Philosophical Investigations 250-300

261. So in the end when one is doing philosophy one gets to the point where one would like just to emit an inarticulate sound.

268. Why can't my right hand give my left hand money?--My right hand can put it into my left hand. My right hand can write a deed of gift and my left hand a receipt. --But the further practical consequences would not be those of a gift. When the left hand has taken the money from the right, etc., we shall ask: 'Well, and what of it?' And the same could be asked if a person had given himself a private definition of a word; I mean, if he has said the word to himself and at the same time has directed his attention to a sensation.

271. 'Imagine a person whose memory could not retain what the word "pain" meant--so that he constantly called different things by that name--but nevertheless used the word in a way fitting in with the usual symptoms and presuppositions of pain'--in short he uses it as we all do. Here I should like to say: a wheel that can be turned though nothing else moves with it, is not part of the mechanism.

291. What we call "descriptions" are instruments for particular uses.

292. Don't always think that you read off what you say from the facts; that you portray these in words according to rules. For even so you would have to apply the rule in the particular case without guidance.

293. If I say of myself that it is the only from my own case that I know what the word 'pain' means--must I not say the same of other people too? And how can I generalize the one case so irresponsibly?
Now someone tell me that he knows what pain is only from his own case!---Suppose everyone had a box with something in it: we call it a 'beetle'. No one can look into anyone else's box, and everyone says he knows what a beetle is only by looking at his beetle.--Here it would be quite possible for everyone to have something different in his box. One might even imagine such a thing constantly changing.--But suppose the word 'beetle' had a use in these people's languages?--If so it would not be used as the name of a thing. The thing in the box has no place in the language-game at all; not even as a something for the box might be empty.--No, one can 'divide thought' by the thing in the box; it cancels out, whatever it is.
That is to say: if we construe the grammar of the expression of sensation on the model of 'object of designation' the object drops out of consideration as irrelevant.