The idea of a private language was made famous in philosophy by LudwigWittgenstein, who in §243 of his bookPhilosophicalInvestigations explained it thus: “The words of thislanguage are to refer to what only the speaker can know — to hisimmediate private sensations. So another person cannot understand thelanguage.” This is not intended to cover (easily imaginable)cases of recording one’s experiences in a personal code, for such acode, however obscure in fact, could in principle be deciphered. WhatWittgenstein had in mind is a language conceived asnecessarily comprehensible only to its single originatorbecause the things which define its vocabulary are necessarilyinaccessible to others.

Immediately after introducing the idea, Wittgenstein goes on to arguethat there cannot be such a language. The importance of drawingphilosophers’ attention to a largely unheard-of notion and thenarguing that it is unrealizable lies in the fact that an unformulatedreliance on the possibility of a private language is arguablyessential to mainstream epistemology, philosophy of mind andmetaphysics from Descartes to versions of the representational theoryof mind which became prominent in late twentieth century cognitivescience.

• 1. Overview: Wittgenstein’s Argument and its Interpretations
  • 1.1 Recent Developments and Their Consequences
  • 1.2 Are Claims Affirming the Possibility of a Private Language False or Nonsense?
• 2. The Significance of the Issue
• 3. The Private Language Argument Expounded
  • 3.1 Preliminaries
  • 3.2 The Central Argument
  • 3.3 Interlude: the Rejection of Orthodoxy
  • 3.4 The Central Argument Continued
  • 3.5 Are the Orthodox Objections Met?
• 4. Kripke’s Sceptical Wittgenstein
  • 4.1 The Community View Revisited
• Bibliography
• Academic Tools
• Other Internet Resources
• Related Entries

1. Overview: Wittgenstein’s Argument and its Interpretations

Wittgenstein’s main attack on the idea of a private language iscontained in §§244–271 ofPhilosophicalInvestigations (though the ramifications of the matter arerecognizably pursued until §315). These passages, especiallythose from §256 onwards, are now commonly known as ‘theprivate language argument’, despite the fact that he bringsfurther considerations to bear on the topic in other places in hiswritings; and despite the fact that the broader context, of§§243–315, does not contain a singular critique ofjust one idea, namely, a private language—rather, the passagesaddress many issues, such as privacy, identity, inner/outer relations,sensations as objects, and sensations as justification for sensationtalk, amongst others.

Nevertheless, the main argument of §§244–271 is,apparently, readily summarized. The conclusion is that a language inprinciple unintelligible to anyone but its originating user isimpossible. The reason for this is that such a so-called languagewould, necessarily, be unintelligible to its supposed originator too,for he would be unable to establish meanings for its putativesigns.

We should, however, note that Wittgenstein himself never employs thephrase ‘private language argument’. And a few commentators(e.g., Baker 1998, Canfield 2001 pp. 377–9, Stroud 2000 p. 69)have questioned the very existence in the relevant passages of aunified structure properly identifiable as a sustained argument. Thissuggestion, however, depends for its plausibility on a tendentiouslynarrow notion of argument—roughly, as a kind of proof, withidentifiable premisses and a firm conclusion, rather than the moregeneral sense which would include the exposure of a confusion througha variety of reasoned twists and turns, of qualifications,weighings-up and re-thinkings—and is a reaction against somedrastic and artificial reconstructions of the text by earlier writers.Nevertheless, there is a point to be made, and the summary aboveconceals, as we shall see, a very intricate discussion.

Even among those who accept that there is a reasonably self-containedand straightforward private language argument to be discussed, therehas been fundamental and widespread disagreement over its details, itssignificance and even its intended conclusion, let alone over itssoundness. The result is that every reading of the argument (includingthat which follows) is controversial. Some of this disagreement hasarisen because of the notorious difficulty and occasional elusivenessof Wittgenstein’s own text (sometimes augmented by problems oftranslation). But much derives from the tendency of philosophers toread into the text their own preconceptions without making themexplicit and asking themselves whether its author shared them. Somecommentators, for instance, supposing it obvious that sensations areprivate, have interpreted the argument as intended to show they cannotbe talked about; some, supposing the argument to be an obvious butunsustainable attempt to wrest special advantage from scepticism aboutmemory, have maintained it to be unsound because it self-defeatinglyimplies the impossibility of public discourse as well as private; somehave assumed it to be a direct attack on the problem of other minds;some have claimed it to commit Wittgenstein to behaviourism orverificationism; some have thought it to imply that language is, ofnecessity, not merely potentially but actually social (this has cometo be called the ‘community view’ of the argument).

The early history of the secondary literature is largely one ofdisputation over these matters. Yet what these earlier commentatorshave in common is significant enough to outweigh their differences andmake it possible to speak of them as largely sharing an Orthodoxunderstanding of the argument. After the publication in 1982 of SaulKripke’s definitely unorthodox book, however, in which he suggestedthat the argument poses a sceptical problem about the whole notion ofmeaning, public or private, disputation conducted by Orthodox rules ofengagement was largely displaced by a debate on the issues arisingfrom Kripke’s interpretation. (However, there is overlap: Kripkehimself adheres to the community view of the argument’s implications,with the result that renewed attention has been paid to that issue,dispute over which began in 1954.) Both debates, though, show atendency to proceed with only the most cursory attention to theoriginal argument which started them off.

This rush to judgment about what is at stake, compounded by awidespread willingness to discuss commentators’ more accessibleaccounts of the text rather than confront its difficulties directly,has made it hard to recover the original from the accretion of more orless tendentious interpretation which has grown up around it. Such arecovery is one of the tasks attempted in this article. The criterionof success in this task which is employed here is one of coherence: agood account should accommodate all of Wittgenstein’s remarks in§§244–271, their (not necessarily linear) ordering aswell as their content, and should make clear how these remarks fitwith the context provided by the rest of the book. (One of theproblems with many of the commentaries on this matter, especially theearlier ones, is that their writers have quarried the text forindividual remarks which have then been re-woven into a set of viewssaid to be Wittgenstein’s but whose relation to the original istenuous. A striking example of this approach is Norman Malcolm’sfamous and influential 1954 review ofPhilosophicalInvestigations, which was commonly taken as an accuraterepresentation of Wittgenstein’s own thinking and formed the target ofmany “refutations”.)

