lizards. Unless, Quine says, we
can find some way of rewriting the “there is” claim in a way that does not
mention primes. Perhaps, we can cast the sentence in terms of set theory.
Then we might be “committed” to admitting sets into our ontology,
but not numbers per se. Similarly, we can reword, “The average man
has three and a third children” in a way that avoids reference to one-
third of a child, thus relieving our ontology of the burden of tripartite
children. Applied to our case, since we want to say there is someone in
Crime and Punishment who murders two women, we are committed to
putting Raskolnikov in the class of real things, along with Socrates and
Kant, unless we can rewrite the troublesome claim. Perhaps as, “It says
in Crime and Punishment that Raskolnikov murdered two people.”
An opposing position holds in effect that there is no really real.
Rather, there are various classes of utterances of the form, “There is an
x such that...,” where each class employs its own distinctive criterion
for deciding the truth of its utterances. In mathematics a simple exam-
ination will reveal that there is a prime number greater than three and
less than seven. We need not, in granting that, commit ourselves to
some Platonic realm in which reside strange non-empirical entities, the
numbers. Again, the criterion for whether there is a mate in two in this
position is whether a mate can be demonstrated. The truth of the claim
LOSS 20 (11/0 ae EIT.

does not require that there be in the world—in our ontology—mates

in two. (Not that there are not mates in two!) What makes it true that
there is some double murderer in the St Petersberg of Crime and Punish-
ment? Well, read the book. On this view, talk of the really real, or of an
all-embracing ontology, is replaced by talk of classes of instances distin-
guished by the truth criteria they presuppose. “True” does not imply
“real”, and in some contexts “true” and “fictional” or “non-empirical”
are consistent. “Empirical statement” covers a very wide range of claims
about how the world is, where these are governed by different truth-
criteria. “Empirical” too is a family-resembDlance concept. But the term
is not so loose as to allow our statement about Raskolnikov to count as
empirical.
We will understand fictional statements better if we pursue the
following question: Is it possible to transform a description of a person
in a novel into an empirical claim? Suppose that after reading Stendhal’s
account of Fabrizio at war, we assert the sentence:

At the battle of Waterloo Napoleon wore no braid on his coat.

Is this true? Well, if we treat it as a statement like that about Raskolnikov,

that is, as one that is to be decided by what the novel says or implies,
then we know it to be true. Stendhal’s Napoleon wore no braid:

‘So that was the Emperor who went past then?’ he asked the man
next to him.
Why surely, the one with no braid on his coat.’

It does not follow, of course, that our sentence is empirically true, that
is, true in real life. It might be said that we can easily transform the
sentence into an empirical one, and that can be granted; we simply
change the truth-criteria we assume to govern the sentence. But while
we can transform the sentence into an empirical one, if we do so we
change its meaning. A crucial part of the meaning of an assertion is a
function of the criterion governing it. Under the transformation in ques-
tion, the sentence stays the same, we might say, but the corresponding
statement changes. I am distinguishing here between what we might
call sign (sentence) and symbol (statement). The sign per se is a mere phys-
ical object—marks on paper or particular sounds. What makes it into
a symbol—something with meaning—is that it is used. The sign itself
does not carry its meaning with it wherever it goes; it can be used in
various ways and hence can have various meanings, as “Napoleon wore
 The Further Adventures of Nobody

no braid” can be used as an historical sentence or as a description of the

Napoleon of The Charterhouse of Parma. It all depends on the criterion
assumed in the context in which the sign is uttered or put forward.
Now what about the prosecutors’ utterances of “Alex is guilty?” Are
these fictional? They are not, because they lack an essential feature of
Statements like “Raskolnikov murdered two people.” In particular, they
lack an author. Imagine someone eavesdropping as Dostoevsky dictated
part of Crime and Punishment, say the line, “He rushed at her with the
hatchet.” The eavesdropper protests, “No, that’s not true. Raskolnikov
never did that.” This is absurd, because the author has the say over what
Raskolnikov did or did not do. He makes it up! There is no such figure
operative in the example of Alex and his prosecutors; no one has the
authorial “if I say it happened then it did” power.
SO one cannot say that characterizations like “Alex is guilty” are
fictional. One can say, however, that the prosecutors’ claim, made in
those words, is fiction-like. One point of similarity between fiction and
some I-story characterizations is that in both cases empirical constraints
are not applied. In both cases, we might say, there is a disconnect
from the empirical. It is not enough, however, to point out that in
fact no impartial empirical investigations were undertaken. A mere lack
of adjudication does not amount to a disconnect from the empirical.
For consider a parallel case: I say “There is a dictionary in the drawer,”
but no one ever happens to check to see if that is true. No empirical
investigation is in fact undertaken. Nonetheless, what I said was in no
way fiction or fiction-like. It was a straightforward empirical claim.
What more is needed to justify the claim that instances like the
prosecutors’ “Alex is guilty” are fiction-like? Not only must fair empirical
investigation be in fact absent, but in addition, there must be something
that blocks its occurrence, something having to do with the self-stories
of those who make the assertions. There is a parallel here to fiction per se.
In the classical cases, an author like Stendhal is not free to say anything
at all about his characters—to portray them in any way he wishes. For
once his book is underway, its continuance must be roughly consistent
with what has been said before by way of establishing their properties.
Fabrizio, in the midst of the battle of Waterloo, cannot suddenly become
a sly, lazy, cowardly, sniveling, Napoleon-hating creature of limited
intelligence and striking ugliness. On the contrary, he has already been
portrayed as naive, energetic, brave, upstanding, Napoleon-admiring,
clever, and handsome. Narrative consistency requires that the further
exploits of Fabrizio be in keeping with those traits. So, while Stendhal is
free to make up the story of his hero, once the tale is well underway he
 Becoming Human

becomes bound by the constraint of narrative consistency (something

quite different from empirical constraint).

Axioms

A similar narrative constraint often controls self-ascriptions. In

particular, my I-remarks must be consistent with what might be called
axioms Of my Self-story. By this, I mean claims that are central to a
person self-image and that stand fast for him or her. They are not open
to doubt. In the example of the prosecutors who insist on Alex’s guilt in
the face of decisive evidence to the contrary, I suggest that something
like the following be counted an axiom in their self-stories:

I am fair-minded and good at my job; I don’t make egregious mistakes,

and in particular would not convict a patently innocent man.

From this it follows that Alex, who was convicted by the people in
question, is guilty. Their self-stories contain, as a not inconsiderable
part, the assumption, “I convicted Alex, who is guilty of the crime.” We
can treat the claim, “Alex is guilty” as part of their self-stories, since
it has implications for how they think of themselves. Is the claim an
empirical one?
The question is complicated by the fact that someone outside the
circle of Alex’s prosecutors could raise the question of whether indeed
Alex is guilty, and treat it as straightforwardly empirical. The prosecutors
themselves might do so, say, after suffering a bout of honesty.
But while the claim about Alex’s guilt could be treated as subject to
empirical constraints, the prosecutors in fact do not so treat it. Rather
they treat it as what I shall call a protected claim. I am assuming
in these remarks a continuum along which we project ourselves to
ourselves—from normal to pathological projection, passing through
banal self-enactment, self-enhancement, and self-deception toward the
more problematic self-delusions and delusional paranoias, and so on. A
protected claim is one the denial of which is so much in conflict with
important parts of a speaker's self-story that he will go to great lengths to
maintain the claim’s truth. Even-handed empirical investigations could
be employed to settle the question of the claim’s truth but they are not.
The protected assertion can be considered in two different ways, or
in two different contexts. In one context, its truth is to be decided
by fair inquiry into the facts. In the context in which it counts as a
 The Further Adventures of Nobody

protected claim, those who affirm it do not in fact treat it in the fair-
minded way. Rather, they strive mightily to maintain its truth. The goal
of the empiricist’s approach is to decide the question of truth on the
basis of an unbiased application of the kind of adjudication methods
proper to the case. The point of the protectionist approach is to use any
means at all plausible to support what the relevant self-stories require—
in this case the axiom, or central assumption, of being expert and
fair-minded.
Thus there are two possible criteria that could be assumed to govern
the claim “Alex is guilty.” One involves a neutral investigation and
weighing of the facts, the other the sort of procedure found in cases of
protected assertions, where points that count in favor of the claim are
emphasized and those that count against ignored or played down. There
are, correspondingly, two different uses of “Alex is guilty,” one for the
prosecutors and one for an assumed neutral fact finder.
But now it might be objected that if there are two different uses then
the opposing parties mean different things by the claim, and hence
do not really disagree. Since there obviously is disagreement here, the
conclusion must be that my account of the example is wrong. My reply
is to deny the objection’s inference from “mean different things by...”
to “do not really disagree about....” There are two different uses in play
of “Alex is guilty,” two criteria operating, and two different meanings in
question. It is consistent with those claimed features to say that we can
have here a paradigm case of disagreement. Genuine disagreement can
occur in cases where each party uses the disputed assertion differently, in
that they presume different criteria of truth, and hence different mean-
ings. For example, in the dispute between Galileo and the Church over
whether Jupiter has moons, each side deployed different criteria. Galileo
looked; the Church appealed to theology. No one could deny they used
different criteria, but equally no one could deny they disagreed. That is
what disagreement can look like.
To return to our case, a further complication must be noted, namely
that while the prosecutors do not bring empirical criteria into play, in
the cases in question, they may nonetheless affirm that their assertions
are so governed. “Of course we are fair-minded empiricists,” I imagine
them saying. But in fact they are not; they do not do what they say
they do. This is an instance of the common split between an action and
its ideological justification. Their claim is treated by them, in fact, as
protected and not as empirical.
The prosecutors’ treatment of “Alex is guilty” 1s therefore what I am
calling “fiction-like.” It’s not that like a novelist they are free, within
 Becoming Human

certain limits of consistency, to make up what counts as true. They

cannot make up the facts out of whole cloth. Rather they judiciously
select certain relevant facts, emphasize the importance of those that
favor their stand and de-emphasize or ignore those that would count
against them; and so on. They need it to be true that Alex is guilty,
and they block out the overwhelming evidence to the contrary. What
it means to live in story is in part to be understood in terms of this and
Similar examples.
However, not all I-claims have the same status. Some are fiction-like,
others plainly empirical, and some fall somewhere in between. Iwo
contextual features of I-characterizations affect their categorization as
empirical or fictional. One concerns the distance of the remark from its
possible empirical adjudication. At one pole, there is fairly easy access to
the decisive facts, and, at the other, the salient facts would be virtually
impossible to come upon. In between are numerous degrees of accessib-
ility. The more difficult it is to find the facts that would determine the
truth or falsity of an I-claim, the easier it is for that claim to be separated
from the empirical and passed off as true.
Another significant contextual feature concerns the size of the group
that upholds an J-remark. At one extreme are statements of delusional
paranoids. Smith’s “I am Napoleon” will normally be upheld by one
person only, Smith. Then there are folie a deux instances, where a
delusional system is shared. In the Alex example a group of several
people, the prosecutors and their cronies, maintain the idea that he
is guilty. Then there are cases where an entire society upholds certain
self-characterizations. Let us look further at the last type of case.

Truth assumptions from the culture

These exemplify a second way I-characterizations can be sundered from
the empirical. A crucial part of my self-story concerns the way I portray
the people around me, as in the earlier example of Hitler’s view of
his generals. I am he who lives with a wife who has such and such
Characteristics, children who are thus and so, friends who are like this,
enemies like that, and so on. What I call truth assumptions from the
culture may affect my understanding and subsequent treatment of the
people around me. For example, societal “truths” about a persecuted
minority can be maintained by an entire nation as incontestable, as can
De seen in extreme cultures like that of Nazi Germany, or the American
South in the era of lynching and the Klu Klux Klan. Most of the then
denizens of those societies assume, ox are at least willing to assert, that a
 The Further Adventures of Nobody

whole class of people, Jews or Afro-Americans, are subhuman. They are

evil of an extreme kind; we are good.
The truth of “They are subhuman” can be established or adjudicated
in two ways, empirically or, let us say, ideologically. For any dispas-
sionate observer the claim conflicts with plainly visible facts (“Do we not
bleed?”). But the majorities in the examples do not base their views on
observation or reason. Rather they maintain, by what they teach their
children, by how they treat dissenters, by propaganda, and so on, that
the claim is true. It is not allowed to be subject to empirical adjudication,
or perhaps the very idea of objectively judging it never arises.
Like the claims of Alex’s prosecutors, such truth-assumptions of a
culture are fiction-like. These “truths” are put forward as empirical—true
of the world—but not in fact treated as subject to what an objective
outsider would call impartial empirical constraints. Such tribal myths,
as we might call them, can make up crucial portions of peoples’ I-stories.
“Well, I may not be much,” one might say, “but at least I am not
subhuman!”
My culture will also supply values assumed in my self-image. For
example, what is to count as honorable, what as shameful, and so on
are given through acculturation. Thus the content of the claim “I am
honorable”—as determined in part by the criterion governing it—will
vary from culture to culture. Such values are not accepted on the Dasis
of empirical investigation. For the once born they are beyond doubt.
I want to consider one last type of example of I-characterizations that
are fiction-like. I touched above on the case of the delusional paranoid
Smith. Are his self-characterizations empirical or fictional? Well, not
fictional, in that we will not grant anyone authorial command over
them. But they are fiction-like in something like the manner of the
claims of Alex’s prosecutors. Namely, there is for Smith a disconnect
between the claim and what we would count as its empirical adjudica-
tion. The difference is that here the major, ruling axiom of the self-story
is far beyond the plausible. Smith sees himself, say, as the central figure
in an alien plot to destroy the planet; his enemies know that only he can
save the world, and they hatch plots to undo him. We have here an [|
blown out of all proportion. Virtually everything Smith encounters gets
incorporated into his life story. The cars parked on the street may De the
vehicles of those in the grand conspiracy against him. The light bulb
found on the bed is really a message directed to him, as is that leaf on
the sidewalk; and so on. In this kind of life the person is overwhelmed
by story; everything is drawn into it. In contrast, our own selves are
 Becoming Human

much less grandiose and all-encompassing; but perhaps one can see in
them some small resemblance to Smith.

What about us?

The reader may resent being put in the same class with Smith, the
Nazis, and Alex’s near-sighted prosecutors. I have been dealing with
cases of self- and other-characterizations at or near the far pole of the
non-empirical. The question now arises whether something like what
occurs in those instances also happens in less radical ones such as yours
and mine.
One instance of a fiction-like element in some of our self-stories is
provided by the widespread phenomenon of nationalism. I am, for
example, a Canadian, she an American. I may define myself in part
negatively, in terms of an objectionable character that I attribute to
Americans, say, and assume that I, as a Canadian, Jack. Here the fictional
element in my self-characterization is provided by hasty generalization.
I think of Lichtenberg’s remark:

What is a ‘German character’? What? Tobacco-smoking and honesty,

didn’t you say? O you simple dolts! Listen: be good enough to tell
me what the weather is like in America. Shall I tell instead of you?
All right. It lightens, it hails, it’s muddy, it’s sultry, it’s unbearable,
it’s snowing, freezing, windy, and the sun is shining.!”

We are often swift to attribute good qualities to our nation, and unin-
hibited in seeing other states as deplorable in certain ways. The fact that
such generalities are suspect is overlooked. And of course nationalism
is not the only locale where fiction-like I-stories thrive. There is one’s
ethnic group, and one’s religion, for example. Pascal wrote of the folly
of humans, for whom if you are born on this side of the river you are
my friend, and if on that side my enemy. The death of a child is to be
Demoaned or celebrated, depending on whether or not it Delongs to the
Same warring camp as you.
On a more local scale, the people in, or connected in various ways
to, one’s social group can be characterized on the basis of little reliable
evidence. The Rashamon effect is widely in play, where the way we see
others in our group, and hence by reflection ourselves, varies from one
participant to the next, with no one attempting (were it possible) an
objective investigation to see who if anyone is right in their perceptions
of what has occurred.
 The Further Adventures of Nobody

With regard to the example of paranoia, something akin to that way

of coping with the world can be found in us. Again we find a continuum,
running from the poor soul who sees himself as being under attack by
global or universe-wide forces, to the case of one who, walking along the
Street, brings what he sees into connection with himself, in an everyday,
and certainly non-psychotic way. He sees a house and wonders whether
he would like to own it or not, for example, and in that way he brings
what he sees under the umpDrella of self-concern. Somewhere between
these cases might be that of a cancer patient whose I-thoughts return
again and again to the fact of his illness, something he just cannot get
out of his consciousness.
Finally, one more way in which our everyday life involves our self-
Stories is suggested by a remark of LichtenDerg’s:

Teach me to talk to the hearts of men so that my words will not be

deflected in the refractory medium of their systems of convictions.'*

Or in particular, we might say, the distorting systems of their fiction-like

self-stories.
I have emphasized two aspects of living in story. In one, the case of
the nearly ubiquitous I-thoughts, we engage in inner enactments, inner
dramatizations. In the other, we inwardly or outwardly attribute various
characteristics to ourselves and others. By doing the latter we also depict
ourselves as living in a world containing the people so described (Hitler
and his generals; Rashamon). These characteristics, if not straightfor-
wardly fictional are, at least in many cases, fiction-like.
Those dramatizations and characterizations may come to light in
people’s actions. A hastily arrived at and empirically disconnected
portrayal of a person may be reflected in one’s attitude toward the
person, for example. Since he did such and such to so and so, I shall treat
him with contempt. Another case: either my inner enactment or my
I-related characterization of him may result in my physically attacking
isbhose

In these examples we see some of the significance living in story

has for human life. The significance lies in part in mundane effects—
misunderstandings, cross-purposes, and the like. Perhaps also the
pervasive anxiety common to our age has its roots in our I-stories. [he
greatest anxiety, the fear of death, is a fear that the I will cease to be.
Last but not least our involvement in story has Deen plausibly said to
be the thing that cuts us off from the Tao.
 Becoming Human

Questions and objections

The previous chapter examined two aspects of the false self, the I as
person and as grammatical fiction. This one has dealt with the third
element, the narrative self. My thesis, again, is that the self, as we
commonly suppose it to be, combines those entities. In this penultimate
section, I discuss certain issues concerning that alleged identity.
First, is the idea of there being three distinct uses of “I” in conflict
with the supposition that the assumed referents in the three cases are
equal? Any hint of inconsistency disappears when we make a distinction
between how “I” works and how we picture or tacitly assume it does—
between the nature of the three language-games for using “I”, on the
one hand, and what we explicitly or implicitly assume about those uses.
There are three different uses but we do not recognize that fact. The false
I results from the false assumption that all three uses of “I” are referring
ones, and moreover that they refer to the same thing.
But who says or assumes that the three are one? Not everyman—
he never heard of them before. You too, for example, probably never
considered whether they are equal. My claim is not that in everyday
life we articulate and affirm the thesis that they are equal. Rather we
tacitly affirm that they are. Suppose I am the self-deceived prosecutor I
described above. I might utter within a short space of time “I”-statements
from each of the three categories: “I need a shave.” “I feel happy.” “I
was right to prosecute him.” What justifies my claim that the speaker
here tacitly assumes he is talking about one and the same thing in each
case? Is the same self spoken of each time? Well of course! To revert to
the first person: what justifies the claim about the tacit assumption is
my obvious if unspoken conviction that there is only one of me, not
three. Of course, I unthinkingly think, I’m talking about one and the
same thing each time—myself.
A further question is, Who affirms, if only tacitly, the existence of the
tripartite self? Is it the person, the grammatical fiction or the narrative
self that does this? Well, two of the components of the false self are
incapable of affirming anything, or of real-world actions of any Kind.
Neither the grammatical fiction self nor the narrative self exists in space
and time; they are hence incapable of any action in the world we move
about in, including that of affirming things or making judgments. Nor is
it the false self—the amalgam—that affirms or believes in its own exist-
ence, for it, being made up in part of unreal things, is itself an unreal
creature, and as such cannot really affirm or believe anything. The point
needs clarification. We might question whether a character in a novel
 The Further Adventures of Nobody

really believes a certain proposition. For example, does Raskolnikov

really believe his acts of murder were justified, or was he deceiving
himself? There are two ways of taking the question. On one, we would
appeal to textual evidence. The issue concerns what the novel says or
implies. On the other interpretation, we are asking if the belief exists
in the space of actual human life. To say it does is to contrast that
Delief with one held by a fictional character. So in denying real belief or
real affirmations to the false self, | mean only to place any such things
squarely in the realm of the fictional. As | am now using the phrases “real
Delief” “real affirmation,” and so on, the criterion for whether a certain
entity really has a given belief or really does believe such and such is
empirical in nature. So there is only one candidate in sight for being
one who really affirms: the person, the space-time entity, the animal.
Fictional people can be said to affirm things, but those creatures are not
to be found on earth.

