On language and privacy

​To imagine a language, Wittgenstein wrote, is to imagine a form of life.  He gives the example of a language made up of commands and reports from battle, or a language made only of questions to which you can give a yes or no answer.  The forms of life, or ways of living, he is imagining are easier to work out from these examples than the languages: what kind of grammer could restrict conversation to commands while allowing reports from battle?  Wouldn’t someone whose grammar allowed reports from battle have the idea of reporting on other activities? Wouldn’t someone whose language was made up of questions think of using the question mode rhetorically, until someone eventually thought to reply to a “question” with a “question”?  If I think beyond armed city states or a world of on-line bureaucracy, though, and open the doors to the waiting pets, in at once rush forms of life speaking only in commands and questions.  If this is true of their conversations with me, though, is it true of their conversations with each other, and, even more interesting to think about, is it true of their conversations with themselves?  Could an animal have a private language?  According to Wittgenstein, not even a person can have a private language, and to prove this point he asks us to imagine having private beetles.  If everyone has a beetle in a matchbox but no one could look in anyone else’s matchbox, how could we know we were using the word “beetle” to talk about the same thing?  In such a situation, he says, if the word “beetle” was used, it would be as pure designation, without object, which makes the word designation not quite the right word either, it becomes pure gesture, and in Wittgenstein’s understanding of language, language is always gestural, a series of gestures used to provoke actions in others.  But what action could the word beetle provoke?  It could only provoke you to think of each other’s inner matchboxes, perhaps to wonder what is in there, what colour each other’s beetle is, whether when we call a beetle green we have the same idea of “green” in mind.  It might provoke you to wonder what other secrets I am keeping, and perhaps whether I have a private language of my own to keep my secrets in.  What if I kept my secrets in a diary, like Wittgenstein’s diarist who uses the letter S. to signify a sensation there are no words for, so as to record its recurrence.  Wittgenstein’s argument against the possibility of a private language rests on the impossibility of giving a definition for this sign S.  Is it really impossible, he asks himself?  “I speak, 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.”  Is this a definition?  No, he decides, it can only be a “ceremony,” since a definition “serves to establish the meaning of a sign,” and this inward pointing can only “bring it about” that “I remember the connection right in the future.”  Language, for Wittgenstein, exists only to “bring about” actions, whether someone else’s or your own, and the definition of a word can only be tested by the results of speaking it, if someone brings you an apple when you expected a pear, you know you have got the word for pear wrong.  (One of my earliest memories is of being asked to bring my mother a couple of apples, and not knowing how many apples there were in a couple, I brought instead of a pair of apples as many as I could carry, more in fact than I could carry, and the confusion that this caused cleared up the confusion over what the word “couple” meant for me so effectively I still know a couple is only two, to this day.)  But for Wittgenstein’s diarist, there can be no “criterion of correctness,” only “whatever is going to seem right to me is right,” which is no correctness test at all.  It is a funny idea though that language needs to be tested to be language at all, that unless we can be sure we are testing it against whatever everyone else means we are only babbling pre-linguistically using words that are not words, even if, unlike Wittgenstein’s diarist, we might be using words we have heard, only using them wrongly.  I think I have thought using words wrongly as meaningfully as I have using words correctly, even if I have only been thinking for myself.  Wittgenstein’s diarist’s use of the sign S. makes me think about how much more there is to language than communication, how by using it for inward pointing we can open up the whole vast matchbox of the self.  As for those lonely beetles, never meeting another beetle, what do they make, I wonder, of our intermittent presence as we look to see our indescribable beetles are still in their boxes, do they take the flashes of light as communication, are they working on a hermeneutics of the box openings, or are they engaged in constructing a civilisation amongst themselves, communicating without our knowing it, through waves of pheromones coursing box to box, or in the ways they move their feet, and wave their feelers, against the walls of their boxes which are both the barrier that separates them, and the medium in which they speak?