1.1 Recent Developments and Their Consequences

Interpretation of Wittgenstein started to become even more complex atthe close of the twentieth century, as commentators began to focus onbroad questions of method. In bothTractatusLogico-Philosophicus andPhilosophicalInvestigations there is a tension between some statements thatseem to be stating controversial philosophical positions and othersthat seem to be saying that philosophy ought not to offercontroversial theses but only work with what we already know by beingcompetent language users embedded in human circumstances. In thelatter book there are passages that seem to support ananti-philosophical position and others that seem to offer interestingnew philosophical views in the process of criticizing more traditionalphilosophical doctrines such as foundationalism and Cartesianism.Along these lines, two overlapping distinctions concerning how to readPhilosophical Investigations have arisen: theresolute–substantial distinction, and thePyrrhonian–non-Pyrrhonian distinction. In general, the resoluteand Pyrrhonian readings make Wittgenstein out to be ananti-philosopher, one who is not offering positive philosophicaltheses to replace false ones; rather, his goal is to show thenonsensical nature of traditional philosophical theorizing. It is thisgoal that is partly responsible for the unique style ofPhilosophical Investigations (its dialogical and, atleast at times, anti-dogmatic, therapeutic character). On thesubstantial and non-Pyrrhonian readings, Wittgenstein is not onlypresenting a method for exposing the errors of traditionalphilosophers, but also showing how philosophy should rightly be doneand thereby offering positive philosophical views, views which mustoften be inferred or reconstructed from an elusive text.

There is neither a single resolute/Pyrrhonian nor a singlesubstantial/non-Pyrrhonian reading of Wittgenstein. Moreover, there isan important difference between the resolute–substantial andPyrrhonian–non-Pyrrhonian distinctions. The former distinctionarises from a continuing debate on how to readTractatusLogico-Philosophicus, both on its own and in relation toPhilosophical Investigations (see, e.g., Conant 2004 andMulhall 2007), and is associated with the so-called NewWittgensteinians (see, e.g., Crary and Read 2000). The Pyrrhonian andnon-Pyrrhonian discussion is to be found, for example, in Fogelin(1994), Sluga (2004), and Stern (2004, 2007), and concerns the ways inwhich Wittgenstein might be considered as writing in the tradition ofthe ancient Pyrrhonian sceptics, who were philosophically scepticalabout the very possibility of philosophy (see Fogelin 1994, pp. 3ffand 205ff). These distinctions cut across the distinction betweenOrthodox and Kripkean non-orthodox readings of the text: both Orthodoxand Kripkean non-orthodox interpreters have tended to offersubstantial or non-Pyrrhonian readings of Wittgenstein—thoughthe line may not always be clear and some (e.g., Hacker, 1990) movefrom a resolute/Pyrrhonian to a substantial/non-Pyrrhonian readingwithout remarking the fact.

Some (Fogelin, Stern, and Mulhall, for example) have come to questionwhether it makes sense to suppose that either one or the other,resolute/Pyrrhonian or substantial/non-Pyrrhonian, must bethe correct way to read Wittgenstein. Fogelin and Stern seethe tension in the text ofPhilosophical Investigationsas the expression of a tension, indeed a struggle, within itsauthor, between his wanting to uncover the ‘disguisednonsense’ of philosophical theses and his being tempted anddrawn into still other philosophical positions on the nature oflanguage, reference, private experience, and philosophy itself. Inwhat is surely a reference to §133c—which reads: ‘Thereal discovery is the one that enables me to break off philosophizingwhen I want to. — The one that gives philosophy peace, so thatit is no longer tormented by questions which bringitself inquestion’—Wittgenstein is reported by Rush Rhees to havesaid ‘In my book I say that I am able to leave off with aproblem in philosophy when I want to. But that’s a lie; I can’t’(Rhees, 1984, p. 219 n. 7). According to Stern, the Wittgenstein ofthePhilosophical Investigations is more Pyrrhonian thannot, while understanding all too acutely the attraction of philosophyand the difficulty of giving it up. One’s stance on these mattersaffects how one reads the private language sections, in particular byraising the question whether Wittgenstein intends to argue that thepositive claim of the possibility of a private language is false, oris some kind of nonsense.

1.2 Are Claims Affirming the Possibility of a Private Language False or Nonsense?

If someone were to insist that a private language is possible, one wayto argue against him would be by employing the method ofreductioad absurdum: assume that it is true that a private language ispossible, show that that assumption leads to certain absurdities or acontradiction, and then conclude that it is actually false that aprivate language is possible. This is the way in which the argumentwas typically understood. But this understanding has come intoquestion. In contrast to his earlier commentaries, for example, GordonBaker has since called into question whether the private languagesections should not be read as attempting to show that the notion of aprivate language is intelligible but false, but rather that it isnonsense masquerading as an important possibility (Baker, 1998).

There is, however, in Wittgenstein’s thinking an inclination to thinkof contradiction in terms of the disintegration of sense, so that evenargument byreductio might be understood not in terms offalsehood. (The appearance of this inclination inTractatusLogico-Philosophicus, for example, is well mapped by Fogelin[1995, Ch. IV].) And it is characteristic of Wittgenstein to talk ofphilosophical error in terms of nonsense. In §119 ofPhilosophical Investigations he writes, e.g., ‘Theresults of philosophy are the discovery of some piece of plainnonsense and of bumps that the understanding has got by running upagainst the limits of language. They — these bumps —make us see the value of that discovery.’ And in §464:‘What I want to teach is: to pass from unobvious nonsense toobvious nonsense.’ In the discussion of the possibility of aprivate language it may well at first seem as though we understand thepossibility under consideration. After all we seem to understand thequestion in §256, ‘Now, what about the language whichdescribes my inner experiences and which only I myself canunderstand?’ But is Wittgenstein suggesting weonlyseem to understand this question?

The matter may not be clear. Shortly after the main private languagesections, the following remark occurs as part of a dialogue, ‘Itamounts to this: that only of a living human being and what resembles(behaves like) a living human being can one say: it has sensations; itsees; is blind; hears; is deaf; is conscious or unconscious’(§281). The dialogue continues in §282:

“But in a fairy tale a pot too can see and hear!”(Certainly; but itcan also talk.)

“But a fairy tale only invents what is not the case: it does nottalknonsense, does it?” — It’s not as simple asthat. Is it untrue or nonsensical to say that a pot talks? Does onehave a clear idea of the circumstances in which we’d say of a pot thatit talked? (Even a nonsense poem is not nonsense in the same way asthe babble of a baby.)

