[HN Gopher] Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Mind on Fire
___________________________________________________________________
Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Mind on Fire
Author : miobrien
Score : 146 points
Date : 2021-09-21 13:35 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.newstatesman.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.newstatesman.com)
| michjedi wrote:
| Surprisingly for many, Wittgenstein had a deathbed conversion to
| Catholicism.
| michaelsbradley wrote:
| Ludwig Wittgenstein Confesses (1992):
|
| https://www.firstthings.com/article/1992/06/ludwig-wittgenst...
| InitialLastName wrote:
| I don't see where that article in any way engages with what
| GP says; it appears to use "confession" in a more
| metaphorical appeal to religiosity as a concept rather than
| to a specific spiritual ritual.
| jamiek88 wrote:
| Many lies are surprising.
| psychoslave wrote:
| But it is rarely as surprising as actual truth. :D
| question005 wrote:
| Not true, other sources say he was actually molested by
| Catholic priests as a child and on his deathbed he finally
| named his tormentors.
| Veen wrote:
| To whom did he reveal this? The Catholic friends and the
| Dominican priest at his bedside? Which sources are you
| referring to?
| leephillips wrote:
| This is precisely the perpetual Catholic slander that
| Christopher Hitchens referred to regularly. A lie told by
| believers about several prominent freethinkers.
| coldtea wrote:
| Funny you should say that, as Christopher Hitchens in his
| deathbed, converted to Catholicism himself.
| jpxw wrote:
| Source?
| Cipater wrote:
| This is untrue.
|
| Edit: This one went over my head.
| samhw wrote:
| I'm fairly sure he's making an ironic joke about the
| comment he was replying to.
| Veen wrote:
| It goes both ways. On the one hand the religious want to
| claim eveyone as one of their own, especially in death-bed
| conversions. On the other hand, there are the rabidly anti-
| Catholic types who make up lies about people having been
| abused without evidence, as we see in this thread. Or the
| atheists who conveniently forget that quite a lot of "free
| thinkers" were religious.
|
| Wittgenstein was not a Catholic because he had no faith, but
| he was respecful of Catholicism, had many Catholic friends,
| and asked for a priest to be present as he died. There's no
| evidence he formally converted.
| gverrilla wrote:
| https://www.bbc.com/news/topics/c9z6w6n469et/catholic-
| church...
| Veen wrote:
| What of it? What would Wittgenstein say to the syllogism,
| 'Some Catholic priests are child abusers, Wittgenstein
| was a Catholic in childhood, therefore Wittgenstein was
| abused by a priest'?
| goto11 wrote:
| The comment about abuse is obviously a tongue-in-cheek
| retort to the claims he converted on his deathbed.
| masswerk wrote:
| Well, as mentioned in the article, at the time of writing the
| _Tractatus,_ Wittgenstein was deeply moved by the kind of
| spirituality found in Leo Tolstoy 's work. However, it's the
| explicit purpose of the _Tractatus_ to draw a demarcation
| line between propositions of logic (and by this, meaningful
| sentences of philosophy) and any mystical or spiritual
| feelings, thoughts, or faith. So it really doesn 't matter at
| all.
| [deleted]
| trutannus wrote:
| The only sources for the claim are evangelic Christian
| websites, and this specific thread. This thread is actually
| one of the top results for the search now. I've spent a lot
| of time reading Wittgenstein, and reading about Wittgenstein.
| This was never mentioned in any credible source I've come
| across.
| klik99 wrote:
| I plan on doing that - just in case the pearly gates are truly
| guarded by someone who requires you believe in a specific God.
| It's called hedging your bets
| InitialLastName wrote:
| If there are multiple possible gods, and you get punished
| more for believing in the wrong one than for not believing in
| one, you might be better off without it.
| samhw wrote:
| The answer is clearly to believe in all of them! With a bit
| of possible-worlds logic it should be doable.
| baron_harkonnen wrote:
| Let's suppose this was even true, what would it matter?
|
| There's this weird assumption in popular culture that somehow
| the moment near death contains more truth than other moments,
| as if right before passing we have some "ah!" moment. But the
| opposite seems far more reasonable: as we get closer to death
| our reasonings will become increasingly distorted.
