 Though Mulhall claims that the private language sections can justifiably be read either resolutely or substantially—because ‘each reading can … point to an aspect of the text that it fully acknowledges, and whose proper acknowledgment by the other is at the very least an issue for it, it would seem profitless to insist that one reading is essentially faithful to Wittgenstein’s text and the other intrinsically faithless’ (ibid., p. 20)—it is plain that he thinks the resolute reading is to be preferred. However, we may not need to choose. We might view the private language sections as Wittgenstein’s asking, ‘Do we have a clear picture of the circumstances in which we should say that someone spoke a private language?’ The line of reasoning that follows §243 can be read as various attempts to achieve a clear picture of what it might mean to speak a private language, where the attempts ultimately fail, with the result that what at first sight seemed intelligible (‘a language which describes my inner experiences and which only I myself can understand’) turns out not to be intelligible after all. And in so far as we cannot make intelligible the circumstances in which there could be a private language, we should say that the idea of a private language is nonsense. However, as we saw above, in §282 Wittgenstein seems to suggest that the border between nonsense and falsehood is itself unclear; and moreover, in trying to make sense of the possibility of a private language, we may find, in different parts of the chain of reasoning, suggestions of falsehood as well as of nonsensicality. 