Sigh. Sarcasm is always lost on the internet. I was replying to the actually insane comment who said the Tractatus was well below Milton on his reading list (presumably to express how little any of them are worth his time…?)
It would be also good to read Wittgenstein's later thought on this work. He completely reversed course in Philosophical Investigations, and the contrast between early and late Wittgenstein is almost as important as the text itself.
I always felt like the Tractatus was similar in form to Sanskrit sutra texts—especially those with hierarchical structure e.g. Panini's Astadhyayi [1]. In the Astadhyayi, a sutra can serve as the anuvritti (context) for a subsequent sequence of sutras, and further anuvrittis may be nested within. This results in a tree-like structure where to understand any individual sutra, one must traverse up the tree to gather all the relevant context. While the enumeration scheme doesn't explicitly capture anuvrittis as the Tractatus does, later commentators did considerable work to uncover the hierarchical structure required to understand the text by clearly identifying anuvrittis.
I’ve often thought that a lot of mental anguish in young Wittgenstein’s life could’ve been prevented if Gödel’s incompleteness work had come a little earlier and he could have known how big the windmill he was tilting at really was.
Talking about the Tractatus, I would suggest that Godel's work would be considered "nonsense", in that it attempts to use (mathematical) language to describe language, which is an invalid operation. This opinion went very much out of fashion, I suspect because computers do these operations with great success, but I believe he is saying something deep about meaning here, not about symbolic manipulation at all. But Wittgenstein didn't publish anything after the Tractatus (except a spelling dictionary for rural Austrian schoolchildren), and what has been published posthumously is extremely difficult, so this is probably a question for a very small number of subject matter experts. So not me. I'd ve very interested in better-informed opinions.
Later Wittgenstein is not really "extremely difficult". But it does present an understanding of meaning and language and philosophy that is quite different from the TLP, many would say it is fundamentally different although there are disagreements. I don't really know if he would have much to say about Godel's work based on his later writings. He would probably have to much to say about how others have used Godel's work and concepts, though, to make questionable connections to other things.
If anything he would probably be very critical of the idea that it has profound insight into anything beyond niche questions of higher order math and computation. It makes sense in that context, but then it would be similar to the philosophers he criticized as constructing houses of cards out of "language games" if you were to apply it to something to which it has no contextual relationship at all, in which you case you could say it is "nonsense" when it outsteps the bounds of sense. Later Wittgenstein is not really concerned with fundamental, Platonic, truth. In fact, he is outright critical of the very idea. His later writings are more about method. He's far more interested in clarification as the goal of philosophy. He wants to dissolve seemingly intractable questions to reveal how they are the product of nonsensical language games filled with mistaken assumptions.
I actually wrote a paper comparing how Tractatus and Godel’s incompleteness theorems approach the concept of self-reference. (I believe it was the final for Philosophy of Mathematics with the brilliant Colin McLarty.)
I don’t have it hosted anywhere but iirc the tl;dr is that they’re more or less independently reaching different conclusions as the two models are fundamentally incompatible.
Tractatus is basically the opposite of "windmill tilting", it concludes that the vast majority of philosophical "problems" end up being essentially "windmills" in the context of that expression, and that what remains is trivially solvable and not particularly interesting.
Wittgenstein, during his lifetime and after, was often confused for logical positivist, that is all that matters is logically provable statements. But it's quite clear from his further writings (and a thoughtful reading of the Tractatus) that what is being said is: if you're limiting your discussion to logical statements (i.e. philosophy has he understood it at that point) then what you can talk about is limited to logical facts and their consequences... unfortunately this doesn't cover much ground in human experience. For all of those other parts of human life, (logical) philosophy doesn't have anything to say. Hence the concluding “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”
The anti-philosophy philosopher tried to demo twice how all humans do not understand language, and that is including himself (and why the words about silence) and then later finding a round about way to let the butterfly off the jar.
We are trapped by our language somehow. And I suspect the trap is our own trap. Just like a butterfly thought it has to open a door to escape and it can’t. The philosopher showed it by turning it around and demonstrate to it that it is always free. It is the attempt to open the lock that is the problem — because there is no lock.