|
| For example, a common narrative is "on their death bed they had
| wished they had focused less on career and more on family." Of
| course that's what you'd think on your death bed! You're likely
| scared, feeling alone and wish there was someone with you. You
| also don't have to worry about rent, gaining the respect of
| your peers, what you're going to do with your free time,
| retirement etc.
|
| The idea that the moment of death brings some sort of grand
| understanding only makes sense if you presuppose there _is_
| some grand sense behind it all. Otherwise it 's just the final
| moment of a long process of physical, emotional and mental
| decline.
| Veen wrote:
| > Let's suppose this was even true, what would it matter?
|
| Your analysis begs the question. It assumes the secular
| worldview, but that's precisely what a deathbed conversion
| repudiates. To a Catholic, deathbed conversions matter a
| great deal because Catholics don't conceptualize death (or
| life) in the same way as a secular person.
| baron_harkonnen wrote:
| You're just reiterating my point. Even if this where true,
| it doesn't add any information. For a Catholic it simply
| affirms their Catholic worldview, however for someone with
| a secular worldview it is also perfectly inline with their
| existing views.
|
| As such the statement "Surprisingly" make no sense, since
| this information is not "surprising" to anyone, even if it
| were true (which is it very likely not).
| slibhb wrote:
| Of course is matters. Not because it indicates some "grand
| understanding" or "aha" just because it shows how we spend
| our entire lives trying to look life head-on without
| flinching but, in the end, we almost all flinch.
| mbg721 wrote:
| If you're Catholic, it's significant as one's last chance to
| turn away from sin, discard this life, and join Christ in an
| eternal life that isn't this one.
|
| If you're not, then think of it like an actuary: at every
| moment in your life, you have to live with the sum of your
| past and future choices, adjusted as need be. At the last
| moment, you have no more uncertain future choices, so it's
| clear what the optimal path was, so naturally you have
| regret.
| burnished wrote:
| "Sinner actually going to heaven, not hell" priest declares to
| grieving family. I wonder how many so called 'deathbed
| conversions' actually happened, vs how many were completely
| fabricated.. and not in the sense of some one wearing robes
| tenting their fingers and laughing maniacally, but instead
| trying to 'offer salvation' and taking literally any movement
| or noise as confirmation.
| codeulike wrote:
| Favourite Wittgenstein quote:
|
| _A philosopher who is not taking part in discussions is like a
| boxer who never goes into the ring_
| advanced-DnD wrote:
| Have that changed to politics... These discussions never went
| outside of its scholastic bubble and have not shape the society
| in the past decades.
| lordleft wrote:
| I know Wittgenstein repudiated the Tractatus, but did he ever
| alight on another vision of the world & the limits of what can be
| expressed? Or was 'Late Wittgenstein' primarily a more bounded
| project concerned with the philosophy of language?
| nabla9 wrote:
| He wrote a book after Tractatus. It's called Philosophical
| Investigations. There he sets up, among many other things, the
| whole "meaning is use" theory.
|
| One of the most influential books in the last century together
| with Tractatus.
| jhickok wrote:
| Repudiated is a bit strong. In some sense Wittgenstein hated
| everything he had written. However, Wittgenstein did believe
| that his friend had shown the system he laid out in Tractatus
| as unworkable:
|
| https://www3.nd.edu/~jspeaks/courses/2007-8/43904/_HANDOUTS/...
|
| The so-called "late" period his scope was no more bounded than
| the early Wittgenstein, but he changed his method of analysis
| from strict conceptual analysis to something more
| conversational. His study of language is not really interesting
| for what it contributed to philosophy of language, but because
| of the implications to the methods of philosophy itself.
| musesum wrote:
| My takeaway was that Concepts have Contexts. The problem is that
| the Context may vary from person to person. Kinda like an n-gram,
| where n can vary between people.
|
| Later, I read Lotfi Zadeh who treated Concepts as a kind of
| probability distribution. Such as mapping someone's height,
| described as "short", "tall", "very tall", to a range measured in
| centimeters. Pygmies and Belgians may vary.