Here the question of how theInvestigations is to be readintrudes. For example, part of the distinction between what Mulhallcalls resolute and substantial readings of Wittgenstein concerns thesense in which Wittgenstein aimed to ‘overcome our attraction tothe idea that there is something that we cannot do inphilosophy’ (Mulhall, 2007, p. 8; cf.PhilosophicalInvestigations §374). Mulhall claims that that idea goesagainst the moral ofInvestigations §500:‘When a sentence is called senseless, it is not, as it were, itssense that is senseless. Rather, a combination of words is beingexcluded from the language, withdrawn from circulation.’Further, this substantial reading attributes to Wittgenstein animplicit philosophical theory of meaning, ‘of the (nowgrammatical) conditions of sense—quite as if our everydayabilities to distinguish sense from nonsense require at the very leasta philosophical grounding or foundation (perhaps a criterialsemantics, or a theory of language-games, or an anthropology of thehuman life form’ (Mulhall, 2007, p. 9). By contrast, on aresolute reading ofPhilosophical Investigations,Wittgenstein’s appeal to the notion of a grammatical investigationinvolves the deployment of ‘our everyday capacity to distinguishsense from nonsense in a philosophical context, and hence as deprivingitself of any claim to expertise or authority that exceeds that formof practical ability—an ability that can equally well be laidclaim to by any competent speaker, and hence by any philosophicalinterlocutor’ (ibid., p. 10). Further, the resolute reading isespecially firm in rejecting the idea that there is somethingdeterminate that we cannot do, the idea that there is something,namely, a private language, that cannot be achieved; there is not alimitation on language. Rather, the idea is simply nonsense, or asMulhall later puts it (ibid. p. 18): no sense can be given to the ideaof aphilosophically substantial private language.

Though Mulhall claims that the private language sections canjustifiably be read either resolutely or substantially—because‘each reading can … point to an aspect of the text thatit fully acknowledges, and whose proper acknowledgment by the other isat the very least an issue for it, it would seem profitless to insistthat one reading is essentially faithful to Wittgenstein’s text andthe other intrinsically faithless’ (ibid., p. 20)—it isplain that he thinks the resolute reading is to be preferred. However,we may not need to choose. We might view the private language sectionsas Wittgenstein’s asking, ‘Do we have a clear picture of thecircumstances in which we should say that someone spoke a privatelanguage?’ The line of reasoning that follows §243 can beread as various attempts to achieve a clear picture of what it mightmean to speak a private language, where the attempts ultimately fail,with the result that what at first sight seemed intelligible (‘alanguage which describes my inner experiences and which only I myselfcan understand’) turns out not to be intelligible after all. Andin so far as we cannot make intelligible the circumstances in whichthere could be a private language, we should say that the idea of aprivate language is nonsense. However, as we saw above, in §282Wittgenstein seems to suggest that the border between nonsense andfalsehood is itself unclear; and moreover, in trying to make sense ofthe possibility of a private language, we may find, in different partsof the chain of reasoning, suggestions of falsehood as well as ofnonsensicality.

2. The Significance of the Issue

The issue’s significance can be seen by considering how the argumentis embedded in the structure ofPhilosophical Investigations.Immediately prior to the introduction of the argument(§§241f), Wittgenstein suggests that the existence of therules governing the use of language and making communication possibledepends on agreement in human behaviour—such as the uniformityin normal human reaction which makes it possible to train mostchildren to look at something by pointing at it. (Unlike cats, whichreact in a seemingly random variety of ways to pointing.) One functionof the private language argument is to show that not only actuallanguages but the very possibility of language and concept formationdepends on the possibility of such agreement.

Another, related, function is to oppose the idea that metaphysicalabsolutes are within our reach, that we can find at least part of theworld as it really is in the sense that any other way of conceivingthat part must be wrong (cf.Philosophical Investigationsp. 230). Philosophers are especially tempted to suppose that numbersand sensations are examples of such absolutes, self-identifyingobjects which themselves force upon us the rules for the use of theirnames. Wittgenstein discusses numbers in earlier sections on rules(185–242). Some of his points have analogues in his discussionof sensations, for there is a common underlying confusion about howthe act of meaning determines the future application of a formula orname. In the case of numbers, one temptation is to confuse themathematical sense of ‘determine’ in which, say, theformulay = 2x determines the numerical value ofy for a given value ofx (in contrast withy > 2x, which does not) with a causal sense inwhich a certain training in mathematics determines that normal peoplewill always write the same value fory given both the firstformula and a value forx—in contrast with creaturesfor which such training might produce a variety of outcomes (cf.§189). This confusion produces the illusion that the result of anactual properly conducted calculation is the inevitable outcome of themathematical determining, as though the formula’s meaning itself wereshaping the course of events.

In the case of sensations, the parallel temptation is to suppose thatthey are self-intimating. Itching, for example, seems like this: onejust feels what it is directly; if one then gives the sensation aname, the rules for that name’s subsequent use are already determinedby the sensation itself. Wittgenstein tries to show that thisimpression is illusory, that even itching derives its identity onlyfrom a sharable practice of expression, reaction and use of language.If itching were a metaphysical absolute, forcing its identity upon mein the way described, then the possibility of such a shared practicewould be irrelevant to the concept of itching: the nature of itchingwould be revealed to me in a single mental act of naming it (the kindof mental act which Russell called ‘acquaintance’); allsubsequent facts concerning the use of the name would be irrelevant tohow that name was meant; and the name could be private. The privatelanguage argument is intended to show that such subsequent facts couldnot be irrelevant, that no names could be private, and that the notionof having the true identity of a sensation revealed in a single act ofacquaintance is a confusion.

The suggestion that a language could be private in the way describedappears most openly in the second of Bertrand Russell’s publishedlectures ‘The Philosophy of Logical Atomism’, whereRussell says:

In a logically perfect language, there will be one word and no morefor every simple object, and everything that is not simple will beexpressed by a combination of words, by a combination derived, ofcourse, from the words for the simple things that enter in, one wordfor each simple component. A language of that sort will be completelyanalytic, and will show at a glance the logical structure of the factsasserted or denied. … A logically perfect language, if it couldbe constructed, would not only be intolerably prolix, but, as regardsits vocabulary, would be very largely private to one speaker. That isto say, all the names that it would use would be private to thatspeaker and could not enter into the language of another speaker.

… A name, in the narrow logical sense of a word whose meaningis a particular, can only be applied to a particular with which thespeaker is acquainted, because you cannot name anything you are notacquainted with.

… One can use ‘this’ as a name to stand for aparticular with which one is acquainted at the moment. We say‘This is white’. … But if you try to apprehend theproposition that I am expressing when I say ‘This iswhite’, you cannot do it. If you mean this piece of chalk as aphysical object, then you are not using a proper name. It is only whenyou use ‘this’ quite strictly, to stand for an actualobject of sense [i.e., a sense-datum], that it is really a propername. And in that it has a very odd property for a proper name, namelythat it seldom means the same thing two moments running and does notmean the same thing to the speaker and to the hearer.

… [I]n order to understand a name for a particular, the onlything necessary is to be acquainted with that particular. When you areacquainted with that particular, you have a full, adequate andcomplete understanding of the name, and no further information isrequired.

Although Wittgenstein does not explicitly say so, it is likely thatthis is the inspiration of his argument: his writing is marked in manyplaces by criticism of Russell, both explicit and otherwise.

