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Wittgenstein’s Legacy: The Principles of the Private Language Arguments (2018)

106 points by tokyoseb 7y ago

DanielBMarkham 7y ago
My favorite self-quote: technology development is applied philosophy. Wittgenstein taught it; we're the people living it. When philosophy and science existed mostly as words handed from one generation to the next in written form, it was possible to amass enough of a web of meaning for any one general field for a body of practitioners to gain useful applicable knowledge for the rest of humanity. But as philosophers found out early enough, and the sciences are learning too, it's also possible to create not only webs but islands of meaning, such that localized progress can appear to be made without having any impact, positive or negative, on mankind as a whole. We mind our knitting so well that nothing ever gets knitted. We technology developers have this problem; but we not only have it, we have had it over and over again with each new domain we absorb. We start with (spoken) languages, jargon, and cultural knowledge, combine various tribes together, create a mezzanine language among ourselves, then translate all of that into math. Hopefully it's provable, rock-solid math. But however we do it, we deal with mapping ideas to bits. In the history of mankind, nobody else has ever had the job of doing that over and over again across dozens or hundreds of domains. Instead, the typical approach was to become good in one domain, then continue to specialize. In this sense, technology solution development is applied polymathematics. Because of that, it's been really interesting watching the tech community interact with the academy. I don't think there's much love lost on either side most days, but both groups have important things to offer the other. I've seen several attempts to formally bridge the gap, but it's usually done through some quasi-formal symbolic system such as UML. The light hasn't come on yet. We are getting close, though, as it's a hoot to watch. History nerd note: when Wittgenstein first began down this road and realized the impact of what he was doing, he announced that he had "solved philosophy". Philosophy was no longer something that needed work. This had to have driven Russell bananas; as he was trying to "solve" it by going down an almost diametrically-opposite path.
- kieckerjan 7y ago
  "Mezzanine language". Now that is a wonderful evocative phrase. Wittgenstein would approve. Thanks!
- codeulike 7y ago
  I don't really understand the main argument of this comment. Can someone help me out?
  - whatshisface 7y ago
    Philosophers and programmers both take hazy cultural ideas and turn them into rulesets.
    - codeulike 7y ago
      But to such different ends that the resemblance is very strained, surely? Programmers look to make an approximately useful tool, Philosophers look to discover fundamentals and insights.
      - inimino 7y ago
        But useful tools are built on fundamentals by way of insights.
        codeulike 7y ago
        I disagree. Tools are just based on what is possible and what seems to work. No deep understanding is necessary. Text messages turned out to be a great tool, created more or less by accident and intended for a completely different purpose. Twitter is something no-one asked for, but it changed the very landscape of mass communication. Its more like a tool that has shaped the world around it. Wikipedia is a fantastic tool. It was essentially created on a hunch, that a crowd-sourced encyclopedia would work. Deep analysis of the fundamentals of knowledge and how people work together to shape it was not necessary for it to be built. It was more like 'this is possible, lets try it'. The internet is basically layers of hacks, each bent to a different purpose from the original design. If you try to design something like the internet and make it philosophically pure, you end up with Project Xanadu. Which doesn't work. Facebook's model of how human friendships work is laughably simplistic - binary on/off friend/unfriend. There's no insight there. If the Social Network is to be believed, Zuckerberg's main insight was to build something that would help harvard students get laid. But still, Facebook works as a tool. Google Plus tried to have a more accurate model of relationships, and made it too complicated. Perhaps insight is a disadvantage? A good tool should be about the possible.
- Merrill 7y ago
  While natural languages and mathematics are two important formalisms by which technologists communicate, it seems to me that we also use a much broader set of visual symbolic systems. These include tables of data in various formats and figures that incorporate drawings, diagrams, charts, pictures and videos. These are now as important as the text and formulas. Problems with tables and figures are one of the main reasons for retractions. It seems that philosophers like Wittgenstein deal with all text communications (like a law book) or at most with text and formulas (like a math book). It not clear how their work relates to something such as a complex, detailed structure diagram of a molecule like a enzyme, such as are frequently published.
  - DanielBMarkham 7y ago
