Full Description
Wittgenstein's critique of private language in the Philosophical Investigations does not attempt to refute the possibility of a private sensation-language, let alone in any one argument, as has often been thought. Nor does it aim to establish that language is intrinsically social. Instead, PI §§243-315 presents a series of arguments, suggestions, questions, examples and thought-experiments whose purpose is to undermine the temptation to think of sensations and perceptual experiences as private objects occupying a private phenomenal space. These themes are clear developments of Wittgenstein's earlier critique of sense-datum theories (1929-1936) and his insight that naming is more complex than he had assumed in the Tractatus.
Contents
1. Introduction; 2. Methodological and exegetical commitments; 3. Privacy and the objectification of sensation and perception; 4. Private language; 5. Solitary speakers; 6. Ontological privacy, epistemic privacy and first-person authority; 7. Avowals; 8. The first wave: verification and memory; 9. The second wave: ostensive definition; 10. The third wave: rules; 11. The fourth wave: stage-setting; 12. The human manometer; 13. The beetle; 14. Epilogue; Abbreviations; References.
