7 ms·

Could you elaborate on how Kant does work that seems to be little more than the obfuscation of trivial or false ideas?

lisper 3y ago
Sorry, I made a mistake. I meant Wittgenstein, not Kant, who wrote one of the premier works of philosophical nonsense: the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus [1]. I believe that Wittgenstein himself once admitted that it was basically intended to be a practical joke kind of like the Sokal affair [2], but I can't find the reference right now. But some people seem to still take it seriously. The biggest problem in classical philosophy is that there were fundamental things they simply didn't know. In particular, anything written before 1936 doesn't have the benefit of Turing's results on universal computation, and so it suffers from all kinds of misconceptions about human exceptionalism. These mistakes are understandable, but nonetheless the products of ignorance, and should be of little more than historical interest today. But AFAICT contemporary philosophers still take them seriously. [1] https://www.wittgensteinproject.org/w/index.php?title=Tractatus_Logico-Philosophicus_(English) https://www.wittgensteinproject.org/w/index.php?title=Tracta... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair
- pdonis 3y ago
  > I meant Wittgenstein, not Kant I think Kant would have been another justifiable example. I found Bertrand Russell's commentary on Kant to be apt: "Hume, with his criticism of the concept of causality, awakened him from his dogmatic slumbers--so at least he says, but the awakening was only temporary, and he soon invented a soporific which enabled him to sleep again."
  - lisper 3y ago
    > I think Kant would have been another justifiable example. He may well be, I just don't know that much about him.
- dsubburam 3y ago
  What do you make of Wittgenstein's "no private language" argument?[1] I am not a professional philosopher, but I understand that that argument is offered as proof that "language is essentially social" (see article cited below), and so of some import. [1] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/private-language/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/private-language/
  - lisper 3y ago
    He's not wrong, but the right way to make this argument is in terms of Shannon's information theory. You don't need to resort to philosophical mumbo jumbo, as Wittgenstein did. And Wittgenstein actually had no excuse because Shannon published while Wittgenstein was still alive. This is the difference between the Wittgensteins and the Dennetts and Maudlins of the world. Wittgenstein just seems to be profoundly ignorant of science and how it applies to philosophical questions, while Dennett and Maudlin are really scientists first and philosophers second. Their work is chock full of references to actual scientific studies. Maudlin probably knows more about quantum physics than many physicists.
    - wizzwizz4 3y ago
      Information-theoretical arguments are powerful, but they're not the only worthwhile approaches. You can't use an information-theoretic argument to teach someone information theory, and they'll find it easier to grok the consequences of information theory if they have other concepts to relate it to. Having multiple different routes to a given understanding is useful. Wittgenstein was studying the nature of language, something closer to mathematics than to physics. And he came up with these ideas no later than 1933: Shannon only published his work on information theory in 1948. That Wittgenstein's later work was validated by advances in science over a decade later suggests that "philosophical mumbo jumbo" does not characterise it well. Indeed, perhaps there's something to learn from it.
    - glenstein 3y ago
      >Wittgenstein just seems to be profoundly ignorant of science and how it applies to philosophical questions ??? If anything his criticism of his own work was that it was excessively represented language as being the kind of language used by the natural sciences, which was a narrow slice of the full breadth of possible ways language can be used to convey meaning. The very thing that makes his career so fascinating is that he was purely an engineering bro, who cared more about math and logic, and he brought that perspective into philosophy, and challenged philosophy as being nonsense when measured against the standards of the hard sciences. That's essentially what the Tractatus is, and also the reason why it was retrospectively regarded as dogmatic. Shannon's information theory is brilliant, but born out of an interest in formalisms related information transmission, and while it can be treated like it's in conversation with theories of semantic meaning, I don't think it was ever considered a specific repudiation of any particular approach. There was a whole century's worth of "ordinary language" philosophy in the anglo world guilty of much graver offenses in regarding uncritical assumptions about ordinary language as some kind of conceptual or informational bedrock, and the ways you apply Shannon to any of that, while I think you can, are non-obvious. > And Wittgenstein actually had no excuse because Shannon published while Wittgenstein was still alive. Tractatus came out something like 20 years before information theory, and by the time it was published he had already taken his late career "turn" to self criticism, but again, I don't think anyone treated Shannon like it was any specific commentary on his philosophy, the topics are rather remote and while they can "speak to" one another in a sense, a lot depends on how you build out your conceptual bridge between the two topics.
