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

----- Original Message -----
From: "Sally Caves" <scaves@...>

I have to forward this; it was blocked yesterday.

 ----- 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?  My former message was posted
at two this morning (yesterday morning).  Maybe you'd check it out.  More on
Wittgenstein to follow in the SemiOT(ic) thread.  Dan Sulani has weighed in
as well.

> 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 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.

> If I feel
> confident that I can introspect and identify a class of "private
> sensations" reliably enough to attach a name to it, then I'm happy to do
> so -- and it doesn't matter to me (in the first instance) that nobody else
> has access to the particular sensations that this name refers to. Of
> course, I'm probably not thinking of "private sensations" in exactly the
> same way that Wittgenstein was........
>
> That said, I reckon I *can* say that I don't think Wittgenstein's "private
> language" argument has any bearing at all on the feasibility of conlanging
> as we understand it.
It doesn't, as I said, for most of us; read Dan's earnest and interesting
response to my post earlier yesterday afternoon.

John Cowan wrote:
> >     Sally Caves scripsit:
> >I once described a plunger as a "kleegle."  I was four, I was
> >in the bathtub and I pointed to the toilet plunger and asked my mother
> >"what's that kleegle over there?"  (already conlanging)   Mom still uses
> >the
> >word to mean an object you don't have a word for.  It's a private joke, a
> >word only our family knows.  I suppose if I were a famous author and
> >wrote about it, it could fall into public use.
> There *are* in fact lots of words in public use for that purpose: gadget,
> widget, gilkickie, e.g.  Geeks also have a set of proper names (though
> not usually capitalized) for referring to complex things:  foo, bar, baz.
>
> But "kleegle" is charming, provided it does not put you in mind of
> "Kleagle"
>  (the title of some KKK official or other).
It didn't then.  I worried about it later. :]  But in all honesty, I was
naming the object; at four, I didn't know the vocabulary for whatsit,
doohickey, widgit, thingummy.  I had said, "what's that?"  Mom said, "what?"
unsure of what I was pointing at.  "That kleegle," I said.  To me, I was
giving it its most appropriate name.  What could better describe a worn
wooden pole with a red rubber cup at the end of it, standing pole up under
the sink near the toilet?  Maybe that's the best association for Mr.
Kleagle.  I may have been mistaken about the application of kleegle.  Maybe
it was just applied to all toilet plungers.

I gotta do some serious work here!  I mean, paying a traffic ticket, that's
such a waste of time.

> Sally
And that's my last post for the day I'm afraid, so I'm gonna shut up and
shut down.

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