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You think you know what pain feels like. I think I know what pain feels like. But here’s the uncomfortable truth: we might be talking about completely different things when we use that word.
This isn’t just linguistic nitpicking. This is the heart of why your arguments with your spouse go nowhere. Why political debates feel like shouting into the void. Why you can read the same tweet as someone else and come away with opposite interpretations. The problem runs deeper than different opinions. The problem is that we’re all speaking private languages while pretending we share a common one.
The Philosopher Who Broke Language
Ludwig Wittgenstein, a philosopher who thought so hard about language that he almost gave up philosophy entirely, stumbled onto something that explains much of human conflict. He called it the private language argument, though really it’s less an argument and more an observation that should terrify anyone who cares about communication.
The basic idea goes like this: if language gets its meaning from private, internal experiences that only you can access, then meaning itself becomes impossible. You cannot even be sure what you meant yesterday, let alone what someone else means today.
Think about the last time someone told you they felt “anxious.” What did they mean? Your version of anxiety might be a racing heart and spiraling thoughts about everything that could go wrong.
Their version might be a vague unease, like wearing a sweater that’s slightly too tight. Or maybe it’s something you’ve never experienced at all.
You both used the same word. You both nodded knowingly. But you might have been describing entirely different internal states. And here’s the twist: there’s no way to check. You cannot climb into their skull and feel what they feel. They cannot demonstrate their anxiety the way they might demonstrate a dance move.
Where Meaning Actually Lives
This is where Wittgenstein gets interesting. He argued that meaning cannot come from these private, internal sensations. If it did, language would be impossible. Instead, meaning comes from public use, from the games we play with words in social contexts.
When a child learns what “pain” means, they don’t learn it by comparing their inner sensation to some Platonic ideal of pain. They learn it when they cry, and adults respond with care. They learn it when they say “ow” and people ask what happened. The word gets its meaning from this public performance, not from the private sensation that prompts it.
But we forget this. We walk around thinking our words refer to our private experiences. We assume that when we say “freedom,” “justice,” or “love,” others are accessing the same inner concept we are. This assumption is the soil in which most of our disagreements grow.
Why Movie Debates Never End
Consider two people arguing about whether a movie is “good.” One person insists it’s a masterpiece. The other thinks it’s overrated trash. They marshal evidence, cite reviews, point to box office numbers. But underneath all this, they might mean completely different things by “good.”
For one person, a good movie is emotionally moving. For another, it’s technically accomplished. For a third, it’s morally instructive. They’re using the same word but playing different language games. No amount of evidence will settle the dispute because they’re not actually having the same conversation.
This happens in politics constantly. Take “freedom.” Conservatives might use it to mean freedom from government interference. Progressives might mean freedom from economic precarity or discrimination. Libertarians might mean something else entirely.
They all write passionate essays about freedom. They accuse each other of wanting to destroy it. But they’ve been speaking different private languages all along, and the argument cannot go anywhere because there’s no shared meaning to anchor it.
The Beetle in the Box
The counterintuitive part is that this isn’t a problem we can solve by being more precise. You might think the solution is to define our terms carefully at the start of every conversation. But definitions just lead to more words, which lead to more private interpretations. It’s turtles all the way down. The meaning of a word isn’t in your head or in a dictionary. It’s in how we use it together, in the rough and tumble of actual communication.
Wittgenstein used a thought experiment about a beetle in a box. Imagine everyone has a box with something called a “beetle” inside. No one can look in anyone else’s box. Everyone says they know what a beetle is by looking in their own box.
But the thing in the box might be different for each person. It might be constantly changing. One person’s box might even be empty. The word “beetle” couldn’t get its meaning from the things in the boxes because those are private and unchecked. The word would have to get its meaning from how people use it in conversation, from the role it plays in language.
Replace “beetle” with any word for an internal state. Pain, happiness, anxiety, love, meaning, purpose. We all carry these words around like boxes we cannot open for each other. We assume our boxes contain the same things. This assumption is generous and kind, but it’s also the source of immense frustration when we realize we’ve been talking past each other for years.
Your Last Fight Was About Language
Here’s where it gets personal. Think about your most recent serious disagreement with someone you care about. Maybe your partner said you weren’t “supportive” enough. Maybe a friend accused you of being “selfish.” Maybe a coworker said your idea wasn’t “practical.”
In that moment, you probably felt misunderstood. You tried to explain yourself. You provided examples of times you were supportive, generous, or practical. But the argument went nowhere. Why? Because “supportive,” “selfish,” and “practical” meant something different to each of you.
Your partner’s private language of support might emphasize emotional availability. Yours might emphasize problem solving. You’re both right within your own frameworks. You’re both wrong within each other’s.
The tragedy is that most people think disagreements are about facts, when really they’re about frameworks. We believe that if we just present enough evidence, enough logic, enough clear explanation, the other person will see things our way. But if we’re operating with different private vocabularies, evidence gets interpreted through those different lenses. What looks like proof to you looks like a category error to them.
