All of Wittgenstein is now public domain
wittgensteinproject.org
wittgensteinproject.org
> The questions, "What is length?", "What is meaning?", "What is the number one?" etc., produce in us a mental cramp. We feel that we can't point to anything in reply to them and yet ought to point to something. (We are up against one of the great sources of philosophical bewilderment: we try to find a substance for a substantive.)
> The idea that in order to get clear about the meaning of a general term one had to find the common element in all its applications, has shackled philosophical investigation; for it has not only led to no result, but also made the philosopher dismiss as irrelevant the concrete cases, which alone could have helped him to understand the usage of the general term. When Socrates asks the question, “what is knowledge?” he does not even regard it as a preliminary answer to enumerate cases of knowledge. If I wished to find out what sort of thing arithmetic is, I should be very content indeed to have investigated the case of a finite cardinal arithmetic. For: (a) this would lead me on to all the more complicated cases, (b) a finite cardinal arithmetic is not incomplete, it has no gaps which are then filled in by the rest of arithmetic.
> Now I don't say that this is not possible. Only, putting it in this way immediately shows you that it need not happen. This, by the way, illustrates the method of philosophy.
Another unrelated Wittgenstein-ian point that I found enlightening in college is that in PL design you can’t design a language that stops people from writing incorrect programs. Statements can’t be correct as an inherent quality of their structure, they can only be correct in context of a goal.
Of course the irony is that Wittgenstein asks "why?" again and again like Socrates and for very much the same purpose (to show that it gets us caught in circles), thus representing even more ironic loops than the previous circles. Wittgenstein turns to philosophy to repudiate it and show as much to his students (show the fly out of the bottle), but in so doing he affirms a central Socratic lesson, but with far less irony. And I would say irony wins out: rather than quiet philosophy into therapy, Wittgenstein became the most influential 20th century philosopher who attracts by far the most published academic and popular commentary.
Within the context of his mathematical investigations this question makes a lot of sense, though: the younger Wittgenstein was studying logic under Bertrand Russell and therefore had a lot of exposure to the idea of a formalized logical totality as represented by Principa Mathematica - this was the world he lived in. And he did not seem to feel that the incompleteness theorems settled the limitations of logical formalism either.
I really love how this subject is approached in the Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.
I'd highly recommend checking out his work on (and coining of the term) "language games" [1] I'm not sure I agree with all of the thinking behind them, but it's a fascinating concept that has useful nuggets whether or not you agree with everything Wittgenstein says about them. They are explored pretty fully in his work "Philosophical Investigations" [2] This work pretty much set aside a fair amount of his thinking in Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, which is still an interesting work in its own right. I think that even a cursory ELI5 treatment of this material in a standard college course would be very useful in arming students with tools needed to dissect language. I've used it (in brief) when teaching a course on Informal Logic in relation to propaganda.
[0] It seems copyright on the English translation might still be in effect, or at least a gray area of determination. Since it's a common text use in college courses I'm guessing the copyright owners may fight public domain release. The issue will be whether or not the translation was a work for hire or if it can be considered sufficiently different to constitute an original work. The English translation by Anscombe, Hacker, and Schulte occured posthumously, and so might not be considered work for hire. Hopefully it will resolve in favor of public domain. For a shorter consideration of "language games" check out Blue Book.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_game_(philosophy)
[2] https://www.amazon.com/Philosophical-Investigations-Ludwig-W...
Did the "intellectual property" regime contemporaneous with him writing encourage or discourage his output?
I mean, there's some thought that Giuseppe Verdi reduced his output when copyright was introduced: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1336802
From the tiny book "On Certainty" by Wittgenstein. Really interesting and thought-provoking.
TL;DR:
Descartes (and others): We can't know for certain that the external world exists.
GE Moore: "Here is one hand, and here is another. There are at least two external objects in the world."
Wittgenstein was pointing out that this doesn't address any of the actual claims. (I think "agree" is a confusing word to use in the translation. "Know" would work better.)
EDIT: I'd also like to throw this Moorean SMBC sub-comic because I love it and it's relevant: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comics/20100512after.gif -- from https://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=1879
Here is one hand,
And here is another.
There are at least two external objects in the world.
Therefore, an external world exists.
That is a good question. One possible answer would be "It depends on the quality of the simulation". If we are living in a simulated world there could be a simulated drug the so-called red pill which allows you to see the execution of the simulation.
If we started seeing Fortran source-code in the sky and the code would seem to be about running a world-simulation, and we would also see data-expressions in the sky that curiously described the world we experience outside of us then I think we would be pre-disposed to think it looks like we are simulated beings in a simulated world.
Held together with Perl, don't forget. https://xkcd.com/224/
Moore's point is: why is the internalist assumption any better than the assumption that here is one hand?
If there is a hand then everything else falls out deductively. Using induction, it's trivially true that there is a hand.
Using deductive reasoning to prove an inductive proposition is ultimately a waste of time, using inductive reasoning to create a correct framework for deductive reasoning is ultimately unknowable. Both of these together is how we live our lives and create our standard model, which is ultimately imprecise at best, and wrong at second best.
This is Moore's point, that we are wasting our time trying to deductively prove the existence of an external world when it's trivially provable. We may not get accurate axiomatic framework, but we can never get that anyway.
Much of the point of philosophy is properly delineating between these two methods of reasoning. Much of analytic philosophy is finding areas where language blurs the two.
"And Wittgenstein was a beery swine who was just as sloshed as Schlegel."
[1]https://montypython.fandom.com/wiki/Bruces%27_Philosophers_S...
A. W. Moore, The Infinite, Routledge, 1990
A somewhat related experience I had recently and found very strange was having two parties who each knew me meet, and relate stories about me or things that I'd supposedly said, in a way which made clear that at best my meaning was misunderstood even if the words were correct. What of all the other dialogue that didn't happen to come up? What percentage of what we say is understood as we intend, even if it seems so at the time?
And so does the publisher for the design of the printed book.
So don't get too cocky copying books unless you understand the current status of various other possible copyrights you might be violating.
Also-- right-click Copy isn't suppressed and there's no email list modal popping up when I scroll.
Did this site get hacked or something?
The things we do, eh? I wonder what Wittgenstein would have made of it all.
TL;DR: substantial editorial input