6 ms·

Was Wittgenstein Right? (2013)

28 points by scribu 8y ago

bingchenasian 8y ago
To save you the click: "Wittgenstein claims that there are no realms of phenomena whose study is the special business of a philosopher, and about which he or she should devise profound a priori theories and sophisticated supporting arguments. There are no startling discoveries to be made of facts, not open to the methods of science, yet accessible “from the armchair” through some blend of intuition, pure reason and conceptual analysis. Indeed the whole idea of a subject that could yield such results is based on confusion and wishful thinking."
- hshehehjdjdjd 8y ago
  In other words, philosophy is a form of mental “self-stimulation.” It feels like you’re accomplishing something when actually you aren’t. That matches my views at any rate. Not that there’s anything wrong with a bit of self-stimulation. I’m here commenting after all. But philosophy is pretty unique in that they present their fun as some kind of noble pursuit.
  - darkmighty 8y ago
    More like, philosophy is the extreme version of the 'Uncategorized' box of science -- it's almost the leftover pile which gets slowly picked up and put into neat boxes of knowledge. Mechanical nature of life was once philosophical musings, now is biology. Atomic nature of matter were philosophical musings, now physics. Nature of consciousness is now philosophy, will sooner or later become neuroscience and artificial intelligence. Philosophy isn't useless. It is a ground for preliminary discussion before the matter is ready to shift into more solid ground -- mathematics, logic, or hard sciences. That it suffers from (a degree of) infinite dwelling on pointless topics is inevitable, because it is very hard to judge what will one day be useful or legitimate of discussion; making the false positive nil will increase the false negatives too much. Plus if philosophy decided on a too strict topic regime, soon another field would be born to house the outcasts of academic philosophy, thus becoming the new leftover pile of reason.
    - yabb 8y ago
      Pretty much this. It's like pre-science. I could see how a lot of modern philosophy could be rehashing issues that have already been extensively formalized though
      - andrepd 8y ago
        There is plenty of knowledge that is non-scientific. Not all knowledge is accessible through the scientific method. Ethics, metaphysics, etc.
    - jacobush 8y ago
      That is the most frank yet loving description of philosophy I have read. Bookmarked.
    - andrepd 8y ago
      >Nature of consciousness is now philosophy, will sooner or later become neuroscience and artificial intelligence. You speculate so.
  - woodruffw 8y ago
    I seem to post a version of this comment whenever a philosophical subject ends up on HN: First, Wittgenstein's ultimate views concerned the validity/fundamental meaninglessness of metaphysics, not all philosophical inquiry. There are other subjects in philosophy that require little to no metaphysical justification: aesthetics, mathematics, and certain branches of ethics are all examples of this. Second, we (HN users) are all here because of philosophy. The fundamental theories and methods of computation stem directly from the work of philosophers in the 1920s and 1930s, who in turn were building off of systems of formal reasoning devised in the 5th century BC. The same can be said for our political organizations, our aesthetic considerations, and our basic Western metaphysical perspective. I'd call that "accomplishing something."
    - hshehehjdjdjd 8y ago
      Yeah, a rare few philosophers did some precursor work to my field before it was its own field of study. Well enough. Would someone else have done it if they hadn’t? Perhaps a mathematician? Maybe. Maybe not. Probably. Philosophers doing something useful a century ago tells us little about whether philosophy continues to be a productive force in society. If the best thing you can say about the pursuit is that many years ago its members contributed to studies we now think of as separate disciplines, well, that’s not much.
      - woodruffw 8y ago