Ontology of the I
The false self is twice unreal: not only does it not exist, it could not. As
regards the first point, two of its components are unreal, although in
different ways. The grammatical fiction self is a mere picture, a phantom
born of our propensity to assume a referent when we consider a word
Or phrase having the surface grammar of a suDstantive. The narrative
self is unreal in that statements about it are not governed by empirical
truth-criteria. What has unreal parts must itself be unreal. So the false
self is no more real than is Lewis Carroll’s Nobody or Stendhal’s Fabrizio.
As regards the second point, such a thing could not exist, since the three
parts are categorically different and so cannot really combine into one.
Every conceptual space has its own criterion of identity governing
objects within it, but no space allows cross-category identities. Anumber
can be identical with another number—for instance, two equals the
Square root of four. But a number cannot be identical with a numeral,
or with a fish. Similarly, the I qua person cannot be identical with
either the I qua grammatical fiction or with the narrative self. The self
as commonly conceived is an impossible thing, yet something we intu-
itively and tacitly posit. We conjure the false self into being when we
affirm I-statements of those three kinds and implicitly take them all to
Moers om
We began with the question, “What is the self that it might be a
delusion?” I have proposed this answer: It is the false self, the fantasy
creature that results when one takes the three would-be referents of
 Becoming Human

I delineated above to be one and the same. We implicitly posit the

existence of the false self every time we utter or think I-claims, as well
as when we enact inner self-centered dramas. But what about Judith
Thompson's objection? What or who is this “one” who takes things a
certain way or posits something? It can’t be the false self, since it is a
creation of fantasy. Again, the only candidate in sight is the person.
Given the contrast between the person and the false self, the reply to
Thompson is this: the fact that we cannot sensibly deny the existence
either of ourselves or of the person we are talking with does not mean we
cannot deny the self. We must recognize the fact that certain animals,
humans, have managed to create and live under the dominance of a false
idea of themselves. The self as so understood can be denied, without
denying what it is impossible sensibly to deny, the human being.
That claim, however, can be misleading. It can help generate a luKe-
warm secular humanism that acknowledges the plain fact of our species’
existence and grants our entanglement with self. Existentially we are
animals: we are born, live under the pall of the false self, and then the
pieces return to nature. Here there is no sign of the transcendental.
I prefer to think of the matter in terms derived from Hinduism.
Hinduism speaks of two selves: large and small. We might picture the
Situation as a dot at the center of a circle. The dot is the small self—the
false one—standing in the center of the universe, of the not-I. This is a
dualistic perspective: me and not me. We mistakenly adopt this way of
looking at things. But the small self is an illusion, and when it disap-
pears there remains the large self, the circle and all its contents. Duality
retires, oneness iS; Or SO the Claim goes.

The evolution of self

I have followed my usual strategy. To say how the self evolved, first
say what it is. AS we have seen, we form our idea of self by implicitly
assuming that a certain three things are one. But in fact nothing is
both a person, a grammatical fiction, and a narrative fiction-like thing.
We are dealing here with a worse than mythical beast—a conceptually
impossible creature. Such a thing could not have evolved, any more
than a unicorn could. Not in the Darwinian sense of evolved. (A fictional
Don Juan might be said to have evolved from Moliere’s treatment, to
Mozczart’s to Bernard Shaw’s, but that is a different meaning of “evolved.”)
Not because we cannot imagine Darwinian natural selection producing
a creature that looks rather like a horse, but with cloven feet and a
single horn. The reason why a unicorn could not have evolved is that
 The Further Adventures of Nobody

the creature belongs to mythology, in that its features, such as being

tameable only by a virgin, are attributed to it not on empirical grounds
but rather on what the reigning myth says. Unicorns and such like
creatures are closer in nature to fictional animals than to horses.
So we must change the question. Not, “How did the I evolve” but
“How did it come to be?” This question asks after the history of an
illusion. The obvious precondition for the birth of the false self is the
development of our complex language. We have seen how language
might have evolved. The development of language-customs in which
people are named and referred to by pronouns seems unproblematic.
Such a development already gives rise to the self qua person, where
talk about ourselves is governed by empirical constraints. To get the
second element of the false self we need to add two things. First, the
use of a word or word-element—like “I” or the “o” in “Cogito”—in first-
person present-tense psychological assertions, where in fact this word
or linguistic item does not function to refer. Secondly, we must add in
our propensity to imagine a referent when we have a term which, by its
surface syntax, refers. “I” seems to stand for something in a statement
like “I am in pain,” but in fact it does not. That imagined referent is the
self qua “picture” or grammatical fiction.
The requirement for the appearance of the third member of the group
is the development of narrative. This must have deep roots in our
history. Think, for example, of the custom of counting coup, as perhaps
growing from an acted out pantomime of a warrior’s adventures with
the enemy. Given the language-game of narrative we can imagine it
growing in two ways. One is a matter of inner dramatization, the other
of characterizing oneself. The rules governing self-characterizations—
governing the truth of what one says about oneself—are in fact loose
enough to allow the appearance of fiction-like entities.
What is necessary for there to be narrative? We need language-customs
that state our intentions and desires, that say what we did and why, and
what we hope to do, and what others did or may do, and so on. We
need the ability to describe ourselves as agents, entities that act with
a purpose. These descriptions include those that are strictly empirical,
their truth being governed by criteria concerning people’s actions and
reactions in space and time. The truth or falsity of my statement that
I intend to go to the waterfall depends on whether I meet the criteria
governing the truth of such an assertion. It will be true if in a certain
context I act a certain way (trying to get to the waterfall, for example).
Similarly in an other case it will be false. Here truth or falsity is an
objective matter, subject, again, to empirical criteria.
120 Becoming Human

From such a base in the common ascription to people of various

instances of acting, feeling or thinking, we can imagine the growth of
narrative claims that are not governed by such empirical criteria. For
example questions like, “Where did he come from?” “Where did that
tribe come from?” might be extended to cases where empiricism does
not reach, but where there is pressure for an answer. Where did people
come from?” is an obvious example. Across the world, primitive and not
SO primitive cultures supply answers. Stories are told, for instance, about
how this mythical animal or that gave birth to the original humans. The
truth of such myths is fixed in the culture: this is what one is taught
to say and Delieve, or what soothsayers or wise men or women pass on
through the generations. We have a continuum: On the one hand plain
empirical claims: “I saw him at the water fall,” “I have a headache,”
and so on; on the other, such sentences as those plainly belonging to
myth. In between are a wide and varied number of cases, including those
concerning the prosecutors’ self-serving claims discussed above. Some
of these in-between statements are more clearly fiction-like than others,
but many of them are sufficiently similar to straightforward utterances
about characters in novels to justify calling them fiction.
And so the rise across all human cultures of the illusion of self. Its
emergence in an individual or a people is not sudden but gradual, not
like a light switched on, but rather like rheostat-controlled illumination
becoming brighter by small increments. But “brighter” is the wrong
simile; what happens is rather a darkening, as the false self gradually
takes over more and more of the innet life. In the case of the individual,
perhaps the process comes to maturity in adolescence with the creation
of a basic persona. In any case, when the illusion is firmly in place we are
no longer in Eden. As our species did in the past, we pass gradually from
creatures of innocence and oneness to the split and conflicted beings
each of us is.
(‘Onsciousness

Misleading parallel: psychology treats of processes in the

psychical sphere, as does physics in the physical
(PI, §571).

Consciousness, it would seem, appeared long before the evolution of

our species; evidently it is something we share with numerous of our
fellow creatures. This chapter takes up the question of what exactly it
is we share. The reason for examining consciousness has to do with
the Cartesian worldview. One who reflects on the topic of our essential
nature will be drawn to the conception of us as creatures with a dual
nature: we have bodies, and we have minds. The portrait of the human as
an animal with a conscious mind—a being in possession of a rich set of
mental objects like sights, sounds, pains, and pleasures—is a compelling
one. We cannot understand our place in nature without reaching a
decision on the accuracy of that portrayal. As attractive as it is, it misses
the mark.
There are two other reasons for studying consciousness. One has to
do with its role in the mind-body problem, a conundrum which also
goes back to Descartes. Mind, the realm of consciousness, is categorically
distinct from body, or from matter in general. Unlike the body and
the objects surrounding it, mental things like pain or a feeling of joy
cannot be located in three-dimensional space. The mind-body problem
is to understand how entities as different as mind and matter could
possibly interact causally. Just as a ghost in the Hollywood movies of my
childhood could pass through a wall without in any way changing it,
and in general—to be consistent—should not be able to bring about any
alteration in the way the physical world is, so the ghost-like, purely non-
material stuff of mind would, it appears, be unable to cause anything to
122 Becoming Human

happen in the three-dimensional world we move about in. Conversely,

just as we could not hurt the ghost by stabbing or shooting it, so matter
cannot affect mind, or so it would seem. Yet body does affect mind
and vice versa; stepping on a thorn causes pain; a mental willing causes
action; and so on. How can this be?
This question has been taken up Dy biologists, among others. For
instance, Francis Crick, in seeking a scientific solution to what he sees as
the problem of consciousness, is in effect engaging with the mind-body
problem.* I think he was moved by examples like this: In the process
of seeing a red rose, retinal irradiation causes electro-chemical impulses
to be transmitted to the brain, whereupon, miraculously, consciousness
of red arises. How can we explain scientifically—that is, in terms of the
material space-time world—this wonderful transformation of brain agit-
ation into an awareness of colors-as-seen, sounds-as-heard, and so on?
How can a change in matter bring about a state of mind? Wittgenstein
spoke of the intuition that lies behind the question as “|t|]he feeling of an
unbridgeable gulf between consciousness and brain process...” (PI, §12).
The doctrine of physicalism provides another, related reason for preoc-
cupation with the conscious mind. For the physicalist everything is
ultimately to be understood in terms of the concepts of physics. Science
tells us what is, and there is no room in its conceptual apparatus for
talk of mental stuff. Yet the mental too undoubtably exists; for instance,
people often experience red or feel pain. The issue then is, can the exist-
ence of consciousness, in the form of awareness of pain, pleasure, and so
on, be reconciled with the assumption that everything must ultimately
be reduced to atoms and the void. One path of reconciliation would
be to identify the mental and the physical: to be in pain, for example,
might be, really, to be in a certain brain state.
One final preliminary point. The topic of consciousness has drawn
an enormous literature in philosophy, psychology, and biology. I shall
sidestep the resulting discussions by attacking the problem at the
root, where matters are simpler. In brief, there has been a failure
to understand the concept of consciousness. Of course, the question
“What is consciousness?” has not gone untouched; there is a large sub-
literature on this preliminary but essential point. One influential writer,
whose discussions span both philosophical and scientific accounts of
consciousness, is John Searle, and I shall begin with some remarks of
his. He points out that “consciousness” has meanings not relevant to
our interests here. Consciousness as it concerns us should be distin-
suished from knowledge, attention, and self-consciousness.* He goes on
to portray consciousness as we are interested in it:
 Consciousness 123

By ‘consciousness’ I simply mean those subjective states of sentience

Or awareness that begin when one awakes in the morning from a
dreamless sleep and continue throughout the day until one goes to
sleep at night or falls into a coma, or dies, or otherwise becomes, as
one would say, ‘unconscious’).°

AN mr 0508

The most important [feature] ...is... ‘subjectivity’. There is a sense in

which each person’s consciousness is private to that person, a sense in
which he is related to his pains, tickles, itches, thoughts and feelings
in a way that is quite unlike the way that others are related to those
pains, tickles, itches, thoughts and feelings. This phenomenon...is
sometimes described as that feature of consciousness by way of which
there is something that it’s like or something that it feels like to be
in a certain conscious state. If somebody asks me what it feels like to
give a lecture in front of a large audience I can answer that question.
But if somebody asks what it feels like to be a shingle or a stone, there
is nO answer to that question because shingles and stones are not
conscious. The point is also put by saying that conscious states have
a certain qualitative character; the states in question are sometimes
described as ‘qualia’.*

Our interest then is in consciousness qua “subjective phenomenal exper-

ience,” as it has been called. The idea of consciousness may seem plain
enough, but in fact it eludes understanding. Searle’s account draws on
four notions: “subjectivity,” “privacy,” “what it is like to be something,”
and “qualia.” The first and last of these themselves need explanation.
The notion of the metaphysical privacy of experience is something I
shall take up later. Here | want to raise a difficulty about the remaining
item in Searle’s arsenal of explanatory ideas. I do so in order to give
some initial plausibility to the notion that “consciousness” is a deeply
problematic idea.
As Searle indicates, he is not alone in utilizing the notion “what
it’s like” to explain consciousness. The phrase is drawn from a famous
essay by Thomas Nagle: “What It’s Like To Be a Bat.”> We can’t
know what it’s like to be a bat, because, for one thing, we lack the
subjective experiences associated with echolocation. In light of that
example, we might think that to know what it is like to be some-
thing is to be explained in terms of having the relevant subjective
experience. But actually, for Searle, the direction of explanation is
124 Becoming Human

supposed to go the other way: “subjective experience”—consciousness

itself—is supposed to be elucidated in terms of Knowing or not knowing
what it is like to be something. What is consciousness or subjective
experience? It is the sort of thing one must have in order to know what
it is like to be something—a bat for example. But this explanation is a
cheat. We think we understand it because we are all familiar with the
use of the phrase “Know what it is like... We know what it is like to be
some things, and do not know what it is like to be others. Some people
know what it is like to be on death row; most do not. Some know what
it is like to De in love in Paris in the spring; most do not. It makes sense
to ask, say, “Do you Know what it is like to be told you have cancer?” In
each case the criterion for knowing what it is like is whether the person
has been in that situation, been on death row, in love in springtime
Paris, and so on. In these instances, and in general, for the question,
“Do you know what it is like to be a such and such?” to make sense there
must be a real possibility for you to be a such and such. So for the idea
of knowing what it feels like to be a bat to make sense it would have to
be possible for me to have been a bat. But not being a bat is, one could
say, one of my essential properties. Hence, the idea of knowing what it
is like to be a bat is senseless, and as such can hardly be used to explain
what consciousness is. What has happened here is that a phrase we all
know how to employ has Deen extended beyond its normal range of use
and co-opted to express a certain metaphysical conception. We have the
picture in mind of immediate subjective experience, and we understand
“Knowing what it is like to be a bat” in terms of that picture. Searle has
not explained Dut rather presupposed the idea of subjective experience.
He might reply that the notion is itself plain enough; it needs no elucid-
ation beyond what he has provided. In particular, he might say the idea
is Clear Decause we all experience consciousness; it is this one might
remark, pinching oneself. [his is to move to another of his four attempts
to explain the idea of consciousness. But it is uncertain that this new
method will work. What remains clear at any rate is that philosophical,
psychological, or biological investigations of consciousness are rooted
in the corresponding idea; we must proceed by trying to understand that
telex:

Consciousness is?

The difficulty of grasping the idea of consciousness shows itself in

some remarks by G.E. Moore. He said that whenever we are aware
of something, there are two elements to be discerned, the object of
 Consciousness 125

consciousness, and the consciousness itself. Thus if lam conscious of the

color blue, there are two things to be discerned: blue, and my conscious-
ness of blue. He goes on,

Though philosophers have recognized that something distinct is

meant by consciousness, they have never yet had a clear conception
of what that something is. They have not been able to hold it and blue
before their minds and to compare them, in the same way in which
they can compare biue and green. |For...| the moment we try to fix
our attention upon consciousness and to see what, distinctly, it is, it
seems to vanish.... When we try to introspect the sensation of blue,
all we can see is the blue; the other element is as if it were diaphanous.
Yet it can be distinguished if we look attentively enough.... My
main object in this paragraph has been to try to make the reader
see it....°

Note that the path Moore takes toward getting a clear conception of
consciousness goes by way of introspection; if we can isolate the referent
of the word “consciousness” in a case like that concerning the sensation
Dlue we will presumably have grasped the concept of consciousness. To
understand the word, become acquainted with its referent. But as we
shall see, this turns out to be a treacherous path to understanding.
Meanwhile, I leave it to the reader to separate the blue in the sensation
of, say, a blue cup, from the corresponding consciousness of blue. Good
luck!
It can’t be done, I want to say; in thinking it could be, Moore was
under some weird illusion. And yet one feels one should be able to do it.
After all, Iam conscious of blue when I look at the cup. Consciousness
seems obviously real and indeed ever-present when one is awake and
Aa
Moore’s assumption of the existence of consciousness—one most
reflective people would share—seems fair enough. How could one even
think to deny its existence? It is, one believes, palpably there if you just
focus on your experience at this moment. Consider the visual field—the
world of what is given in the mind when we see. Looking, one says
with certainty, “This cannot be denied.” The attention, here, is not on
what we see—this desk, those books—but on the presentation of those
things to the mind, the fhis given in perception—“subjective phenom-
enal experience,” as it 1s called. However, it is hard to find two things
here. I see the glass of water; | am, one might say, aware of it. But am I
also aware of the consciousness of it? Again, it seems impossible to find
126 Becoming Human

two things here, although, to repeat, Moore thought there were, and
that he could teach us to see them. Nonetheless, it will seem to many
beyond question that people are directly aware of “subjective experi-
ence.” On the other hand—to raise again the possibility that something
might be awry here—I note that the “this” aimed inwardly looks a little
suspicious. In everyday life, “this” often comes with a gesture, as when
one points and says “Take this chair upstairs.” What could one point to
in the case of consciousness of the visual field? If you try to point to
something other than the glass, desk, Dooks, or other objects one sees,
the gesture will seem empty. But then the natural thing to say is that one
can point not with a physical gesture but by concentrating one’s atten-
tion. However, the idea of such inward pointing remains dicey—does it
accomplish anything?

Zombies

One way of drawing attention to what one might take to be the reality of
consciousness appeals to a notion found in some contemporary discus-
sions, that of a philosophical zombie. These are marvelous creatures.
They look and act just like us, but lack something we all have, conscious-
ness. You throw a ball to such a creature and it leaps and catches it,
and smiles at you, proud of its agility; it jokes and carries on behaving
as the good friend you know it is (though of course you think of it
as a he, not an it). But in fact the zombie’s mind is empty, a total
blank. No trace of consciousness accompanies its actions and reactions.
A further feature of these imagined creatures is that they have the under-
lying physical constitution of a normal human—the same atoms in
the same places doing the same causal jobs. That we can postulate or
imagine such beings—that the notion of a philosophical zombie seems
(to some) plainly intelligible—highlights the apparently undeniable fact
of consciousness, the thing we have and they lack.
A key property of the imagined scenario is that we can never tell if
someone—my neighbor, or, say, my wife!—is a zombie. The Haitian
variety are easy to spot, slow moving, sluggish, and dirt encrusted as
they are, not to mention dead, but the philosophical ones are indistin-
guishable from normal humans. No matter how closely we study them
no differences emerge. That is why philosophers find them useful. For,
as suggested earlier, the task many have taken on is to reconcile the
fact of direct experience—the existence, we might say, of mind—with a
scientific naturalism according to which everything in the world consists
of physical elements, period. We are each a cloud of atoms, subatomic
 Consciousness 127

particles or “strings,” and so on, and there is no room in this world for
the mental, unless it can somehow be reduced to the physical. Function-
alism is one attempt at such reduction; it holds that things like pain are
to be understood as functional states of an organism. To be in pain is to
be in a particular kind of bodily state which is caused by certain physical
events and which in turn causes certain reactions. For instance, your
stepping on a thorn causes a certain Drain state which in turn causes
you to cry out and wince, and so on. Here pain is being reduced to a
functional physical state that intervenes between injury and reaction;
an organism in such a functional state is in pain. On this view, pain is
not identified with some human Drain state, or type of brain state, since
it is conceivable that creatures lacking brains of the kind we have might
De in the same functional states as we are in. A creature with a Drain
made up of bubblegum particles might nonetheless be in the functional
State we are when we are in pain.
It might seem that there is an easy and obvious refutation of func-
tionalism. To be in pain more is required than being in some functional
physical state; one must also fee! pain. The example of the zombies just
serves to dramatize that point. Being in the requisite functional state,
the zombie, upon stepping on a thorn, winces and cries out; yet it lacks
something crucial to being in pain, namely this or something like it (and
here you might pinch yourself). So, apparently, the functionalist’s view
of things leaves something out—indeed, one might think, it overlooks
the main thing, our immediate experiences.
An interesting feature of philosophical zombie-hood is that the
creatures themselves do not know they lack consciousness.’ They say
in all sincerity that they see this or that, feel angry, experience pain,
and so on. Their loving or angry looks are indistinguishable from ours;
their words of love or anger fit perfectly the context of their lives. Their
sincerity in reporting them is the real article. If asked the (extraordin-
arily weird) question, “Are you conscious?” they might reply, especially
if they have a bent to philosophy that allows them to ignore the strange-
ness of the question, and again in all sincerity, “Yes, of course!” They
cannot know they are zombies, and yet we feel strongly that we under-
stand the difference between them and us. If you ask yourself “Am I a
zombie?” the answer seems plain. Of course not! How could you tell?
Well, you feel this, you say, this pain in your chest that is annoying
you. But then wouldn’t a zombie say the same, and with all sincerity,
convinced of its truth? “Are you in pain?” we ask it, and it replies—
truthfully by its lights—“Yes! And I worry about this pain in my chest.”
But since the zombie doesn’t feel anything, how can it be in pain?
Doesn’t it feel anything? In some cases we can see it is in pain: its leg
is half torn off by a bomb, say; it shrieks in agony. And if it is in pain
then it feels pain. It too is certain it is in pain; it begs for morphine.
Does the hypothesis that it nevertheless does not feel pain make sense?
I believe we contradicted ourselves by postulating a creature that acts,
reacts, and speaks exactly like us Dut feels no pain, no anger, and so on.
For as we ordinarily use the word “pain” (“and how else are we to use
it?”), the “zombie” with its leg in tatters is in pain.
But, once more, doesn’t saying that ignore the crucial difference?
Suppose you ask a zombie, “What is pain?” and it replies, “Pain is this
and like experiences.” The problem is that in the zombie’s case there
is no this to point to; that is the difference. I am wary of this alleged
difference. For, after all, the purported zombies have learned to use our
psychological language in just the way we use it, even though they
can appeal to no bona fide instances of “this” in learning it. Thus it
would seem that no inwardly pointing demonstrative “this” is needed
in either learning or using mental terms like “pain.” Yet the very idea
of consciousness, as understood by its theoreticians, seems to stand
or fall with the meaningfulness of that inner-directed demonstrative,
for like Moore they believe that consciousness is something we can be
aware of, the referent of an inwardly pointing “this.” | want to chal-
lenge that idea of consciousness, Dut before continuing it will be useful
to step back and consider in general terms the nature of the position
I shall defend.

