This is a linkpost for an essay I wrote about Wittgenstein and the private language argument on substack. Links lead to other essays on substack, so don't click these if you don't want to be directed there.

...the difficult thing here is not to dig down to the ground; no, it is to recognize the ground that lies before us as the ground. For the ground keeps on giving us the illusory image of a greater depth, and when we seek to reach this, we keep on finding ourselves on the old level. Our disease is one of wanting to explain.
Ludwig Wittgenstein - Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics §VI.31

Describing phenomena by means of the hypothesis of a world of material objects is unavoidable in view of its simplicity when compared with the unmanageably complicated phenomenological description. If I can see different discrete parts of a circle, it's perhaps impossible to give precise direct description of them, but the statement that they're parts of a circle, which, for reasons which haven't been gone into any further, I don't see as a whole - is simple.
Ludwig Wittgenstein - Philosophical Remarks §XXII.230

In the article Language and Meaning I started to articulate holism, in an intentionally vague way. The question we left off with at the end of that piece was where the boundary between the name and the thing named lies. At what point does what we think of as pure or conceptual thought, the pre-linguistic, become language? Is the separation between the two intelligible upon analysis? These are questions that suffuse the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein, one of the most fascinating and thought-provoking thinkers I have encountered^[1]. In this piece I will go through his Private Language Argument^[2] (PLA) and its implications, which touches on meaning, language, metaphysics, mind and experience. In the words of Hacker^[3]: “The private language argument is, if correct, one of the most important philosophical insights achieved in this century. It is a criticism of the conception of the mind which is not merely the dominant one in European philosophy, but is also pervasive in our culture, in psychology, linguistics, and indeed in the reflections of most people who think about the nature of 'self-consciousness' and the mind.” Though Hacker wrote this close to five decades ago (and Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations were published over seven decad...

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