|
| Now days, I guess we'd use word embeddings.
| reggieband wrote:
| As an aside, if you like graphic novels and philoshopy then I
| highly recommend Logicomix [1]. This work heavily features Ludwig
| Wittgenstein. I can't claim it is historically accurate but I do
| think it is quite an interesting read.
|
| 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logicomix
| klik99 wrote:
| My rule of thumb summary of Wittgenstein: If you can spend an
| entire book on the meaning of a concept (IE Truth-with-a-
| capital-T, The meaning of life) then you may be confusing an
| artifact of grammar and language with something that exists in
| actual reality.
|
| In other words, just because you can construct a correct sentence
| with a word doesn't mean it actually makes sense. Statements can
| be true or false, but can a heart be true? My understanding is
| the Tractatus was meant to "end philosophy" by implying that most
| of philosophy arises from the confusion between these grammatical
| artifacts and reality.
|
| I read a lot of philosophy in my 20s, but I think only Marcus
| Aurelius and Wittgenstein actual made me into a better, happier
| person.
| colechristensen wrote:
| A not so small portion of philosophy can come down to defining
| words and bits of grammar in robust ways or at least coming to
| an agreement how terms are used differently by different
| people. Importantly, much philosophy fails to point this out
| and gets a bit lost failing to accept that all words are made
| up and can have arbitrary meanings - picking meanings shouldn't
| be so contentious sometimes.
| fantod wrote:
| > My understanding is the Tractatus was meant to "end
| philosophy" by implying that most of philosophy arises from the
| confusion between these grammatical artifacts and reality.
|
| Apologies in advance as I haven't read any Wittgenstein myself,
| but am I wrong in thinking this is what the Philosophical
| Investigations was about (as opposed to the Tractatus)?
| jhrmnn wrote:
| In Investigations Wittgenstein realized that he went perhaps
| too far in Tractatus, and that words can be meaningful also
| "by consensus" not only "from first principles".
| mabub24 wrote:
| The relationship between the arguments in Tractatus and
| Philosophical Investigations (PI) is quite complex and, while
| there is some disagreement over the the degree of his
| renunciation, it's generally understood that by the time of
| his writing much of the notebooks that ended up as PI
| Wittgenstein had altered his understanding of philosophy and
| language quite a bit.
|
| Both had a sort of "end philosophy" ambition, to a degree.
| The Tractatus, with its ambition to address the ways that
| language _touches_ the world in a picture theory, was more
| akin to the idea of "solving" philosophy in a sense. In PI,
| he makes a change in his view of philosophy towards
| anthropology and remarks on language that is rooted in
| behavior and use. PI "ends philosophy" more in the sense of
| dissolving philosophical issues, by revealing the conceptual
| underpinnings of a number of philosophical debates as
| nonsense. Philosophy's job, thus, becomes conceptual
| clarification.
|
| So to answer your question, yes, though there is some
| overlap.
| bmj wrote:
| _I read a lot of philosophy in my 20s, but I think only Marcus
| Aurelius and Wittgenstein actual made me into a better, happier
| person._
|
| My advisor at university, a philosophy professor, said the same
| thing about Wittgenstein. During the initial part of his
| graduate studies, philosophy left him empty, and depressed.
| Discovering, and focusing on, Wittgenstein, changed his life.
| erichahn wrote:
| Wittgenstein had this effect on me too. But not the
| Tractatus. What calmed me down was the Philosophical
| Investigations and Kripkes Naming and Necessity.
| jhickok wrote:
| Wittgenstein has a reputation for being a "therapeutic
| philosopher", in the same vein as Kierkegaard, Nietzsche,
| etc.
|
| There is a fantastic book that I recommend along these lines:
| https://www.amazon.com/American-Philosophy-Story-John-
| Kaag/d...
| JBlue42 wrote:
| I also enjoyed Kaag's "Hiking with Nietzsche: On Becoming
| Who You Are"
| jhickok wrote:
| Agreed, I actually read that one first. I was bummed to
| find out that he recently divorced his second wife who he
| talks about so highly in both his books.
