Libby asked:

What is a word?

The Oxford dictionary definition is as follows: 1. A sound/ sounds expressing a meaning and forming
one of the basic elements of speech 2. this represented by letters or symbols.

What I really want to know is how are language and thought connected? or how philosophers have
gone about looking into this matter? Can there be such a thing as 'private language' — are thoughts
simply unspoken words strung together in the mind? Where do the limits/ boundaries of language lie?
And do words themselves convey meaning i.e. can a proposition be broken down into its individual
elements, like building blocks, or must a word be within the context of other words for it to have
meaning — just as a thing cannot exist in itself, only within a state of affairs?

Finally, if X is left of Y, is the 'left of Y' arbitrary? Could one mean the same thing by saying 'right of
Y'? Why does X have to be the subject, and is syntax as it is because it is or is their some logical
relationship between it and reality?

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First, I believe Wittgenstein decisively undermined the notion of a private language by his famous
thought experiment in Philosophical Investigations. Imagine a person who, every day he experiences
a certain sensation, enters a certain squiggle in his diary. But one day he experiences a sensation
about which he isn't able to decide whether it is the one he marks by a squiggle or another, slightly
similar sensation. How can he now check whether or not the sensation is the same as before? The
only thing he can turn to is his own memory, but the whole question arose only because he became
doubtful about his own memory.

Second, it seems unclear what it would mean to say that thoughts are words in the mind. If I think of
the first movement of Haydn's twenty-second symphony, what are the words I'm talking to myself?
They seem more like a sequence of musical notes to me. If I think of a purple parallelogram, what are
the words I'm talking to myself? They seem more like a visual image of a purple parallelogram to me.

Third, it is surely not arbitrary that X is left of Y; what is arbitrary is whether or not we happen to be
located at a place in three-dimensional space from where X is left of Y and not right of it.

T. P. Uschanov

Research Assistant

Department of Philosophy

University of Helsinki

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