Page 93 - Encyclopedia of Philosophy of Language

just be language spoken by only one person. In that case, Robinson Crusoe, alone on his island, spoke a private language, especially if he invented his own terms for the strange flora and fauna he met there. So would the last surviving speaker of a vanishing Amerindian language. Most—though certainly not all—commentators agree that this is not what Witt- genstein had in mind, as the (unquoted) first half of Sect. 243 makes clear. If we came to rescue Crusoe, we would have no trouble seeing what his neologisms meant, nor do field linguists face special in-principle problems if they can find only one informant. In res- cuing Crusoe, we do not rescue his language from privacy; it faced no such danger. That remark imposes a dual constraint: whatever the private language argu- ment is, it should leave Crusoe untouched; whatever about our usual language lets it escape the argument should not vanish for one-speaker languages.
Crispin Wright (1986) and Margaret Gilbert (1983) have each suggested, independently, two relevantly different notions of privacy. On one notion, words are private if their semantics, or content, or proper understanding, is available only to their speaker: only that person could produce words with that semantics, or understand/take words as having it. On the other notion, though two people, Pia and Pol, may each attach the same semantics, Pia to her words W, and Pol to his, W*, they could never have good reason to believe that that is what they were doing. These are certainly two ways of being unable to understand another's words. Whether the distinction matters de- pends on what the case against private language is.
2. Private Language and Mental Life
Why is private language worth thinking about? Partly because of its relation to our picture of mental life, or that part we care enough to have words for. Since a large stretch of the Philosophical Investigations before the private language discussion (from Sect. 138), and a large stretch after it, are concerned with questions about mental life, the conclusion that this is one of the points of the discussion seems inescapable. (Before Sect. 243, the concern is to attain 'greater clarity about the concepts of understanding, meaning, and think- ing'; during and for a stretch after, the concern is primarily with sensations, notably pain.)
The picture of the mind a private language dis- cussion would target derives from Descartes. Notori- ously, such a view weaves problems of mind into problems of knowledge. On this view, mental life con- sists, for the most part, of a series of events or experi- ences, which form, as it were, a stream of con- sciousness. Elements in this stream, since they are the subject's experiences, are directly accessible to his inspection, but not available for inspection by anyone else. So the subject can know what the elements are in a way in which no one else can. Moreover, they are independent of things outside our skins. While some
of them may represent such things as being thus and so (these, according to Descartes, are ideas), none requires anything of the 'external' world for its being the element it is. It cannot be essential to any of these experiences, for example, that it is an experience of seeing a cow; for then it could not occur without the cow. The actual elements of the scheme, on Descar- tes's view, are what might be in common to cases of seeing a cow and cases of only seeming to. Some would embroider this picture as follows: what I judge in judging my stream now to have a certain character (to contain elements of this or that type) is incorrigible; I could not, in principle, be wrong about it. The embroidery is not needed for a private language argu- ment to get a grip. Note too that Wittgenstein con- centrates on experiences, like pain, which are world- independent in the required Cartesian sense. So it does not matter much for this discussion if there is no experience common to seeing a cow and only seeming to.
I know what my mental life is, according to this picture, by observing its elements and seeing of each I observe that it is thus and so. That is to say, I may just see of an element that it is of a certain sort or type. I may observe it to be, roughly, a pain in the foot, or an intention to go sailing, etc. That is rough. But more precisely, of what type might I observe such an element to be? Thinking on the model of observable features of objects—colors, say—the feature or type in question would be fixed in this way: it is that feature observably exemplified by such and such elements in streams—the elements that exhibit such and such a pattern. That it is the one so exemplified is essential to identifying which feature it is. But the only elements I can observe, in principle, are ones in my own stream. So the feature I have in mind when I take one of my current elements to be thus and so must be fixed as the one exemplified by such and such (prior) elements in my stream; that is essential to its being the one I am thinking of. But now, what decides whether my current element is of that type? Only I could be in a position to judge that. My thought about my current element, in identifying it as such and such, is thus, in a clear sense, a unit of a private language.
3. Criticisms of Private Language Based on the Cartesian View of Mind
Insofar as the private language discussion is directed against this picture, the first point is this. It is simply not possible that only I can be in a position to see what is exemplified (by seeing what exemplifies it), consequently to judge whether an item has the charac- ter that there gets exemplified. A language that worked in such a way would be incoherent. It would have neither correct nor incorrect applications, to elements of a stream of consciousness or to anything else; there could be no standard of correctness for it. Conversely, any language, public or private, which does say some-
Private Language
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