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ME: Pretend I am a five-year-old. Can you explain Wittgenstein's ladder? CHATGPT: Sure! Wittgenstein's ladder is a metaphor used by philosopher Ludwig Wittgen

ME: Pretend I am a five-year-old. Can you explain Wittgenstein's ladder? CHATGPT: Sure! Wittgenstein's ladder is a metaphor used by philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein to explain how language and ideas work. Imagine you want to get to the top of a tree. At first, you might use a ladder to climb up. But once you get to the top, you don't need the ladder anymore. You can throw it away or leave it behind. In the same way, Wittgenstein argued that language is like a ladder. It's a tool we use to get to a certain point, but once we've reached that point, we don't need the language anymore. We can throw it away or leave it behind. For example, imagine you're learning to count. You might use your fingers to help you count to five. But once you've learned how to count to five, you don't need to use your fingers anymore. You can count to ten, twenty, or even a hundred without needing to use your fingers. Wittgenstein's ladder is a reminder that language is a tool we use to reach a certain goal, but it's not the goal itself. Once we've reached the goal, we don't need the language anymore. ME: Why is this concept useful? Don't we always need language, simply to communicate with those around us? CHATGPT: You're right that language is essential for communication, but Wittgenstein's ladder is more about the nature of language and how we use it to think and talk about the world around us. The ladder metaphor is useful because it highlights the idea that language is not fixed and unchanging. Rather, it's a flexible tool that we can use in different ways to achieve different goals. Sometimes, we need to use language in a precise, technical way to communicate complex ideas, while other times we might use language more loosely and creatively to express our emotions or share stories. Wittgenstein's ladder can also help us recognize when we're using language in a way that's no longer serving its original purpose. For example, if we're using technical jargon to communicate with someone who doesn't understand it, we might be climbing up the wrong ladder. We might need to switch to a different ladder (i.e., a different way of using language) that's more accessible and useful for the person we're communicating with. Ultimately, the concept of Wittgenstein's ladder reminds us that language is a tool we can use in different ways to achieve different goals. By being aware of how we're using language and why, we can become more effective communicators and thinkers.

its_ethan 4y ago
Assuming this is accurate, this was a much better explanation than the wikipedia page.
skybrian 4y ago
It reminds me a bit of David Chapman's view that language usage is often ad-hoc improvisation: > We use words as tools to get things done; and to get things done, we improvise, making use of whatever materials are ready to hand. If you want to whack a piece of sheet metal to bend it, and don’t know or care what the “right” tool is (if there even is one), you might take a quick look around the garage, grab a large screwdriver at the “wrong” end, and hit the target with its hard rubber handle. A hand tool may have one or two standard uses; some less common but pretty obvious ones; and unusual, creative ones. But these are not clearly distinct categories of usage. > Words go the same way. Almost any word can be used to mean almost anything, in some context. You could play this as a challenge game… How about “The eggplant is a straw hat, and the spinach is yelling about politics”? > We’re in the kitchen of a vegetarian restaurant. A table’s entrees are ready, and the server who took the order is explaining to the one who will deliver the meal which diner gets which dish. One customer’s flamboyant straw hat is a salient, unambiguously identifying feature; you can see it all the way across the room. The other probably needs to turn up a hearing aid; you can hear their opinions about cultural appropriation all the way across the room. https://metarationality.com/purpose-of-meaning https://metarationality.com/purpose-of-meaning
extr 4y ago
To apply this to philosophy, Wittgenstein argued that many of the "classical" problems of philosophy, like the meaning of life, beauty, truth, etc, are basically misappropriations of language. The reason they are intractable is because they are nonsense. The words "life", "beauty", "truth", and all other words, have meanings in certain contexts for a communicative purposes, to achieve some mutual understanding about a state of affairs in the world. But once you remove this purpose, you're playing word games with yourself. Past a certain point, it's a waste of time. That's probably an oversimplification and wrong in some way, happy for someone to correct me. But that was my takeaway from reading a ton of philosophy and eventually reading Wittgenstein and feeling "cured".
Jevon23 4y ago
This explanation is trivially incorrect if you actually read the quote from Wittgenstein: >My propositions serve as elucidations in the following way: anyone who understands me eventually recognizes them as nonsensical, when he has used them—as steps—to climb beyond them. (He must, so to speak, throw away the ladder after he has climbed up it.) It is his propositions (the propositions he lays out in the Tractatus - the book is structured as a list of propositions) that form the "ladder", not language itself. I'm really not looking forward to people having dozens of hours of hallucination-filled conversations with ChatGPT and then thinking that they've learned something. (I've already seen it tell someone that "C++ is typically compiled to intermediate code and executed on a virtual machine, making it less performant than C".)
- libraryofbabel 4y ago
  This! I read ChatGPT‘s explanation and it immediately mentioned language and I’m like, “huh! no! that’s late Wittgenstein!” Early Wittgenstein of the Tractatus is very different; the ladder is not about language at all. As usual ChatGPT is showing it’s good at globbing together a bunch of related concepts and sounding very convincing about it, while also being quite wrong. (Just read the Wikipedia page, c’mon.)
- Waterluvian 4y ago
  They’ve learned something after those hours. Just like I learned something from this hallucination. I never really did consider things like using your fingers to count as a kind of language and how you often toss them away once done. That really resonates with me. I’m going to be thinking about it. But to your point: it may not at all be accurate in terms of asking for a specific definition of a thing. Is AI going to screw up semantics for us? Where we muddy the meaning of things like above?

