Overrated: Ludwig Wittgenstein
standpointmag.co.uk
standpointmag.co.uk
It's a type of transaction that I bet takes place every single day in every single tech-sector business between a smart-guy code monkey and a dimwit pointy-haired boss and, for some reason, it's always the pointy-haired boss who walks away with his overconfidence in tact and the code monkey that walks away having been made to feel bad about themselves, when it should be the other way around.
It's a cultural norm that may exist in the tech world today, but it's certainly not a cultural norm that existed at Cambridge back in Wittgenstein's and Russel's day. -- It's one of the many cultural attitudes that are working together to create the post-truth society we live in today.
It is true about pretty much any philosopher of note that they are thought of as being hard to understand (just think of Kierkegaard). That's not because those philosophers are altogether so very overrated. It's because the readership is mostly comprised of people who are not as smart as those philosophers. That's true by construction. Because the reason you read is because you start out stupid and want to end up smart.
Further,I think philosophical quality ultimately has to do with its ability to produce positive outcomes. Plato is not definitive -- but reflecting on Plato is deeply enriching. Incomprehensible and miserable philosophy is just that and only that.
I think this video is a very good illustration of this fact
This contains the assumption that the purpose of philosophers is to convey philosophy to the masses. I'm not sure why it should be. An electrical engineer's job isn't to convey electronics to lay people. A mathematicians' job isn't to convey his work to laypeople. There are people of those disciplines who take up that as their purpose, and this is an important, crucial role, but to pretend that the goal of every great engineer, scientist or philosopher is to do it is absurd.
I agree it is a different job to do promotion. But it's an issue if Wittgenstein couldn't communicate comprehensibly to the greatest philosophers of his time -- or experts of today.
If philosophy is easy to understand then good. But make every concept comprehensible to 6-year-old kids would limit the exploration of concepts.
As an example I can think of - in programming world, a bunch of programmers always trying to explain an abstract idea of 'monad' to other programmers but almost always fail. But it's a really useful universal abstraction in programming.
> It's a type of transaction that I bet takes place every single day in every single tech-sector business between a smart-guy code monkey and a dimwit pointy-haired boss and, for some reason, it's always the pointy-haired boss who walks away with his overconfidence in tact and the code monkey that walks away having been made to feel bad about themselves, when it should be the other way around.
How is this related to the article? You have some (potentially correct) grievance about imbalanced power relationships in the workplace leading to stupid person winning argument. But this is not the situation here. I don't think the blog author has some power over Wittgenstein.
> It is true about pretty much any philosopher of note that they are thought of as being hard to understand
Russel is a great example of a very clear philosopher. Heck, Russel's main complaint with Hegel, for example, was failure to use clear logic.
> That's not because those philosophers are altogether so very overrated. It's because the readership is mostly comprised of people who are not as smart as those philosophers.
This is a hard sell. I've ready many books and research papers by great physicists and mathematicians. People who are as "smart" as the best of philosophers (and certainly smarter than me), but mostly their works are quite clear.
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I think there is a tendency among, especially, austrian and german philosophers to write in sentences that are hard for modern Americans to parse. I suspect this is not a function of "intellect" but rather the prevalent writing style. A lot of philosophical works used lots of indexical references and non-linear patterns. Yet, we are now taught to write with direct, short sentences. Books and other media we read are full of such language. Even our long sentences usually have only dependent clauses. This makes it hard for us to parse out things like:
"Thus the word “is” appears as the copula, as the sign of equality, and as the expression of existence; “to exist” as an intransitive verb like “to go”; “identical” as an adjective; we speak of something but also of the fact of something happening." (3.323, picked somewhat at random by opening a book and looking for a long sentence on the page)
With no particular loss of meaning (but with greatly improved comprehension, albeit somewhat more verbose, the fault being all mine as it is too late) we could have:
"Thus the word "is" forms a copula that can have two meanings: a sign of equality or an expression of existence. When used to mean "equality," it links an adjective with the object. But, when used to mean "existence," it is an intransitive verb unbound to an object. Thus "is" allows us to speak of something (an object) but also of something happening (no object)."
Here's a random page from Russell's most famous work: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Page:Russell,_Whitehead_-_Pri...
And the fact that the author thinks it's a valid argument makes me think that the author subscribes to the same fallacious cultural norm that PHB (pointy-haired boss) subscribes to when he puts the burden on Dilbert to have to work harder to make himself understood by PHB, rather than PHB taking it upon himself to have to work harder to try to understand Dilbert.
Why am I saying it's not a valid argument? Say you read Wittgenstein, and it strikes you that he is difficult to understand, but, despite that feeling of difficulty, your takeaway from reading Wittgenstein is some idea that you think is the idea Wittgenstein is trying to express. At that point you have no way of knowing whether the idea you took away is correct or incorrect, whether it is complete or incomplete as a reflection of what it is that Wittgenstein was trying to say. You furthermore think to yourself: Boy, that idea that was my takeaway from Wittgenstein, I could explain that very easily so that a 6-year old could understand.