Basic strategy
My aim, as said, is to attack consciousness studies at the root. Most
of those who write on the subject presuppose the intelligibility of the
philosophical idea of “consciousness.” Despite the seemingly obvious
truth of that supposition, it is mistaken. It is not the fact of consciousness
that is in question, but the very idea itself. My thesis is that those
theoreticians who write of consciousness do not deploy our everyday
idea of it; rather they write under the influence of a certain wrong
picture. As a result, their talk of consciousness is hidden nonsense. My
attempt to bring that hidden nonsense to light follows Wittgenstein’s
treatment of the subject and also draws on some oDservations made by
Norman Malcolm.®
We might put the thesis that consciousness exists as follows: there
are minds, or, the mental is real. And again, how could anyone sensibly
think to deny the mental? Even the physicalist, for whom only what
 Consciousness 129

the science of physics sanctions exists, will grant that the mental is, in
that people have pains, and so on; for how could anyone believe seri-
ously that no one feels pain? It’s only that physicalism seeks somehow
to make its position compatible with the existence of the mental, for
example, as discussed earlier, by saying that pain just equals a certain
state of the Drain. Similarly, in setting myself against philosophical talk
of consciousness and the mental, | do not wish to deny such claims as,
“Pain is a mental state.” But to clarify what | am up to here I must set
out a certain distinction. In doing so, I go a bit more fully into points
[ have already touched upon, regarding the ideas of “grammar” and
“picture.”

A fourfold difference

The contrast in question is between surface grammar, picture, superficial

grammar, and depth grammar. Let me begin with the first and last of
these. The apparent or surface grammar of a sentence may hide its
real or logical form, which a study of its depth grammar will reveal. It
may be useful to note how the distinction between apparent form and
underlying logical form came to philosophical prominence. In 1905, in
“On Denoting,”” an essay of broad philosophical influence, Bertrand
Russell distinguished the logical form of the sentence “The present King
of France is bald” from its apparent form. It looks as if the phrase “the
present King of France” does exactly the same duty a proper name
might do, or that might be achieved, say, by pointing to some person.
The phrase seemingly serves to pick out an individual in order that
something might be said of him. The trouble is that at the time the
sentence was pronounced, France had no monarch. Now if you point
and say “That is a raven,” or if you point to something and say “Take
that upstairs” then you make your meaning clear. But if in each case
there is nothing at all you are pointing to, your sentences seem to
lacK any sense whatsoever. Seen in that light, Russell's King of France
example should be senseless, yet it seems meaningful. Russell resolved
this dilemma by employing items from the new logic developed by
Gottlob Frege and himself. With those tools he analyzed the sentence in
such a way that the seeming singular referring expression “the present
King of France” disappeared. Understood properly the sentence says:
“There is something x that is presently King of France and for any y
if y is presently King of France then x equals y; and x is bald.” We
thus come to see that the sentence’s underlying logical form contains
no name-like entities, but only logical terms, variables, and predicates.
130 Becoming Human

Since there is no x that is presently King of France the sentence is false,

and not senseless in the manner in which sentences with names that
have no referents were held to be senseless.
Russell’s distinction between surface grammar and logical form played
a key role in Wittgenstein’s early philosophy. The contrast has a central
place in his later philosophy also, but there the notion of “logic” is trans-
formed. Now to investigate the depth grammar or “logic” of a sentence
is to study the essential features of the language-game within which it
is uttered. Although the term “depth grammar” brings Chomsky’s writ-
ings to mind, it has a very different employment here. Instead of “depth
grammar, we might speak of a survey in philosophical anthropology,
one which seeks to establish how the words implicated in philosophy
are actually used.
As for surface grammar, consider the sentence, “He’s got a lot of gall.”
By its apparent form—its surface grammar—the word “gall” tells us what
it is he has a lot of. The sentence seems in the same class as “He’s got a lot
of money” “...a lot of stamps,” and so on. Thus, given its place in the
sentence and its status as a noun, the word “gall” might appear, on an
extremely hasty reading, to stand for some stuff or substance the person
is said to possess a large amount of. But of course that interpretation
is absurd. Rather, to speak of a lot of gall, in the present context, is to
refer to the brazen way the person typically acts or is presently acting.
Now it is only in Wonderland that someone might be fooled by surface
grammar to investigate the nature of the gall someone has a lot of,
but other instances are serious. For example, surface grammar may fool
us in the case of “intention” or, more directly to the point, in that of
“consciousness.”
We avoid being fooled by looking closely at how the key words are
actually used. We may distinguish two kinds of grammatical or “logical”
remarks that play a role in the investigation of philosophically signi-
ficant words. One is superficial, the other not. I take up an example
of the former in a moment, but first note that whether superficial or
deep, grammatical remarks, as understood here, are logically true as
Opposed to contingent or empirical. Thus “Arsenic is a poison” is an
empirical remark, whereas “Arsenic is a substance” is a “grammatical”
or logical one. The latter sentence does not really add to our knowledge
of arsenic, unlike the former one. Rather “Arsenic is a substance” says
something about the concept of arsenic. The grammatical remark puts
arsenic in the same class as, say, lead or water, and in a separate category
from sounds, colors, and so on. What can De said of those categorically
different things cannot be said of substances, and vice versa. This red
 Consciousness 131

can be brighter than that; a sound can be middle c. But arsenic cannot
be brighter than some color, or be middle c, and so on.
Grammatical remarks, so called, cannot be false, because they cite
essential truths about the use of words. Their model is “One plays
patience by oneself,” which tells us something definitive about the
game, unlike, say, the sentence, “He plays patience every morning.”
Similarly, if something were not a substance it would not be arsenic. Our
and other animals’ bodies might have been so constituted that arsenic
did us no harm; arsenic would then not be a poison but it would still
be arsenic.
The difference between superficial and non-superficial grammatical
remarks is merely a matter of scope. Superficial ones, while they
make valid logical points, do not reflect a wide survey of usage. An
example of a superficial grammatical remark would be, “Pain is a mental
phenomenon.” The sentence is undoubDtably true, and someone might
argue that since it is, it makes no sense to in any way doubt or deny
the existence of the mental, that is, of consciousness. In reply, we can,
indeed must, grant that “Pain is mental,” Dut to say that is only to
grant a logical truth. It is to place the word “pain”—as we use it—in
the same category as other psychological words, and to say, implicitly,
that we cannot speak of pain in the way we speak of physical objects,
or numbers, and so on. In particular, to say “Pain is mental” is not to
grant the corresponding metaphysical thesis, which holds that pain is
a mental substance or object, one of the mind’s constituents at a given
moment. Thus, Wittgenstein remarks,

‘Mental’ for me is not a metaphysical but a logical epithet... .*°

There is no contradiction between granting that pain is mental

and setting oneself against some metaphysical conception of the
mental.
The same point holds for the other psychological terms we are inter-
ested in. No one can deny, for example, that fear is an inner state;
in some sense my fear-utterance describes a mental phenomenon. But
what is the sense in question? It is one in which the statement “Fear
is inner or mental” is philosophically innocent, carries no philosoph-
ical weight, and does not point to or presuppose the metaphysical
burden of mind. Rather the statement makes a grammatical claim; it
makes a “superficial logical classification” (LW, IT 82), one which puts
talk of feelings of fear in the same class as talk of pain, belief, anger,
gladness, and so on, as opposed, say, to talk of chairs or behavior."*
132 Becoming Human

The items in the first class snare some important properties. Feel-
ings of gladness or fear (etc.) cannot be said to be located in three-
dimensional space, or weighed, or painted, and so on; such ascriptions
make no sense.
The classification is called superficial, for one reason, because there
are myriad and important differences between these various ways of
speaking (between talk of pain and talk of fear, for example) and in
addition there are major differences within each case—differences, for
example, within the class of fear-utterances, some of which are what
Wittgenstein calls Ausserungen, some descriptions, and so on.'* The
superficial grammatical remark in question describes a feature of our
language-game with “fear.” As such, it just reminds us of a characteristic
of our speech; it has the same status as the definition one might give a
child by saying “This is (what we call) red.”
Now, since I do not deny the superficial logical remarks just discussed,
the question arises, what do I wish to oppose? This question brings
us to the last item in my fourfold distinction. For the answer to the
question is, the inner as we picture it when we think about these matters.
“Picture” here is a term of art from Wittgenstein’s later philosophy. To
repeat some previous points, in general a metaphysical picture arises
when someone, reflecting on the meaning of some word and misled
by surface grammar, understands it on the basis of a false comparison
with the use of some other term. Most commonly the misunderstanding
involves taking a word to refer to some object in cases where in fact
it does not do so. Thus to advert to my usual example, if “I” is taken,
in all its occurrences, as a referring expression, standing for something
in the way that “you” stands for something (namely some person),
philosophical questions arise about the nature of the I, or the criteria of
identity governing judgments about it.
Let me apply the distinctions I have been discussing to the example
“T feel pain.” Its surface grammar has it that “I” is a noun in the subject
place and “pain” a noun in the object place. If we take surface grammar
as a guide, and understand the sentence in a way analogous to the way
we would understand, say, “Jones sees Mount Washington,” then we
will suppose that some entity, the referent of “I”, is in a certain relation-
ship to another entity, the mental object pain. We picture “I” and “pain”
as referring words and our thinking will reflect that supposition. The
supposition is reinforced by the fact that the sentence “Pain is mental”
is true. We are inclined to interpret this sentence as telling us a meta-
physical truth about pain, namely that it can form part of the content
of mind. But in reality “Pain is mental” is only a superficial grammatical
 Consciousness 133

truth, telling us that talk about pain is in the same class as talk about
anger, fear, and so on, and in a different class from talk about ships,
shoes, and sealing wax. What looked like an obvious metaphysical truth
is in fact a mere tautology. A deeper-going grammatical investigation
will discover such things as that “I am in pain” is not governed by a
criterion.
I can now state my main thesis in this chapter in terms of some of
the distinctions I have set out. It is that depth grammatical investiga-
tions will reveal that theoreticians of consciousness, fooled by surface
grammar, form a misleading picture of their subject, and hence speak
hidden nonsense. Otherwise put, the assumption of the existence of
consciousness is like the supposition that the “I” of “I think” refers,
which in turn is like the hypothesis that the “It” of “It is raining” is real.
J begin a defense of that position with a further distinction.

Consciousness

Norman Malcolm opens his perceptive study of consciousness by

noting that there are two uses of the term, one “transitive” the other
The first kind takes an object: we are conscious of some-
thing or conscious that something, as in “I was conscious of a feeling
of dread” or “I was conscious that the deadline was near.” On this use,
“conscious of” and “aware of” come to pretty much the same thing.
The second kind takes no object, as in “He finally regained conscious-
ness.” We must ask of each use whether it supports the metaphysical
assumption of the mental.

‘Transitive Consciousness

To have a pain is to be aware of pain, which in turn is to be conscious

of pain; and similarly for being angry, having an intention, and so
on. These particular instances of transitive consciousness provide one
source of our philosophical confusion. We get to consciousness by
taking the various psychological words as referring to mental objects
or states. One’s consciousness is then the sum total of those mental
states. Thus the metaphysical idea of consciousness is reinforced by the
contemplation of the many words that so strongly seem to name or
describe elements or states of “mind” or “consciousness,” as in “He feels
depressed,” or “I am in pain.” The proper way of proceeding is to take
up these philosophical temptations case by case, in an extended series
of deliberations, and to show in each instance that the metaphysical
154 Becoming Human

construal of the piece of language in question must be rejected. Doing

this even partially is well beyond the scope of this book. The great length
of any such project results from Wittgenstein’s way of doing philosophy.
He understands philosophy as a fight against very deep-seated intuitions
we have about such metaphysically significant matters as being aware
of a pain. Surely, one assumes, pain is an inner something, and to report
a pain is to give the results of one’s observations of that inner state. No
single argument will kill that assumption, or put it to rest. Instead, one
will be drawn back to it again and again. Furthermore, the contempla-
tion of one philosophically important word will bring to notice other
words about which confusion is also possible, if not inevitable. Thus in
considering the mental! state pain we might think that it is not possible
for another to know I am in pain, since pains are private. And now we
Shall have to consider how in fact the word “Know” is used. (To take
one point, as we do use it, another can indeed know I am in pain).
Our intuitions keep drawing us back to metaphysics, and that is why
Wittgenstein’s philosophical remarks keep circling back to issues close
to those he has already addressed. The enormous anti-metaphysical task
set by a word like “pain” must be multiplied by the number of words
of moment to a philosophical psychology—desire, fear, intention, joy,
and on and on.
My interest here, however, is in outlining a Weiltanschauung that is
drawn from Wittgenstein’s work and that throws light on, or gives us a
way of perceiving, our place in nature and our journey out from Eden
and back thereto. Part of that project is to render to some degree plaus-
ible the negative point that the mentalist view of mind—its assump-
tion of the metaphysical burden of consciousness—is nonsensical. My
defense of that claim will be in two parts. One is a consideration of
some points about the example of pain. While far from conclusive,
they at least lend some plausibility to the anti-mentalist position. The
other is an attack on the sensibleness of the common, metaphysically
important assumption that one can successfully point inwardly to an
item of consciousness.

The case of pain

Under the influence of the picture of pain as a felt mental something,
we naturally distinguish between pain and the awareness of pain. Given
the distinction, it seems to follow that pain might exist when I am not
feeling it, just as the red wagon I see exists when I am not looking at it.
Armstrong, for example, writes,
 Consciousness 135

[T]he natural view to take is that pain and awareness of pain are
‘distinct existences’. If so, a false awareness of pain is at least logically
possible. **

The kind of would-be example he has in mind concerns someone whose

leg aches even though he is unaware of its aching (127), perhaps because
he is engrossed in some task. Armstrong’s view is acommon one. People
are quite ready to assert that one might have a pain Dut in certain
circumstances—distracted say by an interesting conversation—not feel
it. Someone might say therefore that “ordinary language” supports the
thesis that people might have unfelt or not-experienced pains. However,
Wittgenstein is an “ordinary language” philosopher only in that his
results concern how words like “pain” are used, in his special way of
studying use. An ordinary person’s claims about how words are used
are by no means privileged. The ordinary person, like the philosopher
or scientist, Knows how to use words like “pain”; all English speakers
are brought up to employ in everyday life words like “pain” or “ache”
and so on. We are not brought up, however, to be able to reflect accur-
ately on the crucial features of the way we use those words. We are
not brought up to be Wittgensteinian “logicians”! Similarly, one might
imagine a people who learn Dy oDservation and prompting to play chess
but who never articulate the rules of the game. They might follow those
rules but have no vocabulary for stating them. Now when “ordinary”
people reflect on what words mean—when they say, for instance, that
it is in accord with the meaning of “ache” that one can have an ache
one is not aware of—they are just as likely as the philosophers or social
scientists to base what they say on some false picture. Here, the picture
of pain as an object upon which one might turn the spotlight of atten-
tion, or not. Such intuitively based claims about words must be tested
against an examination of the language-games in which the words
are employed.
As we employ the words “ache,” and “feel,” the assertions “My leg
aches,” and “I feel an ache in my leg,” come to the same thing. Similarly
“IT am in pain,” and “T feel pain” can be used interchangeably. If that is
so, then the case of the unfelt ache in the leg is an impossibility. Since
the picture we have of pain makes it a possibility, we have grounds
to doubt the picture. These remarks, however, are dogmatic. Someone
might object as follows. It is true that “My leg aches but I feel no ache”
makes no sense; but what about the past tense case? “My leg ached but I
did not feel it ache” might be said to be true, in the example where one
was for a time absorbed in something. It is as if one spoke of turning
136 Becoming Human

a flashlight now on this animal and now on that; the first creature
does not cease to exist when the light leaves it. Aches do not neces-
sarily cease to exist when one’s attention focuses elsewhere, Or so one
might argue.
In reply, let me pose this question: what would my criterion be for
judging that yesterday afternoon [ had a pain I did not feel? I could rely
on memory or on other people’s testimony to establish that I did not
feel pain then; I remember rather a carefree, happy time spent talking
with an old friend. But what would show that nevertheless I] was in
pain then? What counts for my not feeling pain also counts for my not
having pain; that is, the evidence for the person’s not feeling pain is
also evidence against his being in pain. Counter to this, one might site
evidence like the following: I know my leg ached all morning yesterday,
but not in the afternoon, when my friend was here; but after he left it
ached for the rest of the day. So it is plausible to assume that it ached
during the afternoon as well, although I did not feel it. Implicit in this
reply is the assumption that the criterion governing past instances of
being in pain differs from that governing past instances of feeling pain.
The criterion for the alleged afternoon pain is something like this: if I
was in pain in the morning and again in the evening, then I was in pain
in the intervening time. But this is not the way we use the phrase being
in pain. For instance, someone oDserving the person in question might
say that he was not in pain in the afternoon, and do so on the same
grounds as govern the judgment that he did not feel pain. So it seems
that to speak of past unfelt pains makes sense only if one alters the
criteria governing such talkK—altering them in a way that brings them
out of agreement with what is in fact the way we speak of pains, present
Or past.

Ausserungen
One approach to understanding the “logic” or depth grammar of “pain”
and other psychological words draws on the concept of an Ausserungen.
This is another of Wittgenstein’s special terms; he uses it to pick out a
certain class of uttered sentences. However, he does not use the word
consistently; he sometimes employs it in an ordinary, non-technical
way, leaving it to context to tell us which meaning is in play. The same
point holds for his use of the term “picture” (Bild). Sometimes a picture
is just a picture; sometimes to have a picture is to be under the influence
of a misleading analogy.
 Consciousness 137

Wittgenstein’s “Ausserung”’—whether in its technical sense or not—is

commonly translated as “utterance.” The trouble with that policy is that
the translation, while true to the German text, can be misleading. For
example, consider the following remark:

What do psychologists record?—What do they observe? Isn’t it the

behaviour of human beings, in particular their utterances? But these
are not about behaviour (PI, p. 179b).

