Social Dimension of Language
As a matter of fact, what has been said is only an introduction to a more profound problem of what connects language to reality. Part of that problem concerns the impossibility of a private language.
Every individual expression gains its meaning when used in a language-game while the language-game is connected to our actions. Wittgenstein emphasised that we should also call the whole, consisting of language and the actions into which it is woven, the language-games. Hence, language as a semantic phenomenon is only a part of the totality. The other essential part is the social dimension, which Wittgenstein himself calls the form of life. In this regard, a language-game is always an expression of a certain form of life, or, as Wittgenstein says: “And to imagine a language means to imagine a form of life” (Wittgenstein 1967, 19; Hintikka 1976, 275; Winch 1958, 33; Kenny 1975, 163; Pole 1958, 52; Aarnio 1997, 115).Henri Le Roy Finch refers to the close relationship between “form of life” and “language-game” as follows: “It is significant that all Wittgenstein’s five references in the Investigations to forms of life mention language, which shows how forms of life are interwoven with language” (Finch 1977, 91). Charles Taylor, for his part, emphasises the significance of inter-subjective (common, shared) meanings that presuppose that a certain shared value is part of the shared world, and that all of this is common (Taylor 1976, 250).
Therefore, Wittgenstein does not in any way see the characterisation of languagegames as just an analysis of simple communication - that is, about spoken and written language. The question is not about “getting rid of the trash in language”, as Peter Winch has stated (Winch 1958, 33). The identification of a language-game in the Wittgensteinean sense is always identification of a certain form of life. Language is a social (shared) matter. Wittgenstein here goes to the point: If a lion could speak, we would not understand it. In this very sense, a language-game is a public phenomenon. A fully private language, belonging only to an individual subject, is not possible. It is not a language-game at all because no one else can play it with the person in question. There is no social dimension to a private language (Hintikka 1976, 275).
In order to illustrate this side of the case, let us conduct a thought experiment. There is only one being in the world capable of thinking and conveying sounds. In what sense has this being a meaningful language? Every single expression has a meaning for him alone. He is constantly engaged in a monologue with himself. His “language”, as language, would be odd, since, from the being’s own point of view, he is acting blindly. He does not have a meta-language with which he could analyse and evaluate his “primary” language. Thus it would be absurd to talk about his sounds constituting a language-game, and about these sounds having a meaning.