Mental events are often deemed to be private. Language, on the other hand, is inter-subjective. Yet we use a public language to communicate purportedly private mental events. If mental events were genuinely private, how would we know that other people were referring to the same things that we refer to when we use words that are meant to be about private mental items? Other people’s private mental items, to us, if not them, would be like possible “beetles-in-a-box”, in Wittgenstein’s phrase. Therefore, Wittgenstein concluded, our sensation language is not only public, but it must also refer to public items.
If we use public words to express private mental states, there must be a sense in which these mental states are not in fact private at all, at least not everything about them. We would have no right or justification to use public words to refer to genuinely private mental states. If these states were private, then evidently no one would know if we were using the words correctly. There is no available method for the third person to decipher the truth or correctness of our utterances that express genuinely private mental states. So, for now, we can say that the language we use about private mental states must be public, we can have no private language, but the mental states themselves may well be private. However, we will come to see that it may not even make sense to believe that even the mental states themselves are in fact genuinely private.
We could say that it is the utterance of the pain that belongs to the public domain, not the pain itself. This is clearly the case because we can be in pain in a private space without even uttering a word. We simply feel the pain. However, as soon as we say anything about the pain, even to ourselves, then what we say will only express concepts and meanings that have been publicly determined and constructed.And if that is the case, then what we say cannot, according to Wittgenstein, be expressing something about an experience that is essentially private. This means that what we experience or feel is something very different to that what we utter or express. In a sense, this now appears to be a truism. We do nevertheless think that our expressions are not only of something private, but that they are true and accurate expressions or representations of what it is that we are experiencing or feeling. But perhaps there is no reason to assume that what we express is tied intimately and faithfully to the experience we are having. And even if the expression or utterance is bona fide, it is only so within the context of expressions that get their nature from the public domain, not from any purely private acts of, say, ‘ostensive definition’ (Wittgenstein, 1953). If our expressions were genuinely of something private, then we would not have the right to express them in a publicly-determined language. The privacy of our experiences would need an equally private language. But, of course, we express our pains, etc., in a public language. It may well follow that not even our purportedly private pains are genuinely private. Does all this apply equally to the actual experience as it does to the expression of the experience?
In public language many words are used to refer to referents. These referents, along with the words, are public phenomena. When we refer to private items or states, is the same thing happening? Is there a word referring to a private referent? More exactly, is there a public word referring to a private referent? One question clearly remains:
Can there be private referents of public words?
Not if all referents are usually deemed to be publicly accessible too. They are public because more than one individual is capable of agreeing on what that referent is. In terms of private referents, only the individual subject has access to his supposedly private referent. Only he can know if he is going right or wrong about it. However, if only he knows about it, then perhaps he can be neither correct nor incorrect about it. No one could tell him when he is going right or when he is going wrong. Can he tell himself this? No, it would be hard to make sense of the idea that a single individual alone can exclusively determine whether or not what he said about his private referents is correct or incorrect. No one could tell him otherwise. Telling himself that he is correct or incorrect doesn’t seem to make much sense. After all, he could quite easily always take himself to be correct about what he says about his private referents. No one, not even in principle, could ever tell him otherwise. It seems to follow from this that we can only make sense of correctness or incorrectness within a public arena. If the individual uses public words about private items, he must also accept that the referents of his public words are themselves public in some way. But how, one may now ask, can the mental items of an individual ever be public?
What may happen, according to Wittgenstein, is essentially that the mental item or referent is neither taken privately nor publicly. As Wittgenstein argues, it effectively ‘drops out of the picture’ as irrelevant. It no longer plays any part in our public and private expressions of our mental experiences. All we now have are words and behaviour. If we do not know that there is a ‘beetle in the box’, or if we know nothing about it, then why not forget about it completely and simply concentrate on linguistic and bodily behaviour? All we are really talking about is not private mental states, but publicly observable linguistic expressions and bodily actions.
For example, when we say, “I am in pain”, we are not, according to Wittgenstein, describing a private pain-state. The utterance is, as it were, the pain-state. Our behaviour, including linguistic behaviour, is literally everything. If pain were private, then how would we know that other people’s pain utterances referred to the same things that we refer to? If someone were to refer to something only they had seen, then we wouldn’t get the whole import of their reference to something unseen or, perhaps, unknowable in principle by all other people. When we use pain-language we must be referring to essentially public items. So what are these public items?
What does it mean to say that ‘the utterance is the pain-state’? This, initially, doesn’t seem to make much sense. However, it makes sense if the utterance is the only thing that the third person has access to. He doesn’t, therefore, actually have access to the pain-state itself. And if the utterance is public, which it is, then what the utterance expresses must be publicly accessible too. If the utterance expressed something genuinely private, then how could the third person understand a publicly-worded utterance that is ostensibly about things that are in fact private? This means that there must be nothing that is private in the expression. Anything allegedly private would be like a ‘beetle in the box’.
