We can never fully access another person’s perspective, but to what extent do our individual private experiences matter when it comes to language and shared understanding? According to the early 20th-century Austrian-British philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, the answer is ‘not at all’. A distilled rendering of Wittgenstein’s so-called ‘private language argument’, Wittgenstein’s Beetle in the Box Analogy explains why he believed that the meaning behind language inevitably lay in our shared understanding, and not in our private minds, because we simply can’t access each other’s experiences or sensations.
videoMathematics
Spiral into the ‘golden ratio’ – and separate the myths from the maths
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videoPhilosophy of mind
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videoHistory
Hags, seductresses, feminist icons – how gender dynamics manifest in witches
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videoArt
Background music was the radical invention of a trailblazing composer
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videoMetaphysics
What do past, present and future mean to a philosopher of time?
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videoBioethics
What a 1970 experiment reveals about the possibility and perils of ‘head transplants’
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videoNeuroscience
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11 minutes