Putnam. Wittgenstein and Realism

7/29/2019 Putnam. Wittgenstein and Realism

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Internat ional Journal of Philosophical Studies Vol. 16(1), 3–16

International Journal of Philosophical Studies

Wittgenstein and Realism1

Hilary Putnam

Taylor and FrancisRIPH_A_280995.sgm10.1080/09672550701809370International Journal of Philosophical Studies0967-2559 (print)/1466-4542 (online)Original Article2008Taylor & [email protected]

Abstract

This paper compares and contrasts three views on the issue of ‘solipsism’ thatwere much discussed in the first half of the 20th century, namely those of Wittgenstein, Carnap and Reichenbach. While the paper deals mainly withearly Wittgenstein, the so-called ‘later Wittgenstein’ is seen as arguing thatCarnap’s Aufbau, and any similar ‘solipsist’ reinterpretation of the languagemust start with a notion of experience utterly different from the one we actu-ally have. And this criticism actually coheres with Wittgenstein’s views in the

Tractatus.

Keywords:

Wittgenstein; solipsism; realism; Carnap; Reichenbach; ViennaCircle; metaphysics

Writing about Wittgenstein is dangerous, I find. One is liable to be‘attacked by both sides’, by Wittgenstein-

Schwärmer

on the one hand andby Wittgenstein-haters (of whom there are a great many nowadays) on

the other. But in my philosophical life, I have always discovered inWittgenstein’s texts the sort of depth

that makes them worth thinkingabout whether one agrees or disagrees with them on first (or even subse-quent) reading. So I shall once again take the risk.

The title of this article is ‘Wittgenstein and Realism’. But I could alsohave titled it ‘Wittgenstein, Carnap, and Reichenbach on Realism’, because,as will shortly become evident, I have found it necessary to say somethingabout the views of all three of these philosophers.

I shall begin by discussing a famous passage in the Tractatus

in which

Wittgenstein appears to address the issue of realism versus solipsism,namely:

Here we see that solipsism strictly carried out coincides with pure real-ism. The I in solipsism shrinks to an extensionless point and thereremains the reality co-ordinated with it.

(Wittgenstein, 1922: §5.64)



INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES

What Sort of ‘Solipsism’ does Wittgenstein Have in Mind?

It was reading Brian McGuinness’ brilliant essay ‘Solipsism’ that made merealize just how many different meanings ‘solipsism’ had in Wittgenstein’swritings (including not just published writings, but letters, discussionsreported by Russell in 1912, the Notebooks

, and successive drafts of the

Tractatus

). In particular, Wittgenstein used the term to characterize

Schopenhauer

’s philosophy. A striking fact is that that philosophy is not‘egocentric’ in the sense in which Russell was concerned with escaping froman egocentric predicament. As McGuinness writes, after pointing out thatBoltzmann’s physicalism was one of Wittgenstein’s early influences,

If Boltzmann was his first idol, how does Wittgenstein still contriveto value the thinker who seemed to Boltzmann to represent philoso-

phy at its most sterile and ridiculous? Once again the answer lies inWittgenstein’s wish to transcend the old philosophy. He usesSchopenhauer’s terms, or ones like them, to make philosophicalmoves that confirm Boltzmann’s hostility to philosophy.

(McGuinness, 2002: p. 133)

In this section, as a preliminary to my own discussion, I summarizeMcGuinness’ interpretation, with which I largely agree.

McGuinness points out that the very first proposition of the Tractatus

both parallels (in style) and opposes (in content) Schopenhauer’s famousdictum that the world is my idea. ‘The world’, as McGuinness puts it, ‘is notmy idea, but is all that is the case (i.e. regardless of what is known or thoughtto be the case). This contrast remains even if there is also a contrast with theidea that the world consists of objects. Later in the book we realize thatWittgenstein nevertheless wants to accommodate Schopenhauer’s insightwithin his own. “The world is my world” is the point of reconciliation withinthe two’ (McGuinness, 2002: pp. 133–4).

