Where Is My Itch?

[Philosophy Now]

Raymond Tallis is itching to find out.

http://philosophynow.org/issues/94/Where_Is_My_Itch

[Toadny]

[T]he claim that the itch is really located inside an image of the body created in the brain would have rather extraordinary consequences. Let me illustrate this with something that has bothered me since 1961. Between puffs on his Woodbine, Ned Ellis, my physics teacher, once asked the class where mirror images were. We gave the standard answer: they are as far behind the mirror as the object reflected was in front of it. No, he said: they are in your brain. And he reminded us that if you looked behind the mirror, you wouldn’t see the image. It is we who construct the image and locate it out there in the world. But this cannot be extended to objects as well as images. We do not locate the mirror in the world: it is located there without our help, thank you.

It seems to me that what I see of the wooden mirror frame is located in my mind and out there in the world to exactly the same extent as what I see in the mirror glass.

I'd suggest that the problems discussed here and throughout the article can be resolved by understanding that an itch and an image are described as being in different locations depending on the level of description we choose to adopt. For normal everyday purposes we say the itch "is in" my leg, the image "is in" the mirror; at another level the itch or the image are said to "be in" the relevant parts of the nervous system and the brain, or to "be in" an image of the body in the brain.

So the questions that have been bothering Professor Tallis for more than half a century are less about the nature of reality and more about the different ways we use the words "is in". The question "Where is My Itch?" is best answered not by a philosopher but by a lexicographer.