experiencing the same sensation as we did before; the problem only arises when I try to get other people to understand what I mean. Wittgenstein wants to question this. At #244 he asks,
"How do words refer to sensations?
There doesn't seem to be a problem here; don't we talk about sensations every day and give them names? But how is the connection between the name and the thing set up? This question is the same as how does a human being learn the meaning of the names of sensations? -of the word
'pain' for example."
On the picture to be scrutinised, my words refer, via an ostensively established connection, to a privately accessible purely mental item.. How is this connection made? The natural thought is that I simply label my sensations. My sensations occur within my consciousness, and I simply give them names and descriptions. Very crudely, the picture would be something like, at the onset of a particular feeling, I might say "I will call this very distinctive feeling 'gollow frusion' if ever it occurs again". And on this account the labelling is of course accomplished privately; indeed it must be carried out privately as no-one else can feel my sensations and do it for me.
The idea that this private act of ostension could be the basis of a genuine concept comes under direct attack in the so-called Private Language Argumentez.
#258 "Let us imagine the following case. I want to keep a diary about the recurrence of a certain sensation. To this end I associate it with the sign 'S' and write this sign in a calendar for every day on which I have the sensation.-! will remark first of all that a definition of the sign cannot be formulated."
It's obvious enough why not: if I, for example, define 'gollow frusion' as 'that feeling of being entirely gobsmacked, where one's insides feel hollow, and any ideas which have not fled altogether have frozen and fused', then that public definition is what the words mean, even if I
^^Hacker suggests that 'Private Language Argument’ is a misnomer, in view of the many 'different but closely interwoven themes' which are investigated in sections #242-318. (Wittgenstein, Meaning and Mind P. 15) There is something in that. He also says it would be futile by now to advocate abandoning this name'. There is something in that too, and I will not follow his lead in pluraUsing the term.
never explain it to anyone else. So the term doesn't get its meaning from an act of private ostension.13
"But still I can give myself a kind of ostensive definition.-How? Can I point to the sensation? Not in the ordinary sense. But I speak, or write the sign down, and at the same time I concentrate my attention on the sensation -and so, as it were, point to it inwardly. -But what is this ceremony for? for that is all it seems to be! A definition surely serves to establish the meaning of a sign -Well, that is done precisely by the concentration of my attention; for in this way I impress on myself the connection between the sign and the sensation.—But 'I impress it on myself can only mean: this process brings it about that I remember the connexion right in the future. But in the present case I have no criterion of correctness. One would like to say: whatever is going to seem right to me is right. And that only means that here we can't talk about 'right'."
'Ceremony' is deliberately abusive, but what exactly is wrong with this baptism ceremony? It is tempting to think that private ostension is just like public ostension in all essential respects. But the act of public ostension is not simply a ceremony. It picks out a public object with public features, some of which will serve as criteria for its identity, and some of which will not. The bare act of matching an object, either private or public, to a word could not serve as a definition; the matching has to be done in accordance with some concept, and the concept is fixed by standards which can be publicly assessed. An ostensive definition, when it works, gives a concept in virtue of the fact that certain paradigmatic characteristics are salient. And, when it doesn't, the act of ostension has at least picked out an object on the basis of which mistakes can later be recognised and corrected. Children are, in fact, remarkably good at picking up concepts, but there is a stage during which they tend to class things too generally: calling all men 'Daddy', for example, or all drinks 'juice', or all small furry quadrupeds 'cat'.
^^Similarly, once a concept is in place there is no difficulty. Once a concept is in place, individuals do not fix the definition privately. Suppose someone says "Now I know what 'migraine' means. I have recently been getting headaches, and I suspect they are migraine headaches, although I’ve never had them before." They may seem to be in position to ostensively define the word 'migraine', although they never had been previously. But notice that here the criteria for a llyin g the concept 'migraine' are publicly describable (intensity and location of pain, visual disturbances of various kinds etc). It is important to recognise that it is a necessary condition of our being counted as having grasped a public concept, like migraine, that we are able to make ourselves intelligible to others, and use the concept in the same way as everyone else. The idea to be rejected is the idea that it is possible, say in baptising 'gollow frusion', to impose similarly constraining conditions on my grasp of a private concept, and so make a meaningful baptism.
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