| ckosidows wrote:
| > I read a lot of philosophy in my 20s, but I think only Marcus
| Aurelius and Wittgenstein actual made me into a better, happier
| person.
|
| How about Epicurus?
|
| I'm not at all in the philosophy realm, so I don't know who is
| revered or reviled. Maybe he's not noteworthy enough, too
| idealistic or just plain wrong? Perhaps he's passed over for
| some other reason.
|
| The few things I've read about his philosophies seem like
| they're focused on finding basic happiness. Am I just
| oversimplifying?
| blix wrote:
| One problem with reading Epicurus is that there is not so
| much surviving Epicurus to read. The second-hand story from
| Lucretius is about as good as you can get.
| ckosidows wrote:
| Ah, I suppose that makes sense then.
| AQuantized wrote:
| Buddhist philosophy also has a strong focus on showing that
| arbitrary conventions shouldn't be taken too seriously, and
| that a great deal of suffering arises as a result of believing
| too strongly in useful fictions.
|
| Nagarjuna is one particularly impressive philosopher of the
| Madhyamaka school, a school which he set the groundwork for in
| his book Mulamadhyamakakarika (Madhyamaka means middle way, a
| karika is a work composed of verses that concisely formulate
| some doctrine). There's a great translation and explanation by
| Mark Siderits and Shoryu Katsura if anyone is interested.
|
| I think there are a lot of parallels with Wittgenstein's
| philosophy, and it speaks to Wittgenstein's genius that he was
| able to conceive of a similar philosophy largely independently.
| masswerk wrote:
| In a nutshell, Wittgenstein showed (or, attempted to show) that
| much like we can't gain information from logic, we can't gain
| transcendental meaning ( _das Mystische_ ) from logic - even,
| if (or, more precisely, provided that) we discard any
| meaningless propositions. (Mind that this is in sharp contrast
| to Kant, who engaged in his _Critique of Pure Reason_ in order
| to address pure ethics.)
|
| It's a bit like "Godel for transcendentals". But this has been
| mostly ignored, while the tools used by Wittgenstein have been
| an inspiration to many.
| samvega_ wrote:
| Kant's critiqe of pure reason was what the title suggests
| actually, he also argued that logic (i.e pure reason), cannot
| hammer out ethics (what one ought to do) nor metaphysics
| (what ultimately is). It's only practical reason which can
| determine morality, i.e. his point of departure for his
| ethical theory is the acting being, not pure logic.
| klik99 wrote:
| Interesting way to put it: "Godel for transcendentals" -
| probably only able to put it that way with the benefit of
| time.
|
| The relationship between the Russell/Godel camp and
| Wittgenstein is complicated - In some ways at odds (as they
| grew apart Russell thought Wittgenstein was dedicating his
| life to not thinking) but I think they were concerned with
| the same questions.
|
| Godel and Wittgenstein would probably both agree that you
| can't describe the system from within the system. Godel was
| more interested pulling the threads and exploring the edges
| of that, whereas Wittgenstein took that to mean philosophy
| (at least as it pertains to living) was a lost cause and
| distraction from reality. In other words, I feel they were on
| the same page but had completely different ultimate
| interests.
|
| And ultimately, the Russell camp won - a modern echo of that
| is the search for the one equation that will describe all of
| reality, or at least a belief that even if we never find it
| there is still one out there. Wittgenstein would probably
| believe that no man made system could fundamentally describe
| reality.
|
| It's largely been ignored, yes, because where do you go from
| there? Someone who believes in Wittgenstein is probably more
| likely to join the army or become an architect than become a
| philosopher, which guarantees that it will be ignored.
| Evolutionarily it's an idea that doesn't fit into the
| ecosystem.
| masswerk wrote:
| You may say that Wittgenstein in his later phase (W II) was
| more interested in pulling the threads, when he explored
| concepts like pain as a stand-in for internal evidence (or,
| as W I put it: the mystical). However, this was also on an
| entirely different page, as in comprehending the subject as
| a social process.
|
| Mind that I do not mean to suggest any kind of parallelism
| in a strict sense (hence the emoticon.)
