Wittgenstein’s Legacy: The Principles of the Private Language Arguments (2018)

When philosophy and science existed mostly as words handed from one generation to the next in written form, it was possible to amass enough of a web of meaning for any one general field for a body of practitioners to gain useful applicable knowledge for the rest of humanity. But as philosophers found out early enough, and the sciences are learning too, it's also possible to create not only webs but islands of meaning, such that localized progress can appear to be made without having any impact, positive or negative, on mankind as a whole. We mind our knitting so well that nothing ever gets knitted.

We technology developers have this problem; but we not only have it, we have had it over and over again with each new domain we absorb. We start with (spoken) languages, jargon, and cultural knowledge, combine various tribes together, create a mezzanine language among ourselves, then translate all of that into math. Hopefully it's provable, rock-solid math. But however we do it, we deal with mapping ideas to bits.

In the history of mankind, nobody else has ever had the job of doing that over and over again across dozens or hundreds of domains. Instead, the typical approach was to become good in one domain, then continue to specialize. In this sense, technology solution development is applied polymathematics.

Because of that, it's been really interesting watching the tech community interact with the academy. I don't think there's much love lost on either side most days, but both groups have important things to offer the other. I've seen several attempts to formally bridge the gap, but it's usually done through some quasi-formal symbolic system such as UML. The light hasn't come on yet. We are getting close, though, as it's a hoot to watch.

History nerd note: when Wittgenstein first began down this road and realized the impact of what he was doing, he announced that he had "solved philosophy". Philosophy was no longer something that needed work. This had to have driven Russell bananas; as he was trying to "solve" it by going down an almost diametrically-opposite path.

Wittgenstein is famously hard to read. I have the book (translated by a group including the author of this article) with side-side German-English text, the better to puzzle over his more inscrutable pronouncements. But this article is worth your time.

The good news is that humans are little language-creating monsters; so much so that we do it all the time without realizing it. (This is one of the reasons Wittgenstein's conclusions were so notoriously hard for us to reach. Whenever anybody got close, we without-realizing-it created new usages and kept on going. It wasn't until the self-contradictions reached almost crisis levels and there was enough thought put on paper that we could step back and see what we were doing)

Not only do "is" and "have" cause trouble, they can have multiple meanings at multiple levels between the same two closely-knit people in the same social context. A lot of comedy is prefaced on two people who know each other really well getting mixed up on what one word might mean.