The private language argument is really a collection of ideas that puts pressure on the idea that what is referred to or named by your expressions is ‘in your head’ and thus in principle inaccessible to others. The view is perhaps most powerful for sensation words, but it can encompass all expressions. If the view were true, it would mean that we speak in ‘idiolects’ and can never really be sure whether we are communicating with one another, since we can never really be sure of each other’s meanings. If words function to name things, and sentences are just a collection of names, and if what is named when you use a word is in your head (e.g. an image or a private, conscious ‘experience’) and not accessible to others, then others can only guess but will never really know what you say.

If you take this to be an unacceptable conclusion, as Wittgenstein did, you must say what is wrong with the argument. The Philosophical Investigations is, in fact, a systematic rebuttal of the view that words function to name things and that sentences are a collection of names. The argument against the idea of a private language has three important strands. The first is to show that even if there were private objects that could be named, this would have no bearing on the English (say) words ‘pain’, ‘sensation’, ‘feeling’, etc. or their correlates in other languages. The second strand questions the utility of devising a language with private objects as the meanings of its expressions. The third questions the coherence of doing so and puts the whole idea of private objects into doubt.

That is my take on it, in any case, and it takes about three lectures to spell out the details! Incidentally, these three strands seem to me to be interwoven throughout the first 300 or so sections of the Philosophical Investigations. But there is a vast literature out there with many differing opinions about whether the argument exists, what the argument is, where it begins, and what it shows!

By: Julia Tanney at: 29th July, 2009