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

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

#21

Post by whatshisface »

codeulike wrote: post #19
DanielBMarkham wrote: post #2

My favorite self-quote: technology development is applied philosophy. Wittgenstein taught it; we're the people living it. 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 fo…

I don't really understand the main argument of this comment. Can someone help me out?

Philosophers and programmers both take hazy cultural ideas and turn them into rulesets.

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

#22

Post by deltron3030 »

goatlover wrote: post #14
tuesdayrain wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When I first read about Wittgenstein in some junior encyclopedia, it said that he discovered that many problems in philosophy were meaningless because words might mean different things. That's how I've always intuitively felt about the Ship of Theseus thought experiment. It only seems paradoxical when people try to apply imprecise language to a precise situation. The way I see it, it's technically a new ship with e…

It's unusual because our ordinary language does not talk about objects being new with every change. The ship that sets sails is supposed to be the same ship that returns. And yet change is part of life. Everything undergoes change, as Heraclitus noted a long time ago. So why do we talk so imprecisely about objects as if they have permanence? Why is it the same river the next time we step in it?

> Why is it the same river the next time we step in it?

Maybe because the river bed is more or less still the same location. Location is important for mapping the environment.

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

#23

Post by tokyoseb »

paganel wrote: post #3

Not to diminish Wittgenstein’s influence, quite the contrary, but I for one first heard about the idea of a “private language” while reading the works of Wilhelm von Humboldt [1], written around the 1830s (so about a century before Wittgenstein). I remember Humboldt saying something along the lines of “at the limit, we each speak our own, private language”. I read his work in translation, as I don’t speak German, so…

Wittgenstein didn’t come come up with the idea of a “private language” but in his Philosophical Investigations he famously argued that the concept itself is nonsense (not via a single logical “proof” but using several thought experiments).

The idea that a private language exists (ie. ‘mentalese’) is taken for granted by a lot of authors. I recently read Stephen Pinker’s book The Language Instinct and he never seemed to doubt the concept for instance.

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

#24

Post by tokyoseb »

If you’d like to read Wittgenstein but don’t know where to start I would recommend reading “How to read Wittgenstein” by Ray Monk, as an introduction before moving to “Philosophical Investigation” (rather than starting with his first book, the Tractatus, which is really cryptic). I saw this advice on another HN thread a while ago and for me it was it spot on. I also read Ray Monk’s bio of Wittgenstein but found it a lot less interesting.

I can’t pretend I understood 100% of his Philosophical Investigations but it definitely made me see things differently. I like his approach to try to “turn unobvious nonsense into obvious nonsense” and show that a lot of the seemingly “natural” ideas we rely on to describe our mental activity rest on very shaky grounds.

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

#26

Post by Merrill »

DanielBMarkham wrote: post #2

My favorite self-quote: technology development is applied philosophy. Wittgenstein taught it; we're the people living it. 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 fo…

While natural languages and mathematics are two important formalisms by which technologists communicate, it seems to me that we also use a much broader set of visual symbolic systems. These include tables of data in various formats and figures that incorporate drawings, diagrams, charts, pictures and videos. These are now as important as the text and formulas. Problems with tables and figures are one of the main reasons for retractions.

It seems that philosophers like Wittgenstein deal with all text communications (like a law book) or at most with text and formulas (like a math book). It not clear how their work relates to something such as a complex, detailed structure diagram of a molecule like a enzyme, such as are frequently published.

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

#28

Post by claudiawerner »

tlb wrote: post #4

When I first read about Wittgenstein in some junior encyclopedia, it said that he discovered that many problems in philosophy were meaningless because words might mean different things. I imagined he was talking about words like "socialism" or "equality" -- words that are obviously slippery. But it turns out that words like "is" and "have" cause just as much trouble. Wittgenstein is famously hard to read. I have the…

>I imagined he was talking about words like "socialism" or "equality" -- words that are obviously slippery.

Even if this were necessarily true, it wouldn't make philosophizing about them useless; for instance, as slippery as the term 'equality' may be, it's also clear (except for 18th century French philosopher Babeuf) that it doesn't literally mean that everyone in society is allocated and has access to an equal amount of resources.

In my own experience talking about these concepts, much greater confusion and misunderstanding comes from simply not reading the source material, rather than the words having potentially different meanings. Most people (including some socialists) talk about socialism without having read just what its foremost proponents (and critics of their own socialism) have to say.

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

#29

Post by smallnamespace »

goatlover wrote: post #14
tuesdayrain wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When I first read about Wittgenstein in some junior encyclopedia, it said that he discovered that many problems in philosophy were meaningless because words might mean different things. That's how I've always intuitively felt about the Ship of Theseus thought experiment. It only seems paradoxical when people try to apply imprecise language to a precise situation. The way I see it, it's technically a new ship with e…

It's unusual because our ordinary language does not talk about objects being new with every change. The ship that sets sails is supposed to be the same ship that returns. And yet change is part of life. Everything undergoes change, as Heraclitus noted a long time ago. So why do we talk so imprecisely about objects as if they have permanence? Why is it the same river the next time we step in it?

> So why do we talk so imprecisely about objects as if they have permanence? Why is it the same river the next time we step in it?

Why do most languages allow variables to mutate, rather than forcing us to write in static single assignment style?

Because it is useful; the imprecise name still communicates something of value to both parties: that variable foo and variable foo', although not identical, are joined by a common purpose.

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

#30

Post by codeulike »

whatshisface wrote: post #21
codeulike wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't really understand the main argument of this comment. Can someone help me out?

Philosophers and programmers both take hazy cultural ideas and turn them into rulesets.

But to such different ends that the resemblance is very strained, surely? Programmers look to make an approximately useful tool, Philosophers look to discover fundamentals and insights.
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