    I'm using the term "mathematics" in a deliberately hand-wavy fashion because people keep wanting to poke at this from various angles and even though the underlying theory is the same, it can appear that you are receiving different answers simply because you are asking the question from different epistemological frameworks. There's a reason Wittgenstein was the man and I'm not. If you like, we can assume that different numbers have a concrete, discrete meaning. We can then add commutation and association, maybe induction. At some point, however far down the rabbit hole we want to go, these numbers in a table represent some physical thing: six apples or whatever. These diagrams and other visuals represent some tangible, agreed-upon thing: a diagram of an enzyme, perhaps. The mapping of various calculii to either physical things or commonly-held concepts is not on the table here. The point is that the concepts themselves can have subtly-different meanings for any two practitioners or observers. A doctor in the middle ages may check your humeurs and a modern nurse may check you blood pressure. Imagining for a second that both operations look similar, even though you may have the same number, you have a completely different understanding of what those numbers mean. So whatever formal rules of mathematics you'd like to have, and whatever visuals or measurements you'd like to take or produce, the end goal is analysis or language creation around a shared interest. If I hold up a coconut and want to trade it, then you make some odd sound, it means nothing. But then if you hold up two bananas, we may be beginning to converse and exchange meaning. (In this case by way of commerce, but this is just one example of thousands) The visuals enable higher-bandwidth conversations. Do I then think that 1=2, since I had one coconut and you had 2 bananas? I might. I might not. If we're from completely different cultures we have a lot more work to do. That's an obvious example, the deeper and much more profound truth is that the same thing can happen with a vapor trail in a particle accelerator. I'm reminded of John Wheeler's idea that maybe there's only one electron in the entire universe. Once the web of meaning reaches some degree of complexity, the human brain shuts down and stops evaluating all the possible alternative meaning paths; we are not aware of this. In our mind we've thought through everything and are sitting on top of thousands of years of received wisdom. It has always been like this. So yes, they are much, much more important than text or formulas, but they're more important because they assist us in the drive for common language creation. Frankly, many times they do a much better job than the others. But the job in both cases is the same. I will make another stupid analogy. Ever see the scintillating grid optical illusion?[1] It looks like you can see every other black dot except the one you're looking directly at. Meaning is similar in that whatever the concept under observation, it appears like some analysis can work out the problems. The other ones, farther away, don't need any work. They're all set in stone. But then, given time, when you look at those, you realize that no, actually there's some problems over here. That area you were looking at before? That's all fixed now. The lesson here is that there is a cognitive limit to the things that you can simultaneously ponder about their meaning, relationships, and relevance to any one situation. After that limit, it's all just "common knowledge" or received wisdom. It has to be this way. (no time to go into why). But then you realize that it's all a web, we're all living in our own constructed grid that's different, and the goal is to align both the concepts under observation and the "given" concepts among several of us such that we can erect a language scaffold sturdy enough to make progress towards some common goal. I know that sucks, but that's the best I've got in ten minutes. Hope it helped. There's an entirely other conversation about how we construct these grids, how we share them, and more importantly why this is a feature of sentience and not just a stupid primate trick. No time for that. 1. https://www.illusionsindex.org/i/scintillating-grid https://www.illusionsindex.org/i/scintillating-grid
paganel 7y ago
Not to diminish Wittgenstein’s influence, quite the contrary, but I for one first heard about the idea of a “private language” while reading the works of Wilhelm von Humboldt [1], written around the 1830s (so about a century before Wittgenstein). I remember Humboldt saying something along the lines of “at the limit, we each speak our own, private language”. I read his work in translation, as I don’t speak German, so I cannot tell how much of a direct overlap there is between von Humboldt and Wittgenstein in terms of the nomenclature they were both using. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilhelm_von_Humboldt https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilhelm_von_Humboldt
- scooble 7y ago
  I don't think that anyone credits Wittgenstein with inventing the term 'private language'. Rather for the arguments/observations relating to the idea. He would not have agreed with the Humboldt remark you quoted.
- tokyoseb 7y ago
  Wittgenstein didn’t come come up with the idea of a “private language” but in his Philosophical Investigations he famously argued that the concept itself is nonsense (not via a single logical “proof” but using several thought experiments). The idea that a private language exists (ie. ‘mentalese’) is taken for granted by a lot of authors. I recently read Stephen Pinker’s book The Language Instinct and he never seemed to doubt the concept for instance.
  - paganel 7y ago
