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Wittgenstein's W Child – Does the Tractatus contain a Private Language Argument? – in P. Sullivan and M. Potter (eds.) Wittgenstein’s Tractatus: History and Interpretation. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013, pp. 143-169. Does the Tractatus Contain a Private Language Argument? William Child It is a central feature of so-called ‘new’ readings of Wittgenstein that they find in the Tractatus an absence of positive philosophical doctrines, a kind of quietism, and an explicitly therapeutic approach that have traditionally been associated with Wittgenstein’s later philosophy. Seen from the perspective of a ‘new’ reader, this reveals ‘a novel kind of continuity’ in Wittgenstein’s thought (Crary 2000: 4). Seen from the perspective of a ‘traditional’ reader, it involves reading back into the Tractatus elements that properly belong to Wittgenstein’s later work. I want to explore the justice of this complaint in connection with a recent argument of Cora Diamond’s, that the Tractatus contains a private language argument: an argument to the effect that private objects in other people’s minds can play no role in the language I use for talking about their sensations.1 The argument Diamond finds in the Tractatus is not the private language argument of Philosophical Investigations. But the appearance of such an argument in Wittgenstein’s early writings, she thinks, brings out important elements of continuity in his work: it challenges the orthodox idea that ‘the topic of privacy’ is distinctively ‘a topic of Wittgenstein’s later philosophy’, that its appearance in the later work is ‘indicative of a shift in Wittgenstein’s philosophical interests to topics within the philosophy of mind, not of interest to him in the Tractatus’, and that ‘his treatment of the topic [is] an illustration of the fundamental shifts in his overall philosophical position’ (262). And the ‘Tractatus private language argument’, Diamond thinks, is important not only for our understanding of the development of Wittgenstein’s philosophy but also for the discussion of realism and anti- realism more generally, ‘especially as that discussion has been shaped by Michael Dummett’ (284). My paper has three parts. In part 1, I challenge Diamond’s interpretation on internal grounds. To find a private language argument in the Tractatus, I argue, we would have to read Tractarian doctrines about naming and use in ways that might, indeed, be suggested by Wittgenstein’s later writings but which are entirely absent from the earlier work. In part 2, I discuss the account of sensation language that Wittgenstein offered in 1929, and argue that it poses a prima facie challenge to ‘new’ readings of the Tractatus. Part 3 explores the relation between the Tractatus and Dummettian realism. I defend Dummett’s suggestion that the Tractatus embodies a form of semantic realism against Diamond’s arguments, and show the helpfulness of Dummett’s framework in reflecting on the nature of Tractarian analysis. 1. The ‘Tractatus Private Language Argument’ Diamond argues that the Tractatus contains a private language argument, the immediate target of which is a set of views advanced by Russell in the period 1905-1913. Russell held that ‘Every proposition which we can understand must be composed wholly of constituents with which we are acquainted’ (Russell 1912: 32). He also held that each of us is acquainted with objects that no-one else can be acquainted with: our own experiences and, possibly, our selves.2 So there are propositions about a subject’s self and experiences that only she can understand, because they contain constituents with which only she can be acquainted. But even though I cannot understand 1 W Child – Does the Tractatus contain a Private Language Argument? – in P. Sullivan and M. Potter (eds.) Wittgenstein’s Tractatus: History and Interpretation. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013, pp. 143-169. such a proposition about another person’s self or experiences, I can identify it by description and may know that it is true: for I can understand a descriptive proposition, composed wholly of constituents with which I am acquainted, which is true or false in virtue of the truth or falsity of the proposition I do not understand. In that way, Russell thought, someone else’s private objects can play a role in one’s language. For example: when we say anything about Bismarck, we should like, if we could, to make the judgement which Bismarck alone can make, namely, the judgement of which he himself is a constituent. In this we are necessarily defeated, since the actual Bismarck is unknown to us. But we know that there is an object B, called Bismarck, and that B was an astute diplomatist. We can thus describe the proposition we should like to affirm, namely, ‘B was an astute diplomatist’, where B is the object which was Bismarck… This proposition, which is described and is known to be true, is what interests us; but we are not acquainted with the proposition itself, and do not