Wittgenstein and the Private Language Argument

The Magical Flower of Winter is an essay series exploring reality and our relationship to it. It deals with philosophy, science and our views of the world, with an eye on the metacrisis and our future. Sign up to receive new essays here:

---

...the difficult thing here is not to dig down to the ground; no, it is to recognize the ground that lies before us as the ground. For the ground keeps on giving us the illusory image of a greater depth, and when we seek to reach this, we keep on finding ourselves on the old level. Our disease is one of wanting to explain.

Ludwig Wittgenstein - Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics §VI.31

Describing phenomena by means of the hypothesis of a world of material objects is unavoidable in view of its simplicity when compared with the unmanageably complicated phenomenological description. If I can see different discrete parts of a circle, it's perhaps impossible to give precise direct description of them, but the statement that they're parts of a circle, which, for reasons which haven't been gone into any further, I don't see as a whole - is simple.

Ludwig Wittgenstein - Philosophical Remarks §XXII.230

In the article Language and Meaning I started to articulate holism, in an intentionally vague way. The question we left off with at the end of that piece was where the boundary between the name and the thing named lies. At what point does what we think of as pure or conceptual thought, the pre-linguistic, become language? Is the separation between the two intelligible upon analysis? These are questions that suffuse the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein, one of the most fascinating and thought-provoking thinkers I have encountered¹. In this piece I will go through his Private Language Argument² (PLA) and its implications, which touches on meaning, language, metaphysics, mind and experience. In the words of Hacker³: “The private language argument is, if correct, one of the most important philosophical insights achieved in this century. It is a criticism of the conception of the mind which is not merely the dominant one in European philosophy, but is also pervasive in our culture, in psychology, linguistics, and indeed in the reflections of most people who think about the nature of 'self-consciousness' and the mind.” Though Hacker wrote this close to five decades ago (and Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations were published over seven decades ago), the pervasive conception of mind and reality the PLA is aimed at is still dominant. The argument takes as its starting point the common theory that meanings are the objects to which words refer, and that in reality these relations are unambiguous. The argument acquires its name from its application on a hypothetical private language, which figures in a range of contexts. As we will see, Wittgenstein’s PLA destroys all hopes for the common theory of meaning and the possibility of a truly private language, and its power plots the course for a view of reality as a whole⁴. 

Ludwig Wittgenstein in 1917 (Photograph by Ben Richards). Public Domain.

The PLA can be stated quite simply. If a language exists, which corresponds to private sensation, i.e. your private experience, then that language has to be shareable, thus precluding it being truly private. This all sounds innocent enough, but the force is amplified once we start analyzing its consequences, and the context in which the argument was put. Before jumping to consequences, let us look at the argument in more detail⁵. The PLA is embedded in a wider investigation into the plausibility of a common conception of how meaning works, the naive view I mentioned in [Language and Meaning]. This conception of meaning is built on two presuppositions: First, that meanings are the objects to which words refer, independent of how we use language, and second, that any ambiguity lies not in the objects and their meanings, but in language use. It then becomes the “philosophers” task to uncover this meaning essence that language clouds. This will result in an ideal language that removes all ambiguity of meaning. How is the correctness of such an ideal language to be achieved? The criteria for correctness can only be found in experience, so it is in experience we must look for these meaning objects⁶. They may be behavioral, physiological or mental (even in the naive view, meaning can’t solely be built on physical inanimate objects, as this would exclude finding the meaning object corresponding to verbs or abstract concepts). It might seem dualistic or pluralistic to assume this division of experience, but the exact division has no effect on the argument that follows. 