- jolux 3y ago
  Wittgenstein later repudiated the line of inquiry that produced the Tractatus but I’m pretty sure he was quite serious about it when he published.
- d0odk 3y ago
  Someone who is discrediting all of philosophy shouldn't confuse Wittgenstein and Kant. Further, Wittgenstein disavowed Tractatus as a failed project and completely revised his approach to philosophy. His most important and influential works came afterwards.
  - lisper 3y ago
    > Someone who is discrediting all of philosophy shouldn't confuse Wittgenstein and Kant. Getting the names confused is not the same as getting the people confused. My poster child for philosophical nonsense has always been the Tractatus. I just somehow got it into my head that it was written by Kant, not Wittgenstein (I've always been bad at remembering names) and I didn't bother to check because I was writing an HN comment and not a paper for publication.
    - d0odk 3y ago
      Okay, but you initially criticized Wittgenstein, the philosopher, not Tractatus, the work. Wittgenstein himself would agree that Tractatus is deeply flawed. He wrote his more influential works later, and they went in a completely different philosophical direction. You're criticizing a philosopher as "pooh-pooh-able" for a work that he personally disavowed and does not represent the positions he is best known for.
      - lisper 3y ago
        I was intending to criticize the field, and in a shot-from-the-hip in a moment of some passion chose Wittgenstein as my example. > Wittgenstein himself would agree that Tractatus is deeply flawed. So I am vindicated. I'm not actually criticizing Wittgenstein for writing Tractatus; there's nothing wrong with writing nonsense. Lewis Carroll was a master. The problem is writing nonsense and not recognizing it as nonsense. I'm criticizing the field of philosophy for elevating Wittgenstein to iconic status after having written such manifest nonsense without recognizing that it is manifest nonsense. That is an indictment of the field, not the man. BTW, the reason that this is a touchy subject with me is that I did my masters thesis (in 1987) on the subject of intentionality [1] in AI. After wading through dozens of inscrutible papers I came to realize that the whole topic was basically bullshit [2], and that the problem had been completely solved by Bertrand Russell in 1905 [3], but no one seemed to have noticed. Even today the vast majority of philosophers (AFAIK) think this is still an open topic. And BTW, Russell's solution is beautiful and easy to understand. Frankly, I think it has been ignored because it is easy to understand. [1] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/intentionality/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/intentionality/ [2] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/intentionality/#InteInex https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/intentionality/#InteInex [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Denoting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Denoting
- raddan 3y ago
  I would love to see a reference to the claim that Wittgenstein regarded Tractatus as a joke. I took an analytic philosophy course as an undergrad that featured Wittgenstein prominently, and that prof certainly did not regard it unseriously. Anyone whose job it is to uncover the truth ought to be ant least a little curious about what we know and how we know it, and perhaps more importantly, whether there are true things that we can never know. These are mostly not scientific questions, but thinking about them helps us understand why science settled on the particular set of axioms that it did (eg, that there really is a world that exists independently of humans and their conception of it).
  - lisper 3y ago
    > I would love to see a reference to the claim that Wittgenstein regarded Tractatus as a joke. Apparently I was wrong about that too. According to another comment in this thread [1], he disavowed the work later, but intended it to be serious when he wrote it. It has always seemed like self-evident nonsense to me though. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40089100 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40089100
- vehemenz 3y ago
  I think your critique of philosophy would land better if you picked an easier target. The primary metaphor of the Tractatus (pulling up the ladder) often goes over people's heads.

