[HN Gopher] Visualization of Wittgenstein's Tractatus logico-phi...
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Visualization of Wittgenstein's Tractatus logico-philosophicus
Author : martinlaz
Score : 61 points
Date : 2021-02-26 11:25 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (pbellon.github.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (pbellon.github.io)
| acabal wrote:
| You can download a free ebook edition of Tractatus with nice
| MathML formulas at Standard Ebooks:
| https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/ludwig-wittgenstein/tracta...
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| I've actually always wanted something like this for Spinoza's
| Ethics. The whole book is a directed graph, and is hard to read
| without constantly leafing around (propositions supported by
| other propositions and their corollaries, etc.). Similar in
| structure to this book (the "geometric method") as both are
| inspired by Euclid's Geometry (and I'm sure Wittgenstein had read
| Spinoza as well).
|
| Spinoza's Ethics is probably more deeply nested than this, and it
| would be handy to be able to see the original Latin forms of
| propositions alongside the English translation(s). The highly
| structured and granular form of the book means that you could see
| the translations on a proposition by proposition basis, so it
| would really lend itself to that kind of thing.
|
| I went so far as to work the whole of the book into XML back in
| 1999 or 2000, but I've long since lost that. These days I'd
| probably put it into a relational database.
|
| Every few years I attempt it, but UI dev isn't my forte.
| blululu wrote:
| This is cool in general, but I feel like it disrupts the flow of
| the writing/presentation. There is something fundamentally poetic
| about the structure and rhythm of the Tractatus. Perhaps that is
| why it has held so much appeal. In any case I feel like
| indentation or some other nesting convention found in software
| formatting would do a better job of visually representing the
| logical structure of the book without disrupting the flow.
| sibane wrote:
| I personally think the structure of the book is it's biggest
| weakness. No matter how poetic, it really doesn't support
| communicating it's material very well. At least not to normal
| people.
|
| That said, I actually did a redesign of the book
| (https://i.imgur.com/QFyuIsd.jpg) years ago using indentation
| and lines as guides. I reckon that's the best way to improve
| the experience in book form without fundamentally altering the
| text itself.
|
| If I were to do the same for web, I'd also make sure the reader
| always sees the statements from upper layers to get the full
| picture of the context in which the current statement is said.
| 74d-fe6-2c6 wrote:
| Is this just some hyped up collection of interconnected
| assertions (for lack of a better description) or does it actually
| reveal something non-trivial if you take the effort to dive into
| it?
| The_rationalist wrote:
| My theory is that the tractacus was a bullshit detector made by
| Wittgenstein. If after reading it you think it is genius you
| fail the test, if you understand that it is a bunch of refined
| nonsense you pass. Honestly it is obvious to anybody that
| actually spent time reading it, e.g even the truth tables in it
| are invalid. He conclude the book by saying that when you don't
| know what you're talking about, it would be better for you to
| not speak about it, this is obviously a meta-critic about the
| tractacus. Ironically, most philosophers fail the test
| (obviously most of most philosophers admire it out of
| authority, without having read a single page from it nor it's
| subsequent book (as if the subsequent book was even needed for
| understanding it's true semantically-empty nature..))
| 74d-fe6-2c6 wrote:
| > e.g even the truth tables in it are invalid
|
| that would be a very specific and relevant point to make. can
| you back this up with sources or more than one example?
|
| > My theory is that the tractacus was a bullshit detector
|
| Are you serious? This seems like a fun idea but doesn't
| really pass my own bullshit detector.
| The_rationalist wrote:
| _Two objects of the same logical form are--apart from their
| ex- ternal properties--only differentiated from one another
| in that they are different._ differentiated in that they
| are different. It is a mediocre circular reasoning. The
| correct statement could have been to say that they are
| internally structurally the same object but have different
| _identity_ like e.g in nominal typing.
|
| HOWEVER, I skimmed the tractacus years ago and now I update
| my jugement: The tractacus has many flaws but it is not
| pure bullshit nor a bullshit detector test despite the
| striking irony of Wittgenstein saying in the preface and in
| the conclusion _Its whole meaning could be summed up
| somewhat as follows: What can be said at all can be said
| clearly; and whereof one cannot speak thereof one must be
| silent._ And then spending a hundred a pages talking in a
| non clear, vague manner about a few conclusions that are
| one 1) obvious to any rationalist And 2) that can be summed
| up in ~one page Cf the symbol grounding problem, defining
| empiricism and that metaphysical questions are by design
| out of the scope of science and therefore cannot be
| answered (well an exhaustive list of the possibles can
| still be given). This book has a very low signal to noise
| ratio which make it easy to mistakely take for bullshit
| /pseudo intellectualism. As a NLU researcher some of his
| thoughts are actually interesting about how do define a
| semantic space even if most of them are trivial.