World view A: Holds most dearly the notion of a complex idea explained so simply that a 6-year-old can understand.
World view B: Holds that any idea that can be grasped by a 6-year-old couldn't have been all that complex to begin with.
World view A, together with a personality trait of overconfidence, departs from the assumption that your understanding of Wittgenstein is perfect and arrives at the conclusion that Wittgenstein is doing a shitty job making himself understood.
World view B departs from the observation that your understanding of Wittgenstein is such that it could be grasped by a 6-year-old. Granting that the stuff that some of the most famous philosophers of all time were talking about when they were exchanging ideas on philosophy is not stuff that a 6-year-old could understand, you would arrive at the conclusion that your understanding of Wittgenstein is probably incorrect and/or incomplete.
Now.
Overconfident stupid people tend to go through life adopting world view A. Throughout their whole lives they have the experience of smart people talking to them in a complicated way, and taking away ideas that a 6-year-old can understand. Well. If it looks that way to you, it's probably because, being stupid, you only understand half of what they're saying. And, in your perception: Complex ideas simply do not exist. But the world is filled with people explaining simple ideas in complex ways.
Well, to such people I have something to say: "Complex ideas do exist. And I'm done trying to explain them to you and feeling bad when failing."
And Wittgenstein is not a world-famous historical figure due to being overrated. Rather Crispin Sartwell is somebody no one has ever heard of for reasons that seem to me to be entirely rightful.
Tldr, writing style matters and can confuse people independent of idea complexity.
Edit: more thought, in physics (and other math heavy field) we often rename sub-expressions with variable names to make formulas written subsequently shorter and more comprehensible. This means that we often write extra lines of text simply to segment out different concepts so no one line is too hard to understand/too long. This makes it easier to understand the "important" parts.
I don't know if he fomented conflict among his "disciples" or if they came to it among themselves, and I'm sure not all of his work was equally insightful, but this article is far from an even-handed assessment of his work.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_game_(philosophy)
How is that original? Of course, the exact meaning of a word and a sentence depends on the context.
If I remember correctly my studies about Mesopotamia, in one the oldest bilingual dictionaries of the world there was a word with two translations, which mean the author knew that there was two distinct meanings for the same word. Centuries later, many of the various authors of the Bible were fond of playing with words. Their writings are full of double-entendre and of reusing the same word in a different context to change its meaning. Aristophanes wrote parodies of the classical Greek tragedies, and he certainly knew how to instill comedy into plain or epic words. It's hard to imagine none of these processes were conscious. More recently, Littré's dictionary at the end of the 19th century had a stress on the context: most definitions include many examples of use across time and places, to show the intrinsic complexity of words.
Symbols (words) can point to different objects depending on context (what you call words having multiple meanings), this has nothing to do with logical atomism. The point of logical atomism (and as it turns out this is not a complete picture) was that a particular meaning of the word can be described unambiguously (in the sense of using entirely existing objects).
This discussion is largely language agnostic (in a sense that I think every natural human language supports it).
Perhaps there are things that are worth trying to understand, even if they are difficult to comprehend. You can miss out on a lot if you're in the habit of dismissing things out-of-hand.
Just because something is written in a clear and approachable way, it shouldn't be dismissed out-of-hand.
Of course it doesn't necessarily follow that all such material is ground breaking. But sometimes the genesis of groundbreaking ideas doesn't lend itself to easy comprehensibility because the language and concepts needed to convey the ideas, the abstractions, are under development.
The issue in this particular thread that I am addressing is much more narrow: that of content density and value. And on that front, it is you who have failed to present a cogent reply.
And that's my issue with this thread. OP, and now you, are accusing the article of being facile while responding with an obvious claim to a straw man argument. If you want a meaningful discussion, relate it to Wittgenstein, and not some silly "Some things that are complicated are worth investigating" argument that nobody in their right mind would disagree with. If this doesn't seem cogent to you, you've probably been reading too much Wittgenstein.
I certainly don't think something should be dismissed because it's written in an approachable way: that's a virtue that all writing should strive for. My point is that some ideas are inherently difficult to write about (and some people aren't very good at writing in a clear way), but we shouldn't be quick to dismiss either because of their difficulty.
People were reading their works because it was fashionable (yes, hard-copy, cover to cover). I did, too. Now I think it was a waste of time.
The Tractatus is an unordered collection of pretty mundane observations which do not inspire any useful thought.
And the Tractatus was the work with the highest cult status.
To put him on the same level as G.E. Moore (and his brilliant naturalistic fallacy) and Bertrand Russell (and his [and Whitehead's] brilliant Principia Mathematica) is deeply misguided.
I don't get how you can hold Moore and Russell up so highly and then completely discount what they thought of him. I feel they are much better judges of this question than I am.
:0)
Of this Moore does not speak.
