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A Beginner's Guide to the Later Philosophy of Wittgenstein Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 December 2024
The Third Leg of the Three-Legged Stool
The idea that our language is private inasmuch as its words refer to what only the speaker can have and to what only he can know is, as we have already noted, akin to a three-legged stool. Two of these legs – namely the idea of private and inalienable ownership of subjective experience and the idea of private and privileged knowledge of subjective experience – have been shown to be rotten. Today we shall deal with the third leg – private ostensive definition.
We shall focus on the manner in which words signifying subjective experiences, such as ‘pain’, are supposedly given a meaning by the private linguist. Our critical task is to examine the cogency of the accounts of language and linguistic meaning given by philosophers who assume that words have a meaning by virtue of standing for ideas in the mind or ‘internal representations’. Our constructive task is to remind ourselves how words signifying subjective experiences are actually used and explained and to give a surveyable representation of this domain of the grammar of our language. We shall touch on this today and discuss it at greater length in the next lecture.
Int. Before you begin, I would like to ask something.
PMSH. Yes, by all means. What is worrying you?
Int. Well, why does Wittgenstein bother to continue? I mean, since he has shown that the first two legs of the three-legged stool of the private language are rotten through and through, as you explained in the last two lectures, why bother with the third leg? I mean, it is already obvious that with the assumptions of private ownership of experience and of epistemic privacy, the putative private language would not be intelligi-ble to anyone other than the speaker. If the words of my language were to refer to things that only I can have, and only I can know of, then obviously no one else could understand it! Now that is surely absurd, since the languages we speak are obviously understood by others. The languages of mankind are shared, common languages.
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