What, if anything, does the Private Language Argument demonstrate?

“The idea of the ego inhabiting a body is to be abolished.” – Wittgenstein

“Language is very difficult to put into words.” – Voltaire

Wittgenstein’s Private Language (PL) Argument should be understood as PL arguments, and these arguments should be viewed in the wider context of Wittgenstein’s philosophical aims and especially the “Philosophical Investigations” (PI). This wider context is specifically that of rule-following and the critique of the “inner”. However, due to the necessary limitations upon this essay, only a cursory contextualisation and analysis of the arguments and definitions of terms can be allowed.

The PL arguments are Wittgenstein’s sustained and radical demonstration of how language can only be meaningful in a social context, specifically that sensation can only be named within a public framework of rule-imposing institutions; this has been termed the collectivist demonstration. The arguments also demonstrate that language must be communicated and communicable to be a language and that introspection and our “mental processes” play no significant role in language-use. These demonstrations are inter-dependent to varying degrees and are at odds with certain philosophical traditions and conclusions reached by Augustine, Russell, Descartes, Locke, the arguments of the Tractatus, and solipsists, to name a few. The arguments ultimately have wider implications in the fields of ethics, sociology and the philosophy of mind. How the arguments achieve this (and what they do not achieve) requires careful study.

Rules

Wittgenstein argues against the primacy of public ostensive definition in teaching language in the first part of PI, and this applies to private ostension too . PL is thus defined as a private analogue of training in the use of words, not mere introversion regarding sensation. Wittgenstein denies the possibility of personal rules of ostensive definition in PI 202. Without public rules for the correct application for the use of words, a PL user would make constant mistakes, or simply not understand, even if the words have been taught ostensively. Language is a (flexible) rule-guided activity, like a game. These language-games are structured by (but which also invent or determine) rules. Without language-games we would have lots of names for things, but no notion of how we should use them.

These language-games are embedded in a form of life (PI 23). A form of life “is a culture or social formation, the totality of communal activities...” which “provide the foundations of language…” Language requires conformity of use as imposed by corrective/definitive rules so that forms of life are coherent and allow participation and communication by the practitioners, as without this there would not be practices. (One cannot ask whether these rules themselves are correct as they determine correctness. We must also be aware that the meaning of language changes, as rules change.) Practices are all of those things we do socially and language is one of these activities. However, this seems to allow for the possibility of a PL, as practices do not always require social settings. Blackburn claims that “we must not…simply equate practice with public practice...” Indeed, people can give themselves their own individualised practices, but individual linguistic practises are underpinned by language, so contra Blackburn we must equate specific practices involving language (even non-linguistic practices which are contextually interwoven) as essentially public. Wittgenstein makes it clear in PI 337 why this is so: a social background of practice, customs and institutions are necessary for language-use. Language rules require teaching through testing and correcting and this can only be performed by a community, otherwise there are no outward criteria of correctness which could guide the language-user. These criteria cannot simply be imagined or personally acquired in some other way (PI 237, 265, 266, 267).

Thinkers have taken issue with this “collectivist” approach to language. Unless I am overstating his claim, A.C. Grayling writes that if language is a form of life requiring public teaching/training, an individual could not privately create (a publicly) understandable language. “If language is logically public there cannot be languages in any sense private” and “there cannot be contingently private languages.” But perhaps Grayling misunderstands that though language is taught publicly via rule-conformity, it can then be used (and its rules modified) privately afterwards so long as the rules can be socially re-applied. The forms of life we are involved in are not always public. We hold private opinions and values, but we needed exposure to them to some degree first in order to form them initially. Language is the same; we need exposure first so as to take language away. Wittgenstein denies the possibility of a PL developing without any recourse to public rules outside the social context of rule-conformity. Wittgenstein is not denying that publicly understandable PLs are possible within a social context.

Finally Grayling writes that “…if rules were constituted by agreement within a language community and not determined by anything external to that community’s practices, then the problem facing a putative PL user…also faces the community as a whole. How does the community tell whether it is following a rule?”. This is an interesting question that once answered highlights further the impossibility of individual rule-use (and hence PL use) outside a social context. Wittgenstein notes at PI 244 that learning a language is public. Yet a community’s language-use is guided not completely by people, but by the “primitive, natural expressions of the sensation”, by the fossilised rules of tradition that build up over time in official institutions (churches, schools, governments), linguistic sources (oral tradition, books and other media) and “unofficial” social institutions (like the family). In this way these institutions pass on diverse linguistic rules, mores, norms, values, dialects, etc. to children. These social forces reinforce and perpetuate linguistic rules and ensure linguistic conformity by providing public criteria for proper use with varying degrees of success as language-rules are constantly subject to change. These institutions arise historically and collectively through the inter-play of various powers.

