ABSTRACT
This chapter summarizes the philosophical methodology which has two goals: to describe correctly, and gain an understanding of, the ways in which language is actually used; and to use this understanding to show where traditional philosophy has gone wrong. A corollary of this method, and one that can be traced in Norman Malcolm's review of Philosophical Investigations, is that philosophy should not go beyond descriptions to advance theoretical constructions. One of the most energetic attempts to demonstrate that the philosophical idea of a private language is motivated by a mistaken or confused view of the privacy of sensations was provided by John Cook in 1965. He also took Philosophical Investigations as vantage point in his discussion. Accordingly, an analysis of sensation language would show what characterized pain and what characterized 'pain' – and show which statements were concerned with the objects of sensation discourse and which were concerned with its rules.
