Dakryn's Batshit Theory of the Week

[CiG]

I wonder how it breaks down by age in regards to what games men play vs what games women play. I have a feeling if you look at the mobile game players, a decent chunk of the women are middle-aged and older. My mother plays mobile games more than I play any kind of game, especially Tetris (and Tetris derivatives) and any kind of gambling game available. She's even won hundreds of dollars playing the latter.

 

[Einherjar86]

I don't follow Nick Land like I used to, and I haven't visited his blog in over a year. But I came across this interview recently. It's long, but I actually really enjoyed it. I obviously have personal ethical problems with his philosophy, but I appreciated his critique of where he feels right- and left-wing "emancipation" (and he's specific about this word) go wrong concerning accelerationism (spoiler: it's humanism).

https://vastabrupt.com/2018/08/15/ideology-intelligence-and-capital-nick-land/

Here's a little snippet:

Nick Land: I think the terminology of left and right, for anyone like you who is fascinated by the question of ideology, it’s completely indispensable. I totally see why people get dissatisfied with that language and say “We have to move beyond this” or “This terminology ceases to be useful” but I have a sense of its kind of extreme resilience. I don’t see us ever stopping talking about the left and the right. It’s always going to come back in, I call it the prime political dimension, there is a basic dimension with left and right polarities that everyone returns to, after their wanderings and complications. And all kinds of ideological currents themselves have a strategic interest in either muddying the water or trying to get people to rethink what they mean.

But in the end, people come back to this basic dimension of ideological possibility and I think it is the one that captures the accelerationist tendency most clearly. On the right end of that is the extreme laissez faire, Manchester liberal, anarcho-capitalism kind of commitment to the maximum deregulation of the technological and economic process. And on the opposite extreme is a set of constituencies that seek in various ways to — polemically, I would say words like “impede” and “obstruct” and “constrain” and whatever, but I realize that’s just my rightism on display. And there are other ways of saying that, to regulate it or control it or to humanize it, I wouldn’t try and do a sufficiently sophisticated ideological Turing test on myself to try and get that right you know?

But I don’t think there’s any real … It’s not really questionable, which of those impulses is in play and I think that it’s on that dimension that so-called left-accelerationism is left, I mean, it’s left because it is basically in a position of deep skepticism about the capitalist process. It’s accelerationist only insofar as it thinks there is some other — I would say magical — source of acceleration that is going to be located somewhere outside that basic motor of modernity. They gesture towards the fact that things will somehow still be accelerating when you just chuck the actual motor of acceleration in the scrap. And I think that is the left.

Left-accelerationism is left in a way that is robust, that everyone will recognize, they definitely are in fact genuine leftists, they’re not playing games like that, and they catalyze, obviously, a right opposition as soon as they do that because they’re already [inaudible] the prime political dimension. They’re on the left pole of it, they’re in antagonism to, then, what is defining the right pole of that same spectrum.

Justin Murphy: So it sounds like you would basically say that Deleuze and Guattari are not really leftists. They might be writing from a kind of leftist milieu, and they might have some, sort of, leftist connotations, but the core of their project is not leftist because … you think leftism is basically the position of trying to slow down the accelerator?

Nick Land: Yes, I think that project is anti-leftist but smuggled-in — this insidious thing of subverting the Marxist tradition from inside. I think the Marxist tradition is easy to subvert from inside because the Marxist tradition is based upon an analysis of capitalism that has many very valuable aspects. And as soon as you’re doing that, then you are describing the motor of acceleration, and once you then make the further move that Deleuze and Guattari do — and Marx obviously at times does, too — of actually embracing the kind of propulsion that that motor is is generating, then you’re there. I mean, you’ve already crossed the line.

He's clearly more sympathetic to the right (that's no surprise) but I think his assessment of both sides is quite evenly balanced and largely functional in nature--which is also no surprise, given his cybernetic proclivities. He's really an anti-humanist right-winger, to the degree that he favors machinic production over human livelihood; and I think that's where my ethical objections come into play.

