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THE ROLE OF PHILOSOPHICAL INVESTIGATIONS 258: WHAT IS THE PRIVATE LANGUAGE ARGUMENT?

DEREK A. McDOUGALL

Culloden Inverness

Introduction

The Private Language Sections of Ludwig Wittgensteins Philosophical Investiga-tions, generally agreed to run from 243271, but extending to 315 with thebooks continued treatment of the private object model and the inner and outerconception of the mind, have proved remarkably resistant to any generally

agreed interpretation. Even today, ways of looking at these sections which werefirst in vogue half a century ago when discussions of this aspect of Wittgen-steins work were at their height, still have their adherents, at a time when theemphasis in Wittgenstein exegesis has graduated towards anti-theoretical, non-doctrinal, and therapeutic conceptions of his entire methodology. Discussionabout the rule-following considerations after Saul Kripkes new interpretationof the argument against private language, which predominated during the lastquarter of the 20th century, has tended to be superseded into the new millen-nium by controversy over substantial versus resolute conceptions of nonsensein the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, a debate now seen by some interpreters to

illuminate Wittgensteins later work. This paper sheds light on these complexmatters firstly by studying a very popular interpretative approach to the rel-evant sections within its historical context, and secondly by attempting to grasphis overall methodology, primarily as practised in the private language pas-sages themselves. This can help to show how they may reflect the content of 89133. However, just as it can be argued that Hume never fully reconciles thesceptical and naturalistic tendencies in his writing, it can be surmised thatWittgenstein never really finds a proper balance between the avowedly thera-peutic intent of those stated passages and what, at least for some commentators,are the clearly discoverable argumentative strategies that he employs through-

out his treatment of private language and, indeed, throughout Part 1 of thePhilosophical Investigations (A).

1. A Popular Interpretation of The Private Language Argument

Since its publication in 1953, no part of Ludwig Wittgensteins PhilosophicalInvestigations has been subject to more scrutiny than those sections generally

A. Now classified in the latest P. M. S. Hacker & Joachim Schulte edition (Oxford, Wiley-

Blackwell, 2009) as the Philosophical Investigations simpliciter, Part II becoming Philosophy of Psychology A Fragment. One philosopher among others who readily discovers these argumentativestrategies is Meredith Williams. See her recent Blind Obedience Paradox and Learning in the LaterWittgenstein (Abington, Routledge, 2010).

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Analytic Philosophy Vol. 54 No. 1 March 2013 pp. 4471

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agreed to run from 243271 dealing with a language only I myself canunderstand,1 sections which for this reason have been taken to comprise whathas come to be known as The Private Language Argument. While this title isnot used by Wittgenstein himself, it had rarely been in question until recentlythat an argument of some kind is being presented in those sections. Its exactnature, however, and the philosophical standpoints it was presumed either toattack, defend, or deflate, have been the subject of interminable dispute. Thosesections, indeed, including the extended discussion of privacy and the privateobject model up to 315, have proved to be the most contentious in thePhilosophical Investigations. As Stewart Candlish puts it in his very concise surveyof the entire private language question, there has been fundamental andwidespread disagreement over its details, its significance, and even its intendedconclusion, let alone its soundness.2 Consequently, as Candlish concludes,every reading of the argument including his own is controversial. Yet long

after the pioneering reviews of the Philosophical Investigations by Malcolm andStrawson, the famous early debate between Ayer and Rhees, the extendeddiscussions in the 1960s by philosophers as astute as Donagan, Pitcher andKenny,3 and Kripkes highly influential treatment of rule-following-and-private-language, recent commentary has tended to deny any role forargument in 258270, emphasising instead a grammatical investigation intoour concepts4 in accordance, as we shall see, with a methodology that hasa distinctly anthropocentric thrust.

In 243271, Wittgenstein has two different objects of attack. His primaryargument in 258 is directed against a model of radical privacy: private objects

on this model are so defined that they fail to meet any criteria which wouldallow them to function as the objects of reference within ordinary language asit is used to permit first and third person sensation ascription. This primaryargument will be discussed in Section 3. However, he also employs a secondarymethodological argument, and this is directed against presuppositions under-lying a popular reading of 258 which still has adherents today. Scott Soamesin 2003 is only one of a number of commentators who adhere to this histori-cally popular interpretation. His account of 258 is expressed as follows:

Suppose I were to introduce some word to refer to a momentary sensation that

was private to mei.e., a particular sensation that others could not have orobserve (though they could, perhaps, have similar sensations of the sametype). Suppose, further, that in the future I wanted to use the word to refer to

1. Philosophical Investigations, trans. G.E.M. Anscombe (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1963), 256.2. Private Language in Stanford Encylopedia of Philosophy, Stewart Candlish, 1996 revised by

George Wrisley 2010, at: http://www.plato.stanford.edu/entries/private-language3. George Pitcher: The Philosophy of Wittgenstein (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall 1964). All

other authors with their seminal papers appear in the book edited by George Pitcher, Wittgen-stein The Philosophical Investigations (New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1966).

4. With an accompanying concern for the importance of a therapeutic understanding of Witt-

gensteins philosophy. See, for example, Marie McGinn: Wittgenstein and The Philosophical Inves-tigations (London: Routledge, 1997) Chap. 4, David Stern: Wittgensteins Philosophical Investigations(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), Chap. 7, and Gordon Bakers posthumousWittgensteins Method: Neglected Aspects (Oxford: Blackwell Pub., 2004) Chapters 57.

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other sensations of mine that were of the same type. In such a situation,neither I nor anyone else would be able to conclusively determine whether Iwas using the word correctly . . . Without such an ability, there could be nocontent to the claim that I was using the word correctly . . . Thus, Wittgensteinconcludes, no one can meaningfully use a term purely privately.5

The significant feature of this interpretation lies in its reference to sensations ofthe same type, for this contains a presupposition that relates Soamess reading toways of understanding this passage provided originally by philosophers asdiverse as Strawson and Ayer. In effect, Soames is employing an ambivalentnotion of privacy allowing private objects to be numerically distinct entitiesowned by different speakers, yet which is akin to an ordinary notion of privacyin that it allows the sensations enjoyed by these speakers to be of the same ordifferent types. But this is already to think that these sensations possess a

characteristic which Wittgenstein can be shown to take a private object, bydefinition, to lack. This means that the argument Wittgenstein is supposedlypresenting in 258 is already undermined if the notion of a sensation typepresupposes the ability to consistently apply a meaning-rule in a privatecontext. But this is a conclusion that Soames has already endorsed earlier in hispresentation:

Nothing in the Investigationsrules out the possibility that perception providesthe agent with representational content. We know that pre-linguistic agentscan distinguish different colors. . . . But if the agent already has somethinga part of his visual systemthat represents things as being redthen it

doesnt seem to be a huge step to suppose that he could introduce somethingelsea word with that same content.6

Consequently, if a word can be used consistently in these terms, as Soamescontinues to take for granted in his ensuing argument, the strong thesis of theprivate language argument as he understands it, namely, that no meaningfulword used by a speaker stands for any kind of private sensation, is subject todecisive refutation:

More strongly, I suggest that we do have such perception-like experiences,

and that we could introduce sensation terminology more or less in accordwith the above story. . . . Since such terminology would refer to states andevents that are, in a natural sense, internal to individual agents, the strongthesis of the private language argument should be regarded as incorrect.7

Soamess discussion, involving a distinction between a weak thesis and a strongthesis, follows Strawson who takes the strong thesis, namely, that no wordsname sensations or private experiences to be false, and the weak thesis,namely, that the existence of a common language is a condition of ascribing

5. Scott Soames: Philosophical Analysis in the Twentieth Century, Volume 2, The Age of Meaning(Princetonand Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2003) 44 et seq.6. Ibid., 37.7. Ibid., 56.

