Introspection and Wittgenstein’s Beetle in a Box

Introduction to Philosophy: Introspection

[roamsy]

I feel like I get the beetle in the box analogy, and it’s presented well here. What I find harder to grasp is what he is trying to say about its analogy to pain and philosophy of mind. “ That is to say: if we construe the grammar of the expression of sensation on the model of 'object and designation', the object drops out of consideration as irrelevant.”

So the pain felt itself is the object (what’s in the box) and our word or description of pain is the “grammar of expression of sensation” ( beetle).
His point being that in the game of language pain cannot be “generalized irresponsibly” just bc we know it from our experience, we can’t automatically correspond it to another persons pain and what they are experiencing. Not at least without some sort of triangulation like you speak of.

It’s also interesting to me the things that he is dancing around here that I don’t know if he talks about (been a while since I read the book). Things like empathy and compassion are implicated here. As well as the value of self knowledge, he seems to say they are effectively irrelevant. Whereas in Vedic philosophy we have quite the opposite ideas where “the science of the Self” is of supreme importance. Anyways that may be going far with it, but his work always stirs up all those ideas for me. Definitely one of the more memorable analogies in western philosophy.

[roamsy]

The other big thing it brings up to me is trust issues lol…I feel like in order to refute the relevance of shared pain and to doubt whether pain in another being is even real, it takes some serious trust issues to manifest that. Again maybe I go too far but these are the things his works brings up to me.