The ‘reconciliation’ of which McGuinness speaks is not a reconciliationin the usual sense of that term, however. It is not that Wittgenstein findsthat Schopenhauer’s and Boltzmann’s ‘insights’ are both right, but that hefinds that they are both empty

. In fact, the remarks about the world beingmy world were originally intended to be part of the discussion of pseudo-

propositions

(§5.53ff. in both Prototractatus

and Tractatus

), but as theybecame longer they got moved to a section on their own, the §5.6s(McGuinness, 2002: p. 135). As McGuinness explains,

Originally the point was to say that the world is my world has as little

real content as saying that a thing is identical with itself. It could beparaphrased by saying meaninglessly – ‘The world

we describe is the



WITTGENSTEIN AND REALISM

Mach and Russell by saying to them, Look, you’re not saying anythingdifferent from what the realist or physicalist (Hertz or Boltzmann)wants to say. No insight is being conveyed when the solipsist says, ‘Theworld is what I experience (or could experience), unless one goes on

to say with Wittgenstein, ‘But I am nothing’, and then one conveysboth a logical lesson (as here) and (in the diary and Notebooks

) amoral lesson which we have yet to consider.

The logical lesson is that just as there is no a priori science of identityand of the nature of the proposition (two of his examples in thiscontext), so there is not an a priori experience of the world’s relationto the subject, no a priori order of the world. Thus Wittgenstein takesa further step in the rejection of the a priori, and hence of philosophy

itself, which was his heritage from Boltzmann, and yet at the sametime is able to do justice to the hidden stream, with its origin inSchopenhauer and Tolstoy, that has all along accompanied his devo-tion to logic.

(McGuinness, 2002: pp. 135–6)

In understanding what McGuinness means, it is important to keep inmind that for Wittgenstein, as for Frege in the same period, there is only one

language, of which all the natural languages are different realizations. Thatis, there is a fixed totality of possibilities, or, as one might also put it, of coherent thoughts to think, which are simply expressed in different signs indifferent natural languages. If we put aside the famous self-destruction of the Tractatus

(the fact that the Ladder is to be ‘thrown away’ at the end), aself-destruction which does not seem to have been in Wittgenstein’s mind inthe Prototractatus

and the Notebooks

, then the picture is this:The only world that the ‘subject’, that is the utterly impersonal speaker of

‘the’ language, can speak of or think of is the world that all speakers of thelanguage necessarily share by virtue of sharing a language – not a particularnatural language, such as English or Chinese, but the only possible language(that is what makes ‘the’ subject, in a sense, impersonal). Professing to be a‘physicalist’ or a ‘solipsist’ cannot change or add anything intelligible to thecontent of the propositions (

Sätze

) of the language. And those are the samepropositions no matter what metaphysical gloss one may attempt to put onthem.

A way I find it helpful to think of all this is via a contrast with Kant. Theso-called ‘realism’ of the Tractatus

, the ‘realism’ that consists in taking atface value the totality of possibilities represented in the language (which are

also the propositions of science), is what Kant called ‘empirical realism’. ButKant thought that the possibility of empirical realism could only be seen




Tractatus

and pre-Tractarian writings) is saying that ‘transcendental ideal-ism’ is unintelligible nonsense. I spoke a moment ago of taking the proposi-tions of ‘the’ language – which is also ‘ordinary language’, according to the

Tractatus

, and also the language of science – at ‘face value’; but taking them

at face value is the only way there is

to take them! That’s

the point.In line with this deflationary reading of the supposed ‘solipsism’ of the

Tractatus

, McGuinness reads ‘the much-discussed proposition’ ‘Thatthe world is my world gets shown in the fact that the limits of language(of language which alone

I understand) mean the limits of my

world [

Die

Grenzen der Sprach (der Sprache die

allein ich verstehe) die Grenzen

meiner Welt bedeuten

(Wittgenstein, 1922: §5.62)]’ as meaning simply that‘there are no possibilities other than those guaranteed to be such, permit-ted to be such, by language, and since anyone can envisage everything

language allows (and cannot envisage anything else), everyone has thesame relation to the whole world’ (McGuinness, 2002: pp. 136–7).McGuinness anticipates the inevitable question: ‘Why then call it my

world?’, and answers, ‘Because it follows from the above that everyone is,and I in particular am, a measure of the world. We define its possibilities bybeing a completely neutral point of view. We are dual with it, as languageis and for the same reason. It is for this reason that Wittgenstein exclaims,It is true. Man is the microcosm’ (McGuinness, 2002: p. 138; Wittgenstein,1979: p. 84; a note dated 12 October 1916).