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sensations to those who have them, to be true. Strawson even suggests at onepoint that Wittgenstein gets himself into a muddle, confusing the weaker thesiswith the stronger when, Strawson argues, we can properly be said to recogniseor identify a sensation like a taste, even if in doing so we do not use criteria ofidentity for the taste.8 While this indicates that Strawsons difference fromWittgenstein on this point may really be no more than verbal, given that whatStrawson is clearly calling our attention to is the Wittgensteinian point thatfirst-person sensation ascription is criterionless, his overall approach is never-theless criticised by Malcolm, who argues against Strawsons suggestion that aman might invent a private language simply by getting into the habit of makinga mark in a certain place every time a sensation occurred:

In the mere supposition that there is a man who is struck by the recurrence of a certainsensation and who gets into the habit of making a certain mark in a different place everytime it occurred, no ground whatever has been given for saying that the mark is a sign for

a sensation. The necessary surroundings have not been supplied.9

This suggests that Malcolm is criticising Strawson because he sees him asnaming his sensations privately in a vacuum, that is, in the absence of thesurrounding circumstances which Wittgenstein, as therapeutically interpreted,would regard as fundamental to our understanding of the grammar of our publicsensation-language. Malcolms strategy here, however, is not logical but meth-odological. It points to the fact that Strawson, and indirectly Soames, takes forgranted that he can do something, namely, name his sensations in a privatelanguage that gains its sense for Wittgenstein only because what he is doing is

already parasitic on his prior acquaintance with a public language. The SoamesStrawson presupposition that there is nothing at all wrong with the idea thattheir private linguist can invent names for sensations which are already thoughtto be intrinsically meaningfulto have Soamess representational contentisWittgensteins principal target in those anti-Augustinian passages 12 and 32 in which Augustines child is said to be able to think, but not yet speak.Malcolm is perhaps rather ahead of his time here in believing that Strawsonsidea of a private language turns on this presupposition. As Strawson puts it:

It is also just worth asking, in connection with some of Wittgensteins argu-

ments here: Do we ever in fact find ourselves misremembering the use ofvery simple words of our common language, and having to correct ourselvesby attention to others use?Wittgenstein gives himself considerable troubleover the question of how a man would introduce a name for a sensation intothe private language. But we need imagine no special ceremony. He mightsimply be struck by the recurrence of a certain sensation and get into thehabit of making a certain mark in a different place every time it occurred.10

The fact that Strawson should even ask whether we do ever find ourselvesmisremembering the use of simple sensation words in our ordinary language,

8. P.F. Strawson, Review of Philosophical Investigations, in Pitcher, ed. 45 et seq.9. Norman Malcolm, Wittgensteins Philosophical Investigations, in Pitcher ed. 96.

10. P.F. Strawson, Review of Philosophical Investigations, in Pitcher, ed. 100.

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suggests that what he has in mind in proposing the idea of a private languageis the invention of a language to talk about his ordinary sensations in isolationfrom the surroundings, or contexts referred to in 257 in which this languagewould normally be taught and learnt. Yet Malcolms criticism of Strawson alsosuggests, without saying so explicitly, that he takes Strawson to be introducingWittgensteins own idea of a radically private language. At this point in thediscussion, however, there is clearly nothing to suggest from what he says, thatStrawson has the measure of the radical kind of privacy that Wittgenstein canbe shown to be criticising with his primary argument. Indeed, it is not evenclear that Malcolm himself fully appreciates how radical Wittgensteins notionof a private language to talk about private objects really is.

This is borne out by the fact that Strawson nowhere mentions a languageonly I can understand, since what he means by a private language is one inwhich the individual names (descriptive words) refer solely to the sensations of

the user of the language.

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At this point Strawson appears to indicate agree-ment with a conclusion he attributes to Wittgenstein, namely, that the hypo-thetical user of the private language has no criterion of the correctness of hisuse of it. Yet in his final assessment, and in the course of considering how a manmight introduce a word into his private language, he neglects any considera-tions of this kind, precisely because by this stage he has already come toassume, as Soames expresses it in his later terminology, that our sensationshave representational content. Furthermore, it is soon quite obvious foranother reason that Strawsons private language has little in common withWittgensteins much more radical notion. This is shown in the disastrous

conclusion that Wittgensteins criticisms of a private languagemeaning inthis context a language used by only one individualhas equal application toa language in which the words stand for colours or material objects or ani-mals.12 It is difficult to render consistent everything that Strawson says in hisReview, for in claiming that Wittgensteins arguments would at most tend toshow that a language of any kind used by only one person is an absurditywhether or not that language is one used to talk only about sensations or alsoabout public objectsthe context leaves it unclear whether this is a languagein fact and not in principle used by only one person.

The inconsistencies in Strawsons treatment serve as a reminder of how

difficult it must have been to truly engage with Wittgensteins originality inthese early days. They also pose the disturbing question whether we, benefitingfrom hindsight, would have fared any better in coming blind to the privatelanguage passages in the Investigationsfor the first time. It may always, of course,be suggested that the ultimate responsibility for these inconsistencies in inter-

11. P.F. Strawson, Ibid. in Pitcher ed. 42.12. Strawson, Ibid., 43. Material objects and animals shows Strawsons private language to be

at odds with Wittgensteins intentions. Brendan Wilson echoes Strawson in this rather oddinterpretation. Yet it is not quite so odd if the notion of a private language at work here is,

like Strawsons, that of our ordinary language invented by an individual to talk about bothprivate sensations and public objects having representational content: see Wilsons Wittgen-steins Philosophical Investigations, A Guide, (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press: 1998), 7. Thisidea originated with A. J. Ayer as discussed in the present section.

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pretation lies with Wittgenstein himself, because he is notoriously unclear in hispresentation of what a private language really is. But the proper answer to thisis that anyone who made such a claim would be failing to appreciate themethodological strategies Wittgenstein employs in order to lead readers upthose blind alleys where they can discover for themselves that a certain modelof privacy which Wittgenstein defines has no application. While it will beessential to look at these strategies later on, in the meantime the immediateproblem requiring investigation is why many philosophers have followedSoames and Strawson in their interpretations of those passages, notably 258and 265, which appear to invite readings leading them almost inevitably toask why Wittgenstein should seem to be denying what to them is transparentlytrue. Saul Kripke provides a classic example of this kind of reaction in mockingthe traditional requirement for checkable public criteria of application forsensation terms, often thought to be the point of 258:

For, if we see Wittgensteins problem as a real one, it is clear that he has oftenbeen read from the wrong perspective. Readers, my previous self certainlyincluded, have often been inclined to wonder: How can he prove privatelanguage impossible? How can I have any difficulty identifying my ownsensations? And if there were a difficulty, how could public criteria helpme? I must be in pretty bad shape if I needed external help to identify myown sensations!13

That this point has importance for Kripke, and that it plays some part in forcing

him to look elsewhere for a proper interpretation of Wittgensteins remarksabout a private language, is revealed by his inclination to repeat it later on:

Now another case that seems to be an obvious counterexample to Wittgen-steins conclusion is that of a sensation, or mental image. Surely I canidentify these after I have felt them, and any participation in a community isirrelevant!14

Consequently, what Wittgenstein appears to be claiming in the relevant pas-sages, namely, that we cannot identify and reidentify our sensations, is soimplausible that it cannot possibly be true, with the consequence that a newroute must be found into the text in order to discover what its message reallyis. Saul Kripkes interpretation has itself become the subject of much dispute,and although the concerns it raises are not directly relevant to the content of 258, its important implications together with those contained in his associatedPostscript on Other Minds, will be discussed later on.15

Yet the very fact that Kripke should feel the need to adopt such an approachis ultimately dependent on his sharing those assumptions embodied in that

13. Saul Kripke: Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language(Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1982), 60.

14. Saul Kripke, Ibid., 80.15. Kripkes concerns are discussed penetratingly and comprehensively, if at times controversiallyby Martin Kusch in his A Sceptical Guide to Meaning and Rules, Defending Kripkes Wittgenstein(Chesham: Acumen, 2006).

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ambivalent notion of privacy that has already been shown to govern thetreatments provided by both Soames and Strawson. Many commentatorswould agree that on balance this has proved historically to be the mostcommon approach. Here is its prime expositor, A. J. Ayer, writing in 1954 apropos of 265:

I check my memory of the time at which the train is due to leave byvisualising a page of the time-table; and I am required to check this in its turnby looking up the page. But unless I can trust my eyesight at this point, unlessI can recognise the figures that I see written down, I am still no better off . . .But if without further ado I can recognise such noises or shapes or move-ments, why can I not also recognise a private sensation?16

Ayers approach is important because, paradoxically, he claims to freely agreewith Wittgenstein that no sense can be granted to a private language one that it

is logically impossible for anyone but the speaker to understand.17 He also freelyacknowledges that references to ones private experiences are made within theframework of a public language.18 What he takes himself to be querying isWittgensteins assumption that, as he puts it, this is a matter of logical necessity.But, once again, this may seem ambivalent, because in denying that a privatelanguage as Wittgenstein understands it makes any sense, he is left with noalternative but to propose that a language which could in principle be capable ofbeing understood by more than one person can nevertheless be invented by anyone person in isolation. Ayer makes his point as follows:

The view which I am attributing to him is that it would not be possible toframe concepts only on the basis of ones own experience; if the signs inwhich such concepts were supposed to be embodied constituted a privatelanguage in this sense, they would not have any meaning even for theirauthor himself.19

Consequently, when Ayer chastises Wittgenstein for making the false assump-tion, as he puts it, that the meaning of words is indissolubly tied to the contextsin which they are originally learned,20 the point he is making is not one thatbears directly upon Wittgensteins conception of a language only I myself can

understand. Instead, it bears solely upon the issue of how our ordinary publicsensation language can acquire meaning. This point is confirmed in Ayersoriginal discussion in 1954 when his famous Robinson Crusoe is allowed toinvent a language for himself with which he can talk not only about hissensations, but about the world around him, a language which, because it canin principle be spoken by more than one person, he is able, if not withoutdifficulty in respect of terms for sensations, to teach to Man Friday.

