‘I Know that I am in Pain’ is Senseless

Abstract

Professor Chisholm, in one of my many instructive encounters with him as a graduate student at Brown, deflated my enthusiasm for Quine’s Two Dogmas argument by raising the question, essentially, of who says one cannot legitimately use such and such a set of concepts as a basis for an account of analyticity. What is and is not obscure is not lightly to be legislated; nor is it a matter to be settled by philosophical fashion. In doing an article for this commemorative volume, the writer naturally takes on as superego a Galtonian composite of Professor Chisholm, his colleagues from the old days at Brown, and his many talented students. This figure, I see, looks askance at the use made herein of such notions as ‘use’, ‘language game’, ‘point’, ‘function’, ‘senseless’ and ‘nonsense’. (And of course it’s far from the case that only members of ‘Rod’s bunch’ would view the use of such notions with a degree of alarm that would require, at least, scare quotes.) I can only answer that these notions are taught in the Philosophical Investigations by a series of examples, and are thereby raised up from mere jargon. And I appeal to what I learned as a graduate student, that one should not take lightly judgments of obscurity: Who’s to say? It’s a key problem in philosophy to know what is and what is not intelligible. At the same time, it will escape no one that the influence of Professor Chisholm runs deep through the pages of this article; personally I am sure that this influence is all to the good, and for its workings here, as elsewhere, I am deeply grateful.