        > Yeah, a rare few philosophers did some precursor work to my field before it was its own field of study. We're talking about the late 19th and 20th centuries in the cases of Frege and Russell (two of dozens), well into mathematics being its own field of study. I brought up the 5th century BC to show a continuous line of inquiry, but you can look into most philosophy departments today to see novel work in the philosophy of mathematics. I studied under some professors who did that work. > If the best thing you can say about the pursuit is that many years ago its members contributed to studies we now think of as separate disciplines, well, that’s not much. I'm not understanding this reasoning. The "separate disciplines" you're talking about would not exist without philosophy. All modern computing, mathematics, and political science stems directly from relatively recent discoveries and insights by philosophers. In my book it's a sign of tremendous success, not failure, for one field to spawn another.
  - perl4ever 8y ago
    "Not that there’s anything wrong with a bit of self-stimulation. I’m here commenting after all." That sounds a bit solipsistic. Don't you believe other commenters exist?
    - hshehehjdjdjd 8y ago
      I believe other commenters exist. I don’t believe any of the comments any of us are making are useful. We are all here because commenting feels productive, even though it totally isn’t.
      - goatlover 8y ago
        > We are all here because commenting feels productive, even though it totally isn’t. Actually, I don't feel like commenting is ever productive (for me), but I enjoy doing it, or can't resist trying to make a point. Being productive is certainly not a motivation I have when thinking about philosophy, any more than it is for enjoying art or any number of subjects. Being productive only matters when I have something I need to get done.
- woodruffw 8y ago
  The irony, of course, being that Wittgenstein's view is itself a metaphysical view, albeit a reductive one. Wittgenstein himself seems to be aware of this in his later works, where he walks back the claim of having solved philosophy to just the claim of having rendered metaphysics moot.
- agonz253 8y ago
  > There are no startling discoveries to be made of facts, not open to the methods of science, yet accessible “from the armchair” through some blend of intuition, pure reason and conceptual analysis. A counterexample of this is the kind of philosophical speculations that led to the General Theory of Relativity. E.g see the first 3 sections in Einstein's paper from 1916 "The Foundation of the General Theory of Relativity". I agree with the sentiment of this quote but I think that sometimes there are indeed truly fruitful ideas to be found buried in a given philosophical work. What's hard is spotting them by weeding out all the BS. David Hume's and Mach's work certainly influenced the development of scientific ideas. For one, their empiricism taught us to be wary of concepts about which we cannot talk about in an operational sense, such as absolute space and absolute time. Both SR and QM owe something to this view. It's funny that some of the thinking employed in the formation of GR actually resembles more the kind of philosophizing employed by ancient thinkers, and would perhaps be dismissed as "metaphysical" by most scientists today.
- colordrops 8y ago
  > accessible “from the armchair” through some blend of intuition, pure reason and conceptual analysis. I'm guessing he believed Buddhism to be a monumental waste of time.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
MisterOctober 8y ago
Another angle on Wittgenstein's rectitude, by the folks at Existential Comics : http://existentialcomics.com/comic/245 http://existentialcomics.com/comic/245 In which W's talking lion shows a taste for English pop groups and Ultimate Frisbee
p1necone 8y ago
Funny that this is being posted here. Don't the foundations of computing come from Philosophy?
- ucaetano 8y ago
  For any X, the foundations of X come from Philosophy.
ucaetano 8y ago
This reminds me of someone who once told me that the vast majority of philosophical problems are self-inflicted and caused by the intentional use of vague and ambiguous definitions, and therefore could be solved trivially simply by agreeing on a definition for something. One example given was the Theseu's Paradox (or The Ship of Theseus): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus The entire problem only exists because you're intentionally using a vague term in the problem, therefore causing the problem itself. At least that was the commentary, I'm not an expert in the subject, and I'm sure many will disagree. But then, even the disagreeing is just pointlessly creating a problem for the sake of the discussion.
