a language understandable by only a single individual is incoherent" — Andrew4Handel

When I wrote that, I chose the wording with care. I had in mind the very misinterpretation you make, and hence chose "a language understandable by only a single individual" against "a language understood by only a single individual". Subtle stuff.

So Taushiro is understood by only one man, but might be understood by others. But the private language argument concerns a language that could not in principle be understood by another person - a language about private sensations.

So Taushiro is understood by only one man, but might be understood by others. But the private language argument concerns a language that could not in principle be understood by another person - a language about private sensations. — Banno

Do you think quantum physics is in principle understandable by everyone?

Are there not things that are only understood by very few people?

I gave the example of Einstein earlier. He formulated private ideas about physics/time/light and he didn't need to share them so they could have stayed unique to his own mind.

I don't see in principle why an idea and experience might not only be accessible to one person. For example someone's visual system may make them see the world different with more colours, less colours and all sorts of subtle or big differences in perception that crop up in neurology with brain abnormalities. Taushiro may have words for phenomena in this sense for experiences living in that community. (See the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis)

"a hypothesis, first advanced by Edward Sapir in 1929 and subsequently developed by Benjamin Whorf, that the structure of a language determines a native speaker's perception and categorization of experience."

I didn't think the issue was about hypothetical privacy though. Everything could hypothetically be shared but as is the case with Taushiro that possibility just doesn't exist anymore.

Keep reading and thinking. You haven't got there yet. See especially "What a private Language is" in the Wiki article.

gave the example of Einstein earlier. He formulated private ideas about physics/time/light and he didn't need to share them so they could have stayed unique to his own mind. — Andrew4Handel

He didn't have to use a private language to express his ideas. It appears that language use requires some sort of stable, external grounding to keep the rules straight. That's the intuition behind the private language argument.

He didn't have to use a private language to express his ideas. It appears that language use requires some sort of stable, external grounding to keep the rules straight. That's the intuition behind the private language argument. — frank

The language became private when only he understood it. People can combine words from the current languages to create new meaning. That meaning may only resonate with them.

Keep reading and thinking. You haven't got there yet. See especially "What a private Language is" in the Wiki article. — Banno

What I have noticed is that there are many interpretations of what the private language argument is and that Wittgenstein does not present formal arguments.

The language became private when only he understood it. People can combine words from the current languages to create new meaning. That meaning may only resonate with them. — Andrew4Handel

It would help if we replace "private" with "unique and unsharable.". That's what Wittgenstein meant. It's hard to even conceive of a unique, unsharable language, that only you know. How could it have developed?

Imagine that you have some sensation that is unique only to you and there's no way to communicate what it's like to anyone else. The private language argument suggests that you might not be able to remember this sensation for lack of any external foundation for naming it.

More likely, your awareness of sensations is shaped by the language community you grew up in, since naming and remembering are grounded there.

What I have noticed is that there are many interpretations of what the private language argument is and that Wittgenstein does not present formal arguments. — Andrew4Handel

That's true. It's not actually an argument. It's just a set of observations.

The private language argument suggests that you might not be able to remember this sensation for lack of any external foundation for naming it. — frank

Yes I remember that part of the argument.

It seems clear that we are able to remember a lot of sensations without words attached such as different tastes and smells and the feel of different textiles.

But that part of the argument has led to people including I believe Daniel Dennett influenced by Higher Order theory advocates (David Rosenthal) of going to the extent of arguing that animals without language aren't conscious.

It seems clear that we are able to remember a lot of sensations without words attached such as different tastes and smells and the feel of different textiles. — Andrew4Handel

I guess the question is: how would you confirm that odor-x that you're sensing now is the same thing you've smelled before? If you could attach it to some category like "herbal" or "plastic", then it would be easier, right?

People can combine words from the current languages to create new meaning. That meaning may only resonate with them. — Andrew4Handel

This reminds me of genesis versus structure. 'Language is received like the law.' But language does slowly mutate thanks to the creativity of individuals. New memes (new metaphors, new equations) are created and become popular, and old memes are forgotten.

It seems clear that we are able to remember a lot of sensations without words attached such as different tastes and smells and the feel of different textiles. — Andrew4Handel

If sensations are understood as radically immaterial, perhaps it's not so clear. I can however easily imagine experiments where people smell something and recall the name for it, etc. But what role is 'sensation' playing here ? Does it clarify or obscure ?

But what role is 'sensation' playing here ? Does it clarify or obscure ? — plaque flag

Does it cause confusion for you?