Enter Carnap

It is eighty-five years since theTractatus

was published by Routledge & KeganPaul in their series The International Library of Psychology, Philosophy andScientific Method, but its volumes continued to reverberate for decades, and,in a way, continue to reverberate. What I want to do now is trace some of thosereverberations.

It is well known that the members of the Vienna Circle spent manymonths reading and discussing the Tractatus

. Among the ideas that theyfound congenial in that short book, in addition to the idea of clarifyingmeaning with the aid of modern logical notation, which they were alsofamiliar with from Russell’s writings, was certainly the identification of whatcould meaningfully be said with the propositions of science. (Recall §6.53:‘The only strictly correct method in philosophy would be this. To say noth-ing except what can be said, i.e.

the propositions of natural science, i.e.

something that has nothing to do with philosophy: and then when someoneelse wished to say something metaphysical, to demonstrate to him that hehad given no meaning to certain signs in his propositions. This method

would be unsatisfying to the other – he would not have the feeling that wewere teaching him philosophy – but it would be the only strictly correct




correct method’; in fact, they thought that it was full of metaphysics.(Wittgenstein felt the same way about the views of the Vienna Circle, butthat is a story for another occasion.)

Part of what they saw as ‘metaphysical’, i.e. as nonsensical, was the idea

that the world has one fixed logical structure, or, alternatively, that propo-sitions have one fixed logical structure. (In Philosophical Investigations

,Wittgenstein also famously rejects this view.) But before I considerCarnap’s alternative view, I need to say a word about Carnap’s notion of ‘metaphysics’.

Usually that notion is explained in terms of the Vienna Circle’s famousVerifiability Theory of Meaning: what is metaphysical (or ‘nonsense’) iswhat cannot be (scientifically) verified or refuted, and during much of hislife Carnap did try to find a satisfactory statement of that theory. But in the

Logical Syntax

period, appeals to the verification principle are entirelyreplaced by the idea that philosophy, which Carnap identifies with ‘logic of science’, ‘is nothing other than the syntax of the language of science’(Carnap, 1937: p. 7). With the verification principle conspicuous by itsabsence, what then justifies the rejection of metaphysics? Wittgenstein!I quote: ‘Wittgenstein has shown that the so-called sentences of metaphys-ics and of ethics are pseudo-sentences’ (Carnap, 1937: p. 282). The idea wasthat logical syntax would separate the nice scientific sheep from the nastymetaphysical goats. (Of course, Carnap was soon to turn to, and even

formalize, the very semantics that he had rejected inLogical Syntax

.)If there is one thing that is constant in Carnap’s description of ‘metaphys-ics’, however, it is that he gives assertions of ‘reality’ as paradigm examplesof the sort of metaphysics that he repudiates. Thus in Carnap, 1959 [1930]:p. 144 he writes, ‘We speak of “methodological” positivism or materialismbecause we are concerned here only with methods of deriving concepts,while completely eliminating both the metaphysical thesis of positivismabout the reality of the given and the metaphysical thesis of materialismabout the reality of the physical world.’ And twenty years later, in Carnap,1950, ordinary empirical questions of existence, which he regards as mean-ingful ‘internal questions’ provided a scientific language has been selected,are sharply separated from ‘external questions’ (e.g., ‘Do material objectsexist?’, ‘Do sense-data exist?’) which are only meaningful when reconstruedas questions concerning the utility of selecting one or another form of language, and meaningless if construed as theoretical questions (‘Do mate-rial objects really

exist?’).That there are problems with this stance goes without saying. One prob-

lem is raised by Quine’s attack on the intelligibility of Carnap’s ‘internal/external’ distinction in the famous paper ‘Carnap and Logical Truth’