| bondarchuk wrote:
| Rationalists are all about cognitive biases, huh? Here's
| one for you:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effe
| ct
| steve_gh wrote:
| The Tractatus is basically an exploration of the limits
| of Tautology - anything that follows from the axioms is
| tautologous. And we have no grounds to speak about
| anything else
| The_rationalist wrote:
| _can you back this up with sources or more than one
| example?_ I am referring to the case x=3 y=3 of the
| assertion 4.442
| gjm11 wrote:
| There is no x nor y in 4.442. I have two guesses at what
| you might mean.
|
| 1. Maybe you're referring to the last sentence "(The
| number of places in the left-hand pair of brackets is
| determined by the number of terms in the right-hand
| pair.)" and saying: haha, if the number of terms in the
| right-hand pair is 3 then the number of places in the
| left-hand pair is 8, not 3. But Wittgenstein doesn't say
| "is equal to", he says "is determined by", and that's
| correct.
|
| 2. Maybe you're referring to the concrete truth-table,
| where if you label its rows and columns 1,2,3 etc., the
| slot with x=y=3 is left blank. That's a weird notational
| choice but I'm pretty sure it isn't a _mistake_. Look at
| 4.44: "The sign that results from correlating the mark
| 'T' with truth-possibilities is a propositional sign."
| Wittgenstein's being terse as usual, but I think what he
| means is that when reading one of these truth-tables what
| we need to know is where the Ts are. For a bit more
| explicitness, look further back at 4.43: "We can express
| agreement with truth-possibilities by correlating the
| mark 'T' (true) with them in the schema. _The absence of
| this mark means disagreement._ " (Emphasis mine.) So the
| right-hand column of his truth tables uses T to mean that
| the corresponding proposition is true, and the absence of
| a T to mean that it's false. Which is exactly what he
| does in 4.442. He's clearly aware that there's a cost in
| clarity, which is why after writing it as "(TT-T)(p,q)"
| he says: "or more explicitly (TTFT)(p,q)".
|
| Either way, I think you're wrong to characterize this as
| a mistake.
| The_rationalist wrote:
| I agree
| 74d-fe6-2c6 wrote:
| well, that escalated quickly ... :D
| davidivadavid wrote:
| I would always give Wittgenstein the benefit of the doubt
| on such relatively trivial things given 1) this work was
| checked thoroughly by the likes of Bertrand Russell 2)
| the topic has evolved considerably over the last ~100
| years, or at least the language and notation used to talk
| about it, which may lead to misunderstandings for today's
| readers.
| mudita wrote:
| "He conclude the book by saying that when you don't know what
| you're talking about, it would be better for you to not speak
| about it"
|
| That's NOT what he wrote. The quote is:
|
| "whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must remain silent." (or
| "What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence." in
| this translation)
|
| Proposition 7 is about the limits of language, not about
| dissing idiots.
| hilbert42 wrote:
| A perhaps useful quick reference point-by-point summary of the
| Tractatus but it would be even better if one could see the whole
| tree and branches in full or expandable/collapsible branch by
| branch. As is, it requires the text to be open in front of one
| (this may not always be convenient in the internet age).
| fouc wrote:
| Looking at Tractatus logico-philosophicus, I'm reminded of Ayn
| Rand's Objectivism - another attempt to derive a philosophy from
| axiomatic principles.
|
| However, it's probably impossible to deductively derive something
| that lines up with reality, given how language itself is an
| imperfect medium for that.
|
| It looks like Wittgenstein eventually points out the problems
| with the Tractatus in his later works like "The Philosophical
| Investigations"
| conformist wrote:
| While I don't know a lot about Objectivism, it feels like there
| is a very fundamental difference. The Tractatus bans things
| like ethics and perhaps even metaphysics (and therefore itself,
| which is the ladder-type argument) to the realm of the
| unspeakable, whereas Ayn Rand seems to try to draw ethical or
| moral conclusions?
| Veen wrote:
| > It looks like Wittgenstein eventually points out the problems
| with the Tractatus in his later works like "The Philosophical
| Investigations"
|
| Yes, he came to the same conclusion you did, that what he
| attemtped in the Tractatus was misguided at best and impossible
| at worst.
| Viliam1234 wrote:
| > what he attemtped in the Tractatus was misguided at best
| and impossible at worst
|
| But it remains his most famous and most quoted (well, that
| one sentence specifically) book.
| kbd wrote:
| IIRC doesn't the Tractatus itself famously end with a kind of
| acknowledgment of its own failure? "Whereof one can't speak,
| thereof one must be silent?"
| Rerarom wrote:
| There was also this some years ago
|
| https://wittgenstein-network.gitlab.io
|
| https://arxiv.org/abs/1703.04336
| talkingtab wrote:
| Don't know much about Tractatus. Don't know much about d3js. But
| I do know this let me see. what a wonderful world they can be.
| dane-pgp wrote:
| Whoa, la ta ta ta ta ta ta (Science book)
| talkingtab wrote:
| :-)
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(page generated 2021-02-28 23:02 UTC)