 

[Dak]

I'm not sure I follow him saying that on the one hand, left accelerationists believe in a magical acceleration machine outside of the known apparatus, and on the other, D&G don't fall into this category. It is certainly not novel to claim that leftists think they can have the fruits of the capitalist tree from some other tree/without the tree.

 

[Einherjar86]

Definitely not novel, you're right.

If I'm understanding him correctly (and with Land you can't be sure), he's saying that Marxism, if it's being honest with itself, actually isn't leftist. He says that current left-accelerationism wants to "chuck the actual motor of acceleration in the scrap" because they believe in a "magical" source of acceleration somewhere beyond capitalist intensity (intensity is Land's word from elsewhere). This is where leftism diverts from Marxism, in his eyes at least.

Marxism identified the functional motor of acceleration, even if leftism then went on to corrupt Marxism (in Land's view) by installing an ethical imperative founded on humanism. In Land's reading, D&G argue that there can be no dismantling of capitalism via proletarian revolution; all we can do is let capitalism accelerate itself to death, a view that's already embedded in Marx's writings. I think he separates D&G (and Marx, to an extent) from the "magical" left-accelerationists because neither D&G nor Marx proclaim to know what lies on the other side of capitalist collapse--when intensity reaches critical mass, beyond the pleasure principle of economics, so to speak (it bears noting that we're talking of the Marx from Capital here, not the idealistic Marx of the Manifesto). The communist utopia isn't an image we find in Capital, and it certainly doesn't appear in Anti-Oedipus or the Plateaus. Instead, all we find is an unpacking of the systemic contradictions of production unto the point of meltdown (and the cybernetic valence is also already present in Anti-Oedipus). That's basically accelerationism, for Land; and you find it already in Marx and D&G, before it gets plastered over with emancipatory humanism.

For Land, Marxism isn't leftism because it basically apologizes for the unimpeded and continuous production of capital until capital can no longer sustain itself. Leftism is where an agent (either individuals or the state) intrudes on capitalism and restricts its capacity for (re)production.

 

[Dak]

I guess it depends on whether one is able to distinguish between "Marxist analysis" and "Marxist ideals".

Of course I think, and I think Land and others think, that if there is a "crisis" of capitalism it is in that it becomes (or is revealed to be) anti-human, which is different from "inhuman." Modernity/"post-modernity" is arguably entirely "inhuman", ie, beyond the bounds of our collective evolutionary adaptive capabilities. The Enlightenment/Humanism is a mutation that burned bright but may burn itself out. Some would argue that NRx is an "accelerant". I disagree. Using engine/accelerant/etc. lingo, I would argue that if we accept that capitalism may turn anti-human, the "left (and by extension the tradright, as merely fore-stallers)" are completely misguided in their attempts to "give free rein" or alternately "dispense" with capitalism, and thereby vulnerable to total erasure. NRx is the arguable attempt to "ride the tiger" (diomeme.jpg) as opposed to "holding the tiger by the tail" (tradright) or "fight the tiger" (left).

 

[Einherjar86]

I think those descriptions make sense, with the added element that in all scenarios the tiger is running toward a cliff. So NRx may have the most symbiotic sense of its relation to the tiger, but it also seems to be playing the short game (not to say any other philosophy is playing the long game, or that there is a long game).

I think that one of Land's less objectionable aims is to get people comfortable with capitalism's anti-human qualities. By this, I don't mean that it actively resists human life and livelihood (since I don't think that capitalism is an intentional agent), but that its functions are ultimately incompatible with humanist values. Land isn't the only person to advance such an idea. A few years back, Peter Thiel wrote that capitalism and competition are opposites, and that monopolies are what allow businesses to achieve true success. That's a fair assessment of capitalism, but it doesn't sit well with humanists (left or right).

It looks like you're distinguishing between anti-human and inhuman in that the former permits human development/evolution, while the latter forecloses it. There's a lot to unpack in that claim, and in its subclaims. You say that capitalism is anti-human while modernity is arguably entirely inhuman; but capitalism is also arguably the engine of modernity. We likely wouldn't have modernity without capitalism (at least, modernity as it's typically identified).