Let us put this conception of meaning to the test, and analyze the term “laughing”. First, behaviorally, we can think of extreme cases to which we would use “laughing” that have no common behavioral pattern: purely in terms of behavior, both a guffaw and a snort are considered, in the right context, “laughing”. What we find is not a behavioral core of identity that is common to all situations of “laughing”, but a pattern of “family resemblance”. This means that one case of “laughing” can be behaviorally similar to others, which are again similar to yet others, and so on. There is as such a family resemblance, stretching wide across situations and contexts, yet no identifiable core that covers all cases. Thus, the essence of meaning, the meaning object, can’t be behavioral. Physiologically, we will find the same. People may pretend to laugh or imitate laughter, which physiologically looks the same as laughter, yet we do not mean the same thing by pretended laughter. We can also imagine performing a neuroscientific experiment where we record the neurological activity in a (sufficiently) large range of “laughing” cases. But scientific results rely on statistical analysis, and the results of such an experiment would be an aggregate that has been subject to outlier removal, averaging, transformation etc. The result would not correspond to an identifiable case of “laughing”, and neither would it account for all cases in which “laughing” is used (This same argument applies to a behavioral experiment). A physiological core can consequently not be identified either, as physiology too follows a pattern of family resemblance.  The last possibility⁷ is then that the essence of meaning is mental. But here too we will only find family resemblance: I can laugh “inside” without external signs, and I can laugh out loud without knowing why. No mental process, available to introspection, is common to all cases. For the mental case, there is the further difficulty of what criteria we use in the process of trying to identify, by introspection, the similarity between mental processes. Memory is imperfect, so how could we trust subjective assessment of mental content to provide a robust essence to meaning? What manner of correctness would justify our individual recognition of mental content from one occurrence to the next? In the words of Hacker: “This is as if someone were to buy several copies of the same morning paper to assure himself of the truth of one of them.”⁸ Thus, no mental experiment can be performed that would pass any plausible evaluative standard, due to the issues of subjective reporting. One can try to deflect the essence to other mental processes like intending, or meaning to: That what we mean by “laughing” is the mental process that occurs when we intend or really mean “laughing”. But these processes are themselves subject to the same analysis as “laughter”, and will be found to have no common essence. The conclusion is that meaning objects, the essence of meaning, cannot be found to reside in anything given in experience. An ideal language must then be impossible, but we are clearly able to use language even though meaning is ambiguous. Maybe the presuppositions of the common theory of meaning are wrong?

Wittgenstein presents his alternative to meaning-objects by a use-dependent and holistic conception of meaning based on language games. A language game can be thought of as a particular context in which we use language according to some rules. Language games are often illustrated by an analogy to chess: we can think of words, sentences and grammar as pieces, positions and rules in the game. The board, the pieces and the rules of chess are all made by us. Change any of these now, and the game is no longer chess, but a different game. Earlier iterations of chess have seen different rules, different pieces, different move sets, while the game at that time was still called chess. The same holds for a language game, the elements and rules of the language are made and agreed upon by us, collectively, and changing these changes the game, but the game is still language. Importantly, we do not sit down and agree upon the game and its rules beforehand, we are always simply «thrown» into experience, the context of the game, and both the elements and rules are a consequence of our collective efforts, subject to the pressures of communication, cooperation, well-being and survival. Rule following too is independent of the existence of some foundational rulebook, the rules of the game arise in just the same way as words and meaning do. Any situation you are in where language takes part is in one way a new language game, for the parameters of the game, the context, is always unique. But different contexts bear a family resemblance to each other, so while the context always changes, the game is much the same. The meaning of words is spread out across contexts, connected by resemblance. And it is the very resemblance of contexts, the familiarity of experience, that in part tricks us into believing there must be some constant essence providing foundations⁹. This conception of language leads to the meaning of terms as the totality of how they are used, and as also outlined in Language and Meaning, meanings are what they are by relation to the whole. "Every sign by itself seems dead. What gives it life? - In use it is alive. Is life breathed into it then? - Or is the use its life?"¹⁰ The question of an unshareable language, a truly private language, now becomes untenable, for in the absence of a community within which the language gets its meaning through use, a private language cannot exist, for it would lack a context and would be disconnected from the public criteria and processes that imbue meaning. One might now say that surely one could come up with words and rules that are made up and never share them with anyone. But this is contingent unsharability, what the PLA denies is the possibility of an essentially unshareable language: there is no way that an essentially unshareable language could exist, for its existence, only made known through evaluation, would require contact with a public language, at once making it shared. This also invalidates private criteria for the recognition of mental content. You may certainly have a private sensation of recognising a named feeling, but the criteria on which you evaluate this cannot be private, as the meaning of the named feeling is decided by the use of the name in language games. The criteria, in addition to words, meanings and grammar are part of the package that is language acquisition. And language acquisition is not about attaching words to objects, but a fully dynamic and reciprocal process of learning by imitation, trial and error, against an evaluative background that is equally dynamic and being learned. To speak about the existence of anything, the very idea of “existence”, what this term means, is itself a collective term. The way we use the term stands in opposition to anything that is closed off from our conceptual web, the framework within and against which anything acquires meaning. 