Sorry, I made a mistake. I meant Wittgenstein, not Kant, who wrote one of the premier works of philosophical nonsense: the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus [1]. I believe that Wittgenstein himself once admitted that it was basically intended to be a practical joke kind of like the Sokal affair [2], but I can't find the reference right now. But some people seem to still take it seriously. The biggest problem in classical philosophy is that there were fundamental things they simply didn't know. In particular, anything written before 1936 doesn't have the benefit of Turing's results on universal computation, and so it suffers from all kinds of misconceptions about human exceptionalism. These mistakes are understandable, but nonetheless the products of ignorance, and should be of little more than historical interest today. But AFAICT contemporary philosophers still take them seriously. [1] https://www.wittgensteinproject.org/w/index.php?title=Tractatus_Logico-Philosophicus_(English) https://www.wittgensteinproject.org/w/index.php?title=Tracta... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair

pdonis 3y ago
> I meant Wittgenstein, not Kant I think Kant would have been another justifiable example. I found Bertrand Russell's commentary on Kant to be apt: "Hume, with his criticism of the concept of causality, awakened him from his dogmatic slumbers--so at least he says, but the awakening was only temporary, and he soon invented a soporific which enabled him to sleep again."
- lisper 3y ago
  > I think Kant would have been another justifiable example. He may well be, I just don't know that much about him.
dsubburam 3y ago
What do you make of Wittgenstein's "no private language" argument?[1] I am not a professional philosopher, but I understand that that argument is offered as proof that "language is essentially social" (see article cited below), and so of some import. [1] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/private-language/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/private-language/
- lisper 3y ago
  He's not wrong, but the right way to make this argument is in terms of Shannon's information theory. You don't need to resort to philosophical mumbo jumbo, as Wittgenstein did. And Wittgenstein actually had no excuse because Shannon published while Wittgenstein was still alive. This is the difference between the Wittgensteins and the Dennetts and Maudlins of the world. Wittgenstein just seems to be profoundly ignorant of science and how it applies to philosophical questions, while Dennett and Maudlin are really scientists first and philosophers second. Their work is chock full of references to actual scientific studies. Maudlin probably knows more about quantum physics than many physicists.
  - wizzwizz4 3y ago
    Information-theoretical arguments are powerful, but they're not the only worthwhile approaches. You can't use an information-theoretic argument to teach someone information theory, and they'll find it easier to grok the consequences of information theory if they have other concepts to relate it to. Having multiple different routes to a given understanding is useful. Wittgenstein was studying the nature of language, something closer to mathematics than to physics. And he came up with these ideas no later than 1933: Shannon only published his work on information theory in 1948. That Wittgenstein's later work was validated by advances in science over a decade later suggests that "philosophical mumbo jumbo" does not characterise it well. Indeed, perhaps there's something to learn from it.
  - glenstein 3y ago
    >Wittgenstein just seems to be profoundly ignorant of science and how it applies to philosophical questions ??? If anything his criticism of his own work was that it was excessively represented language as being the kind of language used by the natural sciences, which was a narrow slice of the full breadth of possible ways language can be used to convey meaning. The very thing that makes his career so fascinating is that he was purely an engineering bro, who cared more about math and logic, and he brought that perspective into philosophy, and challenged philosophy as being nonsense when measured against the standards of the hard sciences. That's essentially what the Tractatus is, and also the reason why it was retrospectively regarded as dogmatic. Shannon's information theory is brilliant, but born out of an interest in formalisms related information transmission, and while it can be treated like it's in conversation with theories of semantic meaning, I don't think it was ever considered a specific repudiation of any particular approach. There was a whole century's worth of "ordinary language" philosophy in the anglo world guilty of much graver offenses in regarding uncritical assumptions about ordinary language as some kind of conceptual or informational bedrock, and the ways you apply Shannon to any of that, while I think you can, are non-obvious. > And Wittgenstein actually had no excuse because Shannon published while Wittgenstein was still alive. Tractatus came out something like 20 years before information theory, and by the time it was published he had already taken his late career "turn" to self criticism, but again, I don't think anyone treated Shannon like it was any specific commentary on his philosophy, the topics are rather remote and while they can "speak to" one another in a sense, a lot depends on how you build out your conceptual bridge between the two topics.
