In reflecting about experience, philosophers are prone to fall into a dualism of conceptual scheme and pre-conceptual given, according to which the most basic judgments of experience are grounded in non-conceptual impingements on subjects of experience. This idea is dubiously coherent: relations of grounding or justification should hold between conceptually structured items. This thought has been widely applied to 'outer' experience; at least some of the Private Language Argument can be read as applying it to 'inner' experience. In (...) this light, Wittgenstein's suggestion that a sensation is 'not a something' seems infelicitous. The main point of this reading of Wittgenstein is in Richard Rorty's Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature', but Rorty locates the point in the context of a subtle materialism, and a 'communitarian' substitute for first-person authority, which seem non-Wittgensteinian. (shrink)

In reflecting about experience, philosophers are prone to fall into a dualism of conceptual scheme and pre-conceptual given, according to which the most basic judgments of experience are grounded in non-conceptual impingements on subjects of experience. This idea is dubiously coherent: relations of grounding or justification should hold between conceptually structured items. This thought has been widely applied to 'outer' experience; at least some of the Private Language Argument can be read as applying it to 'inner' experience. In (...) this light, Wittgenstein's suggestion that a sensation is 'not a something' seems infelicitous. The main point of this reading of Wittgenstein is in Richard Rorty's Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature', but Rorty locates the point in the context of a subtle materialism, and a 'communitarian' substitute for first-person authority, which seem non-Wittgensteinian. (shrink)

Simon Blackburn objects that Wittgenstein's private language argument overlooks the possibility that a private linguist can equip himself with a criterion of correctness by confirming generalizations about the patterns in which his private sensations occur. Crispin Wright responds that appropriate generalizations would be too few to be interesting. But I show that Wright's calculations are upset by his failure to appreciate both the richness of the data and the range of theories that would be available to (...) the private linguist. (shrink)

In this book Saul Kripke brings his powerful philosophical intelligence to bear on Wittgenstein's analysis of the notion of following a rule.

The private language arguments exemplify the analogy: private ownership of experience; private knowledge of experience; private ostensive definition; the mereological fallacy; the 'beetle in the box'; and so on. The supposition that Wittgenstein's philosophy is primarily therapeutic obscures the extent to which therapy is only possible if one attains a grasp of the logical geography of the relevant part of the philosophical landscape. The analogy between clarifying and eradicating philosophical confusion and treating a disease is (...) often linked to a related analogy that Wittgenstein drew in five different contexts in the 1930s, namely between his methods in philosophy and the method of treating mental illness by psychoanalysis. The idea of a private language is incoherent precisely because it fails to distinguish imagining a justification for using a word and justifying the use of a word in one's imagination. (shrink)

Ludwig Wittgenstein's treatment of private language has received more attention than any other aspect of his philosophy. Yet, for more than fifty years, a remarkably self-contained exegetical tradition has defined the terms of debate and the principal positions that are discussed. Orthodox interpreters hold that the proof that a private language is impossible turns on showing it is ruled out by some set of systematic philosophical commitments about logic, meaning, and knowledge. Leading candidates for this ground (...) on which the argument depends have included the analysis of concepts, the grammar of our everyday language, the logic of criteria, or the nature of our rule-following, practical activity, or form of life. This article introduces an alternative interpretive tradition, which not only rejects the orthodox methodology, but also rejects the presupposition that Wittgenstein's principal aim is to provide a deductive proof that the idea of a private language leads to contradiction. Finally, it examines some of the leading readings of Philosophical Investigations §258, the passage most frequently discussed by orthodox interpreters. -/- . (shrink)

Wittgenstein's treatment of private language is the dissolution of some of the major problems in traditional philosophy. Philosophical problems, for Wittgenstein, are the conceptual confusion arising due to the abuse of language. They can be fully dispensed with by commanding a clear view of language. Language, for Wittgenstein, is on the one hand, the source of philosophical problems while, on the other hand, it is a means to dispense with them. Private language is (...) one such issue which is ultimately rooted I a mistaken conception of language and is the sources of various philosophical problems/ puzzles. (shrink)

I will defend the claim that we need to differentiate between thinking and reasoning in order to make progress in understanding the intricate relation between language and mind. The distinction between thinking and reasoning will allow us to apply a structural equivalent of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Private Language Argument to the domain of mind and language. This argumentative strategy enables us to show that and how a certain subcategory of cognitive processes, namely reasoning, is constitutively dependent on (...) language. The final outcome and claim of this paper can be summarized as follows: We can think without language, but we cannot reason without language. While this still leaves several questions about the relation between mind and language unanswered, I hold that the insights defended in this paper provide the basis and proper framework for further investigation about the relationship between language and the mind.Keywords: Private language argument, Wittgenstein, thought/mind and language, reasoning, linguistic relativity, non-linguistic cognition. (shrink)

