Page:Schlick - Gesammelte Aufsätze (1926 - 1936), 1938.djvu/398

 'my' can be used meaningfully, i.e., where by substituting 'his' or 'your' we would get the description of a possible state of affairs. This condition is fulfilled if 'my' is deiined as referring to the body M, and it would also be fulfilled if I agree to call 'my body' any body in which I can feel pain. In our actual world these two definitions apply to one and the same body, but that is an empirical fact which might be different. If the two definitions did not coincide and if we adopted the second one we should need a new word to distinguish the body M from other bodies in which I might have sensations; the word 'my' would have meaning in a sentence of the form 'A is one of my bodies, but B is not', but it would be meaningless in the statement 'I can feel pain onfy in my bodies', for this would be a mere tautology.

The grammar of the word 'owner' is similar to that of the word 'my': it makes sense only where it is logically possible for a thing to change its owner, i.e., where the relation between the owner and the owned object is empirical, not logical ('external', not 'internal'). Thus one could say 'Body M is the owner of this pain' or 'that pain is owned by the bodies M and 0'.

The second proposition can, perhaps, never be truthfully asserted in our actual world (although I cannot see that it would be incompatible with the laws of nature), but both of them would make sense. Their meaning would be to express certain relations of dependence between the pain and the state of certain bodies, and the existence of such a relation could easily be tested.

The solipsist refuses to use the word 'owner' in this sensible way. He knows that many properties of the data do not depend at all upon any states of human bodies, viz., all those regularities of their behavior that can be expressed by 'physical laws'; he knows, therefore, that it would be wrong to say 'my body is the owner of everything', and so he speaks of a 'self, or 'ego', or 'consciousness', and declares this to be the owner of everything.

(The idealist, by the way, makes the same mistake when he asserts that we know nothing but 'appearances'.) This is nonsense because the word 'owner', when used in this way, has lost its meaning. The solipsistic assertion cannot be verified or falsified, it will be true by definition, whatever the facts may be; it simply consists in the verbal prescription to add the phrase 'owned by Me' to the names of all objects, etc.

Thus we see that unless we choose to call our body the owner or bearer