|
| Regarding the lost cause as a distraction, I'm not so sure
| about that. I guess, Wittgenstein would have insisted on
| this being about all, which was important to _us_ , but
| nevertheless being out of reach of any kind of theory in
| the strict sense.
|
| (And this is, because - according to Wittgenstein - it is
| essentially outside of any reality, which is accessibly to
| us. On the other hand, it may have still reality beyond
| this, "The contemplation of the world sub specie aeterni is
| its contemplation as a limited whole." [6.45], _" Die
| Anschauung der Welt sub specie aeterni ist ihre Anschauung
| als-begrenztes-Ganzes."_ However, there are no legitimate
| question that may be actually posed regarding this limited
| whole, which is reflected just as a feeling from the
| inside; hence, the proposed riddle - which is really about
| existence - doesn't exist on any level of disciplined
| discourse.)
|
| Regarding evolutionary fitness, there may have been a
| niche: According to the _Tractatus_ , the mystical
| _arises,_ which might have been further explored by some
| theory of emergence. But this developed only much later and
| - as far as I know it -- a connection was never made.
| srcreigh wrote:
| I wonder if it affects the theory of computation in any way.
| Is it an argument against the church Turing thesis? Is it
| reason to believe in the existence of computational oracle TM
| such as a halting oracle TM? To me these questions are
| related to strong AI. Are creative inputs to normal
| algorithms fundamentally more effective than normal inputs to
| creative algorithms? Is there a high degree of intricacy of
| information such that inputs to the algorithm is somehow more
| powerful than any algorithm?
| masswerk wrote:
| Not really, as it is on an entirely different level.
| According to the _Tractatus,_ any transcendental questions
| are really about existence. As this is outside of what is
| graspable inside the world (and only accessible as a
| concept by the impossible position from looking at the
| world from outside), it is simply beyond theoretical reach.
| As any propositions about the real, factual world belong to
| the natural sciences, this leaves no genuine propositions
| to philosophy. The subject of these philosophical questions
| just arises, but can 't be argued about - at least, not in
| a meaningful way in the strict sense. So computation
| doesn't promise any meaningful answers, nor do these
| questions lend themselves to computation. Even more so, as
| nothing genuinely arises from logic (but logic structure).
|
| (While some of this may remind of Kant's _thing in itself,_
| it is comes from an entirely different direction, namely, a
| proposed teleology of philosophy, while Kant addresses this
| from the fundamentals of perception.)
| masswerk wrote:
| Or, if you like it this way, the _Halteproblem_ for
| transcendental reasoning is universal. There are no
| computable propositions regarding the mystical. ;-)
| iechoz6H wrote:
| Wittgenstein < Schopenhauer < Nagarjuna < Buddha
| KhoomeiK wrote:
| If we're talking about philosophy of language, Buddha himself
| didn't have much formal reasoning in that, did he?
| [deleted]
| dang wrote:
| " _Please don 't post shallow dismissals, especially of other
| people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something._"
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| iechoz6H wrote:
| In what way was it shallow? I was simply hinting at a
| potential lineage of Wittgenstein's philosophy.
| qsort wrote:
| main.hs:1:14: error: * No instance for (Ord
| Philosopher) arising from a use of `<'
| iamcurious wrote:
| Good point, funny and goes along with user name. 10/10 would
| read again.
| nabla9 wrote:
| Wittgenstein [?] { Nagarjuna, Buddha }
| yesenadam wrote:
| This short article is by Ray Monk, who in 1990 published a
| biography of Wittgenstein, which I'd highly recommend to anyone
| wanting to know more about the guy's life and thought. Monk also
| wrote an excellent 2-volume biography of Bertrand Russell. This
| article seems to contain nothing not in his 1990 book. I found it
| a little depressing for him that the _New Statesman_ is
| apparently paying him for an article that 's a very condensed
| summary of part of what he wrote 30+ years ago..
| leephillips wrote:
| On the other hand, you might consider that it means that what
| he wrote 30+ years ago hit the mark so well that it's still
| worth paying for a summary of part of it. Less depressing that
| way.
| yesenadam wrote:
| Well, I think they're both definitive biographies, yes. But I
| guess it's like big rock bands travelling the world, having
| to play their big hits forever after. Good for the fans,
| depressing for the musicians.
