Private Languages, again

The argument against the possibility of a 'private' language (a language one knows, oneself, how to speak; but which is never used in a conversation with any other person) is, broadly, that our judgements that we were correctly following the rules upon which the intelligibility of the language depended would be no better than our judgements that we were speaking the language properly in the first place.  No internal test of correct usage could avoid relying on judgements which were, themselves, open to questions about correct usage.

Public languages have access to a further resource - the judgements of other language users.  A usage which could not be rendered intelligible to these could not be part of the shared language.  As Kripke observes, however, this only helps with judgements within the language, and not with judgements about the intelligibility of the language as a whole, where the problem of external validation arises once again - in a fairly catastrophic way.  So the PL problem is not just a problem for strictly private languages.

The solution to Kripke's problem is, as I've suggested, to realize that all of our judgements of validity and intelligibility are also moves within a language game - to ask whether the whole game (to include 'all' language games) is valid or intelligible is to ask whether judgements of validity and intelligibility are possible. The answer to this question is either 'yes' or unintelligible.

An interesting question is whether this approach can be taken to private languages as more traditionally explicated (as in the parentheses in paragraph 1).  The motivation for asking this question is that something like a private language seems to be required to rescue the idea of intelligible private thought, in so far as we are able, in thought, to reflect on the reliability or our own perceptions and judgements.

One way we do this, of course, is to apply our public conceptions of validity and intelligibility to our private ruminations - either by imagining how they might be articulated in a public language, or by actually articulating them. Our imaginings here are at least as reliable as our imaginings that we can speak ...

The problem with this approach is that it requires the private language to be translated into the public one for testing - so rendering it non-private.  The private language can only be private in the required sense if it cannot be so translated, a fact which strengthens the PL argument rather than otherwise, given Donald Davidson's observations on how we determine whether something is or is not a language.

Untranslatable private thought is just part of that 'of which we must remain silent'.  Why would we need to worry (somewhat unintelligibly ... ) about its 'intelligibility'?

Only because we project inwards from public intelligibility?  We will find what we are looking for if we do this, as Chomsky and Fodor demonstrate.  Chomsky finds that anything that looks like a language must look like the language he (more or less) shares with us; Fodor finds that for any internal process to come out as intelligible it must be translatable into the language of his enquiry, which we (more or less) follow.

But if even the mechanisms which underlie public intelligibility need not be rendered as generally reliable (see my last post on the Turing test), why should we expect our phenomenological experience of them to be intelligible?

Of course what we say must make sense, but that making sense is such a struggle suggests that it cannot be just a matter of translation ...