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<blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 9197914" data-attributes="member: 42582">From time-to-time posters on these boards like to mention Wittgenstein. Given that I know Wittgenstein's work fairly well, I thought I might have a go at this too!In his later work Wittgenstein advanced an argument called the &quot;private language argument&quot;. The interpretation of the argument is contentious, and so is its soundness. What I take away from it - and here I'm also influenced by Otto Neurath's earlier work on &quot;protocol sentences&quot;, and Hilary Putnam's later work on reference - is that language is in-principle sharable. There are no purely and essentially private words, or purely and essentially private referential relationships.The previous sentence is a fairly strong claim, with sometimes counter-intuitive implications for how we think about thoughts and the mind. For instance, it means that - in principle - I can talk about your dreams just as much as you can: that the only obstacle to my doing so is epistemic (ie I don't have immediate cognitive access to them, given that they happen in your head), but not deeper than that: the position I take from Wittgenstein, Neurath and Putnam is that there can't be &quot;images&quot; or &quot;mental events&quot; in your dreams that are in principle not amenable to being talked about by me.One aphorism Wittgenstein uses to motivate his argument is this: that language is rule-governed, and that a rule can't be established purely privately because that would be like checking if today's newspaper is accurate by comparing it to another copy of the same paper. The point of the aphorism is that there must be some &quot;external&quot; check or constraint in order to establish a rule.This is one sense, then, in which solo imagination is, in-principle, sharable. But when it comes to RPGing I think there is a more demanding way in which the notion of solo vs shared applies. The problem, in solo play, of being one's own referee is a bit like checking the accuracy of the newspaper against another copy of the same paper: it's not really a limit.Shared imagination is an important source of constraint in RPGing; and a very important part of RPG design is establishing the various mechanisms whereby the content of the shared fiction is established.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="pemerton, post: 9197914, member: 42582"] From time-to-time posters on these boards like to mention Wittgenstein. Given that I know Wittgenstein's work fairly well, I thought I might have a go at this too! In his later work Wittgenstein advanced an argument called the "private language argument". The interpretation of the argument is contentious, and so is its soundness. What I take away from it - and here I'm also influenced by Otto Neurath's earlier work on "protocol sentences", and Hilary Putnam's later work on reference - is that language is in-principle sharable. There are no purely and essentially private words, or purely and essentially private referential relationships. The previous sentence is a fairly strong claim, with sometimes counter-intuitive implications for how we think about thoughts and the mind. For instance, it means that - in principle - I can talk about your dreams just as much as you can: that the only obstacle to my doing so is epistemic (ie I don't have immediate cognitive access to them, given that they happen in your head), but not deeper than that: the position I take from Wittgenstein, Neurath and Putnam is that there can't be "images" or "mental events" in your dreams that are in principle not amenable to being talked about by me. One aphorism Wittgenstein uses to motivate his argument is this: that language is rule-governed, and that a rule can't be established purely privately because [I]that would be like checking if today's newspaper is accurate by comparing it to another copy of the same paper[/I]. The point of the aphorism is that there must be some "external" check or constraint in order to establish a rule. This is one sense, then, in which solo imagination is, in-principle, sharable. But when it comes to RPGing I think there is a more demanding way in which the notion of solo vs shared applies. The problem, in solo play, of being one's own referee is a bit like checking the accuracy of the newspaper against another copy of the same paper: it's not really a limit. [I]Shared[/I] imagination is an important source of constraint in RPGing; and a very important part of RPG design is establishing the various mechanisms whereby the content of the shared fiction is established. [/QUOTE]

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