Abstract

This book is another work on the voluminous literature on the Private Language Argument. The author devotes his arguments solely to a refutation of "anti-private language thesis" as it appears in the articles of N. Malcolm, J. D. Carney, and Newton Garver. Two arguments of the thesis are considered without ascription to Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations. The first is the familiar "The Diary Keeper Argument" found in Wittgenstein : "The claim that the supposition that one could keep a record of a particular kind of sensation having no publicly observable behavioral or circumstantial indicators is unintelligible". Smerud’s attack on this argument in part relies on Ayer’s paper "Can There Be a Private Language?" on the issue of recognition. For the issue on the criterion requirement, Smerud appealed to J. J. Thomson’s paper "Private Languages" as a basis for argument. No note is taken of the criticism of the relevance of verification principle to the issue in D. Locke’s Myself and Others.