if doubt were possible we would need criteria to make out the seems right/is right distinction; otherwise, we could make no distinction between successes and failures of cognitive
achievement. Whatever that criterion was, if it were a genuine criterion, and not just a shuffle, it would have to open up the possibility of error, (i.e., the possibility of being on the wrong side of the distinction.) But if we try to establish such a distinction, we are beggared for any kind of criterion or standard of correctness. Expression of doubt makes no more sense in the case of a sincere avowal than it does with a genuine scream of pain.
The temptation dies hard to think that although it might be difficult, or impossible, to convince others, at least I would be able to convince myself thoi my avowals were error-firee. At #289, the dialogue with the interlocutor continues,
"When I say 'I am in pain' I am at any rate justified before myself — What does that mean? Does it mean : "If someone else could know what I am calling 'pain', he would admit that I was using the word
correctly"?
Here the interlocutor is still playing with the idea of there being a possible doubt about the use of sensation words, and is claiming that in the first person case at least, I can justify my own use to myself. Let us go back to the omithologically interested telephoner. He might now claim to see a lesser spotted woodpecker. That bird is rare, and his friend might say that he thought that was unlikely. The first man might look at his bird book and look at the bird, and say 'Well I am justified in my own mind that I have seen a lesser spotted woodpecker'. Now what that would mean would be something like 'If someone else could see what I am calling a lesser spotted woodpecker, he would admit I was using the word correctly'. But of course in the case of sensation talk, that possibility doesn't make sense. It is written into the nature of what we call sensations, that nothing counts as feeling another's pain (as the discussion of this issue in the Blue Book suggests, even feeling pain in another’s body would only be my feeling my pain in his body). So what can my claiming to be 'at least justified before myself really mean?
There doesn't seem to be anything for us to mean. The feeling of justification is just that: a feeling.
Investigations #271 begins with what might look as if it were a way that the private linguist could make out, at least for himself, a sound distinction between seeming to have had the same sensation, and actually having had the same sensation again.
"Let us imagine a use for the entry of the sign "S" in my diary. I
discover that whenever I have a particular sensation a manometer shews that my blood-pressure rises. So I shall be able to say that my blood- pressure is rising without using any apparatus. This is a useful result. And now it seems quite indifferent whether I have remembered the sensation right or not. Let us suppose I regularly identify it wrong, it does not matter in the least. And that alone shews that the hypothesis that I make a mistake is mere show. (We as it were turned a knob which looked as if it could be used to turn on some part of the machine; but it was a mere ornament, not connected with the mechanism at all.) "
He keeps writing "S" in his diary, whenever he judges that sensation S crops up. We tease him, after our reading of the Private Language Argument. We argue that notwithstanding his confidence that he is right, he may be misremembering, or applying different rules, for all he knows. Now one day it occurs to him that, as well as his conviction that he is right, he might also use a manometer to check the correctness of his response; and, sure enough, whenever he judges that sensation S occurs, his blood pressure does indeed rise. So now he says
triumphantly, 'You see, I was right. Whenever I wrote 'S' in my diary I did indeed have sensation S. The manometer proves it.'
But evidently this is not the demonstration the private linguist needed. What the private linguist needed was something which would help him to make a distinction between it seeming to him that he remembered correctly, and used the same rule, and so on, and its actually being so. Whereas the manometer might rise every time he believed he had sensation S, even if the sensations he felt on each occasion were quite different. There is no necessary connection between the 'feel' of his sensation and his blood pressure rising. The manometer reading
118 '