(Quine, 1963). One can read Quine as asking, ‘If I say that chairs exist andthat chairs are material objects, doesn’t that imply that material objects




exist’ is a trivial empirical proposition, while as an ‘external’ sentence,‘Material objects exist’ is a metaphysical pseudo-proposition, and verylikely he would add that ‘Chairs are material objects’ likewise has two roles:as an analytical internal sentence, and as an metaphysical external sentence,

but Quine finds both the internal/external distinction and the (inflated)analytic/synthetic distinction Carnap appeals to suspect. Quine is telling usthat when we acquiesce in our home language, there is no intelligible differ-ence between ‘Chairs exist’ and ‘Chairs really exist’, or between ‘Materialobjects exist’ and ‘Material objects really exist.’ Quine asks us to give up theidea of a fixed ‘scientific/metaphysical’ distinction along with the other posi-tivist baggage – the Verifiability Theory of Meaning, the (inflated) analytic/synthetic distinction, and the internal/external distinction.

Apart from the last step – the giving up of the metaphysical/scientific

distinction – it seems to me that Quine’s attitude is close to the attitude of Wittgenstein in the Tractatus

. What Carnap is trying to do in ‘Empiricism,Semantics and Ontology’, it would seem to both Quine and Wittgenstein, isto find an external standpoint from which to condemn external questions as

meaningless

. To distinguish a sense that ‘Chairs exist’ or ‘Material objectsexists’ has within the language

, an ‘internal’ sense, from a pseudo-sensewhich can only be characterized from outside the language, is precisely tomiss the point that there is no standpoint available to us outside the language– precisely the point that Wittgenstein was making in the Tractatus

, as we

have seen. What is ‘outside the language’ is only what has not been given asense at all, ‘nonsense’ in the most ordinary sense of the term.

Carnap in the Aufbau

In the book that first made him famous, Der Logische Aufbau der Welt

(Carnap, 1928), Carnap reveals a significant disagreement with Wittgenstein.As I have already mentioned, in the Tractatus

Wittgenstein believes (likeFrege before him) that there is a unique correct analysis of the propositionsof science (the propositions of the one and only ‘Sprache’ = ‘my’ language).If Wittgenstein is really arguing in the §5.6s of the Tractatus

(as, followingMcGuinness, I have claimed that he is) that the dispute between ‘physicalists’and ‘solipsists’ is empty

, then the assumption of the uniqueness of the logicalform of the Sätze

(propositions) of science (and the further assumption thatthere is nothing particularly ‘metaphysical’ about that logical form) is anessential premise of the argument. But this is an assumption that Carnapdisputes.

There is an irony here, in that Carnap’s position, that the language of science admits of both

a (‘methodological’) solipsist reconstruction and

a

physicalist reconstruction, is one that Wittgenstein himself had held as astudent of Russell’s. This is something we know from a letter of Russell’s to




I argued about Matter with him [Wittgenstein]. He thinks it is a trivialproblem. He admits that if there is no Matter then no one exists buthimself, but he says that doesn’t hurt since physics and astronomy andall the other sciences could still be interpreted so as to be true.

(Quoted in McGuinness, 2002: p. 132)

To be sure, neither Carnap nor (presumably) the young Wittgenstein whoargued this with Russell in 1912 thought that the existence of differentformulations of the language of science meant that themetaphysical

issue of whether solipsism is ‘really true’ was thereby reinstated. Rather Carnapthought (and it sounds as if in 1912 Wittgenstein thought) that these formu-lations (solipsist and physicalist) are in some way ‘equivalent’. But there are

serious problems with this ‘equivalence’ claim. (McGuinness thinks that thiswas also Wittgenstein’s position in the Tractatus

, but I disagree.)For one thing, the equivalence cannot be ordinary logical equivalence,

since the models of the physicalist language and the models of the phenom-enalist language are not even isomorphic. In fact, the physicalist language,if it includes quantification over space-time points or even regions, will haveonly non-denumerably infinite models, while the phenomenalist language,if it quantifies only over theElementarerlebnisse

(‘Elementary Experiences’)of one human being (the ‘subject’) as does the phenomenalist language of

Carnap’s Aufbau

, will have only finite

models.

