What is Wittgenstein’s private language argument

If you wake up alone on a deserted island and decide to call the sensation of a cold breeze "Brrr," have you failed to speak a language simply because there is no one there to correct you? Ludwig Wittgenstein famously argued in his [Philosophical Investigations](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_Investigations) that a "private language"—one that refers to internal sensations known only to the speaker—is impossible because language requires a public rule-book to distinguish between right and wrong. However, this perspective may ignore the biological reality of how we think and the undeniable "privacy" of our own consciousness. ## The Problem of the Solitary Knower Wittgenstein’s core weakness lies in his radical skepticism regarding memory. He argues that if you label a sensation "S," you have no way to know if you are remembering "S" correctly the next time it happens, likening it to a man buying several copies of the morning paper to check if the news is true. Critics like [A.J. Ayer](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A._J._Ayer), a prominent British philosopher, argue that this skepticism is a double-edged sword. If we cannot trust our memory to identify an internal sensation like "pain," why should we trust our memory to identify a public object like a "stop sign"? All language, whether public or private, ultimately relies on the individual’s ability to recognize a pattern and apply a rule. > "I can imagine a person who has never learned a language... he would be able to identify certain recurrences in his experience... he would be able to give these recurrences names." — A.J. Ayer, [Can There Be a Private Language?](https://www.jstor.org/stable/2251314) ## Mentalese: The Language of Thought Another major blow to Wittgenstein’s argument comes from cognitive science and the work of [Jerry Fodor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Fodor). Fodor proposed the **Language of Thought Hypothesis**, suggesting that humans possess an innate, internal symbolic system—often called "Mentalese"—that exists *before* we learn any social language. If Fodor is right, Wittgenstein’s "public criteria" are not the foundation of meaning. Instead, our public words (like "apple" or "sad") are just translations of a pre-existing, private mental code. From this view, the "private" comes first, and the "social" is merely a layer we add on top to communicate with others. ## The Blind Spot of Subjective Experience Wittgenstein’s view risks turning humans into "black boxes" where internal states don't matter unless they produce an external behavior (like shouting "Ouch!"). This borders on **Behaviorism**—the idea that only observable actions are real. Thinkers like [Thomas Nagel](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Nagel) argue that there is a "what it is like" to be a conscious being that external rules can never fully capture. By insisting that meaning must be public, Wittgenstein may be dismissing the most certain thing we possess: the raw, private data of our own senses. If I know I am in pain, I don't need a community to vote on it to make my internal "label" for it meaningful.