ABSTRACT
This chapter demonstrates the Ludwig Wittgenstein's position, before he adopted physicalism, involved a de facto private language; and that this was an important factor in the period, in 1929, in which Wittgenstein's adoption of physicalism took place. It then describes what seems to have been the main reason why he felt forced to adopt physicalism: the impossibility of a phenomenological language. The situation after the Phenomenological Language Argument had been pressed into service was therefore as follows. Wittgenstein had maintained the picture theory and the notion that reality was ultimately constituted by the immediately given. Therefore he had, essentially, failed to move beyond a position in which the confrontation between language and reality was a private affair; privacy was still very much a hallmark of his theory. The Phenomenological Language Argument embodies the considerations that led to a change in Wittgenstein's philosophical convictions in the autumn of 1929 and hence to his adoption of a kind of physicalism.
