Black Box Beetle: Über Privatheit und Intransparenz

Wittgenstein has criticized the philosophical concept of "Privatheit" in his Philosophical Investigations from the perspective of the philosophy of language. In Luhmann"s systems theory "intransparency", that is, the problem that one has no access to the mind of someone else, seems to be analogous to "Privatheit". Do the epistemological problems (of solipsim and semantical scepticism) implicated by the privatist concept therefore return in systems theory? In my opinion, Luhmann addressed these problems by introducing the notion of "double contingency" in the communication. On the basis of a systematic comparison between the two terms "Privatheit" and "intransparency", I argue that the model of "double contingency" is not necessarily bound to the concept of "Privatheit". The systems-theoretical construction of double contingency even provides a way to formulate Wittgenstein"s argumentation against privatist scepticism without reference to the postulation of an integrative function of ordinary language.