    I have not read Pinker so I don’t have a good idea of what he meant by “mentalese”, but Humboldt was using the concept of “private language” more on the lines of two different people having different “understandings” (for a lack of a better word) for concepts bearing the sama name. For example when I think of a “red apple” I might think of a different thing compared to when you think of a “red apple” on your turn (leaving aside the issue that we still need to settle on what “thing” from the previous sentence actually means). I must admit that I last read some Wittgenstein about 15 years ago, but even so, I don’t find that this understanding of what a “private language” really means is that far off from his writings. If anything, it completely invalidates the 2000-year old platonic “ideas”, as me and you thinking of different things when presented with the words “red apple” practically means that there is no underlying “red” or “apple” idea behind those concepts. That is something very valuable, Plato’s interpretation being debunked, that is.
tlb 7y ago
When I first read about Wittgenstein in some junior encyclopedia, it said that he discovered that many problems in philosophy were meaningless because words might mean different things. I imagined he was talking about words like "socialism" or "equality" -- words that are obviously slippery. But it turns out that words like "is" and "have" cause just as much trouble. Wittgenstein is famously hard to read. I have the book (translated by a group including the author of this article) with side-side German-English text, the better to puzzle over his more inscrutable pronouncements. But this article is worth your time.
- pfortuny 7y ago
  Well, Aristotle showed this very thing when talking about “being”, “cause”, “effect”, etc. Is is a shame that Greek philosophers are thought of as “old” when analytic philosophy is more or less what Aristotle did (when doing philosophy).
- DanielBMarkham 7y ago
  Wittgenstein somehow managed to suck all of western philosophy into his head and came up with this. I don't think it's necessary for us to follow in his footsteps to realize the truth of what he's saying; this is much like we don't have to understand thermodynamics to build a campfire, even though we're using a lot of its principles. He can be "right enough" for our purposes, which is ironically the point of much of his work. The good news is that humans are little language-creating monsters; so much so that we do it all the time without realizing it. (This is one of the reasons Wittgenstein's conclusions were so notoriously hard for us to reach. Whenever anybody got close, we without-realizing-it created new usages and kept on going. It wasn't until the self-contradictions reached almost crisis levels and there was enough thought put on paper that we could step back and see what we were doing) Not only do "is" and "have" cause trouble, they can have multiple meanings at multiple levels between the same two closely-knit people in the same social context. A lot of comedy is prefaced on two people who know each other really well getting mixed up on what one word might mean.
  - goatlover 7y ago
    What does it mean for Wittgenstein's philosophy to be true in light of his analysis of philosophy, since truth is one of those heavily scratched philosophical itches?
lilrightedjddj 7y ago
Wittgenstein was a homosexual, he even had tons of boys up there at his camp, so, maybe he was overloaded in some areas and it diminished his intellectual capacities.
goatlover 7y ago
This works only if one accepts that philosophical problems (itches) can be dissolved by analyzing ordinary language use to find out where philosophers, scientists or lay people have abused language to create the problem. One example the article gives is of failing to notice the disanalogy of people hiding thoughts behind the curtains of their faces. > Then someone reports what he thinks, he is neither describing what he thinks, nor is he describing anything he sees. So what is the person describing? If I was thinking it would be nice to take a break and walk around, and you ask what I was thinking, so I tell you we should take a break to stretch our legs, am I not telling you what I was thinking? This sounds like a denial that I was thinking anything at all in order to block objections to the private language argument that we do have private thoughts and feelings we can tell other people about. Maybe the "disanalogy" came about because people do have thoughts which are only made public upon telling others. We're not a telepathic species, and I'm as sure about thinking as I am about anything else in experience, including the world and other people.
lilrightedjddj 7y ago
One thing I admire is that he had this priceless Silver cup/stein, which he just drank well-water through. I can't imagine what that cup would fetch now. Wittgenstein s cup of boy fsggottry
danharaj 7y ago
> So the resultant sentence, for example ‘I know I am in pain’, is nonsense I found this amusing. It's definitely possible to not know one is in pain. > And if that were so, it would be possible for me to make a mistake about whether I am in pain or not, and it would be possible for me to doubt whether I am in pain, but not to be sure. But none of these are genuine possibilities. So, this route is closed. But they are, though. I think anyone who has suffered from chronic pain and/or dissociation has experienced these 'impossibilities'. I think this might be beside the point of the argument, that the author chose a naive working example that makes sense to him, but I need to further think about what it means to say "I was in pain" a while after asking myself "Am I in pain?" likewise "I wasn't in pain". It seems to me that the arguments laid out here rest on a transparency of language that doesn't actually exist. > But it does not describe an impossibility either – for a logical or mathematical impossibility is not a possibility that is impossible. The sequence of words has been shown to have no sense – to be a nonsense. Ok, but if something is nonsense, i.e. nothing, then it has no meaning. But