Arguments in defense of Private Language?

Question

Is it the case that the beetle in the box does not play any role in our…? Or do similar neurological constituents and identical physical input contribute to the experience of 'pain' in a Kantian manner, where each individual possesses their unique sense perception but shares at least the same scheme?

Answer 1

I think the obvious answer is no. But one could perhaps stretch the definition of language a bit and think of interesting workarounds.

We know that writing is a system of conventions that makes material "imprints" of spoken languages. Written language will "die" once it loses any remaining link to spoken languages and the "breath of life." It can never again be translated or understood unless some Rosetta Stone is discovered to administer an "artificial resuscitation" via a known spoken language. Of course, one would not call this a "private" language but a "dead" language.

But now let's imagine the famous operator inside Searle's Chinese Room. In this case a written language is in effect "imprinted" upon her living behavior. She caries out the operations of Chinese communications without understanding it at all. (And let's assume that her original instructions are in a recently extinct language or simply long since memorized.)Does her behavior then constitute a gestural interpretation of Chinese that might itself be called a language? One that follows linguistic operations "inside" a public language and conveys an understanding or "how-to", but is not comprehensible to anyone else and is hence "private."

An even simpler case would be the last speaker of an extinct language, not at all a fantastical scenario. For an interval, at least, it is still operating though only in a single mind. One might call this its withdrawal into privacy. In other words, there may be grey areas "before and after" the emergence of a language into its living social matrix. I am not at all convinced by my own arguments here, but I'll go ahead and post while I think about it.

Answer 2

Are there some kinds of arguments in defense of Private Language?

Well consider the case of a space where all speech acts are public.

Q. How then can one carry out a private conversation?

Because its due to conversations being private that one can plan to ones advantage, and to the disadvantage of others (and in this case, mostly to others; in the sense, the others are more numerous).

Well, in such a public space, one invents a private language. That looks like the public language, but is so coded that one knows what is being said. If you have some physics knowledge, think of a communication signal being overlayed on a carrier wave.

Note however, the advantage is accrued wholly to the private group, who are in charge of the private language. Thus, if you are publicly minded, you might think this is no advantage at all; and in fact, a disadvantage.

So I came to praise private language, and in fact, it seems I have buried it...!

Answer 3

Wittgenstein's "beetle in a box" argument is easily seen to be incorrect, simply by our successful operation of internal dialog and reasoning processes, and that we succeed with both even as prelingual toddlers. His presumption that we would no longer be able to reason or think to ourselves, if the rest of humanity died out and we could no longer confirm word meanings with an external community, is implausible in the extreme.