Adam asked:

Do you think it correct, as Scruton suggests in his discussion of Kant (1982), that the "publicity of
language guarantees the objectivity of its reference"? Scruton thinks that Wittgenstein's private
language argument shares the premises and the conclusion of Kant's transcendental deduction (i.e.
Wittgenstein's argument is transcendental in that there can be no knowledge of experience which
does not presuppose reference to a public world). The thought seems to be that I know my
experience immediately only because I apply to it concepts which gain their sense from public use.

My view is that this makes a great deal of sense, but my acquaintance with the primary texts is
something I am ashamed of!

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It was Roger Scruton who as a lecturer first introduced me to the Private Language Argument, while I
was an undergraduate student at Birkbeck College, London in the early 70's. I thought at the time,
and still think that it is a devastating argument.

To see why, consider the familiar idea (which I recall first thinking about when I was 9 or 10) 'How do I
know that when we both look up at the sky, the blue in your mind is the same colour as the blue in my
mind?' Nagel has a great take on this (in his short OUP book What Does It All Mean?). If I could lick
your brain while you were eating chocolate, and it tasted of chocolate, that still wouldn't prove that the
taste of chocolate is the same for you as it is for me.

'Blue', 'chocolate' have established uses in our shared language. When I talk about 'my
incommunicable experience of the way blue is for me' or 'the incommunicable taste that chocolate
has for me', on the other hand, what I meanis something that I don't have a name for, something
essentially private, incapable of being communicated.

Wittgenstein says, Give your inner something a name. You can do that, can't you?

It turns out that you can't. The reason is that you are the only person who is in a position to say
whether the name you have invented for your incommunicable experience is being used correctly or
not:

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'.

12. Wittgenstein Philosophical InvestigationsPart I, para 258.

Here's how Wittgenstein proposes to 'get rid of the idea of the private object':

assume that it constantly changes, but that you do not notice the change because your
memory constantly deceives you.

ibid. Part II, p. 207.

I can't think of the number of times I've racked my brains trying to imagine the thing Wittgenstein asks
us to 'assume', that the inexpressible quality blue has for me constantly changes etc. etc. It took me a
long time to realize that it's all wasted effort.

Well, we can argue about that. We can argue about whether Wittgenstein is right in claiming that in
order to have meaning, it is necessarythat the meaning a term be capable of being communicated to
others, that it should have a meaning in our 'public language'. Scruton's claim is that it is sufficientfor
a term to have what he terms 'objective reference' that it should have a recognized use in a public
language. And I think he could be wrong about this.

The fact that people agree, or a capable of reaching agreement doesn't prove anything. We can all
agree about something , and still be wrong. Or our seeming agreement can be the result of pure
accident. For a term to have genuine, objective meaning, and not merely a name we pass around,
thinking we all mean the same thing by it, something more is needed, something to do with the way
we are connected with the world: the fact that we do not spend all our lives merely talking to one
another but use language for a purpose.This is something the pragmatists clearly saw.

Geoffrey Klempner