LANGUAGE This is so even in the relatively simple case of naming a colour or a material object; matters are much more complicated when we consider the names of mental events and states, such as sensations and thoughts Consider the way in which the word ‘pain’ functions as the name of a sensation We are tempted to think that for each person ‘pain’ acquires its meaning by being correlated by him with his own private, incommunicable sensation But Wittgenstein showed that no word could acquire meaning in this way One of his arguments runs as follows Suppose that I want to keep a diary about the occurrence of a certain sensation, and that I associate the sensation with the sign ‘S’ It is essential to the supposition that no definition of the sign can be given in terms of our ordinary language, because otherwise the language would not be a private one The sign must be defined for me alone, and this by a private ostensive definition ‘I speak, or write the sign down and at the same time I concentrate my attention on the sensation in this way I impress on myself the connection between the sign and the sensation’ (PI i 258) Wittgenstein argues that no such ceremony could establish an appropriate connection When next I call something ‘S’, how will I know what I mean by ‘S’? The problem is not that I may misremember and call something ‘S’ which is not S; the trouble goes deeper Even to think falsely that something is S, I must know the meaning of ‘S’, and this, Wittgenstein argues, is impossible in a private language But can I not appeal to memory to settle the meaning? No, for to so I must call up the right memory, the memory of S, and in order to that I must already know what ‘S’ means There is in the end no way of making out a difference between correct and incorrect use of ‘S’, and that means that talk of ‘correctness’ is out of place The private definition I have given to myself is no real definition The upshot of Wittgenstein’s argument is that there cannot be a language whose words refer to what can only be known to the individual speaker of the language The English word ‘pain’ is not a word in a private language because, whatever philosophers may say, other people can very often know when a person is in pain It is not by private ostensive definition that ‘pain’ becomes the name of a sensation; pain-language is grafted on to the pre-linguistic expression of pain when the parents teach a baby to replace her initial cries with a conventional, learned expression through language 141