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I'm referring to his two works, the "Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus" and "Philosophical Investigations". There's a lot explored here, but Wittgenstein basically
by darby_eight 3y ago
I'm referring to his two works, the "Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus" and "Philosophical Investigations". There's a lot explored here, but Wittgenstein basically makes the argument that the natural logic of language—how we deduce meaning from terms in a context and naturally disambiguate the semantics of ambiguous phrases—is different from the sort of formal propositional logic that forms the basis of western philosophy. However, this is also the sort of logic that allows us to apply metaphors and conceive of (possibly incoherent, possibly novel, certainly not deductively-derived) terms—counterfactuals, conditionals, subjunctive phrases, metaphors, analogies, poetic imagery, etc. LLMs have shown some affinity of the former (linguistic) type of logic with greatly reduced affinity with the latter (formal/propositional) sort of logical processing. Hallucinations as people describe them seem to be problems with not spotting "obvious" propositional incoherence.
What I'm pushing at is not that this linguistic ability naturally leads to the LLM behavior we're seeing and calling "hallucinating", just that LLMs may capture some of how humans process language, differentiate semantics, recall terms, etc, but without the mechanisms that enable rationally grappling with the resulting semantics and propositional (in)coherency that are fetched or generated.
I can't say this is very surprising—most of us seem to have thought processes that involve generating and rejecting thoughts when we e.g. "brainstorm" or engage in careful articulation that we haven't even figured out how to formally model with a chatbot capable of generating a single "thought", but I'm guessing if we want chatbots to keep their ability to generate things creatively there will always be tension with potentially generating factual claims, erm, creatively. Further evidence is anecdotal observations that some people seem to have wildly different thresholds for the propositional coherence they can spot—perhaps one might be inclined to correlate the complexity with which one can engage in spotting (in)coherence with "intelligence", if one considers that a meaningful term.
- Y_Y 3y agoThanks for the fascinating response.
- beepbooptheory 3y agoWait, are you saying this something you read in both the Tractatus and the PI? They are quite opposed as texts! That's kinda why he wrote the PI at all.. I don't think Wittgenstein would agree, first of all, that there is a "natural logic" to language. At least in the PI, that kind of entity--"the natural logic of language"--is precisely the kind of weird and imprecise use of language he is trying to expose. Even more, to say that such a logic "allows" for anything (like metaphors) feels like a very very strange thing for Wittgenstein to assert. He would ask "what do you mean by 'allows'"? All we know, according to him (in the PI), is that we find ourselves speaking in situations. Sometimes I say something, and my partner picks up the right brick, other times they do nothing, or hit me. In the PI, all the rest is doing away with things, like our idea of private language, the irreality of things like pain, etc. To conclude that he would make such assertions about the "nature" of language, of poetry, whatever, seems like maybe too quick a reading of the text. It is at best, a weirdly mystical reading of him, that he probably would not be too happy about (but don't worry about that, he was an asshole). The argument you are making sounds much more French. Derrida or Lyotard have said similar things (in their earlier, more linguistic years). They might be better friend to you here.
- darby_eight 3y ago> They are quite opposed as texts! The texts are quite different, this is true, but I don't find them contradictory. Whereas Tractatus was almost a facetious or flippant rejection of the millenia-long project to agree on a philosophical subset of language suitable for rigorous philosophy (although it continues today in the form of analytical philosophy), PI basically says "well we don't need to throw the baby out with the bath water", which I think is a fantastically mature response to a flawed tool that's still the best we have to reason about the universe. So: not contradictory in evaluation of fundamental compatibility of non-formal language for the formal needs of propositional philosophy, but perhaps contradictory in implied reaction to this realization.
- jjgreen 3y agoWhat we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.
- notpachet 3y ago> some people seem to have wildly different thresholds for the propositional coherence they can spot This sums up the last decade remarkably well.