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Wittgestein
Oct. 14th, 2015 02:02 pm“The limits of language are the limits of my world.”
-- Ludwig Wittgenstein
Here is a piece that helps to clarify one's sense of Wittgenstein. After reading it, one ought to be able to do a much better job at faking it when talking about Wittgenstein.
<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<
Wittgenstein’s writings, broadly speaking, divide into two periods, and in the second he more or less wholly rejected the underlying conception of the first. In his first lecture, Pears began: “Some philosophers fly; others struggle to crawl.” Wittgenstein flew, then crashed to earth and crawled thereafter.
[...]
Wittgenstein’s first period, culminating in 1921’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (which Pears had co-translated), drew heavily on Bertrand Russell’s work in philosophical logic and made a huge impact on the logical positivist movement of the time, which would later in turn influence computer science, artificial intelligence, and linguistics. The Tractatus makes an ambitious and ostensibly definitive attempt to chart out the relationship between language and the world. Alongside Russell’s work, it was tremendously influential on logicians, yet Wittgenstein later ended up rejecting one of its central premises: that our linguistic statements depict true or false states of affairs, and that formal logic provided the structure that regulates our construction of these statements. Language and the world share logical form, which is also the form of reality. This attempt to regiment language as formal logic went on to be an article of faith for many computer scientists and cognitive scientists for decades, as well as exerting a foundational influence on Noam Chomsky’s linguistics.
But after a 10-year hiatus from philosophy, during which he was a schoolteacher and co-designed and built an austere house for his sister, Wittgenstein came to change his mind. Language did not have such a fixed, eternal relation to reality bound by logic. The process of “measuring” the truth of a statement against reality was neither objective nor cleanly delineated. The meaning of what we say can’t be abstracted away from the context in which we say it: “We are unable clearly to circumscribe the concepts we use; not because we don’t know their real definition, but because there is no real ‘definition’ to them,” Wittgenstein wrote. Instead, our speech acts are grounded in a set of social practices.
The idea of words having relative meanings was not new, but Wittgenstein pioneered the controversial linguistic conception of meaning-as-use, or the idea that the meanings of words, relative or not, cannot be specified in isolation from the life practices in which they are used. Instead, language should be studied from the starting point of its practices, rather from abstractions to syntax and semantics. As Wittgenstein put it, “Speaking a language is part of an activity, or of a form of life.”
[...]
There’s no doubt in the end that Wittgenstein remains a real pain. I wouldn’t have read him had I not been convinced that the answers I was getting from every other field, and even from every other philosopher, were unsatisfactory. Wittgenstein didn’t give me the answers, but his philosophy did teach me to ask the right questions. Even still, it took me years after my class to get a grasp on these questions in any kind of systematic way. Today, however, they inform every single piece I write without exception, though often invisibly. “Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language,” Wittgenstein wrote. And that lesson is worth repeating on a daily if not hourly basis.
-- David Auerbach at Slate.com
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
-- Ludwig Wittgenstein
Here is a piece that helps to clarify one's sense of Wittgenstein. After reading it, one ought to be able to do a much better job at faking it when talking about Wittgenstein.
<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<
Wittgenstein’s writings, broadly speaking, divide into two periods, and in the second he more or less wholly rejected the underlying conception of the first. In his first lecture, Pears began: “Some philosophers fly; others struggle to crawl.” Wittgenstein flew, then crashed to earth and crawled thereafter.
[...]
Wittgenstein’s first period, culminating in 1921’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (which Pears had co-translated), drew heavily on Bertrand Russell’s work in philosophical logic and made a huge impact on the logical positivist movement of the time, which would later in turn influence computer science, artificial intelligence, and linguistics. The Tractatus makes an ambitious and ostensibly definitive attempt to chart out the relationship between language and the world. Alongside Russell’s work, it was tremendously influential on logicians, yet Wittgenstein later ended up rejecting one of its central premises: that our linguistic statements depict true or false states of affairs, and that formal logic provided the structure that regulates our construction of these statements. Language and the world share logical form, which is also the form of reality. This attempt to regiment language as formal logic went on to be an article of faith for many computer scientists and cognitive scientists for decades, as well as exerting a foundational influence on Noam Chomsky’s linguistics.
But after a 10-year hiatus from philosophy, during which he was a schoolteacher and co-designed and built an austere house for his sister, Wittgenstein came to change his mind. Language did not have such a fixed, eternal relation to reality bound by logic. The process of “measuring” the truth of a statement against reality was neither objective nor cleanly delineated. The meaning of what we say can’t be abstracted away from the context in which we say it: “We are unable clearly to circumscribe the concepts we use; not because we don’t know their real definition, but because there is no real ‘definition’ to them,” Wittgenstein wrote. Instead, our speech acts are grounded in a set of social practices.
The idea of words having relative meanings was not new, but Wittgenstein pioneered the controversial linguistic conception of meaning-as-use, or the idea that the meanings of words, relative or not, cannot be specified in isolation from the life practices in which they are used. Instead, language should be studied from the starting point of its practices, rather from abstractions to syntax and semantics. As Wittgenstein put it, “Speaking a language is part of an activity, or of a form of life.”
[...]
There’s no doubt in the end that Wittgenstein remains a real pain. I wouldn’t have read him had I not been convinced that the answers I was getting from every other field, and even from every other philosopher, were unsatisfactory. Wittgenstein didn’t give me the answers, but his philosophy did teach me to ask the right questions. Even still, it took me years after my class to get a grasp on these questions in any kind of systematic way. Today, however, they inform every single piece I write without exception, though often invisibly. “Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language,” Wittgenstein wrote. And that lesson is worth repeating on a daily if not hourly basis.
-- David Auerbach at Slate.com
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
