Wittgenstein's Private Language

Tonight, I attended another talk at the HKSHP. This time, it was a talk given by Dr. Lau Kwai Biu, its chairman. He spoke on a philosopher who had only authorized the publication of one book of philosophy and yet whose influence on modern philosophy might be said to be in inverse proportion to the number of books on philosophy he himself published. All the rest of the other publications by him are published by others on his behalf, either his family or his students. He is Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951). It could be said that no philosopher has had more influence on the way 20th century analytic philosophy has developed in the West than this rather enigmatic man. It is a situation a bit like that of Jesus and of the Buddha.

Wittgenstein came from a very well to do Jewish family in Vienna, Austria with a Catholic mother and was one of  9 children, 4 of whom sisters and 4 others brothers, one of the latter being a concert pianist. He was the youngest son. From an early age, he had an intense loathing of himself which he took out on everyone he met. His father was a great patron of the arts, having commissioned many works by Rodin. Brahms and Mahler gave regular concerts in their music rooms. Like his brothers, he was home-schooled because of his father's fear that they would acquire bad habits were they to study in public schools. He first began studying aeronautic engineering at Manchester University in 1908 and whilst there became interested in the mathematical logic of Frege and upon the latter's advice went in 1911 to study philosophy at Cambridge with Bertrand Russel  where between 1911-1913, he became intensely attached emotionally to G E Moore and John M Keynes. Then he retreated to Norway for months to ponder upon philosophical problems and to work out the relevant solutions. He returned to Austria in 1913, joined the Austrian army in 1914 upon the outbreak of the First World War and was captured in 1917. Whilst in prison, he wrote the notes for his first and only book authorized for publication, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus ("TLP"). It was published and translated into English after the war. Then, thinking that he had already solved all the interesting philosophical problems, he lost interest in philosophy, gave away his part of the family fortune and started to work successively as a gardener, a high school teacher, an architect in and around Vienna but all the while continuing discussing various philosophic subjects with members of the "Vienna Circle". Among its members were Gustav Bergmann, Rudolf Carnap, Herbert Feigl, Philipp Frank, Kurt Godelm Hans Hahn, Tscha Hung, Victor Kraft, Karl Menger, Richard von Mises, Marcel Natkin, Otto Neurath, Olga Hahn-Neurath, Theordor Radakovic, Rose Rand and Friedrich Waismann who all subsribed to the philosophy of applied logical positivism., based largely upon his TLP. The Vienna Circle's influence on 20th century philosophy was immense and much later, Quine wrote against them. His conversations, correspondences and lectures were gathered together by his students and later published respectively as Ludwig Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle, The Blue and Brown Books, Philosophical Grammar. During this period, his thoughts underwent some pretty radical changes. He wanted to argue against his own previous views on almost every important subject. He developed his ideas in the manuscripts of a book to be called Philosophical Investigations("PI")  in which he turned from formal logic to ordinary language, psychology and mathematics and he became intensely skeptical about the ability of philosophy to solve important problems. He prepared the final manuscripts of the book in 1945 but at the last minute decided not to publish it until after he died. It was not published until 1953, two years after his death.

He tried initially to deal with the problem of "what is reality" and how it could be "represented" by language in TLP and condensed his thoughts on the subject into 7 numbered statements as follows:

1. the world is all that is the case.

2. what is the case, a fact, is the existence of affairs,

3. a logical picture of facts is a thought.

4. a thought is a proposition with sense.

5. a proposition is a truth function of elementary propositions ( an elementary proposition is a truth function of itself)

6. the general form of truth function is 〔p, E, N(E)〕

7. What we cannot speak of, we must pass over in silence.

This has been called his picture or referential or representational theory of language. In this period he thought that words bear a certain fixed logical and structural relationship with the reality to which the relevant words refer in the external reality or world or to a particular mental state inside our brain  Language is taken as a "representation" of that other reality, external or internal. He quotes in the PI from Augustine's Confessions in which Augustine was said to have given us "a particular picture of the essence of human language," based on the idea that "individual words in language names objects" and "that sentences are combinations of such names"  and went on to attack and criticize this. His "private language argument", the subject of the evening's talk, however is related to his seventh proposition in his earlier TLP.