the demonstration of an impossibility theorem in mathematics most definitely has non-trivial meaning. It is not obvious that you can't trisect the angle, and there is a minimally complex way to obtain the result which is certainly more complex than, say, the impossibility of 1 = 2 in the integers. But if they're both nonsense (i.e. nothing, as the author says), then I can't ascribe this complexity of proving their impossibility to them, for I would be able to make some sense of nonsense. Now, even in most constructive logics there is no sense ascribed to a theorem of "A => 0", but this, in my opinion, should be considered a flaw in logic, the absurd does have meaning! No one thinks that Wiles proved that nonsense was nonsense, an immediately obvious statement. Nonsense can appear as sense for so long that you would never know it was any different. -- I think my rumination above as I read are very shallow (and I have spared y'all from many more), but I have been wanting to read Wittgenstein for quite some time now and I think this writing will motivate me to do it sooner. At the very least Wittgenstein is irresistible to engage with. I think one of my main problems is with the reliance on logical possibility as fully coherent.
tokyoseb 7y ago
If you’d like to read Wittgenstein but don’t know where to start I would recommend reading “How to read Wittgenstein” by Ray Monk, as an introduction before moving to “Philosophical Investigation” (rather than starting with his first book, the Tractatus, which is really cryptic). I saw this advice on another HN thread a while ago and for me it was it spot on. I also read Ray Monk’s bio of Wittgenstein but found it a lot less interesting. I can’t pretend I understood 100% of his Philosophical Investigations but it definitely made me see things differently. I like his approach to try to “turn unobvious nonsense into obvious nonsense” and show that a lot of the seemingly “natural” ideas we rely on to describe our mental activity rest on very shaky grounds.
- zwkrt 7y ago
  I’ll let professional philosophers try to peel apart every nuance of the Investigations. It is a thoroughly enjoyable and approachable—if not chaotich—book for anyone used to reading academic papers in CS, math, or linguistics. The topic is deeply scrutinizing our everyday language, especially language about mental states. He is a very persuasive and poetic writer. Some excerpts: - To utter a word is to strike a note on the keyboard of the imagination. 359. Could a machine think? ... Well is the human body to be considered such a machine? It surely comes as close as possible to being such a machine. 583. ... And the word “hope” refers to a phenomenon of human life. (A smiling mouth smiles only in a human face.)
lordleft 7y ago
The older I get, and the more I read Wittgenstein, the more I am astonished that we are able to convey ideas to each other other all. Language is lossy, and perilous.
rags2riches 7y ago
Can you forgive me if I take this opportunity to share a link to the brilliant Avantgarde artist M. A. Numminen singing Wittgenstein? https://youtu.be/57PWqFowq-4 https://youtu.be/57PWqFowq-4
simplesleeper 7y ago
For those who enjoy Wittgenstein, I highly recommend the works of one his greatest students - Elizabeth Anscombe. Possibly one of the most prominent women philosophers of all time.
- zafka 7y ago
  Thank you for the Recommendation. I have read little of Wittgenstein, but he is on my "to be read" list. I had a quite brilliant but ne'er-do-well friend who opened by eyes to so many great authors and philosophers: Herman Hesse, Idries Shah ( story teller?), Doris Lessing, and quite a few others. These little nudges on HN get me back to reading content more worthwhile than what I am bombarded with in other venues.
debatem1 7y ago
A professor of mine once referred to Wittgenstein as "Bertrand Russel, through a mirror darkly". I like the analogy, and wonder which of the two it would have annoyed more.
deleted 7y ago
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freyr 7y ago
For someone so obsessed with language, I never understood why his writing is so cryptic. I haven't read the original, but in translation, his writing seems almost purposefully ambiguous. To people here versed in philosophy, was there really a purpose for this? Could his ideas not have been expressed more clearly or explicitly?
- Viliam1234 7y ago
  The less clearly you write, the more chance you give people to read in your texts what they want to see there. And then they will feel good about you having the same opinion. Someone expressing himself clearly would not become so famous.
cjauvin 7y ago
"This has dramatic implications. For it immediately illuminates venerable puzzles concerning what non-human animals can think or experience, and whether they can reason or act for reasons. It sheds no less light on the question of whether machines can think, or whether we shall be able, sometime in the future, to make machines that can think. It is not surprising that Wittgenstein exclaimed ‘How much one must be able to do before one can be said to think’. It has equally dramatic consequences for theology, both for the belief that we survive, bodilessly, after death and for the idea that there can be a supreme thinking being that has no body." Wittgentein's ideas have echoes and deep relationships with modern subjects like cognitive science and artificial intelligence (and sensitive ones, like religion and beliefs in the supernatural). In the case of AI, what is interesting is that his ideas do not discuss whether it's possible or not to create a thinking machine (i.e. technically or scientifically), but rather what it would really mean (conceptually).

