# Wittgenstein's private language argument.



## jwright82 (Jul 27, 2021)

Wittgenstein is far more important than people think. His argument against a private language is transcendental, Bahnsen points this out (see Van Til reader) in his work. 
His point is this you could only invent a private language after learning a social one, so your starting point is social not private. Also since words are socially learned you must use them socially to get your point across unless your simply talking nonsense, which is meaningless. You could invent a private language but it would be of no use to you, since you couldn't communicate with anyone unless you translated it into a socially acceptable language, ( hence defeating the purpose of "private "). 
Hence a private language is practically impossible, you can't get there from here.

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## Andrew35 (Jul 27, 2021)

Mainly what I remember about Wittgenstein is that he would critique a lot of public language as "meaningless." I think of this often when I'm in a teacher professional development workshop.

Education jargon would have blown all the poor man's fuses.

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## jwright82 (Jul 27, 2021)

Andrew35 said:


> Mainly what I remember about Wittgenstein is that he would critique a lot of public language as "meaningless." I think of this often when I'm in a teacher professional development workshop.
> 
> Education jargon would have blown all the poor man's fuses.


Yeah thats the early Wittgenstein, you see linguistic philosophers believed philosophical problems were the result of a misunderstanding of ordinary language and needed to be logically "perfected" to iron out the problems (we talk weirdly about things, hence we have weird ideas about things). Also the meaningless thing is a category for arguments thats worse than simply false, at least a false argument makes sense and can be judged true or false. Meaningless means it can't, the person isn't even making sense to judge.
The later Wittgenstein adored ordinary language (which is where this argument comes from). And still believed that through understanding ordinary language we could resolve all philosophical problems. That didn't pan out but for what its worth the later Wittgenstein is by far the more influential. I hope that helps. There's far more that could be said but I hope this makes "sense".

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