References
- Donald Davidson endorses this view of language when he writes, ‘Language is necessarily a social affair …. If anyone is to speak a language, there must be another creature interacting with the speaker’ (‘The Second Person,’ in Peter A. French et. al. (ed.), The Wittgenstein Legacy (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1992), pp.262–263). Norman Malcolm endorses this view of language when he suggests the idea that a ‘forever-solitary person’ might know a language, like the idea that he might buy and sell, is internally inconsistent (‘Wittgenstein on Language and Rules,’ Philosophy, vol. 64, 1989, p.22).
- Various people think Wittgenstein has proven the communalist thesis. Donald Davidson offers his own support for the thesis (in ‘The Second Person’ and elsewhere).
- Jonathan Dancy presents the communalist, anti-solipsist reasoning this way: ‘The solipsist admits no community to ground (his use of words). But this means … he has no rule that takes him one way rather than another in a new case …. (H)e can say whatever comes into his head and it will be as correct as anything else. But in that case his words lose their meaning …. It is impossible, therefore, for there to be a private language of the sort which the solipsist needs. All possible languages are necessarily public, since they have no meaning unless they are used by a community’ (An Introduction to Contemporary Epistemology (Oxford: Blackwell, 1985), 76). ‘Solipsism is not a tenable position …. It suffers from multiple incoherence’ (ibid., 73). Ilham Dilman and Stephen Thornton use the anti-solipsist argument. (See the former's Existentialist Critiques of Cartesianism ((London: Macmillan, 1993), p.4) and the latter's ‘The Incoherence of Solipsism,’ (section 7 of ‘Solipsism and the Problem of Other Minds’ in The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2007).) Donald Davidson also seems to use it (see ‘The Second Person,’ op. cit., especially, 262–3). The argument appears central to anti-Cartesian reasoning that A. C. Grayling assigns Wittgenstein. It has a central role in what Grayling proposes may be ‘Wittgenstein's greatest contribution’ to philosophy—undermining the Cartesisan view of the mental and the skeptical, epistemological reasoning intertwined with that view of the mental (‘Wittgenstein's Influence,’ in A. Phillips Griffiths (ed.), Wittgenstein Centenary Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 78). John Cottingham, too, finds the argument persuasive. Wittgenstein seems to show ‘our grasp of concepts is an inescapably public, socially mediated phenomenon.’ This discovery of language's (alleged) necessary social character ‘undercuts’ Cartesian external world skepticism, Cottingham suggests (‘The Cartesian Legacy,’ Aristotelian Society Proceedings, Supplement, LXVI, 1992, 12). A skeptic cannot coherently entertain solipsism. Wittgenstein does not explicitly articulate the communalist anti-solipsist argument I address, and much of what he does explicitly say receives multiple interpretations. Nonetheless, I believe Wittgenstein uses this anti-solipsist argument, with subtlety, in a set of passages that includes #24, #199, #202, #206, #243, #258 (Philosophical Investigations (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1953).
- Reasoning of the following sort is central to the support people give communalism: 1. Language is rule-governed, 2. For language to be rule-governed there must be a ‘criterion of correctness’ for following a rule, 3. Only other persons can provide someone with a ‘criterion of correctness' for following a rule, hence, 4. For someone to use language, other persons must exist.’ Wittgenstein argues that there can be no ‘private ostension words’, words that can be learned only through attending to a sensation, in oneself, of the sort the word is to designate. Wittgenstein's famous argument against private ostension words functions as support for premise 3. When people think of the Wittgensteinian attack on solipsism, they may immediately think of the attack on private ostension words and its role in supporting communalism. In this paper I do not criticize communalism or the reasoning used to support it. I criticize the reasoning people rely on to get from communalism to the falsity of solipsism.
- Though a person cannot assume others exist in an anti-solipsist argument's premises, in this paper I can assume others exist. I am not arguing against solipsism. I examine a purported refutation of solipsism.
- Babe Ruth might not accept this. He might decide playing baseball does not require other minds—that he could play baseball even if his ‘teammates’ were mindless automata or projections of his mind. As other minds and external world skeptics picture matters, a world in which others are mindless automata or projections of someone's own immaterial mind might be empirically indistinguishable from a world with external, physical persons with minds. That person has the same sense of acing and communicating with others that you and I have. Understanding baseball in a way in which other minds are not essential to playing baseball, Babe Ruth could discard the claim that ‘a forever-solitary person cannot play baseball’. If he does this, he would presumably lack interest in wielding the anti-solipsist argument offered to him. Some people might handle language as Babe Ruth here handles baseball. They might decide that using language does not require other minds—that a person could use language even if the other ‘persons’ in his world were automata or projections of his mind. The automata or projections might stand in for the other persons that Wittgensteinians say are needed to provide criteria of correctness for word use. (For a development of this view, see my ‘Ontology, Epistemology, and Private Ostensive Definition’ in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Vol. 56 (1996), pp. 137–147.) People who analyze language this way accept the possibility of there being a language that only one person understands. They reject that form of communalism upon which the anti-solipsist argument I address in this essay rests.
- ‘Meaning is relational,’ Christine Korsgaard writes. ‘To say that X means Y is to say that one ought to take X for Y; and this requires two, a legislator to lay it down that one must take X for Y, and a citizen to obey’ (The Sources of Normativity, ed. Onora O'Neill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 137).
- ‘I think, therefore you are,’ might be Sophie's maxim, Charles Lowney suggests.
- Thanks to Charles Lowney, John Heil, and this journal's referees for their astute comments on drafts of this essay.