- woodruffw 8y ago
  Which vague term? The problem in The Ship of Theseus is one of identity: do objects have historical properties (i.e., do they undergo change but remain "the thing"), or do they become new objects when change occurs? Taking either horn leads to radical conclusions about the objects we interact with on a daily basis, and so we have a paradox. There are plenty of examples of vague and ambiguous language in philosophy, but I think that the SoT remains problematic without them.
  - dooglius 8y ago
    This is just moving to vagueness in the definition of "object". >Taking either horn leads to radical conclusions about the objects we interact with on a daily basis How would someone deal with objects in the real world differently based on a solution to this supposed problem? In what context is the distinction important?
    - woodruffw 8y ago
      By "object," I just mean "a thing in the world." We can talk in particulars: a candle, a ship, whatever. I don't disagree that there's plenty of room for vagueness there, but I don't think that either of us has particularly vague definitions of "object" in mind. > How would someone deal with objects in the real world differently based on a solution to this supposed problem? The simplest example is in the second case: if we were to conclude that objects don't contain historical properties, then we would be hard pressed to accept any sort of continuity. Am I the same person as I was a moment ago? Am I responsible for "my" future actions, even if it's not "me"? The first case also has problems: if objects encapsulate their historical properties, then how did we end up with two objects? Which one of them is the "real" one, i.e. the one with the name "Theseus's Ship"?
captain_perl 8y ago
Einstein, Bertrand Russell and even Wittgenstein himself were all armchair philosophers. They just formed their deductive powers in the modern scientific era. Wittgenstein is well-known for changing the origin of mathematical problems to the most convenient in his mind - about as close to philosophy as you can get.
lebrad 8y ago
The argument about science replacing philosophy is constantly presented as a nuanced conundrum. But there really are scientific questions and there really are philosophical questions. For example, when two cars crash, science can in principle tell us exactly at what speeds they were traveling, what the drivers were doing, and all the physical details. But as humans we want to find not just what happened but who's at fault. When we ask questions about guilt, we're asking a non-scientific, philosophical question. Understanding precisely what happened is important in assessing guilt, but only up to a point. I don't mean questions of physical cause and effect, or even of legal guilt, but actual culpability. If you think that question is answerable, then you're in the realm of philosophy. Questions of credit and blame lead to questions of good and bad. If you believe that ethics are a real thing, then every decision has an ethical dimension, and science can't really help with that. The best attempt I've seen at reconciling science and physics is by Bob Doyle at http://www.informationphilosopher.com/ http://www.informationphilosopher.com/
- Retra 8y ago
  Why do you think that guilt is a non-scientific question? Is it only because it is too inadequately defined to produce a consistent interpretation? And guilt probably has little to do with fault.
  - ethbro 8y ago
    The comment was presumably talking about guilt in the ethical rather than factual sense. E.g. Trolley Problem https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem
    - Retra 8y ago
      Do you mean guilt-the-emotion, or guilt as a causal relation? Neither of those are beyond the pervue of science. The only troubles you get -- the reasons scientists don't engage in this kind of theorizing -- is that the domain is both complex and culturally sensitive, and thus work doesn't receive funding and appreciation. It's not because it can't be done.
perl4ever 8y ago
I think he was right when he wrote "Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muß man schweigen." I once read a book by a Zen Master called "Wanting Enlightenment Is a Big Mistake" and by the end of it, I agreed. Hence the book was worthless. Edit: so is it fitting if this post earns me negative karma?
yarrel 8y ago
Which time?
wittgenstein 8y ago
Yes I was.

