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PhilosophersLudwig Wittgenstein

Ludwig Wittgenstein

The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.

Analytic philosophy1889 – 1951 AustriaPhilosopher of languageLogicianPhilosopher of mind
Philosophical Investigations, §§243-315

The private language argument and the beetle in the box

What it claims

A strictly private language is impossible. The word "pain" does not get its meaning from an object hidden in a box: it replaces crying, and it is learned and used in public.

Why

A word needs a standard of correct use independent of the speaker's impression, which a private language lacks.

Valid with an implicit premise

A very widespread idea, in Descartes, Locke and many others: what I feel, only I truly know, and my words for it get their meaning from what I see within. Wittgenstein imagines a language whose words would refer only to my private sensations, and shows that such a language cannot work. These sections are among the most discussed of the 20th century, and there is no agreement on their exact structure: what follows is a reconstruction.

P1 · implicit premiseA sign has meaning only if there is a criterion to tell its correct use from its incorrect use.
P2This criterion must be independent of the speaker's impression. Otherwise "whatever is going to seem right to me is right", and that only means we can no longer talk about "right".
P3In a strictly private language, whose words refer to what only the speaker can know, the only check is his impression: his memory checked by his memory, as if one bought several copies of the same newspaper to make sure it tells the truth.
Therefore a strictly private language is impossible. The word "pain" does not get its meaning from an object hidden in a box: it replaces crying, and it is learned and used in public.

click a premise to reject it

If you accept every premise, logic forces you to accept the conclusion. So the debate is about the premises.
Checked by a logic solver: the premises cannot all be true while the conclusion is false.
Without the implicit premise: Without P1, the computer finds a private sign that has meaning without any criterion of correctness: a word one could never misuse, but which would still mean something.
Valid with P1. Wittgenstein does not write it as one sentence: it is assumed when he says that a definition serves to establish the meaning of a sign (§258) and that one cannot obey a rule "privately" (§202). Most commentators attribute it to him, but it is a point of attack: can a word mean something if one could never be wrong in using it?
Analogy. Everyone has a box with something in it, called a "beetle". No one can look into anyone else's box. Yet the word "beetle" can work perfectly well between us. But then what is in the boxes plays no role: each could have something different, or an empty box. The image is Wittgenstein's (§293).

Objections

3

Each objection is a conversation: click to see who replies and where the debate stands.

Descartes (Meditations, II) 1641 · attacks premise 3

What I feel, I know with an unequalled certainty. Even if I am dreaming, "I seem to see light, hear a noise, and feel heat; this cannot be false". Access to my own sensations is not a mere impression: it is the surest check there is.

Wittgenstein replies
Wittgenstein Wittgenstein's reply (without naming Descartes)
"Only I can know whether I am really in pain" is wrong in one way, and nonsense in another. Wrong, because other people very often know when I am in pain. Nonsense, because it cannot be said of me, except as a joke, that I "know" I am in pain: what would it mean, except that I am in pain?
The debate goes on (our summary) For his defenders, this means that my certainty about my pain is not verified knowledge, so not a criterion that could check a private word. A Cartesian will answer that Wittgenstein shifts the question: the issue is not whether one says "I know" about one's pain, but whether the pain itself is grasped directly, with nothing in between. The debate on self-knowledge remains very lively.
A. J. Ayer ("Can there be a private language?") 1954 · attacks premise 2

Every check ultimately rests on someone's memory or impressions, even in public: to consult a timetable I must trust what I see and what I remember. If memory is never enough, no language is possible; if it is enough, a Robinson Crusoe isolated from birth could name his own sensations.

no reply
summary: their text is not yet in our corpus
No reply possible: objection raised in 1954, after the author's death (1951).
The debate goes on (our summary) Wittgenstein's defenders answer that he does not doubt memory in general: in the public case, a memory can be checked against something independent (the printed timetable, other people), whereas in the private case there is nothing else to consult (§265). Saul Kripke (1982) rereads the argument through the rule-following paradox: what the private speaker lacks is a community able to correct him. This reading is itself much disputed.
Objection anticipated by Wittgenstein attacks the conclusion

If the word "pain" does not refer to an inner object, then the sensation itself is nothing. You are a behaviourist in disguise: for you, everything except behaviour is a fiction.

Wittgenstein replies
Wittgenstein
He refuses. Between pain-behaviour accompanied by pain and the same behaviour without pain, "what greater difference could there be?". The sensation is not an object we talk about like a thing in a box, but it is not a nothing either. If he speaks of a fiction, it is a "grammatical" one: he rejects a way of picturing language, not pain.
The debate goes on (our summary) Some critics, and even some admirers, nevertheless find that the argument pushes towards a form of logical behaviourism: if "an inner process stands in need of outward criteria" (§580), what is left of the inner? Others see it only as a critique of the picture of the "inner object". The debate goes on.