the private language argument: what it is; what it isn't

We still, 71 years after the Philosophical Investigations was published, find ourselves surrounded by versions of its 'private language argument' (PLA) (§§243ff) which are both hopeless arguments and, in my view, unconvincing interpretations. To put this right, I've set out below how the principal hopeless PLA tends to go, and then present how I think the main argument in those sections actually does go. (Arguing the interpretative case isn't my task here - although the interpretative principle of charity alone should take us some of the way there...)

LW annoyed at the bad PLAs 

Hopeless PLA

To set the stage for this version of the PLA, let's start by elaborating a particular philosophical conception of mind as 'inner'. To construe mind as inner in this respect is to hold to the following two claims. We can i) usefully be said to know, perhaps through something we'll call 'introspection' or 'inner awareness', the 'goings on' in our own conscious minds (we know what we at least seem to see; we know the sensations we feel; we know what thoughts we have; we 'directly apprehend the phenomenal field'; etc). By contrast we don't really know what's going on in others' minds. And ii) the relationship between our ('outer') expressive, behavioural, linguistic lives and our ('inner') mental lives is but contingent. That's to say: it doesn't enter into our very concept of (say) "pain" that someone in pain will tend to act in certain ways (squeal, recoil, etc).

Now, with that conception of 'the inner' in place, and without (for the moment) in any way questioning it, imagine the following. A new detail in my inner life has struck me, and I want to develop a new concept for it. I inwardly focus on, say, a new sensation, and at the same time pronounce "this, and what is just like it, shall henceforth be called an "S"".

Wittgenstein - on this hopeless version of the PLA  - now comes along and insists "but you haven't thereby given "S" a meaning". ... "Why?" ... "Well, this inner baptism has none of the necessary consequences of genuine definition, and in any case lacks the requisite contextual character to support the making of genuine definitions." ... "But, erm, why think this?" ... "Well, if it were a genuine definition then there would later be such a thing as using it right or wrong." ... "Well, ok, and why can't I do that here?" ... "It's because there's no way of verifying whether that later use is correct. (We assume the earlier sensation has died away so it's not like checking that the sensation in your right knee is the same as the S in your left.) Perhaps you misremember, etc. And, like I said, the requisite context is also missing: we normally only get going with ostensive definition once we've got a whole bunch of pre-existing ways of relating to the item in question. It's these ways, and not any momentary act of semantic fiat, that gives the above "and what is just like it" any content; without them we are without a way of determining just what is here at issue, namely what shall count as "just like it". Result: we must give up this philosophical conception of mind as inner."

I think it shouldn't be too hard to dispose of these arguments! The first imports an implausibly verificationist premise. Why should the fact that I can't verify that I've correctly used "S" mean that my use is meaningless? The second can just be denied. Ok, sure, often enough we do require a bunch of stage setting for our language use to get going, but given how nicely and clearly everything is laid out before me in the internal world, on the 'phenomenal stage', we can, at the time of baptising S with "S", just dispense with it here. And there shall in any case always be an issue, in any definition at all, of the scope of proper judgements of what is and what isn't sufficiently and relevantly similar to the initially ostended item. The inner is no special case.

Result: the PLA fails, and we can after all hold onto the above-articulated conception of mind as inner. And anyway, abandoning it looks like abandoning ourselves to behaviourism. That's to say: acknowledging a more than contingent relationship between S and the behaviour S evinces (for a pain sensation, say: my avoidance, my wince, my yelp, etc.) results (it is alleged) in a collapse the having of S into these behaviours. Which seems to leave us with no inner life at all!

Plausible PLA

See: he's a little happier now

Now needless to say I don't think any of that is Wittgenstein's argument. ... But is there a better one to be had? Well, here's what I think he's really saying:

Let's begin by outlining a different (than above) conception of what makes for an inner life. (1) it's a fact about any genuine sensation (etc) discourse that there's no such thing as me getting it wrong that I've a toothache. It can't seem to me that I've toothache whilst actually I've got butterflies in my stomach. Misleadingly put: if it seems to me I've got toothache, then I'm right that I've got toothache. Better put: there's just no such thing as going either right or going wrong here. (If there's just no such thing as wrong here, there's also no such thing as right, since the two are conceptual complements.) For sure, if I say "I've got toothache" when I've got toothache then I've said something true. But correctness and truth are different concepts: "I've got toothache" is not an expression of a judgement I make about my having toothache. Instead it's an expression of the sensation itself. In saying it I don't voice a correct belief that I've got toothache; I truly voice, as we might put it, the toothache itself. (If we can't express our sensations without expressing our beliefs about them - if every voicing is the expression of a judgement about how we find things with ourselves - then how come I can simply voice, express, these beliefs? Or am I (cue the infinite regress...) voicing, expressing, my belief that I have a belief that I have a toothache?) Or perhaps I'm pretending - in which case I'm saying something false (but still not expressing a false belief that I've got toothache; I don't believe it at all!) (2) we will also temporarily accept the second of the above-claims from the 'hopeless PLA': that ii) inner and outer are only contingently related, so that we shan't get to the meaning of our mind discourse through thinking about a minded being's expressive behaviour.