2

When Carnap wrote the Aufbau

, presumably the ‘equivalence’ betweenthe possible reconstructions of the language of science, of which thephenomenalist reconstruction given in that work was supposed to be onlyone, was supposed to be cognitive equivalence as measured by a ‘method-ologically solipsist’ version of the Verifiability Theory of Meaning.According to Carnap at that time, any sentence has the same conse-quences as far as the experiences of the subject are concerned whether thesentence is formalized in the physicalist version of the language or in thephenomenalist version of the language. But this is a highly problematiccriterion of cognitive equivalence.

To see why, let us recall Reichenbach’s argument against the choice of ‘the egocentric language’ inExperience and Prediction

(Reichenbach, 1938).

Enter Reichenbach

Following Carnap’s recommendation, Reichenbach describes the questiondividing phenomenalist and physicalists as simply a question of ‘choice of alanguage’. (‘Our mistake was that we did not recognize the question as one

of decision regarding the form of language; we therefore expressed our viewin the form of an assertion – as is customary among philosophers – rather




Reichenbach offers against the choice of an ‘egocentric language’ (i.e. a‘methodologically solipsist’ language, like that of the Aufbau

) actually cutsagainst the idea that nothing is at stake but a pragmatic ‘choice’.

To be sure, the way in which Reichenbach describes the ‘choice’ may

make it seem that he is not talking about Carnap at all. The two languagesbetween which we are supposed to choose in the first part of Experience and

Prediction

are described as ‘egocentric language’ and ‘usual language’.

3

And ‘egocentric language’ is not a sense-datum language (a language of

Erlebnisse

). It is a language in which I can speak of things as existing onlywhen they are observed by me. But if ‘things’ are supposed to exist onlywhen observed by me, and are assigned only the properties that they appearto me to possess, then these ‘things’ will be just as phenomenal as Carnap’s

Erlebnisse

or the empiricists’ ‘impressions’. And I have no doubt that

Carnap was his intended target in this discussion.The justification Reichenbach offers for the ‘choice’ of usual language is,it seems to me, extremely deep. Instead of making the expected empiricistargument that ‘usual language’ enables us to formulate more successfulscientific theories – i.e. that it enables me

to make better predictionsconcerning my

future experiences – he offers what we might call a Kantianargument (thinking of the Kant of the third Critique

, rather than the first):namely, that the choice of an egocentric language would leave us unable toformulate the justifications of a great many ordinary human actions (and

here, revealingly, he calls it ‘the strictly positivistic language’).

The strictly positivistic language contradicts normal language so obvi-ously that it has scarcely been seriously maintained; moreover, itsinsufficiency is revealed as soon as we try to use it for the rationalreconstruction of the thought-processes underlying actions concern-ing events after our death, such as [purchasing] life insurance policies… we find here that the decision for the strictly positivistic languagewould entail the renunciation of any reasonable justification of a greatmany human actions.

(Reichenbach, 1938: p. 150)

I described Reichenbach’s argument as ‘deep’, and indeed it is deep, inreminding us of what is too often forgotten in discussions of ‘realism’, ‘solip-sism’, and the like: that language is used not only to predict, but also to

justify our actions (and, of course, much else besides – for example, toexplain ourselves, to exculpate ourselves, to make it possible for us to sharea moral world. Someone who can only explain why he buys life insurance in

terms of the sensations it gives him does not share our moral world). Furtherdeveloped, this insight could have led Reichenbach to reflect, with the




Claim of Reason (1979), on the fact that our relation to the world is notrightly conceived as one of knowledge. But it remains alone and isolated inReichenbach’s œuvre.

A Problem with Reichenbach’s ‘Egocentric Language’

Although this may not seem important if we think of Reichenbach’s‘egocentric language’ (Reichenbach, 1938: pp. 135–55) as simply a stand-infor Carnap’s full-blown phenomenalist system, it must be noted that, takenon its own, that language seems unintelligible. Supposedly that languagespeaks about ‘things’ (trees and chairs and other human beings), but whatconcept of a ‘thing’ is in play here? It is not as if the idea that things existindependently of the perceiver and that many of them existed before their

current perceivers did and the idea that many will exist after those perceiv-ers die and many of them are not perceived by us at all are superficial

features of our thing-concept. Just to say, ‘Subtract all that from the notionof a thing’ leaves us with – just what notion? Reichenbach has given us amoral argument for using ‘usual language’ (though not , obviously, forregarding that use as just a ‘choice of a language’ as he pretends), but deepas that argument is, he would have gone still deeper had he asked whetherthere really is such a thing as an ‘egocentric language’ tochoose (or refuseto choose).