I also would want to dig deeper into why anti-humanism permits human development while inhumanism doesn't. I'm not suggesting that inhumanism does, only that anti-humanism tends toward scales and perspectives that eventually must become incompatible with traditional human activities/behaviors. Perhaps the argument is that humans need to evolve in order to keep up with anti-humanist systems; but then one could argue that we're not talking about humans or humanism anymore...

 

[Dak]

It looks like you're distinguishing between anti-human and inhuman in that the former permits human development/evolution, while the latter forecloses it. There's a lot to unpack in that claim, and in its subclaims. You say that capitalism is anti-human while modernity is arguably entirely inhuman; but capitalism is also arguably the engine of modernity. We likely wouldn't have modernity without capitalism (at least, modernity as it's typically identified).

What I meant by inhuman was that it isn't "against" humanity, simply that it's an environment that although some thrive in it, collectively we can't "keep up"; there's something like an indifference. Having a "god shaped hole" for instance. Anti-human is something that is, in this use, is so alien that it is actively working against humans collectively, rather than something more like indifference.

I tend to argue the extreme that capitalism (or at least "market based economics" or some other such label) has basically always existed (at least to the beginning of human history), and that formalized concepts of it were a part of a larger shift in formalizing (moving beyond religious contexts) that marks the Enlightenment era. Once you understand what you have been doing, you can maximize it, make effective changes, etc.

Perhaps the argument is that humans need to evolve in order to keep up with anti-humanist systems; but then one could argue that we're not talking about humans or humanism anymore...

Well this is the Transhumanist position, or even imperative. I'm not clear on whether Land is quite to that extreme or not. NRx seams to be an attempt to, again, ride it out while staying at least nominally human.

I'm intrigued with suggestions that we live in some sort of simulation, which if true would render a lot of this sort of discussion almost pointless. We have to assume there's some sort of Truman Show-esque wall we, or something other/beyond we are going to hit.

In other stuff:
https://qz.com/1486287/a-new-theory...rom-the-ashes-of-the-global-financial-crisis/

First thing from the macro side I've seen that has me interested.

 

[Blurry_Dreams]

I wonder how it breaks down by age in regards to what games men play vs what games women play. I have a feeling if you look at the mobile game players, a decent chunk of the women are middle-aged and older. My mother plays mobile games more than I play any kind of game, especially Tetris (and Tetris derivatives) and any kind of gambling game available. She's even won hundreds of dollars playing the latter.

I don't mobile game, so not really sure how competitive that is. What competition there could be is probably indirect (IE high scores on candy crush or whatever). There's definitely heavy on the directly competitive side for all the esports type games and the sports titles (nba/madden), which are pretty male dominated. Thrown in CoD/CS:GO and stuff too. Might be a point there regarding the competition aspect.

Edit: Regarding education, it's without bach degrees:

if you separate the the people who buy mobile phone games from the people who buy games for desktop/laptop/gaming-consoles/MMOs
the distinction is damn near pure gender
most of the people buying mobile-phone-games are female
most of the people buying computer/gaming-console games are male
it was lumping the phone games in with the other games that created that whole wierd-ass "60% of gamers are female" statement that created the whole "gamer-gate" thing

 

[Dak]

Yeah. And I bet if they further specified phone vs handheld systems, phone games would be overwhelmingly dominated by women.

 

[Einherjar86]

What I meant by inhuman was that it isn't "against" humanity, simply that it's an environment that although some thrive in it, collectively we can't "keep up"; there's something like an indifference. Having a "god shaped hole" for instance. Anti-human is something that is, in this use, is so alien that it is actively working against humans collectively, rather than something more like indifference.

I tend to argue the extreme that capitalism (or at least "market based economics" or some other such label) has basically always existed (at least to the beginning of human history), and that formalized concepts of it were a part of a larger shift in formalizing (moving beyond religious contexts) that marks the Enlightenment era. Once you understand what you have been doing, you can maximize it, make effective changes, etc.

