Mind, Matter, and Meaning

Pick a sensation that feels entirely your own — the particular quality of a headache settling in behind your left eye, right now. It seems like the clearest case there could be of something private. No one else feels it. No one else has access to it. And it seems obvious that you could, if you wanted, give it a private name: call this exact felt quality S, fix the meaning of S by attending to the sensation and mentally christening it, and use S thereafter to refer to that quality whenever it recurs. The headache is yours; surely the word for it could be yours too, in the strongest sense — a word whose meaning you alone set and you alone could check.

Wittgenstein argued that you could do no such thing. Not that the headache is unreal. Not that you can’t talk about it. But that the strongest version of the private word — meaning fixed by a private ceremony, correctness checked by private memory — collapses into incoherence on inspection.¹ The argument is one of the most misunderstood in philosophy, and the misunderstanding matters, because the chapter’s whole account of interiority — its case that the felt inner life is real but not the sealed, self-sufficient private chamber we take it for — leans on getting it right.

The Argument, Stripped Down

Strip the scenario to its load-bearing parts. You attend to the sensation and inwardly say “S.” You have performed a private ostensive definition: you have pointed, inwardly, at a felt quality and attached a sign to it. The question is whether anything has thereby been defined — whether a meaning has been fixed.

To have fixed a meaning is to have set up a distinction between using S correctly and using it wrongly. A word with no possible misuse is not a word; it is a noise. So: next week a sensation recurs and you say “S again.” What makes that application correct or incorrect? In the public case, the answer is ready to hand — the community’s practice, the shared criteria, the other speakers who can check you. In the private case, by stipulation, there is nothing but your own memory and your own present inclination. You apply S because this sensation seems to you the same as the one you christened.

And here the floor gives way. Your only check on whether the sensation really is the same is the very memory whose reliability is in question. If it seems the same, you call it S; and there is no further fact, no independent standard, against which “seems the same” could be tested. Wittgenstein’s sentence is the one to keep: whatever is going to seem right to me is right. And that only means that here we can’t talk about ‘right.’² The distinction between being correct and merely seeming correct has quietly evaporated, and with it the distinction between following a rule and merely thinking you are. No rule, no meaning, no language. Only the appearance of one.

You might want to protest that you can simply recognize the sensation when it returns — that recognition needs no outside warrant, because the felt quality announces its own identity. But recognition is itself a capacity that can go right or wrong, and an inner act that could never misfire cannot mark the line between getting it right and merely feeling sure. To think you are following a rule is not yet to follow one.³

A short statement of the result: the private word is not a word that happens to be hard to check. It is a word for which the very idea of checking has no purchase — and a sign you cannot misapply is not a sign you have given a meaning.

What the Argument Does Not Show

Now the misreading, because it is everywhere and it is tempting. People hear the private-language argument and conclude that Wittgenstein has denied inner experience — that he is some kind of behaviorist for whom the headache is nothing but wincing and aspirin-seeking, the felt quality dismissed as a fiction. On this reading the argument is an attack on the inner life itself, and most readers, sensibly attached to their own headaches, reject it.

They are right to reject that. But that is not the argument. Wittgenstein nowhere denies that you have a sensation, or that it has a felt character, or that the character is yours in a way no one else’s is. He says something far more specific and far more interesting: that the language in which you describe the sensation — the word “ache,” the word “throbbing,” the word “behind the eye” — is a public language, learned from others, governed by shared criteria, and that its meaning cannot be fixed by your private inner pointing. The inner episode is real. The word for it is borrowed.

Notice the shape of the move, because it is the same shape the whole book has been tracing. The mistake is not believing in inner experience. The mistake is believing that inner experience could be self-grounding — that a bare private presence could, all by itself, anchor a meaning, certify a judgment, serve as the bedrock on which the rest is built. This is what McDowell, reading the private-language argument in its widest setting, identifies as its real quarry: the seductive picture of the Given, the idea that there are bare presences that could be the ultimate grounds of judgment without owing anything to the public, conceptual, world-involving practices in which we learned to judge at all.⁴ The headache is not in question. The headache as a self-sufficient inner foundation is.

