ABSTRACT

An everyday psychological concept can be of such an indefinite nature, accommodating phenomena of radically different kinds, that its content is too bare to sustain interest in abstraction from a specific application of the concept. A prime example is the concept of a feeling. Consider the variety of things I might feel: a pain in my ankle, fear, joy or depression, conviction, dependency, awkwardness, energy or tiredness, dizziness, the position or movement of my arm, and the explicitly propositional feelings that something is about to happen or that I have been in just the same situation before or that my surroundings are unreal. Many of these so-called feelings are examined by Wittgenstein and in each case his investigation is conceptual or grammatical. His interest is the determination of the psychological category to which the feeling should be assigned. 1 Perhaps the two best models of Wittgenstein’s method are his treatment of the concept of our immediate feeling of the position and movement of our limbs – our feeling how a limb is disposed or moving without feeling the limb with another part of the body – and his treatment of the topic of the emotions. These two examples each involve the idea of a feeling, although they involve it in different ways and the feelings fall into different psychological categories. It is true that an emotion need not be felt when it occurs. But emotions often are and always can be felt, and to each emotion there is a corresponding emotional feeling – a feeling of anger, jealousy, embarrassment, remorse, or whatever. The reason for Wittgenstein’s special interest in these two different kinds of feeling is his belief that there is a strong tendency to reduce each feeling to the favoured paradigm of a feeling, a bodily sensation. I begin with the simpler of the two cases. 2