Here, “utterances” is a translation of “Ausserungen.” But the reader is

easily misled. If we take “utterances” in its ordinary sense, as opposed to
its technical one, then the passage quoted will seem strange. For many
of our utterances are about behavior—for instance, if I utter the words
“He is running.” No—to make sense here the term must be understood
as having its technical use, to stand, roughly, for first-person present-
tense psychological remarks like “I am in pain,” “I intend to go,” and
so on; and these are not about behavior. They are, rather, about pains,
intentions, and so on. In what follows, I shall use the terms Ausserung
and Ausserungen to flag the technical uses of what are often rendered
as “utterance” and “utterances,” words that in the English translations
of Wittgenstein may or may not have a technical sense. This way of
proceeding builds into quotations from Wittgenstein what is in part an
interpretation of them, and makes what he says more readily under-
standable.
What then is an Ausserung? There are no perspicuous one-word rendi-
tions of the term. Some time ago issues concerning Ausserungen were
discussed under the term “avowal” but I find that rendition unhelpful,
if not misleading. We might try to define “Ausserung” in general terms,
for example as “an expression in language of an inner state.” But the
notion of an Ausserungen is supposed to help us understand talk of an
“inner state”, not presuppose it. Further, the idea of an “expression”
here is puzzling. In general, and with an eye on Wittgenstein’s method-
Ology, the appeal to a definition is not promising. One might attempt
explication through examples. “I am in pain,” is an Ausserung, and so
(on some uses) is “I intend to go,” “I am angry,” and so on. This appeal
to instances, however, is not very helpful, for we do not know what it
is that makes them Ausserungen.
One of the key marks of an Ausserung lies in its contrast with corres-
ponding third-person uses. The criterion I deploy in the latter instances,
for example in judging whether someone is in pain, concerns looks and
behavior in a context. [ hear the sound of a bone snapping and see
138 Becoming Human

him fall and cry out. Similarly, my assertion that the person over there
intends to leave may be based on the observation that he is gathering
up his belongings, standing up, nodding farewell to his colleagues, and
so on, this in the context of our being participants in a meeting which
is nOW coming to an end. In contrast, my corresponding first-person
utterances (my Ausserungen) are not based on observation of any kind.
Certainly it makes no sense to say that I Dase my claim to be in pain on
my seeing myself in a mirror writhing and grimacing, or that I know I
intend to leave on the Dasis of observing my behavior.
However, someone might insist that I do base my statement on
observing an inner object—for instance my pain or my intention as I
perceive them. The way to see that I do not is to attend to a second
feature that counts as a key mark of Ausserungen. This is that they can
be seen to lie on the continuum (discussed in Chapter 4) that runs from
the pre-linguistic, through gestures, and on to use in a language-game.
Concerning the first, a pre-linguistic hominid’s howl is an expression of
pain, a natural or instinctive way of reacting to it. The howl just comes
out, in the same way that an animal’s jumping away from a predator
comes naturally, directly. As an example of the gesture phase, consider
a Child’s deliberate prolonging of its crying in pain—a whimpering that
jt draws out and that brings its mother’s attention. An Ausserung as here
conceived replaces natural behavior or gesture with a word or phrase.
Thus, given the child’s experience of adults’ uses of language, its skill at
imitation, and the adults’ prompting and encouragement, it may come
to substitute the expression “Ow!” for its instinctive pain reaction, or for
its whimpering qua gesture. Or more sophisticated ways of expressing
pain may be acquired, such as, “That hurts!” or, finally, “I am in pain.”
And just as it seems implausible to postulate that the instinctive reac-
tion of the hominid in my story is to be understood as its turning its
mind’s eye on a certain mental state and then as a result howling, so it
seems in the case of “That hurts!” The latter is a substitute for wincing
or howling; it is as it were a way of wincing. It is wrong to put an inner
observation of pain between the pain and its expression, in the case of
a howl, and wrong too in the case of a verbal substitution that replaces
the how].!°

Intransitive consciousness

I turn now to the other item in Malcolm’s distinction. Meaning is use;

and for “I am conscious” to have a use is for it to be uttered within
a language-game. Such usage will take place within a certain context.
 Consciousness 139

Suppose I have been in a coma, and now, lying in a hospital bed, |

overhear the nurses talking about me as if I weren't there, discussing
the details of my case. Annoyed at this I might say, “I’m conscious you
know.” In such a context, “I am conscious” clearly has a use; it makes
sense. But the truth of the utterance doesn’t support the metaphysical
idea that consciousness is a mental something or other, as it were a
veil between the aware subject and the world. The criterion others will
deploy in judging the truth of my utterance is how I appear and act;
it has nothing to do with some assumed existence of mind-stuff. For
example, how do the nurses know my remark is true? Well, they look
at me and see I am conscious. In contrast, I might utter the words, “I
am conscious” from within a coma, and then the nurses could see that
lam in fact not conscious,
What happens to “I am conscious” when it is said outside some such
context as that just imagined? For instance, in the midst of a conversa-
tion with someone | say “I am conscious.” My interlocutor could make
nothing of such a remark. It would De as if the person you are speaking
with were to utter the “Hello” of greeting in the midst of your conver-
sation. Or as if we were to see someone lifting a feather, ask “What are
you doing?” and get the reply “I’m trying to lift this feather.” It would
take a special context for this to make sense. For instance, if the person
is just regaining the use of his arm and hand after a stroke, or if the
feather is made of some extraordinarily heavy material. On the other
hand, if the feather is an ordinary one, and the speaker in good health,
to say he or she is trying to lift the feather fails to make sense, because
the context in which it might do so is missing. There is no job for
it to do.
In contexts in which claims about consciousness make sense, the
criterion for whether another person is conscious is how they look and
act. In contrast, in the case of first-person, present-tense claims to be
conscious, the speaker deploys no criterion to discover or assay the
truth of the utterances. In the limited cases where “I am conscious,”
makes sense, it is an Ausserung, and like others of the kind (“I am in
pain,” “I intend to go,” and so on) it is not made on the basis of
applying a criterion. In particular, it is not made on such a basis as this:
“Iam aware of tnis, therefore | am conscious,” where the ftnis points
inwardly to some mental object, state, or property. But it is only if such
first-person claims were made and judged on such a basis that their
existence would constitute grounds for belief in mind qua Cartesian
consciousness.
140 Becoming Human

PLA Lite

As in the case of intransitive consciousness, the picture that sustains the

metaphysical interpretation of our psychological utterances is one of an
inward awareness of some mental thing; for instance, an inward aware-
ness of some pain. What is pain, on this metaphysical interpretation of
our talk about it? It is this, a something that, for instance, a philosoph-
ical zombie, or a rock, lacks. So whether we deal with the general idea
“Il am conscious” or with specific instances of being conscious, such as
allegedly reported by “I feel pain,” and like utterances, we are assuming
the sensibleness of an inner pointing to, or focusing on, something
before the mind.
But isn’t it obvious, incontrovertible, that to speak of my conscious-
ness or my pains, fears, joys, and so On is to speak of what is before
the mind—to speak of something that can be demarcated by an
inward glance? I isolate what I am speaking of by an act of atten-
tion focused on the particular inner something, or several somethings,
in question.
To assume that possibility of fixing the reference of our psycholo-
gical words is to presuppose the possibility of a private language. A
private language in this sense is one it would be impossible for any
other person to understand—impossible because of the privacy of the
mental. Thus consider this example. How do [J learn the word “red?”
Well, the mentalist might say that when we see a red object we have
a certain corresponding experience, that of having or being aware of
a certain inner something—a sense datum or qualia or, in the older
terminology of Bishop Berkeley, David Hume, and others, an idea. To
learn to call things “red” is to learn to apply the word when we have
that inner something. So, [ look out and see the wagon. In doing so, I
experience a certain inner state—the one I have learned to associate with
the word “red.” And hence I say the wagon is red. What is private here?
It is the inner something I have learned to tag with the public word
“red.” “Inner” in that you cannot know what it is like for me to experi-
ence what I call “red.” Here arises the notion of the inverted spectrum.
For it seems possible that what you experience when you see colors is
systematically different from what I experience in those cases. You can
never have my qualia—to do so would be metaphysically impossible.
You might experience something that is qualitatively the same, Dut you
can never know whether you do.
Something is red if it matches what I experienced when I learned to
speak of “red.” What is it I experienced? Well, this. The question now
 Consciousness 141

becomes, does that “this” make sense? Similarly, while “pain” is a public
word, in that we use it to communicate with one another, the sensation
of pain is private, in that no one can have my particular feelings of pain.
To learn to use the word “pain” to report a present experience is to learn
to apply it in cases where the sensation I am now having matches the
one I had when I originally made the hook up between inner sensation
and the word “pain.” On this view of things “pain,” “red sensation,”
“experience of anger,” and so on are all leaned Dy a private ostensive
definition.
In ostensive definition proper, a teacher points to something and
says the word that denotes it. In this way the student learns what the
word applies to. Imagine I am teaching someone English. I point and
say “chair”; and then, if things go right, he in future will employ the
word “chair” to refer to such like objects. The idea of inner ostensive
definition is the same, except there can be no such pointing.
Wittgenstein argues against the idea of such inner ostensive defini-
tions:

“Imagine a person whose memory could not retain what the word
‘pain’ meant—so that he constantly called different things by that
name—but nevertheless used the word in a way fitting in with the
usual symptoms and presuppositions of pain”—in short he uses it
as we all do. Here I would like to say: a wheel that can be turned
though nothing else moves with it, is not part of the mechanism
(Pl, §271).

Suppose that an initial ostensive definition and subsequent recognition

are the source of first-person pain-talk. If so, then it makes sense to
suppose that some person’s memory works in the twisted way Wittgen-
stein describes, Dut that nevertheless his pain-utterances are in keeping
with the normal symptoms and presuppositions of everyday pain-talk.
Given those assumptions, it will follow that what the person says in a
given case—his “I am in pain”—is false. False because he has failed to
recognize correctly the feeling or mental state he reports upon as pain.
But that the utterance is false is the reductio, for there will be cases where
his, “I am in pain,” fitting the usual symptoms and presuppositions of
pain-talk, will be true.
Does this reductio argument work? That hangs on the question of
whether the pain-utterance of the person with the twisted memory
would be true in the situation as described. That is, Wittgenstein assumes
that there are twisted memory cases where someone says “I am in pain,”
142 Becoming Human

where what he says fits in with the normal symptoms and presupposi-
tions of pain, and where what the person says is true. The objection to
be considered holds that the assumption is false: If the one who speaks
of his pain is experiencing something markedly different from what he
Originally learned to call “pain” then that person is just wrong; what he
says 1s false.
There are two ways of understanding the above reference to the
speaker’s experiencing something markedly different from what others
experience (and what he felt when he originally hooked up “pain” with
its referent). The first assumes our ordinary manner of speaking of pain.
For example, we could describe that “markedly different experience”
by saying it is not pain, where “pain” is used in the ordinary way. So
Wittgenstein’s assumption would then turn out to be that a person says
he is in pain but is not. That is not the case Wittgenstein is concerned
with. The idea of someone experiencing something markedly different
from what you and I experience is to be understood rather in terms
of the intuition that is the target of §271’s reductio argument. That is,
the idea in question is to be understood in terms of the picture under
attack; the picture that having pain means being in or possessing one
of a certain kind of mental state or object. The assumption 1s that the
person’s memory misleads him in that he is not in fact in that sort
of mental state but thinks he is. [t is one thing to assume—using our
ordinary language in an ordinary way—that someone is not in pain;
it is another to make the metaphysical assumption that he is not in
the state we (allegedly) baptize and then subsequently recognize as the
referent of the public word “pain.” Wittgenstein’s aim is to show the
difference between how we use “pain” and that metaphysical picture
of pain.
But even granting the above distinction, and consequently focussing
on the second way of understanding the markedly different experi-
ences in question, it may still appear that what the person says in
Wittgenstein’s example is false. False simply because pain is a certain
type of experience or inner state, and if, ex hypothesis, the person is
in a different state, one he falsely takes to be of the appropriate type,
then he is not in pain, regardless of any “symptoms and presupposi-
tions.” The reply is that we have here another case where a sentence
can be read in an innocent, ordinary way, or in a metaphysical manner.
If said in an innocent way, the statement about pain being a type
of experience might be used to help teach a child the concept of an
experience; the child would then learn that experiences in general, like
pains in particular, cannot be measured in inches, or transported in a
 Consciousness 143

box, or taken out and shown to someone, and so on. The metaphys-
ical reading of “pain is a certain type of experience” is, once again, in
terms of the picture of the inner ostensive definition of a mental object,
and so on.
To return, the twisted memory example, understood in the metaphys-
ical way in question, may nevertheless plausibly seem to be one where
the utterance “I am in pain” is false, for the reason stated, namely that
the person is not in the sort of state originally associated with the word
“pain.” And to repeat, Wittgenstein needs the utterance to be true. The
utterance may well appear false, but only out of context: that is, removed
from the stream of life, where such utterances are made and responded
to in the normal way of things. When we supply a context, the idea
that the utterance is false loses all plausibility.
First, let us remind ourselves of what some of the usual symptoms
and presuppositions of pain look like in a concrete case. It would be a
mistake to ask for a general account of what such symptoms and presup-
positions are; what they are can only be known through examples. The
essential presupposition is some normal, everyday setting. So Jones is
at the dentist having a cavity filled; his gum has been anesthetized
but the dentist tells him that if he feels pain during the drilling he
should signal by raising his hand. While the dentist is drilling, Jones
suddenly grimaces, and simultaneously raises his hand (saying in effect,
“Tam in pain”). The dentist stops, injects more Novocain, waits for it to
take, and then proceeds. Jones makes no more signals, submits to the
procedure with apprehension but no more grimacing, and subsequently
chats with the dentist, saying that after the second injection he felt
no more pain. And now suppose, as Wittgenstein’s remarks in §271
suggest, that when Jones grimaced and signaled he was not experien-
cing the inner state he had learned to associate with the word “pain”
but some other mental state; he just misremembered and thought it
was the one he calls “pain.” So he was wrong in saying (signaling) “I
am in pain”: the truth of what is said in the ongoing use of speech is
affected by the supposed inner working of stipulation and recognition.
But this retort, given the assumed context, carries no conviction. In this
situation, where the person says (by the signal) that he is in pain, and
is sincere, it is true that he is in pain. That is how we use the word
“pain”—assuming we translate his signal as “I am in pain.” We don’t
stop to ask if he remembered correctly what paradigm the experience
in question matches up with. We don’t stop to ask this not because
we simply assume that he remembers correctly, but rather because such
questions are irrelevant to the way we use “pain.” We use it and respond
144 Becoming Human

to its use in a manner that makes conjectures about such inner happen-
ings as just imagined irrelevant. That is not to say that Wittgenstein is
a behaviorist. The person is speaking of (signaling about) his pain, not
his pain behavior. What he does is paradigmatically a case of referring
to pain. But the truth of the latter statement does not drag in its train
the imagined apparatus of ostensive definition and recognition. The
person’s signal is an expression of pain.
Suppose the dentist in question is armed with a piece of late twenty-
first century technology, a mental-object scope or MOS as it is called.
The dentist, who has theoretical interests, had the MOS trained on Jones
when the latter as a child learned to speak of his pains; the dentist
knows (in a way) the sort of object then baptized “pain.” The dentist also
applied the MOS to Jones over the years and saw that Jones is consistent
in his responses to that type of mental object; he calls it “pain.” Add all
that to the above example and replay it. Now Jones signals by raising
his hand, but the dentist glances over at his MOS and sees that Jones
is mistaken. So the dental procedure goes on without benefit of more
Novocain. Jones grimaces and twists, sweats, grips his chair tightly with
one hand while repeatedly raising and then waving the other. But the
dentist, with the MOS in sight, persists with his drilling. Afterwards there
is no chatting, Dut rather Jones, who, as he thinks, can’t stand pain,
upbraids the dentist for causing him so much distress by not increasing
the Novocain. The dentist reassures him that despite Jones’s conviction
he was not really in pain. On the way home the pain, though much
milder now, persists, or at least Jones says so to his wife. She gives him
some aspirin and what he takes to be the pain goes away, and he relaxes,
though vowing never to go to that dentist again. But had the dentist
been there on the journey, armed with his MOS, he could have assured
Jones that no aspirin was needed; it was just another mistake. What
Jones needs is work on his memory.
We can imagine that, due perhaps to the pressure of scientific-minded
experts, a linguistic community would end up substituting a MOS-
driven use of “pain” for our present employment. For them it would
De false that the Jones visibly suffering in the dentist’s chair is in pain,
despite his protestations. But then the community would need a new
word to fill in for the one the scientists usurped. No one, MOS-expert,
scientist, whoever, will want to do without a way of using language to
stop the dentist from drilling with inadequate Novocain, to commu-
nicate the need for an aspirin, and so on and on, for all the practical
purposes that our first-person pain-utterances serve, and would serve no
matter what the imagined MOS-relevant circumstances. The new word
 Consciousness 145

we would want to introduce would be equivalent to our present word

“pain.” The MOS-based definition of “pain” doesn’t capture our present
use of the word. Since the imagined MOS-style employment of “pain”
merely reflects the metaphysical picture of “pain” Wittgenstein objects
to, the gap between the way we use “pain” and that picture becomes
evident.
The reductio example of Jones at the dentist shows that a criterion of
sincerity governs the truth of pain-Ausserungen; in the proper context,
given the appropriate symptoms, if the person is sincere in saying or
signaling he is in pain, then he is. The language itself allows no room
for the mentalistic considerations in question to affect the truth of pain-
Ausserungen. That can be seen most clearly by examining how children
learn to speak of their pains. They are not taught to re-identify some
inner state, but rather learn to substitute a linguistic expression or mani-
festation of pain for a non-linguistic one. The independence of our
Ausserungen from an assumed inner observation is expressed vividly in
this remark of Wittgenstein’s:

Does something happen when I...intend this or that?—Does

nothing happen?—tThat is not the point; but rather: why should what
happens within you interest me? (His soul may boil or freeze, turn
red or blue: what do I care?)'°

An alternative picture
Two quotations from Wittgenstein may serve to remind us of the main
positions [ have been defending in this chapter. I take it that the
meaning of the quotations has been clarified by my previous remarks.
The tirst is this:

The ‘inner’ is a delusion. That is: the whole complex of ideas alluded
to by this word is like a painted curtain drawn in front of the scene
of the actual word use.??

We get to that picture by wrongly understanding actual use. Hence my

second quotation:

The main difficulty arises from our imagining the experience (the
pain, for instance) as a thing, for which of course we have a name
and whose concept is therefore quite easy to grasp.’
146 Becoming Human

On the view of things assumed in these quotations, the Cartesian world

picture is a hallucination, and the mind-body problem something that
cannot be intelligibly stated.
But what might Wittgenstein offer as an alternative to a mentalist
interpretation of our lives, as revealed in our talk of pains, intentions,
fears, and the like? On his view the first-person, present-tense sentences
with “pain,” “intend,” and so on have meaning within our social lives,
but they are not names of the inner, of the mental, not descriptions of
consciousness as understood in a metaphysical, Cartesian manner. They
are rather Ausserungen. These bits of language find uses in our lifeway
as social animals; our words function in that context. Paradigmatically
“Tam in pain” functions to draw someone’s attention to my predic-
ament. Similarly, “I intend to go” does not function to tell someone
of what is going on in my mind (that I am having present to my
mind such and such an intention qua inner object). Rather its aim is
to say what I am up to, what I am or will be doing, what project I am
engaged upon.
Speech is a custom-guided form of action, and a crucial point about
the alternative worldview in question is that the acts constitutive of
speech are a form of what I have earlier called “just doing,” a spon-
taneous way of moving in the word lauded in Taoist and Buddhist
texts. It stands in contrast to self-conscious action. We are, it has
been said, self-conscious animals. Not only are we aware of the
contents of our minds, but we are also aware of being so aware.
One central point of an alternative, Wittgensteinian worldview of
Our Dasic human nature is that self-consciousness, so understood, is
one more illusion.
There is another, more significant difference between the worldview
I am attempting to present and that of the theoreticians of mind.
The latter try to bring within the scope of language something that
lies outside it. They try to speak meaningfully about the metaphys-
ically inner; they would raise into the sphere of language and the
intelligible something beyond conception. Instead they have passed
unnoticed into nonsense. They have done so by misunderstanding—
wrongly picturing—language-games concerning the psychological. I
prefer an opposing picture, on which the immediately given is beyond
words. We relate to it only in the space of the ineffable.
Self-Consciousness

There are some philosophers who imagine we are every moment

intimately conscious of what we call our SELF....
David Hume

At some not so distant point, our line of descent passed from hominid
to creatures physically indistinguishable from us. Still, if those beings
lacked self-consciousness, we might want to deny them the epithet
“human.” Conversely, Homo sapiens plus self-awareness equals human.
Thus we have reached what some consider the ultimate stage of our
journey from Eden: We transcend our not quite fully human forbDears
by becoming self-aware. But now our familiar “what is” question. What
is this crucial phenomenon of self-consciousness? And once we under-
stand the idea, can the corresponding thing itself be said to exist?

Fictionalism

I shall approach these questions through some remarks by George

Graham, who gives a clear account of a metaphysical view of self-
consciousness. In the abstract of his essay “Self-Consciousness, Psycho-
pathology and Realism about Self,” he writes,

It seems obvious that self-consciousness is introspective awareness or

consciousness of a self. My being self-conscious, for example, is my
being aware of
In the body of his paper, he champions that “obvious” account. He
begins by contrasting two views, one which denies the existence of such
148 Becoming Human

self-consciousness, and another which grants it. First, the one he calls
fictionalism, and rejects:

Selves do not, and cannot, exist. I do not exist—nor do you. So says

the philosophical doctrine of anti-realism or fictionalism about the
self (see Canfield...). One implication of fictionalism is that self-
consciousness is not consciousness of self. Since there is no self, there
is NO consciousness of self.

In contrast, he himself is a realist:

Selves do exist. You exist—and so do I. So says the philosophical

doctrine of realism about the self.... One implication of realism 1s
that self-consciousness is consciousness of self. Since there is self,
self-consciousness is consciousness of self.