This paper distinguishes five key interpretations of the argument presented by Wittgenstein in Philosophical Investigations I, §258. I also argue that on none of these five interpretations is the argument cogent. The paper is primarily concerned with the most popular interpretation of the argument: that which that makes it rest upon the principle that one can be said to follow a rule only if there exists a 'useable criterion of successful performance' (Pears) or 'operational standard of correctness' (Glock) for its (...) correct application. This principle, I suggest, is untrue. The private language argument upon which it rests therefore fails. (shrink)

The sections of Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations which contain the Private Language (PL) Argument are dense, cryptic and wide ranging. I argue that a specific argument against a private language can be distilled from the text that is less involved and obscure than is often supposed in the immense secondary literature. It is also far less self-contained and isolated from the mainstream of philosophy than many make out, including Brian Garrettand Michael Ming Yang in recent papers in (...) this journal. It can be distinguished from arguments about rule-following, pain and the problem of other minds, forms of life, etc. and, as I have framed it, avoids Garrett's objections. Moreover, a number of would-be conclusions Garrett takes its proponents to draw from the argument, far from depending on it, are long standing positions, on some of which the PL Argument itself depends. (shrink)

For several decades, Stephen Priest has championed a picture of the mind or soul as a private, phenomenological space, knowable by introspection and logically independent of behaviour. Something resembling this picture once dominated Western philosophy, but it suffered a severe setback in the mid-twentieth century as a result of Wittgenstein’s ‘private language argument’. While Priest has written about the threat posed by Wittgenstein’s argument to the picture of the mind that he favours, he has not explained how (...) advocates of that picture should respond to Wittgenstein. The present essay takes up this challenge, defending the picture of the mind as a private phenomenological space against four lines of argument drawn from Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations § 243-315. (shrink)

cannot understand the language.”[1] This is not intended to cover (easily imaginable) cases of recording one's experiences in a personal code, for such a code, however obscure in fact, could in principle be deciphered. What Wittgenstein had in mind is a language conceived as necessarily comprehensible only to its single originator because the things which define its vocabulary are necessarily inaccessible to others.

I argue that if Wittgenstein’s Private Language Argument is correct, then both Theory Theory and Simulation Theory are inadequate accounts of how we come to know other minds since both theories assume the reality of a private language. Further, following the work of a number of philosophers and psychologists, I defend a ‘Second-Person Approach’ to mindreading according to which it is possible for us to be directly aware of at least some of the mental states of (...) others. Because it is not necessary to assume a private language within the Second-Person Approach, I argue that this account of social cognition is superior to Theory-Theory and Simulation Theory since it avoids the objections of the PLA. (shrink)

A valid and arguably sound private language argument is built using premises based on Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations augmented by familiar analytic distinctions and concepts of logic. The private language problem and the solution presented here can be plausibly traced to Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. Both literatures missed the connection.

Discusssion of passages 243 et. seq. of Wittgenstein's Philosophical lnvestigations tends to concentrate on the argument supporting the thesis that a logically private language is impossible. When the discussion becomes broader, the presumption is generally that this thesis is one premifs of an argument against solipsism. I believe that the passages will support a valid argument that might, at first glance, give comfort to someone in the egocentric predicament, but that this comfort would quickly grow cold on closer (...) examination. I do not mean to suggest that Wittgenstein offers no escape from the predicament, only that the escape will not be a consequence of the pluralism necessary to the existence of language, but rather a byproduct of his discussion of the logic of mental discourse. In this paper, I state an alternative to the contra-solipsist reading of the passages, taking Wittgenstein there to be reflecting a three part dispute, the other participants of which are a skeptic and a philosopher I'll call ‘the Realist'. (shrink)

In an attempt at fleshing out the thesis that religious (and other similar) experiences cannot be attributed to an individual on the basis of outer behaviour alone, the hypothesis is entertained of somebody who decides, at a certain point in his life, to fool everybody into beUeving that he is a reUgious beUever. This person, it is claimed, lacks the inner conviction that is crucial to religious experiences. Does this claim fall prey to Wittgenstein-like objections to the possibility of a (...) private language? It is argued that it does not, by distinguishing between what counts empirically, and what conceptually, as a private language. (shrink)

In an attempt at fleshing out the thesis that religious (and other similar) experiences cannot be attributed to an individual on the basis of outer behaviour alone, the hypothesis is entertained of somebody who decides, at a certain point in his life, to fool everybody into beUeving that he is a reUgious beUever. This person, it is claimed, lacks the inner conviction that is crucial to religious experiences. Does this claim fall prey to Wittgenstein-like objections to the possibility of a (...) private language? It is argued that it does not, by distinguishing between what counts empirically, and what conceptually, as a private language. (shrink)

Although the proper formulation and assessment of Ludwig Wittgenstein's argument (or arguments) against the possibility of a private language continues to be disputed, the issue has lost none of its urgency. At stake is a broadly Cartesian conception of experiences that is found today in much philosophy of mind.