Those attracted to Wittgenstein's later thought like Philosophical Investigations would likely appreciate a lesser known philosopher's thought, that of R. G. Collingwood, too. I'm not alone in finding similarities (not plagiarism) in those two.
And a quote from one of his books that reminds me of the private language argument:
" This might seem to presuppose community of language between the speaker and hearer; for unless they were accustomed to use the same words, the hearer in using them to himself would not mean the same thing by them. But community of language is not another situation independent of the situation we have been describing, and prior to it: it is one name by which we refer to that situation itself. One does not first acquire a language and then use it. To possess it and to use it are the same. We only come to possess it by repeatedly and progressively attempting to use it.
"The reader may object that if what is here maintained were true there could never be any absolute assurance, either for the hearer or for the speaker, that the one had understood the other. That is so; but in fact there is no such assurance. The only assurance we possess is an empirical and relative assurance, becoming progressively stronger as conversation proceeds, and based on the fact that neither party seems to the other to be talking nonsense. The question whether they understand each other solvitur interloquendo. If they understand each other well enough to go on talking, they understand each other as well as they need; and there is no better kind of understanding which they can regret not having attained."
I find Collingwood to have more helpful insights for language and communication in general than Wittgenstein, because language as Collingwood explains it includes bodily gestures and, although he doesn't by any means neglect the spoken and written word (which are still important to him), he emphasises the importance of other types of language too. For example, to pull another quote:
"Vocal language is thus only one among many possible languages or orders of languages. Any of these might, by a particular civilization, be developed into a highly organized form of emotional expression. It is sometimes fancied that although any one of these languages might express emotion, vocal language has an exclusive, or at least a pre-eminent, function in the expression of thought. Even if this were true, it would not be of interest at the present stage in our discussion, for we are now dealing with language as it is before being adapted to serve the purposes of thought. As a matter of fact, it is probably not true. There is a story that Buddha once, at the climax of a philosophical discussion, broke into gesture-language as an Oxford philosopher may break into Greek: he took a flower in his hand, and looked at it; one of his disciples smiled, and the master said to him, ‘You have understood me.’"
(Both quotes taken from The Principles of Art, where his main discussion of language is.)
You understand some of what your cats mean because you learned it using the same language games Wittgenstein describes. Also they co-evolved to work with us. But just because you understand three moods of your cat, doesn't mean you would understand their language (if they had one). In fact, it is well studied that cats communicate differently with other cats than with humans.
Sidenote: grouping together non-verbal communication and language fails to take into account the richness of language.
I think Collingwood would defend (at least a qualification of) that statement of Wittgenstein's if asked about it. He readily admits that some communication between humans and other creatures is possible, but he thinks human languages tend to be somewhat incompatible with each other: "the assimilation of one kind of experience to another goes smoothly for a time, but sooner or later a break comes, as when we try to represent one kind of curve by means of another" (the unstated premise in this quote being that different cultures have developed different languages, each expressing the emotions common to that particular culture). If true, it's likely that one would hit a communication barrier with a lion much soner.
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"This ‘sympathy’ [= the kind of phonemonon when panic would spread non-verbally through a crowd] (the simplest and best name for the contagion I have described) exists visibly among animals other than man, and between animals of different species; notably, for example, between man and his domestic animals. A dog will snap at a man because it is afraid of him; and the best way to make a dog bite you is to feel frightened of it. However successfully you think you are concealing your nervousness, the dog feels it; or rather he feels the nervousness in himself which he has thus caught from you."
> I find Collingwood to have more helpful insights for language and communication in general than Wittgenstein, because language as Collingwood explains it includes bodily gestures and, although he doesn't by any means neglect the spoken and written word (which are still important to him), he emphasizes the importance of other types of language too.
I'm a big fan of Collingwood as well, but did want to clarify that Wittgenstein also discusses and included body language and gesture in his writings. For instance, he wrote quite a bit about pain and emotion and links those to his own ideas on language. At the most basic level, Wittgenstein argued that language was behavior after all.
> There is a story that Buddha once, at the climax of a philosophical discussion, broke into gesture-language as an Oxford philosopher may break into Greek: he took a flower in his hand, and looked at it; one of his disciples smiled, and the master said to him, ‘You have understood me.’
