ABSTRACT
More, it seems, has been written about Wittgenstein's private language argument than any other aspect of his philosophy. The reason for this, I think, is that the private language argument gets us back to the familiar ground on which modern philosophy has fought many of its battles. It has been a recurrent theme, at least since Descartes, that the foundation of knowledge is given in subjective self-certainty. There is ample room for disagreement within this tradition concerning the elements of this subjective certainty; they might be evident truths (e.g., “I think”) or particular non-propositional items in consciousness (e.g., sense data), but, whatever these immediate contents of consciousness are, the task is to construct the edifice of knowledge on their foundation. (Conversely, one of the chief sources of scepticism has been the failure of all attempts to complete this task.) Perhaps the main reason, then, that the private language argument has attracted so much attention is that it seems to show that this whole approach (i.e., the approach of modern philosophy) is fundamentally misguided. Now I think that it is entirely possible that the private language argument, if correct, will have such far-reaching consequences, but the argument, as it develops in the text, has no such immediate focus. The first task is to see how the argument actually emerges in the text; the second is to assess its merits. Then we can speculate on its implications for the development of western philosophy.