106 points by tokyoseb 7y ago

My favorite self-quote: technology development is applied philosophy. Wittgenstein taught it; we're the people living it. When philosophy and science existed mostly as words handed from one generation to the next in written form, it was possible to amass enough of a web of meaning for any one general field for a body of practitioners to gain useful applicable knowledge for the rest of humanity. But as philosophers found out early enough, and the sciences are learning too, it's also possible to create not only webs but islands of meaning, such that localized progress can appear to be made without having any impact, positive or negative, on mankind as a whole. We mind our knitting so well that nothing ever gets knitted. We technology developers have this problem; but we not only have it, we have had it over and over again with each new domain we absorb. We start with (spoken) languages, jargon, and cultural knowledge, combine various tribes together, create a mezzanine language among ourselves, then translate all of that into math. Hopefully it's provable, rock-solid math. But however we do it, we deal with mapping ideas to bits. In the history of mankind, nobody else has ever had the job of doing that over and over again across dozens or hundreds of domains. Instead, the typical approach was to become good in one domain, then continue to specialize. In this sense, technology solution development is applied polymathematics. Because of that, it's been really interesting watching the tech community interact with the academy. I don't think there's much love lost on either side most days, but both groups have important things to offer the other. I've seen several attempts to formally bridge the gap, but it's usually done through some quasi-formal symbolic system such as UML. The light hasn't come on yet. We are getting close, though, as it's a hoot to watch. History nerd note: when Wittgenstein first began down this road and realized the impact of what he was doing, he announced that he had "solved philosophy". Philosophy was no longer something that needed work. This had to have driven Russell bananas; as he was trying to "solve" it by going down an almost diametrically-opposite path.

