Wallace's story illustrates the solipsistic problems caused by the (hyper)reflexive attitude. For this attitude causes us to regard our so-called internal processes--thoughts, feelings, et cetera--as objects, 'as things that we have', and ourselves as the exclusive 'owners' of those objects. Although this might seem like an innocent line of thought, the effects are irrevocably far-reaching. Hacker writes: 'If we think of "pain" as the name of a sensation we have on the model of names of objects (in a generalized sense of 'object'), then solipsism is unavoidable. A public language cannot be construed as the confluence of private languages that happen to coincide.' If I think that for me the meaning of the word 'pain' lies anchored in an essentially private experience, then I will never be able to speak meaningfully about my pain with others. It is impossible to connect myself to the outside world if I, from a reflexive attitude, regard the meaning of myself and the world to be derived from processes that take place inside me.

However, Wittgenstein has shown, through his private language arguments, that my understanding of myself and the world cannot and does not depend on such looking-inside. A word has a certain meaning because it has a certain use in language. That use is not invented by me at the moment that I pronounce a word while I point inside. Rather, it is the other way around, Wittgenstein writes: 'Grammar tells what kind of object anything is.' It is grammar--the use a certain word has in language--that determines what I mean when I say 'I am in pain.' Or, as Wallace summarizes Wittgenstein's position: 'a word like pain means what it does for me because of the way the community I'm part of has tacitly agreed to use pain'.