BLOG - No beetle? Wittgenstein's 'grammatical illusions' and Dalabon emotion metaphors

Apart from a few fruitful but pointed encounters, linguistics and philosophy of language often talk past each other. In this post, I try and establish a dialogue between these two disciplines, around the question of private states (or inner states) and their linguistic descriptions. I suggest a ‘translation’ of Wittgenstein’s stance on private states into more technical linguistic terms, and I show how empirical description of the way private states are described in various languages may relate to some of Wittgenstein’s philosophical questions.