Wittgenstein on Sameness, Necessity and Privacy*

The aim of this paper is to examine Wittgenstein’s arguments against the meaningfulness of statements which state the possessive privacy of sensations; and to demonstrate their incorrectness. The English word ‘same ’ is ambiguous and according to that the following proposition is ambiguous too: (1) The car of Peter is the same car as the car of Paul. The ambiguity of the word ‘same ’ is caused by the fact that the word ‘same ’ can be used in English in two different ways and meanings. Let us therefore distinguish ‘same1 ’ and ‘same2’. What do ‘same1 ’ and ‘same2 ’ mean? To make the differences between ‘same1 ’ and ‘same2’ precise and obvious we can give the following definition