ABSTRACT
A number of remarks from the late 1920s and early 1930s suggest that Wittgenstein was for a time committed to the privacy of experience and to the special role of what is given in experience as mediator between mind and world. These include some seemingly uncritical remarks about sense-data, which have prompted some interpreters to maintain that as early as the Tractatus Wittgenstein was committed to the existence of sense-data and to the possibility of-even the need for-a private language for the description of immediate experience. In this chapter, I shall argue that although Wittgenstein does pass through a brief phase of attraction to the idea of a phenomenological language for the description of immediate experience in 1929, he is ambivalent about whether or not such a language must be logically private, and he gives up on the project almost as soon as he begins it (§2.4).