To Wittgenstein, there is a realm of experience which is entirely private to the individual concerned and which simply cannot be communicated accurately to others in language no matter how much he would desire to . He believed that there is nothing that the person can do except to suggest to others through language what he has thus experienced in private. But no matter how skilful the suggestion is, the experience cannot be communicated "exactly" or "fully" . For example: I feel a certain pain in my stomache. Only I myself  "know" how painful it in fact is. There is a sense in which we can say that there is no way my friend can "truly" understand how much it hurts because he cannot feel that pain that I actually feel. He may see me knitting my brows together. He may see me wrinkling my forehead and expanding my nostrils. He may see my lips curling up at the corners and my upper lip curled upwards and outwards. He may see me bending down my body. He may hear me say, "I've got a severe stomache cramp". All he could do is to "infer" that I am in some kind of pain. But in a sense, he could never in principle be certain that I "really" was in pain. I might be "pretending". I might be "exaggerating". Even if I were doing nothing of the sort, still he could not know the kind of pain that I actually felt because the pain occurs in my body, not in his! In this type of situation, Wittgenstein advises us to keep silent.

Upon hearing Dr. Lau's exposition, I raised a query about Wittgenstein's theory. I said that although it may be true that my friend's body is his body and my body is mine, my friend could make use of his previous experience of me as an honest person and decide that it is unlikely that I would be either pretending or exaggerating and in addition, since we now know from scientific studies and experiments and brain scans of sites in various parts of the human brain by brain neurologists that the very act of perceiving another person who exhibits signs of suffering pain similar to those which we ourselves feel through our own personal experience and which we thus "know" always are the concomitant of our own experience of intense pain, the "mirror neurons" in my friend's brain would cause him to "feel" "my" pain in "his" own body, exactly the way I did and in this sense, it is not meaningless for him to say that he "knew" the "pain" I felt. I said this is in fact routinely done all the time by writers and poets when they use words. They would use words in such a way that a stranger seeing them could easily "imagine" and therefore literally "feel" the kind of "pain" or some other emotions, which theoretically, is personal to the writer or to the person that writer is writing about. Depending on the skill or art of the writer, the "personal " or "private" feeling that he describes will approximate more or less "accurately" the "true" state of "pain" or other emotions which exists in reality. I said we all know that  language is never a very accurate recording instrument, certainly not accurate in the same way that a voltameter is accurate in recording the electrical voltage of an article which is electrically charged but for all ordinary purposes of life, that will be good enough. I said that in daily life, that is done all the time and that in requiring from our ordianry use of language the kind of exact one-to-one correspondence as in mathematics or logic as posited in Wittgenstein's picture theory between a word and the corresponding reality that word is supposed to be a word of,  is an unreasonable demand. Dr. Lau said that that however was exactly what Wittgenstein was attempting to do in his picture or referential theory of language. He wanted knowledge to be as "certain" and as "accurate" as mathematical symbols.

I said that in demanding such accuracy, Wittgenstein does not appear to me to be realistic because in daily life, we simply do not require that kind of accuracy to function. Besides, what are we to do with our " inaccurate" language. We can certainly accept that words can sometimes serve to disguise and to mislead instead of leading us to the truth and we can also accept that despite our effort to use language as accurately and as carefully as possible, we can still make mistakes or be inaccurate, still we must never forget that that imperfect tool of communication we call language is the only instrument we have got to communicate with each other, no matter how good or bad our words and our language are or is. For practical purposes, that is the language we "actually" use, although theoretically we can use another language. There can certainly be more than one kind of language and language need not be a language of words at all. It can be a language in signs, in images, in sound. In fact we use more than one language in our daily life in Hong Kong: English and Chinese. The best we can hope for is to be rather more careful in our use of language if we do not want to be misunderstood or to mislead others when we talk or write but for the purposes of living our lives, we certainly do not "require" that high degree of correspondence between a word and the experience or reality to which that world may refer in each and every situation. On the contrary, it would be a complete waste of time if we were to use more time than is necesary in trying to be as objectively "accurate" as possible in using our words IF the situation does not require that kind of accuracy e.g. when I see the MTR train coming and I want to signal to my friend that an MTR train was coming, I don't need to verify that it actually is an "MTR" train or whether MTR has in fact changed its name to say "PTT" (Public Transport Train) several days ago or that the train that I was referring to has just "three" carriage instead of the usual 8 carriages and for that reason is not the kind of MTR train that my friend had in his mind today because yesterday the train had 8 carriages. I said if Wittgenstein were right, then we have to completely change our normal language into a new language using only logical symbols which meet with his one-to-one correspondence or else we would not be able to communicate at all!    Dr. Lau said that that was part of the reasons why Wittgenstein turned against his own earlier views in his later philosophical writings.  