28 points by scribu 8y ago

To save you the click: "Wittgenstein claims that there are no realms of phenomena whose study is the special business of a philosopher, and about which he or she should devise profound a priori theories and sophisticated supporting arguments. There are no startling discoveries to be made of facts, not open to the methods of science, yet accessible “from the armchair” through some blend of intuition, pure reason and conceptual analysis. Indeed the whole idea of a subject that could yield such results is based on confusion and wishful thinking."

hshehehjdjdjd 8y ago
In other words, philosophy is a form of mental “self-stimulation.” It feels like you’re accomplishing something when actually you aren’t. That matches my views at any rate. Not that there’s anything wrong with a bit of self-stimulation. I’m here commenting after all. But philosophy is pretty unique in that they present their fun as some kind of noble pursuit.
- darkmighty 8y ago
  More like, philosophy is the extreme version of the 'Uncategorized' box of science -- it's almost the leftover pile which gets slowly picked up and put into neat boxes of knowledge. Mechanical nature of life was once philosophical musings, now is biology. Atomic nature of matter were philosophical musings, now physics. Nature of consciousness is now philosophy, will sooner or later become neuroscience and artificial intelligence. Philosophy isn't useless. It is a ground for preliminary discussion before the matter is ready to shift into more solid ground -- mathematics, logic, or hard sciences. That it suffers from (a degree of) infinite dwelling on pointless topics is inevitable, because it is very hard to judge what will one day be useful or legitimate of discussion; making the false positive nil will increase the false negatives too much. Plus if philosophy decided on a too strict topic regime, soon another field would be born to house the outcasts of academic philosophy, thus becoming the new leftover pile of reason.
  - yabb 8y ago
    Pretty much this. It's like pre-science. I could see how a lot of modern philosophy could be rehashing issues that have already been extensively formalized though
    - andrepd 8y ago
      There is plenty of knowledge that is non-scientific. Not all knowledge is accessible through the scientific method. Ethics, metaphysics, etc.
  - jacobush 8y ago
    That is the most frank yet loving description of philosophy I have read. Bookmarked.
  - andrepd 8y ago
    >Nature of consciousness is now philosophy, will sooner or later become neuroscience and artificial intelligence. You speculate so.
- woodruffw 8y ago
  I seem to post a version of this comment whenever a philosophical subject ends up on HN: First, Wittgenstein's ultimate views concerned the validity/fundamental meaninglessness of metaphysics, not all philosophical inquiry. There are other subjects in philosophy that require little to no metaphysical justification: aesthetics, mathematics, and certain branches of ethics are all examples of this. Second, we (HN users) are all here because of philosophy. The fundamental theories and methods of computation stem directly from the work of philosophers in the 1920s and 1930s, who in turn were building off of systems of formal reasoning devised in the 5th century BC. The same can be said for our political organizations, our aesthetic considerations, and our basic Western metaphysical perspective. I'd call that "accomplishing something."
  - hshehehjdjdjd 8y ago
    Yeah, a rare few philosophers did some precursor work to my field before it was its own field of study. Well enough. Would someone else have done it if they hadn’t? Perhaps a mathematician? Maybe. Maybe not. Probably. Philosophers doing something useful a century ago tells us little about whether philosophy continues to be a productive force in society. If the best thing you can say about the pursuit is that many years ago its members contributed to studies we now think of as separate disciplines, well, that’s not much.
    - woodruffw 8y ago
      > Yeah, a rare few philosophers did some precursor work to my field before it was its own field of study. We're talking about the late 19th and 20th centuries in the cases of Frege and Russell (two of dozens), well into mathematics being its own field of study. I brought up the 5th century BC to show a continuous line of inquiry, but you can look into most philosophy departments today to see novel work in the philosophy of mathematics. I studied under some professors who did that work. > If the best thing you can say about the pursuit is that many years ago its members contributed to studies we now think of as separate disciplines, well, that’s not much. I'm not understanding this reasoning. The "separate disciplines" you're talking about would not exist without philosophy. All modern computing, mathematics, and political science stems directly from relatively recent discoveries and insights by philosophers. In my book it's a sign of tremendous success, not failure, for one field to spawn another.
- perl4ever 8y ago
  "Not that there’s anything wrong with a bit of self-stimulation. I’m here commenting after all." That sounds a bit solipsistic. Don't you believe other commenters exist?
  - hshehehjdjdjd 8y ago
    I believe other commenters exist. I don’t believe any of the comments any of us are making are useful. We are all here because commenting feels productive, even though it totally isn’t.
    - goatlover 8y ago
      > We are all here because commenting feels productive, even though it totally isn’t. Actually, I don't feel like commenting is ever productive (for me), but I enjoy doing it, or can't resist trying to make a point. Being productive is certainly not a motivation I have when thinking about philosophy, any more than it is for enjoying art or any number of subjects. Being productive only matters when I have something I need to get done.
woodruffw 8y ago
The irony, of course, being that Wittgenstein's view is itself a metaphysical view, albeit a reductive one. Wittgenstein himself seems to be aware of this in his later works, where he walks back the claim of having solved philosophy to just the claim of having rendered metaphysics moot.
agonz253 8y ago
> There are no startling discoveries to be made of facts, not open to the methods of science, yet accessible “from the armchair” through some blend of intuition, pure reason and conceptual analysis. A counterexample of this is the kind of philosophical speculations that led to the General Theory of Relativity. E.g see the first 3 sections in Einstein's paper from 1916 "The Foundation of the General Theory of Relativity". I agree with the sentiment of this quote but I think that sometimes there are indeed truly fruitful ideas to be found buried in a given philosophical work. What's hard is spotting them by weeding out all the BS. David Hume's and Mach's work certainly influenced the development of scientific ideas. For one, their empiricism taught us to be wary of concepts about which we cannot talk about in an operational sense, such as absolute space and absolute time. Both SR and QM owe something to this view. It's funny that some of the thinking employed in the formation of GR actually resembles more the kind of philosophizing employed by ancient thinkers, and would perhaps be dismissed as "metaphysical" by most scientists today.
colordrops 8y ago
> accessible “from the armchair” through some blend of intuition, pure reason and conceptual analysis. I'm guessing he believed Buddhism to be a monumental waste of time.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]

