The Evolution of the Private Language Argument Aldershot

in these cases it is not only going to make a recognisable difference to the behaviour of themanometer whether I have one kind of pain or the other, but also that my correctly predicting themanometer reading is going to correspond to my reporting what kind of sensation I am having. If,for example, I temporarily forget the proper correlation and predict a rise in blood pressure onhaving a dull pain in my foot, then I will have made a quite definite mistake in my prediction. Inthe same way, if I instead make only a slip of the tongue by saying that there is a rise in bloodpressure when I report a dull pain in my foot, intending to refer to my knee, I will still have madethe right prediction regardless of how clumsy I have been in stating what I feel, since this slip ofthe tongue was no part of my intention. It then follows that when Wittgenstein talks of its beingquite indifferent whether I have recognised the sensation right or not, he is either referring to aprivate object that has no part to play in talking about our sensations, because it is only on thisinapplicable model that a question of correct or incorrect recognition arises, or he is simplyreiterating the point that since a question of recognition does not arise in those cases where wetalk about our ordinary sensations, the private object drops out of consideration altogether.Neilsen is justified in concluding that a similar point is being made in § 293 - and incidentally in§§ 271-2 - where the vivid imagery of the Beetle in the Box is no more than a reminder that ifwhen doing philosophy the tendency is to reify private objects in this fashion, then we will betempted to ask the kinds of questions asked by Pitcher and Donagan, who were prone to querywhether there really are private sensations which are qualitatively the same for each of them.Neilsen remarks at the end of Chapter 10 that Wittgenstein’s treatment of aprivate language nowhere excludes the possibility of an infant Robinson Crusoe inventing alanguage for himself, so making Crusoe a potential speaker. Here it is almost as if he is obliviousof Wittgenstein’s point that our attraction to Crusoe is symptomatic of our being party to apicture which is doing no real work, one which underlies the philosophical urge to talk at a moresophisticated level about innate conceptual capacities and intrinsically meaningful sensationswhich can be named prior to the acquisition of a public language.28