There's even a anecdote about Wittgenstein that is similar and was, at least according to the anecdote, very influential towards his work in PI. Wittgenstein was talking with Italian economist Piero Sraffa and discussing some of his work on language. Wittgenstein wanted to ground the entirety of language in a question of logical form. Like in TLP, at this time he was still a disciple of the picture-idea of language where "a proposition is a picture of reality". Sraffa made a gesture, that a lot of Italians will know as meaning something like disgust or contempt, of brushing the underneath of his chin with an outward sweep of the finger-tips of one hand. And he asked: “What is the logical form of that?” This form of body language was a revelation to Wittgenstein who quickly thereafter left his picture theory of language.
Appreciate the clarification! Reading about Wittgenstein's comments about pain rings a bell, but I don't seem to remember the details (a sign that I should refresh my memory).
The anecdote you mention is entirely new information to me too (I don't think I ever encountered it before), and I'll have a look into it since it sounds interesting.
It'd be great if more people had the audacity to say they've solved all problems in an academic field and then leave that field, instead of referring to that popular image that shows how your PhD is only a small dent/addition to the large circle of human knowledge.
I also wished we had an academic world that valued that advancement of a field that wandering the world in thought and then showing up with a ground changing work was enough to get a Phd.
It's hard to imagine a new Wittgenstein in the world, even with LW's connections, being able to show up at 40 years old with a work in hand, defend it and walk away with a PhD.
Once (in college I think) I was reading the Tractatus on a plane and the person sitting next to me asked “hey, whatcha reading?” I showed them the cover and the face they made was hard to describe but very memorable.
When your epistemological view is that all words are only representations of concepts of whim and not observation of reality, a lot of dumb ideas become possible, and Wittgenstein's is one of them. Woe to any person who gets lost in any of these ideas. If something in your gut says something wrong about a philosophy that's ultimate conclusion is "you can't say anything because you can't know anything", you should pay attention to it. To those who do, take the advice of your own teacher:
“Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”
IMHO, that this work is so highly regarded says more about the sad state of modern philosophy than it does about Wittgenstein. The Tractatus is linguistically and logically incoherent. For example:
1.1 The world is the totality of facts...
1.11 The world is determined by the facts...
So which is it? Is the world identical with "the totality of facts" or is the world something separate from the facts whose nature is "determined by the facts"? It can't be both. To say nothing of the fact (!) that Wittgenstein never defines what he means by "fact". The standard Phil101 definition is that "a fact is that which is the case" but Wittgenstein writes:
1 The world is everything that is the case.
So he uses the word "world" to mean what is usually denoted by "fact". So either facts are something other than "everything that is the case" or 1.1 is vacuous.
Sure, but that's a vacuous observation. X being determined by Y is only useful when X and Y are somehow distinct. Simply having two different labels for the same object is not very interesting.
I would suggest that if one label is singular (the world) and the other is plural (the totality of facts) and you explain how the latter combine to form the former then the observation should be especially informative.
In general pointing out that two labels point to the same object can be very informative and this is relevant for the context in which Wittgenstein was writing https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frege%27s_puzzles
1.11 The world moves forward, by facts being unveiled. (Here, he sort of gives world and facts a better definition by involving time).
The world is everything that is the case = fact + point in time = case
If you have a more detailed response than a quote of the first two sentences of one of the most complicated philosophical works of all time (and arguably what put an end to analytical philosophy and a start to computer science), then it would be a nice chat, but by God man do better than copying and pasting 3 lines and saying "Wow this is dumb"
If I were to write a detailed critique of the Tractatus it would be orders of magnitude longer than the Tractatus. But when critiquing a work that is utter nonsense from beginning to end it suffices to show that the foundations are nonsense because garbage-in-garbage-out. If someone starts out by proclaiming that one is equal to two, you don't have to dig into the details of their argument to say confidently that it has no merit.
> what put an end to analytical philosophy and a start to computer science
That is also nonsense.