16. A.J. Ayer: Can There be a Private Language? in Wittgenstein The Philosophical Investigations,Pitcher ed. 256 et seq. Also in Ayers The Concept of a Person (London: Macmillan 1963).

17. A.J. Ayer: Wittgenstein (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1985) 74.18. Ayer, Ibid., 75.19. Ayer, Ibid., 75.20. Ayer, Ibid., 77. The criticism is made primarily with reference to Investigations 244.

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Ayer unwaveringly maintains this position throughout his career in opposi-tion to what he takes to be the private language described in the PhilosophicalInvestigations, once again tracing what he treats as Wittgensteins fundamentalerror, to the following point:

The crucial fact which it seems to me that Wittgenstein persistently over-looks is that anyones significant use of language must depend sooner or lateron his performing what I call an act of primary recognition.21

If anyone has any doubt about what he understands by primary recognition,one need only read what Ayer says about it in a final discussion with DavidPears about its overall significance in relation to Wittgensteins idea of a privatelanguage in the context of Pearss treatment of meaning-rules:

The recognition consists in treating whatever it may be as an instance of its kind, as being

the same as a previous specimen which, if no label has yet been applied to it, may itself beremembered simply as being, in a more or less shadowy context, the same as this. If the kindhas been labelled, the disposition to apply the same label enters into the process of recognition;and here it must not be forgotten that the labels themselves have to be recognised. 22

So it turns out after all that what Ayer is offering here is the time-honouredempiricist proposal that our sensations are intrinsically meaningful, and thatsensation terms acquire meaning through association with the sensations them-selves. What, in other words, Ayers primary recognition succeeds in providingis precisely that representational content Soames discovers in his immediate

experiences when he proposes that a word could be introduced to mirror whatis already provided by nature via the operation of his visual system.

Ayer and Soames are far from being alone in advocating proposals alongthese lines. Here is Simon Blackburn raising the kinds of questions whichcontributed in the 1980s to the ongoing debate revolving around Kripke andWittgenstein on private language:

Let us consider a proposed case of private ostensive definition. A man has acertain kind of sensation. This sensation has a phenomenal quality which isknown to him alone: he is aware of it, just by having it. He can attend to it,

like it or dislike it, relish it, and, let us suppose, christen it. By this christeninghe (purportedly) provides himself with an intended rule: in the future callonly this kind of sensation, S.23

The problem Blackburn then almost inevitably goes on to discuss is whetherWittgenstein, in his argument against private language, has amassed sufficientresources to show that this proposal cannot be carried through. As it turns out,unlike Ayer who has no doubts whatsoever on the matter, Blackburn believes

21. Ayer, Ibid., 76.

22. Ayer: Reply to David Pears, The Philosophy of A.J. Ayer ed. L.E. Hahn (La Salle Illinois: OpenCourt, 1992) 403.23. Simon Blackburn: Spreading The Word, Groundings in The Philosophy of Language (Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 1984) 95.

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that on balance the so-called private linguist can exercise a technique to bringorder into his life, and so endow his private subjective world with the requisitecoherence without which we can have no understanding of ourselves asconscious of an objective or spatially extended world.24 Blackburns finalassessment is expressed in the following way:

In this circumstance there is no reason at all for the private linguist to takethe attitude that whatever seems right is right. He may do better to take theattitude that his memory is not totally reliable, that it is easy to fail to noticegenuine differences between S and sensations like S but importantlydifferent in what surrounds them, and so on. . . . The would-be privatelinguists title to think of himself as a believer would be derived from his titleto think of himself as a theorist, attempting a whole set of views about hismental life.25

So for Blackburn, unlike Ayer, Wittgenstein as he interprets him provides agenuine challenge to his private linguist, one which he nevertheless believes hislinguist can overcome. Crispin Wright is more pessimistic, although for thepresent purposes the more important question is what Wright takes a privatelanguage, in Wittgensteins sense, to be. Beginning with what on the face of itmay seem the extraordinary suggestion that Wittgensteins presentation of aprivate language as one which necessarily only one person can understand, isnot quite right, he explains in the following way why he takes this view:

Intuitively, two people share an understanding of a predicate if what quali-

fies an item to fall within its extension is the same for both of them. Accord-ingly, if I somehow invented a language apt for the description of materialsensations, or whateverin principle accessible only to myself, someone elsemight nevertheless understand the language: he would do so if he associatedwith its various descriptions material of the same respective kinds as Iassociated with them.26

Once again Wright, like Blackburn, reveals himself to be party to that ambiva-lent conception of privacy which appears to have some relevance to the pointsWittgenstein is making, but which in its assumption about different speakersexperiencing sensations of the same kinds, nevertheless indicates strong affini-ties with a conception of privacy already familiar to us. The assumption,shared with Soames and Ayer, that these sensations are also intrinsicallymeaningful is captured in the idea that a speaker can invent a language to talkabout them. It may indeed be thought that because Wright ultimately disa-grees with Blackburn that a private language is really possible, all of this issimply a pose adopted prior to his introduction of a decisive reductio. But

24. Blackburn, Ibid. 100.

25. Blackburn, Ibid., 101.26. Crispin Wright: Does Philosophical Investigations 258-60 Suggest a Cogent ArgumentAgainst Private Language? in Rails to Infinity (Cambridge Mass: Harvard University Press2001), 223.

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whatever Wrights conclusions, and no matter how cogent his argument mayappear in its own terms, his presentation has resonances which are distinctlyun-Wittgensteinian:

But if the felt quality of my experience has some part to play in determiningthe content of the relevant parts of my vocabulary, and if it is accepted thatthis quality can be known only by myself, it must follow, it seems, that wecannot have reason to think that we fully understand each others talk ofsensations, and so on.27

Even if we allow that Wright is ploughing a quite distinct field from Wittgen-stein in which the principal issue at stake is one in which the private diaristas a theorist of his sensations may be allowed to predict patterns of theirrecurrence, a field in which Blackburn allows for the establishment of system

enforcing recognition of fallibility whereas Wright does not, the fact remainsthat all of these philosophers are shown here to be party in varying degrees toan assumption the rejection of which, while central to Wittgensteins method-ology in 12 and 32, is not entirely relevant to what is going on in 258.This assumption is that our sensations, intrinsically meaningful, merely requireto be named, an assumption mentioned by Anthony Kenny28albeit in its18th century guisein his reference to the British empiricists who thought thatimpressions and ideas could confer meaning unaided. The reason that thisassumption relates to 12 and 32 rather than to the content of 258 isthat the notion of privacy which these philosophers are using here is one

which is actually parasitic on its ordinary use, so that from the methodologicalperspective he is employing, Wittgenstein regards these philosophers with theirempiricist leanings as viewing for their own (metaphysical) purposes theseordinary circumstances in which we do in fact name our private sensations, inisolation from the background of our prior acquaintance with a public lan-guage. Yet it is a central feature of the Investigations as a whole, a featureillustrated at its very beginning with its treatment of Augustine, that it is thisbackground alone which Wittgenstein would take to underlie whatever sensethere is to their speculations about naming their private sensations, because thisis something we can be said innocuously to do in the everyday context of our

use of a public language.

2. The Popular Interpretation Fails to Capture WittgensteinsReal Private Language Argument

This helps to explain why philosophers like Ayer, Kripke and Blackburn clearlyinterpret the notion of a private language in terms which lead them to questionhow Wittgenstein can possibly deny what to them seems transparently true. YetWittgenstein approaches the issue of a private language from a number of

27. Wright, Ibid., 226.28. Anthony Kenny: The Legacy of Wittgenstein (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984), 9.