| jhickok wrote:
| Less depressing is that Ray Monk put together a Spotify
| playlist of Wittgenstein's favorite music, so he must still
| enjoy it a little bit.
|
| https://open.spotify.com/playlist/4v540LW145G9MpAQSkmVWK
| mi3law wrote:
| Thank you for sharing this! You should post it to HN as
| its own post-- I work to classic music and this is a very
| interesting list that others would enjoy, too.
| frereubu wrote:
| I'll second the recommendation of Monk's biography of
| Wittgenstein. There's a fantastic clarity to his exposition of
| Wittgenstein's philosophy that made it very readable. Going to
| track down the Russell biography now...
| subsubzero wrote:
| I have read the Bertrand Russell biography(its a 2 part set)
| and absolutely loved the first part. Ray Monk the author
| describes various ideas in analytic philosophy extremely
| clearly and does an amazing job on what ideas were circulating
| during that time in regards to philosophy. I couldn't recommend
| it enough, in fact I enjoyed the author so much I also got his
| bio of Wittgenstein and hope to start it in the next few weeks.
| yamrzou wrote:
| One of the highly underrated contributions of Wittgenstein that
| doesn't get the attention it deserves is his book " _On
| Certainty_ ".
|
| It's a book on philosophical skepticism and the nature of doubt
| which he wrote late in his life.
|
| It has a unique writing style, which feels like a thought dump,
| but it was eye opening for me.
|
| Edit: If you want to read a bit more about it, you might be
| interested in this series of posts by Sam26 on the (now gone)
| philosophy forums: _Wittgenstein 's Early and Later Philosophy -
| With Emphasis on "On Certainty"_:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20160304215023/http://forums.phi...
| routerl wrote:
| To give a little bit more context:
|
| "On Certainty" is about the foundations of empiricism and how
| they relate to the foundations of logic. It takes as a starting
| point that logical deduction is the one truly certain mode of
| inference we humans have, then asks "how does this apply to
| physics?".
|
| But it does this while being extremely indirect, and
| presupposing knowledge of every major philosophical/scientific
| debate of its time, particularly the centuries-long debate over
| the nature of empirical inductive reasoning.
|
| Wittgenstein sometimes seems to be talking only about, say, how
| a certain type of sentence works, but is actually making
| extremely broad statements about how all of language (and
| linguistic communities (like scientists)) work.
|
| As with all of Wittgenstein's writings, it only seems simple on
| the surface. The reason this stuff is still read and thought
| about is because it has a lot of implications.
|
| Here's my software engineering metaphor: Wittgenstein's method
| is to point out particularly poignant problems in the
| implementation of a class, in an object-oriented system, that
| are meant to demonstrate problems in the underlying
| architecture. According to him, the way most of us think about
| language is wrong, and that includes science, politics, and
| philosophy (even though he is unwilling to say much about those
| subjects directly).
| reggieband wrote:
| I absolutely hated reading "On Certainty" but in a sort of good
| way I suppose. It is a frustrating experience that I wouldn't
| recommend to anyone. Wittgenstein spends a bulk of his effort
| on two questions, roughly, how can he say that the statement "I
| know my name is Ludwig Wittegenstein" is true, and how can he
| validate the truth of the statement "I know that is a tree"
| while looking at a tree.
|
| Both of those starting points end up in tail-chasing
| experiments. It is very stream of consciousness as it was
| actually compiled from his journals after his death and wasn't
| a book he was attempting to write. If feels like he is trying
| to grasp some deep meanings but I could sense his frustration
| when he realized his logic was at a dead end or when it was
| coming back on itself in a circle. Often he just abandons a
| line of thought mid sentence and you soon realize it is because
| he has once again stumbled upon one of a few consistently
| encountered dead ends.
|
| I've heard it described that "On Certainty" was some kind of
| proof that certainty is illusive. However, the book never
| proves anything. It's basically an insight into the mind of an
| extremely intelligent and well practiced philosopher banging
| his head against a problem that proves intractable.
