Was Wittgenstein Right? (2013)
opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com
opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com
One example given was the Theseu's Paradox (or The Ship of Theseus): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus
The entire problem only exists because you're intentionally using a vague term in the problem, therefore causing the problem itself.
At least that was the commentary, I'm not an expert in the subject, and I'm sure many will disagree. But then, even the disagreeing is just pointlessly creating a problem for the sake of the discussion.
The problem in The Ship of Theseus is one of identity: do objects have historical properties (i.e., do they undergo change but remain "the thing"), or do they become new objects when change occurs? Taking either horn leads to radical conclusions about the objects we interact with on a daily basis, and so we have a paradox.
There are plenty of examples of vague and ambiguous language in philosophy, but I think that the SoT remains problematic without them.
>Taking either horn leads to radical conclusions about the objects we interact with on a daily basis
How would someone deal with objects in the real world differently based on a solution to this supposed problem? In what context is the distinction important?
I don't disagree that there's plenty of room for vagueness there, but I don't think that either of us has particularly vague definitions of "object" in mind.
> How would someone deal with objects in the real world differently based on a solution to this supposed problem?
The simplest example is in the second case: if we were to conclude that objects don't contain historical properties, then we would be hard pressed to accept any sort of continuity. Am I the same person as I was a moment ago? Am I responsible for "my" future actions, even if it's not "me"?
The first case also has problems: if objects encapsulate their historical properties, then how did we end up with two objects? Which one of them is the "real" one, i.e. the one with the name "Theseus's Ship"?
That is still a vague definition. Are you talking about the set of matter (atoms, etc.) in their certain relative positions and interactions? Are you talking about the general usefulness?
Defining object in this sense (as in the object "ship of Theseus") will solve the problem of SoT.
Let me give some examples of where the distinction could actually be meaningful:
Logistically, the museum can only put one of the ships up for display. Which one should it choose?
The museum hires you to compile a database of all its historical items that can be browsed online. Should you put the "Ships of Theseus" in a single row, or two rows, one for each ship?
A rich and extravagant museum visitor, after seeing the ship on display (whichever one that is), offers the museum a generous sum to purchase it. Later, when he learns of the second ship, he is outraged and demands his money back. Should the museum reverse the deal?
Prior to the second ship being reconstructed, the museum had taken out an insurance policy on the "Ship of Theseus". Later, when there are two ships in existence, the second ship burns down in an unfortunate fire. Should the insurance company compensate the museum? Would it matter if the other ship burned instead?
After finding and deciphering ancient journals from the Theseus crew, the museum learns that treasure may be hidden within the wood of the ship. Which ship should be searched?
The museum trades one of the ships to a neighboring museum in exchange for other historical items. Later, both museums begin advertising that they have the original Ship of Theseus on display. Should both be allowed to advertise this?
These examples give, I think, differing and nuanced notions of what the "Ship of Theseus", and even an "object" is. There is no reason why there should be a singular "right answer" that applies universally, without a sense of what question is being asked or what problem needs to be solved.
"the same", as in "is it the same ship?".
Of course a philosopher would never realize that, because they'd never bother looking hard enough to get to quantum mechanics.
There is no Ship of Theseusness that gets transferred at any point. You just built a leaky abstraction over how things really work, and surprise: it's leaky.
I don't agree with everything Yudkowsky says, but he makes my point here: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Bp8vnEciPA5TXSy6f/can-you-pr...
There is no "if you replaced every atom in your body". That's not even describable with what we know of the universe's fundamentals. It's an abstraction we layer on top so we can make sense of it. There is no useful debate about whether it's true or not, because it's just something we choose.
I'm not taking a position. I'm dissolving the question. I don't care if that's secretly "doing philosophy" or not. If it upsets you that I think there's no value in "thousands of years of debate" and things that most people would consider philosophy, prove me wrong.
Different systems have chosen to take very different stances on this. As it turns out, taking a stance on what makes a file a file (or a ship a ship) — being explicit rather than vague — does not solve the problem. Not even close. In fact, one of the many little things that make Git a brilliant piece of software is that it refuses to take a stance on identity. Git is intentionally vague about what makes a file a file. It doesn't actually track it at all — file identity is determined retroactively. It's a question for which Git intentionally doesn't have a straight answer.
