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Letters
Letters
Private Wittgenstein Dismissed • Vive La France • Men are for Dogs, Women for Cats • Sporting Chances? • Finding Further Fault With Foucault • Argument? What Argument? • Abandon Deism, or Abandon God? • God, Being & Time • On Creative Regret
Private Wittgenstein Dismissed
Dear Editor: According to Les Jones in ‘Plaiting Gravy’ in Issue 153, Wittgenstein “demolished the possibility of a strictly personal language developed inside one’s own head” and argued that “understanding is a public phenomenon.” Yet surely understanding is something that occurs within a consciousness, otherwise it doesn’t constitute understanding. A particular understanding may occur just within one consciousness or it may occur in more than one, but it doesn’t exist outside the particular minds that experience it. The understanding of meanings does not require communication with others. I can certainly decide to use a system of symbols that only I understand.
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