In the second set of remarks above, Graham cites my book The Looking-
Glass Self, but my account there is more nuanced than the one he
attributes to me. I believe he would contrast my present position with
his in the same way he does with respect to my earlier one, in part Dy
appealing to what seems obvious to common sense. As he says, “Selves
do exist. You exist—and so do I.” He takes the obvious fact that you
and I exist as contradicting fictionalism; the latter therefore is the view
that stands in opposition to the fact that selves exist. But the fact in
question does not touch the brand of fictionalism I would defend. No
sensible person could deny that selves, if taken as meaning people, exist;
you do, I do, knock on wood. But it is not selves on that sense of the
word that | held to be grammatical fictions. Rather my thesis in The
Looking-Glass Self concerned the self qua referent of “I” in present-tense
psychological utterances. People exist; selves, qua the references of those
first-person utterances, are grammatical fictions. I still hold to that view,
but on my present understanding I would add a further element to the
characterization of self. This is the narrative self, a figure that is also
fictional, but in a different way.
Now, does common sense, or what is plain fact, refute the thesis that
selves do not exist? It is a plain fact that people exist, so that if “self”
means “person” then of course selves exist. But if the self is, as I have
argued, a conglomerate of person, grammatical fiction, and narrative
protagonist, then that three-in-one being is in part fictional, and so
cannot be said to exist in the way that ordinary space-time creatures
such as people do. Rather, selves—those false selves as I name them—
 Self-Consciousness 149

exist in the same space as does the “It” of “It is snowing” and, to take an
extreme case, the space wherein the madman Smith is Napoleon. The
denial of existence here is like that of “Raskolnikov does not exist” rather
than, say, “Big Foot does not exist.” Big Foot is a creature which might
have existed in space and time, but in fact does not. To deny its existence
is to make an empirical claim. Whereas the corresponding remark about
Raskolnikov is a logical one; one is saying that Raskolnikov is a fictional
character. Thus the fictionalism I espouse here, as well as the version
advocated in The Looxing-Glass Self, might be termed logical: It is not
that the self does not in fact exist but rather that by its nature it could
not. And if there cannot be a self there cannot De self-consciousness qua
self aware of self.

Picturing self-consciousness
How do people arrive at the notion of self-consciousness given in remarks
like, “My being self-conscious...is my being aware of myself” (op.
cit.). Consider a parallel case, that of self-deception. In standard, two-
person cases of deception one person fools another. Understanding self-
deception on the model of deception proper, one thinks that in the
former case too there will be a deceiver and a deceived. But if these
two are one and the same, it is hard to see how self-deception could be
possible. I am self-deceived about whether, say, I have treated my friend
badly. I first believe I did, and then I fool myself into believing I did not.
On the analogue of other-deception there must be, here, a deceiver and
a deceived; but how can I be both of these at once? If I deceive Jones,
I get him to believe true what I believe is false. If I deceive myself I get
myself to believe true what I believe is false: at one and the same time [
believe something to be both true and false. And so it seems impossible
for there to be such a thing as self-deception. The problem arises from
the original portrayal of self-deception on the model of other-deception.
An examination of actual cases of self-deception shows that for them
to occur it is not necessary to posit a person who, impossibly, at once
accepts and denies a certain belief. Rather to deceive oneself may be
simply to come to believe something in a context where, given the evid-
ence, a reasonably judicious person would not believe it. In addition,
in typical cases, the belief denied by the self-deceiver is one that, if it
were true, would put the person in a bad light. So, I deceive myself
about whether I treated my friend badly. The facts of the matter, of
which I am plainly cognizant, show I did indeed treat him badly, but
it would hurt my self-image to admit having done so. In that context,
150 Becoming Human

and against what a reasonable onlooker would say, I assert, sincerely,

that I did not treat him badly. Those privy to the facts say, correctly,
that I am self-deceived. For that verdict to stand, it is not necessary to
establish the foolery of me believing something at the same time as I
get myself to not believe it. The paradoxical reading of self-deception
results from seeing the phenomenon as analogous to other-deception,
and in particular as requiring two people to be at work where there is
only room for one.
The metaphysical picture of self-consciousness arises in the same
way. Consciousness involves a perceiver in a relationship of aware-
ness to something perceived, or so one might assume. It is a two-
termed relationship. Correspondingly, self-consciousness must consist
in a perceiver having that awareness-relation to itself, qua perceiver.
Suppose I am conscious of the song of a bird. That phenomenon
concerns two things, me and the song. Similarly, if I am said to be
conscious of myself, that too must involve a two-termed relation—in
this case between me and myself. So understood, self-consciousness is
highly problematic, as we shall see. But in fact self-consciousness, as we
understand the phenomenon in daily life, does not require a self—a real
thing—standing in an attitude of awareness to itself.

Two ways of being self-conscious

Consider the following argument. Self-consciousness exists; we
encounter the phenomenon in ourselves and attribute it to others.
Therefore fictionalism is false and realism true. The trouble with this
argument is that it relies on an ambiguity. There are two ways of under-
standing self-consciousness. One of them is, so to speak, ordinary—self-
consciousness as we actually speak of it in everyday life. The other is
metaphysical—to be self-conscious is for a self to be aware of itself. The
mistake is to confound the two ideas. Reflection assures us that there is
such a thing as self-consciousness, but having conflated the ordinary and
the metaphysical varieties of it we now become certain of the existence
of the latter. The self-consciousness that does exist is of the ordinary
kind; and from it the reality of the metaphysical variety does not follow.
Well, what are these two varieties? We’ve already met the metaphys-
ical version; what then of the other kind? To get an answer let us look
first at some instances where, in the usual sense of the phrase, we would
speak of someone’s being self-conscious. I am in the middle of a Tai Chi
move—one | am just learning—when my teacher steps up to watch how
Iam doing. When I notice her, my brain seems to seize up; its almost as if
 Self-Consciousness 151

I hear the fizz of wires short circuiting. I loose all idea of how to perform
the move, and just stand there, stuck. I have become self-conscious.
There are many similar cases where people becomes uneasy as a result
of believing they are being observed. Again, noticing a novice speech
maker’s hesitancies and embarrassed mien, we say he is self-conscious.
To take another example, Kleist, in his marvelous essay “On the Mari-
onette Theatre,” describes the case of a young man who is a paragon
of grace, until one day, catching sight of himself in a mirror, he sees a
similarity between his posture in raising his foot to a stool and a like
pose depicted in a certain famous statue.’ After this insight the young
man loses his former unsought and unthinking grace of movement. His
newfound self-consciousness shows itself in his altered way of moving
through the world. The difference is subtle but real.
We ascribe self-consciousness in such cases on the basis of there
coming to be a certain hesitancy, lack of flow, or awkwardness, and this
against a background where it would be appropriate to say, out loud or
to oneself, such things as “She is watching me” or “T look exactly like the
figure in the statue.” In such instances we speak of someone’s being self-
conscious; and no doubt, then, humans are sometimes self-conscious. In
contrast, (to repeat) on a metaphysical interpretation, self-consciousness
gets pictured as a self aware of itself—a subject aware of an object. We
know what awareness is: a person can be aware of a birdcall or a red light.
We then picture self-consciousness as an awareness relation between an
J and itself. To ascribe self-consciousness to someone on this reading of
it would be to posit facts about his mind that involve the I turned in
upon itself. But when our judgment is in keeping with the everyday use
of “self-conscious,” we do not ascribe the phenomenon on the basis of
such inner goings on as that; we do so rather by reference to a person’s
reactions in a context such as that in which someone sees she is being
critically observed. The ascriptions in the two cases differ in what they
are Dased upon. In the one case nuances of Dehavior in contexts of a
certain kind, in the other hypothesized inner self-referential goings-on.
The above remarks point to another, significant difference between
Ordinary and metaphysical ascriptions of “self-consciousness.” Such
incidents of self-involvement as those given above are occasional,
not permanent, whereas the self-awareness that is thought to be the
crowning feature of humankind is, once achieved, always present. Kant
said an “I think” accompanies aii our states of consciousness;* similarly,
self being aware of self is commonly thought to be a constant, once the
babyhood of the race, or of the growing child, is left behind. Similarly,
John Locke, spoke of a
152 Becoming Human

consciousness which is inseparable from thinking, and, as it seems to

me, essential to it: it being impossible for any one to perceive without
perceiving that he does perceive. When we see, hear, smell, taste, feel,
meditate, or will anything, we know that we do so. Thus it is always
as to our present sensations and perceptions: and by this every one
is to himself that which he calls self....°

This self-consciousness, or “perceiving that he does perceive,” is alleged

to be ubiquitous. But as “self-consciousness” is actually used it refers
to an episodic and not a constant phenomenon. In using the term, we
distinguish instances when someone is self-conscious and those when
he or she is not. The alleged ubiquitous brand of self-consciousness is
the metaphysical variety. It is that self-aware-of-self that is taken to be
an ever-present feature of the human mind and that purportedly marks
us off from the beasts.
To assess those claims a further distinction is necessary, between
“conscious of” and “conscious that.” The former is directed upon some
thing-like entity, whereas the latter takes as its object some proposition
or judgment. The cow is conscious of the electric fence, in that it sees and
avoids it. But it is not conscious that there is an electric fence there, at
least not in the sense of “consciousness that” which requires the subject’s
contemplating some proposition or judgment. Lacking ideas, the animal
cannot entertain propositions, or so it seems. Whereas “consciousness
of” requires only having experience of a thing, and that a cow can have.
Graham’s account of self-consciousness falls in the consciousness of
camp. But some views that would be counted as metaphysical appeal
to the consciousness that side of the distinction. The two possibilities are
easily confused. Locke, in the remarks quoted above, seems equivocal
on the issue. We cannot perceive without perceiving that we perceive,
and this fact is taken to imply that each person “is to himself that which
he calls self.” This latter self-reflective way of being seems to involve a
consciousness of, I perceive a self perceiving, and thus become acquainted
with self—come to a consciousness of self. On the other hand, Locke says
that when we “see, hear, smell, taste, feel, meditate, or will anything,
we know that we do so.” This knowing seems to De a consciousness that.
I will consider Doth cases.
On the “of” alternative, when I am conscious of something (a head-
ache, say) | am also conscious of a self conscious of that thing. schem-
atically “S conscious of O” entails “S conscious of S Conscious of O.”
But now this ubiquitous “self-consciousness of” will generate a new self-
consciousness: S conscious of S conscious of S conscious of O; and so
 Self-Consciousness 153

on. So the idea that consciousness always involves a self aware of a self
generates an infinite number of states of awareness.° Being aware of all
those states seems too much to ask of a mere mortal.
David Hume pointed out another difficulty with the metaphysical
idea of self-awareness:

For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself,
I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or
cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch
myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe any
thing but the perception.’

I am supposed to be aware of a self aware of a headache, for example.

But, when I actually focus on what I am aware of | find no awareness
of self, but only an awareness of this headache, this tension, that color,
and so on.

Cognitive self-consciousness
What about the “that” option? Instead of saying self-consciousness
occurs when I am conscious of myself being conscious of something,
we say it occurs when I am conscious that I am conscious of something.
Such consciousness that is a matter of having beliefs or Knowledge. For
example, self-consciousness concerning my present state of anger might
consist in my believing or knowing that I am angry. Such a view of
self-consciousness has been stated by Allan Colin, among others:

“Self-consciousness refers to an organism’s capacity for second-order

representation of the organism’s own mental states.”®

This account defines “self-consciousness” in a purely cognitive way,

that is, as involving belief or knowledge, but as entailing nothing about
some higher order consciousness of. One appeal of such an account is
that it retains something like the dualism found in the consciousness
of account. Instead of the duality of self aware of self it champions a
duality consisting of a first-order representation such as “I am in pain”
and a second-order one such as “I Know I am in pain.” We are distin-
guished from the other animals in virtue of our making such second-
order representations—or so it could be argued. (On the other hand
many would attribute second-order representations to animals.)
154 Becoming Human

However, the cognitive account faces a formidable difficulty. As

discussed earlier, on the metaphysical view, self-consciousness is
ubiquitous; the “I think” is (allegedly) appended to all our first-person,
present mental states. That is to say, since we are self-conscious, for
every first-order mental state we are in, we are also in a corresponding
second-order mental state. If I am in pain, then I know I am in pain;
and so on. The difficulty is that some of these second-order instances,
including “I know I am in pain,” are as Wittgenstein observed senseless.?
We see this when we look at how such a sentence might be used. To
know makes sense only where doubt is possible, and one cannot doubt
whether one 1s in pain or not.
Note, however, that some uses of corresponding utterances
concerning the mental, such as “I know I am afraid” do make sense.!” “I
am afraid” is not always an Ausserung and therefore not always sense-
less in the way that “I know I am in pain” is. “I am afraid” might be
asserted as a result of my reviewing in thought how I have been acting
and reacting all day. In this case doubt is possible, and I could be said
to know IJ am afraid. In contrast, “I am afraid” can be an Ausserung and
then there is no question of knowing it, since both doubt and know-
ledge have no place in this use. Sometimes second-order representations
of the mental make sense, but sometimes they do not. The result is that
the cognitive account does not meet the metaphysical desideratum of
ubiquity.
It could be argued, however, that the idea of self-consciousness as
ever-present in humans can well be abandoned; we can say it is not
ubiquitous but occasional. And when it does happen it is a matter of
first- and second-order representations. Certainly one could define the
term that way. But such an account of consciousness that does not help
us much in our effort to understand our place in nature. We are looking
for some essential feature of humankind above and beyond the mastery
of language. What can be salvaged from the ubiquitous version of the
cognitive account comes down to holding that humans sometimes speak
of speaking of their mental states, in that they can say or think things
like “I Know I am afraid” or “I know I am angry.” These abilities do
single us out as unique, but unique in a way we have already considered.
We are animals with an enormously complex social life, an essential
part of which is constituted by the collection of mini-customs that
make up language. In particular, humans alone are masters of certain
second-level language-customs. While such mastery makes us special, it
does not constitute an essential difference over and above our posses-
sion of language of the more than rudimentary variety. To make the
 Self-Consciousness 159

second-order representation “I am afraid,” for example, is just to exer-

cise one’s mastery of one of the language-games in which one speaks of
fear. Self-consciousness of, on the other hand, if it in fact existed, would
be a distinguishing feature other than mere language-use. It doesn’t
exist, however, and with regard to the cognitive alternative, the mere
fact that we have beliefs about our beliefs does not lift us to a new
and unique level of being. That is, self-consciousness, as understood in
the “second-order representation” way, does not constitute a unique,
essential difference between humans and other animals. Here again, a
difference in quantity (in the complexity of our interactions) leads to a
difference in quality.

Despite the above considerations, there remains a strong conviction that

I am in some rich sense conscious of myself! When I pay attention to
what transpires in consciousness—to what is going on in my mind, as
one might say—I do come across a sense of self. Indeed, I seem unable
to shake it. It is hard to put a finger on it, but perhaps Hume was wrong
after all. Perhaps when I[ look within I do find something in addition to
particular pains, sensations, thoughts, and the like. That something may
be highly allusive, and yet, in my experience, it seems stubbornly and
tantalizingly present somehow, if invisibly, so to speak. Introspecting,
one finds oneself convinced of the presence of self, or at least finds
oneself unable to fully and wholeheartedly dismiss it as not there, or for
that matter “fictional.” But on the other hand I am convinced that the
self is a fiction. How to square these two convictions?
My answer is that indeed the self is a fiction, but that we are convinced
of its existence not because we are aware of it, but rather because we
live in story. It follows that if we could as it were drop the story—cease
to see ourselves as protagonists in life-long dramas—then we would lose
that subtle but none the less powerful sense of self I spoke of.
I am suggesting a fourth account of self-consciousness in addition
to our ordinary one, the metaphysical consciousness of variety, and the
cognitive consciousness that. To be self-conscious in this fourth way is to
be caught up in story. What this is like, what it is like to be engaged in
narrative, has already been canvassed. This form of self-consciousness
is not quite ubiquitous, but it comes close. That is, one’s mind can be
momentarily quiet, for whatever reason, but soon enough it comes back
to that central I-centered story.
156 Becoming Human

Is this brand of self-consciousness something that marks us off from

the other animals, and in a way that goes beyond the difference made
by our possession of speech? Certainly. We are the only animals that
live—in considerable portion—in the fantasy worlds of the false self.
The development of language was necessary to get us here, but not
sufficient. In addition, we have utilized language to create the stories—
the supposedly real-life dramas that preoccupy us. To return to Eden
would De to cease to live in story.
10
Back to Eden

Be a Lamp Onto Yourself

The Buddha

Having portrayed the main way stations on our trek out from Eden
[I turn now to the end point. What is it we have achieved? What is it
like to be human? The question can be considered from three points of
view, biological, anthropological, and religious. The verdict of the first
standpoint is clear. In general terms, the evolutionary account of our
passage from hominid to human must hold. It is no secret: we have
evolved from earlier primate forms. But of course that is not the whole
story. kor one thing, we must recognize the fact of cultural evolution—
the growth and spread of various human customs, paramount among
them the series of mini-customs or language-games that constitute
speech.
From a perspective centering On custom, speech does not consti-
tute a great ontological or existential divide between us and the other
creatures. We are animals, full square. We are unique in that we have
mastered an extremely complex and varied set of language-customs in
which words play a role, but that mastery does not show that we stand
essentially apart. The rudiments of some such customs can be found in
other primates and in pre-linguistic children. The difference of quality
we feel between us and other organisms is a function of a huge differ-
ence in the quantity of our language-customs and corresponding social
and material cultures.
Adopting a custom-centered viewpoint also has consequences for
understanding the other main features of our present state. In particular,
the self as ordinarily pictured gives way to the view of it as threefold,
including as its most striking facet the false or narrative self. As for
158 Becoming Human

self-consciousness, it emerges not as something definitive of humanity

but as merely a temporary lack of ease occurring in certain contexts.
The great growth of humankind’s multifarious language-games qua
customs has had a good result and a bad one. It has allowed humans to
develop an astonishing technology, leaving us, ants aside, masters of the
planet. On the downside, it has led to the entrenchment of the false self,
something that serves us ill indeed. We are the only animals that live in
a world of delusion, under the pall of an assumed selfhood. Caught up
in narratives of self and other, imposing those storylines on the world,
we very frequently act not out of compassion Dut in the service of the I.
We do not really see either ourselves or those around us; we deal rather
with constructs, fictionalized beings. What truly marks us off from all
the other denizens of Earth is that, while remaining mere animals, we
unendingly engage with the fantasy of self. To break out of that illusion,
some say, is to be enlightened. This Drings us to religion, a third point
of view from which to address the question of what it is to be human.

SW ele) Cece or ieee

What then of the possibility of a religiously significant return to Eden?

By that I mean nothing political; for example, I do not think of a return
to Eden as a reversion to a simple form of community. The Taoists spoke
of a happy man who could hear dogs barking in the next village but who
had never traveled as far. We are well beyond the possibility of any such
primitive arrangement of society. Furthermore, our collective madness
shows little sign of abating, so if Paradise is thought of in political
terms there is faint hope of reaching it. My interest concerns rather the
possibility of an individual, person by person, return to Eden. Each of
us must discover his or her own way to wake from the nightmare of
history. Such an achievement would count as religious because it would
satisfy a deep yearning to find meaning, solace, and even joy in being
human. The sort of profound breakthrough I speak of is assumed in
the classic contemplative wings of the major religions and in individual
encounters with oneness like those described in James’ The Varieties of
Religious Experience.’ In the case of Buddhism, the breakthrough I wish
to discuss gets expressed as a coming to realize our “Buddha Nature,”
which is described by the Zen Master Huang Po as being “omnipresent,
silent, pure.... [I]t is glorious and mysterious peaceful joy—and that is
all. Enter deeply into it by awaking to it yourself.”* This awaking, or
enlightenment, is what brings us back to Eden, or which makes us know
some OK ors Aneel hoe
 Back to Eden

My account of the possibility of such a return or realization will be

secular in nature and consistent with an empiricism that rejects the
supernatural. Thus my goal in this chapter is to finish the description
of the journey from Eden out and back by setting forth the features of
a mystical but nonetheless secular or non-supernatural return. I use the
perhaps unhappy phrase “a secular mysticism” to refer to it. Unhappy
because not only does the term “mysticism” call up a sense of musty
back rooms in second-hand book stores, where one finds works on astro-
logy, Edgar Cayce, and the like, but more than that, it seems in stark
contradiction to “secular” (as well as to “empirical” or “scientific”). But,
as we Shall see, a mystical tradition exists that does not traffic with the
supernatural in any of its guises. So, despite the phrase’s misleading
connotations, and lacking a better name, I shall speak of a “secular” or
“empirical” mysticism. As for the term “supernatural,” as I use it here,
to have supernatural beliefs is to assert certain things as true that lie
outside the sphere of empirical inquiry. In contrast, naturalism disal-
lows such beliefs. Thus to say that there are gods, or life after death, is to
reject naturalism by saying things that cannot be confirmed or discon-
firmed by looking at the way the world is. The distinction can be put in
terms of two kinds of descriptions. Some descriptions are governed by
empirical truth-criteria and some (the non-natural ones) are not. Now,
does every form of mysticism advance descriptions of reality that go
beyond the empirical? The answer is no; the secular mysticism I shall
depict is committed to no supernatural descriptions, because it proffers
no descriptions at all, whether of the natural or supernatural kind.

A religion without words

The consideration of the following remark of Wittgenstein’s will set the
Stage for a discussion of such a brand of mysticism:

Is talking essential to religion? I can well imagine a religion in which

there are no doctrinal propositions, in which there is thus no talking.
Obviously the essence of religion cannot have anything to do with
the fact that there is talking, or rather, when people talk, then this
itself is part of a religious act and not a theory. Thus it also does not
matter at all if the words used are true or false or nonsense.?