You might, understandably, not be greatly convinced of the importance of this argument. The use-dependent and holistic view of language and meaning might make sense, but so what? The importance should hopefully make itself clear as we start thinking about the prevalence of the common theory of meaning. The particularist stance¹¹ (among other atomist or reductionist stances) relies on the common view of meaning. But on the alternative and anti-reductionist conception of meaning outlined above there is no way for mental or physical objects to contribute to providing reference or meaning, for any words we would use in establishing this are themselves subject to the variety of contexts in which all of these elements are coming together. As we have seen, the criteria that define what e.g. «reading» as an activity is, are not found by pointing to mental content, for we use “reading” in such different contexts that no mental content can be common to all the cases. Neither do we find the criteria for reading in our intending reading, or really meaning reading, for these phrases too are used in a variety of contexts that in sum rules out an essence. We could attempt to write down a definition of the meaning of the term, but we would always be able to come up with a case where the word is used and meaningful that is not covered by the definition. We could attempt to write down a rule, but we would always be able to come up with an exception. “..Ever and again comes the thought that what we see of a sign is only the outside of something within, in which the real operations of sense and meaning go on.”¹² There is no “hidden inner”, no “essence”, no object or no mental content at work, it is all an idle wheel for the workings of language and meaning, thus an idle wheel in the epistemic. But this is not to deny that one has private sensation or private representation of meaning, or that the existence of objects is denied, it is to deny that the existence of these in any way necessitates that they are what essentially provide reference or meaning. We may talk about private sensation and representation, but what the words we use in doing so refer to and mean is out in the open. The common image of thinking as something “inner” sets up an expectation of something “outer”, which prepares the ground for confusing the image used for what is going on in reality, a confusion of the map for the territory. This is the use-dependent, pragmatic dimension of meaning that I mentioned in the previous article must be seen in conjunction with the dimensions of meaning put forth there (structural, holistic and anti-foundationalist). 

What about the claim that all this makes sense at a higher level of description, the one we have so far employed in talking about this, but that the brain (or body¹³) operates at a lower level of description, one of neurons, signals, action potentials, symbolic processing etc., and that in the background of the public learning and use of language, the brain itself is in fact operating in a language or representation inaccessible to our linguistic introspection, thus “hidden”? The unavailability of these lower-level representations to introspection is not an argument against the PLA as such, but rather a statement about the relationship between us, as operating linguistically with higher-level descriptions, and our brains. These representations, to be recognised as representations, must be publicly accessible - we must be able to access them, not in ourselves introspectively, but in each other. The representations, if they are to do any work to contribute to reference and meaning, cannot be hidden, cannot be publicly inaccessible, must be in the open, and thus of the same kind as all else. The particularist in us now shouts for attention: Doesn’t meaning reduce to, emerge from or supervene on these brain representations? Isn’t it simply our ignorance of the details of how language and meaning arises from a mental or physical substrate that leads to these issues? This is of course to fall prey to the very same presuppositions that led to trouble in the first place. That which we would like to explain, whether via reduction, emergence or supervenience, would lose its meaning in the translation to whatever substrate we want to explain in terms of. «Mind» gets its meaning from how we use the term in discourse about a vast range of behaviors, and social and psychological considerations. By attempting to transpose «mind» into a language where we do not have a concept of mind, regardless of whether this transposition is reductive, emergent or supervenient, we have taken “mind” out of the contextual sphere in which it acquires meaning, and we inevitably meet a wall and are left with an unclosable gap in our discourse: a hard problem. 

…philosophers do not—or should not—supply a theory, neither do they provide explanations. Philosophy just puts everything before us, and neither explains nor deduces anything.—Since everything lies open to view there is nothing to explain.

