Thought experiment 5: wittgenstein’s beetle

In 1913 Ludwig Wittgenstein told Bertrand Russell that he was planning to live by the fjords in a secluded part of Norway until he had solved the central questions in logic. Russell was

aghast: “I said it would be dark, & he said he hated daylight. I said it would be lonely, & he said he prostituted his mind talking to intelligent people. I said he was mad, & he

said God preserve him from sanity (God certainly will)”. Wittgenstein was never guilty of false modesty and for a time convinced himself that the only philosophy book he published in his

lifetime, the _Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus_ (1922), had indeed settled the most important philosophical problems. But he was also troubled by the thought that he was never fully

understood. Having completed the _Tractatus_, he decided to teach in remote villages in lower Austria. His sister Hermine protested that his genius was wasted on schoolchildren; it was like

using a “precision instrument to open crates”. Wittgenstein replied: “You remind me of somebody who is looking out through a closed window and cannot explain to himself the strange movements

of a passer-by. He cannot tell what sort of storm is raging out there or that this person might only be managing with difficulty to stay on his feet.” This tormented personality is

reflected in his most famous (and briefly sketched) thought experiment. It crops up in Wittgenstein’s masterpiece, _Philosophical Investigations_. Published posthumously, the book, like the

_Tractatus_, is presented in numbered paragraphs or sections. Section 293 includes this: “Suppose everyone has a box with something in it: we call it ‘a beetle’. No one can look in anybody

else’s box, and everyone says he knows what a beetle is only by looking at _his_ beetle. Here it would be quite possible for everyone to have something different in his box.” However, and

this is Wittgenstein’s point, even if your box contained something different from my box (perhaps your beetle has an extra antenna, perhaps in your box is a coin, or perhaps it is empty),

that wouldn’t necessarily stop us using the term “beetle” in the same way. What’s in the box could be irrelevant. In a similar vein we might ask how you know that when you think of the

colour red, others have the same colour in mind. What matters is not how we experience colour but that we use colour terms with reference to the same things, such as tomatoes and post boxes.

_[SEE ALSO: WITTGENSTEIN AT WAR]_ Wittgenstein’s poetic, aphoristic style and his habit of posing questions without answering them makes him notoriously difficult to read. Scholars

furiously dispute the relevance and application of the beetle-in-a-box. It appears at the end of a section on the so-called private language argument; among the shelves of books written on

Wittgenstein, no other topic has been so exhaustively analysed. What is his target? We may be tempted to think that when each of us uses a word like “pain”, we are referring to a particular

inner sensation. This leads to a kind of solipsism. I don’t have access to your mind or you to mine, so how can I know what you mean by pain? I might say, “I can’t know your pain.” Yes, I

saw the accident, I can hear your cries, but I can’t know what it means for you to be in pain. Perhaps you’re a terrific actor. In a tradition going back to Descartes, philosophers had

claimed only knowledge of my own sensations is really secure. Wittgenstein turned this on its head. Language doesn’t function this way: it is public, not private. “Wittgenstein is attacking

the idea that minds are hidden from one another,” says Barry Smith, director of the Institute of Philosophy at the University of London. If that were the case, “communication would become

extremely difficult – a mere matter of guesswork – about what goes on in people’s minds when they use words. But words are not like sealed containers, with something put inside by the

speaker and then guessed at by the listener.” Mind and meaning are on show when a person winces or says, “I’ve got a terrible headache.” As Wittgenstein puts it, “One can say of someone ‘he

is hiding his feelings’. But that means that it is not a priori that [feelings] are always hidden.” Indeed, Wittgenstein suggests the whole notion of an entirely private language – a

language that only I can understand – is incoherent. For how would I know when I was using my words correctly? Language can function only because there are public criteria for acceptable

usage. The practices of a community set up and police linguistic rules. If Wittgenstein is right – and most philosophers are convinced he is – the Cartesian picture of how we converse and

relate to each other has been dramatically overturned. “That,” says Smith, “is a quite extraordinary achievement.” _[SEE ALSO: LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN: A MIND ON FIRE]_ Topics in this article :

Magazine , Philosophy This article appears in the 13 Nov 2024 issue of the New Statesman, Trump World