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Quoted from http://www.iep.utm.edu/solipsis/:

One might even say, solipsism is necessarily foundationless, for to make an appeal to logical rules or empirical evidence the solipsist would implicitly have to affirm the very thing that he purportedly refuses to believe: the reality of intersubjectively valid criteria and a public, extra-mental world.

I've had the pleasure of speaking with Dr. Thornton (the author of the article on the IEP) rather extensively. He is a truly intelligent man, and his views and defense of the PLA seem well founded and thorough.

I suppose the real question at hand is, does Wittgenstein's argument succeed in the way Dr. Thornton says it does?

It seems to me any weak point of the PLA isn't enough to derail it, and that logically it's well founded for the most part. The pyrrhonian view seems to clearly be something Wittgenstein was not arguing for, as does the Kripkean view of the PLA, so the answer to the above would preclude those views.

Frank Hubeny
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Nathan Cronauer
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  • "Does Wittgenstein's argument succeed in the way Dr. Thornton says it does?". Obviously not otherwise there would be no Solipsists. –  Jul 08 '17 at 07:21
  • I don't believe that the solipsist has to appeal to the reality of of intersubjectively valid criteria and an extra-mental world. He can appeal to his experiences (the empirical evidence) without metaphysically reifying them. Indeed, this is exactly what mysticism does for a view by which solipsism is not strictly true or false, He can appeal to logic negatively, by showing that logic cannot falsify solipsism. –  Jul 08 '17 at 10:49
  • @Isaacson That is a total non-sequitur. Since when is there any correlation between having adherents and being well-founded? –  Jul 10 '17 at 18:32
  • This notion surely does not address the 'New Age Berkeleyan' version of solopsism for whom 'God is All' and 'Thou art That'. 'Not central to my self-image' and 'independent of me' are not synonymous, or even related once you step into psychoanalytic territory like Jung's 'imago/shadow/ego ideal'. –  Jul 10 '17 at 19:08
  • @Jobermark Solipsists exist, they are rational intelligent human beings, and they have read Dr. Thornton. Therefore **an** argument exists to contradict his. How else do you suggest we measure the "success" of his argument?. By how many Solopsists it has convinced (that falls into the populist trap you highlight above), by how convincing we personally find it (that just dissolves the question into "Do you like Dr. Thornton's argument?"), by testing it's claims (it makes no testable claims), by whether it it logically sound (well, obviously, otherwise it would not even have been published). –  Jul 11 '17 at 07:01
  • The point of my, admittedly rather facetious, comment was that a question trying to measure the "success" of an argument for which at least one counter-argument exists is a pointless question, or at least one which simply asks for opinion. It implies that philosophy has successes and failures measurable by some objective criteria, which 2000 years of sustained debate has clearly shown it does not, once the idea has reached the threshold of publication or popular approval. –  Jul 11 '17 at 07:03
  • @Isaacson You could suggest an edit to the question, instead of just being snarky. (Or you could be more obviously snarky -- as it was I did miss the point.) What would be the right way of asking the closest thing you find reasonable to ask? (Of all of Wittgenstein, the Private Language Argument is the thing I find least compelling -- from my place in psychoanalysis: people talk to themselves, and they are composed of multiple parts, so they do have internal dialogs, and those do take place in some coding, how is that not a language?) –  Jul 11 '17 at 14:00
  • @Jobermark I'm not sure there is anything close to the question that it would be reasonable to ask. Both Wittgenstein (via Dr. Thornton's interpretation) and the Solipsists in general have reasonable arguments to support their positions, if they didn't, neither position would exist in the literature. You (and I) might find aspects of their arguments preferable to believe or not, but that is a matter of personal opinion, I simply can't think of a way in which "success" might be measured that is not trivial (does it make some logical sense?), or populist (do lots of people adhere to it?). –  Jul 12 '17 at 08:50
  • In a rhetorical sense, Dr. Thornton has hinted at the problem himself in his choice of prosaism "One might even say ...", admitting at the outset that this is simply what someone might reasonably say, not the *only* thing one could reasonably say, just one of the options. –  Jul 12 '17 at 08:56

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