| [deleted]
| cjauvin wrote:
| To me the most intriguing ideas that have been explored by
| Wittgenstein are related to his notion of a "private language"
| (and the question of whether it is simply possible or
| meaningful). You can ask for instance what is the difference
| between your body pain, which seems to be a kind of "internal
| object", that only you can possess and access, and the blue of
| the sky, when you look at it, which doesn't feel like an internal
| sensation (rather like an external fact), even though it can be
| construed as one, if needed.
| masswerk wrote:
| In my understanding, this was much a vehicle for what figures
| as the mystical in the _Tractatus_ : spiritual insight,
| personal revelation, faith and believes, ethics, internal
| evidence. If we can't share or even show them, how do we arrive
| at any consent? How are they even a thing _between_ us?
| ctw wrote:
| I read the first 100 pages or so of _Philisophical
| Investigations_ before giving up since I had lost track of the
| lines of reasoning. Here 's what I got out of what I did read
| though:
|
| Language is far more important in philosophy and life than we
| think. The biggest takeaway I got from the part of this book I
| read is a way of looking at problems with the limitations of
| language in mind. Ask yourself: to what extent is thinking
| speaking? What is thinking without language? Is it even possible,
| or is that something else?
|
| There's this interesting idea that has stuck with me, which is
| that when we say words, "pictures" are "brought before" our mind.
| Is language (speaking, reading/writing) simply a way for us to
| conjure up these mental images in other people's minds? If so,
| how can we be sure that what they see is what we intended for
| them to see? I think it's clear from experience that the images
| are mostly right, most of the time. But when they're not, we have
| misunderstandings. Another interesting statement made in the book
| (iirc) is that we only need more language when we feel there is a
| misunderstanding. The word "more" is important in the previous
| sentence. The idea here is that when we speak, we have some
| desired outcome from the outset. Once we feel that our speaking
| has led to the outcome we wanted, we are satisfied to stop
| speaking. It is only when the person we're speaking to isn't
| doing what we want, or seems to be getting the wrong mental
| picture that we need to continue speaking (this is what I meant
| by "more language": to continue speaking).
|
| There's another interesting area Wittgenstein explores (which I
| can't admit to following very well), but I'll try to conjure a
| mental image in your head of it ;). Basically, so far his
| argument (if I understood correctly) is that "the truth" is the
| mental images we see and the actions we take, and language is
| just a means to those ends. He then argues (again, if I
| understood him correctly) that we usually run into trouble when
| we take language as the starting point of knowledge. That's not
| very clear, so what do I mean by that? It's sort of like, words
| work well when we're using them to achieve some outcome. But they
| start to confuse us when we use them without a desired outcome
| from the outset: when we use them to gain knowledge. Words are
| not facts that we can logically make deductions from to discover
| new knowledge.
| mabub24 wrote:
| _Philosophical Investigations_ is not exactly hard to read, but
| the style of argument Wittgenstein uses is very slippery. He 's
| trying to poke holes in the conceptual pictures and assumptions
| we use, and which often lead us to nonsense or philosophical
| debates that can be dissolved through conceptual clarification.
| It's nothing less than a full on broadside against an entire
| tradition of philosophical thought extending back to Plato.
|
| I would say the first 100 or so pages of the book are a form of
| conceptual cartography around language. Later, he uses that
| "grammatical analysis" to look at psychology, vision, pain, and
| many other topics.
|
| There are a lot of incredibly consequential arguments and
| thought experiments in the book, but you can pare them down to
| some generalizations:
|
| - Language is a form of behavior.
|
| - Language is public and cannot be fundamentally private. As
| are rules and rule following.
|
| - For almost every case, _meaning is use_ in a form of life
| (there are some caveats, like color, which also rely on an
| ostensive definition). An explanation of the "grammar" of a
| word, is an explanation of a rule for the use of the word in a
| particular context.
|
| - Understanding is akin to an _ability_.
|
| - Many of our complex mental and cognitive and cogitative
| abilities, are manifest in our behavior, the most rich and
| complex being language.
|
| - Fundamental skepticism, of a Cartesian sort, is nonsense.