kieckerjan 7y ago
"Mezzanine language". Now that is a wonderful evocative phrase. Wittgenstein would approve. Thanks!
codeulike 7y ago
I don't really understand the main argument of this comment. Can someone help me out?
- whatshisface 7y ago
  Philosophers and programmers both take hazy cultural ideas and turn them into rulesets.
  - codeulike 7y ago
    But to such different ends that the resemblance is very strained, surely? Programmers look to make an approximately useful tool, Philosophers look to discover fundamentals and insights.
    - inimino 7y ago
      But useful tools are built on fundamentals by way of insights.
      - codeulike 7y ago
        I disagree. Tools are just based on what is possible and what seems to work. No deep understanding is necessary. Text messages turned out to be a great tool, created more or less by accident and intended for a completely different purpose. Twitter is something no-one asked for, but it changed the very landscape of mass communication. Its more like a tool that has shaped the world around it. Wikipedia is a fantastic tool. It was essentially created on a hunch, that a crowd-sourced encyclopedia would work. Deep analysis of the fundamentals of knowledge and how people work together to shape it was not necessary for it to be built. It was more like 'this is possible, lets try it'. The internet is basically layers of hacks, each bent to a different purpose from the original design. If you try to design something like the internet and make it philosophically pure, you end up with Project Xanadu. Which doesn't work. Facebook's model of how human friendships work is laughably simplistic - binary on/off friend/unfriend. There's no insight there. If the Social Network is to be believed, Zuckerberg's main insight was to build something that would help harvard students get laid. But still, Facebook works as a tool. Google Plus tried to have a more accurate model of relationships, and made it too complicated. Perhaps insight is a disadvantage? A good tool should be about the possible.
Merrill 7y ago
While natural languages and mathematics are two important formalisms by which technologists communicate, it seems to me that we also use a much broader set of visual symbolic systems. These include tables of data in various formats and figures that incorporate drawings, diagrams, charts, pictures and videos. These are now as important as the text and formulas. Problems with tables and figures are one of the main reasons for retractions. It seems that philosophers like Wittgenstein deal with all text communications (like a law book) or at most with text and formulas (like a math book). It not clear how their work relates to something such as a complex, detailed structure diagram of a molecule like a enzyme, such as are frequently published.
- DanielBMarkham 7y ago
  I'm using the term "mathematics" in a deliberately hand-wavy fashion because people keep wanting to poke at this from various angles and even though the underlying theory is the same, it can appear that you are receiving different answers simply because you are asking the question from different epistemological frameworks. There's a reason Wittgenstein was the man and I'm not. If you like, we can assume that different numbers have a concrete, discrete meaning. We can then add commutation and association, maybe induction. At some point, however far down the rabbit hole we want to go, these numbers in a table represent some physical thing: six apples or whatever. These diagrams and other visuals represent some tangible, agreed-upon thing: a diagram of an enzyme, perhaps. The mapping of various calculii to either physical things or commonly-held concepts is not on the table here. The point is that the concepts themselves can have subtly-different meanings for any two practitioners or observers. A doctor in the middle ages may check your humeurs and a modern nurse may check you blood pressure. Imagining for a second that both operations look similar, even though you may have the same number, you have a completely different understanding of what those numbers mean. So whatever formal rules of mathematics you'd like to have, and whatever visuals or measurements you'd like to take or produce, the end goal is analysis or language creation around a shared interest. If I hold up a coconut and want to trade it, then you make some odd sound, it means nothing. But then if you hold up two bananas, we may be beginning to converse and exchange meaning. (In this case by way of commerce, but this is just one example of thousands) The visuals enable higher-bandwidth conversations. Do I then think that 1=2, since I had one coconut and you had 2 bananas? I might. I might not. If we're from completely different cultures we have a lot more work to do. That's an obvious example, the deeper and much more profound truth is that the same thing can happen with a vapor trail in a particle accelerator. I'm reminded of John Wheeler's idea that maybe there's only one electron in the entire universe. Once the web of meaning reaches some degree of complexity, the human brain shuts down and stops evaluating all the possible alternative meaning paths; we are not aware of this. In our mind we've thought through everything and are sitting on top of thousands of years of received wisdom. It has always been like this. So yes, they are much, much more important than text or formulas, but they're more important because they assist us in the drive for common language creation. Frankly, many times they do a much better job than the others. But the job in both cases is the same. I will make another stupid analogy. Ever see the scintillating grid optical illusion?[1] It looks like you can see every other black dot except the one you're looking directly at. Meaning is similar in that whatever the concept under observation, it appears like some analysis can work out the problems. The other ones, farther away, don't need any work. They're all set in stone. But then, given time, when you look at those, you realize that no, actually there's some problems over here. That area you were looking at before? That's all fixed now. The lesson here is that there is a cognitive limit to the things that you can simultaneously ponder about their meaning, relationships, and relevance to any one situation. After that limit, it's all just "common knowledge" or received wisdom. It has to be this way. (no time to go into why). But then you realize that it's all a web, we're all living in our own constructed grid that's different, and the goal is to align both the concepts under observation and the "given" concepts among several of us such that we can erect a language scaffold sturdy enough to make progress towards some common goal. I know that sucks, but that's the best I've got in ten minutes. Hope it helped. There's an entirely other conversation about how we construct these grids, how we share them, and more importantly why this is a feature of sentience and not just a stupid primate trick. No time for that. 1. https://www.illusionsindex.org/i/scintillating-grid https://www.illusionsindex.org/i/scintillating-grid

paganel 7y ago

Not to diminish Wittgenstein’s influence, quite the contrary, but I for one first heard about the idea of a “private language” while reading the works of Wilhelm von Humboldt [1], written around the 1830s (so about a century before Wittgenstein). I remember Humboldt saying something along the lines of “at the limit, we each speak our own, private language”. I read his work in translation, as I don’t speak German, so I cannot tell how much of a direct overlap there is between von Humboldt and Wittgenstein in terms of the nomenclature they were both using. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilhelm_von_Humboldt https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilhelm_von_Humboldt

scooble 7y ago
I don't think that anyone credits Wittgenstein with inventing the term 'private language'. Rather for the arguments/observations relating to the idea. He would not have agreed with the Humboldt remark you quoted.
tokyoseb 7y ago
Wittgenstein didn’t come come up with the idea of a “private language” but in his Philosophical Investigations he famously argued that the concept itself is nonsense (not via a single logical “proof” but using several thought experiments). The idea that a private language exists (ie. ‘mentalese’) is taken for granted by a lot of authors. I recently read Stephen Pinker’s book The Language Instinct and he never seemed to doubt the concept for instance.
- paganel 7y ago
  I have not read Pinker so I don’t have a good idea of what he meant by “mentalese”, but Humboldt was using the concept of “private language” more on the lines of two different people having different “understandings” (for a lack of a better word) for concepts bearing the sama name. For example when I think of a “red apple” I might think of a different thing compared to when you think of a “red apple” on your turn (leaving aside the issue that we still need to settle on what “thing” from the previous sentence actually means). I must admit that I last read some Wittgenstein about 15 years ago, but even so, I don’t find that this understanding of what a “private language” really means is that far off from his writings. If anything, it completely invalidates the 2000-year old platonic “ideas”, as me and you thinking of different things when presented with the words “red apple” practically means that there is no underlying “red” or “apple” idea behind those concepts. That is something very valuable, Plato’s interpretation being debunked, that is.

