Looks, Gestures, and Words: Skepticism and the Ethical in Cavell and Levinas

Abstract

Whether physical or emotional, I take pain to be an unpleasant private experience. The significance of the pain example, which will appear multiple times henceforth, is that most people take pain to be private to their owner in the strong sense that no one else can epistemically access the other's pain in the way that one has access to his own pain. 11 Austin gives the goldfinch example, among other places, in a 1946 essay entitled "Other Minds.