We cannot therefore see pain-words as referring to private pain-states. This is the case with other names or words too. They refer to entities that are essentially publicly accessible. Pain-words must refer to things that are publicly accessible and not, therefore, private. Pain cannot be a beetle in a permanently closed box. If pain is in any kind of box, it is in an open and publicly-accessible box. The named object, if private, must “drop out of consideration as irrelevant”. Therefore whatever is in the box must be publicly accessible. Other people cannot and do not see private mental items. Public items are needed for a public language. Language is a shared phenomenon primarily because there are shared referents and shared references of these referents. Without shared referents of our names and words, there would be no shared language. The shared referents largely determine the shared language.
There is no such thing as private reference, Wittgenstein argued. All acts of reference must therefore be public. You cannot refer to something private because by definition the third person, or the public generally, cannot also get at it. The counterintuitive or even radical thing about Wittgenstein’s argument is that anything genuinely private ‘drops out of the picture’ when it comes to our public utterances of our mental states. If the third person by definition has no access to private mental items and states, then why or how can the subject refer to them or use them in his public expressions? Indeed, we can say, again, that in many senses public referents ground public discourse. Without these public referents, perhaps public discourse would not even get off the ground. It would certainly not get off the ground as a language that is capable of referring. We can now say that public referents are like axial points round which the general public language revolves. If we introduce ostensible private referents, such revolutions round the aforementioned axial points would loose their direction and purpose.
This means that there cannot be a private language that refers to private mental items or sensations. The essence of language is its shared and public nature. If language is not public, or shared, it is not, in fact, a language. If we were just communicating with ourselves, then perhaps we wouldn’t need a descriptive language at all. We would simply know, for example, that we are in pain and, therefore, pain-descriptions would not be necessary.
There is no such thing as a ‘private language’ because languages are by nature public. We use a language to communicate with other people, not to ourselves. And, according to Wittgenstein, we cannot even have a private language in which we simply talk to ourselves because in so doing we would be using public words that would include public referents. Internal conversation, therefore, is in a sense as public as a conversation between two people. The private individual uses words and terms that have obtained their meanings and referents, etc., care-of the community at large. If the individual wants a true private language, according to Wittgenstein, he would need to invent his own private words. But even this would not be an example of a genuine language. We can now say that if we are pain, and we do not want to communicate that pain to a third person, then why would we need any kind of language at all? We would simply experience that pain and leave it at that. There would be no need to express the pain. Not even to oneself.
Private Pain and Public Language
It follows that if there are private mental states or items in a subject’s mind, and S were to name these items, then he would have to introduce his own names rather than use names he has acquired from other people. How could public names refer to truly private items? There couldn’t be a public or inter-subjective ‘ostensive definition’ of S’s private mental items. Indeed, it is Wittgenstein’s argument that there couldn’t even be a private ostensive definition of one’s own private mental items. How would Sknow that he was describing or defining a mental item correctly or incorrectly? The correctness or otherwise of an ostensibly private ostensive definition would depend on a third party determining whether or not such an attribution is correct or incorrect. If S doesn’t know if he’s going right, then how would he know that he’s going wrong in his self-attributions?
Despite all this, the must still be the sense that certain mental items are indeed private, such as pain. This seems, prima facie, to be evident. For example, if I do not communicate my pain by either linguistic or physical behaviour, then no one else would know that I am in pain. But I am in pain. Therefore only I know that I am in pain. Therefore my pain is private. Yes, it is true that if I were to express my pain, either by language or even by physical behaviour, then I would be using a public language. And even if I use such words to talk to myself about my pain, I would still be using public words and public expressions. We could now say that the epistemic status of the belief, how it is known or the way it is known, depends on the external world and public language. However, there is more to the pain than our knowledge of the pain. It has an ontological and an experiential status. We can also consider that any ontological and experiential status the pain does have will itself be coloured by public language. That is, the part of public language that has given us the tools and concepts to think about a pain’s ontological and experiential status. But, yet again, there is still something about pain that is above and beyond its epistemic position and its ontological and experiential status. There is a state or process - the pain that is the subject of all these public expressions. These public expressions are about something other than themselves. They are about pain. And even if the very concept [pain] were a public concept, which it is, what the concept itself is about is more than a concept; it is a something that falls under the concept [pain] or under the word “pain”. Even if it were the case that everything we say, or even think, about the pain is somehow polluted by public language, there would still be something about the pain that has nothing to do with public discourse. More to the point, there is something about the pain that is indeed private. The problem is, as Wittgenstein saw, as soon as we say something about this private something, it becomes for the other person, and even for oneself, a public something. What is said about this something, its experiential nature, etc., is public. But isn’t what all this public talk is about something private? We can’t, however, get to this private something without polluting it with public language. Even when we get to it ourselves, it is still thus polluted. The private pain, then, is like a Kantian “thing-in-itself”. It is a noumenon. Its true reality or status can never be known, if such a status is deemed to be how the pain is regardless of public language but how it is “in itself”. Of course, many philosophers think the phrase ‘pain as it is in itself’, or anything ‘as it is in itself’, may deem the very idea of a private pain suspect, as, in fact, it has been. Does the idea even make sense? Does it serve any purpose? That, however, would be to take this issue onto foreign soil.