Enter the Later Wittgenstein

In closing, I want to suggest that a useful approach to the philosophy of thelater Wittgenstein, and to the so-called ‘Private Language Argument’ inparticular, is to see it as raising precisely that question. (I shall break this lastsection, explaining why I think this, into three subsections for clarity.)

(a) How I Understand ‘Grammar’ in Wittgenstein

Our look at the Tractatus may, I hope, have clarified the sense in whichWittgenstein accuses his earlier self of having conceived (or rather ‘precon-ceived’) of logic as having a ‘crystalline purity’. Logic is the very structureof the world, and imposes demands: No vagueness! Concepts must makesense in all possible situations! What is possible is absolutely fixed inadvance! Hence what thinkers can meaningfully think is also fixed (and, aswe saw, must be the same for all thinkers!) – All demands that the laterWittgenstein comes to see as chimerical. I hear pathos in Wittgenstein,1952: §108 when he asks: ‘But what becomes of logic now? Its rigour seems

to be giving way here. – But in that case doesn’t logic altogether disappear?– For how can logic lose its rigour? Of course not by our bargaining any of




removed by turning our whole examination around. (One might say: theaxis of reference of our examination must be rotated, but around the fixedpoint of our real need.)’

The ‘new axis of reference’ is called ‘grammar’ by Wittgenstein. But what

exactly is Wittgensteinian ‘grammar’?In a conversation, John McDowell suggested to me the way of thinking of

that notion that I find most helpful. What he suggested was that I shouldthink of the sort of examination of concepts that Elizabeth Anscombe under-took in Intention (1957) as a ‘grammatical’ investigation in Wittgenstein’ssense; for example, pointing out the differences in the way we answer thequestion ‘Why is water trickling down the window pane?’ and ‘Why are youcutting the bread?’ is clarifying the ‘grammar’ of intentional explanation.

I like a number of things about McDowell’s explanation: particularly,

I like the fact that it does not turn grammar into a Procrustean bed. Thereis no suggestion here that grammatical investigation must beall of philoso-phy (even if that may have been Wittgenstein’s preferred use of the word‘philosophy’ after a certain period), or any suggestion that constructivephilosophical work and grammatical investigation must be incompatible,i.e. that philosophy must consist merely of ‘therapy’. As McDowell wenton to say, what Wittgenstein does when he is at his best is convince onethat certain philosophical ‘theses’ (e.g., ‘no one ever directly perceives amaterial object’) don’t, in the end, say anything intelligible, or better, don’t

say anything that I any longer feel I can express any insight by saying – butwhy shouldn’t showing that not require constructive work, provision of analternative philosophical picture? But I shall stop here, because my aim isnot to develop an interpretation of Wittgenstein’s later philosophy as awhole, but simply to indicate a way of thinking that helps me to learn fromthat philosophy.

(b) Why I Say ‘an Approach’

I said earlier that I want to suggest that a useful approach to the philosophyof the later Wittgenstein, and to the so-called ‘Private Language Argument’in particular, is to think of it as taking up the question Reichenbach failedto ask, whether the idea of an ‘egocentric language’ really makes sense.I take it that this question calls for a ‘grammatical’ investigation, in thesense I just explained. I speak only of ‘suggesting an approach’ and not of ‘interpreting’, both because it would be absurd to attempt anything as ambi-tious as interpreting ‘the Private Language Argument’ (or arguments) in afew pages, and because what I want to accomplish in this paper is less to‘interpret’ Wittgenstein than to suggest a useful approach to his work, one

which enables one to learn from it and build on it in one’s own way. ThePrivate Language Argument, to the extent that there isa Private Language




ing, a collection of aperçus which touch on many complex philosophicalissues. Still, when Wittgenstein wrote the famous paragraph §256 whichcontains the words ‘private language’ I find it plausible to suppose thatone

of the issues he had in mind was the issue which concerned him in the §5.6s

of the Tractatus, the issue of ‘solipsism’. But (apart from this remark),I shall not try to ‘read his mind’, but rather to apply ideas from Philosophi-

cal Investigations to that issue in my own way.

