2024-07-2612:57 Status:Complete Tags: ‘Woke’ Wittgenstein
Everyone has a box, and in each box is something called a beetle. You aren’t allowed to look in anyone else’s box, so you aren’t sure if they have the same thing as you - or even anything at all. You are allowed to talk freely about your beetle to the others. Wittgenstein posits that what matters is the way in which people talk about the beetles, not the beetles themselves. When you or I talk about pain, we aren’t actually referring to the electrical impulse felt by say, placing your hand on a fire, but rather an abstract concept shared in conversation. So the beetles don’t matter, but the idea of beetles does.
TLDR: It doesn’t matter what something actually is but how it is used and referred to socially
Source(s)
https://www.reddit.com/r/philosophy/comments/5mvqxj/wittgensteins_beetle_in_a_box_analogy/