What I think is really fascinating about all of this is that computers are forcing us to deal with age-old philosophical problems head on. These are not just interesting riddles anymore. They're real problems that need concrete solutions. Event more interestingly, there is something in this that establishes computing as categorically different from just pure mathematics. Computing forces us to bridge abstraction with the real world — to answer questions like what is the relationship between an abstract model and the thing that is being modelled. This to me is really exciting, and what follows from it can't be easily dismissed with a comment like "most philosophical problems only exist because language is vague".
But that's my point: when you choose to make a call on the definition os "the same", the problem no longer exists. SoT only exists while you refuse to provide a more precise definition for "the same".
> Different systems have chosen to take very different stances on this.
Yes, and any stance will solve the problem. You could say that it is the Schrodinger's Cat of philosophy: the moment you decide to go one level deeper (open the box and observe the cat), the problem ceases to exist.
> These are not just interesting riddles anymore
Agreed, and the point of the original commentary was that they were never interesting riddles to start with, they were only riddles at all because we purposefully forced them to be riddles. We avoided the fact simply to carry on the discussion.
Similarly, any judge won't care about the SoT, because at the end of the day, that judge will have to make a call if the ship in question is Theseus' or not.
And just like quantum mechanics, the moment you look at it, the "wave function collapses" and you have a solution.
SoT is only a problem for the same duration as Schrodinger's cat: while you refuse to open the box.
What I'm arguing is that dismissing these philosophical problems as just nonesense rooted in the vagueness of language is missing the point. If nothing else, these paradoxes lay bare the vagueness of language, but moreover they beg the question of why language is so vague. What's more, it turns out that making language more precise — as we've tried to do with computers and mathematics — doesn't seem to solve the problems at all. In fact, it seems to lead to even more trouble, as, for example, the designers of Subversion or Mercurial eventually discovered.
Oh, I agree, I don't think they are nonsense at all, and they do force us to think about the way we communicate and so on.
That's why I call them the Schrodinger's Cat of philosophy, while they only exist until you decide to solve them, they do force us to think about how we view the world.
But then you end up in another problem for philosophy: if what remains after you remove all the natural sciences is just the problems that humans create due to language, law, understanding, etc. and all of those are covered in subject-specific human sciences (law, linguistics, psychology, behavioral economics, etc.), what is left for philosophy?
Apparently, this is covered partially by this week's NPR Philosophy Talk:
https://www.philosophytalk.org/shows/does-science-over-reach
Can you explain what you mean by this? It seems to me as though "git blame" pretty clearly indicates that git keeps a notion of a file's identity as it changes over time.
http://existentialcomics.com/comic/245
In which W's talking lion shows a taste for English pop groups and Ultimate Frisbee
But there really are scientific questions and there really are philosophical questions.
For example, when two cars crash, science can in principle tell us exactly at what speeds they were traveling, what the drivers were doing, and all the physical details.
But as humans we want to find not just what happened but who's at fault.
When we ask questions about guilt, we're asking a non-scientific, philosophical question.
Understanding precisely what happened is important in assessing guilt, but only up to a point. I don't mean questions of physical cause and effect, or even of legal guilt, but actual culpability. If you think that question is answerable, then you're in the realm of philosophy.
Questions of credit and blame lead to questions of good and bad. If you believe that ethics are a real thing, then every decision has an ethical dimension, and science can't really help with that.
The best attempt I've seen at reconciling science and physics is by Bob Doyle at http://www.informationphilosopher.com/
And guilt probably has little to do with fault.
E.g. Trolley Problem https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem
As you note, a large portion of it depends on value judgements. If I wilfully murder 1 person to save 3 from being accidentally killed, am I guilty? What if I take no action and allow 3 people to be accidentally killed?
Without attempting to Asimovly define the value of all possibilities, I'm not sure how science can answer these questions in any meaningful sense.
Without tumbling into a morass of complexity (e.g. a life is worth this because of GDP per capita and birth rate and lifespan, and taking an action is to be valued this way because of neuroscience and experimental psychology) that, should it be fallen into, would start to look more like ethical philosophy than post-Enlightenment science.
But then, that's why they were both the same field before experimental repetition was enshrined...
