Wittgenstein's Beetle:
Imagine - everyone has a small box in which they keep a beetle. However, no one is allowed to look in anyone else's box, only their own.
The word "beetle" over time becomes to mean what is in everyone's box.
The beetle is like an individual's mind. No one can know anyone else's mind but it is generally assumed that the mental workings of other people's mind are very similar to our own.
The word beetle - as we have no way of verifying what it really means simply means "what is in the box".
In this way the mind is simply "what is in your head".
Therefore to say there must be a special mental entity called a mind that makes our experiences private is wrong. This is partly as language has meaning through public usage.
The word mind/beetle was given a definition through conversation and can therefore only ever mean just "what is in your head", not some mental substance that no one is sure exists.

	Created by lucy-hook about 11 years ago

A-Level Philosophy (Philosophy of the Mind ) Note on Behaviourism , created by lucy-hook on 15/01/2014.