In this context, we should take a moment to note a set of issues ofincreasing interest, namely, ones found in Cora Diamond’s claim in‘Does Bismarck Have a Beetle In His Box’ that:

TheTractatus provides us with arguments against theRussellian idea of someone else’s private object, the beetle inBismarck’s box. It lets us see that any such beetle would have no rolein language or thought, but it left unmolested the beetle in one’s ownbox. Russell’s conception of how we can think about things in theminds of others was subjected to a critique, but theTractatus left unexamined a questionable conception of whatit is for our words to be about things in our own minds. (p. 283)

It would not be until post-Tractarian work that Wittgenstein wouldturn his attention to question of private objects in one’s ownmind. Regarding Russell, as Diamond sees it, his commitment both toprivate objects and their possibility/admissibility comes primarilyfrom his views on knowledge by acquaintance in contrast to knowledgeby description, an important part of which is his holding that“…the chief importance of knowledge by description isthat it enables us to pass beyond the limits of our privateexperience. In spite of the fact that we can only know truths whichare wholly composed of terms which we have experienced inacquaintance, we can yet have knowledge by description of things whichwe have never experienced” (quoted in Diamond [2000],p. 267). Further, according to Diamond, it is Russell’sunderstanding and use of quantification that he employs to provide away to get around the problem of not being acquainted with the‘private’ objects in the minds of others. While Bismarckknows by direct acquaintance the meaning of ‘This isexcruciating’ said of his sensation, another can only say,‘Bismarck’s sensation is excruciating’. However,this can be meaningful once we understand that the its meaning is tobe analyzed in terms of, ‘Something is a sensation, had now byBismarck, and it is excruciating’ (p. 273). Once she hasidentified the importance of the issue of privacy for Russell, andlaid out the details of his position, she is primarily concerned toshow how Wittgenstein’s views in theTractatus(particularly on quantification, logical space, and there not beinglogical objects that serve as the referents of terms such as‘some’ and ‘all’) undermine Russell’sposition on quantification and private objects in other people’sminds. Further, she argues, briefly, for the importance of there beinga ‘private language argument’ in theTractatus along two main lines. First, she takes it to beimportant for our understanding of Wittgenstein’s work and itsdevelopment (and here her argument is firmly in line with herPyrrhonian and resolute reading of theTractatus and itscontinuity with Wittgenstein’s later work). Second, she takes it tohave implications for Michael Dummett’s way of framing the realism andanti-realism issue, especially as it relates to theTractatus. Against Dummett, she sees theTractatusas putting forward an anti-realist position, “…at anyrate about other people’s private objects” (p. 284).

As this entry is focused on the private language considerations foundprimarily in thePhilosophical Investigations, we will not gointo further detail regarding Diamond’s argument. However, asnoted above, the issues she raises are of increasing interest bothdirectly and indirectly. Directly, they are engaged by WilliamChild’s recent ’Does theTractatus contain aprivate language argument?’ in which he argues that Diamond ismore or less wrong across the board in her main contentions regardingthere being a private language argument in theTractatus andher assessment of theTractatus as anti-realist. His centralcontention is that Diamond projects views attributable to the laterWittgenstein into theTractatus, particularly thoseconcerning naming and use. However, he also argues thatWittgenstein’s 1929 views on sensation language‘challenge’ ‘new’ readings oftheTractatus, such as Diamond’s, where by ‘newreadings’ he means ones that, “find intheTractatus an absence of positive philosophical doctrines,a kind of quietism, and an explicitly therapeutic approach that havetraditionally been associated with Wittgenstein’s laterphilosophy” (p. 143).

Indirectly, Diamond’s piece is in line with an increasing interest inquestions of how to read Wittgenstein, such as those we noted above inour discussion of the resolute-substantial andPyrrhonian-non-Pyrrhonian ‘Wittgensteins’. The issues raised in thesecontexts have further relevance for understanding other centralWittgensteinian themes such as how best to respond to the temptationsof solipsism (see Stern [2010] for a helpful overview of many of theseissues; he does not discuss Diamond directly, but he does focus on thequestion of the development of Wittgenstein’s thought and, forexample, the question of solipsism in the context of private languageconsiderations. Another recent example of interest in Wittgenstein’sphilosophical development, and explicitly one that concerns privatelanguage, is Nielson [2008]).

To return to our exposition of the private language concerns found inthePhilosophical Investigations, in distinction fromRussell’s work, for example, the idea of a private language is moreusually hidden: the confusions supposed to belong to it allegedlyunderlie a range of articulated philosophical notions and theories,without themselves being so articulated. The argument is thus perhapsmost profitably read as targeting, not any particular theory, butrather the motivation for considering a range of apparentlyindependent or even competing theories along with their associatedtasks, problems and solutions.

For example, a still very common idea, often attributed to John Lockeand openly embraced by Jerry Fodor in the nineteen seventies, is thatinterpersonal spoken communication works by speakers’ translation oftheir internal mental vocabularies into sounds followed by hearers’re-translation into their own internal vocabularies. Again, Descartesconsidered himself able to talk to himself about his experiences whileclaiming to be justified in saying that he does not know (or not untilhe has produced a reassuring philosophical argument) anything at allabout an external world conceived as something independent of them.And he and others have thought: while I may make mistakes about theexternal world, I can infallibly avoid error if I confine my judgmentsto my immediate sensations. (CompareThe Principles ofPhilosophy, I, 9.) Again, many philosophers, including JohnStuart Mill, have supposed there to be a problem of other minds,according to which I may reasonably doubt the legitimacy of applying,say, sensation-words to beings other than myself.

In each of these examples, the implication is that the internalvehicle of my musings could in principle be private (as Kenny [1966,p. 369] showed, this vehicle does not have to be alanguagefor the argument to apply to it): for these problems and theories evento make sense, sharability must be irrelevant to meaning and it mustbe at least conceivable that my knowledge, even my understanding, isnecessarily confined to my own case. The implication is of courseoften denied. The terms of Fodor’s language of thought, for example,are supposed to be able to refer to public objects. But the questionis, on what basis does this ability rest? However this question shouldbe answered, Fodor himself was concerned enough about Wittgenstein’sargument to try to show both that it did not apply to his viewsand—apparently superfluously—that it is not a goodargument anyway (Fodor pp. 68–73). The matter is clearer withDescartes (compare Kenny 1966): for his sceptical question to beraised without being immediately self-defeating, he must hold itpossible to identify his experiences inwardly—where‘inwardly’ means without relying on resources supplied byhis essential embodiment in a world whose existence is independent ofhis own mind and accessible to others (e.g., such resources as theconcepts acquired in a normal upbringing). The question whichaccordingly looms large in the private language argument is: How isthis identification of one’s experiences to be achieved?

However, it cannot be emphasized too strongly that the significance ofthe private language argument does not rest on the scholarly detail ofwhether this or that thinker can be correctly described as committedto the idea. The target is a way of thinking which generatesphilosophical theories, not the theories themselves.

