Colin Pink Wittgenstein’s private language argument and the Cartesian picture of the mind. A Cartesian picture of the world might be rendered something like this: the world consists of bodies and minds; I am intimately acquainted with my mind and its contents, more so than anything else. I therefore have a greater certainty about my own mind and its contents (thoughts, feelings, impressions) than I have about other things e.g. bodies and other people’s minds. Through a series of sceptical arguments (utilising the notions of the fallibility of perception, dream states and the concept of an Evil Genius deceiving him) Descartes claims to throw into doubt the existence of everything other than his own mind; but that he cannot doubt because the very act of doubting it proves to himself that it does exist (‘I think therefore I am’). Having established his own mind as the only thing he can be certain of Descartes then has the task of working his way, so to speak, out of his mind in order to retrieve the rest of existence, which he set to one side in his exercise of hyperbolic doubt. Having started from the lone, isolated individual mind Descartes is saddled with a number of difficult problems: avoiding solipsism, proving that anything other than his mind exists, and the interraction between such radically different ‘substances’ as mind and body, to name a few. Wittgenstein’s private language arguments challenge a number of assumptions that are commonly made about the 1