Well, guilt may well be a necessary concepts for a variety of social, institutional and psychological reasons. To say that guilt is must exist simply because of our humanness seems very much like the simplification that article gives some enlightening (imo) Wittgenstein quotes on:
"Our craving for generality has [as one] source … our preoccupation with the method of science. I mean the method of reducing the explanation of natural phenomena to the smallest possible number of primitive natural laws; and, in mathematics, of unifying the treatment of different topics by using a generalization. Philosophers constantly see the method of science before their eyes, and are irresistibly tempted to ask and answer in the way science does."
Also, Wittgenstein is certainly not arguing for science replacing philosophy but arguing for philosophers not to emulate scientists.
Wittgenstein is well-known for changing the origin of mathematical problems to the most convenient in his mind - about as close to philosophy as you can get.
"Wittgenstein claims that there are no realms of phenomena whose study is the special business of a philosopher, and about which he or she should devise profound a priori theories and sophisticated supporting arguments. There are no startling discoveries to be made of facts, not open to the methods of science, yet accessible “from the armchair” through some blend of intuition, pure reason and conceptual analysis. Indeed the whole idea of a subject that could yield such results is based on confusion and wishful thinking."
Philosophy isn't useless. It is a ground for preliminary discussion before the matter is ready to shift into more solid ground -- mathematics, logic, or hard sciences.
That it suffers from (a degree of) infinite dwelling on pointless topics is inevitable, because it is very hard to judge what will one day be useful or legitimate of discussion; making the false positive nil will increase the false negatives too much. Plus if philosophy decided on a too strict topic regime, soon another field would be born to house the outcasts of academic philosophy, thus becoming the new leftover pile of reason.
You speculate so.
First, Wittgenstein's ultimate views concerned the validity/fundamental meaninglessness of metaphysics, not all philosophical inquiry. There are other subjects in philosophy that require little to no metaphysical justification: aesthetics, mathematics, and certain branches of ethics are all examples of this.
Second, we (HN users) are all here because of philosophy. The fundamental theories and methods of computation stem directly from the work of philosophers in the 1920s and 1930s, who in turn were building off of systems of formal reasoning devised in the 5th century BC. The same can be said for our political organizations, our aesthetic considerations, and our basic Western metaphysical perspective. I'd call that "accomplishing something."
We're talking about the late 19th and 20th centuries in the cases of Frege and Russell (two of dozens), well into mathematics being its own field of study. I brought up the 5th century BC to show a continuous line of inquiry, but you can look into most philosophy departments today to see novel work in the philosophy of mathematics. I studied under some professors who did that work.
> If the best thing you can say about the pursuit is that many years ago its members contributed to studies we now think of as separate disciplines, well, that’s not much.
I'm not understanding this reasoning. The "separate disciplines" you're talking about would not exist without philosophy. All modern computing, mathematics, and political science stems directly from relatively recent discoveries and insights by philosophers. In my book it's a sign of tremendous success, not failure, for one field to spawn another.
You are affirming the consequent. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affirming_the_consequent
That sounds a bit solipsistic. Don't you believe other commenters exist?
Actually, I don't feel like commenting is ever productive (for me), but I enjoy doing it, or can't resist trying to make a point. Being productive is certainly not a motivation I have when thinking about philosophy, any more than it is for enjoying art or any number of subjects.
Being productive only matters when I have something I need to get done.
Wittgenstein himself seems to be aware of this in his later works, where he walks back the claim of having solved philosophy to just the claim of having rendered metaphysics moot.
A counterexample of this is the kind of philosophical speculations that led to the General Theory of Relativity. E.g see the first 3 sections in Einstein's paper from 1916 "The Foundation of the General Theory of Relativity".
I agree with the sentiment of this quote but I think that sometimes there are indeed truly fruitful ideas to be found buried in a given philosophical work. What's hard is spotting them by weeding out all the BS. David Hume's and Mach's work certainly influenced the development of scientific ideas. For one, their empiricism taught us to be wary of concepts about which we cannot talk about in an operational sense, such as absolute space and absolute time. Both SR and QM owe something to this view. It's funny that some of the thinking employed in the formation of GR actually resembles more the kind of philosophizing employed by ancient thinkers, and would perhaps be dismissed as "metaphysical" by most scientists today.
I'm guessing he believed Buddhism to be a monumental waste of time.
I once read a book by a Zen Master called "Wanting Enlightenment Is a Big Mistake" and by the end of it, I agreed. Hence the book was worthless.
Edit: so is it fitting if this post earns me negative karma?