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Part Two
Solipsism, Individualism and Internalism
Wittgenstein spent a lot of time confronting not only a miniscule number of genuine solipsists, but also the kind of solipsism that he found in many kinds of seemingly non-solipsistic philosophy. Not only solipsists were solipsists. For example, In a sense Descartes was a solipsist. Didn’t he bring his mind to bear on his restricted set of data? When he carried out his inquiries, the world and other people could have disappeared. Didn’t he, after all, bring all his resources to bear on his own little private world? He didn’t trust the offerings of the senses. He didn’t trust tradition or authority or the words of other men either. His pure rationalism demanded a pure isolation. Extraneous factors would have only polluted the truth of his vision. Of course, Descartes made his way back to the world, eventually. But could he have even started his enterprise as a genuine external to the world?
For a start, the language Descartes used was a public language, with all its contingencies and inconsistencies. Not only that, according to Wittgenstein his very idea of himself as a person was, as it were, borrowed from the public world. His relations with the world and other people within that world partly, or even wholly, determined his concept of himself as a person. As Kant said later, the ‘internal sense’ is parasitically dependent on the ‘external sense’. In a purely psychological sense, we define ourselves in relation to other people and how they too define themselves. On another level, the objects and events of the world also determine what we are as a person. Even when we refer to putative private goings-on in the mind, we still use a public language. Not only is “I am in pain” a public locution, so too is any reference to the I. For a start, the philosopher would have no data, not even a restricted set of data, if it weren’t for the world around him. Most examples of data are acquired from others, even if we work on that data and come up with something entirely original. The philosopher would not even philosophise if it were not for the public world. The very act of philosophising takes root in the public domain because language itself is in the public domain. Philosophical reasonings would not even get off the ground if other philosophical reasonings had not previously got off the ground.
The Cogito
Wittgenstein argued not just against the possibility of a private language, but any form of Cartesian internalism. Descartes claimed that he had expunged from his mind not only the external world but also, effectively, everything within his mind that had come to him from the external world. But that would have included the language he used during his famous meditations. Of course he rejected all the explicit philosophical parts of the language. But he didn’t reject the parts of the language that are not deemed philosophical but in fact are. Descartes might have clearly have rejected, say, the Aristotelian
The world as a whole has a purpose.
If only to accept it later. But he didn’t do the same with the seemingly non-philosophical content of
I think, therefore I am.
If Descartes had actually expunged the world from his mind, then, we may ask, what was left? What, precisely, would the empirically-free mind actually be like? In a sense Descartes did indeed expunge all philosophical prejudices from his mind. In that sense he did ‘start anew’. But what of all those words and concepts that he went on to use that were not deemed philosophical or part of the tradition? Many would argue that virtually all words and terms have a philosophical or metaphysical import, not just obvious words like ‘cause’, ‘mind’, ‘truth’, and so on.
The Cogito expresses a philosophical position on the existence of the I. However, he expressed this ostensibly axiomatic statement with public words which Descartes himself would have used for many years. So he should have been able to explain not just the blatantly and obviously philosophical content of his famous claim. But would he have been able to justify and explain the seemingly non-philosophical parts of that statement? For example, what did he mean by the word “I”? What did he mean by “think”? And how would he have justified and explained the use of the connective “therefore”? And what does “am” mean? Of course, after the Cogito, Descartes could have easily explained and justified his use of the words in that statement. For example, he might have said that
The I is the essence of the mind. The part of the mind that remains throughout its many changes.
Or,
I use the word “therefore” between a statement and another statement that is entailed or implied by it.
There is so much of Descartes’ Cogito that simply accepts the philosophically uncontroversial aspects of certain words and terms. Such terms and words may not have been controversial, but they were still, nevertheless, philosophical and public in nature.
Perhaps Descartes should have started the Mediations with a claim of a different type altogether. For example, something about the mind, or thought, or the I, or even existence itself. Then he might have offered this as an alternative Cogito:
Thoughts are processes that occur in my mind.
Very simple, if not helpful. However, unlike the other imaginary Cartesian examples, this is a statement of what is the case, not a description of the concepts and words one uses to make Cogito-like statements. It could be seen as foundational or axiomatic because perhaps we cannot think or philosophise at all without knowing what thoughts are. The Cogito is a thought, therefore it can be said to depend on a prior knowledge of what thoughts are. There would be no Cogito without thought. Therefore perhaps thought itself is more foundational and fundamental than the Cogito-thought itself, which is a token of the type thought. To this possible question Descartes might have then said:
Thoughts are processes that occur in the mind.