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different directions, and it would be quite wrong to take at face value anythinghe says that might at first sight appear to contradict a widely accepted truism,like Kripkes belief that he can have no difficulty identifying and reidentifyinghis sensations, without clarification of what Kripkes statement is actuallypresupposingthat these sensations have appropriate representationalcontentjust as the mere appearance of 258 as a self-contained reductioshould not lead anyone to believe that this properly captures its role in Witt-gensteins overall strategy. 256 provides a good example of how easily one canbe led astray, precisely because it appears to point in a number of differentdirections:

Now, what about the language which describes my inner experiences andwhich only I myself can understand? How do I use words to stand for mysensations?As we ordinarily do? Then are my words for sensations tied up

with my natural expressions of sensation? In that case my language is not aprivate one. Someone else might understand it as well as I. But suppose Ididnt have any natural expression for the sensation, but only had thesensation? And now I simply associate names with sensations and use thesenames in descriptions.

Given its proximity to 257258, this has traditionally been understood (e.g.,by Malcolm) to be a clear reductio of the thought that associating namesprivately with sensations can endow these signs with meaning. Yet Soames andAyer evidently see nothing at all wrong with their proposal that names can be

associated with intrinsically meaningful sensations. In fact, Wittgenstein makesno attempt to show that this idea is demonstrably false. It is rather because, inSoamess terms, it is not ruled outinsofar as it seems to have an immediatephilosophical appealthat Wittgenstein regards it as such a tempting way,philosophically, to proceed. Consequently, he would treat this notion not assomething subject to logical refutation but as part of the misleading picture thatultimately leads to an infinite regress, the one enshrined in Augustines child in 12 and 32 who can think only and not yet speak. Secondly, what is meantin 256 by a natural expression for sensation? Since many sensations we talkabout in a public language have no natural bodily expressions, what is being

considered here is just the difference between a language which is private inthat it could by definition have no public understanding of its terms, and onewhich is public in a generally recognised sense. Lastly, the suggestion that thereis no natural expression for the sensation but only the sensation also supplies aclever trap for the unsuspecting reader, for this clearly invites two opposinginterpretations, pointing either to the notion of a radically private sensation onthe one hand, one in principle segregated from any expression in a publiclanguage, or to the notion of a sensation in fact without any normal means ofbodily expression on the other hand. Yet this very distinction incorporatesinherent dangers for the unwary. Colin McGinn fails to spot what they are:

We should, first, remind ourselves of how surprising the conclusion ofWittgensteins argument ought to seem. He invites us to believe that someone

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whose sensations happen to have no behavioral expression is semanticallyimpotent in respect of those sensations. . . . Only if her body offers up potentialcriteria for others to detect her sensations can she succeed in homing insemantically on those sensations. Suppose the sensations are publicly unde-tectable up to time t and then acquire behavioral manifestations at t, only torevert to privacy ten minutes later. According to Wittgenstein, the subjectcould not refer to her sensations before t, though she can once her body startsto show their presence to others; and when the behavioral manifestations goher sensation words lapse back into mere empty sounds.29

Yet before we jump to the conclusion that McGinns account must be a travestyof Wittgensteins thinking, it should be noted that his main reason for taking hisexpression of surprise to be wholly justified lies entirely in how, perhapsunderstandably, he may have chosen to interpret a point made by Malcolm

Budd about the interplay of first and third person use in the grammar ofsensation ascription:

The most that the private language user can do is to use his sign S inaccordance with part of the grammar of the self-ascriptive use of names ofsensations. And this implies that when he writes S down he uses it withouta justification: on each occasion when he writes S down he has no reasonto do so that justifies him in doing so.30

But if this is intended to be Budds argument against his private linguist, the

second part of his passage misses the point of 289 that to use a word withoutjustification does not mean to use it without right; and the first part cannot becorrect either, for it sounds here as if the only difference between the privateuser and the public one is that the private linguist in having access to part of thegrammar is in fact deprived of a body and his normal intercourse with others.But that would hardly be a reason for concluding, even in these dire circum-stances, that he could no longer talk of his private sensations using a publiclanguage he had already managed to acquire. Budds conclusion that in the defacto absence of a public setting the criterionless aspect of first person sensationascription would have no application is unjustified. Yet McGinns logical

argument is based on the premise that Wittgenstein would have opposed hisunsurprising assumption that he can happily fantasise about suddenly findinghimself without a body, unable to communicate with others, while still able totalk to himself inwardly about his sensations. However, daydreams of this kindexploit the idea of someone who is already a user of a public language nomatter what imaginary misadventures might befall him. Indeed, the fact thatwe can readily indulge in fantasies of this kind is what Wittgenstein would taketo underlie McGinns temptation to so completely misconstrue the force of theappeal to public criteria for the application of sensation-terms. Wittgenstein is

29. Colin McGinn: Budd: Wittgensteins Philosophy of Psychology, Minds and Bodies: Philosophersand Their Ideas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997) 188. A clear echo of Kripke.30. Malcolm Budd: Wittgenstein On Sensuous Experience, The Philosophical Quarterly, Vol.36,

No.143, April 1986, 187. See Wittgensteins Philosophy of Psychology (London: Routledge, 1989).

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not arguing for the conclusion that all private sensations must have publiccriteria of expression (cf. pain and pins and needles), given that it is purely aquestion of fact that some do and some do not. His primary argument is ratherdirected against the idea of a language which could not in principle have anypublic means of expression for sensation-terms.

Wittgensteins secondary argument, on the other hand, is not a reductio buta reminder that what the philosopher often thinks he is doing in presentingimportant metaphysical revelations about naming sensations which haveSoamess representational content, is in practice always parasitic on his prioracquaintance with a public language. Wittgensteins point here is entirelymethodological, and to the extent that it is, it fails to provide a logical objectionto Kripkes desire to adhere to his metaphysical intuitions. Nevertheless, if onefails to recognise that the common modern empiricist response to 258 in thesecondary literature relates only to one strand of Wittgensteins attack on private

language, one will equally fail to distinguish the conception of privacy enshrinedin ordinary use and borrowed by the modern empiricist, from the wholly distinctkind of radical privacy that is attacked by Wittgenstein in 258. This helps toexplain the lack of any uniform consensus even today in the secondary literatureon the interpretation of Wittgensteins private language argument.

3. The Real Private Language Argument as aTherapeutic Device

Wittgensteins primary object of attack in 258 is a certain conception ofradical privacy. Yet this conception is so esoteric that it must lead to doubtabout the kinds of general historical implications that Anthony Kenny, amongmany other commentators, have felt justified in taking to follow from theprimary private language argument of 258, for these conclusions can beshown to be at odds with the role of this primaryas distinct from secondaryargument in Wittgensteins overall strategy:

But the interest of the private-language argument is not merely internal toWittgensteins own philosophy. Philosophers as different from each other asDescartes and Hume have thought it possible for an individual mind to

classify and recognise its own thoughts and experiences while holding insuspense the question of the existence of the external world and of otherminds.Such a supposition seems to entail the possibility of a private language or ofsomething very like one. If Wittgenstein is correct in thinking such a lan-guage impossible, then both the Cartesian and empiricist traditions in phi-losophy require immediate overhaul.31

But if this primary logical argumentas distinct from the secondarymethodological argument already shown to have clear implications forempiricismis closely studied, its import is far from being as wide-ranging as

31. Anthony Kenny: Wittgenstein Revised Edition (Oxford: Blackwell Pub, 2006) 13.

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Kenny believes. The main reason for this is that if we study the way in whichphilosophers like Ayer have used their idea that our sensations have represen-tational content or are intrinsically meaningful, it is hard to justify theconclusion that they are actually committed to a concept of radical privacy ofthe kind that Wittgenstein attacks. In Ayers case, it has already been shown,even by his own admission, that this is certainly not so.

