ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the details of the arguments and their scope were mainly discussed with reference to Philosophical Investigations, it was the reviews that defined the direction of discussions about privacy. It soon became generally recognized that Cartesianism was the target of Ludwig Wittgenstein's remarks on private language in Philosophical Investigations. By contrast, the Reductio Argument specifically attacked the notion that the Cartesian could construct a language in which he could refer to sensations. The philosophical relevance of intuitive observations such as these has lent credibility to Cartesianism – that is, to the idea that there is a contingent relationship between an experience and its outward expression. Hence, when Norman Malcolm, in his review of Philosophical Investigations, took the attack on a private language to be directed against Cartesianism, he was implicitly extending the Cartesian position to incorporate a theory of language explaining how sensation words refer to sensations.
