Wittgenstein, Spatial Phenomenology, and “The Private Language Argument”

This chapter aims to consider one particular set of remarks that Ludwig Wittgenstein makes from the “middle period” about the nature of our spatial phenomenology, which seem to provide some limited support for thesis. A topic which occupied Wittgenstein a great deal when he first returned to philosophy in 1929 was the (im)possibility of a “phenomenological language.” Wittgenstein would surely have been aware of B. Russell’s claims about the fleeting, ephemeral persistence conditions of sense-data. The chapter outlines the phrases “private language” and “private language argument” in scare quotes throughout. G. E. Moore’s summary of Wittgenstein’s lectures testifies that Wittgenstein lectured on the “grammatical difference” between an expression as applied to the visual field and its application to a physical object. In the notes made by Wittgenstein’s student J. A. King on his lectures from 1931–32, a whole section is devoted to the topic “visual and physical space.”