Is it really possible to have a religion in which no words whatever are

exchanged? That there could be such a thing will seem implausible.
Confession, absolution, dogma, creeds, redemption, and salvation—all
160 Becoming Human

are heavy with words. But behind those words stand practices, ways
of behaving, such as the celebration of Mass. If we look at religions as
essentially practices we can imagine various wordless ones, just as we
can imagine a silent Mass.
One such conceivable instance results from dropping all words from
Zen Buddhism. Since Zen speaks of itself as beyond words, stripping it of
talk while leaving it essentially the same appears possible. Zen followers
quote this remark, attributed to Bodhi-Dharma, the legendary founder
of the Zen or Ch’an Sect:

A special transmission outside the scriptures;

Without dependence on words or letters;
Direct pointing to the essence of mind;
Seeing one’s true nature and attaining Buddhahood.*

Of course, as here, Zen is nonetheless highly articulate. We can imagine

a completely silent form of it by considering the week-long silent Zen
retreat, as described, say, in Peter Matthiessen’s book The Nine-Headed
Dragon River. If we modify that description slightly, leaving out all
talking, and generalize the resulting account—so that this totally silent
form of Zen, practiced, say, in numerous such retreats, constitutes the
whole of the religion—we have an example of a religious faith sans
words. Let us call this imagined entity “silent Zen.” How in detail does
it differ from Zen proper? Well, in a real Zen retreat there is a daily talk
by the resident Zen Master—discussing a koan, for example. There are
individual meetings of student and teacher where words are exchanged,
and there are exhortations made to encourage the meditating practi-
tioners. Silent Zen will have no such verbalizations. Now, what would
remain unchanged in that imagined variant of Zen? The basic shared
content would be the quest for enlightenment. Both, it might perhaps
be said, involve a great effort to change one’s mode of being from
ordinary to enlightened. In Zen proper, the exertion takes the form of
lengthy periods of “sitting,”—zazen, or Zen meditation—with the prac-
titioners’ attention insured by attendants who roam the meditation hall
striking with a flattened stick those whose minds might be wandering,
and in general keeping up an atmosphere of extreme exertion, of intense
seeking after a goal. The goal being, in Zen, to open one’s eyes, to
experience something called in Japanese “kensho”—a term referring to
an initial enlightenment experience. In our silent Zen, the same goal is
sought but not named.
 Back to Eden

If we see enlightenment as a natural phenomenon, something that can

be realized by humans in this life, then silent Zen exemplifies something
that is both a religion answering to our existential need, and compat-
ible with empiricism, in that it makes no claims about the supernatural,
since it makes no claims at all! However, silent Zen is too stark to serve
as the secular mysticism I am seeking. One wants some words of guid-
ance and orientation, but without an assumption of the supernatural.
Zen itself might be thought to constitute an articulate, naturalistic reli-
gion, since Buddhism is often presented as having no supra mundane
commitments. It has some, however. Zen is after all a form of Buddhism,
and as such takes on the assumption of the existence of supernatural
Deings—including the Buddha himself and numerous Bodhisattvas—
to whom one can pray or look to for solace or encouragement. The
Buddha is sometimes said to be a mere human,° but various Buddhist
texts say otherwise. For one thing, before being born as the human
Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha is said to have gone through many
rounds of rebirth, an idea that sits uncomfortably with a secular world-
view. However, we can reach the kind of wholly secular but nonetheless
religiously significant position I am looking for, and thus discern traces
of a path back to Eden, Dy eliminating those features of Buddhism a
scientifically oriented worldview might reject.

Buddhism without the Buddha

There are five tenets common to the major sects of Buddhism, including
7en:
1. Universal causation
> The doctrine of karma
3. Rebirth (as opposed to reincarnation)
4 No-self
5. The possibility of enlightenment
The secular mysticism I am attempting to delineate would drop the first
three of these while retaining the last two.
The first idea, that everything that happens has a cause, fits nicely with
the train of thought encapsulated in early Buddhism’s four noble truths:
life is suffering; suffering has a cause; the cause can be eliminated; and
the way to do so is through the eightfold path. The thesis of universal
Causation seems broadly empirical rather than supernatural; that it is
true needs proving. But the question of whether humans can become
enlightened, in the special sense assumed here, is independent of the
162 Becoming Human

problem of whether all our acts are caused. Thus the issue of the idea’s
truth or falsity has no significance for deciding whether a Buddhistic
mysticism consistent with empiricism is possible. Universal causation
can be safely omitted from the religiously significant practice I wish to
delineate.
The next two points I listed are decidedly non-empirical. Karma—
roughly the notion that our good deeds will be somehow or sometime
rewarded and our bad ones punished—must, in the light of its seeming
falsity, bring in the notion of other lives. Many a saintly person has been
repaid for good acts by being murdered. To keep up the karmic balance
we would have to appeal to some future reward or some previous life’s
sin. In either case, we find ourselves assuming the third tenet, rebirth.
Rebirth, it seems, is not an idea consistent with naturalism. Humans
are conceived, develop in the womb, and are born; it’s all a biological
process, no matter how miraculous it may appear. And then after a
while we die, a further biological event. The elements that functioned
so marvelously to sustain us now cease to do so—end of story. The
notion that we are each reborn, with many a past and future life to
somehow echo this one, and the linked idea of karma, are apparently
in conflict with an empiricist worldview that explicitly rejects the
supernatural.
I am trying to portray a modified form of Zen Buddhism that is reli-
giously significant yet makes no claims concerning the supernatural.
The first step is to drop the tenets just considered. But what would
justify rejecting those claims? As suggested above, the answer might
be thought obvious: they are inconsistent with a scientifically oriented
worldview. But are they? A relativist might object to that answer, saying
that while it is one thing to be an engaged scientist it is another to
believe that only scientific or broadly empirical claims are true. The
first position does not entail the second. If we think of both science
and religion as practices, then they can co-exist. For example, the
well-known philosopher and scientist Pierre Duhem was both a prac-
ticing physicist and a practicing Catholic; he rightly felt no strain
between the two. According to the relativist, it is only if we treat
science as hegemonic over religion, as somehow containing within itself
a rejection of religion and the supernatural, that the views become
incompatible. In particular, assertions belonging to physics, chem-
istry, or biology are in no way inconsistent with any assertions found
in Buddhism. There is no more incompatibility here than there is
between chess and bridge. The incompatibility holds rather between
scientism and religion. Scientism holds that only science is in charge
 Back to Eden

of settling truths about the universe. Whereas the relativist says, for
example, that the big bang theory of the origin of the world is not incon-
sistent with the story in Genesis. Rather it is scientism that conflicts
with the Biblical story by banning such supernatural accounts. We do
prefer the scientific version (or perhaps acceptance of the scientific one
helps define the “we” in question). And it is true also that science is
in charge of settling all scientific claims. But, as in the case of Duhem,
it is only scientism and not science that stands opposed to religious
assertions.
On what grounds then am I justified in rejecting the Buddhistic tenets
of karma and rebirth? In fact I have none. Without adopting a full-blown
relativism | nonetheless see I can’t prove that someone who believes in
them is wrong, or is in conflict with science. On the other hand, | can’t
Delieve in them. They are not part of a worldview I can ascribe to. In
this | am in agreement with a goodly part of the Western intellectual
tradition. The theses are not part of the secular mysticism I am seeking
to portray.
It is another story as regards the Buddhist doctrines of no-self and
enlightenment. These I believe can find acceptance—or at least would
De treated seriously—by many members of the tradition in question. But
it’s not a matter of counting noses.

Not-know thy self

On my understanding, a secular mysticism will retain the doctrine of
no-self common to all Buddhist sects. I have already argued that the
self as we assume it to be is an illusion—that claim is not a scientific
truth, but at the same time it requires nothing supernatural. Thus we
come to the question of enlightenment: What is it? To be enlightened,
it has been said, is to know one’s true nature.’ This is not an intellectual
Knowing; it is rather a direct being-at-one-with, a not-knowing, one
might say. But these phrases are, obviously, mysterious.
Enlightenment cannot be captured in a description. Like the mystical
experiences emphasized in contemplative religious sects, it is, as we
are frequently told, ineffable. Our ordinary vocabulary cannot touch it.
Thus a person in an enlightened state might be said to be “in presence,”
or that state might be spoken of as one of “transcendence.” The mind
of the enlightened person (the “Bodhi-mind”) might, strangely enough,
be spoken of as “The oak tree in the garden.” None of these appellations
can be taken as descriptions open to empirical adjudication—no more
than can the notion, commonly met with in contexts like this, of being
Rey Sm Lae tise wT LL:

one with things. Enlightened people in attempting to describe their

state must have recourse to uses of words that are stretched beyond the
normal.
Taken together with my previous remarks, the fact that enlightenment
is ineffable guarantees that the secular mysticism I am outlining here is
consistent with a scientism that rejects non-natural claims. Otherwise
put, being ineffable gives enlightenment a free pass through scientism’s
Darrier. Imagine an empiricist approaching an enlightened person and
asking, “What is this state of enlightenment that you claim to be in?”
The answer might be, “The oak tree in the garden,” or, perhaps, “My
mind is transparent.” The empiricist can now complain, rightly, that
the other is not making sense. If someone were to ask, “What is it they
are going to cut down,” and I were to the answer, “The oak tree in
the garden,” the person will understand me perfectly. But if someone
asks a Zen Master, “What is enlightenment,” and gets the answer, “The
oak tree in the garden,” the person will have no understanding of what
the Master is speaking of. But lack of understanding in such cases is a
given; mystics everywhere say that their claims lack literal, descriptive
force. What the empiricist cannot say is that any of the (failed) ‘descrip-
tions’ of enlightenment are inconsistent either with the claims or aims
of science or with the stringent edicts of scientism. Only if the nonsense
in question purports to make sense can the empiricist rightfully
reject it.

A matter of context
What a secular mysticism will retain from the rich and marvelous Zen
tradition is paramountly a striving after and realization of enlighten-
ment, as well as the linked idea of the self as illusory. Also retained are
the features of meditation and silent retreats.
Words that point toward the enlightened state but which have no
descriptive meaning must be understood as uttered in such a context
as just indicated. In particular, statements or statement fragments like
“My mind is still” or “The oak tree in the garden” are best understood
as reports on the successful breaking through to some realization, often
after a long period of striving. That is how those words are used. They
have a home in some such particular practice as I have sketched, and
cannot be understood apart from it. They make no empirical claims or
ones subject to scientific verification. They are not descriptions. But they
are not gibberish; rather in context they have a use, as indicated. Given
the context, what is it that such words do? What is their function? They
 Back to Eden

can serve either as a signal or as what we might call a pointer. In many

Zen texts, that first function is plain. The pupil’s words signal to the
Master that the pupil has finally broken through to an understanding,
a visceral understanding, as it were. The pupil’s mode of being in the
world has altered from an anxious duality to a oneness, and the change
is, or might be, heralded by some such words. Alternatively, the words
may be used by an enlightened person to point to the state a seeker
Strives to attain.
The Zen Master’s use of words to point to something might be under-
stood as saying, in effect, “This is the Bodhi mind.” Similarly, the pupil’s
use of words as a signal might be paraphrased as “I have finally recog-
nized the this you have been speaking of.” The paraphrases in question
have no more descriptive force than do the original signals or acts of
pointing. I understand “Be like this,” if the model held out is, say, some
nappy go lucky fellow; in that case the speaker might even act out the
“this” he has in mind. But if the “this” is the imagined referent of one
of those Zen utterances, I will be at a loss. There are three distinct uses of
the word “this.” One is its use in everyday life: “Take this chair upstairs,”
or “This is what we call sepia.” One is metaphysical: we use “this” in
an unavailing attempt to Dring the phenomenally given into language.
The third, in contrast, points to the ineffable.
I have said that utterances like, “The oak tree in the garden” get their
Significance from being made in a certain context. It might be objected
that if this is true then any nonsense sounds should be able to do the
job of signaling or pointing, and that seems unacceptable. “The oak
tree in the garden” or, from another koan, “the partridges in spring”
seem to say something more than would be said by some plain bit of
gibberish such as “oogamooga.” The exchange, “ ‘What is the Bodhi-
mind?’ ‘Oogamooga,’” lacks a certain something, no matter what the
context—or so it seems. And yet the Zen Masters, as the koan collec-
tions show, often just do meet their pupils’ questions in a downright
nonsensical way, for example by hitting the questioner, or by the Master
putting a slipper on his head and walking out of the room. If there is a
difference between such answers and “oogamooga” I suggest it resides
in a certain poetical force the former have and the latter lacks. The
enlightenment-signaling words have uses in other situations, and thus
they carry into the Zen contexts a certain atmosphere, as it were—echoes
of those other meaning-uses. But their primary use is to signal or to
point.
To signal or point, but of course in that Zen context or some similar
one such as the secular mystical one I have been adumbDrating. Let us
166 Becoming Human

turn our attention again to that context. If the breakthrough sought were
not significant, special, it would not amount to much. The passage from
unenlightened to enlightened must come to more than some change
in what is said. There must be a change in how a person lives. The
change is marked by internal and external features. The internal one is
that the ubiquitous inner chatter characteristic of human life is silent,
at least for a time. In its place can be a joyous awareness of the sights
and sounds of the world. What was once seen through a fog of narrative
can now appear in clarity and beauty. Here is how the matter seemed
to the meditation leader Toni Packer:

Enlightenment, True Nature, True Self, Wholeness, the Uncondi-

tioned Absolute—whatever words have been given to what is without
words, unthinkable, unknowable, ungraspable—is not the effect of
a cause. It is luminously present and timeless, overlooked by the
roving intellect that is trying to grasp it, and obscured by the body-
mind’s constantly shifting moods, desires and fears. Moment to
moment meditation is clearly coming upon this roving and shifting,
resisting and fearing mind and the urge to do something about
it!... Meditation that is free and effortless, without goal, without
expectation, is an expression of Pure Being that has nowhere to go,
nothing to get.®

Externally the transformation spoken of manifests itself in fine details of

a person’s behavior. ‘or example, a person’s face might show something
like the simple joy one can find in children, but which for most of us
is long lost. The most significant manifestation of enlightenment is the
opening-up of the person to compassion. Enlightenment brings love,
not of the romantic kind but something deeper.
The sudden appearance of enlightenment has been compared to the
change that can occur when one contemplates a certain kind of picture
puzzle. What appears at first as a mere two-dimensional scattering of tiny
patches of color may suddenly shift and become a three-dimensional
image—say of a wolf. What before was chaos becomes now a striking
picture. In the analogue, what was a world of duality in which the I plays
a dominant role changes in a moment into a world of oneness. And yet
it is the same world. There are a number of transformations that have a
similarity to that one, most notably the conversion experience, in which
someone suddenly awakes to Jesus. Again, there is the phenomena of
the paranoid break, when in an instant it becomes clear that, say, the
reason the person is suffering is that he or she is at the center of a vast
 Back to Eden

intergalactic conspiracy. There are also the extraordinary mental states

brought about by drugs such as LSD or mescaline.
With respect to this last example, Huston Smith once published an
article in which he presented two descriptions, one drawn from the
classical mystical literature and one from an account of experiences
under LSD. He challenged the reader to say which was which. The point
was that one could not do so; going just by their verbal content the
two accounts were indistinguishable.” One might want to conclude that
drugs can Dring about genuine mystical experiences, Dut that would bea
mistake. We cannot evaluate the force of the words without considering
the contexts in which they were uttered. When we do so we see that the
two descriptions differ greatly in their significance qua use. Similarly,
the difference between Buddhistic enlightenment and, say, a conversion
experience, resides not in the words reporting them but in the broad
context in which they are uttered, including the subsequent fine beha-
vior of the people, and their compassion for and sensitivity to others.
Enlightenment is not something permanent; one can De in a state of
oneness, and then be out of it. Nor does it guarantee good behavior.
There are many cases of enlightened teachers abusing their position, and
a recent book documents the fact that in Japan during the Second World
War, Zen Masters strongly supported the government’s war policy.!9 |
have no idea how to explain that discrepancy between Zen ideals and
reality. Furthermore, and of course, enlightenment offers no protection
from the physical dangers we are all heir to. But that is not to deny that
the enlightened mind can meet misfortune in a way different from the
manner in which it is met in the Samsara world of duality.

Where is this Eden?

Well, let us appeal to the experts. Here is what Huang Po says,

Only come to Know the nature of your own mind, in which there is
no self and no other, and you will in fact be a Buddha.”?

What is the self which is here denied? I believe it is the false self I have
adumbrated earlier. The self that isan unholy mixture of biological-cum-
social organism, grammatical fiction, and narrative protagonist. What
is it to Know that there is no such self? It is not an intellectual knowing
of the kind we can garner from Dooks, testimony, or thought. It is not
a knowing that. It might better be called a not-knowing. In that not-
Knowing there is no consciousness of a self standing apart from what
168 Becoming Human

is seen heard or felt. The busy tumult of I-centered narrative is absent.

Subject and object have collapsed into one. What is left is the world of
oneness, a thing beyond the intellect’s grasp.
To return to Eden is not a matter of traveling somewhere but of living
in a certain way, one marked by the falling-away of the false self. The
misleading feeling of duality nurtured by dwelling in the story of the I
gets replaced by unity. Huang Po writes,

A perception, sudden as blinking, that subject and object are one,

will lead to a deeply mysterious wordless understanding; and by this
understanding will you awake to the truth of Zen.!¢

The observer is then, as Krishnamurti said, the observed. According to

the secular mysticism I have been attempting to delineate, the result is
contact with what the Zen Master Bankei spoke of as, “the marvelously
illuminating Buddha Mind.”!* Those who carry on their everyday lives,
chopping wood and hauling water, doing what life demands but moving
in oneness, illuminated, dwell in Eden.
A secular mysticism can co-exist with an empiricistic science. Science
is just one more custom-constrained way of going on in the world. It has
nothing to say to the ineffable reality of the present. Many who speaK
of such things assert also that there is no need to become enlightened;
we already are. So why don’t I experience or live that secular mysticism
I have Deen speaking of? Perhaps, as Wittgenstein says,

What is eternal and important is often hidden from a man by an

impenetrable veil. He knows there’s something under there, but he
cannot see it. The veil reflects the daylight.'*

“What is eternal and important?”—what Zen practitioners might call

enlightenment. How is it hidden? Maybe it is there all the time yet
we are kept from seeing it, not by some reflection from a veil, but by
being distracted by a never-ending, seemingly unstoppable stream of
l-centered, story-maintaining thoughts. Let them be wholly silent and
the story ceases, the I disappears, and the world shows itself. To reach
that silence is to make the last step—a step that is no step—on the
journey out and back from Eden. To be human is to live in oneness.
Notes

wala a
1. De Hieronymus Bosch, p. 110.
>
The Cloud of Unknowing, trans. C. Wolters, p. 62.
7,. Freud, Sigmund. “Civilization and its discontents.” In Albert Dickson, ed.,
Civilization, Society and Religion. London: Penguin, 1991.
This Dook is translated by Hans Meyerfhoff as Man’s Place in Nature.
Language and Mind, p. 66.
. See Richard Leaky and Roger Lewin, Origins Reconsidered, pp. 67-96 ff.
. The Zen Teachings of Huang Po, p. 92.
. Lexts of Taoism, pp. 30, 31.
es Ibid., p. 29.
. Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Book II, chapter 27.
. A Treatise of Human Nature, Book I, Part 4, chapter 6.
. See Robert E. Hebling, The Major Works of Heinrich von Kleist, pp. 41 ff.
LsTranslated by Cherna Murray.

What language is not

Lancaster, Jane B. Primate Behavior and the Emergence of Human Culture. New
York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1975.
. Ibid., pp. 56 ff.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid., p. 73.
Ibid., p. 57.
Ibid., pp. 68, 69.
Ibid., p. 69.
. For a critical overview see Terrace, H. “In the beginning was the name.”
American Psycnotogist, 40, pp. 1011-1028.
. See Jerry A. Fodor and Jerrold J. Katz. The Structure of Language. Englewood
Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1964.
See for example Jerry Fodor. The Language of Thought. Cambridge, Massachu-
setts: Harvard University Press, 1979, pp. 59 ff.
Chomsky, Noam. Language and Problems of Knowledge. Cambridge, Massachu-
setts: MIT Press, 1988.
Ibid., p. 32.
. Ibid., p. 134.
See Goldberg, B. “Mechanism and meaning.” In Carl Ginet and Sydney
Shoemaker, eds, Knowledge and Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983,
pp. 191-210.
1/Q Notes

Language-games
. Ludwig Wittgenstein, The Philosophical Investigations. New York: The
Macmillan Company, 1957, §1. (Hereafter, “The Investigations”
referred to as “PI”
o
see my paper “The concept of function in biology.” Philosophical Topics, 18,
no. 2, pp. 29-54.
some characterizations of Wittgenstein’s talk of the use of utterances collapse
that threefold distinction between function of part, function of whole, and
function of function. See, for example, Kripke, p. 294.
. see, for example, PI, p. 187.
. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Trans. D.F. Pears and
B.F. McGuiness. New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1961, 2.0211, 2.0212.
. Ludwig Wittgenstein, The Blue and Brown Books. New York: Harper and
Brothers, 1958, p. 19.
. PI, p. 190,
. See, for example, P.M.S. Hacker and G.P. Baker, Investigations: Scepticism,
Rules and Language. Oxford: Blackwell, 1984. See also the works cited in my
paper “The community view” The Philosophical Review, 105, no. 4 October
eToys
See the bibliographic entries for these writers.
. Alasandro Duranti, “Ethnography of speaking: Toward a linguistics of the
praxis.” In Frederick J. Newmeyer, ed., Linguistics: The Cambridge Survey.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988, pp. 210-228, p. 212.
Fdward Keenan and Elinor Ochs, “Becoming a competent speaker
of Malagasy.” In Timothy Shopen, ed., Languages and their Speakers.-
Cambridge, Massachusetts: Winthrop Publishers, 1979, pp. 113-160.
The claimed universality makes the extensional difference between the two
views explicit. For example, D. Hymes, the theoretical founder of ES, emphas-
izes that he wishes to study cultural diversity:

The complementary type of explanatory adequacy [—that sought by

ES—] leads from what is common to all human Deings and all languages
toward what particular communities and persons have made of their
means of speech (Foundations in Sociolinguistics: An Ethnographic Approach.
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1975), p. 203.

