You can download a free ebook edition of Tractatus with nice MathML formulas at Standard Ebooks: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/ludwig-wittgenstein/tracta...
Visualization of Wittgenstein's Tractatus logico-philosophicus
11–20 of 30 posts
Re: Visualization of Wittgenstein's Tractatus logico-philosophicus
#12Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 be…
> 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.
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.
Re: Visualization of Wittgenstein's Tractatus logico-philosophicus
#13Looking 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 Philoso…
> 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.
> 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.
Re: Visualization of Wittgenstein's Tractatus logico-philosophicus
#14Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
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 a…
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Re: Visualization of Wittgenstein's Tractatus logico-philosophicus
#15Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
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 a…
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
Re: Visualization of Wittgenstein's Tractatus logico-philosophicus
#16Looking 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 Philoso…
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?
Re: Visualization of Wittgenstein's Tractatus logico-philosophicus
#17I'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.
Re: Visualization of Wittgenstein's Tractatus logico-philosophicus
#18Don'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.
Whoa, la ta ta ta ta ta ta (Science book)
Re: Visualization of Wittgenstein's Tractatus logico-philosophicus
#19This 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.
Re: Visualization of Wittgenstein's Tractatus logico-philosophicus
#20Is 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?
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 be…
“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.