Page:Schlick - Gesammelte Aufsätze (1926 - 1936), 1938.djvu/211

 to the promised land. I shall continue to use the term 'content' now and then for the sake of convenience, but the reader will understand that a sentence in which this word occurs must not be regarded as a proposition about something called 'content', but as a sort of abbreviation of a more complicated sentence in which the word does not occur.

13. Communication with one's self. I do not flatter myself to have removed all doubts concerning the justice of our dealings with 'Content'. I can imagine that you may admit the validity of my arguments and still hold the opinion that there are cases in which "sameness of quality" must mean "sameness of content". You will ask: How about the comparison of qualities perceived by one and the same person? Our former considerations do not seem to apply here. If I declare that the leaf I see to-day has the same colour as one I saw yesterday, or perhaps even the same colour as one lying next to it at this moment: am I then not dealing with quality in a deeper, more intimate sense than that of "mere" structure?

I answer that undoubtedly there is a great difference in the meaning of the word "same" when it is used in regard to "data in two minds" and when it is used in regard to "data in one mind", but that this difference cannot be described by saying that the word denotes equality of structure in the first case and equality of content in the second case. The propositions are verified in a different way in the two cases, they express different kinds of facts, but the second one is just as far from expressing "content" as the first one — indeed, infinitely far.

This grows clear as soon as we realise that the main point of our reasoning (which consisted in regarding incommunicability as the criterion of inexpressibility) remains applicable even when we restrict ourselves to the consideration of a single mind.

It would be wrong to suppose that one could not speak of communication at all unless there were at least two individuals involved, and between them some kind of causal connection by means of which a message could be transmitted. If this were so our whole argument would presuppose certain empirical facts, as the existence of different persons and particular relations between