Bambi B. Schieffelin, The Give and Take of Everyday Life. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1990.
See John L. Austin, How To Do Things With Words. Cambridge, Massachu-
setts: Harvard University Press, 1962; John Searle, Speech Acts. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1962; John Searle, “Indirect speech acts.”
In P. Cole and J.L. Morgan, eds, Foundations in Sociolinguistics: An Ethno-
graphic Approach. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1974,
pp. 59-82; John Searle, Expression and Meaning. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1979; John Searle and Robert Vanderveken, Foundations of
Ilocutionary Logic. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985. Chomsky,
in his famous attack on Skinner (“Review of B.F. Skinner, verbal Beha-
vior.” Language, 35, pp. 25-58) criticized the relevance of the concept
 Notes 171

of a “stimulus” on the ground that to cover all the relevant cases the term
had to be stretched to the point where it lost its meaning. I Delieve the
same criticism holds for “speech act.” The term gets its aura of significance
from such clear cases of performatives as “I promise,” but when stretched to
cover all cases of language-use it too loses its significance. The same criticism
would hold for “language-game” had not Wittgenstein explicitly said that
language—and hence “language-game”—is a family-resemblance concept. In
addition, the paradigmatic instances used to communicate what a language-
game is differ from those appealed to in the literature of speech acts.
lime S. Levinson, “Activity types and language.” Linguistics, 17, 1979, pp. 365-
Rt he
16. L.S. Vygotsky, Thought and Language. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press,
1966, p. 44.
ive Andrew Lock, ed., Action, Gesture and Symbol. London: Academic Press, 1978,
p. 4.
18. Andrew Lock,The Guided Reinvention of Language. London: Academic Press,
1980, p. 194.
Bos J. Bruner, Child’s Talk: Learning to use Language. New York: Norton, 1983,

p. 122.
20). The Guided Retnvention of Language, p. 10.
21. Work in the areas I have been discussing forms a vast literature, one
I have only touched upon. See in addition studies in human etho-
logy by Eibl-Eibesfeldt, 1989; Gricean pragmatics (Fasold, 1990); work by
Tomasello (1992); and the ecological approach. See also Noble and Davidson,
eae

Zoe learns to talk

. Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty. G.E.M. Anscombe and G.H. von Wright,
eds, trans. Denis Paul and G.E.M. Anscombe. Oxford: Blackwell, 1969.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, “Cause and effect: Intuitive awareness.” Trans. Peter
Winch. In Philosophia 6, nos 3 and 4, 1976, pp. 409-445, p. 420.
Ibid., pp. 416, 417.
Ibid., p. 414.
. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology, Vol. I.
G.E.M. Anscombe and G.H. von Wright, eds, G.E.M. Anscombe, trans.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980, 9191.
. Ibid., §916.
. “Cause and effect,” p. 420.
. The point has been much debated. I have defended the “language is essen-
tially social” reading in my paper “The Community view.” The Philosophical
Review, 105, no. 4, October 1996: pp. 469-488.
. See Plooij, Frans X., “Some basic traits of language in wild chimpanzees.”
In A. Lock, ed., Action, Gesture and Symbol.London: Academic Press, 1978,
pp. 111-132. See also E.S. Savage-Rumbaugh, “Language learning in the
bonobo: How and why they learn.” In N. Krasnegor, D.M. Rumbaugh,
M. Studdert-Kennedy, and R.L. Schiefelbusch, eds, Biological and Behavioral
1/2. Notes

Determinants of Language Development. Hillsdale, New Jersey: Lawrence

Erlbaum Associates, 1991.
See Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology, Il, §270.
“Some Dasic traits in wild chimpanzees.” p. 117.
Tbid.
See the discussion in my article “The rudiments of language.” Language and
Communication, 15, no. 3, July 1995: pp. 195-211.
Peter Geach, “Notes on Wittgenstein’s Lectures.” In P.T. Geach, K.J. Shah,
and A.C. Jackson, eds, Wittgenstein’s Lectures on Philosophical Psychology.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988, pp. 1-116, p. 25.
. J. Goodall, The Chimpanzees of Gombe. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard
University Press, 1986, p. 389.
Kuroda, in Heltney, Understanding Chimpanzees.
“Desire” is a term that can be explained by reference to examples such as the
reaching and grabbing that primatologists depict. But those actions should
not be seen as expressing some metaphysical inner state, the desire as mental
object.
ieee Where we draw the line between what we shall properly call a “gesture” and

some purely instinctive behaviour on the infant’s part, such as crying when
hungry, is not important. The existence of borderline cases does not destroy
the usefulness of a distinction.
Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology, Il, §171.
“Language learning in the Bonobo,” p. 217.
As regards artifacts and biology, I have defended the view sketched here in
“The Concept of function in biology.”
Wittgenstein makes the point in Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology,
I] §269 and again in §270. In the latter he writes: “Briefly, if the child
executes the movements IN THIS WAY, then we say that they are voluntary.
Movements in such syndromes are called ‘voluntary.’ ”
A chimpanzee infant who is being weaned may, when he wants to suckle,
first groom the mother around her nipples for a while, then try to nurse. See
C.B. Clark, “A preliminary report on weaning among chimpanzees of the
Gombe National Park, Tanzania.” In S. Chevalier-Skolnikoff and F.E. Poirier,
eds, Primate Bio-social Development: Biological, Social, and Ecological Determin-
ants. New York: Garland, 1977, pp. 235-260.
Similarly, in a case cited by Goodall (p. 565) and mentioned earlier, when
Fifi’s son Freud wanted to travel in a direction opposite that her mother has
chosen, he took his one-year-old sister Fanni in his arms before walking off
in his direction. Whatever else it does, this act of taking Fanni also serves to
call his mother’s attention to his projected line of travel.
Hiraiwa-Hasegawa, Mariko. “Sex differences in the behavioral development
of chimpanzees at Mahale.” In Heltne and Marquardt, eds, Understanding
Chimpanzees. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989, pp. 104-115,
p. 110.
Goodall, The Chimpanzees of Gombe, p. 366.
Two examples of such theorists are, I believe, Bruner and Snowden. To quote
the latter: “In our definition, ‘language’ is the symbolic use of communic-
ative signs; the use of signs in communicative settings to engage in acts of
reference, p. 224.
 Notes 173

This passage is discussed by Eike von Savigny, who comes to a different

interpretation from that defended here. See his “Common behaviour of
many a kind: Philosophical Investigations §206.” In Robert L. Arrington and
Hans Johann Glock, eds, Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations: Text and
Context. London: Routledge, 1991, pp. 105-119.
Eibl-Eibesfeldt, I. Human Ethology. New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 1989, p. 558.
schieffelin, Tne Give and Take of Everyday Life, p. 7.
See D.M Rumbaugh, Sue Savage-Rumbaugh and Mark T. Hegel, “Summation
in the Chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes).” Journal of Experimental Psychology:

See also Eibesfeldt, Human Ethology, pp. 458, 503.

Goodall, The Chimpanzees of Gombe, p. 119.
Ibid, p. 41.

How the human got its words

a
See, for example, Philip Lieberman, “The origins and evolution of language.”
In T. Ingold, ed., Companion Encyclopaedia of Anthropology: Humanity, Culture,
and Social Life. London: Routledge, 1994, pp. 108-132.
. [bid., p. 125.
. Jared Diamond, The Third Chimpanzee. New York: HarperPerennial, 1993,
pp. 33 ff.
. Ibid., p. 32.
, Ibid., pp. 47, 48.
. Ibid., p. 48.
. [bid., p. S4.
The vagueness of “language” is relevant to a certain criticism of Wittgenstein’s
discussion of the slab/pbeam people. The objection holds that if those
“slab/becam” exchanges were all the talk the tribe possessed, as Wittgenstein
asks us to imagine, they could not truly be called language. But the criti-
cism is not conclusive. Do Wittgenstein’s builders have language? Our
concept of language does not come equipped with a criterion to settle that
issue. If we say no, we implicitly fix, by fiat, what we will count as language.
. Quoted by Wells, G.A. The Origin of Language. La Salle, Illinois: Open Court,
1987, p. 11.
W.V. Quine. “Foreword” to David K. Lewis, Convention: A Philosophical Study.
Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1969, p. xi.
Wells, The Origin of Language, p. 8.
. Chomsky, Noam. Language and Problems of Knowledge, pp. 32, 134.
See Pinker, Steven. The Language Instinct. New York: HarperPerennial, 1995,
p. 363.
Ibid., p. 365.
See for example Lock, Andrew. The Guided Reinvention of Language. London:
Academic Press, 1980. See also Robbins Burling, How Language Evolved.
Anna Wierzbica, English: Meaning and Culture, and Understanding Cultures
Through Their Key Words. Peter Muhlhdausler, Pronouns and People.
See, for example, Wittgenstein and Psychology, The Self and Others, and
The Singular Seif.
174 Notes

Malinowski, Bronislaw. Argonauts of the Western Pacific. New York:

Dutton, 1921.
Cartesian Linguistics, p. 4.

Self-portrait, inK On paper

. See Wittgenstein, The Blue Book, pp. 66, 67, and PI, §404 ff. See also
G.E.M. Anscombe, “The first person.” In S$. Guttenplan ed., Mind and
Language. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975; Anthony Kenny, “The first
person.” In Cora Diamond and Jenny Teichman, eds, Intention and Intention-
ality. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1979; Norman Malcolm,
“Whether ‘I’ is a referring expression.” In Intention and Intentionality;
Hans Sluga, “ ‘Whose house is that?’ Wittgenstein on the self.” In Hans
Sluga and David G. Stern, eds, The Cambridge Companion to Wittgenstein.
Cambridge: The Cambridge University Press, 1996.
. Wittgenstein, Blue Book, p. 67.
. Ibid., pp. 66, 67.
. Ibid., p. 66.
. Lichtenberg, Georg Christoph, Schriften und Briefe. Munich: Carl Hanser
Verlag, 1971, p. 412.

The further adventures of nobody

. There is a large literature on the idea of the narrative self. For an excellent
overview, see Elinor Ochs and Lisa Capps, “Narrating the self.” In Annual
Review of Antnropotogy, 25, 1996, pp. 19-43.
Inquiries Into Human Faculty and Its Development, pp. 58 ff.
. Stendhal, Red and Black, trans. Robert M. Adams. New York: W.W. Norten,
1969, p. 230.
, J. Canfield, The Looking-Glass Self. New York: Praeger, 1990, pp. 185, 186.
Kafka, Franz. The Castle, trans. Willa and Edwin Muir. London: 1965, p. 121.
Blofeld, John, trans., The Zen Teachings of Huang Po. New York: Growe Press,
19538, p. 88.
. J. Canfield, The Looking-Glass, Self, pp. 188-190.
. Quoted by Gordon A. craig in “The Goblin at War.” New York Review of
Books, 50, no. 19, December 4, 2003, p. 52.
. Getting Married, p. 23.
. Scott Turow, “To kill or not to kill.” The New Yorker, January 6, 2003.
. Quine, Willard Van Orman. “On what there is.” In From A Logical Point of
View. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1953.
Stendhal The Charterhouse of Parma, trans. C.K. Scott Moncrieff. New York:
Doubleday and Company, 1956, p. 55.
Lichtenberg, Georg Christoph. Lichtenberg: Aphorisms & Letters, trans.
and ed. Franz Mautner and Henry Hatfield. London: Johnathan Cape,
1969, p. 35.
Lichtenberg, Lichtenberg: Aphorisms & Letters, p. 34.
 Notes 175

Consciousness
. Francis Crick, The Astonishing Hypothesis, pp. 20 ff.
. John R. Searle, The problem of consciousness. Retrieved April 1, 2006, from:
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/%7Eharnad/Papers/Py104/searle.prob.html, p. 1.
. Ibid., p. 1.
. Ibid. The same points are made in Searle’s book Mind, Language and Society.
New York: Basic Books, 1998, pp. 42 ff.
. Philosophical Review, 83, no. 4, 1974: 435-450.
. G.E. Moore, Philosophical Stuaies. New York: Harcourt Brace & Co.,1922,
p. 25. Quoted in D.M. Armstrong and Norman Malcolm, Consciousness and
Causality. Oxford: Blackwell, 1984, pp. 21, 22.
. See for example, Gtiven Gtlizeldere “Approaching consciousness.” In Ned
Block, Owen Flanagan and Guven Gtizeldere, eds, The Nature of Consciousness.
Cambridge, Massachusetts, MIT Press, 1999, p. 44.
. Consciousness and Causality by D.M. Armstrong and Norman Malcolm.
Oxford: Blackwell, 1984, p. 3.
. Russell, Bertrand. “On denoting.” Reprinted in Logic and Knowledge.
Edited by Robert Charles Marsh. London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd,
pp, 39-56.
. Last Writings on the Philosophy of Psychology, Il, p. 63. (Hereafter referred to
as “LW"™ It.)
. Ibid., p. 82.
. See PI, p. 188.
. Armstrong and Malcolm, Consciousness and Causality.
. Quoted by Malcolm from D.M. Armstrong: A Materialist Theory of the Mind.
London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1968, p. 5.
a See PI, §245: “For how can i go so far as to try to use language to get between
pain and its expression?”
. Remarks on tne Philosophy of Psycnology, Vol. I, $215.
. LW, 884.
. LW, Vol. Il, 9435.

Self-consciousness

. George Graham “Self-consciousness, psychopathology and _ Realism

about self.” Retrieved April 20, 2006, from http://www.swif.uniba.it/lei/
mind/texts/allen. htm.
oye an oe
. “On the Marionette Theatre,” trans. Cherna Murray, Life and Letters Today,
16, 1937, 101-108.
Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith.
London: Macmillan & Co, 1956, p. 152.
Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Book II, chapter 27.
Frege makes this point in his essay “Thought.” In Michael Beaney ed., The
Frege Reader. Oxford: Blackwell, 1997, p. 340.
. A Treatise of Human Nature. Oxford: Claranden Press, 1967, p. 252.
176 Notes

Allan Colin, “Animal consciousness.” In Edward N. Zalta, ed., Stanford Encyc-

lopedia of Philosopy (Summer 2003 Edition). Retrieved April 30, 2006, from
http://Plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2002/entries/consciousness-animal.
See PI, §246. I have defended Wittgenstein’s position elsewhere. See “ ‘I Know
that I am in Pain’ is Senseless.” In Keith Lehrer, ed., Analysis and Metaphysics.
Boston: D. Reidel, 1975, pp. 129-144.
PI, p. 188.

Back to Eden
. William James. The Varieties of Religious Experience. New York: Longmans,
Green and Co., 1922.
. The Zen Teachings of Huang Po, p. 35.
. Friedrich Waismann, Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle (Conversations
recorded by Friedrich Waismann. Ed. Brian McGuinness, trans. By Joachim
Schulte and Brian McGunness. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1979), p. 117.
. See Nyogent Sensaki and Ruth Trout McCandless, Buddhism and Zen.
New York: The Wisdom Library, 1953, p. 10.
. Shambhala: Boston, 1987.
. See, for example, Dwight Goddard, ed., A Buddhist Bible. New York:
E.P. Dutton & Co, 1951, p. 3.
. See, for example, Taizan Maezumi and Bernie Glassman, On Zen Practice.
Boston: Wisdom Publications, 2002, p. 7.
. The Silent Question. Shambhala Press: Boston, 2007.
. Huston Smith, “Do drugs have religious import?” pp. 522 ff.
. See Daizen Victoria, Zen at War. New York: Weathernhill, 1997.
. The Zen Teachings of Huang Po. Trans. John Blofeld. New York: Grove Press,
1958, p. 68.
. Ibid., p. 92.
. Bankei Zen, p. 80.
. Culture and Value, p. 80.
Bibliography

Anscombe, G.E.M. “The first person.” In Guttenplan, S. (ed.), Mind and Language.
Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975.
Armstrong, D.M. A Materialist Theory of the Mind. London: Routledge & Kegan
Paul, 1968.
Armstrong, D.M. and Malcolm, Norman. Consciousness and Causality. Oxford:
Blackwell, 1984.
Arrington, Robert L. and Glock, Hans Johann (eds), Wittgenstein’s Philosophical
Investigations: Text and Context. london: Routledge, 1991.
Austin, John L. How To Do Things with Words. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1962.
Bach, Kent and Harnish, Robert. Linguistic Communication and Speech Acts.
Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1979.
Bankei Zen. Bankei Zen: Translations from the record of Bankei. Peter Haskel (trans.),
New York: Grove Press, 1934.
Barkow, Jerome H., Cosmides, Leda, and Tooby, John. The Adapted Mind. Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1992.
Bauman, Richard and Joel, Sherzer (eds), Explorations in the Ethnography of
Speaking. London: Cambridge University Press, 1975.
Blofeld, John (trans.), The Zen Teachings of Huang Po. New York: Grove Press,
1958.
Bruner, J. Child’s Talk: Learning to Use Language. New York: Norton, 1983.
Bullowa, Margaret (ed.), Before Speech. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1979.
—. “Introduction: Prelinguistic communication: A field for scientific research.”
In Bullowa, 1979, pp. 1-62.
Burling, Robbin. How Language Evolved. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005S.
Canfield, John V. “ ‘I know that I am in pain’ is senseless.” In Lehrer, Keith (ed.),
Analysis and Metaphysics. Boston: D. Reidel, 1975, pp. 129-144.
——. “Discovering essence.” In Ginet, Carl and Shoemaker, Sydney (eds),
Knowledge and Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983, pp. 105-129.
—. “The concept of function in biology.” Philosophical Topics, 18, 1990:
pp. 29-54.
——. The Looking-Glass Self. New York: Praeger, 1990.
—. “Wittgenstein’s intentions.” In Canfield, J.V. and Shanker, S. (eds),
Wittgenstein’s Intentions. New York: Garland, 1992, pp. 1-37.
——. “Folk psychology versus philosophical anthropology.” Idealistic Studies, 29,
no. 3, Fall 1999: 153-172.
—. “The community view.” The Philosophical Review, 105, no. 4, October 1996:
pp. 469-488.
Cheney, D. and Seyfarth, R. How Monkeys See the World. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1990.
Chomsky, N. “Review of B.F. Skinner, Verbal Behavior.” Language, 35, 1959: 25-58.
——. Language and Mind. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1968.
178 Bibliograpny

——. Language and Problems of Knowledge. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988.
Clark, C.B. “A preliminary report on weaning among chimpanzees of the Gombe
National Park, Tanzania.” In Chevalier-Skolnikoff, S. and Poirier, F.E. (eds),
Primate Bio-social Development: Biological, Social, and Ecological Determinants.
New York: Garland, 1977, pp. 235-260.
Colin, Allan. “Animal consciousness.” In Zalta, Edward N. (ed.), Stanford Encyc-
lopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2003 Edition) Retrieved April 30, 2006, from
http://Plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2002/entries/consciousness-animal.
Craig, Gordon A. “The Goblin at war.” New York Review of Books, 9Q, no. 19,
December 4, 2003.
Crick, Francis, The Astonishing Hypothesis. New York: Scribner, 1994,
Daizen, Victoria. Zen at War. New York: Weatherhill, 1997.
De Tolnay, Charles. Hieronymus Bosch. New York: Reynal and Company, 1965.
Diamond, Jared. The Third Chimpanzee. New York: HarperPerennial, 1993.
Duranti, Alasandro. “Ethnography of speaking: Toward a linguistics of the
praxis.” In Newmeyer, Frederick J. (ed.), Linguistics: The Cambridge Survey.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988, pp. 210-228.
Fibl-Eibesfeldt, I. “Patterns of parent-child interaction in a cross-cultural
perspective.” In Olivero and Zappella, 1981, pp. 177-218.
——. Human Ethology. New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 1989.
Fasold, R. Sociolinguistics of Language. Oxford: Blackwell, 1990.
Fasold, R. and Shuy, Roger (eds), Studies in Language Variation. Washington, DC:
Georgetown University Press, 1975.
Foundations in Sociolinguistics: An Ethnographic Approach. Philadelphia: University
of Pennsylvania Press, 1974.
Fraser, Bruce. “A partial analysis of vernacular performative verbs.” In Shuy,
Roger and Bailey, C.-J. (eds), Towards Tomorrow’s Linguistics. Washington, DC;
Georgetown University Press, 1974, pp. 139-158.
Frege, Gottlob. “Thought.” In Beaney, Michael (ed.), The Frege Reader. Oxford:
Blackwell, 1997.
Geach, Peter. “Notes on Wittgenstein’s Lectures.” In Geach, P.T., Shah, K.J., and
Jackson, A.C. (eds), Wittgenstein’s Lectures on Philosophical Psychology. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1988, pp. 1-116.
Goddard, Dwight (ed.), A Buddhist Bible. New York: E.P. Dutton & Co, 1951.
Goodall, J. The Chimpanzees of Gombe. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1986.
Graham, George. “Self-consciousness, psychopathology and realism about
self.” Retrieved April 20, 2006, from http://www.swif.uniba.it/lei/mind/texts/
allen.ntm.
Grice, H. Paul. “Logic and conversation.” In Cole, P. and Morgan, Jerry L. (eds),
Syntax and Semantics: Speech Acts. New York: Academic Press, 1975, pp. 41-58.
Guzeldere, Gtiven. “Approaching consciousness.” In Block, Ned, Flanagan, Owen,
and Guzeldere, Giiven (eds), The Nature of Consciousness. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 1999.
Harre, Rom. The Self and Others. Westport Connecticut: Praeger, 2003.
——. The Singular Self. London: Sage Publications, 1998.
——. Wittgenstein and Psychology. London: Ashgate, 2005.
Heltne, Paul G. and Marquardt, Linda A. (eds), Understanding Chimpanzees.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989.
 Bibliography 179

