Several years ago on an online forum I took part in a discussion about Wittgenstein’s private language argument. Those who had never come across it before found it very interesting, with the exception of one rather obnoxious person who dismissed it out of hand. He declared that it must be nonsense because he could see no way of expressing the argument in purely notational form, as might be done on a computer program. As he’d already interpreted the argument as an attempt to show that objects can be brought into existence by imagining them (no, I don’t know how he got there either) it’s fair to say that his philosophical comprehension was not all it might be.
However, I was wondering if it really would be possible to express literally any philosophical argument, no matter how complex, in a purely notational form. Introductions to logic often give illustrations of very simple arguments expressed notationally, but do you think this could be done with the private language argument or something like it? Or is it only possible for particular types of argument? Thanks in advance for your thoughts on this.
There are schools of thought that say that any utterance that cannot be notationally expressed is by definition not a philosophical statement. Wittgenstein’s first work (The Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus) is more or less the peak of this - he effectively defines a complete logical notational system, and says that anything outside of this is not philosophy (“Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muß man schweigen”).
However.
After writing this, he dusted his hands, content at having solved philosophy for everyone, and went off to do other stuff. And then changed his mind, to the effect that philosophy was about meaning, and that there are many many meanings that cannot be captured notationally. The story I’ve heard is that an Italian colleague made an offensive gesture (img.wonkette.com/images/2006/03/ … stures.JPG) and said “notate this”… there’s a nice clip here: youtube.com/watch?v=PIhl9rVg6mM
In any case, it’s precisely this point that led Wittgenstein to revise his thought completely, and develop the theory of language games and private languages. As he puts it, logic is pure and smooth, like ice - you can go a long way with it, but only in straight lines, you need the traction of real life to get moving and to make progress. Language is a communicative venture, designed for action and interaction, and straightjacketing it into formal rules is unnatural; bent and twisted language leads to bent and twisted thoughts; the private language argument supercedes the logical argument of your acquaintance, it answers it, not vice versa… meaning is use.
I also don’t see how the private language argument could be condensed down to a few lines of notation. It has always seemed to me to be a highly dubious assumption to think that it must always be possible to express any argument in this way, pouring it into a pre-existing mold, without distorting the argument in the process. That doesn’t mean it can’t be done in some cases of course - those arguments which are “pure and smooth, like ice” could be expressed in this way. However, while the private language argument is powerful and persuasive, I think it’s fair to say that there is little which is “pure and smooth” about it! I recall this person struggling badly with complex philosophical arguments in other discussions and the fundamental reason seemed to be the same each time: he hated the way philosophical arguments often take a number of twists and turns instead of conforming to those “straight lines” you mention. (In a way, it would be very convenient if all arguments did stick to those straight lines: no-one would need to bother writing whole books to explain their arguments if a few lines of notation would do the job just as well. However, it seems philosophical arguments are often not like that - and if the later Wittgenstein’s conception of meaning is right, we should not expect them to be.)
I suppose it might just be possible to condense the private language argument down to a relatively small number of propositions (rather than notation), but, even if that could be done, I suspect each of those propositions would need an argument of its own to back it up, so it would be a pointless exercise anyway.
Thanks for the links - it’s hard to say if that YouTube clip is an accurate portrayal of Wittgenstein’s personality, but whether it is or not, it is very funny!
Well, I find in philosophy it pays to look at any theory twice - once positively, once negatively. There are few philosophies that are completely without value.
To paraphrase Freddie Ayers, who developed a form of logical positivism after WWII, philosophy is about the search for truth. Therefore, a philosophical argument is one that can be definitely decided and verified, and not left to opinion or personal feeling. “Beer is nicer than lemonade” isn’t a philosophical position capable of objective truth, “horses have tails” is.
Philosophical arguments therefore boil down to
logical statements, which are by definition tautologous - they couldn’t be any other way. “2+2=4” must be true, because you have the same thing both sides of the equation.
empirical assertions, which can be measured and verified scientifically.
Now, this robs philosophy of a lot - morality and ethics, for example. The argument is that these things cannot be determined as true or false, they can only be argued from personal preferences, and philosophy has no business outside the pursuit of truth. There are arguments outside philosophy, of course, such as whether beer is nicer than lemonade. It’s effectively a restriction of the purview of philosophy, rather than a restriction on its methods.