Why the Chapter Needs This

Set the result beside the chapter’s other findings and the picture closes. The inner voice, Vygotsky argued, is internalized social speech — outer become inner.⁵ The self, we argued, is not a Cartesian core — not a self-standing inner subject of the kind Descartes imagined, complete before it ever met the world — but a constitutive achievement conducted in a borrowed vocabulary. The private-language argument supplies the missing structural reason these are not three separate observations but one. The vocabulary of inner life had to come from outside, because there is no other place it could have come from. A meaning cannot bootstrap itself from a private act of attention. The criteria that make “ache” mean ache live in the practice of a community, not in the privacy of a skull.

This is why interiority is an illusion in the precise sense the chapter intends, and not in the crude sense the misreading fears. The felt life is real, vivid, and particular to you. What is illusory is its self-sufficiency — the sense that the inner is the primary thing, the secure foundation, the place where meaning gets its first grip before reaching out to the world. Run the private-language argument and the order reverses. The reaching-out comes first. The public practice comes first. The inner vocabulary in which you describe your most private ache is itself an inheritance from the outer world, on loan, and answerable to a court you did not convene.

The ache is yours. The word for it never was.

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Notes

1. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell, 1953), §§243–271 for the core of the so-called private-language argument, with the sensation-diary thought experiment (“S“) at §258. The label “private language argument” is not Wittgenstein’s and is somewhat misleading: there is no single deductive argument but a sequence of connected considerations against a particular philosophical picture. I reconstruct the central thread rather than the whole texture. On whether §243–271 constitute one argument or a family of them, see Saul Kripke, Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), and the dissent in P. M. S. Hacker, Wittgenstein: Meaning and Mind (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990). ↩
2. Wittgenstein, Investigations, §258: “One would like to say: whatever is going to seem right to me is right. And that only means that here we can’t talk about ‘right.’” The sentence is the hinge of the whole passage. It does not deny that the diarist has experiences; it denies that the diarist’s bare say-so could constitute a criterion of correct application, and so denies that a meaning has been fixed. The diarist proposes to “concentrate my attention” on the sensation and so “impress on myself the connexion between the sign and the sensation” (§258) — and it is precisely this private ostensive ceremony that Wittgenstein argues cannot do the work of fixing a use. ↩
3. A natural objection: surely I can simply recognize the recurring sensation, and recognition needs no external check — the felt quality announces its own identity. Wittgenstein’s reply is that recognition is itself an exercise of a capacity that can go right or wrong, and an inner episode that cannot misfire cannot underwrite the distinction between recognizing and merely seeming to recognize; “to think one is obeying a rule is not to obey a rule” (§202). The point is sharpened at §293, the “beetle in the box”: if the word for the sensation got its meaning only from a private object each of us inspects in isolation, “the thing in the box has no place in the language-game at all; not even as a something: for the box might even be empty.” The sensation is not thereby eliminated; rather, its public word does not get its meaning from a private act of inner pointing. For a representationalist gloss compatible with the position taken here — that the felt character is the world-directed content of the state, not a private inner object the word labels — see Michael Tye, Consciousness, Color, and Content (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000), ch. 1. ↩
4. The reading of the private-language argument as an application of a more general rejection of the Myth of the Given is John McDowell’s, Mind and World, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), Lecture I, esp. pp. 18–19, where the “apparently compulsory way of thinking” that posits “bare presences that are the ultimate grounds of judgements” is named as “Wittgenstein’s target in the so-called Private Language Argument,” and McDowell proposes to “understand that polemic as applying a general rejection of the [Myth of the] Given.” The connection to Wilfrid Sellars’s critique (Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind, 1956) is explicit in McDowell and worth pursuing for readers who want the epistemological version of the same point; the wider aim is to refuse what McDowell calls “bald naturalism,” not to deny that the rational is part of nature. ↩
5. See “The Origins of Inner Speech” (Ch. 7 §I), and L. S. Vygotsky, Thought and Language, rev. ed., trans. and ed. Alex Kozulin (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986), for the thesis that inner speech develops by the internalization of egocentric, originally social speech; cf. Inner Speech, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, on Vygotsky’s claim that inner speech “does not change in its fundamental nature” but remains a kind of actual, socially derived speech. Saul Kripke’s influential reconstruction in Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982) frames the argument around rule-following and the sceptical paradox rather than sensation specifically; I have followed the more orthodox sensation-centred reading here because it bears more directly on the chapter’s concern with the vocabulary of inner states, but Kripke’s version reaches the same destination — that correctness conditions require a community — by the rule-following road. ↩