Peter Hacker - Wittgenstein: Meaning and Mind
Chapter One: The Private Language Arguments
1. Preliminaries
● There is more than one argument in sections 243-315; let us call them the private
language arguments
○ they are all connected more or less directly with the idea of a language
that can be understood only by its speaker
○ but they are designed to reveal the incoherence of a complete
philosophical discipline, dominant since Descartes
● This discipline includes a conception of the mental to which we are naturally drawn
○ this is the ‘inner/outer’ conception of the mental, and is as important to
the philosophy of mind as the Platonist conception of number is to the philosophy of
mathematics
■ both of these conceptions, and their dialectic contraries
(behaviourism and formalism) are rooted in the Augustinian picture of language,
where each word is a name, and each sentence a description
● The same philosophical nexus includes the view that the source of all knowledge is
experience
○ hence language has its foundations in mental or subjective objects, the
names of which link language to reality
● It is a mistake to think that the ‘real’ private language argument is over by 202 (Kripke)
○ W did not mean to show in his discussion of rule following that it only
makes sense to talk of x following a rule where x is part of a community of rule followers
■ instead, we can talk of following a rule where there is a
practice (behavioural regularity) that is informed by normative activities (i.e.
using the rule as a standard of correctness, rectifying mistakes etc)
● these activities are usually shared, but
not necessarily so - Robinson Crusoe can follow a rule alone
■ if W had meant to show this, he wouldn’t have shown
that public language isn’t a congruence of private languages built on private ODs
(Locke and empiricists)
● clearly he had a point to make about the
possibility of a genuinely private language
● private ODs aren’t just an OD that
nobody happen to know about, they are rules which cannot be
communicated to other people
● W’s target is a misconstrual of our concepts of experience that inform philosophical,
psychological and theoretical linguistic accounts of the nature of language, the foundations of
language in ‘private’ experience and ‘private’ rules, and the putative foundations of knowledge
○ the question is not the logical possibility of a language in solitude, it is
whether there is an analogue of following a rule in the case in which the putative rule
could not be communicated to anyone else
■ if we see the meaning of words as given by explanation,
then the question is not whether the private linguist can explain to others what he
Chapter One: The Private Language Arguments
1. Preliminaries
● There is more than one argument in sections 243-315; let us call them the private
language arguments
○ they are all connected more or less directly with the idea of a language
that can be understood only by its speaker
○ but they are designed to reveal the incoherence of a complete
philosophical discipline, dominant since Descartes
● This discipline includes a conception of the mental to which we are naturally drawn
○ this is the ‘inner/outer’ conception of the mental, and is as important to
the philosophy of mind as the Platonist conception of number is to the philosophy of
mathematics
■ both of these conceptions, and their dialectic contraries
(behaviourism and formalism) are rooted in the Augustinian picture of language,
where each word is a name, and each sentence a description
● The same philosophical nexus includes the view that the source of all knowledge is
experience
○ hence language has its foundations in mental or subjective objects, the
names of which link language to reality
● It is a mistake to think that the ‘real’ private language argument is over by 202 (Kripke)
○ W did not mean to show in his discussion of rule following that it only
makes sense to talk of x following a rule where x is part of a community of rule followers
■ instead, we can talk of following a rule where there is a
practice (behavioural regularity) that is informed by normative activities (i.e.
using the rule as a standard of correctness, rectifying mistakes etc)
● these activities are usually shared, but
not necessarily so - Robinson Crusoe can follow a rule alone
■ if W had meant to show this, he wouldn’t have shown
that public language isn’t a congruence of private languages built on private ODs
(Locke and empiricists)
● clearly he had a point to make about the
possibility of a genuinely private language
● private ODs aren’t just an OD that
nobody happen to know about, they are rules which cannot be
communicated to other people
● W’s target is a misconstrual of our concepts of experience that inform philosophical,
psychological and theoretical linguistic accounts of the nature of language, the foundations of
language in ‘private’ experience and ‘private’ rules, and the putative foundations of knowledge
○ the question is not the logical possibility of a language in solitude, it is
whether there is an analogue of following a rule in the case in which the putative rule
could not be communicated to anyone else
■ if we see the meaning of words as given by explanation,
then the question is not whether the private linguist can explain to others what he
