On the need for a listener and community standards
pp. 247-259
in: Martin Gustafsson, Lars Hertzberg (eds), The practice of language, Berlin, Springer, 2002Abstract
On the received reading of Ludwig Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations 1" the book contains an argument purporting to show the impossibility of a private language. There has been a lively debate, however, on how the relevant notion of a private language is to be understood, and what considerations should be taken to rule it out. Some have understood Wittgenstein to mean that a language must be something that several speakers actually share, while others take him to mean that a language must be something that they could, in principle, share. Or, slightly differently put, on one view, speaking a language presupposes the actual existence of a linguistic community upholding certain shared standards of meaning and correctness, while on the other view, it only presupposes that such a community might have existed. These views have come to be known as the "community view" and the 'solitary speaker" view, respectively.2 Furthermore, supporters of the community view tend to think that the discussion about privacy holds a central place in Wittgenstein's later philosophy, whereas those who support the solitary speaker view usually see its bearings as limited to the issue of the privacy of experience.
