Language and the Society of Others

Extract

The solitary language user is again stalking the critical fields of Europe (and America, one should add). This pre-social individual, abstracted from all social and historical context, has been seemingly revived after what many of us saw as a death-blow dealt by Wittgenstein in his analysis of the notion of following a rule, and his related discussions bringing out the impossibilities of a ‘private’ language—what has come to be known as Wittgenstein's ‘private language argument’. Just what a ‘private language’ is has become the issue. Did Wittgenstein show that language-use and rule-following essentially and necessarily involved others, and were therefore necessarily social in character (thus showing that to be human and to be rational was necessarily to be social—as Aristotle had it)? Or did his arguments bear only against the notion of a language which was essentially and necessarily private, one which could not in principle be taught to another?