Take the example of music.

We both hear a piece of music. I dislike it you like it.

But it is the same input to both of us. So what is happening when we perceive the same input as good or bad? We do not seem to be having the same experience of the same thing.

But we could both put a name to it such as "Beethoven's 5th"

The phenomena I am concerned with here are not sensations received from the outside world but mental states like memories and beliefs and dreams that we need to define but only we are having the experience.

No one else can have my dream or share my dream. Part of what seems to make them, irreducibly private is that language is not adequate to represent them.

But I may be wrong and we may, with adequate phenomenological analysis and finer language, be able to describe them such that a correlation between them and physical mechanisms can be made.

Part of what seems to make them, irreducibly private is that language is not adequate to represent them. — Andrew4Handel

:up:

I claim that irreducibly private basically means or implies nonconceptual.

It's like money. We can discuss the idea that each of us has our own 'immaterial feelings' toward 500 euros, but it makes more sense to me, in discussing what euros mean, to see how those euros are traded out in the open.

a correlation between them and physical mechanisms can be made. — Andrew4Handel

A correlation between sign use and brain states makes sense, but I can't imagine any investigation of all of elusive and paradoxical immaterial private states, for these seem to be strategically defined as exactly whatever sneaks through every discursive or technical net. (I think this is related to 'the forgetfulness of being.' It's a strange issue.)

It's like money. We can discuss the idea that each of us has our own 'immaterial feelings' toward 500 euros, but it makes more sense to me, in discussing what euros mean, to see how those euros are traded out in the open. — plaque flag

This seems like a strange way to go about it. I don't need any metaphysical issues laid to rest before I decide whether or not I have sensations.

Does it cause confusion for you? — frank

Motte and bailey. Ordinary mentalistic talk is fine, but the metaphysical dualistic radicalization of this mentalistic talk (private immaterial referents) is confused. It's a pretty dry issue though. Bad metaphysical theses are mostly harmless and therefore widely available.

This seems like a strange way to go about it. I don't need any metaphysical issues laid to rest before I decide whether or not I have sensations. — frank

Strange. I thought you were describing pretty well why 'private language' doesn't make much sense.




Maybe this will help :

Words don't mean whatever you or I want them to mean or think they mean.

Money isn't worth whatever you or I want it to be worth or think it's worth.

Do you both agree / disagree ?

metaphysical dualistic radicalization of this mentalistic talk (private immaterial referents) is confused. — plaque flag

I'll take your word for it. I'm not sure what metaphysical dualistic radicalization of this mentalistic talk is exactly. I know exactly what sensations are, though.

You know exactly what sensations are ?

Did you discover their exact nature ? Or is it a tautology ? Synthetic or analytic ?

I'm guessing it's analytic, just the 'grammar' of the word, which is to say the role it plays in claims and explanations. Tomorrow's bots will make the same claim perhaps.

Strange. I thought you were describing pretty why 'private language' doesn't make much sense. — plaque flag

Private language doesn't make sense. Most of us have private sensations, though. It's two different uses of "private."

You know exactly what sensations are ? Did you discover their exact nature ? Or is it a tautology ? Synthetic or analytics — plaque flag

If you don't know what sensations are, I probably won't be able to explain it to you. I definitely know what they are, though. I have them all the time.

This may or may not help.
https://sites.pitt.edu/~rbrandom/Texts/Panoramas_of_Mind_and_Meaning%20(1).pdf
****
Descartes worries about responding to the threat of epistemological skepticism: things may not in fact be at all as we take them to be. Or at least, we can’t show that they are. Kant worries about responding to the threat of a deeper and more radical semantic skepticism. This is the claim that the very idea of our mental states purporting to specify how things are is unintelligible. Kant’s most basic transcendental question does not, as his own characterization of his project suggests, concern the condition of the possibility of synthetic knowledge a priori, but the conditions of the intelligibility of representational objectivity: of states or episodes that answer for their correctness to how it is with the objects they represent.

In asking this question, Kant moves to an issue that is clearly conceptually prior to the one that is central for Descartes. And this move is not of merely historical interest. The principal argument of Sellars’s masterwork Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind is that the soft underbelly of both traditional and logical empiricism is their implicit semantics. Broadly Cartesian foundationalism depends on there being a semantically autonomous stratum of thought—what is ‘given’, both semantically and epistemologically. It is this semantic givenness that Sellars ultimately takes issue with. So Sellars offers Kantian semantic arguments against the epistemological Myth of the Given. More specifically, Sellars argues that there cannot be an autonomous language game—one that can be played though no other is—that consists entirely of making non-inferential reports. Unless some claims (endorsements) can be made as the conclusions of inferences, none of them can count as conceptually contentful, in the sense required for them even potentially to offer evidence or justification for further conclusions. That is, nothing that cannot serve as the conclusion of inference can serve as the premise for one.

