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, on the page
- Mid-century Cambridge
Plate · Generated interpretation
A closed box. What were you doing when you named the inside?
Listen · Eve
0:00 / —:—
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. That is Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, section 293, published in 1953, two years after his death, in German and in G. E. M. Anscombe’s English.
The book is not a psychology experiment. It is a set of remarks, numbered, often as questions, about how words work. Nearby, in the so-called private-language passages, Wittgenstein asks whether a sensation-word can be a name I give to a private object only I can inspect. The beetle is a device for that question. 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. It 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.
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. A section is not a biography of Cambridge.
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?