Introduction

If two people retire to the privacy of the bushes, they go where they expect to be unobserved. What they do is done privately, or in private, if they are not actually seen doing it. Should they later advertise or publish what they were about, what was private would then become public knowledge. Or they may have been mistaken in thinking their retreat private—they may have been in full view of passersby all the time. One's private affairs, however, are private in a different sense. It is not that they are kept out of sight or from the knowledge of others that makes them private. Rather, they are matters that it would be inappropriate for others to try to find out about, much less report on, without one's consent; one complains if they are publicized precisely because they are private. Similarly, a private room remains private in spite of uninvited intruders, for, unlike the case of the couple in the bushes, falsifying the expectation that no one will intrude is not a logically sufficient ground for saying that something private in this sense is not private after all.