3. The Private Language Argument Expounded

3.1 Preliminaries

As already noted, the private language sections ofPhilosophicalInvestigations are usually held to begin at §243 (thoughwe shall see that Wittgenstein relies on points made much earlier inthe book). The methodological issues canvassed above arise at theoutset, in the interpretation of §243’s crucial secondparagraph.

On a substantial/non-Pyrrhonian reading, Wittgenstein begins toclarify what kind of philosophically important notion of privatelanguage is to be examined, i.e., one that is necessarily private andwhich refers to one’s immediate private sensations. In the remarksthat follow, Wittgenstein argues that the idea of such a privatelanguage is nonsensical or incoherent because it is a violation ofgrammar (i.e., Wittgenstein draws on his substantive views onmeaning).

On a resolute/Pyrrhonian reading, it is emphasized that the reader isasked in the first sentence of the second paragraph whether one canactuallyimagine a language for one’s inner experiences, forprivate use. Wittgenstein at this point reminds the interlocutor thatwe already use ordinary language for that. But the interlocutorquickly replies in the last three lines of §243 that what he isasking is whether we can imaginea private language that refers towhat only the speaker can know. In the following sections,Wittgenstein examines ‘whether there is a way of meaning thewords of the penultimate sentence [of §243] that does not simplyreturn us to a banality, whether in fact his interlocutor meansanything in particular with those words’ (Mulhall 2007, p. 18).The question is whether the notion of a language ‘which only Imyself can understand’ can be given any substantial meaning tobegin with. On this latter reading, §§258 and 270, forexample, are attempts to give the interlocutor what he says he wants,but which, in the end, amount to nothing (in the case of 258) or bringus back to a publicly understandable language (in the case of270).

As we saw above, in section 1.2, it is not clear that we must choosebetween these two readings. On either, the point of the privatelanguage argument is that the idea is exposed as unintelligible whenpressed—we cannot make sense of the circumstances in which weshould say that someone is using a private language.

So, having introduced the idea of a private language in the wayalready quoted, Wittgenstein goes on to argue in a preliminarydiscussion (§§244–255) that there are two senses of‘private’ which a philosopher might have in mind insuggesting that sensations are private, and that sensations as theyare talked about in natural languages (such as English and German) arein fact private in neither of them. He then turns, at §256, tothe question whether there could be a private language at all. Hecontinues to talk of sensations, and of pain as an example, but oneshould remember that these are notour sensations, theeveryday facts of human existence, but the supposed exemplars ofphilosophical accounts of the everyday facts. Thus, forinstance, they might be the sensations of something like a Cartesiansoul (perhaps one associated with a physical body, as indicated in§§257 and 283), something which has no publicly availablemental life and whose “experiences” are accordinglyprivate. (It is worth noting that the earlier Anscombe translation ismisleading here: in §243, for example, where the idea of aprivate language is introduced, it loses the crucial contrast, soevident in the original German, between the ordinary human beingsdescribed as solitary speakers in the first paragraph and the secondparagraph’s mysterious ‘one’ who is the‘speaker’ of a private language and whose nature iscarefully left unclear. See the recent 4th edition translation of thisparagraph, a relevant part is in the first sentence of this article,to find a version closer to the original German.) Consistent with thispoint is that in §256 Wittgenstein suggests that one cannotarrive at the idea of a private language by considering a naturallanguage: natural languages are not private, for our sensations areexpressed. But neither can we arrive at the idea by starting with anatural language and just subtracting from it all expression ofsensations (temporary paralysis is clearly not in question), as heconsiders next, for as he says in §257, even if there could belanguage in such a situation as this where teaching is impossible, theearlier argument ofPhilosophical Investigations(§§33–35), concerning ostensive definition, has shownthat mere “mental association” of one thing with anotheris not alone enough to make the one into a name of the other. Namingone’s sensation requires a place for the new word: that is, a notionof sensation. The attempt to name a sensation in a conceptual vacuummerely raises the questions of what this business is supposed toconsist in, and what is itspoint. But, for the sake ofgetting to the heart of the matter, Wittgenstein puts the first ofthese questions on one side and pretends that it is sufficient for thesecond to imagine himself in the position of establishing a privatelanguage for the purpose of keeping a diary of his sensations.

However, to investigate the possibility of the imagined diary case byexploring it from the inside (the only way, he thinks, really toexpose the confusions involved) requires him to use certain words whenit is just the right to use these words which is in question. Thus heis forced to mention in §258 examples like ostensive definition,concentrating the attention, speaking, writing, remembering, believingand so on, in the very process of suggesting that none of these canreally occur in the situation under consideration (§261).

This difficulty has often gone unnoticed by commentators on theargument, with particularly unhappy results for the understanding ofthe discussion of the diary example. Fogelin [1976], for instance, aparadigm representative of Orthodoxy, treats this as a case wherehe himself, a living embodied human being, keeps a diary andrecords the occurrences of a sensation which he finds it impossible todescribe to anyone else. But we are not to assume that the descriptionof the keeping of the diary is a description of a possible or evenultimately intelligible case. In particular, we are not to think ofsuch a human being’s keeping a real diary, but of something like theCartesian internal equivalent. It is thus vital to the argument thatthe diary case is presented in the first person, without our pressingthe question, ‘Who is speaking?’ At this stage we aresimply not to worry about whether the diary story ultimately makessense or not. But the fact that it may not make sense must beremembered in reading what follows, which in strictness shouldconstantly be disfigured with scare quotes. (We shall, as we havealready, occasionally supply them as a reminder, reserving doublequotes for this purpose.)

To summarize the argument’s preliminary stage: In §256Wittgenstein asked of the “private language”,‘How do I use words to signify my sensations?’,and reminded us in §257 that we cannot answer ‘As weordinarily do’. So this question, which is the same question as‘How do I obtain meaning for the expressions in a “privatelanguage”?’ is still open; and the answer must beindependent of ouractual connections between words andsensations. In the attempt to arrive at an answer, and explore thequestion in its full depth, he temporarily allows the use of thenotions of sensation and diary-keeping (despite the objections of§257), and imagines himself in the position of a private linguistrecording his sensations in a diary. The aim is to show that even ifthis concession is made, meaning for a sensation-word still cannot besecured and maintained by such a linguist. The crucial central part ofthe argument begins here, at §258.

3.2 The Central Argument

Wittgenstein points out in the diary case ‘I first want toobserve that a definition of the sign cannot be formulated’.(The translation here obscures the reason why. Wittgenstein’s word is‘aussprechen’, better translated as‘expressed’ than ‘formulated’: the pointfollows by definition from the fact that the case is one where thedefinition is private.) So if meaning is to be obtained for the“sign”, this must be achieved through a private exerciseof ostensive definition, where I concentrate on the sensation andproduce the sign at the same time. (In these circumstances, meaningcannot be extracted from a pre-existing practice of private use, sincewhat is in question is how such a use could be established in thefirst place.) But if this exercise is to be genuine and successfulostensive definition, it mustestablish the connectionbetween sign and sensation, and this connection mustpersist.As Wittgenstein says, ‘“I commit [the connection] tomemory” can only mean: this process brings it about that Iremember the connectioncorrectly in the future’. For Ido not define anything, even to myself let alone anyone else, bymerely attending to something and making a mark, unless this episodehas the appropriate consequences.