Ah, the capitalist axiom. Another D&G theory (although maybe some economists too, I admittedly don't know). I suppose what I meant by capitalism was its specifically modern attributes, namely industrialization and the rise of corporate entities. I don't think it's any coincidence that Adam Smith's and David Hume's economic writings were accompanied by major developments in industrial technology and the transition from charter companies to privately-run companies. So I take your point about capitalism always existing; but I also think that material (i.e. industrial) developments fueled the socio-intellectual/self-descriptive trends that come about under modernity.

I'm still not entirely sure I understand your distinction between inhuman and anti-human. When you say inhumanism entails indifference, do you mean indifference to human existence under the conditions of modernity? i.e. "We can't keep up, so why bother trying?" If so, could you provide some reasoning behind why you see that as a component of modernity (which begins sometime in the 17th-18th centuries), and how it's a widespread notion?

I can definitely sympathize with you seeing that as an element of some postmodern theory, e.g. Baudrillard or Lyotard. But I wouldn't privilege either of them as emblematic of modernity.

Well this is the Transhumanist position, or even imperative. I'm not clear on whether Land is quite to that extreme or not. NRx seams to be an attempt to, again, ride it out while staying at least nominally human.

I think there's a posthumanist dimension to what I'm saying that avoids the Transhumanist one. Transhumanists believe specifically that technology will "save" humanity, so to speak--that it will allow us to live longer, or eternally via virtual existence, etc. There's a direct correlation between technological development and the preservation of, let's say, the human idea. We might continue on with our consciousness uploaded to computers, but we'll still "be us," or "think like us," so to speak.

Posthumanism declares that we would no longer be us or think like us. We would evolve, which is an un-directed and unintentional process. Technology wouldn't save us, it would simply factor into the process of our evolution. I see these two things as being quite different. Not sure where Land sits though.

Also, fyi, Land's been writing some creative weird cosmic horror in his spare time and self-publishing to Amazon. His most recent (I think) is called Phyl-Undhu, and it's about the Great Filter. The premise of the story is basically that the Great Filter is the tendency of advanced civilizations to retreat into simulated environments, effectively halting all socio-cultural change. Seems plausible to me.

In other stuff:
https://qz.com/1486287/a-new-theory...rom-the-ashes-of-the-global-financial-crisis/

First thing from the macro side I've seen that has me interested.

I'll try to read when I have time.

 

[Blurry_Dreams]

Yeah. And I bet if they further specified phone vs handheld systems, phone games would be overwhelmingly dominated by women.

yeah
now that i'm thinking about it
women playing Candy Crush and Bubble Witch caused Gamergate,

 

[Dak]

Ah, the capitalist axiom. Another D&G theory (although maybe some economists too, I admittedly don't know). I suppose what I meant by capitalism was its specifically modern attributes, namely industrialization and the rise of corporate entities. I don't think it's any coincidence that Adam Smith's and David Hume's economic writings were accompanied by major developments in industrial technology and the transition from charter companies to privately-run companies. So I take your point about capitalism always existing; but I also think that material (i.e. industrial) developments fueled the socio-intellectual/self-descriptive trends that come about under modernity.

I'm still not entirely sure I understand your distinction between inhuman and anti-human. When you say inhumanism entails indifference, do you mean indifference to human existence under the conditions of modernity? i.e. "We can't keep up, so why bother trying?" If so, could you provide some reasoning behind why you see that as a component of modernity (which begins sometime in the 17th-18th centuries), and how it's a widespread notion?

I can definitely sympathize with you seeing that as an element of some postmodern theory, e.g. Baudrillard or Lyotard. But I wouldn't privilege either of them as emblematic of modernity.

