Re: Wittgenstein & 'private language' (was: SemiOT: Revealing your conlanger status)

Sally Caves said:
>
>  ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Mark P. Line" <mark@...>
> To: <CONLANG@...>
> Sent: Friday, June 18, 2004 3:37 PM
> Subject: Wittgenstein & 'private language' (was: SemiOT: Revealing your
> conlanger status)
>
>> Wittgenstein's "private language" argument was not really about
>> conlanging. What he said (in _Philosophical Investigations_ (_PI_),
>> paragraph 243) about a hypothetical private language was:
>>
>> "The individual words of this language are to refer to what can only be
>> known to the person speaking; to his immediate private sensations. So
>> another person cannot understand the language."
>
> Holy Moly!! We both came up with the same Wittgenstein quotation and the
> same header!!  How's that for synchronicity?
Great minds think alike.


>> Although I follow the thinking of the later Wittgenstein pretty closely
>> in
>> my own, I don't think I ever made up my mind about this particular
>> argument. The problem, I think, was epistemological: how do I know that
>> I've captured a certain "private sensation" with a certain word, without
>> the intersubjective semantic control that I have when using a _public_
>> language (natural or constructed)? I see his point, but I also think
>> that
>> a word I invent can capture exactly what I say it captures.
>
> But can I capture that understanding when you explain the word to me?
> That's the point.  I don't think it's strictly epistemological except in
> the
> sense that we know and can talk about something by virtue of its having a
> word in public use that can roughly correspond to what we identify as our
> feelings.  Such as being "heartsick."  As I said in my post, I think it
> was
> primarily an argument against the claims of solipsism.  I'm not going to
> reproduce all of that here.
I read your earlier post. I never took Wittgenstein's 'private language'
argument as being about solipsism (maybe because I was mostly looking for
guidance as a linguist), but I'll have to reread part of _PI_ before I can
make any kind of cogent comment.


> I do remember this, though.  I used not to be able to distinguish between
> fatigue, nausea, and thirst.  I was five when my parents took me to see
> "Snow White." When she bit into the apple, she put her hand to her head
> and
> said, "I feel so... strange!"  And then she fell to the floor.  Two images
> came to mind: being tired, and being on the swing and having had too much
> of
> it.  Being on the swing and having had too much of it required a drink
> from
> the drinking fountain.  Tiredness, dizzyness, nausea, and thirst were all
> mixed up in my mind until public vocabulary separated them for me.

My experience is that a sensation is generally unintelligible to me until
I've given it a name of some kind. (The name doesn't have to be verbal;
call it "conceptualization" if you like.) Whether or not the name has any
public mindshare or not doesn't seem to be relevant to this
"intelligibilization" function.

A couple of months ago, I was seriously ill with a GI "flu" that had been
going around. I had to wake my wife up in the middle of the night (she's a
semi-retired physician) to look after me. She marched me into her office
to work one of her spells, and when we got in there and I was leaning
against a table, I started to experience an odd sensation that I couldn't
identify (much less explain to her). She took my blood pressure, she told
me it was something like 85/40, and then I said, "Oh, now I know what this
funny feeling is... I'm fainting...!". (Whereupon she marched me back to
bed, and I didn't actually lose consciousness...)

The point is that, for a little bit, I had no way of expressing what the
sensation *was* -- not to my wife, and (above all) not to myself.

The thing about languages, even "private" languages in Wittgenstein's
sense, is that they are not arbitrary collections of isolated elements.
Words are not generally made to mean certain things in a direct one-to-one
correspondence where both the word and the referent are completely
insulated from every other word and every other referent.

Words are about making things intelligible (to oneself, in the first
instance), and they (the words) don't have to be public for that.
("Intelligible" doesn't entail "mutually intelligible", "real", "true" or
anything of that nature.) They just have to hang together in some
more-or-less stable configuration. (Stability being one of the criteria I
would expect speech pathologists like Dan to use if they wanted to try to
distinguish between meaningless babble and some sort of private speech
form.)

That's why I think Wittgenstein's issue was primarily epistemological: I
find it hard to believe he'd disagree with much of the above, but the
above does little to defend against solipsism (quite the contrary, in
fact).


(I said earlier that I need to reread Wittgenstein before making any
cogent comment. Please treat these comments here as non-cogent......)


-- Mark

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