What can be meaningful

because we think language is fundamentally about naming things, we think that psychological concepts must also be names of things, but of things in an inner space. So we model the reality of the inner on the existence of physical things with the peculiar property that these mental objects are only visible to and nameable by their owner. But we are also puzzled about how words can function as names at all. How they can reach out to what they name? Words are, after all, just arbitrary sounds or squiggles. We think then that it must be something special indeed which enables words to have meaning. It must be some special set of the psychological states and processes, a picture of which we already have. Our words mean because we mean. And we can mean because we are in possession of inner, essentially private psychological states that can intrinsically reach out to the world. Language is really a collection of private, inner acts of meaning and naming, a collection of private languages that happen, more or less imperfectly, to overlap.

Ian Ground, The relentless honesty of Ludwig Wittgenstein.