Hang on : Über formal unentscheidbare Sätze der Principia Mathematica und verwandter Systeme I !!! You can be as brilliant as you like, but if you are fundamentally wrong (which Russell and Whitehead were) then you get knocked off your perch. Still, I guess that they were in good company.
Bertrand Russell was a wonderful man, but I still smile when I think of the Principia and the essay he wrote nine years after Godel blew it up :"Why Mr. Hitler will not invade Russia"
I think that reason that Wittgenstein is still taught is that there are ideas in there that have not been successfully extended or refuted, except sometimes by Wittgenstein, and even then... Debatably! Also his "approach" is still used by many people.
If the GP thinks Wittgenstein is a vandal I wonder what he makes of Derrida and the other French lunatics; if you want to see where philosophy (and politics and literature) were crippled Paris in the 60's and Yale & Irvine in the 70's would be good places to start. One of it's legacies is the constant and ongoing attack on science - I blame Derrida for climate change denial!*
* I know - this is an act of pure spite, but old people need their fun, and he's dead, and anyway, his friends would just deconstruct my sentence to show that in fact I'm not blaming anyone, blame is not a real concept, things cannot be denied, there is no climate and things can't change.
I purposefully put them both up there! Russell was wrong (and, on a personal level, his atheistic slant profoundly annoys me), but he had a coherent and laudable plan -- he was the logical positivists' spearhead. Godel, of course, blew that whole plan up, but it was a plan nonetheless.
> If the GP thinks Wittgenstein is a vandal I wonder what he makes of Derrida and the other French lunatics;
In line with the analytic tradition, I wasn't much exposed to the "French lunatics" (thankfully). Nietzsche was bad enough†.
† I actually quite like some of Nietzsche, but the prose is atrocious.
It is generally a better use of time to brush up on the underrated.
Whatever virtues Wittgenstein might have concealed, comprehensibility wasn't among them. If he was right about anything, we can never know, so needn't bother wondering.
Philosophy matters. Look at how the lack of it affects politics and individual wellbeing.
In college, as a math/physics major, I relented and signed up for a course Philosophy of Science. The course was taught in the philosophy department by a guy from the Bible Department -- the Presbyterian church chipped in some money for the college which however had a good physics department (with some USAF money) and a quite good math department.
So, the course got to Wittgenstein. The prof was traveling or some such so asked a math prof to give the class on Wittgenstein.
As the class started, the math prof winced, hesitated, and said: "I read the Wittgenstein. Uh, let's f'get about Wittgenstein."
That was enough Wittgenstein for me!
The reaction of the Chair of the physics department was "Get your Ph.D. first and philosophize later."
For me, now is "later", and I conclude that his advice was good: Just how math, physics, and the rest of science do or do not work is not simple, and even a first level understanding needs quite a lot of experience, at least observation, of what does or does not work.
Sorry, Ludwig, buddy. Go sign up for a math/physics major, get a Ph.D. in one of those, get experience for some decades, and then see if you can formulate a clean, simple, solid philosophy for how it all should work! My guess is, even with all the background, you can't do it! Sorry 'bout that!
This is pretty laughable. Math/physics and philosophy may both involve logic, but they are so different. It's neither necessary nor sufficient to be good in one to do well in the other. I'm sorry you had a bad experience in your own philosophy classes, but I've found that understanding some of the basics of philosophy (utilitarianism, natural rights, etc.), have vastly helped me understand why people in the STEM fields are motivated to work on one project versus another.
Philosophy of Science
The course prof suggested that a math prof teach the class.
That was ALL right there in my original post.
Again, once again, over again, yet again, one more time, just for you, as in my post and as here, the class was
Philosophy of Science
Understand now????
So, a local community college may be able to give you a remedial course in reading comprehension.
I'm sorry you are having so much trouble with simple reading.
Your response, ignoring
Philosophy of Science
is "laughable". You have insulted me and humiliated yourself.
I was torqued. I had big justification in being torqued: I was trying, trying to learn math, physics, and in general science. So, hearing about the course in
Philosophy of Science
I took a chance, signed up, spent the time and the MONEY, tried, and the result was that a math prof's view was "f'get about Wittgenstein" and a physics prof said to philosophize after a Ph.D. So, the course and Wittgenstein ripped me off, wasted my time and money. I was ripped off, had good justification to be torqued, and was.
Again, here I'm reporting what two of my profs said.
If you want to learn math or physics, take a math or physics class. A "Philosophy of Science" class will not teach you that. Philosophy studies how people think, how they perceive things, how they organize their motivations ... i.e., why people do what they do. In a "Philosophy of Science" class, I'd expect to learn about why so many people think science is important, why many people feel a desire to learn or have curiosity, and the repercussions of this on the individual and society.
Again, I'm sorry you had a bad experience, but it seems like you were trying to get something out of a class that it was never intended to give you.
You realize that Wittgenstein studied mechanical engineering and aeronautics?
"I have zip, zilch, and zero first hand knowledge of Wittgenstein, but I will report on what two of my college profs said"
Maybe a local community college will be able to help you with reading comprehension, too.