Well what I mean is that the system isn't being built with humans in mind. It hasn't, I would argue, to this point worked directly against humans. After all, we can trot out all of Pinker's indices and point to all of our technological toys and life-saving things as evidence. But I would say the environment, as we become more developed, isn't necessarily conducive to happiness, or peace, or satisfaction, or belonging, or any number of vague fuzzy terms which indicate something approaching contentedness, just the opposite in fact for many, even as their objective positions improve. We don't judge things objectively very well, we judge them relatively, and almost all of us can find something to place ourselves as doing relatively badly, and it's increasingly easy to do. By contrast, it's certainly possible that the "new tech creates new jobs" train is is reaching its end, which, even without any further damage done, is going to create significant problems for everyone, but especially for persons who are biologically and/or sociologically disadvantaged already. Social problems are only going to grow in the near to medium future, because we have a growth based modern capitalist society, of which the originating genetic stock is depleting, and which also are torn about its value. Meanwhile, non-originating genetic stock is growing which might portend a collapse, but technology and capital might be advanced but sequestered enough to reach runaway status anyway. Nothing about the future looks good from any direction without a reset, or in case Musk et al's longshots get them off the planet.

As far as talking about the genetic (and I mean culturally too in that), this was posted today by Greer:

http://scholars-stage.blogspot.com/2018/12/on-taking-cross-cultural-psychology.html

I don't have any sort of reference at the moment to provide any extra academic backing, and I imagine what would easily be found in a non-academic sense would be neoreactionary-ish. I can

I think there's a posthumanist dimension to what I'm saying that avoids the Transhumanist one. Transhumanists believe specifically that technology will "save" humanity, so to speak--that it will allow us to live longer, or eternally via virtual existence, etc. There's a direct correlation between technological development and the preservation of, let's say, the human idea. We might continue on with our consciousness uploaded to computers, but we'll still "be us," or "think like us," so to speak.

Posthumanism declares that we would no longer be us or think like us. We would evolve, which is an un-directed and unintentional process. Technology wouldn't save us, it would simply factor into the process of our evolution. I see these two things as being quite different. Not sure where Land sits though.

Also, fyi, Land's been writing some creative weird cosmic horror in his spare time and self-publishing to Amazon. His most recent (I think) is called Phyl-Undhu, and it's about the Great Filter. The premise of the story is basically that the Great Filter is the tendency of advanced civilizations to retreat into simulated environments, effectively halting all socio-cultural change. Seems plausible to me.

Well at some point there will be a post human, we can't expect otherwise barring some sort of freeze. Which would tie into this simulation, but even then I'm skeptical. The question becomes one of direction and pace.

 

[Dak]

https://www.nowpublishers.com/article/Details/RBE-0092

 

[Dak]

https://www.jehsmith.com/1/2018/12/its-all-over.html

 

[Einherjar86]

https://www.jehsmith.com/1/2018/12/its-all-over.html

To me, this sounds like just more vaguely luddite-ish lamentation over the abdication of subjectivity, which I think the author conflates roughly with individuality, personhood, etc.

There's just too much going on to give this my complete attention, but I see too many ambiguities and elisions to approach it without suspicion--beginning with this passage:

Someone who thinks about their place in the world in terms of the structural violence inflicted on them as they move through it is thinking of themselves, among other things, in structural terms, which is to say, again among other things, not as subjects.

Is this to say:

a) there's no such thing as structural violence, but only some other kind of more intimate violence that grants subjectivity to the body

b) there is such a thing as structural violence, but we shouldn't pay attention to it because it deprives the victim of subjectivity (*note the author doesn't say someone who thinks about their place in the world only in terms of structural violence, which would imply that we can think about violence in various ways*)

c) that thinking in structural terms forecloses the possibility of thinking in terms of subjectivity? (*this seems to me an obvious implication of the passage, but I also think it's prematurely stated and unsupported; people like Althusser and Foucault would say that subjectivity arises because of structural thinking*)

I can't help but see this as the familiar criticism that identifying structural violence denies victims their subjectivity (individuality, personhood, etc.). But then this raises the question of what we're to do about structural violence if we shouldn't identify it. Some might say there's really no such thing as structural violence--a statement I find absurd, but I'll leave it at that.