******************

A 'language' in which you can 'call' something 'pain' or 'blue' lacks content. These labels would have no grip, no relation to reasoning or justifying actions.

A 'language' in which you can 'call' something 'pain' or 'blue' lacks content. These labels would have no grip, no relation to reasoning or justifying actions. — plaque flag

I experience pain. As I said, I don't need to dredge any metaphysical swamps to know that.

I experience pain. As I said, I don't need to dredge any metaphysical swamps to know that. — frank

Personally I don't mind if you think Wittgenstein is boring. It's dry stuff. But to me, on this particular issue, you might as well be a chat bot. There's no question that Everybody knows that Everybody definitely 'experiences pain.' To me, this is not a discovery (you checked in your immaterial secret interior and found the Form of Pain there) but just the coughing up of training. One says that one experiences pain. Please note that I do not mean this to sound rude. I'm just looking for vivid words, trying to build a bridge between us. Can we see around our botlike training ? That there's strangeness in all this ? What if you say 'pain' 12 times in the dark ?

If you were an idealist, you'd tell me that my assumptions about the material world around me are the product of training. You'd tell me I'm indistinguishable from a chat bot with all my talk of concrete.

You're a metaphysician. I'm an ontological anti-realist.

Calling something 'red' or complaining of 'pain' only makes sense within a larger system. Who cares that something is labelled 'red' if nothing follows from that ? What does it mean to claim to be in 'pain' if this claim is unrelated to other claims and actions ? Mentalistic talk is part of a larger system. 'Mental entities and 'physical' entities function in the same inferential nexus. 'He had a headache because they were out of coffee at work.' 'She stopped feeling nauseous because the dramamine kicked in.'

From the same source.
********************************
Here is perhaps Kant’s deepest and most original idea, the axis around which I see all of his thought as
revolving. What distinguishes judging and intentional doing from the activities of non-sapient creatures is not that they involve some special sort of mental processes, but that they are things knowers and agents are in a distinctive way responsible for. Judging and acting involve commitments. They are endorsements, exercises of authority. Responsibility, commitment, endorsement, authority—these are all normative notions. Judgments and actions make knowers and agents liable to characteristic kinds of normative assessment. Kant’s most basic idea is that minded creatures are to be distinguished from un-minded ones not by a matter-of-fact ontological distinction (the presence of mind-stuff), but by a normative deontological one. This is his normative characterization of the mental.

Drawing on a jurisprudential tradition that includes Grotius, Pufendorf, and Crusius, Kant talks about norms in the form of rules. Judging and acting—endorsing claims and maxims, committing ourselves as to what is or shall be true—is binding ourselves by norms. It is making ourselves subject to assessment according to rules that articulate the contents of those commitments. Those norms, those rules, he calls ‘concepts’. In a strict sense, all a Kantian subject can do is apply concepts, either theoretically, in judging, or practically, in acting. Discursive, that is to say, concept-mongering creatures, are normative creatures—creatures who live, and move, and have their being in a normative space.
It follows that the most urgent philosophical task is to understand the nature of this normativity, the bindingness or validity (Verbindlichkeit, Gültigkeit) of conceptual norms. For Descartes, the question was how to think about our grip on our concepts, thoughts, or ideas (Is it clear? Is it distinct?). For Kant the question is rather how to understand their grip on us: the conditions of the intelligibility of our being bound by conceptual norms.

This master idea has some of Kant’s most characteristic innovations as relatively immediate consequences. The logical tradition that understood judging as predicating did so as part of an order of semantic explanation that starts with concepts or terms, particular and general, advances on that basis to an understanding of judgements (judgeables) as applications of general to particular terms, and builds on that basis an account of inferences or consequences, construed syllogistically in terms of the sort of predication or classification exhibited by the judgments that appear as premises and conclusions. In a radical break with this tradition, Kant takes the whole judgment to be the conceptually and explanatorily basic unit at once of meaning, cognition, awareness, and experience. Concepts and their contents are to be understood only in terms of the contribution they make to judgments: concepts are functions of judgment. Kant adopts this semantic order of explanation because judgments are the minimal units of responsibility—the smallest semantic items that can express commitments. The semantic primacy of the propositional is a consequence of the central role he accords to the normative significance of our conceptually articulated doings. In Frege this thought shows up as the claim that judgeable contents are the smallest units to which pragmatic force can attach: paradigmatically, assertional force. In the later Wittgenstein, it shows up as the claim that sentences are the smallest linguistic units with which one can make a move in the language game.

