Augustein: "I can only believe that someone else is in pain, but I know that I am."
Wittgenstein: "Yes, one can make the decision to say 'I believe he is in pain' instead of 'he is in pain', but that is all. What looks like an explanation here, or like a statement about a mental process, is in truth an exchange of one expression for another."
Augustein: "Which, while we are doing philosophy, seems the more appropriate one?"
Wittgenstein: Just try - in a real case - to doubt someone else's fear or pain."
Augustein: "But you will surely admit that there is a difference between pain behaviour accompanied by pain and pain behaviour without any pain?"
Wittgenstein: "Admit it? What greater difference could there be?"
Augustein: "And yet you again and again reach the conclusion that the sensation itself is a nothing."
Wittgenstein: Not at all. It is not a something, but not a nothing either! The conclusions was only that a nothing would serve just as well as a something about which nothing could be said. We have only rejected the grammar which tries to force itself on us here. The paradox disappears only if you make a radical break with the idea that language only functions in one way, always serves the same purpose: to convey thoughts - which may be about houses, pains, good and evil or anything else you please."
Augustein: "But you surely cannot deny that, for example, in remembering, an inner process takes place?"
Wittgenstein: "What gives the impression that we want to deny anything? When one says, 'still, an inner process does take place here', one wants to go on, 'after all, you see it'."
Augustein: "And it is this inner process that one means by the word 'remembering'."
Wittgenstein: "The impression that we wanted to deny something arises from setting our faces against the idea of the 'inner process'. What we deny is that the picture of the inner process gives us the correct idea of the use of the word 'to remember'. We say that the picture, with its ramifications, stands in the way of seeing the use of the word as it is."
Augustein: "Why should I deny that there is a mental process?"
Wittgenstein: "But, 'there has just taken place in me the mental process of remembering...' means nothing more than: 'I have just remembered'."
Augustein: "To deny the mental process would be to deny the remembering, to deny that anyone ever remembers anything! Are you not really a behaviourist in disguise? Aren't you, at bottom, really saying that everything except human behaviour is a fiction?"
Wittgenstein: If I do speak of a fiction, then it is of a grammatical fiction."
Augustein: "How does the philosophical problem about mental processes and about behaviourism arise?"
Wittgenstein: "The first step is one that altogether escapes notice. We talk of processes and states and leave their nature undecided.
Augustein: "Sometime perhaps, we shall know more about them."
Wittgenstein: "We think! But that is just what commits us to a particular way of looking at the matter, for we have a definite concept of what it means to learn to know a process better. (The decisive move in the conjuring trick has been made and it was the very one we thought quite innocent). And now the analogy which was to make us understand our thoughts falls to pieces, so we have to deny the yet uncomprehended process in the yet unexplored medium and now it looks as if we had denied mental processes and naturally we don't want to deny them".
Augustein: "What is your aim in philosophy"
Wittgenstein: "To show the fly the way out of the fly-bottle".
