are there any flaws or holes in wittgensteins private language argument?

Question

if so what are they?

Answer 1

I'll go so far as to say that his whole argument is garbage.

One of the things he attacks is ostensive definitions. Defining something by example. Yet this is how all of us learn all language - by hearing and seeing samples of it over and over. Wittgenstein is correct in pointing out that conclusions made in this way may be wrong (see link 1, problem of induction) but this hardly means that it doesn't happen or that the process is intrinsically flawed.

Consider how most of us first learn that the sun rises: we see it happen every day. Then we conclude that it WILL happen every day. And while this conclusion works and has worked for billions of years, it is wrong. There WILL be a day where the sun does not rise (because it has swallowed the Earth). I am reminded of a fellow who had learned many words by reading them in books and pronounced them all incorrectly. If you didn't know what he was talking about already, it was quite easy to misunderstand what he was saying.

To make matters worse, he leans on the fallability of human memory. And he misses another point - all that we have to prove that the past exists at all is memory. Presumably if I use a word wrong in public language, someone will straighten me out and the original meaning will be preserved, but in private language there is nobody else to do the straightening.

But what if a virus were engineered to wipe out all memory of the word Paris? By his original definition of a private language, someone could in principle understand that word even if nobody did in actuality, so it wouldn't be private. But if nobody is really necessary to correct misuse and bad memory, what does this have to do with the argument at all?

Ultimately, I think Wittgenstein was setting up and knocking down straw men. My experience has been pretty much the opposite of his: that everyone has such a baggage of connotations and associations with every word they use that pretty much EVERY language is a private one, and the public ones are just a pidgin communication to a greater or lesser extent. The proof of this seems almost obvious - is there really any one thing that you think of exactly the same way as anyone else? Have two people write ten pages about any one thing without corresponding and you're sure to have very different results.

So it goes.