Private Language Argument

Wikipedia. An argument or series of arguments by Wittgenstein.

John Locke (and much later Jerry Fodor) assume or possibly argue that ideas are consistent across minds, so there is a language of thought ("mentalese" for Fodor). Ideas are the referents of words. Wittgenstein in the Philosophical Investigations seeks to dismantle this idea, proposing (restoring?) for language a primarily social function. He does this not through a single-stranded argument but by a number of examples, if I understand correctly.

In other words... I think it's like arguing that all meaning is intersubjective, emergent, and social, and that the idea of some abstract land of ideas (sounds a bit platonic) is inconsistent. Possibly this is projecting too much of my own thinking onto Wittgenstein, whom I haven't read in any detail.

Le Guin's argument that all speech presupposes a listener (from Isabela Salon 3) seems related to this argument.

Thomas Kuhn felt that most attempts at an "objective language" would probably lead to a dead-end, or at least all attempts by the time he had writing had failed. He was talking more about a scientific language of percepts than one of concepts -- not sure if this matters. I tweeted that section here.

I'm interested in this argument because it has implications for Ego Formation. If language (social) is a pre-condition for narrative meaning, and the ego is a narrative construction, then it suggests that coherent identity can only be formed on top of social interactions. There is no private language, so there is no narrative identity in the absence of social interactions. Identity emerges from communication, rather than language being about communicating some pre-existing identity.

But when and why does language originate? Origins of Language