Wittgenstein's Beetle in a Box Analogy

You can't know exactly what it is like to be another person or experience things from their perspective. Wittgenstein had an analogy for this.

Narrated by Aidan Turner. Scripted by Nigel Warburton.

From the BBC Radio 4 series about life's big questions - A History of Ideas.

This project is from the BBC in partnership with The Open University, the animations were created by Cognitive.

[guiyeoullim]

It’s mainly about how different people can talk about the beetle in the box. He is a philosopher focused on language analysis.
Such a good analogy.

[johnkinsey]

Fantastic. Never thought I'd see an explanation of this analogy that did it justice in under 2 mins. Well done.

[Barisius]

It's signing Gregor Samsa with Kafka; Beetlejuice; Volkswagen Beetle that founded by Nazi Party that connected with Martin Heidegger; Beatles through pronunciation of the word and finally Schrödinger's cat in the box analogy related somewhat in the box metaphor. Marvellous.

[jacksonfolly]

The length of this video suggests that my lecturer was wrong when he said that the Beetle in the box would extend beyond the remaining time we had left in our lecture. Great video! Good Job!

[ilPitproductions]

this channel is amazing!

P.S: just got to say there's a little mistake here. The analogy is in philosophical investigations not in the tractatus. the analogy is actually repudiating the tractatus

[Donteatacowman]

Yes!! The color experiences!!! So it sounds like this is mostly about how language is an imperfect tool for communicating ideas. But I'm not sure based on the wording. ;P

[Tenebryon]

Let's complete this view : the ideas and thoughts are a dynamic process, they change. How do they change : by the interaction that these shared use of words (the situated view presented by the beetle-in-the-box analogy) have with personal experience (the very thing that Wittgenstein says is inaccessible and therefore have no influence whatsoever). But sometimes the difference between personal experiences will lead to paradoxical situations, where things would not seem at all so obvious for some people in the use of these words and ideas. For a difference in the view of colours, this is kind of "physics", people will not see things the same way, just look at the UV pictures of flowers (just like the bees do), and to the question "do you see this", one may say yes, the other may say not really. For difference in the understanding of words and ideas, well, imagine a beetle is 1:(an insect) for somebody, 2:(an annoying disgusting spirit that lives in your house) for another, or just 3:(an empty word that is to be used when it's meant to be so in conversation) for the last one ; they may agree on the fact that it just makes the house such a nasty place to live in, but they will disagree on the ways to get rid of it, the way it feeds itself or reproduces, and disagree also on any new ideas that may come about around this word "beetle". The idea is that personal experience is a driving force to the life of ideas in society, and that knowledge is a discriminating factor that connects both our experience and our language to the real world, which is a nice way to look at life altogether I'd say.

[williamfrost]

We cannot be someone else but we communicate well enough.

[wynstansmom]

Thank you BBC Radio 4. Now how many John Malkovich's can you spot in this video?

[johnnycents]

The difficulty I find with this analogy is that it seems to try to disregard the relevance of content as a whole in public language, despite not being able to do so on its own grounds.

For example, it doesn't answer to traditionalists who favor a view that the semantic content expressed in our words is public rather than private (i.e. that words signify universal concepts instantiated in more than one person rather than some mysterious, private 'qualia').

It also raises as many problems as it might solve. The dilemma might serve Wittgenstein's point that private sensations are irrelevant to public language, but there is still left the question of how our sensations as psychological facts can come to be discussed (even if the word 'pain' does not signify our private sensations of discomfort, there is still a means of referencing this private sensation in some sense, as is assumed in the very comparison between the word 'pain' and the phrase 'private sensation'). Indeed, it leaves open the plethora of problems that come with trying to collapse the entire representative aspect of words, and the knowledge-that (compared to knowledge-how) which comes with it.

[ToyboatToyboat]

Basically a short summery of Being John M.

[Duongy]

we can try and communicate that 'beetle' through different means of communication (that is language, or to go further, drawings, actions or media).

[DSAK]

C S Peirce said words have "cash value"

[kirbyurner]

Good except he also said a pitfall is thinking there's something we "cannot do" as if we could think of what "doing so" might mean.

[Jdonovanford]

Pain, love, etc. are human sensation, how our sensations as psychological facts are not universal? Most of them are. Therefore, we can't be so far from each other's subjective experiences in regards to those basic sensations.

[forestpepper]

I don't understand. If 2 people each had their own box, but each person's box held an item totally different from that in the other person's box, I think they would soon discover that they could not use the same name to describe both items, even though they never directly viewed the contents of the other person's box. If one box held an actual beetle, while the other box held a rose, a brief conversation would indicate that the name "beetle" could not refer to both items. For instance, the beetle has six legs and crawls around; while the rose has thorns, never moves, and has a sweet aroma.

[ulicadluga]

But, what is the linguistic link here? Is Wittgenstein telling us about the inability to have shared feelings, or is he pointing out that we needn't bother with trying to interpret our personal context in a social context - or perhaps the opposite?

"That of which we cannot speak, we must be quiet about"? Does that feed in to our lives?

Personally, I struggle with Wittgenstein. It's a bit like being told by a priest that there is a higher knowledge out there that you cannot understand, so just submit.

I interpret Wittgenstein in my own way. I believe the language of description is like the language of painting, poetry or fiction.

Strangely, we can describe things that seem too grotesque to be able to happen. I believe that everything that can be imagined is or has happened - or will happen. Perhaps it's as simple as parallel universes, perhaps it's because the description is incomplete, or really that life and the universe are a play - or a film. Is "Le Chien Andalou" a window into another reality or is the window the reality, and what it opens up on just a language?

But then, as is often the accusation made against pornography, perhaps the representation leads us into the world we believe to see through the window.

[tarvoc]

Actually, Wittgenstein thinks that there *is no* "private something". Feelings are actually public, because they can't even be properly separated from their expressions. *I* can know that you feel pain by observing your behavior (and of course, I can be wrong about that, but that only proves that there are criteria for right and wrong here). *You* can't know that you feel pain, because that's just a complicated way of saying that you feel pain, and that's not a state of knowledge, it's a feeling.

[christianrupprechter]

Haha, that's so funny, I... I don't get it.

[lukasdonald]

I think this argument seeks to say something about the problem of other minds. The conclusion, in proposing that the meaning of sensation words cannot come from introspection, seems to be that language as such cannot help with this problem. This conclusion depends on a commitment to 1. the view that language depends for its meaningfulness on its status as public and 2. the reality of private sensation. Wittgenstein has to be committed to private sensation for the argument to work. Given these premises, the conclusion naturally follows. However if the meaning of sensation words (like "pain" in this example) cannot as such be found through introspection, it begs the question how discourse using sensation words can be meaningful at all? Is it not more or less gibberish? But this would assume that whenever anyone enters into discourse using so-called sensation words, they are tacitly agreeing to talk nonsense. This is bullshit. I suppose what Wittgenstein has to commit to with the argument is the less solipsistic view in regard to the problem of other minds that "I can be have some confidence THAT the user of sensation words has sensations, but not WHAT those sensations consist in". Which is a pretty standard viewpoint...
I refer to my sensations using these words because other people's use of them corresponds to my knowledge of what could possibly give them reference - my sensations.