3.3 Interlude: the Rejection of Orthodoxy

At this point we should suspend our exposition of the argument, inorder to examine closely the remark ‘this process brings itabout that I remember the connectioncorrectly in thefuture’.

This remark has usually been interpreted as a demand that, for thesign ‘S’ to have been given a meaning, it mustalways figure thereafter (if used affirmatively and sincerely) as atrue statement: that is, I must use the sign ‘S’affirmatively only when I really do have the sensationS. Andit has usually been thought that the subsequent argument concerns theadequacy of memory to ensure that I do not later misidentify mysensations and call a different kind of sensation‘S’ in the future. This account of the argumentand its history is summed up by Anthony Kenny as follows:

Many philosophers have taken ‘I remember the connectionright’ to mean ‘I use “S” when andonly when I really haveS’. They then takeWittgenstein’s argument to be based on scepticism about memory: howcan you be sure that you have remembered aright when next you call asensation ‘S’? …

Critics of Wittgenstein have found the argument, so interpreted, quiteunconvincing. Surely, they say, the untrustworthiness of memorypresents no more and no less a problem for the user of a privatelanguage than for the user of a public one. No, Wittgenstein’sdefenders have said, for memory-mistakes about public objects may becorrected, memory-mistakes about private sensations cannot; and wherecorrection is impossible, talk of correctness is out of place. At thispoint critics of Wittgenstein have either denied that truth demandscorrigibility, or have sought to show that checking is possible in theprivate case too. (Kenny[ 1973] pp. 191–2)

This interplay of criticism and defence characterizes the Orthodoxinterpretation of the argument. (See Fogelin [1976], pp. 162–4,for a good example.) There seem to be at least two reasons why thisinterpretation should have become established. First, philosopherscommitted to the idea of a private language are often looking for anarrangement in which mistakes of fact are impossible; that is, theyare trying to overcome scepticism by finding absolute certainty.(Descartes is the example usually cited.) And this would makesceptical arguments appear to be natural weapons to use in reply tothem. (See, e.g., Fogelin [1976] p. 153.) Secondly, it isplausible—which is not the same as correct—to suppose thatone cannot be mistaken concerning the natures of one’s presentsensations, and a supposed proof that the idea of a private languageentails that one is just as fallible on this subject as on any othercould thus seem crippling to that idea.

But, as Kenny first showed, the question of factual infallibility infuture uses of the sign ‘S’ is not the issue. Ifwe look closely at §258, we see that ‘I remember theconnectioncorrectly’ refers to remembering ameaning, namely, the meaning of the sign‘S’, not to making sure that I infallibly apply‘S’ only toS’s in the future. (Nor doesthe private language argument depend on taking the latter to be aneffect of the former.)

3.4 The Central Argument Continued

Now that we are clearer about what the connection is which has to beremembered right, we can return to the exposition of the argument. Iam to imagine that I am a private linguist. I have a sensation, andmake the mark ‘S’ at the same time, as I might inan ordinary case introduce a sign by ostensive definition. Afterwards,I “believe” myself to have established a meaning for thissign ‘S’, and I now use it to judge that I amagain experiencing the same sensation. What do I mean by‘S’ on this second occasion? Wittgensteinconsiders two possible answers.

The First Answer

One of the answers is that what I mean by ‘S’ isjust the sort of sensation I am now having. Of this Wittgenstein saysmerely:

… whatever is going to seem correct to me is correct. And thatonly means that here we can’t talk about ‘correct’.

The point is highly condensed. Here is a more explicit version. Forthere to be factual assertion, there must be the distinction betweentruth and falsehood, between saying what is the case and saying whatis not. For there to be the distinction between truth and falsehood,there must be a further distinction between the source of the meaning,and the source of the truth, of what is said. Suppose that I confrontsome object and say of it ‘This isS’. If I mustalso appeal to this very object to make this utterance intelligible tomyself, I deprive it of any claim to the status of factualassertion—it becomes, at best, ostensive definition. (The‘at best’ is important here, for the same reason that thediary example is not to be assumed genuinely possible.)

The Second Answer

The second answer Wittgenstein considers to the question of what Imean by ‘S’ is this: I mean by‘S’, not this current sensation, but thesensation I named ‘S’ in the past. We havealready seen, in Kenny’s rejection of the Orthodox reading of theargument, that scepticism about memory has no place in the discussionof “private language”; the text simply does not supportit. But at this point we must break with Kenny too. For according tohis account the crucial claim becomes: ‘If it is possible for meto misremember my previous ostensive definition of“S”, then I do not really know what“S” means.’ (See, e.g., Kenny [1973] p.194.) This is just conventional scepticism about memory extended toinclude meanings as well as judgments. And it is an elementary pointof epistemology that knowing something does not obviously entail justas a result of the definition of knowledge that it isimpossible for one to be wrong about that thing, only thatone is not in fact wrong.

What has gone wrong? The answer is that Kenny’s and the Orthodoxaccounts share an unnoticed assumption: that even in the circumstancesof the “private language” there is actually an applicationof a sign to a private sensation by a private linguist. The problem asKenny then conceives it is one of later remembering this earlierapplication in order that ‘S’ should haveretained its meaning. The question then seems to be whether one’sadmittedly fallible memory is adequate for the maintenance of meaning.But why should this assumption be allowed? What entitles us to assumethat a private linguist could even ostensively define his sign tohimself in the first place? As we have seen, this is one of thematters in question; and §§260 and 261 show thatWittgenstein was not prepared to let an argument in favour of privatelanguage proceed from this assumption. In these two sectionsWittgenstein reminds us that his arguments in the earlier sections(e.g., 33–35) ofPhilosophical Investigations showedthat ostensive definition was not achieved by any performance unlesscertain circumstantial conditions are fulfilled; and nothing about thediary case as so far described shows them to be fulfilled. It is onlylater (§§270–271) that Wittgenstein imagines a partialfulfilment of them, and the result there is to render the languagepublic.

One cause of the muddle is Wittgenstein’s insistence that there mustbe a distinction between obeying a rule and merely thinking that onehas. This does not result, as the Orthodox have supposed, in a demandfor, and eventual rejection of, ‘memory-infallibility in aprivate language’: demand and rejection being based respectivelyon the grounds that without infallibility one could always be goingwrong and would never know if one were, and with infallibility onewould collapse the distinction between obeying a rule and merelythinking one was obeying it. Rather, the argument is this. The privatelinguist cannot legislate a meaning for a sign by “privateostensive definition”merely—for this has toestablish a technique of using the sign (§260). The techniquecannot function by means of repeated “ostensivedefinitions”, as we saw in examining the first answer, sincethis collapses the distinction between meaning and truth and thusdestroys the possibility of making factual judgments. So the so-called“definition” has on some other basis to establish aconstancy in use of the sign.

