The beetle in the box

Here is the passage from Philosophical Investigations, section 293, where Wittgenstein examines one way in which we might conceive of a private language.

Now someone tells me that he knows what pain is only from his own case!— 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.—Here it would be quite possible for everyone to have something different in his box. One might even imagine such a thing con­stantly changing.—But suppose the word “beetle” had a use in these people's language?—If so, it would not be used as the name of a thing. 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.—No, one can “divide through” by the thing in the box; it cancels out, whatever it is.

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.

The analogy between pain, on one hand, and the beetle in the box, on the other, is meant to reinforce the point of the private language argument. If you really could not, even in principle, get into some­one else's box to see if there was a beetle, then whether there was a beetle in the box could not possibly matter to the language-game. Wittgenstein suggests at the end of this passage that we have been misled by the “grammar” of the sentence “I have a pain” into think­ing that when John is in pain, there is a private object that he expe­riences, just as when Joanna has a beetle in a matchbox, there is a public object that she possesses.

Having-a-pain is certainly not an essentially private state. If, for example, I stick a pin in you while you are awake and I see you wince, then, in the normal course of things, I know that you are in pain. (This was the basic idea behind Block's “simple-minded theory of pain” in 1.7.) If Wittgenstein is right, the problems generated by the privacy of pain are all dissolved. Indeed, if we could replace all the Cartesian talk of the allegedly private objects of experience by talk of the public (that is, in principle detectable) property of hav- ing-the-experience, the problem of other minds would disappear. Thus, even though Wittgenstein discusses the issue of privacy in terms of private language and not in terms simply of private objects of experience, his arguments, if successful, solve a central problem in the philosophy of mind.

Wittgenstein's talk of “grammar” here suggests he thinks that, in this case, clarity about how language works will allow us to avoid the philosophical error of thinking that there can be private states. So you might be led to conclude that Wittgenstein's interest in lan­guage was just the sort of interest in language as a tool that I said was not the main reason for philosophical concern with language in our own century. The reason why I think you should not draw this conclusion is that I believe Wittgenstein's concern for issues about grammar is a consequence and not a cause of his skepticism about the usefulness of trying to explain human action, including human speech, by talking about private mental states.

Hobbes' answer would be that to understand a sentence is to know “what thought the speaker had... before his mind.” So, according to Hobbes, if I know what Joanna means by the word “table,” I know that it “signifies” her idea of a table. There are at least two sorts of objection that one might make to this explanation. The first is that, far from helping us understand what Joanna means, it actually makes understanding Joanna impossible. After all, Hobbes thinks that I cannot know about Joanna's ideas since they are Joanna's private property. Yet if this explanation of meaning were right, I would have to know what Joanna's idea of a table was like in order to know what she meant by her word “table”—which, accord­ing to Hobbes, is impossible!

A second objection to Hobbes' theory is that it mistakes a funda­mentally subjective question for an objective one. The question of what experiences go with Joanna's use of words is subjective. It depends on Joanna's particular psychology. But the question of what Joanna means is not, in this sense, subjective at all. What Joanna means by the word “table,” if she understands English, is the same as what you or I mean by it; it is quite independent of her psycho­logical peculiarities.

This second objection was made by the German philosopher Gottlob Frege in a very well-known article called “On Sense and Reference.” “Sense” and “reference” are the words that Frege used, as we shall see, to explain what is involved in understanding lan­guage. For the moment, let's just take “sense” to refer to meaning and “reference” to mean the thing that a name names. In this pas­sage, he makes his point by considering what is involved in under­standing what someone means when they use the name “Bucephalus,” which was the name of Alexander the Great's horse.

One should distinguish between the reference and the sense of a sign, on the one hand, and the associated idea, on the other.

One reasonable response to these two objections, both of which are arguments against the subjective character of the Hobbesian theory of meaning, is to try to explain what is going on in language not by saying how it relates to our inner subjective experiences but by say­ing how it relates to the outer objective world. And Frege was the pioneer of modern thought on this issue.

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