Wittgenstein's Private Language

Abstract

This book presents a detailed critical commentary on sections 243-315 of Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations: the famous remarks on ‘private language’. It makes detailed use of Stanley Cavell's interpretations of these remarks. It relates disputes about the interpretation of this aspect of Wittgenstein's later philosophy to a recent, highly influential controversy about how to interpret Wittgenstein's early text, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, by drawing and testing out a distinction between resolute and substantial understandings of the related notions of grammar, nonsense and the imagination. Throughout, the book seeks to elucidate Wittgenstein's philosophical method, and to establish the importance of the form or style of his writing to the proper application of this method.