[tlb]

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.

[DanielBMarkham]

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.

[mancerayder]

Wittgenstein somehow managed to suck all of western philosophy into his head and came up with this.

That's not true if you mean it in the literal sense, that he was a student of philosophy. He really wasn't; he hadn't read much philosophy (having been an engineer/mathematician), but he did jump in and criticize contemporary ideas and managed to very much impress Bertrand Russell, who became his mentor. Later in his life, towards his final days, he did start to read philosophy from the ground up, like an undergrad or grad student would.[1]

What's amusing is that he wrote the Tractatus, then "retired" from philosophy, believing he'd solved it all, before getting back into it again and producing Philosophical Investigations. During this time I believe he was either a monk or a teacher and gardener.

1 - Source for this is a talk given by Professor A C Grayling at Cambridge University (on YouTube) about Wittgenstein's life

[goatlover]

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?

[DanielBMarkham]

Wittgenstein has noticed a common pattern among sentient beings such that knowledge of that pattern leads to accomplishing goals that otherwise could not be accomplished.

I'll give you that for "truth". We could poke further; we would just get a bigger bowl of word salad.

The value is in the application. At the risk of sounding like Yoda, this is like walking into a large hall with other people and noticing that really good dance music is playing. People are moving around the dance floor. So you say to your partner "This is great!" and being dancing.

What's great about it? "There is a pattern of activity that I find pleasing that I can join in and feel as if I am accomplishing something of value"

Except in Wittgenstein's case, all the people were dancing, but they were all dancing to different songs and in their own invented way of dancing. Now there's nothing wrong with inventing your own songs and dance moves, mind you, but Wittgenstein was the guy that pointed out that this was what was happening.

And now we being discussing "Can we all listen to the same music", and "Who likes Jazz?", and so forth. We've opened up a new class of exploration that didn't exist before.

My guess is that Wittgenstein thought that either you'd play the music loudly enough and one dance would win (unlikely), or that it was impossible for such a large group to agree to much of anything, from the genre of music to the types of moves that looked cool. (more likely) But then you get into even more interesting issues, like how large of a group can agree on anything, what does it mean to agree on language, and so forth. We've joined the social to the philosophical in a way that had never been done before. I could go on at length, and probably would. I'd love to drag Kuhn and Popper into this. I apologize for being so wordy.

[gumby]

> What does it mean for Wittgenstein's philosophy to be true in light of his analysis of philosophy...

I think you have to pull your question apart in to two implications of "truth". There is a "ground truth" question (from plato's shadows on through today) which is not addressed in this essay.

But there's an epistemological enquiry that is at least as important, which is into the validity of our internal states and reasoning/justifications. Search down to the discussion starting with "We are, when philosophizing about experience and its objects, mesmerized by the analogy between having a chattel and having an experience." The author is referring to the deep analogies we quickly use to reason about things and how they can immediately lead us astray, often irrecoverably.

This problem is made worse by the internal private languages we each develop: I generate my utterances in the desire to induce some mental state within you; you respond similarly. What model and process do I use to convince myself that I have adequately induced that state in you? That's also an important sense of "truth"

[Retra]

I don't think the problems are meaningless because words might have different meanings, but because problems are often posed as if the words can't have multiple meanings so questions are often arranged in a way such that any reasonable solution will end up contradicting the meaning of words in the question.

IMO, the best thing to take away from Wittgenstein is that he understood how words acquire meaning -- through usage in context -- and that two people can think they are talking about the same thing but if there is any difference in how they use the terms, or any variation in what contexts they consider them appropriate, then they cannot be talking about the same thing, because they aren't using the words the same way in the same context.

Learning language is like learning a certain kind of morality: which words are 'proper' to use in which order, situation, etc. (And you can always find stark disagreement where any moralities diverge.) The wisdom of all this is to instead focus on where people have agreement, by establishing shared definitions, axioms, or even participation in activities. These kinds of things are 'meaning multipliers'.

[pfortuny]

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).

[tuesdayrain]

> 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.

That's how I've always intuitively felt about the Ship of Theseus thought experiment. It only seems paradoxical when people try to apply imprecise language to a precise situation. The way I see it, it's technically a new ship with every part that gets replaced. Nothing unusual about it.

[fmihaila]

> It only seems paradoxical when people try to apply imprecise language to a precise situation.

Yes, but the very notion of precise language is more elusive than at first glance. It could be argued that every language is necessarily imprecise.

