ABSTRACT
Only one person, the ‘speaker’, can understand the words of a ‘private language’, because she will refer to items in the metaphysically exclusive domain of the immediately given. Since Norman Malcolm’s ground-breaking review of the Investigations, the following passage from §258 of that book has been commonly supposed to voice some would-be powerful argument intended to show the impossibility of such a language:1
precisely by the concentration of my attention…I impress on myself the connexion between the sign and the sensation.-But ‘I impress it on myself can only mean: this process brings it about that I remember the connexion right in the future. But in the present case I have no criterion of correctness. One would like to say: whatever is going to seem right to me is right. And that only means that here we can’t talk about ‘right’.
