Private Experience and Sense Data

Abstract

Abstract In the mid 1930s, Ludwig Wittgenstein was immersed in problems about, amongst other things, experience, or perhaps one might say, our thought about experience. One record of his developing thinking are the notes that Rush Rhees himself made of the lectures by Wittgenstein on these topics which Rhees attended in 1936, published under the title ‘The Language of Sense Data and Private Experience’, in Philosophical Occasions. The ideas that Wittgenstein is developing in these notes and lectures culminated in the discussion of the same topics in Philosophical Investigations. What views about sense data and private experience is Wittgenstein proposing? Wittgenstein suggests that bad philosophy is produced by the ‘bewitchment of intelligence by language’. In addition, he brings out a genuine contrast between the status of the idea of the private object account of perception and the idea of private objects as involved in the experience of sensations. It is natural to read Wittgenstein's brief discussion of the so-called ‘visual room’ in Philosophical Investigations as another engagement with the sense datum model of perception.