First, Wittgenstein did not "put an end to analytical philosophy":
"Analytic philosophy is a branch and tradition of philosophy using analysis, popular in the Western world and particularly the Anglosphere, which began around the turn of the 20th century in the contemporary era in the United Kingdom, United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Scandinavia, and CONTINUES TODAY [emphasis added]." [1]
And second, Wittgenstein did not start computer science. That credit goes to Alan Turing -- or maybe Goedel or Babbage or Jacquard or Boole or Frege or the unknown inventor of the abacus. But certainly not Wittgenstein.
Yeah, that's another stupid thing he said. Anything that anyone says about anything manifestly renders that thing of which something was said a thing whereof it is possible to speak. So point 7 is a vacuous tautology.
(Or maybe what he meant was not what he said, in which case he probably failed to follow his own rule.)
I disagree pretty strongly with most of the tractatus, but I think you're doing a disservice by acting as if it's undiscussable nonsense.
A lot of important developments in formal logic, for a specific example, modal logic and Lewis' analysis of counterfactuals, would almost certainly not have been advanced if it is wasn't for the opening sentences that you dismissed as meaningless.
I think its also worth pointing out that Wittgenstein later came to reject everything he'd said in the Tractatus and laid out very different views in his later writings, which are arguably even more influential.
That's a long way of me saying: go ahead and disagree the tractatus, but don't pretend there's nothing worth discussing in it.
I didn't say there was nothing worth discussing in it. I said it was linguistically and logically incoherent. In other words, it's nonsense. But just because something is nonsense doesn't mean it is without value or not worth discussing. Lewis Carroll's Jabberwocky, for example, is nonsense, but it has a lot of value and it's worth discussing.
That is indeed news to me. Can you provide a reference?
BTW, Turing's Ph.D. advisor was Alonzo Church. So it's possible that Turing once took a class from Wittgenstein or attended one of his lectures, but he was definitely not "Wittgenstein's student" in the sense in which that phrase is generally understood in academia. According to Wikipedia, Turing "attended lectures given in 1939 by Ludwig Wittgenstein about the foundations of mathematics." But that is not the kind of thing that would allow Wittgenstein to lay any claim to Turing's work.
Try reading a biography or a companion book instead of just googling everything. The internet has a lot of knowledge, but it's very low quality. Books (depending on the book) have quality of knowledge that is just unmatched on the internet.
And now with LLMs, the quality of knowledge on the internet is going to take another substantial hit soon.
So that's a "no", you cannot (or will not) supply a reference.
You are the one making the claim, so the burden of proof is on you. And BTW, the claim you need to defend is not that "Turing was Wittgenstein's student for a number of years". That is demonstrably false. Turing and Wittgenstein didn't even meet for the first time until after Turing finished his Ph.D., indeed, after he published "On Computable Numbers". But that is neither here nor there (except insofar as it speaks to your general credibility). The claim you need to defend is that the Tractatus "put an end to analytical philosophy and a start to computer science".
Can you cite even one author who supports this claim? Can you cite a single example of Turing acknowledging Wittgenstein as an influence on OCN? (OCN itself doesn't mention Wittgenstein at all.) In fact, can you cite a single example of Turing and Wittgenstein publicly agreeing about anything? Because all of the references to Turing and Wittgenstein interacting with either other involve vehement disagreement.
In fact, I suspect that the truth is the exact opposite. If Wittgenstein had any influence on Turing at all, it would have been to motivate Turing to invent computer science in order to debunk Wittgenstein. Indeed, many of Wittgenstein's positions are embarrassingly naive in light of modern knowledge. It's not just the Tractatus that is bogus, AFAICT he was just wrong about everything. The fact that he is so highly regarded is truly bewildering.
That's not a no. I CAN provide a reference. As a matter of fact, I did. Wittgenstein and Turings biographies. Read my comments you uneducated keyboard warrior instead of acting out emotionally.
Isn't an important part of the tractatus pointing out that people get tripped up by "is" having different meanings? I can't remember, it's been a long time.
Maybe, I don't know. I haven't read the whole thing. Like I said, to me it is self-evident incoherent nonsense from the get-go, so it doesn't seem worth spending a lot of time on it. But I will point out that Bill Clinton is infamous for having made the same observation in a rather different context, so it's hard for me to imagine how this could be considered a deep insight.
