Wittgenstein on Private Ostensive Definition

Wittgenstein’s so-called ‘private language argument’ has often been found evocative of transcendental reasoning. Leslie Stevenson declares that ‘one and the same valid argument can be extracted and reconstructed from some of the writings [Kant and Wittgenstein] left behind them’, namely the Transcendental Deduction and the private language argument (Stevenson 1982: 321). Jonathan Lear also reads the Investigations as incorporating a transcendental argument but reconstructs its aim differently, assigning only a marginal role to the private language discussion (cf. Lear 1984: 227–229). The most common assimilation of the private language argument is the one with Kant’s Refutation of Idealism (cf. Hymers 1997: 442). I shall later discuss such an interpretation in a subsection on an article by Michael Hymers (cf. chapter 19). Other authors, including at one time Peter Hacker and Eckart Forster, have thought that the private language discussion incorporates a transcendental argument, without associating it with any particular transcendental argument in Kant.