jolux 3y ago
Wittgenstein later repudiated the line of inquiry that produced the Tractatus but I’m pretty sure he was quite serious about it when he published.
d0odk 3y ago
Someone who is discrediting all of philosophy shouldn't confuse Wittgenstein and Kant. Further, Wittgenstein disavowed Tractatus as a failed project and completely revised his approach to philosophy. His most important and influential works came afterwards.
- lisper 3y ago
  > Someone who is discrediting all of philosophy shouldn't confuse Wittgenstein and Kant. Getting the names confused is not the same as getting the people confused. My poster child for philosophical nonsense has always been the Tractatus. I just somehow got it into my head that it was written by Kant, not Wittgenstein (I've always been bad at remembering names) and I didn't bother to check because I was writing an HN comment and not a paper for publication.
  - d0odk 3y ago
    Okay, but you initially criticized Wittgenstein, the philosopher, not Tractatus, the work. Wittgenstein himself would agree that Tractatus is deeply flawed. He wrote his more influential works later, and they went in a completely different philosophical direction. You're criticizing a philosopher as "pooh-pooh-able" for a work that he personally disavowed and does not represent the positions he is best known for.
    - lisper 3y ago
      I was intending to criticize the field, and in a shot-from-the-hip in a moment of some passion chose Wittgenstein as my example. > Wittgenstein himself would agree that Tractatus is deeply flawed. So I am vindicated. I'm not actually criticizing Wittgenstein for writing Tractatus; there's nothing wrong with writing nonsense. Lewis Carroll was a master. The problem is writing nonsense and not recognizing it as nonsense. I'm criticizing the field of philosophy for elevating Wittgenstein to iconic status after having written such manifest nonsense without recognizing that it is manifest nonsense. That is an indictment of the field, not the man. BTW, the reason that this is a touchy subject with me is that I did my masters thesis (in 1987) on the subject of intentionality [1] in AI. After wading through dozens of inscrutible papers I came to realize that the whole topic was basically bullshit [2], and that the problem had been completely solved by Bertrand Russell in 1905 [3], but no one seemed to have noticed. Even today the vast majority of philosophers (AFAIK) think this is still an open topic. And BTW, Russell's solution is beautiful and easy to understand. Frankly, I think it has been ignored because it is easy to understand. [1] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/intentionality/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/intentionality/ [2] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/intentionality/#InteInex https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/intentionality/#InteInex [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Denoting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Denoting
raddan 3y ago
I would love to see a reference to the claim that Wittgenstein regarded Tractatus as a joke. I took an analytic philosophy course as an undergrad that featured Wittgenstein prominently, and that prof certainly did not regard it unseriously. Anyone whose job it is to uncover the truth ought to be ant least a little curious about what we know and how we know it, and perhaps more importantly, whether there are true things that we can never know. These are mostly not scientific questions, but thinking about them helps us understand why science settled on the particular set of axioms that it did (eg, that there really is a world that exists independently of humans and their conception of it).
- lisper 3y ago
  > I would love to see a reference to the claim that Wittgenstein regarded Tractatus as a joke. Apparently I was wrong about that too. According to another comment in this thread [1], he disavowed the work later, but intended it to be serious when he wrote it. It has always seemed like self-evident nonsense to me though. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40089100 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40089100
vehemenz 3y ago
I think your critique of philosophy would land better if you picked an easier target. The primary metaphor of the Tractatus (pulling up the ladder) often goes over people's heads.