The Evolution of the Private Language Argument

Keld Stehr Nielsen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351890113
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

The Evolution of the Private Language Argument presents a continuous view of modern analytical philosophy by telling the history of one of its central strands. It is an in-depth history of this well known philosophical argument, the evolution of Wittgenstein's thoughts and its influence on analytical philosophy of mind and language. Nielsen looks at early discussions of the private language argument in the Vienna Circle and the influence of Wittgenstein's ideas and examines the relation between the early and later Wittgenstein on this subject. He discusses which influential versions of the private language argument have been presented in the fifty years since Philosophical Investigations was published and how they relate to Wittgenstein's thoughts, and considers how the role and the interpretation of the argument, and Wittgenstein's philosophy, changed along with changes in the conception of the nature of analytic philosophy.

Chapter 1

Introduction

The preoccupation with language that characterized much analytic philosophy after 1900 is distinctive. With a seriousness and determination that had not been witnessed before, twentieth-century philosophers took on the task of exploring the nature of language. In particular, they sought to identify the philosophical consequences, and the consequences for philosophy, of the notion that language is the public manifestation and essential bearer of a person’s thoughts. This book focuses on a single, central issue in this task: it traces and explicates the determining factors in the debate over the possibility of a private language. This debate has developed over many years. In the late 1920s it was part of the Vienna Circle’s struggle to combine a ‘scientific world conception’ with the experiential basis of observation. Later it featured in discussions about the foundations of normativity in language – discussions that continue to this day.

With the exception of a few unavoidable jumps back and forth in time, the chronological structure of the book is broken only by an examination of Wittgenstein’s account of the subject in his Philosophical Investigations, published in 1953. This structure represents an acknowledgement that the interpretation of Wittgenstein’s work has played, and continues to play, a significant part in discussions of the exact form and consequences of argumentation against a private language. On the basis of the impact of the interpretations, it is fair to conclude that these, rather than Wittgenstein’s original text, have played the most decisive part in the argument’s history. To some extent this continues to be the case even today, although I think that Chapter 10 presents a fairly accurate picture of what Wittgenstein intended by his ‘private language argument’.

Wittgenstein’s influence on the debate whose history is considered in this book can hardly be exaggerated.¹ The thoroughness with which he discussed the possibility of a private language and epistemic privacy in general, and the compactness of his remarks in Philosophical Investigations, ensured that discussion after 1953 more or less equated the question whether there can be a private language with the question whether Wittgenstein’s attack on such language was sound. Even before 1953 Wittgenstein exerted an influence on the debate. Thus his presence is detectable, as I show in Chapter 2, in pre-1950s discussions between Rudolf Carnap and Otto Neurath. In some cases this was unfortunate. His authority as a genius, combined with the difficulty of his thinking and his unorthodox writing style, led to accounts that carried conviction largely because they seemed to respect his thought. On the other hand, these factors encouraged philosophers to speculate about the subject even at times when the prospects of advance in this field seemed dim. There is little doubt that the issue would have received much less attention had it not been for Wittgenstein’s treatment. He condensed into it issues of considerable significance in epistemology, the philosophy of mind and the philosophy of language.

This book is therefore not just about the evolution of the private language argument. It is also about the evolution of Wittgenstein’s philosophy and, especially, the reception of that philosophy.

It should be made clear from the outset that the label ‘the private language argument’ is quite misleading. In so far as the promise is to demonstrate the impossibility of a private language, it would be more appropriate to speak of the anti-private language argument. At this late hour it would, however, be futile to abandon the conventional name. Another problem is posed by the use of the definite article. Not even within the confines of Philosophical Investigations is it merited. A survey of literature of the last hundred years reveals a wide range of different arguments that have been invoked to demonstrate the impossibility of a private language. I have respected this diversity by giving these arguments different names, but I have used the label ‘the private language argument’ in my title as the prevailing tendency is to speak of a single argument demonstrating the impossibility of a private language. With this label, philosophers will more often than not be referring to whatever is to be found in Wittgenstein’s book.

Let me emphasize that one should not be misled by the title into thinking that the book is structured around the evolution of a single argument which gradually improved over the years. It might be possible to base the discussion during some periods on that model, but to see the entire period from the 1920s onwards in this light would be to distort what actually happened. Argumentation against private language cuts through several philosophical genres, and considerable discussion has concentrated on the question what, exactly, this sort of argument targets. So the history is not one in which a clear-cut case against a particular position is developed, but rather one in which several different arguments succeed one another as philosophical currents change.

