“Ah, I Know How You Feel!”, Do You Really Though?
Imagine the following familiar scenario. Your best friend starts “describing” a certain situation that he/she has just experienced. All of a sudden, you feel compelled to reply, “Ah, I know how you feel!” To your surprise you’ve been through the same exact situation a while earlier! Wow, no wonder you guys are besties!
Although you both might have gone through the same exact experience, it’s absolutely impossible that you both felt the same exact way about it! Yup, it’s true and Austrian-British philosopher, Ludwig Wittgenstein, has a rather interesting analogy to prove this, called the Beetle in a Box. But before we get into it, let’s first take a step back and talk a little bit about the nature of language.
Inevitably Lost in Translation!
One compelling theory on language is that it maps different words to our different “thoughts and sensations”. Considering that, the “thoughts and sensations” in my “mind” are different from those in yours. Regardless, I can match a thought or sensation I have to a word in our common language, and then speak the word. You then match that same word to a “thought or sensation” in your “mind”. Thus, our “thoughts and sensations” in effect form a so-called “private language” which we translate into our common language and so share.
Now, different languages have varying degrees of articulacy when “describing” different “thoughts and sensations” and that’s generally why words drastically lose meaning in translation. For the time being, forget about that and let’s further explore this intriguing concept of a “private language”.
“Private Language”, Does It Really Exist?
Obsessed with the difficulties of language, Wittgenstein introduced the controversial Private Language argument. In his argument, for a language to qualify as “private” it must meet the following 3 criteria:
- It must be unlearnable
- It must be untranslatable into any ordinary language
- The speaker is exclusively able to make sense of it
In essence, the Private Language argument argues that a language understandable by only a single individual is incoherent. According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “The reason for this is that such a so-called language would, necessarily, be unintelligible to its supposed originator too, for he would be unable to establish meanings for its putative signs.” This implies that language, by nature, is social and such a “private language” can’t possibly exist.
Now brace yourself for a good ol’ controversy! The following Beetle in a Box analogy was introduced by Wittgenstein himself in an attempt to destroy his own Private Language argument!
Hey! No Peeking into My Box!
The Beetle in a Box analogy, in contrast, implies the existence of this so-called “private language” and goes like this: Suppose that everyone has a “box” that only they and no one else can see into. Each person describes what he/she sees in the box as a “beetle”.
Wittgenstein points out that in such situation, there might be different things in everyone’s boxes, or even nothing at all in some of them. The thing in the box, could be changing all the time for the matter of fact! Because no one can really know what’s in any box but their own, the word “beetle” becomes meaningless outside the context of that thing in your “box”. Analogously the “box” represents your “mind” and the “beetle” represents your different “thoughts and sensations”.
Mind Your Words!
So how did we go about associating a word with a thought or sensation? And in turn, how does this association lead to the word actually meaning that particular thought or sensation? Have languages generally originated from a vocabulary that reflects a single speaker’s private “thoughts and sensations” that we later just acknowledged and adapted as our own?
According to Wittgenstein, there must be some system of rules that establish meaning for any given word and that it’s highly doubtful that such system could exist in the privacy of one’s own mind. Thus, debunking the existence of such a “private language” once more.
Still Think You Know How Someone Else Feels?
In conclusion, your public usage of words doesn’t explicitly “describe” your inner thoughts and sensations, yet it merely “expresses” them. Public words that refer to inner thoughts and sensations don’t get their meaning from these thoughts and sensations themselves. All these words tell us is that there is a thought or sensation, not what the thought or sensation is.
To Wittgenstein, linguistic meaning is the use of words to “express” rather than to “describe” our inner thoughts and sensations. Honestly, you’ll never truly know how someone else feels!