Dr. Lau then explained that in the PI, Wittgenstein wanted to retract a large part of his earlier private language theory. He said that in fact, in our language, there are many words in respect of which it is theoretically not possible to say to what external objects or experience they point eg. words like "much" "little", words like "in" "on" "within" "without" " " a," "the" etc which are words indicating "relations" between things or the "quality" of the things in the external world between themselves and with the subject or object of the relevant sentences. They point to no specific objects or objective states in the external world nor to any internal mental state. In addition, Wittgenstein switched instead to the idea that the meaning of words depends on the contexts in which the words are actually used. He said: "For a large class of cases--though not for all--in which we employ the word 'meaning', it can be defined thus: the meaning of a word is its uses in the language." He thus advises philosophers not to think and generalize but to look and see how people "in fact" use words in particular cases. Explanatory generalizations are to be replaced by description of the the actual use of words by people. The traditional idea that a proposition houses a content with a number of restricted Fregean force ( e.g. assertion, question and command) gives way to an emphasis on the diversity of its actual uses. The same word may have a completely different meaning in different contexts. Dr. Lau cites the example of the word "馬" . It could mean an animal with four legs of a certain shape and a mane. It could also mean a piece on a chess board. It could also mean "subordinates" in the context of triad confrontation when the gang leader says he is going to call his "馬" for assistance. Thus there is a radical change of emphasis of in the thoughts of Wittgenstein. Whilst the earlier Wittgenstein emphasized formal logic, the later Wittgenstein emphasized "ordinary language".

There is a similar shift from attention on definition and analysis of the relevant "pictures" to "family resemblance" and "language games", from systematic philosophic writing to an aphoristic style of writing and from mild to extreme anti-dogmatism and the same shift of emphasis is apparent also in his philosophy of mathematics and philosophic psychology. Thus people plays all sorts of " language games"eg. reporting an event, speculating about an event, forming and testing a hypothesis about a possible event, making up a story, reading a story, play-acting, singing catches, guessing riddles, making a joke, translating, asking, thanking etc. Although there are certain rules of grammar, these rules are not as strict as those in propositional or mathematical logic. There are no necessary and sufficient conditions which apply in all cases of the use of a particular word. Instead, he advises us to "travel with the word's use through a complicated network of similiarities, overlapping and criss-crossing" Through examining such actual use, we may then discover certain "family resemblances" in how the relevant words are being used. The exact boundaries and exactness of Platonic form, Aristotelian form or the general form of a proposition discussed in TLP are now eschewed in favour of  rough family resemblance. There is always a little room for "creativity". This is in fact what I found in my reading of literary writings and in particular of poetry. The concept of game is not a close category. Therefore he did not give a definition of what is a "game" but merely gives examples of what he considers to be games. His philosophic method now resembles more that of an artist than that of the traditional rational philosopher. An artist seldom know the rules by which he creates but he can show you what he can do by actually giving you samples of his artistic creations. In this later period, he conceived of philosophy not so much as an analytic and critical exercise but more as a therapeutic exercise.  

To me, it was right that Wittgenstein made such a switch and return language to its rightful place as a "tool" for communication between ordinary human beings because even "nouns" really do not have fixed meanings and their meaning can and should change according to the contexts. It is in fact wrong to suggest that there be one-to-one correspondence between a noun and an external reality without reference to the context in which it is used. In fact, in the case of poetry, the poets constantly exploit the variability, the ambiguity and indeterminacy in the meanings of words for special effects! Jokes would become impossible without permitting a switch of the contexts in which various key words are used!

Perhaps it was for this reason that 20th century ordinary language analytical philosophers has a field day since Wittgenstein. Foucault, too, began to pay attention to the contexts in which certain key words acquire different meanings in different types of society e.g. "madness", "normal",  "knowledge", "order", "reason" and thought that the definition of the meaning of words is governed by the dominant class having their own ideological preferences in their own favour in a kind of power relationships. Phenomenologists since Wittgenstein like Husserl, Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty have also made their own contributions on the question of how to determine the meaning of certain key words  like "truth", "being" , "consciousness'" etc by eludicating on the social situation of man in his relationship with the world, physical, social and philosophical.