This also means that I have not attended much to the question whether a certain elaboration by one writer is valid, but rather placed my emphasis on the underlying premises. Consequently, when, in Chapter 6, I criticize certain arguments, I do not do so with the intention of proving them to be invalid. Rather, I am attempting merely to point out that the arguments rest on certain premises that had, at the relevant time, been recognized as problematic. Generally, I think this strategy generates the most authentic picture: most of the arguments that have played a role in the history of the private language argument are valid – or, if that is too technically loaded a term, do not rest on mistaken reasoning. There are, however, cases in which the use of this strategy is less obviously sound. Most notably, perhaps, the arguments described by Norman Malcolm in his review of Philosophical Investigations are not obviously valid, given Malcolm’s description of the premises. Equally, my account of Anthony Kenny’s interpretation of §265 trades on a selective focus; only so does it live up to Kenny’s own observations. Still, I think the interpretations in these cases are justified. For the sake of clarity, I have summarized some of the arguments in point-by-point fashion in the appendices.

As mentioned above, there are certain discontinuities in the slice of intellectual history discussed here. I have attempted to register these by dividing the discussion of the book into two parts. Part I concentrates mainly on what went on in the bustling philosophical environment of Vienna in the late 1920s – home, during that period, to both the Vienna Circle and Wittgenstein, though the latter frequently travelled beyond the city. Here, discussion concentrated on problems associated with the apparently commonplace notion that our only experience of the world is derived from what we directly perceive. Once language had moved to the centre of philosophical attention it became clear that a more nuanced picture was needed of the way in which language connects with, and communicates, the contents of experience. To begin with, the revisions placed certain strictures on what could be communicated. Later on, in a radical departure from his contemporaries, Wittgenstein came to think that revision of our conception of the contents of experiences was needed.

Part II begins with the publication of Philosophical Investigations in 1953, a book many observers would probably see as marking the beginning of discussions about privacy. The upshot was a remarkably confused discussion with underlying methodological discord. Underlying the various discussions there was often disagreement about the nature and aim of philosophy. Nonetheless, successful and lasting contributions were made to the philosophy of mind, and more specifically to efforts at that time to query Cartesian dualism, which had dominated the field for centuries. So-called ‘ordinary language philosophy’, for all its problems, proved to be an effective way to direct attention to details in our conception of the mind which had been neglected in the Cartesian drive for a theoretically stringent picture.

Part III covers discussion of the private language argument from the early 1970s until today. Although the debate had all along centred on certain essential features of language, in the early 1970s the discussion liberated itself from the methodological crusades so distinctive of the Vienna Circle and ordinary language philosophy and focused on the mechanisms of language. Philosophers focused their attention, so to speak, on the tool – language – rather than simply using it, as they had in previous decades. This meant that discussion of the private language argument gradually became merged, as a sub-theme, with other discussions about such matters as following a rule and the possibility of a scientific approach to the mental. In so far as there still is a distinctive private language discussion today, it is among Wittgenstein scholars. I enter this debate in Chapter 10.

How, then, do these parts connect? Should we think of these transitions in the discussion as part of an evolution or merely as a superficial change of appearance? We can approach this question by acknowledging the fact that the private language debate shares certain general characteristics with the role that language has played in one branch of twentieth-century philosophy. Two leading reasons why language became central in philosophy in the early twentieth century were that it promised, first, to demarcate the borders of sense, and second, simultaneously to satisfy the striving for objectivity so essential to philosophical progress. Philosophers of the Vienna Circle took these features to provide a powerful tool with which to, as it were, muck out the metaphysical concepts of their contemporaries. It is true that this role of philosophical watchdog was also adopted in the linguistic philosophy emanating from Cambridge and Oxford in the 1950s. Here, however, philosophical aspirations were connected less closely with science, and in particular with a belief in the superiority of scientific language, than they were in the work of members of the Vienna Circle.

The purpose of drawing this crude, one-sided picture of philosophy in Vienna, and Cambridge and Oxford, is to shed light on what was regarded as the primary aim of argument against the possibility of a private language: within a linguistic framework, the private language argument promised to banish ghosts and myths that had haunted philosophy for centuries. These myths were not just found on the periphery: both Carnap, in 1932, and Malcolm, in 1954, saw their private language arguments as proving the impossibility of phenomenalism and Cartesianism. Private language argumentation was, therefore, conceived of as a facilitator of progress, because it was part of modern philosophy distancing itself from its predecessors. The discussion of private language in Part III continues this line, but the ideas that are disposed of there are of more recent origin and have to do with the conception of language inherent in the two earlier parts of the book. Wittgenstein had exposed and confronted not only the demons of his predecessors, but also those of his earlier self. His argument was taken to turn against the idea that ostensive definition is the ultimate meaning-fixing mechanism. It also constituted part of a serious problem for several conceptions of the normativity so essential for language. Since these discussions are still in vogue, the private language argument is still part of a cleansing process.