It is therefore not possible that an asocial individual outside of society (if such a thing is possible) could erect a social institution, which guided linguistic rules. The rules of language developed socio-historically through interaction; they did not and could not arise from an individual’s own PL and then spread like a Gospel. Social (linguistic) rules are created by us and are that which we are also created by, in a complex network of institutional interrelations and activities of practice (or forms of life). If we deny this, or at least simplify Wittgenstein’s sociological view (as Ayer and Grayling appear to) we deny social hierarchy and human will and thence require a socially (humanly) external force which ensures that linguistic rules are followed, perpetuated and enforced. Therefore, without this linguistic, publicly perpetuated conformity, society would be like the gibbering people at the foot of the Tower of Babel; that is – no society at all.

The Private Language

Having explored the necessity of rules in language-games it is easier to be clear as to what Wittgenstein means by a “Private Language”. A PL is a language that can in principle, only be understood by its user. This understanding is an idiosyncratic private name for a private sensation. A PL would therefore be untranslatable (PI 207). But these concepts of PL are incoherent, as for the PL to be logically understood by the PL user, s/he should theoretically be able to share the language with others. If the PL could not be shared with and so understood by other people, it could not be understood by the PL user either. A further defining notion is that of regularity. We must understand the PL to be so irregular due to its lack of rule-use, and hence incoherent, so as to not be linguistic, even privately.

A.J Ayer argues that the word “private” misleads Wittgenstein as meaning is always private (as experience takes place subjectively), even in reference to public objects. However, it is unlikely Wittgenstein is denying private meaning in Ayer’s sense, as this would negate all kinds of subjective interpretations concerning the world as mediated by language. Wittgenstein is denying the privacy of use. This is the pertinent point: Wittgenstein insists that languages require public criteria of use via rule-following in a form of life. If words cannot be used in this way then they cannot have meaning (PI 43). Hence, Wittgenstein finally dismisses the PL as conceptually unintelligible. As a result Wittgenstein cannot attack the unintelligible directly. This is one good explanation for Wittgenstein’s ambiguity and why he has to use so many arguments from analogy.

“Inner” and “Outer”

The “inner” is the beginning for Descartes in his “Meditations”; it is also the basis of the social and philosophical myths concerning the idea that we have privileged access to our own minds and of the privacy of language-use. Wittgenstein’s characterisation of private language and introspection as “private ostensive definition” allows him to undermine the proposal that the naming of sensations begins with the individual. Naming presupposes a technique of use, the social rules discussed above require “a great deal of stage-setting” (PI 257). Private ostension is actually nothing at all (PI 265) and this is later characterised as a non-move in a game as it has no consequences (PI 268). Wittgenstein examines various possibilities concerning our sensations and behaviour. He considers the interplay between the “inner” and “outer” and exposes certain mistakes about introversion and the connection with private language. A good example is Wittgenstein’s discussion of the “S” diary (PI 258). This is related to rule-use and the necessity of public criteria as discussed above. A PL user has no “inner” test to see if he is using a sign correctly with regards to his sensations. Wittgenstein implies that the fault may lie with our memory as it lacks a means of “outward” verification (PI 265); but this argument is open to serious doubts. If memory is as deceptive as Wittgenstein claims then no society can verify the sensations of a public language-user (never mind a PL user) as everyone is subject to the same deceptive memory and the uncertainty of criteria. However it is probable that Wittgenstein’s memory-scepticism is really about the lack of “…certain empirical conditions necessary for the applicability of the concept of remembering…” Though what these empirical conditions might be is open to question.

These problems imply the necessity of an “outward” verification with regard to language-use and this is again related to rule-use, requiring a language-user to check against some external source whether he is using language correctly, thus disqualifying any possibility of private language. Wittgenstein uses the analogy of the newspaper and train timetable to explain why this checking is necessary (PI 265). However, this so-called verificationist argument is problematic. Ayer points out that the checking procedure as Wittgenstein describes it in PI 265 implies a series of checks which do not seem to end, “Everything hangs in the air unless there is at least one item that is straightforwardly identified.”. Ayer tries to solve this series-of-checks problem by positing an “act of primary recognition” as the basis of memory, but this solution needs further explanation by him. Furthermore:

“A single person has… in many respects the character of a society: one of his perceptions can confirm another and what he sees at one time can be confirmed by what he remembers at another etc. The comparison of intrapersonal confirmation with the buying of several copies of the same newspaper is in no way apt, since different copies are not separate sources of information which could possibly disagree...”

Here Findlay is saying that perceptions can falsify one another and hence offer criteria of confirmation when they agree; he objects to the analogy of buying several copies of the same newspaper in order to check the accuracy of a story because it ignores confirmation by different perceptions when they agree. However Wittgenstein says that a valid internal checking process has to come up with some perception Y that confirms perception X was correct. Comparing X with Y requires that one remembers X accurately; but there is nothing internal against which to check the accuracy of X except some other memory Z, leading to infinite regress.