From this, I presume, he would have wanted to derive numerous other statements that were somehow entailed or implied by it.
The problem with foundations is that other philosophers will always come along with alternative foundations, as, say, Husserl did in the early 20th century. What they always tend to find are things that they deem to be even more foundational and fundamental than their adversaries’ foundations. The solution is, of course, to reject the very concept of foundations altogether.
Descartes thought that the I that thinks is foundational. Husserl, for example, thought that it is consciousness itself that is foundational and that the I is far too empirical an entity to work as a foundation. My own alternative is to say that surely thought is the true foundation of, well, thought about foundations. But we may not even be able to give thought itself a foundational or axiomatic status.
But in this statement too there are concepts and words that have not been explained or even understood. What does he mean by “mind”? What is a “process”? Are the processes in the mind the same as processes external to the mind? And so on. Not only are there presupposed concepts in this statement, but also we need to think in terms of how each concept is intimately connected to other concepts. Concepts are not atomic; they depend on other concepts for part of their content. Even if the concept [substance] or Descartes’ own [“thinking thing”] or [things that logically follow one another] aren’t in the statement itself, the concepts [thought], [process] and [mind] that are in the initial statement, rely and depend upon the existence of other concepts and our knowledge and acceptance of them. As Derrida said (in an even more extreme holistic manner):
Every borrowing of a concept from western philosophy brings along with it the whole of western philosophy. Concepts are not atoms, they are part of a syntax and a system. (1967/1978)
Basically Descartes took certain words and concepts for granted. And these words are as philosophical and perhaps controversial as the words and concepts that he did indeed question. Similarly, Descartes had no notion of the holistic nature of concepts and concept-use. If we use one concept, almost by definition we must also be committed to at least one other concept to which it is intimately related. Such a concept would not be the concept it is without its tight relations to other concepts. We can even take these holistic arguments further and say that not only are concepts interconnected, but also they are also intimately related to a system of concepts. Indeed, concepts are related one to the other precisely because they belong to a ‘syntax and a system’. One could easily play a game in which we choose a single concept and see what we can say about it without bringing in other concepts to which it is closely, or not so closely, related. In will soon become apparent that no concept is an atom. Not only may there be a system of concepts, but there may be a huge tradition of concepts, which we bring on board simply by using a single concept from that tradition. Therefore, despite Descartes’ reduction, he might still have brought into his reasonings the whole tradition of western philosophy, even, tacitly, those concepts that he consciously rejected.
On another Wittgensteinian issue. How could Descartes have used common words to refer to an essentially private domain? And he couldn’t even have used common words to talk to himself about an ostensibly private domain or use them as vehicles of self-attribution. If Descartes used common words to refer to his private domain, then, according to Wittgenstein, such words were being used illegitimately. The words used by Descartes had so far been used inter-subjectively to refer to publicly-accessible referents. But his own private mental items were not publicly accessible or inter-subjectively available. Again, in Descartes’ private self-attributions, how did he know when he was going right if he could never have known that he was going wrong? This leaves us to the conclusion that whatever he did refer to it was not something that is essentially private. What would these public or non-private things be? They would be examples of behaviour, both physical and linguistic.
As in the private language argument, perhaps Descartes should have brought in his own concepts and terms in order to affect a genuine reduction. Indeed, he probably had no other alternative. But, again as in the private language argument, this private philosophical discourse would not have been possible. All the words and concepts that Descartes used, not just the philosophical ones, were being used illegitimately, as Wittgenstein might have put it. Also, how would Descartes have known that he was going right or wrong if he had erased public discourse along with the public world? Could he have told himself that he were going right or wrong? According to Wittgenstein, he could not have done so because such examples of philosophical self-analysis would not have even made sense. Descartes could not have truly erased the public world, in any of its aspects. Therefore there could have been no genuine philosophical reduction on Descartes’ part. There would have been no genuinely private philosophical discourse in which Descartes could have come to his conclusions. From the beginning of his Cogito, Descartes couldn’t help but be polluted in some way by the public and therefore empirical world.
References
Derrida, J. (1967) ‘Force and Signification’ in Writing and Difference, ed. Alan Bass
Descartes, R. (1641/1986), A Discourse on Method and Meditations and Principles, trans. John Veitch
Hacker, P.M.S. (1986), Insight and Illusion: Themes in the Philosophy of Wittgenstein
Monk, R. (1991), Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius
Ryle, G. (1949), The Concept of Mind
Wittgenstein, L. (1953), Philosophical Investigations, ed. Anscombe and Rhees