Dyson: "...and next door to me there was Wittgenstein, who lived on the same staircase, and he always cooked for himself too, and so I used to cook my supper with the smell of fish from Wittgenstein's room next door."
[Interviewer] And you got to get to know him?
Dyson: "A little bit. Of course, Wittgenstein was a man who loved to torture people and so he invited me into his rooms one day - this was the closest contact I ever had with him, in fact. I mean, we passed each other very often on the stairs without speaking, but once he suddenly invited me into his rooms and said, 'Would you like to come and have a cup of coffee?' So I was thrilled, I said, 'Yes, I'll certainly come.' So I came in there and there was one chair, and he invited me to sit down in it, and it was a canvas deck chair which meant I was practically lying horizontally on this canvas chair, and he was standing uncomfortably waiting for me to say something, and so I found it acutely embarrassing, but in any case, I'd come in and so I thought I might as well try, and so eventually I decided I would start a conversation. So I said to him, 'Well, you know, I read the Tractatus and I'd be interested to know whether you still believe the things you said in the Tractatus or have you changed you mind?' And so Wittgenstein looked at me in a very, very hostile fashion and he said, 'Tell me please, which newspaper do you represent?' That was the end of the conversation. So there was another long silence, and then I drank the coffee and left. So I didn't get much out of Wittgenstein. I had the impression he was simply a charlatan. He loved to torture people and he was of course always extremely insulting to women. He couldn't tolerate women coming to his lectures, and he would just simply be so rude that they had to leave."
At university I had an acquaintance who was a philosophy major. His comment on Wittgenstein was: "it feels like the Tractatus is what he believes, and the Philosophical Investigations is what he can prove."
Highly recommend "On Certainty" by Wittgenstein, very short read.
> The project had a broad goal: to identify the relationship between language and reality and to define the limits of science.
A notable harsh criticism (or the impossibility) of use of human languages to capture the reality can be found in Nagarjuna [0].
Nagarjuna's writings are esoteric. A gentle introduction can be the podcast episode [1] in the History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps by Prof. Peter Adamson.
I do NOT recommend this book. Contemplation this book during college lead me into very difficult psychological territory, without any light at the end of the tunnel.
Looking back, I was lead astray by the book’s false assumption that one formal system can capture all of philosophy. One is given the impression that Wittgenstein cracked the code of the mind-universe, and that if you cannot understand what he’s talking about, then you are just not cut out for intellectual work in this era.
Of course I now realize that is hogwash, but it threw me for a loop at the time.
Reading some of the other very thoughtful comments on this thread, I realize the above probably says more about my psychology than it does about the TLP. Nonetheless, I think a cautionary tale is warranted here similar to long intensive meditation retreats… attempting to change your conception of the world based on TLP can break things!
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 127 ms ] threadSo tell us: have you read it?
I’ve read all three for the record.
And your "presumably" is quite wrong: that's your invention. I'd happily stack my life reading list against yours, anytime.
Those other two are "hope to read someday." Tractatus is "unlikely."
The Commedia is a poem that can be hardly separated from notes and contains many intentional layers of interpretation.
If you value economy of effort, there is a possibility that you will find the Tractatus more digestible.
http://tractatus.lib.uiowa.edu/map/
Wittgenstein: The Only Genius of the Century?(1971) [pdf] https://philpapers.org/archive/NAGWTO.pdf
https://pastebin.com/iEgCpBQ4
(It may still contain some errors)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A%E1%B9%A3%E1%B9%AD%C4%81dhy%C...
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wittgenstein-mathematics/...
Talking about the Tractatus, I would suggest that Godel's work would be considered "nonsense", in that it attempts to use (mathematical) language to describe language, which is an invalid operation. This opinion went very much out of fashion, I suspect because computers do these operations with great success, but I believe he is saying something deep about meaning here, not about symbolic manipulation at all. But Wittgenstein didn't publish anything after the Tractatus (except a spelling dictionary for rural Austrian schoolchildren), and what has been published posthumously is extremely difficult, so this is probably a question for a very small number of subject matter experts. So not me. I'd ve very interested in better-informed opinions.