But if structural violence does exist, then I'd contend that thinking in structural terms doesn't deny victims their subjectivity; the structural violence itself is what does that. Thinking in structural terms, i.e. identifying methods and practices of structural violence, is an attempt to diagnose problems and returns subjectivity to the victims.

Anyway, those are just my immediate reactions to that piece. I'm also a William Burroughs fan, so that part's cool.

 

[Dak]

@Einherjar86

I took the totality of the piece to be asserting that we are beginning to see ourselves as merely a data point formed from a coalescence of data points, rather than experiential subjects, and I think there's at least plenty of "anecdata" in support of that point.

 

[Einherjar86]

@Einherjar86

I took the totality of the piece to be asserting that we are beginning to see ourselves as merely a data point formed from a coalescence of data points, rather than experiential subjects, and I think there's at least plenty of "anecdata" in support of that point.

I think that's definitely true. My primary concern is with the implicit false dichotomy that the author sets up in the essay, which is that we can't simultaneously see ourselves as data and as individual bodies/selves that have experiences.

My secondary concern is that the author appears to assume that seeing ourselves as data is a bad thing, and that his general readership would agree. I'm also not suggesting that seeing ourselves as data is prima facie a good thing. I simply got a polemical vibe from the piece, and would have liked to see more reflection on the author's part.

 

[Einherjar86]

Probably more appropriate here.

People who inflict some pain, psychological or material, on others, may be repaid in kind. Is it unethical to repay pain with pain purely because it is pain? I don't even consider pain in the equation but that's how it looks from a "pain" perspective. Just a pain stalemate.

Again, I don't understand your comment. It reads to me as evasive.

The question I posed was: when it comes to interpersonal relations in which no prior agreement exists, why isn't acknowledgement of another's pain a reasonable premise from which to formulate an ethics of behavior? If you've offered or implied an answer, I'm still not sure what it is.

Let me answer your question to the best of my ability. Yes, it's unethical to repay pain with pain--but that's not because pain in and of itself is inherently unethical. In and of itself, pain is meaningless. My emphasis here is on the interpersonal capacity of acknowledgement. This isn't my term; it's from Stanley Cavell's influential reading of Wittgenstein, primarily his essay "Knowing and Acknowledging." Inflicting pain on another, absent any established precedent for doing so, is unethical given that the aggressor has the capacity to acknowledge that they're causing another's pain. "Eye for an eye" is, interpersonally speaking, an unethical value system.

It sounds like you're just trying to break down the argument by repeating the mantra that pain doesn't mean anything--pain is just pain. But I'm not trying to say that pain means anything.

 

[Dak]

Probably more appropriate here.



Again, I don't understand your comment. It reads to me as evasive.

The question I posed was: when it comes to interpersonal relations in which no prior agreement exists, why isn't acknowledgement of another's pain a reasonable premise from which to formulate an ethics of behavior? If you've offered or implied an answer, I'm still not sure what it is.

Let me answer your question to the best of my ability. Yes, it's unethical to repay pain with pain--but that's not because pain in and of itself is inherently unethical. In and of itself, pain is meaningless. My emphasis here is on the interpersonal capacity of acknowledgement. This isn't my term; it's from Stanley Cavell's influential reading of Wittgenstein, primarily his essay "Knowing and Acknowledging." Inflicting pain on another, absent any established precedent for doing so, is unethical given that the aggressor has the capacity to acknowledge that they're causing another's pain. "Eye for an eye" is, interpersonally speaking, an unethical value system.

It sounds like you're just trying to break down the argument by repeating the mantra that pain doesn't mean anything--pain is just pain. But I'm not trying to say that pain means anything.

How can pain both not mean anything and also be the foundation of reasoned ethics?