...
Kant’s idea is that his normative characterization of mental activity—understanding judging and acting as endorsing, taking responsibility for, committing oneself to, some content— is the place to start in understanding and explaining the nature of the representational, objectpresenting judgeable contents of those judgings. This explanatory strategy is Kant’s pragmatic turn.

It is this order of explanation that is responsible for the most general features of Kant’s account of the form of judgment. The subjective form of judgment is the ‘I think” that can accompany all our judgings, and so, in its pure formality, is the emptiest of all representations. Thought of in terms of the normative pragmatics of judgment, it is the mark of who is responsible for the judgment. (A corresponding point applies to the endorsement of practical maxims.) The transcendental unity of apperception is ‘transcendental’ because the sorting of endorsements into co-responsibility classes is a basic condition of the normative significance of commitments.

Committing myself to the animal being a fox, or to driving you to the airport tomorrow morning normatively preclude me from committing myself to its being a rabbit, or to my sleeping in
tomorrow, but they do not in the same way constrain the commitments others might undertake.

The objective form of judgment is “the object=X” to which judgments always, by their very form as judgments, make implicit reference. Thought of in terms of the normative pragmatics of judgment, it is the mark of what one has made oneself responsible to by making a judgment. It expresses the objectivity of judgments, in the sense of their having intentional objects: what they purport to represent. The understanding of the intentional directedness of judgments—the fact that they are about something—is through-and-through a normative one. What the judgment is about is the object that determines the correctness of the commitment one has undertaken by endorsing it. (On the practical side, it is normative assessments of the success of an action for which the object to which one has made oneself responsible by endorsing a maxim must be addressed.) In endorsing a judgment one has made oneself liable to distinctive kinds of normative assessment. What one is thinking and talking about is what plays a special role, exercises a special sort of authority in such assessments. Representing something, talking about or thinking of it, is acknowledging its semantic authority over the correctness of the commitments one is making in judging. Representational purport is a normative phenomenon.
Representational content is to be understood in terms of it.
*****************************

In general we seem to be thrown into a way of saying and doing things that we mostly don't even notice enough to begin to question. Descartes took the meanings of his words and the unity of his voice for granted. Fine, right ? But if one makes a certain kind of philosophy a relatively serious project, it's not fine. Why is the voice unified ? What the fuck is a self ? Who decided on one ghost per machine ? If meanings are anchored or founded on immateriality, how are bots so good at it ? And so on. To be sure, almost no one in my practical life cares that I care. But I don't care that they don't care. It's a good way (?) to pass the time that would have passed in any case.

If you play the guitar by yourself, you'll get better over time, but you'll be limited. If you play with others, your skill level will explode.

But only if you learn to listen.

I don’t need to see something or know something about it to talk about it. — Michael

Wittgenstein was talking about sensical language, not merely the possibility of forming words. the words the 'The Jabberwocky' all make a kind of flow and are grammatically correct, but it's nonsense.

It doesn't make sense for us to hold a conversation about my brother when I have no brother. That I can string together the words "your experience of red" doesn't mean those words have any sense. This is what Wittgenstein meant by the "bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language".

I think Wittgenstein's apparent position was unreasonable and self defeating

He is apparently saying you should not talk about things that you are not certain about. Which rules out everything.

In the film "Caro diario" by Nanni Moretti it is partly about how he had an undiagnosed cancer

"He visits many doctors and specialists, but they all dismiss him with different diagnosis, prescribing to him a lot of costly drugs and prohibiting him to eat most of his favorite food. Seeing no improvements, Moretti unsuccessfully tries alternative cures like reflexology and acupuncture."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caro_diario

"After almost a year, a doctor notices his developing cough during a visit and suggests him an X-ray. That reveals a mass on his lung, which after a biopsy is discovered to be a still-curable Hodgkin's lymphoma. "

This is a fairly common experience. People can feel ill but fail to get a quick diagnosis. They have to rely on there private subjective symptoms. If we dismiss people at this stage by saying:

"Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent. What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence."

We are needlessly shutting down investigations and condemning people to harm. The value of language is that we can start an investigation that may lead somewhere it never needs suppressing.