If anything he would probably be very critical of the idea that it has profound insight into anything beyond niche questions of higher order math and computation. It makes sense in that context, but then it would be similar to the philosophers he criticized as constructing houses of cards out of "language games" if you were to apply it to something to which it has no contextual relationship at all, in which you case you could say it is "nonsense" when it outsteps the bounds of sense. Later Wittgenstein is not really concerned with fundamental, Platonic, truth. In fact, he is outright critical of the very idea. His later writings are more about method. He's far more interested in clarification as the goal of philosophy. He wants to dissolve seemingly intractable questions to reveal how they are the product of nonsensical language games filled with mistaken assumptions.
I don’t have it hosted anywhere but iirc the tl;dr is that they’re more or less independently reaching different conclusions as the two models are fundamentally incompatible.
Tractatus is basically the opposite of "windmill tilting", it concludes that the vast majority of philosophical "problems" end up being essentially "windmills" in the context of that expression, and that what remains is trivially solvable and not particularly interesting.
Wittgenstein, during his lifetime and after, was often confused for logical positivist, that is all that matters is logically provable statements. But it's quite clear from his further writings (and a thoughtful reading of the Tractatus) that what is being said is: if you're limiting your discussion to logical statements (i.e. philosophy has he understood it at that point) then what you can talk about is limited to logical facts and their consequences... unfortunately this doesn't cover much ground in human experience. For all of those other parts of human life, (logical) philosophy doesn't have anything to say. Hence the concluding “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”
We are trapped by our language somehow. And I suspect the trap is our own trap. Just like a butterfly thought it has to open a door to escape and it can’t. The philosopher showed it by turning it around and demonstrate to it that it is always free. It is the attempt to open the lock that is the problem — because there is no lock.
A good, short introductory article on Collingwood is here: https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/ideas/philosophy/39183/ho...
And a quote from one of his books that reminds me of the private language argument:
" This might seem to presuppose community of language between the speaker and hearer; for unless they were accustomed to use the same words, the hearer in using them to himself would not mean the same thing by them. But community of language is not another situation independent of the situation we have been describing, and prior to it: it is one name by which we refer to that situation itself. One does not first acquire a language and then use it. To possess it and to use it are the same. We only come to possess it by repeatedly and progressively attempting to use it.
"The reader may object that if what is here maintained were true there could never be any absolute assurance, either for the hearer or for the speaker, that the one had understood the other. That is so; but in fact there is no such assurance. The only assurance we possess is an empirical and relative assurance, becoming progressively stronger as conversation proceeds, and based on the fact that neither party seems to the other to be talking nonsense. The question whether they understand each other solvitur interloquendo. If they understand each other well enough to go on talking, they understand each other as well as they need; and there is no better kind of understanding which they can regret not having attained."
I find Collingwood to have more helpful insights for language and communication in general than Wittgenstein, because language as Collingwood explains it includes bodily gestures and, although he doesn't by any means neglect the spoken and written word (which are still important to him), he emphasises the importance of other types of language too. For example, to pull another quote:
"Vocal language is thus only one among many possible languages or orders of languages. Any of these might, by a particular civilization, be developed into a highly organized form of emotional expression. It is sometimes fancied that although any one of these languages might express emotion, vocal language has an exclusive, or at least a pre-eminent, function in the expression of thought. Even if this were true, it would not be of interest at the present stage in our discussion, for we are now dealing with language as it is before being adapted to serve the purposes of thought. As a matter of fact, it is probably not true. There is a story that Buddha once, at the climax of a philosophical discussion, broke into gesture-language as an Oxford philosopher may break into Greek: he took a flower in his hand, and looked at it; one of his disciples smiled, and the master said to him, ‘You have understood me.’"
(Both quotes taken from The Principles of Art, where his main discussion of language is.)
Sidenote: grouping together non-verbal communication and language fails to take into account the richness of language.
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"This ‘sympathy’ [= the kind of phonemonon when panic would spread non-verbally through a crowd] (the simplest and best name for the contagion I have described) exists visibly among animals other than man, and between animals of different species; notably, for example, between man and his domestic animals. A dog will snap at a man because it is afraid of him; and the best way to make a dog bite you is to feel frightened of it. However successfully you think you are concealing your nervousness, the dog feels it; or rather he feels the nervousness in himself which he has thus caught from you."
