In this article, I’m looking at the brilliant philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein’s “The Beetle in the Box” analogy.

Wittgenstein rose to fame with his first book, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, in which he proposed the idea of a picture theory for words. Very loosely put, words correspond to objects in the real world, and any statement should be a picture of these objects in relation to one another—for example, “the cat is on the mat.” However, in his later years Wittgenstein turned away from his ideas. He came to see the meaning of words in how they are used by the public, realizing that private language isn’t possible. To provide a simple explanation, we need an external reference to calibrate meanings to our words. If you’re experiencing pain, all you can say is that you experience pain. While the experience of pain is private, all we have is a public language to explain it. For example, if you experience a severe pain on Monday and decide to call it “X,” and a week from that day, I have some pain and decide to call it “Y,” one cannot be sure if “X” was the same as “Y.”

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