Thought Experiment 5: Wittgenstein’s Beetle
Language can function only because there are public
criteria for acceptable usage.
“Suppose everyone has a box with something in it: we
call it ‘a beetle’. No one can look in anybody 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.”
However, and this is Wittgenstein’s point, even if
your box contained something different from my box (perhaps your beetle has an
extra antenna, perhaps in your box is a coin, or perhaps it is empty), that
wouldn’t necessarily stop us using the term “beetle” in the same way. What’s in
the box could be irrelevant. In a similar vein we might ask how you know that
when you think of the colour red, others have the same colour in mind. What
matters is not how we experience colour but that we use colour terms with
reference to the same things, such as tomatoes and post boxes.