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Private Language

People usually call it Wittgenstein’s “private language argument.”
At a high level:

He’s not saying you can’t have private experiences.
He’s saying you can’t have a meaningful language whose words are, in principle, understandable only by a single person from their own inner experiences.

1. What is a “private language”?

Think of the idea Wittgenstein is targeting:

Suppose I say: “I’m going to invent a word ‘S’ for a certain feeling I have.
Only I can ever know what ‘S’ means, because it refers to my inner, private experience.”
This is the picture:
The meaning of “S” is tied directly to some inner mental object or sensation only I can access.
There’s no way anyone else could check whether I’m using it correctly.
The “language” is essentially a one-person code grounded in private experiences, not in anything public.
That’s the “private language” Wittgenstein is going after.

2. His key claim: meaning needs public standards

Wittgenstein’s main idea:

For a word to have a meaning, there must be some standard for using it correctly, and that standard has to be, in principle, publicly checkable.
In other words:

When we learn words like “table,” “pain,” “red,” “tree,” we don’t just stare into our minds and invent meanings.
We learn them in practices:
pointing, asking questions, correcting each other, agreeing, disagreeing, teaching kids, etc.
From that he draws a big conclusion:
If there is no possible way for anyone (even you) to check whether you’re using a sign right or wrong except by your own say-so, then the idea of “correct” and “incorrect” use collapses.
And if there’s no real notion of “correct” use, then we don’t really have a language with meanings; we just have noises or marks we feel like producing.
So:
Language needs rules, and rules require criteria for following them.
Those criteria have to go beyond “whatever seems right to me.”

3. The diary example (“S” for a feeling)

In Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein gives a famous thought experiment.
Imagine:

You keep a secret diary.
Every time you have a certain special inner feeling, you write “S” in the diary.
You say: “ ‘S’ names this feeling. Only I can know what it means, because only I can have this exact experience.”
Wittgenstein asks: How are you checking that you’re using “S” correctly over time?
Suppose you wrote “S” yesterday for a feeling.
Today you think you have the same feeling and write “S” again.
You say to yourself: “Yes, this is the same as yesterday.”
But what are you comparing?
You don’t have yesterday’s feeling anymore.
You don’t have a public test (like a thermometer or a scale).
All you have is: “It seems the same to me.”
He says: that doesn’t give you a real rule for what counts as using “S” correctly. Because:

Whatever seems right to you will be right.
And that just means you can’t talk about “right” at all.
If there’s no difference between “it seems right” and “it is right,” then there’s no concept of mistake.
If you can’t ever be wrong, you’re also not really right; the notions of correctness and incorrectness vanish.
And then:
Without a notion of correctness, there is no rule-following.
Without rule-following, you don’t really have a language in the normal sense.
You just have a ritual or habit with no genuine standard.

4. The beetle in the box

Another famous image: the “beetle in a box” thought experiment.
Imagine:

Everyone has a box.
Each person calls what’s in their box a “beetle.”
But nobody can look into anyone else’s box—only their own.
Over time they use the word “beetle” in ordinary language.
Wittgenstein says:
In that case, what’s in the boxes might differ from person to person.
Or some boxes might even be empty.
But the language-game (how people use the word “beetle” in sentences like “I caught a beetle,” “Bring me that beetle,” etc.) would still work.
His point:

The meaning of “beetle” in the language doesn’t depend on some hidden private object; it depends on how the word is used in public practices.
Apply that to “pain,” “feeling,” or “S”:
We often think: “The word ‘pain’ gets its meaning by pointing to an inner object (my private pain).”
Wittgenstein says: no, it gets its meaning from the public ways we use the word:
crying out, saying “I’m in pain,” comforting someone, going to the doctor, and so on.
So:
Private inner experiences exist,
But the meaning of the words we use for them is grounded in public language-games, not in some direct inner “pointing” to a private mental object.

5. What he is NOT saying

It’s easy to over-read him, so here are the important “nots”:

He is not denying that we have private experiences.
- He’s not saying “you don’t really feel pain” or “there’s no inner life.”
He is not saying we can never talk about inner states.
- We obviously do: “I’m sad,” “I’m in pain,” “I’m anxious.”
He is not saying science or psychology are impossible.
- He’s targeting a philosophical picture of how meaning works, not everyday or scientific talk.
  His target is specifically:
  
  The idea that I could have a meaningful language whose terms refer to things only I can possibly know about, and that this meaning could be grounded purely in my private inner “pointing.”
  He thinks that idea falls apart once you ask:
  “How do I distinguish using the word correctly from just thinking I am?”

6. Putting it all together

Wittgenstein’s “private language theory” (better: private language argument) says:

To have meaning, a word needs a rule for its use.
To have a rule, there must be a difference between using the word correctly and incorrectly.
If a “language” is such that only one person could ever, in principle, understand or check its words—because they refer to totally private inner objects—then:
- There is no way to distinguish “correct use” from “whatever seems right.”
- Therefore, there is no genuine rule-following.
Without rules and the possibility of mistakes, we don’t have a language in the usual sense, just private habits or marks.
Conclusion:

A genuinely private language, in this strict sense, is impossible.
Private experiences exist; a purely private language with meaningful, rule-governed terms for them does not.
If you hold onto that distinction—
private experiences, yes; a strictly private, rule-governed language about them, no—you’ve basically got Wittgenstein’s view.

Wittgenstein on death and finitude (Chapter 5) Philosophy Principles and Problems - Roger Scruton

Scruton notes that our first-person perspective tempts us to imagine ourselves “looking back” on our own death, as though the “I” might somehow persist and survey a world in which our body lies lifeless. He calls these fantasies “unruly thoughts” with no real authority: the I is a point of view on the world, not an item within it, and the world does not need to be seen from that point of view.

He then cites Wittgenstein’s remark in the Tractatus that “death is not part of life but its limit”. We never live through death to emerge on the other side; death is not an experience in life, and there is no standpoint from which we can look back on it and assess it.

This does nothing to calm our anxieties, Scruton says, because it is not death as an event that troubles us but finitude itself: the thought that we exist only for a finite time and will one day not exist at all. Our disturbance comes from this awareness of eventual non-existence, not from any imagined experience of being dead.

Ludwig Wittgenstein