2 ms·

One of the highly underrated contributions of Wittgenstein that doesn't get the attention it deserves is his book "On Certainty". It's a book on philosophical

One of the highly underrated contributions of Wittgenstein that doesn't get the attention it deserves is his book "On Certainty". It's a book on philosophical skepticism and the nature of doubt which he wrote late in his life. It has a unique writing style, which feels like a thought dump, but it was eye opening for me. Edit: If you want to read a bit more about it, you might be interested in this series of posts by Sam26 on the (now gone) philosophy forums: Wittgenstein's Early and Later Philosophy - With Emphasis on "On Certainty": https://web.archive.org/web/20160304215023/http://forums.philosophyforums.com/threads/wittgenstein-a-summary-41631.html https://web.archive.org/web/20160304215023/http://forums.phi...

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
reggieband 5y ago
I absolutely hated reading "On Certainty" but in a sort of good way I suppose. It is a frustrating experience that I wouldn't recommend to anyone. Wittgenstein spends a bulk of his effort on two questions, roughly, how can he say that the statement "I know my name is Ludwig Wittegenstein" is true, and how can he validate the truth of the statement "I know that is a tree" while looking at a tree. Both of those starting points end up in tail-chasing experiments. It is very stream of consciousness as it was actually compiled from his journals after his death and wasn't a book he was attempting to write. If feels like he is trying to grasp some deep meanings but I could sense his frustration when he realized his logic was at a dead end or when it was coming back on itself in a circle. Often he just abandons a line of thought mid sentence and you soon realize it is because he has once again stumbled upon one of a few consistently encountered dead ends. I've heard it described that "On Certainty" was some kind of proof that certainty is illusive. However, the book never proves anything. It's basically an insight into the mind of an extremely intelligent and well practiced philosopher banging his head against a problem that proves intractable.
routerl 5y ago
To give a little bit more context: "On Certainty" is about the foundations of empiricism and how they relate to the foundations of logic. It takes as a starting point that logical deduction is the one truly certain mode of inference we humans have, then asks "how does this apply to physics?". But it does this while being extremely indirect, and presupposing knowledge of every major philosophical/scientific debate of its time, particularly the centuries-long debate over the nature of empirical inductive reasoning. Wittgenstein sometimes seems to be talking only about, say, how a certain type of sentence works, but is actually making extremely broad statements about how all of language (and linguistic communities (like scientists)) work. As with all of Wittgenstein's writings, it only seems simple on the surface. The reason this stuff is still read and thought about is because it has a lot of implications. Here's my software engineering metaphor: Wittgenstein's method is to point out particularly poignant problems in the implementation of a class, in an object-oriented system, that are meant to demonstrate problems in the underlying architecture. According to him, the way most of us think about language is wrong, and that includes science, politics, and philosophy (even though he is unwilling to say much about those subjects directly).

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

reggieband 5y ago

I absolutely hated reading "On Certainty" but in a sort of good way I suppose. It is a frustrating experience that I wouldn't recommend to anyone. Wittgenstein spends a bulk of his effort on two questions, roughly, how can he say that the statement "I know my name is Ludwig Wittegenstein" is true, and how can he validate the truth of the statement "I know that is a tree" while looking at a tree. Both of those starting points end up in tail-chasing experiments. It is very stream of consciousness as it was actually compiled from his journals after his death and wasn't a book he was attempting to write. If feels like he is trying to grasp some deep meanings but I could sense his frustration when he realized his logic was at a dead end or when it was coming back on itself in a circle. Often he just abandons a line of thought mid sentence and you soon realize it is because he has once again stumbled upon one of a few consistently encountered dead ends. I've heard it described that "On Certainty" was some kind of proof that certainty is illusive. However, the book never proves anything. It's basically an insight into the mind of an extremely intelligent and well practiced philosopher banging his head against a problem that proves intractable.

routerl 5y ago

To give a little bit more context: "On Certainty" is about the foundations of empiricism and how they relate to the foundations of logic. It takes as a starting point that logical deduction is the one truly certain mode of inference we humans have, then asks "how does this apply to physics?". But it does this while being extremely indirect, and presupposing knowledge of every major philosophical/scientific debate of its time, particularly the centuries-long debate over the nature of empirical inductive reasoning. Wittgenstein sometimes seems to be talking only about, say, how a certain type of sentence works, but is actually making extremely broad statements about how all of language (and linguistic communities (like scientists)) work. As with all of Wittgenstein's writings, it only seems simple on the surface. The reason this stuff is still read and thought about is because it has a lot of implications. Here's my software engineering metaphor: Wittgenstein's method is to point out particularly poignant problems in the implementation of a class, in an object-oriented system, that are meant to demonstrate problems in the underlying architecture. According to him, the way most of us think about language is wrong, and that includes science, politics, and philosophy (even though he is unwilling to say much about those subjects directly).