I've got a couple of problems with taking pain so seriously. First, pain as a term is slippery and as an experience incredibly subjective. The second problem is found in the first: What kind of pain are we talking about? Physical? Mental? Well, all pain is ultimately mental, even when due to damage inflicted to the body. But if we keep the dichotomy, then there are several easy thought experiments which render physical pain as the "lesser of evils". If we include both mental and physical pain, now we run into all sorts of contradictions that come from the subjectivity.

tl;dr: Pain has low signal to noise ratio when establishing data points on which to base ethics.

 

[Einherjar86]

How can pain both not mean anything and also be the foundation of reasoned ethics?

1. All systems of meaning are built on meaninglessness.

2. I said that ethics is based on acknowledgement of pain, not on pain in and of itself. It's our shared capacity for expression that bestows meaning on pain-behavior (Wittgenstein's term, not mine).

I've got a couple of problems with taking pain so seriously. First, pain as a term is slippery and as an experience incredibly subjective. The second problem is found in the first: What kind of pain are we talking about? Physical? Mental? Well, all pain is ultimately mental, even when due to damage inflicted to the body. But if we keep the dichotomy, then there are several easy thought experiments which render physical pain as the "lesser of evils". If we include both mental and physical pain, now we run into all sorts of contradictions that come from the subjectivity.

Acknowledgement is about socially negotiating the subjectivity of private sensations. I'm going to appeal to an article from a colleague of mine:

Wittgenstein indicates that the shared nature of language also informs our descriptions of our own internal experience. He tries to imagine a language in which words “refer to what only the speaker can know—to his immediate private sensations. So another person cannot understand the language” (243).7 He then imagines the case of a man who labels a particular internal sensation “S” whenever he experiences it, wondering if “S” could become a private word, known only to this speaker. However, Wittgenstein points out that for the man to conceive of “S” as a sensation is already to rely on shared language: “For ‘sensation’ is a word of our common language, which is not a language intelligible only to me” (261). The private word simply substitutes for, and therefore relies on, the speaker’s knowledge of a shared term. We learn to use a word like “pain,” then, by speaking with others and familiarizing ourselves with the standard contexts in which people employ this term. When I grimace and say, “I am in pain,” my companion knows what I mean, Wittgenstein suggests, because I am using the word in accordance with conventions we have both learned for its use. [End Page 170]

In “Knowing and Acknowledging,” an essay in Must We Mean What We Say? (1969), Cavell expands on Wittgenstein’s discussion by considering the case of the skeptic: the speaker who [...] points to the impossibility of knowing another’s pain the way I know my own. For Cavell, the fact that the word “pain” is used in shared ways does not actually refute the skeptic’s point. After all, when the skeptic says something like “I cannot know you are in pain because I cannot have your pain,” we understand this statement; the skeptic does not use words in ways that are incoherent to us, inconsistent with our shared linguistic practices. Moreover, Cavell points out, in a certain sense the skeptic’s statement is exactly right: my knowledge of your pain is of a different order than my knowledge of my own, a different level of certainty. To respond to the skeptic, Cavell writes, requires that we attend to a different use of the word “know”: that of expressing acknowledgment. In this sense, to say “‘I know you are in pain’ is not an expression of certainty . . . ; it is an expression of sympathy” ([1969] 2002, 263). The problem with the skeptical position is that concern with the inaccessibility of other minds may prompt us to discount our connections to, or obligations toward, those around us. The skeptic’s picture of the divide between mind and world relegates not only “objects of knowledge,” as Simona Bertacco and John Gibson suggest, “but nearly the entire range of objects of human concern, of value” (2011, 109) to the far side of this divide. So Cavell decides that while we cannot know (be certain) of another’s pain, we can acknowledge (respond to, do something about) it.

This is a central argument in determining ethical behavior.

Clearly there are difficulties that arise when distinguishing between mental and physical pain, and in determining the extent of someone's pain. None of this means that we don't acknowledge pain when we sense it, even if we can't be specific about it. I don't think specificity about quantities and/or qualities of pain is necessary for establishing criteria about acknowledging that someone is in pain. Whether someone's actions cause a pinprick's or aircraft carrier's worth of pain, acknowledging that our actions have caused pain should factor into our ethical determinations.