Bloor (and others) on enthusiasm, private languages etc.

The private language argument is an also an anti-sceptical argument.

The issue is not whether there can be, in some representation of cognitive processing, something that looks like a private language (or, indeed, a 'language of thought') - a signalling system, for instance, that has a syntactical structure.

It is, instead, whether this thing that looks like a private language can have meanings attributed to its 'signals' that do not depend upon the meanings of language game within which it is described. Bloor thinks of a social matrix, or socialisation here. Wittgenstein is vague, but points to the need for public tests of some kinds. Locke refers to reason ...

As Bloor says, (p55, Wittgenstein, Rules and Institutions), arguments of this kind cannot 'claim absolute cogency or a decisive victory'.

But he's making the same mistake as Quine did - having found a concrete narrative (science, society) of the process which seems to exemplify or underpin public rationality, he mistakes the content for the form. It's like believing a laptop can think, or believing a word processor can speak because it can check grammar.

The normative aspects of attributing meaning, or rationality, cannot be captured in this kind of concrete narrative. Not only is there an open question problem here - about the normative status of the narrative, about it's capacity to confer validity on the processes it seeks to explain - but the very nature of the narrative itself is called into question. What is 'society' or 'socialisation'? If it becomes just 'what underpins rationality' (Spinoza? !), then this empties the narrative of content and the explanation of sense.

And , of course, the narrative depends, for its meaning, on the very categories it seeks to explain (truth, rule following, knoweldge). And, sadly, it can only claim to support them by trying to deny or marginalise the very aspect of them that we most want explained: the validity of their content.

If, on the other hand, we show that these categories can be recursively grounded in our ability to talk about things - an ability which needs no further exposition, since querying it is unintelligible - then we not only have the fundamental argument that Bloor denies is possible, but we also avoid the open question trap.