know it, though we know it is true. (Russell 1912: 31) In this case the private object is Bismarck himself: Bismarck’s ego. But, according to Diamond, Russell gives the same treatment to propositions about anything else with which only Bismarck can be acquainted: Bismarck’s toothache, for example.3 It is this set of views that is challenged by the private language argument Diamond finds in the Tractatus. In this first part of the paper, I do two main things. First, I examine the case Diamond offers in support of her claim that the Tractatus contains a private language argument. She highlights an important difference between Russell’s account of quantification and the treatment of general sentences that Wittgenstein offers in the Tractatus. But, I shall argue, in claiming that the Tractatus treatment of generality entails that private objects in other people’s minds can play no role in our language for talking about others’ sensations, Diamond imputes to the Tractatus a specific conception of use, with a definite epistemic content, that is not actually there; she reads back into the Tractatus a conception of use that only surfaces in Wittgenstein much later on. Second, I examine Diamond’s account of the kind of positive treatment of claims about others’ sensations that, she thinks, is implicit in the Tractatus; Tractarian analysis of such propositions, she says, ‘involves an early version of the later insistence that where there are symptoms (inductively based justifications for a kind of statement) there must also be criteria (something that would count, non-inductively, as justification)’ (281). Here, again, I argue, Diamond interprets the Tractatus in a way that makes it seem far more similar to Wittgenstein’s later work than it really is — by reading into the Tractatus epistemic concerns that have no place there. I should emphasize at the outset that I am not arguing that, at the time of writing the Tractatus, Wittgenstein actually envisaged analyzing statements about others’ sensations in a way that treated those sensations as private objects. In the first place, there is plainly no explicit account of sensation-language in the Tractatus. That is a particular instance of a more general point: that Wittgenstein simply had no views about the specific kinds of analysis that would be appropriate for particular parts of ordinary language. In the second place, insofar as it is reasonable to speculate about the kind of analysis of sensation-language that Wittgenstein might have favoured, had he been pressed to provide one, it seems plausible that he would have opted for something along the lines of the account of thoughts suggested by Tractatus 5.542 and the remarks in a much-quoted 1919 letter 2 W Child – Does the Tractatus contain a Private Language Argument? – in P. Sullivan and M. Potter (eds.) Wittgenstein’s Tractatus: History and Interpretation. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013, pp. 143-169. to Russell (WIC 98-9). On this view, thoughts are composed of psychical objects: objects that are straightforwardly open to public, empirical investigation, just as we can investigate the worldly objects with which those psychical objects are correlated. There is no reason why Wittgenstein should not have envisaged extending this treatment from the case of others’ thoughts to the case of others’ sensations — regarding them not as private objects knowable only by their possessors but as psychical objects whose nature is discoverable by empirical investigation. My case against Diamond, therefore, is not that the Tractatus actually envisages an account of sensation-language that treats others’ sensations as private objects. It is, rather, that there is nothing in the Tractatus to rule out such an account. Diamond sees a private language argument in the Tractatus. I argue that her interpretation depends on projecting onto the Tractatus views of Wittgenstein’s that only appear later on. 1.i Quantification, Naming, Acquaintance, and Use On Diamond’s interpretation, the key to the ‘Tractatus private language argument’ lies in the difference between Russell’s and Wittgenstein’s treatments of generality. A crucial element in Russell’s view is the idea that I can grasp a general proposition that is true or false in virtue of the truth or falsity of singular propositions that I cannot understand. For example, I understand the proposition, ‘There is something that is a toothache and is had by Bismarck’. That proposition is true (we may suppose) in virtue of the truth of the proposition ‘t is a toothache’, where ‘t’ is a name for some token toothache of Bismarck’s. But I cannot understand the proposition ‘t is a toothache’, since I cannot be acquainted with the toothache that is named by ‘t’. What allows me, nonetheless, to understand the general proposition is the fact that I am acquainted with the universal, toothache, and that I have ‘a general grasp of what it is for a property or relation to be instantiated in some or all cases’ (271).
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