The existence of other people addresses us; their existence is a fundamentally second-person matter. This chapter argues that staying too much in the would-be-utterly spectatorial third person, or stuck within the first person, has been philosophy’s bane. Such ‘objectivity’ and ‘subjectivity’, far from being opposites, are but two sides of the same coin. The alternative is the living world of the second person: being involved with others. I connect my illustration and elicitation of this ethics to Løgstrup and to Levinas. (...) And I triangulate my relational ethic with an apparent problem of ‘individualism’ in the second-person perspective as present in the work of Nykänen and Backström. (shrink)

Stephen Mulhall offers a new way of interpreting one of the most famous and contested texts in modern philosophy: remarks on "private language" in Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations. He sheds new light on a central controversy concerning Wittgenstein's early work by showing its relevance to a proper understanding of the later work.

Cora Diamond has claimed that Wittgenstein’s Tractatus contains an early ‘private language argument’: an argument that private objects in other people’s minds can play no role in the language I use for talking about their sensations. She further claims that the Tractatus contains an early version of the later idea that an inner process stands in need of outward criteria. The paper argues against these claims, on the grounds that they depend on an unwarranted construal of (...) the Tractatus’s notion of use. It is further argued that Diamond’s interpretation makes a mystery of the relation between the Tractatus and Wittgenstein’s 1929 account of sensation language, set out in Philosophical Remarks and elsewhere. Finally, the paper considers and defends Michael Dummett’s contention that the Tractatus is a paradigm of semantic realism, in the light of Diamond’s claim that the Tractatus in fact suggests a form of anti-realism about sensation language. (shrink)

Wittgenstein’s Private Language Argument holds that language requires rule-following, rule following requires the possibility of error, error is precluded in pure introspection, and inner mental life is known only by pure introspection, thus language cannot exist entirely within inner mental life. Fodor defends his Language of Thought program against the Private Language Argument with a dilemma: either privacy is so narrow that internal mental life can be known outside of introspection, or so broad (...) that computer language serves as a counter-example. I suggest that the developing field of artificial intelligence (deep learning neural networks) tends to vitiate Fodor’s defense and hence vindicate the Private Language Argument. The first horn of Fodor’s dilemma requires language to encompass genuinely internal mental life, i.e. non-projected intentional states, which are not exhibited in classical machine learning but only by deep learning neural networks (artificial intelligence). Such networks act as black boxes, however, whose state cannot be understood by tracking the changes in their supervenience bases without shared context, and that shared context introduces the possibility of error. The language of artificial intelligence is not private. (shrink)

Discussion of Wittgenstein's philosophy has suffered from a scarcity of commentators who understand his work well enough to explain it in their own words. Apart from certain notable exceptions, all too many advocates and critics alike have tended merely to repeat slogans, with approval or ridicule as the case may be. The result has been an unusual degree of polarization and acrimony—some philosophers abandoning normal critical standards, falling under the spell and becoming fanatical supporters; and others taking an equally extreme (...) opposite view, deriding the absence of analytic technique, and refusing to see anything of value in Wittgenstein's work. (shrink)

This chapter discusses Wittgenstein's private language arguments in both the broad and the narrow sense. It begins by introducing the traditional ideas Wittgenstein's arguments can be seen as undermining. In fact, Wittgenstein points out, it is not bodies that have pains, rather living beings. Only 'of a living human being and what resembles a living human being can one say: it has sensations; it sees; is blind; hears; is deaf; is conscious or unconscious'. Many philosophers have shared the (...) picture or aspects of the picture underlying these views, and have sublimated them into philosophical theories. The chapter examines the relation between the inner and outer, the relation between sensation and its natural and linguistic expression. It explores private ownership that is the impossibility of different people having the same sensation. The paradigmatic application of the qualitative‐numerical distinction is the case of physical objects, objects with a spatiotemporal location. (shrink)

In this paper, I first review previous interpretations of Wittgenstein's remarks on private language, revealing their inadequacies, and then present my own interpretation. Basing mainly on Wittgenstein's notes for lectures on private sensations, I establish the following points: ‘remembering the connection right’ means ‘reidentifying sensation-types’; the reason for ‘no criterion of correctness’ is that nothing, especially no inner mechanisms nor external devices, can be utilised by the private speaker to tell whether some sensations are of one (...) type or different types; and private names are not really names, private language is not really a language, therefore, private language is a grammatical illusion. My interpretation has the advantage of being able to reconcile Wittgenstein's conception of philosophy, which is to dissolve philosophical problems by rearranging grammatical facts, with his actual philosophical practice, at least in the case of private language. (shrink)

In this paper I want to consider whether the 'phenomenal concepts' posited by many recent philosophers of mind are consistent with Wittgenstein’s private language argument. The paper will have three sections. In the first I shall explain the rationale for positing phenomenal concepts. In the second I shall argue that phenomenal concepts are indeed inconsistent with the private language argument. In the last I shall ask whether this is bad for phenomenal concepts or bad for Wittgenstein.