(c) ‘Private Language’ and Public Language

The question I accused Reichenbach of ignoring was whether there reallyis such a thing as an ‘egocentric language’, as opposed to ‘usual language’(our public language). If we take the ‘egocentric’ language not to be

Reichenbach’s strange thing-language-which-is-not-about-things (hehimself identifies his egocentric ‘things’ with ‘impressions’ in much of hisdiscussion in Part I of Experience and Prediction), but to be, say, Carnap’s‘methodological solipsist’ language in the Aufbau, then that is precisely thequestion that launches the Private Language Argument:

§256 Now, what about the language which describes my inner experi-ences (Erlebnisse) and which only I myself can understand? How doI use words to stand for my sensations? – As we ordinarily do? – Then

are my words for sensations tied up with my natural expressions of sensation? In that case my language is not a ‘private’ one. Someoneelse might understand it as well as I. – But suppose I didn’t have mynatural expressions of sensation, but only had the sensations? Andnow I simply associate names with sensations and use these names indescriptions.

I certainly do not want to speculate that Wittgenstein actually hadCarnap’s Aufbau in mind here (especially since Wittgenstein himself hadconceived of the possibility of phenomenalist reconstruction of the wholelanguage as early as 1912, and was to flirt with phenomenalism again in theso called ‘early middle period’ (1929–?)). But I will apply what he says hereto that work, because such an ‘approach’ fits surprisingly well.

The question Reichenbach ignored was whether our ordinary notion of a‘thing’ doesn’t involve many attributes incompatible with ‘egocentric’ exist-ence. But it is not hard to see that there is a similar question to be askedabout sensations and ‘experiences’ in the sense of Carnap’s ‘Erlebnisse’.Knowing what a pain is certainly involves knowing that pains are ‘located’in parts of the body, that they cause one to move the part of the body when

I think or instinctively feel that that will cause the pain to stop (e.g., whenI discover that my hand is in water that is too hot), that severe pain will




explanations of physical movements and of responses to physical events. Insum, sensation language and thing language are parts of a single publiclanguage. If someone didn’t know that, they couldn’t have our ‘grammar’of sensation talk. So, what concept of a ‘sensation’ could they have? – That

is the question that Wittgenstein poses in §256. And please note, the ques-tion does not presuppose either behaviourism or verificationism or anyother ‘-ism’. It only presupposes that (normally, anyway) to ascribe aconcept to someone is to ascribe some mastery of its grammar.

But why, you may wonder, did Wittgenstein say that the private languageis one that only I myself can understand? If we suppose that a position likeCarnap’s is being targeted, this makes perfect sense. To see why, recall twofeatures of the Aufbau:

(1) The purpose of the Aufbau is not merely to present a reconstruction

of the language of science (or the language of cognition, since there is nocognition outside of science, for Carnap), but the reconstruction that hasepistemic priority, i.e. the one we need when we do epistemology. (In 1936Carnap was to renounce ‘epistemology’ altogether, but in 1922 he was stillunder residual Husserlian influence.) But that means that the Aufbau ismeant to depict all we canknow, and to show how we know it. Since the pointof view is constructionist and certainly not ‘holistic’ in the Quine–Duhemsense, that means that we are supposed to have knowledge expressed by‘protocol sentences’, and hence to fully understand the primitive phenome-

nalistic concepts they contain, before we ascend to understanding talk of physical objects (whose reduction to talk of Erlebnisse the Aufbau was,famously, unable to complete). So it is essential to this sort of foundationalist

phenomenalism that sensation concepts (Erlebnisse concepts) should not

presuppose thing concepts.(2) Talk of other people’s sensations was supposed to be interpreted

behaviouristically, once talk of their bodily motions had been reconstructed(i.e. after talk of physical objects had been reconstructed). So sensationconcepts at the ground level, the concepts that figure in protocol sentences,must not presuppose the sense of ‘sensation’ or ‘experience’ in which other

people have ‘sensations’ or ‘experiences’ (which is a totally different sense,viewed from the Aufbau). That is why the reconstruction has to be ‘solipsist’.

