144. Michael Hymers | Private Language

If Wittgenstein is right, the mystery of “private experience” doesn’t point to hidden inner objects or an incommunicable language of sensation, but to a philosophical picture that makes our ordinary talk about pain and perception look far more puzzling than it is.My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.1. GuestMichael Hymers is Munro Professor of Metaphysics at Dalhousie University, Canada and his work has focused primarily on Wittgenstein, 20th-Century philosophy, epistemology, philosophy of language.Check out his book with Cambridge Elements, "Wittgenstein on Private Language, Sensation and Perception"!https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/wittgenstein-on-private-language-sensation-and-perception/BC7058BF509740A839271C98B084F176https://a.co/d/05nGUE5I2. Book SummaryMichael Hymers argues that Ludwig Wittgenstein’s discussion of private language in Philosophical Investigations §§243–315 is best read not as “the” Private Language Argument (centered on the diary passage at §258), and not as an attempt to prove that language is intrinsically social. Instead, the book presents Wittgenstein’s treatment as a cluster of arguments, examples, and reminders whose central target is a picture: the temptation to treat sensations and perceptual experiences as private objects located in a private “phenomenal space,” and to model sensation-words on an “object-and-name” scheme. Hymers frames this as continuous with Wittgenstein’s earlier work (including The Big Typescript) and with his shift away from assumptions carried over from the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus about how naming works. Methodologically, the book emphasizes Wittgenstein’s therapeutic/clarificatory aim: dissolving philosophical confusion by giving an overview of our “grammar,” rather than issuing deep theses or scientific-style explanations.A large part of the book (roughly its middle sections) explains why the “private object in phenomenal space” picture is unstable, and why it makes the very idea of a private sensation-language look deceptively natural. Hymers traces Wittgenstein’s doubts to the earlier critique of sense-data and of treating visual or tactile “space” as if it worked like physical space—where measurement, re-identification, and objecthood behave very differently. He then distinguishes “ordinary” privacy (e.g., the mundane fact that pains are my pains in the sense that I’m the one who manifests them) from stronger “superprivacy,” and separates epistemic privacy (who can know) from ontological privacy (what sort of thing a pain is). Against the idea that first-person authority rests on privileged inner access to private objects, Hymers highlights Wittgenstein’s alternative: first-person present-tense psychological utterances (“I am in pain,” etc.) function paradigmatically as expressions or avowals rather than as reports based on observation, so their asymmetry with third-person claims is grammatical, not a deliverance of a private epistemic channel.In the latter half, Hymers organizes the interpretive landscape around several “waves” of reading Wittgenstein’s anti–private-language materials—moving from verification/memory worries, to problems about private ostensive definition, to rule-following, and finally to broader “stage-setting” concerns (what has to be in place for something to count as naming, attending, or grasping a rule at all). Key thought experiments are used to pry us away from the object-and-name model: the “human manometer” shows that even if a diary-sign ‘S’ correlates with a bodily measure, it can become pointless to insist on a hidden inner act of correctly identifying the sensation—suggesting that the “misidentification” knob is ornamental if sensations are treated as detached inner objects. And the “beetle in a box” at PI §293 is presented as the most explicit pressure against thinking that sensation-words get their meaning by privately baptizing inner items: if the term belongs to a shared practice, the private “thing in the box” is not what gives it its role, and treating sensations as if they were objects is precisely the misleading picture doing the damage. The epilogue’s upshot is not behaviorism or the denial of experience, but a diagnostic: the philosophical “problem” is generated by a grammatical fiction that holds us captive, and Wittgenstein’s aim is to restore clarity about how our sensation- and perception-talk actually works.3. Interview Chapters00:00 - Introduction01:06 - Overview of element03:39 - Methodology09:31 - Interpreting Wittgenstein13:57 - Private language18:01 - First wave: skepticism22:17 - Second wave: definition27:22 - Third wave: social34:10 - Wittgenstein on Kripke37:22 - Fourth wave: stage-setting49:23 - Pains and sensations52:52 - Problem for private languages54:23 - Difference from second wave56:46 - Objections1:01:31 - Avoiding behaviorism1:07:00 - Inverted spectrum1:14:17 - Infallibility1:17:07 - Objection1:21:55 - Upshots1:25:15 - Value of philosophy1:26:33 - Conclusion This is a public episode. 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