Paulo asked:

I would like to know about Private Language in Wittgenstein, but I also want to make connections with
arguments of Quine about translation (the famous Rabbit) and the mind as a Museum. I need this
because I am trying to put the things in a comparative table for students. Thanks.

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At one place in Word and Object,Quine makes a disparaging remark about Wittgenstein's argument
against a private language. That it was not in the least bit original, and had all been thought before. I
remember reading the remark and thinking that this must have been a kind of blindness on Quine's
part. Sure, the philosophers who rejected the idea of a private language before Wittgenstein made
the right move. But there is all the difference in the world between rejecting a theory — like the
famous incident recorded by Boswell of Dr Johnson kicking a stone in order to refute Berkeleian
idealism — because you are convinced by your gut feelings that the theory is wrong, and offering a
philosophical argument which shows why the theory is wrong, and uncovers the source of the illusion
that tempts us into holding the theory in the first place, which is what Wittgenstein did with his attack
on the idea of a private language.

The 'indeterminacy of translation' and the 'inscrutability of reference' are two famous Quinian theses.
There is nothing in Wittgenstein that is remotely like the claim that translations from one language to
another are underdetermined by all actual and possible data (indeterminacy thesis), or that it is
impossible to determine from the structural features of a given language which objects the singular
terms of that language refer to (inscrutability thesis). The closest Quine comes to sounding like
Wittgenstein is when characterizes the view he is arguing against as involving the picture of the mind
as a Museum, with rows of exhibits each labelled with a different word. That is not a philosophical
argument, however. It is mere rhetoric.

According to Wittgenstein's private language argument, there is no knowledge of 'objects'
independent of a shared language and its resources for identity and individuation. According to
Quine, the objects that exist in the universe are relative to our language. So, by changing our notion
of identity, we change the way in which reality is carved up into objects. There is no 'absolute',
language independent, list of the objects that 'really' exist. Reference is 'inscrutable'.

So, for example, in Quine's famous case of the rabbit, if you came across a tribe who used a word
'gavagai' which they used whenever we used the term 'rabbit', it would be possible in principle to offer
an alternative, equally accurate translation according to which 'gavagai' was a term which referred to
a 'rabbit part', or, alternatively, to a temporal 'slice' of a four-dimensional space-time rabbit.

Like Quine, Wittgenstein makes his point using an imaginary scenario. Wittgenstein asks us to
imagine a person attempting to coin a word for an experience whose onlyimpact on the world is in
the mind of the subject whose experience it is, which cannot be accounted for or defined in terms of
any concepts with which we are familiar.

In a similar way, you could pair off Wittgenstein's argument that there will always in theory be more
than one way of interpreting the expression of a given linguistic rule, with Quine's thesis of the
indeterminacy of translation. According to Quine, however much data you gather, it is conceivable
that the sentence you have translated into English has an alternative, incompatible translation which
is consistent with that data.

I am prepared to concede that in both cases, Quine and Wittgenstein are talking about the same
thing. They are trying to get across the same idea. In my admittedly biased view, however, Quine's
dialectical approach fails while Wittgenstein's succeeds.

Geoffrey Klempner