I'm a big fan of Collingwood as well, but did want to clarify that Wittgenstein also discusses and included body language and gesture in his writings. For instance, he wrote quite a bit about pain and emotion and links those to his own ideas on language. At the most basic level, Wittgenstein argued that language was behavior after all.
> There is a story that Buddha once, at the climax of a philosophical discussion, broke into gesture-language as an Oxford philosopher may break into Greek: he took a flower in his hand, and looked at it; one of his disciples smiled, and the master said to him, ‘You have understood me.’
There's even a anecdote about Wittgenstein that is similar and was, at least according to the anecdote, very influential towards his work in PI. Wittgenstein was talking with Italian economist Piero Sraffa and discussing some of his work on language. Wittgenstein wanted to ground the entirety of language in a question of logical form. Like in TLP, at this time he was still a disciple of the picture-idea of language where "a proposition is a picture of reality". Sraffa made a gesture, that a lot of Italians will know as meaning something like disgust or contempt, of brushing the underneath of his chin with an outward sweep of the finger-tips of one hand. And he asked: “What is the logical form of that?” This form of body language was a revelation to Wittgenstein who quickly thereafter left his picture theory of language.
The anecdote you mention is entirely new information to me too (I don't think I ever encountered it before), and I'll have a look into it since it sounds interesting.
It's hard to imagine a new Wittgenstein in the world, even with LW's connections, being able to show up at 40 years old with a work in hand, defend it and walk away with a PhD.
“Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”
If only…
1.1 The world is the totality of facts...
1.11 The world is determined by the facts...
So which is it? Is the world identical with "the totality of facts" or is the world something separate from the facts whose nature is "determined by the facts"? It can't be both. To say nothing of the fact (!) that Wittgenstein never defines what he means by "fact". The standard Phil101 definition is that "a fact is that which is the case" but Wittgenstein writes:
1 The world is everything that is the case.
So he uses the word "world" to mean what is usually denoted by "fact". So either facts are something other than "everything that is the case" or 1.1 is vacuous.
And that's just the first three lines!
In general pointing out that two labels point to the same object can be very informative and this is relevant for the context in which Wittgenstein was writing https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frege%27s_puzzles
1.11 The world moves forward, by facts being unveiled. (Here, he sort of gives world and facts a better definition by involving time).
The world is everything that is the case = fact + point in time = case
If you have a more detailed response than a quote of the first two sentences of one of the most complicated philosophical works of all time (and arguably what put an end to analytical philosophy and a start to computer science), then it would be a nice chat, but by God man do better than copying and pasting 3 lines and saying "Wow this is dumb"
> what put an end to analytical philosophy and a start to computer science
That is also nonsense.
First, Wittgenstein did not "put an end to analytical philosophy":
"Analytic philosophy is a branch and tradition of philosophy using analysis, popular in the Western world and particularly the Anglosphere, which began around the turn of the 20th century in the contemporary era in the United Kingdom, United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Scandinavia, and CONTINUES TODAY [emphasis added]." [1]
And second, Wittgenstein did not start computer science. That credit goes to Alan Turing -- or maybe Goedel or Babbage or Jacquard or Boole or Frege or the unknown inventor of the abacus. But certainly not Wittgenstein.
I'm sorry, but this emperor is naked.
---
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analytic_philosophy
(Or maybe what he meant was not what he said, in which case he probably failed to follow his own rule.)
A lot of important developments in formal logic, for a specific example, modal logic and Lewis' analysis of counterfactuals, would almost certainly not have been advanced if it is wasn't for the opening sentences that you dismissed as meaningless.
I think its also worth pointing out that Wittgenstein later came to reject everything he'd said in the Tractatus and laid out very different views in his later writings, which are arguably even more influential.
That's a long way of me saying: go ahead and disagree the tractatus, but don't pretend there's nothing worth discussing in it.
