Great Ideas of Philosophy

III. As long as we subscribe to a “picture theory,” we can tap into the knowledge of another only through theother’s introspective reports. Likewise, we publicize our knowledge by revealing “our pictures” to others.A. My knowledge, as regards my own mental life, is private and incorrigible. It can’t be corrected by anybodyelse.B. The central claim of science, in the patrimony of Bacon and Newton, is that the suitable subject ofscientific inquiry is that which is, in principle, accessible to observation.1. But if the contents of my mental life are something over which I have total epistemological authorityand if all of my mental life is filled up with the facts of the external world, solipsism seems to belurking everywhere.2. Thus, the problem of knowledge is just the problem of my knowledge of the external worldC. This is the received view, and Wittgenstein set out to show that it is based on any number of mistakes,largely grammatical. They have to do with the way we play what Wittgenstein famously refers to as the“language game.”D. To illustrate the necessity of such rules, Wittgenstein uses the beetle in the box exemplum:1. Consider a room with a half-dozen persons, each with a small box.2. No one can see the contents of any box but his own.3. When questioned as to the contents of his box, each person responds, “Beetle.”4. Wittgenstein asks: If each person had his own private language, how could anyone know the meaningof the word beetle in any language but his own?E. To carry the example further, suppose you are alone—the only thinking being in the cosmos—and wantedto identify the contents of the box. How to do it?1. A name signifies something only to the extent that it is understood to stand for the thing signified.2. But “to stand for” anything, a sign must be related to that thing by some sort of rule or conventionalunderstanding.3. But the adoption of conventions is a social act. Conventions are part of the actual practices of peoplein the world.4. It is simply impossible to apply a private rule to a private occurrence! You can’t even violate the rulesof the language game unless there are other players.F. Wittgenstein concludes that our minds are not black boxes to which we alone have access, whose contentswe name for ourselves. How could anyone, seeing only something in the box, know it to be a beetle,without prior agreements on what a beetle is?IV. Thomas Reid took the position that if there were not a natural language, there could never be an artificiallanguage of cooperative and expressive content. It is a language of sounds and facial expression, of intonationand posture. Wittgenstein takes very much the same position.A. The natural language of pain, for instance, is grimacing, crying and cringing.1. This is not something that’s learned; it is in place.2. Artificial, conventional forms and signs can be grafted onto that natural language.B. We use the resources of our natural language to build the shared reality represented in our artificiallanguage.V. Where there is meaning, there must be social conventions and social practices. There is a discursive historybehind every experience by which that experience gains its meaning. It begins as a public phenomenon andmight be internalized in some way thereafter.A. Thus, the language game is a set of social practices not reducible to the experiences of any one person, notpossibly confined to the arena of a private mind.1. “Beetle” refers to an object that can be dubbed “beetle” only by those with a sufficiently shared formof life for such denominations to come to have settled meaning.2. Thus, meaning is socially constructed through the actual practices of the community.B. As philosophy is a search for meanings, a search for truth, a search for rules of conduct, and so on, it is aninevitably social undertaking proceeding according to accepted grammatical (rule-governed) forms.©2004 The Teaching Company Limited Partnership 33