The standard model of communication is something like the transmission of information from one point to another. Doesn't that make the idea that talking to oneself is a bit problematic? (I am NOT suggesting that we do not talk to ourselves.)

@LudwigV -- Hume argued a "bundle theory" model of self, that we are different selves instant to instant. Under bundle theory, we NEED language to communicate with our future selves! Most philosophical ideas contain kernels of truth, and in many cases they then overgeneralize, and I think this is true for Hume and bundle theory. But the utility of bundle theory to show how self-communication is not only not a contradiction, but actually ESSENTIAL is -- still valid.

So talking to oneself is just one self talking to another? Still, if both selves share some memories, one self saying to another "Your train is due at 9:20" is a bit puzzling. Or does each self have its own memories?

@LudwigV I do not endorse Hume's bundle theory, but it does capture an aspect of the diverse/random non-contiguous nature of at least some of our thinking. Talking TO oneself helps to focus and channel our sometimes scattered thoughts in a particular direction, and reinforce a conclusion we want to carry out. Is this communicating with oneself? I would think it has to be.

@Dcleve Well, I don't endorse the conventional view of the self as a metaphysically or linguistically given unity. Both are simplistic. It is obviously true that one can debate with oneself (Descartes' Meditations), Akrasia etc. But language is not only communication. It is also expression, for example. Counting the beats when playing music or marching is something different again. &c. Unfortunately, I don't have an articulate model to replace them.

BTW, the SEP article does indeed effectively criticize the "error correction" idea in the PLA. But it goes on to argue that W's objection was not that, but to the idea that the initial ostensive definition ceremony works in the first place. See section 3. The conclusion is "Now showing the absence of any appeal to memory-scepticism involved transferring the burden of the argument from the question of whether or not an ostensive definition could be remembered or not to the question of whether there could be an ostensive definition in the first place." I'll buy that.

@LudwigV Can you summarize the "argument" in 3.4 2nd Answer from PP "But this is just what is in question." on? This just scans as a terrible muddle to me. I can look at a sunset, and experience it, and think about prior sunsets I have experienced that are both similar and different, and none of this is in English. I can look at a packing problem, and do fitting and rotational transforms to figure out how to pack a collection, and none of this is in English. The denial that I can do this, which these paragraphs claim, is simply falsified by test.

They also are refuted by the reality of the last speaker of Etruscan, who need not have spoken it aloud for her last several decades of life, and still she was speaking Etruscan to herself.

@Dcleve I'll have a look at 3.4 and see what I can do.

Your Etruscan speaker is a thought-experiment, not a reality. Still... Empirically, I was fluent in Latin some decades ago, but have seldom used it since. Empirically, I know that I have forgotten a good deal of what I used to know and probably misremember a good deal more. Empirically, I can become aware of those errors. Can your last speaker? Remember, words change their meaning even in living languages, and the speakers don't necessarily remember that.

But for the purpose of PLA, Etruscan was a proper language, so will never be a private language. Do you want to adjourn to chat?

@LudwigV Yes, chats a good idea. My Etruscan speaker is not ONLY a thought experiment, it is an empirical reality that has played out thousands of times. Languages die, such that the last speaker has nobody else to talk to. But their stream of consciousness will continue to be in the now-dead-language. I don't think first languages ever leave a speaker, unlike your Latin.

Also, my reading of the SEP entry tends to reinforce the comment I once read that W tends to have a somewhat "cultlike" following among some philosophers. THREE DIFERENT "interpetations" comes across as a very "religious" sort of philosophizing. what those interpretations share is the presumption that W CANNOT BE WRONG, and if one concludes he was wrong, he must have been misinterpreted.

@Dcleve Of course, it must have actually happened that there was a last speaker. I was only thinking that there is not necessarily a last speaker, since, for example, several members of a family can die at the same time (in some sort of disaster). But that's not really relevant.

What is relevant, and I forgot to mention, is that the last speaker of Etruscan would be able to teach it to someone else. So it would be a private language in the ordinary sense, but not in the sense required for a logically private language.

@Dcleve I have heard the comment that W's following was somewhat cultlike. I've heard the same of Heidegger - which admittedly is not a recommendation. I can't claim any personal connection at all with him or any of his followers. But then, I don't really regard myself as a follower, as such. But I do like the books very much.

"the presumption that W CANNOT BE WRONG, and if one concludes he was wrong, he must have been misinterpreted" is no doubt annoying. But I don't think it is in any way peculiar to W. From time to time, one comes across people like that, who simply cannot take a critical argument seriously. Either they start listening, or one gives up.

I dont understand "THREE DIFERENT "interpetations" - three sounds like a rather small number to me - or "comes across as a very "religious" sort of philosophizing". I suppose you mean something like a determination to save the text, at all costs. Maybe so. But it seems to me more a question of style than a reason to dismiss an argument.

Perhaps you mean something like Hume's comment on Berkeley in the Enquiry ".. that all his arguments, though otherwise intended, are, in reality, merely sceptical, appears from this, that they admit of no answer and produce no conviction. Their only effect is to cause that momentary amazement and irresolution and confusion, which is the result of scepticism." Perhaps so. But I find that in other arguments as well. One has to keep trying.

@LudwigV -- No not dismissing. But when the SEP article correctly notes that the "orthodox" interpretation of what W was arguing (which is how I read him) is simply wrong, and the primary alternative reinterpretation of him also makes no sense, then offers a third interpretation that scans as just a muddle to me -- I simply conclude that W was wrong, and yes we CAN have private languages.

My philosophy cafe discussed this question recently, and the most charitable interpretation of W was that his major motivation was definitional: that language is FOR communication between people, and therefore communication between people was essential for language. And his error correction passages were just a failed effort to back up the definitional argument with an example to justify it further.

I noted in raising the quesiton that Quine had challenged THAT definitional assumption with another common one for linguistic philosophers, that language is essential for thought, and that all our thinking was therefore in language, also by definition. In Two Dogmas, Quine noted that we can never perfectly reconcile our internal understanding of a language to anyone else's understanding, hence ALL languages are different and private. I considered this a strong refutation of W.

Well, my next task is to read the SEP article. I've always thought that the argument walks perilously close to verificationism and behaviourism, so I'm not going to defend him at all costs. But I'm afraid that would leave me without a view, because I completely fail to understand the modern dualisms. Bats, Zombies and qualia. Perhaps you will be able to help me with those. BTW - you may have noticed that I'm not a fan of the idea that language is communication or nothing.

I'm afraid I have somewhere else to be now. It will be tomorrow before I can return.

BUT, my group and I both agreed that definitional approaches to language are themselves flawed. That language is a category that seems to be real in our world, but that our "definitions" of it are only approximations. We used "life" as a similar issue -- biologists do not DEFINE life, they list its properties. And figuring out whether edge cases that only satisfy some of those properties are life or not, is currently an open question.

Applying that to language -- probably not all thinking is linguistic, and it appears we can communicate with ourselves, not just others. We seem to have developed thinking before language, developed language FOR inter-tribal communication, then adapted language for much of our internal thinking in a typically Darwinian adaptive retro-fit.

Here is my phil cafe link: meetup.com/philosophy-cafe-central-maryland/events/291708980

@LudwigV -- reply whenever you want. :-)