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Comment by The_rationalist | Hacker News Reader

My theory is that the tractacus was a bullshit detector made by Wittgenstein. If after reading it you think it is genius you fail the test, if you understand that it is a bunch of refined nonsense you pass. Honestly it is obvious to anybody that actually spent time reading it, e.g even the truth tables in it are invalid. He conclude the book by saying that when you don't know what you're talking about, it would be better for you to not speak about it, this is obviously a meta-critic about the tractacus. Ironically, most philosophers fail the test (obviously most of most philosophers admire it out of authority, without having read a single page from it nor it's subsequent book (as if the subsequent book was even needed for understanding it's true semantically-empty nature..))

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“He conclude the book by saying that when you don't know what you're talking about, it would be better for you to not speak about it”

That’s NOT what he wrote. The quote is:

“whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must remain silent.” (or “What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.” in this translation)

Proposition 7 is about the limits of language, not about dissing idiots.

> e.g even the truth tables in it are invalid

that would be a very specific and relevant point to make. can you back this up with sources or more than one example?

> My theory is that the tractacus was a bullshit detector

Are you serious? This seems like a fun idea but doesn't really pass my own bullshit detector.

can you back this up with sources or more than one example? I am referring to the case x=3 y=3 of the assertion 4.442

There is no x nor y in 4.442. I have two guesses at what you might mean.

1. Maybe you're referring to the last sentence "(The number of places in the left-hand pair of brackets is determined by the number of terms in the right-hand pair.)" and saying: haha, if the number of terms in the right-hand pair is 3 then the number of places in the left-hand pair is 8, not 3. But Wittgenstein doesn't say "is equal to", he says "is determined by", and that's correct.

2. Maybe you're referring to the concrete truth-table, where if you label its rows and columns 1,2,3 etc., the slot with x=y=3 is left blank. That's a weird notational choice but I'm pretty sure it isn't a mistake. Look at 4.44: "The sign that results from correlating the mark 'T' with truth-possibilities is a propositional sign." Wittgenstein's being terse as usual, but I think what he means is that when reading one of these truth-tables what we need to know is where the Ts are. For a bit more explicitness, look further back at 4.43: "We can express agreement with truth-possibilities by correlating the mark 'T' (true) with them in the schema. The absence of this mark means disagreement." (Emphasis mine.) So the right-hand column of his truth tables uses T to mean that the corresponding proposition is true, and the absence of a T to mean that it's false. Which is exactly what he does in 4.442. He's clearly aware that there's a cost in clarity, which is why after writing it as "(TT-T)(p,q)" he says: "or more explicitly (TTFT)(p,q)".

Either way, I think you're wrong to characterize this as a mistake.

I agree

well, that escalated quickly ... :D

I would always give Wittgenstein the benefit of the doubt on such relatively trivial things given 1) this work was checked thoroughly by the likes of Bertrand Russell 2) the topic has evolved considerably over the last ~100 years, or at least the language and notation used to talk about it, which may lead to misunderstandings for today's readers.

Two objects of the same logical form are—apart from their ex- ternal properties—only differentiated from one another in that they are different. differentiated in that they are different. It is a mediocre circular reasoning. The correct statement could have been to say that they are internally structurally the same object but have different identity like e.g in nominal typing.

HOWEVER, I skimmed the tractacus years ago and now I update my jugement: The tractacus has many flaws but it is not pure bullshit nor a bullshit detector test despite the striking irony of Wittgenstein saying in the preface and in the conclusion Its whole meaning could be summed up somewhat as follows: What can be said at all can be said clearly; and whereof one cannot speak thereof one must be silent. And then spending a hundred a pages talking in a non clear, vague manner about a few conclusions that are one 1) obvious to any rationalist And 2) that can be summed up in ~one page Cf the symbol grounding problem, defining empiricism and that metaphysical questions are by design out of the scope of science and therefore cannot be answered (well an exhaustive list of the possibles can still be given). This book has a very low signal to noise ratio which make it easy to mistakely take for bullshit/pseudo intellectualism. As a NLU researcher some of his thoughts are actually interesting about how do define a semantic space even if most of them are trivial.

The Tractatus is basically an exploration of the limits of Tautology - anything that follows from the axioms is tautologous. And we have no grounds to speak about anything else

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