It may be argued that on this point Ayer is simply an exception to the rule.32

Indeed, is it not a central feature of the kind of empiricism generally associatedwith philosophers like Ayer that some form of radical privacy is essential to itsformulation? In his recent book on Wittgenstein,33 for example, William Childinterestingly begins his discussion of Wittgenstein on sensation, with the treat-ment of sensation language provided in 192930 on his immediate returnto philosophy, which in effect involves the rather awkward combination ofa Cartesian account of an individuals (LWs own) private sensations with a

behaviourist account of sensations belonging to anyone else. This in effect is thekind of proposal that Ayer famously introduced in his Language, Truth and Logic(Gollancz 1936) only to drop it in later years. According to Child, at that stageWittgenstein believed that there is a fundamental assymetry between firstperson and third person sensation language. Quoting from PhilosophicalRemarks, Childs earlier Wittgenstein famously states that if he (LW) has atoothache, that is equivalent to there is toothache, whereas if A has toothache,that is equivalent to A is behaving as LW does when there is toothache. So inLWs case, toothache does acquire its meaning by direct association with hisimmediate subjective, private experience; yet it also has a separate public

meaning governed by its association with those distinctive patterns of humanbehaviour that are associated with pain.In the course of elaborating on this earlier view, and how it came to evolve,

Child draws our attention to what is in effect the most familiar presentation ofa radical notion of privacy, when he argues that it seems natural to us whendoing philosophy to think that sensations are individuated by their own sub-jective introspectible characters, characters independent of external circum-stances and behaviour: So, we think, it is perfectly possible for two people tobe subject to all the same external stimuli, and to be exactly alike in everybehavioural respect, but for the subjective character of their sensations to be

entirely different (Ibid., 152), a view that Wittgenstein implicitly criticizes in 272 of the Philosophical Investigations.

But what are the grounds for his criticism? To successfully answer thisquestion is to grasp the nature of the methodology he employs in this sectionand those surrounding it, and this paves the way to an understanding of thoserespects in which his approach may be said to be therapeutic. In effect, herejects the idea of radical privacy because it has no application within thecontext of our ordinary use of a public language: that the subjective characterof one persons kind of sensation might differ from that of someone else withoutthe possibility of discovering this to be so is no more than an idle speculation

32. In its most general terms, this point has been stressed to me by an anonymous referee.33. William Child Wittgenstein (Abington, Oxon, Routledge 2011).

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that in Wittgensteins later thinking has no genuine content because there areno ordinary contexts in which this picture might be applied. While there arepublic criteria by which it can be determined that someone is colour blind,there cannot by definition be any public criteria by which it could be deter-mined that the subjective character of one persons sensation of red differsfrom that of someone else; for if there were, it would no longer be a radicallyprivate sensation. Like the logical possibility of zombies, this idea depends onstaring at a picture that in this case has no genuine use, and therefore no realsense within the contexts in which people employ a public sensation language.This, of course, leaves open the question whether, when doing philosophy, wecan ever really be said to understand the notion of radical privacy that is herebeing rejected, and this gives rise to the idea that we are in this context thevictims of an illusion of sense. This is an idea we have come to associate withCora Diamond:

So that is the next question: in what ways does the argument against Russellresemble the private-language argument in the Investigations? A centralinsight in the Investigations is that, if we take our capacity to talk about andthink about our own sensations as a matter of our having, each of us, aprivate object, then the object thus understood plays no role in our actuallanguage games. Wittgensteins conclusion is not that there are no sensa-tions, but that our words for sensations do not have their meaning byconnecting up with private objects. To think that they do is to have aconfused picture of their grammar.34

On the face of it, this may seem at odds with the view we have come to regardas Diamonds, namely, that far from denying that our sensation terms acquiremeaning by connecting with private objects, Wittgenstein is really saying thatwe have no genuine conception of what it might be for this kind of connectionto hold.35

But the fact of the matter is that in order to show coherently what Wittgen-stein is up to in these sections, there is often no way of avoiding the adoptionof an argumentative stance which on Diamonds assessment conveys only anillusion of sense which the philosopher may come to outgrow. But it is then

hard to avoid the conclusion that what the resolute commentator wants to sayabout Wittgensteins method cannot fail to be thoroughly ambivalent. In, forexample, her paper Criss-Cross Philosophy,36 Diamond refers to an inter-pretation which says that Wittgenstein did mean the metaphysical-seemingpropositions, including those about the nature of language, to be recognisableas plain and simple nonsense. She elaborates on this point about the Tractatusin a footnote:

34. Cora Diamond: Does Bismarck Have a Beetle in His Box? in The New Wittgenstein

(Routledge: London, 2000), 275.35. This point has been emphasised to me by an anonymous referee.36. In Wittgenstein at Work Method in the Philosophical Investigations, ed. Erich Ammereller and Eugen

Fischer, (Abingdon, Oxon, Routledge, 2010 [Ppk]), 208.

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The issue of a resolute interpretation of the book should be separatedsharply from the question whether Wittgenstein had genuinely freed himselffrom metaphysics in his thought about language. In fact, I think that propo-sitions like Propositions are truth-functions of elementary propositions areparticularly good examples we are meant to be able to recognize to beplainly nonsensical, to have no content, speakable or unspeakable. It isnevertheless arguable that they are also excellent examples of how Wittgen-stein had not freed himself from a metaphysical conception of language(Ibid., Endnote 4, 219).

But if this is taken literally, then it clearly invites the retort that if thesepropositions genuinely are examples which can be used to reveal this aboutWittgenstein, then they cannot lack the metaphysical overtones that Diamondidentifies, in which case they cannot be plain nonsense or sheer gibberish.

Indeed, this point is so obvious that she must be using the notion of recognisingto be plainly nonsensical in such a way that it cannot be incompatible with thenotion of appearing to have metaphysical content, yet it is not at all clear howsuch a compatibility might be explained and understood.

In the same book, a more down-to-earth and rather blatant psychologicalconception of philosophical therapy is adopted by Eugen Fischer37 when heargues that philosophers are party to certain autonomous habits of thoughtwhich give rise to a form of perplexity because, although from one perspectivethey are quite unreasonable in relation to the philosophers stable, reflectivebeliefs (Ibid., 121), they gain a hold on the philosopher by inducing in him a

sense of wonder or confusion. On Fischers view, the resultant feelings arepathological, and in order to shed them, and to obtain peace, Wittgensteinexposes and weakens the relevant psychological/intellectual habits by employ-ing the method Fischer describes as cognitive therapy.

The obvious question which arises here is whether the psychological glossintrinsic to Fischers overtly clinical reading, adds very much to Wittgensteinsclaim, with which we are familiar, that when doing philosophy, we becomesubject to certain misleading pictures that accompany our ordinary practices,yet which we are irresistibly inclined to treat as capturing the real meaning, ina distinctly metaphysical sense, of the practices themselves, what for example

referring to our sensations privately must really be about. To the Wittgensteinof the Philosophical Investigations, the very idea that there could be a problem, forexample, about the existence of an external world, any more than there couldbe a problem about the existence of other minds, rests on a misleading pictureof something that exists behind or on the other side of in the first casesense-data, and in the second external behaviour.

Fischer interestingly goes on to present A. J. Ayers phenomenalism asfeatured in The Foundations of Empirical Knowledge (Macmillan, 1940) as a classicexample of the kind of delusion that arises from an automatic thought embody-ing a philosophical intuition that requires to be weakened to the point that it

need no longer be honoured. The formulation of the problem of an external

37. A Cognitive Self Therapy 138197 Op. cit.

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world by Ayer in terms of the Argument from Illusion usually proceeds bypresenting a distinction between perception which is veridical and perceptionwhich is delusive, through the introduction of an item which is commonlyseen in both cases, an appearance called a sense-datum that we are invitedto consider as the proper object of visual experience. Using Macbeths famousdagger as an example, we are encouraged to draw the conclusion that becausethere is no perceptual distinction between cases where we see a real daggerand those in which it only seems that a dagger is present, the lack of certaintyover the existence of a physical object expressed in this claim, is properlycaptured only by postulating something common to both cases whose existenceis really certain, a sense-datum as the true object of perception.

The answer to this argument which seems obvious to us now, and one whichwould have been clear to J. L. Austin in Sense and Sensibilia (O.U.P., 1964), isthat when Macbeth encounters an illusory dagger, there is no justification for

saying that it seems to him he sees anything in any relevant philosophical sense,so that there need be no reason for introducing any kind of intermediary incases of sight. Investigationspassages 275278 express a related view, and offera clear expression of Wittgensteins method. Indeed, when we go on to inves-tigate the kind of criteria we employ in practice to determine whether or not adagger is ever really seen in cases of this kind, it turns out that the dagger shouldbe amenable not merely to the sense of sight, but also and primarily to that oftouch, and no doubt also to the senses of taste and smell.