tlb 7y ago

When I first read about Wittgenstein in some junior encyclopedia, it said that he discovered that many problems in philosophy were meaningless because words might mean different things. I imagined he was talking about words like "socialism" or "equality" -- words that are obviously slippery. But it turns out that words like "is" and "have" cause just as much trouble. Wittgenstein is famously hard to read. I have the book (translated by a group including the author of this article) with side-side German-English text, the better to puzzle over his more inscrutable pronouncements. But this article is worth your time.

pfortuny 7y ago
Well, Aristotle showed this very thing when talking about “being”, “cause”, “effect”, etc. Is is a shame that Greek philosophers are thought of as “old” when analytic philosophy is more or less what Aristotle did (when doing philosophy).
DanielBMarkham 7y ago
Wittgenstein somehow managed to suck all of western philosophy into his head and came up with this. I don't think it's necessary for us to follow in his footsteps to realize the truth of what he's saying; this is much like we don't have to understand thermodynamics to build a campfire, even though we're using a lot of its principles. He can be "right enough" for our purposes, which is ironically the point of much of his work. The good news is that humans are little language-creating monsters; so much so that we do it all the time without realizing it. (This is one of the reasons Wittgenstein's conclusions were so notoriously hard for us to reach. Whenever anybody got close, we without-realizing-it created new usages and kept on going. It wasn't until the self-contradictions reached almost crisis levels and there was enough thought put on paper that we could step back and see what we were doing) Not only do "is" and "have" cause trouble, they can have multiple meanings at multiple levels between the same two closely-knit people in the same social context. A lot of comedy is prefaced on two people who know each other really well getting mixed up on what one word might mean.
- goatlover 7y ago
  What does it mean for Wittgenstein's philosophy to be true in light of his analysis of philosophy, since truth is one of those heavily scratched philosophical itches?

lilrightedjddj 7y ago

Wittgenstein was a homosexual, he even had tons of boys up there at his camp, so, maybe he was overloaded in some areas and it diminished his intellectual capacities.

goatlover 7y ago

This works only if one accepts that philosophical problems (itches) can be dissolved by analyzing ordinary language use to find out where philosophers, scientists or lay people have abused language to create the problem. One example the article gives is of failing to notice the disanalogy of people hiding thoughts behind the curtains of their faces. > Then someone reports what he thinks, he is neither describing what he thinks, nor is he describing anything he sees. So what is the person describing? If I was thinking it would be nice to take a break and walk around, and you ask what I was thinking, so I tell you we should take a break to stretch our legs, am I not telling you what I was thinking? This sounds like a denial that I was thinking anything at all in order to block objections to the private language argument that we do have private thoughts and feelings we can tell other people about. Maybe the "disanalogy" came about because people do have thoughts which are only made public upon telling others. We're not a telepathic species, and I'm as sure about thinking as I am about anything else in experience, including the world and other people.

lilrightedjddj 7y ago

One thing I admire is that he had this priceless Silver cup/stein, which he just drank well-water through. I can't imagine what that cup would fetch now. Wittgenstein s cup of boy fsggottry

danharaj 7y ago

> So the resultant sentence, for example ‘I know I am in pain’, is nonsense I found this amusing. It's definitely possible to not know one is in pain. > And if that were so, it would be possible for me to make a mistake about whether I am in pain or not, and it would be possible for me to doubt whether I am in pain, but not to be sure. But none of these are genuine possibilities. So, this route is closed. But they are, though. I think anyone who has suffered from chronic pain and/or dissociation has experienced these 'impossibilities'. I think this might be beside the point of the argument, that the author chose a naive working example that makes sense to him, but I need to further think about what it means to say "I was in pain" a while after asking myself "Am I in pain?" likewise "I wasn't in pain". It seems to me that the arguments laid out here rest on a transparency of language that doesn't actually exist. > But it does not describe an impossibility either – for a logical or mathematical impossibility is not a possibility that is impossible. The sequence of words has been shown to have no sense – to be a nonsense. Ok, but if something is nonsense, i.e. nothing, then it has no meaning. But the demonstration of an impossibility theorem in mathematics most definitely has non-trivial meaning. It is not obvious that you can't trisect the angle, and there is a minimally complex way to obtain the result which is certainly more complex than, say, the impossibility of 1 = 2 in the integers. But if they're both nonsense (i.e. nothing, as the author says), then I can't ascribe this complexity of proving their impossibility to them, for I would be able to make some sense of nonsense. Now, even in most constructive logics there is no sense ascribed to a theorem of "A => 0", but this, in my opinion, should be considered a flaw in logic, the absurd does have meaning! No one thinks that Wiles proved that nonsense was nonsense, an immediately obvious statement. Nonsense can appear as sense for so long that you would never know it was any different. -- I think my rumination above as I read are very shallow (and I have spared y'all from many more), but I have been wanting to read Wittgenstein for quite some time now and I think this writing will motivate me to do it sooner. At the very least Wittgenstein is irresistible to engage with. I think one of my main problems is with the reliance on logical possibility as fully coherent.