But this is just what is in question. What would beconstancyhere? What wouldbe using the sign in the same way as before?Howwas the sign used in the first place? As there cannot beassumed to be a way of using the sign which the linguist succeeds evenin determining, let alone establishing, and which is the correct way,independent of the linguist’s later impression of the correct way,then a defender of “private language” would have to showthat there was. It might now seem as if one could show this byappealing to the private linguist’s memory. He simply remembers how heused the sign before. And this looks straightforward enough, becauseone thinks: he certainly did something before, for he remembers it.And we do not require his memory to be infallible. But the memory doesat least have to be amemory: that is, accurate or not, ithas to be of something determinate which existed independently of thememory of it; and the “memory” alone cannot bring such athing into existence.

This is the argument of §265, which has often been mistakenlygiven an epistemological interpretation. Again we cannot assume thatthere has been an actual table (even a mental one) of meanings in thecase of the private linguist, a table which is now recalled and aboutwhich the linguist must rely on recall since the original has gone.Rather, as §§260–264 show, there may be nothingdeterminate other than this “remembering of the table”. Sowhen we think that a private linguist could remember the meaning of‘S’ by remembering a past correlation of the sign‘S’ with a sensation, we are supposing what needsto be itself established—that there was indeed some independentcorrelation to be remembered. Fallibility of memory, even of memory ofmeaning, is neither here nor there: the point is not that there isdoubtnow about the trustworthiness of memory, but that therewas doubtthen about the status of what occurred. And thisoriginal,non-epistemological, doubt cannot later be removedby “recollections” of a status inherently dubious in thefirst place. That is, if there was no genuine original correlation inthe first place, a “memory” will not create one. But if,alternatively, we do not suppose that there was something independentof the memory to be remembered, again ‘what seems right isright’; the “memory” of the“correlation” is being employed to confirm itself, forthere is no independent access to the “rememberedcorrelation”. (Not even the independent access that we have asposers of the example, since the question is, can we pose such anexample? The typical mistake commentators make here is to disguise theproblem by thinking ofS in terms of some already establishedconcept, such as pain, which they bring to the examplethemselves.) This is why Wittgenstein says in §265, ‘As ifsomeone were to buy several copies of today’s morning paper to assurehimself that what it said was true’.

The Closing Stages

So far the argument has been conducted in terms of an ‘I’not essentially related to body or related only to an inert body. At§269, however, it moves to examples where there is bodilybehaviour but despite this there is still the temptation to think ofprivate meanings for words independent of their public use. Thissuggests a further chance for a defender of the idea of a privatelanguage: that a private linguist might secure a meaning for his sign‘S’ by correlating its private use with somepublic phenomenon. This would apparently serve to provide a functionfor the noting of ‘S’ in the diary (§260)and thus give a place for ostensive definition, and would give as wella guarantee that there is some constancy in the linguist’s use of theterm ‘S’ independent of his impression of suchconstancy. Wittgenstein uses the example of the manometer in§§270–271 to consider this idea, and his criticism ofit is in effect that this method of securing meaning works, but thatthe secured meaning is public: the so-called “privateobject”, even if there were such a thing, is revealed to beirrelevant to meaning. Presumably a defender of “privatelanguage” would hope that the example would work like this: if Ikeep saying, on the basis of my sensation, that my blood pressure isrising, and the manometer shows that I am right, then this success injudging my own blood pressure shows that I had in fact established aprivate meaning for the sign ‘S’ and was usingthe sign in the same way each time to judge that my sensation was thesame each time. However, all the example really shows is that justthinking that I have the same sensation now as I had when my bloodpressure rose formerly, can be a good guide to the rising of my bloodpressure. Whether in some “private sense” the sensationwas “actually the same” or not becomes completelyirrelevant to the question of constancy in the use of‘S’—that is, there is no gap between theactual nature of the sensation and my impression of it, and‘S’ in this case could mean merely‘sensation of the rising of the blood pressure’; indeed,for all we are told of the sign’s role, it could even mean just‘blood pressure rising’.

3.5 Are the Orthodox Objections Met?

Does the ruling out of memory-scepticism as irrelevant to the privatelanguage argument mean that two associated Orthodox objections to itare likewise irrelevant? The first of these is that the argument,self-defeatingly, rules out a public language as well. The secondrelies on the ‘community view’ interpretation: it is thatthe argument, equally self-defeatingly, rules out as impossiblesomething perfectly conceivable: namely, the case of a so-called‘Robinson Crusoe’, a human being who, unlike Defoe’soriginal Crusoe, is isolated from birth but devises a language for hisown purposes without his having first been taught another language bysomeone else. Wittgenstein’s Orthodox defenders, faced with thissecond objection, looked to be on shaky ground, often being forcedinto the position of conceding that the argument did indeed excludethe case, but claiming (not very plausibly) that such a Crusoe isafter all impossible so that the concession was not damaging.

The question as it concerns the first objection has already beenanswered. The supposed threat to public language arose entirely fromthe claim that memory-scepticism could not be confined to the privatecase. But since scepticism concerning memory is no part of theargument, there is no reason to suppose that any question of suchconfinement arises, and thus there is no question of the argument’sbeing self-defeating by excluding the possibility of something we knowto be actual, i.e., the language we already have. Now showing theabsence of any appeal to memory-scepticism involved transferring theburden of the argument from the question of whether or not anostensive definition could be remembered or not to the question ofwhether there could be an ostensive definition in the first place.

This enables us to answer the question as it concerns the secondobjection. It is clear that an argument which has as its focus thequestion of ostensive definition is not committed to ruling out inadvance all hypothetical cases of ‘Robinson Crusoes’. Forthere is noa priori barrier to imagining a form of lifecomplex enough for us to be assured that a determinate ostensivedefinition had been accomplished by such a being. Such a Crusoe,unlike a private linguist, lives in a world independent of hisimpressions of it, and thus there could be definite occurrences in itwhich he could remember or forget; and some of those occurrences couldbe correlations of signs with objects. It is easy to describe suchhypothetical cases (a clear example appears in pages 486–8 ofCanfield [1996]), and difficult to give a plausible denial that insome sense they are possible. There are, however, furthercomplications here, described briefly in section 4 below.