MisterOctober 8y ago

Another angle on Wittgenstein's rectitude, by the folks at Existential Comics : http://existentialcomics.com/comic/245 http://existentialcomics.com/comic/245 In which W's talking lion shows a taste for English pop groups and Ultimate Frisbee

p1necone 8y ago

Funny that this is being posted here. Don't the foundations of computing come from Philosophy?

ucaetano 8y ago
For any X, the foundations of X come from Philosophy.

ucaetano 8y ago

This reminds me of someone who once told me that the vast majority of philosophical problems are self-inflicted and caused by the intentional use of vague and ambiguous definitions, and therefore could be solved trivially simply by agreeing on a definition for something. One example given was the Theseu's Paradox (or The Ship of Theseus): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus The entire problem only exists because you're intentionally using a vague term in the problem, therefore causing the problem itself. At least that was the commentary, I'm not an expert in the subject, and I'm sure many will disagree. But then, even the disagreeing is just pointlessly creating a problem for the sake of the discussion.

woodruffw 8y ago
Which vague term? The problem in The Ship of Theseus is one of identity: do objects have historical properties (i.e., do they undergo change but remain "the thing"), or do they become new objects when change occurs? Taking either horn leads to radical conclusions about the objects we interact with on a daily basis, and so we have a paradox. There are plenty of examples of vague and ambiguous language in philosophy, but I think that the SoT remains problematic without them.
- dooglius 8y ago
  This is just moving to vagueness in the definition of "object". >Taking either horn leads to radical conclusions about the objects we interact with on a daily basis How would someone deal with objects in the real world differently based on a solution to this supposed problem? In what context is the distinction important?
  - woodruffw 8y ago
    By "object," I just mean "a thing in the world." We can talk in particulars: a candle, a ship, whatever. I don't disagree that there's plenty of room for vagueness there, but I don't think that either of us has particularly vague definitions of "object" in mind. > How would someone deal with objects in the real world differently based on a solution to this supposed problem? The simplest example is in the second case: if we were to conclude that objects don't contain historical properties, then we would be hard pressed to accept any sort of continuity. Am I the same person as I was a moment ago? Am I responsible for "my" future actions, even if it's not "me"? The first case also has problems: if objects encapsulate their historical properties, then how did we end up with two objects? Which one of them is the "real" one, i.e. the one with the name "Theseus's Ship"?

captain_perl 8y ago

Einstein, Bertrand Russell and even Wittgenstein himself were all armchair philosophers. They just formed their deductive powers in the modern scientific era. Wittgenstein is well-known for changing the origin of mathematical problems to the most convenient in his mind - about as close to philosophy as you can get.

lebrad 8y ago

The argument about science replacing philosophy is constantly presented as a nuanced conundrum. But there really are scientific questions and there really are philosophical questions. For example, when two cars crash, science can in principle tell us exactly at what speeds they were traveling, what the drivers were doing, and all the physical details. But as humans we want to find not just what happened but who's at fault. When we ask questions about guilt, we're asking a non-scientific, philosophical question. Understanding precisely what happened is important in assessing guilt, but only up to a point. I don't mean questions of physical cause and effect, or even of legal guilt, but actual culpability. If you think that question is answerable, then you're in the realm of philosophy. Questions of credit and blame lead to questions of good and bad. If you believe that ethics are a real thing, then every decision has an ethical dimension, and science can't really help with that. The best attempt I've seen at reconciling science and physics is by Bob Doyle at http://www.informationphilosopher.com/ http://www.informationphilosopher.com/

Retra 8y ago
Why do you think that guilt is a non-scientific question? Is it only because it is too inadequately defined to produce a consistent interpretation? And guilt probably has little to do with fault.
- ethbro 8y ago
  The comment was presumably talking about guilt in the ethical rather than factual sense. E.g. Trolley Problem https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem
  - Retra 8y ago
    Do you mean guilt-the-emotion, or guilt as a causal relation? Neither of those are beyond the pervue of science. The only troubles you get -- the reasons scientists don't engage in this kind of theorizing -- is that the domain is both complex and culturally sensitive, and thus work doesn't receive funding and appreciation. It's not because it can't be done.

perl4ever 8y ago

I think he was right when he wrote "Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muß man schweigen." I once read a book by a Zen Master called "Wanting Enlightenment Is a Big Mistake" and by the end of it, I agreed. Hence the book was worthless. Edit: so is it fitting if this post earns me negative karma?

yarrel 8y ago

Which time?

wittgenstein 8y ago

Yes I was.