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This chapter begins with a discussion of the private world problem, and argues that with or without sensations, the spectre of the ‘private world’ arises equally, so sensations are not the problem if there is a ‘private world problem’. It is also argued that the role of knowledge of behaviour (or what a sensation is ‘apt to cause’) and/or physical circumstances (or that by which the sensation is ‘apt to be caused’) needs better understanding. The rejection of analogical ways of thinking about the experiences of others and the complementary fixation on public, observable, shared behaviour and circumstances leads — when carried to its fair conclusion — to a second joke, which is explained in the chapter.

Although participants in the scientific enterprise comply at least tacitly with the Milesian requirements of monism, naturalism, and rationalism, not all philosophers have followed suit. Many metaphysicians continue to believe in the contingency of the world, thereby still stirring the pot in which simmer the traditional ‘problems’ of external-world skepticism, induction, other minds, etc. But two 17^th century philosophers, Thomas Hobbes and Benedict Spinoza, produced Grand Theories satisfying the Milesian requirements. Hobbes's Monism consisted in asserting that nothing exists but bodies in motion. Sensations and all mental items are motions in the brain. Hobbesian Naturalism was his claim that bodies are not driven by forces other than those inherent in them. He was a Rationalist, holding that all true propositions are necessarily true. He did not distinguish between philosophy and science: both are the finding out of causes from effects and vice versa, by “ratiocination.”

This chapter analyzes how words refer to sensations through Wittgenstein's tale of the hurt child. The child, who hurts himself, cries; it is not he, but the adults around him, who make the connection between his cries and the domain of exclamations and sentences in the language of pain. There is no moment of recognition on his part that mediates between his pain and his crying, certainly none that involves an act of identifying or naming what he is feeling as pain. It is the adults who recognize his cries as cries of pain, and hence are in a position to replace them with primitive linguistic forms of pain behaviour, and so induct him into (this dimension of) life with language. In other words, the relevant linguistic connection between ‘pain’ and pain is set up for the individual learner by the society of which he is a part.

This chapter examines §246 of Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations, which begins to question the conception of sensations as ‘private’. Wittgenstein seems essentially uninterested in the possibility of any lack of clarity or ambiguity in what his interlocutor might mean by his answer to the opening question; he does not ask himself, and thereby invite us to ask ourselves, what the interlocutor might be trying to get at through his invocation of a cognitive disparity between the first-person and third-person cases. Instead, he responds as if the meanings of the words he employs are either self-evident and singular (adverting to the normal use of the word ‘to know’), or barely capable of an alternative interpretation (‘except perhaps as a joke’). This apparent refusal to open himself to other possibilities of sense is epitomized by the moment when he turns words which might have been used to invite an exercise of the sympathetic imagination to purely sarcastic intent (‘How else are we to use it?’, ‘What is it supposed to mean?’). And without allowing such space for the imagination to be exercised, there seems to be little ground for attributing a resolute strategy to Wittgenstein at this point.

This chapter examines the internal structure of the (interrupted) reflection on the status of the conclusions established in §246. Wittgenstein offers two pairs of propositions that he explicitly claims (or implies) are comparable with each other: first, ‘Sensations are private’ and ‘One plays patience by oneself’, and then ‘Every rod has a length’ and ‘This body has extension’. Their comparability resides in their tendency to elicit the following kind of response from those to whom they are addressed: ‘I can't imagine the opposite’, or ‘What would it be like if it were otherwise?’ Wittgenstein suggests (call this the second level of his reflections) that this betrays an implicit awareness on the part of the respondents that these pairs of propositions are grammatical rather than empirical — by which he means that they do not represent a state of affairs that might have been otherwise, but would rather be advanced (to quote the preceding §247) ‘when one was explaining the meaning of the word [‘sensation’, or ‘patience’, or ‘rod’ or ‘body’] to him.

This chapter analyzes §258. It considers the question: can the diarist establish a meaning for his term ‘S’? If so, it must be possible to define that meaning, for the grammar of meaning is such that a coherent practice of employing a word presupposes a standard of correctness for its use. The diarist attempts to establish this by impressing on himself the connection between the sign and the original sensation; future candidate sensations will correctly be called ‘S’-type sensations if they resemble the original sample sensation, otherwise not. But, as Wittgenstein points out, to be able to remember the original sensation correctly, we must be able, in principle, to distinguish memories of ‘S’ from memories of other sensations (call them ‘T’ and ‘U’); but we could only do so if we already had a standard of correctness for the use of ‘S’ (since talk of a ‘memory of S’ can be meaningful only if ‘S’ is meaningful).

