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

----- Original Message -----
From: "Mark P. Line" <mark@...>

> Sally Caves said:
> >
> >> 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.
Well, so will I.  I think I'm influenced by a philosophy class I took years
ago.  The PI can be terribly formidable.  Saul Kripke wrote a whole book on
W's "private language" notions; it's called _On Rules and Private Language_.
I'll see if I can't wrestle it out of this mess that's my study.  Anybody
else know it?  Yes, I'm resorting to a gloss!  :)

> My experience is that a sensation is generally unintelligible to me until
> I've given it a name of some kind.
Me too.

> (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.
I like "intelligibilization."

> 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...)
Wow, you had to be grown up and married before you knew what it felt like to
faint!  Many of us gals were already starting on that with...  well, let's
see what else you have to say here:

> 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.
Yes... my first panic attack struck me the same way.  I didn't feel panic.
It was something else indescribable, like pain without physical pain.  But
it created a whole new kind of dread that I just had no word for.  So of
course I insisted my doctors check me out for somatic illnesses.  It took a
long time to diagnose, and for a long time I felt that I was trapped within
a malady I had no way to get out of and no way to describe.  That just made
it worse.  This was twenty years ago, before the term "anxiety disorder" was
even a term for me.

> 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.
Exactly.

> 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).
Right, but he does defend against "private language," and he is skeptical
about a language of private sensation (in the sense of one that has rules).
Since we've established that what most of us are doing here is writing
idioglosses with rules that we hope others will learn, then "private
language" as W. meant it is not what we're doing.

One important point Kripke makes is that the whole Private Language
conundrum is best understood if we read the paragraphs BEFORE 243; most of
us read the following paragraphs.  He associates the private language
argument with arguments about "obeying rules."  He writes that para. 202
starts the paradox: "Hence it is not possible to obey a rule privately:
otherwise thinking one was obeying a rule would be the same thing as obeying
it."  Kripke responds by saying that "The 'private language argument' as
applied to sensations is only a special case of much more general
considerations about language previously argued; sensations have a crucial
role as an (apparently) convincing counterexample to the general
considerations previously stated."

Are you a mathematician, Mark?  I've gathered from your comments (and your
address) that you are.  You might like Kripke's book; it's Greek to me,
although I've underlined passages, but what he does in analyzing the Private
Language argument is to insist that W. is talking about rules and
contradictions of rules within language as he does within mathematics (W. as
you know was equally interested in mathematics and the philosophy of mind),
and he proposes a bizarre analogy in his second chapter about a mathematical
problem that is contradicted by a "mad" skeptic who quarrels with his
colleague about what his colleague means by "plus."  Perhaps he meant "quus"
all this time, and therefore his solution is 5 and not 125.   I don't know
the language of mathematics very well, and don't have the time tonight to
struggle through his arguments; if anyone knows his book, perhaps he/she can
guide me.  But the argument leads up to a discussion of language, rules, and
the private mind.

Chapter two ends:  "...ultimately the sceptical problem cannot be evaded,
and it arises precisely in the question how the existence in my mind of any
mental entity or idea can constitue 'grasping' any particular sense rather
than another.  The idea in my mind is a finite object: can it not be
interpreted as determining a quus function, rather than a plus function?  Of
course there may be another idea in my mind, which is supposed to constitute
its act of assigning a particular interpretation to the first idea, but then
the problem obviously arises again at this new level. (A rule for
interpreting a rule again.)  And so on.  For Wittgenstein, Platonism is
largely an unhelpful evasion of the problem of how our finite minds can give
rules that are supposed to apply to an infinity of cases.  Platonic objects
may be self-interpreting, or rather, they may need no interpretation; but
ultimately there must be some mental entity involved that raises the
skeptical problem."  Chapter Three: "The skeptical argument, then, remains
unanswered.  There can be no such thing as meaning anything by any word.
Each new application we make is a leap in the dark; any present intention
could be interpreted so as to accord with anything we may choose to do.  So
there can be neither accord, nor conflict.  This is what Wittgenstein said
in par.202."

Okay, I need to finish the book, and then look at the relevant paragraphs...
not what I had intended for this evening!  but it seems to me from Kripke's
accounts (who may be wrong but who knows more about W. than I do) that W. is
refuting is the solepsistic argument that private references count, so to
speak; if they do, then anyone can mean anything by a word.  "A private
world that is in need of refutation," is how Kripke puts it, and he musters
W.V. Quine as a philosopher who maintained similar notions to those of W's.
This is why I think I've insisted that the private language argument is a
counter-argument to solipsism.  Public agreement on the rules of language
and reference are what matters.  A "private language" is merely a
counter-example, like the analogy with the made mathematical skeptic, and
not intended to describe anything like Sindarin, or even pathological
idioglossia.

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

I was hoping to get this in before midnight; I hadn't used up my quota for
"yesterday."  Good night everyone.

Sally
http://claws.com

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