To elaborate a little on the first (1) of these two latter claims about what it is to enjoy an inner life: we might sum it up with: subjectivity repels normativity. (It thwarts the establishment or maintenance of that which to be properly itself must be truly characterisable in terms such as 'correct' and 'incorrect'.) If it were the case that I could be wrong that I've got a certain S, then 'S' can't be the name of a sensation. (The private linguist might deny this, of course, but then they will need a different argument to convince them out of their conception of the inner than can be provided by the PLA.)  But the private linguist is committed to setting up a normative practice - since to give a meaning to 'S' is to make for the possibility of correct and incorrect uses of the term. It's here, then, that we have our problem. (Much of what's contained in the later 'private language argument' paragraphs of the Investigations is in fact an ongoing tussle between a desperate interlocutor who somehow hopes that, despite what at root he acknowledges to be the subjectivity (ie constitutive lack of normativity) of the inner, a fantasy of normativity can nevertheless make for at least a kind of normativity in his discourse about the inner. Wittgenstein's task is to patiently bring him back down to earth.)

Wittgenstein's own solution to the problem of the origin of the normativity of sensation discourse is to repudiate (2) the idea of our inner lives as constitutively divorced from behaviour / expressive life. (This move of his has literally nothing to do with now relying on the judgement of others as well as one's own; we don't - pace Kripke et al - get to normativity by piling up a collective of subjectivities.) He stresses too, of course, in his own unpacking of the inner, his very different conception of (1) than is had by those who try to conceive of inner experience as a phenomenal field - as if sensations or imaginings or thoughts were like inner visibilia, i.e. as if a notion like 'apprehension' - only a 'very most immediate apprehension!' - could model the relation of sensation to she who suffers it. But let's set that aside for now, since it doesn't address Wittgenstein's own solution to the above-mentioned problem - which solution instead is to stress that the relation between sensations and sensation behaviour (avoiding and withdrawing from that which hurts me, wincing and groaning when hurt, etc) is non-contingent. To be disposed to react thus is part and parcel of what it is to experience sensations like this. I don't understand sensation language, I go wrong in my use of the term S, to the extent that say of someone that he is Xing when his behaviour says otherwise.

But how, then, are we to avoid a collapse into behaviourism? Well, this really is the beauty of Wittgenstein's positive reconceptualisation of what makes for an actual 'inner' life. For this conception not only involves the above-articulated (1) recapture of the immanence of sensation in sensation's declaration, thereby preventing the collapse into an alienated conception of sensation declarations as voicings of judgements of what we notice within. But it also enables us to have our cake and eat it when it comes to grasping both a) the genuine immanence of mind in action, sensation in expression, etc., and b) the possibility of having sensations without reacting as expected. And in truth it's this very conjoint necessity-and-flexibility which gives our central concepts of mind their whole character. So, Geoff, you know, has an ongoing and severe leg pain. And yet his seemingly confident stride, on this afternoon walk, is as before, he's no more inclined to rest the leg, he doesn't get it seen to, and so on. Is this possible? Is this straightforwardly intelligible? The behaviourist will say it's impossible and unintelligible; the pundit of the (corrupt, above-articulated) conception of the inner ought to find it possible and straightforwardly intelligible; but my enlightened reader will I hope find it possible yet not straightforwardly intelligible. For, I suggest, this possibility only becomes truly intelligible to us when we see that the disposition to act in the ways Geoff declines to act must here be overridden; absent such an explanation and we have not a mystery but a muddle. (Mary - God knows why - has promised him £5000 if he ignores and feigns the absence of the pain.) In fact it's in this way that we regain for ourselves a non-corrupted, ordinary, conception of the inner. For the actual inner of which we ordinarily, pre-philosophically, speak is precisely the domain of our secret or unexpressed thoughts, both conscious and unconscious and semiconscious. It's the domain, in particular, of our longing and shame, our timid hope and unuttered dread.