This chapter examines why should the discovery that a particular sensation (whose presence we choose to express or note by using the sign ‘S’) is correlated with a rise in blood pressure give us any additional reason to think that the supposition of a mistake in identifying the sensation itself was mere show? Wittgenstein's text claims that regular misidentification of the actual sensation would not matter; for if I could tell that my blood pressure is rising despite misidentifying the sensation, that could only be on the basis of my thinking (often wrongly) that I am having that sensation. But to say that misrecognition would be an irrelevance for that reason would amount to saying that the actual presence or absence of a sensation would be an irrelevance — for the usefulness of our utterances of ‘S’ would then no longer be dependent on their being responsive to or expressive of my actually having a particular sensation. In short, if ‘S’ really is the name of a sensation, Wittgenstein's conclusion about misrecognition simply begs the question against his opponent; and if it is not, his conclusion is valid but irrelevant to its purported subject-matter.

This chapter dismisses the idea that there are events which would be reported by E-reports, if there were such reports, but which, in the absence of these, cannot be reported at all. It states that it does not seem that any of the trains of thought considered, as possibly leading to a belief in the existence of E-reports, can be adapted so as to become good arguments for this rather strange idea. However, it is not easy to see what else but this idea can be intended by philosophers who say that one cannot describe the sensations. They do not mean that it cannot describe the sensation which the chapter describes as the queer tickling sensation up the spine when one is a fourteen-year-old boy and the attractive art mistress looks over one's shoulder. Nor do they mean that one cannot make perception-claims and illusion-reports, or assert perception–illusion disjunctions.

Daniel Dennett’s “intentional stance” theory is a leading specimen of the rationality theory, though Dennett vacillates in offering stronger and weaker variants. In the strong formulations, the theory is quite implausible; in its weak formulations, its content is too thin to have predictive implications. It also suffers from an inability to handle attributions over the entire range of mental states, including sensations like thirst, hunger, or itchiness. Finally, it offers no satisfactory story of how mental concepts are understood. An ostensibly related theory, the “teleological stance” theory, doesn’t really claim to explain mental state attribution.

This chapter explicates the concept of a natural sign. The original Reidian concept of a natural sign is either a sensation or a perception that is causally linked “upstream” to what the sign signifies and “downstream” to the generation of a characteristic judgment. The author extends Reid's work to consider the idea of a “theistic natural sign.” A theistic natural sign ought to be something that is connected both to God and to a human disposition to believe in God. He argues that both widespread belief in God and current cognitive science are consistent with the claim that theistic signs exist. Finally, he argues that theistic natural signs might be understood as either (a) non‐propositional grounds on which belief in God is warranted, or (b) non‐propositional (or, perhaps, even propositional) evidence for the fact of God's existence. He remains neutral between these competing views.

This chapter explains how Reid arrives at his appeal to suggestion by an argument from elimination. It then discusses his application of his theory of suggestion to tactile perception. Reid claims that the Way of Ideas operates upon the assumption that the immediate intentional objects of our thoughts are ideas or other representational intermediaries. The Way of Ideas attempts to reduce contentful mental states to non-contentful features of those states, whereas Reid takes intentional content as irreducible and basic. Special attention is given to Reid's experimentum crucis, or ‘crucial test’, a thought experiment involving a subject's systematic sensory deprivation. Reid seeks to show that the uses of sensation, custom, and reasoning are singly and jointly insufficient for the formation of our perceptual contents. He takes this as a fine objection to the Way of Ideas, on which sensations and reflection upon sensations are sufficient for providing us with our perceptual contents.

This chapter focuses on the relationship between Reidian sensation and perception. It considers whether sensations are intentional objects of other mental states and, if so, what type of mental states takes them as objects. It argues that Reidian sensations are qualitative feelings and not perceived intermediaries. Indeed, sensations, strictly speaking, are not even necessary for perceptual events. Though this confirms some fears about Reid's theory — that he has in a sense omitted sensations from his theory of perception — it is argued that he does this intentionally. This conclusion is justified by examining Reid's provocative comments to the effect that our capacity to experience sensations evolved or was created for the purpose of enhancing our survival, and not for the purpose of assisting us in getting information about the mind-independent world.

This chapter examines Reid's account of how we are perceptually aware of qualities. It begins by describing how Reid structures the debate about qualities and our perception of them. It then turns to his inchoate analysis of primary and secondary qualities, devoting special attention to whether Reidian secondary qualities are dispositions.

This chapter analyzes Reid's treatment of the Molyneux question. Molyneux's question can be presented in general form as this: ‘Were a blind person to be given sight, and were a cube and a sphere set in her field of vision, would she be capable of identifying which object is which?’ In the Inquiry, Reid gives both a ‘no’ and a ‘yes’ to Molyneux's question. The thrust of Reid's response to Molyneux's issues emphasizes the limitations Reid places upon sensation in the perceptual process. This chapter exhibits the key differences between Reid and the Way of Ideas, and confirms several other attributions made to Reid in the material preceding this chapter.