BTW, Turing's Ph.D. advisor was Alonzo Church. So it's possible that Turing once took a class from Wittgenstein or attended one of his lectures, but he was definitely not "Wittgenstein's student" in the sense in which that phrase is generally understood in academia. According to Wikipedia, Turing "attended lectures given in 1939 by Ludwig Wittgenstein about the foundations of mathematics." But that is not the kind of thing that would allow Wittgenstein to lay any claim to Turing's work.
And now with LLMs, the quality of knowledge on the internet is going to take another substantial hit soon.
You are the one making the claim, so the burden of proof is on you. And BTW, the claim you need to defend is not that "Turing was Wittgenstein's student for a number of years". That is demonstrably false. Turing and Wittgenstein didn't even meet for the first time until after Turing finished his Ph.D., indeed, after he published "On Computable Numbers". But that is neither here nor there (except insofar as it speaks to your general credibility). The claim you need to defend is that the Tractatus "put an end to analytical philosophy and a start to computer science".
Can you cite even one author who supports this claim? Can you cite a single example of Turing acknowledging Wittgenstein as an influence on OCN? (OCN itself doesn't mention Wittgenstein at all.) In fact, can you cite a single example of Turing and Wittgenstein publicly agreeing about anything? Because all of the references to Turing and Wittgenstein interacting with either other involve vehement disagreement.
In fact, I suspect that the truth is the exact opposite. If Wittgenstein had any influence on Turing at all, it would have been to motivate Turing to invent computer science in order to debunk Wittgenstein. Indeed, many of Wittgenstein's positions are embarrassingly naive in light of modern knowledge. It's not just the Tractatus that is bogus, AFAICT he was just wrong about everything. The fact that he is so highly regarded is truly bewildering.
"My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me finally recognizes them as senseless"
I shall sleep well tonight.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Clinton#Oxford
Dyson: "...and next door to me there was Wittgenstein, who lived on the same staircase, and he always cooked for himself too, and so I used to cook my supper with the smell of fish from Wittgenstein's room next door."
[Interviewer] And you got to get to know him?
Dyson: "A little bit. Of course, Wittgenstein was a man who loved to torture people and so he invited me into his rooms one day - this was the closest contact I ever had with him, in fact. I mean, we passed each other very often on the stairs without speaking, but once he suddenly invited me into his rooms and said, 'Would you like to come and have a cup of coffee?' So I was thrilled, I said, 'Yes, I'll certainly come.' So I came in there and there was one chair, and he invited me to sit down in it, and it was a canvas deck chair which meant I was practically lying horizontally on this canvas chair, and he was standing uncomfortably waiting for me to say something, and so I found it acutely embarrassing, but in any case, I'd come in and so I thought I might as well try, and so eventually I decided I would start a conversation. So I said to him, 'Well, you know, I read the Tractatus and I'd be interested to know whether you still believe the things you said in the Tractatus or have you changed you mind?' And so Wittgenstein looked at me in a very, very hostile fashion and he said, 'Tell me please, which newspaper do you represent?' That was the end of the conversation. So there was another long silence, and then I drank the coffee and left. So I didn't get much out of Wittgenstein. I had the impression he was simply a charlatan. He loved to torture people and he was of course always extremely insulting to women. He couldn't tolerate women coming to his lectures, and he would just simply be so rude that they had to leave."
Highly recommend "On Certainty" by Wittgenstein, very short read.
A notable harsh criticism (or the impossibility) of use of human languages to capture the reality can be found in Nagarjuna [0].
Nagarjuna's writings are esoteric. A gentle introduction can be the podcast episode [1] in the History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps by Prof. Peter Adamson.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nagarjuna
[1]: https://historyofphilosophy.net/nagarjuna-change
2. The most powerful LLM is the sum of al that has been said.
3. No LLM can transcend the statements of natural science.
Looking back, I was lead astray by the book’s false assumption that one formal system can capture all of philosophy. One is given the impression that Wittgenstein cracked the code of the mind-universe, and that if you cannot understand what he’s talking about, then you are just not cut out for intellectual work in this era.
Of course I now realize that is hogwash, but it threw me for a loop at the time.
https://knowtify.chat/gpinvite/vivVn2tN9Qagj85DZeqx/Ludwig%2...