Wittgenstein’s critique of the “inner” is implicit in his denial that we have knowledge about our mental states, but he accepts that we experience them. This is really about the misuse of words, as “knowledge” implies the possibility of making mistakes, and we cannot be mistaken about whether we are, say, in pain or not, only about how to use the word “pain” correctly (PI 246, 288). In this way language poses a problem for the solipsist, as it shows there is an external world from which language rules are internalised. Thus the PL arguments upturns Cartesian scepticism and hence threatens the dualism (and idealism and notions of privacy) that Descartes infers from his cogito. This de-stabilisation of Descartes’ cogito hints at the impossibility of knowing a PL to be able to secure (a partially language mediated) reality on the basis of ourselves, as Descartes attempted. Descartes should not have been sceptical about all things except for his thinking, because the thought ‘I think therefore I am a thinking thing’ is possible only in language; without the “outside” that Descartes thinks he must exclude from his assumptions, there can be no such language.

Wittgenstein does not exactly deny that we have privileged access to our own minds, but he does deny that we are infallibly aware of our behaviour (the outward signs of consciousness). Talking about pain is different from feeling pain, as the word does not accurately convey the sensation (though Wittgenstein does not deny the sensation, see PI 296). We have to talk about pain as an object, but it is not, which is what leads us to these mistaken notions of “inner” or private objects that we supposedly define via introversion. We can apply this word to others even when their behaviour might be ambiguous (PI 537) because “the criteria for ascribing pain are given by the language-game of which pain-ascriptions are a part, and it is the practice of experiencing, recognising and talking about pain which we learn when we learn how to use the word ‘pain’.”

The distinction between “inner” and “outer” then, is actually one of sensation (pain) and sensation (pain)-behaviour; it is a grammatical distinction which draws our attention to the use of concepts. Though the sensation and word temporally correspond, the meaning is given in the use, not via introversion. This is all due to rule-use and that “one can only refer to sensations in an established public framework.”

This understanding of pain allows for the expression of pain as “not necessarily pain felt in my body. My pains are the pains to which I give expression…” which is why one can say: “we are in pain”, or “I feel your pain”. This may not literally be so, but the word is used as a tool to publicly express a (physical or emotional) sensation. A private understanding of pain (or any sensation) via private ostension not only ignores the necessary exposure to public rule-use but will not be communicable in this way to others due to its asocial character. Indeed, for Wittgenstein, talking of “inner” and “outer” can be useful, though misleading as it is a false dichotomy. Actually a person is making use of rules and expressions, publicly identified and inferred from behaviour, so as to communicate sensations.

Possible Conclusions

The PL arguments are anti-essentialist in scope and ultimately demonstrate the redundancy of the notion of the private self (not a socially private self, but the metaphysical subject, the thinking Cartesian self, the fly in the bottle banging against the glass, the solipsist). Language-use is immediate and reliant on rules, with no need for a private self as intermediary. Intermediaries ultimately lead to the reductio ad absurdum of infinite regress. In this way the PL arguments also indicate the unintelligibility of private objects, “mental processes”, and “self-identity” which are really matters of grammar rather than metaphysics or psychology. Wittgenstein’s dissolving of the Cartesian dualism in this manner shows that “the mental is neither a fiction nor hidden behind the outer. It infuses our behaviour and is expressed in it.”

Furthermore, the arguments show that a proposition must be independent of what it records and as a measure it must be independent of what it measures; “justification consists in appealing to something independent” (PI 265). This exposes (Russellian) logical privacy (PI 580) as a target of the PL arguments. One can follow a rule privately, but one cannot follow logically private rules due to the dynamic of rule-use as discussed above. Wittgenstein’s definition of meaningful language as use means that as the PL user who cannot use his language has a meaningless language (if indeed he has a language at all). Understanding the PL arguments in this way allows us to deepen our understanding of Wittgenstein’s notion that we do not function psychologically, but grammatically. Wittgenstein wanted to demonstrate (partially via the PL arguments) that the notions of the ego, mental concepts and the “inner” are fraudulent and to reach a stage in philosophy of post-metaphysics. “An objectified “internality” has been taken for granted, particularly since the time of Saint Augustine; we have the same thing… in Descartes and in… Kant.”

These observations imply then, that there can be no absolute private self because, like PL, there is nothing to which is can be independently measured or understood. There is always an external complement that has some part in defining the self and language and keeping these in some sense public. The PL arguments demonstrate that the PL is logically incoherent, does not explain language meaning or use, leading to absurd, dualistic and mystifying notions, and is ultimately irrelevant as an explanation.

 

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