These remarks are very general and are intended to draw lines that pervade the whole period. Let me conclude by briefly introducing the book’s chapters in turn.

Chapter 2 focuses on the protocol sentence debate of the early 1930s involving Carnap and Neurath. This debate addressed the problem of reconciling the scientific demand for inter-subjectivity with the primacy of experience. An important part of it centred on the recognition that private language was unacceptable.

Chapter 3 presents Wittgenstein’s struggles in 1929, when he still believed in the necessity of a phenomenological language – a language which directly and non-hypothetically describes what is immediately given in sense experience. His repeated attempts to make sense of this language, and his subsequent abandonment of it, amount essentially to a private language argument.

Chapter 4, like the preceding chapter, draws upon material from Wittgenstein’s Nachlass that has only recently become available in published form. It examines Wittgenstein’s thoughts on privacy as they appear in a text written in 1941. This text outlines more clearly and coherently, but also more superficially than similar passages in Philosophical Investigations, the problems Wittgenstein saw here. Although the material is related to the discussion of Chapter 10, I have included it here, because in conjunction with Chapter 3 it brings out an important transition in Wittgenstein’s philosophy.

Chapter 5 presents the earliest reactions to the publication of Philosophical Investigations in 1953, and to the alleged demonstration, in that work, of the impossibility of a private language. Together, these reactions introduced a variety of topics into the discussion and raised it to the top of the agenda in philosophy. In particular, Malcolm’s review proved influential here. Indeed it probably explains why the topic came to enjoy such prominence, since he argued that the idea of a private language was inherently unstable, as opposed to being, merely, irreconcilable with new trends in philosophy. This created an expectation of real progress.

Chapters 6 and 7 look at discussions that occurred during the 1960s. This was the period in which the subject received the greatest attention. Chapter 6 asks whether Malcolm’s promise of a reductio ad absurdum of the notion of a private language was, or could have been, delivered on during the 1950s and 1960s; in particular it analyzes the alleged neutrality of Malcolm’s assumptions.

Chapter 7 focuses on methodological issues that also formed part of the privacy discussion during that period. It describes contributions that bore fruit independently of this methodological agenda, not only as interpretations of Wittgenstein, whose authority greatly influenced the debate, but also within the philosophy of mind. These contributions, however, did not amount to direct arguments against the possibility of a private language; they were located on the perimeter of the argument.

Chapter 8 discusses the important steps in the debate in the early 1970s, a time in which interest in private language had begun to cool as a result of external factors. Previous arguments had usually focused on the use of language as a medium; but philosophers now sought consciously to clarify their conception of this medium. Thus the debate about private language became more distinctively an issue in the philosophy of language. Once located here, the issue was gradually subordinated, during the 1970s, to the problem of rule-following.

Chapter 9 discusses the private language argument in the context of Wittgenstein’s rule-following considerations. In fact the conclusions of these considerations are reached before Wittgenstein turns to comment on private language in Philosophical Investigations. Hence, the private language argument proves to be relevant to questions about normativity in language and the question whether language is an essentially social phenomenon.

Chapter 10 analyses certain sections in Philosophical Investigations whose interpretation has been the focal point of the debate since 1953. I offer my own interpretation of these sections, but I also analyze some interpretations provided by leading Wittgenstein scholars. I show that although Wittgenstein’s main target seems to have been the Cartesian private object, his investigations connect thematically with recent applications of the argument. Accordingly, Chapter 11 links his conclusions to issues beyond the scope of Wittgenstein exegesis.

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¹ A few numbers might serve to underline this claim. In their 1990 bibliography of secondary literature on Wittgenstein, Frongia and McGuinness (1990) list 128 entries on ‘private language’ up to 1987. This makes ‘private language’ the largest single entry. The Philosopher’s Index (July, 2002) carries 168 entries for the same period. Of these, 85 also appear in the Frongia and McGuinness list. Of the remaining 83, 42 make explicit reference to Wittgenstein and only 20 refer to other philosophers. In these 20 items, indirect reference to Wittgenstein is common. The philosophers mentioned are: Kripke (5), Frege (1), Castañeda (1), Schlic...

Table of contents

• Cover-Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Content Page
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• Part I: Between the Wars
• Part II: Post-War Effects of Philosophical Investigations
• Part III: Language within Philosophy
• Appendices
• Bibliography
• Index