Paradoxically, Ayer may actually have regarded these various factors ascounting in favour of his view rather than against it,38 for the answer he

provides to Austin in a considered reply is that the characteristic certaintywhich is said to accompany acquaintance with the private sense-data withwhich we are always acquainted, as distinct from the lack of certainty about theexistence of the real physical object never to be encountered in experience, isin the final analysis a simple matter of logic. So, although Austin may haveordinary usage on his side should he argue that we would have no reason to saythat the existence of a chair in our presence is less than certain when it is seenin the clear light of day, Ayer wishes to propose that the genuine lack ofcertainty here results from the principle that factual propositions are notconclusively verifiable: no finite number of observation statements could ever

render certainlogically certainany claim upon empirical fact. No matterhow well established, a statement of this kind can always be subsequentlyoverturned.

But here Wittgenstein would have illustrated his method by replying thatin the kinds of circumstances in which we do genuinely have the evidence ofall the relevant senses for saying that a dagger in our presence is real, there isnothing we can conceivably envisage that could later be shown to underminethis conclusion which did not also throw doubt on the framework within whichit had actually arisen. In short, if we can think of the notion of conclusive

38. Ayers interesting reply to Austin can be found in his Has Austin Refuted the Sense-DatumTheory? originally in Synthese, 17, 1967, but more readily available in Metaphysics and CommonSense (London: Macmillan, 1969).

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verifiability as having an ordinary application, then justification must at somepoint come to an end, a point with which we have become familiar from OnCertainty. But Ayers use of this notion is far from ordinary. The question atstake is whether, with Fischer, we ought to see it as the expression of a visionsgentle madness requiring a preference of duty over self-deceipt (Ibid., 125), orwhether we ought to regard it in rather more conventional terms as embodyinga kind of philosophical error.

At least part of the answer to this question can be found by considering thatthe concept of therapy itself gains its raison detre only against the backgroundof an accepted methodology, which in Wittgensteins case has a distinctlyanthropocentric thrust. The notion of therapy does not exist in a vacuum. Yetmany philosophers who adopt a wholly therapeutic reading of Wittgensteinoften give the impression of believing that it does.

The tendency to oscillate between thinking of Wittgensteins method as

pointing, from one perspective, towards the commitment of philosophical erroron the part of a wayward philosopher, and from another as singling thatphilosopher out as someone who fails to make sense because he uses wordsoutwith his normal surroundings of application, is reflected in the role we canassign to certain well-known passages about privacy in the Investigations. Ofparticular importance to the understanding of Wittgenstein as someone whodenies the right of the philosopher to believe that because he can imagine thathis private sensation of red differs from someone elses, this picture has somekind of special philosophical application, is the interpretation of 288, wherethe expression of doubt is said to have no place in the ordinary language-game

in which the self-ascription of our sensations is criterionless. The abrogation ofthe ordinary public language-game therefore results in a legitimate return ofdoubt about the correct or incorrect identification of a private object. This pointhe emphasises in the course of defining how we are to understand the nature ofthis distinctively private language. It must be evident that Wittgenstein is not inthe business here of demonstrating the truth of certain theses, or of discoveringimportant philosophical insights, since he is describing and defining features ofthis private language in the course of ruling it out as a viable language, a pointhe confirms when he allies the criterionless aspect of first person sensationascription to the salient point that he knows this colour to be red not by a form

of mental pointing, but because he has learnt English ( 381, Cf. 384).If we take this reading of 288 seriously, we have to relate the enigmatic

reference to whatever is going to seem right to me is right in 258 to the verydire consequences which accrue from the attempt to correctly identify anindividual sensation according to criteria in circumstances in which thisidentification has already been ruled out by Wittgenstein because it has noapplication, and therefore no sense in relation to our ordinary talk about oursensations in a public language.

270, as Wittgenstein presents it, is from this perspective misleading,because the term sensation has at least the appearance of being used with the

same meaning in 258 and in 270. Yet what he says about the sensation inthe later passage only makes sense if he is understood to be talking of anordinary sensation of a particular kind, a description which simply cannot

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apply to the private object which is the subject of 258. This point is reflectedin 270s claim that it is indifferent whether the sensation is recognised right ornot, where the ambivalence arises from the simultaneous reference to anordinary sensation of a particular kind that is correlated with a manometerreading, one to which of course the question of correct or incorrect privateidentification cannot apply.

Severin Schroeder interestingly says of 258:

This is a powerful argument directed at the very core of the Inner Objectpicture. If a sensation were an inner object perceived and identified throughintrospection, it would be conceivable that one should misperceive andmisidentify it. It would be possible to be mistaken in ones belief that one wasin pain. That sounds absurd, and 258 and 290 explain why; we do notidentify our sensations by criteria. And where there is no criterion, there is

no possibility of error.

39

This fails to gel, however, with Schroeders interpretation of whatever is goingto seem right to me is right, for in claiming that this verdict is a little too harsh,it is evident that he is conflating the reference to a private object in this passagewith our ordinary talk about a sensation of a particular kind, a point confirmedwhen he claims that it would still be wrong for me to write down S on a daywhen none of my sensations seemed to be of the same kind as the one I initiallycalled S (Ibid., 158), a reason he provides for concluding that one may verywell speak of a correct or incorrect application of S. No doubt one may, but

only in a public language where the only relevant kind of error in the firstperson would be verbal, because sensations can innocently be said to beindividuated by their own introspectible characters within the context of ouruse of a public language.

Schroeder is not the only philosopher to have been led astray in his readingof 270. Even as respected a commentator as David Pears is prompted to claimthat while the general drift of the criticisms Wittgenstein makes of a PrivateLanguage are clear enough, the same cannot be said for the details.40 WhilePears is not alone in finding the use of the manometer in 270 problematic,what he succeeds in providing in his attempt to resolve the puzzle it is often

thought to present, becomes so convoluted that it invites the reader to return toWittgensteins text to capture what he is really saying. Pearss difficultiesrevolve around Wittgensteins claim that following the useful result of beingable to say that his blood pressure is rising without using any apparatus,Wittgenstein puzzlingly states that it then seems indifferent whether he hasrecognised the sensation right or not, and that identifying it wrong does notmatter in the least. Pearss difficulties evaporate, however, when we realise thatWittgensteins initial reference to having a particular sensation is already to

39. The Demand for Synoptic Representations and The Private Language Discussion PI 243315, Wittgenstein at Work, Op. cit., 159.40. David Pears: Paradox and Platitude in Wittgensteins Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press,

2008 [pbk]) 57 et seqq. Cf. Brendan Wilson in his book as quoted.

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having a sensation of a particular kind. So every time he feels a sharp pain inhis elbow, for example, he finds his blood pressure rising, and provided that thecorrelation is experimentally confirmed, he can in the future go on to correctlyclaim that his blood pressure is rising without using any apparatus. It isindifferent whether he recognises the sensation right or not, only because in thiscase, as distinct from that envisaged in 258 (cf. 288), there is no question ofrecognising the sharp pain is his elbow as right or wrong at all, for his correctlyclaiming in the first person that he has a pain of this kind is not dependent onthe operation of criteria. That could be true only on the misleading privateobject model that is actually being undermined here through the way in whichWittgenstein constructs the manometer example in conformity with his usualmethodological strategy.41

What has clearly misled a number of interpreters of 270, including Pears,is the tendency to misread the apparent indifference about recognising the

sensation right or not as a way of saying that it does not matter what kind ofsensation is correlated with the manometer reading, since that suggestion, asPears understandably remarks, would indeed arouse our puzzlement. It wouldlead us to ask what work the correlation is supposed to be doing if it is after allirrelevant what particular kind of sensation allows us to conclude that ourblood pressure is rising without using any kind of apparatus.

Much of this was already captured by Sir Anthony Kenny a number ofdecades before in his initial treatment of Wittgensteins radically private lan-guage. This is particularly true of his claim that the notion of identifying asensation of pain introduces an intermediate step between its occurrence and

its normal (criterionless) expression. However, the presentation provided byKenny has seemed, at least to some readers, sufficiently convoluted to havegiven rise to even more puzzlement:

Why does Wittgenstein say no mistake is possible? Cannot I say S and thenfind that my blood pressure is not rising? Yes, but that is not what Wittgen-stein is rejecting: he is talking about a would-be intermediate step betweenhaving the sensation and judging Now my blood pressure is rising, a stepwhich would consist in recognising the sensation as a sensation of a particu-lar kind, and remembering that a sensation of that kind indicated a rise in

blood-pressure. Misidentification here would not matter, provided that Iboth misidentified the kind of sensation and misremembered what kind ofsensation indicated the blood-pressure rise. It is this, according to Wittgen-stein, which shows that the hypothesis of a mistake is mere show.42

What Wittgenstein does in 270 is present the private object model as only anapparently viable picture of how our sensation language functions, a modelwhich is undermined in this passage through the revelation that it is has noapplication to our ordinary sensations. Yet there has, historically, been a

41. This, albeit in a rather less theoretical guise, is effectively Peter Hackers controversialreading in Wittgenstein Meaning and Mind, Volume 3, Part II Exegesis, ofAn Analytical Commentaryon the Philosophical Investigations (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), 77.

