Wittgenstein's private language argument establishes that the very conceptual content of perceptual reports presupposes shared public criteria, undermining strong experiential privacy.

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Experiential privacy(as what Wittgenstein's argument challenges): The idea that your inner experiences—your feelings, sensations, and what things look like to you—are completely private and only you can truly know them.
Perceptual reports(contrasted with non-observational self-knowledge in the statement): Statements about what you see, hear, or sense through your senses—like saying 'I see a tree' or 'I hear music.'
Public criteria(what internal thoughts need in order to have meaning): Shared, observable rules or standards that a group of people can all understand and check—like how we all agree what the color 'red' means.
Wittgenstein: Ludwig Wittgenstein was an Austrian-British philosopher who fundamentally changed how people think about language and meaning in the 20th century. He argued that many philosophical problems arise from misunderstanding how words actually work in everyday life, rather than from deep metaphysical mysteries. His ideas influenced not just philosophy but also mathematics, logic, and even how people approach psychology and artificial intelligence today.

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