Thought Experiment 5: Wittgenstein’s Beetle - New Statesman

Ideas 13 November 2024 Thought Experiment 5: Wittgenstein’s Beetle Language can function only because there are public criteria for acceptable usage.

By David Edmonds

Photo by Moritz Nahr / Album / Alamy 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]

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

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