Wittgenstein Private Language Essay

In remark 246 Wittgenstein attempts to explain the hardships we encounter when discussing personal sensations in relation to a private language. This is one of the most famous and constantly debated topics of the Investigations because there is still much confusion over what Wittgenstein was trying to say in this remark. He proceeds to inform us that the everyday practices that are derived from our ordinary language-games and give them meaning are non-existent where private language is concerned. He gives us the following explanation: if we claim that we feel “X”, there is no concrete definition or evidence that shows another person how to properly understand “X”. This shows the difficulty in internalizing our language, there needs to be external

It is quite likely that we can externally agree about the word pain. We may view pain as two completely different things internally, but when we express them externally they are unbelievably equivalent. This concept is extremely frustrating to get a grip on but does begin to clarify itself. One might argue that a color (blue in our case) cannot be compared to an emotion (pain) in this case. I believe this argument would be invalid because of the different opinions that philosophers such as Aristotle, Epicurus, and Augustine had in terms of the word and emotion of happiness. This example is relative because it is fact that each of these philosophers had differing opinions of what defined the emotion happiness but although their internal experiences were all different, the term happiness remained constant. Therefore, if we claim to be happy, Aristotle will predict our personal mindset slightly differently than Epicurus would and slightly different than Augustine would. The same goes for pain, and I believe this to be what Wittgenstein is arguing. For one to say they are in pain gives everyone a basic idea of the way they are feeling but we cannot pin point precisely how they feel because our internal perceptions of pain are different. Therefore we cannot learn the true meaning of pain through language, we must learn the true meaning of pain and everything else for that matter through our experiences. Wittgenstein would like this idea because our experiences are much more concrete than