Ludwig Wittgenstein - Philosophical Investigations §126

Philosophy shows us where our questioning, our demand for explanation must stop. And we must stop not because the going gets tough, but because we arrive at the very limit of language. There exist questions that seemingly stand in need of answers, but upon inspection these questions base themselves on incoherent assumptions, and an answer is, literally,  meaningless. “Here we come up against a remarkable and characteristic phenomenon in philosophical investigation: the difficulty - I might say - is not that of finding the solution but rather that of recognizing as the solution something that looks as if it were only a preliminary to it.”¹⁴ We run into problems, unsolvable problems, because we take words and concepts out of their normal contexts, out of the settings and situations we use them in, the everyday discourse that has brought about these terms. “Like everything metaphysical the harmony between thought and reality is to be found in the grammar of the language.”¹⁵ We expect to be able to generalize the conceptual from experience, to rigorously define things, when it turns out that all we actually do is recognize family resemblance, because all things and concepts are vague (and as stated in Language and Meaning, necessarily so). "...For we are under the illusion that what is sublime, what is essential, about our investigation consists in its grasping one comprehensive essence.”¹⁶

The private language argument and its consequences counter both solipsism (“only my mind exists”) and idealism (“reality exists entirely in mind”), at least the variations of these relying on a private language. Wittgenstein also provides a battery of additional arguments against these¹⁷. But let us for a moment look at what the argument says about realism as a position. So far I have taken realism to be the position stating that there is an external world independent of us¹⁸. What the PLA shows is the untenability of this position in the face of language and meaning as community- and use-dependent. Speaking of “world” or “reality” is meaningless except against an epistemic framework, a conceptual scheme, a language that is inseparable from us. To counter that this is just epistemic, about our knowledge and not the world itself, is to again succumb to the realist presupposition. Any “world in itself” is unspeakable. The very idea of an “external and independent world” has only ever occurred in the epistemic. But anti-realism does not imply idealism or solipsism. The correspondence of the term “real” set up in “realism” to imply independence is incoherent with our normal usage of “real” that more or less corresponds to our experience. We are operating with two notions, but only one word. The realism/anti-realism question has taken a term out of its context, and this has led to a hard problem¹⁹. We are now in a position to say something about the boundary between the name and the thing named, of the transition from the pre-linguistic to the linguistic. Upon investigation we have seen how this isn’t merely a linguistic or semiotic question, but a question that cuts to the heart of what reality is. The pre-linguistic can play no role to the linguistic, to meaning, because the thing named, the essence, the meaning object, the thing-in-itself, disappears from the equation that our world is made out of. I term this epistemisation²⁰: any epistemic process (linguistic, conceptual, mathematical, empirical) epistemises the ontic. The instant we move away from just experiencing, to structuring experience, talking about it, measuring it, the ontic has already evaporated. From the point of view of the epistemic everything is always-already epistemised. The ontic is, epistemically, an unreachable limit. Simultaneously, the ontic seems undeniable, we experience, and many think of some link to pure experience in terms of the “unconscious”. This line of inquiry opens many paths I won’t walk down now. I will be returning to epistemisation and how holism further cuts through the realism/anti-realism dichotomy. 

Where does our investigation get its importance from, since it seems only to destroy everything interesting, that is, all that is great and important? (As it were all the buildings, leaving behind only bits of stone and rubble.) What we are destroying is nothing but houses of cards, and we are clearing up the ground of language on which they stand. The results of philosophy are the uncovering of one or another piece of plain nonsense and of bumps that the understanding has got by running its head up against the limits of language. These bumps make us see the value of the discovery.

Ludwig Wittgenstein - Philosophical Investigations §118

When I say: Here we are at the limits of language, that always sounds as if resignation were necessary at this point, whereas on the contrary complete satisfaction comes about, since no question remains.

Ludwig Wittgenstein - The Big Typescript §89

What becomes of science and philosophy given all this? We keep on theorizing and experimenting in an effort to explain and predict, these activities are inseparable from our well-being, science and philosophy will never end because there exists no criteria for their completion. What does the practice of science, the historical record on the scientific method and the progression of knowledge, say about reality and our relation to it? This brings us to topics in the philosophy of science like explanation, incommensurability, pluralism and reductionism I will follow up on in an article for now named “Science and Explanation”. 