tokyoseb 7y ago

If you’d like to read Wittgenstein but don’t know where to start I would recommend reading “How to read Wittgenstein” by Ray Monk, as an introduction before moving to “Philosophical Investigation” (rather than starting with his first book, the Tractatus, which is really cryptic). I saw this advice on another HN thread a while ago and for me it was it spot on. I also read Ray Monk’s bio of Wittgenstein but found it a lot less interesting. I can’t pretend I understood 100% of his Philosophical Investigations but it definitely made me see things differently. I like his approach to try to “turn unobvious nonsense into obvious nonsense” and show that a lot of the seemingly “natural” ideas we rely on to describe our mental activity rest on very shaky grounds.

zwkrt 7y ago
I’ll let professional philosophers try to peel apart every nuance of the Investigations. It is a thoroughly enjoyable and approachable—if not chaotich—book for anyone used to reading academic papers in CS, math, or linguistics. The topic is deeply scrutinizing our everyday language, especially language about mental states. He is a very persuasive and poetic writer. Some excerpts: - To utter a word is to strike a note on the keyboard of the imagination. 359. Could a machine think? ... Well is the human body to be considered such a machine? It surely comes as close as possible to being such a machine. 583. ... And the word “hope” refers to a phenomenon of human life. (A smiling mouth smiles only in a human face.)

lordleft 7y ago

The older I get, and the more I read Wittgenstein, the more I am astonished that we are able to convey ideas to each other other all. Language is lossy, and perilous.

rags2riches 7y ago

Can you forgive me if I take this opportunity to share a link to the brilliant Avantgarde artist M. A. Numminen singing Wittgenstein? https://youtu.be/57PWqFowq-4 https://youtu.be/57PWqFowq-4

simplesleeper 7y ago

For those who enjoy Wittgenstein, I highly recommend the works of one his greatest students - Elizabeth Anscombe. Possibly one of the most prominent women philosophers of all time.

zafka 7y ago
Thank you for the Recommendation. I have read little of Wittgenstein, but he is on my "to be read" list. I had a quite brilliant but ne'er-do-well friend who opened by eyes to so many great authors and philosophers: Herman Hesse, Idries Shah ( story teller?), Doris Lessing, and quite a few others. These little nudges on HN get me back to reading content more worthwhile than what I am bombarded with in other venues.

debatem1 7y ago

A professor of mine once referred to Wittgenstein as "Bertrand Russel, through a mirror darkly". I like the analogy, and wonder which of the two it would have annoyed more.

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freyr 7y ago

For someone so obsessed with language, I never understood why his writing is so cryptic. I haven't read the original, but in translation, his writing seems almost purposefully ambiguous. To people here versed in philosophy, was there really a purpose for this? Could his ideas not have been expressed more clearly or explicitly?

Viliam1234 7y ago
The less clearly you write, the more chance you give people to read in your texts what they want to see there. And then they will feel good about you having the same opinion. Someone expressing himself clearly would not become so famous.

cjauvin 7y ago

"This has dramatic implications. For it immediately illuminates venerable puzzles concerning what non-human animals can think or experience, and whether they can reason or act for reasons. It sheds no less light on the question of whether machines can think, or whether we shall be able, sometime in the future, to make machines that can think. It is not surprising that Wittgenstein exclaimed ‘How much one must be able to do before one can be said to think’. It has equally dramatic consequences for theology, both for the belief that we survive, bodilessly, after death and for the idea that there can be a supreme thinking being that has no body." Wittgentein's ideas have echoes and deep relationships with modern subjects like cognitive science and artificial intelligence (and sensitive ones, like religion and beliefs in the supernatural). In the case of AI, what is interesting is that his ideas do not discuss whether it's possible or not to create a thinking machine (i.e. technically or scientifically), but rather what it would really mean (conceptually).