[goatlover]

It's unusual because our ordinary language does not talk about objects being new with every change. The ship that sets sails is supposed to be the same ship that returns. And yet change is part of life. Everything undergoes change, as Heraclitus noted a long time ago. So why do we talk so imprecisely about objects as if they have permanence? Why is it the same river the next time we step in it?

[smallnamespace]

> So why do we talk so imprecisely about objects as if they have permanence? Why is it the same river the next time we step in it?

Why do most languages allow variables to mutate, rather than forcing us to write in static single assignment style?

Because it is useful; the imprecise name still communicates something of value to both parties: that variable foo and variable foo', although not identical, are joined by a common purpose.

[coldtea]

>So why do we talk so imprecisely about objects as if they have permanence? Why is it the same river the next time we step in it?

Because the concept of river describes a body of water in flow starting from and passing through specific geographical locations.

Those all remain, even if the water at any point X of the river changes...

[goatlover]

Those all undergo change as well. In context of the parent, any change whatsoever results in a new object. Which was the point of Heraclitus not being able to step in the same river twice. It's all flux.

That's what motivated Plato and Kant to come up with their philosophical responses to the flux. One with eternal forms and the other with categories of thought.

[coldtea]

>Those all undergo change as well

And we are free to disregard small changes, like we do everywhere.

I'm aware of Heraclitus' thought (and other pre-socratics, Aristotle, Plato, Kant, Hegel, and many others besides) but it's not a binding observation (that one should fell compelled to respond by resolving some great paradox).

"Yeah, the river undergoes small changes all the time, and bigger changes from time to time. Still enough remains common for us that we still don't care and will call it by the same name, what are you gonna do about it?" is a nice common sense response...

[goatlover]

Right, but the paradox is that a bunch of inconsequential changes lead to major changes over time, such as the ship being replaced plank by plank until it has none of the original material.

[deltron3030]

> Why is it the same river the next time we step in it?

Maybe because the river bed is more or less still the same location. Location is important for mapping the environment.

[coldtea]

>The way I see it, it's technically a new ship with every part that gets replaced. Nothing unusual about it.

That's still unusual because we don't consider a house a "new house" if we replace the door or rebuild a wall or whatever. We don't consider a person a new person when we e.g. give them an artificial leg. We also never consider a ship a "new ship" when we replace a part of the ship. Not instinctively, not casually, and nor "technically" (e.g. as far as the law is concerned).

So not sure why you think there's "nothing unusual about it", and what's your solution. You merely picked a side to a two-sided paradox, you didn't solve it...

[shoes_for_thee]

So are you technically a different person when your every cell is replaced?

[chernov]

One may argue you are a different person even once some of your cells are replaced.

I imagine your next question might be whether you owe something to now-me if you were to take a loan from a previous-me.

This looks like a pair of mirror bugs. Yeah, the person is already a new one, but if we'd really treat them that way, we'd have to make our laws and morals even more complex. Instead, we just pretend that's the same person.

[shoes_for_thee]

These are excellent, very much open questions.

I mostly wanted to point to the parent comment and say, "Things are not quite so pat." I should have explicitly said so.

Sometimes I think paradoxes exist to teach us that many things are not precisely true or false.

[ZoomZoomZoom]

So, one grain of sand is a heap?

If one cell is enough, than one atom is enough and so on. Then, nothing's really the same. But we use this notion because it's convenient, so we're back at the beginning.

[chernov]

>So, one grain of sand is a heap?

"Is a single grain a heap" doesn't look like a paradox to me. A "heap" is just a word with an ambiguous definition. Once you define it, you'll have your answer :)

>Then, nothing's really the same

If that was the case, intelligence would've been impossible. We need similarities as well as the differences to be able to compare things (including abstract concepts)

[claudiawerner]

>I imagined he was talking about words like "socialism" or "equality" -- words that are obviously slippery.

Even if this were necessarily true, it wouldn't make philosophizing about them useless; for instance, as slippery as the term 'equality' may be, it's also clear (except for 18th century French philosopher Babeuf) that it doesn't literally mean that everyone in society is allocated and has access to an equal amount of resources.

In my own experience talking about these concepts, much greater confusion and misunderstanding comes from simply not reading the source material, rather than the words having potentially different meanings. Most people (including some socialists) talk about socialism without having read just what its foremost proponents (and critics of their own socialism) have to say.