Page:Schlick - Gesammelte Aufsätze (1926 - 1936), 1938.djvu/397

 of meaning in the sense that it does not assert anything, but merely indicates a rule concerning the use of words.

We infer that T, which is the second interpretation of Q, adopted by the solipsist and forming the basis of his argument, is strictly meaningless. It does not say anything at all, does not express any interpretation of the world or view about the world; it just introduces a strange way of speaking, a clumsy kind of language, which attaches the index 'my' (or 'content of my consciousness') to everything without exception. Solipsism is nonsense, because its starting-point, the egocentric predicament, is meaningless.

The words T and 'my', if we use them according to the solipsist's prescription, are absolutely empty, mere adornments of speech. There would be no difference of meaning between the three expressions, 'I feel my pain' ; T feel pain'; and 'there is pain'. Lichtenberg, the wonderful eighteenth-century physicist and philosopher, declared that Descartes had no right to start his philosophy with the proposition 'I think', instead of saying 'it thinks'. Just as there would be no sense in speaking of a white horse unless it were logically possible that a horse might not be white, so no sentence containing the words T or 'my' would be meaningful unless we could replace them by 'he' or 'his' without speaking nonsense. But such a substitution is impossible in a sentence that would seem to express the egocentric predicament or the solipsistic philosophy.

R and S are not different explanations or interpretations of a certain state of affairs which we have described, but simply verbally different formulations of this description. It is of fundamental importance to see that R and S are not two propositions, but one and the same proposition in two different languages. The solipsist, by rejecting the language of R and insisting upon the language of S, has adopted a terminology which makes Q tautological, transforms it into T. Thus he has made it impossible to verify of falsify his own statements; he himself has deprived them of meaning. By refusing to avail himself of the opportunities (which we showed him) to make the statement 'I can feel somebody else's pain' meaningful, he has at the same time lost the opportunity of giving meaning to the sentence T can feel only my own pain'.

The pronoun 'my' indicates possession; we cannot speak of the 'owner' of a pain — or any other datum — except in cases where the word