No one can deny that we know things about ourselves which others
cannot know unless we tell them. We know when we have toothache, when
we feel thirsty, what we were dreaming when we woke up, and so on.
Dr. Watson might say that the dentist can know we have toothache by
observing a cavity in a tooth. I will not reply that the dentist is
often mistaken; this may be merely because the art of dentistry has not
been sufficiently perfected. I will concede as possible, in the future,
a state of odontology in which the dentist could always know whether
I am feeling toothache. But even then his knowledge has a different
character from mine. His knowledge is an inference, based upon the
inducive law that people with such-and-such cavities suffer pain of
a certain kind. But this law cannot be established by observation of
cavities alone; it requires that, where these are observed, the people
who have them should tell us that they feel toothache. And, more than
that, they must be speaking the truth. Purely external observation can
discover that people with cavities _say_ they have toothache, but not
that they have it. Saying one has toothache is a different thing from
having it; if not we could cure toothache by not talking about it, and
so save our dentists’ bills. I am sure the expert opinion of dentists
will agree with me that this is impossible.
To this argument, however, it might be replied that having toothache is
a state of the body, and that knowing I have toothache is a response to
this bodily stimulus. It will be said that, theoretically, the state
of my body when I have toothache can be observed by an outsider, who
can then also know that I have toothache. This answer, however, does
not really meet the point. When the outside observer knows that I have
toothache, not only is his knowledge based upon an inductive inference,
as we have already seen, but his knowledge of the inferred term,
“toothache”, must be based upon personal experience. No knowledge of
dentistry could enable a man to know what toothache is if he had never
felt it. If, then, toothache is really a state of the body--which, at
the moment, I neither affirm nor deny--it is a state of the body which
only the man himself can perceive. In a word, whoever has experienced
toothache and can remember it has knowledge that cannot be possessed by
a man who has never experienced toothache.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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