ABSTRACT
Ludwig Wittgenstein thinks that ostensive definitions, whether private or public, are indeterminate in themselves; to achieve determinacy, they require a lot of conceptual stage-setting. Wittgenstein’s point is that for a word to have a determinate meaning, there must be a sameness or constancy in the way it is used. The misunderstandings of first-person, present-tense, psychological statements that philosophers and laypersons are prone to, ultimately rest on the private linguist’s account of the mental – that is on the idea that the meaning of psychological expressions, e.g., ‘pain’, and ‘the experience of blue’ is the private, subjective experience that only the subject can have and thus know. However, Wittgenstein not only objects to the ‘privatist’ conception of meaning but offers a diagnosis of how it comes about, as well as providing his own positive account of how sensation terms get their meaning.
