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Wittgenstein

The Private Language Argument

Richard Floyd explains a notorious example of Wittgenstein’s public thought.

Wittgenstein is certainly a special case. He is perhaps the only philosopher who could have produced an argument for which there can be serious debate about whether or not it is in fact an argument. The passage which has earned this dubious honour is commonly known as the private language argument. If we are going to apply strict logical criteria and say that an argument must have premises which lead to a conclusion via rules of inference, we would have to say that the private language argument is not an argument, given that it lacks any clear structure and any obvious conclusion. If however, we can accept that any piece of text whose main aim is to make a philosophical point can reasonably be called an argument, then we can indeed call the private language argument an argument.

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