ABSTRACT
The conceptually graspable meaningfulness of one’s own argument is a surely necessary presupposition of its presentablity as argument, whether to oneself or to others. Very often, of course, fond parents are suspected of taking the sound or gesture productions of their infant offspring as communicationally meaningful long before there can be any clear justification for regarding them as anything other than the in principle wholly explicable effects of antecedent efficient causes. It is true, of course, that no-one normally spends more than a very small portion of their time in direct reflection upon the nature of their own ability to think or upon their exercise of that ability. Moreover, if some version of the anti-private language argument is indeed correct, then the author must in principle be looking to similar consistencies of commitment from all the author possible interlocutors, all his potential fellow-participants in discourse.
