Event · Language · 1953
A Box, a Beetle
A philosopher asks us to imagine that everyone has a box with something in it called a beetle. No one can look in anyone else’s box.
- Cambridge
- Mid-century Cambridge
Plate · Generated interpretation
A closed box. What were you doing when you named the inside?
Listen · Eve
0:00 / –:–
Cambridge, 1953. Ludwig Wittgenstein has been dead two years. He was born in Vienna in 1889, taught at Cambridge, resigned the chair in 1947, and died in the city on 29 April 1951. G. E. M. Anscombe, one of his literary executors, publishes Philosophische Untersuchungen with an English facing him: Philosophical Investigations. The book is not a treatise with a last chapter. It is numbered remarks, often questions, about how words work. Section 293 is a small device. It is not a laboratory of pain, and it is not a biography of Trinity.
Suppose everyone had a box with something in it. We call it a beetle. No one can look into anyone else’s box, and everyone says he knows what a beetle is only by looking at his beetle. It would be quite possible for everyone to have something different in his box, or nothing. The thing in the box drops out of the language-game. Nearby, in the so-called private-language passages (§§243–315), he asks whether a sensation-word can be a name I give to a private object only I can inspect. If “beetle” is the name of what is in the box, and the box cannot be shared, then the object does not do the work of the word. What does the work is the use we make together.
Philosophische Untersuchungen, 1953. Anscombe’s English. §§243–315 is the private-language neighborhood. Later editions add a second part. This plate is §293. Rush Rhees and G. H. von Wright stand with Anscombe as executors. The beetle is not a laboratory of pain.
The thing in the box has no place in the language-game at all; not even as a something: for the box might even be empty.
Nagel wants the like. Wittgenstein wants the use. They can sit on the table. Making Wittgenstein deny that you have an inner life is a later fight, not a quotation. The beetle is not a theory that you are empty. It is a warning about how a word would have to work if it named only what no one else could check. A section is not a life of Cambridge. Vienna, the Tractatus of 1921, the years teaching children in rural Austria, the return to the university: those are other rooms. This plate stays with the box. What the word does, if no one can open the box, is the only experiment here, and it is not run with instruments. It is run with a sentence we already know how to use.
The beetle is a device. It is not a raid on feeling. Whether a word can mean a private object, and still be a word we share, is the remaining knot.
Whether a word can mean a private object, and still be a word we share, is the remaining knot.
Distant echoes
Echo
Late twentieth-century science of mind · Tucson, Arizona
The hard part
Chalmers points at the leftover. Wittgenstein asks how the pointing could work as language.
Echo
Late analytic philosophy · Princeton, on the page of *The Philosophical Review*
What it is like
Nagel needs the unshareable. Wittgenstein asks what “unshareable” could do in a sentence we share.
One question remains
Language · What changes when experience becomes a word?
If the thing in the box cannot be compared, what were we doing when we named it?