Ludwig Wittgenstein · Philosophy
Wittgenstein’s famous argument that there could be no ‘private language’ - a language whose words refer to private sensations knowable only to the speaker. Without a public standard of correctness, the very distinction between ‘correct’ and ‘merely seeming correct’ collapses. This dismantles the Cartesian picture of a private inner world named by a private vocabulary.
We have a deeply rooted picture of the mind, inherited above all from Descartes: each of us has an inner world of private experiences - sensations, feelings, mental images, the felt quality of a pain or a colour - to which we alone have direct access. I know my own pain immediately and infallibly, simply by having it; you can only infer it from my behaviour. On this picture, my inner experiences are essentially private: they are mine, hidden from everyone else, and I name them in my own mind - ‘pain’, ‘red’, ‘tingling’ - by inwardly attending to the private sensation and attaching a word to it. The words of my ‘sensation language’, it seems, get their meaning from the private inner objects they name, objects that only I can observe. Indeed, on the most radical version of this picture, it seems I could have a wholly private language - a language whose words refer to my private sensations and whose meanings are therefore knowable only to me, in principle uninterpretable by anyone else, because no one else can get at the inner objects the words name.
Wittgenstein takes this picture - which can feel like the most obvious common sense, the very starting point of all reflection on the mind - and subjects it to one of the most famous and influential arguments in twentieth-century philosophy: the private language argument. His claim is startling: such a private language is not merely difficult or impractical but impossible - incoherent, ruled out by the very nature of language and meaning. And if a genuinely private language is impossible, then the whole Cartesian picture of the inner that seemed to require it begins to crumble: the idea that meaning could be grounded in a private act of inner naming, that my words for sensations get their sense from private objects, that the inner is a self-standing realm prior to and independent of the public world of shared language. The argument is compressed, difficult, and endlessly debated, but its target is nothing less than the dominant modern conception of the mind.
The heart of the argument is a thought-experiment. Imagine I try to give myself a private name for a recurring sensation. I attend inwardly to the sensation and I write down the sign ‘S’ in a diary, intending ‘S’ to name this sensation - a purely private definition, by inner pointing, with no connection to anything public. Each time the sensation seems to recur, I write ‘S’ again. Now, Wittgenstein asks: what does it mean for me to use ‘S’ correctly - to apply it to the same sensation again? To use a word according to a rule, there must be a difference between following the rule and merely thinking I am following it, between being right and merely seeming right. But in the private case, there is no such difference. I have nothing to check my use against except my own memory and present impression - and if all I have to go on is that it seems to me like the same sensation, then I have no independent standard by which ‘it seems right’ could ever differ from ‘it is right’. ‘Whatever is going to seem right to me is right.
This is the opening of the lesson. The rest — the dialogue, the primary source, and the recall — is in the app.
You learned Wittgenstein’s argument that a ‘private language’ (words naming sensations knowable only to the speaker) is impossible: with no public standard of correctness, ‘correct’ collapses into ‘seems correct’, so the rules that make a language a language cannot get a grip. Explain the argument and the beetle-in-th…
Leads to Rene Descartes.
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