42. Kenny: Wittgenstein Ibid., 154.

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tendency in the secondary literature to treat passages like 258, 265 and 270in isolation, in which case it is going to seem obvious to commentators, as it didin much of the early literature (e.g., the 1966 volume of essays edited byPitcher), that Wittgenstein is in the business of providing a form of reductioargument against the possibility of a private language. At that time, readerswere usually invited to assume that the most enigmatic passage, and also as itturns out the most mulled-over one in the entire book ( 258), endlessly quotedin discussions about Wittgensteins account of private language, concerns asubject who believes that by mentally attending to, or by mentally pointingat some object, in this case a radically private one, he can christen this objectand provide it with a name which has an unambiguous meaning. It would havebeen common ground to many commentators that what Wittgenstein is able toreveal in 258 is that this just cannot be done. Yet why it cannot be done hasbeen the subject over the last sixty years of an extraordinary amount of debate.

It has now been shown that this is just not how Wittgenstein proceeds, sothat we are justified after all in concluding that when the empiricist (Ayer)misappropriates an ordinary notion of privacy by, as Wittgenstein would see it,taking it out of context, he is not adopting Wittgensteins idea of radicalprivacy, though there may very well be instances in which he believes that heis. This is consistent with David Sterns claim that either the notion of privacybeing used by Wittgensteins private-linguist is one with which we are alreadyfamiliar, in which case it gains its sense from the normal circumstances inwhich it is applied (secondary argument),43 or it is so outlandish that we canhave no genuine idea of what we are talking about by referring to a notion of

radical privacy (primary argument). If, for example, we are tempted to followCora Diamond in her claim that the very idea of a private language is plainnonsense or sheer gibberish, this is primarily because the concept of a privatelanguage has already been defined by Wittgenstein in such a way that it canhave no conceivable application because it bears no relation to those charac-teristic features which surround our ordinary sensation talk.44Although he doesso in an entirely different context in which he is talking, not about radicalprivacy but about the evolution of the higher animals and of man, Wittgensteinbrilliantly sums up the method he employs in the privacy passages in termsthat, once we properly understand his method of approach, require no further

explanation:

What this language primarily describes is a picture. What is to be done withthe picture, how it is to be used, is still obscure. Quite clearly, however, itmust be explored if we want to understand the sense of what we are saying.But the picture seems to spare us this work: it already points to a particularuse. That is how it takes us in (Investigations, Part II, vii, 184).

43. Cf. David Stern: Wittgensteins Philosophical Investigations An Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 2004) 175.44. Cora Diamond. See, for example, What Nonsense Might Be in The Realistic Spirit(Cambridge,MA: MIT Press, 1991). It has been stressed by an anonymous referee that this is not how manyreaders of Diamond would allow her to be understood.

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The fact that the notion of a private language has in this way already beendefined by Wittgenstein, is what allows him throughout 243315 to followhis important methodological strategy of presenting the private object model asan apparently viable picture of how sensation language functions, yet onewhich is undermined in the presentation of the examples themselves: theindifference shown to correct or incorrect private identification when in ourpublic sensation talk the question of identification cannot arise ( 270); theinability to remember what a private word for pain could mean when this isquite irrelevant to the public use of the term ( 271); the supposition thatdifferent people might have different private sensations of red when theirpublic use of colour words perfectly agrees ( 272); the use of a private timetablein the imagination which is used to confirm itself ( 265); the creation of a diaryto record the occurrence of a sensation when the private sensation term cannever be meaningfully applied ( 258); and the regularly different items in, or

even absent from their boxes, private items which have no bearing on theproper use of the public terms speakers use to talk about the regularly recurringsensations they enjoy ( 293).

For those who are attracted to a wholly therapeutic conception of Wittgen-steins method, strategies of this kind undoubtedly appear to confirm hisintention to teach the reader to pass from a piece of disguised nonsense tosomething that is patent nonsense ( 464). Yet this conception derives from amethodology incorporating the concepts of radical privacy and of a privateobject, which, as shown here, have been so defined that it can be far fromcertain, historically, that famous philosophers like Locke and Hume ever really

adopted them.This lends support to the view that Wittgensteins more positive treatmentslie instead in his issuing of reminders of the kind he can be seen to be providingto Scott Soames: what the philosopher is tempted to say about the represen-tational content of his perceptual experiences only too often results from staringat the criterionless aspect of first person sensation ascription in isolation fromthe normal surroundings in which our prior mastery of a public languagegrants these seemingly metaphysical revelations with their overwhelming force.In its own way, this is an immensely powerful form of argument. By turning theaxis of the investigation around, it does serve, metaphorically speaking, to

illuminate the geography of the philosophical landscape in a way which isworth comparing to Gordon Bakers new re-orientation in his approach toWittgensteins private language argument following his breakup with the Baker& Hacker partnership. It is not part of a cut-and-thrust kind of adversarialattack of the kind that Baker fails to find in Wittgenstein. It is also worth notingthat Baker also finds suspect the wide historical implications Kennys kind ofprimary argument is often taken to presuppose.45

45. Gordon Baker: Wittgensteins Method Neglected Aspects (Oxford: Blackwell Pub., 2006), Chapters,5, 6, and 7. It would, however, be misleading to imply that Bakers reasons for adopting thisview coincide with those provided here.

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4. Kripkes Private Language Argument &the Rule-Following Paradox

Saul Kripkes Postscript Wittgenstein On Other Minds is in many ways sucha fascinating and avowedly anti-realist account of Wittgensteins treatment ofits subject that it is difficult to see why so many commentators engrossed withKripkes treatment of the rule-following considerations have been inclined toneglect it in their discussion of the main book.46 Kripkes location of the realprivate language argument much earlier in the Investigations than 243315,one which seems to render these later passages almost redundant, togetherwith his sceptical solution following upon the failure of a certain meaning-determinist picture to capture the real nature of following a rule, have formed,and to some extent still do, central topics for debate in the secondary literature.Kripke, in fact, is so mesmerised by the picture referred to that it does colour

his approach in a way that is totally at odds with Wittgensteins actual meth-odology, even although, paradoxically, the difference between Kripke andWittgenstein here can sometimes seem to turn on a knife-edge, a point whichis readily illustrated in Kripkes treatment of Wittgenstein on Other Minds.The passage which captures the essential difference between Kripkes Witt-genstein and Wittgenstein is Investigations 300. But what really underlies thefundamental divergence between them?

It iswe should like to saynot merely the picture of the behaviour thatplays a part in the language game with the words he is in pain, but also the

picture of the pain. Or, not merely the paradigm of the behaviour, but alsothat of the pain.It is a misunderstanding to say The picture of pain entersinto the language game with the word pain. The image of pain is not apicture and this image is not replaceable in the language-game by anythingthat we should call a picture.The image of pain certainly enters into thelanguage game in a sense; only not as a picture. (Philosophical InvestigationsPartI, 300.)

Paradoxical as it may at first seem, Saul Kripke actually provides a powerfulpresentation of this passage,47 one which, were it not for his anti-realist under-

pinnings, actually points in the direction of Wittgensteins intentions, capturedin Kripkes claim that To use the image of pain as a picture is to attempt toimagine the pain of another on the model of my own, and to assume that mystatement that the other person is in pain is true precisely because it corre-sponds to this picture. But this picture of truth conditions derived from theTractatus has no place in Kripkes Investigations, where truth conditions arereplaced by conditions of warranted assertion grounded in the circumstances inwhich people do in fact attribute sensations to themselves and to others:

To use the image of pain as a picture is to suppose that by an appropriate use

of this image, I can give determinate truth conditions for the other persons46. Kripke, Op. cit.47. Kripke, Ibid., 139.

