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Well, the later work has a caution that applies to programmers ... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_language_argument https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private

Well, the later work has a caution that applies to programmers ... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_language_argument https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_language_argument

paganel 9y ago
Thanks for the link, didn't know this was a "concept" per-se, so to speak, even less so that it had its own wikipedia page and that Wittgenstein had written about it. I've started thinking about this concept ever since I read Wilhelm von Humboldt's "The Heterogeneity of Language and its Influence on the Intellectual Development of Mankind", where at some point he mentions that, taken at the limit, each of us speak our own, very private language (the book was written in the early 1800s). That idea has stuck with me ever since and I've tried ways of both disproving and affirming it, now I'm mostly in the "affirming it" phase. As a quick example, one can just think of a sentence like "I love you", which means different things for different people, even if spoken in the same language, and, most important of all, it might mean (and in many cases it does mean) different things to different people who have lived together for decades (as husband and wife, for example, or as parents and children). On the other hand, more "neutral" sentences like "turn off the lights" seem to mean the same thing for a larger proportion of speakers.
- B1FF_PSUVM 9y ago
  Thanks for the Humboldt reference, haven't been that way and did not know of it. I'd guess it is a fairly common doubt, I remember wondering, as a schoolboy, if what everyone called green was perceived identically. All this ends up being a centuries long conversation, and the current reference is merely the latest overlay. For instance, Wittgenstein mentioned that one must "throw away the ladder after he has climbed up it", riffing on Schopenhauer's scorn of those who carried books on their backs instead of leaving them behind as climbed ladder steps, and apparently it was Plato who spread the idea that there was a knowledge ladder to be climbed ...

Well, the later work has a caution that applies to programmers ... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_language_argument https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_language_argument

paganel 9y ago

Thanks for the link, didn't know this was a "concept" per-se, so to speak, even less so that it had its own wikipedia page and that Wittgenstein had written about it. I've started thinking about this concept ever since I read Wilhelm von Humboldt's "The Heterogeneity of Language and its Influence on the Intellectual Development of Mankind", where at some point he mentions that, taken at the limit, each of us speak our own, very private language (the book was written in the early 1800s). That idea has stuck with me ever since and I've tried ways of both disproving and affirming it, now I'm mostly in the "affirming it" phase. As a quick example, one can just think of a sentence like "I love you", which means different things for different people, even if spoken in the same language, and, most important of all, it might mean (and in many cases it does mean) different things to different people who have lived together for decades (as husband and wife, for example, or as parents and children). On the other hand, more "neutral" sentences like "turn off the lights" seem to mean the same thing for a larger proportion of speakers.

B1FF_PSUVM 9y ago
Thanks for the Humboldt reference, haven't been that way and did not know of it. I'd guess it is a fairly common doubt, I remember wondering, as a schoolboy, if what everyone called green was perceived identically. All this ends up being a centuries long conversation, and the current reference is merely the latest overlay. For instance, Wittgenstein mentioned that one must "throw away the ladder after he has climbed up it", riffing on Schopenhauer's scorn of those who carried books on their backs instead of leaving them behind as climbed ladder steps, and apparently it was Plato who spread the idea that there was a knowledge ladder to be climbed ...