7 - The Incommunicability of “Felt Qualities”

Summary

“The Incommunicability of ‘Felt Qualities’” focuses on the claim that has been at the center of many debates generated by Wittgenstein’s “Philosophical Investigations“: that “we cannot communicate certain qualities” – for example, the special felt qualities of toothache – to others. Rorty suggests that philosophers have been making too much of that claim. Instead, he argues that it is true only in a “philosophically innocuous” sense – we can never be sure whether we mean or know the same thing in describing ‘X’ – and false when it becomes philosophically interesting, since using the noun toothache correctly in relevant circumstances denotes knowledge of the term, even if the felt qualities of a toothache were never experienced. By focusing on language use, Rorty alleviates the philosophical controversy and the threat of epistemological skepticism, concluding that we need deny “neither the existence of a perfectly good sense of ‘know’ in which there can be prelinguistic or nonlinguistic knowledge (or “awareness” or “consciousness”), nor the existence of unsharable mental particulars to which we have privileged access.”