| Humans are social animals with the ability for an enormously
| complex language rich in concepts; the mind/body,
| inside/outside, distinction is a false picture that leads to
| nonsense. Do not mistake the _personal_ for the _private_.
| [deleted]
| psychoslave wrote:
| > Words are not facts that we can logically make deductions
| from to discover new knowledge.
|
| Did you acquire this conviction through thoughts arisen by
| Wittgenstein's words?
| jhickok wrote:
| This is the exact sort of question that Wittgenstein
| addresses and created a terrifying argument to press a wedge
| into. In the Investigations he formulates the Rule Following
| Argument which in many aspects mirrors the underdetermination
| argument for computational anti-realism; any physical state
| embodies any computational function under some arbitrary
| description (also known as pancomputationalism or
| computational trivialism). Wittgenstein intended to show--
| and I think succeeded-- that meanings are underdetermined
| logically, and thus non-rational ( _not_ irrational) forces
| determine how one means something. Thus, causal structures of
| social bodies that holistically determine meanings.
|
| This argument was initially somewhat ignored until revived by
| the great Saul Kripke in his book Wittgenstein on Rules and
| Private Language. I take this to be one of the great
| epistemological problems, joining the ranks of similar
| challenges like Descartes' demon. Like Descartes,
| Wittgenstein offered a solution, albeit a much less religious
| one than Descartes.
| ctw wrote:
| I think we're interpreting that in different ways. I'm
| assuming you read it as something like "words can't be used
| to communicate (knowledge)", which you're seeking to disprove
| by showing me that I only gained that knowledge through
| Wittgenstein's words. Please correct me if I'm wrong.
|
| That's not what I meant though. I meant that words are like
| signs; they point at the real thing. We must be careful not
| to confuse the sign for the thing itself. We can't simply
| rearrange words and assume that what this new sign, this new
| combination of words points to, is "real". Not all words or
| sentences point to anything, or anything meaningful. And the
| trap we sometimes fall into (as philosophers especially?) is
| assuming that they always mean something.
|
| Edit: First the thing exists, then we use a word to refer to
| it. The mistake is reversing that, by thinking that by
| creating new words or combinations of words, we can bring
| something into existence.
| qqtt wrote:
| Just to put a button this excellent summary, the classic
| example of "rearranging words to form a sentence that we
| think has meaning" that Wittgenstein uses in Investigations
| is the question: "What is the meaning of life?"
|
| We think intuitively that because we constructed this
| sentence with words, that it must have meaning, and must
| have an answer - as you say, it is flipping the causal
| relationship between starting with a sign and using
| language versus starting with language and trying to find a
| sign. This question is ultimately the latter.
| psychoslave wrote:
| >Please correct me if I'm wrong.
|
| Would my opinion be that you are wrong, it would not imply
| that:
|
| - I'm right about you being wrong;
|
| - my own view is right and spread it would be an act of
| correction.
|
| > I meant that words are like signs; they point at the real
| thing.
|
| Nothingness doesn't point at anything real by definition.
|
| > We must be careful not to confuse the sign for the thing
| itself.
|
| Nor the sign with an interpretation act stimulated by some
| sign.
|
| > We can't simply rearrange words and assume that what this
| new sign, this new combination of words points to, is
| "real".
|
| Words don't exist outside some interpretation process, by
| the way.
|
| >Edit: First the thing exists, then we use a word to refer
| to it.
|
| That's a bit trickier. Because before someone use a word to
| refer to something, this word didn't exist. Naming things
| is a performative action. Through words, not only can you
| gain new knowledge that you can challenge through non-
| verbal actions, but they change the reality itself as it
| introduces new relationships in the world that where not
| present before there were used as a reference tool.
| sparsely wrote:
| This was a really clarifying comment for me, thank you.
|
| It links nicely with the positivists' ideas about
| meaningful/non meaningful statements as well - which I
| believe were inspired by Wittgenstein.
| bserge wrote:
| Wittgenstein was a tortured soul in a garbage world, much like a
| lot of other people who did not have the means or will to
| organize all of their thoughts in writing. I do wonder how many
| "great philosophers" were and are out there, not writing down
| their thoughts.
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