Wittgenstein: How We Think

The “Private Language Argument” has Profound Implications

Juan Gris, Portrait of Picasso (detail), 1912. (Public domain. Source: Wikimedia Commons). In the early twentieth century, Cubist artists like Juan Gris sought to depict the way we really experience reality — in movement and change. In doing so, they complicated the relationship between the objects of focus and their backdrop — what art theory describes as “figure” and “ground”. Wittgenstein’s investigations of language and mind similarly complicate the relationship between our minds and private thoughts and the wider culture we are a part of.

What is the self?

Try standing before a mirror and gaze into your own eyes and think for a moment. Think about what is going on inside your head. You’re thinking in silence, in your brain, about you. What comes to mind?

You have a name, you look a certain way that you can describe — the length of your hair, the shape of your face and eyes, the colour and tone of your skin. You have predispositions and preferences, a whole mix of things that make you unique.

How self-sufficient is your brain when you’re taking account of who you are? Let’s take the example of your hair, let’s assume it’s brown, like mine. What makes it “brown”? It resembles other things that are brown, perhaps. Brown bark, brown wood and so on.

But there must be a vast spectrum of browns — millions close to red, millions close to green, or orange or even yellow. What makes all those different hues “brown”?

I’m colour blind too, so the brown I see may be different from the brown you see. So it’s “we” now, isn’t it? Not just “me” who’s doing the thinking. I need you — and you need me — to agree on what brown means for me to think that my hair is brown.