ABSTRACT
The solitary language user is again stalking the critical fields of Europe (and America, one should add). This pre-social individual, abstracted from all social and historical context, has been seemingly revived after what many of us saw as a death-blow dealt by Wittgenstein in his analysis of the notion of following a rule, and his related discussions bringing out the impossibilities of a “private” language-what has come to be known as Wittgenstein’s “private language argument.” Just what a “private language” is has become the issue: did Wittgenstein show that language use and rule-following essentially and necessarily involved others, and were therefore necessarily social in character (thus showing that to be human and to be rational was necessarily to be social-as Aristotle had it)? Or did his arguments bear only against the notion of a language which was essentially and necessarily private, one which could not in principle be taught to another?
