An explanation, by way of example, of why I love David Foster Wallace. This is a footnote. Everything here is quoted from "Authority and American Usage," an essay published in the book Consider the Lobster, 2005.
[…] you have only to accept the proposition that language is by its very nature public — i.e., that there is no such thing as a private language32 — […]
32This proposition is in fact true, as is interpolatively demonstrated just below, and although the demonstration is persuasive it is also, as you can see from the size of this FN, lengthy and involved and rather, umm, dense, so that once again you’d maybe be better off simply granting the truth of the proposition and forging on with the main text.
INTERPOLATIVE DEMONSTRATION OF THE FACT THAT THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS A PRIVATE LANGUAGE
It is sometimes tempting to imagine that there can be such a thing as a private language. Many of us are prone to lay-philosophizing about the weird privacy of our own mental states, for example; and from the fact that when my knee hurts only I can feel it, it’s tempting to conclude that for me the word pain has a very subjective internal meaning that only I can truly understand. This line of thinking is sort of like the adolescent pot-smoker’s terror that his own inner experience is both private and unverifiable, a syndrome that is technically known as Cannabic Solipsism. Eating Chips Ahoy! and staring very intently at the television’s network PGA event, for instance, the adolescent pot-smoker is struck with the ghastly possibility that, e.g., what he sees as the color green and what other people call “the color green” may in fact not be the same color-experiences at all: the fact that both he and someone else call Pebble Beach’s fairways green and a stoplight’s GO signal green appears to guarantee only that there is a similar consistency in their color-experiences of fairways and GO lights, not that the actual subjective quality of those color-experiences the same; it could be that what the ad. pot-smoker experiences as green everyone else actually experiences as blue, and that what we “mean” by the word blue is what he “means” by green, etc. etc., until the whole line of thinking gets so vexed and exhausting that the a. p.-s. ends up slumped crumb-strewn and paralyzed in his chair.
The point here is that the idea of private language, like private colors and most of the other solipsistic conceits with which this reviewer has at various times been afflicted, is both deluded and demonstrably false.
In the case of private language, the delusion is usually based on the belief that a word like pain or tree has the meaning it does because it is somehow “connected” to a feeling in my knee or to a picture of a tree in my head. But as Mister L. Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations proved in the 1950s, words actually have the meanings they do because of certain rules and verification tests that are imposed on us from outside our own subjectivities, viz., by the community in which we have to get along and communicate with other people. Wittgenstein’s argument centers on the fact that a word like tree means what it does for me because of the way the community I’m part of has tacitly agreed to use tree. What makes this observation so powerful is that Wittgenstein can prove that it holds true even if I am an angst-ridden adolescent pot-smoker who believes that there’s no way I can verify that what I mean by tree is what anybody else means by tree. Wittgenstein’s argument is very technical but goes something like:
(1) A word has no meaning apart from how it is actually used, and even if
(2) “The question of whether my use agrees with others has been given up as a bad job,”* still,
(3) The only way a word can be used meaningfully even to myself is if I use it “correctly,” with
(4) Correctly here meaning “consistent with my own definition” (that is, if I use tree one time to mean a tree and then next time turn around and use tree to mean a golf ball and then the next time willy-nilly use tree to mean a certain brand of high-cal corporate cookie, etc., then, even in my own little solipsistic universe, tree has ceased really to “mean” anything at all), but
(5) The criterion of consistency-with-my-own-definition is satisfiable only if there exist certain rules that are independent of any one language-user (viz., in this case, me). Without the existence of these external rules, there is no difference between the statement “I am in fact using tree consistently with my own definition” and the statement “I happen to be under the impression that I am using tree consistently with my own definition.” Wittgenstein’s way of putting it is:
Now how is it to be decided whether I have used the [privately defined] word consistently? What will be the difference between my having used it consistently and its seeming to me that I have? Or has this distinction vanished?...If the distinction between ‘correct’ and ‘seems correct’ has disappeared than so has the concept correct. It follows that the ‘rules’ of my private language are only impressions of rules. My impression that I follow a rule does not confirm that I follow the rule, unless there can be something that will prove my impression correct. “And that something cannot be another impression—for this would be as if someone were to buy several copies of the morning paper to assure himself that what it said was true.”
Step (5) is the real kicker; step (5) is what shows that even if the involuted adolescent decides that he has his own special private definition of tree, he himself cannot make up the “rules of consistency” via which he confirms that he’s using tree the way he privately defined it—i.e., “The proof that I am following a rule must appeal to something independent of my impression that I am.”
If you are thinking that all this seems not just hideously abstract but also irrelevant to the Usage Wars or to anything you have any interest in at all, I submit that you are mistaken. If words’ and phrases’ meanings depend on transpersonal rules and these rules on community consensus,† then language is not only non-private but also irreducibly public, political, and ideological. This means that questions about our national consensus on grammar and usage are actually bound up with every last social issue that millennial America’s about—class, race, sex, morality, tolerance, pluralism, cohesion, equality, fairness, money: you name it.
And if you at least provisionally grant that meaning is use and language public and communication impossible without consensus and rules, you’re going to see that the Descriptivist argument is open to the objection that its ultimate aim—the abandonment of “artificial” linguistic rules and conventions—would make language itself impossible. As in Genesis 11:1-10-grade impossible, a literal Babel. There have to be some rules and conventions, no? We have to agree that tree takes e’s and not u’s and denotes a large woody thing with branches and not a small plastic thing with dimples and TITLEIST on it, right? And won’t this agreement automatically be “artificial,” since it’s human beings making it? Once you accept that at least some artificial conventions are necessary, then you can get to the really hard and interesting questions: which conventions are necessary? and when? and where? and who gets to decide? and whence their authority to do so? And because these are the very questions [the Descriptivists] believes Dispassionate Science can transcend, their argument appears guilty of both petitio principii and ignoratio elenchi, and can pretty much be dismissed out of hand.
*Because The Investigations’ prose is extremely gnomic and opaque and consists largely of Wittgenstein having weird little imaginary dialogues with himself, the quotations here are actually from Norman Malcolm’s definitive paraphrase of L.W.’s argument, in which paraphrase Dr. Malcolm uses single quotation marks for tone quotes and double quotation marks for when he’s actually quoting Wittgenstein—which, when I myself am quoting Malcolm quoting Wittgenstein’s tone quotes, makes for a rather irksome surfeit of quotation marks, admittedly; but using Malcolm’s exegesis allows this interpolative demonstration to be about 60 percent shorter than it would be of we were to grapple with Wittgenstein directly.
†There’s a whole argument for this, but intuitively you can see that it makes sense: if the rules can’t be subjective, and if they’re not actually “out there” floating around in some kind of metaphysical hyperreality (a floating hyperreality that you can believe in if you wish, but you should know that people with beliefs like this usually get forced to take medication), then community consensus is really the only plausible explanation left.
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