ABSTRACT
The aim of this paper is to make a few tentative recommendations in regard to our talk about the acts and processes that take place in our minds. There is a linguistic performance, very frequently practised, in which we give other people information about our own contemporary or past thoughts and feelings. And it would not be incorrect to say that people frequently understand this form of discourse, and that they reciprocate by telling us what they are thinking or feeling, or what they thought and felt on given occasions in the past. There is also a much less frequently practised game in which we are not content to say baldly that we thought this or that, or that we were having this or that sort of experience, but in which we try to say more specifically how we felt, or what the experiences in question were ‘inwardly like’. In this latter kind of performance we are frequently at a loss for suitable words in which to clothe our meaning, and are forced to eke out the inadequacies of established usage by gestures and intonations, as well as by neologisms and figures of the most various kinds. While we are frequently unsuccessful in such a performance, and our auditors cannot be certain just what kind of experience we are talking of, there are cases where communication seems entirely successful, and our auditors exclaim: ‘Yes, I know exactly how you felt at that time’, ‘How very well I can enter into your feelings’, and so forth. There are also some 340occasions on which we try to give listeners elaborate analyses of our inner experiences in terms that have currency only in small groups of specially schooled people. While these attempts at communication often end inconclusively in general confusion and puzzlement, there are also occasions when results of some value are achieved by them. But though these forms of linguistic communication are commonly practised, and though their simpler varieties are regarded as only a little more precarious than many other communications about remote or hidden objects, yet their existence nevertheless gives rise to various forms of deep puzzlement, so that we ask ourselves: ‘How is it possible to tell other people how we feel inwardly? How can we ever effect a comparison between the private feelings of different individuals? How can we ever be sure that other people really feel as we think they feel?’ and so on. Furthermore, all the variable and unsettled figures in which we try to describe our inner experiences also give rise to such troublesome questions as: ‘How is it possible for the same object to be present in many minds?’ or ‘What is the nature of the agent or factor within me that does my thinking and feeling?’ or ‘How is it possible to think of something that exists nowhere or exists no longer?’ These and many other similar questions leave us hesitant and tongue-tied, and without any clear notion as to how to begin answering them. So that the whole situation seems to demand a thorough examination of our introspective usages, an examination which will lay bare the sources of our difficulties, and permit our talk about experiences to achieve a maximal degree of smoothness and internal unity.
