[lisper]

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/

[2] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/intentionality/#InteInex

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Denoting

[glenstein]

>So I am vindicated

I think there's a lot of confidently wrong histories being tossed around this thread, and it's not quite right to say he abandoned his old work as meaningless. He considered it dogmatic, but not nonsensical by any stretch.

[d0odk]

My gripe is that the commenter above cites early Wittgenstein as an example of the failure of philosophy as a whole, while ignoring (or perhaps being unaware) that later Wittgenstein is what is philosophical "canon". I'll concede there is some debate about how Wittgenstein's views evolved over his life and the extent to which he repudiated his earlier work. But I think you're going a bit far by characterizing what I said as "confidently wrong history," if that's directed at what I wrote.

[glenstein]

I'm actually quite agreeable to idea the that much of philosophy is incoherent nonsense. I would have completely gone to bat for this commenter if they said Heidegger was such an example. Or Searle for that matter. I can even see the case for Kant. And they all have their defenders, just not me.

But even for someone as sympathetic to that argument as I am, I don't see any version of Wittgenstein's reflections on the Tractatus as agreeing it to be nonsense much less a paradigmatic example of it. It's not just a matter of the later Wittgenstein being the "good" stuff. The Tractatus built on the work of Frege and was incredibly dense in its logical expressions, and half the challenge is keeping up with him, because he did philosophy from the perspective of an engineer, knowledgeable in logical and mathematical notation. It's one of the essential works of philosophy from the 20th century.

[knightoffaith]

What do you think is nonsensical about Searle? My sense is that he's very much not obscurantist in the way one might think Heidegger or Kant is (of course, the defense is that they use technical language because they're discussing technical things). But maybe you just mean that his arguments fail.

[glenstein]

The deep dive version of this convo might be a topic for another time, but the most concise answer I can give is to grab a copy of I Am A Strange Loop by Douglas Hofstadter, and flip to chapter 2 where he discusses an idea proposed by John Searle about the so-called "terribly thirsty beer can." This is an argument from Searle that he believes is a knockdown argument against the idea of consciousness embodied in something that isn't a biological mind as we know it. It is, and I do not say this lightly, it is just stunningly naive.

Hofstadter's dispensation of it in chapter 2 is to my mind, a completely decisive dressing down of the fundamental naivety of Searle's ideas about minds. I can't find any convenient quotation of the passage on the internet, but in my copy of the book it's page 29 chapter 2.

I think it puts on perfect display how truly ridiculous Searle's ideas are, and I think the Chinese room idea is similarly discreditable, and ultimately I think that Searle was more a fraud who more appropriately belongs in the category anti-science apologists along the lines of intelligent design proponents, rather than a positive contribution to the canon of Western analytic philosophy. And the extent to which he has gained influence in academic philosophy is something I take as discrediting of it as a field, to the extent that Searle is it's standard bearer. So if the commenter above cited him instead of Wittgenstein I would be cheering it on as a legitimate observation.

[knightoffaith]

Thanks for the citation, I failed to get through GEB but you've piqued my interest in IAASL.

Could you say something more about him being an anti-science apologist? I can see your case that his arguments fail, but I don't see the anti-science.

[Vecr]

Do you still have your master's thesis?

[lisper]

https://vtechworks.lib.vt.edu/server/api/core/bitstreams/1d7...

But just for the record, re-reading it now 37 years after the fact, I would not hold it up as a particularly good piece of work. It's a bit cringey actually.

[d0odk]

Have you read later Wittgenstein?

[lisper]

I've read (parts of) Critique of Pure Reason. Does that count?

[d0odk]

lol

[lisper]

I'll take that as a "no". What would you recommend?

[d0odk]

Critique of Pure Reason is Kant. I thought you were making a joke based on the earlier mixup between Kant and Wittgenstein. Late Wittgenstein is Philosophical Investigations. There are also good texts on philosophy of language that excerpt from the major authors (including Wittgenstein) without requiring you to read the entirety of their books.

[lisper]

Nope, not a joke. Just the same mistake I made originally. I guess I have conflated Kant and Wittgenstein in my mind even more thoroughly than I thought.

My bad. I've gotten pretty overwhelmed with all the activity in this thread, and I'm trying to get some actual work done in between responses so I'm a little distracted.