4. Kripke’s Sceptical Wittgenstein

The Orthodox domination of the secondary literature on privatelanguage was largely ended by Saul Kripke’s account of Wittgenstein’streatment of rules and private language, in which Wittgenstein appearsas a sceptic concerning meaning. Kripke (p. 5) denies commitment tothe identity of this sceptical figure with its historical source, and,appropriately, his account has spawned a literature of its own inwhich discussion often proceeds largely independently of the originalprivate language argument: Kripke’s Wittgenstein, real or fictional,has become a philosopher in his own right, and for many people, it isnot an issue whether the historical Wittgenstein’s original ideasabout private language are faithfully captured in this version. Thecomplexities of the subsequent discussion of thephilosophical—as opposed to interpretative—questionsraised by Kripke’s Wittgenstein need a separate article to themselves.(For a survey, see Boghossian [1989].) All that will be settled hereis the interpretative question.

Kripke’s account resembles that given here in its rejection ofOrthodoxy and in its emphasis on the logical priority ofWittgenstein’s discussion of rule-following to that of privatelanguage. It differs in the prominence it gives to the openingsentence ofPhilosophical Investigations §201:‘This was our paradox: no course of action could be determinedby a rule, because every course of action can be brought into accordwith the rule.’ Kripke says of this (p. 68), ‘Theimpossibility of private language emerges as a corollary of[Wittgenstein’s] sceptical solution of his own paradox’.Wittgenstein himself immediately brushed this “paradox”aside in his very next paragraph: ‘That there is amisunderstanding here …’; but Kripke takes the paradox topose a genuine and profound sceptical problem about meaning.

The example Kripke chooses to illustrate the problem is that ofaddition. What is it to grasp the rule of addition? The application ofthe rule is potentially infinite, and bizarre interpretations of therule, as well as the standard use of it, are compatible with anyfinite set of applications of the usual sort such as 7 + 14 = 21. Sowhat is it which makes it true that when I say ‘plus’ Imean the usual addition function and not some other? Kripke (pp.62–71) understands this question as containing a Humean problemto which, he claims, Wittgenstein gives a Humean,‘sceptical’ solution.

What Kripke means by this comparison with a Humean problem is thatWittgenstein is questioning the nexus between a past act of meaningand subsequent practice in a way analogous to that in which Humequestions the causal nexus between a single past event and asubsequent one. And what he means by a Humean solution is that thereis a corresponding analogy between the ways in which Hume andWittgenstein handle their respective problems. Kripke’s view is that,just as Hume says, in effect, “Unique causation isunintelligible;A’s causingB consists inA’s being embedded in a pattern of the following ofA-type-events byB-type-events which inclines us toassert thatA causedB”, so, comparably,Wittgenstein says, in effect, “Unique meaning is unintelligible;rather, someone’s meaning the usual addition function when saying‘plus’ consists in their being considered by a communityto have passed the community’s test for employing thatfunction.”

Kripke formulates the so-called Humean problem in two differentways.

The first way is this: “[T]here is no fact about me thatdistinguishes my meaning a definite function by ‘plus’… and my meaning nothing at all” (p. 21). The absence ofthis fact, in Kripke’s view, leads Wittgenstein to abandon theexplanation of the meanings of statements like “By‘plus’, I meant addition” in terms oftruth-conditions, and to replace it with explanation in terms ofassertibility-conditions, which involve actual (not merely potential)community agreement. (Hence the claim that this is a ‘scepticalsolution’: Wittgenstein is supposed to concede to the scepticthe absence of truth-conditions for such statements.) This agreement,on Kripke’s account, legitimizes the assertion that I meant additionby ‘plus’ despite there having been no fact of thematter.

This requirement of community agreement for meaning (the‘community view’) obviously rules out the possibility ofprivate language immediately, thereby rendering the argument ofPhilosophical Investigations §§256–271superfluous. This superfluity makes for an odd reading of the text;and the oddness is highlighted by the observation that this firstformulation of the sceptical problem relies on Kripke’s assumptionthat we have some idea of what a fact is, independent of a statement’sbeing true. For one of the themes ofPhilosophicalInvestigations is that there is no such idea, that the onlyroute to the identification of facts is through the uses of theexpressions in which those facts are stated, uses which give us thetruth-conditions. These uses are often very different from what wewould expect—hence the impression that truth-conditions arelacking—and it is a matter of some philosophical difficulty tosee them clearly.

The other formulation of the problem is this (Kripke p. 62):“Wittgenstein questions the nexus between past‘intention’ or ‘meanings’ and presentpractice: for example, between my past ‘intentions’ withregard to ‘plus’ and my present computation ….” The idea is that my grasp of the rule governing the use of‘plus’ does not determine that I shall produce a uniqueanswer for each of indefinitely many new additions in the future. Theimpression that something is missing here, though, is a result of justthat kind of confusion about determination identified in the sectionheaded ‘The Significance of the Issue’ above.

Kripke’s account of the private language argument is thus vitiated byhis unargued reliance on ideas which Wittgenstein argued against. Thisof course does not show that he has not hit upon a new and moreinteresting notion of private language than that expounded here.Further, his reading of the argument gave new life to the debate overthe community view.

4.1 The Community View Revisited

Although, as was just said, the community view is not easilyreconciled with part of Wittgenstein’s text, the matter is less clearthan has been indicated so far. Significantly, even the most careful,insightful and sympathetic of Wittgenstein’s commentators have dividedon this matter (for example, Malcolm for the community view, and Bakerand Hacker against it). The dispute is partly explained by the factthat the original texts (including some from Wittgenstein’smanuscripts) seem to point two ways, some supporting the account givenabove (that the burden of the argument is that language must bepotentially social), others the community view that language isessentially social.

That is, textual support can be found for two apparently conflictingexegetical claims:

1. Language is essentially social.
2. It is conceptually (even if not psychologically) possible that alifelong Crusoe (i.e., a human being isolated from birth) shouldemploy some kind of linguistic system and follow rules in sodoing.

And the contending parties share the assumption that the conflict isgenuine.

There is, however, reason to believe that this assumption is false,for investigation of Wittgenstein’s notions ofessential,possible andlifelong Crusoe shows that admission ofthe first claim does not commit him to the denial of the second. Totake the first notion: on Wittgenstein’s view, while chess isessentially a game for two players, this does not exclude thepossibility of playing it against oneself provided such solitary gamesare not regarded as paradigm instances of chess. Similarly, he canclaim that language is essentially social, but still allow thepossibility of exceptions provided these are peripheral cases. Theissue is complex, and its pursuit would lead away from the currentarticle’s purpose of articulating the central text. For a detailedaccount, the reader is referred to Canfield [1996] (to which thissection is indebted, and which also contains a useful bibliography ofthe debate over the community view), and to Hacker [2010].

Bibliography

The secondary literature on this topic is enormous. The following listis highly selective, and entries are included by meeting at least oneof the following criteria: good representative of a standard readingof the argument; influential source, primary or secondary; usefulcollection of items meeting one or other of the previous two criteria;useful survey; item making recent and significant progress in theunderstanding and assessment of the argument; source drawn on in thewriting of this article; item mentioned in the main text of thisarticle.

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