Witti-Buch2 2001.qxd - Austrian Ludwig Wittgenstein Society

David Pérez Chico & Moisés Barroso Ramos
am in pain, it would be interpreted as a denial of the private nature of the knowledge I
have about my own experiences. But, Does Wittgenstein really deny that? Is it there any
other sense in which the knowledge of my own experiences can be said to be private?
Following the works of J. Bouveresse and S. Cavell, we will explore the idea that what
Wittgenstein denies is the exclusiveness, that is, the secrecy, of the meanings of the
psychological vocabulary we use to express our sensations and inner states in general.
Thus understood, Wittgenstein's critique will help us to overcome the vertigo that takes
over us when the egocentric conception is threatened.
2. The myth of the interiority: Bouveresse's reading on
Wittgenstein.
Bouveresse has made a fair reading of the problem of the private language. According
to this reading, it is possible to think that the private language makes sense given that
the language we normally use is so pervaded by our experiences that we are prone to
think that the use we make of our words is mainly private. The same as the language is
by nature shared, the experience is in itself private. However Bouveresse asks, How do
we get from something so obvious, that is, that my experience is mine, to the
construction of a myth of an inaccessible interiority, an incommunicability of the lived
experiences and an insularity of the minds? (Bouveresse, 75). From being the only one
in having the experience I have, I want to conclude that I am the only one able to know
what kind of experience I really have. The language that makes possible the expression
of my experiences, Is it not deceptively privatized in doing just so?
The notion of a private language has owned a remarkable philosophical prominence
because, as Bouveresse says, it is thought to be a "language more straight, more
rigorous, closer to reality, more truthful than the ordinary language" (81), whereas
Wittgenstein's defense of the ordinary language seems to downgrade the claims of
philosophy and its powers of thought. "To defend the possibility of a private language is
above all to put emphasis on the acquired components that are included in our
representations and concepts" (83). It is unquestionable that the descriptive expressions
I learn gain a personal nuance, but one cannot extract from this fact that they have no
more than this meaning: they have a public meaning as well that is previous to the
nuances the human being could add to them. It is true though, that the meaning of
certain words of the ordinary language are so closely related to some personal
experiences that we tend to assume we accurately account for their use by saying that
they designate that kind of experiences.
According to Bouveresse, there would be a sort of "inner gesture" that could "appoint
by itself any specific object of the inner", and which would be responsible of the "private"
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