Philosophy in the modern world a new history of western philosophy, volume 4 (new history of western philosophy) ( PDFDrive ) (1) 158

LANGUAGE

This is so even in the relatively simple case of naming a colour or a
material object; matters are much more complicated when we consider the
names of mental events and states, such as sensations and thoughts.
Consider the way in which the word ‘pain’ functions as the name of a
sensation. We are tempted to think that for each person ‘pain’ acquires its
meaning by being correlated by him with his own private, incommunicable
sensation. But Wittgenstein showed that no word could acquire meaning
in this way. One of his arguments runs as follows.
Suppose that I want to keep a diary about the occurrence of a certain
sensation, and that I associate the sensation with the sign ‘S’. It is essential to
the supposition that no definition of the sign can be given in terms of our
ordinary language, because otherwise the language would not be a private
one. The sign must be defined for me alone, and this by a private ostensive
definition. ‘I speak, or write the sign down and at the same time I concentrate my attention on the sensation . . . in this way I impress on myself the
connection between the sign and the sensation’ (PI i. 258).
Wittgenstein argues that no such ceremony could establish an appropriate connection. When next I call something ‘S’, how will I know what
I mean by ‘S’? The problem is not that I may misremember and call
something ‘S’ which is not S; the trouble goes deeper. Even to think falsely
that something is S, I must know the meaning of ‘S’, and this, Wittgenstein
argues, is impossible in a private language. But can I not appeal to memory
to settle the meaning? No, for to do so I must call up the right memory,
the memory of S, and in order to do that I must already know what ‘S’
means. There is in the end no way of making out a difference between
correct and incorrect use of ‘S’, and that means that talk of ‘correctness’ is
out of place. The private definition I have given to myself is no real
definition.
The upshot of Wittgenstein’s argument is that there cannot be a
language whose words refer to what can only be known to the individual
speaker of the language. The English word ‘pain’ is not a word in a private

language because, whatever philosophers may say, other people can very
often know when a person is in pain. It is not by private ostensive definition
that ‘pain’ becomes the name of a sensation; pain-language is grafted on to
the pre-linguistic expression of pain when the parents teach a baby to
replace her initial cries with a conventional, learned expression through
language.
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