ABSTRACT
In Chapters 4 and 5, we saw how Wittgenstein works to overcome the idea that the notion of a private object can be used to explain, for example, the difference between the meaning of the word ‘pain’ and the meaning of the word ‘crying’. As we saw, one important theme of Wittgenstein’s attempt to overcome the philosophical myth of the private object is to remind us of the qualitative difference between our experience of human beings and other animals, on the one hand, and our experience of machines and other inanimate objects, on the other. He tries to show that the ontological cut that our language makes does not lie within the body – the private pain and the public behaviour – but between bodies of quite different kinds: those whose ways of acting and responding make them accessible to psychological description and those that are out of play to psychological concepts.
