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. And that only means that here we can’t talk about “right”.’
The point is not merely that my memory might be unreliable (as if a better memory would fix it); it is that in the wholly private case there is nothing that could even count as a check, no possible standard against which to measure whether my present use matches my original definition - because the only thing I can consult is another impression or memory, which is in exactly the same predicament and could equally be mistaken, with nothing further to appeal to. Wittgenstein’s image: it is ‘as if someone were to buy several copies of the morning paper to assure himself that what it said was true’ - checking one impression against another impression of the same kind gives no independent confirmation at all. Without the possibility of a genuine distinction between correct and incorrect use, there is no rule being followed; and without a rule, the sign ‘S’ has no meaning - it is just a mark I make, not a word naming anything. So the supposedly private definition fails to confer any meaning at all. The private language collapses, because the very thing that makes a word a meaningful word - the governing of its use by a standard of correctness - cannot exist in the purely private case. Meaning requires a public standard, a practice, a possible check; the dream of meaning conjured up by a solitary act of inner naming is empty.
Wittgenstein crystallises the upshot in one of philosophy’s most famous images: the beetle in the box. ‘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.’ Now here is the twist: it would be quite possible for everyone to have something different in their box - or for the thing in the box to keep changing - or even for the box to be empty. ‘The thing in the box has no place in the language-game at all; not even as a something: for the box might even be empty.’ Whatever role the word ‘beetle’ plays in the public language, it cannot be playing it by naming the private object in each person’s box, because that object ‘cancels out’ - it makes no difference to the shared use of the word, since no one can check it and it could be anything or nothing. The meaning of ‘beetle’ in the common language is fixed by its public use, and the private object drops out as irrelevant.
The lesson, applied to sensations, is radical and liberating. The word ‘pain’ does its work in our shared language not by each of us privately naming an inner object that only we can inspect (the ‘beetle’ in our private box of consciousness) - for if that were how it worked, the word could not function as a shared word at all. Rather, ‘pain’ has its meaning in the public language-game of pain-behaviour, expression, and response. This does not mean Wittgenstein denies that we have sensations, or that he is a behaviourist who reduces pain to mere behaviour (a common misreading he explicitly rejects: ‘the conclusion was only that a nothing would serve just as well as a something about which nothing could be said’ - he is attacking a confused picture of how the inner relates to language, not denying the inner). The point is to overturn the Cartesian picture of meaning: the inner is not a private realm of objects that grounds the meaning of our sensation-words by private ostension; rather our talk of the inner is woven into public practice and gets its sense there. The deepest target is the whole Cartesian conception of the self-enclosed mind, directly known only to itself, communicating its private contents to others by an uncertain inference - a picture that has dominated modern philosophy of mind and that Wittgenstein, with the beetle in the box, aims to dissolve. The next lesson follows the considerations on which all this rests down to their foundation: the puzzle of what it is to follow a rule, and the form of life on which meaning finally depends.
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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