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being in pain, and that one need only ask whether these truth conditionscorrespond with reality to determine whether my statement that he is inpain is true or false.48

While Peter Hackers exegesis of 300 is more detailed than Kripkes, andwhile he is conscious of the fact that there is in English, unlike German, nocorresponding expression for imagination and its cognates, making theaccurate translation of Wittgensteins remark here and in related texts almostimpossible,49 Kripkes interpretation has the advantage of brevity and suc-cinctness were it not for the fact that it leaves the reader with a lastingimpression that Wittgenstein is denying the truth of something which ordinar-ily we would not even consider to be up for assessment:

Wittgenstein would reject any attempt to explain my attitude and behavior

towards a sufferer by a belief about his inner state. Rather, once again theorder is to be inverted: I can be said to think of him as having a mind, andin particular as suffering from pain, in virtue of my attitude and behaviortowards him, not the reverse.50

On this reading, the position of Kripkes Wittgenstein would be, not that weare debarred from having knowledge about the sensations of others, and forthat reason are almost bound to be sceptical about attributing inner states tothem. It is rather that because we cannot entertain that conception which, ourintuitions inform us, grounds our understanding of what it is to believe in other

minds, we must find another justification for our belief, a sceptical solutionto our doubts resting in the circumstances in which we do warrantably assertpropositions about their contents.

In order to obtain a proper grasp of Wittgensteins method, however, it isworth comparing Kripkes anti-realist interpretation with the final standpointon the vexed question of other minds presented by A.J. Ayer in his book onWittgenstein:

My attributing consciousness to others is not just a matter of my accepting,on the strength of a doubtful analogy, the generalisation that two different

sorts of events, one mental and one physical, habitually go together. It is aconsequence rather of my accepting a whole body of theory which enablesme to account for the behaviour of others by crediting them with consciousthoughts and sensations and emotions and purposes. My ability to entertainthis body of theory does depend on my having learned from my ownexperiences what these mental states are like, but my justification foraccepting it is that it has been found, in Putnams words, to have genuineexplanatory power.51

48. Kripke, Ibid.49. P. M. S. Hacker: Wittgenstein Meaning and Mind(Oxford: 1993) PART II Exegesis, 118.50. Kripke, Ibid. 138.51. Ayer, Wittgenstein, Ibid., 38.

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The overwhelmingly significant feature of Ayers presentation is that it has allthe hallmarks of treating what seems a genuine questionwhether peopleother than myself have conscious thoughts and sensations as have Ias if itwere a question of fact. Yet there are no ordinary empirical criteria whichwould allow this question to be provided with a factual answer unless, ofcourse, it is already understood to be an ordinary factual question aboutwhether certain specific people on certain specific occasions are enjoyingconscious experiencesfor example, they are not actually unconsciousinwhich case the framework allowing this question to be sensibly asked andanswered will already be in place.

The response Wittgenstein provides to this conundrum can be expressed inseveral different ways, and perhaps the simplest wayas hereis to presenthim as saying that what Ayer is asking is not a genuine question to begin with,because it is asked outwith the framework which would allow it to be provided

with an ordinary answer. This response is a methodological one, insofar as itdoes point to the practice providing the framework within which we doattribute conscious states to ourselves and to others; and while this has theappearance of an argument from the paradigm case, it is also important thathis response should not be presented only as if it were an argument of this kind.Wittgensteins underlying point is that since there are normal circumstances inwhich we do participate in the practice of talking about other minds, the usualphilosophical problem of other minds can arise only because the philosopheris guilty of being party to a picture, innocent in itself, which harmlesslyaccompanies our practice yet which appears according to the dictates of his

philosophical intuitions to encapsulate what it means to make the attributionsin question.It is for this reason that when Kripke claims that Wittgensteins order is to be

inverted, that my attitude and behaviour towards him are what give rise to thebelief that he is in pain, and not the other way round, this could constitute avalid account of Wittgenstein on other minds only if it is not taken to be areflection of Kripkes avowedly anti-realist stance. For the adoption of thatstance is wholly dependent for Wittgenstein on having become mesmerised bythe misleading picture lying behind that conception of what it is to believe inother minds that Kripke ultimately cannot entertain.

Wittgensteins order, therefore, insofar as it is not anti-realist, is not invertedat all: our understanding of the application of the concept of pain does rest inour participation in the practice in which we do attribute pain both to ourselvesand to others; and it is governed by third person criteria (in an ordinarynon-technical sense) determining whether the sufferer does or does not have acertain inner state. But his being in fact in a certain inner state does not consistin our ability (when doing philosophy) to conjure up (imagine) a picture of hispain, a depiction of something going on in him (an inner state) which corre-sponds in his case to what goes on in us when we are in pain. Understoodproperly, the picture is no more than a perfectly innocent accompaniment to

the practice of attributing pain both to ourselves and to others. The realdifficulties we perceive here arise only when doing philosophy, for we are thenprone to take our understanding of the practice of attributing pain to others to

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rest in our attempt to apply the picture ( 422426). Our apparent inability toapply the picture in these circumstances, together with the intuitive conviction(shared by Kripke) that only through its application do we acquire our under-standing of what it is to attribute pain to others, is what gives rise to theinterminable (sceptical) doubt whether someone is really suffering pain irre-spective of whether our ordinary criteria are, or are not, actually satisfied.

Wittgenstein adopts a similar outlook in relation to the issue of meaning-determinism and the rule-following paradox. If to begin with the concept of theborn-Crusoe is understood to be representative of the meaning-determinismrejected by Kripke, a rejection which leads to the associated rule-followingparadox, then we gain a superior vantage point from which to understandWittgensteins approach if we see the Platonism inherent in the meaning-determinist picture, and the rule-following paradox as illustrated in the claimthat anything one does at this point can be in accordance with some rule or

other, as two opposing poles, each of which provides a source of philosophicalmisunderstanding in relation to the circumstances in which we acquire andemploy language.

Wittgensteins paradox results from staring at the ordinary application of arule in isolation from its context in those practical affairs in which it finds itsnormal expression, just as, and at the other extreme the concept of the born-Crusoe takes the exercise of the rule to be predetermined (the Kripkeanmeaning-determinist picture) by Crusoes possession of a capacity possessed, asit were, in isolation from the social background against which we come in factto understand both how it is acquired and how it manifests itself in practice. Yet

in the natural philosophical attempt to abandon this Platonist picture of theborn-Crusoe magically encompassing within himself the capacity required tomaster a rule in an infinite number of applications, the temptation is to retreatto a single point in time. But this leaves one with the problem of having todecide to go in one direction rather than another as a way of interpreting therule, when anything that one does can then be understood to be in accord withit. One is then victim to the rule-following paradox, because what one has to doat this point has the character of making a stab in the dark.

But this retreat to a single point in time at which a decision must be madeimmediately takes what one has to do at this point in following the rule out of

context, because, ordinarily, what one has to do in following the rule is not amatter for decision. One follows the rule blindly ( 219), with the unreflectingconfidence characteristic of those circumstances in which the rule has notbecome severed from the background in which ( 201) our grasping a rule isexhibited in practice in the quite ordinary way in which we talk about obeyingthe rule and going against it in actual cases. The emphasis Wittgensteinplaces in Investigations 199 on what Colin McGinn once called the multipleapplication thesis,52 and which led to his puzzlement over what Wittgensteincould possibly be getting at in suggesting that it is not possible that there be onlya single occasion of rule-following, is no more than a reminder that if we insist

when doing philosophy on taking our understanding of what it is to follow a

52. Colin McGinn: Wittgenstein on Meaning (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984) 80 et seqq.

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rule out of its ordinary context within the framework of sharedand onoccasion unsharedresponses in which we obey rules and go against them,then the sceptical paradox will be unanswerable. Indeed, it is unanswerable onWittgensteins assessment if we insist on staring at the picture in which it seemsthat we can give one interpretation after another, almost as if each onecontented us for a moment, until we thought of yet another standing behind it( 201). The way forward lies in turning our eyes away from the picture, for ifwe fail to do so then we will be caught in a classically insoluble philosophicaldilemma, continually oscillating between the adherence to an unacceptableconcept of a Platonist born-Crusoe at one extreme, and the retreat to a pointin time at which one has to make a stab in the dark in the other.

Yet the assumption that only Kripkes community view, performing a quitespecific role as a sceptical solution, can save the day and prevent this con-tinuing oscillation from one unacceptable extreme to another, rests on the false

premise that Wittgenstein could grant to the meaning-determinist picture therole i

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