Abstract

This paper explores the so-called Epistemic Privacy Way, one of Wittgenstein's lines of attack on the very possibility of a private language. The Epistemic Privacy Way has it that sentences like `I know I am in pain' or `But I must know whether I am in pain!', among many others, cannot be used as vehicles of a sort of knowledge incorrigible and immediate. To substantiate such a criticism, Cora Diamonds views of nonsense are spelled out and a constraint, i.e. the Meaning Restricted Exportability Requirement , is distilled out of them. Beside holding, in opposition to Diamond, that MRE is compatible with the Principle of Meaning Compositionality, it is argued that sentence constituency is subject to two kinds of conditions, namely, syntagmatic and paradigmatic, which contribute to a detailed explanation of why sentences like `I know I am in pain', `It is 5 o'clock p.m. on the Sun' or `Spain is above New Zeland' could be nonsensical. Another result of making MRE to bear on this topic is a distinction between meaning and thought -- a sentence could be meaningful but express no thought at all -- that echoes back Wittgenstein's distinction between depth and surface grammar