In sum, the Aufbau, and any similar ‘solipsist’ reinterpretation of thelanguage, must start with a notion of experience utterly different from theone we actually have. And this is what Wittgenstein doubts we canunderstand.

Concluding Remarks

Of course my account of Wittgenstein’s long struggle with the possibility of a ‘solipsist’ reconstruction of the language ends where most discussions of




to do, Wittgenstein considers the possibility that the solipsist will concedethat his notion of a sensation is not the one we have in ‘usual language’ (asReichenbach called it), and will say that the private language refers toprivate objects (today some might call them ‘qualia’), and that this reference

is made possible by private ostensive definition, and he tries to make ussuspicious of both notions. I say ‘tries to make us suspicious’ because I donot think that he was giving a ‘proof’ of the non-existence of private objectsor the impossibility of private ostensive definition. But I think that we arewell advised to ask ourselves whether either notion really makes sense, andthat Wittgenstein has given us a valuable introduction to serious reflectionon these topics – an introduction, but not a ‘last word’, because there are nolast words in philosophy.

Carnap, of course, did not try to defend the phenomenalist reconstruction

by invoking private objects (which would have seemed to him too metaphys-ical) or private ostensive definition. Instead, he lost interest in the project,and also renounced the idea of epistemology. And gradually, too, solipsismand phenomenalism ceased to be a world-wide preoccupation of philoso-phers – ceased to such an extent that today our graduate students hardlyhave an inkling of what the Tractatus or the Aufbau or Experience and

Prediction were about. I hope to have convinced you that that ignoranceshould be rectified. It should be rectified because the period of theTractatus,the Aufbau, and Experience and Prediction was one of the great periods in

the history of philosophy, and to miss what its issues and debates were reallyabout is to misunderstand writings that we can still profit from today.

Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA

Notes

1 This paper is a lightly revised version of a lecture given at the Truax LectureSeries Conference on ‘Realism and its Critics’ at Hamilton College, 31 March–1April 2007.

2 I develop this point in more detail in Putnam, 1994a.3 For a fuller discussion see Putnam, 1994b.

References

Anscombe, G. E. M. (1957) Intention, Ithaca: Cornell University Press.Carnap, Rudolf (1928) Der logische Aufbau der Welt, Berlin–Schlachtensee:

Weltkreis Verlag.—— (1936–7) ‘Testability and Meaning, Continued’, Philosophy of Science 4(1)

(Jan. 1937): 1–40.—— (1937) The Logical Syntax of Language, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

—— (1950) ‘Empiricism, Semantics and Ontology’, Revue Internationale dePhilosophie 4: 20–40.




—— (1959 [1930]) ‘The Old and the New Logic’, in A. J. Ayer (ed.)Logical Positivism,Glencoe: The Free Press: 133–46 (a translation of ‘Die alte und die neu Logik’,Erkenntnis 1(1): 12–26).

Cavell, Stanley (1979) The Claim of Reason, Oxford: Clarendon Press.McGuinness, Brian (2002) Approaches to Wittgenstein, London: Routledge.

Putnam, Hilary (1994a) ‘Logical Positivism and Intentionality’, in Words and Life,Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, pp. 85–98.

—— (1994b) ‘Reichenbach’s Metaphysical Picture’, in Words and Life, Cambridge,Mass.: Harvard University Press, pp. 99–114.

Quine, W. V. (1963) ‘Carnap and Logical Truth’, in P. A. Schilpp (ed.) The Philosophyof Rudolf Carnap, LaSalle: Open Court, pp. 385–407.

Reichenbach, Hans (1938) Experience and Prediction, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig (1922) Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, London: Kegan Paul,Trench, Trübner & Co.

—— (1952) Philosophical Investigations, Oxford: Blackwell.

—— (1969) On Certainty, Oxford: Blackwell.—— (1979) Notebooks 1914–1916, 2nd edn, ed. G. H. von Wright and G. E. M.

Anscombe, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.



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Putnam. Wittgenstein and Realism