Hiraiwa-Hasegawa, Mariko. “Sex differences in the behavioral development of

chimpanzees at Mahale.” In Heltne and Marquardt, 1989, pp. 104-115.
Hume, David. A Treatise of Human Nature. Selby-Bigge, L.A. (ed.). Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1967.
Hymes, D. “The ethnography of speaking.” In Gladwin, T. and Sturtevant,
William (eds), Anthropology and Human Behaviour. Washington, DC: Anthropo-
logical Society of Washington, 1962, pp. 13-53.
—. “Toward Ethnographies of communication: The analysis of commu-
nicative events.” In Giglioli, Pier Paulo (ed.), Language and Social Context.
Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972, pp. 21-44.
——. Foundations in Sociolinguistics: An Ethnographic Approach. Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 1974.
James, William. The Varieties of Religious Experience. New York: Longmans, Green
and Co., 1922.
Kafka, Franz. The Castle. Willa and Edwin Muir (trans.). London: Shocken Books,
ib
Kant, Immanuel. The Critique of Pure Reason. Norman Kemp Smith (trans.).
London: Macmillan & Co, 1956.
Keenan, Edward and Ochs, Elinor. “Becoming a competent speaker of Mala-
gasy.” In Shopen, Timothy (ed.), Languages and their Speakers. Cambridge, MA:
Winthrop Publishers, 1979, pp. 113-160.
Kenny, Anthony. “The first person.” In Diamond, Cora and Teichman, Jenny
(eds), Intention and Intentionality. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1979.
Kleist, Heinrich von. “On the Marionette theatrr.” Cherna Murray (trans.). Life
and Letters Today 16, 1937: 101-108.
Kripke, Saul A. “Wittgenstein on rules and private language.” In Block, Irving
(ed.), Perspectives on the Philosophy of Wittgenstein. Oxford: Blackwell, 1981,
238-3172.
Kuroda, Suehisa. “Developmental retardation and behavioral development of
pygmy chimpanzees.” In Heltne 1989, pp. 184-193.
Leaky, Richard and Lewin, Roger. Origins Reconsidered. Great Britain: Little, Brown
and Company, 1997.
Legge, James (trans.), Tne Texts of Taoism. New York: The Julian Press, 1999.
Levinson, 8. “Activity types and language.” Linguistics 17, 1979: 365-399.
Lichtenberg, Georg Christoph. Lichtenberg: Aphorisms & Letters. Franz Mautner
and Henry Hatfield (trans. and ed.). London: Johnathan Cape, 1969.
——. Schriften und Briefe. Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1971.
Lieberman, P. “The origins and evolution of language.” In Ingold, T. (ed.),
Companion Encyclopaedia of Anthropology: Humanity, Culture, and Social Life.
London: Routledge, 1994, pp. 108-132.
Lock, Andrew (ed.), Action, Gesture and Symbol. London: Academic Press, 1978.
——. The Guided Reinvention of Language. London: Academic Press, 1980.
Locke, John. Essay Concerning Human Understanding. New York: Dover, 1959.
Maezumi, Taizan and Glassman, Bernie. On Zen Practice. Boston: Wisdom Public-
ations, 2002.
Malcolm, Norman. “Whether ‘T’ is a referring expression.” In Diamond, Cora
and Teichman, Jenny (eds), Intention and Intentionality. Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 1979, pp. 15-24.
——. “Language as expressive behaviour.” In Nothing ts Hidden. Oxford: Basil
Blackwell, 1986, pp. 133-153.
IRON Ay
Malinowski, Bronislaw. Argonauts of the Western Pacific. New York: E.P. Dutton,
wx Co., 1961.
Matthiessen, Peter. The Nine-Headed Dragon River. New York: Shambala, 1986.
McCarthy, D. “Language development in children.” In Carmichael, L. (ed.),
Manual of Child Psychology. New York: Wiley, 1954.
Moore, G.E. Philosophical Studies. New York: Harcourt Brace & Co., 1922.
Miihlhausler, Peter. Pronouns and Pcopic. Oxford: Blackwell, 1990.
Nagel, Thomas. “What is it like to be a bat?” Philosophical Review, 83, no. 4, 1974:
pp. 435-450.
Noble, W. and Davidson, I. “The evolutionary emergence of modern human
behaviour: Language and its archaeology.” Man, 26, 1991: 223-253.
Ochs, Elinor. “A sliding sense of obligatoriness: The polystructure of Malagasy
oratory.” Language in Society, 2, 1973: pp. 225-243.
Ochs Keenan, Elinor. “Norm-makers, norm-breakers: Use of speech by men and
women in a Malagasy community.” In Bauman and Sherzer 1974, pp. 125-143.
—. “The universality of conversational implicature.” In Fasold and Shuy 1975,
pp. 255-268.
Ochs, E and Schieffelin, B. “Language acquisition and socialization.” In Schweder,
R. and Levine, R. (eds), Culture Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1984.
Ochs, Elinor and Capps, Lisa. “Narrating the self.” Annual Review of Anthropology,
29, 1996: pp. 19-43.
Olivero, Alberto and Zappella, Michele. The Behaviour of Human Infants. New
York: Plenum Press, 1981.
Pinker, Steven. The Language Instinct. New York: HarperPerennial, 1995.
Plooij, Frans X. “Some basic traits of language in wild chimpanzees.” In Lock
1978, pp. 111-132.
Quine, Willard Van Orman. “On what there is.” In From a Logical Point of View.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1953.
Reed, Edward S. “The ecological approach to language development: A radical
solution to Chomsky’s and Quine’s problems.” Language & Communication. 15,
no. 1, January 1995: pp. 1-29.
Rumbaugh, D.M. “Comparative psychology: Patterns in adaptation.” In Rogers,
A.M. and Scheirer, C.J. (eds), G. Stanley Hall Lecture Series, 5S. American Psycho-
logical Association, 1985, pp. 7-53.
Rumbaugh, D.M., Savage-Rumbaugh, Sue and Hegel, Mark T. “Summation in
the chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes).” journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal
Behaviour Processes. 13, 1987: pp. 107-115.
Russell, Bertrand. “On denoting.” Reprinted in Logic and Knowledge, Robert
Charles Marsh (ed.). London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd, pp. 39-S6.
Savage-Rumbaugh, E.S. “Language learning in the bonobo: how and why
they learn.” In Krasnegor, N., Rumbaugh, D.M., Studdert-Kennedy, M. and
Schiefelbusch, R.L. (eds), Biological and Behavioral Determinants of Language
Development. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1991.
Savage-Rumbaugh, E.S., Sevcik, R.A., Rumbaugh, D.M. and Rubert, E. “The
capacity of animals to acquire language: Do species differences have anything
to say to us?” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, 1985,
pp. 177-185.
 Bibliography 181

Saville-Troike, Muriel (ed.), Linguistics and Anthropology. Georgetown University

Round Table on Languages and Linguistics. Washington, DC: Georgetown Univer-
sity Press, 1977.
—. The Ethnography of Communication. Oxford: Blackwell, 1989.
Scheler, Max. Die Stellung des Menchen im Cosmos. Bayreuth: Steeger & Co., 1949.
Schieffelin, Bambi B. The Give and Take of Everyday Life. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1990.
Schiefelbusch, Richard and Pickar, Joann. The Acquisition of Communicative
Competence. Baltimore: University Park Press, 1984.
Searle, John. Speech Acts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969.
——. “Indirect speech acts.” In Cole and Morgan 1975, pp. 59-82.
——. Expression and Meaning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979.
—. “The problem of consciousness.” Retrieved April 1, 2006 from
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/%7Eharnad/Papers/Py104/searle.prob. html.
Searle, John and Vanderveken, Robert. Foundations of Illocutionary Logic.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985.
——. Mind, Language and Society. New York: Basic Books, 1998.
Sensaki, Nyogent and McCandless, Ruth Trout. Buddhism and Zen. New York: The
Wisdom Library, 1953.
Sluga, Hans. “ ‘Whose house is that?’ Wittgenstein on the self.” In Sluga, Hans
and Stern, David G. (eds), The Cambriage Companion to Wittgenstein. Cambridge:
The Cambridge University Press, 1996.
Snowden, C.T. “Language capacities of nonhuman animals.” Yearbook of Physical
Anthnropoiogy, 33, 1990: pp. 215-245.
Stendhal. The Charterhouse of Parma. C.K. Scott Moncrieff (trans.). New York:
Doubleday and Company, 1956.
——. Red and Black. Translated by Robert M. Adams. New York: W.W. Norten,
Bree
Terrace, H. “In the beginning was the name.” American Psychologist, 40, 1985,
pp. 1011-1028.
Tomasello, Michael. “The social bases of language acquisition.” Social Develop-
ment, I, no. 1, 1992: pp. 67-87.
Victoria, Daizen. Zen at War. New York: Weathernhill, 1997.
von Savigny, E. “Common behaviour of many a kind: Philosophical Investigations
section 206.” In Arrington, 1991, pp. 105-119.
Vygotsky, L.S. Thought and Language. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1966.
Wells, G.A. The Origin of Language. La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1987.
Wierzbica, Anna. English: Meaning and Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2006.
——. Understanding Cultures Through Their Key Words. Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1997,
Wittgenstein, Ludwig. The Philosophical Investigations. New York: The Macmillan
Company, [1953] 1957.
——. “Cause and effect: Intuitive awareness.” Philosophia (Israel) 6, 1976:
pp. 409-425.
——. Last Writings on the Philosophy of Psychology, Vol. I. G.H. von Wright and
Heikki Nyman (eds), translated by C.G. Luckhardt and M.A.E. Aue. Oxford:
Blackwell, 1992.
——. On Certainty. G.E.M. Anscombe and G.H. von Wright (eds), translated by
Denis Paul and G.E.M. Anscombe. Oxford: Blackwell, 1969.
182 Bibliograpny

——. Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology. Vol. I. G.E.M. Anscombe and G.H.
von Wright (eds), Translated by G.E.M. Anscombe. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1980, §1951.
——. Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology, Vol. If. G.H. von Wright and Heikki
Nyman (eds.), translated by C.G. Luckhardt and M.A.E. Aue. Chicago: Univer-
sity of Chicago Press, 1980.
Wolters, Clifton (trans.), The Cloud of Unknowing. Baltimore Maryland: Penguin,
ilove
Index

aims, 3, 4 metaphysical idea of, 133

Alex, 105, 109, 110, 111, 112, transitive, 133
eK 114 Crick, Francis, 122
Argonauts of the Western Pacific, 9 Crime and Punishment, 97, 106, 107,
Armstrong, D.M., 134 teh te
The Ascent into the Heavenly Paradise, 2 criteria of personal identity, 91
Ausserung, 26, 90, 92, 132, 136-8, Cro-Magnon, 5, 60, 62
139, 145, 146, 154 custom, its definition, 42-3
axioms of the self-story, 110 cyclops, 56

Bankei, 168
day dreaming, 109
being human, three perspectives,
De Tolnay, Charles, 2
157, 158
depth grammar, 75, 129, 130, 131,
Big Foot, 149 132, 133
The Blue Book, 25 Descartes, 9, 86, 121
Bosch, Heironymous, 1, 2, 3
v. Lichtenberg, 84, 85
bottom up v. top down, 4, 23-6
Diamond, Jared, 8, 60, 61
Bruner, J., 31, 33
Don Juan, 118
Buddhism, 6, 7, 78, 158, 160
Dostoevsky, 106, 109
five common tenets, 161-3
drawing attention to v. referring to,
four noble truths, 2 oe
without the Buddha, 161
Duck Soup, 103
Dugan, 105
Carroll, Lewis, 86, 105, 117 Duhem, Picrre, 162, 163
Ch’an, 6, 160
Duranti, Alasandro, 30
The Charterhouse of Parma, 102, 109
child as hero, 76
chimpanzees, their primitive social early language-games
lives, 70-1 of counting, 57
Chomsky, Noam, 35, 41, 58, 76, 130 30180 ee.
on inherited concepts, 17 of intention, 49-53
on syntax, 17, 66-9 of make believe, 57
Chuang-tzu, 7 of merely naming, 53-96
The Cloud of Unknowing, 2 of possession, 97
the cogito argument, 85 of refusal, 56, 57
cognitive self-consciousness, 153-6 of requests, 45-9
the compatibility of science and Eden
religion, 162 the empiricist’s version, 101-4
Condillac, 63-4 its location, 167-8
consciousness the mystic’s version, 3, 5, 6-8
the concept of, 122-6, 128-9 a religiously significant return,
intransitive, 138-9 4,158
184 Index
empirical adjudication of
self-stories, 112
a Renee:
enlightenment, 163-7
the ethnography of speech, 30,
43-5
the evolution of language
Steven Pinker on, 69-70
the evolution of the self, 118-20
family resemblance, 28-9, 42, 108
fictionalism, 147, 148
form of life, 70
four noble truths of Buddhism, 2
Frege, Gottlob, 18, 175 n6
Freud, Sigmund, 3
function, 22-3, 48-9
SF (eum leh eee!
Galton, Francis, 98
The Garden of Earthly Delights, 1, 2
gesture, 38-40
Graham, George, 147-8, 152
the great leap forward, 60-1
greeting, 33
je coos Paya.
heap of sand, 62
Hitler’s generals, 104, 112, 115
Homer, 86
Huang Po, 6, 103, 158, 167, 168
Hume, David, 7, 94, 140, 153, 155
Hymes, Dell, 30
as grammatical fiction, 83-4
non-referring uses, 88-90
as object of scientific
investigation, 82
object uses, 87
our picture of it universally
held, 33
pre-theoretical idea of, 79
as protagonist, 79
the puzzle of, 79
as referent, 80
as three-part entity, 82
“lam in pain”, 88-95, 98, 133, 134-6,
137, 138, 1359, 140-5, 153
I-characterizations, their fictional
nature, 106-15
I-thoughts, 98-101, 103, 104, 115
and auditory images, 98-9
and visual images, 98-9
the inner as delusion, 145-6
intention, 21, 28, 33, 38-54, 55, 56,
62, 84, 119
and ethnography, 30-1
stated evasively, 30
utterances of, 41-2
James, William, 158
just doing, 8, 77, 146
just so story, 64-6
Karma, 161, 162, 163
Keenan, Elinor Ochs, 30
Kensho, 160
Kleist, Heinrich von, 8, lol
Klu Klux Klan, 112
Kripke, S., 170 n 3
pam moss:
Kula-ring, 8
Lancaster, Jane B.
critical comments, 14-17
on the origin of speech, 12-14
language
dating its advent, 58-62
definition of, 11
selective advantage of, 73
language-games, 20, 26-8
definition of, 29
and family resemblance, 28, 29
family resemblance among, 28-9
order of appearance, 75
simple, 40-1
why overlooked, 74
see aiso early language-games
language socialization studies, 31-2
Lichtenberg, Georg Christoph, 84-85,
en? ah
Lieberman, Philip, 58-9, 61
Lock, A., 31, 33, 34, 74
Locke, John, 7, 79, 151, 192
Lhe Looking-Glass Seif, 148
Malcolm, Norman, 113, 128, 138
Malinowski, Bronislaw, 9, 73

materia! culture, 71, 72, 75, 157
Matthiessen, Peter, 160
merely naming, 16, 20, 21, 22, 53-56,
a proto language-game, 35-8
mind-body problem, 121-2, 146
Mlle de La Mole, 99
Moliere, 118
Moore, G.E.
on the idea of consciousness, 124-6
Mozart, 118
the mystic’s Eden, 1-3
Nagle, Thomas, 123, 124
Napoleon, 108, 109, 112
narrative consistency, 109, 112
narrative, its requirements, 119
nationalism, 114
natural selection, 118
naturalism, 77
Neanderthals, 5, 59, 60, 62
not-Know thy self, 163-4
the oak tree in the garden, 164-6
oceanic feeling, 3
“On Denoting”, 129
“On the Marionette Theatre”, 8, 151
ontology, 107-8
of the I, 117-18
our family tree, 5
Packer, Toni, 166
pain, 37, 88-94, 134, 141-6
and consciousness, 132-6, 137, 138
as distinct existence, 135-6
and functionalism, 127-8
and private language, 140-5
paranoia, 110, 113, 1195
personal identity
and continuity of consciousness, 87
and spatio-temporal continuity, 87
philosophical anthropology, 9, 9, 44,
79, 130
physicalism, 122, 129
picture, 129, 132, 133
Pinker, Steven, 69, 70
PLA Lite, 140-5
Plato, 66, 69
pre-linguistic ancestors, 6, 71
Index 185
private language argument, See
PLA Lite
project, 38, 41
The Pure Land, 3, 6—7
Rashamon, 114, 115
Raskolnikov, 97, 106, 107, 108, 109,
11/7, 149
the reader over one’s shoulder,
101, 102
rebirth, 161, 162, 163
religion without words, 159
requests, 39-40, 45-7, 55, 75
Rousseau’s paradox, 63-5, 70
Russell, Bertrand, 129-30
NM APR a eMC tte
acquisition, 19
Saville-Troike, Muriel, 30
Scheler, Max, 4
Searle, John, 122-4
secular mysticism, 8-10, 159, 161,
163, 164, 165, 168
selected characterizations, 104-5
alba
and narrative, 98
its three part nature, 98
See also |
self-awareness, 2, 3, 4, 7,8
see also self-consciousness
self-consciousness, 2, 3, 4, 9
Frege on, 175 n 6
Hume on, 153
infinite regress, 152-3
Locke on, 152
and the narrative self, 155-6
as occasional, 151
ordinary v metaphysical
interpretations, 150-1
picture of, 150
self-conscious of v self conscious
that, 152
unshakeable conviction of, 155
self deception, 149-SQ
Silent Zen, 160-1
speech as custom regulated action,
35, 146
the spirit of the stairs, 102
186 Index
Stendhal, 99, 108, 109, 117
superficial grammar, 129, 130,
Lol, 1lsZ
surface grammar, 129, 130, 132, 133
suzuki, D.T., 7, 8
syntax, its alleged necessity, 66-9
Taoism, 6, 7, 115
Thompson, Judith Jarvis, 79, 118
Through the Looking-Glass, 86
top down v bottom up, 23-6
truth assumptions from the culture,
112-13
Turow, Scott, 105
unicorns, 118-19
universal causation, 161-3
UT my OPK Cee py
Vygotsky, L.S., 32-3, 34
Waking Life, 106
Wells, G.A., 63
Weltanschauung, 134
‘What It’s Like To Be a Bat’, 123-4
wnho-criteria, 91-2
Wierzbica, Anna, 74
Wittgenstein, L., 4-5, 19-20, 22, 122,
128, 129, 151, 134
on an alternative to mentalism, 146
on “Ausserung”, 136-8
on builders and destroyers, 21
on buying apples, 21-2
on the common behavior of
mankind, 55
and cultural anthropology, 32
on the eternal, 168
and the ethnography of speech,
43-5
and the faulty memory example,
141-5
and gesture, 38-40
on ‘I’, 84
on inner ostensive definition, 141-5
on the inner as delusion, 145
on Knowing one is in pain, 153-4
On naming not Deing a move in the
game, 94-5
on non-referring uses of ‘I’, 90-3
on not being dogmatic, 20-1
and ordinary language, 135
on pain as a thing, 145
on‘ picture’, 132
on referring to sensations, 88-90
on a religion without words, 159
similar views, 29-34
On speech as custom regulated
action, 35-8
on the slab/beam language-game,
19, 20
zazen, 160
Zen Buddhism, 160
Zombies, 126-8