Why Online Arguments Are Pointless
This is why online arguments are so pointless. Someone posts about “capitalism.” Half the replies assume they mean a specific economic system with property rights and markets. Others assume they mean corporate power. Others assume they mean greed. Others assume they mean American foreign policy. They’re all arguing with their own private definitions while pretending they share a common one.
The original poster might have yet another meaning entirely. Everyone leaves frustrated, more convinced than ever that people are stupid or arguing in bad faith. But mostly people are just playing different language games while using the same words.
Wittgenstein would say that meaning is use. A word means what we do with it in practice, not what we imagine it refers to in our private mental space. This seems obvious until you try to apply it. It means that when you and your friend disagree about whether something is “fair,” you need to stop debating fairness in the abstract. You need to look at how each of you actually uses that word. In what contexts does your friend call something fair? What pattern emerges? That pattern is what they mean, not whatever Platonic ideal of fairness they think they’re defending.
The Illusion of Understanding
The uncomfortable implication is that most of what we think of as communication is actually elaborate pretense. We’re all performing a kind of social pantomime where we act as if we understand each other. Most of the time, this works well enough. We order coffee without incident. We collaborate on projects. We navigate social situations. But scratch the surface with any emotionally charged topic and the illusion breaks down. We discover we’ve been alone in our private languages all along, shouting across an unbridgeable gap.
Some people find this depressing. If we’re all trapped in private languages, isn’t understanding impossible? Isn’t connection futile? But Wittgenstein would say that’s the wrong takeaway. The point isn’t that understanding is impossible.
The point is that understanding doesn’t work the way we think it does. Real understanding doesn’t come from successfully transmitting the contents of your private mental space into someone else’s. It comes from learning to play the same language game together, from coordinating your uses of words through practice and feedback.
How Understanding Actually Works
Think about inside jokes with close friends. These work not because you all have the same private experience when you hear the joke. They work because you’ve built up a shared practice of using certain phrases or references in certain contexts. The meaning is in the practice, not in matching internal states. This is what all understanding is like, just usually less obvious.
The practical upshot is that when you’re stuck in a disagreement, stop trying to win and start trying to understand the other person’s language game. What do they actually do with the words they’re using? In what contexts do they apply them? What patterns can you observe?
This takes patience. It requires giving up the fantasy that you can simply explain your position clearly enough that they’ll finally get it. You probably can’t, because clear explanation happens within a language game, and you might not share one yet.
Instead, you build a shared language game through interaction. You propose uses of words. You see how the other person responds. You adjust. You try again. It’s more like learning to dance with someone than like downloading data from one computer to another. It’s messy, imperfect, and slow. But it’s also the only way humans have ever actually communicated.
What Therapy and Long Marriages Teach Us
Consider therapy. Good therapy doesn’t work because the therapist successfully excavates your private meanings and finally understands you. It works because therapist and client build a shared language game over time. The therapist learns how you use words like “angry” or “scared” or “worthless.” You learn to apply these words in new contexts through the therapeutic conversation. The meaning shifts and clarifies through use, not through better access to private mental contents.
The same applies to any relationship. Couples who stay together for decades don’t do so because they perfectly understand each other’s inner worlds. They do so because they’ve built an elaborate shared language game. They know what “I’m fine” means in seventeen different contexts based on tone, timing, and history. They know when “maybe” means “convince me” versus “absolutely not.” This accumulated knowledge isn’t about telepathy. It’s about learning each other’s language through years of coordinated use.
What This Means for Public Discourse
For politics, social media, and all the ways we fail to convince each other? It means most of our communication strategies are doomed from the start. We cannot win arguments by being more logical if we’re not even playing the same language game. We cannot foster understanding by clearly explaining our private definitions if meaning doesn’t work that way.
Instead, we need to get better at recognizing when we’re speaking different private languages. We need to slow down and do the hard work of building shared language games before we try to resolve disagreements. We need to be more humble about how little our words convey and more curious about how others are using the same words differently.
This doesn’t mean giving up on truth or defaulting to relativism. Wittgenstein wasn’t saying all language games are equally valid or that we can never be wrong. He was saying that meaning and truth only make sense within a language game, and that we need to share one before we can productively disagree. Some language games are better than others. Some are more useful, more clarifying, more humane. But you cannot judge a language game from outside all language games. You’re always already in one.
The strange hope in all this is that once you see the private language problem, you become better at navigating it. You stop assuming you know what people mean. You start asking better questions. You notice when arguments are going nowhere because of incompatible frameworks rather than incompatible facts. You get more interested in how people use words and less interested in what they claim their words mean in private.
You might even discover something surprising. The person you’ve been arguing with for months isn’t your enemy. They’re just someone playing a different language game, using familiar words in unfamiliar ways. There’s still a path to mutual understanding. It just doesn’t run through the fantasy of perfectly transparent communication. It runs through the hard, patient work of learning to speak together.