So in the view of such rationalism, the private language argument doesn’t belong to philosophy; it’s certainly not purely logical, and it’s unverifiable. On the other hand, the point Wittgenstein was making was that the purpose of philosophy was the quest for meaning and the dissolution of “problems” by looking at the assumptions of language behind them… which is a different aim to the above view that it is the quest for truth and objective fact. So we need a philosophy of philosophy to tell us which description of philosophy we should adhere to - but it’s clearly not an empirical question! And so the fun begins.
Logical positivism is out of fashion now. Gödel showed that you can’t have a mathematical notation system that’s both consistent and complete, Wittgenstein challenged the aims and methods of logic as opposed to language, and there was an attack from both pragmatists and postmodernists on how theory-dependent the postulation of empirical assertions were - you only assert things that current knowledge encourages you to assert.
It’s a dramatisation, of course, but apparently not far from the truth - highly-strung, neurotic, painfully frustrated that no-one else could keep up with his thoughts. Mostly, I love the exchange
“But what will you do with the rest of your life?”
“Well, I shall start by committing suicide.”
I suppose what I found dubious was the assumption that “it must always be like so and it’s rubbish if it isn’t”. In the case of the obnoxious person I mentioned before, this was certainly no more than an assumption; he didn’t feel the need to back it up with any sort of argument, he simply took it for granted that it was “obviously true”, because it was all he knew. But of course, if you read an explanation or analysis of the private language argument, even the most lucid of them are fairly complex. The idea that it must be possible to condense all of that down to just a handful of simple steps and then notate them (as if such a complex argument could be boiled down to something not much more complicated than a simple syllogism) is highly dogmatic; and if there is an enemy of philosophy it is surely dogmatism.
I must say I do find myself much more in sympathy with Wittgenstein’s position than that of the positivists. Positivism seems to concentrate predominantly on one particular class of statements, namely propositions that make statements about physical objects; or, more generally, that purport to describe some directly observable feature of the physical world. As you say, other types of statements are then either dismissed as meaningless, or at the very least as being not truly meaningful in a philosophical sense. As a large portion of the statements we make are not descriptions of some directly observable physical feature of the world, it seems much more reasonable to try to account, as Wittgenstein did, for the fact that we can and do use highly diverse types of statements in everyday life meaningfully. It is perhaps rather ironic that Wittgenstein’s notions of “forms of life” and “language games” as constituting our fundamental ontological position in the world - as opposed to the detached Cartesian observer experiencing an inner series of mental representations of an “external world” - bears some similarity to Heidegger’s analysis of what he describes as “being-in-the-world” in the first half of Being and Time. There are many differences between the two of course, but Heidegger’s repeated insistence that the Cartesian picture is only a secondary way of being, which would not be possible without what he calls “being-in-the-world” and which Wittgenstein calls “forms of life”, is a striking similarity. It is undoubtedly not a similarity the positivists would be happy to acknowledge, given that they claimed Wittgenstein as one of their own at one point but poured scorn on Heidegger, a loathing which was unquestionably mutual.
I was thinking specifically of the way in which that clip seems to portray Wittgenstein as being gifted with superb comic timing - he was certainly not known as being a barrel of laughs! That said, I suppose he could have been unwittingly funny. But generally speaking, yes, he does indeed seem to have been a brilliant but intimidating character who did not suffer fools gladly. Ray Monk’s biography makes that very clear, and is a very interesting book for anyone with an interest in Wittgenstein.
I’m guessing that attempting to express the private language argument in predicate logic would run into the objection outlined above by Only_Humean - namely, that attempting to straightjacket language into formal rules (in this case, the formal rules of predicate logic) distorts the argument being expressed. Only_Humean, I’d be interested to know if you think that is indeed the case.
From Wittgenstein’s point of view, you’re attempting to take the argument out of the normal context of its expression, yes. This doesn’t automatically lead to meaninglessness, I suppose, but can lead us into linguistic contortions trying to make it all match up, and opens the door to glaring errors and nonsense to come in where they would like.
From the pure logician’s point of view, predicate logic expresses objective facts and relations, whereas the private language argument is one of subjective reasoning regarding internal events. I can’t honestly see that you could get much further than replacing the nouns with algebraical figures. There exists an x and it is in a box, where x is a beetle. Or something… The argument doesn’t really deal with the atomic facts of PL, so much as argue from social experience.
