ABSTRACT
Philosophical Investigations set the stage for debate about the possibility of a private language in 1953. The evolution of the private language debate was, and still is, intimately tied up with developments in the interpretation of Philosophical Investigations. Ludwig Wittgenstein's thoughts have been so central to the debate that there is a sense in which most articles have served a dual purpose, illuminating both whether a private language is possible and why Wittgenstein thought it was not. Confidence in the argument's cogency, however, requires the use of criteria in the argumentation to be rendered at least as inconspicuous as the principles employed in Candlish and Kenny's version. The chapter considers the notion of a criterion employed in the Memory-Criteria Argument in detail. Argument is more fundamental for Wittgenstein than the Memory-Criteria Argument, because it deals with a kind of privacy that comes to mind more intuitively and is therefore more reluctantly abandoned.