Of course, the insights provided by Wittgenstein and the private language argument aren't satisfying our curiosity for physics, neuroscience or other scientific disciplines in any direct manner, like a «theory of everything» or a «theory of mind» would, but should we not be satisfied with having grasped the limits of these disciplines? Of having understood parts of the structure of these frameworks and their relation to language and meaning? One possibility is that these insights are in fact so dissatisfying that they are ignored for the purposes of continued funding or the satisfaction of “playing out the game” until the very end, of following a scientific course through. Another possibility is that our discourse operates largely dogmatically, with few questioning the underpinnings of their discipline, or its larger context. I take this to be an inevitable characteristic of most world views: being able to see alternative views clearly and unattached is nearly impossible when your own world view also dictates the criteria for such evaluation. Science and technology unquestionably have extremely important consequences on our lives, ones we would not want to be without, but do the way science and philosophy is now practiced have adverse effects on humanity and reality as a whole? This is the thread we will follow in a piece tentatively named “Philosophy for our Future”. 

In this and the preceding article we have followed one thread through the tapestry I am attempting to bring into view. I have now and previously hinted at numerous other threads, threads I will follow up on in due course, but in the next piece I want to provide a brief break where I look back and ahead, to allow something of a birds-eye view of the tapestry as a whole, and talk about the process that this project is for me. 

---

Thank you for reading! If you enjoyed this or any of my other essays, consider subscribing, sharing, leaving a like or a comment. This support is an essential and motivating factor for the continuance of the project.

References

Braver, L. (2014). Groundless Grounds: A Study of Wittgenstein and Heidegger. MIT Press.

Feyerabend, P. K. (1985). Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations. In Philosophical Papers Vol. 2: Problems of Empiricism. Cambridge University Press.

Hacker, P. M. S. (1975). Insight and Illusion: Wittgenstein on Philosophy and the Metaphysics of Experience. Oxford University Press.

Monk, R. (1991). Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius. Penguin Publishing Group.

Teller, P. (1989). Relational Holism. In J. T. Cushing & E. McMullin (Eds.), Philosophical Consequences of Quantum Theory: Reflections on Bell's Theorem. University of Notre Dame Press.

Wittgenstein, L. (1953). Philosophical Investigations (G. E. M. Anscombe, Trans.). Wiley.

Wittgenstein, L. (1970). Zettel: Edited by G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. Von Wright. Translated by G. E. M. Anscombe (G. E. M. Anscombe & G. H. v. Wright, Eds.; G. E. M. Anscombe, Trans.). University of California Press.

Wittgenstein, L. (1980). Philosophical Remarks (R. Rhees, Ed.). University of Chicago Press.

Wittgenstein, L. (2005). The Big Typescript, TS. 213 (C. G. Luckhardt & M. E. Aue, Eds.; C. G. Luckhardt & M. E. Aue, Trans.). Wiley.

1. A great biography, for those interested, is Monk (1991).

2. Wittgenstein (1953).

3. Hacker (1975) p. 245.

4. Hacker (1975) p. 335 might disagree: «Any suggestion that Wittgenstein's philosophical clarifications have metaphysical consequences is a sure sign that they have been misconstrued.» I, at least, take “metaphysics” to be part of a view of reality, even if metaphysics only plays a negative part. This is to say that Wittgenstein’s philosophical clarifications have consequences for what metaphysics means, and are consequential on recognizing metaphysics, the ontic, as a limit.

5. My presentation owes much inspiration from both Feyerabend (1985) and Hacker (1975).

6. See Braver (2014), to which I owe much inspiration.

7. That the essence could be a core in the combination of physical, behavioral, physiological and mental  patterns was not to my knowledge addressed by Wittgenstein, but this case falls just the same to the argument of family resemblance.

8. Hacker (1975) p. 269.

9. Imagine if this wasn’t the case: experience would overwhelm us, nothing would be recognizable. Without memory and the capacity to recognize resemblance in experience, we, complex human beings,  wouldn’t have evolved at all.

10. Wittgenstein (1953) §432.

11. See The Magical Flower of Winter for details on what I mean by particularism. My use of this term is inspired by Teller (1989).

12. Wittgenstein (1970) §140.

13. In using “brain” in the following I don’t mean to imply a separation between brain and body when it comes to what biologically correlates with experience or mind.

14. Wittgenstein (1970) §314.

15. Wittgenstein (1970) §55.

16. Wittgenstein (1970) §444.

17. See Chapter VIII and IX of Hacker (1975).

18. The definition of realism is itself contextual (and historically dependent), which is why I am calling attention to this particular aspect of it.

19. A similar conclusion can be reached by looking at the word «physical» in the physicalism/non-physicalism dichotomy.

20. See The Epistemic and The Ontic for a description of my use of these terms.