Witti-Buch2 2001.qxd - Austrian Ludwig Wittgenstein Society

Private Language: A Voiced Secret
character of our language. Thus the myth of a private ostensive definition or of a private
explanation is here brought up. Nevertheless the more significant mistake about the
inner lies in the believe that not only our expressions point to private experiences but
also their meaning comes from that kind of experiences (88). The myth of the inner
entails giving an excessive explanatory faculty to the events we call intimate, hidden,
privates (694). Thus far we have attempted to show that the neglect the possibility of a
private language is not the same thing as the refutation of the validity of our private
experiences and our knowledge of them; it means rather that the expression of these
experiences falls within a language that joins, indeed, the realms of a larger language
(699).
3. Dissolution of the self: Cavell and the problem of other minds.
According to Cavell, Wittgenstein's teaching in these matters "is in service of a vision
that false views of the inner and of the outer produce and sustain one another" (Cavell,
329). Both Wittgenstein and Cavell think that nothing is closer than the inner and the
outer, although just if this claim is meant figuratively, because what they really would like
to mean is that "nothing can come between [the inner and the outer] on the ground that
in such cases there are not two things for anything to come between" (341). Our words
are nothing but an expression of our private sensation; the meaning of our expressions
of pain, let us say, is not up to me, instead it is given to me by the very same language
I speak. On the other hand, Wittgenstein effort is "to illuminate something about the
publicness of language, something about the depth to which language is agreed in"
(344). What underlies the hypothesis of the private language is the denial of the public
character of language, because in its publicness we could observe a fear of loosing our
interior.
A different consequence of this pretension has to do with the impossibility of knowing
with certainty the inner states of the others because, according to the myth of the inner,
only the owner of those states would have a direct epistemic access to them. According
to Cavell, the fantasy of the public inexpressibility of my inner states has as a
consequence that I cannot make my interior known to the others, I am a monad, as it
were, the only one that could understand himself. And if my own inner existence cannot
be put in common with the inner existence of the others, then I could not be
acknowledged by the others as an other. The gap between me and the others is
unavoidable, and this much is what Wittgenstein and Cavell would accept from the
traditional picture: we are in fact separated, there exist certain distance between us. Far
from regretting it, it would not be crazy at all to think that this gap is bridgeable thanks,
precisely, to the means that the mutual acknowledgement that the public character of
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