its_ethan 4y ago

Assuming this is accurate, this was a much better explanation than the wikipedia page.

skybrian 4y ago

It reminds me a bit of David Chapman's view that language usage is often ad-hoc improvisation: > We use words as tools to get things done; and to get things done, we improvise, making use of whatever materials are ready to hand. If you want to whack a piece of sheet metal to bend it, and don’t know or care what the “right” tool is (if there even is one), you might take a quick look around the garage, grab a large screwdriver at the “wrong” end, and hit the target with its hard rubber handle. A hand tool may have one or two standard uses; some less common but pretty obvious ones; and unusual, creative ones. But these are not clearly distinct categories of usage. > Words go the same way. Almost any word can be used to mean almost anything, in some context. You could play this as a challenge game… How about “The eggplant is a straw hat, and the spinach is yelling about politics”? > We’re in the kitchen of a vegetarian restaurant. A table’s entrees are ready, and the server who took the order is explaining to the one who will deliver the meal which diner gets which dish. One customer’s flamboyant straw hat is a salient, unambiguously identifying feature; you can see it all the way across the room. The other probably needs to turn up a hearing aid; you can hear their opinions about cultural appropriation all the way across the room. https://metarationality.com/purpose-of-meaning https://metarationality.com/purpose-of-meaning

extr 4y ago

To apply this to philosophy, Wittgenstein argued that many of the "classical" problems of philosophy, like the meaning of life, beauty, truth, etc, are basically misappropriations of language. The reason they are intractable is because they are nonsense. The words "life", "beauty", "truth", and all other words, have meanings in certain contexts for a communicative purposes, to achieve some mutual understanding about a state of affairs in the world. But once you remove this purpose, you're playing word games with yourself. Past a certain point, it's a waste of time. That's probably an oversimplification and wrong in some way, happy for someone to correct me. But that was my takeaway from reading a ton of philosophy and eventually reading Wittgenstein and feeling "cured".

Jevon23 4y ago

This explanation is trivially incorrect if you actually read the quote from Wittgenstein: >My propositions serve as elucidations in the following way: anyone who understands me eventually recognizes them as nonsensical, when he has used them—as steps—to climb beyond them. (He must, so to speak, throw away the ladder after he has climbed up it.) It is his propositions (the propositions he lays out in the Tractatus - the book is structured as a list of propositions) that form the "ladder", not language itself. I'm really not looking forward to people having dozens of hours of hallucination-filled conversations with ChatGPT and then thinking that they've learned something. (I've already seen it tell someone that "C++ is typically compiled to intermediate code and executed on a virtual machine, making it less performant than C".)

libraryofbabel 4y ago
This! I read ChatGPT‘s explanation and it immediately mentioned language and I’m like, “huh! no! that’s late Wittgenstein!” Early Wittgenstein of the Tractatus is very different; the ladder is not about language at all. As usual ChatGPT is showing it’s good at globbing together a bunch of related concepts and sounding very convincing about it, while also being quite wrong. (Just read the Wikipedia page, c’mon.)
Waterluvian 4y ago
They’ve learned something after those hours. Just like I learned something from this hallucination. I never really did consider things like using your fingers to count as a kind of language and how you often toss them away once done. That really resonates with me. I’m going to be thinking about it. But to your point: it may not at all be accurate in terms of asking for a specific definition of a thing. Is AI going to screw up semantics for us? Where we muddy the meaning of things like above?