The Merkel-Schulz exercise in vapidity and The Beetle in a Box Analogy

That #TVDuell between Uckermark and Würselen before the elections with an already foretold outcome.

Merkel and Schulz getting revved up for the TV Duell

Perhaps it's going to be an abridged form of 'Scenes from a Marriage' (remember back then when you were still a virgin?!) They will encounter some 'Problems of Human Communication' along those hours of boredom, guaranteed by some dickheads & tarts from German TV. Take the 'e' out of 'duell' and you save yourself some ass time.

Let's turn to some much more interesting problems: Ludwig Wittgenstein & His Philosophical Insights on the Problems of Human Communication and his Beetle in a Box analogy.

His Philosophical Investigation's approach to the problems of communication involves a development of the “ostensive”—or demonstrative—role of language. Wittgenstein made an argument that language can only serve a social, rather than a personal, subjective, function. To make the point, he introduced his “Beetle in a Box” analogy, which you can see explained above in an animated BBC video written by Nigel Warburton and narrated by Aidan Turner.

The analogy uses the idea of each of us claiming to have a beetle in a box as a stand in for our individual, private experiences. We all claim to have them (we can even observe brain states), but no one can ever see inside the theater of our minds to verify. We simply have to take each other's word for it. We play “language games,” which only have meaning in respect to their context. That such games can be mutually intelligible among individuals who are otherwise  opaque to each other has to do with our shared environment, abilities, and limitations. Should we, however, meet a lion who could speak—in perfectly intelligible English—we would not, Wittgenstein asserted, be able to understand a single word. The vastly different experiences of human versus lion would not translate through any medium.

Because no one can really know what's in any box but their own, the word "beetle" ceases to have any meaning outside of "that thing that's in your box." The box in Wittgenstein's analogy is the mind. We assume that the inner workings of another person's mind—the feeling of love, the sensation of pain, the very experience of being conscious—are pretty similar to our own. But that's just an assumption. We can only see into our own minds and describe that experience in words to other people, and they can do the same with us. That's why this analogy is sometimes called the "private language argument": the language we use to refer to our private experiences is defined by the way it's used with other people, and to have language that exclusively describes your own private experiences is impossible.

There are quite some interpretations on the 'private language argument' and I really do have to read it again and again. This following made immediate sense to me:

Another possible interpretation is that Wittgenstein wished to tackle Comte’s problem about the impossibility of introspection; the idea that I would need to somehow split my mind between feeling a sensation and observing myself feeling that sensation. However, according to Wittgenstein, I do not need to observe the fact that I am in pain; I know it perfectly well already, I couldn’t not know it; and given that for Wittgenstein language cannot describe inner sensations, introspection would be useless anyway. It could not tell us anything we do not already know. But both of these implications seem to be side-effects rather than being the main inspiration for the argument.

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