One of the twentieth century’s most famous philosophers, Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951), asked us to imagine that a number of people each have a closed box which they claim to the others contains something they call a ‘beetle’. None of the individuals can look inside anyone’s box but their own, so none of them is sure that what the others refer to with ‘beetle’ is what they themselves refer to with the same term. Nonetheless, thinks Wittgenstein, these individuals still manage to talk successfully and meaningfully about the contents of their boxes.
Wittgenstein thinks this teaches us that what happens to be contained in each individual’s box is irrelevant to the shared meaning of the term ‘beetle’. The meaning of this term must rather be determined by the way it is used. The term does mean something (since the individuals manage to use it to talk about the contents of their boxes). However, because no one can see in anyone else’s box, ‘beetle’ cannot mean the particular beetle things themselves. Rather, ‘beetle’ must mean whatever it is that’s contained in each person’s box. The imagined scenario is, Wittgenstein thinks, analogous to the phenomenon of our referring to individually-experienced sensations like pain, hunger, and anxiety. We cannot access each other’s sensations, so we cannot ever know whether what someone else experiences when they say they feel anxious is what we experience when we say that we feel anxious. Nonetheless, just like the individuals with their ‘beetle’ boxes, we manage to talk successfully and meaningfully about our private somethings (pain, anxiety, and so on), so the particular experiences themselves are likewise irrelevant to the shared meaning of ‘pain’, ‘anxiety’ and so on. | |||