Wittgenstein's private language argument demonstrates the impossibility of a coherent language for private sensations.
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Reference literature and scholarly commentary dispute whether Wittgenstein's discussion actually demonstrates the impossibility of a private sensation-language, with some interpretations noting his critique does not aim to establish its impossibility.
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.
A language which expresses one's inner thoughts, feelings or experiences but which cannot be used for communication, since it is known to and understandable by only one person—the existence of which was famously argued by Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) to be impossible.: #*
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interpreters “ the private - language argument .” Whether it be a veritable argument or not (and Wittgenstein never ... and Private Language One of the issues most associated with the later Wittgenstein is that of rule- ... descriptions of its use or by deciphering roots of the private language arguments in this Wittgenstein’s musings ...
Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein ( VIT-gən-s(h)tyne; Austrian German: [ˈluːdvɪç ˈjoːsɛf ˈjoːhan ˈvɪtɡn̩ʃtaɪn]; 26 April 1889 – 29 April 1951) was an Austro-British philosopher who worked in logic, philosophy of mathematics, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of language.
Wittgenstein was born in Vienna into one of Europe's richest families. From 1911 to 1913, he studied at the University of Cambri
The Blue Book, a set of notes dictated to his class at Cambridge in 1933–1934, contains the seeds of Wittgenstein's later thoughts on language and is widely read as a turning point in his philosophy of language. Philosophical Investigations was published in two parts in 1953. Most of Part I was ready for printing in 1946, but Wittgenstein withdrew the manuscript from his publisher. The shorter Part II was added by his editors, Elizabeth Anscombe and Rush Rhees. Wittgenstein asks the reader to think of language as a multiplicity of language…
He argues that the bewitchments of philosophical problems arise from philosophers' misguided attempts to consider the meaning of words independently of their context, usage, and grammar — what he called "language gone on holiday". Wittgenstein wrote, "For a large class of cases of the employment of the word 'meaning'—though not for all—this word can be explained in this way: the meaning of a word is its use in the language."
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Works by Ludwig Wittgenstein in eBook form at Standard Ebooks
Works by Ludwig Wittgenstein at Project Gutenberg
C.K. Ogden's English translation of Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (Gutenberg)
Works by or about Ludwig Wittgenstein at the Internet Archive
Works by Ludwig Wittgenstein at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks)
Works by Ludwig Wittgenstein at The Ludwig Wittgenstein Project
Fieser, James; Dowden, Bradley (eds.). "Ludwig Wittgenstein". Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. ISSN 2161-0002. OCLC 37741658.
Fieser, James; Dowden, Bradley (eds.). "Ludwig Wittgenstein: Later Philosophy of Mathematics". Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. ISSN 2161-0002. OCLC 37741658.
Trinity College Chapel
John Searle on Ludwig Wittgenstein on YouTube
BBC Radio 4 programme on Wittgenstein, broadcast 13 December 2011
"A. J. Ayer's Critique of Wittgenstein's Private Language Argument"
Wittgenstein, BBC Radio 4 discussion with Ray Monk, Barry Smith & Marie McGinn (In Our Time, 4 December 2003)
Ludwig Wittgenstein at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
Wittgenstein's Jet – BBC Radio 4 programme Broadcast Friday 2 January 2015
GB Patent GB191027087A: Improvements in Propellers applicable for Aerial Machines, 1910 – Espacenet
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